Tag: hit&run

In the Shadow of the Towers: Stuyvesant High on 9/11. HBO. Wednesday, September 11, 9 p.m.

My parents remembered with precision just where and how they learned of the attack on Pearl Harbor. And when I first arrived at college 30 years later, late-night beers in the dorm often led to discussions of what we were doing at the moment President Kennedy was assassinated. It made us feel oh-so-ancient to imagine there were kids in the third grade who hadn’t even been born when it happened.

Time and human evil march onward, and millennials have their own grim generational milepost in which the sudden, lethal intrusion of the outside world imposes a sudden burst of maturity: “I was a senior… I was 13… I think I was 15 years old at the time.”

Anybody in their mid-30s will instantly recognize the subject: the 9/11 attacks, their generation’s where-were-you definitional moment. But in this case, the moment was intimately personal: These were teenagers who watched 9/11 not on television but out their schoolhouse window.

The storied Stuyvesant High (its alumni include Jimmy Cagney, Thelonious Monk and four Nobel winners) is a magnet school just three blocks from the old site of the World Trade Center. Because the school stayed intact during the September 11 attacks and no one there was hurt, Stuy, as it’s known to its students and teachers, has largely been overlooked in journalistic accounts of that day.

Now the Stuy kids have what amounts to a video yearbook. In the Shadow of the Towers: Stuyvesant High on 9/11 is told entirely in their words. And though they’re now doctors, lawyers, investment bankers and marketing executives, their words still echo with the sense of awful wonder they felt as their childhood ended that day.

One of them remembers hearing a metal-rending screech from outside and thinking a truck had backed over some garbage cans. When it became apparent that something much worse had happened, classroom TV sets went all over the school, and a number of kids had the blood-chilling novel experience of seeing a second plane hit the south tower, followed moments later by an instant replay on television.

Another student was puzzled by blurry video of what seemed to be bits of debris dropping from the towers as they burned. “What is that?” he asked others. “What’s falling?”

As the cameras sharpened their focus, the outlines of human beings plummeting from the upper floors popped into clear view. And suddenly it occurred to the student that the answer to his question might be “my uncle,” who worked on the 86th floor of one of the towers. He does not even try to describe his agonized shriek.

(Don’t sit around waiting for a surprise happy ending; 9/11 wasn’t that kind of day. The uncle’s family never saw him again.)

As the towers continued to burn and, eventually, collapse, Stuy administrators closed the school and sent the students home. With buses and subways shut down, for most of the kids it was an 8-to-10 mile trudge suffused with ash and dust and abject ignorance—in 2001, cell phones were still rare among teenagers, and they had little idea what had happened.

When one boy allowed a group of his classmates to take turns calling their families from his clunky Nextel mobile phone, the conversations were not reassuring. “Please, please, just survive,” sobbed one father. The students quickly learned that rogue airliners weren’t the only threat. Several of them remember a man on the sidewalk pointing at a Stuy girl wearing a hijab and bellowing: “Bitch!”

It’s at this point that Shadow of the Towers goes off the rails, turning from a credible, if not necessarily remarkable, reminiscence about a brutally painful day to simplistic immigration agitprop. I’ve no doubt the know-nothing bully on the sidewalk existed and their encounter with him, under those circumstances, was terrifying.

But it seems unlikely that the only political lesson any of the Stuy kids drew from 9/11 is that it resulted in racist immigration restrictions. Surely producer-director Amy Schatz talked to at least one former student who said something about the nature of jihad or fallout from U.S. foreign policy, or cursed out Osama bin Laden.

Yet not a single word of that made its way into her film, just as not a single word of doubt about the merits of gun control could be heard in her last one, Song Of Parkland, a documentary about survivors of a Florida school shooting. What does come through, loud and clear, is the sound of Schatz fluffing up the progressive corsage on her sleeve.

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Labor unions in Oregon are taking aim at a new threat to the working man: self-checkout machines.

On Thursday, the Oregon chapter of the AFL-CIO, a federation of unions in the state, submitted the first batch of signatures required to get the Grocery Store Service and Community Protection Act on the 2020 state ballot. The measure would forbid Oregon’s grocery stores from operating more than two self-checkout machines at a time.

