Texas

Americans aged eighteen to twenty account for only four percent of the population but 17 percent of murderers, almost always male. School shootings get the most attention. The problem is not just the guns. It is the young men who wield them. That means any possible solution rests with the shooter, not the firearm. There’s a pattern inside those sordid statistics, with some 70 percent of school shootings since 1999 having been carried out by people under eighteen. The median age of school shooters is sixteen. It’s kids shooting kids; whether because they are left out, bullied, teased or angry at some slight or teacher’s offense, it is kids killing kids.

The calls started almost immediately. The bodies of nineteen children and two teachers had barely cooled when politicians and activists took to social media demanding some sort of action on guns. Some called the National Rifle Association a terrorist organization, while others castigated Republicans for allegedly supporting gun rights over children. Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer was urged to bring a bill on background checks up for a vote so the “votes fall with the children who died.” Politics takes no break during tragedies. The crescendo of activist furor will likely peak this weekend during the NRA Convention in Houston. Demonstrations are already planned near the George R. Brown Convention Center with political actors of all kinds expected to attend.

The “Tinder Swindler” has some competition in the “romantic entanglement gone wrong” department this week. Congressman Van Taylor, Republican from Texas, has just announced he’s ending his re-election campaign, which the Texas Tribune reports he had in the bag with 49 percent of the primary vote. The reason? According to Breitbart, Taylor had an affair with Tania Joya, a so-called “ISIS bride.” Cockburn notes that the details are sordid. Joya had been married to the late John Georgelas, an American who had converted to Islam, embraced jihad, joined ISIS and was reported to have been killed in Syria in 2017. Joya says Taylor paid her $5,000 to keep the affair quiet and provided Breitbart with bank records that appear to prove that Taylor did, indeed, make such a deposit.

Cockburn is a great admirer of Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. In an age when even stand-up comics allow themselves to be intimidated by the woke scolds of the left, AOC is a one-woman Alamo, fearlessly defending her right to talk absolute gibberish. Republicans like to think that Democrats don’t know the country outside their blue-state cities, but AOC isn’t afraid to slum it in red America. In January, when her constituents in the Bronx were enduring the double blow of a New York winter and Covid checks before they could get indoors, AOC went clubbing in Florida, the magic kingdom of Ron DeSantis, went maskless in a drag bar and picked up a case of Covid as a souvenir.

It wasn’t so long ago that an official at London’s Heathrow airport, warned by the scanner through which my luggage was passing, uttered an Archimedean Eureka! (or words to that effect), pounced on my suitcase and abstracted an incriminating bottle of shampoo, which he confiscated. “Over the limit, Sir,” he exclaimed, as a colleague asked me to step aside and extend my hands to be tested for evidence of contact with explosive materials. It’s not only in England, of course, that functionaries subject the populace to their petty tyranny. It’s the same drill in the US. “Oh, but it’s to keep you safe, you know, that’s why we spend billions on our intelligence services and elite crime fighting units, equipping like armies so they can protect us from the bad guys.

Faced with some high-profile crimes, our law enforcement authorities are finding it hard to say what has prompted “suspects” to pursue deadly violence. Even President Biden found himself baffled by what would lead a known Islamist terrorist to invade a synagogue on Saturday night and hold a rabbi and other members of his congregation hostage. The FBI likewise for a period expressed its bewilderment. The hostage taker had demanded the release of Aafia Siddiqui, a convicted Islamic terrorist held in a Texas prison, but the FBI wasn’t about to draw any inferences from his choice of hostages or his principal demand. The FBI professed to know nothing of his motives — and President Biden nodded in agreement.

Political brains detonated last week after Texas governor Greg Abbott signed a new executive order that effectively banned vaccine mandates by any institution. The timing of the order seemed extraordinarily odd. Abbott, a Republican, has long advocated for private business rights and inoculation efficacy, especially after President Joe Biden announced a federal vaccine mandate. Abbott also didn't comment when Texas hospitals enacted COVID shot requirements over the summer. Why the change? Texas Democrats and Houston Chronicle columnist Erica Grieder blame Abbott’s 2022 GOP primary fight against Allen West and Don Huffines.

Cockburn was intrigued to learn that OkCupid, the dating app service, now offers a ‘pro-choice’ badge for its users’ profiles. The feature was introduced in response to Texas Senate Bill 8, a law that could potentially limit abortions after a fetal heartbeat is detected at around six weeks.  While dating apps are not Cockburn’s preferred method of wooing the ladies (mystery is everything), he wonders whether this corporate vice-signaling is catching on. In addition to abortion enthusiasm, OkCupid also promotes itself as a platform for the sexually adventurous. On its website, colorful gender-bending models simulate various sex positions and one apparent orgy.

