Are Some States Recovering FROM DEMS’ LOONY TUNE CAMPS?

Tennessee makes homeless camping a felony

by JAZZ SHAW  at HotAir, May 22, 2022

  

AP Photo/Ben Margot

States around America, including some of the bluest, have recently taken steps to empty out entrenched homeless encampments on public lands. Even San Francisco and Los Angeles have attempted to break up the makeshift communities where crime tends to flourish and people with drug and alcohol addiction problems congregate. These efforts have not met with a great deal of success yet, but Tennessee has been taking a more confrontational approach this year. Two recent laws, one passed in 2020 and another this year, will make it a felony punishable by up to six years in jail to camp out in parks and on other public lands without a permit. This has both the homeless themselves and advocates working on solutions to the endemic homelessness problem concerned. (Associated Press)

Tennessee is about to become the first U.S. state to make it a felony to camp on local public property such as parks.

“Honestly, it’s going to be hard,” [Miranda] Atnip said of the law, which takes effect July 1. “I don’t know where else to go.”

Tennessee already made it a felony in 2020 to camp on most state-owned property. In pushing the expansion, Sen. Paul Bailey noted that no one has been convicted under that law and said he doesn’t expect this one to be enforced much, either. Neither does Luke Eldridge, a man who has worked with homeless people in the city of Cookeville and supports Bailey’s plan — in part because he hopes it will spur people who care about the homeless to work with him on long-term solutions.

Other states like Texas have introduced new regulations on public camping, but only Tennessee has made it a felony. But as noted in the excerpt above, even the sponsors of the new law don’t expect to see anyone actually prosecuted and imprisoned over it.

Tennessee’s failure to come up with a long-term solution to the epidemic of homelessness shouldn’t come as any surprise. Nobody has made much progress on this issue despite vast amounts of money and resources being poured into various efforts. But lawmakers have to respond to public concerns and many people are indeed alarmed about these homeless encampments. They tend to be populated with people suffering from mental illness and those with chronic substance abuse problems. Crime is rampant and many of the homeless themselves wind up falling victim to predators. Local residents frequently feel threatened by what is typically referred to as “aggressive panhandling.”

But how does making homeless camping a felony solve anything, particularly when they don’t expect to really enforce the law? Locking up the homeless in jails and prisons isn’t going to work because there aren’t nearly enough cells to hold even a significant fraction of the homeless. And if you’re not doing anything to address the mental health and addiction issues of these people, all you’re doing is kicking the can down the road until they are released and then the cycle starts all over again. Additionally, it will be even harder for those who truly want help and to transition back to a normal, housed life if they have a felony on their record when applying for a job.

I’ve long since given up on trying to figure out a plausible, long-term solution that would work. Part of the problem, as noted even by advocates who work with the homeless, is that some people simply do not want the type of help government programs seek to provide. If you physically remove them to shelters, some will check out almost immediately rather than be subject to curfews or rules against alcohol and drug use. Giving every homeless person their own free apartment and food supplies is not only financially impossible, but it would foster resentment among those who have to work for a living and pay their bills.

Perhaps the solution involves going to each community and identifying those who are truly interested in getting help and willing to follow the rules to do so. Prioritize them for space in shelters and enrollment in mandatory mental health and substance abuse programs. For all the rest, cities may need to simply establish permanent camping locations away from business districts and residential areas with food banks and public showers and bathrooms provided. It’s not a very satisfying answer and it will cost money, but I honestly can’t think of any sort of perfect, one-size-fits-all solution.

Do Today’s Brits Know Who They Are?

 MAY 22, 2022 BY JOHN HINDERAKER at PowerLine:

ONLY THE WOKE NEED APPLY

From the Telegraph, a story that sums up much that is wrong with the West. Calvin Robinson has been studying at Oxford for the last two years to become an Anglican priest. Robinson was scheduled to begin a curacy at a parish in London, but the post was denied him and he was told the church did not have a role for him. Why?

Mr Robinson submitted a subject access request (SAR) to the Church of England – asking the organisation for access to the personal information it held on him.

It was then that he discovered a series of internal emails between Church bosses raising concerns over his opinions on institutional racism in Britain.

