Stella Creasy continues to disappoint (and that’s putting it politely).

But of course she didn’t meet “with a number of women involved in all your groups.” There are no such women. The People’s Front of Judea part is insulting. She’s being dismissive and contemptuous and hostile…to feminist women, when she claims to be a feminist woman herself.

Would she like to hear from some gender critical women now?

No.

It seems she once held an online workshop along with Stonewall on…wait for it…misogyny. Yes, let’s bring Stonewall in to inform us about misogyny. Women who argued were booted out.

There is to be no arguing with Stonewall. If Stonewall explains misogyny to women then women are to shut up and listen. They’re not there to argue with Stonewall. Stonewall is never wrong.

For Women Scotland weren’t thrown out, but that’s because they were never allowed in. What do women know about misogyny?! It’s Stonewall that’s the expert! God knows they’ve had a lot of practice.

More genius thinking from Billy Bragg.

That’s not about trans women, it’s about violence against women!

How the hell does he think he knows the difference? How does he think anyone does? How does he think women do?

We can’t. That’s the point. That’s why all this self-ID nonsense is such bullshit – because it’s an open door the size of Texas for predators. There doesn’t happen to be any Magic Filter Device that turns purple when a “male predator” disguised as an innocent Trans Lady enters the women’s toilets. There’s nothing. We can’t tell, and we don’t want to be forced to have to try to tell. It shouldn’t be dumped on us. The end.

Piers Morgan says he did not either censor Kate Smurthwaite on his tv chat show. Kate says he did.

On the list of alleged subjects to avoid was Morgan’s “vindictive obsession” with Meghan Markle, according to comedian and political activist Kate Smurthwaite…Smurthwaite continued: “They didn’t want me to get ‘too personal’ with Morgan. They didn’t want me criticising or seeking to explain his ‘vindictive obsession’ with [Meghan Markle].

“The main thing they didn’t want me to say was: ‘You know that no matter how many hours you spend slagging her off, she’s still not going to shag you?’. True. Funny. Insightful. What’s not to love?”

Not a thing.

Stella Creasy says she met with the groups; the groups say we’d be happy to meet with you Stella, just name the date.

Oh she has done so?

Maybe it was trans sitting down with? Identifying as sitting down with?

Updating to add another:

And another.

And one more so that’s ALL of them.

Another one.

The theft of Title IX:

Equality for women in sports followed decades of struggle. Fifty years ago, President Nixon signed Title IX, which banned discrimination in higher education. This opened doors to previously all-male classes and led to many more female teams and scholarships.

The result is a massive increase in women’s sports.

Some trans activists are challenging aspects of Title IX, specifically its implicit acknowledgment of biological difference. And supporters, not least the Biden administration, say transgender girls should be permitted on girls’ sports teams. They have pushed for a federal Equality Act, which would prohibit discrimination based on sexual orientation and gender identity in housing, education, employment and credit.

Only that’s not equality, it’s something else. Forced endorsement of other people’s fantasies, combined with a complete takeover of women’s sports by men calling themselves trans women.

The legal rationale for keeping women’s sports sex-segregated would fall away. “We are bringing a male body into a female sport,” Dr. Coleman said. “Once you cross that line, there’s no more rationale for women’s sport.”

Some trans activists and academics welcome that. Nathan Palmer, a lecturer at Georgia Southern University, wrote in Sociology in Focus: “Nature loves diversity, but humans love simplicity. Separating males from females may be socially useful, but when the dividing lines limit and oppress, we have to acknowledge they are social constructions.”

Limit and oppress whom?

If they succeed in putting an end to women’s sports there will be very few women in sports. Apparently that’s the goal.

Today in the NY Times:

The women on the Princeton University swim team spoke of collective frustration edging into anger. They had watched Lia Thomas, a transgender woman who swam for the University of Pennsylvania, win meet after meet, beating Olympians and breaking records.

So we’re going to talk about this now? In the Times? At long last?

The team met with the executive director of the Ivy League athletic conference, Robin Harris. They enumerated the physical advantages males have. Harris said she wasn’t going to change the rules in the middle of the season.

The battle over whether to let female transgender athletes compete in women’s elite sports has reached an angry pitch, a collision of competing principles: The hard-fought-for right of women to compete in high school, college and pro sports versus a swelling movement to allow transgender athletes to compete in their chosen gender identities.

It’s all about the swelling, isn’t it.

