The New York Young Republican Club

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This story hit the news yesterday:

Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Georgia) entertained Republicans in Manhattan Saturday night with a range of one-liners trolling the political left on hot-button topics.

“I want to tell you something, if Steve Bannon and I had organized that, we would have won. Not to mention, we would’ve been armed,” she said of her role at the Jan. 6, 2021 attack on the US Capitol. . . .

The controversial congresswoman was one of several high-profile conservative firebrands . . . at the annual event hosted by the New York Young Republican Club.

Her speech took a strange turn while she noted how “you can pick up a butt plug or a dildo at Target nowadays” . . .

I was curious so I did a quick search:

OK, yeah, I guess she’s right!

Anyway, this all reminded me that I spoke at the Young Republican Club once! It was in February, 2009, and I talked about our book, Red State Blue State. It was a mellow occasion. As I recall they told me they were looking forward to an upcoming softball game with the Young Democrats. I remember telling the Young Republicans that I’d recently given a talk at the Princeton Club of New York, and that 50 years earlier there would’ve been a big overlap between the Princeton Club and the Young Republican Club but not anymore.

It seems that the organization has changed even more in the past decade or so. I can’t imagine speaking at a club where they joke about armed overthrow of the government. That really bothers me. I guess that’s how they were talking 55 years ago at the Young Communist Club, or the Students for a Democratic Society.

Stepping back, we can understand this as part of the residue of a couple hundred years of 1776 rhetoric. If it was ok for Sam Adams, George Washington, etc., to have an armed insurrection against the British, and if it was ok to have a bunch of slaveowners have an armed insurrection against the U.S. government in 1861, then what exactly is wrong with modern-day congressmembers talking about shooting up the Capitol building? Once you accept the idea that Joe Biden and Abraham Lincoln are worse than George III, the rest all follows. From that perspective, it makes me wonder why there isn’t more of this sort of talk in public. Ultimately I guess it’s more of a pragmatic issue than a moral issue. It’s against the law to threaten to shoot people, so keep talking like that and you might go to jail. Also most voters aren’t into the whole insurrection thing, so if you’re a politician and you’re not in a safe seat, this sort of extremism could be politically risky. But from a theoretical perspective, sure, if 1776 or 1861 is the standard, then, yeah, shooting at government officials could be considered to be just fine.

There’s a difference. King George was not elected by the public; Abraham Lincoln and Joe Biden were. But, once you accept the idea that overthrowing the government is OK, I guess it’s no big deal if guns are involved.

Back in 2009, nobody at the Young Republican Club was talking about hijacking Congress. Or butt plugs, for that matter. At least not on the day I was there. Things have changed.

56 thoughts on “The New York Young Republican Club”

    • Yes, they are. The pink one is a ‘dildo’ by all definitions of the word: to quote WP, “A dildo is a sex toy, often explicitly phallic in appearance, intended for sexual penetration or other sexual activity”; that is a ‘sex toy’, ‘phallic in appearance’, intended for ‘sexual activity’, including ‘sexual penetration’ (as the official page for that dildo helpfully explains with illustrated diagrams showing that yes, the central haft is meant to penetrate the vagina: https://myplusone.com/product/plusone-dual-vibrating-massager-6704/ ).

      And nothing in the screenshot may be a butt plug, but nevertheless, Target does carry them, and here’s two: “Hello Cake Buzzy Butt Rechargeable Vibrating Butt Plug” https://www.target.com/p/hello-cake-buzzy-butt-rechargeable-vibrating-butt-plug/-/A-87604286 “plusOne Vibrating Plug” https://www.target.com/p/plusone-vibrating-plug/-/A-87527440

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      • This is semantic, but to me a dildo is a device used to simulate penetrative sex. I would describe that one as primarily a vibrator; you can’t really thrust with it, it’s intended to be inserted and just held there while vibration does its thing. But again, semantics. I would be confused if I asked for a dildo and I received that thing though.

        I’m afraid to disappoint you, but as someone who buys condoms at target, they don’t actually stock the butt plug in stores. Target’s online catalog includes a bunch of stuff that’s basically just third party sellers, delivery only.