In one email, the Rt Rev Rob Wickham, Bishop of Edmonton, voiced concerns to senior church leaders after Mr Robinson suggested Britain was not a racist country.

He wrote: “Calvin’s comments concern me about denying institutional racism in this country.”

It was also a problem that Robinson didn’t think the Church of England–in which he wanted to serve as a priest–is racist:

He alleges [the Bishop of London] told him: “As a white woman I can tell you that the Church is institutionally racist.”

So apparently you can’t work for the Anglican Church unless you think it is a racist organization. It doesn’t sound like an institution with a bright future.

Oh yeah, one more thing: Calvin Robinson is black. He is leaving the Church of England and joining a “breakaway conservative group” called the Global Anglican Future Conference.

Stupid, Crooked Joe Biden Boasts His Imaginations, AND SO, CAUSES DISASTERS!

Is Biden’s ‘Success’ Our Mess?

What Americans see as an abject catastrophe, the Biden Administration cheers on as stunning and planned progress.

By Victor Davis Hanson at American Greatness:

May 18, 2022

If an administration deliberately wished to cause havoc on the border, to ensure fuel was nearly unaffordable, to create a crime wave, to spark 1970s hyperinflation, and to rekindle racial tensions, what would it have done differently than what Joe Biden has done? 

So is Biden malicious, incompetent, or a wannabe left-wing ideologue? 

When pressed about inflation and fuel price hikes, Biden either blames someone or something else, gets mad at the questioner, or claims Donald Trump did it. 

His administration apparently believes things are going well and according to plan. 

When polls disagree, his team either believes the American people are brainwashed or that they themselves have not supplied sufficient propaganda. So they never pivot or compromise, but rededicate themselves to continued failure. 

Why? Apparently, what most in the country see as disasters, Biden envisions as success. 

Take the border—or rather its disappearance. 

Never in U.S. history has an administration simply canceled immigration laws, opened the border, and welcomed in millions of illegal aliens. All arrive illegally, and without audit, or vaccinations and tests in times of a pandemic. 

Cartels now import lethal drugs at will into the United States. We have no idea how many terrorists walk across the border each day. 

Almost all the millions who break the law by entering are poor, without high school diplomas or English skills, and in dire need of massive federal and state housing, food, education, legal, and health subsidies.

Do the leftists in Washington believe that millions of dependent new residents will look to the Left for decades of support and soon find ways to reciprocate with fealty at the polls? Is that why Democrats brag in unapologetic tribalist fashion about changing the demography of the electorate?

Barack Obama’s energy secretary-designate Steven Chu once gaffed in the 2008 campaign when he openly wished that U.S. gas prices would reach European levels. 

In truth, the Left has always believed the only way to achieve their objectives of discouraging driving, forcing middle-class Americans onto trains and buses, and persuading them to live in urban high-rises rather than drive carbon-spewing cars from spacious suburban ranch-style homes was to encourage high fuel prices.

Is that agenda why Biden, during the current energy crisis, simply canceled new federal oil and gas leases? As diesel hits $7 a gallon in California, why else did he refuse to finish the Keystone XL pipeline or reopen Alaskan oil fields? 

Inflation continues officially to exceed eight percent per annum. Most consumers feel it is double that when they pay for food, fuel, building materials, houses, or rent—the essential stuff of life. 

What did the Biden Administration expect would follow from keeping real interest rates at near zero, while printing trillions of dollars at the moment supplies were short and demand was spiking? 

Or did it think inflation more fairly “spreads the wealth”? Does it prompt new necessary attacks on “corporate greed?” Does it demand more federal intervention and socialist policies? 

If inflation is “bad” for most, it may not seem so to this left-wing administration. 

Violent crime is on its way to 1970s levels. The combination of defunding the police, radical city and county prosecutors who don’t charge or lock up criminals, and emptying jails and prisons have ignited a national crime wave. 

The Biden Administration shrugs. It offers no new federal help to fund more police or charge freed criminals under applicable federal statutes. 

Does it think it is more socially just to let criminals free than incarcerate them? 

Does it buy into “critical legal theory” that laws do not reflect ancient ideas of right and wrong, but instead are “constructed” by the privileged to oppress the already oppressed? 

Is what Americans see as dangerous crime something the Biden zealots applaud as tough social karma? 

