#Peachy Keenan

[justinspoliticalcorner]

Gaby Del Valle at Politico Magazine:

The threat, we are told here this weekend, is existential, biological, epoch-defining. Economies will fail, civilizations will fall, and it will all happen because people aren’t having enough babies.

“The entire global financial system, the value of your money, and every asset you might buy with money is defined by leverage, which means its value depends on growth,” Kevin Dolan, a 37-year-old father of six from Virginia, tells the crowd that has gathered to hear him speak. “Every country in the developed world and most countries in the developing world face long-term population decline at a level that makes growth impossible to maintain,” Dolan says, “which means we are sitting on the bubble of all bubbles.” Despite this grim prognosis, the mood is optimistic. It’s early December, a few weeks before Christmas, and the hundred-odd people who have flocked to Austin for the first Natal Conference are here to come up with solutions. Though relatively small, as conferences go, NatalCon has attracted attendees who are almost intensely dedicated to the cause of raising the U.S. birth rate. The broader natalist movement has been gaining momentum lately in conservative circles — where anxieties over falling birth rates have converged with fears of rising immigration — and counts Elon Musk, who has nearly a dozen children, and Hungarian prime minister Viktor Orbán among its proponents. Natalism is often about more than raising birth rates, though that is certainly one of its aims; for many in the room, the ultimate goal is a total social overhaul, a culture in which child-rearing is paramount.

NatalCon’s emphasis on childbirth notwithstanding, there are very few women in the cavernous conference room of the LINE Hotel. The mostly male audience includes people of all ages, many of whom are childless themselves. Some of the women in attendance, however, have come to Austin with their children in tow — a visual representation of the desired outcome of this weekend. As if to emphasize the reason we’re all gathered here today, a baby babbles in the background while Dolan delivers his opening remarks.

Broadly speaking, the people who have paid as much as $1,000 to attend the conference are members of the New Right, a conglomeration of people in the populist wing of the conservative movement who believe we need seismic changes to the way we live now — and who often see the past as the best model for the future they’d like to build. Their ideology, such as it exists, is far from cohesive, and factions of the New Right are frequently in disagreement. But this weekend, these roughly aligned groups, from the libertarian-adjacent tech types to the Heritage Foundation staffers, along with some who likely have no connection with traditionally conservative or far-right causes at all, have found a unifying cause in natalism. At first glance, this conference might look like something new: A case for having kids that is rooted in a critique of the market-driven forces that shape our lives and the shifts that have made our culture less family-oriented. As Dolan later tells me in an email, declining birth rates are primarily the fault of “default middle-class ‘life path’ offered by our educational system and corporate employers,” which Dolan says is “in obvious competition with starting a family.” These systems, he believes, have created a consumer-driven, hedonistic society that requires its members to be slavishly devoted to their office jobs, often at the expense of starting a family.

But over the course of the conference, the seemingly novel arguments for having children fade and give way to a different set of concerns. Throughout the day, speakers and participants hint at the other aspects of modern life that worried them about future generations in the U.S. and other parts of the West: divorce, gender integration, “wokeness,” declining genetic “quality.” Many of the speakers and attendees see natalism as a way of reversing these changes. As the speakers chart their roadmaps for raising birth rates, it becomes evident that for the most dedicated of them, the mission is to build an army of like-minded people, starting with their own children, who will reject a whole host of changes wrought by liberal democracy and who, perhaps one day, will amount to a population large enough to effect more lasting change. This conference suggests there’s a simple way around the problem of majority rule: breeding a new majority — one that looks and sounds just like them.

In recent years, various factions of the old and the new right have coalesced around the idea that babies might be the cure for everything that’s wrong with society, in the United States and other parts of the developed West. It’s not a new argument. Natalists made similar claims in the early 20th century, when urbanization drove birth rates down and European immigration kept the U.S. population afloat. Then, too, people attributed the drop in fertility rates to endemic selfishness among young people.

Throughout it all, some religious conservative cultures have continued to see raising large broods as a divine mandate. White supremacists, meanwhile, have framed their project as a way of ensuring “a future for white children,” as declared by David Lane, a founding member of the white nationalist group The Order. More recently, natalist thinking has emerged among tech types interested in funding and using experimental reproductive technologies, and conservatives concerned about falling fertility rates and what they might mean for the future labor force of the United States and elsewhere in the developed world. The conservative think tanks the Center for Renewing America and the Heritage Foundation — the latter of which was represented at NatalCon — have proposed policies for a potential second Trump administration that would promote having children and raising them in nuclear families, including limiting access to contraceptives, banning no-fault divorce and ending policies that subsidize “single-motherhood.”

[...]

The speakers who lay out this bleak state of affairs are a motley crew of the extremely online right, many of whom go by their X (the website formerly called Twitter) handles rather than their names. Via Zoom, anonymous Twitter user Raw Egg Nationalist warns us about endocrine disruptors in everything from perfume to bottled water. Ben Braddock, an editor at the conservative magazine IM-1776, claims that antidepressants and birth control pills have permanent, detrimental effects on women’s fertility. Together, the speakers paint a dire picture of a society that has lost its way, abandoning fundamental biological truths and dooming itself to annihilation in the process. The solution, of course, is to have more babies. Peachy Keenan, a pseudonymous writer affiliated with the conservative Claremont Institute, urges attendees to “seize the means of reproduction” — as in, to out-breed liberals, who are already hobbling their movement by choosing to have just a couple children, or none at all. “We can use their visceral hatred of big families to our advantage,” Keenan says. “The other side is not reproducing; the anti-natalists are sterilizing themselves.”

Here lies the project, spelled out in detail: The people who disagree have bloodlines that are slowly going to die out. To speed up that process — to have this particular strain of conservative natalist ideology become dominant quickly in the United States — everyone in this room has to have more kids, and fast. But it’s only when the speakers get to who should have babies and how they should raise them that their deeper concerns, and the larger anxieties behind this conference, become clear. The goal, as put by Indian Bronson, the pseudonymous co-founder of the elite matchmaking service Keeper, is “more, better people.” But the speakers lack consensus on the meaning of the word “better,” as they do on the subject of using technology to encourage the best and brightest among us to breed.

Keenan, who has previously celebrated her sense that it is now acceptable to say “white genocide is real,” says better means conservative. Pat Fagan, the director of the Marriage and Religion Institute at the Catholic University of America, says good children are the product of stable, two-parent Christian households, away from the corrupting influences of public school and sex ed. (Christian couples, he adds, have “the best, most orgasmic sex,” citing no research or surveys to support this.) To protect these households, we must abolish no-fault divorce, declares Brit Benjamin, a lawyer with waist-length curly red hair. (Until relatively recently, Benjamin was married to Patri Friedman — grandson of economist Milton Friedman — the founder of the Seasteading Institute, a Peter Thiel-backed effort to build new libertarian enclaves at sea.) And to ensure that these children grow up to be adults who understand their proper place in both the family and the larger social order, we need to oust women from the workforce and reinstitute male-only spaces “where women are disadvantaged as a result,” shampoo magnate and aspiring warlord Charles Haywood says, prompting cheers from the men in the audience.

The far-right natalist movement's goals are to cause a population explosion of people who think like them.

[dontmeantobepoliticalbut]

The threat, we are told here this weekend, is existential, biological, epoch-defining. Economies will fail, civilizations will fall, and it will all happen because people aren’t having enough babies.

“The entire global financial system, the value of your money, and every asset you might buy with money is defined by leverage, which means its value depends on growth,” Kevin Dolan, a 37-year-old father of six from Virginia, tells the crowd that has gathered to hear him speak. “Every country in the developed world and most countries in the developing world face long-term population decline at a level that makes growth impossible to maintain,” Dolan says, “which means we are sitting on the bubble of all bubbles.”

