The end of the Social Justice Détente

After the wrenching fights over social justice from the ’60s through the early ’70s, American society made an implicit bargain I like to call The Social Justice Détente:

• no new big new government policy moves to correct injustices
• no public expressions of overt bigotry

Advocates for social justice today tend to think of the emergence of The Détente as simply the bigots winning, but it did not seem that way at the time. Before The Détente, American public culture had allowed a measure of bigotry hard to imagine even if one is old enough to remember it. Changing that was not trivial.

Part of the logic of The Détente was that in the ’70s & ’80s, social justice advocates in our pop media engaged in a pervasive propaganda campaign to overcome bigotry. In an episode of Mork & Mindy, Young Robin Williams faced down the local chapter of the Klan! In an episode of The Partridge Family, Danny became an honorary Black Panther. Norman All In The Family Lear was the king of this sort of thing, but it was everywhere. When young social justice advocates grumble about white liberals’ earnest, maddening misunderstandings, half the time they are confronting ideas inherited from this propaganda campaign, which feels dangerously tepid & naïve to contemporary viewers but reflected a powerful challenge in its time supported by sophisticated social justice advocates.

The broad left hoped that these egalitarian parables and a public sphere purged of overt bigotry would produce a new American generation free of the bigoted attitudes of the past. Arresting policy progress was a pause, not a surrender; the next generation would would pick up the baton and take the next steps toward a more just society.

Obviously that did not happen. American culture still has plenty of bigotry. The wave of political support for new policy comparable to the anti-racist (and anti-sexist) reforms of the Civil Rights Era did not come. To understand our current condition, we need to understand both those failings and the successes we did get.

Baseline common bigotry on the broad left today mortifies people attentive to social justice, but it is far less than the bigotry common even on the broad left prior to The Détente. Even the fact that we have a hard time remembering how bad bigtory used to be constitutes a major victory.

The broad right today is twistier.

The right started worse, and changed a lot less. But they are sincerely offended by a lot of things their great-grandparents would have said casually … which they think means they are not bigots at all. Bigots never think they are bigots; they think their attitudes are just obvious common sense.

People on the right assume that most people on the left privately understand and agree with their attitudes but are more committed to a hypocritical performance of public norms which conflict with common sense. So people on the right have learned not to express themselves “honestly” without subtly checking first whether everyone in earshot is “cool”. It is easy for folks on the left to underestimate the gulf between the attitudes people on the right have and routinely express in private versus what they say when measuring their words in our presence. When people on the right grumble about the “far left” exercising “totalitarian” control and “dominating” culture with “lies”, it is absurd but a sincere description of how they experience it.

Compounding that, the broad right feel that the broad left have violated the terms of The Détente. We didn’t accept The Détente as a satisfactory endpoint. We don’t admit that “real” racism & sexism have been obviously defeated. Indeed, we greedily demand more. The scope of what we permit in public keeps narrowing. And we have extended the power of the state to support the disgusting queers.

All this is of course a big part of why they find Trump refreshing and forthright. And they remain frustrated because even Trump does not get to say everything they say in private. I think it’s dangerously simpleminded to understand MAGA as just about bigotry, but it is a lot about bigotry.

All of which comes to mind because of a recent story about leaked chats among Young Republicans which I think even most people on the broad right would find repulsively bigoted and fascist. The bigots-among-the-bigots use the skills they learned in stepping carefully in mixed company to watch what they say even among ordinary folks on the broad right. Even more than regular people on the broad right, they find it cathartic to speak “plainly” among themselves, and yearn for a world in which they can be “honest”. Vice President Vance dismissing concern over the leak by saying “I refuse to join the pearl clutching” demonstrates how MAGA as a manifestation of our ongoing massive social reälignment rejects both aspects of The Détente: they will roll back the social justice policies implemented in the ’60s & early ’70s and change our public culture to permit bigotry.

Romney bitterness

Over on Bluesky, a bunch of lefties piled on to a post expressing a common sentiment from the right.

The media smeared Mitt Romney as Hitler. Then Republicans thought, well we might as well run Hitler.

We have been hearing this for years, and lefties mostly respond by calling shenanigans on this as disingenuous. This classic cartoon from lefty satirist Matt Bors sums up the point:

That critique of the right claiming that the left drives them right has a lot of truth to it, but I think there is some extra dimension to folks on the right feeling raw about Romney in particular.

To many folks on the broad right who may not even be MAGAs, supporting Romney’s presidential bid reflected something paralleling what Clintonian triangulation represents to the broad left. “He is obviously sharp. He is fundamentally competent. He doesn’t say inflammatory stuff that freaks out the other side which some other potential candidates from our side might. We are tacking toward the center rather than toward what we want most, to be less vulnerable to criticism.” There was even the inversion of Dems’ grumble, “How can the Republicans object to the Affordable Care Act when it is essentially the same plan Romney implemented in Massachusetts?” He was not a candidate who excited them, he was a candidate they hoped would repel their opponents less, win over a few votes, and enable reaching across the aisle in Congress.

I’m not saying Romney was that person; he was more a creature of longstanding Republican movement conservatism than they remember. But a lot of Republicans sincerely understood him that way. Folks on the broad left should be familiar with how it feels to see that fail.

There’s also a thing that fascinates me about Mitt Romney’s screen presence. He looks like the actor one might cast in a movie which has just one scene in the Oval Office, and thus needs a guy who is obviously meant to be the president without anyone having to be told. It’s a characteristic which feels very comforting to Republicans in a way they would assume extends to Dems. They don’t understand that it opens the question of why they don’t feel the same comfort with Obama in the Oval, with its obvious ugly answer.

Dems of course did not attack Romney as Practically Hitler. But we did sharply criticize him (for very good reasons), which felt so unfair because they were Trying To Be So Nice in picking him.

Fine, then. They’ll pick a candidate who does excite them. Not because Trump is a fascist — obviously that is a “leftist” fantasy! But they get to enjoy the schadenfreude from the left frantic over that “fantasy”. Why not? Being nice by picking Romney got them nowhere.

“Cancel culture” and criticism

I keep bouncing off of my attempts to say something sophisticated about the challenges in constructively criticizing social justice advocacy culture. It’s a huge subject and I get lost in nuance.

Today I fell into a rant about some of the essentials on Bluesky, so it seemed worth capturing (and slightly refining) that here.

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95% of grumbling about “cancel culture” — or about social justice advocacy culture more generally — is disingenuous reactionary bullshit from opponents of social justice. 95% is not 100%, because there are some legitimate criticisms which are not just attacks on the project of social justice itself. Roadblocks to engaging in worthy criticisms largely emerge as a response to conditions created by opponents of social justice, either directly or indirectly, but some of them are truly organic to social justice advocacy culture itself.

“Cancel culture” in particular

The Thing We Are Talking About When We Talk About “Cancel Culture” reflects this challenge. Because opponents of social justice often make absurd claims about “cancel culture”, advocates for social justice often claim there is no such thing. But there is a thing, it is a feature of social justice advocacy culture, and as the Bluesky thread which inspired this post observes:

in hindsight it makes sense to see cancel culture as a harbinger of the end of shame rather than an excess of it. “shame” presupposes stable social norms and a sense of what one did wrong and how it could have been avoided. not suddenly a thunderbolt from zeus thrown at random people

I have captured that thread below. This post started from me expanding on the point: the scary thing is capriciousness and lack of proportion. Memorable real examples include:

• A woman followed by a handful of friends on Twitter ironically takes the voice of a bigot to make a bad joke about Ebola, gets on a plane, and when she gets off she is infamous and unemployed. She deserved criticism, sure, but that was capricious and disproportionate.
• A couple of guys at a tech conference joke to each other about the technical term “dongle” and by the end of the day they are infamous and one of them is unemployed. They deserved criticism, maybe, but that was capricious and disproportionate.
• A trans woman writes a raw, personal story attempting to subvert a transphobic trope, the publisher faces so much criticism of it being “obviously” transphobic that they withdraw it, and the writer ends up so shaken by the pushback from her own community that she never attempts to get anything published again. A tragedy.