Americans are tired of the new woke tribalism. Judging individuals on the basis of their race, gender, or superficial appearance is amoral, and contrary to the entire civil rights movement, and the U.S. Constitution. 

OBAMALINGS LOVE CENSORSHIP AND DECEIT; Schumerites and Pelosis LOVE FASCISM!

May 22, 2022

Obama Supercharged the Left’s Embrace of Censorship

By J.B. Shurk at American Thinker:

It seems every day some notable Democrat is pushing for censorship.  After the horrific Buffalo mass murder on May 14, New York Governor Hochul threatened social media companies for not purging “hate speech,” that dangerously elusive term that has the potential to cover anything Democrats don’t like.  Former New York mayor Bill de Blasio demanded that Congress pass legislation to “reign in the spread of hate” on the Internet.  Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer had the audacity to send a formal letter to Fox News ordering the network to “immediately cease the reckless amplification” of ideas he blamed for the Buffalo shooting.  MSNBC’s Carl Cameron insisted that “it’s time to actually start doing things” to control speech, such as “maybe taking some names and putting people in jail.”  And all of these attacks on free speech are occurring while President Biden is flirting with the creation of a “Ministry of Truth” and the Democratic National Committee is “working with” Big Tech to “enforce a comprehensive political misinformation policy.”  How did we get to this perilous moment in the United States when prominent public figures so carelessly demand the regulation, punishment, and even criminalization of free speech?

Where is the journalistic outrage over threats to the First Amendment?  Remember when reporters pretended President Trump’s habit of slapping the “fake news” moniker on their work was nothing short of a threat against their lives?  Before Chris Cuomo found other ways to sink his career, CNN’s primetime spinmeister even claimed that being called “fake news” was a vile insult “equivalent of the N-word for journalists.”  America’s marquee news peddlers frequently excoriated President Trump for the insults he slung toward reporters and news outlets, even though he never once called for the censorship or punishment of a single journalist.  On the other hand, the Biden administration is planning the formation of its own “Disinformation Board” equipped to target any speech the government judges as not worthy of First Amendment protection, and the same reporters and outlets once up in arms for finding themselves on the receiving end of Trump’s barbs are now quiet as church mice.  Should that rather jarring hypocrisy be seen as evidence of obtuseness or duplicity?

Of course, it is easy to forget that it was President Obama, not President Trump, who originally bemoaned the rise of “fake news.”  Both before and after the 2016 election, he frequently mentioned the issue during news conferences and in interviews.  It bothered me at the time because his repeated insistence that speech (whether false or not) should be seen as a threat to the United States seemed very un-American to my ears.  

Unlike President Trump’s later derogatory use of “fake news” as an insult to belittle CNN or Meet the Press, Obama’s discussion of “fake news” always carried the implication that what is “fake” must be excised, if not punished.  After President Trump’s election, Obama immediately pointed to “fake news” as the principal culprit for his success, and in the weeks leading up to the Electoral College vote confirming Trump’s victory, news media ran many stories alleging that “fake news” had thrown the election to the underdog.  As I listened to pundits exercise their First Amendment rights by calling for the punishment of other voices allegedly spreading “fake news,” it was clear that too many Americans were champing at the bit to strike a blow against freedom of speech.

Many stories alleged that “fake news” helpful to Trump had been planted and pushed by foreign sources, in particular Russia.  There were even some pundits claiming that the use of Russian “fake news” to influence an American election constituted an “act of war.”  I found this hysteria shocking.  Having watched President Obama seek to influence the Brexit vote in the U.K., as well as election votes in Canada, France, Israel, and elsewhere, I couldn’t believe that commentators in the U.S. seemed surprised, if not outraged, that other nations might try to influence American politics.  Even worse, though, I was dumbfounded that so many Americans would claim that certain political speech should be censored simply because that speech arose from non-Americans.  The United States, after all, is home to millions of foreigners, many of whom own real estate and operate businesses.  Yet the same Democrats who obsess over “multiculturalism” and “diversity” and actively encourage foreign nationals to cross our borders illegally were also making the spectacular claim that free speech somehow belonged to American citizens alone during election season. 

