The language gap

One worrying sign of the sharpening polarization in America is the increasing inability of the Blue Church to communicate with the rest of the country. Not only do the bizarre ideological fixations of the Left appear to the majority of Americans to be increasingly unhinged and divorced from reality, but the very vocabulary of the Left -- the actual words Leftist use -- bear an ever-more-tenuous connection to normal English.

I just came across an example of this in a New Yorker article on Linus Torvalds, the irascible creator of Linux, who decided to step down temporarily after the magazine confronted him about complaints that his "abusive behavior" had discouraged women from working as Linux programmers. The article finds no evidence that Torvalds' notorious rudeness was directed specifically at female programmers, or was intended to discourage women as a category from contributing to Linux.

In any case, the article describes the efforts of Sage Sharp, "a prominent Linux contributor," to influence Torvald's behavior and impose a Code of Conduct on the project. I was struck by this sentence:

In 2013, Sharp, who is nonbinary and uses “they/them” pronouns, confronted Torvalds on his home turf—the public Linux kernel mailing list.

Now, I have come across the term "nonbinary" before, and I imagine most regular readers of the New Yorker have as well. They are, I assume, steeped in the vernacular of social justice. A majority of Americans, however -- perhaps a large majority -- when confronted with the matter-of-fact assertion that some individual is "nonbinary" and uses the pronouns "they" and "them" to describe xirself, would have absolutely no idea what the fuck that means.

Other examples abound, of words that are pregnant with meaning to Leftist elites but meaningless, incomprehensible or totally misunderstood by the rest of America. "Cisgender." "Privilege." "Being an ally." "Intersectionality." "Safe space." Insane concepts denoted by fake words or made-up uses of normal words. They infest the discourse of the modern Left, these alien locutions as indecipherable to the average American as a Sanskrit mantra.

It bodes ill for our republic that important segments of the elite no longer speak to the rest of us, but have retreated into a make-believe world, speaking an arcane court language that nobody else understands.

Good luck with that

There is a certain type of ideologue that believes it is both possible and desirable to completely ban civilian ownership of guns in America. It is useful to bear in mind that what these people are calling for, is the confiscation of 40% of the world's firearms:

American citizens now own 40 per cent of all guns in the world - more than the next 25 top-ranked gun ownership countries combined - with the number only set to grow, according to new research.

According to a decade-long survey released by the Graduate Institute of International and Development Studies in Geneva, not only do Americans own the highest number of guns per capita, but also between 2006 and 2017, US gun owners acquired some 122 million new guns. That represented more than half of the 207 million new civilian-owned firearms around the world during that time.

“The biggest force pushing up gun ownership around the world is civilian ownership in the United States,” said Aaron Karp, one of the authors of the report.

And here's another take on the data courtesy of Stephen Gutowski:

I don't think people really understand how many guns American civilians own. The Small Arms Survey was just updated this week and found there are about 400 million civilian-owned guns in the US.
April Sets Gun Sales Record
April 2018 saw the most gun-related checks run through the Federal Bureau of Investigation's background check system.
http://freebeacon.com/issues/april-sets-gun-sales-record/
This, of course, makes is by far the #1 in civilian gun ownership in the world with the next closest being India at about 70 million. There are more civilian-owned guns in the US than their are people Most people, I think, understand that but don't really grasp what it means.
Every law enforcement agency in America combined have about 1 million firearms in their inventory. That means American civilians have about 400 TIMES as many firearms as American police.
In May alone, American civilians bought somewhere around 2 million firearms. That's twice as many firearms as every police department in America combined IN A SINGLE MONTH.
Similarly, the American military is estimated to hold about 4.5 million firearms. That means American civilians have 100 TIMES as many firearms as every branch of the American military COMBINED.
If you combine May and April's gun-related background check numbers you get 4.7 million. That means the American public bought more guns IN JUST THE LAST TWO MONTHS than the entire American military has on hand.
Furthermore, the Small Arms Survey estimates all the world's law enforcement agencies combined hold about 22.7 million guns. In 2017 alone, the FBI processed 25.2 million gun checks. The American public bought more guns in 2017 than every police agency in the world combined.
Between 2012 and 2017, the FBI did more than 135 million civilian gun checks. That's more than the estimated 133 million guns held by ALL THE WORLD'S MILITARIES COMBINED.
Over the last 5 years, the American public purchased more guns than every military force on the planet combined.
I hope that gives everyone some more insight into American gun ownership. For more details on this please read my piece:
Report: Nearly 400 Million Civilian-Owned Guns in America
A report published this month found civilians in the United States own almost 400 million guns, outpacing every other population, police, or military force.
http://freebeacon.com/culture/report-nearly-400-million-civilian-own

Friendly reminder that the Cold War is over

It made sense to oppose Russia with all our might when the Cold War was actually a thing. Cold Wars are nasty affairs that involve things like your enemy saying they will bury you, enslaving whole nations under a totalitarian government, exporting revolutionary ideologies to the far corners of the earth, and placing nuclear weapons and tens of thousands of troops in a country 100 miles from your own coastline. But given that Russia no longer does any of these things and has not made aggressive moves on anyone since it gave up control of 700,000 square miles of territory and 180 million people in what was widely believed to be the end of the Cold War, one might reasonably conclude that the Cold War is, in fact, over.

