Massive Sewage Pipeline: Grand Opening

election year narratives arrive

It’s an election year, so get ready. Two astonishingly dullwitted books arrived in bookstores this week, on the same day, as their dreadful authors hit the airwaves to promote them. One was White Rage: The Threat to American Democracy, about the breathtaking stupidity and backwardness of rural whites, who are destroying America. Taking care to be subtle, the publisher gave the book a cover that features a pick-up truck with an American flag and a Trump sign, leaving out only the weird kid with the banjo and the dude who shouts, “Squeal, boy! Squeal like a pig!”

And then there’s the wonderfully nuanced title Attack from Within: How Disinformation is Sabotaging America, by Obama-era US Attorney Barbara McQuade, who is now a law school professor after being asked to resign by Orange Hitler — though apparently a law school professor who is unfamiliar with the text of the 6th Amendment, thinking it exists to confer a right upon the public to have people put on trial right away.

Go look at the replies to this remarkable claim if you want to understand why Professor McQuade is so concerned about wide open social media channels that allow everyone to speak.

The cover of McQuade’s book is somehow more obnoxious than the cover of White Rage:

See, it’s a giant clenched fist rising out of Middle America. Get it? Get it? It may take a moment.

These books: If, one day, by some bizarre chain of weird accidents, these are the only remnants of our civilization, no one will have the slightest idea what actually happened while we were alive. They’re miscategorized fiction. Every paragraph is full of obtuse faked reality; if you hold it up to the real world, it doesn’t even sort of match. Go click on the Amazon preview for McQuade’s book, if you’d like to see this for yourself, and let’s just take two back-to-back paragraphs from the bottom of pg. 15 and the top of pg. 16. Really read this, because Barbara McQuade’s writing will, let’s put it this way, leave quite an impression on you:

Do you suddenly have a migraine? In order:

“Teen gunman” Kyle Rittenhouse offers an example of “vigilante violence,” and he took up arms “to right perceived wrongs.” But Rittenhouse was acquitted of every criminal charge he faced, quickly and predictably, in a televised trial that featured a bunch of video evidence; he was peacefully protecting a business during a period of widespread looting and arson when he was attacked.

The Associated Press offers a mostly okay basic blow-by-blow description of all of this; in the final moments, Rittenhouse was chased, then “shot and killed Anthony Huber, 26, a protester from Silver Lake, Wisconsin, who was seen on bystander video hitting Rittenhouse with a skateboard,” then “wounded Gaige Grosskreutz, 27, a protester from West Allis, Wisconsin, who had a gun in his hand as he stepped toward Rittenhouse.” You can see the gun in Grosskreutz’s hand, for crying out loud, just before he was shot and as he was shot and right after he was shot:

So people chased Rittenhouse, and beat him and tried to shoot him as he protected a business, so he shot them in self-defense, a premise a jury accepted. McQuade’s conclusion: “a direct assault on the rule of law…the kind of destruction wrought by teen gunman Kyle Rittenhouse.” None of her conclusions match any known and easily proved facts.

In her book about the dangers of disinformation.

McQuade’s next example of “vigilante violence” by America’s vicious gun culture, taking up arms to “right perceived wrongs?” Yes, “more than 1,000 insurrectionists in our nation’s capital on January 6, 2021.” There were more than a thousand armed insurrectionists at the Capitol, and they represent an example of people taking up arms?

Bound in teams, boys, but stay inside the velvet ropes

Here’s NPR trying to save the claim that January 6 was an armed insurrection:

In the wake of the Jan. 6 insurrection at the U.S. Capitol, a popular narrative has emerged: that because rioters did not fire guns that day, they were not really "armed."

But a review of the federal charges against the alleged rioters shows that they did come armed, and with a variety of weapons: stun guns, pepper spray, baseball bats and flagpoles wielded as clubs.

But in fact, they did not fire guns that day. That’s it. That’s what happened. A very few January 6 rioters have admitted to having concealed guns as they entered the Capitol or the Capitol grounds, but no evidence I’ve seen shows that any drew them in the Capitol, and police now say — three years later — that someone fired a gun in the air outside the building. This is all just like more than a thousand people directly assaulting the Capitol with AR-15s, because Barbara McQuade says so. More than a thousand insurrectionists took up arms at the Capitol on January 6 to right perceived wrongs, says prominent disinformation expert.

Onward: “Much of the American right glamorizes assault weapons, based on the absurd claim that the Second Amendment protects not only the right to bear arms but also the right to overthrow our government.”

My goodness, where would anyone get the claim that a founding-era American document meant to describe citizens as having a right to overthrow their government?

The Declaration of Independence, the literal founding statement of the nation that gave McQuade a government job:

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness. — That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, — That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government…But when a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same Object evinces a design to reduce them under absolute Despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such Government, and to provide new Guards for their future security.

Thomas Jefferson thought Americans had a right to “throw off” their government; Barbara McQuade finds it an “absurd claim.” Which one do you think understood the topic?

And finally, we turn to McQuade’s claim that “assault weapons…are the very same kinds of guns that have made mass shootings an American epidemic.”

Murders are mostly committed with handguns. Click on that link and look at murders in California in 2019: 1,679 murders; 762 committed with handguns; 252 committed with knives; 102 committed with “hands, fists, feet, etc.”; 34 committed with rifles. The FBI does this every year, and you can find more of these tables for yourself with a minute of simple effort.

Stick to just mass shootings and you get more rifles — or, if you feel like it, “assault rifles,” which are rifles but shiny and black — but the answer is still…handguns, at a little more than two-to-one:

I’ve just unpacked two short paragraphs from a book that’s almost 400 pages long. Look how much absolute horseshit this fool has packed into just those two paragraphs.

Want to read the whole book?