“The widescale use of self-checkout machines in our state’s grocery stores is part of a deliberate corporate strategy that relies on automation to reduce labor costs and eliminate jobs,” Oregon AFL-CIO President Tom Chamberlin said in a statement. After the state attorney general drafts an official ballot title for its measure, petitioners will have to collect 112,000 signatures in order to qualify for the state ballot.

The text of the ballot initiative details a number of ills allegedly caused by self-checkout machines.

These include the loss of grocery store jobs, the enabling of underage alcohol purchases, and an increase in “social isolation and related negative health consequences.” The text also mentions difficulties the disabled or elderly sometimes have with operating the machines.

The state’s Bureau of Labor and Industry would be empowered to fine noncompliant stores the equivalent of one day’s salary and benefits for their highest-paid retail clerk. That’s for the first offense; further violations would result in increased fines.

The Willamatte Week reports that the initiative comes in the midst of tense salary negotiations between the grocery store chain Fred Meyer and the United Food and Commercial Workers (UFCW) Local 555, an AFL-CIO-affiliated union that represents grocery store workers in Oregon and Southwest Washington. In late August, the UFCW voted to authorize a strike should negotiations with Fred Meyer break down.

One could interpret this initiative as a way of applying pressure on Fred Meyer during these negotiations. It’s not hard to see why labor organizations would want to effectively require stores to hire more of their members.

That perhaps explains why the public-spirited arguments offered by the Oregon AFL-CIO for their measure are so weak.

For starters, grocery stores continue to maintain a hybrid of self-checkout machines and full-service checkout aisles. Folks who have difficulty operating self-checkout machines or who enjoy bantering with clerks can still opt to have an employee to scan their groceries for them.

And while a reduction in labor costs might be a bad thing for unions, it’s generally good for customers, who reap the benefits of lower prices. These same consumers can then spend the money they save on other products and services, creating more jobs that don’t need to be mandated into existence.

Indeed, the arguments advanced by the Oregon AFL-CIO’s ballot initiative could just have been deployed a century ago to prevent grocery stores from transitioning to modern, human-staffed checkout aisles the group is now trying to preserve. Back in the day, customers had to wait on grocery store staff to assemble their orders for them. The introduction of self-service grocery stores in the early 20th century allowed patrons to stroll the aisles themselves, picking out which goods they wanted. The change saved shoppers and stores time and money, creating the far more convenient stores we know today.

Few would argue that we’d be better off if lawmakers in the 1920s chose to ban self-service grocery stores in an effort to save jobs and prevent “social isolation.” Cracking down on self-checkout machines seems equally foolish.

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A beef between Mississippi lawmakers and producers of meat substitutes may be ending with a satisfactory compromise.

Mississippi passed a law earlier this year that banned labeling plant-based meat substitutes (veggie burgers, etc.) as “meat” or a “meat food product.” This silly state-mandated censorship was an attempt to help protect entrenched agricultural interests from competition. Proponents claimed the law was intended to prevent “confusion,” which is utter nonsense. People are not generally tricked into buying meat substitutes based on food labels, and vegan and vegetarian foods clearly label themselves as such specifically to appeal to those who don’t eat real meat. There was really no pressing reason for the Mississippi lawmakers to get involved, except to satisfy producers of beef, chicken, and pork products at a time where the quality of meatless substitutes is improving and potentially reaching a greater number of customers.

The Institute for Justice, teaming up with the Plant Based Foods Association and a vegan food company called Upton’s Naturals, filed a federal suit in July to block the law, arguing that it violated of the First Amendment rights of businesses such as Upton’s. As institute attorney Justin Pearson noted back in July, “Under the First Amendment, businesses should be able to use almost any word they want, as long as consumers understand what they are saying. People know that vegan burgers do not come from cows. That is why they are called ‘vegan.'”

Today the Institute of Justice announced what appears to be a successful end to the fight. The Mississippi Department of Agriculture has withdrawn the regulations it proposed to enforce the law and introduced a new set of regulations. Under the new proposal, it’s still wrong for a plant-based food product to be labeled as “meat” or a “meat food product,” but there will be exceptions for products that include an appropriate qualifying term on the label, such as “plant-based,” “meatless,” “vegetarian,” or “vegan.”

So terms like “veggie burgers” or “meatless bacon” will be allowed on labels in Mississippi. Upton’s Naturals can still sell its seitan “Classic Burger“—seitan is a wheat gluten meat substitute—as long as the label also makes it clear it’s not beef.

