TBT: Progressivism and Political Violence II: Candace Owens Attack and the Deficiency of Decorum

About a year ago I wrote about the Leftist attack on Candace Owens and Charlie Kirk while they were attempting to enjoy breakfast.  Last summer, all the rage was for Leftist activists to harass conservatives and Trump administration officials while they were trying to dine.

Fast forward one year and we have conservative journalists getting smashed over their heads with concrete-filled milkshakes and guys in MAGA hats assaulted in the streets.  Nevertheless, the ranks of Conservatism, Inc., stubbornly insist on taking the high road, ruthlessly policing any threats to their Right, while shrugging helplessly—perhaps accompanied by a schoolmarmish finger wagging—as the Left ratchets up its wanton, unabashed violence.

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Unspeakable Horror

Blogger photog has a piece up at his blog, Orion’s Cold Fire, entitled “What I Took Away from the Weekend Horror Fest,” which sums up the root causes of this weekend’s two terrible shootings: fatherless, isolated young men with few prospects, few role models, and an excess of narrow ideology.

As I wrote way back in January, I don’t typically write about shootings, because I don’t have much to add, and because the discussion always (incorrectly) focuses on controlling guns, not on addressing the real underlying issue.  The United States doesn’t have a gun problem; we have a God problem.  More precisely, we’ve jettisoned any sense of a transcendent moral order in favor relativism and a form of neo-paganism.

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Unspeakable Fear

Scott Rasmussen’s Number of the Day for August 2 demonstrates the fear and distrust that grip our public discourse.  According to Rasmussen’s polling, 22% of voters are afraid to share their political views most of the time, with another 25% fearing to do so some of that time.  That means that 47% of voters are afraid to discuss politics with their co-workers, friends, neighbors, etc.

Of those voters polled, 39% who strongly approve of President Trump believe they are discriminated against because of their political views.

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Lazy Sunday XXI: Travel

I don’t really like to travel, mainly because I prefer sitting on my own toilet and watching my own TV.  If you’ve seen one trendy downtown district, you’ve seen them all, and going to cool places overseas is expensive, time-consuming, disruptive, and dangerous.  Yes, I would liked to have visited London thirteen years ago (when my family took a ten-day trip all around Ireland), but now that it’s part of the Islamic caliphate, I’ll pass.  Same with Paris.  The United States is a big country, with plenty to see and do domestically.

That said, I keep the road hot, and enjoy the occasional excursion to points of interest near and far.  With my recent trip to Wilmington—and with summer rapidly drawing to a close—I thought I’d dedicate this belated Lazy Sunday to posts about travel.

  • Gig Day II” – This post is super short, but it briefly chronicles my trip to The Juggling Gypsy Cafe a year ago.  At that point, I was living in a hotel because my old apartment had flooded.  Because of the flooding, the power supply for my Casio keyboard was kaput (though it miraculously began working again a couple of weeks later), and I had to borrow an incredible Korg SV-1 from a pianist friend.  I’d spent the day laying sod at school, a grueling, physically-demanding job.  Conditions were far less than ideal for a late night gig in a distant city, but it went pretty well.
  • Put Your Money Where Your Poll Is” – This piece analyzes a 2018 Gallup poll, in which 16% of Americans said they wanted to leave the United States permanently.  The findings showed that young, Democratic-leaning women tended to be the least grateful to live in this great country, as Ilhan Omar and Squad have demonstrated.  I posed the question then:  “So, young radical feminists, why don’t you put your money where your poll is?  I’d wager less than 1% of those who indicated they want to leave will actually do so.”  If you don’t like it—by which I don’t mean, “If you love the country, but you want to fix some things,” but rather, “If you fundamentally hate what our country is and stands for”—then get the hell out.
  • Mid-Atlantic Musings” – This SubscribeStar-exclusive post details my trip to New Jersey, Coney Island, and the New York City Aquarium.  It also features hilarious of a video of an otter spinning head-over-tail in circles for minutes on end, one of Nature’s many bizarre pranks.  But you’ve gotsta be a subscriber—for just $1 a month or more!—to read it.
  • Wilmington Wanderings” – Another SubscribeStar-exclusive post, this one covers my trip two days ago to Wilmington for another gig at the Juggling Gypsy.  It’s a detailed account of my encounters with a friendly transgender bartender/photographer, as well as the seedy nightlife of aging hipsters.  It’s well worth a $1 subscription (heck, you can even cancel immediately after reading it!).

That’s it for this week.  Here’s to the last week of summer vacation!

–TPP

Other Lazy Sunday Installments:

Phone it in Friday III: Video Killed the Blogging Star

I’m heading up to Wilmington, North Carolina tonight to play a gigI played the same joint exactly a year ago, while I was living in a sleazy motel after my old place was flooded.  If you’re in the area, come on by, or check out my tour dates.

