Weekend Reading

A few articles and posts to read. Normally I just limit this to firearms, self-defense and prepping, but this time I will add a few more on items in the news:

• First up is Greg Ellifritz's Weekend Knowledge Dump from Friday. Articles and links cover topics such as backpack guns (although Greg warns that in shooting events, you do NOT want to be caught with a long arm in a backpack); tips on surviving urban strife and riots; intelligence gathering at protests; an article that collects information from a bunch of self-defense experts on how they carry pepper spray; a look at one man room clearing tactics (probably should be a must read for the civilian defender); bugging out with pets; some facts about mass shootings; and more. 

    The latter article, "Mass Shootings in America,"was particularly interesting to me because of a police spokesman indicating that the kid that carried out a shooting at a Colorado high school earlier this week said that the kid had been radicalized by an extremist network. The article cited by Ellifritz looks at the five shootings that meet the FBI's definition of a "mass shooting" that occurred in 2024-2025 and notes that "[a]ll five shootings that meet this criteria were carried out by a shooter radicalized within online NVE [Nihilistic Violent Extremists] communities such as 764, NLM, MKY, or TCC (short for True Crime Community, this is an online Group that glorifies and even sexualizes former mass killers)." Yes, there are networks and secret combinations out there that want to kill you.

• Charlie Kirk's assassination has been on our minds, and if you are like me you have seen a lot of commentary from conservatives; but what do the more moderate leftists think about it? "Let’s be honest about Charlie Kirk’s life — and death"--Vox. Basically, this article contends that political killings are bad, but Kirk was evil. How so?

 Kirk vehemently defended Trump’s “big lie” about the 2020 election and sent seven buses of activists to the January 6 rally that culminated in the storming of the Capitol. His organization, Turning Point USA, maintained a “professor watchlist” designed to chill left-wing speech on campus and lionized vigilante killer Kyle Rittenhouse. He endorsed authoritarian policies, demonized his political opponents, and said a tremendous amount of objectively bigoted stuff — warning of “prowling Blacks [who] go around for fun to go target white people” or that “Islam is the sword the left is using to slit the throat of America.”

It reminds me of a recent comment by best selling author, Larry Correia, republished at Instapundit where Correia observes:

     Only this time all the moderate normie republicans out there saw MILLIONS of liberals celebrate and justify the brutal murder of a man... all because that man held beliefs similar to theirs. Beliefs that regular Americans consider completely normal and common sense. 

    These normal folks were going about their day, then they saw some shocking brutality, and before they could even process it all their liberal friends were dancing in the blood and gleefully justifying it. "He deserved it for believing X and Y." And that normal person realized that they also believe X and Y, so them getting murdered would be just as celebrated too. At best they saw a "Murder is bad, BUT... he deserved it for believing X and Y." 

• "Conservatives are Waking Up"--Vox Day. Day quotes from a post on X by Nick Freitas, a state representative in Virginia, explaining his awakening in the wake of Charlie Kirk's assassination. An excerpt:
  
  
  I convinced myself for a long time that whenever the left called me a racist, a bigot, a sexist, a fascist, a “threat to democracy” for even the most innocent of disagreements, that it was simply hyperbolic rhetoric done for effect. And now the “effect” is a widow and two orphaned children, because the left couldn’t bear the thought of a peaceful man debating them and winning. I don’t think they realize it yet, but murdering Charlie is going to be remembered as the day where we finally woke up to what this fight really is. It’s not a civil dispute among fellow countrymen. It’s a war between diametrically opposed worldviews which cannot peacefully coexist with one another. One side will win, and one side will lose.

• "Even as they condemn it, the left gaslights us about Charlie Kirk’s death" by Batya Ungar-Sargon, New York Post. She makes three main points: First, "[e]ven in their denunciations, the left is gaslighting us about the truth: The vast majority of the political violence in this country is coming from their side." Second, "[t]hey view the world not through the Judeo-Christian lens of right versus wrong, but through the lens of power" and, therefore, "[i]n their view, people with less power have no moral responsibilities." And third, which is derived from the second point, the left believes that words are violence and, therefore, can be met with physical violence.
• "The Full Story of the Killing of Iryna Zarutska" by Jared Taylor, Unz Review. We all know that Decarlos Brown was unleashed on the public by Magistrate Teresa Stokes, a black woman who apparently was all in on DEI. But as this article discusses, behind Stokes and her appointment as a magistrate, were a whole line of other black women pushing DEI policies and working to appoint black women like themselves to important government positions.