“The new proposed regulation is a victory for the First Amendment and for common sense,” Pearson said in a statement today. “Mississippi has made the wise decision to change those regulations so that companies will be free to continue selling vegan and vegetarian burgers and other meat alternatives in the Magnolia State.”

If the proposed regulations are adopted (there’s a 25-day period for the Department of Agriculture to accept comments), the institute, Upton’s, and the Plant Based Foods Association will consider dropping their federal lawsuit.

And there’s more good news on the horizon for anyone who’s been looking to make the shift away from real meat but doesn’t want to miss the flavor: At the end of July, the Food and Drug Administration approved the sale of Impossible Burger meat directly to consumers at supermarkets. Starting later this fall, you will no longer have to go to restaurants to get them; you’ll be able to bring them home and craft your own recipes. I’ve had one myself, and yeah, beef producers should maybe be just a little bit worried.

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By erecting tariffs and threatening to tear up trade agreements, President Donald Trump has done more to achieve one of the left’s longstanding policy goals than any other modern president.

For the Democrats running for office in 2020, this creates a conundrum: They can’t say they like what Trump is doing, but they’re also not really willing to criticize his trade war. In fact, many of the 2020 Democratic candidates are espousing protectionist views that sound a lot like what Trump was saying in 2016.

The Democrats are essentially arguing that all we need is a more competent protectionist in the White House. But there’s no way to “correctly” implement policies that stop individuals from peacefully exchanging goods and services, just because they live in different countries. Whether imposed by Trump or by Bernie Sanders, these ideas are a catastrophe for all Americans.

Written by Eric Boehm. Produced and edited by Mark McDaniel.

Photos:
Allison Dinner/ZUMA Press/Newscom
Kevin Dietsch/CNP/AdMedia/SIPA/Newscom
Paul Kitagaki Jr./ZUMA Press/Newscom

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Federal and state investigators have identified a common element in many of the cases where people have suffered respiratory illnesses after vaping. The Washington Post reports that tests by the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) found vitamin E acetate, an oil-based nutritional supplement, in 10 of 18 THC fluids used by patients, while a New York state laboratory found “very high levels of vitamin E acetate in nearly all” the cannabis extracts it tested. That substance was not found in any of the nicotine e-fluid tested by the FDA or the lab.

These findings reinforce the suspicion that the respiratory illnesses reported to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC)—215 at last count—are caused largely by additives or contaminants in black-market THC products. Illegal nicotine products may also have played a role in some of these cases, although so far the CDC and the FDA have not identified a common element in patients who vaped nicotine. Notwithstanding attempts to blame these illnesses on the use of legal nicotine products, there is no evidence that standard e-cigarettes are causing the patients’ symptoms. That insinuation was always implausible, given that e-cigarettes have been in wide use for years and these conditions were reported only recently.

While vitamin E acetate is safe to consume orally as a nutritional supplement, it is potentially dangerous when inhaled. As the Post explains, citing Bryn Mawr chemist Michelle Francl, “When that vapor cools down in the lungs, it returns to its original state at that temperature and pressure, she said, which means ‘it has now coated the inside of your lungs with that oil.'” That observation is consistent with reports from Utah of lipoid pneumonia, a rare condition caused by fat particles in the lungs, in patients who had vaped cannabis extracts.

“Vitamin E acetate is not an approved additive for New York State Medical Marijuana Program-authorized vape products and was not seen in the nicotine-based products that were tested,” the New York State Department of Health said in a press release issued yesterday. “As a result, vitamin E acetate is now a key focus of the Department’s investigation of potential causes of vaping-associated pulmonary illnesses. Vitamin E acetate is a commonly available nutritional supplement that is not known to cause harm when ingested as a vitamin supplement or applied to the skin. However, the Department continues to investigate its health effects when inhaled because its oil-like properties could be associated with the observed symptoms.”

Assuming that vitamin E acetate is the culprit in many of these cases, it is clearly not a complete explanation, since it was not detected in all of the fluids vaped by patients. The FDA and the CDC are still trying to figure out which other agents may be causing the respiratory illnesses.

