Barney and Clyde - Season 2, Episode 4

Your fortnight-long wait is over! Episode 4 Season 2 is here! Welcome back to the Libation Station! Pour yourself something bracing and pull up a stool and join us for an hour of examination of matters on the nation’s plate. Clyde provides the libertarian perspective, Barney the conservative view.

In this installment, we discuss

1 - You'll Never Be Woke Enough: Joachin Phoenix's bizarre speech at the Oscars
2 - Meanwhile, Back in Athens: A local property Tax referendum has us pondering the broader implications of property taxes and whether their fundamental existence means that property rights don't exit.
3 - The VSG Unleashed: Trump's behavior since his acquittal
4 - No Room for Moderates: Bernie's rise to become the top contender among the Democrats.
Until Next Fortnight.... Stay vigilant about your freedom!

The delusion further entrenches itself into what's left of Western civilization

Changing its perfectly innocuous and apt greeting in order to indulge a tiny percentage of the population in its madness:

Employees aboard Air Canada flights will no longer greet guests by referring to them as "ladies and gentlemen" or "mesdames et messieurs," which has been typical protocol for years, in an effort to be conscious of gender fluidity. 

Flight attendants and other staff will not use the language in boarding announcements, and the company instead plans to replace the standard greetings with neutral words, such as "everybody" or "tout le monde." 

"We will be amending our onboard announcements to modernize them and remove specific references to gender," a media spokesperson for the company said, also noting that Air Canada was named one of Canada's Best Diversity Employers for 2019. "We work hard to make sure all employees feel like valued members of the Air Canada family, while ensuring our customers are comfortable and respected when they choose to travel with us." 

Canada has taken steps to recognize and protect its citizens who don't identify as either male or female or identify as "non-binary." In the country, gender identity and expression are protected under criminal code, and crimes motivated by such characteristics could constitute hate crimes. It is also illegal in Canada to discriminate against someone based on their gender identity.

Gender is not fluid. There are boys and girls, men and women. You may "feel" like you're a damn pomegranate, but it doesn't make you one.

As I've said before, we must not become inured to this. We must not just roll our eyes and move on. This is the perpetuation of pretense. It's making a virtue out of lying to oneself.

It's a middle finger raised to almighty God.

Saturday roundup

A culture-war skirmish that turned out right:

Oberlin College in Ohio may be one of the most egregious politically correct campuses in the nation. Back in 2013, the campus closed down for a day of “racial sensitivity training” despite the fact that the administration knew that the supposed “racial incident” that prompted this “crisis” (someone spotted wearing Klan robes on campus) was a hoax.

Then in 2016, Black Lives Matter and a number of super-woke Oberlin students launched protests and a boycott against Gibson’s Bakery, a family-owned and run establishment that has been a fixture of downtown Oberlin since 1885. What prompted this? Gibson’s had the temerity to apprehend and charge three students with shoplifting (they later pled guilty), but because of the race of the offenders, the Oberlin College wokerati accused Gibson’s with racism, racial profiling, and probably genocide for all I know.

The Oberlin student Senate passed a resolution charging Gibson’s with “a long history of racial profiling,” and the Oberlin dean of students, Meredith Raimondo, endorsed and distributed the flyer. The college also discontinued purchasing baked goods from Gibsons, because you just can’t take the chance that you’ll cause literal pain or mental anguish to Oberlin students by procuring a bag of racist bear claws for the faculty lounge.

Gibson’s decided not to take this politically-motivated harassment lying down. They filed a  libel and slander suit against Oberlin College, and yesterday a jury found for Gibson’s, ordering Oberlin to pay $11 million in compensatory damages. A punitive damages hearing will follow, so the total award could grow to over $30 million.

William Jacobson at Legal Insurrection has a complete account of the background of the case and the legal drama that has played out. A news account quotes Jacobson: “The students eventually pleaded guilty, but not before large protests and boycotts intended to destroy the bakery and defame the owners. The jury appears to have accepted that Oberlin College facilitated the wrongful conduct against the bakery.”

And here's another one. Take your $21.5 million and stuff it, Culverhouse:

The University of Alabama's board of trustees has voted to return a $21.5 million gift from Hugh Culverhouse Jr. — the school's biggest donor — and take his name off its law school. The move comes after Culverhouse urged businesses and prospective students to boycott the university and the state over Alabama's new abortion law.

The school says the transaction to return the funds was processed Friday morning and that it will also return any accrued interest. Last fall, Culverhouse pledged to donate a total of $26.5 million over four years.

"The action taken by the Board today was a direct result of Mr. Culverhouse's ongoing attempts to interfere in the operations of the Law School," the university's vice chancellor for communication, Kellee Reinhart, said Friday. "That was the only reason the Board voted to remove his name and return his money."

Culverhouse issued a statement Friday in which he renewed his call for students "to protest and reconsider their educational options in Alabama."

Pardes Seleh gets video of a standoff at the Dyke March between the main group, which is excluding any Stars of David, Israeli flags or other symbols of Judaism, and a group displaying those very things. The spokesdyke for the exclusionary group explains her bunch's position in a too-nice-nice way, dripping with sanctimony. She's determined to be all peace, love, tofu and sprouts, even though we all know she can't stand the sight of the other bunch. And there's just something about the way she  enunciates the word "dyke." And is "dyke" some special category of female homosexuality? I'm assuming it is, and that I'm hopelessly behind the curve.

Great Alexandra deSanctis piece at National Review entitled "Joe Biden Never Was Pro-Life." Along with tracing his public support for the Hyde Amendment until about 48 hours ago, going back to voting on its passage in 1976, she reminds us of such Biden moves as voting against Robert Bork's SCOTUS nomination (a move similar to his latest, in that he originally supported Bork). That seat, of course, went to Kennedy, who "went on to affirm Roe v. Wade in Planned Parenthood v. Casey, authoring the constitutionally illiterate decision that upheld the Court-imposed regime of abortion-on-demand."

And speaking of the procedure whereby the brains are vacuumed out of the skulls of people who aren't born yet, here's a HuffPost piece that may be the wackiest thing you'll read this decade. (I can say that, because this decade's nearly over. As to how soon after that you'll read something wackier, I wouldn't be willing to bet.) It's entitled "Women Aren't the Only People Who Get Abortions." A taste:

Even the most progressive health organizations, like Planned Parenthood, are still not up to speed on some of the most rudimental ways to give competent and compassionate care to trans and nonbinary folks. 

