I disagree: it's not an either-or proposition; embrace the power of "and"

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Derek Hunter, TownHall:

Democrats Are Evil, Not Stupid

Democrats are the evil party, but that doesn’t mean they’re stupid. In fact, I often have to remind people that they are evil, not stupid, to explain why they do the things they do. They know what they’re doing, and you should too. It explains why, after more than 6 weeks, they suddenly decided to vote to reopen the government. It wasn’t because they felt people were suffering – you don’t subscribe to a political philosophy responsible for 100 million deaths in the last century if you have concern over suffering – but because it was electoral politics, plain and simple.

What changed the “principled stance” Democrats had been taking? The election happened. That’s it, that’s really all it was. If this had happened before the vote, there was a chance some Democrats, the more radical ones, would have stayed home. Disgusted people don’t generally go out and vote for the people with whom they are disgusted. 

But they did vote, and Democrats won the elections they should have won, so the threat is gone. They waited a week because they couldn’t do it immediately, lest they expose themselves as the frauds they are. But a week later has people have already forgotten how short a period of time ago the election was – “was it last week or the week before?” It really is that simple. 

Also worthy of note is the fact that none of the 8 Democrats who voted for the “deal” are up next year; they’re either retiring or have 15 political lifetimes between now and when they could next face voters. In other words, they were strategically chosen to cast just enough votes to end the shutdown while giving as many of their fellow travelers as possible the cover they need to pretend to be outraged over an end to the shutdown with nothing to show for it.

As usual, one of our best Senators predicted this way back on October 8th:

Sen. Kennedy Perfectly Called How the Shutdown Would End Weeks Ago

“It will end eventually when Senator Schumer goes to six or eight of his members and his Democrats and says, ‘Do me a favor. Vote to open it back up. I may have to criticize you, I’m not gonna vote with you, but I need a way out of this. I need an offering.’” He even warned, with his trademark wit, that Schumer would have to be careful not to make it look orchestrated. Because, as he put it, “if it looks contrived… he’s boned.”

Kennedy is so much fun:

As for what I mean about adding “AND”? Here’s some libtard radio host claiming disciplehood:

Color Revolutions

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New: USAID's Secret Signal Chats Document Plot Against U.S. Leadership

“Declare that their goal is to create new "socio-political economic governance systems."

The linked-to article about former government workers conspiring against the Trump administration refers repeatedly to a “color revolution”, and looking up that term lead me, eventually, to this one in the Eurasia Review, a publication that I hadn’t heard of before. Stripping away its anti-western diatribe, it does perfectly describe what we’re seeing in the ANTIFA, pro-Hamas, pro-communist and even the Global Warming protests currently erupting on our streets and campuses. In that sense, it’s enlightening or, at the least, provides confirmation of what we already suspected. Of particular interest is the author’s contention that there are almost always government forces at work behind the scenes in these “spontaneous” eruptions.

Color Revolutions: The Most Sophisticated Means Of Warfare – Analysis

Color revolutions are political term used to describe turbulent political events: mass street protests and riots in order to achieve a revolutionary change of government. Some revolutionary upheavals are successful and some remain only attempts. However, so far they have taken place in a number of countries at the end of the 20th and the beginning of the 21st century. 

Color revolutions broke out in the countries of the former Soviet Union, in the Balkans, in the Middle East, and more recently in other places such as Iran and China. The most popular revolutions ares: the Pink Revolution in Georgia in 2003, the Orange Revolution in Ukraine in 2004, the Tulip Revolution in Kyrgyzstan in 2005, and the Euromaidan Revolution in Ukraine in 2014. Some observers called the events a revolutionary wave whose beginnings can be traced back to 1986 and the Philippine Yellow Revolution.

The world we live in is changing more and more from day to day and so are the means of political struggle. Conquering power by military means is to some extent obsolete because people no longer have the will to die in the trenches like they used to. Classic wars are expensive and long and are being replaced by more subtle ways of conquering a certain area. One of the most important is the colored revolution. Under the guise of a democratic uprising, the removal of an unskilled government or a coup d’etat is actually being carried out. 