In states that have reported what patients were vaping, Boston University public health professor Michael Siegel notes, the vast majority of cases have involved THC oil: all 21 cases in California, all eight cases in New Mexico, and 24 of 27 cases in Wisconsin. But despite the evidence implicating black-market THC products, public health officials are continuing to issue general warnings about “vaping” and “e-cigarettes,” implying that all such products are equally dangerous. “In their zeal to demonize e-cigarettes,” Siegel writes, “the CDC and other health agencies have put the lives of our nation’s youth at risk.”

The risk is twofold. First, without specific information about the potential hazards of black-market THC oil, people may continue to use those products. Second, people who have switched from combustible cigarettes to e-cigarettes may switch back, even though smoking is indisputably much more dangerous, while smokers who had been considering a switch to e-cigarettes may decide to continue smoking. Both of those choices increase the risk of respiratory illnesses, along with the litany of other diseases caused by smoking. You might think that government officials who claim to be promoting public health would recognize those hazards.

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Some discrimination against Jews is based on their religion, and is generally forbidden in employment and other contexts by federal and state laws banning religious discrimination. But many anti-Semites dislike Jews based on their ethnicity, a hostility that also covers irreligious Jews and Jewish converts to other religion.

American antidiscrimination laws generally don’t expressly ban discrimination based on ethnicity, but they do ban discrimination based on race and national origin. Judge Dee D. Drell’s decision in Bonadona v. Louisiana College (W.D. La. Aug. 28, 2019), illustrates how complicated this can end up being:

Joshua Bonadona was born to a Catholic father and Jewish mother. He was raised both culturally and religiously as a member of the Jewish community. His mother is both racially and religiously Jewish…. [While a student at Louisiana College, he] converted to Christianity.

Upon his graduation from LC in 2013, LC hired Bonadona as an assistant football coach. In June 2015, he resigned his position to pursue a graduate degree and football coaching position at Southeast Missouri State University.

In 2017, LC hired Justin Charles as its new head coach of the football team. Charles reached out to Bonadona about returning to LC as its defensive backs coach. Bonadona submitted an application wherein he identified himself as a Baptist, described his salvation experience, and acknowledged he understood and supported LC’s [Christian] mission statement.

Bonadona interviewed with Charles who advised that the coaching position was his, subject to approval by [LC President Rick] Brewer. Accordingly, Bonadona interviewed with Brewer. During the interview, Brewer asked Bonadona about his parents’ religious affiliations. Bonadona affirmed his father was Catholic and his mother was Jewish but expressed he was a practicing member of the Christian faith and attended a Baptist church in Missouri.

Based on representations made by Charles, Bonadona returned to Missouri and submitted his resignation. According to Bonadona, Charles contacted him a week later to advise that LC decided not to hire him because of his Jewish heritage [according to the complaint, Brewer referred to Bonadona’s “Jewish blood”].

The court allowed Bonadona’s claim under 42 U.S.C. § 1981 (part of the Civil Rights Act of 1866) to move forward; that statute, banning race discrimination in enforcement of contracts, was held by the Court starting with the 1960s to apply to private discrimination as well as governmental discrimination. Because “race” in 1866 covered what we might today label ethnicity, and in particular was used to refer to the “Jewish race,” the Supreme Court had interpreted the Civil Rights Act of 1866 as “defin[ing] race to include Jews,” see Shaare Tefila Congregation v. Cobb (1987).

But the court reject Bonadona’s claim under Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, because:

Under the canons of statutory construction, words should be given the meaning they had when the text was adopted. This canon was adhered to by the Supreme Court in Shaare Tefila Congregation, when it noted that while Jews were a protected race in 1866, they are no longer thought of as members of a separate race.

What about national origin discrimination? The Bonadona court didn’t deal with it, because Bonadona hadn’t mentioned it his Complaint. But some other district courts conclude that being Jewish isn’t a national origin, either, because “[S]tating that one is Jewish gives no indication of that individual’s country of origin…. Jews, like Catholics and Protestants, hail from a variety of different countries.” On the other hand, some federal district court cases treat ethnicity-based discrimination against Jews as discrimination based on race or national origin. The Second Circuit has also said that “for purposes of Title VII, ‘race’ encompasses ethnicity, just as it does under § 1981”; that case involved discrimination based on Hispanic ethnicity, but its logic applies equally to Jewish ethnicity.