We all have said bad things that landed with people as even worse than they were, then found ourselves unable to set things right despite our sincere efforts. Dreading the possibility — however distant — that such an episode could seriously damage our careers or standing in community is natural and justified.

Moves people in social justice advocacy culture make to dismiss these concerns — like saying “‘cancel culture’ just means ‘consequences’” or “people should be more careful what they say” — implicitly endorse the capriciousness and disproportionate stakes.

The Thing We Are Talking About When We Talk About “Cancel Culture” is turbo-charged by online social media shitstorm dynamics but it is such a distinct phenomenon in social justice advocacy culture that Jo Freeman referred to it as “trashing” in a famous essay about feminist organizing in 1976.

Perversely, the more one actually cares about social justice, the more vulnerable one becomes to the thing we are talking about when we are talking about “cancel culture”. That bad actors often benefit from being “cancelled” is no comfort if one is neither cynical nor evil.

Again, most criticisms of “cancel culture” are disingenuous BS from bad actors trying to rationalize their desire to say bad things in public without consequence. But they are leveraging a real thing which presents substantive problems. Dismissing that real thing and those problems helps the bad actors and weakens the effectiveness of our advocacy.

Social justice advocacy is handicapped by advocacy culture resistance to criticism

These problems in talking about “cancel culture” exemplify a larger pattern. Preventing social justice loyalists from making good faith critiques of advocacy culture is not just bad on the liberal-values merits, it has been bad for achieving social justice. We can and should do better.

Ceding the ground of critiquing social justice advocacy culture to opponents of social justice makes those opponents look more credible than they are. “We are the only ones talking about this.”

It also undermines social justice advocates’ ability to develop our praxis. Every critique (including this post) has to waste a lot of energy underlining its support for the project of social justice rather than addressing its point. When we cannot sustain an internal dialogue about a problem, new critiques cannot build on past efforts or address those efforts’ limitations, re-starting from Square One, reïnventing the wheel. I find it particularly galling that social justice advocacy culture has let our opposition repeatedly coöpt our terms of art for self-reflection, including “identity politics”, “political correctness”, “social justice warrior”, and “woke”.

That social justice advocates all too often snap — either retreating from public advocacy or even joining the opposition — is bad for everyone. I submit that most people we push out from social justice advocacy culture were just flawed in an ordinary, human way, just trying to figure things out, just making honest mistakes. On principle, social justice advocacy culture should help people where they stumble, not attack them. Yet the Driving People Out thing in social justice advocacy is another pattern which pre-dates the era of the identity politics framework and social media. And yes, some of those folks were charlatans all along, but is rooting out charlatans as vigorously as possible worth the cost? The right don’t think so; they support their charlatans and it sure pays off for their cause. Plus I think many of us are too eager to read dissenters as having been Charlatans All Along; the psychological pressures of people facing a shitstorm of criticism will screw up even the most level-headed person. F’rinstance, I am fascinated by the tragedy of Warren Farrell. In the 1960s & ’70s he was a deeply committed feminist advocate. He turned the feminist analytical toolkit on what we now call toxic masculinity; I read his 1993 book The Myth Of Male Power, which has a fascinating mix of insight and bad ideas. Had feminist culture engaged with what he wanted to address rather than rejected him, our understanding of toxic masculinity would have gotten decades of head start. Instead, the pushback he got from feminist women drove him mad, and eventually he became a thoroughly evil MRA.

We need to do better. And we are rarely even ready to admit that we need to do better.

Aelkus on cancel culture

Not exactly my read, but illuminating, and it inspired the thread which became this post.

in hindsight it makes sense to see cancel culture as a harbinger of the end of shame rather than an excess of it. “shame” presupposes stable social norms and a sense of what one did wrong and how it could have been avoided. not suddenly a thunderbolt from zeus thrown at random people

because that was what CC was for the vast majority of people actually impacted by it.

at its peak, it really was essentially a free for all driven by platform dynamics and a ritualized system of aggression

Venkatesh Rao described a good part of here: The Internet of Beefs

there's a saying “not even wrong” to describe bad theories — they’re so bad that they’re impossible to be shown wrong. you might coin an analogue: “not even a mob with pitchforks.” all of the insanity of a crowd stoning someone to death, but none of the lasting social effects

i don’t think it makes sense to make an analytical separation, anyway, between “online harassment” and “cancel culture” as phenomena. they were both symptoms of the same underlying generating mechanisms in the 2010s

we do so largely because they are still ideologically loaded terms rather than neutral ways of describing “large masses of people concentrating negative energy on the internet towards a single target”

similarly, little of the discussions of “surveillance capitalism” in the 2010s acknowledged that social media was always built around peer to peer surveillance

the end result was fairly predictable. lots of random furries in discords got their social identities obliterated by other random furries in discords. however those with significant offline social status not only weathered the storm but became proficient at controlling platforms to use as tools of aggression. the quasi-feudal system Rao described in the post I linked died, and was replaced by what X represents today. A fully operational battle station controlled by a single nutty person

the fact that the system that produced this progression is now filled with nostalgia speaks to the enduring delusions its participants have about its true nature

The Ballads of Malcolm Reynolds

Over on Bluesky, Sean Kelly says:

Malcolm Reynolds starting off as an abusive prick who all the women love anyway because deep down, he’s a good person is such a case of Joss Whedon telling on himself.

Kelly is smart about this sort of thing. I see why he says this. As someone who watched — twice — all of Whedon’s perverse masterwork Dollhouse, I recognize him frequently revealing his misogyny, narcissism, and abusiveness in his storytelling. I see plenty of those problems in Firefly.

But on this point I see something else going on, because we know quite a bit about what Whedon wanted to do with Firefly and with Malcolm Reynolds. A few years back, I posted a quote from Whedon on this very subject:

Mal is somebody that I knew, as I created him, I would not get along with. I don’t think we have the same politics. But that’s sort of the point.

The series offers Mal to us as a noble scoundrel loved by all of the women aboard the Serenity, but not because Whedon wanted to tell that story, quite. Whedon created that under protest, as an adaptation to Fox’s insistence that the central character of the ensemble could not be the utter bastard he wanted to examine. Whedon filed down Mal’s rough edges — still an abusive prick, but less so — and made the whole ensemble less fractious, more loving. That paradoxically meant that the story did less work to justify the sympathy for Mal it asked for, creating a dissonance which made Kelly itch.

We can glimpse the different Malcolm Reynolds Whedon wanted to give us in the pilot which the studio rejected. The first sequence introduces Mal as a callously violent soldier smugly fighting for the Space Confederacy. In the second sequence, we see that losing the war broke something in him, turning him into an utter shit. He is insulting and disrespectful toward a sincere priest and a self-possessed prostitute! Had Whedon been able to figure out a way to justify including a dog in the scene, Mal would have kicked it.

In that pilot, yes, Kaylee does love Mal. Whedon has said that in writing the show “when Kaylee says it, we believe it” because she is a pure soul, wise enough to fall in love with the real hero of the Serenity crew before his heroism became apparent. But her love for Mal is the only thing in the pilot telling us that this asshole is worth caring about. Even Mal himself tells us otherwise.

