Francis Fukuyama turns over a rock.

For the most part, twentieth-century politics was defined by economic issues. On the left, politics centered on workers, trade unions, social welfare programs, and redistributive policies. The right, by contrast, was primarily interested in reducing the size of government and promoting the private sector. Politics today, however, is defined less by economic or ideological concerns than by questions of identity. Now, in many democracies, the left focuses less on creating broad economic equality and more on promoting the interests of a wide variety of marginalized groups, such as ethnic minorities, immigrants and refugees, women, and LGBT people. The right, meanwhile, has redefined its core mission as the patriotic protection of traditional national identity, which is often explicitly connected to race, ethnicity, or religion.

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Arthur Herman has a good recollection over at National Review of the climax of the Democratic Party’s disastrous 1968 national convention in Chicago exactly 50 years ago on this date. It was unhappiness with the grassroots of the party that led to the “reforms” that disempowered party bosses and insiders and made the Democratic Party more populist (that’s before “populism” became a dirty word for liberals), resulting in such sterling subsequent nominees as George McGovern, Jimmy Carter, Walter Mondale, and Michael Dukakis.

I remember ’68. It wasn’t a good time.

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America experienced another tragedy over the weekend — this time in Jacksonville, Florida — and like the overwhelming majority of mass public shootings, Sunday’s incident also occurred in a gun-free zone.

Two bystanders were killed after a gunman opened fired at a Madden 19 Tournament at Jacksonville Landing, an open-air retail center with stores, bars and restaurants. Jacksonville Landing prohibits the possession of any type of firearm, regardless of whether it is carried legally or not (except for by law enforcement), making it a gun-free zone.

“Possession of a weapon, even if legally carried (except by law enforcement officers) is absolutely prohibited on Landing property,” according to the Jacksonville Landing website.

Yeah, I guess that worked out really well for them, didn’t it? If I didn’t have anything better to do I’d make up a bunch of signs that said CRAZY MASS SHOOTERS, GET YOUR VICTIMS HERE! and plant them in front of any establishment advertising itself as a ‘gun free zone’. Maybe they’d get the message.

I’m waiting for somebody wounded at a mass shooting at a ‘gun free zone’ to sue the establishment. That would be entertaining.

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We’re serious about driving in Texas.

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Note that they aren’t demanding compensation from the U.S. government, who paid Monsanto to develop Agent Orange and who decided when and where to apply it. No, they’re going after the civilian supplier, as if it were a pesticide with undesirable side effects.

Of course, they have no chance of getting any satisfaction from a Trump Administration. But maybe they’ll get lucky and find a judge appointed by Clinton or Obama who was a SJW in college and will buy whatever imaginary liability theory they come up with.

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GPs are supposed to identify patients whose symptoms suggest cancer for “urgent referral” to a hospital specialist.

NHS targets state that 93 per cent of cases should be seen within a fortnight, so that tests and treatment can be started.

But analysis reveals this target was missed for the whole quarter ending June 2018, with the worst performance since records began in 2008.

How about that GREAT government-provided health care system in Britain? Don’t you wish we had such a system in the U.S.?

Feel the Bern….

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Any one who shows up to a public gathering with a concealed face ought to get arrested as a terrorist.

But it won’t happen.

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More ‘enforcement theater’.

Prediction: No one will get fired, no one will go to jail.

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Not only are all white people racists and responsible for slavery because some (usually unrelated) white people once owned slaves, White Guilt is apparently inheritable, like a defective gene.

Proglodyte puritans can be very Biblical when they think nobody is looking.

UPDATE: The “sins” of the father

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I am not making this up.

No wonder Prince Harry never went to University. There’s no University left in Britain worth going to.

The Other McCain is on the case.

This is how you know a crucial election is coming up. If there’s not enough racism to energize black voters, Democrats will just invent some.

More here: White Sex Offender Accused Of Urinating On Black Child Won’t Be Charged Because Story Was Fabricated

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Like almost all Democrats, Beto O’Rourke is a member of the Blame America First crowd.

Why any American would vote for such a moron escapes me. But they do.

Of course, not all Democrat voters are Americans.

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The French town of Calais has been no stranger to public disorder in recent years, with recurrent battles between police and migrants or striking ferry workers making headlines across the world.