Of course, well-counseled plaintiffs would generally be able to prevail under § 1981 even if they can’t prevail under Title VII, as we see for Bonadona himself. But the legal controversy remains important; as the Second Circuit noted, “Although Title VII and § 1981 overlap in many respects, there are significant differences with respect to their statutes of limitations, employers’ respondeat superior liability, the cognizability of claims against individuals (as opposed to organizations), and whether a plaintiff must show that discrimination was intentional.” This is especially significant for lawsuits against local governments as employers, where § 1981 rules are more pro-defendant. The disagreement about how Title VII deals with such ethnic discrimination thus remains important.

Note also that LC might well be entitled not to hire non-Christians, because Title VII ban on religious discrimination exempts religious institutions. But there is no such statutory exemption for race or national origin discrimination. (There is a First Amendment exception for any sort of discrimination as to clergy and similar employees, but that wouldn’t cover football coaches.) And of course Bonadona’s claim is that he was discriminated against based on his ethnicity, not based on his current or past religion.

The Anti-Defamation League, by the way, has condemned characterizing discrimination against Jews as race discrimination, even when such characterizations might help fight anti-Semitic discrimination:

ADL is deeply offended by the perception of Jews as a race found in both allegations against the College and the plaintiff’s assertions in the lawsuit.  According to a court filing, the administration was motivated in its actions because of Mr. Bonadona’s “Jewish blood” and Mr. Bonadona is attempting to circumvent the 1964 Civil Rights Act’s religious employer exemption by characterizing his “Jewish heritage” as racial….

The idea that Jews are not only a religious group, but also a racial group, was a centerpiece of Nazi policy, and was the justification for killing any Jewish person who came under Nazi occupation—regardless of whether he or she practiced Judaism. In fact, even the children and the grandchildren of Jews who had converted to Christianity were murdered as members of the Jewish “race” during the Holocaust.

Based on Congress’ 19th Century conception of race, the U.S. Supreme Court in the 1980s ruled that the definition of “non-white races” found in post-Civil War anti-discrimination laws, includes Arabs, Chinese, Jews and Italians.  The 1964 Civil Rights Act, which explicitly covers national origin and religion, does not embody these antiquated views.  Although Mr. Bonadona’s attorney certainly could try to bring claims under these 19th century laws, we believe that attempting to create similar legal precedent under the Civil Rights Act perpetuates harmful stereotypes and views about Jews….

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Not too long ago, Sohrab Ahmari, the editor of the New York Post op-ed page, wrote a jeremiad against National Review‘s David French, succinctly titled “Against David French-ism.” At its core, it was an argument not only that French was too nice but that he embodied a habit among conservatives, and in particular among social conservatives, of shrinking from important cultural fights. 

What looked on the surface like a personal spat between two opinion journalists was in fact a larger debate about the future of the political right. Ahmari was arguing for a conservatism that wasn’t nice or civil as a matter of practice. He wanted a conservative politics that would wage cultural war on its enemies—and win. 

Last night, Ahmari took the fight directly to his enemy, debating French in person for the first time in an event at Catholic University in Washington, D.C., moderated by New York Times columnist Ross Douthat. As debates go, it was profoundly lopsided.

French, a lawyer and former president of the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education, repeatedly challenged Ahmari to explain what concrete actions he proposed to defend religious liberty and culture. In doing so, French demonstrated over and over again that Ahmari’s arguments are hollow, that his thinking is shallow, that he is an utter lightweight on virtually all the matters of policy substance he claimed to care about. To put it in the kind of blunt and less-than-civil terms that the Post editor might use, the evening proved that Sohrab Ahmari is a joke. 

Much of the debate centered on “drag queen story hour,” an event held at a California public library that was, by Ahmari’s telling, the inciting incident for his attack against French. Ahmari was offended by this event’s existence, and for whatever reason he decided that French, and French’s style of political argument, were to blame.

Ahmari brought up the California event early in the evening, calling it and others like it a “cultural crisis and a moral emergency.” Drag queen story hour, he warned, was a “global movement,” since the group that hosts it has 35 chapters. “It is,” he said, “a threat.” 

This eventually prompted French to ask the obvious question: What would Ahmari do to combat this supposed crisis? “What public power would you use?” he asked. “And how would it be constitutional?”