This isn't very complicated.

Twitter's massacre of the innocents

Why is Twitter silencing its most interesting accounts?

This week, Twitter locked, suspended, or terminated the accounts of at least 10 prominent users. All affected accounts, as far as I’m aware, were critical of contemporary society and attacked it from the right. They included a fringe continental philosopher, a YouTube pundit, and six leaders of an influential Twitter clique known as frogtwitter. 

Despite journalists breathless attempts to label frogtwitter as neo-Nazi, white supremacist, anti-democracy, Alt-Right, and “NRx,” it’s in reality just a small group of young, vaguely right-wing intellectuals interested in critiquing Western life. They aren’t all white (not even close), nor are they all American. It has an internal list serve, internal communications, and recognized leaders who offer their critiques through tweets and organize via DMs. It’s not a mass fascist movement, it has nothing to do with Richard Spencer, and most traditional conservatives either hate it or don’t understand it. It’s opposed by an equally intellectual and anti-PC group, the Dirtbag Left, though the two sides often share the same ideas and memes. That is, until one side was banned.

The banning of these irreverent and largely apolitical (and hilarious) accounts indicates that Twitter has shifted into a new phase. No longer content merely to silence influential pro-Trump and alt-right voices, Twitter now seems intent on stamping out any form of intellectual edginess. Political bias has mutated into a war on challenging ideas, even if those ideas are expressed in a non-abusive, Terms of Service-compliant way.

By the new rules of the game, if Socrates, Shakespeare, or Orwell lived today, they would all be - to varying degrees - unwelcome on Twitter.

It's a shame, really, because the authors of the banned accounts have clearly put a great deal of time and effort into crafting their tweets, many of which are absolute classics of the medium. To the extent that art can live on twitter, these anonymous posters are artists. They will now have to find a new medium to express their creative vision.

As it happens, I am aware that Twitter is a corporation and that corporations have the right to ban anyone from their platforms for any reason. I'm not making an argument about free speech or censorship or any of that crap. I am simply pointing out, because I find it noteworthy, that the world's ninth-largest social network, with an active user base as large as the US population, seems to have decided to make itself as boring as humanly possible.

Why Twitter is doing this to itself and what this means for the future of the internet, I have no idea. But one thing seems clear, that it heralds a richly-deserved future of lingering decline and probable death for what used to be a great platform.

More on this from Anatoly Karlin.

Don't worry, it'll get worse

Steve Bannon, Evil Counselor to the God-Emperor of Mankind, weighs in on what the future holds for the administration's war with the establishment:

SCHLAPP: [...] What is it that they keep getting wrong and do you think it ever gets fixed? What does the media keep getting wrong about this Trump phenomena and what's happening out there in the country? And is there any hope that this changes? 

PRIEBUS: I think there's hope that it's going to change. I mean we -- we sit here, every day and -- and the president pumps out all of this work and -- and the executive orders and the punching through of the promises that he made to the American people. So we're hoping that the media would catch up eventually. [...] 

BANNON: The reason Reince and I are good partners is that we can disagree. It's not only not going to get better. It's going to get worse every day. 

(LAUGHTER) 

And here's why. By the way, the internal logic makes sense. They're corporatist, globalist media that are adamantly opposed -- adamantly opposed to an economic nationalist agenda like Donald Trump has. President Trump really laid this out, as Reince said, many years ago at CPAC. It's really CPAC that really originally gave him the springboard. It's the first time at Breitbart we start seeing him, and saw how people, you know, his speeches resonated with people. 

And then he would go out to these smaller town halls later and really he got traction with the same message he's bringing today. Here's the only -- here's why it's going to get worse: Because he's going to continue to press his agenda. And as economic conditions get better, as more jobs get better, they're going to continue to fight. If you think they're going to give you your country back without a fight, you are sadly mistaken. Every day -- every day, it is going to be a fight. And that is what I'm proudest about Donald Trump. All the opportunities he had to waiver off this; all the people who have come to him and said, "oh, you've got to moderate." Every day in the Oval Office, he tells Reince and I, "I committed this to the American people; I promised this when I ran; and I'm going to deliver on this."

