Tough Love

Kevin Williamson posits what is apparently a controversial idea - people living in economically depressed areas should take control of their lives and try to better themselves. Williamson has been attacked from both the left and the right on this one, though as he points out (his response to his critics linked below), no one has actually disagreed with any of his arguments. Most of the criticism has targeted the harsh tone of his article. One damn lie being spread is that Williamson suggested that working class whites should die. There is no limit to the evil mendacity of the left and the alt right.

https://www.nationalreview.com/nrd/articles/432569/father-f-hrer

David French at NRO defends his colleague --

http://www.nationalreview.com/corner/432796/working-class-whites-have-moral-responsibilities-defense-kevin-williamson

And Williamson responds to his critics here --

http://www.nationalreview.com/corner/432828/what-critics-get-wrong-about-white-poverty

Jim Geraghty writes of the wrongheaded desire of those disenchanted with the current political environment to burn it all down.

You dare not call yourself conservative if you belong to this arson-minded mass. Conservatives are here to preserve, create, and build, not to ignite and destroy. Insofar as the torch is an American political tradition, it’s not a conservative one — it’s the recourse of our country’s worst radicals, from the Klan to the Weather Underground to the Black Panthers to Timothy McVeigh.

...Yes, of course, America has problems. We’ve got paranoid zero-tolerance school administrators suspending kids for pretending their lunchtime sandwich was a gun. We’ve got CEOs getting dismissed by their own corporate boards for past opposition to gay marriage. We’ve got journalists lecturing others about which pronoun to use for a former Olympic hero who changes names and genders. We have 46 million families using food banks and food-service programs, and half-a-million homeless, one quarter of them children.

But let’s have some perspective. This morning, about 50 million American children took the bus to a public school, and for the vast majority of them, nothing went wrong. About 121 million Americans went off to a full-time job, worked hard, and thought about what they would do with their paycheck at the end of the week. For those out of work, there were 5.6 million job openings at the end of 2015, at least 57,000 of them offering on-the-job training. About 60 million married men and women across the country went to bed last night thinking about their spouse — most of them still in love, and not worried about how he left the toilet seat up. Last year, American families adopted about 135,000 children who needed homes. And in the last year of complete statistics, we gave more to charity than ever before.

http://www.nationalreview.com/article/432770/donald-trump-2016-voters-above-burning-system-down

Victor Davis Hanson compares some of Trump's outrages to those of esteemed leftists and finds common ground in depravity.

Trump reprehensibly has urged his supporters to physically tangle with opponents. But, after Chicago, did he emulate a presidential urge “to argue with them and get in their face!”? When Trump does his next Philadelphia rally, will he, in Obama fashion, egg on his Trumpsters with this: “If they bring a knife to the fight, we bring a gun. Because from what I understand, folks in Philly like a good brawl. I’ve seen Eagles fans.”

Or maybe Trump could adapt another line from Obama and use it with his working-class white supporters, cautioning them that, instead of sitting out the election, they should say, “We’re gonna punish our enemies and we’re gonna reward our friends who stand with us on issues that are important to us.” Or maybe Trump could try still another adaptation of a line from President Obama for those stubborn senators who favor open borders: “Those aren’t the kinds of folks who represent our core American values.”

...We could play this tu quoque all day long, but the fact that we can play it at all suggests that Trump is hardly, by current standards, beyond the pale, much less that he is aberrant in U.S. presidential-campaign history. He is or is not as uncouth as Barack Obama, who has mocked the disabled, the wealthy, typical white people, the religious, and the purported clingers, and has compared opponents to Iranian theocrats and said that George W. Bush was “unpatriotic” — all as relish to wrecking America’s health-care system, doubling the national debt, setting race relations back six decades, politicizing federal bureaucracies, ignoring federal law, and leaving the Middle East in shambles and our enemies on the ascendant.

...I would not vote for Donald Trump in the primary, given that I have no idea what he would do as president and thus most certainly hope he does not get the nomination. But he seems about on par with the current president, in terms of reckless speeches, inexperience, crudity, and cluelessness. Yet I don’t recall hearing that many in the Democratic party ever felt that Obama’s provocative and ignorant campaign utterances, along with his past associations with the likes of Tony Rezko, Revernd Wright, Bill Ayers, and Father Pfleger, had driven them to vote for a far more sober and judicious John McCain or Mitt Romney.

http://www.nationalreview.com/article/432786/trump-compared-to-obama-clintons

Will Franken is a London performance artist who spent seven months as a transgender woman before converting back to a man. He recounts his experience and progressives' less than tolerant reception of his reconversion.

http://thefederalist.com/2016/03/07/what-life-as-a-transgender-woman-taught-me-about-progressives/