Ahmari’s answer—and I promise I am not making this up—was that he would hold a congressional hearing “on what’s happening in our libraries,” in which sympathetic conservative senators such as Josh Hawley and Tom Cotton would “make the head of the Modern Library Association or whatever sweat.” 

There has always been something frustratingly vague about Ahmari’s vision. In his original essay attacking French, he longed for a conservatism that would “fight the culture war with the aim of defeating the enemy and enjoying the spoils in the form of a public square re-ordered to the common good and ultimately the Highest Good.” It was never clear what, precisely, he felt the common good or the Highest Good were, or who would be in charge of defining them. But now, at long last, we have some clarity about it means to fight the culture war in this manner: It means convening a formal event at which public officials are mean to the head of the Modern Library Association. Which is to say: It means political theater designed to entertain and satisfy Sohrab Ahmari.

Later, Ahmari suggested that local ordinances could be passed to prohibit culturally offensive displays like drag queen story hour, or that obscenity laws could be enforced more strictly. French, an actual lawyer, patiently explained that even the oldest and strictest interpretations of obscenity laws would not bar drag queens from the library; even back then, courts would not have seen dressing in drag as obscene. More importantly, local ordinances would violate the Constitution, which protects viewpoint-neutral access to public facilities such as schools and libraries. Those protections, French noted, have benefited conservative Christians immensely, ensuring that they cannot be denied access to public spaces because of their religious beliefs. But the same protections also prohibit public officials from turning away drag queens. You can’t have one without the other. 

“I’m going to fight for the rights of others that I would like for myself,” French said, “because I know that my rights are fragile.” It’s not possible to create a system that only delivers results that Ahmari likes. Sometimes, French said, “people you disagree with are going to have to go to court and win.” What matters is the fairness and integrity of the system as a whole, not one’s irritation with a particular outcome.  

Ahmari stumbled in response, arguing that there are “cultural battles that can’t be fought” in the courtroom. These issues were bigger than the courts, he said. This was something of a retreat, if not an outright reversal, from the position he took in his essay, in which he nonsensically complained that French—who has sued countless universities to protect individual religious and speech rights—was too resistant to using government power to achieve his desired ends. Instead, he claimed at the time, French was overly enamored of “cultural change” as the solution. 

So which is the correct way forward? Culture? Or law? As on so many things, Ahmari couldn’t seem to decide. 

I suspect he isn’t really concerned about either. What Ahmari really wants is theater, the satisfaction of watching a friendly senator dress down an unfriendly liberal. 

Similarly, Ahmari wants to reinstate the ban on assault weapons, a position an editorial in his paper recently endorsed, not because he believes it would be effective—the piece admits that such bans are arbitrary and that the previous one had “limited impact”—but because his agenda consists almost entirely of empty, symbolic action. 

He likewise defended Missouri Sen. Hawley’s absurd plan to regulate social media functionality, not because it offered good, practical ideas—”it’s not as if I agree with every provision,” he said—but on the grounds that “at least [Hawley’s] willing to say, here’s a problem, and the state may have a role.” At one point he offered, largely unprompted, “I am willing to ban things. Let me put it that way.” The Highest Good, I guess.

This is not a practical agenda. It is a flimsy expression of irritation. Ahmari is upset about things that are happening in the culture, and he wants them to go away—or at least to be castigated publicly by someone in a position of power. He doesn’t really have a plan to make anyone’s life better. He just wants the brief satisfaction of a lively political show. 

To be clear, my critique of Ahmari is not a defense of all of French’s ideas. The National Review writer is, to put it mildly, no libertarian. I believe he is wrong about many things, such as whether the First Amendment does—or should—protect pornography. (French made clear in the debate that he believes it shouldn’t, although he recognized that cultural demand presented challenges to his view.) But he has also done much to concretely defend individual liberty for both religious and secular people, especially on college campuses. And he understands, correctly, that the foundation of individual freedom is the protection of individual rights, even—especially—when they benefit people and actions you personally dislike.

French is sometimes wrong. But unlike Ahmari, he is arguing thoughtfully and in good faith. He knew what he was talking about, the precise details and history of the law, and the ramifications that alterations might have, in the way that a lawyer with years of on-the-ground experience knows. Ahmari knew what he felt, he knew that he was upset, and he didn’t know much more. 

