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Peter Robinson interviews Professor Russell Muirhead of Dartmouth College. This is a fascinating look at the history of political parties in American history.

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Executive Summary: They suck.

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Sounds like a win-win to me.

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Sometimes the old ways are best … and sometimes not.

Thanks to Debby Witt, a kindred soul.

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Events in Washington and on the left coast display a political analogue. Listening to Chuck Schumer and Nancy Pelosi recycle canards of the 1980’s, well, it’s tiresome. Their creative juices are not flowing. At some time before the onset of the digital era, the record needle got stuck in their groove.

Watching the leftist thugs doing their thing to shut down Milo Yianoppoulos at Berkeley yesterday, we are struck by the repetition.

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Just who decided we should trust a Pennsylvania rodent with weather prognostication?

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History repeats itself.

May the farce be with them.

Steve Sailer has the pictures.

Maybe we ought to ship them back the Statue. They seem to need it more than we do.

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Texas Republican Gov. Greg Abbott cut off state funds to a county that provides sanctuary to illegal immigrants Wednesday, following through on an earlier pledge to punish such sanctuary cities and localities.

Don’t mess with Greg Abbott.

Travis County will no longer have access to $1.8 million in state criminal justice grants, Abbott announced in a letter to county officials, because of a new sanctuary policy implemented by the county sheriff. The policy at issue instructs staff at the sheriff’s department to release illegal immigrants booked in the local jail rather than assist the federal government in deporting them, unless they have been charged with murder, aggravated sexual assault or human smuggling.

Travis County is where Austin, the state capital, is located, and is the biggest blue urban pustule on the red butt of Texas. All of the statist and big-government hipsters gravitate there, and fester.

Steven Hayward looks the situation over.

It is evident that the left, with the active cooperation of the news media, wishes to drive Trump from office. Nothing will sate the left or get them to calm down into a recognizably responsible opposition force.

And why shouldn’t the left think this can succeed? It has worked before. They bagged two presidents in succession back in the 1960s and 1970s—Lyndon Johnson and Richard Nixon. “In a sense,” Daniel Patrick Moynihan wrote of Lyndon Johnson’s decision not to run again in 1968, “he was the first American President to be toppled by a mob. No matter that it was a mob of college professors, millionaires, flower children, and Radcliffe girls.” The night Johnson announced his decision, leftists took to the streets to sing “We have overcome.”

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Rueters reports that the Boy Scouts will begin accepting girls into the Boy Scouts, provided the girls pretend they are boys, or suffer from a mental illness making them unable to comprehend which sex they are, or their parents suffer from a mental illness making them unable to comprehend which sex their child is.

…

Unlike the decision to admit sexual perverts into the company of young boys, this decision to have teen girls bunking in tents and showing with adolescent boys in a movement allegedly design to teach boys morals, virtues, and manhood, was made with no previous debate among the membership.

No one was consulted. It was simply an ambush.

I recall being a Boy Scout. I doubt that any of the guys in my troop would have wanted a girl hanging around.

The SJWs have effectively killed off scouting. Churches and other non-insane, non-evil groups may or may not start youth movement of their own, but it will not have the universal and international character of Boy Scouts.

Well, the Boy Scouts had to get established at some point. Let’s see what can be done.

Rasmussen poll finds the truth.

A new Rasmussen Reports national telephone and online survey finds that 57% of Likely U.S. Voters favor a temporary ban on refugees from Syria, Iraq, Iran, Libya, Somalia, Sudan and Yemen until the federal government approves its ability to screen out potential terrorists from coming here. Thirty-three percent (33%) are opposed, while 10% are undecided.

I guess when Democrats say ‘that’s not who we are’ they’re not talking about Americans.

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BLUF: Probably.

Andrew Klavan is not afraid to ask.

