Frigid Individualist

Motorcycles. Photography. Oppositional Defiance. Not a member of your tribe. Nope, not yours, either. 🚁

[Frigid Individualist @emeksv]

“The trouble with fighting for human freedom is that one spends most of one’s time defending scoundrels. For it is against scoundrels that oppressive laws are first aimed, and oppression must be stopped at the beginning if it is to be stopped at all.” - H.L. Mencken

So I see Kimmel got fired last night and we’re now at defcon 1. I have thoughts.

Let’s forget that the world kinda shrugged when a woman hopped on a plane after making a tweet and landed 12 hours later with half the world hating her. Let's forget that we missed that great opportunity to join together and say 'no'.

Let’s forget that a man was hounded from the company he founded for donating to a ballot initiative campaign, a ballot initiative that _passed_, in blue California.

Let’s forget that a professor was fired for pronouncing Chinese correctly.

Or that another professor was fired for questioning whether a policy explicitly benefitting blacks was racist.

Let’s forget that the editor of the New York Times was forced to resign for publishing an opinion piece by a sitting US senator.

Let’s forget that academics were fired, or censured, for doing science; not for doing bad science, but for doing good science that provided uncomfortable answers.

Let's forget that a political consultant was fired for saying political violence was politically counterproductive.

Let’s forget that a rocket scientist was fired for _wearing a shirt_ with women on it, an act that lacked any discernible political valence at all. A shirt that was actually made, and gifted to him, by a friend, _who is a woman_.

Let’s forget that a race car driver lost sponsorship because his father used a racial epithet before he was even born.

Let’s forget that none of those people got their lives back, or even much of an apology.

Let’s forget that the very worst of these acts is orders of magnitude more acceptable than cheering for the public assassination of people one disagrees with.

Let’s even forget that what Kimmel in particular said was anodyne by comparison to cheering for public murder, and even kinda funny. I chuckled at the bit about the fourth stage of grief being construction.

Let’s forget that most of you screaming about Kimmel in particular today sat idly by as the things I’ve mentioned above happened. At best you didn’t care. At worst, you tacitly approved. But let’s forget about that. Let’s forget about who started it.

You are asserting, now, today, that people - not just randos, but people in positions of trust; doctors, school teachers, bureaucrats, airline pilots, nurses, etc - should be able to openly celebrate assassination without consequences in their professional lives.

That is a spectacularly libertarian position to take! Congratulations! I agree with you! I could quibble, but fuck it, let’s go with that.

We have an opportunity to move forward.

Moving forward, especially with 'endorses murder' as a floor standard, means also accepting a lot of far less objectionable speech:

It means not firing or banning people with restrictionist ideas about immigration and who should be allowed to come here.

It means not firing or banning people who believe men cannot ever be women or that there are only two genders or that people who claim otherwise have a mental illness. It means not firing or banning people who refuse to use designer pronouns.

It means not firing or banning people who believe women shouldn't be allowed to vote.

It means not firing or banning people who believe that Islam is poison and cannot be integrated into the West.

It means not firing or banning people who hate Jews, whether they are on the right or the left.

It means not firing or banning people who hate black people, or believe them to be inferior.

It means not firing or banning people who believe group differences are at least in part due to genetics.

It means not firing professors who research this or other controversial ideas. It means not gatekeeping public research data to prevent such research. It means not gatekeeping PhD and peer review to prevent such research.

It means you have to give up on 'hate speech.' It means you have to confront the outraged with the fact that they have no right to not be offended. It means growing a skin.

It doesn't mean you have to like these people; it doesn't mean you have to be friends with them. But it does mean you have to behave civilly with them at work, and it means you have to give their ideas equal space in public debate.

More critically than anything else it means, as Mencken says above, actually defending everyone's _right_ to say the most horrible things you can imagine, without sanction. It means loudly objecting and demanding redress when anyone's livelihood or ability to participate in civic discourse is threatened, regardless of the reason.

That might sound expensive, but it's the only off-ramp. What's happening today is not innovation, it's escalation. If you can't do this, we just keep spiraling. We've been on this road for at least a decade.

If you can’t do this, can’t do _all of this_, then you are no better than Brendan Carr or Pam Bondi. You are _exactly the same_.

I opened with Mencken; I'll close with his much-less-quoted coda: “The trouble when people stop defending scoundrels is that they stop defending human liberty.”

So that’s where we are. Which way, Western Man?

[The Misfit Patriot @misfitpatriot_]

This you?

[Christopher F. Rufo ⚔️ @christopherrufo]

@GovPressOffice Actually, I am a journalist who has exposed you for giving free sex-change surgeries to trans migrants, free solar panels to illegal aliens, and free porn-enhanced iPads to state prisoners. And I’m just getting started.

[mike bski @BskiMike22802]

Let me ruin your June for a second.