So when I say that Ahmari is a joke, I don’t do so solely as a cheap jab. I’m saying he is so thoroughly ignorant of or careless about the particulars of legal and policy substance that he should not be regarded as merely wrong. I’m saying he should not be regarded at all. 

Ahmari has nothing productive to offer, nothing useful to add to the debate about conservatism and nationalism and the best way to protect the rights and liberties of Americans. He is a person without a plan beyond behaving rudely to garner attention. He has substituted shallow snideness and pointless personal attacks against a decent man in place of a thoroughly considered political program, because, in the end, his political program consists of little more than sneers and shallow assertions of moral righteousness. Incivility is not the process by which he means to achieve some larger political victory but an end unto itself. Ahmari-ism is not an agenda, or an ideology, or a political program. It is, at heart, being a jerk for its own sake. 

Ahmari will probably have to be satisfied with that, because his attack has backfired. He lost last night’s debate, and lost badly, in a fight that he started. In doing so, he proved not only that David French can fight but that French-ism can win. 

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In a move that has been foreshadowed for a year, the Republican Party this weekend will cancel presidential primary elections in four states, Politico reports.

Quoting “three GOP officials who are familiar with the plans,” the paper said that South Carolina, Nevada, Arizona and Kansas, which between them comprise around 7 percent of the overall delegate haul, will simply wave away political competition rather than let the likes of Bill Weld, Joe Walsh, and perhaps Mark Sanford take a David vs. Goliath swing at an incumbent president whose Gallup approval ratings among Republicans has been between 87 percent and 91 percent all year.

The camcellations, which grow out of the unprecedented collusion between the Republican National Committee and President Donald Trump’s reelection campaign, demonstrates strikingly less confidence than that of his predecessor.

State Democratic parties generally held primaries and caucuses in 2012 unless no competitors qualified for the ballot. This led to such amusemens as attorney and perennial candidate John Wolfe winning 42 percent in the Arkansas primary. But Obama, whose approval rating among Democrats in the first half of 2011 bobbed between 75 percent and 85 percent, waltzed to the nomination.

South Carolina—Sanford’s home state—and Nevada are third and fourth, respectively, on the Republican primary/caucus calendar, giving them outsized influence on the electoral process. The last time an incumbent president acted in such a heavy-handed way toward an early-state primary was George H.W. Bush, whose apparatus eliminated the competition in the 1992 Iowa caucus and the just-after-New-Hampshire South Dakota primary. That focused the attention of Bush’s upstart challenger, Pat Buchanan, on New Hampshire, where his 37 percent of the vote shook up the whole election.

Trump and his team are reportedly very aware of the historical parallels (as are his competitors—Weld is focused on the “Buchanan benchmark” in Granite State polling), and they want to eliminate the element of surprise. “We don’t elect presidents by acclamation in America,” Weld said in a statement reacting to the news. “Donald Trump is doing his best to make the Republican Party his own personal club. Republicans deserve better.”

Walsh, too, is unamused.

So to protect their King, the Republican Party is actually going to eliminate elections.

Defend this Trump supporters. I dare ya. https://t.co/T3JXr6gIYJ

— Joe Walsh (@WalshFreedom) September 6, 2019

Programming note: I will be appearing tonight with Joe Walsh (and also Christina Hoff-Summers, Maria Teresa Kumar, and Democratic presidential candidate John Delaney) on HBO’s Real Time with Bill Maher, live at 10 p.m. ET.

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President Donald Trump’s new round of tariffs on Chinese goods is going into effect even as we speak. But the more Trump escalates his trade war, the more unpopular protectionism gets with American voters, especially Democratic ones. So all the Democratic presidential candidates are sprinting to put distance between their trade policies and Trump’s America Firstism, right? Wrong!

Indeed, the party’s leading presidential contenders, Sens. Bernie Sanders (I–Vt.) and Elizabeth Warren (D–Mass.), who are setting the tone for the rest of the pack, are functionally identical to if not worse than Trump on this issue. The reason is that they don’t think that average Democratic voters care enough about trade to punish them for their protectionism.

