El Paso

Thursday

Joshua Treviño

Cartel drones vs Texas lasers

Yesterday, El Paso, Texas, was placed under severe restrictions from the Federal Aviation Administration. For unspecified reasons of national security, no aircraft would be allowed in or out for ten days. Washington sources soon confirmed what many suspected: the cause was hostile drone activity from Mexico. Then there was an about turn. Within a few hours, the flight ban was lifted. What actually happened? We know that the Department of War has been working on an anti-drone system for some time, using lasers to shoot down craft. One of these laser systems was actually deployed near El Paso and officials claim a drone was indeed shot down. The FAA, concerned with possible threats to civil aviation, then imposed the ten-day flight ban.

Monday

James Jeffrey

Texas or Hell

The first time I saw Texas, I was more than ready for it. I crossed the state line in the middle of a month-long, coast-to-coast road trip after a hellish tour in Afghanistan. ‘You can go to Hell, but I am going to Texas,’ said Davy Crockett. I think he had a point. Texas is better, though it’s nearly as hot come summertime. My wingman and I did our best to honor Hunter S. Thompson’s advice to embrace ‘madness in any direction, at any hour’. Well, of a sort. We were both still subject to the army’s random drug tests, plus it was hard to entirely forget the chivalrous officer code drilled into us at Sandhurst, the West Point of Britain.

texas

Wednesday

Jacob Heilbrunn

Trump heals the nation…by attacking Beto for his ‘phony name’

The Democratic party, mired in infighting only a week ago, has reunited over racial division. New Jersey senator Cory Booker stated in a speech on Wednesday in Charleston, S.C., that the recent acts of white nationalist violence received a stimulus 'from the highest office in our land, where we see in tweets and rhetoric, hateful words that ultimately endanger the lives of people in our country.' Joe Biden took direct aim at President Trump: in an impassioned speech in Burlington, Iowa, he declared, 'in both clear language and in code, the president has fanned the flames of white supremacy in this nation.' A day earlier, Fox News host Tucker Carlson tried to douse the controversy over white nationalism by averring that the phenomenon is a 'hoax.

phony name

Tuesday

Michael Tracey

A new ‘War on Terror’ is a terrible idea

Does anyone in their right mind really think the ‘War on Terror’ waged by the United States since 9/11 has been a successful policy? , The terrorist group the US claimed it was most determined to destroy, al-Qaeda, has surged in strength over the last few years. ISIS sprouted in Iraq and Syria as a direct consequence of the general ‘War on Terror’ posture, which had its most egregious manifestation in the 2003 invasion. Today, the US bombs countries and stations troops all over the world with the nebulous goal of ‘defeating terrorism,’ which of course is just a tactic and can never be truly ‘defeated’ – or so we once thought.Back in the George W.

war on terror
nihilism
Claire Berlinski

The Czarist image of mass shootings

Let’s retire the term ‘gun violence,’ or reserve it for jealous husbands who shoot their wives. What happened in El Paso is terrorism; more properly, it is a nihilist insurgency.We should pause to consider the origins of this phenomenon in late Czarist Russia, the cradle of modern terrorism. There is an eerie similarity between America’s shooter culture and the sinister and contagious form of violent nihilism that emerged between 1861 and 1866 in Russia. A number of young men seemed to decide that it would be fine to kill a large number of people. No one knows why. The killer in El Paso scribbled a lunatic alt-right manifesto; the Dayton murderer, to judge from his Twitter feed, was drawn to far-left bromides.

shootings
Daniel McCarthy

Liberalism cannot stop the shootings

What makes a young man pick up a gun, head to a crowded place, and shoot as many people as he can? Liberals have two answers to this question. First, the availability of guns is by itself enough to cause mass shootings. Some people will want to kill, and the guns let them do it easily. Second, young men are not liberal enough not to kill. They might be Donald Trump supporters, and if that isn’t the same thing as being a white nationalist – for a growing number of liberals, it really is – it is a kind of gateway drug, and the president’s failure to say what liberals want him to say, as often as they want him to say it, allows young men to be radicalized into killers. What could Trump say to stop these killings?

Sunday

Freddy Gray

‘Meh’: the psychotic apathy of the Great Replacement killers

There is not much to say about mass shootings. The violence horrifies us, depresses us, we move on — on social media, this process can take a few seconds. The other media routine follows: endless, circular debates on guns are given another spin in the barrel. If the killer is white, somebody important (step up Beto O’Rourke) angrily says it is Trump’s fault. That invites anger in return. Culture wars subsume the story. Sometimes, a frightening viral video emerges, or what hacks call a ‘disturbing insight into the mind of the killer’. These excite our emotions a little longer. Deranged maniacs know that, which is why we now increasingly see their ‘manifestos’ — long pseudo-intellectual declarations of purpose — posted online.

great replacement