In that pilot, River does not love Mal. Well, she doesn’t get to say much. In the second first episode, River says in one of her fugues of holy madness, “Mal. Bad … in the Latin.” The show uses River’s inhuman insight to tell us things, much as Whedon says it uses Kaylee, so that is stark. River comes to love Mal as the whole crew do, but along the way River — who is a scary murder-monster — often fears Mal.

In that pilot, Zoe does not love Mal. She is utterly loyal to him, and she trusts him. The show hints that she feels indebted to him for something he did in the war. But that is not love. In the Serenity film, Whedon tells us very clearly that Zoe only loves only one person in the ’verse, and it ain’t Mal. In the pilot it seems that Zoe does not even like him, though maybe she hopes to someday get back a better Mal she knew before the war broke him.

In that pilot, Inara does not love Mal, despite genre savvy telling us that Inara & Mal have romantic tension. What keeps them apart? Mal being terrible. Inara finds Mal attractive but dislikes him, for good reasons. (In this do see a different accidental confession from Whedon, resentment that women like Inara often feel attracted to men like Mal, an ugly note which shows up many times in his work.)

The changes in charactization after the pilot are significant but not jarring because Whedon and his team are crafty, largely just fast-forwarding to a state Whedon had meant to work hard to earn over a few seasons of storytelling.

He did a similar trick in wrapping as much as he could of several TV seasons’ worth of storylines in the feature film Serenity, including an abbreviation of Malcolm Reynolds’ arc. The series gave us Mal living by a code of honor which emphasized total dedication to his crew. In the film, he realizes that caring for a small circle of people is not good enough. He has to care about everyone. His moral obligation to the ’verse outweighs his own life and even the lives of the people dear to him.

Had Whedon gotten to make the Ballad Of Malcolm Reynolds he originally imagined, I doubt that many people would love it the way they love the cozier Ballad Of Malcolm Reynolds we got. I wish I could reach into a parallel timeline to watch the story we lost; it would have been a hell of a thing.

Luke Skywalker

I don’t entirely love Star Wars Episode VIII: The Last Jedi — it works for me, though I recognize that it is messy — but I consider its capstone to Luke Skywalker’s story not just the best thing in John Williams’ opera cycle but even so good that it retroactively improves Luke’s story in the original IV-VI trilogy. Rescuing some thoughts from X/Twitter and elsewhere:

For one thing, it keeps the promise made by that last moment in VII: The Force Awakens —

— Luke is now ready to truly understand Kenobi, though it takes Luke until the end of VIII: TLJ for him to fully register Kenobi’s final lesson to him and stop wallowing in his own bullshit. It is the fitting end both for Luke and for the “saga”.

John Williams knows the score, if you will pardon the pun. The first time we hear the Force theme is seeing Luke restless in IV: A New Hope …

… and Williams teases us by leaving the theme uncompleted. As he will again and again, either letting is fade away or interrupting it with something else. Until, at long last, he does complete the theme — gently, not triumphantly — with Luke’s death at the end of VIII: The Last Jedi when we know that Luke has in his last moment come to peace with himself, because he finally learned the lesson Kenobi needed him to understand.

A word about violence

It is a pity that the choreography of the fight between Obi-Wan and Anakin at the end of III: Revenge Of The Sith is so bad because the core idea is brilliant: Obi-Wan keeps falling back and falling back and falling back, desperately hoping that Anakin will make a mistake.

Obi-Wan’s error in succumbing to settling things with Anakin through violence and trying to set his own terms for it should give poignance to his duel with Vader decades later in IV: A New Hope, showing he has learned and matured. In Obi-Wan’s last duel, he finally accepts that he cannot — and should not — defeat Vader through violence. He does not try to set the terms of the fight, or try to “win”.

Wisdom.

This takes us to Luke — who we met and came to love as a young hothead — finally learning what Obi-Wan was trying to teach him, stepping up yet refusing violence, completing the work.

Moviebob

So Uncivilized

Luke is not a generic hero, he is a repudiation of the generic hero.

Jesse McLaren

So Luke Skywalker force projected across the galaxy to distract a Sith blinded by anger that he didn’t even realize he wasn’t a fighting a physical person, allowing the next generation of heroes to escape and then he gloriously faded into the sunset and you didn’t like that?!

And it was revealed Rey isnt from a famous family she’s just an ordinary person who has the power to take on the forces of evil and you were mad she’s not a nepo baby?!YOU WERE MAD SHE’S NOT A NEPO BABY?!

Jonathan McIntosh

A handful of The Last Jedi haters in my mentions are offering up a fascinating misreading of the final showdown between Luke and Vader in V: Return of the Jedi. I think it’s worth taking a moment to discuss because it may help explain why these guys hate Luke’s character so much in Episode VIII.

The misreading: Luke Skywalker uses his great warrior skills to defeat Darth Vader. Once he’s proven himself in combat and stands victorious, Luke does the honorable thing by showing mercy and sparing his enemy. Thereby saving himself from corruption and redeeming his father.

What really happened: Luke tries to avoid fighting but gives into anger. As he bests Vader in combat, Luke realizes his great mistake, winning this fight means losing his soul to the Dark Side. The battle itself is corrupting him, understanding this Luke throws away his weapon.

Notice that the misreading (above) reframes Luke as a badass warrior and reframes his refusal to kill Vader as an act of mercy stemming from a position of power. This is significant because Luke beating Vader in combat is explicitly depicted as a moment of weakness not strength.

The desire of some fans to re-imagine Luke as a powerful warrior who spares the bad guy out of benevolence is consistent with the way male heroes are often represented. It’s the way Batman is framed when he doesn't kill The Joker. But Luke Skywalker isn’t the typical action hero.

Luke’s arc in the original trilogy ends with him not only refusing to kill the bad guy, but refusing to even fight a worse villain. This is why Luke’s force projection standoff with Kylo in The Last Jedi is so perfect. It's the ultimate expression of everything Luke has learned.

The fact that an iconic figure like Luke Skywalker was explicitly framed as weak for fighting a murderous villain like Darth Vader is a pretty subversive message, especially for a male hero in Hollywood. And it’s something that, 35 years later, some fans still refuse to accept.

Max Gladstone

Responding to a comment lost to the sands of time, affirming my own disdain for the Jedi.

I see where you’re coming from, but I don’t buy it. Admittedly, in part because I have no difficulty either rejecting prequels or considering them as schlocky historical dramas produced in the period between VI and VII. That said, you’re spot on with respect to Luke’s moral issues in VII and VIII being natural outgrowths of his character in IV-VI. On bias I think the evidence of the prequels is that the Jedi were terrible Jedi. Which kicked me in the feels the way I think some feel kicked by the Luke thing.

The whole plot of the Prequel Trilogy (I-III) rests on the Jedi being so bad at the most basic of human interactions that they don’t recognize fascism and Palpatine’s general skeeviness staring them in the face, and never think through the underpinnings of the civil war. If we sort of go with the prequel trilogy where it seems to lead us, here’s the story as I see it:

• I-III: The Jedi are an ossified order so devoted to strength and self-righteousness that they forget their role and allow a great crime to take place.
• IV-VI: Luke learns the Force but resists exactly the old Jedi bullshit that got the galaxy into this mess. (In this light, walking out on Yoda turns out to be one of the wisest things he does in the whole trilogy …)

This tacking into personal connection ends up saving the galaxy from the Emperor: Luke going to save Han and Leia leads to him reconnecting with Vader (traumatic as that is), and reaching out to Vader leads to the Dark Side eating itself. But, we get to the New Trilogy (VII-IX): Luke’s rudderless when he encounters the limits of his philosophy, and petrified precisely because his iconoclastic mysticism has left him so alone. And he’s aware enough to see himself recapitulate old Jedi mistakes. That leads to his breakdown, and I think that’s the root of his recovery at the end of VIII. At least that’s how I see it.