Mainstream news journalists — by which I mean that collection of Democrats employed by large corporations to push the sort of big government that prevents small corporations from competing with them — have been breathlessly speculating that the recent “Women’s Marches” around the country may be the beginning of a movement. The marches, funded in part by anti-American globalist billionaire George Soros, called forth such headlines as “Cathartic Moment or Enduring Movement” and “Women’s March Activists… Seek To Build a Movement.”

No one knows the future, of course, but I can’t help wondering if the marches, large as they were, were not rather the end of a movement, a fond farewell to an amalgam of obsolete leftist causes that either never had a reason to exist in the first place or have lost whatever reason they might once have had.

If leftism is dead, the speech delivered by actress Ashley Judd in Washington, D.C., may well serve as its eulogy.

Freeberg’s reaction:

It’s all a bunch of gelatinous nonsense, held together by the bitter tendrils of resentment. At its core, are the notions that unproductive people should be able to pull rank on the people who actually produce things, and tell them how to do their producing. And, the premiere asset of any sovereign nation is its tax code, which should be based on resentment and hate. If you happen to be rich, you must have stolen it. Unless you happen to be one of the rich people who lean left. And then you’re wonderful.

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When the cultural Marxism just gets to you too much.

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And liberal heads explode. ‘OMG! THE HITLER BROTHERS ARE CRITICIZING THE NEW HITLER! WHAT ARE WE TO THINK!?’

Of course, another of Hitler’s tricks was to emit ‘fake news’, like calling a hiatus in immigration from seven high-risk countries a ‘Muslim ban’.

Joe Bob Briggs brings the history.

Let me make this clear: I’m not a nativist, I’m a redneck. There’s a difference. A nativist would be one of those snooty New Englanders in the Mayflower Society. Blue bloods in ruffled shirts. Think Adlai Stevenson…Noah Webster…William Rehnquist. Congregationalists. Pointy-nosed moralizers. Some of them could be angry—Jonathan Edwards comes to mind—but they were angry in a sort of clench-jawed Connecticut debutante way. Ewwwww, don’t talk to her, she’s such a Kappa.

The nativist idea of a rebellion is to dress up like Indians and dump tea in the ocean—the 18th-century version of frat boys pranking the archrival football team.

The redneck idea of a rebellion is to lie in wait with a shotgun for the guy who’s trying to tax your whiskey.

ZMan turns over a rock.

The only way to properly understand the American Left is to look at it as a civic religion. Because the American Left adopted European anti-Christianity in the 20th century, it is easy to think they are anti-religious. That’s a mistake the Right has made for half a century. The New Religion, what Progressivism is today, evolved out of the Social Gospel Movement, so it carries with it many of the same habits.

The most obvious of those habits is the obsession with public morality. Public Protestantism starts from the assumption that society is judged as a whole. The righteous, like the virtuous in revolutionary France, have a moral duty to raise up the fallen into the righteous life. This is what gives them license to nose around in your business and order you around. It’s not about fitting the economic pieces together as with European socialists. The American Left is consumed with building the City upon a hill.

…

That’s an important lesson to keep in mind when watching the antics of the Left of late. Their lunacy is not directed at the rest of us. They don’t care what you or anyone else thinks about what’s happening. Their public acts are about signalling to the rest of the believers. By holding protests and making fools of themselves in a public way, they are providing support for one another as they work through the disconfirmation. Like herd animals, they are huddling together in the face if danger. It is pure instinct.

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The problem is not what they know, it’s what they ‘know’ that ain’t so.

Freeberg on Calexit.

As someone else very astutely noted somewhere, liberals have no interest in elections in this day & age — just look at their reaction to the one we just had.