Despite this grim prognosis, the mood is optimistic. It’s early December, a few weeks before Christmas, and the hundred-odd people who have flocked to Austin for the first Natal Conference are here to come up with solutions. Though relatively small, as conferences go, NatalCon has attracted attendees who are almost intensely dedicated to the cause of raising the U.S. birth rate. The broader natalist movement has been gaining momentum lately in conservative circles — where anxieties over falling birth rates have converged with fears of rising immigration — and counts Elon Musk, who has nearly a dozen children, and Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán among its proponents. Natalism is often about more than raising birth rates, though that is certainly one of its aims; for many in the room, the ultimate goal is a total social overhaul, a culture in which child-rearing is paramount.

NatalCon’s emphasis on childbirth notwithstanding, there are very few women in the cavernous conference room of the LINE Hotel. The mostly male audience includes people of all ages, many of whom are childless themselves. Some of the women in attendance, however, have come to Austin with their children in tow — a visual representation of the desired outcome of this weekend. As if to emphasize the reason we’re all gathered here today, a baby babbles in the background while Dolan delivers his opening remarks.

Broadly speaking, the people who have paid as much as $1,000 to attend the conference are members of the New Right, a conglomeration of people in the populist wing of the conservative movement who believe we need seismic changes to the way we live now — and who often see the past as the best model for the future they’d like to build. Their ideology, such as it exists, is far from cohesive, and factions of the New Right are frequently in disagreement. But this weekend, these roughly aligned groups, from the libertarian-adjacent tech types to the Heritage Foundation staffers, along with some who likely have no connection with traditionally conservative or far-right causes at all, have found a unifying cause in natalism.

At first glance, this conference might look like something new: A case for having kids that is rooted in a critique of the market-driven forces that shape our lives and the shifts that have made our culture less family-oriented. As Dolan later tells me in an email, declining birth rates are primarily the fault of “default middle-class ‘life path’ offered by our educational system and corporate employers,” which Dolan says is “in obvious competition with starting a family.” These systems, he believes, have created a consumer-driven, hedonistic society that requires its members to be slavishly devoted to their office jobs, often at the expense of starting a family.

But over the course of the conference, the seemingly novel arguments for having children fade and give way to a different set of concerns. Throughout the day, speakers and participants hint at the other aspects of modern life that worried them about future generations in the U.S. and other parts of the West: divorce, gender integration, “wokeness,” declining genetic “quality.”

Many of the speakers and attendees see natalism as a way of reversing these changes. As the speakers chart their roadmaps for raising birth rates, it becomes evident that for the most dedicated of them, the mission is to build an army of like-minded people, starting with their own children, who will reject a whole host of changes wrought by liberal democracy and who, perhaps one day, will amount to a population large enough to effect more lasting change.

This conference suggests there’s a simple way around the problem of majority rule: breeding a new majority — one that looks and sounds just like them.

In recent years, various factions of the old and the new right have coalesced around the idea that babies might be the cure for everything that’s wrong with society, in the United States and other parts of the developed West.

It’s not a new argument. Natalists made similar claims in the early 20th century, when urbanization drove birth rates down and European immigration kept the U.S. population afloat. Then, too, people attributed the drop in fertility rates to endemic selfishness among young people.

Throughout it all, some religious conservative cultures have continued to see raising large broods as a divine mandate. White supremacists, meanwhile, have framed their project as a way of ensuring “a future for white children,” as declared by David Lane, a founding member of the white nationalist group The Order.

More recently, natalist thinking has emerged among tech types interested in funding and using experimental reproductive technologies, and conservatives concerned about falling fertility rates and what they might mean for the future labor force of the United States and elsewhere in the developed world. The conservative think tanks the Center for Renewing America and the Heritage Foundation — the latter of which was represented at NatalCon — have proposed policies for a potential second Trump administration that would promote having children and raising them in nuclear families, including limiting access to contraceptives, banning no-fault divorce and ending policies that subsidize “single-motherhood.”

Though Dolan opens the conference by talking about the potential economic consequences of a global birth dearth, he and the other NatalCon speakers aren’t primarily concerned with the utilitarian arguments for raising birth rates. “I’m not trying to have grandkids so they can fund Medicare,” Dolan says. “We’re here because we agree that people are beautiful, that life is beautiful, and that it should go on.”

Dolan, a conservative Mormon and a former Booz Allen Hamilton data scientist, resigned from his job in 2021 after a group of self-proclaimed anti-fascist Mormon activists exposed his anonymous Twitter account, which tied him to the far-right Deseret Nationalist movement. Having lost his livelihood and security clearance, Dolan started the EXIT Group, a “fraternity of like-minded men” who are preparing for the supposed collapse of American society — and who, as of recently, have taken on the decline in birth rates as their pet cause.

On his podcast, Dolan says he was first alerted to the problem of demographic collapse by a member of the EXIT Group, which claims to have 171 members. Dolan came up with the idea for NatalCon after watching “The End of Men,” Tucker Carlson’s documentary about “collapsing testosterone levels” in the West. The global drop in sperm concentrations has indeed puzzled scientists for decades and is believed to be one of the factors that has contributed to the global downturn in birth rates. But NatalCon’s organizers and attendees seem more interested in combating social institutions — like corporate employment and the educational system set up to support it — that, in Dolan’s words, have suppressed fertility by being “hostile to life.”

Most of the first day of the conference is spent defining the problem. In a nutshell: Sperm counts are historically low. Our bodies are full of microplastics. Public schools are indoctrinating children against the good Christian values with which they were raised. Dating apps have gamified romance, tricking lonely singles into believing that a better prospect is always around the corner. Women have been convinced that they can have it all — kids and a career and endless vacations and so much more — only to end up unhappy, infertile and alone.

The speakers who lay out this bleak state of affairs are a motley crew of the extremely online right, many of whom go by their X (the website formerly called Twitter) handles rather than their names. Via Zoom, anonymous Twitter user Raw Egg Nationalist warns us about endocrine disruptors in everything from perfume to bottled water. Ben Braddock, an editor at the conservative magazine IM-1776, claims that antidepressants and birth control pills have permanent, detrimental effects on women’s fertility. Together, the speakers paint a dire picture of a society that has lost its way, abandoning fundamental biological truths and dooming itself to annihilation in the process.

The solution, of course, is to have more babies. Peachy Keenan, a pseudonymous writer affiliated with the conservative Claremont Institute, urges attendees to “seize the means of reproduction” — as in, to out-breed liberals, who are already hobbling their movement by choosing to have just a couple children, or none at all. “We can use their visceral hatred of big families to our advantage,” Keenan says. “The other side is not reproducing; the anti-natalists are sterilizing themselves.”

Here lies the project, spelled out in detail: The people who disagree have bloodlines that are slowly going to die out. To speed up that process — to have this particular strain of conservative natalist ideology become dominant quickly in the United States — everyone in this room has to have more kids, and fast.

But it’s only when the speakers get to who should have babies and how they should raise them that their deeper concerns, and the larger anxieties behind this conference, become clear.

The goal, as put by Indian Bronson, the pseudonymous co-founder of the elite matchmaking service Keeper, is “more, better people.”

But the speakers lack consensus on the meaning of the word “better,” as they do on the subject of using technology to encourage the best and brightest among us to breed.