Sebastian Coe, the Olympic champion runner and head of the International Association of Athletics Federations, which governs world track, speaks of biological difference as inescapable. “Gender,” he said recently, “cannot trump biology.”

The American Civil Liberties Union offers a counterpoint. “It’s not a women’s sport if it doesn’t include ALL women athletes,” the group tweeted. “Lia Thomas belongs on the Penn swimming and diving team.”

The ACLU doesn’t “offer a counterpoint,” it insults us with lies. ALL women athletes are women athletes; Lia Thomas is a man. He – obviously – does not belong on any women’s team.

Ms. Thomas herself has chosen silence. In March, after winning the 500-yard freestyle in the N.C.A.A. women’s championship in Atlanta, she skipped a news conference. She has of late spoken only to Sports Illustrated, saying, “I’m not a man. I’m a woman, so I belong on the women’s team.”

It’s a harmful mistake to refer to Thomas as Ms. Thomas and she. It’s doubly true in his case, because it’s not just that trans women are men, it’s also that it seems very unlikely that Thomas is even a trans woman. It seems much more likely that he’s just cheating, without any illusions about himself.

Even nomenclature is contentious.

Well of course it is – nomenclature is all there is. It’s the most purely linguistic form of “activism” ever seen.

Descriptive phrases such as “biological woman” and “biological man” might be seen as central to discussing differences in performance. Many trans rights activists say such expressions are transphobic and insist biology and gender identity are largely social constructs.

Gender identity is of course social, and stupid besides. Biology, no.

So the Telegraph gets to report that Labour doesn’t know what women are.

Stella Creasy was wrong to assert that a woman can have a penis, a Labour minister has said, as the party continues to flounder with the issue of defining womanhood. 

What oh what is a woman? We just don’t know…except when we want to know which people to catcall on the street, which people to pay less, which people to forget to promote, which people to rape, which people to boss around.

Anneliese Dodds, the Labour Party chairman, was asked on Sunday if she agreed with Stella Creasy, her fellow Labour MP, that a woman can be someone who was born with a penis. 

Ms Dodds, who is also shadow women and equalities secretary, said: “No, I don’t agree with her. Biological females obviously aren’t. Of course, there are also trans women who have made a transition in their gender, but sex is not the same as gender. Obviously, I have a huge amount of respect for my colleague Stella Creasy, she has done a huge amount of campaigning for women – but on that issue around biology, I do have a different opinion.”

The Telegraph points out that this is a shift from what Dodds was saying just a couple of months ago.

This “gender” ploy is pretty absurd, really. It’s like saying adult humans can put on costumes and pretend to be Eleanor Roosevelt or Shakespeare or Rosa Parks or Vladimir Putin and we will all say they’re not literally those people but they are pretend-those people so we’ll be polite and play along with their game. We don’t do that. We don’t play let’s pretend games with adults…with the single large but clearly demarcated exception of acting, in the sense of movie and theater acting. We do the willing suspension of disbelief thing as audiences at plays and movies, but we don’t carry it on beyond that. Why is “gender” so different? Why is the word “trans” so magical?

Stella Creasy continues to…do whatever this is.

How can “we” work on prison reform when Creasy insists that men are women if they say they are? That claim has major implications for how prisons operate, so no, we can’t work “together,” because we have a fundamental disagreement on who and what women are.

There needs to be some honesty here??? From Julie and the rest of us disobedient women???? We’ve BEEN honest, over and over again every day. We’re not the ones who pretend that people’s fantasies about themselves are reality while the blunt physical facts about them are airy nothings.

The kicker: I’ve learned from the back and forth that Creasy benefited from being on an All Women Shortlist: she got elected. Talk about pulling the ladder up after you.

Ratcheting the rhetoric up and up and up.

He’s comparing people who don’t accept the claim that men can become or be or transition into women, to Nazi genociders. Nazi genociders.

Many more like that. Real fury and disgust.

Truth.

From the Reduxx article Rowling links to:

An inmate at New Jersey’s Edna Mahan Correctional Facility for Women (EMCFW) is speaking out against the transfer of trans-identifying male convicts into the facility.

Speaking with Reduxx, incarcerated woman Miseka Diggs explained that the female inmates in EMCFW are “scared to death” of the men. Under the current policy, the men do not need to undergo any surgery, and Diggs asserts that most of the men are not on hormone replacement therapy. She stated that a majority of women incarcerated at EMCFW have past trauma, with many being victims of male violence, and the presence of men in the facility is causing them severe distress.

Not, that is, the baseline distress of being in prison, but added distress at being in prison with some men who call themselves women. Another word for it is cruel and unusual punishment.

