John C Wright

Mmmmmmm… pizza….

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On Epstein’s island, perhaps?

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More than you ever wanted to know about nuclear reactors.

ZMan’s commentary to accompany his weekly podcast (which I highly recommend).

The old expression is that change is constant, which is true, but the rate of change is anything but constant. Material progress goes in fits and starts and cultural change is anything but guaranteed. The great cultural revolution that begin in America after the second industrial war is an anomaly. These sorts of sweeping cultural changes are not the norm in human existence. if within this unusual period of change, there have been quiet times when things have not changed much.

For example, the 1980’s were a relatively quiet time on the culture front. In fact, lots of people assumed at the time that the crazy changes of the 60’s and 70’s had finally run their course and things would return to normal. Aesthetically, the 80’s look much more like the 50’s than the 60’s and 70’s, so it made some sense. Then in the 90’s the crazies started getting wound up again and we entered another period of change. In fact, we are still in the second cultural revolution.

Popular ‘Science’.

Our very own Arbeitdienst! Where is Baldur von Schirach when you really need him?

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From 1993, so there’s no guarantee that it’s still available.

The book is well worth reading, though. (Also check out Vinge’s A Deepness in the Sky.)

Shit, just read anything by Vinge. You won’t regret it.

Iran Threatens Gulf Countries Making Peace with Israel

Former French President Nikolas Sarkozy Accused Of ‘Criminal Conspiracy’ For Allegedly Accepting Libyan Campaign Financing

They ‘Can Be Reformed’: Over 600 Islamic State Fighters Released By Kurdish Authorities In Syria

Man Decapitated In Paris Suburb In Suspected Terror Attack

REPORT: Beheading On Street In France Being Investigated As Act Of Terrorism, Suspect Reportedly Shot By Police.

France: Teacher Decapitated, Suspect Shot Dead by Police

Turkey Fires S-400 Missiles From Black Sea Coast In First Test

Macron speaks of ‘existential’ fight against terrorism after teacher killed in France

Islam: A Permanent War Institution

Taliban Agrees To Suspend Attacks After US Ends Air Strikes  And if you believe that one, they’ll tell you another one.

Iran Threatens Response To Errant Missiles On Its Territory From Nagorno-Karabkh Conflict

Allahu Akbar

Demonstrations in France Will Pay Tribute to Slain Teacher

Thousands in Paris Rally in Memory of Murdered School Teacher

French Police Arrest 11th Suspect In Friday’s Grisly Beheading As Government Vows To Disrupt Terror-Financing Networks  Why weren’t they doing that before? And why are they still allowing Muslims into their country?

Israel, Bahrain Sign Deal Establishing Formal Ties

French Police Raid Homes Of Islamic Radicals, Interview Nearly 80 People Who Posted Messages Supporting Decapitation Of Teacher

ISIS Calls On Followers To Attack Westerners & Oil Pipelines Inside Saudi Arabia

Cowardly NY Times: It’s ‘Anti-Islamist’ for France to ‘Seize’ on Decapitation

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Pay no attention to the nondescript woman waving at you from the sidebar. Whatever she wants, it can’t be good.

The excessive supply of PhDs is a result of the conjunction of a number of trends:

1. Everybody has a right to go to college.
2. You can get a doctorate in anything you want to study, no matter how vacuous.
3. Grading standards have sunk so low that all it takes is the willingness to kiss ass for seven years.

This faculty ‘pinch’ is a reminder to those who so desperately need it that markets work even when you don’t want them to.

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Suing somebody else for empowering one’s own character defects is pretty much the defining attitude of this degenerate modern age.

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In a day when half the US population remained transfixed by the ongoing revelations about the contents of Hunter Biden’s “laptop from hell” and the other half was doing everything in its power to ignore the news which the socials have conveniently been desperate to censor, a far less noticed but perhaps just as important investigative report authored by the unknown Typhoon Investigations, was released by Christopher Balding, Associate Professor at Peking University HSBC School of Business Shenzhen, China and also Bloomberg contributor (which is odd considering the clear anti-Trump bias of the Bloomberg media empire) exposing Biden activities in China which “the press has simply refused to cover”, and which reveals “how Biden was compromised by the Communist Party of China.”