Keenan, who has previously celebrated her sense that it is now acceptable to say “white genocide is real,” says better means conservative. Pat Fagan, the director of the Marriage and Religion Institute at the Catholic University of America, says good children are the product of stable, two-parent Christian households, away from the corrupting influences of public school and sex ed. (Christian couples, he adds, have “the best, most orgasmic sex,” citing no research or surveys to support this.) To protect these households, we must abolish no-fault divorce, declares Brit Benjamin, a lawyer with waist-length curly red hair. (Until relatively recently, Benjamin was married to Patri Friedman — grandson of economist Milton Friedman — the founder of the Seasteading Institute, a Peter Thiel-backed effort to build new libertarian enclaves at sea.) And to ensure that these children grow up to be adults who understand their proper place in both the family and the larger social order, we need to oust women from the workforce and reinstitute male-only spaces “where women are disadvantaged as a result,” shampoo magnate and aspiring warlord Charles Haywood says, prompting cheers from the men in the audience.

Haywood’s final words to the audience elicit raucous applause: “The Civil Rights Act of 1964 and its progeny are probably the single most destructive set of laws in American history, and all should be wiped forever,” he says before getting off stage. (A few women told me afterward they and others disagreed with Haywood.)

Notably, most of the speakers do not make a case for more immigration to counter the trend of declining birth rates. Immigrants can’t solve our population problem, Dolan says, because they’ll eventually realize they were brought here to pay into Social Security for old white people. (On X, Dolan has used the word “replacement” to refer to immigration.)

Some at the conference are interested in the genetics of the children they believe everyone should be having. Evolutionary biologist Diana Fleischman and writer Jonathan Anomaly argue that genetics are destiny. (“I shouldn’t say Good quality children,” Fleischman says after speaking at length about how people with mental illness are statistically likely to marry other mentally ill people and pass those genes along to their children, suggesting some children are indeed biologically better than others.)

Razib Khan — a geneticist and science blogger who in 2015 was hired and quickly fired by the New York Times opinion section after Gawker reported on his ties to racist far-right publications — illustrates the problem of current demographic trends in the West compared to other regions by pointing to Ethiopia, which had nearly as many births in 2020 as the entire European continent. “This is the future we’re already in,” says Khan, who is Bangladeshi-American. “Many of you have young children. … They will live to see this world.”

Over and over throughout the conference, anxieties over the drop in birth rates — the issue that brought the speakers and audience together — gave way to fears that certain populations were out-breeding their betters. Though few speakers explicitly mentioned race, the conference provided an opportunity for those with genuine concerns about population decline to join forces with, and perhaps be influenced by, those who espouse racist or regressive views. During the second day of the conference — a closed-door, phone-off event dedicated to brainstorming ways to reverse the population crisis — VIP ticket holders mingled with Jared Taylor, the publisher of the white supremacist magazine American Renaissance, according to multiple people in attendance who wanted to remain anonymous because having their name linked to the conference would jeopardize their work.

The following day, I talk with Malcolm and Simone Collins, the husband-and-wife founder of Pronatalist.org who went viral in 2023 after the Telegraph dubbed them the “elite couple breeding to save mankind.” They are entrepreneurs and investors and previously served as co-CEOs of a travel agency company; Simone is also currently running for a seat in the Pennsylvania House of Representatives.

The Collinses tell me they want to promote a plurality of cultures and protect everyone’s right to be “weird.” Malcolm says they want to make their movement a “big tent” and were initially worried about what kinds of people the conference would attract. “Are they going to be like, ‘[No] transgender people reading kids books?’ Are they going to be racist nut jobs? It’s a real concern,” he says.

The Collinses — parents of four children — present themselves as rationalists, techies trying to solve the looming depopulation crisis by any means necessary. (Simone was pregnant with the fourth child during the conference. That baby, Industry Americus Collins, was born in April.) With their third and fourth children, the Collinses used a preimplantation genetic test that allowed them to select an embryo with optimum genetic makeup.

But they, too, are far more interested in the cultural implications of declining fertility rates than their fascination with reproductive technologies might lead you to believe. The couple is committed to fighting the “urban monoculture” that they claim has tricked a generation of young Americans into spending their most fertile years chasing professional achievements and personal fulfillment at the expense of building a family.

“The monoculture is not an evil thing,” Malcolm says over panang curry and pineapple fried rice at a Thai restaurant the day after the conference’s VIP event, but, he continues, it’s built on false promises. “It promises people, if you join us, you can do whatever makes you happy, so long as it doesn’t interfere with other people’s quality of life, and you can be affirmed for whoever you want to be.” In reality, though, they become casualties of an elitist scam.

The urban monoculture, Malcolm explains, breeds childlessness and therefore must poach other people’s children to survive. It lures them out of small towns and into large cities, encourages them to eschew their religious upbringings in favor of hedonistic secularism, and then leaves them to die alone.

Malcolm compares the “urban monoculture” to the boarding schools the Canadian government forced Native children into, in which indigenous children were forcibly assimilated into white culture. (The U.S. government had similar boarding schools.) “It doesn’t matter if you’re trying to convert them to a culture that’s closer to mine — what you’re doing is wrong,” he says. When I tell him the boarding schools were a state program, not a voluntary form of acculturation, Malcolm becomes animated. “This is a state project! What’s going on in the public schools is a state project! The mechanisms that the urban monoculture uses to de-convert people are primarily a state funded educational system,” he says. (In a subsequent email, he describes the urban monoculture as “one of the descendants of European imperialism.”) The most important and effective way to fight the monoculture, Malcolm later tells me via email, is building “school systems not dedicated to cultural genocide.”

The goal, though, the Collinses tell me, is not to convert the childless, or even to counteract the phenomena that contribute to the “unplanned childlessness” that has become endemic among millennials: it’s to encourage people with a lot of children to have even more. “Some people matter less than other people in getting fertility rates up,” Malcolm says. “Helping somebody who has four kids but wants eight is more important than helping someone who has none but wants one.”

Ultimately, this is what unites the Collinses with the more “trad” wings of the natalist movement, from the nativists to the Christian nationalists: pushing back on social and cultural changes they see as imposed on them by outside forces. To do that, these conference attendees have coalesced around a solution that won’t require them to persuade skeptics to join their cause. If everything goes as planned, the competition will go extinct on their own. All the natalists have to do is have enough kids so that, in a generation or two, they’ll be the ones who inherit the earth.

[arcticdementor]

(link)

[grits-galraisedinthesouth]

Meghan Markle Waves Goodbye To Her Rom-Com Dreams

We do? Rom-coms? I mean, yeah, it would be wonderful to have good movies again, of any genre. But with Meghan in charge, imagine the scripts she would commission. “When Harry Met Meghan, the Oppressed and Suicidal Actress.” “How to Lose a Prince in 10 Days.”  “10 Things I Hate About Kate.” “The Meghan Markle Story, Starring Meghan Markle.” 

That last one’s more of a tragicomedy than a rom-com, sorry. But I understand why she wants to make Julia Roberts-style romantic comedies. After all, just a few years ago, she was lurking on Hollywood Boulevard auditioning for her big break when a prince in an Aston Martin cruised by and whisked her away to his palace. She has lived a real-life Cinderella story. Only this one may not have quite the same ending.

Petty Woman: Meghan Markle Waves Goodbye To Her Rom-Com Dreams

BY: PEACHY KEENAN JULY 03, 2023

The latest chapter in the Meghan character arc is about the content she and hapless Harry are trying to pitch to their paymasters in Beverly Hills.

Not all fairy tales have happy endings, and for Princess Meghan the clock just chimed midnight and the spell has been broken. The coach is turning back into a pumpkin as we speak.