The whole spectacle was horrifying not only because freedom of speech provides the bedrock for our other unalienable freedoms but also because defending that right has historically been deeply bipartisan.  The idea that Americans would call for physical war over speech they disdained was antithetical to America’s past unequivocal defense of free expression.  In the United States, I had always believed, most Americans embraced two salutary principles when dealing with speech they found abhorrent.  First, as with shopping in any street market, caveat emptor, or rather, be wary of buying into everything you hear.  Second, in all instances, the best remedy for incorrect, misleading, or repulsive speech is more speech directed against the offending speakers, never the strangulation of speech, itself.  If Russia or any other foreign nation were propagating what Democrats alleged was “fake news,” choosing to undermine the First Amendment in response was like responding to a foreign missile attack by tossing grenades at your neighbors.

However, because President Trump quickly appropriated “fake news” as a sparring instrument against his critics (a clear exercise of the president’s own free speech, even though the journalist class failed to recognize it as such), Obama’s initial efforts to claim that government must have a hand in deciding “what’s true and what’s not” were obscured by the larger-than-life personality who had just entered the White House.  I breathed a sigh of relief and hoped that Obama’s incipient campaign against free speech had been put out of its misery before it could become our misery, too. 

Alas, it appears that President Obama and other like-minded opponents of free speech have had little trouble refocusing their efforts on rebranding their animus for “fake news” as some sort of national security imperative for fighting dreaded “misinformation.”  To their everlasting discredit, the same press corps that denounced President Trump as a threat to their vocation for his penchant to call out certain news media as purveyors of “fake news” now giddily follow Leftist politicians down the censorship rabbit hole in their burn-and-pillage efforts to root out any “mis-,” “mal-,” or “dis-” information threatening official State narratives.  

First, the censors came for anybody who questioned the origin stories or officially-sanctioned medical treatments for COVID-19.  Then they came for anyone who spoke out against the numerous voting irregularities during the 2020 election.  Then they purged anybody reasonable enough to state factually that biological men cannot be women.  Finally, they squashed any voice that questioned why the U.S. or NATO should intervene against Russia in Putin’s invasion of Ukraine.  And in the background of these major censorship campaigns, social media platforms and search engines continue years of work in their organized efforts to marginalize the voices of conservatives and others who still insist on preserving their rights to dissent from official government narratives.  The anti-American reign of censorship Obama tried to kick off in 2016 is now back with a vengeance.  

We are in a war for the survival of free speech today, and any government official who refuses to recognize that truth is either weak-minded, weak-willed, or already complicit.  Choose your allies accordingly.

“Dragging his friend Michael Sussmann “into a maelstrom,” “

Reluctant Witness Devastates Defense Claims In Special Counsel Criminal Case

BY: MARGOT CLEVELAND

MAY 20, 2022

James Baker’s testimony yesterday in United States v. Sussmann proved devasting to the former Clinton campaign attorney both in substance and in circumstance.

by MARGOT CLEVELAND at the Federalist:

Former FBI General Counsel James Baker felt responsible for dragging his friend Michael Sussmann “into a maelstrom,” yet remained “100 percent confident” that Sussmann had claimed, when providing Baker the Alfa Bank “intel,” that he was not there “on behalf of any particular client.” Baker’s testimony yesterday in United States v. Sussmann proved devasting to the former Hillary Clinton campaign attorney both in substance and in circumstance.

The indictment charged Sussmann with violating Section 1001 of the federal criminal code by telling Baker he was passing on the Alfa Bank information as a concerned citizen, not on behalf of any client, when in fact Sussmann represented both the Clinton campaign and tech executive Rodney Joffe. Earlier this week, during opening arguments, Sussmann’s legal team told the jury that prosecutors would be unable to establish what Sussmann actually said to Baker and would fail to prove the alleged lie “mattered.”

Yesterday, Baker proved Sussmann’s high-powered Latham and Watkins’ attorneys wrong when the former FBI general counsel testified he was “100 percent confident” that Sussmann had denied acting “on behalf of any particular client” during their September 19, 2016 meeting. “My memory on this point, sitting here today, is clear,” Baker told the jury.