Most often, external powers (without exception, the West) [uh huh —Ed] sponsor, plan, organize and implement “revolutions”. The role of external forces in colored revolutions is crucial and without them they cannot arise. These are revolutions mostly in name only. In fact, it is a sophisticated form of warfare, often an international conflict, although the legal profession does not (yet) recognize it as such.

Continuity of colored revolutions

….In addition to the CIA, the State Department, the Pentagon and various US and domestic non-governmental organizations are most often engaged. In the last decade, a long list of countries with relatively stable political systems experienced colorful revolutions. Somewhere they were more and somewhere less successful: Egypt, Tunisia, Syria, Libya, Russia, Ukraine, Belarus, China, Iran, Venezuela. The regime change scenarios in all these countries show striking similarities. 

The same patterns are persistently repeated, which cannot be mere coincidence. Egypt and Ukraine are very different, but the January 25 revolution in Egypt in 2011 and the Euromaidan revolution in 2014 are so similar that even the behavior of the revolutionaries was the same: moderate Islamists in Egypt and radical nationalists in Ukraine.

Definition of the phenomenon

…. The true definition of color revolutions would be that they are technologies for creating a coup and gaining control of the political situation in a certain country from abroad, under conditions of political instability, with pressure on the government through political blackmail using the youth protest movement as a means. The goal of every color revolution is a coup d’etat, or the conquest and maintenance of power by force. Despite the great differences between the countries where revolutions break out (geopolitical, social, economic and other), they all fall under the same scheme that includes the pattern of organizing a protest movement, transforming that movement into a political crowd and using the newly formed popular mass against the existing government as a means of political blackmail.

The movement of young dissidents can most often be created through the student population and the dissatisfaction of students. Students organize street protests that easily destabilize the state and can incite rebellion in other layers of society.

Causes of revolutions – spontaneous and directed scenario

… According to [one] opinion, the revolutions were staged and planned in detail. The same characteristics and scenarios were repeated in countries that have almost nothing in common. Although colored may resemble classical revolutions, they are not. Any resemblance is superficial. Real revolutions are spontaneous and come at some point in historical development, while colored revolutions are staged and carefully planned. 

… Everything follows the same pattern. There is always a youth movement, revolutionary leaders are always similar, and revolutions lack content or revolutionary ideology. It is about the people suddenly rebelling against “evil dictators” and apart from general calls for democracy, everything else is lacking or non-existent.

Three phases of color revolutions

…. According to Sharp, classical color revolutions consist of three stages. The first stage includes the creation of an “underground” movement of cells that together form a network of those dissatisfied with the ruling regime. Members are recruited with big slogans and calls to action. A network of mostly young disaffected suddenly leaves anonymity and appears on the streets of big cities in response to a certain signal. The protests want to present themselves as something spontaneous, but in fact everything was prepared earlier.

…. Members of underground cells become the initiators of the rebellion. Protests, gatherings, marches, setting up fences follow. The people realize that the government may be legal but it is illegitimate and forms an anti-government movement that becomes the driving force of the future revolutionary regime change. Of course, the initiators of the protest do everything carefully and organize the majority who really believe in the proclaimed ideals. People wouldn’t be so rampant in the streets knowing they were tools in the hands of the CIA or MI6. A political crowd forms and protests last for days or weeks in the main city squares.

In the second stage, the goal is to discredit defense, security and law and order bodies through strikes, civil disobedience, riots and sabotage. Protesters are occupying city squares and streets that they do not want to leave until their demands are met. The protestors are organized by the logistics network. In the name of the masses, the protesters give an ultimatum to the government and threaten mass uprisings if they are not satisfied. The government has two choices: retaliate with force or accept the demands. The third and final phase follows, which entails the “non-violent” overthrow of the government. In fact, it is about open attacks on authorities and the occupation of government buildings, institutions and other components or symbols of government. A kind of civil assault on the “organism” of the existing political order. If the government strikes the protesters with force, the media will accuse it of crimes and killing peaceful protesters, while if it agrees to concessions, it will be swept away very quickly because the protesters will not agree to compromises.

