Max's Musings

We’ll have to see the coming events through to discover what our destiny as a people will be.

The Mormon temple in Grand Blanc, Michgan, ablaze. This is all headed somewhere, isn’t it?

Since the Annuncion Catholic School shooting a month ago now, America seems to have entered a tailspin of sorts. We had the Charlie Kirk assassination, a spate of leftist terror attacks, and mass shootings, including two just over the weekend.

When it comes to events like mass shootings, I’ve made it a policy not to talk about them while they’re still breaking news. The Left pounced all over them, citing the political views of the shooters, especially the man who shot up and burned down the Mormon temple in Michigan, to find a way to blame it on the Right. Clearly, the fact that the man responsible for the highest-profile political assassination in recent memory was one of them has driven the Left up a wall.

But it’s very possible these most recent shootings have no political motivation. It’s just that we live in a hyper-politicized time, lots of people have strong opinions, and we’ve come to assume that politics is the motivation behind everything a person does. It’s for these reasons I often take so long to chime in on current events. My role is to clarify, not obfuscate. Unless we’re talking about a 9/11-level event, there’s no harm in waiting for more facts to be revealed, ever.

We won’t be talking about them today, but I’d be remiss if I didn’t at least mention recent events, which can lead a perfectly reasonable person to conclude: is it all coming apart?

Everyone who’s been reading me for a long time knows the answer is “yes.” But we’ve been falling apart for a long time. What’s happening now is a culmination of multiple trends now leading to their logical conclusion. Consider this a look at what’s underneath it all for a better understanding for why it’s all falling apart.

Beware ‘Recency Bias’

Kaiser Bauch

provides an extensive overview of political violence and low-intensity conflict in the West throughout the post-World War II period, arguing that recency bias blinds us to the fact our current moment isn’t historically unprecedented.

He explains:

Recency bias is a cognitive bias that favors recent events over historical ones. A type of memory bias, recency bias gives "greater importance to the most recent event." Now, this is a completely natural phenomenon that, to a large extent, cannot be completely avoided. We understandably perceive events occurring right now with more urgency than historical events that we either have not lived through or that have been ameliorated in their seriousness by being relatively distant memories.

There’s very little disagree with Kaiser Bauch on. I thought this essay was going to be the first time I fundamentally disagreed with him, but the deeper I got into the essay, the more I began nodding along. His point isn’t, as I initially anticipated, that the current moment is just a phase we’re going through, an argument which would’ve surprised me to hear him make. His argument instead is that political violence isn’t alien to the West, that’s it’s more normal than one might think. That’s a fair point.

More important is why political violence happens at scale. Going back to the tumultuous 1960s and 1970s, he surmises:

I would say that the turmoil of that period is caused by a combination of two factors. First of all, there are, of course, the demographics. The baby boom generations born in the post-war decades were in their young adulthood, and there was thus present one of the key elements of social upheaval—lots of young people (especially young men) comprising a substantial proportion of the population.

You’ve heard this argument before. You’ll hear it again until it becomes conventional wisdom, because it’s as close to a certainty as it gets. Young societies have greater instability, whether in the West or elsewhere in the world.

About younger people today possessing less of a taboo against political violence:

There was a poll circulating on the internet where people were flabbergasted by the fact that the acceptance of political violence increases with youth. While 93% of Boomers agree that political violence is never acceptable, among the Zoomers only 58% agree with that statement. But as someone rather correctly pointed out, of course the Boomers—on their way from the doctor’s appointment to get a prescription for hypertension pills to the golf course—are not going to think too much about perpetrating some bomb attack. That is what young people generally do. And many of those Boomers certainly saw things very differently when they were 20 in the early 1970s (as outlined above).

I wish I had historical polling data to prove it, but I’d hazard two guesses: Americans have, at least during the post-World War II period, never supported political violence and that young people at any point in time were more likely to support it. The more things change, the more things stay the same. As Kaiser Bauch points out, at one point, it was the Boomers who were committing all the political violence in America, even as they today renounce it. Age mellows people out.

The real problems today aren’t that young people believe political violence can be justified. It’s that leftists are more likely to do so and that the public has become desensitized to it.

From Politico:

The assassination of conservative activist Charlie Kirk has raised new fears that the country is entering another era of political violence.