As a longtime Royal Family watcher, I admit to feeling shameless glee as I read the recent stories of Meghan and Harry striking out in Hollywood. It’s always fun to watch dire low-stakes predictions come true. Like many of you, I was appalled at the disrespect Meghan showed to her in-laws. Instead of respecting the Queen, Meghan, incredibly, seemed to be trying to compete with the Queen. She thought she was playing a game of “Survivor,” but she was the only one on the island who didn’t know how to make a fire.

A Long Way Down for the Duchess

For those not keeping track, Meghan and her nitwit ginger sidekick have been dropped by Spotify, reportedly losing half of the $50 million promised. She got $25 million for a measly 12 hours of a middling podcast featuring the richest and most famous women in the world complaining about how hard their lives are. Netflix is reportedly about to cut their $100 million deal short. They finished milking them dry of low-hanging tabloid family gossip, and just found out they have no Act 2.

Nothing is working out the way she dreamed it would. Meghan’s imagined billionaire lifestyle is turning into a mirage. Why? Because for some hilarious reason, the creative bigwigs in Hollywood believed Meghan when she promised that her and Harry would be able to provide oodles of monetizable entertainment content.  

I mean, yes, I am quite entertained by the spectacle, but schadenfreude is tough to monetize.

Meghan In Her Flop Era

Meghan’s predicament tells you everything about the people who run Hollywood. Imagine thinking that these two “f*cking grifters,” in the words of the Spotify exec who had to say no to Harry’s harebrained podcast ideas, would be a rich source of high-quality entertainment! 

I can’t help wondering how a D-list golddigger convinced these studio heads that her and the ginger mouth breather would somehow provide $150 million worth of streaming content. It turns out that they’re only good at providing piles of steaming content, if you know what I mean.

I suppose it’s true, as movie producer Jackie Trehorn tells the Dude in “The Big Lebowski,” standards have fallen in entertainment. Since the Sussexes first ditched their careers as legit royalty and started groping for ephemeral Hollywood royalty, my fellow Meghan hobbyists and I have enjoyed a goldmine of unintentional comedy. She’s the Benny Hill of pampered Montecito trophy wives, always running downhill chased by imaginary paparazzi. 

She’s been a source of delight since the early days when she was using a Sharpie to write inspirational messages on bananas to street prostitutes in England. “You are brave.” “You are loved.” Then the cringe-worthy trek through the thousand micro-aggressions she endured at the hands of her sister-in-law Catherine. Did she not realize everyone saw it for what it was: pure jealousy?

But now we come to the era of Meghan Markle, entertainment content creator. The latest chapter in the Meghan character arc is about the content she and hapless Harry are trying to pitch to their paymasters in Beverly Hills. It was clear that her long slide back into C-list obscurity had begun when I read an incredible tidbit in the trades earlier this year. Meghan was talking about her new content ideas she was working on for her “media production company.” See, it’s already funny! 

Meghan gushed to a Variety reporter: “For scripted, we want to think about how we can evolve from that same space and do something fun! It doesn’t always have to be so serious. Like a good rom-com. Don’t we miss them? I miss them so much. I’ve probably watched ‘When Harry Met Sally’ a million times. And all the Julia Roberts rom-coms. We need to see those again.”

We do? Rom-coms? I mean, yeah, it would be wonderful to have good movies again, of any genre. But with Meghan in charge, imagine the scripts she would commission. “When Harry Met Meghan, the Oppressed and Suicidal Actress.” “How to Lose a Prince in 10 Days.”  “10 Things I Hate About Kate.” “The Meghan Markle Story, Starring Meghan Markle.” 

That last one’s more of a tragicomedy than a rom-com, sorry. But I understand why she wants to make Julia Roberts-style romantic comedies. After all, just a few years ago, she was lurking on Hollywood Boulevard auditioning for her big break when a prince in an Aston Martin cruised by and whisked her away to his palace. She has lived a real-life Cinderella story. Only this one may not have quite the same ending.

As Jeremy Zimmer, the CEO of United Talent Agency, one of the largest Hollywood talent agencies dished during Cannes to every reporter within earshot: “It turns out that Meghan Markle wasn’t a great audio talent, or necessarily has some kind of talent. And you know, just because you’re famous doesn’t mean you’re good at something.” 

Ouch. I wonder if Jeremy Zimmer has seen the latest desperate pitch Meghan made to Netflix; a girlboss rom-com called “Bad Manners” starring … Miss Havisham. The show is “a prequel to Charles Dickens’s 1861 novel Great Expectations which will focus on the character Miss Havisham… [the show] aims to shine a feminist light on the spinster, showing her as a ‘strong woman living in a patriarchal society.’”

Who says comedy is dead? Sign me up for this one!

The article ends with the ominous “it is unclear whether the show will get a green light from Netflix.” 

Meghan is learning, finally, the hardest lesson of all: real royalty may be hereditary, but Hollywood royalty has to be earned. Popularity matters. Likeability, in the end, is the only currency that matters if you wear no crown.

Peachy Keenan is a senior contributor to The Federalist and a contributing editor and regular essayist for The American Mind, a publication of The Claremont Institute. She is the author of "Domestic Extremist: A Practical Guide to Winning the Culture War" (coming June 6 from Regnery). She also writes at peachykeenan.substack.com, and you can always find her on Twitter.

[justforbooks]

What is Lucky Girl Syndrome?

“I just always expect great things to happen to me, and so, they do.” With those words (and more) describing her impossibly charmed life, a 22-year-old TikTok influencer ushered in the “Lucky Girl Syndrome,” a viral trend wherein people (mainly girls and women it would seem) are encouraged to accept that just believing all good things will come to them can make it so. It’s as much positive psychology as it is toxic positivity, depending on who is being asked. Here’s everything you need to know about Gen Z’s obsession with Lucky Girl Syndrome.

Okay, so what, exactly, is Lucky Girl Syndrome?

It’s basically the belief that “affirmative mantras and a positive mindset in life will bend everyday events in your favour,” according to the Washington Post. Its “founder,” New York-based Laura Galebe, gets the “most insane opportunities” thrown at her from, like, everywhere, she explains in her viral clip. “Nothing doesn’t ever go my way.” Thoughts like, “nothing ever works for me,” never enter her mind-set. Lucky Girl Syndrome started trending soon after New Year’s Day. On TikTok, people are crediting the LGS mantra for helping them score raises, amazing apartments, cheap flights. Videos with the #LuckyGirlSyndrome hashtag, the Washington Post reported, “have been watched a collective 149.6 million times.”

Is it new?

Not really. It’s more a Gen Z spin on old concepts like positive manifestations, Vox reports, meaning “the practice of repeatedly writing or saying declarative statements in the hopes that they will soon become true.” TikTok has an uncanny knack of making “even the most stale, ancient ideas seem suddenly urgent using one simple trick: give it a new name,” Vox’s Rebecca Jennings wrote.

Essentially, manifesting hinges on the belief “that we can change and shape our lives just by the way we think,” according to the Newport Institute, a mental health treatment centre for young adults that has produced an FAQ on Lucky Girl Syndrome. Also known as the law of attraction, manifesting “gives us the sense that we can create order in a world that feels chaotic and unpredictable.”

That sounds peachy. Couldn’t we all use more positivity?

Well, yes, studies have found that positive thinking can be a salve for anxiety. It may help bolster the immune system and lower blood pressure. It can make people feel more confident and more resilient.

“There’s nothing against wishing,” said Gabriele Oettingen, a professor of psychology at New York University and author of, Rethinking Positive Thinking: Inside the New Science of Motivation. “Our wishes are an expression of our needs, of what we don’t have,” she said. Her own research has shown that “optimistic expectations” help motivate people to work toward achieving goals, and not just click their heels three times.

