Today is the scheduled date for the French election. Darned if I or anyone can say how it will turn out, though I think our President is right -- the attack on three policemen on the Champs-Élysées would certainly seem to boost the chances of Marine le Pen. Of course, I could be wrong, and Barack Obama’s apparent favorite Emmanuel Macron, who says terrorism will “be a fact of daily life” that his countrymen will just have to get used to, will appeal to enough suicidal Frenchmen to carry the day.

March for Science

On Saturday, crowds at the laughably titled global March for Science in our capital city were rained upon.  Mother Nature seems to be laughing so hard she’s crying at these marchers, most of whom have no idea of what they are marching for on a day after the power grids failed in San Francisco and Los Angeles and New York subways were shut down because of a power outage. We seem to need electrical engineers more than we need marchers for “science.” 

In any event, here’s a romp through the 13 most absurd predictions from Earth Day in about 1970. My all-time favorite remains Stanford professor Paul Ehrlich’s:

“Most of the people who are going to die in the greatest cataclysm in the history of man have already been born… [By 1975] some experts feel that food shortages will have escalated the present level of world hunger and starvation into famines of unbelievable proportions. Other experts, more optimistic, think the ultimate food-population collision will not occur until the decade of the 1980s.” 

In fact, obesity seems a bigger problem here and the world is better fed than ever in the past 50 years. 

Marching Against Free Speech

It took thousands of years to develop Western Civilization, with its respect for free speech and assembly, and just decades for big thinkers like Ehrlich to worm their way into academia and create a generation of numbskulls.  Unable to defend their puerile beliefs, the academic left is now shutting down free inquiry and destroying the moral and intellectual basis of the very institutions that have fed them. At Berkeley, whose mayor publicly touts his affiliation with Antifa, where rioters fight to smash the heads of those who dare to speak freely, Ann Coulter is defying the university that sought to deny her that right.

And at all the five campuses of the pricey and elite Claremont colleges, the fascists against academic freedom have stirred. The topper was the fuss at Pomona College, whose president David Oxtoby defended free speech as essential to the very purpose of the college the day after Black Lives Matter at sister college Claremont McKenna shut down a presentation by pro-police speaker Heather MacDonald. Twenty-seven Pomona students demanded an apology “for previously patronizing statement, enforcing that Pomona College does not tolerate hate speech and speech that projects violence unto the bodies of its marginalized students and oppressed peoples, especially Black students who straddle the intersection of marginalized identities.” They also demanded that action be taken against the Claremont Independent editorial staff. 

It’s hard for me to picture students at a prestigious and expensive school (about $50k per year) on a gorgeous campus as “marginalized” and “oppressed” but the text of the letter explains why these students think they are.

Here’s the gist of their argument, which rambles on through more incoherent, ungrammatical leftist gibberish:

Though this institution as well as many others including this entire country have been founded upon the oppression and degradation of marginalized bodies, it has a liability to protect the students that it serves. The paradox is that Pomona’s past is rooted in domination of marginalized peoples and communities and the student body has a significant population of students from these backgrounds. Your recent statement reveals where Pomona’s true intentions lie.

Free speech, a right many freedom movements have fought for, has recently become a tool appropriated by hegemonic institutions. It has not just empowered students from marginalized backgrounds to voice their qualms and criticize aspects of the institution, but it has given those who seek to perpetuate systems of domination a platform to project their bigotry. Thus, if “our mission is founded upon the discovery of truth,” how does free speech uphold that value? The notion of discourse, when it comes to discussions about experiences and identities, deters the ‘Columbusing’ of established realities and truths (coded as ‘intellectual inquiry’) that the institution promotes. Pomona cannot have its cake and eat it, too. Either you support students of marginalized identities, particularly Black students, or leave us to protect and organize for our communities without the impositions of your patronization, without your binary respectability politics, and without your monolithic perceptions of protest and organizing. In addition, non-Black individuals do not have the right to prescribe how Black people respond to anti-Blackness.

Your statement contains unnuanced views surrounding the academy and a belief in searching for some venerated truth. Historically, white supremacy has venerated the idea of objectivity, and wielded a dichotomy of ‘subjectivity vs. objectivity’ as a means of silencing oppressed peoples. The idea that there is a single truth--’the Truth’--is a construct of the Euro-West that is deeply rooted in the Enlightenment, which was a movement that also described Black and Brown people as both subhuman and impervious to pain. This construction is a myth and white supremacy, imperialism, colonization, capitalism, and the United States of America are all of its progeny. The idea that the truth is an entity for which we must search, in matters that endanger our abilities to exist in open spaces, is an attempt to silence oppressed peoples. We, Black students, exist with a myriad of different identities. We are queer, trans, differently-abled, poor/low-income, undocumented, Muslim, first-generation and/or immigrant, and positioned in different spaces across Africa and the African diaspora. The idea that we must subject ourselves routinely to the hate speech of fascists who want for us not to exist plays on the same Eurocentric constructs that believed Black people to be impervious to pain and apathetic to the brutal and violent conditions of white supremacy.