But now the port town is facing a bizarre new threat, according to its council: an alliance of hunters and farmers seeking to take revenge on vegans bent on turning the largely carnivorous French off meat.

The risk of trouble was so great that the council decided to cancel a vegan festival due to be held in the town centre on September 8.

The move was the latest episode in an ongoing battle between vegan militants and butchers and other providers of meat in the north of France.

It’s usually a bad idea to get into a pissing contest with people who kill things as a hobby.

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Thank God for those strict British gun control laws, otherwise the place would look like Texas.

(These guys are amateurs. Chicago can beat that in a month.)

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I have no evidence but my own suspicious nature but I predict that this ‘security guard’, when identified, will prove to be non-white.

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Pretty ambitious. They put some money into this.

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As I wrote here, the Left is outsourcing censorship of the internet to the tech companies of Silicon Valley, all of which are happily–if you are a leftist–run by liberals. What the government can’t do, on account of the First Amendment, private companies like Facebook, Twitter and YouTube can do with impunity. Increasingly, conservatives are persona non grata on social media platforms.

Steve Sailer points out that California is crazier than you can imagine.

I doubt that the nice Jewish mayor lady with the two kids and the pan-Catholic hubby Salvatore Fahey is really a racial Leninist, but she’s running for re-election against an Angry Black Woman. So she apparently feels the need to say stuff that is fairly nuts. But it’s not like anybody who matters is going to call her out on it, are they?

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How about that GREAT government-provided healthcare? Don’t you wish we had a system like that in the U.S.?

Feel the Bern….

The problem with socialism is that eventually you run out of other people’s money.

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Well, that’s one way to hide.

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Sure, help out those people who are pledged to destroy you. It’s a moral imperative.

Gaza has a very nice border with Egypt, its’ fellow-Arab neighbor. Let the Egyptians help.

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How about that GREAT government-provided healthcare? Don’t you wish we had a system like that in the U.S.?

Feel the Bern….

Audacious Epigone distills the essence.

An anti-white white* girl from the heartland goes on a night run wearing almost nothing at all because my body, my choice.

A squatemalan invader goes feral–or a feral squatemalan invader, take your pick–hones in. Strong, independent woman that she is, needing neither man nor bicycle, she’s soon decomposing in a cornfield.

The homicidal alien works for a chamber of commerce-approved Republican cuck. Savagely lusting after and killing young white women is a job Americans just won’t do!

The heritage Americans she despised spend weeks looking in all the wrong places for her. By the time they figure out who the culprit is–the invader–her fate has long since been sealed.

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The key to minimizing crime, Newman discovered was to control access. That meant maximizing private property, minimizing common areas, and limiting the number of entry points into both homes and neighborhoods. Private property deters crime because anyone who doesn’t belong can be readily identified. Cul de sacs deter crime because there is only one way out. Alleys increase crime because they give burglars easy access to a second, largely hidden entrance to most homes.

Newman didn’t specifically study light rail, which hadn’t really been invented when he was doing his research. But light-rail trains and stations are all common areas. Light rail also gives potential criminals one more easy way into and out of neighborhoods. While transit advocates claim that the relationship between light rail and crime is a myth, a suburban police chief in Portland once told me that police throughout the area knew that crime would increase in a neighborhood when a light-rail station opened in that neighborhood.

In dense urban areas with mass transit, nothing is handier for a criminal than to escape the scene by jumping on a train. Think of the number of movies in which people being chased duck into a subway. The French Connection leaps immediately to mind.

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I am not making this up.

It’s called ‘BOY’ for a very good reason.

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That’s pretty embarrassing. Although, just looking at the picture, I can’t imagine anybody missing him much. But that’s just me.

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Sure, open the border! Let ’em all in! What could go wrong?

Update: The Media Is Angry That Fox Is Covering The Mollie Tibbetts Murder

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I thought only Obama did that sort of thing.

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Thank God for those strict gun control laws in Chicago, otherwise the place would look like Texas.

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Thank God for those strict gun control laws in Britain, otherwise the place would look like Texas.

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Thank God for those strict gun control laws in Britain, or the place would look like Texas.

