Young Leftists Embrace Political Violence

From the Washington Examiner (via MSN): "Politics without restraint: A generational shift toward violence and radicalism is taking place." Samuel Abrams writes:

    I recently walked into my politics class at Sarah Lawrence College prepared to discuss civic protest. The prompt was Minneapolis, where a recent immigration enforcement surge has sparked mass demonstrations, a general strike, and the fatal shooting of two civilians by federal agents.

    I planned to cover basic principles: the right to protest, the obligation to remain nonviolent, the distinction between civil disobedience and coercion. My students rejected the premise almost immediately.

    “What are we supposed to do?” one asked. “Hold signs while people are being shot?”

    “You’re asking us to play by rules that only we follow,” another said.

    They cited the Black Panthers. They invoked Stonewall. They argued, confidently, that throughout American history, violence or the credible threat of it was what forced change. Several endorsed armed confrontation with Immigration and Customs Enforcement as both effective and ethically justified.

    This view dominated the discussion.

    I have spent 20 years studying these attitudes in survey data. But numbers do not argue back. What I encountered that day around the seminar table was the data made flesh: Students who spoke about political violence not with reluctance or regret, but with moral certainty.

Abrams notes this isn't just his class. " Over one-third of students now say using violence to stop a campus speaker is acceptable. Nineteen percent of adults under 30 believe political violence is sometimes justified, compared with just 3% of those 65 and older. Republican and Democratic students increasingly converge in their willingness to excuse force, even as they target different opponents. It is a generational shift." 

    And they aren't learning this just from radical publications, but from the elites (particularly those on the left). Consider:

    Last month, Philadelphia District Attorney Larry Krasner issued a statement that would have been unthinkable from a major American law-enforcement official a generation ago. Speaking about federal immigration agents, Krasner declared: “In a country of 350 million, we outnumber them. If we have to hunt you down the way they hunted down Nazis for decades, we will find your identities. We will find you. We will achieve justice.”

    This was not a call for lawful accountability, but a threat of extrajudicial pursuit with language more suited to revolutionary tribunals than a constitutional republic. His sheriff followed with a blunt endorsement: “You don’t want this smoke.”    

He continues:

    What I am describing is the erosion of a foundational American norm: The belief that political opponents, however wrong they may be, remain legitimate participants in a shared civic order, and that conflict must be governed by law rather than resolved through intimidation or violence.

    What we are witnessing is not ideological polarization so much as affective polarization, the transformation of political disagreement into moral hatred in which opponents are no longer seen as mistaken fellow citizens but as illegitimate and dangerous enemies. When that norm collapses, politics does not become more just, it becomes more primitive.

Abrams believes there is a peaceful way out, but it involves the middle--which have not radicalized--stepping up their participation. He notes, for instance, that the the election that Krasner a third term only had a 15% turnout. "A small activist cohort selected officials [and] empowered him to speak in the name of the city. The same pattern now repeats across school boards, city councils, party committees, and faculty senates nationwide." 

    Read the whole thing.

Related:

• "Driver armed with a flamethrower rams LADWP substation in possible ‘terrorism-related event’"--New York Post.  "A man, who was wearing 'soft body armor' and had two shotguns and an assault rifle-style pistol, was found dead in the car suffering from a self-inflicted gunshot wound."
• "Idaho woman accused of attempting to set fire to DHS building with stolen ambulance"--Fox News.  The building was mostly filled with medical offices located next to a hospital, with DHS only just having rented some space. 

Sarah Elizabeth George, 43, of Boise, is accused of stealing a Canyon County Paramedics ambulance from outside St. Luke’s Meridian around 11 p.m. on Feb. 18, crashing it through the entrance of the Portico North building and pouring gasoline across the lobby floor before fleeing on foot, according to a federal criminal complaint.     

• Another unprovoked black on white attack: "Mom describes moment maniac with long criminal history slashed her 13-year-old son's throat in an unprovoked attack"--Daily Mail. Another millimeter deeper and the boy would likely have died.  As the article notes: "The attack comes amid a series of seemingly random, unprovoked, deadly attacks, including the killing of a Ukrainian refugee on a train in Charlotte in September 2025, and a stabbing spree on the New York City subway in January 2025."

Feds Sue Coca Cola For Discriminating Against Men

The suit stems from last September when Coca-Cola Northeast Beverages, a New Hampshire-based distributor, hosted a two-day women-only networking event at the Mohegan Sun Casino and Resort in Connecticut.

    About 250 women attended the event, which centered around the theme “Embrace Your Authenticity: Break Barriers, Be Genuine, Inspire Change,” according to the social media post.

    Women were excused from work and paid their normal wages during the trip without needing to use any vacation time, the lawsuit said.

    The company also paid for their hotel rooms, as well as food and beverages during the trip, according to the suit.

    Funding the trip for female employees, but not male ones, “constitutes a denial of equal compensation, terms, conditions, or privileges of employment on the basis of sex,” the EEOC said in its lawsuit. 

We need more suits like this. For too long, liberals and the organizations they control have gotten away with violating laws prohibiting discrimination. 

Study: Trans People Are Disproportionate Share Of Mass Shooters

Breitbart reports that "[t]ransgender individuals commit 'disproportionate shares of mass public and active shooting attacks,' a Crime Prevention Research Center (CPRC) report shows." The article notes that "CPRC studied data from 2018 to 2024, finding that attacks by transgender shooters was 'at least 12 times their share of the population' in 2024." 