In a series of tweets around noon on Thursday, Balding said that he had really “not wanted to do this but roughly 2 months ago I was handed a report about Biden activities in China the press has simply refused to cover. I want to strongly emphasize I did not write the report but I know who did.”

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They weren’t so picky with Dan Rather re George W. Bush.

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The front pages of multiple national media publications were void of stories Thursday afternoon regarding evidence that Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden could have been involved in Hunter Biden’s China scheme.

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RINOs ASSEMBLE!

Trump Gives Tiny Nuclear Reactors a Billion-Dollar Boost

MidAmerican Energy takes 46 wind turbines offline after blades fall in rural Iowa

Green Privilege, by Audacious Epigone

What cold lizards in Miami can tell us about climate change resilience

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I had a fairly irritating experience this week which is yet to be resolved. I purchased a set of carbon fiber wheel rims in order to build a new set of wheels for my new bike. The rims and hubs turned out to be incompatible, so I had to return both, the hubs to my local bike shop, the rims to a shop in Colorado. Concerned about getting the rims back to the dealer I shipped them via USPS Priority Mail last Thursday. The charges were $35 for the service and an additional $30 for insurance on the rims which have a cost of $975 each. They were supposed to be delivered on Monday according to the tracking notice, but they have been posting expected arrival dates as one day beyond the actual expected date, so I thought that they would arrive on Saturday.

According to the tracking, they left my local post office for a more centralized office a bit north of here. Apparently, they stayed in that office until Monday when they finally shipped to Colorado. I received a notice on Monday night that they would not arrive on time. Boy! Was I surprised! The notice did not change on Tuesday or Wednesday. Nothing updated. It took some searching but I was able to find a Customer Service site and filled in the form. Very surprisingly I got a call back that afternoon from a representative.

What I was told is that due to Covid (which has pretty much become the standard excuse for every possible demonstration of incompetence) the postal service was understaffed and buried in excess mail. They are flying fewer planes, so my package for which I paid premium rates was “likely” shipped via truck. No refund was offered for the demotion in service, and no date for its arrival.

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And the hits just keep on  comin’.

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And worth every penny.

The only thing that saves us is that we don’t get all the government we pay for.

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Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell condemned continuing attacks on Supreme Court nominee Amy Coney Barrett Wednesday, warning that “anti-religious bigotry needs to stop.”

“It is so revealing to watch elite society keep stumbling upon mainstream religious beliefs and practices that are shared by huge numbers of Christian Americans and thinking they’ve discovered some secret scandal,” McConnell said in a Wednesday statement.

Well, from their point of view, it is — nobody they know would admit to being religious, and if they did they would be shunned like a non-hybrid car.

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HUNTINGTON BEACH, Calif., Sept. 25, 2020 /PRNewswire/ — Newlight Technologies, Inc., a biotechnology company based in Southern California dedicated to making materials that improve the environment, has worked with the Carbon Trust, an independent organization with a mission to accelerate the move to a sustainable, low carbon economy, to calculate and certify the cradle-to-gate carbon footprint of Newlight’s AirCarbon product. The footprint analysis reveals that AirCarbon has a carbon negative cradle-to-gate product carbon footprint.

 

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Truer than they know.

In the clip posted on YouTube from The Creative Coalition, stars like Jason Alexander, Mayim Bialik, Tim Daly, Jon Cryer and Yvette Nicole Brown appear as chickens having a Zoom call while they discussed how for the first time ever a fox is running for president of the hen house against a fellow chicken.

I thought Henhouse was the name of a bordello in Nevada.

You learn something new every day.

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And the hits just keep on comin’.

I’m getting the impression that Hunter Biden was a one-stop shop for bribing Democrats in the Obama administration.