It’s hard for me to understand how great satire sites like The Onion can continue to find readers when reality is more absurd than even the creative geniuses there can fathom.

Marching Through Georgia

Repeatedly the media claims that the Republicans are “perilously close” to losing their House majority. They bought into the Democrats’ hyping of three congressional races they thought they could wrest from the Republicans in off-term elections. Two of those three have been held so far, and the Democrats did no such thing. The most watched was the race by Jon T. Osoff, a weak candidate who needed a 50% vote to capture a seat in Atlanta’s 6th district. Osoff, who received substantial backing from rich leftists, lost and will have to run against a top GOP candidate Karen Handel. In a statement early Wednesday, Ossoff acknowledged that he had fallen short:

“This is already a remarkable victory,” he said. “We defied the odds, shattered expectations, and now are ready to fight on and win in June.”

The one thing these elections have proved is the Democrats’ success in redistributing wealth. They are taking millions from the coastal elites and spreading the money throughout the heartland on races only the media thinks they could win. They are counting on keeping the anger machine stoked up. Like Mike Huckabee, I think it’s a losing game:

 In his speech last night, after it became apparent that for all their spending and spitting, the Democrats had once again failed to win, Ossoff gave a perfect illustration of the utter lack of self-awareness of his own party’s flaws, which is their biggest electoral handicap. He melodramatically declared that “there is no amount of dark money, Super PAC, negative advertising that can overcome a real grassroots movement like this. So bring it on.”

To those of us who live in Reality Land, he just described why his own campaign failed to top 50%: because it wasn’t a grassroots movement offering fresh policies that people support; it was an attempt to stir up voters’ base emotions with negative ads paid for by dark money from Super PACs. Are they going to keep trying to stoke the anger machine forever by pouring millions into the run-off, and then into every Congressional election until George Soros is broke? It didn’t work in November, and despite the surge of leftist fury following the election, there’s already a growing sense of fatigue as more and more voters do what Democratic political activists just can’t seem to do: they’re moving past the last election and getting on with more important things in life. You know, the way grown-ups do."

The Great March on Weaponized Intelligence

This week the House Permanent Select Committee invited FBI Director James Comey and National Security Adviser Admiral Mike Rogers to appear at a closed hearing on Russian actions in the 2016 election. As well, they invited former CIA Director John Brennan, DNI James Clapper, and former Deputy Director Sally Yates to appear at an open hearing on that same day, May 2.

The Hill reports that the U.S. is preparing charges against Julian Assange for leaking the DNC emails. My friend “daddy’ explains how silly this makes the claim that Putin colluded with Trump:

It's almost like a Bizarro world version of:

"The House That Jack Built."

This is the White House that Trump Putin built.

This is the Russian Dictator who rigged the election that led to the White House that Trump Putin built.

This is the curb that Hillary fell off after she was drugged by the Russian Dictator who rigged the Election that led to the White House that Trump Putin built.

This is the bed that the prostitutes peed on to fill up the Dossier that ratted out Putin, that preceded the curb that Hillary fell off after she was drugged by the Russian Dictator who rigged the Election that led to the White House that Trump Putin built 

WND details the 31 groups and individuals suspected of targeting by spying, investigation, “and/or prosecuting using intelligence information” which Sharyl Attkisson earlier reported. It’s a new kind of D.C. A List and I imagine people left out might feel socially and politically outcast.

Former DNI James Brennan is now tagged as being intimately connected with the fake charges against Trump by former British spy Christopher Steele: 

Seeking to retain his position as CIA director under Hillary, Brennan teamed up with British spies and Estonian spies to cripple Trump’s candidacy. He used their phony intelligence as a pretext for a multi-agency investigation into Trump, which led the FBI to probe a computer server connected to Trump Tower and gave cover to [then-National Security Advisor] Susan Rice, among other Hillary supporters, to spy on Trump and his people.

Drawing from a news article in the Guardian (UK), George Neumayr adds:

Brennan got his anti-Trump tips primarily from British spies but also Estonian spies and others. The story confirms that the seed of the espionage into Trump was planted by Estonia. The BBC’s Paul Wood reported last year that the intelligence agency of an unnamed Baltic State had tipped Brennan off in April 2016 to a conversation purporting to show that the Kremlin was funneling cash into the Trump campaign.

So much marching going on here. Allow me to tout my newest enterprise? Pitchforks and torches. We’re located at convenient spots throughout the capital.