Tools of Renewal.

This week, someone asked me if I thought Chinese spies were entering the US under our no-borders policy. I didn’t say I thought they were entering. I said they were, in fact, entering.

Imagine you’re a Chinese official. You want to have many spies in the US. That is not a statement a reasonable person can dispute. You have a choice between working hard to get them in legally, with lots of documentation the US government can rely on to track them, taking a great deal of time, or you can tell them to walk in from Mexico.

What would you do?

I’m sure many Chinese moles are coming in legally. There must be advantages to legal entry in many cases. But the Chinese would have to be morons to refrain from sending people in illegally.

ZMan says the quiet part out loud.

The entirety of the hate hunter industry rests on the assertion that certain opinions must lead to certain actions, not only by the person holding the taboo opinion, but by those who are exposed to the opinion. At no point will you see these people argue that the opinions are inaccurate, beyond some chanting of abracadabra phrases like “race science” which is supposed to protect the chanter from the opinion. They never explain how opinion must lead to action.

The closest you get is what amounts to the modern version of spectral evidence which they call “stochastic terrorism.” This is a novel concept that claims, “the use of mass media to provoke random acts of ideolog­i­cally motivated violence that are statistically predictable but individually unpre­dict­able.” In other words, get enough bad words into circulation and people will do bad things in response to the bad words, but there is no way to know who will do the bad things.

Since there is no way to know who will do the bad things in response to the bad words, the only remedy is to eliminate the bad words. Oddly, the witch hunters cannot know who will be triggered by the bad words, but they know exactly which words will do the triggering and who possesses those bad words. We are right back to examining women for third nipples by self-declared experts in a field that has no rational basis, only moral certainty about their own righteousness.

Newsbusters.

I recently traveled to give a speech. I stayed in a hotel where a group of U.S. Customs and Border Protection agents were also staying. I spoke to several, mostly men, but a couple were female. The average person I spoke to had been with the agency for over seven years.

Many people told me, all off the record, that before the Biden administration, they thoroughly enjoyed their job. Many were retired military members and felt that protecting the border allowed them to continue their service to the country. But now, several said they were “counting down the days until retirement.”

They were livid at being converted, as more than one put it, into “Uber drivers” for illegal aliens. One said, “If the average American had any idea who what’s going on, if they knew who we’ve knowingly allowed into the country, if they knew the kinds of things some of these guys are bringing into the country — and I don’t just mean fentanyl and other drugs — they’d burn down the White House.” One showed me a cellphone video he had “secretly” taken depicting “migrants” coming across the border while flashing middle fingers at the agents.

Unfortunately, the ‘average American’ still relies on the Narrative media to bring up what needs attention,  and the Narrative media isn’t going to bring up anything that is embarrassing to proglodytes unless it would be even more embarrassing not to.

Read it.

As he does.

If anyone is watching, there’s been plenty to see as armed Hamas fighters have hijacked aid convoys in videos taken both by the IDF and civilians in Gaza. In video after video, Hamas terrorists seize aid, assault civilians who, in some cases, respond by hurling abuse and stones.

On Halloween, John Kirby, Biden’s national security spokesman, denied anything was going on.

Steve Sailer.

Many long-time iSteve themes converged at last night’s Grammy Awards ceremony: People who think Beyonce should win all the Grammys instead of just more than anybody else ever has, Tom Wolfe’s discovery of modern America’s obsession with Plaques for Blacks, black husbands gallantly making fools of themselves for their wives at awards shows, and how white people assume blacks must suffer from low self-esteem and thus must be protected at all costs from learning anything non-flattering about themselves.

Read it.

As reported in the news feed last weekend, a young “Frenchman” named Sagou Gouno Kassogue had a sudden “Allahu Akhbar” moment at the Gare de Lyon in Paris. He went on a rampage with a knife and other implements of destruction, wounding three people before he could be overpowered and detained.

Before he was apprehended, Mr. Kassogue left a substantial record of political analysis and philosophical ruminations on TikTok.

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Student achievement at a San Francsico-area elementary school fell dramatically following the establishment of a woke teaching policy through a $250,000 federal grant.

Read it.

