Kamala Harris is not cutting it with Pennsylvania Catholics like Joe Biden once did

 

 Harris’ challenge isn’t limited to abortion. The region continues to inch rightward. And Harris didn’t do herself any favors in 2018, when as a senator she grilled a Catholic judicial nominee about whether he could remain impartial due to his membership in the Knights of Columbus, a respected Catholic fraternal organization with a strong presence in northeastern Pennsylvania. The questioning is fuel for a multi-million-dollar campaign in swing states, including Pennsylvania, led by CatholicVote, a conservative advocacy group. ...  in the northeastern part of the state, Trump was ahead by a comfortable margin, 50 percent to 43 percent.

... white Catholics nationally voted for Trump by a wide margin in 2020 and were on pace to vote for him again, with a spring Pew survey finding that white, non-Hispanic Catholic voters preferred the former president by a 61 percent to 38 percent margin over Biden. According to a recent EWTN/RealClear poll, that gap has narrowed, with Trump leading Harris among white Catholics, 52 percent to 42 percent. ... A Brookings analysis earlier this year by University of Pennsylvania professor John DiLulio noted that Hillary Clinton lost the overall white Catholic vote by 33 points in 2016, but four years later, Biden cut that deficit in half, losing by only 15 points. “As much as any single shift in voting patterns between those two elections, the shift in the white Catholic vote away from Trump cost him the 2020 election,” wrote DiLulio.

More. 

The story never once mentions the possible appeal of J. D. Vance, a convert to Catholicism in 2019, to America's Catholic voters.

Scott McConnell: Joe Biden has had his hair on fire for NATO enlargement since at least 1998

Anatol Lieven has pointed out that not a single hawk during the Reagan era (which today’s Democrats pretend to respect in counterpoint today’s America First Republicans) imagined bringing Crimea under NATO jurisdiction and evicting the Russian fleet from Sevastopol would be a desirable or feasible goal for the West. ...

 

One can go back to the 1998 Senate debate over NATO enlargement, won inevitably by the side promising greater profits for the military industrial complex, to see its contours. That debate was spirited, and we might take solace from the fact (unlike the present) that it took place at all. 

Opposing NATO expansion, Senator Daniel Moynihan, the last intellectual in American politics, warned “We’re walking into ethnic historical enmities. We have no idea what we’re getting into.” Taking Moynihan’s side, Republican senator John Warner of Virginia warned of antagonizing Russia by building an “iron ring” around it. And from whom came the most strident objection to Warner and Moynihan? According to the New York Times, Joseph Biden, “took the floor and erupted…stalking the Senate floor, flailing his arms….” 

More.

Non-binary queer man who threatened to blow up his mother's house last year shoots up gay nightclub in Colorado, liberals blame conservatives

Story.

The biggest cuck of the moment is Rod Dreher of The American Conservative, prophet of coming soft totalitarianism to The West

Rod Dreher retweets a whiny guy with kids who thinks boomers are dogshit, a Canadian who is intimidated by a Russian circus act training with a bear, and a Russian propaganda map of Ukraine showing "the advance of our troops".

All in the last 24 hours.

He's in Spain and Hungary enjoying the cafe life for Lent.

 

LOL, Rod Dreher finally is ready for government by a Strong Man to protect the white man

  

Yale’s Anti-White Racist Psychiatrist :

I don’t ever want to see Donald Trump again. He had these people’s number, in a way, but he did little or nothing effective to stop them. I want to vote for a presidential candidate who will move against these dirtbags and their institutions without mercy. Enough is enough. I’m not sure what can be done, but if we keep tolerating this, there is going to be violence, one way or another.  I am not willing to sit here and listen to these aristocrats like Dr. Khilanani, and malignant institutions like Yale, turn people against me, my children, and my neighbors, because we are white.

Scott McConnell of The American Conservative voted for the enemy in 2008 and votes for him now too

Dreher advocates for peace and for praying for the Muslim victims.

In 1776 the American preachers advocated for war and actually killed Christian Redcoats.

Two different religions but you're only here thanks to one of them.

James Pinkerton for The American Conservative completely falls for Hillary's "new" immigration views

Hillary Clinton: Conservatives Were Right on Mass Migration:

[H]ere in the U.S., conservatives—as distinct, of course, from libertarians—are now able to say, “Even Hillary Clinton and John Kerry agree on the need for border enforcement.” And in political terms, that’s not a small victory.

 Commenter Blitzkrieg spoke for many when he opined that Pinkerton "missed the point entirely".

Paul Gottfried has read Antifa's wunderkind Mark Bray and finds that there's no there there, just slogans

Proving once again that PhD's aren't what they used to be. Maybe it's time to draft them. 

The Myth Making of Antifa Intellectuals:

Despite its obvious incompatibility with the dominant political culture, the alt-right seems to have rallied philosophically deeper thinkers than the slogan-chanting adolescents who swarm around [Mark] Bray. ...

Bray’s Left has nothing in common with the Left that existed in interwar Europe. His field and passion are gender studies and “fighting racism.” These were hardly the major interests of anarchists and Marxists in the 1930s. Back then the Left was serious about a socio-economic revolution and showed no noticeable interest in identity politics or LGBT self-expression. It may even be a bit of a stretch to relate antifa activism to the protests in the 1960s that I personally witnessed. The demonstrators at that time opposed a prolonged war in Vietnam into which they might be personally dragged; others protested segregation, which really existed in some parts of the country. What similarly deep cause is driving Bray and his allies? I can’t seem to find one other than seizing power or simply letting off steam.