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I bought a pulse oximeter when the Pandemic Panic first started trending on Twitter arrived in the news, since a decrease in blood oxygen level is a good indicator of possible coronavirus infection, and I check it every day with my weight and blood pressure. If they keep adding useful medical stuff to the Apple Watch, I may need to get one.

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This nasopharynx region — behind the nose — was not thought to host anything but microscopic, diffuse, salivary glands; but the newly discovered set are about 1.5 inches (3.9 centimeters) in length on average. Because of their location over a piece of cartilage called the torus tubarius, the discoverers of these new glands have dubbed them the tubarial salivary glands. The glands probably lubricate and moisten the upper throat behind the nose and mouth, the researchers wrote online Sept. 23 in the journal Radiotherapy and Oncology.

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It’s all about the Narrative.

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During the speech, a group of protesters can be heard and seen making noise to overpower Schumer’s voice, many screaming at him and Senate Democrats for allowing Barrett to make it this far in the confirmation process. Air horns can be heard along with chants of “no KKK, no fascist USA”.

Woker-than-thou is the name of the game.

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Former Hunter Biden business partner Tony Bobulinski has confirmed that an email published in the New York Post’s bombshell exposé is indeed genuine – something the Biden camp hasn’t disputed, and that the “Big Guy” described in one of those emails is none other than Joe Biden himself. Bobulinski also says Joe Biden was lying when he said he and Hunter never discussed business dealings.

UPDATE: Ex-Hunter Biden Business Partner Confirms Authenticity Of Email, Says Bidens ‘Aggressively Leveraged’ Family Name

Victor Davis Hanson.

An avuncular Walter Cronkite, John Chancellor, Jim Lehrer, or Abe Rosenthal at least went through the motions of reporting news that was awkward or even embarrassing to the Left. Their agenda was 1960s-vintage Great Society liberalism, seen as the natural evolution from the New Deal and post-war internationalism. Edward R. Murrow, the ACLU of old, and Free Speech Movement at Berkeley—these were their liberal referents. Those days are gone.

Yet even during the Obama years, when studies showed the president had received the most slanted media honeymoon in news history, overt media bias was, at least, as hotly denied as it intensified. There were still a few ossified, quarter-hearted efforts now and then to mention the IRS scandal, the surveillance of Associated Press reporters, the various scandals embroiling the Veterans Administration, General Service Administration, the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms, and the Secret Service. But even that thin pretense is over now, too.

ZMan points out some inconvenient truth.

It makes for an interesting contrast to the modern day. The most popular movies in this age feature adults dressing up as children’s comic book heroes. They engage in the sorts of fantasy stories featured in comic books. These movies are not made for children, but for adults. The median age of the American comic book consumer is 34. The point of the movies is for the adults to escape anything resembling adulthood and engage in the sorts of flights of fancy normally associated with children.

…

Just look at the absurdity of the Covid panic. All over we see adult children cast in the role of political leader, playing a real-life action fantasy game where they are heroically fighting the Covid monster. Mario’s Cuomo’s oldest, currently staring as Governor, commissioned a book about himself fighting the Covid. It’s a wonder he did not have it titled My Struggle. Like so many other reckless idiots holding high office in this country, he lives in a fantasy land where he is always the hero.

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Time to panic?

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And the hits just keep on comin’….

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Well, which would you rather talk to?

The Guardian.

And if you believe that one, they’ll tell you another one.

This is all a desperate last-ditch attempt to derail the Coney nomination, which will have no effect except on the wokerati.

Facebook removes Babylon Bee satire mocking Sen. Hirono’s treatment of Amy Barrett, says it ‘incites violence’ Help, help, I’m being repressed….

Top Democrats refuse to stand by Feinstein after she praised GOP handling of Barrett hearings

Sorority member put on probation for ‘unbecoming’ conservative values expressed on social media

Tex929rr: Houston DA Lets Suspect Go. 2 Days Later, Suspect Kills LEO.  That’s what happens when Democrats run your city.