Diggs described her anxiety at having to share a shower with one of the male transfers, whom she identified as Nikita Selket. Selket, formerly Neil LaBranche, is a 6′ 7″ man serving a thirty-year sentence for the murder of his roommate in 1995. The New Jersey Department of Corrections has recorded LaBranche as “female.” He is one of 27 men who have been transferred into the women’s facility since last year. The decision was the result of a legal settlement between state officials and ACLU New Jersey.

What about the civil liberties of the women in that prison and in prisons throughout New Jersey? Does the ACLU take them into account? At all?

It gets worse.

The first male inmate transferred to EMCFW was Perry Cerf, who uses the name “Michelle Hel-loki Angelina.” As previously reported by Reduxx, Cerf is serving a 50-year sentence for the murder of Ecuadorian immigrant Flor Andrade. He accepted a longer sentence to have his rape conviction removed from his record.

“Going to prison on a sex charge would be a safety concern for me,” Cerf said at the time. He boasted of drinking the woman’s blood after killing her. Cerf was later found wearing her clothing, driving her car, and had placed his own photograph over hers on the victim’s identification.

Diggs told Reduxx that the day Cerf was transferred into the facility, she witnessed him being escorted by approximately 15 guards. As he was being moved down the corridors, she saw him attempting to kick down doors to women’s cells. While incarcerated in the men’s facility at New Jersey State Prison, Cerf assaulted other male inmates and at one point was placed in solitary confinement for 23 hours each day.

But the ACLU has forced New Jersey to place men like that in the state’s only women’s prison. It’s not just stupid and reckless, it’s not just sadistic, it’s murderous.

It’s the elites. That’s the problem. Not fanatical gun-worship, not psychopathic gun marketing, not copycat massacres by gun, but elites – and not your old-fashioned elites who are rich and powerful but those new elites who are elite in the sense of not agreeing with people like Ted Cruz.

Continuing where I left off –

The GOP speakers shifted blame for the latest tragedy from the availability of high-powered weapons to an array of other culprits, such as declining church attendance, physical and social media bullying, weak families, violent video games, opioid abuse, lack of mental health services, multiple points of entry at schools and unlocked doors.

The speakers also pivoted from condemning the evil of the Uvalde school shooter to vilifying “elites,” the media, Democrats, and “communist Marxists,” eliciting cheers from the under capacity but vocal crowd.

“The elites who dominate our culture tell us that firearms lie at the root of the problem,” Cruz said. “It’s far easier to slander one’s political adversaries and to demand that responsible citizens forfeit their constitutional rights than it is to examine the cultural sickness, giving birth to unspeakable acts of evil.”

So Ted Cruz is not part of the elites who dominate our culture? Despite the fact that he’s a Senator? A Senator who gets a lot of air time and news media coverage? A Senator said to have a net worth of $4 million?

Who decides which opinions are “elite” ones and which are the humble kind? Can we identify our way out? Can I be trans-humble even if I think people shouldn’t be able to buy AR-15s as easily as they buy lunch?

Trump, naturally, chose the Go All-in Option on the guns question at the NRA festivities yesterday. Why not after all? Clearly the proliferation of automatic weapons is being nothing but beneficial.

Former president Donald Trump, Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Tex.) and Texas Gov. Greg Abbott (R), among other speakers, broadly rejected proposals for new restrictions [on guns] and called instead for more school security or mental health screenings, while issuing dark warnings of alleged Democratic plots to take weapons.

“We all know they want total gun confiscation, know that this would be a first step,” Trump told the crowd in an auditorium about 300 miles from the site of the mass shooting in Uvalde, Tex. “Once they get the first step, they’ll take the second step, the third, the fourth, and then you’ll have a whole different look at the Second Amendment.”

You’d have a country more like Sweden than El Salvador in the matter of slaughter by gun. That would be bad why exactly? The guys who wrote the 2d Tweak didn’t have automatic weapons to deal with, nor movies and tv and games full of gun violence, nor a long string of mass shootings by angry men. Tweak Two was about local militias, not an assault rifle in every pot.

The GOP speakers shifted blame for the latest tragedy from the availability of high-powered weapons to an array of other culprits, such as declining church attendance, physical and social media bullying, weak families, violent video games, opioid abuse, lack of mental health services, multiple points of entry at schools, and unlocked doors.