Sussmann made the comments “pretty close to the beginning of the meeting,” Baker explained, noting it was “part of his introduction to the meeting.” Sussmann would go on to provide Baker with two thumb drives and several whitepapers, which Baker said Sussmann explained concerned “an apparent surreptitious communications channel between Alfa-Bank, which he described as being connected to the Kremlin in Russia, and some part of the Trump Organization in the U.S.”

Besides attesting to his 100 percent confidence level in what Sussmann had said, Baker explained to the jury his apparent earlier equivocation about Sussmann’s representations. When asked by lead prosecutor Andrew DeFilippis about his congressional testimony in which he appeared not to remember Sussmann’s statements, Baker told the jury he had not prepared for questions about his meeting with Sussmann and had not refreshed his memory at the time.

The transcript of his House testimony confirms that the congressional hearing’s focus concerned the Christopher Steele dossier and not Sussmann or the Alfa Bank hoax. Baker’s full testimony reveals he was a witness caught off-guard by a topic and attempting to recall the events while being peppered with questions.

Baker further testified on Thursday that “it wasn’t until Durham’s investigators began ‘homing in’ on meeting with Sussmann in June 2020 that he thought in detail about what Sussmann said about not having a client.”

A jury is likely to find Baker’s explanation believable given Baker’s belated discovery of a text message Sussmann sent to Baker the night before the September 19, 2016 meeting. “I’m coming on my own – not on behalf of a client or company. [W]ant to help the Bureau,” the text from Sussmann to Baker read.

Baker’s Thursday testimony also helped seal a second substantive point being challenged by Sussmann’s defense: the government’s claim that Sussmann’s alleged lie “mattered.”

As a matter of law, a lie must “matter,” or in legalese be “material,” for it to constitute a Section 1001 offense. To be material, the lie must be “capable of influencing a decision” of the government actor. While Sussmann’s legal team has told the jury that Sussmann’s alleged statement did not matter even if false, in his testimony yesterday, Baker explained several ways in which the lie “influenced a decision” of the FBI.

First, Baker testified that he would not have taken the private meeting with Sussmann if he knew Sussmann was working on behalf of the Clinton team. Next, Baker explained he had “vouched” for Sussmann, telling top FBI counterintelligence agents that Sussmann was a serious lawyer “who could understand the importance and validity of the information,” based on his belief that Sussmann was acting as a concerned citizen. The former FBI general counsel further explained that because Sussmann had brought the information to him supposedly on his own behalf, he treated Sussmann as a sensitive confidential human source and protected his identity from other agents investigating the data.

On cross-examination, Sussmann’s legal team challenged Baker’s testimony and attacked his memory. But the defense is unlikely to leave a mark on Baker’s credibility, and not merely because of Baker’s 100 percent confidence in the substance of his testimony. Rather, it is the circumstances under which Baker testified that render him untouchable.

Baker testified that he considered Sussmann both a friend and a colleague. When asked why he had not previously provided the special counsel with the damning text Sussmann sent him the evening before their September 19, 2016 meeting, Baker told the prosecutor (and the jury):

“I’m not out to get Michael. This is not my investigation. This is your investigation. If you ask me a question, I answer it. You asked me to look for something, I go look for it. To the best of my recollection, nobody had asked me to go look for this material. I had not recalled that he had texted me until I saw this text in March.”

Baker’s answer conveyed to the jury much more than an explanation for why he had only recently provided prosecutors with the Sussmann text: His response told the jury he is a reluctant witness, and that reality is much more damaging to the defense than Baker’s assertion of 100 percent confidence in his memory.

The jury is unlikely to forget that point because, in one of the few unforced errors coming from Sussmann’s legal team, defense attorney Sean Berkowitz made the mistake of highlighting the fact that Baker is a reluctant witness testifying against his friend.

In cross-examining Baker, who had earlier told the jury that testifying before Congress “was terrible” and “sucked at multiple levels,” Berkowitz asked Baker whether testifying against his friend Sussmann was also a “terrible” experience.

“This is more orderly,” Baker replied, reportedly pointing to his chair, “It’s terrible, but orderly.”

Sussmann’s legal team is unlikely to repeat that mistake today when it finishes its cross-examination of Baker, but the jury is also unlikely to forget Baker’s words—and the special counsel is unlikely to let them.

Senility Doesn’t Seem To Bother Pelosi So She Drives FULL SPEED AHEAD!