Education Department Probe Finds Top Universities Have ‘Massively Underreported’ Funding From ‘Foreign Adversaries’  Follow the money.

CHOP Zone Businesses Pursue Lawsuit Against Seattle

‘I Refuse To Work For This Socialist City Council’: Seattle Cops Go Scorched Earth In Exit Interviews

San Fran’s New Normal: Third Walgreens In A Year Is Closing Due To “Rampant Shoplifting”

California Sees Spike In Gun Ownership Amid Increase In Violence, Study Shows

Georgetown hires disgraced Peter Strzok

Not The Onion: NYT Editorial Board Member Insists Paper Is ‘Not’ ‘A Partisan Newspaper’

Investment Bankers Using Biden’s Tax Hike in New Sales Pitch  Of course they are.

Democratic House Candidate Says She Wants To ‘Defund The Pentagon’ To Fund ‘Social Services’

Delaware State Police Refer Biden Hard Drive Questions to FBI  Pass that hot potato.

Hollywood Actor Outed As Conservative After Being A Decent Human Being  Babylon Bee.

Pushback: This Mother Is Fighting Woke Activism in Public Schools

“Plan For The Worst” – Law Enforcement Across America Is Bracing For Massive Election Riots

“Piles Of Stolen Mail On The Side Of The Road”: Ballot Thefts Reported In Two Portland-Metro Suburbs

NY Post Warns of Chillingly Sophisticated Censorship at Facebook

DOJ offers to assist Minneapolis police; city council not thrilled

House Judiciary GOP Says Twitter Slapped Warning Label on Another Biden Article

Trump Executive Order Aims to Rein in Bureaucracy’s Role in Policymaking

Sunny Hostin, Ana Navarro Accuse Miami Police Officer Wearing Trump Mask At Polls Of ‘Voter Suppression’  Biden voter must be remarkable cowards.

Gavin Newsom To Go Undercover As A Turkey To Catch Families Celebrating Thanksgiving This Year  Babylon Bee.

Pushback: Faced With Lawsuit, Cuomo Reverses Closure of Jewish School in New York City

I’m Yale’s first Black student-body president. The Trump administration is wrong on our admissions. Yeah? Let’s see your SAT scores, bunkie.

Yes, a Pro-China Group in America Supports a Black Lives Matter Founder

Lemon Smears Trump Supporters as ‘Selfish’ for Opposing High Taxes

Sgt. Jonathan Mattingly Says Breonna Taylor’s Death Was Not Similar To George Floyd, Ahmaud Arbery

Black UK Member Of Parliament Blasts BLM, Critical Race Theory In House Of Commons Speech

Teaching “White Privilege” As Fact Is Breaking Law: UK Equalities Minister Blasts BLM, Critical Race Theory  Ponder the fact of a government — a government — that has an ‘Equalities Minister’.

San Francisco Officials Vote Unanimously On ‘CAREN Act‘ To Allow Subjects Of Racist 911 Calls To Sue Accusers

‘I Don’t Want To Be 20cent’: Rapper 50 Cent Says He Doesn’t Care If Trump Hates Black People, Cites Biden’s Tax Plan

Odell Beckham Jr. Banned From LSU Facilities For 2 Years For Handing Out Cash After The National Title Game

‘Our Problem Hasn’t Been White Supremacists, It’s Been Black Elitists’: Owens On Black Celebrities

California City Begins Handing Out Free Cash To “Address Inequalities For Black People”  If it makes black people want to move to California, I’m all for it.

Bloomberg knocks Trump back on his heels in Florida  (Politico) Well, maybe.

Biden will follow science — and that’s not the insult Trump thinks it is (NY Daily News) Biden will do as he’s told — and that’s not why we pick a President.

Trump’s attack on the debate commission is an attack on the election itself (Washington Post)

Donald Trump may try to steal the election. We need to start preparing for that now  (The Guardian) Really? How, exactly?