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        • but to me a dildo is a device used to simulate penetrative sex.

          Oh, I didn’t realize you were objecting based on your own private definition of the term in which, further, penetration (as illustrated in the official documentation for that dildo) somehow no longer counts as ‘penetrative’ (another private definition, I guess). Never mind then, carry on with your objections based on ‘to me’ redefinitions of ordinary English words…

          but as someone who buys condoms at target, they don’t actually stock the butt plug in stores.

          No one said they did – not that this wouldn’t be a hilarious moving of the goalposts if the argument had fallen back to ‘oh well you can buy them at Target, sure, you just can’t buy them in *my local brick-and-mortar store*’ – the quote only said “pick a…up at Target”. Which you can. People ‘pick things up’ on, say, Amazon all the time (and they don’t mean ‘break into a warehouse and prowl the shelves’).

          Even if you move the goalposts yet again and insist on a brick-and-mortar interaction, unsurprisingly, you can buy on the Target site to ship to the store and pick up there. (Yes, I checked ‘Order Pickup’ to verify that the butt plug *and* dildos show up in the Pickup hits. So you didn’t check your ‘delivery only’ claim either.)

        • Anyways, it’s not really just about my private definition. Rabbits have never been marketed as dildos. The vibratex (originator of the design from Japan) website never refers to it as a dildo. I’ve never seen it referred to as a dildo, only a vibrator. Ditto with the penetration thing. Sticking something inside and holding it there isn’t what most people refer to as penetrative sex. But I guess it could be. I’m not really a stickler for looking up technical definitions from wikipedia, then applying them against how the words are actually used. You can prove all kinds of absurdities that way. For example, by your wikipedia definitions, a bullet vibrator is also a dildo used for penetrative sex, as is a ball gag and for that matter a butt plug. Would you really agree with that? Even if you do, I’m not really going to say you’re wrong. I was just reacting that if I was told to or otherwise intended to pick up a dildo or butt plug at target, I wouldn’t be able to get what I wanted. At the very least, we can agree that the pictures fail to demonstrate that butt plugs are available.

          Why are you so mad?

        • I do consider ship to store to be delivery. Otherwise, you could say you could buy almost the entire Amazon catalog at Whole Foods! I wouldn’t say “you can buy a hard drive at Whole Foods these day.” But again, semantics. I was just surprised to not see any butt plugs in the picture!

  4. There’s something a little distasteful about a club of self-styled “Young Republican”s. Here in the UK we have a similarly dubious group of “Young Conservatives”.

    Seems a little sad to me that a group of youngsters are so comfortable associating with (what are now, but were less so in the past) regressive/privileged political positions. Whatever happened to the progression of youthful political viewpoints from somewhere on the socialist/communist spectrum with a shift towards more self-serving ideologies as youngsters become adults with a realization of which side their bread is buttered on.

    Of course those “Young Republicans” may not be so young – not sure what the situation is with the “Young Conservatives” nowadays but I remember them as being obnoxious late teenies/early 20’s who had rather unconvincingly adopted the styles and rhetoric of their political idols.

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  5. I predict: in a few years “democrats” are denying the election of a “republican” (maybe it will be Putin again like in 2016, who knows). And people will be peacefully rioting like in 2020 when they burned down my friends garage.

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    • I agree with your prediction about democrats (I’m one) denying election results. Gore v. Bush, for example.

      You conflate the issues, though, when you equate the George Floyd riots with attempting to overthrow the government.

      By the way, I live in minneapolis, and the the DA (Mike Freeman) lived around the corner from me at the time, so we were overrun with gigantic (thousands of people) involved in peaceful protests. I can say that even peaceful protests of that scale can be a bit unnerving. I am not denying the vandalism and violence – I saw plenty of it.

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      • This seems like a false parallel. Once the Supreme Court ruled that Bush had won the Democratic establishment accepted that. Sure, there were people saying “Not My President” and so on, and still people protesting — and still people pointing out that if any uniform standard had applied to counting the vote in Florida, Gore would have won — but we didn’t have congresspeople supporting armed overthrow of the Bush government.