Trump will not slow down, and he will not moderate. The battle will intensify. Buckle up.

Nationalism trumps ideology

Libertarians, who never mattered much, are finding they matter even less in Trumpmerica:

The "Stand With Rand" shirts were out and the "Make America Great Again" hats were in among the younger crowd at this year's Conservative Political Action Conference.
Libertarians, who normally make up the loudest and most vocal faction at the annual nationwide gathering of conservatives, had a noticeably diminished presence at the 2017 political confab. 

"I think it's disheartening," said Michael Hall, a spokesperson for Students for Liberty. "I'd like to see more libertarians here." 

In previous years, armies of supporters swarmed the conference halls championing Sen. Rand Paul — and formerly Ron Paul — as the future of the Republican Party. These attendees argued that an embrace of libertarianism would usher in a wave of youth support and rescue the GOP from assured death. 

But, after President Donald Trump's surprise November victory, the CPAC program conspicuously changed, underscoring nationalistic ideals while tepidly moving away from principles of small government that were popular among conservatives during President Barack Obama's eight years in office.

Good riddance. Without a doubt, big government needs to be killed with fire - and it's heartening that Steve Bannon understands this, with his "deconstruction of the administrative state" - but this laudable goal is decidedly no longer attached to an ideology that preaches that the personal freedom of the individual is the be-all and end-all of the universe. Thus, immigration and trade are to be tolerated only insofar as they enrich and strengthen the United States; the libertarian belief that everyone has the right to buy anything from anyone in the world at any time, for example, is losing its hypnotic appeal to Republicans as the disastrous effects of free trade on the US economy become increasingly apparent, and will likely go the way of the belief in open-borders immigration. (Libertarians: "But it's good for the Global Economy™!")

I am sympathetic to some libertarian ideas, but the fact of the matter is that libertarians are basically godless leftists who are in thrall to a simplistic, unworkable ideology. All my adult life I've been hearing about libertarians, but they've accomplished precisely nothing. The Republican George W. Bush increased the federal budget by 53%. Libertarians are completely useless.

We should certainly seek to reign in excessive government power, but first things first. It's a new era and our priorities have changed.

The new priority: national survival.

Not as catchy as "MAGA"

The education of Donald Trump

Despite his ruthlessness in business, Donald Trump is no sociopath, and it remains to be seen whether he possesses the icy resolve to comprehensively destroy his enemies in Washington. For they are powerful and merciless, and will neuter his presidency, and possibly impeach him and throw him in jail, if he does not act quickly and firmly to crush them all. His skills have brought him unimaginable fame and riches in the private sector, but the government is a different world, and the waters he has waded into run very, very deep. I wonder if he is just beginning to grasp the immensity of what is required of him:

President Trump may have been wounded more badly than he expected by the Flynn affair. Mr. Trump is, after, a rather decent man. He has no military experience, and as far as I know not much familiarity with military history. His instinctual reaction when an enemy is wounded is to stand back and end the fight. This is the civilized way of doing things, and in civil life it is much to be preferred. 

The military know better. Battles may be won by valor; wars are won in the pursuit. When the enemy is down is the time to put the boot in. Relentless pursuit, slaughter of the retreating enemy, kill them all, take no prisoners because prisoners need guarding and care and reduce your strength; wars are won or lost in the pursuit. [...] 

Valor wins battles; wars are won in the pursuit. Mr. Trump’s enemies know that and believe it. Perhaps Mr. Trump is learning it.

Trump will grow in office, I predict. He will learn to give his enemies no quarter, to show them no mercy, to strip them of all power using every legal means at his disposal. He will learn to ignore their lying shows of friendship and their appeals to fair play, "norms" and other abstract concepts they never gave the slightest shit about as he purges them with fire from a vastly corrupt, out-of-control government.

The alternative is Trump in prison or worse; government of, by and for the National Security State; and the extinction of the republic. Simple choice.

This is an encouraging sign. The showdown continues:

President Trump plans to assign a New York billionaire to lead a broad review of American intelligence agencies, according to administration officials, an effort that members of the intelligence community fear could curtail their independence and reduce the flow of information that contradicts the president’s worldview. 

The possible role for Stephen A. Feinberg, a co-founder of Cerberus Capital Management, has met fierce resistance among intelligence officials already on edge because of the criticism the intelligence community has received from Mr. Trump during the campaign and since he became president. On Wednesday, Mr. Trump blamed leaks from the intelligence community for the departure of Michael T. Flynn, his national security adviser, whose resignation he requested.