The congressional redistricting maps are apparently not only racist, but also sexist

JAZZ SHAW May 21, 2022 8:31 PM ET

 Share  Tweet  

AP Photo/Jacquelyn Martin

It’s no secret that the Democrats have had a rough time of it this year when it comes to the new congressional district maps being implemented in many states. It hasn’t gone well for them in New York and now it’s arguably going even worse in Florida. So why have the wheels been coming off in this fashion? Well, racism of course, because that’s the cause of virtually everything. But it turns out that complaints are being raised the redistricting process is also unfair to women. Why? Because some junior female members of Congress may wind up running in tougher districts than they competed in two years ago. And a couple of them have found themselves in primary battles against other women. How could something like this happen? (Insert sarcasm emoji here.)

Democrats took control of the U.S. House of Representatives in 2018 thanks to a record showing by Democratic female candidates. Two years later, a record number of GOP women won seats, bringing the number of women in the chamber to a historic high.

But for some female incumbents running for reelection this year, holding their seats comes with a new challenge: redrawn congressional districts that will be tougher to win.

It’s too early to know how many female representatives were hurt by the once-a-decade process known as redistricting — in which boundaries are redrawn based on census data to ensure similarly sized districts — because multiple states haven’t finalized their maps. But in states with new district boundaries, the Center for American Women in Politics at Rutgers University found more than a dozen women so far who are running in significantly tougher territory.

There’s Exxon, Clinton, Dems, MUSK, and…..?

Signs and Portents: Elon Musk’s Growing Political Maturity

The Left’s misery continues to Elongate.

By Roger Kimball at American Greatness:

May 21, 2022

Afew weeks ago, Exxon announced that it was banning the display of Pride and BLM flags at its headquarters in Houston. There was a ripple of unhappiness, but nothing was burned down, the media attention was muted, and the world went about its business as before. 

Across the country, school board elections are tossing out woke ideologues and partisans of critical race theory and replacing what amounts to gay pornography in the curriculum with more wholesome fare. The Biden Administration keeps running into roadblocks, most recently a judicial order halting its efforts to rescind Title 42, a Trump-era emergency order that turned away would-be immigrants at the U.S.-Mexico border. A few days ago, Biden’s absurd Disinformation Governance Board was shuttered and its pathetic director, Nina Jankowicz, sucked back into the memory hole whence she came. 

On Friday, Hillary Clinton’s campaign manager, Robbie Mook, testified that, what do you know, his former boss knew all about and in fact approved the spurious efforts to frame Donald Trump as a Russian asset, contrary to what she and her handlers have said ever since before Hunter Biden took his laptop to be repaired. 

Then there is Elon Musk. I have long been a fan of this Rocket Man, notwithstanding his mantras about “sustainable transport” and other sops from the green agenda. Hitherto, my enthusiasm was for his technological prowess, his hard work, and his amazing products. Now I find myself applauding his political savvy and efforts on behalf of free speech. Princeton University and other one-party bastions of conformity and self-congratulation should ponder Musk’s central observation about free speech: “When it’s someone you don’t like saying something you don’t like, that’s when it actually matters.”

The world was stunned last month when Musk first took a 9.2 percent share in Twitter and then announced that he intended to buy the company outright. The anguished skirling of the Twitterati, alarmed that a platform advertised as promoting free expression might be forced to live up to its mission statement, was music to the ears of the unwoke who could hear the clock ticking on this enemy of consecutive thought and political maturity. 

We haven’t heard the last of them. Just as Musk predicted, his promise to restore free speech to Twitter—even, dear God in heaven, to the extent of welcoming back Donald Trump to the platform—sent them right around the bend. And Musk compounded his tort by admitting that he did not believe Twitter’s declaration that “5 percent or less” of its apparent users were bots or spam. 

And the hits just keep on coming. Not only is Musk looking into the question of Twitter’s candor. He is also likely to decrease his offering price when he figures out just how many users are fake. If, he said in a recent interview, you were contemplating buying a house and the owner told you 5 percent of its structure had termites, that would be one thing. But if it turned out that 80 or 90 percent of the structure were infested, that would be something else entirely. 