“Even the pro-choice people are constantly, constantly choosing to ignore my existence,” Gutiérrez said. 

Dr. Krystal Redman, executive director of southeastern nonprofit SPARK: Reproductive Justice Now, pointed to the fact that, historically, legislation in the U.S. has been created by cisgender white people. And that, she argued, creates a systemic “narrative of gender being binary.” 

“Just based on the history of how these laws were created, naturally the narrative and the conversations behind it become this cis-het [cisgender, heteronormative] centered narrative,” said Redman, a cisgender woman.

The language of choice was specifically created by cisgender people for cisgender people, Redman explained. Instead of the question being “Are you male or female?″ or “Do you have insurance or are you uninsured?”, the question for most nonbinary and gender-nonconforming folks is, “What provider can I go to that truly understands the dynamics of my body?”

“Cis folks need to understand that they operate within a privilege,” Redman said. “I don’t care what other racial or ethnic identity you identify with but just by the premise of being cis-identified, there is so much more privilege that you have over folks who do not identify as cis.”

Fewer post-Americans are moving - near or far - than at any time since 1948.  Discuss among yourselves.

 

AOC makes an ass of herself - today's edition

In her zeal to tie together an array of mostly imagined occurrences and pin them on a supposedly greedy capitalist who happened to be a captive audience, she got in way over her head. All the guy on the receiving end of her incoherent attempt at a pillory job had to do was - well, what he did.

She sits on the House Financial Services Committee. It's now headed by Maxine Waters, who has long had it in for the banking industry, even though she has some questionable connections with it herself. 

Waters had arranged a hearing the point of which was to skewer the head of Wells Fargo. One wonders whether committee chairwoman Waters feels that her protege made the best use of her grilling time as this exchange unfolded:

As the Daily Wire pointed out, AOC began by accusing Wells Fargo of caging children, an accusation to which Sloan was awfully confused about.

“Why was the bank involved in the caging of children and financing the caging of children to begin with?” Ocasio-Cortez asked.

“I don’t know how to answer that question because we weren’t,” Sloan said simply.

“Uh, so in finan–, you’ve, you were financing, involved in debt financing in CoreCivic and GEO group, correct?” Ocasio-Cortez responded.

“For a period of time, we were involved in financing one of the firms, we are not anymore,” [Wells Fargo CEO Timothy] Sloan said. “I’m not familiar with the specific assertion you are making, we were not involved in that.”

Our favorite democratic socialist then moved on to trying to nail Wells Fargo with environmental damages from oil pipelines. This also confused Sloan, seeing as how there have been no damages due to leaks from pipelines. This forced Ocasio-Cortez to ask him if Wells Fargo should be responsible if it happened “hypothetically.”

“Should Wells Fargo be held responsible for the damages incurred by Climate Change due to the financing of fossil fuels and these projects?” Ocasio-Cortez asked.
“I don’t know how’d you calculate that, Congresswoman,” Sloan responded.

“Say from spills, or when we have to reinvest in infrastructure building sea walls from the erosion of, um, from the erosion of infrastructure or cleanups, wildfires, etc…,” Ocasio-Cortez said.

“Related to that pipeline?” Sloan replied. “I’m not aware that there’s been any of what you’ve described that’s occurred that’s related to that pipeline.”

“How about, uh, the cleans up from the leaks of the Dakota Access pipeline?” said Ocasio-Cortez.

“I’m not aware of the leaks associated with the Dakota Access pipeline that you’re describing,” Sloan responded.

“So, hypothetically, if there was a leak from the Dakota Access pipeline, why shouldn’t Wells Fargo pay for the clean up of it since it paid for the construction of the pipeline itself?”

Sloan, once again, had a simple answer.

“Because we don’t operate the pipeline, we provide financing to the company that’s operating the pipeline,” he said. 

What if pigs could fly, Sandy?

The exit question here is whether grilling someone about how he would respond to a hypothetical situation dependent upon all kinds of contingencies is seen by most people as a ridiculous polemical approach, or whether a critical mass sees it as a valid way to take someone down.

Wednesday roundup

Gonna be interesting to see the sales figures on this line of products upon launch. Wokeness on steroids:

The glamorous world of Barbie just became a whole lot more welcoming for children with disabilities, after Mattel announced the launch of new disabled dolls, one of which has a prosthetic leg, while the other is in a wheelchair.  

Set to debut in the fall, the new diverse Barbie dolls will join the ever-expanding 'Fashionistas' collection - a range that includes characters of different shapes, sizes, and races. 

'Over the years, the #Barbie #Fashionistas line has evolved to be more reflective of the world girls see around them,' a post on Barbie's official Instagram account explained. 

Kristen Gillibrand disguises her contempt for economic freedom (organizations getting to set their own policies) with that tried-and-true Democrat positive spin: caaaaaaaring. In this case, as is often the case, doncha know, it's caaaaaaaring about the American family.

Just as our national debt surpasses $22 trillion for the first time in history, presidential hopeful Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand, D-N.Y., wants to rehash her worst idea: the FAMILY Act. 

Our least-principled senator has made the media rounds putting a shiny veneer on the FAMILY Act, dressing it up as a feminist dream. But given the ramifications it would have on women's progress in the workplace, it'd be anything but. 

Gillibrand's bill would guarantee 12 weeks of paid leave at a rate of at least 66 percent of earnings for new parents, as well as some coverage for other family caregiving. Unlike the Ivanka Trump plan backed by the White House and some Republicans, which claims to be deficit neutral by allowing adults to pull from "their" Social Security prematurely — remember folks, it's a lockbox and not a Ponzi scheme! — Gillibrand funds her paid leave with a payroll tax.

To force employers to fund their workers' paid leave, encouraging gender discrimination to avoid costly risks, is one thing. To force you, me, and every other average Joe on the street to do it is another thing entirely. Worst of all, it will stymie decades of progress made by women in the workplace. 

As it turns out, if you don't hand free cash to reward women for giving birth, they tend to work more over the course of their entire lifetimes. That's good for the nation's GDP, but it's even better for the individual progress of women. 

Now, with regard to one aspect of Tiana Loew's (author of the Washington Examiner piece linked and excerpted above) argument ("individual progress of women"), I wonder what her take would be on Dennis Prager's latest column, "Not 'All Americans' Are Proud That We Have More Women in the Workforce Than Ever Before.'" This is yet another example of a phenomenon within conservatism that must be reckoned with: young conservative women who see career equity as unqualified progress. National Review's Alexandra DeSanctis took Prager to task last year for a similar column.