Regardless, your daily chum will continue in the vein of last Friday’s post, but with even less loving care.  In essence, I’m going to let you watch two talented individuals say important, insightful things.

It’s the blogging equivalent of pulling out that old media cart at school.  Everyone gets excited when the usual windbag kicks back and that tiny CRT television gets rolled out, its blue screen promising an hour of a grainy VHS tape.

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Box Wine Aunties for Williamson

Yesterday I wrote of a “New Great Awakening,” an awakening of the fast swath of forgotten men and women to the realities of the progressive Left’s destructive ideology.  Blogger photog at Orion’s Cold Fire inspired the post with his piece “The Great Awakening,” which brought to mind a key point about our national debates:  our concerns are primarily theological, not political, in nature.

I’ve written quite a bit about Americans’ desperate search for meaning (also here), for a deeper spiritual Truth that motivates our culture and our lives.  Increasingly, Americans are abandoning traditional Christian faith, embracing instead alternative forms of spirituality, from the mundane and trite —“living your best life”—to sinister, like witchcraft.

It’s no surprise, then, that the dark horse—or, perhaps, the black cat—candidate in the Democratic presidential primaries is self-help guru and author Marianne Williamson.  Williamson made waves during the first set of debates with her “Love is a Battlefield” pronouncement, and has become something of an Internet meme.

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Phone it in Friday II: Boris, Bond, and Borders

It’s been a brutal workweek for yours portly.  “Brutal” is perhaps a bit of an overstatement, but it’s been busy, with a lot of late nights and early mornings.  Fortunately, I’ve been a painting dynamo, and all those music lessons and extra work are reaping dividends.

My planned post summarizing and analyzing the introduction to Richard Weaver‘s seminal Ideas Have Consequences, then, is going to wait until Monday, when I have a bit more mental energy to spare.  My students in History of Conservative Thought are writing an essay about the introduction to that book for their final class session, which is Tuesday.  It’s a dense read for high school students, so that post will help break down some of the main ideas for them.

Instead, this evening’s posts will be a rare “Phone if in Friday” featuring some pieces that crossed my transom today.  Enjoy!

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Photog’s Prognostications

Fellow blogger and e-friend photog of Orion’s Cold Fire has a piece up today about some of the events percolating in the long 2020 presidential election season (as well as a little Brexit shout-out to Boris Johnson, the odds-on favorite for Prime Minister).

According to photog, a recent New York Times piece from popular Leftist economist Thomas Friedman suggests that slightly-less-radical progressives are getting worried by the antics of certifiably-crazy-radical progressives, for fear that those antics will cost Democrats the 2020 election.  Much of the op-ed is Leftist boiler plate talk about mortgaging the environment for quick growth now, along with some baseless claims of racism, but there is an acknowledgment that giving free healthcare to illegal immigrants and eliminating our borders is a tad unrealistic.

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SubscribeStar Saturday: Controlling Spending

Today’s post is a SubscribeStar Saturday exclusive.  To read the full post, subscribe to my SubscribeStar page for $1 a month or more.

It’s been a crazy week, with President Trump successfully maneuvering the ultra-progressive “Squad” of Congresswomen Ilhan Omar, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Rashida Tlaib, and Ayanna Pressley as the faces of the entire Democratic Party.

Lost in the shuffle—indeed, what seems to be an afterthought for most politicians and Americans now—is excessive government spending.  Virtually all of the major Democratic candidates for president in 2020 endorse policies like Medicare for All that would balloon an already-engorged federal deficit (around $22 trillion, I believe).  President Trump, for all of his successes with deregulation and trimming bureaucratic fat, has not done much to cut the budget substantially—indeed, he didn’t even campaign on cutting entitlement spending.

To read the rest of this post, subscribe to my SubscribeStar page for $1 a month or more.

Don’t Let Anymore In

The world has been on fire this week because—in the absence of any real news—President Trump said something on Twitter that’s funny.

The hand-wringing over President Trump’s tweet about “‘Progressive’ Democrat Congresswomen” returning to their home countries to fix them up has had the Left and the Right scurrying to condemn the president.  Ben Shapiro, whose podcast I quite enjoy, dedicated an entire hour to excoriating the president over the Tweet, and another hour to analyze it further.

Shapiro is wrong on this one, and more than a tad disingenuous, which is unusual for him.  He claims that President Trump tweeted that these women should be “sent back” to their countries of origin—which, as far as I can tell, he never said or wrote!  When a crowd at a rally in North Carolina began chanting “Send Her Back!” after the president ran down a litany of Congresswoman Ilhan Omar’s anti-American, anti-Semitic, pro-terrorist, pro-Islamist statements, that seemed to exacerbate things, the president quickly stated that he did not like or agree with the chant.

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