The downfall of conservatism

A conservative laments the betrayal of the conservative media and establishment conservatives who have been exposed by President Trump in Human Events:

What had happened to my heroes?

I understand their objection to Trump’s style—three years ago, I myself was put off by it—but style is nothing when measured against substance. Here was a president advancing their agenda—our agenda—didn’t that mean something?

Establishment conservatives were tokens, allowing liberal elites to pretend they were objective when they were fully intent on transforming American society.

At first, I attributed their open mutiny to pride. Pride is human, and prideful men often make for sore losers.

But now, after ample time to recover from their humiliation, the persistent whining from establishment conservatives has exposed a very ugly truth about our former “leaders.” The George Wills and Tom Nichols of the world were always more interested in self-promotion than advancing conservatism.

Before President Trump’s explosive entrance onto the political scene, mainstream conservatism was somewhat tolerated by gatekeepers in the media, academia, and the arts. My heroes were nuisances to America’s increasingly liberal institutions, sure, but no real threat to the progressively progressive status quo. Establishment conservatives were tokens, allowing liberal elites to pretend they were objective when they were fully intent on transforming American society.

But Donald J. Trump was a different animal altogether, one who refused to kowtow to the cultural norms of American political theater. His frank and straightforward style was intolerable to liberal puppet masters who had spent decades corralling Republicans and forcing them to play nice.

Establishment Republicans have built entire careers out of playing nice. And it shows.

The threat of banishment from cocktail parties and university lectures—over Donald Trump of all people—has been enough to force much of the right’s pundit class to toss aside their ideals to preserve mainstream acceptance.

Three years later, it’s this cadre of tamed conservatives who are lending their efforts to the left’s never-ending coup against the President.

I am ever so pleased to have resolutely refused to ever describe myself, or allow others to describe me, as a conservative. I trust my reasons for having done so are now eminently clear to all and sundry.

And it’s good to see more and more former conservatives seeing the light about the intrinsically false nature of their pseudo-philosophy and its nonexistent principles.

Devil Mouse disappearing its own history

It won’t be long before the Wicked Witch is redrawn as a Misunderstood Stepmother in Snow White and the Seven Dwarves:

A new report details that Disney will be censoring a number of its classic movies for its upcoming streaming service Disney+. CNBC reports that the streaming service will not offer its Academy Award winning 1946 animated feature Song of the South.

That really isn’t a surprise as Disney has never released the film in any home video format in the United States before. Back in 2011, Disney CEO Bob Iger explained the decision to not release Song of the South noting the film “wouldn’t necessarily sit right or feel right to a number of people today.”

It’s possible more censorship will be coming for Disney’s older movies. In the upcoming Lady and The Tramp live-action remake, the classic “The Siamese Cat Song” will be removed from the film with a new song replacing it.

I suspect the move to anodyne and inoffensive entertainment is going to serve animated movies about as well as it has served modern comedy.

OK Boomer

A statistical rebuttal of the Boomer perspective:

Faced with higher property prices and piles of student debt, Americans are getting older and older before they buy a home. The median age of first-time home buyers has increased to 33, the oldest in records dating back to 1981, according to a National Association of Realtors report released Friday. The median age of all buyers also hit a fresh record, 47, increasing for a third straight year — and well above the median age of 31 in 1981…. As buyers’ ages have increased, so have their incomes. The typical income of purchasers rose to $93,200 in 2018 as a lack of affordable options squeezed lower-income potential buyers out of the market.

If those Millennials weren’t so lazy, they’d make that $93k per year right out of college, which they should have worked their way through, right? But hey, it’s nothing that importing 100 million more low-income third worlders can’t cure….

Wittle Benny scared

I’m not at all surprised that the Littlest Chickenhawk is running away from Nick “the Knife” Fuentes. He ran from me twice, and ran from Milo as well. As his debacle on British TV demonstrated to all and sundry, he’s a fraud who is totally incapable of beating anyone in debate but clueless left-wing college students.

Ben Shapiro has dipped and dodged every call for debate giving off an impression of weakness and insecurity. Famed for his skill in debate, a challenging opponent like Nicholas J Fuentes would surely give Shapiro a run for his money and could even spell disaster for his political career built upon a faulty foundation of neoconservatism and middle eastern war-hawking.

Fuentes, who pushes an “America First” platform of (you guessed it) putting Americans First, believes that the neoconservative agenda of increased immigration, war in the middle east and enormous foreign aid to first world countries such as Israel comes at the detriment of the American people. Fuentes believes that this neoconservativism must be debated and ultimately replaced with a patriotic American First platform that is by the people and for the people.

If you would like to see Ben Shapiro debate Nicholas J Fuentes then please share this article on social media with the #DebateNick hashtag.

To be fair, when Shapiru talked about “Alt-Right moon landing conspiracy theorists,” I think he was talking about Big Bear, not Nick Fuentes. Not that he would debate Big Bear either.

So THAT ended well

It’s remarkable to what lengths the media will go to bury the lead these days when immigration is involved:

Tedla and Schlecht were reportedly going through divorce proceedings and were due in court just hours before the gruesome slayings. Schlecht’s brother contacted the authorities that evening, asking to check on his sister after failing to reach her by phone. Kenneth Schlecht, Jennifer’s father, tells the Daily News that the last time he spoke to his daughter was last Sunday and she was in tears.