Now, here's where it could get real silly and tribalistic. I could say one side or the other in this debate is absolutely right and the other side absolutely full of hooey. But Prager's questions must be addressed: are post-American women happier than they were sixty years ago? Are post-American families stronger than American families were?


Gavin Newsom is forced to face reality. Well, sort of. He still wants to see this boondoggle connect those economic powerhouses Bakersfield and Merced:

During Gov. Gavin Newsom's first State of the State speech Tuesday, he surprised listeners by announcing he would put the quest for high-speed rail connecting San Francisco and Los Angeles championed by his predecessor far on the back burner.

Instead, Newsom offered a consolation prize: high-speed rail between Bakersfield and Merced.

"Let's level about the high-speed rail," Newsom said. "Let's be real, the current project as planned would cost too much and, respectfully, take too long. Right now, there simply isn't a path to get from Sacramento to San Diego, let alone from San Francisco to L.A. I wish there were."

Because he'd rather spend the federal subsidy than return the money to the administration run by someone he, like any 2019 Dem, must unreservedly hate:

"Abandoning the high-speed rail entirely means we will have wasted billions and billions of dollars with nothing but broken promises... and lawsuits to show for it," Newsom added, explaining he wouldn't want to send the $3.5 billion in federal money the project has been granted back to the Trump administration.

Yeah, that would be terrible to return that money that me, out here in Indiana, kicked in for this idiotic west-coast scheme.

NRO editorial that says that while the border-barrier compromise is way less than what wall enthusiasts want, they'll have to take it, because Pubs squandered their opportunity for something more substantial when they had the White House and both chambers of Congress.

I would not normally provide a link to something this foul, but occasionally we need to look squarely at the enemy. This was written by a PhD candidate in history at Columbia.

More wokeness in the business world. Memo to the above-discussed Mattel: It works out badly:

Panera Bread has shuttered the last of its ideologically driven "pay what you want" restaurants. The socialist-tinged ventures were called "Panera Cares" and the higher-ups have finally figured out that "caring" is not synonymous with "viable business model." On February 15, the final Panera Cares, located in Boston, will close.

The website Eater gives Panera Cares' history and provides the company's motivation behind the now-defunct mission:

The chain opened its first donation-based community cafe in St. Louis, Missouri, in 2010. Under the model championed by the company’s founder Ron Shaich, the restaurant operated like a typical Panera, but offered meals at a suggested donation price, with the goal of raising awareness about food insecurity. “In many ways, this whole experiment is ultimately a test of humanity,” Shaich said in a TEDx talk later that year. “Would people pay for it? Would people come in and value it?” It appears the answer is a resounding no.

Food insecurity? While having a pretty good idea of what the term means, I still looked it up. According to Feeding Texas, "Food insecurity offers an accepted method for measuring food deprivation."

You know who's probably suffering from food insecurity? The employees of Panera Cares who are no longer employed and no longer receive paychecks. You can't buy food if you don't have a job, and providing jobs is only assured if companies are focused on making money. If Panera had cared more about making money than promoting a constantly refuted ideology, its employees would still be receiving paychecks. Frighteningly, though, a growing segment of the populace seems to be allergic to common-sense economic principles.

That's what happens when you decided to ignore the LITD First Law of Economics: The money has to come from somewhere.

 

Lefties need to remove "inclusivity" from their lexicon of buzzwords; their agenda is anything but

Georgia definitely dodged a bullet in November. Not only did Stacey Abrams' SOTU rebuttal quickly deteriorate into identity politics and a number of other hallmarks of 2019 Dem outlook, but she further fleshes out her grim "vision" in a recent magazine piece:

. . . in an essay for Foreign Affairs . . . she argued that the philosophy of intersectionality—a philosophy that suggests that Americans must organize by group identity in order to tear away hierarchies of privilege—was a necessary precondition for the betterment of the country.

Abrams rightly pointed out that marginalized groups were originally forced into group identities by a racist white majority who used legal tools in order to discriminate against those minorities. And she correctly noted that those groups had to organize in order to fight back. But then she stated that political beliefs of which she did not approve were hallmarks of that same dominant, bigoted majority—and that the majority’s bigotry therefore necessitated the continued use of identity politics by minority groups.

“When the groups most affected by these issues insist on acknowledgment of their intrinsic difference, it should not be viewed as divisive,” Abrams wrote. “Embracing the distinct histories and identities of groups in a democracy enhances the complexity and capacity of the whole.” Indeed, Abrams rejected the “amorphous, universal descriptors” of liberty and equality and individual rights. Instead, she relied on “an expanded, identity-conscious politics.” 

This is an ugly vision of the future of the country: a future in which all political differences are chalked up to thinly-masked bigotry, and in which the only solution to that supposed bigotry is identity politics in search of power. That was Abrams’ response to Trump’s articulation of an America united by creed, history, and vision—an America divided by race, class, and sex, but united by a desire to see the system overthrown. And that contrast of visions is sure to be at the center of the 2020 presidential race.

The thing is, though, this "vision" winds up being a fast trip to nowhere. Any and all of the demographic groups present at any "intersection" wind up devouring each other, as Rich Lowry points out in a piece for Politico:

Democrats are about to embark on the first woke primary, a gantlet of political correctness that will routinely wring abject apologies out of candidates and find fault in even the most sure-footed. The passage of time will be no defense. Nor the best of intentions. Nor anything else.
Any lapses will be interpreted through the most hostile lens, made all the more brutal by the competition of a large field of candidates vying for the approval of a radicalized base. The Democrat nomination battle might as well be fought on the campus of Oberlin College and officiated by the director of the Office of Equity, Diversity and Inclusion.

Being a progressive hero of long-standing doesn’t afford any protection. Consider Sen. Elizabeth Warren. She certainly deserves all the grief she gets for her laughable identification of herself over the years as an American Indian. But for the identity-politics Left, her fault runs deeper: In trying to rebut the allegedly racist mockery of her as “Pocahontas,” she herself committed a racial offense.

After taking a DNA test to prove her (distant) Native American ancestry, she stood accused in the words of a member of a tribe in South Dakota of “privileging nonindingenous definitions of being indigenous.” According The New York Times, she had also tread “too far into the fraught area of racial science—a field that has, at times, been used to justify the subjugation of racial minorities and Native Americans.” Not to mention how she had given “validity to the idea that race is determined by blood—a bedrock principle for white supremacists and others who believe in racial hierarchies.”