Conservatism upside-down: Russell Kirk chair in history at Hillsdale held by professed libertarian

Bradley J. Birzer, here:

"I have never considered myself a classical liberal, but I have always considered myself libertarian."

Russell Kirk, of course, was neither, but especially not libertarian.

And at public universities also it is common for atheists to chair religion departments.

A grandmother of Bolshevism over at The American Conservative is upset with her children

Hey, we are the chosen immanentizers of the eschaton, not you!

Kelly Marcum, here:

The left, which continues to decry the social faux pas of cultural appropriation with ever-increasing vehemence, is itself guilty of the very same crime. They, the proponents of a predominantly liberal post-Christian culture, have undertaken a great project of appropriating and reinventing orthodox Christian values. ...

The left has made it its mission to culturally appropriate Christianity and use it for its own ends; in too many cases, it has been allowed to do so and even aided in its efforts by Christians themselves. ...

If orthodox Christianity is to survive in an evermore hostile culture, its practitioners and leaders will need not only to withstand the pressure to accommodate and self-censor, but to repossess their own language and tenets that have been exploited by the left.

And at the so-called American Conservative the lead is about sex, not antifa

Sex is Cheap and It’s a Buyer’s Market—If You’re a Man

And surprise! it's not by Rod Dreher.

Laugh of the Day: Leave it to Rod Dreher to crank out 2,000 to 3,000 words about so much bologna

Here, in the comments section.

For some unknown reason The American Conservative decided to remind us today about the crack-up of Bruce Bartlett

They reran his 2012 piece detailing his several intellectual crises, in which the libertarian finally gave up and became the liberal, although he denies it.

Nostalgia on the editors part, no doubt, for wound-licking in defeat.

Rod Dreher is a boob, calls Homer's Odyssey "a novel"

Here.

Let's hope no one puts him in charge of someone's classical Christian education somewhere.

A conservative makes an appearance at The American Conservative

Not in the articles line-up, but in the comments section, here:

"Every able-bodied Christian man should learn to shoot a rifle, because it will come to that if we live uncompromising lives."

Laugh of the Day: The top one percent in brains tend to become our senators

Gotta be a typo.

Seen here:

Reflecting on the latest findings of longitudinal studies on gifted students, Jonathan Wai, a psychologist at the Duke University Talent Identification Program, concluded that children with early cognitive ability “control our society…The kids who test in the top one percent tend to become our eminent scientists and academics, our Fortune 500 CEOs and federal judges, senators and billionaires.”

Noah Millman at The American Conservative discovers the inverse of "Employment Population Ratio: 25 - 54 years"

Here, excitedly writing about the inverse of this chart which has been around for a long time:

The problem with measuring employment with this chart, or unemployment with its inverse as Millman advocates, is that this cohort (25 to 54 years of age) has been shrinking due to declining birth rates. The meaning it conveys has changed over time for this and other reasons.

Rising birth rates of the Baby Boom until 1964 help explain the dramatic upward movement in the chart thereafter in the first place, along with the entry of Baby Boom women into the workforce at the same time, a second most important variable.

Additionally, at the peak of the Baby Boom in 1957, the birth rate was 25.3. Twenty years later in 1977 it was only 15.1 and has remained thereabouts and even lower ever since.

The lower birth rates have been winding their way through the employment statistics while female employment was peaking at the same time, like the inverse of a goat going through the belly of a snake but undetectable because of the female phenomenon. The peak in the employment population ratio of this cohort notably coincides with the 1957 peak of the Baby Boom hitting 20 years in the workforce in January 1999, shown above. They hit 30 years in the workforce in 2009, right in the middle of the Great Recession.

Ask how many 52 year olds lost their jobs that year (29.5 million of all ages lost their jobs in 2009), and then passed out of the range of this chart within two years, only to be replaced by . . . not enough people born after 1964.

Interestingly, employment for women in this cohort, while still not fully recovered, is off only 600,000 from the 2007 peak, but for men is off 1.8 million, both on an average basis through 2016. That's a deficit of 2.4 million, but based on declining birth rates I'd estimate most of them won't ever materialize in the future . . . because they never existed.

During the Baby Boom between 1946 and 1964, births per year averaged 4.0 million. But between 1965 and 1992, today's 25 to 52 year olds, births per year averaged just 3.6 million per year.

That's 11.6 million fewer people to take up today's slack.

This is probably as good as it gets.

Not-a-conservative Rod Dreher is wrong, wrong, wrong, but also right in the same paragraph

Here, at once unable to appreciate how the Electoral College just saved the Republic, but zeroed in like a laser on the fact that Hillary was such a horrible candidate that she was beaten by a carnival barker:

I find the insistence of many liberals now that Clinton won the popular vote to be annoying. Yeah, she did, and maybe the Electoral College needs scrapping, I dunno. The much more important point is that Hillary Clinton, the very embodiment of Establishment Washington, lost the presidency to Donald Trump. Donald Trump! That’s a message that shakes both the Democratic Party and the establishment of the Republican Party to their cores. Whether you like Trump or not, you have to admit that his was a breathtaking achievement.

Rod Dreher, popularizer of ideas, accuses Claes Ryn, a bona fide intellectual, of misunderstanding him, and declines to elaborate

Good move, Rod. Run, retreat. Benedict Option!

Here:

"I started to undertake a point by point refutation of Ryn’s specious claims, but then realized that it would be pointless."

Claes Ryn shoots one across Rod Dreher's bow

Here.

He comes as close as a Catholic can to recommending that conservatives stand and fight.

Meanwhile a certain Presbyterian has been hard at it already since June 2015.

His name is Donald John Trump.

Catholics are late to the party, again.