Brendan Hodges

This week taught me loads of people think the Jedi in the prequels were Good Guys who did everything right, instead of inhuman militarized priests whose hypocritical arrogance directly contributed to the fall of The Republic. The Jedi steal children from their parents, never let them talk to their parents again, generally act like inhuman robots and “training” is forcing kids to play party games seeing if they guess a speeder or a cup is on their iPad. What could go wrong!

When Anakin goes to Yoda for spiritual support, mortified Padme might die, Yoda responds: “Train yourself to let go of everything you fear to lose.” If Yoda had a more nurturing & accepting hand, Anakin never would’ve become Darth Vader. Instead, it’s a culture of Catholic Guilt. Brendan Hodges

It’s significant the only Jedi to stand up to the Council in all 3 prequels is Qui-Gon Jinn, the first Jedi to learn to become a Force Ghost. Lucas is demonstrating knowledge and wisdom go deeper than fundamentalist attitudes and over-reliance on arbitrary dogma.

The Jedi think they’re “keepers of the peace, not soldiers,” only using the force for “knowledge and defense.” Yet, from the opening of I: The Phantom Menace, Jedi are deployed as armed enforcers for The Republic, shaking down CEOs of trade companies. They live by none of their values. II: Attack of the Clones is especially damning. Yoda and Mace are anguished their “ability to use the force has diminished.” Ultimately, they cover up their failure from the Senate, the same toxic attitude of cover-ups with the police & the Church, an image of power above all else.

When Luke ultimately realizes the cycle of violence and fundamentalist hypocrisy must end, he’s right.

“Now that they are extinct, the Jedi are romanticized, deified. But if you strip away the myth and look at their deeds, the legacy of the Jedi is failure. Hypocrisy, hubris.” Luke hides on Ahch-To out of guilt, but also in fierce ideological opposition to propagating a toxic religion. Until Rey, he doesn’t see a way of reconciling the virtues of the Jedi with a new outlook (syncretism). IX: The Rise of Skywalker should have deepened these ideas, but alas.

While the Star Wars Prequels (I-III) may fail as entertainment or drama, they persevere as rich, rewarding and sadly relevant texts by a very strange man, George Lucas. And Rian Johnson is the only post-Lucas storyteller to meaningfully reckon with them. They’re a magnificent work of art.

Redford headcanon

I have a headcanon that Robert Redford’s characters from Three Days of the Condor, Captain America: The Winter Soldier, and Spy Game are all the same guy — and also appears in Sneakers, if you understand that he is played not by Redford in that film but by Sidney Poitier.

After the events of Condor, the Rockefeller Commission subpoena’d the documentation which Joe Turner provided to the New York Times. After testifying to Congress, Turner got tapped to work on reforms within the CIA. To avoid reprisals from dirty agents, he took the new name “Nathan Muir”.

As Condor demonstrates, Turner is a nerd with a surprising knack for fieldwork, so by around 1980 “Muir” had secured a place as a mid-level CIA insider with a mix of friends and enemies. Among those friends: then-young S.H.I.E.L.D. agent Nick Fury.

In the Reagan era Turner saw enough dirty business and geopolitical chaos to become bitterly disillusioned. The Hydra network paperclipped into the CIA turned him, and he became an effective Hydra recruiter, bringing in S.H.I.E.L.D. agents Sitwell & Rumlow and countless others. After the collapse of the Soviet Union, Hydra wanted to re-deploy this nerd good at fieldwork into the increasingly-important hacker underground. Spy Game depicts Turner on his way out of the CIA, securing the loyalty of rogue agent Tom Bishop (played by Brad Pitt) to bring in yet another Hydra recruit.

Turner took the name “Donald Crease” and joined the Sneakers crew; recall Sneakers’ running gag of “Crease” (played by Sidney Poitier, not Redford) coyly refusing to explain why he left the CIA. Turner saw guys like Redford’s Sneakers character Martin Brice as useful idiots. (He did eventually recruit the amoral Carl, played by River Phoenix, into Hydra.) “Bernard Abbott” — actually high-ranking Hydra CIA mole James Greer — allowed Brice to “trick” him out of Janek’s decryption box confident that Turner would just bring the box to Hydra later.

Stealing the box blew Turner’s relationships in the hacker underground, but having the tech meant Hydra no longer needed as much hacker support anyway. Hydra now needed political power to enact Project Insight, which would use the intel gathered using the box to target dissidents for mass assassination, so Hydra directed Turner to build a political power base.

Nick Fury, unaware of Hydra, set up yet another new identity for his buddy from the old days; when Fury tells war stories about working with “Alexander Pierce” at the “State Department”, he’s offering a classic intelligence operative’s cover. “Pierce” landed a position in the World Security Council, where he enabled Hydra infiltration of S.H.I.E.L.D. and other institutions. Exercising Hydra’s resources and his personal networks at CIA, S.H.I.E.L.D., and elsewhere, Turner manufactured incidents which burnished “Pierce”’s reputation — Fury tells us he came close to a Nobel Peace Prize! — eventually winning “Pierce”’s appointment as Secretary of the WSC. In that position, Turner nearly succeeded in orchestrating a global Hydra takeover.

This all started with Leonard Atwood, CIA Deputy Director of Operations for the Middle East, attempting to avoid embarrassment over a botched rogue op by burning a nerd who just read books and wrote reports. It took nothing less than a team of superheroes lead by Captain America to finally stop that angry nerd. The moral of the story is fear blowback from burning your nerds.

Charlie Kirk and Ezra Klein

Ezra Klein’s New York Times editorial Charlie Kirk Was Practicing Politics the Right Way is bad.

The headline

That headline is worse than the editorial itself. It is so unconscionable that Klein has a moral obligation to either:

• publicly apologize for it and demand both that the Times both change it and publicly apologize for using it
• resign from his position as an editorial writer at the Times

I do not expect him to do either, which indicts both him and the NYT. I regret that I had only one subscription to cancel, and exercised that measure quite some time ago.

I say this headline is worse than the content of the editorial because it takes Klein’s point out of context:

You can dislike much of what Kirk believed and the following statement is still true: Kirk was practicing politics in exactly the right way. He was showing up to campuses and talking with anyone who would talk to him. He was one of the era’s most effective practitioners of persuasion.

Klein says this in service of rejecting the assassination of Kirk as a form of political violence which we should not exercise for any reason.

Political violence is a virus. It is contagious. We have been through periods in this country when it was endemic.

As far as that goes, I vigorously agree with Klein. Persuasion is the right way to do politics.

But that points to the failings of the editorial. Klein had an obligation to name the odiousness of both the content of Kirk’s politics and the method of Kirk’s rhetoric. He did not. Very bad.

Charlie Kirk was not the person Klein describes

Many Americans have not heard of him. Klein’s editorial will be many people’s introduction to him, and will become the core of what they know; him failing to explain Kirk and his place in American politics betrays those readers.

Kirk was a nasty piece of work. So it is disingenuous when Klein says this …

American politics has sides. There is no use pretending it doesn’t. But both sides are meant to be on the same side of a larger project — we are all, or most of us, anyway, trying to maintain the viability of the American experiment.

… because no, Kirk was not trying to maintain the viability of the American experiment. He was part of the far right ecosystem deliberately attacking American fundamentals. Turning Point USA helped organize people attending the “Stop The Steal” rally which turned into the 6 January 2021 insurrection against the US government, and Kirk baldly denied the plain truth of J6:

It’s bad judgment, all of a sudden, to climb the Capitol steps and walk in the rotunda; it’s just not wise. However, ‘not wise’ does not mean you’re an insurrectionist, ok? Let me be very clear.