One worrying sign: Americans’ attention has moved on faster and faster as incidents have become more frequent, data suggest, indicating the public may be becoming rapidly desensitized to it.

And:

Each attack may seem shocking, but the incidents are leaving less of a mark on the national consciousness. A POLITICO review of Google search data and newspaper front pages found individual attacks are getting less attention than they did in the past, and Americans are moving on even quicker. The news cycles for incidents of political violence this year are typically measured in a few weeks, if not just days.

“There’s a whole bunch of studies on violence in the news, documenting the fact that people’s emotional cognitive reactions early on are high, and then as time goes on, the more you are exposed, those cognitive emotional reactions lessen,” said Karyn Riddle, a communications professor at University of Wisconsin who studies violence in media.

This isn’t a good thing. Political violence demands an audience, not to mention the lack of any kind of reaction is emboldening. The reason why the advice from school administrators and teachers to “ignore” bullies is so stupid is that it only escalates their behaviors in response, because they know they can get away with it and triggering a reaction from their victim is precisely the point. The more Americans become desensitized to political violence, the more likely it becomes through normalization.

Back to Kaiser Bauch:

The second element is what the political scientist James C. Davies called the “Revolution of Rising Expectations.” What this theory entails is that revolutions are more likely to occur not when people are at their poorest or most oppressed, but rather after a period of social and economic improvement, when that progress is suddenly halted or reversed. That fits rather neatly with the Western 1970s—after what can be rather fittingly considered a post-war golden age (economic miracle, full employment, high family stability and fertility rates, low levels of inequality, high social cohesion), the early 1970s brought a sharp worsening of the situation with the 1973 oil crisis and the consequent period of stagflation, to which the Keynesian economic status quo could not find an answer, since high public spending aimed to alleviate economic stagnation and unemployment is not a usable tool when you are simultaneously battling high inflation.

This is an interesting theory I’ve never heard before. Are we entering another such a period? Maybe. We live in different circumstances from the 1970s, but what’s undeniable is that, at least for the Millennial and Zoomer generations, we’ve grown up in an era of certainty few other cohorts have enjoyed. Now that that certainty is under threat, it’s triggering a reaction. Home ownership is becoming more difficult, college isn’t the golden ticket it once was, to name a few examples.

What Kaiser Bauch is positing is a synthesis of two arguments. One is the Strauss-Howe generational theory, which I talk about constantly here, and the other is the increasingly popular theory that the U.S. economy, despite continuing to grow, hit the point of diminishing returns much earlier than people realized. The Strauss-Howe theory shows that history unfolds in cyclical fashion, meaning that our current moment is just a manifestation of a cycle which ends with the infamous Fourth Turning. America is undergoing that as we speak, but the roots of the current Fourth Turning were planted way back during the Second Turning, which occurred during the 1960s and 1970s. I’m not prepared to say that’s the case with all cycles, but it appears to be the case with this one.

Basically, the 2020s are another 1970s:

That is where we are now—in a period of broad reaction against the previous dogmas. While history never really repeats itself and every parallel is limited in nature, the overall atmosphere truly seems to bear resemblance to the 1970s: ideological radicalization, rising political violence, economic problems, ethnic/racial tensions, and overall pessimism and nihilism.

Kaiser risks overstating it. Bad as things are getting, they’re still nowhere near as bad as the ‘70s were. It must also be remembered that while the 1980s and 1990s are seen as a second golden age of the post-World War II period, they also constitute the Third Turning: Unraveling. The only reason why this period felt so good is because everyone decided to focus on themselves first and foremost and enjoy things. But this is also the time when society passed the point of no return, when the fracturing became guaranteed.

This means that even if we manage to survive another ‘70s, what follows won’t necessarily be better. It was in the ‘80s and ‘90s that the changes wrought by the ‘60s and ‘70s cultural revolution became entrenched in our institutions, after all. Even if we get another respite, it only means we go through something like this yet again in another 20 to 30 years, and I doubt the 2030s and 2040s are going to be like the ‘80s and ‘90s.

On the other hand, if the 2020s are just the 2020s, and this is the Fourth Turning, not a reversion to the Second, then if we manage to survive it, what follows ought to be a better time. It’ll be the start of a new cycle and the First Turning is a High. The downside, of course, is that the events of the Fourth Turning are devastating, always so, and a minimum of tens of thousands of American lives are lost. Maybe the death toll this time will be lower, thanks to advances in medical care and because of the type of war that’s to be waged, but the point is lots of Americans, far more than we could ever be comfortable with, will lose their lives.