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Here’s the arithmetic: one in three potential recruits are disqualified from service because they’re overweight, one in four cannot meet minimal educational standards (a high school diploma or GED equivalent), and one in 10 have a criminal history. In plain terms, about 71 percent of 18-to-24-year-olds (the military’s target pool of potential recruits) are disqualified from the minute they enter a recruiting station: that’s 24 million out of 34 million Americans. The good news is that while the military takes pride in attracting those who are fit, educated, law abiding, and drug-free, they’re having difficulty finding them—manifestly because fewer of them actually exist.

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Funny how socialism is very productive in generating refugees. Other stuff, not so much.

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These guys are a herd of oxymorons on the hoof.

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Note to self: Stay away from Disneyland.

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A teenager posted online that he was glad to make it to his 17th birthday after all he had been through. Little more than an hour later, he was shot dead.

Armond Latimore was killed in broad daylight while standing outside a restaurant in St Louis, Missouri, on Saturday.

Just another instance of the senseless violence against People of Color in Amerika? Well, not exactly.

Previous postings showed the high school student holding wedges of $100 bills. In one he appeared to have a hand gun in the waistband of his trousers. In another he sent a message of support to Richard Antwon Donaldson, another St Louis teenager who has been charged with the murder of a 72-year-old man during an attempted car-jacking. “Keep yo head up,” he told Donaldson.

So the fact that he made it to 17 was in spite of, rather than because of, the life he apparently led.

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As many are aware, Google’s management and staff helped put together the indomitable Obama big data, drill down, finite, targeted social media, voter mobilization effort in 2012. I proffered that Facebook might do the same. My thoughts were dismissed very quickly by some knowledgeable people on Ricochet as impossible given that Google so carefully controls its search algorithm and no such hanky-panky would be tolerated. Who believes this is not possible today?

Apple, Google, Facebook, Twitter, and other social networks or downloading services are private. They are not subject to the First Amendment and therefore can arbitrate what is transmitted over their private networks. To police this and behave in a responsible way, they label any material which they deem inappropriate as “hate speech.” There is no way to know if they are limiting access, turning off the flow, or simply cutting out points of view that they deem “hate speech” unless they announce their intention to do so.

Republican politicians and conservatives have accused such companies of turning down the flow of Tweets, hits, and search results. There is clear evidence this has happened, whether this was intentional or not. If it happens at a critical moment in a campaign, in a particular locality, might it make a difference in the election outcome?

Big Brother has learned to outsource that stuff that isn’t in his core competency, which is shooting people.

The problem with not loving Big Brother is that you are surrounded by people who do, or who at least don’t mind his hand in their pockets and his grip on their heads.

John Fund asks a rhetorical question.

Hint: Yes.

An almost certain sign that a nation’s economic future and rule of law are in danger is the decision by its government to seize private land without paying compensation. From Cuba to Zimbabwe to Venezuela, expropriating private property has almost inevitably meant a slide into authoritarian rule.

That’s why many South Africans are worried at the news last week that its African National Congress (ANC) government has for the first time moved to seize land without going through the courts first, with two game farms in Limpopo the first test cases.

The planned seizures are part of a larger government plan to use its two-thirds majority in Parliament to change the nation’s constitution to legalize unilateral seizures. Once it has that new constitutional power, the government could in theory posture at being magnanimous and merely force landowners to give up their land for only a token or very small payment.

If history teaches us anything, it teaches us that once black people get in control of a government, that government sooner or later (typically sooner) collapses under the weight of corruption, cronyism, and abuses under color of law. It happened in Zimbabwe, it happened in Detroit, it has happened throughout Africa since the 1960s, and throughout the United States once People of Color got their hands on the levers of municipal power. The only reason that it hasn’t occurred more widely in the U.S. is the un-get-aroundable fact that Africans are only about 13% of the population.

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Good luck with that. ‘Conservative Catholics’ have yet to get anything that they wanted out of the church hierarchy.

The Roman church has had a shortage of both priests and nuns since at least the 1970s. I have no evidence on which to base an opinion, but it wouldn’t surprise me to learn that at least one of the motives in the kid-glove treatment of priests accused of sexual abuse was the fear that cleaning house would leave the house rather empty.

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In SF and other cities where Square is ubiquitous, not everyone is a fan.

“I hate when I’m prompted to tip on fast food restaurants. Even worse, before I even get my food,” Nando Albuquerque tweeted at Square last year. “Taking my money (plus tip) isn’t service. Wouldn’t you agree?”

“I’m asking not to be coerced into tipping before receiving any service,” he went on. “I’m sure you can solve this, if you only accept it’s a problem.”