Yes, Warren stood exposed as implicitly in league with the oppressors of Native Americans—and here she had just wanted Donald Trump to stop referring to her by a derisive nickname. Cherokee Nation activist Rebecca Nagle told CNN last week that Warren needed to apologize “to the tribes that she has harmed and to Native people broadly.”
Sure enough, she apologized, and presumably will keep on doing it as long as she’s running.

It is a season of apologies. When recently announced candidate Kirsten Gillibrand went on “The Rachel Maddow Show,” the MSNBC host hit her for having in the past used the term “illegal alien,” although it was standard and technically correct usage. Gillibrand allowed that she was embarrassed by her past positions on immigration. She, of course, was last seen being an enforcer herself, and pushing Al Franken out of the Senate over groping allegations.

Another presidential candidate, Rep. Tulsi Gabbard, recorded a four-minute apology video over her former opposition to gay marriage: “In my past, I said and believed things that were wrong, and worse, they were hurtful to people in the LGBTQ community and to their loved ones.”
In this environment, being a white male, particularly a white male not obsessed with gender and race, is a risk factor. This is a major vulnerability of Sen. Bernie Sanders, whose outright socialism is no defense.

Segments of the Left jumped on him this week for doing the same State of the Union response that he’s done for the past couple of years. This time was different because he’d be following the African-American activist Stacey Abrams, and somehow or other supposedly upstaging her. Activist Marc Lamont Hill called Sanders’ choice “racially tone deaf.” Never mind that Sanders had praised the choice of Abrams for the formal rebuttal.

In every presidential campaign, candidates have to explain and backfill to get with the party’s latest program. What will make this process so much more intense for Democrats is the belief that even past mistakes involving the choice of words or symbolism are affirmatively injurious of other people. And the belief that such mistakes represent deep sins to be repented.

Joe Biden was speaking sardonically when he said a couple of weeks ago regarding the criticism of his praise for a Republican, “Bless me, Father, for I have sinned.” If he runs, Biden will find himself repeating essentially the same sentiment over and over again, given his lengthy record prior to the sharp turn of the Democratic Party toward identity politics.

Even Sen. Kamala Harris, who calls racism, sexism, and trans-phobia matters of “national security,” isn’t safe. She was once a prosecutor, after all. Reviewing her record, a New York Times op-ed writer said “she needs to radically break with her past.”

Who doesn’t? No one will be woke enough to emerge from this process unscathed. 

Indeed. Somebody's purist standards are always going to collide with somebody else's.

Italian fashion brands are finding out that there's a minefield wherever one deigns to step:

Gucci pulled a black polo neck sweater from its shops Thursday after it sparked comparisons with racially offensive golliwog and "blackface" imagery.

The "balaclava jumper" can be pulled up to the eyes with the mouth visible through large red lips.

"Happy Black History Month y'all," one African American fashionista tweeted ironically, with others pointing out the resemblance to a golliwog.
It is the third Italian brand to be hit in recent months by race rows, after Prada was forced to pull a line of accessories in December because of their resemblance to blackface imagery.

Dolce & Gabbana are reeling from a boycott in China after a calamitous advertising campaign of a Chinese woman struggling to eat spaghetti and pizza with chopsticks that was decried as racist. 

The way out of the booby trap? Have none of it in the first place. Proceed through this world with the bearing of a grownup. Let it be known that you'll do no puking all over yourself about anything.

Abrams is full of excrement. The only worthwhile approach to culture or public policy is on the basis of universally applicable principles. A worldview worth having is one that sees that anybody can be a sinner or a saint. Victims and oppressors are not automatically so due to some way they can be categorized.

Accord others the respect of assessing them as individual souls and insist on that for yourself.

"Spiritually flawed human being" is a category that can include us all.

 

Tuesday roundup

A WSJ editorial on how the leftist media is trying to give the person who will probably take Brett Kavanaugh's old seat on the DC Circuit Court of Appeals the Kavanaugh treatment:

Ms. Rao cleared the Senate for that post with bipartisan support—unusual in the Trump era—after an uneventful confirmation process. She’s certainly qualified for a judgeship. Ms. Rao clerked for Justice Clarence Thomas, taught for a decade at George Mason University’s law school, and worked in George W. Bush’s White House counsel’s office. She’s an expert on administrative law, which is valuable for a court that hears many challenges to federal regulation.

But here comes BuzzFeed with the scoop of the year that Ms. Rao “wrote inflammatory op-eds in college.” Yes, apparently this is why some people get into journalism. The story is clearly an oppo-research dump, probably from the left-wing Alliance for Justice, which is trying to torpedo Ms. Rao.

Not long ago, before everyone’s entire life was politicized, college was a period of intellectual development. Students are young and often write with more passion than wisdom. If writing or remarks at age 22 are disqualifying for public life, then every Member of Congress might as well resign now.

Ms. Rao’s sins aren’t that she was inflammatory but that she is conservative. Ms. Rao took a dim view of racial preferences in a piece about the great African-American scholar, Thomas Sowell. She also wrote that progressives preach tolerance but too often don’t practice it. Q.E.D. Some of her writing is infelicitous or sophomoric, but none of it is relevant to how she might rule as a 45-year-old judge with adult life experience.

One supposedly damning piece touches on how alcohol complicates student relationships. “It has always seemed self-evident to me that even if I drank a lot, I would still be responsible for my actions,” Ms. Rao wrote in the Yale Herald. “A man who rapes a drunk girl should be prosecuted. At the same time, a good way to avoid a potential date rape is to stay reasonably sober.” We look forward to the same people who assailed Brett Kavanaugh for drinking too much beer finding fault with Ms. Rao’s sobriety.

The real motive for destroying Ms. Rao is maintaining progressive control of the D.C. Circuit to rubber stamp the left’s agenda on climate change, health care and more. Then Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid packed the court during the Obama years, but Ms. Rao replacing Justice Kavanaugh won’t alter the composition of the court.

Kamala Harris tries to pull that with-Medicare-for-all-there-won't-be-any-cumbersome-bureaucracy crap, but Ed Morrissey at Hot Air is having none of it:

TAPPER: Just to follow up on that, correct me if I’m wrong. To reiterate: You support the Medicare for All bill, I think initially co-sponsored by Bernie Sanders, you’re also a co-sponsor.

HARRIS: Yes.

TAPPER: I believe it will totally eliminate private insurance. So for people out there who like their insurance — they don’t get to keep it?