Just because you do something stupid, does not mean you’re Timothy McVeigh. Just because you do something that is regrettable does not mean that you are planning an armed insurrection against the United States government.

The New York Times should be embarrassed that their editors have so much to learn from Teen Vogue and their article Who Was Charlie Kirk? What to Know About the Turning Point USA Founder and His Views.

Far-right political activist Charlie Kirk was shot dead on September 10 while speaking at Utah Valley University. Kirk, the CEO and co-founder of Turning Point USA, was 31.

The shooting occurred as Kirk was speaking in front of a crowd at the Utah university, a kickoff event for Turning Point’s “American Comeback” national tour that had received nearly 1,000 petition signatures calling for it to be canceled, reports the Associated Press. According to CNN, Kirk was asked about the statistics of transgender people linked to mass shootings, an active — and misleading — talking point on the right; Kirk was answering the question when he was fatally shot.

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A Trump ally, Kirk was popular among the far-right, known for rallying young people around conservative ideas and around the President. Kirk often travelled to college campuses, where he would debate with students on popular right-wing talking points. He is often credited with rallying young conservatives in a new wave of political activism. During these appearances, Kirk frequently spoke out against abortion and reproductive rights, espoused anti-trans ideology, spread COVID-19 misinformation, spread other controversial and, often, prejudiced opinions. Kirk was gifted at digital attention-grabbing throughout his career as a right-wing commentator; in 2024, prior to another “debate” campus tour, his appearance on the video platform Jubilee debating young liberals went viral.

Kirk has been outspoken against gun control legislation, frequently defending access to guns during debates and speaking engagements. In a Turning Point speech last year, Kirk called shooting deaths as a result of gun access the “cost to liberty,” comparing gun deaths to the risk of driving and auto accidents. He made similar comments in 2023, calling gun deaths “worth” it in exchange for Second Amendment rights shortly after a mass shooting killed three children and three adults at the Christian Covenant School in Nashville, Tennessee. Around the same time that Kirk was shot, a shooting at a Colorado school was also unfolding. According to the Denver Post, two teens were injured, with one still in critical condition, and the teenage shooter dead after turning the gun on himself, as of the morning after the shooting.

[⋯]

[Turning Point USA] has long maintained a “Professor Watchlist” to allegedly “expose and document college professors who discriminate against conservative students and advance leftist propaganda in the classroom.” In 2023, an Arizona State University professor on TPUSA’s “Watchlist” was physically attacked by someone associated with Turning Point USA. In 2017, TPUSA was the subject of an investigation by the Chronicle of Higher Education over allegations they had violated their 501(c)3 status by funneling money to student government candidates on campuses across the country.

In short, Kirk was dedicated to destroying the viability of the American experiment. No, that is not practicing politics the right way.

Teen Vogue has more, and I have more below.

Commentaries

Seth Cotlar

As someone who spent many hours listening to Kirk’s show on AM radio, I would say that he made Rush Limbaugh seem like Walter Cronkite by comparison, in terms of rhetorical tone and empirical rigor. The subtext of every show was “You don’t hate the left enough.”

That is the message Kirk devoted his life to spreading. I don’t see how it honors him to turn him into a paragon of democracy, when that is not how he saw himself.

Has anyone seen a compilation of clips or quotes that show Kirk speaking to his audience in a manner that illustrates the civic virtues he’s being eulogized for having embodied? If so, I’d be interested to see it. If not, that seems notable, no?

When we eulogize political figures who have died we usually do so with snippets of their own words that exemplify the essence of their life’s work. So let’s see them, all of the Kirk quotes in which we see him urging his followers to embrace the better angels of their nature.

He was a very talented shitposter who was adept at creating selectively edited, “own the college kid libs” content that made his boomer billionaire funders and MAGA Republicans happy. That’s what his fans admired him for. There’s no need to pretend like he was something other than what he was.

I’m choosing to remember Charlie Kirk’s contribution to American civic life in his own words.

Hillary For Prison

If Alexander Hamilton, Thomas Jefferson, George Washington, or John Adams saw drag queen story hour, they would mobilize the Minutemen

Residents of Springfield, OH are reporting that Haitians are eating their family pets, another gift of the Biden-Harris mass immigration replacement plan. Liberals will soon be lecuting Americans on why they need to sensitive to Haitian culture and accept this …

It’s just so nauseating where this wife … who comes in with her sweet husband who probably works his tail off to make sure that she can go and, you know, have a nice life, provides for the family. And then she lies to him, saying, “Oh yeah I’m going to vote for Trump” and then she votes for Kamala Harris as her little secret in the voting booth.

Derek Chauvin has been found guilty on all three charges leveled against him — Second Degree Murder, Third Degree Murder, and Second Degree Manslaughter

Biden’s “prayers” were answered.

Maxine Waters got her way.

Will it be enough to keep America from burning?

Only a dishonest media would care more about Trump allegedly paying $750 in taxes than Hunter Biden taking in $350 Million from the Russians.

The New York Times game of “gotcha” with the president makes them look petty and small.

This is a tragic and all too familiar sight right now: Athletes dropping suddenly.

All men are created equal but not all cultures are created equal

The West is superior to every other culture because it is the most prosperous, tolerant, and innovative culture to ever exist

That's why America is the only country where even those who hate it refuse to leave

American culture is most accepting on Earth

The world is a better, stronger, and more peaceful place, thanks to the Western values

When a conservative gun enthusiast tried to assassinate Trump, Kirk immediately tried to fan the flames of division by blaming it on “them,” by which he meant the “them” he always blamed everything on, “the left.”

If an NHL enforcer known for taking out players on the opposing team died, we wouldn’t eulogize him for his grace and nimbleness on the ice. Kirk was a skilled propagandist who had a very loose and opportunistic relationship to what most people would call “the truth.” Why pretend otherwise?

On the GOP FB pages I follow I’ve seen dozens of comments from Kirk’s fans in which they say it’s time to “take off the gloves” and do to Democrats what they did to Kirk.

1. we don’t know who the killer is.
2. I thought we didn’t do vigilante violence and collective guilt in “the west.”

No one is responsible for what their followers say or do. But it’s noteworthy that so many of Kirk’s admirers are calling for political violence in response to this act of political violence. They apparently didn’t get the memo from him that such attitudes run counter to his beliefs.

One final thing. It’s odd to see Ezra Klein, a total policy nerd, say Kirk did politics the right way when Kirk had almost no interest in either policy, or the empirical rigor necessary to get policy right. Kirk’s approach to politics was 99% culture war rage stoking with almost no policy content.

There’s a reason Kirk rarely engaged with his fellow adults who knew things about things. It’s because Kirk was not interested in or adept at knowing things about things … which, IMO, is not an admirable quality in a figure whose entire brand is to engage in public/political debate.

As we learn from the New York Times Daily podcast, Kirk cut his teeth as the manager of Don Jr’s social media accounts. From a young age Kirk aspired to be the Rush Limbaugh of his generation. His goal was to be the most polarizing figure possible.

So again, one might ask how an empirically-grounded journalist who wrote an entire book lamenting the polarized state of American politics, might describe one of the most intentionally polarizing fabulists of our era as someone who did “politics the right way.”

Seth Cotlar again

American politics has sides. There is no use pretending it doesn’t. But both sides are meant to be on the same side of a larger project — we are all, or most of us, anyway, trying to maintain the viability of the American experiment. We can live with losing an election because we believe in the promise of the next election; we can live with losing an argument because we believe that there will be another argument. Political violence imperils that.

Kirk and I were on different sides of most political arguments. We were on the same side on the continued possibility of American politics. It is supposed to be an argument, not a war; it is supposed to be won with words, not ended with bullets. I wanted Kirk to be safe for his sake, but I also wanted him to be safe for mine and for the sake of our larger shared project. The same is true for Shapiro, for Hoffman, for Hortman, for Thompson, for Trump, for Pelosi, for Whitmer. We are all safe, or none of us are.

