Sep
30
2025

Left-Wing Glorification of Violence: A Long Tradition of Existence

You might have noticed paeans to the recently-deceased Assata Olugbala Shakur. Example, from the Democratic Socialists of America:

Many responses at the link, but I got a chuckle out of the one from Reason's Liz Wolfe:

As Wikipedia notes, three current CongressCritters are DSA members: Greg Casar, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, and Rashida Tlaib. Google can't find any indication that they've either endorsed or denounced the DSA's lionization of a convicted cop-killer.

Also of note:

  • Yes, we have no … soybeans? Kevin D. Williamson has a very long Wanderland column this week, where he takes a Democrat candidate for Congress to task for The Wrong Way to Fight Trump’s Tariffs

    I am forbidden by the terms of my employment and by professional ethics from giving paid advice to political candidates—but, for pity’s sake: Could somebody, somewhere, teach Democrats how to talk about trade?

    Case in point: Rebecca Cooke, the Democrat challenging Republican incumbent Derrick Van Orden in Wisconsin’s 3rd Congressional District, wants to pick a fight with the Trump administration over trade policy. Good idea: The Trump administration’s trade policy is a gigantic slop bucket of amateurish buffoonery into which congressional Republicans have dived headlong, and the district Cooke would like to represent includes a bunch of soybean farmers who are getting absolutely hosed—for the second time—by Donald Trump’s incompetence. Most informed observers would likely agree that a team of monkeys who graduated at the very bottom of their monkey community college class would probably produce a more intelligent and coherent policy.

    Small problem: Cooke doesn’t know a damned thing about trade. Or at least that is the impression her campaign literature gives.

    KDW isn't gentle on Van Orden either ("a Trump-stroking, self-abasing sycophant").

  • In case you thought they had hit bottom… Becket Adams observes The Media’s Sins of Omission Are Getting Worse. And his example is New Hampshire-related:

    Consider, for example, NBC News’ tortured handling (archive.today link) last week of a deadly shooting at a wedding reception in New Hampshire.

    The relevant facts, which were known at the time of NBC’s coverage, are that the alleged gunman, 23-year-old Hunter Nadeau, shot and killed one wedding-goer, 59-year-old Robert Steven DeCesare, and injured two others.

    Just before opening fire on the wedding party, Nadeau reportedly said, “The children were safe,” and then shouted, “Free Palestine!”

    Yet, as was first brought to my attention by Charlie Cooke, NBC practically had to be bullied into acknowledging accounts of the gunman’s reported words.

    Google's AI tells me that "As of late 2023, NBC News has been using the slogan "This is who we are".

    My obvious response: Could you try being someone else for a change?

  • Longest article ever? Mani Basharzad tells us What Zohran Mamdani Doesn’t Understand about Wealth.

    Zohran Mamdani, the person who defeated Cuomo in the primaries and is now seen as a mayoral contender for New York—the beating heart of capitalism—recently declared in an interview: “I don’t think we should have billionaires.”

    Mamdani is not alone in this view. The visible edge of economic populism—the slogans, the soundbites—often conceals an intellectual iceberg beneath: ideas inherited from defunct economists, or sometimes living ones. One such idea with deep roots is limitarianism: the belief that there should be a cap on personal wealth.

    Thomas Piketty defines it as “the idea that we should set a maximum on how much resources one individual can appropriate.” Its most articulate modern advocate is Ingrid Robeyns, whose recent book, Limitarianism: The Case Against Extreme Wealth, calls for a global wealth cap, which she suggests could be set around $10 million per person.

    But limitarianism rests on an old intellectual error. An error common not only on the Left but even among some classical liberals too: the mistaken division between “production” and “distribution.” The assumption is that production happens through economic forces and that distribution is purely political, so policymakers can reshape who gets what without damaging how much is created.

    Mani's a pretty sharp cookie, explaining that "mistaken division".