It’s in the wake of great tragedy that a society finds its bearings, its purpose again. Or it comes apart. We’ll have to see the coming events through to discover what our destiny as a people will be.

“Cancel Culture” Is Sometimes Necessary

ABC’s late-night talk show host Jimmy Kimmel was suspended over the following remarks:

We hit some new lows over the weekend with the MAGA gang desperately trying to characterize this kid who murdered Charlie Kirk as anything other than one of them with everything they can to score political points…

You can watch the entire clip to hear for yourself and decide whether the suspension was valid, if anything is being taken out of context. I don’t think there’s any ambiguity in what Kimmel is saying: he’s associating the shooter, Tyler Robinson, with MAGA, with the Right. That’s pretty clear and obvious. The only other explanation is that he has no clue what he’s saying, meaning we have a crazy person on stage.

He has since returned to television, aggrieved and unapologetic as ever. I think the suspension was valid, regardless of how it might’ve gone down. I don’t want to be over-dramatic and say America is teetering on the brink or anything like that, but the air is filled with uncomfortable tension. What Kimmel says is malicious and last I checked, malice isn’t protected by the First Amendment. He’s deliberately throwing gasoline onto the fire.

Once upon a time, I would’ve not been okay with Kimmel being suspended. However, this is 2025, and we’re not living in the America everyone older than the Zoomers grew up in. We need to recognize what that means. Let me explain.

When we were growing up, Jimmy Kimmel probably wouldn’t have been suspended for what he said. But, just as important, Kimmel would’ve likely known better than to say what he said. If he did say it, he would’ve been made to apologize, and that probably would’ve been the end of it. This is important to understand: context matters. Context dictates behavior like no other. The context of 2025 isn’t the same as that of 2005, or even 2015. Political tensions are off-the-charts at the moment in a way they haven’t been in more than two generations.

It’s just as important to understand what Kimmel is: a political commentator. Yes, he’s a left-wing talking head, whether he or his supporters want to admit it or not. The days of being purely an entertainer are almost a decade behind him. Kimmel, like his comrades Stephen Colbert and Jon Stewart, use comedy as a vehicle for sending very serious messages about how things are and how they ought to be. They cannot use the “I’m just a comedian!” defense, since they clearly expect to be taken quite seriously. If they’re comedians, they’re clearly catering to a specific, politically-defined audience.

Which leads to the next, most important point: the stakes are far too high to give Kimmel a pass. If Kimmel wants to be taken seriously, if he wants to affect the discourse, then he cannot be allowed to lie so flagrantly on the air. He’s in the narrative-shaping business, not the entertainment business, not anymore. If he’s going to play a role in shaping the narrative, then he needs to be held to the bare minimum standard where he cannot tell such a bold-faced lie.

Narratives, not facts, are what drive social change. By trying to pin the blame for Charlie Kirk’s murder on the Right, Kimmel is deliberately trying to deceive the American public. Given that most Americans lean left or hold liberal views, the public is more likely to believe leftist lies than they are right-wing lies. Kimmel was ruthlessly exploiting that. That cannot be ignored, not now. In times of increasing political instability, lies intended to shape the narrative matter that much more.

Many, including on the Right, have argued that cancel culture isn’t the way to fight the Left. Fine, how exactly are we supposed to, then? How are we supposed to counter the fact that most people are predisposed to believe the Left’s lies? Open and honest debate doesn’t work because the Left doesn’t want it. They aren’t interested in listening, they think their views are the gospel truth, debate over, that’s the end of it. The fact they continue to rationalize, if not justify, Kirk’s killing by citing his “hateful thoughts” proves they believe the Right shouldn’t feel free to speak openly, their ideas have no merit or value, and that only the Left can prevail or else democracy dies in darkness.

De-escalation works only when the other party is interested in de-escalation. Calling for a truce with the Left is basically a reversion to the status quo at this point. Keep in mind that people, everyday people, were canceled in the past for a lot less. This doesn’t even include high-profile figures canceled for running afoul of the Regime’s ideology.