HARRIS: Well, listen, the idea is that everyone gets access to medical care. And you don’t have to go through the process of going through an insurance company, having them give you approval, going through the paperwork, all of the delay that may require. Who of us has not had that situation where you’ve got to wait for approval, and the doctor says, “Well, I don’t know if your insurance company is going to cover this”? Let’s eliminate all of that. Let’s move on.

Spoken like someone who never had to deal with Medicare, which — contrary to Harris’ claims here — requires every single step she claims to detest. The biggest fib here is that switching to Medicare eliminates the approval process. It most certainly does not, a fact easily found with about two seconds’ worth of research on the website for the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS):

Medicare coverage is limited to items and services that are reasonable and necessary for the diagnosis or treatment of an illness or injury (and within the scope of a Medicare benefit category). National coverage determinations (NCDs) are made through an evidence-based process, with opportunities for public participation. In some cases, CMS’ own research is supplemented by an outside technology assessment and/or consultation with the Medicare Evidence Development & Coverage Advisory Committee (MEDCAC). In the absence of a national coverage policy, an item or service may be covered at the discretion of the Medicare contractors based on a local coverage determination (LCD).

That’s no different than dealing with private insurers, whose coverage is similarly limited by “reasonable and necessary” clauses. Furthermore, Medicare requires plenty of its own paperwork and red tape, with response times that routinely exceed those of private insurers, at least those outside the HMO model. Private insurers also manage care, but at least consumers have some choice for insurers and options for potentially better service and more tailored coverage.

Furthermore, we already know how government-run single-payer systems in the US operate, because we have two of them besides CMS: The Veterans Administration and Indian Health Services. The latter is a disgrace which Congress keeps ignoring, while the former is often a disgrace that Congress can’t quite ignore. Every ill Harris assigns to private insurers is amplified in both systems — delays, red tape, lack of accountability, and arbitrary services. 

There are rumblings in the Freedom-Hater party that perhaps AOC should be primaried.  

Dennis Prager sees in the current spate of disparagement of the institution of NFL cheerleaders the overall war on immutable human nature in microcosm He builds his case by citing some examples of said disparagement:

In The Boston Globe, Margery Eagan, Globe columnist and co-host of NPR's "Boston Public Radio," wrote a column titled "It's time to say goodbye to the NFL cheerleaders." She described NFL cheerleading as "creepy and demeaning."

USA Today sports columnist Nancy Armour came to the same conclusion: "The underlying premise of NFL cheerleaders is degrading. ... NFL cheerleaders need to go."

Chicago Tribune sports reporter Shannon Ryan wrote, "The league has shown only that it regards cheerleaders as pieces of sideline eye candy." To make her point, she asked, "why aren't there scantily dressed male cheerleaders and dance teams?"

Only the well-educated could ask such a stupid question -- because only the highly educated deny that, with few exceptions, the only people who would like to see scantily dressed male cheerleaders are gay men.

In USA Today, Yale Divinity School Director of Communications Tom Krattenmaker added a theological voice to the anti-cheerleader chorus. "It's time," he intoned, "to call this out for what it is: demeaning to women and an anachronism that ought to be beneath the male fans to whom this titillating eye candy is served." This sentence, and his whole piece, is what goes for deep thought on the left today. He doesn't explain how being an NFL cheerleader is "demeaning." He simply declares it so. Did he bother to interview any cheerleaders? I did, and the consensus among cheerleaders is that it is one of their greatest life experiences.

Here's what's really going on:

Why do leftists have contempt for cheerleading and cheerleaders (who, after all, choose to be cheerleaders -- and for virtually no pay)?
A Vanity Fair piece on cheerleaders gave the game away: "The league profits from selling a retrograde notion of masculinity -- big, strong men, unafraid to take a hit, surrounded by enthusiastic, scantily clad women."

Or as a Canadian Broadcasting Corporation article titled "Pro cheerleading 'should be abolished'" reported, former professional basketball player Mariah Burton Nelson said, "Cheerleading implies that women's proper role is to support men, smile at men and fulfill the sexual fantasies of males." 

The left has contempt for masculinity and the male sexual nature that is part of it. The new emasculated man will not look at sexy women. And the new defeminized woman will not want to "support men," let alone appear sexy for them. 

Cathy Young at Reason looks at just how furious the current crop of feminists is.

Modern feminism, with its framework of male privilege and female oppression, takes a simplistic and one-sided view of gender dynamics in modern Western societies. It ignores the possibility that some gender-based biases (such as the expectation that males will perform physically grueling and/or dangerous tasks, paid or not) may benefit women or disadvantage men. It disregards the vast diversity and flexibility of cultural norms. It refuses to recognize that there is no perfect solution to the problem of dispensing justice when someone alleges a crime with no witnesses and both parties tell a credible story.

Rage-driven activism can be particularly destructive when it targets and politicizes interpersonal relationships, an area in which the sexes are probably equal but different in bad behavior. Victoria Bissell Brown's verbal abuse of her husband is hardly a typical example, but even Traister sees nothing wrong with the fact that, at the height of #MeToo, her husband once marveled, "How can you even want to have sex with me at this point?"

Anger can be productive, usually as an impetus for short-term action. But rage feminism is a path of fear and hate. It traps women in victimhood and bitterness. It demonizes men, even turning empathy for a male into a fault, and dismisses dissenting women as man-pleasing collaborators. It short-circuits important conversation on gender issues.

Victoria Bissell Brown penned a particularly silly op-ed a while back:

In October, a few days after Brett Kavanaugh was sworn in as a Supreme Court justice, The Washington Post published one woman's account of channeling her rage into half an hour of screaming at her husband. "I announced that I hate all men and wish all men were dead," wrote retired history professor Victoria Bissell Brown, entirely unapologetic despite conceding that her hapless spouse was "one of the good men."

 

Three House members from the Freedom-Hater party are saying incredibly stupid things about the US stance toward the current situation in Venezuela, a stance shared by most South American and European countries. The three are AOC, Ilhan Omar, and Tulsi Gabbard. Omar in particular sounds like a 1980s apologist for the Sandinistas:

“We cannot hand pick leaders for other countries on behalf of multinational corporate interests."

Listen up, toots. Venezuelans are eating zoo animals and selling their breast milk in order not to starve.

AOC and Ro Khanna take the worst possible position one could on the latest Venezuela developments

She retweeted fellow House member Ro Khanna's (D-CA) tweet about how the US should "support Uruguay, Mexico, and the Vatican's efforts for a negotiated settlement & end sanctions that are making the hyperinflation worse."