I read this part of the Klein article and asked myself, “hm, I wonder what Charlie Kirk said about the 2020 election? Did he ever acknowledge that Biden won?” The answer, unsurprisingly, is no.

Charlie Kirk did not believe in recognizing the results of elections his side lost, which, in my opinion, is the definition of doing politics the wrong way.

This is just a tiny sampling of his election denial posts.

WOW. Director Tulsi Gabbard confirms that she’s uncovered multiple “burn bags” tucked away in safes and random back offices, that contain intel on the politicization of the 2020 election.

Was 2020 really the most secure election in history?

And when will that all come out.

[Video from TheStormHasArrived]

STEVE BANNON:

“You are the sovereign will of the American people. Handed down generation to generation. Through every patriot’s grave, down to the current time.

They steal the 2020 election. Did you give up? Did you go back and cry? Did you go into the fetal position and suck your thumb? Hell no. You didn’t.”

Republican Wisconsin senate candidate Eric Hovde breaks his silence:

“At 4am, Milwaukee reported ~108K absentee ballots, with Sen. Baldwin receiving nearly 90% of those ballots. Statistically this outcome seems impropable.”

Eric Hovde was up big in Wisconsin on election night. But just like in 2020, in the middle of the night, Milwaukee County posted a huge number of absentee ballots (~108K) all at once, that overwhelmingly went for Democrat Tammy Baldwin (~90%), and erased Hovde’s lead completely.

A new study by The Heartland Institute finds that mail-in ballot fraud significantly impacted the results of the 2020 election and that Trump would have “almost certainly won” without the massive, often illegal expansion of mail-in voting.

zerohedge.com/markets/mail-b…

Republicans who ignore the con of the 2020 election should leave the party.

Why haven’t the any of the 2,000 mules who committed multiple crimes surrounding widespread ballot trafficking in the 2020 Election been arrested yet?

🤔

[Blurry images of election workers]

If Twitter hadn’t interfered in the 2020 election, there never would have been any issue on January 6.

Imagine how many of these pro-Hamas thugs we could have deported if Joe Biden and the Democrats hadn’t rigged the 2020 election.

Isaac! At the Butler! responds to Klein

I feel like I am taking crazy pills. Charlie Kirk’s ultimate goal, which he said time and time again, would have been the suppression, through threat of violence and the use of state power, of the rights of those he disagreed with, including freedom of expression.

Like, yes, what Kirk built, the speed at which he did it, and his ability to speak to college students etc. is impressive. But you can’t lionize that without also explaining what he actually stood for and what he was actually advocating.

I think I understand where this is coming from— we’re all scared about the violence of our political culture spinning wildly out of control— but this kind of dishonesty simply abets Kirk and his allies’ project.

I’m also fairly sure Klein didn’t write anything like this after the assassination of multiple Dem politicians in Minnesota. I’m not saying this as a gotcha, but rather the show the implicit assumption of our discourse, which is that Right Wing violence is to be expected, and thus tacitly accepted.

On some level this bugs me way more than the Times’s euphemistic way of describing Trumps’ authoritarian power grabs, because the not-very-online segment of the Times readership likely has little idea who Kirk was, and are going to come away very misinformed from the way they’re treating this.

Like … my parents have no fucking idea who Charlie Kirk is. What they’re going to get from the Times coverage is that he was a compelling speaker and gifted organizer who was martyred for free speech.

Also, sorry, too worked up and my first cup of coffee just hit… Kirk was part of the effort to overthrow the elected government of the United States on January 6th! In what sense was that “practicing politics the right way”????

Charlie Kirk may have been good at showing up at college campuses and talking to anyone who would listen etc. But the org he headed built a database of professors to target with harassment campaigns in the hopes of drumming them out of academia. Is that practicing politics the right way?

It’s also interesting that Klein mentions the reichstag fire because what’s going on feels a lot more like the canonizing response to the murder of Horst Wessel, a response that Klein is now participating in with this reprehensible piece.

Btw since this thread has now escaped the ecosystem of people I normally interact with I just want to reiterate / clarify something: i am very pro free expression. I think Skokie was correctly decided etc. if all Kirk was doing was saying hateful nonsense into microphones, Klein would have a point

But that’s not what Kirk actually did. Beyond frequent comments that could arguably amount to incitement, his actual operation (Turning Point) is a Thiel backed intimidation racket that explicitly opposes academic freedom and targets people for harassment campaigns.

He also provided material support to an effort to overthrow the government. You can’t lionize his persuasion campaigns and not mention these things. He was an outspoken defender of free expression for people he agreed with and worked to silence those with whom he disagreed.

If you’re going to write an appeal to our better angels piece after Kirk, it’a gotta be an appeal to do politics the way he pretended to do it.

Mother Jones | Charlie Kirk Doesn’t Really Seem to Mind White Nationalism

Worth reading the whole thing. Mentions of two of my anti-favorite people jumped out at me: Sailer & Yarvin:

In October, he invited veteran white supremacist Steve Sailer, whose bonafides include writing for overt white nationalist publications including VDare and the Unz Review, on his podcast. During their interview, Kirk called Sailer his favorite “noticer”—a word frequently used in internet conservative spaces as a euphemism for individuals willing to publicly draw bigoted conclusions linking race and criminality. Sailer did exactly this during their conversation, insinuating that Black people commit crimes because of innate characteristics: “Blacks tend to commit murder about 10 times as often per capita as whites… it’s not just all explained by poverty.”

“Steve, what you’re doing is so important,” Kirk gushed.

In January, Kirk hosted Curtis Yarvin, a neo-reactionary, anti-egalitarian who has described slavery as “a natural human relationship” and argued the biological roots of intelligence vary between populations. (He has tried to walk such claims back.) While Kirk seemed uncomfortable when Yarvin’s expressed his affinity for monarchy, he mostly remained effusive and praised his guest for “thought-provoking ideas” that “I love.”

Noah Berlatsky | Whitewashing Charlie Kirk Promotes Political Violence

The main problem with this is that it is a lie. Kirk was not especially interested in persuasion. He was an enthusiastic supporter of the January 6 insurrection; his organization, Turning Points USA, bussed people to the coup — including one man who stormed the capital and beat police with a fire extinguisher. Kirk continued to defend the insurrection and TPUSA’s role in it for years.

Kirk’s assault on democracy did not start on January 6. TPUSA has been touted (by Klein and others) as some sort of righteous free speech advocacy group promoting debate on campus. But that (again) is a lie. In fact, TPUSA’s main purpose is summed up by its “Professor Watchlist” a website which lists teachers and professors who TPUSA believes “discriminate against conservative students, promote anti-American values and advance leftist propaganda in the classroom.”

In short, the Watchlist is intended as, and functions as, a mechanism to stifle academic freedom by targeting those on the left—especially women and BIPOC professors — for stochastic terrorism and harassment. Professors on the list say that they regularly receive hate mail and death threats — and that the threats accelerated after January 6, the insurrection that TPUSA supported. The link to the recent firing of a children’s literature professor reported by a conservative student for talking about “gender” is quite clear. TPUSA was a leader of a conservative moral panic designed to terrorize liberal professors and drive them from the academy—a moral panic which has metastasized into Trump’s unprecedented, openly ideological campaign to defund universities.