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        • Nor did I hear that the Young Democrats expressing support, humorous or otherwise, for armed insurrection in the U.S.

          As I wrote above, I think a better analogy was the 1930s-1940s, when there were some people in the far left of the Democratic party who had Communist loyalties, or the late 1960s, where there were some people in the far left of the Democratic party who were supportive of armed insurrection in the U.S., at least to some extent. The difference is that in this case the insurrectionists represent a large part of the Republican party, not just the extreme fringe.

          Perhaps Anon is right that this will happen to the Democratic party in a few years. I find it hard to picture that happening. I guess we can check back in this space in five years, say, and see if the Young Democrats are inviting guests who joke about an armed attack on the U.S. Capitol.

        • No, democrats have not preached armed rebellion, but they have plenty of underhanded other methods on the agenda:

          1) stacking the supreme court;
          2) turning every liberal stronghold into a state (DC etc) which will then have two senators;
          3) eliminating multiparty elections and replacing them with “top two” elections, ensuring other parties are blocked out of the actual elections;
          4) letting litterally millions of people illegally enter the country
          5) not enforcing laws they disagree with
          6) persecuting attacking and undermining the authority of police
          7) giving away money
          8) replacing education with left-wing indoctrination

          Yet despite all this, their policies are so horrendous and so obviously counterproductive that they can barely hold control of the government, and Clinton lost to, and Biden may also lose to, of all people, Donald Trump!

        • chipmunk,

          jeez, man, the court-packing thing was back in 1937 and a bunch of Democrats opposed it. Don’t you think it’s time to let it go?

          I’ve found no record of DC, Guam, or Puerto Rico becoming states, either. I think they should, or at least DC and PR, but they aren’t. So I don’t know what you’re on about with that one, either.

          As you may have noticed, the Biden administration agreed to support an immigration bill that would have, among other things, allowed them to turn back asylum-seekers. The GOP refused to vote on it, because Trump wants to retain this as an issue rather than fixing the problem.

          I could go on.

          I wouldn’t want to be in the position of defending every Democratic position, but for you to suggest that their positions add up to something as bad as attempting to overthrow the elected government is ridiculous.

          But, yeah, Trump could win again. It’s pretty shocking to me, I had really thought one thing most Americans agreed on was that if you lose the election you leave office. Evidently not. I’m guessing you don’t see Trump’s actions as disqualifying? That’s pretty bad.

        • Phil, really? Popular discourse in the last couple years has been full of suggestions that the Democrats should expand the supreme Court. It’s also been full of discussions about how the Senate empowers unpopulated states and maybe populated ones should split.

          If anything I’d say chipmunks characterizations are very mild hyperbole since the Democrats are structurally incapable of doing pretty much anything and everyone knows it including the Democrats. But all those topics are indeed active topics in discourse today, not 1930s. This just makes you seem a bit out of touch.

        • Daniel, Chipmunk
          I think these arguments are getting ridiculous. First of all, the term “Democrats” is too aggregate – are these party members, voters, or just an aggregate of a multitude of different individuals? I tend to vote Democrat but I’m not registered in that party, so am I part of what you are talking about or not? While there have been discussions of all sorts of things (e.g. expanding the Supreme Court, making DC or Puerto Rico a state, etc.), how many “Democrats” support these things? How many does it take before your reference to these things as Democratic “methods” makes any sense? I suspect that some of the listed items have relatively little support among “democrats.”

          Now I may be guilty of the same problem when I think about “Republicans.” But they have earned many of the aggregate characterizations. Their embrace of Trump and toeing the party line makes a number of characterizations fair, in my view. But only up to a point. Recently there have been discussions of making the US a Christian country – discussions among Republicans, but I don’t think it is fair to call that a Republican strategy or method, at least not yet. But the view that Jan 6 was not an insurrection is something that I think is fair to characterize as a Republican view, and I’m with Phil here on saying that there is a qualitative difference between that and the things on chipmunk’s list.

        • Daniel –

          > Democrats are structurally incapable of doing pretty much anything and everyone knows it including the Democrats.