In response to the virus pandemic and nationwide Black Lives Matter riots in the summer of 2020, some elite colleges and universities shredded testing requirements for admission. Several years later, the test-optional admission has yet to produce the promising results for racial and class-based equity that many woke academic institutions wished.

The failure of test-optional admission policies has forced Dartmouth College to reinstate standardized test scores for admission starting next year. This should never have been eliminated, as merit will always prevail.

Read it.

Amazon yielded to pressure from President Joe Biden’s White House to suppress books that opposed COVID-19 vaccines, according to documents reviewed by The Daily Signal.

The House Judiciary Committee obtained the emails, which demonstrate the White House’s pressure on Amazon to suppress “anti-vax books” and the company’s decision to take action against the books.

Amazon employees strategized for a meeting with the White House on March 9, 2021, openly asking whether the administration wanted the retailer to remove books from its catalog.

My, what a surprise.

Read it.

Prices at fast food restaurants in California are set to jump in April as huge minimum wage hikes kick in. Escalating restaurant prices won’t be limited to California.

California already has some of the highest fast food prices in the nation. Expect to pay still more, and not just in California.

You could always cook healthy food from scratch, as we used to do in the Good Old Days. But I guess not.

I’d be interested in how many lower-tier people are going to lose their jobs due to increased automation and so forth.

The franchise owner will weigh the cost of a kiosk vs shelling out $250,000 in wages. Joe’s Grill and Susie’s Diner don’t have that option.

Newsbusters.

In 2020, Joe Biden won three states by less than 1 point: Georgia, Arizona and Wisconsin.

If Donald Trump can flip these three in November — he took them all in 2016 — he’ll be back in the White House this time next year.

Can he do it?

Read it.

Repeat break-ins have forced an Atlanta small business owner to close her store.

Thieves broke into According to Fashion in Sweet Auburn at least seven times in 2023.

Police dusted for prints, and by December, officers had arrested three people.

Apparently that wasn’t good enough.

Per Wikipedia:

The mayor of Atlanta is Andre Dickens, a Democrat elected on a nonpartisan ballot whose first term in office began on January 3, 2022.Every mayor elected since 1973 has been Black

Read it.

A recent interview with the leader of an immigration reform organization that the Southern Poverty Law Center has branded a “hate group” potentially shines new light on how the SPLC allegedly uses its “hate” accusations as a tactical political weapon.

Throughout the 2016 presidential election, the Southern Poverty Law Center, a 501(c)(3) nonprofit entity, condemned candidate Donald Trump for his supposed ties to “far-right extremists.”

The following year, an immigration group helped report this to the IRS, claiming the SPLC had violated its tax-exempt status by engaging in political activity against Trump, and the SPLC appears to have responded by adding that group to its “hate map” in what the immigration group calls an act of retaliation.

The SPCL ‘hate map’ is merely a map of all the people they hate. It has no other significance.

Zman does a deep dive.

Carl Schmitt famously said that “the political is reducible to the existential distinction between friend and enemy.” The shorthand you hear in dissident circles is that politics is about friends and enemies. You can see this in your own life when it comes to some issue with which you have been on the opposite side of a friend. That person may now be a former friend if the issue was important at the time. It is why families often avoid talking about politics during the holidays.

A practical aspect of this reality is that political activism should always seek to harm the opponent and boost your side. An action that makes the other side look bad is good activism and it is even better activism if it also makes you look good. Of course, bad activism is that which boosts the enemy and harms you. The Charlottesville rally in 2018 turned out to be disastrous activism for the alt-right. It rallied their enemies and gutted their support in the broader community.

Life is not always so cut and dried. Generational politics, for example, often feels like good politics to the people doing it. Whether it is young people moaning about old people having had it easy or old people moaning about young people having it easy, the people doing it always feel good about it. A Nick Fuentes feels like a hero when he makes fun of adults for being adults. He thinks it is good politics because it brings in money and gets his young fans excited.

Read it.

leopard, Camembert and Roquefort are on the brink of extinction. The cause: a narrow selection of the strains of fungi used to culture the cheeses has been reproduced through an asexual, standardised process —to the point of exhaustion. Could cheese be a metaphor for our humanity adrift?

