Civil War on the Left

Civil War on the Left, Part 60: PP vs. SEIU

Featured image Remember the old saying about the Iran-Iraq war of the 1980s attributed to Henry Kissinger—it’s too bad they can’t both lose? We’ve got a great case study in that right now between Planned Parenthood and the SEIU union. Normally it’s just one big happy family in the leftist “hive,” but apparently not this time. From The Intercept: Planned Parenthood Is Asking Donald Trump’s Labor Board for Help in Busting Its »

Civil War on the Left, Part 59: Minnesota Not-So-Nice

Featured image It’s true. Everyone in Minnesota is nice. Not just Scott and John and Mitch Pearlstein. Everyone, that is, except progressive Democrats. Turns out a Democratic group in the state founded to promote the legacy of the late Paul Wellstone is feuding: In the Democratic Party’s reckoning following the election of Donald Trump, an unlikely feud has erupted inside an organization at the heart of the progressive movement. Earlier this year, »

Civil War on the Left, Part 58: Going Googly-Eyed

Featured image I have been remarking for a while that it is not a coincidence that Google refers to its Mountain View headquarters as a “campus,” as the politics of Google appear to be a close replication of college campus politics, with identity politics running amok. They might want to rethink this. We covered Google’s disgraceful firing of James Damore (here, here, and here), but today the Wall Street Journal has a »

Civil War on the Left, Part 57: Dem House Divided Against Itself

Featured image Democrats have a very good chance of taking the House of Representatives in November—if they can keep their comediennes under control. Apparently the folks who run the White House Correspondents Dinner have forgotten the lessons of the Wellstone funeral in 2002. Democrats also need to keep their Bernie-bro “progressives” under control. Whatever else you may think of Nancy Pelosi and minority leader Steny Hoyer, they know practical politics, and know »

Civil War on the Left, Part 56: Diversity for Thee, But Not for Me (Updated)

Featured image One of the things you can always count on from liberals is that their earnest care about the poor and disadvantaged always ends when policies to alleviate inequality might affect them. Like this story from the Wall Street Journal today about how parents on the Upper West Side of Manhattan (it hardly gets any more correctly liberal than the Upper West Side) object to a plan to admit student with—gasp! »

Civil War on the Left, Part 55: Democrat Dilemmas

Featured image One of the central problems of liberalism is that its operating dogmas sooner or later collide with each other. Take the way antitrust operated for decades: if you charged the same price as your competitors, you were guilty of collusion and price-fixing. But if you charged less than your competitors, you were guilty of predatory pricing. (Indeed this is exactly how antitrust investigations began decades ago before we came to »

Civil War on the Left, Part 54: Campus Cannibalism

Featured image Today’s installment of our Civil War on the Left series notes two recent incidents on campus that should fuel a big bump in popcorn futures prices in the commodity pits. First, at the University of Texas at Austin, a leftist professor who checks all the right boxes is nonetheless in hot water because he stumbled over one of the advanced feminist borders. From The American Spectator: An Antifa group at »

Civil War on the Left, Part 53: Riot of the Cavemen

Featured image Talk about your Feel Good Story of the Day, from The Hill: That’s so much fun to read it’s worth repeating again: From the copy: Progressives are hammering Sen. Minority Leader Charles Schumer (D-N.Y.) for his agreement with Senate Republican leadership to end the government shutdown on Monday. Even House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) has spoken out against the deal, saying there was no reason to support it. “I don’t »

Owls Through the Haze

Featured image At first glance this article in a forthcoming issue of Avian Conservation and Ecology about increased mortality of the endangered Northern Spotted Owl from rat poison doesn’t seem to indicate a political angle, at least not from the dense abstract. You just need to wade through it a bit to the payoff toward the end: Exposure to rodenticides in Northern Spotted and Barred Owls on remote forest lands in northwestern California: »

Civil War on the Left, Part 52: Manning Versus the Man

Featured image Paul has already taken note of the Maryland Senate candidacy of Chelsea Manning, but I think we have overlooked the comic possibilities of the identity politics train wreck this might offer. To wit, from Glenn Greenwald today: . . . Manning’s opponent in the Democratic Party primary is one of the most standard, banal, typical, privileged and mediocre politicians in the U.S. Congress: Benjamin Cardin, a 74-year-old white, straight man who is »

Civil War on the Left, Part 50: No High-Five for DiFi

Featured image California Senator Dianne Feinstein has announced today that she will seek re-election to the Senate next year, when she will be 84. And the left is not happy about it. Feinstein is too moderate for California! (Which, sadly, is probably true.) The JuiceVoxers note: Her reelection bid comes amid some criticism of her record from the left wing of the Democratic Party. As Emma Roller wrote in a profile at »

Civil War on the Left, Part 49: BLM vs. ACLU

Featured image The ACLU began equivocating lately about their categorical, content neutral defense of free speech, saying they might not defend the speech of hate groups that incite violence or force. I guess they’ll have to cross Black Lives Matter off their list of groups they will defend, then. Reason‘s Robbie Soave reports: Black Lives Matter Students Shut Down the ACLU’s Campus Free Speech Event Because ‘Liberalism Is White Supremacy’ Students affiliated »

Civil War on the Left, Part 48: Asian Supremacy?

Featured image Are Asians an oppressed minority in America, or not? We know for a fact that elite universities are nowadays discriminating against Asian applicants in much the same way they discriminated against Jewish applicants decades ago. But didn’t a lot of Asians historically suffer the same kind of discrimination that Irish, Italian, and other immigrants nowadays considered part of the world of “white supremacy”? For example, there’s a little noticed passage »

Civil War on the Left, Part 47: Obama, Please Go Away!

Featured image We know that black turnout in the last election was down from 2012, when black turnout was actually higher than white turnout. The left screams “GOP vote suppression!,” except that the lower turnout occurred in many instances in cities and states that Democrats control. Maybe the fact that Obama was no longer on the ballot—and Hillary was—might explain why some black voters stayed home (or voted for Trump—he got the »

Civil War on the Left, Part 46: Googly Bits Fall Off

Featured image One of my theories about the hollow and politically-correct liberalism of the tech oligarchs in Silicon Valley is that it is simply the new face of assuaging their own liberal guilt at piling up such huge fortunes so rapidly. I heard a report last year about Google’s CEO Eric Schmidt being challenged about his support for Hillary Clinton, and his reply was that Silicon Valley opposes government control of either »

Civil War on the Left, Part 45: The Banality of Chelsea

Featured image We noted here a couple of months back the obvious truth that Chelsea Clinton is a nitwit. Who knew, however, that a leftist would stumble across this fact? Prof. Corey Robin of Brooklyn College, author of a book popular among leftists called The Reactionary Mind that purports to explain conservatism (gee: I wonder if we can figure out the thesis from the title), got into an argument recently with Chelsea. »

Civil War on the Left, Part 43: I Can’t Even

Featured image Just imagine all of the problems this story is going to cause the left, who won’t be able to sort out the competing Victimology and Moral Purity claims: Fish becoming transgender from contraceptive pill chemicals being flushed down household drains A fifth of male fish are now transgender because of chemicals from the contraceptive pill being flushed down household drains, a study by has suggested. Male river fish are displaying feminised traits and even »