Positive manifestation, Alyx Gorman wrote in The Guardian, shares some features of positive cognitive behavioral therapy, which focuses on enhancing that which helps people flourish. The difference is, cognitive behavioral therapy is anchored in science.

Still, the notion that if you just wish for something hard enough it will “manifest” itself is a seductive one. It alleviates people of actually having to work at achieving goals.

“As much as we might like to tell ourselves otherwise, we can’t transform our lives, luck and circumstances simply by telling ourselves so really, really hard that we can,” writes Roisin Lanigan in Vice.

“There are going to be, unfortunately, some situations in life that we are not able to manifest and think our way out of,” psychologist Carolyne Keenan told the BBC. “I would be concerned about people being in a situation where maybe that’s not going to be an effective strategy.”

What is it that people don’t like about this?

Lucky Girl Syndrome conveniently glosses over barriers like poverty, and systemic racism and inequalities. An argument could also be made that believing in luck “is an entitled luxury for the privileged,” according to Newport’s national advisor of healthy device management, Don Grant.

Indeed, Lucky Girl has been called “icky,” the “smuggest” TikTok trend yet and “the peak of the internet’s delusional era.” A defiant Galebe challenges her followers to, go ahead, “Try being delusional for a month and tell me if your life doesn’t change.”

Thinking positive thoughts and pushing away self-limiting ones is generally a good thing. Humans have an inherent negativity bias. “Thousands of years ago, our brains were constantly scanning the horizon for threats,” Louisa Jewell, author of Wire Your Brain for Confidence, told Forbes.

“Whether conscious or subconscious, (people’s thoughts and beliefs) strongly affect what we want and whether we succeed in getting it,” Stanford psychologist Carol Dweck told the magazine.

But ignoring reality isn’t helpful for mental well-being. “Trying to manifest change — and failing — can make people feel worse,” according to the Newport Institute.

“(It) triggers disappointment for some whilst others completely lose their confidence,” Lucy Baker, a U.K.-based confidence coach, told the New York Post. Believing one is the “luckiest person on planet Earth and luckier than any other living being can be dangerous.”

Daily inspiration. Discover more photos at http://justforbooks.tumblr.com

[alaturkanews]

How can Americans win the culture war?

Online culture warrior Peachy Keenan reveals her identity on 'Fox News Tonight.' Subscribe to Fox News! https://bit.ly/2vBUvAS Watch more Fox News Video: http://video.foxnews.com Watch Fox News Channel Live: http://www.foxnewsgo.com/ FOX News Channel (FNC) is a 24-hour all-encompassing news service delivering breaking news as well as political and business news. The number one network in cable,…

[bllsbailey]

Shocking News: Matt Walsh Uncovers Another Woke Google Executive Behind Gemini AI

It hasn't been a great week for Google. Their new Gemini AI application has debuted like a lead balloon after hundreds of examples came to light about how the application is incapable of generating images of white men, even regarding historical figures, like Popes (all of whom throughout history, incidentally, have been white men).

Then, it was revealed that the director of Gemini, Jack Krawczyk, has a history of vile, racist remarks against white people on Twitter and is so captured by woke, leftist ideology that he told the world that he cried when he voted for Joe Biden and Kamala Harris.

So, it was probably inevitable that we would find many more examples of how wokeness has completely overtaken employees at Google, particularly in their executive ranks. We just didn't think it would happen quite so quickly. 

But just one day after Krawczyk's Twitter history was exposed, Daily Wire host Matt Walsh discovered video of another executive at Google whose only purpose in life seems to be to infect the entire company -- and its AI endeavors -- with 1984-style DEI initiatives and thinking.

Walsh posted the following thread to Twitter in one of those 'shocking but not at all shocking' moments that have become all too common in recent years. 

That is an insane 80 seconds of speech right there. Treating all of your employees equally is a bad thing, according to Gennai, and we should never do that.

(Also, it is worth noting that not a single person who has ever uttered the word 'Latinx' has done so without sounding like a completely racist idiot. Maybe because it's almost exclusively white, leftist women who have ever said that word, not ever an actual Latino individual.)

It should also be noted that Gennai is the Founder and Director of the Responsible Innovation Group at Google. In other words, her useless position never existed before she created it. And Google, let alone humanity at large, would be much better off if it still didn't exist today.

Walsh continues his thread: 

The only mistake here is that Gennai has an executive and influential position at a powerful company like Google.

But from Gennai's perspective, the mistake Gemini made is not that it can't depict white people, it's that Gemini made it so obvious to the entire world that it had been programmed to not depict white people.

Walsh is spot on here. Everything Gennai utters in this clip is utterly meaningless, woke gobbledygook. 

5/ Senior Google employees like Gennai know they have a lot of power. Shortly before the 2020 election, Gennai was caught on hidden camera implying that Google will do what it can to prevent Donald Trump from winning again. https://t.co/Uho3gER3Zz— Matt Walsh (@MattWalshBlog) February 22, 2024

But Google told us all they never did that. That's weird. 

Once again, we are shocked. SHOCKED. Well ... not that shocked. 

Do not trust Google? Well, we're WAY ahead of you on that one, Matt Walsh. 

But he's 100 percent correct. Google keeps showing everyone how they are not to be trusted. Gemini is just the latest example. 

We should probably believe them. 

Elon Musk has been having a FIELD DAY all week trolling and mocking Google. Of course, he does have a business reason to do that too, but we're going to give him the benefit of the doubt and also assume he's doing it because he sees what Google is doing as the evil that it is. 

No, silly. Gennai doesn't want to hold HERSELF accountable. Just you. That's how DEI works.

Yep. What he said. 

Nightmare fuel is exactly correct. And DEI will be our downfall if it is not ended. Stomped out wherever it exists, burned, buried and the earth above it salted over.

But we think this tweet from Peachy Keenan -- one of the first accounts on X that exposed the racism programmed into Gemini AI -- sums up Gennai and Google perfectly: 

Leftists are inherently miserable people. DEI sums up their misery in a nice, ideological package. 

And we all know that misery loves company, which is why they want to inflict their mind virus on everyone else. 

That's something we should probably keep in mind before using any of Google's products in the future. 

***

Editor's Note: Do you enjoy Twitchy's conservative reporting taking on the radical left and woke media? Support our work so that we can continue to bring you the truth.  Join Twitchy VIP and use the promo code SAVEAMERICA to get 40% off your VIP membership!

[lifejustgotawkward]

365 Day Movie Challenge (2019) - #166: The Belle of New York (1952) - dir. Charles Walters

Fred Astaire reteamed with Easter Parade/The Barkleys of Broadway director Charles Walters and Three Little Words costar Vera-Ellen for the musical The Belle of New York, a pleasant trifle that gets by on a minimum of plot and a maximum of artistic ability. In this story set circa 1900, Astaire is Charlie Hill, a perpetual playboy whose roving eye is stilled when he meets mission house advocate Angela Bonfils (Vera-Ellen). Angela disapproves of Charlie’s lavish, fun-loving way of life, but of course she falls under his spell and everything is peachy... at least until Charlie realizes that she is employed by his aunt, the formidable Mrs. Phineas Hill (Marjorie Main), who staunchly opposes the lovebirds’ relationship. The cast is rounded out by MGM stalwarts Keenan Wynn, Alice Pearce (always a nasally-voiced treat), Clinton Sundberg and Gale Robbins. Although the songs are unfortunately forgettable for the most part, Fred Astaire and Vera-Ellen put their feet to fine use and Astaire has two of his most inspired solos in “Seeing’s Believing” and “I Wanna Be a Dancin’ Man.”

