Titled “Attack Helicopters and White Supremacy: Interesting Malicious Responses to an Online Questionnaire about Transgender Undergraduate Engineering and Computer Science Student Experiences,” the paper reported on “individuals exercising discursive power in their language to target researchers and tamper with data.”Play stupid games, win stupid prizes. "The scholars had sent the questionnaire link to over 3,000 email addresses associated with 'department chairs, program administrators, and faculty at accredited engineering bachelor’s degree-granting institutions,' who could then forward the survey to undergrads."
The authors wrote that the “backlash” to the project “reflects characteristics of contemporary far-right or fascist political movements in the U.S., such as the synthesis of antisemitism with anti-Black and anti-feminist rhetorics.”
About 25 percent of the “malicious responses” provided some airplane-related response to gender, including several who specifically identified as an “Apache helicopter.”
Look, just because it's so easy to construct and distribute surveys doesn't mean you should, and a case study that infers all sorts of things about the mental state of students whose inboxes probably get a lot of this sort of clutter isn't valid research under any reasonable standard of scholarship, but who said that minimal publishable units had to meet reasonable standards of scholarship these days? It's not clear that the bulletin in question is peer reviewed as I understand the term to mean.
But if there are popular sentiments supporting the restoration of a state of good repair in the common culture, let us have more of them! Consider, for instance, the recent Try That in a Small Town, which has caught on among populist insurgents more quickly than Beasts of England among the animals of Animal Farm. Never mind that Orwell's pigs later banned the singing of it.
In 2018, [singer Jason] Aldean was speaking after being the witness to one of the worst mass shootings in history, in Las Vegas. It’s not hard for us to imagine that he was responding emotionally, without thinking things through and later when he had more perspective, he changed his mind. Ideally, one's emotions should never overrule one's judgment, but it is pretty human.I don't know if that song has caught on because it speaks to that desire for a restoration of a state of good repair, or simply to cock a snook at Our Intellectual Betters. "The 'backlash' is from butthurt lefties who don’t want to be reminded that they’re a neurotic minority whose days of bullying the rest of the country are coming to an end." Twitchy's Aaron Walker continues.
Furthermore, after 2018 came 2020 and around a year of riots where very often authorities let the rioters run rampant and threatened to prosecute anyone who resisted them, while many others declared they wanted to defund or abolish the police.
We have said for a long time that the defund-the-police movement and the George Floyd Riots are when the left lost the gun control debate. Twenty years ago, it would have been unthinkable to say that if someone is trying to break down your door and you call the police, they might tell you no one would come. Today it is not so unthinkable. And this “tolerance” of rioting is a relatively new phenomenon.I don't pay much attention to the movies, screen writers and actors strike or not, although I hear that Sounds of Freedom is drawing well, and that, too, might be despite, or perhaps in response to, the aesthetic preferences of Orwell's pigs.
Finally, Power Line's Elizabeth Stauffer suggests that the political economy of entertainment now extends to amusement parks.
As the Left continues to alienate themselves from traditional American values with woke new versions of classic fairy tales and children’s stories, conservatives have quietly begun building a parallel economy. The boldest arrival into this space is American Heartland Theme Park, an affiliate of Mansion Entertainment Group, LLC. The company has announced plans to create a $2 billion, 1,000 acre entertainment destination in northeastern Oklahoma which is intended to rival the best that Disney has to offer.There might be a political message in the park's design.
The project will lean heavily on the talents and experience of former “Disney Parks builders and Walt Disney Imagineers.” But rather than focusing on Disney characters, the park will “feature a collection of six distinctly American lands” including: “Great Plains, Bayou Bay, Big Timber Falls, Stony Point Harbor, Liberty Village and Electropolis.”Will it draw visitors? I don't know. Moreover, to the extent that the park's business model is explicitly political, it's implicitly limiting its appeal. It will be built along the old Route 66 near Vinita, Oklahoma. The story got me thinking about the old Bell's Amusement Park on the State Fair grounds in Tulsa, which operated a pretty good wooden roller coaster. You wouldn't know the owners' politics from visiting the grounds, but if you read Brother John Birch's monthly magazine, there was always a Bell's advertisement therein. The park had to leave the fairgrounds, and the roller coaster came down. The family plan to build a new amusement park in Broken Arrow. Will Oklahoma be the new "Avoid Woke" tourist destination?
Conservatives, unhappy with the eagerness of corporations like Anheuser-Busch, Target and Nike to insert themselves into the culture wars, are no longer afraid to show their disapproval with their wallets. And this has opened up a huge economic opportunity for newcomers who refuse to bend to liberal pressure to champion the transmania that has replaced common sense in corporate executive suites.
No longer willing to allow the Left to wage this cultural war on our values and institutions, more and more Americans are saying ‘no thanks’ and taking their business elsewhere.
We have the power to put a stop to the madness. Putting the squeeze on woke corporations is a no-brainer and something all conservatives should rally behind. We don’t have to pretend that men can get pregnant or that changing one’s gender is courageous and something to be celebrated. Rather than being revered, these notions should be ridiculed and rejected out of hand.
The Bud Light flap was a wake-up call. We need to take our power back. And we can start with the power of the purse. A parallel conservative economy is an idea whose time has come.
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