They have to run “everything”…but, they’re incurious dimbulbs, by & large, way too preoccupied with their virtue-signaling to take the time to define “everything.” You know anyone like this in your extended family? Every family seems to have one character like this. Sticking their nose into something that’s none of their concern, starting fights, but as long as they don’t find out about it it’s all good…so everyone else starts to keep secrets from them, because over time it’s been learned by all that that’s the solution. Just put Crazy Auntie Mabel in a snow-globe, of sorts, let her think the world is tinier than it really is. That, too, is an apt description of today’s liberals. If they find out little kids are being taken to church on Sunday mornings somewhere, they’ll start fights and they’ll get into that pit-bull mode of “This argument’s not over until it’s over the way I like it to be over.” But first, they have to find out about it. So we put them in little jars, shrink their little worlds, keep them from finding out about too much, and it’s all good.

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The Psychomachia, or ‘War of the Soul’, was composed by the Late Antique poet Prudentius in the 5th century and depicts an action-packed battle between the Virtues and Vices for possession of the human soul. This allegory of good versus evil was hugely popular in the medieval period with about 300 surviving copies of the work, 20 of which were illuminated. Two illuminated Anglo-Saxon copies are held at the British Library (now Additional MS 24199 and Cotton MS Cleopatra C VIII) and their illustrations can be compared to our comic books today.

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If someone offers a solution to the Gordian Knot of food sustainability, run it through the following gauntlet:

1. Does it allow you to do most of your food shopping at the grocery store?
2. Does it require just eliminating one or two things from your diet or, alternatively, eliminating all but a few things?
3. Does it excuse you from making substantial shifts in your diet as the seasons progress?

A ‘yes’ to any of those questions is the clarion call of bullshit. A long list of solutions gets beaten to death in this gauntlet, and few so much as vegetarianism.

The scientific term for creatures that eat only plants is ‘prey’.

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A Voice of the Crust wakes up … sort of.

Then 2016 arrived, and with it, Donald Trump’s winning run for the White House. Suddenly the words “complexity” and “ambiguity” — not to mention “nuanced” — disappeared from the vocabularies of the so-called sophisticates, washed away in the swirling high tide of the return of that simplistic word: “evil.”

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Strange, isn’t it, that when the tables are turned, the liberal pushers of moral ambiguity are as absolutist as any fundamentalist preacher associated with George W. Bush? There’s a lesson or two to be learned here. With all due respect to Brzezinski, the right doesn’t have a lock on paranoia. And dualism — our side good, your side evil — is actually baked into human nature and doesn’t really have much to do with how smart you are or how many shades of moral gray you think you can discern. Whenever you let loose your moral indignation at high decibel, someone somewhere will be laughing.

So who are the Manichaeans now?

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I don’t so much mind not getting the promised flying car, but I’m really disappointed about not getting the promised celebrity exodus.

And they whine about Trump being a liar….

Glenn Reynolds understands the dialectic.

Why are the relations between Donald Trump and the press so bad? There are two reasons. One is that Trump is a Republican, and the press consists overwhelmingly of Democrats. But the other reason is that Trump likes it this way, because when the press is constantly attacking him over trivialities, it strengthens his position and weakens the press. Trump’s “outrageous” statements and tweets aren’t the product of impulsiveness, but part of a carefully maintained strategy that the press is too impulsive to resist.

As I have been saying. The press is more bull than you think.

In fact, Trump’s basically gaslighting them. Knowing how much they hate him, he’s constantly provoking them to go over the top. Sean Spicer’s crowd-size remarks on Saturday were all about making them seem petty and negative. (And, possibly, teeing up crowd size comparisons at this Friday’s March For Life, which the press normally ignores but which Trump will probably force them to cover).

Trump knows that the press isn’t trusted very much, and that the less it’s trusted, the less it can hurt him. So he’s prodding reporters to do things that will make them less trusted, and they’re constantly taking the bait.

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I guess the Great White North doesn’t want them either.

Can’t say that I blame them.

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ZMan is not afraid to ask the rude questions.

Like most people, I just assume this is so, because actors tend to say stupid things when not following a script. The actress Meryl Streep took to the stage at some awards show to say Donald Trump gave her the sads. I’ve watched it a few times trying to figure out what it is she was trying to communicate. Streep is a great actress so it was well choreographed, but it contained nothing more than some hyperventilating about imagined bogeymen. My take away from watching it is that Mx. Streep is not spending her free time working math puzzles.