[funnythingshere0-blog]

Best fantasy football team names 2018

New Post has been published on https://funnythingshere.xyz/best-fantasy-football-team-names-2018/

Best fantasy football team names 2018

Look, rankings, sleepers, busts, cheat sheets, mock drafts, a sound draft strategy — all good stuff; all necessary for a successful 2018 fantasy season (Not really, but humor us). But, as we all know, the most important thing you can do before the season starts is come up with the more creative, funniest and best fantasy football team name of anyone in your league. 

I know what you’re thinking: “But how is having a good team name going to help me score more fantasy points?” That’s a dumb question and you should feel bad for asking it. A clever , pun-based fantasy team name encapsulates the spirit of the game like nothing else. It’s a time-wasting pursuit that usually falls short of its goal and leaves you feeling frustrated, but if everything breaks right, you’ll briefly have a sense of accomplishment before remembering you have to do some mundane real-world chore, like take the garbage out or pay your water bill. Also, no one else wants to hear about it, so just shut up already.

We here at Sporting News Fantasy want to help. And while we can’t help with inside jokes about the time your brother-in-law soiled himself in a Taco Bell drive-through during his bachelor party, we can provide a list of pre-made puns for virtually any player you might have on your team. (For Whom the Le’Veon Bell Soils…hey, look at that. We can kind of do it. Cool.)

DOMINATE YOUR DRAFT: Ultimate 2018 Fantasy Cheat Sheet

Are all of these good? No. Are any of them good? Depends who you ask. One time someone almost laughed while reading this list, so that’s something. Some will make you cringe, others will make you cringe slightly less.

We’ve been compiling these team names over the past couple seasons, but this year we have some new gems, like “Nuthin’ But a Jimmy G Thang”, “The Kamara Adds 10 Pounds”, and my personal favorite, “King of the JuJus”.  Nothing like a little blasphemy to get your season off on the right foot. Some of these references are pretty obscure, so if you don’t get them…well, that’s your own fault.

Let’s get to it!

Best fantasy football team names for 2018

Nuthin’ But a Jimmy G Thang

Jimmy G-String Divas

Miami Guice/Guice Principles

Three Blind Guice/Of Guice and Men

Roll of the Guice/Loaded Guice

Once Bitten, Guice Shy (This will be better for next year if Guice is a bust)

Minute Guice/Guice Cooker/Shrimp Fried Guice

The Guice is Right

Wouldn’t it be Guice?

Slice and Guice

The Guice Man Cometh

Truth or Derrius/Double Derrius

Lights, Kamara, Action

The Kamara Adds 10 Pounds/The Kamara Loves You

Kamara Shy/Instant Kamara

Dakstreet’s Back

Dak and Yellow

Baby Got Dak

Pimpin’ Ain’t Breesy

Touchdown Breesus

Brees the Sheriff

Bad and BouBrees

Zeke Squad

2018 RANKINGS: Quarterback | Running back | Wide Receiver | Tight End | D/ST | Kicker | Top 200 | PPR

Kerryon My Wayward Son

Highway to Bell

Stairway to Evans

Mariota Kart

Mariota Had a Little Lamb

Demaryius Had A Little Lamb

Make Demaryica Great Again!

Watch What You Saquon

All Barkley, No Bite/My Barkley is Louder Than My Bite

Rolls Royces

Lower Your Royce/Keep Your Royce Down

RJ2D2

Penny For your Thoughts

Penny Candy

The Penny is Mightier

Runnin’ Rashaad Over You

Mercedes Wentz

Wentz Upon a Time

Just Say Wentz

North by North Wentz

From Wentz We Came

Two and a Half Freemen (Get Royce, Devonta and and D’Onta Foreman or Deshaun Watson or something)

Good(win) Will Hunting (Bonus points if you get Marquise Goodwin, Will Fuller and Kareem Hunt)

Thick of the Hunt/In the Hunt/Hunting Buddies

MegaErtz

MegaWatts (or MegaWatson)

Going ‘Nuklear/’Nuklear Option/’Nuklear Blast

Don’t ‘Nuk It Til Your Try It/’Nuk Three Times/’Nuk ‘Nuk Joke

Chubb Pack

Chubb’s Boner Patrol (Not a reference to anything…doesn’t need to be, quite frankly.)

SLEEPERS: 8 QBs | 16 RBs | 19 WRs | 9 TEs | 6 D/STs | One from each team

Grand Kenyan

I Do What I Kenyan/Yes We Kenyan!

Life is What You Drake It

Drake It Til You Make It (or Fake it Til You Drake It)

Easy Drake Oven

You Make Me Want To Duke

I Gotta Thielen/Hooked on a Thielen/More than a Thielen/Can’t Stop the Thielen

Thielen Like Makin’ Love

99 Problems But a Fitz Ain’t One

Mahomes Boys

Jury Foreman

Burkhead of the Class

Say It Ain’t Sony

Sony Side Up

Hey Darnold!

A Rosen By Any Other Name…

Guns and Rosens

Rosen in the Sun/California Rosens

Oh My Darling Corey Clementine

Wrong Hill to Dion

‘Reek Havoc (or Havoc ‘Reekers)

‘Rik Havoc (or Havoc ‘Rikers)

Constant Ballage

Crack a Booker

Too Good to be Trubisky

Trubisky Patrol

Keenum? I Hardly Know ’em!

Baker Mayfields Forever

Mayfield of Dreams

Shake-N-Bakers

Wings of a Davante/Devontae/Devonta

Male Pattern Baldwiness

Bad/Good JuJu

JuJu Know What I’m Sayin’?

King of the JuJu’s

Death Ertz-tificate

Funchess Bunch

Can You Diggs It?

Diggs in a Blanket

DRAFT STRATEGY AND RANKINGS TIERS: Quarterback | Running back | Wide receiver | Tight end | D/ST

Woods You Rather?

Fuller Up!

Fuller House

You’re Fuller of S***

On the Ragholor

2 Gurleys, 1 Kupp

The Gurley Gates

Gone Gurley

Throw Some Dedes on That B****

You’re Njoking/What an Njoku

Njokumbaya

Get Ridley Of ‘Em

Pot Calling the Kittle Black

Kittle One

Trey Bien!

Hey Everyone, We’re All Gonna Get Treyed!

Trained Seals-Jones

A Gronking in December

Doyle Rules!

Doyled Alive/Doyling Point/Bring to a Doyle

I’ve Doyled Myself

Games of Jones

Fournettecation

Kelce Lately

Breaking Bradford

Crowder Control/Capacity Crowder/Sold Out Crowder

Gimme Moore

Pryor Restraint/I Got Pryors

Gallup Poll

Even Keelan

There is a Godwin!

The Mixon Administration

Mixon Match

Ingram Toenails

Your Brate Is Sealed

Clam Crowder

Boom Boom Powell

That’s Bilal, Folks!

Bilal We’ve Got

The Black Crowells/The Counting Crowells

Crowella du Ville

DOMINATE YOUR DRAFT: Ultimate 2018 fantasy football cheat sheet

Sanu Jack City

Green Initiative

Ain’t No Such Thing as Halfway Cooks

Steady Cobbin’

Cobb Deep

Amari 2600

Amari Teenage Riot

T.Y. Very Much

T.Y. Dolla $ign

Praise the Jord-y

Golden Rush

Good as Golden

Tate is Enough

Tate Misbehavin’

Hogan’s Heroes

Fanatical Christians

Golden McCaffrey

Christian Missionaries

All About the Benjamins

Sims City

Born to Mack (Better than “Return of the Mack”, trust us.)