It’s fair enough to say that guns don’t carry out massacres by themselves, but it’s also fair, and urgent, to repeat as loudly as possible that making it horrifyingly easy to buy and carry and use an AR-15 does not help. If there’s a disturbed guy roaming your neighborhood at night shouting threats and scattering used needles all over the sidewalks, as there is where I live, the first thing you do is NOT leave a few AR-15s out for him to use. Deal with bullying by all means, deal with opioid abuse, deal with lack of mental health services – but also stop marketing AR-15s as if they were tennis rackets or six-packs of beer.

They’re busy stealing the next election.

House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy is now signaling he won’t comply with a subpoena issued by the House select committee examining Donald Trump’s effort to overturn his presidential reelection loss. The California Republican will be joined in this defiance by other colleagues who played important roles in the attempted subversion.

The same Kevin McCarthy very well may be House speaker in 2024. If Congress doesn’t revise the antiquated process that governs how Congress counts presidential electors, he could play a critical role influencing which electors get tallied, potentially swinging the outcome.

If he can, he will. I think that’s all too obvious.

“McCarthy and his allies in Congress are actively concealing the plot that almost succeeded due to the [Electoral Count Act of 1887],” legal scholar Matthew Seligman, an expert on the ECA, told me. “Anybody who would conceal their own role in such a scheme can’t be trusted to count the right electors next time.”

It’s true that the committee’s subpoena of GOP House members is an extraordinary event. But the information that those members are concealing has to do with an even more extraordinary event.

Consider McCarthy himself. He’s refusing to divulge information about his direct communications with Trump at the very moment Trump was essentially weaponizing a mob to intimidate his vice president and GOP lawmakers into subverting the electoral count, to keep himself in power illegitimately.

In other words he’s being consistent about attempting to make Trump president by cheating and lying.

Blurgh urgh urgh urgh what do words mean let’s just pretend we have no idea and never have had. The Telegraph:

Stella Creasy is clarifying her position on the word ‘woman’. “Do I think some women were born with penises? Yes”, she declares. “But they are now women and I respect that.”

What other words shall we ask people to clarify their positions on? How about “pear”? Shall we decide it means “vegetable similar to broccoli”? Or “ocean”? Can we clarify that it refers to an amount of water that could fit in a thimble? Or “night”? Should we alert the world that it means the time starting with sunrise and ending at sunset?

Zero women were born with penises. People born with penises are called “men.” In French it’s hommes, in German it’s Männer, in Spanish it’s hombres. It’s silly to ask people what they “think” about it; it’s not an opinion, it’s just a small simple fact. There’s no such thing as men who “are now women.” There is no such metamorphosis. There’s also nothing to respect.

…as with all conversations with politicians these days, particularly Labour politicians, any discussion about women quickly turns to their struggle to define the term in the first place. Many of her colleagues have notably declined to even try.

Because suddenly way too many people have decided that women don’t get to go on being women and saying they’re women and men aren’t women – suddenly we have to change all that, and punish women if they say no.

Surely, as a fellow feminist, she and JK Rowling aren’t too far apart on the issue? “No, I don’t agree with her and I’m told I am a bad feminist because I take a different view,” she reveals.

Of course you are. You’re a terrible feminist if you think men are women the instant they say they are (or any other instant).

“As an old fashioned feminist, I’m still fighting the patriarchy. I’m not interested in fighting amongst ourselves. And one of the things that happens to trans women is that they are oppressed because the patriarchy goes, ‘Oh well you’re a woman, right that’s it, let’s pick you apart’. So it’s right for me to stand with my trans sisters and say: ‘Let’s fight these battles together’.”

But they’re not your sisters, and the patriarchy doesn’t “go” the way you claim it does, and above all, those “trans sisters” have zero interest in fighting those battles with us. Their battle is all about bullying us to let them take over and shutting us up.

John Pavlovitz talked about the cult of the gun back in 2017.

Enter the seductive cowboy fantasy of “the good guy with a gun.”

It’s the deadly lie that men have been led to believe; that the world is in grave danger, and that we’re all poised to be the steel-jawed hero—riding in, packing heat, and saving the day by gunning down the bad guys and getting the girl.

It is the perpetuation of a dangerously antiquated gender trope, where men all want to save and women all just want to be saved; that misogynistic myth sold by Hollywood, Republicans, and Bible Belt Evangelicals. This fantasy is incredibly persuasive and undeniably effective—but it is not reality. 

I think it’s not all that persuasive, at least not to adults. It’s a branch of entertainment, but outside that context, I don’t think most people long to see a man with a gun all over the place. But it’s persuasive to all these loonies who buy the damn things, which is what counts.