To understand how this tragedy came about, it’s important to understand the production process that allows these two jewels of French cheese-making expertise to come into the world. To produce Camembert, made from cow’s milk, or Roquefort, made from sheep’s milk, the milk has to be inoculated with very specific fungi: Penicillium camemberti for Camembert, and, logically, Penicillium roqueforti for Roquefort. The presence of these fungi in the milk will transform it and allow it—under the watchful eye of man who monitors the natural process—to develop the fine flavours that will then, after a long evolution, charm the fine palates of gourmets.

The problem is that these little creatures called Penicillia camemberti and roqueforti are rare and fragile.

Read it.

The Firm of Schumer & McConnell (as Senator Lee calls it) released the text of the “bipartisan border bill” last night. The text (I think) is posted here. It’s part of an “emergency” supplemental appropriations bill that runs to 370 pages.

The proponents of the bill have also released a 19-page summary. Fox News reporter Bill Melugin has posted his take on the bill’s highlights on X beginning here.

Senator Schumer wants to call the bill up for an initial procedural vote on Wednesday. Speed is of the essence. One might hazard the guess that is because the closer we look the worse it gets. Listening to Senator Lankford promote the bill, I think that any good the bill allegedly does is illusory.

Read it.

Doubtful.

Read it.

In a series of X posts, Elon Musk revealed to his 171 million followers that radical leftists in the White House intentionally sparked the border invasion as a tool to influence congressional district apportionment and Electoral College votes.

On Friday, Musk explained President Biden’s migrant invasion strategy:

Get as many illegals in the country as possible
Legalize them to create a permanent majority – a one-party state.

Truth.

Read it.

Thereby guaranteeing that only rich people can use them.

Government officials, of course, will not have to pay–or, of they do, the cost will be passed on to the taxpayers.

Bloomberg.

A growing number of young adults can’t see a way to manage both careers and the demands of parenting.

Read it.

No longer reserved exclusively for deadly situations, SWAT teams are now increasingly being deployed for relatively routine police matters such as serving a search warrant, with some SWAT teams being sent out as much as five times a day.

SWAT teams have been employed to address an astonishingly trivial array of so-called criminal activity or mere community nuisances: angry dogs, domestic disputes, improper paperwork filed by an orchid farmer, and misdemeanor marijuana possession, to give a brief sampling.

Police have also raided homes on the basis of mistaking the presence or scent of legal substances for drugs. Incredibly, these substances have included tomatoes, sunflowers, fish, elderberry bushes, kenaf plants, hibiscus, and ragweed. In some instances, SWAT teams are even employed, in full armament, to perform routine patrols.

These raids, which might be more aptly referred to as “knock-and-shoot” policing, have become a thinly veiled, court-sanctioned means of giving heavily armed police the green light to crash through doors in the middle of the night.

Read it.

German schools should serve as the alembic in which the multicultural society will be distilled. Such is the opinion of a “German” diversity expert and lobbyist for multiculti ideals — who just happens to be a Syrian. What a surprise!

Freeberg nails it.

So I was reading this epistle posted on this Internet woke-kiosk called The Mary Sue, which was sounding the familiar clarion call of the woke, “Oh how much I hate this thing, come gather around and help me hate it.” In this case, for today, “it” would be J.K. Rowling, author of the Harry Potter adventures.

The author piqued my curiosity by willfully using the word “problematic.” This isn’t a good word. It doesn’t say anything. Take an object, let’s say it’s a beehive, or a pair of salt & pepper shakers. A milk bucket. You tell me it’s “problematic” and what does that say about the thing? Nothing. You’re telling me about yourself, and your objectives. You’re trying to start a new cultural more in which the thing is generally disliked, for some reason. You’re instigating a bargain. You’ll grant me approval if I help you dislike the thing. Or, you’ll withhold the approval unless I help you. And…that’s it. That’s all you’re saying.

The word “problematic,” itself…has problems. But our newer generation of feminists just can’t stop using it.

It’s a term used to imply that there’s something wrong without doing the work of being specific because that would open up the opiner to refutation; as long as it’s kept inchoate, there’s nothing you can nail down but the impression of deficiency is left in people’s brains.. ‘Troubling’ is another such term.