‘She said her husband had indicated that if she served him with divorce papers he would ruin her or take them all out, which was apparently what he did,’ he said.

Jennifer and Yonathan Tedla, an immigrant from Ethiopia, met in the early aughts at Columbia University, where she was attending graduate school and he was working as an IT technician.

They didn’t mention that the murderer was an Ethiopian immigrant until paragraph 16. Now, the level of domestic violence that black men commit when paired with white women is already off the charts, as interracial domestic violence rates are even higher than black domestic violence, which has by far the highest rate of the intraracial pairings.

Now throw in an entitled individual from a notoriously violent culture and a bad outcome is likely, if not necessarily assured. It’s really rather astonishing that a young woman will be warned repeatedly about the statistically significant dangers of smoking and trans fats and not wearing seatbelts, but never once told about the higher risk of marrying a foreigner who may cut her head off and murder her children.

At the very least, it would be a good idea to see how female-initiated divorce is accepted in a man’s foreign culture before seriously contemplating any form of relationship with him.

The new Dershowitz

Keep in mind this guy is not only representing Eric Ciaramella, fake whistleblower #1, but also Mark Waid of Marvel in Richard Meyer’s tortious interference lawsuit against him.

The whistle blower’s attorney @MarkSZaidEsq has scrubbed the link from his website that went to his YouTube channel.

Here’s the archive showing it was there: http://archive.is/zzikn

Now it’s gone:  https://markzaid.com/zaid/

Here’s the YouTube channel: http://YouTube.com/MarkSZaidEsq

Strange, is it not, that all these nominally elite attorneys have such a strong interest in, shall we say, the younger kind. It’s almost as if some of the strange stories about how these losers obtain their positions are true….

UPDATE: Oh, FFS…. Waid “bragged about his connections to John Podesta.” You don’t say.

Irony of ironies

Facebook cries about its privacy being violated by a massive dump of its internal documents:

An explosive trove of nearly 4,000 pages of confidential internal Facebook documents has been made public, shedding unprecedented light on the inner workings of the Silicon Valley social-networking giant.

On Wednesday, the investigative reporter Duncan Campbell released a vast swathe of internal emails, reports, and other sensitive documents from the early 2010s that detail Facebook’s internal approach to privacy and how it worked with app developers and handled their access to user data.

The documents were originally compiled as part of a lawsuit that the startup Six4Three brought against Facebook for cutting off its bikini-photo app’s access to the developer platform. The documents were supposed to remain under seal – but they were leaked….

Facebook has fought vigorously against the release of the documents, arguing that they do not paint a balanced picture of its activities. In an emailed statement, a company representative told Business Insider: “These old documents have been taken out of context by someone with an agenda against Facebook, and have been distributed publicly with a total disregard for US law.”

They don’t paint a balanced picture? When has ANY Big Tech company been the least bit concerned with treating anyone fairly or painting a balanced picture of them.

Go cry to St. Efan.

Movie buff wanted

If you are a serious – and I mean VERY SERIOUS – film expert, and you would like to get paid to write a few thousand trivia questions about the movies, please email me with FILM in the subject.

In completely unrelated news, we have posted instructions for loading mobi files onto Kindle devices and apps in response to Amazon’s enhancement of your user experience at Arkhaven. Because apparently Amazon, like all Big Tech companies, hates its users and wants to them to be unhappy, it has recently removed from mobile versions of the Kindle reader the ability to directly open .mobi files in the device.

Mailvox: atheist biology

Richard Dawkins’s logic is not only flawed, but as Warkicker, an accomplished surgeon, notes, his grasp of animal and human biology is also nonexistent.

MORE ATHEIST LOGIC: You can trust atheists. Because evolutionary biologists don’t understand how biological functions work.

What a curious argument Dawkins gives regarding the “poor design” of the recurrent laryngeal nerve. Is he not aware that the nerve does more than innervate the larynx? It gives branches to the cardiac plexus, esophagus and trachea in addition to the muscles of the larynx. Hence its circuitous route is necessary and not inefficient. I do thyroidectomies all the time and have to be careful not to injure any part of the nerve during the dissection, not just the branches that serve the larynx. Also, the superior laryngeal nerve does give a direct connection to the larynx, and complements the recurrent laryngeal nerve and provides redundancy in function, so a more direct pathway already exists.

There are unusual conditions in which either the right or left recurrent laryngeal nerves do not loop around in the chest but rather directly innervate the larynx. In such individuals, there is the potential for significant problems in swallowing and breathing. Ironically, if you subscribe to the evolutionary paradigm, such conditions may represent example of mutations that regularly occur but yet evolution “chooses” not to select out for the more direct route!

Additionally, the long route the recurrent laryngeal nerve takes into the thoracic cavity before looping back up to the neck may have saved the lives of many of my patients. They will present with hoarseness prompting me to look at their vocal cords. If I see paralysis of one of the vocal cords, I evaluate their chest and often with find a tumor in their mediastinum, usually early enough to still be treatable. Dr. Michael Egnor, a well-known neurosurgeon, has noticed and commented on this as well.

1200 percent and crushing

how is the castalia house classics coming along again? only spectacularly? ah, that’s too bad. maybe next week it’ll just be incredibly fantastic instead.

Crushingly, as it happens. It isn’t only the chickens that are crushing.

On a not-quite-entirely unrelated subject, if you were ever a patron of Owen’s – and I use the term intentionally and very specifically – please email him to assist with the continued crushing.