Greetings, Dear Reader,
At the top of this, I want to inform you all that I’m taking Friday off. I have travel to do for my other job and it’s a bit too early to get this going.
I also want to repeat the mantra that launched this newsletter, that I promise to rip the euphemism and misdirection off the day’s politics. To give it to you straight — no ice, no mixer.
A lot of people don’t understand how pervasive euphemism has become in our discourse. Think back to when you first saw the opening scene of Saving Private Ryan. I bet for a lot of people that was the first time they truly comprehended even a sliver of the horror that was landing on Omaha Beach. No romance there. Just blood and literal guts.
There are other euphemisms. But here I will always give it to you straight.
Let’s talk about it.
HOW TO MAKE AN OMELETTE
A lot of you have written in since my Friday column calling for violent acts of self-defense to offer support. Some have expressed concern.
Some have said it needed to be said, but asked, did it need to be said in that way? Must it be so “intense,” one of you asked.
Luckily, despite the firestorm it set off, I’ve managed to keep the jobs I have. My employers have demonstrated their support, even as they might have disagreed with the nature of my message. One in particular encouraged me to reflect.
I’ve been fired from more jobs than most people under 30 have ever held. I’ve been chewed out more times than I can count. Ripped open and dressed down publicly. Shot at literally, repeatedly, and in some instances, continuously. I’ve been punched in the face dozens of times. Arrested at least six times. Divorced exactly once.
In all that time I’ve been quite lucky. I know some wouldn’t exactly see it that way. But I do. Ultimately, I’ll be fine, I can assure you.
It’s without argument that Americans have grown fat and lazy, and ultimately ignorant of actual reality in the process. They don’t know the sacrifices it takes to pump electricity into their homes. It simply appears when they flip a switch. They have no concept for how the “farm-to-table” ingredients at their favorite hipster gastropub are actually produced. Likely with pseudo-slave-labor illegals. They have never raised a cow just to slaughter it. They don’t know how turning over the soil to plant the soybeans they love can actually harm the environment. Likewise how paving over all those acres to install solar panels will only power a fenced-in community of 12 or so homes. Also, solar panels wouldn’t be possible without slave labor in China.
But all of that is far away and basically nonexistent to the alternate and very online reality most of these activists believe is a community.
Without so much as setting eyes on a butcher, they’ll pick up their hermetically sealed organic steak, head home, turn on the grill, turn on the lights, power up their Apple computers to jump online and demand that words like “compassion,” “humanity” and “empathy” act as linchpins in the day’s most contentious debates.
J.K. Rowling’s response to Emma Watson, who played Hermione in Harry Potter, is a rather perfect encapsulation of the difference between the activist and the realist.
Watson spent several years railing on Rowling for her position on women and transgender ideology, even when Rowling needed increased security due to death threats, Watson continued railing, using the same tired euphemisms and delusions.
Well, she finally said something nice. Rowling was not amused.
You can read the full statement here, which I encourage, but I’m going to highlight just one section of it, emphasis mine:
Like other people who’ve never experienced adult life uncushioned by wealth and fame, Emma has so little experience of real life she’s ignorant of how ignorant she is. She’ll never need a homeless shelter. She’s never going to be placed on a mixed sex public hospital ward. I’d be astounded if she’s been in a high street changing room since childhood. Her ‘public bathroom’ is single occupancy and comes with a security man standing guard outside the door. Has she had to strip off in a newly mixed-sex changing room at a council-run swimming pool? Is she ever likely to need a state-run rape crisis centre that refuses to guarantee an all-female service? To find herself sharing a prison cell with a male rapist who’s identified into the women’s prison?
I wasn’t a multimillionaire at fourteen. I lived in poverty while writing the book that made Emma famous. I therefore understand from my own life experience what the trashing of women’s rights in which Emma has so enthusiastically participated means to women and girls without her privileges.
The greatest irony here is that, had Emma not decided in her most recent interview to declare that she loves and treasures me - a change of tack I suspect she’s adopted because she’s noticed full-throated condemnation of me is no longer quite as fashionable as it was - I might never have been this honest.
Rob Henderson of the Manhattan Institute calls things like Watson’s activism an example of “luxury beliefs.”
“Luxury beliefs are ideas and opinions that confer status on the upper class, while often inflicting costs on the lower classes,” he says.
Look at this exchange now between Ta-Nehisi Coates and Ezra Klein, who both represent the pinnacle of liberal media elite.
“If you think it is okay to dehumanize people, then conversation between us is probably not possible,” Coates says. “Trans human beings who deserve humanity.”
Ta, we’re talking about industrialized castration and mutilation of confused minors. We’re talking about dudes in Northern Virginia ladies’ rooms beating off in front of children and then not getting prosecuted. We’re talking about compelled speech codes.
If we can’t have a conversation, it’s because you won’t abandon the delusions and euphemisms that color your argument.
Coates wants his steak without ever setting eyes on the butcher.
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SecWar Pete Hegseth gave a big speech yesterday. It touched on a lot of things, standards, wokeness, and so on. The one thing that stuck out to a lot of the public was that he said no more fat officers in the Pentagon.
Kind of a funny moment. Why does the military even have fat officers? Not that long ago, they’d be administratively separated inside a year for being merely overweight.
He also mentioned waging wars with clear goals and overwhelming force, giving Gen. Norman Schwarzkopf a nod.
Schwarzkopf famously descended on Kuwait with a million troops. That is not an exaggeration. He had 500,000 Americans and another ~480 or so thousand coalition troops.
The goal was to kick the Iraqi Army out. Norman achieved that goal in stunning fashion and then left.
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So how do we make an omelette out of the current political challenge we’re facing?
Liberals have staked ground that is utterly delusional in almost every regard. Should confused children be castrated? Trans women ARE women. How much immigration is enough? Give me your tired, your poor … we are a nation of immigrants. Race-based policies are corrosive and morally wrong. In 1619 … Crime has gotten way out of hand. Systemic racism … Student outcomes are terrible. Public education needs to be completely reformed. You hate teachers and children and you’re racist!
Coates is right; we can’t even have a conversation because these people refuse to speak in anything other than euphemisms, slogans and delusions.
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The people who celebrated the death of a peaceful and productive man are the same people who upended our entire society because a guy OD’d on fentanyl while people filmed a cop kneeling on his back.
The worldview that spawned that moral inversion can’t be treated as good faith. It can only be marginalized, institutionalized if necessary, or hopefully completely destroyed.
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The only way to make an omelette is to crack some eggs.
We need to clean house. Firings at public universities, public schools, school boards. Arrests. Tens of thousands of arrests. Millions of deportations. Firings at every level of government. Render them destitute, bring them low, eradicate their worldview.
Like Schwarzkopf, our victory over this corrosion has to be met with the force of a million. It has to be overwhelmingly decisive. It has to be a blitz.
It won’t be pretty; we won’t get everything right. Sometimes some shell will get in the pan. But it is an absolute must.
Let me know your thoughts today about how it should be done.
WHAT I’M READING
Where’s the empathy they love so much?
EXCLUSIVE: Grieving Father Says No Dem Lawmakers Have Contacted Him Since Daughter’s Murder
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This can’t be reasoned with.
EXCLUSIVE: College Says Employee Hurt Its ‘Reputation’ By Helping FBI Catch Leftist Riot Suspect
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Raising foreign flags is bad.
Philadelphia Raises Chinese Communist Flag
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