It isn’t because my biases are the opposite of theirs, and I don’t trust their judgment. Although those apply. No. I would expect a reasonable progressive, if you can find one, to concede the point that never being happy is an indispensable part of their ideology. This is easily defined and easily tested. Just give them whatever they want, which is something we’ve done many times. They’ll find a new way to be unhappy, to say “Still not good enough.” Progress, remember?

Preach it, brother.

Read it.

Recently I found myself trying to describe the appeal of the Harry Potterbooks to a friend who’d never read them, and I came to realise that, at over a quarter of a century since The Philosopher’s Stone was published, the series can now be used to illuminate the dreams, obsessions and resentments of the class of people who took over the reins of first culture and then politics in the late 20th and early 21st centuries in Britain and the Western world more widely. The fact of the rise of this class to prominence is a commonplace and there are many terms in circulation for them that capture various overlapping elements: liberal elite, new elite, graduate class, meritocrats, champagne socialists, or even for the specific British generation that J. K. Rowling belongs to, Britpoppers.

This class rose with the postwar economic expansion and the meritocracy that accompanied it, and combined 1960s counter-cultural values with conventional worldly success. They saw themselves as defined against the fallen old world and being oppositional and anti establishment was core to their self image. For a descriptive term therefore I like American journalist David Brooks’s coinage of Bobo (bourgeois bohemian) from his 2000 book Bobos in Paradise: The New Upper Class and How They Got There. As Scott Alexander said in his partial review of Bobos, the neologism “was cute but never caught on”, but nonetheless I will use it going forward. Harry Potter is often associated with the millennial generation who were its first and largest target market, but while the millennials grew up in the world the bobos created and largely imbibed their philosophy (which is one reason why they liked Harry Potterso much), they were not, of course, its originators.

One of the disadvantages of living in a technological society is that people can prolong adolescence for decades without much in the way of repercusssions.

Read it.

Dearborn, Michigan, Mayor Abdullah Hammoud took to social media platform X on Saturday afternoon to warn “Effective immediately” that “Dearborn police will ramp up its presence across all places of worship and major infrastructure points.”

Hammoud said the reason behind police officers increasing their presence across places of worship and major infrastructure points followed a Wall Street Journal opinion piece calling Dearborn “America’s Jihad Capital.”

Thereby proving its point.

Read it.

There ought to be some way to handle this problem … I dunno … maybe send them back?

Read it.

A Feb. 9 Federal TRIO Programs Subcommittee meeting could push the Biden administration one step closer to extending $1.2 billion in college-preparatory programs to illegal immigrants.

A draft proposal released Jan. 12 by the Department of Education’s Office of Postsecondary Education argued in favor of extending Federal TRIO programs to illegal immigrants. TRIO programs are a set of eight “outreach and student services” initiatives meant to prepare “low-income individuals, first-generation college students, and individuals with disabilities” for college, as seen on the program page.

At the upcoming meeting, subcommittee members will discuss “participant eligibility” and then present their recommendations to an overhead committee, as stated by the Office of Postsecondary Education. Subcommittee members could continue to push the proposal to include illegal immigrants in TRIO programs.

Read it.

A senior BBC employee described white people as a “barbaric bloodthirsty rapacious murderous genocidal thieving parasitical deviant breed,” while also calling the UK a “bigoted” country.

L.A. Times.

From a parking lot on the corner of 12th and Figueroa streets, Michael Lopez carefully commandeered his drone through the skyline around LA Live.
A video screen showed the drone’s slow ascent. Up and up it went, until it framed a shot almost straight out of Ansel Adams. The cloud-covered San Gabriel Mountains. Green foothills glimmering from recent rains. And an abandoned, half-finished skyscraper plastered in bright, bubbly graffiti.
Two other towers were similarly hit, the floor of each 20-plus-story building featuring graffiti on the corners.

The Other McCain.

Moving is racist, when white people do it. When a white person chooses to relocate, the consequences are racism. To understand this, you have to understand what Steve Sailer dubs “Dirt Theory”: Any geographical location where black or brown people live is “Tragic Dirt,” afflicted by poverty and violence, and the only solution to their problem is to move them to white-occupied “Magic Dirt,” where everybody is rich and all the kids have high test scores. At least, this is how liberals seem to believe the world works, and have made “Dirt Theory” the basis of their attitude on such issues as immigration. In their disordered minds, people like Harvard Professor Raj Chetty believe that analysis of geographic data about poverty, crime, etc., will yield insights about the causes of these phenomena — places matter more than people.