I’m old enough to remember, as many of my readers are, when conservative commentators like Sean Hannity, Rush Limbaugh, and Michael Savage were routinely lambasted as “hate-mongerers.” In retrospect, their commentary seems quite mild. Even today, Hannity and Savage are considered moderate by the Right. The anger with which they spoke actually obscured just how milquetoast their message actually was. What matters is that the public believed it. Now they believe all sorts of lies about Charlie Kirk and the man who shot him. Lying works. Otherwise, they wouldn’t do it. When lying works, telling the truth doesn’t.

The good news is that the Left’s lying isn’t as effective as it once was., Though some polls showed otherwise, one YouGov poll showed the American public correctly believed Kirk’s killer was motivated by leftist beliefs. In another, it showed Americans were as concerned with left-wing extremism as they are with right-wing extremism.

But if anyone thinks this is going to get the Left to back off, they’re sorely mistaken. It’s critical to understand that the Left are the revolutionary resistance only in their minds. In practice, they’re the conservatives, they’re the ones in power, regardless of who might be in the White House. The less effective their lies become, the more lies they tell in a desperate attempt to maintain a stranglehold on the narrative.

Speaking of the White House, What About Trump? He Lies All The Time! That’s what I’ve heard from many who support Kimmel. Yes, Trump lying casually is bad. Kimmel lying so blatantly, and routinely mixing truth with lies, is worse. Calling Charlie Kirk’s shooter MAGA isn’t funny. It has no basis in reality whatsoever. We’re not talking about whether Trump’s popularity is as high as he claims it is. We’re talking about a lie which fundamentally opposes reality.

Tyler Robinson is charged with murder and will be charged in court. When his motivations are a subject of courtroom debate, is Kimmel still going to lie about them? This single lie has greater ramifications than several of Trump’s stupid, trivial lies. Nobody believes Trump, anyway, and Kimmel is someone regarded as a more credible figure. That’s turned out to be a matter of poor judgment.

Furthermore, this might be the first time I’m saying this, but I was not against, though not full-throatily in favor, of then-Twitter booting Trump in the wake of the January 6, 2021 riot at the U.S. Capitol. Trump had every right to contest the election results, as we are a democracy, supposedly, but he undoubtedly went too far. If he didn’t incite a riot, he certainly incited a protest and nothing he said or did made the situation any better. It made things worse. I think there are times when you just have to make a guy shut up, and I’d hope even some on the Right would quietly admit that making Trump shut up for a while might’ve been the best thing for him. Trump has many flaws, but among his worst is how he just doesn’t know when to stop talking.

Finally, it turns out nobody was watching Kimmel, anyway:

According to monthly Nielsen figures, “Jimmy Kimmel Live!” dropped to just 1.1 million total viewers in August 2025, down 43% from January’s 1.95 million. His August household rating of 0.35 marked the weakest showing of the year.

The advertiser-coveted 18–49 demo also cratered. Kimmel averaged only 129,000 viewers in that bracket in August, off from 212,000 in January and less than half his June peak of 284,000.

Rod Dreher explains what that means:

For perspective, in a country of 360 million people, slightly more people live in the city of Abilene, Texas, than 18-49 year olds watched Kimmel each night last month.

For 30 days, Kimmel’s viewership among 18-49 year olds amounts to 3.9 million views. By comparison, the online comedian podcaster Theo Von, of whom few people over the age of 49 have ever heard, got nearly 25 million views in the last month evaluated. True, I’m comparing Kimmel’s viewership in the 18-49 bracket to Von’s overall viewership. But I’d be shocked if Von has many views from people 50 and older.

It turns out Kimmel and Trump have things in common: their supporters skew older and they’re not all that popular, at least not as popular as they think they are. Maybe they’ll see a bit of themselves in one another and become friends in the end. It’d do the country a whole lot of good to see that, don’t you think?

I’ll leave you with something Johnny Carson, the King of Late Night, once said, warning about the dangers of talking about serious issues:

Prescient, wasn’t he?

Feel Like A Stranger At Home? Then It’s Not Your Home.

Staff writer at The Atlantic Thomas Chatterton Williams says of the Charlie Kirk memorial service:

I’ve spent half of my adult life living in one foreign country or another and I don’t think I’ve ever felt so estranged from the surrounding culture as I am from the aesthetics and sensibilities of this movement. Not even a criticism, I just feel more at home in Greece than in these images.

