Wednesday was the day the ecosystem of left-wing foundations and Democrat special interests (if you wish to interpret that as “teachers’ unions,” you may) with a stranglehold on American public education chose to draft high school kids into political activism, and the show that effort produced was exactly what one might expect.

Thousands of students across the United States walked out of class Wednesday to demand stricter gun laws in a historic show of political solidarity that was part tribute and part protest. From Maine to California, the 17-minute walkout — one minute for each of the 17 people killed at Florida’s Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School one month ago — began around 10 a.m. in each time zone. Some participants read the names of each victim; others stood in silence around sets of empty chairs. At Granada Hills Charter High School in Los Angeles, students lay down on a football field to spell out the walkout’s rallying cry: “Enough.”

It was the kind of political solidarity which can only come from compulsion, and there were lots of stories indicating that’s exactly what was on order for those kids who didn’t quite buy into being drafted into the gun control movement. Here was one…

WHEATLAND, CA (KTXL/CNN) – A teen said he was not given the choice to participate in the National School Walkout movement. “I was kind of forced to go out,” Colby Prince said. Colby said that’s how he felt in his integrated math class at Wheatland Union High School. He heard his teacher, Angela Harris, deny another student of what he wanted – to opt out of the school’s observance of the nationwide protest. He said there was confusion over what the focus was in Wheatland. “I was stuck between wanting to honor the kids and not wanting to protest gun rights because, you know, (I’m) pro-gun,’ Colby said.

On one level, let’s accept that this was genius. Tell kids they can ditch class at the crappy school you force them to attend for part of a day, and when they do it they’ll get support from Hollywood celebrities and cable news talking heads, and of course they’ll participate. They’re kids. They’ll eat Tide Pods if someone tells them it’s a cool thing to do, for crying out loud. You can’t get a better cast of Useful Idiots than high school kids, and you’ll get some of them to regurgitate everything you tell them to say — especially if they can get on TV to do it.

And everybody on the inside knows this is a scam. Everybody knows the leftists who run public education in this country are manipulating these kids. Meanwhile, the same kids ditching class for 17 minutes at school go home at the end of the day and spend 10 times that playing video games depicting the use of the same weapons they’ve walked out of school in protest of — and almost none of them will even recognize the irony.

Is this effective advocacy? Of course not. But left-wing foundation grant money must be spent some sort of way, and the national school walkout was a deliverable to show the foundations. They’re happy — mostly because you’re fuming over the co-opting of a captive audience by people bent on stealing away a fundamental right from you. And the more evil conservatives who can be made to despair by the publicity stunts funded by the George Soroses of the world, the more the ecosystem of leftist foundations and educrats spending his money feel a sense of accomplishment.

Your proper reaction shouldn’t be to get mad. Your proper reaction should be to take your kids out of the leftist public school subjecting them to never-ending agitprop and indoctrination, and to vote down every dollar of school taxes you can.

It’s time to impose the creative destruction of the market on the slimeballs who drafted those kids into that demonstration. They don’t fool any of us anymore, so why not rain unpleasant consequences down on them?

…

So Matt Damon’s moving to Australia? Can’t say I blame him.

If I was responsible for Suburbicon, one of the biggest box-office fizzles in modern history, at the tail end of a long string of atrocious films like Damon is, I’d probably want to move as far away as I could, too.

And of course he’s going to blame it on Donald Trump. Of course he is.

…

Now that half-dead Thad Cochran is finally going to allow his Senate seat to pass into the hands of the fully alive, one wonders whether the GOP establishment in Mississippi will accede to the party’s nomination of Chris McDaniel.

After all, the establishment resorted to every slimeball tactic imaginable to keep McDaniel from knocking Cochran out in a 2014 primary challenge. And McDaniel responded by sticking around as a thorn in the party’s side, preparing for a primary challenge to the state’s other Republican Senator Roger Wicker this year.

But McDaniel is now pulling out of the race against Wicker to run for Cochran’s seat. One would assume that signifies a workable deal in the making, and a unified Mississippi GOP.

But something tells me that isn’t quite what’s coming. That’s too bad.

…

I’m stealing this from the Daily Caller’s Benny Arthur Johnson, who posted it on Facebook Wednesday, because it’s a primer on how to refute the nonstop hype about that special election in Pennsylvania the Republicans found a way to lose…

How to *not* sound like a total idiot when talking about the Pennsylvania Special Election:

Why are we even having a Special Election? Well, because the hypocrite scumbag “pro-life” Republican congressman holding the safe +20 GOP seat redistricted just for him to win was caught asking his mistress to have an abortion

To replace him, GOP ran a little-known, old, right-wing candidate who hates Unions (which make up a majority of the jobs in the district)

Democrats ran a 33 year old blue collar Marine veteran who loves the 2nd amendment, is personally pro-life & has major Union support

Establishment GOP consultants parachuted into the district last-minute & soaked the party for $8M to ‘run’ a race in a rural district they don’t care about or understand

Trump’s speech in the district was a Trump 2020 reelection speech, not a convincing argument to vote for the candidate

In spite of all this, the GOP should have won easily & shot itself in the foot with a fully-automatic

If Democrats notch this up as a huge win for the ‘Resistance’ & ‘identity politics,’ they will continue to lose these races into eternity

Just so. As we noted last week, there is no particular Blue Wave coming this fall — but there might well be bad Republican candidates who lose very winnable House seats. The Democrats, happily, are just as capable of losing winnable races, and will.

…

Go home, Hillary. You’re drunk. And you’re going to hurt yourself, again.

…

There’s a show on Netflix worth watching if you haven’t seen it. It’s Babylon Berlin, which is a German series set during the Weimar Republic in 1929, starring Volker Bruch as a police inspector charged with cleaning up a rather nasty case of blackmail involving public officials in his hometown of Cologne, and his attachment to the Berlin police involves him in a cascade of events leading to some high drama.

We don’t pay much attention to the history of the Weimar Republic in Germany, other than the occasional hand-wringing that it’s a metaphor for the decline of American political culture. But as a historical period Weimar is truly a fascinating subject, particularly for novels, movies and TV, and Babylon Berlin is tremendously interesting for its portrayal of the period even more than its plot, which is worthwhile in itself.

Especially if you simply can’t understand how a country as sophisticated, literate and technologically advanced could possibly allow itself to be taken over by the Nazis. Watch the 16 episodes of Babylon Berlin, and see the various political forces on display within its story, and there is some insight to be found. That’s no accident; in fact, the show’s co-writer Henk Handloegten told the Wall Street Journal in a January interview that “One of the main reasons to make Babylon Berlin was to show how all these Nazis did not just fall from the sky. They were human beings who reacted to German society’s changes and made their decisions accordingly.”

Give it a binge. You won’t be disappointed, and you’ll gain a bit of perspective in the bargain.