When Seconds Count The Police Are 45 Minutes Away

A mass stabbing yesterday in liberal Washington has left four dead. The incident occurred in Gig Harbor, just outside of Tacoma. According to the article, one of the victims had called 911 at 8:45 am claimant the suspect was violating a no-contact order. While police were en route, another call to 911 reported that the suspect was stabbing people. The suspect was shot dead by police at 9:30 am. The article elaborates:

    Police have since confirmed the no contact order was not yet valid because it had not been served to the suspect.

    Officer were given a copy of the order to serve the suspect, but by the time they arrived at the scene, he had already carried out his stabbing spree.   

The Guardian reports that the suspect "was the subject of domestic violence protection orders recording mental health and substance abuse issues stretching back at least five years."

    The Seattle Times reported that the mother, who has also not been named, had pressed for two protection orders since December 2020. Those early protection orders reported that the woman’s son had been having mental health problems and had threatened her daughter with a knife inside the home.

    In the petition to Pierce county superior court last April, the woman said that her son was delusional and saw himself as “an Egyptian god”. She had returned home to find her cat missing and pictures that had been hanging on the wall destroyed.

    The court granted a protection order requiring him to leave his mother’s house where he had been living and to keep 1,000ft from the property. He was also banned from possessing weapons and told to follow a mental health treatment plan that had been prepared for him involving medication. 

Oldest Writing From Europe And 40,000 Years Old

Everything we thought we knew about the rise of civilization is wrong. From Popular Science: "Earliest known writing dates back over 40,000 years." From the lede:

    New evidence published today in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences indicates humans experimented with symbolic writing as much as 40,000 years ago. If true, the discoveries dramatically recontextualize the history of communication, given the earliest known written languages are Mesopotamian proto-cuneiforms dating back to around 3000 BCE.

    “The artifacts date back to tens of thousands of years before the first writing systems, to the time when Homo sapiens left Africa, settled in Europe, and encountered Neanderthal,” explained Ewa Dutkiewicz, a study co-author and archaeologist at Berlin’s Museum of Prehistory and Early History.

    Dutkiewicz and colleagues have spent years analyzing 260 relics recovered from Stone Age cave sites in the Swabian Jura, a remote mountain range located in southwestern Germany. These include a small mammoth figurine carved from the extinct animal’s tusk along with the Adorant, a famous ivory carving that appears to depict a human-lion figure with outstretched arms. These and many other similar artifacts also feature frequently repeating sequences of lines, crosses, dots, and notches.

 The patterns were found to be similar to early proto-Cuniform writing. 

Big Country Expat Reviews Chinese MRE-Style Meal

From Big Country Expat: "My Thanks, Some Lunch and Lack of Accountability." The article is (mostly) a review of a Chinese MRE-style meal which contained: "Green Bean and Beef Rice for the main, Spicy Beef for the smol snack, 2x duck eggs and some Crisp Cucumbers, with sauce, and Egg Drop soup." Other than the "crisp cucumbers" he thought it was pretty good, and the heater was apparently much more effective than those in U.S. MREs. Nothing on where he sourced it, however. 

TTAG: Best Buffer Setup for a 10.5″ Unsuppressed AR Pistol

The author, Scott Witner, notes that there are a lot of reasons people might not run a suppressor on a 10.5" AR, including that even with a suppressor it is still not hearing safe, so why bother? In any event, to slow down the BCG so it doesn't beat the weapon to death (or, I would add, cause feeding issues like the BCG outrunning the speed at which the magazine can push a new round up to be picked up by the BCG), he recommends an H2 buffer and the Sprinco Enhanced Power AR-15 Buffer Spring – Blue, which is a stronger spring "due to running an over-gassed or suppressed rifle." It is also made from "chrome silicon wire and heat-treated for extreme durability, this spring delivers consistent performance across tens of thousands of rounds without degradation or fatigue." 

    I went with essentially the same buffer setup in my 18" AR build because it was overgassed and running too fast as I described in this post where I had to troubleshoot what initially appeared to be a short-stroke problem (it wasn't). I used the H2 buffer (or something basically the same weight) and subsequently replaced the standard AR spring with a heavier flat coil spring. 

Misreading the Room

Breitbart reports that "[o]n Wednesday’s broadcast of MS NOW’s 'Morning Joe,' Kentucky Gov. Andy Beshear (D) said that for people of faith 'it is unacceptable to have a body count from ICE’s actions or to see these people injured' and that 'If you’re a person of faith, you don’t want to see people chained at the ankles.'" No. Half the country voted for the illegals to be deported and if that requires ICE to defend themselves and chain up violent criminals, so be it. The only people "of faith" that would find it unacceptable either aren't Christian or believe in "teddy bear Jesus", but I repeat myself. 

More On Susan Rice's Revenge Speech

I had posted last week about Susan Rice's threats of revenge on any company or organization that supported or assisted President Trump, warning that it was a big step toward civil war. Rod Dreher had similar thoughts, comparing it to the dynamics that led to the Spanish Civil War in the 1930s. He writes:

This is important. It signals the kind of dynamic that gripped Spain in first half of 1930s, as the govt of the Republic lurched btw Left and Right. Eventually, both sides hated each other so much that civil war was inevitable. ...

He has embedded the video where Rice makes her threats and suggests a YouTube video on the prelude to the Spanish Civil War.

California Has Paid Leftist Groups Behind Illegal Immigrant Invasion Over $100 Million

From Townhall: "It's True: Gavin Newsom's California Government Has Paid Protestors Over $100 Million." The article states that $115 million went to non-profit organizations whose core function is to organize protests, with the Coalition for Humane Immigrant Rights (CHIRLA) receiving over $100 million by itself.