How much worse can it get for the entrenched forces of conformity? A lot worse. On top of everything else, Musk has just announced that he had moved from being a moderate Democrat to being a moderate Republican. “Oh God, Oh God, Oh God: did you hear that, Mabel?”

“I’ve just switched from moderate D to moderate R,” he tweeted, “as I think many independent voters have done.” Salt-in-the-wound time: “We will know the magnitude of this trend in November. I think it’s big.” Me too. 

Or perhaps I should say #MeToo. Musk predicted that attacks against him would escalate once his changed political feelings were made public. “In the past I voted Democrat,” he wrote on May 18, “because they were (mostly) the kindness party. But they have become the party of division & hate, so I can no longer support them and will vote Republican. Now, watch their dirty tricks campaign against me unfold.” I liked that this was followed by a popcorn emoji. And indeed the dirty tricks are flowing in from all sides, the latest being an allegation by a flight attendant that Musk acted inappropriately back in 2016. The charge will not go anywhere—Musk is robust in fighting false charges—but perhaps it will fulfill one longstanding wish. “If there’s ever a scandal about me,” he tweeted in March 2021, “*please* call it Elongate.” Let’s do it!

The story of Elon Musk’s growing political maturity is not a one-off or an individual data point. It is part of a process, a gathering sea change. What we are seeing is not so much a pendulum swinging back from the extremism of identity politics as the eruption throughout society of contrary fires. Elon Musk’s coming of age is a sign or portent of a larger shift in the sensibility of our time. The shift won’t happen all at once, and there will be hold-outs and reversals, but what we are witnessing is a sort of spiritual reveille, an awakening from wokeness. The extent of that awakening will not, as Musk said, be evident until the November election. Indeed, I predict that it won’t be fully evident until the 2024 election when (further prediction) Donald Trump wins yet again, this time beyond the margin of fraud and dissimulation. Let’s see if I am right.

Roger Kimball is editor and publisher of The New Criterion and the president and publisher of Encounter Books. He is the author and editor of many books, including The Fortunes of Permanence: Culture and Anarchy in an Age of Amnesia (St. Augustine’s Press), The Rape of the Masters (Encounter), Lives of the Mind: The Use and Abuse of Intelligence from Hegel to Wodehouse (Ivan R. Dee), and Art’s Prospect: The Challenge of Tradition in an Age of Celebrity (Ivan R. Dee).

O Come, All Ye Faithful!

THE GLORY OF GOD BEFORE US, THE HUMAN THINKER!

The music you are about to hear was “created” around 300 years ago by a German who had moved to England.

Until this lefty American generation past, this German’s “Messiah” was one of the most cherished sounds of music ever heard by Western mankind, most notably within our own United States of America every Easter!

Today’s music absorbed in our America represents the ignorance of its population…..a population which has no interest or understanding of matters of true beauty, truth, and inspiration! Television and education are good at leading the corruption to fit the citizen’s appetites to spend money.

Families barely exist anymore. How many of today’s American women prefer their careers and cultures rather than training their children decency, civility, learning ?

What ever happened to our human American families of yesterday?

WE DON’T EVEN KNOW WHO ARE NEIGHBORS ARE, MUCH LESS THE SOUNDS OF INSPIRATIONAL BEAUTY!

AMERICANS USED TO BE EDUCATED BY CIVILIZED FOLKS, TEACHERS AWARE OF GOODS AND BADS AND WITHOUT DRUGS. CITIZENS ATTENDED SYNAGOGUES AND CHURCHES TO FOLLOW THE WAY OF GOODNESS. TODAY, AMERICANS UNDER AGE 40 HARDLY KNOW HOW TO SPEAK WITH HONOR OR KNOWLEDGE.

I WAS LUCKY IN LIFE……BEING BORN IN 1934 A GENERATION BEFORE THE BEGINNING OF THE COLLAPSE OF CIVILIZED USA. I AM VERY GRATEFUL FOR THE WONDERFUL, JUDEOCHRISTIAN, WELL EDUCATED OLD MAID SCHOOL TEACHERS WHO LED THE KNOWLEDGE SHOWS IN THE GRADE AND HIGHSCHOOLS I WAS FORCED TO ATTEND, 1939 TO THE EARLY 1960S. thank you….from glenn h. ray!