Every year when National Gun Violence Awareness Month rolls around, the same people who have not read a single page of John Lott's 13,312-regression peer-reviewed study start posting pictures of children and demanding you feel responsible for deaths you did not cause and had nothing to do with.

So. Let us talk about children. Since they brought it up.

In 2006, the CDC recorded 642 accidental firearm deaths in the entire United States. For children under the age of ten — the number was 31. Thirteen under age five. Eighteen between five and nine.

Tragic? Absolutely. Every single one.

But here is the number that will not appear on a single "Orange Friday" awareness post: 80.

Eighty children under the age of five drown in bathtubs every year. Every. Single. Year.

ALMOST THREE TIMES as many children drown in bathtubs annually as die from ALL firearm accidents combined — including adults. And forty more drown in five-gallon water buckets. The kind you buy at Home Depot for $4.99.

I have given this information at talks and watched jaws drop, because people genuinely believe the number is in the thousands. They have been so thoroughly marinated in "gun violence awareness" content that their perception of actual risk is completely detached from reality. That is not an accident. That is the point of the campaign.

Where is Bathtub Awareness Month? Where is the congressional hearing on five-gallon bucket control? Where is the hashtag? Where are the orange ribbons for the children who drowned while their parents were in the next room?

There are none. Because the campaign was never about children. It was never about safety. If it were about safety, they would be equally outraged about cars — which killed 1,305 children that same year. Or fire. Or drowning. But they are not. The selective fury lands exclusively on firearms. And if you are a scientist, which I happen to be, you do not get to cherry-pick your data based on which conclusion you prefer. Quinn's Law Number Six: facts are the enemy of liberalism.

Now let us talk about what the actual data says about guns and safety, because John Lott ran 13,000-plus statistical regressions across every county in America and the results are not ambiguous.

Fifty-six percent of convicted felons surveyed in a ten-state study said they would NOT attack a target they believed was armed. Fifty-six percent. The deterrence is real, it is documented, and it functions whether or not a shot is ever fired. The firearm you carry protects your neighbor whether your neighbor knows it or not.

When states passed right-to-carry laws, multiple-victim public shootings — what the media insists on calling "mass shootings" to maximize terror — dropped by 67 percent. Deaths in those events dropped by 75 percent. Injuries by 81 percent. States that adopted these laws virtually ELIMINATED mass public shootings within four to five years. The remaining events? They happened almost exclusively in the specific locations where guns remained banned. The gun-free zones. The places we hang the sign that only the law-abiding ever read.

There were between 760,000 and 3.6 million defensive gun uses in the United States last year alone, depending on which of fifteen national polls you consult. A JAMA Network Open study from March 2025 estimated 489,000 DGUs in which a firearm was actually discharged. The Department of Justice's own National Crime Victimization Survey puts the conservative floor at 65,000 defensive uses per year against assaults, robberies, and home invasions.

No dead body. No coverage. No awareness month.

Here is one more number for you: 74. Seventy-four percent of convicted felons in a National Institute of Justice survey said they actively avoided homes they believed were occupied by armed residents. Criminals respond to incentives. That is not ideology — that is basic deterrence theory, and it is confirmed by the people who actually commit the crimes.

I also want you to think carefully about something the Supreme Court already settled. DeShaney v. Winnebago County (1989). Town of Castle Rock v. Gonzales (2005). Two separate rulings establishing that the government has NO legal obligation to protect you as an individual. None. You are your own first responder. That is not my opinion — that is settled constitutional law from the highest court in this country.

So the political class that just told you the government is not required to protect you... is also the one demanding you surrender the tool you use to protect yourself.

I want fewer people dead. That is why I know the data. That is why I read the book. That is why I am furious every June when emotion and fundraising replace science and evidence in a "debate" that has actual life-or-death consequences for real people.

You want to honor the children? Honor ALL of them. The ones who drowned. The ones who died in car crashes. And the ones who will never be born because a woman alone in her house at 2 a.m. had no way to stop what was coming through her door.

But what do I know — I am only a published textbook author, a science teacher, a father of four, and a combat medic who spent his career reducing human suffering and who actually read the peer-reviewed data before forming an opinion.

IF you agree:
LIKE this post so the algorithm shows it to people who need to read it.
SHARE this.
COMMENT below — did you know the bathtub number? Or did the narrative keep that from you? Tell me.

And if you want MORE of this -- the data, the history, the science, the stories -- JOIN Bski's Classroom community on X or YouTube.

#MAGA #Veterans #Trump
@JoJoFromJerz @GuntherEagleman @catturd2

[HailXenu @HailXenu2112]

The disgrace was not the letter; in a profession as vast as healthcare, you can always find a few dozen wing nuts. It was the absence of a counter-letter, signed by a much-larger and sober set of professionals, disavowing this nonsense. From that absence one could reliably confirm no such sober set existed.