          There are certainly structural tensions in the Democratic Party, but I’m not sure exactly what that means or what standards you use to judge to reach a conclusion of not “pretty much anything.”

          I don’t consider the ACA (and the recent expansion) a nothing (given the numbers of people who gained health insurance). The Chips Act, the Inflation Reduction Act, leading to progress on infrastructure, Medicare drug negotiations.

          Perhaps most significantly real wages rising (importantly wage gains for people of lower income, women, blacks at higher rates) reversing a decades long trend.

          I don’t mean to just cherry-pick good stuff -plenty of bad stuff to go around. Nor am I inclined to necessarily attribute economic trends to the party in the Oval Office, but I think you’re being more than just a tad hyperbolic yourself.

        • Yes to what Dale said.

          Some Democrats suggested expanding the Supreme Court, others think DC and/or Puerto Rico should be a state. Expanding the court has no merit in my opinion, and I don’t think anyone with sense thought it had a chance of happening, but the idea had fifteen minutes of fame because the Republicans refused to allow Obama’s nominee to even be considered by the Senate. Unlike the 1937 attempt to pack the court, no politician made any attempt to do anything like that in recent decades.

          DC statehood has been a bumper sticker slogan since I was in high school, or maybe earlier, but as far as I recall there hasn’t been a major effort to make it happen. I think it should and I don’t even know of any arguments against it other than DC residents are liberal.

          Meanwhile, -most- Republicans support Donald Trump even though he tried to retain office after losing the election, and exhorted an armed mob to try to prevent his successor from being able to take office.

          So, yeah, “really”, Daniel, I think there’s a big difference.

        • Yes there’s a big difference, because republicans are Machiavellian (actively seek to harm the US) and Democrats are too busy lining their coffers for elections to bother doing anything that could benefit anyone. When they do stuff its mainly lining the pockets of favored industries. Literally the last thing they did worth mentioning is the ACA, which was 14 years ago and was essentially a republican idea from the 1990s before the republicans became the loony Qanon party.

          Things democrats haven’t done can be found in their party platform https://democrats.org/where-we-stand/party-platform/

          Make the economy fairer, improve education, improve immigration, universal health care, healing the soul of america (ending racism and oppression)

          These are pretty similar to the typical stuff democrats always say. As of now we have the most unfair economy in history in large part due to active history of neoliberal economics telling people how monopolies are just fine and refusing to enforce antitrust laws (including under Clinton and Obama), a concerted effort by the Biden administration to transfer wealth into college graduates pockets at the expense of people who didnt go to college, a lot of kids in 8th grade who can’t read at 2nd grade level (try reading r/teachers on reddit), opioid epidemic and suicide at their peaks, healthcare driven bankruptcies near all time high rates, successful attacks on trans rights, abortion being made illegal, apparently frozen embryos are children in Alabama…

          People are convinced that real wages are up but they’re clearly down its just the measurement that’s a problem. I gave plots showing this in our last discussion.

          Democrats like Nancy Pelosi actively opposed rules to keep congress from insider trading. She’s clearly corrupt as hell and makes a higher rate of return on investments than is conceivably honest (65% gain in 2023)

          Its a shitshow in this country and I can’t think of a single thing Democrats have successfully done to make it better in 14 years. I honestly dont remember them trying to do anything since 2010.

          A bunch of the things people quoted elsewhere I actively think were harmful. Inflation reduction act increases tax complexity and seems to have lined the pockets of some preferred industries, but almost certainly did nothing for inflation or for economic fairness.

          Last year police in this country killed 1329 people, the most in history and likely more than 10x the number killed in actual mass shootings (ie. Ones the FBI classifies as “public shooting spree”) https://thehill.com/blogs/blog-briefing-room/4413518-police-killings-record-2023/

          https://www.fbi.gov/file-repository/active-shooter-incidents-in-the-us-2022-042623.pdf says in 2022 100 people died in public shootings 2023 was likely less than 133.

          So, no, Democrats are not in any way successful at anything except lining the pockets of campaign funds and personal wealth for politicians and finance companies who buy them off.