I'll let John Sexton at Hot Air have the floor at this point:

This statement doesn’t mention that neighboring Colombia, which has taken the brunt of the Venezuelan refugee crisis, has called for Maduro to step aside or that Argentina, Brazil, Canada, Chile, Costa Rica, Guatemala, Honduras, Paraguay, and Peru have all sided with the U.S. As for the countries supporting Maduro, that’s Cuba, Bolivia and maybe Mexico. And not surprisingly Maduro’s regime has the support of Russia which is shocked, shocked that any country would interfere in someone else’s dictatorship:

Russia, the source of billions of dollars in loans to Venezuela, insisted that Maduro remains the legitimate president and slammed the U.S. approach. Russian officials and pro-Kremlin lawmakers said that Venezuela — after Iraq, Libya, Ukraine and Syria — was becoming the latest victim of global U.S. efforts to foment regime change in violation of international norms.

U.S. recognition of Guaidó was aimed at “deepening the split in Venezuelan society, increasing conflict in the streets, and fundamentally destabilizing the domestic political situation and further escalating the conflict,” the Russian Foreign Ministry said in a statement. A spokesman for Russian President Vladimir Putin said that “attempts to usurp the power in Venezuela are illegitimate and contradict international law.”

As for a negotiated settlement, Maduro has been involved in negotiations with various parties for nearly 3 years. More than a year ago the latest round of negotiations came to an end. The result? Absolutely nothing changed:

Members of Venezuela’s leftist government and opposition leaders concluded a round of talks in the Dominican Republic on Saturday, failing to reach a deal to address the country’s political and economic crisis…

The result prolongs the standoff between the government and the opposition, who have tried and failed for years to strike a pact. The two sides last met for talks in December.

As Foreign Affairs pointed out, these negotiations have been going on since May of 2016:

Since May 2016, the Union of South American Republics (UNASUR), an intergovernmental organization comprising 12 South American states, has attempted to mediate between the government and the opposition, in the hope of averting a meltdown. In October, after the Venezuelan government-controlled electoral commission (CNE) waved off a constitutional referendum and indefinitely suspended local elections—blocking an electoral resolution until the 2018 presidential elections—the Vatican stepped in.

Those mediation efforts have predictably failed, thanks to an inability on the part of the mediators and other outside parties to impose real costs on the government. Since March, the Maduro government has violently repressed street demonstrations, resulting in over 70 deaths, and it continues to imprison at least 120 of its political opponents. The government has resisted calls to hold elections before 2018, refused to recognize the right to a constitutional recall referendum, and, most recently, called for an illegal constituent assembly to revise the constitution. However, it has faced no consequences from the mediators.

Negotiations aren’t a fresh solution, they’re the status quo. And ending sanctions would just make it easier for Maduro to drag things out even longer while his people starve.

Sexton appropriately mentions the fact that AOC recently let loose with a projectile of dog vomit about how her own nation, the United States, is in a "dystopian" state of affairs requiring the "fierce urgency of now." Compared to Venezuela?

Her silliness may play well at Sundance but I don't think the capitals of the above-mentioned nations that have already recognized Juan Guaido as interim Venezuelan president are going to be too impressed.

Every day I become more embarrassed to be a member of the human species - today's edition

All the items currently consuming the oxygen on Twitter, on television and in the pundit-sphere bear an ironic twist.

Probably most glaringly, the egg on the face of Buzzfeed in the wake of the realization that the Trump-told-Cohen-to-lie story has prompted the Very Stable Genius's camp to extend kudos to the Mueller team. Seriously.

(Side note about this: So far, I haven't touched that one, but it's about time for some observations on the advance of journalism's death rattle. Stay tuned.)

Sebastian Gorka's reaction to CNN's Jim Acosta approaching him and making the snide remark about "real journalists" while Gorka was standing inside the entrance to the White House briefing room waiting to meet with Trump - loudly calling him a dickhead and following up with sound ripping-into - is understandable. Acosta's had it coming for a long time. But, of course, we say that every time he gets upbraided in person, don't we? But Gorka is hardly an exemplary figure in the defense-of-core-values business. A tricky call for him. How to settle on a term that wouldn't arguably be applicable to himself?

How about this one?

In a statement on the Senate floor yesterday, Mazie Hirono (D., Hawaii) doubled down on her attacks against the Catholic group the Knights of Columbus and accused her colleague Senator Ben Sasse (R., Neb.) of “embrac[ing] the alt-right position” by offering a resolution rebuking the use of unconstitutional religious tests.

“If my colleague, the junior Senator from Nebraska, wants to embrace the alt-right’s position by offering this resolution, that is his business,” Hirono said on the floor.

This accusation is as irresponsible as it is unfounded. Sasse has been one of the most outspokenRepublican senators against the alt-right, and his response to the white-supremacy rally in Charlottesville was perhaps the most powerful and clear given by any conservative politician.

What’s more, the resolution he offered on Wednesday night — and that the Senate agreed to by unanimous consent — had nothing whatsoever to do with the alt-right. It reaffirmed the constitutional clause forbidding the use of religious tests for public officeholders. Hirono stated in her remarks that Sasse’s resolution was unnecessary “because no religious test is being applied to nominees for Federal office.” 

But Hirono herself is the very reason that Sasse offered the resolution in the first place — and her defensive statement clearly shows that she knows it. The resolution was prompted by Hirono’s recent questioning, along with Senator Kamala Harris (D., Calif.), of a Catholic judicial nominee, Brian Buescher, over his membership in the Knights of Columbus.

Here's one with a the-Left-eats-its-own angle: a gender-fluid comedian gets kicked offstage because he - it? - had the temerity to wear dreadlocks while white.

The co-op explained on Facebook (translation courtesy of The Daily Wire, as is the quote above):

The co-op harvest is a safe space, free from oppression reports. We do not tolerate any discrimination or harassment within our spaces. In view of some recent events, the co-op would like to explain its positions [regarding why a white male with dreadlocks was denied a performance].

…cultural ownership is the fact that a person from a dominant culture is suitable for symbols, clothing, or hairstyles of people from historically dominated cultures. It is a privilege to be able to wear dreads as a white person, and that this is seen … as being edgy, while a black person will be denied access to job opportunities or spaces (accommodation, schools, evenings, sports competitions, etc). In fact, black people too often face the need to change their hair and deny their culture if they want to be employable and be able to survive.

As noted by TDW:

The post goes on to say that after “decades of colonialism, slavery, and cultural genocide” in which people of color were not allowed to style their hair in certain ways and dress as they wanted, “it is a slap in the face” that “another group can take [those styles] without problems or consequences.”