Bonus Material:

Pre-planned ANTIFA protest “spontaneously” erupts at Berkeley

'Berserkeley': Antifa Thugs Violently Attack Attendees at TPUSA's 'This Is Turning Point' Tour

“Here they stand, I can do no other, so help me Gaia”

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Channeling Martin Luther - not

Purple hair, ok, why not? Four guys and a tub of KY? Again, I can accept that things have changed since my church-going days. But an alligator stole? Is nothing sacred?

Don't bite

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Stephen Green:

Dear Young Americans: I'm Begging You Not to Take Trump's 50-Year Mortgage

The typical mortgage these days is $324,000. At 6% over 30 years, borrowers pay $1,942 a month, and over the course of the loan, $375,315.73. Extend that term to 50 years, and young homeowners get that monthly payment down to $1,705 — a savings of less than $250. But interest payments balloon to $699,331.

Let's call that what it really is: indentured servitude to a giant bank. 

But maybe the worst part is the loss of equity. As Glenn Reynolds mentioned earlier today on Instapundit, "this is basically something close to an interest-only mortgage." Buyers might save a couple hundred bucks a month in mortgage payments, but it will be years before they get any equity in their homes. When it's time to trade up because of a better job or a bun in the oven, they won't OWN enough of the house they bought to roll that value into their next house.

President Trump is a real estate guy, and he knows all this. Honestly, there isn't much the president can do about housing costs. Interest rates are largely determined by the Fed, and it's state and local regulations that put the squeeze on the supply.

Why he’s pushing these 50-year absurdities, I have no idea — maybe it’s just smart politics, a way to look like he’s tackling the housing-affordability crisis.

No, people don’t live in the same house for 50 years, but there’s no way to build equity while they do own a house if they’re paying what’s essentially an interest-only mortgage. Build more houses, not more debt.

It took 108 days, but finally, a buyer has stepped up

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119 Hendrie Avenue, Riverside, was listed at $3.895 million on July 25th and never budged from that price until, perhaps, now, when a purchase contract has been reported. I’m a little surprised that the house lingered for so long because, these days, the price doesn’t seem all that far removed from reality. Closing price? I’m guessing closer to $3.4ish than $3.9, but we’ll see.

Guys and Gals

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Part 1

POLICE OFFICER UNDER INVESTIGATION FOR CALLING A MAN A MAN:

Tucker, Georgia, is an eastern Atlanta suburb, located in the ultra-woke Dekalb County, so this story may not come as a surprise, but it’s infuriating a lot of people, so I thought I’d share.

It all started a few weeks ago with a man who identifies as a woman by the name of Sasha Swinson. He was at the Tucker-Reid H. Cofer Library, a place he claims he frequents regularly, and had just used the bathroom. The women’s bathroom. When he stepped outside, a DeKalb County police officer allegedly told him that he needed to use the men’s bathroom next time as there were women and young girls in the other. As you can imagine, that didn’t sit well with Swinson.

“I use the restroom, the women’s restroom, like I have been for months, if not years,” Swinson told local news outlets. “He says, ‘Excuse me, sir.’ So, misgendering me right away, just goes, ‘But you’re not a woman. That’s obvious.'”

In case you’re curious about just how obvious that was, here’s a video of Swinson enjoying his 15 minutes of fame as he complains about the situation. Even I didn’t expect that voice to come out that deep.

Part II

It’s just so hard these days to figure who’s on top of the victimhood totem pole (yes, that’s now a racist term, offense to Indians — screw ‘em). For instance, it wasn’t that long ago that a black female lesbian was pretty high in the rankings, and now she has to lie down for a man flopping his penis around while screaming, “I am woman, hear me roar!”.

It’s a mystery.