The National Rifle Association nurtures and exploits this same sick celluloid dream the in the minds of men; thereby manufacturing the very horror that these “good guys” imagine themselves rescuing people from. The NRA creates the deadly demand and simultaneously generates the violent supply. They flood the world with guns to then necessitate the need for gunslingers. They generate an endless, self-replicating revenue stream—and more and more people die long before they should.

And the actual guys with guns won’t even go in, because hey the guy with a gun might shoot them.

H/t Carrie Chapman

Peter is telling feminists what we’re allowed to do and think again. I’m increasingly tired of it.

Nobody’s talking about “blanket bans on trans women.” That’s a dopey, prejudicial way to put it. It’s not “banning” men to have women-only spaces. Women want and need women-only spaces and we have a right to them, end of story. Trans women continue to exist even if women have women-only spaces. No one is banned.

“Trans women are not a threat” is a ludicrous claim. He doesn’t know that – he can’t know it. It’s entirely possible that some trans women are a threat, in fact it would be odd if none of them were. In any case trans women are men, and we all know that some men are a threat to women, and we know women need to take precautions to avoid such men. Peter Tatchell’s fantasy that men are women if they say they are is not a reason to do away with precautions that women need to take.

Trans women are not “like all women” because they are not women, they’re men. They’re not victims of misogyny, because they’re men.

Peter Tatchell does not “defend all women” – he bullies and lectures us for not agreeing with him that men are women if they say they are. He’s not an ally, not a friend, not a feminist. He can take a hike.

Originally a comment by Pliny the in Between on Celebrating.

Warning: graphic. Brutally, necessarily, truthfully graphic.

It’s the smell. That’s what forces its way into my thoughts every time there’s another mass shooting. I guess it’s part of the PTSD associated with 25 plus years of trauma surgery trying to undo extremes of violence. It’s left its mark. Iron. Metallic. If you are winning the fight, that’s what you smell. If you’re losing it shifts to an indescribable stench of corruption as cells begin to die and normal organ barriers begin to fail. In the OR you smell death well before the monitors slow and the EKG begins to widen. Still you try. Last night I couldn’t sleep because to this day I can still see the face of my youngest GSW patient, hit in the abdomen by a high velocity slug like those used in Texas. From her diaphragm to her pelvis every organ was shredded. Her liver burst from the supersonic shock wave that followed the bullet. So much blood that you have to throw your socks away. Three trauma surgeons worked on her for hours. It wasn’t enough. I remember the smell.

What about crime and punishment? What do we do? What about Restorative Justice? Julie Bindel looks at the details:

Restorative justice (RJ) is described as an alternative to prison; it is a non-punitive response to criminal behaviour. The idea is to bring together the person who inflicted the harm (the “responsible person”, in RJ terminology) and the victim, often in the presence of community representatives. The perpetrator is supposed to accept responsibility for the harm inflicted and reach an agreement with the victim about how to make amends.

I think one problem leaps off the page at this juncture: what if the victim doesn’t want to be brought together with the responsible person? Like, suppose the crime was violent and traumatic, and the victim never wants to lay eyes on the perp ever again? This is one reason rape is hard to prosecute, I think: prosecution generally requires laying eyes on the perp again.

De Blasio’s reforms were welcomed by prison reform campaigners, as well as pretty much every liberal in the State. Alissa Ackerman, a sex crimes policy researcher at California State University and one of the few facilitators of restorative justice sessions for rape victims, has said that RJ, “allows survivors to have their pain heard and stories acknowledged, and is an opportunity for the person who caused the harm to be accountable for their actions”.

There’s that word again – “stories.” It’s not a story; it’s not a narrative. It’s not a talk thing. Rape is the opposite of a story.

I spoke to one proponent of RJ, who asked not to be named “in case I am seen as colluding with carceral white women”.

You know, those bitches who have the bad taste to get raped by non-white men.

It’s an issue. It’s always been an issue. It was an issue during slavery and by god it was a massive issue once Reconstruction was killed. Gone With the Wind contains one of those racist post-Reconstruction rape—>KKK stories, which poisoned the minds of generations. Think the Scottsboro Boys, think Emmett Till. But. It doesn’t follow that rape victims, even white ones, are obliged to meet with their rapists for a chat and then let it go.