Read it.

A former Trump administration official who was shot during a Washington, D.C., carjacking spree on Monday died Saturday, his wife said in a statement.Mike Gill, who worked at the U.S. Commodity Futures Trading Commission under former President Donald Trump, was shot Monday.

Time to leave.

Read it.

• Russia Collusion Hoax
• Hands Up, Don’t Shoot Hoax
• Jussie Smollett Hoax
• Covington KKKids Hoax
• Very Fine People Hoax
• Seven-Hour Gap Hoax
• Russian Bounties Hoax
• Trump Trashes Troops Hoax
• Policemen Killed at Mostly Peaceful January 6 Protest Hoax
• Rittenhouse Hoax
• Eating While Black Hoax
• Border Agents Whipping Illegals Hoax
• NASCAR Noose Hoax
• The Georgia Jim Crow 2.0 Hoax
• Trump Assaulted Secret Service Agents and Grabbed Steering Wheel of Beast Hoax
• MAGA Assaulted Paul Pelosi Hoax
• COVID Lab Leak Theory Is Racist Hoax
• Hunter Biden’s Laptop Is Russian Disinformation Hoax
• Joe Biden Will Never Ban Gas Stoves Hoax
• COVID Deaths Are Over-Counted Is a Conspiracy Theory Hoax
• Mass Graves of Native Children in Canada Hoax
• The Trump Killed All the Fish Hoax
• Hamas Hospital Hoax
• John Fetterman Is Healthy Hoax
• If Reelected, Trump Will Execute People Hoax
• The Alfa Bank Hoax

Read it.

In the following video, the popular French commentator and former presidential candidate Éric Zemmour pays a visit to Modern Multicultural London. His voice-over provides commentary about the Islamization of Europe, and the triumph of Islamic supremacism.

Read it.

Sgt. William Jerome Rivers, Spc. Kennedy Ladon Sanders, and Spc. Breonna Alexsondria Moffett, all from Georgia, were killed in a drone strike by Iran-backed forces on January 28. Georgia Governor Brian Kemp and members of Congress were first to call the families. Parents were told they needed to fill out special paperwork to get a call from the president, whose initial statement mentioned none of the victims. When Biden finally called on January 30, he told the parents of Kennedy Sanders that “My son spent a year in Iraq; that’s how I lost him.” Actually it wasn’t.

Read it.

Equality under the law is a bedrock principle of our country.

But sadly, it’s fallen out of fashion, with many calling for “equity”—the favoring of certain racial or ethnic groups—instead of equality.

This toxic ideology has infused our culture and our courts in many ways, both large and small.

Once neutral areas like procedural and grammatical rules are being weaponized to subtly (or maybe not so subtly) advance the radical equity-over-equality agenda.

To this end, it has become fashionable for writers in both popular culture and the courts to treat and write about people differently based on their race. Many likely don’t even realize they’re doing it and probably (albeit mistakenly) believe they are being good grammarians and following the proper rules.

Steve Sailer.

From The Atlantic, a hilariously literal elucidation of the Magic Dirt / Tragic Dirt theory of white flight.

Read it.

While New York City Mayor Eric Adams (D) has been complaining about “extremely painful” budget cuts, and warned that the flood of migrants thanks to the Biden administration’s open-border policies “will destroy New York City,” somehow – somehow, Adams’ administration has found it in the budget to allocate $53 million towards handing out pre-paid credit cards to migrant families living in Big Apple hotels, the NY Post reports.

…

In response to New York City’s program to take care of illegal migrants before their own homeless population, rapper 50 cent took to Instagram to tell his 31 million followers he might vote for Trump…

Read it.

The first month of the Washington Legislature’s 2024 session is ending with a slew of Democrat-backed gun control proposals, including a new measure to tax people who have the “privilege” of using ammunition.

House Bill 2238, sponsored by Democratic state Reps. My-Linh Thai and Liz Berry, would create an 11 percent tax on the retail sale of ammunition across the state in addition to all existing federal, state, and local sale and use taxes, with the exception of sales to governments for the purposes of supplying law enforcement agencies.