The record influx of illegal immigrants on the southern border — and the White House's refusal to refer to it as a 'crisis' — was the biggest story of the young Biden presidency at the start of the year. Even though the number of illegal crossings continued to swell, hitting over 200,000 migrants a month, the scandal practically disappeared during the summer. The media distracted Americans with fear-mongering about the new Delta variant of COVID-19 and warmongering about the undeniably disastrous withdrawal from Afghanistan. The Biden border crisis has now returned with a vengeance. This week, more than 10,000 Haitians descended on the border town of Del Rio, Texas seeking entry to the United States.

For a people supposedly united by their great and abiding love of freedom, the pandemic year has been an interesting test of Americans' commitment to their country's founding principles. Sure, life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness are great — but have you tried surveilling, spying and snitching on your neighbors amid an endless state of emergency? Turns out, many folks in the US are quite willing to sacrifice various freedoms if it means they get to scold and punish others, particularly their ideological opponents, for breaking the rules. The past two years have seen many Americans embrace their inner authoritarians, treating shamings like a spectator sport and excoriating the noncompliant with evangelical zeal.

If you read one book this fall, make it The Handmaid’s Tale TV show. And then don’t read another book, ever again, if you want to remain au courant on Twitter. Margaret Atwood’s 1985 dystopian novel, and the more recent Hulu series, which depict a futuristic America called Gilead where women are treated as breeding chattel, have become a political obsession. They're used as a kind of shorthand by the trendy left for the medieval theocracy my fellow pro-lifers and I are supposedly hammering together in our spare time. This totalitarian state is evidently being built over the scaffolding of the lawless Randian anarcho-syndicate we were accused of building just a few years ago. But then those kindly old ladies praying rosaries outside abortion clinics are nothing if not adaptive.

President Biden had no censorious words concerning the Taliban as the evacuation catastrophe in Kabul unfolded, but he sure let ’er rip Thursday when the Supreme Court let stand, for now, a new Texas law blocking early abortion procedures. Out came the dictionary of excoriative synonyms: ‘extreme’, ‘blatantly’, ‘outrageously’. Ripping up any reminders of freedom in Afghanistan is a smaller game, in Bidenesque terms, than ripping out, or extracting from the womb in some other manner, the smallest particle of human life. Such is the mode of modern politics, we might note, sadly. The Texas law, which went into effect at midnight August 31, is the latest attempt by a supposedly sovereign state to mitigate the effects of Roe v.

Last week, Texas Democrats fled the state on a chartered plane to Washington DC, maskless with a case of Miller Lite in tow, to a chorus of whoops and cheers of our national media. As Texas attempts to pass new election integrity legislation, or to Democrats and our media writ large, ‘voting restrictions’, Texas Democrats decided to object to the Senate filibuster, by participating in a filibuster. They were doing the rounds on CNN and MSNBC, appearing on morning shows or being celebrated on them (The View). The irony of celebrating a minority party as ‘brave’ few for mucking up the legislative process was apparently completely lost on our journalistic elite.

The Democratic party boasts so many heroes, it’s sometimes hard to keep up. Recently, Rep. Andy Kim revealed that he will be donating his J. Crew wool suit to the Smithsonian Institute. An AP photographer captured the congressman in the Rotunda picking up some trash after the January 6 riots. ‘So I found a roll of trash bags, got down on my knees, and just started trying to clean up a place I love.’ This kind of courage begs the question — can an Emmy award be far behind? After all, not all heroes wear capes, but one definitely wore a cobalt blue suit. Such acts of valor above and beyond the call of duty are nothing new in the modern Democratic party. Where were you on that snowy day in 2019 when you first saw that photo of Rep. Eric Swalwell?

Off to Washington DC on Monday they flew, maskless with Miller Lites in hand — three-score Democratic members of the Texas legislature, breaking the quorum required for any vote, abandoning their duties at a called special session. Washington DC, where the real power-brokers live and the Vice President of the United States. On from there to a PR opportunity with the President himself. What a telling commentary on the state of American politics, where the story gets around that there’s only one side — the progressive side — worthy of attention on account of its self-trumpeted devotion to the people’s rights. Kamala Harris called the stunt ‘as American as apple pie’ — and sadly she’s not altogether wrong.

We did it, Joe! After weeks of pressure, Vice President Kamala Harris is finally going to visit the US-Mexico border. The administration's border czar will travel to El Paso, Texas, on Friday. 'Earlier this year, the President asked the Vice President to oversee our diplomatic efforts to address the root causes of migration from El Salvador, Guatemala and Honduras,' VP spokeswoman Symone Sanders said in a statement Wednesday. 'As a part of this ongoing work, the Vice President traveled to Guatemala and Mexico earlier this month and will travel to El Paso on Friday.' Harris long resisted taking the trip down south, but her position became increasingly untenable with each disastrous interview and skyrocketing numbers of illegal border crossers.