They further claim that while “a person’s intention may not be racist … cultural ownership is a vehicle for racism,” and that anyone who displays such “cultural ownership” shouldn’t have the spotlight at the co-op.

A consideration of the sum total of these occurrences invites that parlor game in which you imagine inviting someone with whom you were close sixty years ago - a parent, perhaps - to spend a few hours with you in January 2019. Said person would surely react, "The entire species has lost its mind!"

As I said in a post a few days ago,

Nobody uses terms like "immutable" and "eternal" anymore, do they? No, now it's all relative and situational. Various "communities" have their own "needs" and sets of issues. Indeed, we're to the point that they have their own "truths."

 There's no sense of a foundation to it all anymore, is there?

There's no adult America that is assured enough of its own resilience to absorb the insanity that now passes for routine interaction among us.

It behooves us to keep an eye on the proceedings, but means of turning this around that had a chance of working in any previous time aren't going to cut it now.

It's very late in the day.

Two Dem candidates remove all doubt that they're not ready for prime time

I guess Krysten Simena is cool with writing off an entire, rather sizable, demographic:

Democratic Senate candidate Kyrsten Sinema, of Arizona, once described stay-at-home moms as leeches in a 2006 interview.

“These women who act like staying at home, leeching off their husbands or boyfriends, and just cashing the checks is some sort of feminism because they’re choosing to live that life,” she told Scottsdale nightlife magazine 944. “That’s bullshit. I mean, what the f*** are we really talking about here?”

Okay, that was twelve years ago. It would be interesting to hear her explain any evolution in her views. She sure wasn't wishy-washy about what she thought then.

And Ocasio-Cortez announces to the world that she's gone full Al Gore:

 Democratic socialist congressional candidate Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez wants to address global warming the same way America defeated the Nazis during World War II.

Speaking at a campaign event on Friday, Ocasio-Cortez made the case that, since Nazi Germany and global warming are both “existential threats,” the same tactics used against one should be levied against the other.

“So, when we talk about existential threats,” said Ocasio Cortez, “the last time we had a really major existential threat in this country was around World War II. So, we’ve been here before, and we have a blueprint of what we did before. None of these things are new ideas.” 

“What we had was an existential threat in the context of a war,” she continued. “And what we did was that we chose to mobilize and industrialize our entire economy and we put hundreds of thousands if not millions of people to work in defending our shores and defending this country.”

So of course, according to the New York Democratic socialist congressional candidate, the “same thing” should work to “get us to 100 percent renewable energy.”

“It may seem like really big, it may seem really ambitious, it may seem very radical, as people love to say, but the fact of the matter is that we’re dealing with a radical truth, and the more we choose to ignore it the worse we are doing by our children and our grandchildren and frankly ourselves,” she concluded.

Go get 'em, Alex!

Fauxcahontas takes the bait re: a DNA test and it shows that she's one of the whitest people this country ever saw

At first, the hard-left "mainstream media" was quite excited, but then this oopsie came to light:

The Boston Globe issued a correction to its big scoop about Sen. Elizabeth Warren’s possible Native American ancestry, showing that their math was off. 

The correction note, appearing now at the bottom of the report, reveals that the ancestry percentage of a potential 10th generation relative is actually even lower than originally stated. 

The Globe initially reported that Warren has “strong evidence” of Native American heritage, stemming from six to 10 generations back, which would make her at minimum 1/512th (or .19 percent) Native American.

However, the Globe acknowledged that the number actually doesn't even reach the tenths place without rounding up. 

“Correction: Due to a math error, a story about Elizabeth Warren misstated the ancestry percentage of a potential 10th generation relative. It should be 1/1,024,” the Globe said in its correction. That would put the percentage at .097. 

Oh. Okay.

This is especially guffaw-worthy given the way she built it up:

 In case you missed it, Warren has released a new "fact" sheet about her supposed Native American heritage, along with an online video.

In case you missed it, Warren has released a new "fact" sheet about her supposed Native American heritage, along with an online video.

Conspicuously absent from this mini-film? Any actual Native Americans.  The clip does, however, show (a) various members of her family confirming that there was "Indian" folklore in their history, (b) various faculty and officials from law schools where she taught praising her skill and denying any knowledge of her claimed ethnicity playing a role in her hiring, and (c) a genealogist concluding that she has Native American blood in her heritage.  All of this content is interspersed with snippets of President Trump ridiculing Warren as "Pocahontas," setting up an obvious dichotomy aimed at Democratic primary voters: Ingest my spin, or side with Trump.  

Hardee-har-har-har.

Fauxcahontas, you do realize the VSG is going to have a field day with this, right?

Thursday roundup

Everything Robert Reich says or writes is, without exception, completely idiotic, but he has outdone himself with his latest proposal:

Robert Reich isn’t merely a former cabinet secretary, he’s a Rhodes Scholar and Yale Law grad . . . You need some mighty elite education to produce something this embarrassing.

The only response to an unconstitutional presidency is to annul it. Annulment would repeal all of an unconstitutional president’s appointments and executive actions, and would eliminate the official record of the presidency.

Annulment would recognize that all such appointments, actions and records were made without constitutional authority…

After all, the Supreme Court declares legislation that doesn’t comport with the Constitution null and void, as if it had never been passed.

It would logically follow that the Court could declare all legislation and executive actions of a presidency unauthorized by the Constitution to be null and void, as if Trump had never been elected.

What does “eliminate the official record of the presidency” mean? In the presidential portrait gallery, there’ll just be a big question mark in a frame where number 45 should be?

Thinking about the chaos that would result if the courts suddenly nullified 18 months’ worth of executive branch action across all arms of the government makes me crave sedatives. The immigration tangle alone would be a mess of historic proportions. If only to avoid the bureaucratic red-tape apocalypse, SCOTUS would never go along with Reich’s suggestion. Plus, how could one hope to show that collusion was a but-for cause of Trump’s victory? Absent the Kremlin fiddling with vote totals, which no one has claimed, the counterargument will always be offered that collusion was essentially harmless error — an impeachable offense, sure, but by no means evidence in itself that Trump wouldn’t have won anyway without Putin’s help.