[Honus 💾 @HonusWenger]

@pmarca This is largely because whites are the least racist major demographic, by far, in America. The entire woke narrative was not only unnecessary; it was fiction.

[Daniel @growing_daniel]

It's genuinely amazing that our one party state has an un-auditable post election process that takes weeks where they tell us vote numbers that are oddly convenient for them and we just accept it

[Frigid Individualist @emeksv]

On the contrary, many of us are furious with the left in general and BLM in particular for hijacking the issue of criminal justice reform to try to make the issue about race. We were this || close to getting the media to pay attention to the issue in 2014 and then the left convinced normies it was all bullshit by picking the absolute worst test cases (Martin, Brown, Floyd).

[TheCharmingSociopath @Eugenics_R_Us]

@wil_da_beast630 "Where was your outrage over a story that didn't make national headlines because the victim wasn't black?"

[Wilfred Reilly @wil_da_beast630]

We were, though.

This case appears in "Taboo," in a mostly color-blind discussion of REAL situations of extreme police misbehavior. The right wing and center right made Timpa famous - as well as Danny Shaver, Dylan Noble, etc.

[Frigid Individualist @emeksv]

So now we know how to get them to acknowledge the counterpoints all of us raised in the summer of Floyd. We just have to come up with something more egregious and they'll be desperate to change the subject. They'll be telling us we didn't care about Daniel Shaver next.

https://t.co/GCBk1IFJEV

[Big Fish @BigFish3000]

The only decent journalist CBS had they fired.
Scott Pelley was silent.

[🇯🇵SAIGOU🇯🇵郷田剛士🇯🇵 @oidonhagouda]

Bro, let’s stop pretending.

Muslims make up about 25% of the entire world’s population — over 2 billion people across 50+ countries.

Japanese people? About 1.4% of the world. One single country.

Shinto exists only in Japan.

So when people say “Japan should prioritize minorities and be more accommodating to Islam,” who exactly are we talking about?

The global majority is coming to one of the world’s smallest ethnic and religious groups and demanding that Japan change its culture, food, and traditions for them.

That’s not “protecting minorities.” That’s the majority trying to colonize a tiny minority.

Japan has every right to protect its own people and culture first.

If Muslims want to live under Islamic rules, they already have dozens of countries where they can do that. They don’t need to come to Japan and turn it into another one.

[Brigham's Burner @FiredUpCoug]

My dumb idea of the day:

We should establish something like birthstones, but for men.

Instead of each month getting a gemstone, each month gets assigned a cut of meat.

January: New York Strip
February: Filet Mignon
March: Porterhouse

And so on.

You’d ask a guy his birthday and instead of saying, “Oh, you’re an amethyst,” you’d say, “Ah, February. Filet Mignon. Sensitive, expensive, and a little smaller than expected.”

I can hear the commercials already

“Celebrate his birth month with the timeless elegance of brisket.”

[Erick Erickson @EWErickson]

You'd think Scott Pelley had a Nazi tattoo the way Democrats are defending him.

[Melissa Chen @MsMelChen]

Bear in mind that during the inquiry into the Manchester Arena bombing, it came out that security guard Kyle Lawler had actually spotted suicide bomber Salman Abedi before.

Abedi was fidgety and sweating in a bulky jacket on a warm night, and carrying a large backpack. Lawler had a “bad feeling” and thought something was wrong, but he hesitated and failed to report it properly. His exact words:

“I did not want people to think I am stereotyping him because of his race… I was scared of being wrong and being branded a racist if I got it wrong and would have got into trouble.”

22 innocents were killed; hundreds scarred for life.

This bloodbath should have been the final wake-up call about the lethal insanity of “anti-racism” and the deranged cult that treats being called racist as the ultimate unforgivable sin.

Instead, Britain doubled down and rammed this poisonous ideology even deeper into the College of Policing’s training.

Time to scrap the race-baiting training and fire the ideologues. Or keep burying more young, innocent Brits.

[Charles C. W. Cooke @charlescwcooke]

Tom Steyer keeps running around saying that it’s unfair that billionaires like him can buy our democracy, then spending hundreds of millions dollars to do just that, then failing to get elected, and then repeating all the same lines the next time around. It’s extremely funny.

[Matt Taibbi @mtaibbi]

America routinely taking days/weeks to count ballots now is f’n hilarious. They might as well announce results in Hamburglar costumes

[PoIiMath @politicalmath]

The simple fact of this case is that the police thought Henry Nowak was a racist and that meant that they did not feel obligated to extend to him any form of human decency

They killed him because someone accused him of racism

[Konstantin Kisin @KonstantinKisin]

I will take absolutely no lectures about "divisiveness" from the people who gave us two-tier policing, racial hiring quotas and endless race-baiting.

Unlike you, we do not kneel.