          But hey, at least they aren’t Republicans who are even worse in every way!

        • Daniel,
          Yes, I understood what you were saying; as is common in political discourse these days, my outrage was fake. My point was not, however. “The Democrats” are not the same as “Democratic politicians”. Given our system, in which you have to vote for whoever you think is less bad, those groups can be quite different.

        • This seems to be merely a linguistic difference in our definitions/usage. If I mean Democrat voters I’d say voters. Democrats to me means politicians who are official members of the Democratic party and either hold office or are campaigning for said office.

          There are many reasons to vote for Democrats other than that you fully approve of them. I would never vote for Trump or any of the Qanon crazies, which leaves me with nothing but Democrats. But I don’t pretend that they’re making good progress towards any of my goals. They’re just not actively promoting violence against citizens or supporting Putin or other craziness.

          Wake me when a Democrat supports the 2nd amendment as a meaningful portion of the bill of rights, when they stop talking about minimum wage and start talking about UBI, when they stop trading stocks and options on inside govt info, when they start talking about breaking Google into 6-8 firms, Facebook too, and Microsoft, and probably about 50 other large firms, and make collecting and storing location data illegal, stop approving mergers and acquisitions, put some telecom CEOs in prison for fraud, require all ISPs to offer ipv6 with a static /56 at least, create a centralized healthcare billing clearinghouse…. You know, REGULATE things instead of handjobbing CEOs.

        • Daniel, dude, just a few comments upthread you were saying Democrats want to pack the Supreme Court, split up existing states, yada yada. But those things were not promoted by the Democratic politicians — or, as you would put it, Democrat politicians (remind me, when did the Democratic Party officially become the Democrat Party? Oh, right, when Fox started saying “Democrat” because they realized it ends with ‘rat’) — right, OK, those things were not promoted by Democrat politicians, which is what you _now_ say is who you’re referring to when you say “Democrat.”

        • Phil, to quote myself: “Popular discourse in the last couple years has been full of suggestions…”

          I did not say that Democratic Politicians were promoting packing the supreme court as a matter of official policy or proposing bills to do so or etc, only that “popular discourse” promoted the idea that they should. Popular discourse to me means, stuff people discuss online or in private conversations with other people who are like minded.

          I feel like this is just an exercise in misreading all around. Perhaps you’re attributing chipmunk’s statements to me or something. Or perhaps there’s really some linguistic phenomenon going on, like I’m spending too much time talking to “the kids these days” and meanings are drifting or my circle of discussion is very different from yours or something.

        • Daniel,
          We’re in garbage time on this thread so I think we can let it go, you can have the final say.

          I pointed out to ‘somebody’ that some of the things he was claiming were Democratic priorities (or, as you would have it, Democrat priorities) were not in fact Democrat priorities. You said “really?”, which I took to mean you disagreed with me. You then brought up ‘popular discourse’, which I took to mean that you were saying lots of Democrats were saying these things, thus equating “Democrats” with “some large fraction of people who typically vote for Democrats” or “people who identify as Democrats” or some such. So it was jarring to see you claim that no, when you say “Democrats” you mean “Democrat politicians”.

          Whatever. It seems silly to even argue about it. I’ll be holding my nose and voting for Biden, since he’s the one who is not actively trying to destroy our democracy, which is worth saving in spite of its flaws.

        • Phil, agree we’re in garbage time, clearly my position was insufficiently clear to communicate what I meant. I’ll be holding my nose and voting for Biden as well. Though a vote for Prez in CA is meaningless as Biden will likely win by nearly 70%. I’ll let “somebody” have the last word on butt plugs.

      • For sure, it started with Gore-Bush, then we had questioning the birth certificate of Obama, followed by Russian interference with Trump, next was questioning the votes with Biden.

        Seems to be escalating and roughly following many historical precedents: Eg, the Marius-Sulla-Caesar-Augustus progression. My prediction is just extrapolation roughly informed by historical parallels.