Officer Could Be Suspended for Wearing Trump Mask in Uniform

CNN Takes Break From Anti-Trump Crusade to Cry ‘Anti-Biden Propaganda’

Trump Supporters Attempt To Frighten Liberals Away From Polls With MAGA Scarecrows Babylon Bee.

Vile Scarborough: You’re ‘Un-American’ If You Vote for Trump

Mel Brooks: Vote For Joe! He Believes in ‘Science,’ Trump ‘Not Doing a Damn Thing’  Except for the low black unemployment, the tax cuts, the job creation, pulling troops back from overseas, and the improved economy. Other than that, what have the Romans Trump done for us?

Dems to Boycott Senate Judiciary Vote on Barrett to Supreme Court: Report  All they can do is go home, because it isn’t even their football.

Sea-Level Rise Takes Business Toll in North Carolina’s Outer Banks  (EcoWatch) Still waiting for NYC to be under water.

King tides, boosted by sea-level rise, are flooding communities along the East Coast (Washington Post) Still waiting for NYC to be under water.

Crisis looms in alarmist climate science  What, another one?

Measuring Climate Intentions, Not Results

It’s about time adults start rising up against climate change (Popular ‘Science’) Or climate change hysteria….

UN Climate Disaster Doubling Revisited

Steve Sailer.

Utra-wealthy, ultra-liberal San Francisco has strikingly bad public schools. I don’t mean “bad” in the usual sense of “infelicitous demographics” but in the sense of poor scores for most ethnic groups relative to their national norms. Now, its one good public high school, exam-using Lowell (the SF equivalent of NYC’s Stuyvesant and suburban DC’s Thomas Jefferson), is going to lottery admissions, perhaps permanently.

Paul Mirengoff at PowerLine.

In November 2011, an elite group of Chinese Communist Party members and cronies of the Chinese regime secured a meeting in the White House thanks to the efforts of Hunter Biden’s associates. The meeting is said to have been with Vice President Biden and other Obama administration officials.

Reports of the meeting come from Peter Schweizer and Seamus Bruner. Andy McCarthy summarizes their findings here.

Schweizer and Bruner were able to break this story thanks to the cooperation of Hunter Biden’s former business partner, Bevan Cooney, who is serving a federal prison sentence for a fraud scheme. Cooney gave them access to his email account, which contains years of correspondence with Hunter Biden and his former associates.

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Purists love to talk about what is and is not a science. Clearly, for example, physics is a science, because it allows us to offer theories, and test them against data. And we learn from the results.

By way of contrast, economics or sociology or psychology are not sciences. Of course not! Those soft squishy subjects have no real predictive power after all, right?

Not so fast. Sure, physics will tell you, with impressive accuracy, what happens when a billiard ball hits another one. But if you replace the target billiard ball with a kitten, physics is not so helpful. And if we replace the kitten with a person, then physics has nothing at all useful to tell us.

On the other hand, some of those squishier subjects, albeit with large error bars, do have some predictive powers when it comes to people. When we scare people in a pandemic, we know some of the likely outcomes. We know how people tend to react to scarcity and plenty, how they change as a result of marriage or divorce. We don’t learn these things from physics, but we can learn them from the study of mankind through these softer “sciences.”

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Of all the people who’d be coming to the defense of apolitical Christian Hollywood star Chris Pratt for refusing to star in a Joe Biden fundraiser, you wouldn’t think it would be other Hollywood stars — some of them rabid lefties.

However in a move of solidarity and political civility, actors Robert Downey Jr. and far left, Trump-hating Bernie Bro Mark Ruffalo didn’t pile on with the media and Twitter mob smearing Pratt for possibly being a *GASP* conservative, they got out and defended him as a stand up guy against the self-proclaimed “sinless” media mob.

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Eleven women were killed Wednesday in Jalalabad, Afghanistan, when a stampede broke out in a soccer stadium while thousands of Afghan citizens attempted to obtain emigration visas, according to the Associated Press.