My recent posts about McCain have generated some spirited back-and-forth, and in the days since his passing, I've thought a great deal about just how much weight his basic and undeniable patriotism should be given vis-a-vis the hard-to-forgive moves - voting against "A"CA skinny repeal comes to mind - which is one way his pettiness and vindictiveness (granted, not uncommon traits in the world of politics) manifested itself. But this business of deciding before he passed who would and would not be welcome at his funeral, and putting his 2008 running mate Sarah Palin in the latter group stains his legacy not a week out from his death.  Especially juxtaposed against the fact that the Most Equal Comrade is going to deliver a eulogy.

LITD likes this: A trend is afoot whereby restaurants are starting to ban diners' use of cell phones at their tables.

What is the best way to proceed on this? Victor Davis Hanson at NRO says the VSG administration should declassify any and all documents pertaining to the Mueller probe.  On the other hand, Lee Smith at Real Clear Investigations sees reasons why the VSG continues to opt to not do so.

LITD and other outlets have had some titters over this year's Burning Man and how it's become stratified, ranging from the scroungy hippies to high-livin' types who have lobster flown in, and how rules of conduct for the Orgy Dome have become a point of focus. A piece in the SF Gate today looks over the gathering's entire history and makes clear that, from the outset, it's been a prime example of how bored and worn-out the counterculture - which some time ago really became the culture - is, and how full of themselves those who've been perpetuating it for the last 50-plus years are.

Michael R. Strain of the American Enterprise Institute gives a big thumbs down to Marco Rubio's idea of funding paid family leave by letting people take some of their Social Security build-up early.

Identity-politics jackboots never let an opportunity to baselessly accuse someone of racism, and they got right to work when Florida Pub gubernatorial candidate Ron DeSantis said this:

Florida elections are always competitive, and this is a guy who, although he’s much too liberal for Florida, I think he’s got huge problems with how he’s governed Tallahassee, he is an articulate spokesman for those far-left views, and he’s a charismatic candidate. I watched those Democrat debates, and none of that is my cup of tea, but he performed better than those other people there. So we’ve got to work hard to make sure that we continue Florida going in a good direction, let’s build off the success we’ve had on Governor Scott, the last thing we need to do is to monkey this up by trying to embrace a socialist agenda with huge tax increases and bankrupting the state. That’s not going to work.

You know exactly what word they pounced on, don't you? Of course, all normal people are going to roll their eyes at the ridiculousness of the attempt to impart a sinister motive, and so you'd think that the Dem candidate, Andrew Gillum - he of the proposal to raise the corporate tax rate to 40 percent - would have just quietly moved on to something substantive, but, no, he got in on the grandstanding.

And the kicking-around of the idea that perhaps DeSantis should have paused and searched for a term less susceptible to controversy makes me want to puke. That's rank capitulation to the jackboots.

I'd rather see more of the attitude of this guy at Facebook:

"We are a political monoculture that's intolerant of different views," Brian Amerige, a senior Facebook engineer, wrote in a post entitled "We Have a Problem with Political Diversity." The New York Times first obtained and reported on the post.

"We claim to welcome all perspectives, but are quick to attack — often in mobs — anyone who presents a view that appears to be in opposition to left-leaning ideology," Amerige charged. "We throw labels that end in *obe and *ist at each other, attacking each other's character rather than their ideas."

"We do this so consistently that employees are afraid to say anything when they disagree with what's around them politically," the engineer explained. "HR has told me that this is not a rare concern, and I've personally gotten over a hundred messages to that effect." On political issues like "'social justice,' immigration, 'diversity', and 'equality,'" Amerige warned, employees "can either keep quiet or sacrifice your reputation and career."

The engineer also noted events that demonstrated these fears are justified. "We tear down posters welcoming Trump supporters," he admitted. "We regularly propose removing [Peter] Thiel from our board because he supported Trump. We're quick to suggest firing people who turn out to be misunderstood, and even quicker to conclude our colleagues are bigots."

Amerige warned that Facebook has "made 'All Lives Matter' a fireable offense." He noted the "witch hunt" against Palmer Luckey, the founder of Oculus, who was pressured to leave Facebook when news spread he had donated to an organization that spread memes against Hillary Clinton online. "We ask HR to investigate those who dare to criticize Islam's human rights record for creating a 'non inclusive environment.' And they called me a transphobe when I called out our corporate art for being politically radical," Amerige noted.

A former A&R person for Atlantic Records has written a memoir that gives a sordid account of Ahmet Ertegun's behavior that is, shall we say, unflattering.

Watching porn in the office, using dildos as decor, and executives bragging about the size of their manhood: This was the record industry before the age of MeToo. 

Dorothy Carvello, the first female A&R executive for Atlantic Records - the label responsible for bringing us musical legends such as Ray Charles, The Rolling Stones, Led Zeppelin, and Aretha Franklin - was 24 years old when she landed a job as a secretary for founder Ahmet Ertegun.

The music mogul had a nightly routine which consisted of downing 14 vodka tonics, four lines of cocaine, two joints, and plenty of women.

And every morning, it was Carvello's job to clean the drugs and vomit off his clothes and track down at which clubs he had left his credit cards.  

Once again, we see that a singularly visionary shaper of American culture had flaws commensurate with his greatness. Another post about human sexuality and human nobility may be brewing.

The older I get - and I mean with each passing day - and the more I witness the exposure of great artists' dark sides (and Ertegun while certainly a businessman, was also an artist), cultures of animal-level hedonism within heretofore respected institutions of entertainment, journalism and even Christianity, and the pettiness and turf protection that so thoroughly permeates our government, the more I see that there is no substitute for turning ourselves toward - and turning ourselves over to - Lord Jesus:

. . . genuine Christianity thrives under hardship. This does not mean that we should welcome persecution and the erosion of religious liberty but rather that if they do come, we’ll be alright. 

Don’t be afraid. Don’t allow the politics of fear to control and consume you. 

Do you remember in the last presidential election when President Trump kept claiming that the system is rigged? He was right but in a completely different way than he was intending. 

If you are a Christian, the entire system of the universe if rigged in your favor. No matter who gets elected or what rights are recognized or taken away, everything ultimately works together for your good and God’s glory (Romans 8:18-39). 

So the next time you step into the booth, don’t vote scared. 

Vote like the citizen of another, better, eternally good kingdom. 

You have a living hope. 

No one can take it away.

A Brown University professor of behavioral and social sciences published an article in a respected journal presenting the findings of her study of rapid-onset gender dysphoria - in other words, the phenomenon of momentum gathering in the number of kids wanting to claim they resent the DNA they were born with, because it's this decade's cool thing to do - and, once the school realized what she quite objectively presented, it removed the article from news distribution.