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The first thing that springs to mind is that you need a near total absence of self-respect to be a performer. It is, at best, a degrading way to make a living. Anyone who has stood in front of a crowd to give a speech knows it is not as easy as it looks. Imagine standing in front of cameras, pretending to be someone else, while a crowd of people watch you play make believe. Often times, the job requires the performer to make a fool of themselves or do degrading things for the amusement of the crowd. Most people will not do it.

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Most Americans have never been to Africa so they only know about the place from books and television. As a result, Americans talking about Africa sound like morons to people who have lived in Africa. This is the problem for performers. They talk about America as if it is a foreign country to them. That’s because it often is a foreign country. How much does Meryl Streep know about America at this stage of her life? She has been cooped up in a museum for decades. Death row inmates have a better feel for America than actors.

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Sayonara. Don’t let the door hit you in the butt on the way out.

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Higher minimum wage = fewer jobs.

Basic economics, too basic for intellectuals to worry about.

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Speed the day.

Nobody needs a master bedroom you could play football in. You have the rest of the house to do non-bed stuff. A bed and a couple of dressers is all you need in there. Think about it.

You don’t need a home theater unless you’re charging your friends admission to watch movies.

I’ve owned three houses and not one had a garage with enough room in it to park a car. Just call it ‘storage shed with big door’ and be done with it.

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To end membership of the United States in the United Nations.

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If the eco-Nazis allow it.

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His name: Trump Jamil Hassan – AKA “Little Trump.”

Jamil, a 25-year-old father of three and Kurdish peshmerga fighter, said he was proud of his decision. “What I like most and admire about Donald Trump is that he’s a confident man and a successful businessman. He became a leader because he has self-confidence, otherwise he wouldn’t be president.”

Six thousand miles away, dossier-citing Democrats would beg to differ, perhaps, but Trump appears to have no shortage of proud fans in Kurdish areas of northern Iraq. Among a population that respects brash displays of masculine authority, expressions of undying loyalty and the kind of transactional dealmaking that the billionaire businessman touts as his trademark, Trump is enjoying a honeymoon full of cross-cultural appeal.

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Hungry New Yorkers ordering meals through such online services as Seamless or Eat24 order everything from sushi to burgers to tacos. But when they order from certain restaurants like Leafage and Butcher Block, they might not realize that those restaurants aren’t restaurants at all. They are virtual eateries created by a company called the Green Summit Group that operates several food-delivery services out of central commissaries in midtown Manhattan, Brooklyn, and Chicago. In New York alone, Green Summit’s brands offer all sorts of cuisine “concepts,” including meatballs, salad/sandwich/juice, and burgers/grilled cheese.

Green Summit is just one example of a growing wave of ghost restaurants that skip the storefront and bring food straight to the customer. These places range from the David Chang-backed delivery startup Maple to ready-to-eat meal services like Munchery to new business models like the integrated kitchen/delivery firm Good Uncle.

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Conventional wisdom holds that Americans drive cars while Europeans ride transit and intercity trains. In fact, while there are some differences in travel habits, differences in rail and bus travel are a lot smaller than most people believe.

Not that you’d know that by reading the DemLegHump Media.

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I have already thrown some skepticism at the idea that there is going to be a traumatic transition that will throw middle class people out on the streets without warning—rather than a long and gradual transition over decades, to which people can adapt. The future doesn’t come that fast, and we will get a chance to see it coming. The best response is to encourage people to respond to technological progress and to seek out the new jobs that will become available as the old ones fade away.

Yes, automation is going to disrupt the economy, just as technological progress has always disrupted the economy, continually, since the beginning of the Industrial Revolution. But helping people to adjust by putting them on a permanent welfare subsidy is the worst and cruelest response, precisely because it pays them not to adapt to the new economy.