“Why can’t Square have a tip option that says, ‘it’s nothing personal, but I can’t give you 20% for handing me a pre-made sandwich,” Daniel Nigro asked on Twitter in May.

I solve the problem by not tipping. As a result, my wife insists on computing and adding a tip when we eat at restaurants.

Actually, that’s not true — I’ve given tips when the service I received was ‘above and beyond’ what I expected. But that’s awfully rare.

Steven Hayward writes from the proglodyte paradise.

Who runs San Francisco? Progressives do—and have for decades now. Why isn’t San Francisco a beacon for the failure of progressive governance?

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Lucky you.

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If ever there was a vivid illustration of illiberal liberalism, it was the response to one of the essays in this very series. After The Economist published an by Kathleen Stock, reader in philosophy at the University of Sussex, which sensitively questioned whether “self-declaration alone could reasonably be the only criterion of being trans”, the Sussex Students’ Union denounced her as a transphobe. In the union’s original statement, it declared “we will not tolerate hate on our campus.” “Trans and non-binary lives are not a debate.”

These key tropes—“we will not tolerate” and “this is not a debate”—are now frequently deployed to curtail discussion of issues deemed to be taboo, invariably to “protect” people deemed vulnerable from speech deemed hateful. This secular version of blasphemy follows a sacred script, written by those who consider themselves liberals. Dare to query it and you’ll be damned.

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Except, of course, that ‘feudalism’ was based on land that was actually productive rather than just Hipster Expensive, but nobody expects ‘journalists’ to understand what they’re talking about these days (especially at Voices of the Crust like Slate).

The story, by Liam Dillon and Ben Poston, analyzes the fallout from a 1986 California law that allows children to inherit their parents’ frozen-in-time tax assessments along with their houses. The state’s property tax rolls were forever stunted by 1978’s beloved, infamous Proposition 13; the 1986 follow-up, Proposition 58, is what allows those ’70s tax rates to be enjoyed by the next generation.

Voted for by a legislature that is overwhelmingly Democrat.

According to the California Legislative Analyst’s Office, the inheritance exemption cuts $1.5 billion from the state’s property tax intake each year—or 2.5 percent of total statewide property tax revenue. In counties with the highest property values, the exemption can reduce state revenue by nearly 10 percent.

And, of course, anything that reduces government revenues is a Crime Against Humanity.

Prop 58 was intended to help families avoid a sudden property tax spike after a homeowner’s death and allow children to afford to stay in their parents’ homes. But it has also enthroned a privileged class of second-generation California homeowners, many of whom don’t even live in those houses.

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One thing that proglodyte legislators can never do is Think Things Through. Hence they are always mousetrapped by Unexpected Consequences. The rest is Narrative.

Johnn Hinderaker at Powerline turns over a rock.

Liberals control every newspaper in America, as far as I know, except the Manchester Union Leader. They control CBS, ABC, NBC and every cable network except Fox News. They control what is left of the news magazines, and pretty much every other magazine, too. Only talk radio and the pesky internet lie outside their grasp, so that is where they seek to impose censorship.

But they have a problem: the First Amendment. The government can’t suppress conservative speech on the ground that it is “hate speech,” i.e., something that liberals don’t like. That was recently reaffirmed by a 9-0 decision of the Supreme Court.

So liberals have outsourced censorship of the internet to the tech titans of Silicon Valley.

The Other McCain lays it out.

America’s triumph in the Cold War, which consigned the Soviet Union’s “evil empire” to the “ash heap of history,” to quote Ronald Reagan, has been followed by a sad retreat from the values that enabled freedom to prevail in that long ordeal. We are today less of a Christian nation than we were when the Berlin Wall collapsed in 1989, and part of the reason for this loss of values is that our nation’s education system is now to a shocking extent controlled by godless Commies. Although they generally do not identity themselves as such, we should be under no illusions about the ideological loyalties of our nation’s university faculties, and the Democrat-controlled public-education bureaucracy. Recall that Sen. Elizabeth Warren — who now wants to “nationalize everything,” as Kevin Williamson says — once taught at prestigious Harvard University, and this should give you a general idea of what sort of latter-day Bolsheviks are now teaching America’s impressionable youth.

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I guess the progression is now Lies, Damned Lies, and Journalism.

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