All I Do is Winston

I’ll Make You Jameis

For the Winston

Dirty Landry

Landry Service

Gym, Tannehill, Landry

Golladay Inn Express

Le’Veon a Prayer

Gospel According to Matthews

Gospel According to Luuuuuuuuuuke)

2018 RANKINGS: Quarterback | Running back | Wide Receiver | Tight End | D/ST | Kicker | Top 200 | PPR

All That I Snead/All You Snead is Love

Honeybaked Beckham/Green Eggs and Beckham

Dude, You’re Getting O-Dell!

O-Dell No

Marshawn of the Dead

Alshon of the Dead

Deshaun of the Dead

Poppin’ Bortles

Bortles Service

Hurns Notice

Al Hurns and Gurley

Feel the Hurns

Keenan-Ivory-Dwaynes (You need Keenan Allen, Chris Ivory, Dwayne Allen and Dwayne Harris to make this work, but, totally worth it!)

Hyde and Go Luck Yourself

Hyde and Tyreek

Get Your Tyreek On

Eastbound and Brown

Saving Matt Ryan

Song of Matty Ice and Fire

Roethlisberger Helper

DeVante’s Inferno

Steady Cams

Dandy Merediths

Lamar the Merrier!

View From Lamar

Lamar You Serious?

Miller’s Bossin’

Serial Miller

Chronicles of Riddick

Let’s Get Riddickulous!

Land of the Freeman

Rudolph the Red-Zone Reindeer

Parker/Lewis Can’t Lose (You’re gonna need to overdraft DeVante Parker and Dion Lewis for this, but You. Will. Not. Lose.)

Dalton’s Abbey

SLEEPERS: 8 QBs | 16 RBs | 19 WRs | 9 TEs | 6 D/STs | One from each team

The Hauschka Always Wins

Butker? Butker? Anyone? Butker?

Gould Members

You Know You Gano Lose

Yippee Ki Yay Justin Tucker

We’re Allen this Together

Reeding Rainbow

Here’s My Number, So Call Me Brady

Golden Grahams

InstaGraham

The Tannehills Have Eyes

Dude, Where’s My Carr?

The Backfields and McCoys

Giovani Vidi Vici

El Gordo Y La Flacco

It’s Von Like Donkey Kong

Ajayi Another Day

13 Reasons Ajayi

Sterling Record

Staff Infection

Rebel Yeldons

Goff Button

Turn Your Head and Goff

Turn Goff the Lights

Goff and Wet and/or Soft and Wentz

Mr. Rodgers’ Neighborhood

Don’t Eli To My Face

Let Sleeping Dogs Eli

Gore Values

Suh-and-a-Half Men

Suh-Tang Clan (Ain’t Nuthing Ta F Wit) 

Wings of a Davante

Peachy Keenan

Peachy Keenum

DRAFT STRATEGY AND RANKINGS TIERS: Quarterback | Running back | Wide receiver | Tight end | D/ST

Turn Down for Watt

Turn Down for Watkins

Rage Against the Vereen

Ladies and Edelman

Johnson and More Johnson

Blount Force Trauma

Ezekiel 25:17

To Be Prosise

Kissing Cousins Good-bye

The Big Gronkowski

Dez Dispensers

Pop-Lockett-Drop It

Hot Lockett

Pocket Lockett

Vinnie Iyer, Jordan Heck, Tony Fortier-Bensen, Jacob Camenker, and Ellis Williams all contributed to this article.

Source: http://www.sportingnews.com/us/fantasy/sport/news/best-fantasy-football-team-names-creative-funny-good-cheat-sheet-2018/5ra7vnd91ibp17epdig0smn9u

[arcticdementor]

(link)

[arcticdementor]

(link)

[arcticdementor]

When I think about the futuristic dystopian movies of my childhood, I recall giant posters of a Dear Leader with a sinister grin on his face, posted around a gray prison city. Big Brother was watching you, always! We sang along to MTV: “I always feel like somebody’s watching me.”

We were warned.

In our present dystopian moment, a new crop of sinister Big Brothers smirks at us from social media and TV, their soulless eyes narrowed, licking their lips as they contemplate how we will taste as they devour us.

Recently I have been struck by the sexlessness of our Biden-era Overlords. Gender-neutrality is all the rage in the swamp, I suppose. Men, women, and everything in between have converged into a new subspecies of person with certain traits of both men and women. The Deep State Uberwench, as it were. Broad-shouldered, strong jawed, lipsticked with blown-out hair, power suited and pumped up, they are the end-product of the sausage grinder of execrable NGOs, D.C. institutes, bottomless and fetid think tanks, and toxic universities.

Debrided of a soul and a capacity for self-awareness, what is left after this is a human being disconnected from humanity. Neither male nor female, they are The State: they are Big Other.

“A shape with lion body and the head of a man,/A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun.”

Big Other is the product of the ideological and physical strip-mining process that turns normal people into powerful tools of the Regime. It’s fascinating how each person who undergoes this process ends up looking, dressing, and even behaving the same way. It is a new breed of American bureaucrat. Neither fully male or fully female, they inhabit a genderless nether region (they no longer have their originals) where, thus stripped of inconvenient signifiers like “sexy” or “beautiful” or “handsome” or “mother,” they are free to wield their enormous powers more fully.

They have been untethered, unmoored from their original ties to family, self, their identity, and instead roped to the behemoth ship of state.

…

In a tweet, Jankowicz posted her official DHS portrait. In the striking photo, she wears something that looks like Hillary Clinton’s pantsuit threw up on Bill’s couch.

The portrait reminds me of a poster that might decorate the set of a dystopian movie from the 1980s, perhaps framed and hanging behind the desk of a glowering gulag matron. Power shoulders, jewel toned jacket snug over a dull plaid dress, that strong jawline, that glossy blowout, her lips pressed into a smirk, she eyes us greedily like a lion on the savanna. I am Nina, hear me roar.

Ms. Jankowicz is now in the final instar in the life cycle of the Bug Person. Congratulations, Nina! 

…

Big Other is listening now, America.

I’d tell you to be afraid of they/them, but it’s hard to fear such people. Perhaps, in the end, the push to fill the highest echelons of the United States Government and everything else with incompetents who fit a diversity checklist will be the petard on which its bloated underbelly is finally hoisted. They will tear it down by virtue of their own unintentionally hilarious goofiness.

Recall Robert Conquest’s Third Law of Politics: “The simplest way to explain the behavior of any bureaucratic organization is to assume that it is controlled by a cabal of its enemies.” In other words, hiring her could easily be the act of someone on our side, inserting a poison pill right at the top of the food chain. Perhaps we should be glad to see such clowns presuming to rule over us. The Regime may not make this mistake again!

Big Other is so comical that they may actually corrode and dismantle the flimsy house of cards from which they spy on us, without any outside interference.

Therefore, have no fear! Untethered from that which makes they/them human, they and the rest of their Global Fellowship will eventually take on water, founder, and sink below the blood-dimmed tide of their own colossal hubris.

[arcticdementor]

Here are Tucker Carlson's 5 favorite conspiracy theories according to today's New York Times puff piece

Congratulations to @nickconfessore for red pilling thousands more of your own readers today! So brave.

It's a FACT, ok? Nina Jankowicz told him so!

Every one of @nickconfessore's claims can be easily refuted, and already has, in other articles that include real examples of democrats laughing about replacing whites, etc., so no need to waste time doing that.

More fun to mock them. Confessore, go to confession!

It's really sick how they describe his mother. What's wrong with you? And why include a detailed description of the exterior of the studio Tucker uses in Maine? Unless you want people to find it.