I spoke to one proponent of RJ, who asked not to be named “in case I am seen as colluding with carceral white women”. White himself, he is a newly trained lawyer in Washington DC, specialising in “replacing the racist system with a true healing process for both parties”. “Anti-rape feminists are probably responsible for more black men being incarcerated than anyone else in modern-day America”, he says. “Locking up African Americans is a product of slavery.” Ben went on to suggest “community resolution” and “non-violent strategies” to address sexual assault.

Pesky anti-rape feminists – why can’t they be like those cool pro-rape feminists? Easy for Ben to suggest “community resolution” when he’s highly unlikely to be a rape victim.

Sarah, whose name I’ve changed, runs a support service for victims of male violence in NYC and is “appalled” that RJ is becoming a substitute for criminal justice sanctions. “What we are seeing is what we have seen forever”, she tells me, “which is the under-policing and under-protection for women, including women of colour. But some BLM activists are claiming that feminists calling for CJS sanctions for rape and domestic abuse is flat-out racist, because black men are overrepresented in the prison population.” As a result, she told me that “black and brown women, indigenous women … are the ones who are bearing the consequences of us not holding men accountable for their violence. They are the ones who are being murdered and raped and their abusers are walking free.”

The problem is that punishment isn’t really a productive or satisfactory response. It’s basically vengeance, which is an obvious dead end. But doing nothing (and just having a chat is doing nothing) is even worse than non-productive. I don’t know of any solution to this stalemate, but I sure as hell think telling women to just move on is not it.

According to the ideals of RJ, after a crime is committed the offender and the victim should meet face-to-face. The victim is not to blame or judge the perpetrator, but rather describe the impact of the offence, in order to “heal” and become “empowered”. RJ sees victim and perpetrator as equal, both in need of support and understanding.

If they were equal he wouldn’t have been able to rape her.

RJ is considered a suitable remedy for domestic violence, childhood sexual abuse and sex trafficking, among other violent crimes predominantly committed by men. Most of these crimes are committed against women by men known to them: male family members, partners and colleagues. “The perpetrators have worked very hard, often for years, to condition the person they are abusing to not disclose, to minimise, to protect his emotions: to protect his character publicly”, says Sarah. “They’ve been using manipulative tactics to inspire self-doubt, blame and fear, in the person they are abusing.”

And victims of this kind of abuse may feel coerced by RJ practices, which are conducted, as Sarah said, “without any understanding of the dynamics of power and control, the impact of a trauma-coerced bond, and also the amount of time and commitment that it actually takes to elicit genuine behaviour change in abusers”.

It doesn’t sound at all restorative, does it.

Read the whole thing.

Gun company drops out of NRA convention:

The gun manufacturer that produced the AR-15-style assault rifle the Uvalde, Texas elementary school shooter used to kill 19 children and two teachers has shut down its social media accounts after being linked to the massacre. It has also reportedly dropped out of the National Rifle Association’s annual convention set to be held starting Friday in Houston. 

…The firearm Ramos used is reportedly made by Georgia-based gun manufacturer Daniel Defense, authorities and the company each confirmed. 

If the company confirmed then you can drop the “reportedly.”

The arms manufacturer states on its site, “At Daniel Defense, we celebrate the liberty of our country, the enthusiasm of our customers and employees, and the quality and accuracy of our products.”

That’s interesting, because the quality and accuracy of their products reduce the liberty of our country, as does the enthusiasm of their customers. A country that has way too many heavily armed lunatics running around can’t boast about its liberty. A country that refuses to do anything about that grotesque situation can’t boast about its liberty. Our liberty is at the sufferance of a lot of heavily armed fanatics.

On Wednesday, one of the company’s social media posts resurfaced from a week ago on May 16, the day Ramos turned 18. That week, he legally purchased two AR-15-style assault rifles, including the Daniel Defense DDM V7 rifle, according to the Washington Post. 

“Train up a child in the way he should go, and when he is old, he will not depart from it,” the post said, in reference to a Biblical proverb, followed by a prayer emoji. The post included a photo of a toddler sitting with an AR-15-style assault rifle on its lap. Daniel Defense also reportedly posted the same image and text on Instagram that day, which included the hashtag #childrenarethefuture.

Dayum. Good find. Train up a child in the way he should go, and that way is carrying a military assault rifle. The way she should go is presumably in terror of him. Virtue is a gun; goodness=murderous violence. It’s a very odd combination.

That’s marketing, of course. The goal is not to say anything true or morally useful, it’s to sell the product. The goal is to sell SUVs and cruises as the planet cooks, and mass-murder guns that can take out whole Targets or primary schools. Go team.