Gold’s Gym Just Canceled Real Woman for Standing Up to Naked Man

But wait, there’s more!

Trans person accused of exposing self in women’s locker room was convicted of brutally beating ex-wife before taking her name

The transgender person caught up in a viral Los Angeles gym bathroom row had been convicted of assaulting their now-ex-wife while living in Ohio as a man — before taking the victim’s first name as their own.

Alexis Black ran afoul of women at a gym in Beverly Hills, including singer-songwriter Tish Hyman, who accused them of exposing himself and harassing her in the locker room.

Black, formerly Grant Freeman, pleaded guilty in 2022 to savagely beating his wife Alexis Freeman, causing a compound fractured jaw among other serious injuries.

“Kyle Grant Freeman caused serious physical harm to the victim. The victim suffered a compound fractured mandible, which resulted in her needing surgery,” said court documents from Hamilton County, Ohio.

Black was sentenced to a year in prison, minus time served.

Black had been convicted of both domestic violence and drug trafficking in the past, and has faced a slew of other charges, including resisting arrest, records show.

Part 3

A couple of weeks ago Stephen Green published a deep dive essay on this subject. It’s behind the PJ paywall, which you can breach by subscribing to all Town Hall’s media outlets — a strategy I highly recommend — but here’s an excerpt:

Thursday Essay: You Only Think the 'Trans' Crisis Is Over

Matt Walsh crowed last week that "Transgenderism is effectively over."

"We destroyed it," he went on, calling it the "clearest and most decisive cultural win that conservatives have ever achieved."

Sorry, no — if Matt were any more wrong, he'd put on a dress and insist we call him Mathilda. But before you can understand where Walsh went wrong, you have to understand what's really going on.

I put "trans" in scare quotes up above in the headline because the word has been conflated beyond all meaning. So before you can understand why the crisis is far from over, we have to restore meaning to that word.

The confusion stems — and this is no accident, by the way — from taking the word transexual (which is the less scientific term for gender dysphoria) and expanding it to cover three other types of people who are not in any way gender dysphoric. 

The short version is that the catch-all term "trans" now includes four distinct groups: the genuinely gender dysphoric, predators, victims, and trendies. Before we get to the fakers and the harmed, let’s take a quick look at the real deal.

True dysphoria isn't a TikTok trend or a phase trendy kids go through — it's a real and painful disconnect between mind and body that makes the simple act of being feel out of tune. At best. It means waking up every day and believing the mirror lies to you about the most fundamental aspect of your biology. The gender dysphoric aren’t confused about who they are; they’re exhausted by how hard it is to live in the body they have.

The real tragedy is that we still don't have a handle, medically or psychologically, on how (or necessarily whether) to treat gender dysphoria. The reported attempted suicide rate for the gender dysphoric is higher than any other group of people you could name, at nearly 40%. That's an astonishing figure, and although the research is spotty on self-reported suicide attempts, the figure remains about the same regardless of whether a dysphoric person has medically transitioned. 

And Another Thing: For brevity's sake, I use "transitioning" for the series of hormonal and surgical procedures that we used to call "getting a sex change." But please know that I know that basic biology and common sense dictate that there's no actual transition or sex change taking place. Any changes are purely cosmetic. For some who are gender dysphoric, that's enough. For others, not so much.

A 2019 study found that "Despite professional recommendations to consider gender-affirming hormone and surgical interventions for transgender individuals experiencing gender incongruence, the long-term effect of such interventions on mental health is largely unknown." That's true even after six-plus decades of procedures performed on tens of thousands of people in the U.S. alone.  

Some are happier after transition surgery and hormone treatments. Some are worse off, but have made changes to their bodies that can never be fully reversed. The medical profession is unable to tell in advance which person will fall into which group.

There are as yet no easy answers. Hell, there don't seem to be any difficult answers, either. People caught in the dysphoria dichotomy deserve our sympathy and our help, although the former is at risk from the "trans" movement, and the latter, we still don't really know how to provide. 

The gender dysphoric do not seek to draw attention to themselves; they just want to pass.