        Speaking of extrapolation, one thing that could alter this timeline would be AI/Mmml capable of actual extrapolation rather than interpolation (which requires insane amounts of data to be useful for even summarizing what is already believed). Others would be order of magnitude cheaper batteries or energy source (fusion, antimatter, whatever).

        Ie, I expect the solutions would be technological, not political.

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        • Anonoeuoid:

          You say:

          > For sure, it started with Gore-Bush, then we had questioning the birth certificate of Obama, followed by Russian interference with Trump, next was questioning the votes with Biden.

          and you say:

          > Seems to be escalating and roughly following many historical precedents: Eg, the Marius-Sulla-Caesar-Augustus progression. My prediction is just extrapolation roughly informed by historical parallels.

          What I find interesting about your comments is that while they’re so focused on scientific integrity, and indeed I think you sometimes you write interesting comments on that topic, at other times you show a near complete lack of interest in distinguishing facts from your unexamined, (honestly sometimes rather hysterical) hot takes to fit the world into your preferred narratives.

          What is it actually that you think “started” with Gore/Bush, and what is this trend that you see “escalating,” and on what basis of well-described trends in carefully delineated metrics do you “project” some putatively objective mathematical “extrapolation” from “informed” historical parallels? Consider the following as just a taste:

          In 1834, during clashes between Whigs and Democrats in Philadelphia, an entire city block was burned to the ground. In 1874, more than five thousand men fought in the streets of New Orleans, in a battle between supporters of Louisiana’s Republican governor, William Kellogg, and of the White League, a group allied with the Democrats. And the nation’s record of overlooking the violent prevention of Black suffrage is much longer than its record of protecting Black voters.

          https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2020/09/14/our-long-forgotten-history-of-election-related-violence

        • Phil I wasn’t aware you were a Democrat politician elected to a state or federal congressional position.

          My comments are not about everyday people who vote Democrat, they are about my impression of professional politicians.

          I thought that was obvious, but maybe not.

      • Reply to everyone
        I reread this lengthy stream of posts and the disagreements seem misplaced to me. I think everyone agrees that both parties exhibit unappealing traits, and mostly unappealing candidates. The dispute seems to be whether both parties are the same (measured in some “badness” metric) or which party is worse. Count me with the Rs are worse than the Ds. This does not exonerate the Ds – I will vote on the basis of not voting for Rs, not that the Ds excite me. To be more specific, I actually don’t dislike Biden – among today’s politicians he strikes me as more honest and less harmful than most. These days that is high praise indeed. Yes, he’s old, too old, and I really wish there was a younger appealing candidate he/they would run. But I’m not excited about voting for him. I can only get motivated to vote against Trump, and most of the Rs since they have lined up behind him.

        So, to return to the original post and the ongoing disagreement. The original post seems to raise concerns about Rs, particularly the Young Rs joking about insurrection. It appalls me more than the positions Ds have either considered or have been suggested they consider – enlarging the Supreme Court, unfunding police deparments, liberally spending other people’s money, promoting laws and regulations that benefit private interests they are beholden to, etc – all of which I object to, but which pale next to the R positions being discussed. Also, the R positions seem to be more officially sanctioned than the D positions. I’m willing to align myself with those pointing their fingers at the R positions despite having substantial agreement with a number of the criticisms of D positions.

        Daniel – do you really want to paint these as equally bad? Chipmunk? The problem with equating them is that it is precisely the logic that is going to be used in the next election. Trump’s transgressions are to be excused because Biden has also been investigated or accused of x,y,z. This leveling of bad actions because there are accusations on both sides is the same “logic” that Trump repeatedly employed when he would say “I have heard…” or “people say….” In that world, accountability ceases to exist because any misdeed is dismissed on the basis that someone else has been accused of a misdeed.

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        • Dale, no I don’t paint them as equally bad. I’m with you pretty much 100%.

          My main position is that I don’t vote “for” Dems I just vote against the insanity of the modern Repubs. The Dems are not “equally bad” but they are bad. There is no-one I can vote “for” and in places like CA where Dems have completely control they fail to do the things that they claim they’re going to do, or they do things that they say they’re going to do, and they turn out just as bad or disingenuous as expected (by me).

