Communism Kills

Except it’s happening in real life.

Check out Sarah Iannarone, a candidate for mayor of Portland, Oregon, and her 2016 ballot:

Let me make that bigger for you:

And anyway, here’s this headline that totally won’t make you die inside or anything, courtesy of OregonLive:

*Edit: and here’s a skirt she apparently actually has no problem owning and wearing:

This is what we’re up against. Everyone who used to say the snowflakes will have to face reality one day, was wrong. They’re going to be the ones ruling over us.

Happy Halloween!

Here is some spooky Beltway libertarian commentary perfect for Halloween nightmares.

This year:

Archive here

And in 2016:

Archive here

Inb4 “why are you still on Facebook?”

Boy, wouldn’t it be great if companies–and, say, the President of the United States–supported all companies that were forced to shut down because of the government-imposed lockdowns, and not just minority-owned businesses? Between the Platinum Plan, the new American Dream Plan, and almost every piece of legislation to help minority-owned businesses, it’s almost like Facebook has the same goal as the Republican Party: supporting minorities, only.

A lot of people have been calling Glenn Greenwald’s decision to leave The Intercept, which he helped found, brave and heroic. Indeed, it takes some guts to quit a job for whatever principled reasons. But there’s a reason why Greenwald and, before him, Andrew Sullivan and Bari Weiss, were able to take this kind of stand against what they saw as institutional oppression from their respective news outlets. It’s very important to note that before they quit–to much fanfare–they were already household names (or household names at least for anyone glued to the daily Twitter dramas).

Not everyone has the ability to quit a job, knowing everything will be all right. The people who are able to do this are already relatively high-profile, whose names draw in their own audiences, and they are able to do this even without the help of big name institutions and big name backing. “Going independent,” for these people, makes far more sense than being subject to the whims of an editor. In some ways, it’s kind of like, “Wow, you guys are so secure in your own ability to get people reading your work that you don’t need to think about a steady paycheck and benefits! And maybe you can even earn more money this way!”

Believe me: there are many people who have wanted to take a stand against things that have happened in their newsrooms, in the organizations they worked for, at the companies that hired them, but they just can’t because too much is on the line financially. But day by day, they try to act as the ~resistance~ any way they can, to try to change things on the margin, and that, too, is heroic.

I know a few good people who have turned to using Substack to promote their work. Even Tucker Carlson promoted it last night as some kind of free speech alternatively to social media companies.

Well, I just checked their terms and conditions.

This stood out from their publisher agreement:

Reading further on the Acceptable Use Policy, this seems to be the same exact kind of broad policy that can be used to crack down on any and all content Substack finds objectionable:

And, also notable, since a lot of very fine people are banned from using Stripe:

And there is, in fact, a mechanism to report “bad” people using Substack:

As Steve Sailer wrote yesterday, “And how is Substack set up to not be taken hostage by its own 20-something woke woman interns like everywhere else?”

Indeed, what exactly makes Substack any different from any other company that started out with lofty free speech goals, only to later crack down on whoever power-hungry professional activists find offensive? Remember: Facebook and Twitter both claim they believe in free speech. And we all see how that has turned out.

The new leaders of America:

All it takes is about $500 billion:

At first, you see these tweets, and you think they’re so stupid only someone with a PhD can come up with them.

Then you look at this person’s bio, and realize, apparently this person has a real book deal with a real publisher with some real money behind it…

… And realize that “they” also write for Teen Vogue…

Sometimes we do need to ask: what is our children learning? It’s also a chicken or the egg situation: is this person horrible because this person is an academic, or is this person horrible because this person is in the media?

>Let’s celebrate the achievements of women
>No, not like that

Apparently, Girl Scouts also replied to people complaining about the inclusion of Amy Coney Barrett on their post about ~female empowerment~ with “keep scrolling,” which infuriated quite a lot of people, including adults such as actual real U.S. Rep. Ayanna Pressley (who, as you may recall, created a criminal justice reform bill that would allow anyone convicted of any crime the ability to go free after 10 years, even if they, for instance, decapitated a Girl Scout):

I got curious about what exactly the Girl Scouts have been up to since I was a child, and a few seconds of scrolling on their Facebook page shows that–perhaps with this one exception–they are an exceptionally left-wing organization. This is the current pinned post on the Girl Scout page:

And this is their most recent current post:

It’s a good thing I never really liked Thin Mints to begin with.

New blog, who dis? I figure I’d start off with a relatively easy target before 8 AM: The Bulwark.

Imagine how out-of-touch you need to be to be a “conservative” website but then running two articles, above the fold, trying to make the case for Biden on perhaps the two issues that Trump has been most solid: abortion and foreign policy.

The “I’m pro-life but I voted for the pro-abortion guy” piece by Michael Stokes Paulsen is less about the issue of abortion, more about the author’s personal grievances with Trump and what he feels like constitutes making a deal with the devil. The piece reads:

Groan. Yes, I’m sure this strawman is a completely accurate representation of a real human being. And I’m totally shocked to see the primary concern people have against Trump has to do with feelings of racism than actual, you know, abortion policy. After reading this, I scrolled down and saw that the author is actually a co-director of the Pro-Life Advocacy Center. That’s terrifying. If protecting human life is his chief concern, then why is he virtue signaling about racism? The rest of the piece goes on the same: because Trump is seen as an immoral bad person, then actually, all of the pro-life activities he’s done and seemingly pro-life judges he’s appointed are meaningless. Did you know Trump hurt my feelings? Orange man bad!

In terms of the foreign policy piece: it’s really no coincidence that Shay Khatiri is advocating in favor of a more aggressive American foreign policy. After all, he’s fairly new to America; according to his own bio on the Bulwark website, he only came to America in 2011 (from Iran). This very same interventionist belief is something Khatiri has written about many times before. He’s even called himself a neocon. This is also the same person who called for Stalinist-like purges of YAF’s speaker rolls of anyone he deemed a thought criminal for the grave sin of being perhaps a genuine conservative. It’s also no coincidence, then, that he too has found a home at the Bulwark, the collection of misfit NeverTrump conservative toys who, apparently, care more about being seen as racist than any actual principles. Ahoy!