You know who does draw attention to themselves? Autogynephilic male predators who coopted the trans label.

The middle-aged straight man with the stringy "girl" hair, the beard, and the dress trying to barge into the girls' locker room so he can ogle and wave his penis around isn't "trans" anything. His kink, as sexologist Ray Blanchard described it, is sexual arousal at the idea of having a female body, and flaunting it in front of others.

In better times, he paraded around in front of his wife or whatever — in private. Today, he uses the law to force the rest of society to accept that he's just a girl, free to invade women's space and compete in women's sporting events.

On second thought, the predators are probably best divided into two subsets: Autogynephilics and losers. 

Here's an autogynephilic:

And here’s a loser:

But make no mistake: Both prey on women.

Autogynephilic men have shown all kinds of violent tendencies, over and over — though I still don’t fully understand why. Maybe someday I'll do enough research to write an essay on them, assuming I can stomach it. 

The Left loves promoting these male predators as having the same rights as women, because promoting predation, kink, and mental illness to individual rights obliterates the entire concept of individual rights. As I wrote above, the conflation between gender dysphoria and "trans" is no accident. 

Get woke, go broke

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This logo is ableist! (unless, of course, that’s a gay, gender dysphoric powering the kayak from a wheelchair)

‘Toxic Intersectionality’: Sierra Club in ‘Downward Spiral’ After Pivot to Social Justice Warrioring

“It issued an ‘equity language guide,’ which warned employees to be cautious about using the words ‘vibrant’ and ‘hardworking,’ because they reinforced racist tropes.”

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Legal Insurrection:

The New York Times published a fascinating read Friday detailing how the Sierra Club went from being a singularly focused, highly influential environmental group with big money backers like former NYC Mayor Michael Bloomberg to one wracked with “internal chaos,” sexual harassment scandals, and an obsession with social justice warrioring, the latter of which appears to have been the catalyst for the “implosion” some current and former members say it is experiencing.

The group has lost 60 percent of the four million members and supporters it counted in 2019. It has held three rounds of employee layoffs since 2022, trying to climb out of a $40 million projected budget deficit.

The write-up also shared how, as President Donald Trump took office and began taking a bulldozer to what the Times called “environmental protections,” the Sierra Club was too distracted by infighting and sexual harassment scandals to fight back:

While Mr. Trump boosted coal power, canceled wind farms and rolled back pollution limits, the club was consumed by internal chaos, culminating when the board fired its executive director, Ben Jealous, a former president of the N.A.A.C.P.

“Sierra Club is in a downward spiral,” a group of managers wrote in a letter reviewed by The New York Times to the club’s leadership in June.

That spiral helps Mr. Trump. But it was not his doing. The Sierra Club did this to itself.

And how did they do that? The Times went on to explain:

During Mr. Trump’s first term, when the Sierra Club was flush with donations, its leaders sought to expand far beyond environmentalism, embracing other progressive causes. Those included racial justice, labor rights, gay rights, immigrant rights and more. They stand by that shift today.

This expansion into social justice warrioring caused the group to lose that singular focus.  As a result, “the club had exhausted its finances and splintered its coalition” by 2022.

The idea behind the hard-left pivot was to bring in a younger generation of environmentalists while also trying to drag members along with the woketivism. That turned some folks off because, at the time, the Sierra Club had a sizable number of members who were not hardcore leftists but who nevertheless agreed with their stances on issues like coal and green energy.

Then, there was the “equity language guide”:

After the murder of George Floyd in 2020, the group called for defunding the police and providing reparations for slavery.

One Sierra Club volunteer told the newspaper that she remembered a conversation with a staff member who she said was more interested in DEI than saving wolves:

Ms. Malone … recalled an incident when a club staff member had scolded her for saying that the club should lobby Colorado’s legislature for more protections for wolves.

“One of the staff said, ‘That’s fine, Delia. But what do wolves have to do with equity, justice and inclusion?’” Ms. Malone said.