Kirk has also just openly called for political violence himself; he praised as Biblical and “perfect” the idea of stoning LGBT people to death, and argued that gun deaths were “worth it” to preserve Second Amendment rights. Klein says it’s not fair to argue that Kirk deserved to die by gun violence because he was opposed to gun control, and that is true. What Klein refuses to grapple with, however, is that, Kirk claimed that the Second Amendment needed to be preserved through violent death. That’s an argument which explicitly says that we should see children killed in school shootings as an inevitable necessary sacrifice to politics. It’s a justification of political violence

Kirk quotes via Brad Johnson

I think it’s worth it. It’s worth to have a cost of, unfortunately, some gun deaths every single year so that we can have the Second Amendment to protect our other God-given rights. That is a prudent deal.

Chicago, New York, Boston, Philadelphia, Portland, San Francisco. We got a big military. We should be willing to use it.

Kamala Harris wants to see the elimination of the United States of America.

Kamala Harris seeks to kidnap your child via the trans agenda.

Jews are experiencing the hate that we white people have been experiencing the last decade, and we've been warning against

We need to have a Nuremberg-style trial for every gender-affirming clinic doctor. We need it immediately.

You might go out to dinner, go see a movie and come back to a bunch of illegals sitting in your living room, and it will then become their home.

The American Democrat [sic] Party hates this country. They wanna see it collapse. They love it when America becomes less white. They love it when America gets overwhelmed.

The great replacement strategy, which is well underway every single day in our southern border, is a strategy to replace white rural America with something different.

They hate those of you that own land and have guns and believe in a better country, and they have a plan to try and get rid of you.

You believe in God, country, family, faith, and freedom, and they won’t stop until you and your children and your children's children are eliminated.

By the way, I would totally tune in to see some pedo get their head chopped off.

The problem is that the MAGA patriots on January 6th, when they went into, for example, the Senate — where the Senate votes, or they went into some of the hearing rooms, they should have stripped naked and filmed themselves having gay sex. That would have solved all the problems.

Native-born Americans, you better buy weapons, everybody. Have a lot of guns at your disposal. I would never leave your home without a weapon.

I can say declaratively this guy [Martin Luther King, Jr.] is not worthy of a national holiday. He is not worthy of godlike status. In fact, I think it’s really harmful.

The left would love to see a race war.

Climate change is the wrapper around Marxism. You have Marxism at its core and you have climate change on the exterior. Climate change activism, environmentalism, pseudo-paganism — we call it a Trojan horse, a wolf in sheep’s clothing, it all sounds so cliché but it’s totally true.

I know this sounds controversial, but peaceful and constitutional defiance of the federal government will actually strengthen the nation.

If they can make you put a mask on, they’ll take your guns. They can make you take a vaccine, they control your children.

Black people tend to be more athletically inclined to be good at basketball. It’s just the way it is.

Twelve thousand Haitians are now your fellow citizens. Did they earn it? Did they come here the right way? Did they apply? Did they wait in line? No.

We’re going to talk about how the other side has openly admitted that this is about bringing in voters that they want and that they like and honestly, diminishing and decreasing white demographics in America.

A properly defined government is a government supposed to fear the people, not the people fear the government. And one of the ways this is possible is to be able to have hundreds of millions of people own firearms."

Ketanji Brown Jackson — is what your country looks like on critical race theory. KBJ is your country on CRT. KBJ — Ketanji Brown Jackson — is an embodiment of the tyranny that we currently live under. She’s an ideological, unintelligent, yet confident fanatic.

Let’s talk about this war on white people. That’s a thought crime … the one type of racism you’re not allowed to talk about, of course, is the war against people who look like you and I.

Kamala Harris has now become the jive-speaking spokesperson of equity.

Ideological purity tests are an interesting approach, but let’s break up the federal government first and then we’ll go from there.

There is a deliberate and venomous anti-white campaign in our country and it drives me crazy and we shouldn’t put up with it.

Western culture is better and it’s a thoughtcrime to say it out loud. Blacks were sold into slavery by other Blacks. Thomas Sowell wrote that in great detail. When Blacks were given opportunities to return home, they did not want to return home. Blacks didn’t want to leave.

I don’t believe Black History Month is worth the kind of full month that it is, at all.

I’m not a fan of democracy.

Happening all the time in urban America, prowling Blacks go around for fun to go target white people, that’s a fact. It’s happening more and more.

Men know the game is rigged against them — especially young white men.

Women are wired to be more emotional and liberal policies appeal to their emotions. The women project’s a whole different thing. Men are rational, hopefully so, in their politics.

Joe Biden is a bumbling dementia-filled Alzheimer’s corrupt tyrant who should honestly be put in prison and/or given the death penalty for his crimes against America.

Now, the 14th Amendment is unbelievably important, obviously, but it’s way too broadly written.

This is left-wing ideologues that allowed the island to burn. That there is blood on the hands of the water worshippers. Christianity broke us free of pagan slavery … Could it be that Maui did not have to burn if they didn’t believe such wacky, goofy, pagan stuff?

If you have a male brain versus a female brain in chess you have a competitive advantage … Chess is very similar, by the way, to why women do not get into coding. Some do, but most do not. Why women don’t get into science, technology, engineering, and math.

Women are notorious for still remembering the details of arguments that they had from years ago.

We should not send women into the frontlines of a conflict nor should we send men into the frontlines of educating our preschoolers. Let's understand our differences and the denial of them creates moral chaos, panic, and confusion.

If you’re a Christian, they consider you a terrorist. If you’re a gun owner, they consider you a terrorist.

The entire Third World is moving into America, and the Democrats want that

I used to love New York City. It’s an unrecognizable city, but that’s what the left does. They’re parasites. The left are cockroaches. They just take things over. They don't build anything. They take stuff over and they destroy it.

Hakeem Jeffries and the Democrats, they are cleaning up. They’re raising record amounts of money … We’re dealing with maggots, vermin and swine here. This is not — these are not good people, they’re not even a little bit good. They are coming after our throats.

Jews have been some of the largest funders of cultural Marxist ideas and supporters of those ideas over the last 30 or 40 years … Until you cleanse that ideology from the hierarchy in the academic elite of the west, there will not be a safe future.

You do not have the brain processing power to otherwise be taken seriously. You had to steal a white person's slot … It’s very obvious to us you were not smart enough to get it on your own.

We made a huge mistake when we passed the Civil Rights Act in the 1960s.

I can’t stand the word empathy, actually. I think empathy is a made up New Age term that does a lot of damage.

They’re trying to make the country less white. They’re trying to make the country more like the third world, the dumping ground of the planet is the United States southern border.

It’s important to note that Haiti is legitimately infested with demonic voodoo.

The Mamdani effect is going to metastasize in the Democrat [sic] Party … A very dark and sinister vision — one that is anti-Western, anti-American, anti-civilization.

“We will flood your country with unvetted foreigners, mutilate kids, worship criminals, and demonize half the population for simply breathing and existing.” … I want to see a Democrat [sic] Party at peace, not a Democrat [sic] Party at war with the country.

The only men who are gravitating toward the Democrat [sic] Party are men who want to become women.

We have to tell our babies to stop crying. … I believe we’re broken by sin upon birth.

White privilege is a myth and a lie. It should be completely destroyed. It is a racist idea. Why don’t they ever talk about Asian-American privilege?

Just because you have a group of people who look the same doesn’t mean they think the same, and we have great intellectual diversity in our organization.

We are up against a group of individuals that are going to use the rest of their lives and all their resources to try to take our freedoms and liberties away. These are liberals.

If we do not have the capacity to defend our freedoms, which the Second Amendment allows us to do, then our rights and freedoms can be just written away in an instant.

The rise of anti-Americanism on college campuses is so dramatic. I believe the greatest threat to Western civilization is what's happening on our college campuses today. I really do.

Professors that never could have succeeded on the outside … Bitterly unhappy people that want to try to indoctrinate and deprogram America’s youth away from our fundamental values, because they’re just so malevolent towards the world that they could never succeed in themselves.