          For example, with modern improved measures of poverty, CA has the very highest poverty rate compared to any other state at 13.2% of CA residents in poverty according to the Supplemental Poverty Measure (which I don’t fully endorse but is likely better than the “official” one which is a quick back of an envelope calc for a USDA researcher in the 1960’s which got canonized)

          https://www.census.gov/content/dam/Census/library/publications/2023/demo/p60-280.pdf

          When it comes to homelessness, CA has about 27% of all homeless people in the US, despite having only about 12% of the US population. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homelessness_in_the_United_States_by_state) We have terrible public education outcomes, very poor systems for handling water resources, very badly handled wildfire management (largely a federal issue, but a federal issue CA Dems could have made a priority to fix).

          Of COURSE we need to vote against Trump. There’s no arguing that Dems are even close to as bad. That’s just not the same as saying they’re “good” at all. It’s like the choice between food poisoning (Dems) and cyanide poisoning (Repubs). You gotta take the loss so you don’t die… Not an enviable position for US citizens.

  7. > From that perspective, it makes me wonder why there isn’t more of this sort of talk in public.

    There is, and quite a lot of it. It’s just not in your neighborhood in NY.

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    • Some of the middle and outer circles planned January 6th on public social media! I suspect the people with the zip-ties and the list of hostages to take and things to do to them had better OPSEC but any mob will be built of the common clay of the New West.

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  8. From my perspective, the Democrats are somewhat corrupt, and the Republicans are close to totally corrupt (on the federal level). Biden was not my choice (Elizabeth Warren was), but I think he has done a rather good job despite massive Republican opposition. I usually respect Daniel Lakeland’s opinions highly, but Phil wins this thread for me.

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  9. Back in 2009, nobody at the Young Republican Club was talking about hijacking Congress. Or butt plugs, for that matter. At least not on the day I was there. Things have changed.

    I suspect Target’s inventory was different back then too.

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  10. > I can’t imagine speaking at a club where they joke about armed overthrow of the government. That really bothers me. I guess that’s how they were talking 55 years ago at the Young Communist Club, or the Students for a Democratic Society.

    Before my time, so I wasn’t personally there, but I highly doubt that SDS were talking about an armed overthrow of the government. Of their output that I am familiar with, all of it is explicit in promoting non-violence (e.g., _The Port Huron Statement_).

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        • My sense of (and irritation with) the gestalt of the left at the time was that everyone had some specific item that they wanted everyone to do first, and they weren’t going to help the larger cause (anti-war effort) unless their particular cause was spoken to first. So not a whole lot got done. And lots of people were real irritated that their particular axe to grind wasn’t getting any traction. And the war went on.

          By the way, it turns out that at that event, the SDS rushed the stage trying to get their speaker to the microphones.

          https://www.thecrimson.com/article/1970/4/16/60000-war-protestors-rally-on-common/

          Fast forward from 1970 to 1973 or ’74. The war was still going. My minor program was Materials Science, and one course took us on field trips to local companies doing materials things. Some were pretty neat: gears for power trains in really large ships. One was doing “thick film circuits”. Basically a more compact alternative to the PC boards of the time. We got a long lecture on how neat the technology was, and I made the mistake of asking what the circuit he was making was actually used for. He was real proud of his circuit. What was it for? It was a fuse for anti-personnel land mines. And these were really great land mines: the land mine popped up in the air and his circuit set the device off at waist hight so the shrapnel would rip the person’s gut to shreds instead of just blowing their foot off. Even better, they were using plastic as shrapnel, so even if the bloke survived and got to a hospital, they couldn’t see the shrapnel on an X-ray and s/he’d die of sepsis.

          One of the most horrific crimes against humanity, and the hatred for “communists” and the Vietnamese was so beaten into this poor bloke’s head he couldn’t even see how evil he was.

          The violence was not only on the side of the protesters.

  11. >she noted how “you can pick up a butt plug or a dildo at Target nowadays”

    Its a bit of an odd product endorsement for a politician, but hey – who am I to be critical of these things?

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