Remember kids: When you work for the Times, they let you doxx people.

These sickening people have no morals, no boundaries, and pure hate in their hearts. They are bloodthirsty, depraved minions who will be deployed against anyone they perceive as a threat.

Pray for @TuckerCarlson

Nick, there is a way out of the darkness. Return to the church of your childhood. Go to confession, today. Repent, do your penance, and go to mass tomorrow. I will pray for your eternal soul!

[arcticdementor]

Pretty soon the only white boys at our top universities will be the ones on the girl's athletic teams

Peachy Keenan

[arcticdementor]

When the frizzy-haired Marxists at my local library start ranting about seizing the means of production, they’re not talking about factories anymore. They’re talking about you, your womb, and its output.

We have put childless despots like this in positions of authority over our kids. They have cleverly figured out that their great nihilistic cultural project requires your children to see it through to the end. And they are coming for them. You can hear the plains vibrating as the great galloping horde approacheth your elementary school.

After all, their harebrained schemes will only work if they can fool a large majority of people to do what they say. You, dear reader, are too smart to fall for their lies! But three-year-olds? Those idiots will believe anything.

Just look around. From the outside, these creatures look normal: young bookstore clerks heaping tables full of rainbow flags and Margaret Sanger hagiographies, lumpy school board officials quietly slipping descriptions of “extreme bestiality and pornography” into middle-grade curricula, feminist librarians proudly displaying Transgender Toddler board books and other government propaganda on the low racks so little kids can easily see them.

Do not be fooled by a Regime functionary’s harmless outward appearance! They are harpies who have swooped into every burgh and barn. They peer at you through jealous eyes as you push your stroller through the park, rubbing their claws together and snapping their beaks as they hatch their plans to ensnare your kids. When I think of these wretched people, I think of Quentin Blake’s drawings for Roald Dahl books like The Witches and The Twits, the evil giants in The BFG, or Giant Peach James’s horrible spinster aunts.

Dahl knew who the true enemies of children were. He warned us! Yet we still put Aunt Sponge and Aunt Spiker in charge—of everything.

…

The profusion of bullshittery at the local bookstore looks, as the Daily Wire writer Matt Walsh puts it, like “signs at an Antifa rally.” Board books have ludicrous titles like Woke Baby, Anti-Racist Baby, and A is for Activist.

Browsing these modern titles quickly devolves into a horror show. One book called Mama, Why Do You Have to Go to Work? features a distressing illustration of two crying, terrified toddlers on the cover clinging to their mother. Sounds like a heartwarmer! “Why Do You Have to Go to Work helps children understand why mom’s job is important and how it enriches their time at home together. The book also reminds mothers how remarkable they are at building a career while simultaneously nurturing a family.”

Hear that? Stop crying, kids!

Once they’ve piped down, you can look forward to helping your kids understand where their little sister went with a “medically accurate, non-judgmental, and gender-inclusive resource” called What’s An Abortion Anyway? Spoiler alert: in this family, they don’t all live happily ever after.

…

“Fairy tales are more than true,” wrote G.K. Chesterton—“not because they tell us dragons exist but because they tell us dragons can be beaten.”

Let us hope he was right.

[arcticdementor]

Let our cities burn. Let human traffickers fling smuggled toddlers over the border wall. Let Navy surgeons castrate newly-female recruits like Ginzu-wielding Benihana chefs on meth.

Just please: stop the deluge of drag queen content swamping our nation.

…

But Drag Queen Story Hour, of course, is all about enraging conservatives. After all, it’s no fun psychologically abusing toddlers unless earnest Christian mothers are outside shouting scripture into bullhorns.

(Tip: Truly radical parents wishing to expose their children to men in long gowns who have rejected mainstream society in favor of reading stories about love and humility can find that going on every Sunday at your local Roman Catholic church.)

Mercifully, the pandemic put a shiv into the bloated, hairy gut of the DQ story hour.

Unfortunately, post-pandemic, these freaks in fright wigs are back with a fierce vengeance—and the backing of every corporation in America.

…

I am old enough to remember the days when drag queens were pure adult camp, and they were all in on the joke. In ancient times, back in the ‘80s and ‘90s, performers like Lady Bunny and RuPaul became famous in the New York club scene with their caricatured costumes and kitschy personas. They were imitating women in highly exaggerated ways—like a minstrel show only with fake boobs instead of blackface.

Lady Bunny was hired to spice up parties, with her spirited wit and four-foot-high bouffant wigs. It was cool to spot her at a party; you knew it was the place to be when you glimpsed the platinum Dolly wig. The act was meant to elicit a knowing titter from the well-heeled crowd. I once partied with Blaine Trump, Linda Carter (the original Wonder Woman), and Lady Bunny at the Met Gala. (Don’t tell my kids.)

Drag in these ancient times wasn’t a sexual identity or a gender or a “lifestyle choice.” It wasn’t a kink or a fetish. It was simply a performance. Drag was a gag, and the person under the Tammy Faye wig was, always, a “cis” gay man, usually on copious amounts of snortables.

Today, the performers have been reduced to grotesqueries and progressive political hacks. The drag queens are tired, they look bad, and worst of all, they are painfully immune to the spark of wit that long defined the form. Instead of skewering celebrity culture and themselves, they aspire to be celebrities, with all of the lowbrow earnestness.

Never in my wildest imaginings did I think that these dudes would one day become corporate spokesmen for, among others, The Walt Disney Corporation.

…

After all, why limit the customer pool for $300 Elsa gowns to biological girls? It’s a move the CFO probably came up with. Now your little boy can live out his dream as Sleeping Beau! Ari the little Merboy! Mo the Polynesian prince!

Your little Princess Charming will not want to miss Amazon’s upcoming Cinderella remake for children starring “non-binary” actor Billy Porter as the “Fairy Godperson,” or “Fab G” as the character is called. “Magic has no gender!” Porter declared.

Magic isn’t real and binary gender is, you start to argue, but then you take the easy way out and toss yourself out a window.

…

Let me explain something to our refined culture overlords: drag is not counterculture, radical, edgy, shocking, interesting, or artistically relevant. Drag queens are lame. Drag is cringe. Drag is a huge bore.

These fools should heed the prophetic words of Barack Obama’s mentor, Saul Alinsky, who wrote as one of his Rules for Radicals: “A tactic that drags on too long becomes a drag.” Literally!

No one asked for drag to be our new national pastime. No one wanted this—especially not parents of little kids. But giant entertainment corporations no longer give audiences what they want; they simply comply with the loudest demands.

We don’t want it, we all hate it, so we’re going to get lots more of it: creepy middle-aged men wearing Spanx lecturing us about our children and their genital preferences.

…

The other reason drag is now ubiquitous is obvious: the LGBT lobby has moved on from caring about gay men, especially white ones. They are all on the trans train now. If you are a white, cis gay man, how can you stay relevant? How will you get an acting gig when the diversity quota drones are looking for anyone but you, a basic white male without talent, charisma, or discernible skill?

You do what you must to survive: you put on the hooker dress, grow out your beard, and strap on the triple-D prosthetics. Kids love those, after all.

Sorry, white gays: you will soon be replaced with the new drag queen, who like Billy Porter and Harry Styles is nonbinary, pansexual, and gender free, and not a prisoner of outdated ideas like “gay” or “man” or “performer.” These new drag queens are authentic. It’s not just a costume; it’s who they really are.

To this next-gen queen, drag is not just an act. It is pure self-expression of their truest form.

To us, drag is the terminal culture of a culture out of ideas.

Besides, if I want to watch talentless hacks pretending to have fun, I’ll just watch the Oscars.