Instead of recognizing the purchase of ammunition as an integral part of the Second Amendment right to keep and bear arms, the language of the bill classifies it as a “privilege.”

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Last November, the American Ornithological Society, or AOS, announced that it would change the common names of all American birds named after people. There are 152 such “eponymic” names (that is, birds that are named after a specific person, like Bicknell’s Thrush) on the AOS’ official checklist, and the group is planning to start with between 70 and 80 species predominantly found in the U.S. and Canada. In the coming years, birds like Cooper’s Hawk, Wilson’s Snipe, and Lincoln’s Sparrow will be stripped of their eponyms and given new common English names.

The eponymic naming issue has been heating up in the bird world for a few years now. Birds got their English names when they were “discovered” by Western scientists, or otherwise identified as a new species. This meant ornithologists had the honor of coming up with whatever moniker they wanted, and frequently named birds in honor of a benefactor, a friend, or the person who shot the first known specimen.

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On Wednesday night, hundreds of tractors poured into Brussels down the swanky main drag pulling manure spreaders and wagons past luxury shops like Balenciaga and others never before seen through the window of a John Deere cab. The roar of engines, police sirens, and helicopters was ear-splitting. Tractors had been arriving all week, 1,300 in total, setting up camp in the blocks around the European Union buildings. By morning, the entire city centre was gridlocked, traffic was snarled onto side streets, and tractors were packed nose-to-hitch for kilometres. One farmer set up a pen in the middle of the street, laid down straw, and let two bulls out so that the bug-eyed city residents could meet a cow.

The  peasants are revolting.

Steve Sailer.

Back in 1997, I wrote a long article “Is Love Colorblind?” about how in the 1990 Census, 72% of black-white marriages featured a black husband and a white wife while 72% of white-Asian marriages featured a white husband and an Asian wife. Black-Asian marriages were rare but almost always featured a black husband and Asian wife (e.g., Tiger Woods’ parents).

What has happened since then?

Read it.

New York is launching a $53 million pilot program to hand out pre-paid credit cards to migrant families living in hotels, the New York Post reports.

Red State.

CNN anchor Erica Hill was stunned into silence on Friday morning after a panelist explained to her why illegal immigrants don’t stay in Florida.

The exchange came after four illegal immigrants were released from jail with no bail after assaulting two police officers in New York City. As they walked out of the police station, they flipped off the cameras and then, according to the NYPD, got on a bus to flee to California.

During the CNN segment, Jon Miller, who is a law enforcement analyst for CNN, explained how organized these criminal illegal aliens are, noting their rap sheets. He then brings up what NYPD detectives are telling him about why illegal immigrants are coming back to New York. The answer? They’d end up in jail if they stayed in Florida.

That’s followed by a period of awkward silence before one of the anchors abruptly ends the segment.

Read it.

California Democrat Gov. Gavin Newsom this week recounted a story in which a local Target employee told him that “there’s no accountability” for retail theft because of him, according to an ABC affiliate.

Well, duh….

The Other McCain.

Just a few years ago, Portland, Oregon, was seen as a sort of progressive utopia, and it’s not really a secret why this was so: Portland is the whitest major city in America. Progressive like to talk about “diversity,” but they prefer to admire it from a comfortable distance, you understand.

…

Portland proves this principle in reverse — a predominately white city populated by the kind of left-wing kooks who like Bernie Sanders, but think he’s perhaps too “mainstream” for their taste. It’s no surprise that Portland is a hotbed of “Antifa” radicalism, just like it’s no surprise that Portland has a significant homelessness problem.

Reuters.

Climate activist Greta Thunberg was on Friday cleared of a public order offence over a protest outside an oil and gas conference last year, after a judge in a London court ruled she had no case to answer.

Thunberg, who became a prominent campaigner worldwide after staging weekly protests in front of the Swedish parliament in 2018, was acquitted at Westminster Magistrates’ Court of a single charge under the Public Order Act.

Thunberg was one of dozens of people arrested in October outside a London hotel where the Energy Intelligence Forum was hosting oil and gas industry leaders.

She and four others, aged between 19 and 59, were accused of failing to comply with an order by police to move their protest to a designated area near the conference.

If there are no consequences for breaking the law, people are going to continue to break the law.