Safe spaces and ‘ze’ badges. Scottish student Madeleine Kearns writes in the Spectator about her bewildering first year at a U.S. college, where she and other free thinkers felt compelled to create their own unsafe space: “We met in a disused convent in Hell’s Kitchen and discussed campus-censored ideas. We read Douglas Murray’s The Strange Death of Europe, Laura Kipnis’s Unwanted Advances: Sexual Paranoia Comes to Campus and Walter Benn Michaels’s The Trouble With Diversity: How We Learned to Love Identity and Ignore Inequality. We were a diverse group: a Catholic woman, a black conservative man, an anti-theist neoconservative, a Protestant libertarian, and a quick-witted Spanish contrarian. We were united in agreeing that we should be free to disagree. We made our own unsafe space, and at the end of each meeting, we were invigorated and parted on good terms.”
The making of an American terrorist. At GQ, Rachel Kaadzi Ghansah spent a few months in South Carolina trying to understand how Dylann Roof became the monster that he is: “The white supremacists of today, having been kicked off Twitter, often have Instagram bios that offer an eerie good-bye to their opposition: Good night, left side. And there are thousands of them. Like Roof, and unlike a typical ISIS recruit, they don’t have handlers or any centralized way of becoming hooked. Instead, they are brought into the fold because they have found something that explains their laggard social progress to them and confirms their narrow worldview as fact.”
Magnets, how do they work? Last fall, I covered a rare legal victory won by a purveyor of “Buckyballs” against America’s nanny, the CPSC. At TWS, we love these little magnets, which adorn a number of our desks and had followed fate of these little round wonders as the regulators tried to regulate them out of existence. Over at the Huffington Post, Jeremy Kutner has a great deep dive into how Shihan Qu’s quest to save his magnets became a regulatory battle for the ages.
Do digital Nazis deserve sympathy? Matthew Prince, a tech CEO (whom we covered last week in the Afternoon Links) has an op-ed in the Wall Street Journal about kicking the racist website Daily Stormer out of its DDoS protection umbrella. Prince suggests that having a few CEOs with the editorial power to determine what should be online is concerning: “Cloudflare is an expert at stopping cyberattacks, but we do not have the expertise to pass judgment on which of our 20 trillion monthly internet requests is racist, reprehensible or offensive. Even if we could solve the technical challenge of filtering them out, hidden behind the scenes is a problem of political legitimacy.”
It’s time for a purge. Writing at Hot Air, Taylor Millard makes the case that the conservative and libertarian movements need to purge the white supremacists in their midst. “There are going to be people who read this and rightly say, ‘But this is a small group, who aren’t really conservative/libertarian, so I shouldn’t care at all about them.’ The problem is these Richard Spencers and Peter Brimelows got their start in ‘the movement,’ under the guise of paleoconservatism, while others are part of the Hans-Hermann Hoppe bloc of libertarianism. They are the wolves in sheep clothing looking to draw more and more people into their pack while ripping away at the foundation of freedom and liberty at the same time.” Jason Kessler, who organized the “Unite the Right” rally in Charlottesville is a great example. A number of conservative webpages published him. It’s hard to imagine they didn’t do their do diligence and know what the guy was about … but they published him anyway! Now, some sites are removing his content from their website like nothing ever happened. Alas, the Internet remembers.
I’ll take blasphemy for $500, Alex. A preacher billed as President Trump’s “spiritual adviser” is in hot water after making some absolutely nutty comments about the Bible, God, and President Trump. Paula White, a televangelist, compared President Trump to Esther, suggesting it was God himself who put Trump in the Oval Office. And those who might not agree with the President? “God says that he raises up and places all people in places of authority… It is God who raises up a king. It is God that sets one down. When you fight against the plan of God, you are fighting against the hand of God.” Not surprisingly, White’s New Destiny Christian Center filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy in 2014. It’s hard to bankrupt a church, but you know the old saying: “you can’t save souls in an empty church.” And with biblical interpretation like that, the good Lord knows White is trying.
The Hannity Curse! Will it continue? Sean Hannity has endorsed Kelli Ward, a former Arizona state senator who is challenging incumbent senator Jeff Flake in the Republican primary. Ward, as readers probably recall, challenged and lost to John McCain in the last cycle. Now, she is again being savaged over her flirtations with chemtrail conspiracy theorists, with the nickname “Chemtrail Kelli.” Ward has other issues with tact, too. Which means that Flake, literally one of the nicest members of Congress, probably doesn’t have much to worry about, now that the Hannity Curse has been invoked. Paul Ryan’s perpetual primary opponent Paul Nehlen got Hannity’s blessing, as did Amy Kremer (who?) in the Karen Handel / Jon Ossoff race in Georgia 6 earlier this year. Kremer got 351 votes.
Windows 95 is 22 years old today. Think nobody uses this old operating system anymore? Think again. “75-percent of the Pentagon’s control systems run Windows XP, or other operating systems that have long been discontinued.” And some of them are Windows 95! It’s OK though, a Pentagon spokesperson says, as long as they’re not connected to the World Wide Web.
Have you ever been this happy?
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