Whether you liked the memorial service or not is entirely a matter of personal taste. There was much not to like about it - President Trump’s address was, as it so often is, about as articulate as a professional wrestler cutting a promo - but the rest of it, nothing about it is alien to American culture. It’s alien to Chatterton Williams. But there’s no mystery why he feels the way he does.

The simplest explanation here is that Thomas Chatterton Williams isn’t American. He may be an American citizen, but he’s about as American as I’d be Japanese if I moved there and became a citizen. Even if the U.S. isn’t an ethno-state or even a nation state, which it’s not, Chatterton Williams’ reaction proves that there exist hard limits to the extent someone can truly belong to even a civic nationalist, proposition nation.

Congressman Maxwell Frost recently tweeted:

If you’re born in America, you’re an American. Period.

Legally? Maybe. But nationhood cannot and will never be based entirely on legalities, even in a civic propositional sense, as explained by someone replying to Frost:

If America is a propositional country, then to be American you have to accept the proposition, the set of ideals and norms that make Americans American. If it’s based on birth then there could be a racial or ethnic component.

These people have taken the strangest position, rejecting both possibilities in favor of a simple proximity test. American just means your parent’s feet were on this soil at the time of birth. America means nothing, it’s for no people in particular.

And:

The biggest problems seems to be 1) you have to agree on the proposition 2) you have to throw out those who don’t agree on it 3) you have to indoctrinate your kids in it

Western culture has lost the feeling that our ideas are worth fighting for

Per usual, liberals promote a contradiction: that anyone can be an American as long as they ascribe to a set of values, and also that anyone can be an American so long as they were born here, even if they don’t ascribe to those values. Which is it?

Even globe-spanning empires like Britain and Spain had a clear identity of what it meant to be British or Spanish. American identity has become so open-ended as to mean nothing. A lot of that has to do with the fact the people who promote America as an “idea” are the ones who’ve imposed it upon the rest of us.

Chatterton Williams represents a class known as the “Anywheres” - cosmopolitans with no real ties to any particular place or people. There’s nothing wrong with this of course, not really. They’re not a particularly unique set of people. The problem is that they’ve come to comprise the elite class of the U.S., along with the West as a whole. The fact that the elites of a country feel so detached from said country is deeply problematic, because the elites are very much its representatives on the global stage. If the representatives themselves don’t feel as though they belong, or that they don’t recognize their country, then does anyone, really?

America’s self-appointed Expert-in-Chief, Tom Nichols, echoed Chatterton Williams’ sentiments:

I’ve lived in the same small American town for 30 years and I often feel the same way: I don’t recognize the places in my country that have been overtaken by cults of personality.

Nichols is from Massachusetts, currently a resident of Rhode Island. New England was never a hotbed for the kind of Evangelical Christianity the memorial service drew inspiration from. So, of course he wouldn’t recognize it. Nichols uses the term “small town” because he understands the mental images it evokes in American minds. The reality is, Nichols lives in a unique part of the country unlike the rest. I, being originally of the South and now residing in the Western part of the country, don’t recognize New England, either. Does that mean New England isn’t America?

The fact that these people don’t recognize their so-called country is entirely self-inflicted, of course. Neither Chatterton Williams nor Nichols have ever bothered to get to know their fellow Americans, real Americans. They’re the ones living in a bubble, not those they feel detached from. Ironically, they’d probably say they consider a foreign ethnic neighborhood to feel more like home than Middle America, where the aesthetics and sensibilities of the Charlie Kirk memorial service are quite common. That’s because these men draw their identities from two things: politics and status. Both are of the establishment, which is leftist, and their status is in the professional intelligentsia. This makes them quite unique, unlike most Americans. So of course they don’t feel like they belong, because they don’t.

Donald Trump has many flaws. But one big reason why he has such a loyal following is because Trump has always accepted Americans as they come. He never pretends to be something he isn’t, either. Other politicians and members of the intelligentsia often need to put on a different skin and adopt different personas depending on the audience or setting. Trump never needs to. Nor does he ever criticize Americans for being who they are. Chatterton Williams and Nichols have made careers out of telling Americans they’re not good enough.

Tell me: is that the kind of person you want as your countryman? There’s a time and place for criticism and even people who love each other need to be critical of one another when needed. But I could never share a home with someone who cannot accept me as I am, even as they want better for me, and I absolutely couldn’t share it with someone who feels they don’t belong.