Attaullah Khogyani, a representative for the governor of the Eastern Nangarhar Province, confirmed that an additional thirteen people — mostly women — were injured.

…

In a separate incident on the same day, the Associated Press confirms that 34 Afghan police officers were ambushed and killed by Taliban insurgents. This marks the deadliest attack by the Taliban since the Afghan government and Taliban leadership began holding peace talks brokered by the United States in February of 2020.

Severian surveys the field.

The Z Man’s latest echoes what I’ve been saying around here for a while now: Whatever happens in the election’s wake, it won’t be a civil war. Not yet, anyway. The key word in “organized violence” is organized, and the organization just isn’t there.

Yeah yeah, I know, Soros etc. And his non-intersectional, genderfluid peeps can organize a riot like nobody’s business. But there’s a vast difference between organizing a riot and even something as low-level as an insurrection, to say nothing of an actual alternative government.

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Not a good time to be Roman Catholic.

Good news for the Orthodox; we always get a lot of converts when the RC church goes all hip & trendy.

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Well, then, we have something to look forward to.

Let’s hope it hits between China and India. They could use the distraction.

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Social media platforms such as Twitter and Facebook were widely condemned for putting up a warning and attempting to limit access to several New York Post articles written about the subject. Twitter claimed the articles violated policy regarding “hacked” material — even though there is no evidence that the material was hacked. At the time of this writing, the New York Post’s Twitter account remains locked.

Democrat politicians and pundits have also rushed to the Biden team’s defense, stating that the material is obvious Russian disinformation. Several federal sources with direct knowledge of the situation, however, have confirmed that the photos and texts printed by the New York Post are in fact genuine and corroborated. They have also confirmed the existence of federal investigations into a number of subjects related to the reports.

Additionally, the Director of National Intelligence has now revealed that there is no evidence or intelligence that Hunter Biden’s laptop or its contents are part of a Russian disinformation campaign. It should also be noted that neither Joe nor Hunter Biden have thus far issued an explicit denial of the reported contents of the laptop.

Scott Johnson at PowerLine creates a useful new word.

Lee Smith places the disgrace of Jeffrey Toobin into the context of the New Yorker’s political project in the Spectator USA column “Jeffrey Toobin’s stroke of misfortune” (“He is not the first journalist to get overexcited about ‘coup porn’”). Lee painted the big media picture out of which it emerged in the Tablet column “Don’t Believe Your Lying Eyes—or Joe Biden’s Big Mouth.”

Lee’s Spectator column made me think back to the New Yorker’s role in promoting the Steele Dossier back in 2018. I devoted five posts to what I called “Jane Mayer’s Dossiad” (all of them and more related items accessible at the link). Mayer is the star New Yorker staff writer who gave Christopher Steele the Tiger Beat treatment.

As Lee suggests, Jeffrey Toobin represents a larger phenomenon. I would describe the phenomenon as repetitive conduct performed disgracefully in public with a compulsive element. Let us give make it a verb and call it Toobin in his honor. Used in a sentence, for example, we may ask: Is the New Yorker Toobin again?

Freeberg lays it out.

Let’s discuss this with honesty: #MAGA stands for Make America Great Again. This is offensive to many.

They are not offended because they think America was already great, although many of them have said so. They are not offended because America has never been great; many have said that. These would be two irreconcilable factions, fighting with each other, if they meant what they had been saying. They never did. We never saw them fight with each other and there’s a resaon for that. These were dishonest cosmetic statements lacking any matching underlying sentiment.

It’s offensive because greatness is decision-based. If you’re some slacker living in your mom’s basement with no job, and you wake up this morning and say “This stops now” and you mean it, you’re already great. The resulting education, job, saving, marriage, house etc. are merely following through on the awakening, like the position of a boat following a new bearing. If the boat is following a bearing of greatness, the boat is great already. That’s how people are. That’s how communities are. That’s how societies are.