Are liberals really unhappy people or is it just me? It seems like a liberal would rather see rich people become poor than poor people become rich. A liberal would rather tell you how to live your life than actually improve the life of their own.

We as conservatives, as free thinkers, and as members of the National Rifle Association, we're never gonna tell you how to live your life.

The left would like nothing more than the most effective, the most powerful grassroots organization in America — the NRA — to be decapitated, because they know as long as the NRA is powerful, they cannot obtain unilateral political power.

The six million members of the National Rifle Association are the greatest threat to the American left that exists today and the greatest protector of American freedom now and for the rest of 21st century.

Jewish communities have been pushing the exact kind of hatred against whites that they claim to want people to stop using against them.

If you actually believe that climate change is an existential threat, which is complete gibberish, nonsense and balderdash—and all of you guys should be unafraid to push back against all that garbage, because it’s designed for one thing: power and control and let me just tell you something that is a general rule, if your biggest worry in life is existential, you live a great life. If your biggest worry is the sky falling and not sanitation, nutrition, getting murdered on the way home, or being beaten, you live a very nice life.

This climate change nonsense can only happen in a rich, generally peaceful society. You think that the people in the slums of India, the 300 million that don't have access every single day to functioning toilets, you think that they're worried about the sky falling?

There’s not this huge call for gun control, even from the citizens of Chicago. We have a lack of father problem in the Black community … and that has contributed to this endless cycle of gang violence and gun violence … the bottom line is a broken culture problem.

You look at what Mayor Giuliani did in New York in the early 2000s, that’s how he cleaned up the streets. He did not divide people based on racial ethnic lines, he built strong partnerships and he cleaned up the streets.

We should have a honest and clear reductionist view of gun violence, but we should not have a utopian one. You will never live in a society when you have an armed citizenry and you won't have a single gun death. That is nonsense. It’s drivel.

Never give up our guns! If we do, only criminals will have guns.

The only thing that stops a bad guy with a gun is a good guy with a gun.

The only purpose of a federal gun registry would be eventual confiscation.

“Gun control” is not about safety, it is about power.

Every time there’s a tragedy, the left talks about banning guns. But you cannot prevent evil by restricting the rights of the innocent.

The statistic out there is that 35,000 people die of gun deaths in America … Two-thirds of that number are death by suicide with a gun. We have a horrible mental health crisis. It’s deceiving to say it’s a gun death. It’s a suicide with a gun.

One in five gun deaths are gang violence, men between the ages of 18 to 30. That's a byproduct of institutional poverty. You’d argue that’s more of a problem of failing schools, failing government programs, lack of economic opportunity, than have much to do really with guns.

New York City councilman Yusuf Salaam, who once took part in the gruesome gang rape of a jogger in Central Park, is now furious that an NYPD officer dared to pull him over for having illegally tinted windows. Salaam wasn’t even arrested or given a ticket, but after getting away with gang rape he apparently thinks he deserves to be completely above the law.

MLK, in my opinion, and based on every objective analysis, he actually gave us more race focus and less emphasis on character and conduct.

[MLK] would be actually to be closer to a race Marxist, almost akin to DEI-type philosopher, if you go deep into his writings, especially later in his life.

Who was MLK? A myth has been created and it has grown totally out of control. While he was alive most people disliked him, yet today he is the most honored, worshipped, even deified person of the 20th century.

Maybe once you break the mythical sainthood of someone like MLK, black voters will realize it’s being used against them to suppress the individual, and even more will realize they are on our side.

Telling the truth about MLK should not be trampling sacred ground. He was just a man. And a very flawed one at that. Worship God, not a mythological anti-racist creation of the 1960s.

MLK was awful. He’s not a good person. He said one good thing he actually didn’t believe.

Husbands should do everything he can to not force his wife into the workforce.

How many of you, every single day, it’s your purpose for being is finding a husband? Every hand should go up. But I thought you said you wanted an amazing family. You have to prioritize and aim at what you want the most.

If you’re not married by the age of 30, you only have a 50% chance of getting married. And if you don’t have kids by the age of 30, you have a 50% chance of not having kids … Having children are are a gift from the Lord. And unfortunately, our culture deemphasizes it.

I don’t think the church talks enough about purity, right? I think it’s incredibly important and we should tell young men and young ladies to save themselves for marriage.

Young men have serious problems. We’re working on fixing that. And it’s easy to laugh, but you need young men. Young men are in a far sicker position right now than young ladies are. They’re committing suicide more. They’re checking out of society.

It’s easy to make fun of young men, but a society needs strong men and we need husbands and we need fathers. And everyone in this room should be part of that project of making men strong again. Everyone.

Young ladies need to be willing to submit to a godly man when you meet one. And if you’re not willing to do that, then you got to pray about that because a lot of young men in the dating pool say, “I don’t want to be bossed around all the time.”

The hypertoxic feminism is very off-putting to young men.

They’re called toxically masculine. They're called, you know, “Who needs men,” “the patriarchy,” and so then they just largely disengage or they do even a worse thing, which is they get involved like, “I’m just going to sleep with a bunch of women, but not going to marry them.”

Men will do anything to solve the problem of scarcity. And if men can get you quite easily, that is not an attractive quality to be able to have a man go on a journey with you … And there is one thing that men want more than anything else and it’s not Bitcoin. You know what it is.

As women have not been saving themselves for marriage and men too in the last 30 or 40 years, we’ve seen marriage rates collapse. There is a one-to-one correlation on those two things.

If everyone here basically said, “Nope, we’re going to combine our our power and be pure and trust in Jesus and in God for our future husband,” you would be shocked at how much the dating pool improves.

You must understand that a man might forget to shower for three days because he’s too worried that we’re going to go to a nuclear war with Iran. Men are obsessed with the macro and they often forget the micro.

Corporations want to hire you so badly because you are incredibly good at microtasks. That is why young women have been so well paid in the corporate environment because when it comes to getting details done, women are much better than men.

Obviously your marriage actually comes before your kids … Your relationship with your kids is important. But it’s not covenantal. Your marriage is a covenant. Your relationship with your kids is an outgrowth of a covenant. They’re under your stewardship.

Of course you should be able to use whips against foreigners that are coming into your country. Why is that controversial?

Don’t follow your heart. It’s a bad idea. Do not do that. You laugh, but the Bible is very clear. The heart is wicked. Do not follow your heart.

The most important thing as a parent is that you must instill self-control, not self-esteem for your kid. Whatever it takes, you must have them understand the power of restraint, which is a fruit of the spirit. Remember, self-control is a fruit of the spirit.

You are not your kid’s friend. You are their parent. It is an up-and-down relationship. It is not a horizontal one.

I see in public these parenting displays, that it’s so sad, where it’s just placation. The parent is being held hostage by the child. It is an ongoing blackmail operation. Where it’s like, give me candy or else I riot. It's no different than BLM.

He doesn’t need a whole feeling session. We don’t need that as men. We don’t need emotionality. No. You need conviction and order and a challenge. And we need high stakes.

You must understand God wired us a lot differently … Men look at we we have a problem where we think we are the firefighter to put out a fire. We see problem, we want to fix it … Sometimes the solution is just talking about the problem which for us is an incomprehensible thing.

Our brains work differently. For women, conversation, especially conversation about nothing, is therapeutic. It’s very cathartic. For men, it’s exhausting. And for us, we like to unplug and we like to watch or see somebody else do something hard. That’s what sports is.

Do not talk down to men, do masculine masculinity bashing of men. Not only do we need men, the civilization is God created men and women. And it’s very tempting to get into the whole kind of girl-dominant society. You do not want to live in that world.