Why share a country with such people?

America Definitely Isn’t Ilhan Omar’s Home

Somalian Ilhan Omar wants you to know America is turning into a dictatorship because she knows what dictatorships are:

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She’s not wrong: Omar recognizes dictatorship is because her family used to support one. A quick dive into her family history reveals the reason why she left her beloved homeland: her father was a senior military officer in the regime of Siad Barre, the dictator who ruled Somalia from 1969 to 1991. After the Barre was overthrown, Somalia descended into civil war, forcing Omar, her family, and others associated with the regime to leave.

Omar often speaks of her time as a refugee, but she never mentions her family’s position in pre-civil war Somalia. In fact, there’s been an institutional-level effort to completely remove all traces of this backstory from public view. Omar an the Regime wants you to think she’s just one of the Third World’s poor victims of oppression and war, when in fact, her family were the oppressors, as it were. She then comes to America and, despite thriving and prospering, holds a blood grievance against the country, blaming it for Somalia’s fate, even though U.S. military intervention occurred in response to the outbreak of civil war and was meant to stabilize the situation, not engage in regime change. It was a misguided mission, but to say it’s the reason why Somalia has become what it is today - a “Mad Max” anarchy - is blood libel.

Which makes what Omar says even more appalling. To say America is anything remotely close to what Somalia was when her family was part of the ruling class is dishonest to a malicious degree. Note that Omar has never had anything nice to say about America. What she thinks of it today is what she thought of it 10 years ago. There’s nothing new under the sun; her political platform has always been grievance-oriented and meant to appeal to racial minorities with an axe to grind against America.

Ilhan Omar is an even better example of how nonsensical the entire civic nationalist, proposition nation, “America as an idea” framework is. If people like Thomas Chatterton Williams and Tom Nichols, who were born in America, don’t feel at home, but Ilhan Omar is as American as George Washington just for moving here, then being an American is an entirely arbitrary distinction. Nations, are to an extent, arbitrary manifestations, but the less they’re rooted in something “real” - ancestry, culture, language, religion - the less real the nation itself is.

Omar certainly shares the view that being American is something real:

I am proud to be born a Muslim.
I am proud to be born in Somalia.
I am proud to have become an American.

None of you can change that no matter how much you rage tweet.

Drink some water and touch grass.

For someone so oppressed, with the boot of White supremacy on her neck, she sure can speak so loudly and obnoxiously, can’t she?

The thing about these Third World figures who claim to be American, in some cases more American than the Founders, is that they know, deep down inside, they’re not and never will be American. Hence, their constant anger and bitterness. If they can’t be American, then nobody can be, is their thinking. If Ilhan Omar, Mehdi Hasan, and Hasan Piker-type figures are as American as the Founders, nobody’s really American, are they?

Of course, we all know real Americans exist. I found some for Ilhan Omar:

You have Gary Gordon and Randy Shughart, who fought and died in Somalia, trying in vain to deliver that ugly land from self-destruction. Ilhan Omar and others like her will never be as American as they are and if they think so, they ought to drink some water, touch grass, and accept the fact they’re Muslims and Somalis, and that’s all they’ll ever be.

Then again, given that Omar is the direct descendant of oppressors, and the American Dream is to become the oppressor, maybe she’s right, and she is more American than Washington.

They Can’t Stop Being Dishonest

We’ll quickly hit three more topics before the big wrap-up.

First, Tom Nichols tells everyone how President Trump’s use of the military to restore order in America’s cities is so very, very bad:

I wonder what Nichols thinks of George Washington personally leading federal troops and state militias to put down the Whiskey Rebellion in the early 1790s? The problem with the intelligentsia class isn’t that they’re liars or low-knowledge. It’s that they know so much, yet they still manage to be both intellectually dishonest and logically inconsistent. It’s unlikely to be accidental.

Second,

Yuri Bezmenov

had a great retrospective on the Duke University lacrosse team rape hoax on their Substack. Whatever you think you know about the case, it’s much worse than you remember:

Duke Lacrosse is the case study of how the smear machine force feeds lies and The Narrative. The same playbook of digital, judicial, and physical attacks has been deployed many times since then. What should have never happened again has only gotten worse because no one was held accountable. If you are wondering how we got here, this is where it started. The only way to end this madness is to subvert the subverters and destroy the destroyers of our society, or else they will keep doing it until they rule over an ash heap. Today I will name and shame the demoralization agents in the media, academia, and judicial system who carried out this travesty.

The personalities at the center of the persecution campaign against the student athletes are guilty of crimes for which no appropriate punishment exists. If you want to see a real “hate” crime, explore the Duke lacrosse team scandal. That’s what the case was all about - hate. All of these personalities remain unapologetic to this day and have continued to prosper, in fact. It makes all of the Left’s criticisms of Trump hollow, doesn’t it?

I once wrote a column on the incident. In it, I said:

Still, many people the last 18 years have believed in the guilt of the Duke lacrosse players. None of this has to do with the veracity of Mangum’s story nor her credibility, of course, both of which collapsed in relatively short order. Instead, it has everything to do with the fact Mangum is Black and a woman, while the falsely accused were White, men, and “privileged” athletes and fraternity brothers.

If you tell most Americans that being a White man in America is unenviable, you’ll catch some strays. But it’s also true that our society guns after White men and, to a lesser extent, White women, like nobody else. If there’s an opportunity take one down, our society spares no expense, throws everything into the kitchen sink in doing so. They’ll even tell outright lies, riding them as far as they can carry them. The Duke lacrosse story was an opportunity of a lifetime and America went all-in.

Reading Yuri Bezmenov’s retrospect led me to conclude that the false accusations were the whole point. The process was the punishment; what they did to the student athletes, their families, and the rage of the Black community was the intended effect. I don’t know how the falsely accused are doing today, but it’s unimaginable that the incident didn’t cast a long shadow. Again, there are millions of Americans who still think they’re guilty. A Black woman and the Left, the most powerful political coalition in history, collaborated to destroy the lives of three young White men because they were White and male. They succeeded.

It probably explains why racial hoaxes, false rape accusations, and witch hunts are as common as they ever were. The target always manages to get destroyed and the perpetrators never really pay for their crimes. Why stop? It quite obviously works. Jussie Smollett, for example, who perpetrated quite possibly the most infamous racial hoax ever in 2019, is now on the comeback circuit.

He appears in the current season of the reality television show Special Forces, and it doesn’t appear to have gone well for him:

The former Empire actor then tells the camera, “I’m okay with taking orders. I just don’t like to be yelled at, all up in my face. I don’t like being disrespected.”

Well, being a liar doesn’t lend respect. But we’re also talking about a Black man.

Yes, I said it. I don’t think it’s any coincidence both Smollett and Crystal Mangum, the woman at the center of the Duke lacrosse rape hoax, were both Black. We shouldn’t judge people based on their race, but if Blacks insist on speaking as one and defending their own just for being Black, then the actions of one cannot be divorced from the group, either. That’s not how it works.

It also underscores why punishing lying is so important. What goes unpunished will continue. Jimmy Kimmel told a lie because, in the past, he got away with it. As he’s back on TV, he feels more emboldened than ever before, and it won’t be long before he’s back to lying. Clearly, it pays.

Finally:

Source

Certainly, this thrills leftists. However, this doesn’t mean the shooter wasn’t politically motivated. The likelihood that the assassination of a political figure didn’t involve a political motivation is so low as to be negligible, unless this was a personal beef, which it very clearly wasn’t.

Also, Timothy McVeigh, perpetrator of the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing, wasn’t a member of any extremist group or militia at the time of the bombing. That didn’t stop the media from drawing the connection, and the federal government stepped up its efforts to tighten the noose around the necks of right-wing extremist groups and militias. Now that the shooter in the Kirk assassination is a leftist, the media is declining to indict leftist extremism as a whole. If that doesn’t tell you the partisan allegiance of the media, nothing will.

Anyway, time to knock it off. What are your thoughts on anything discussed? I apologize if this essay seems a bit unfocused. Initially, I’d not intended for this column to be an edition of “Max’s Musings,” but that’s what it ended up being. I hope you enjoy these one-a-week-or-so forays into tangential issues. I’ve always been a “big picture” guy. This is my way of feeding you all the big picture.

Talk it out in the comments section.

Max Remington writes about armed conflict and prepping. Follow him on Twitter at @AgentMax90.

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