It seems like Trump’s trade bashing has done more to bring people around to the cause of free trade in two years than English political economist Adam Smith’s canonical defense in The Wealth of Nations did in nearly 250. Indeed, literally every time the “chosen one” saber-rattles against China, Americans become more positively disposed toward trade. The Chicago Council Survey found last year that support for trade among Americans had touched an all-time high, with 82 percent of respondents saying it was good for the economy, 85 percent saying it was good for consumers like them, and 67 percent saying it was good for America. These findings were pretty much confirmed last month by a Pew Research poll, which found that 65 percent of Americans believe that free trade is good for the country. Two years ago, only 50 percent did.

Democratic voters in particular, Pew found, had jettisoned their 1990s hostility to trade completely. About 73 percent of those who were or leaned Democratic now agree that trade is good for the country, a 13-point jump even from two years ago. Likewise, a Hill-HarrisX poll found that 58 percent of Democrats believe that Trump’s China negotiations would result in fewer jobs and economic opportunities.

Even more to the point, in Michigan—a swing state that has historically veered Democratic but Trump narrowly won—a statewide poll by the Detroit Regional Chamber found a few weeks ago that voters believe that tariffs on cars made in foreign countries hurt the state’s automotive industry, that tariffs on Chinese imports hurt Michigan farmers, and that tariffs on foreign products hurt consumers like themselves.

Democratic presidential contenders have concluded that all this represents mere revulsion at Trump’s style, not a serious change of heart. But Americans would have to be blind to not see the riches that trade has delivered them.

The Peterson Institute for International Economics has estimated that expansion of free trade has generated $2.1 trillion for America between 1950 and 2016. That works out on average to $18,000 in income for American households. These gains have gone disproportionately to working-class households that shop at Walmarts stacked with foreign goods. If an American hasn’t felt a bigger pinch from the soaring prices of indigenously generated health care, education, and other services, it is because of the plummeting price of foreign goods.

But last year, for the first time in a decade, the prices of furniture, clothes, and electronics stopped falling. And if Trump does not back off his trade war with China, only divine intervention would stop them from spiking.

Nor are consumers the only ones getting hurt. Producers, the intended beneficiaries of Trump’s trade war, are too.

China’s retaliatory tariffs on American soybeans, wheat, and pork are decimating farmers. The National Farmers Union has issued a scathing condemnation of Trump’s trade war. “[I]nstead of looking to solve existing problems in our agricultural sector, this administration has just created new ones,” its statement says. “Between burning bridges with all of our biggest trading partners and undermining our domestic biofuels industry, President Trump is making things worse, not better.” Meanwhile, more than 60 percent of imported goods are used in production, so increased tariffs means increased production costs for American manufacturers.

Given all this, Democrats should be mounting a vigorous case against Trump’s trade policies, pointing out that beggaring-your-partner trade wars aren’t “easy to win”; they are self-injurious.

But that is not what they are doing. They are harrumphing against Trump’s Twitter diplomacy and his hyper-belligerent style. But they are otherwise unwilling to stick up for trade or even defend the era of trade liberalization that President Bill Clinton ushered in with the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) and the normalization of trade ties with China.

Among the top 10 Democrats who will be on the debate stage next week, only former Texas Rep. Beto O’Rourke, who represented the NAFTA-dependent border town of El Paso and is polling at 2 percent, is willing to defend the treaty. Former Vice President Joe Biden, who voted for NAFTA when he was a senator, has gone mum. He slams Trump’s “irresponsible tariff war” but then undercuts his own criticism by declaring that “we do need to get tough with China.” Sen. Kamala Harris (D–Calif.) tosses offhand comments about Trump’s tariffs being a “trade tax” but then quickly abandons the subject. South Bend, Indiana, Mayor Pete Buttigieg has lambasted Trump’s yammerings about America’s export imbalance with China as a red herring, but otherwise he is opaque about his plans.

But there is no ambiguity with Sanders and Warren. Sanders has always been an unrepentant protectionist. If he could have his druthers, he would ban trade with any country poorer than America on the Marxist theory that competition with lower-wage workers leads to the immiseration of the American working class.

Warren is even more ideologically ambitious. Like Trump, she couches her plans under the rubric of fair trade. But for Trump, in theory if not practice, that means forcing other countries to slash their trade barriers and moving toward a no-tariff world where no one has an artificial advantage over America. Warren wants to use America’s economic might to forcibly enlist countries in a leftist crusade. As The Nation‘s Todd Tucker approvingly notes, “Warren’s trade plan is as much a theory of power as it is a set of ideas.”

She has drawn up a tall list of preconditions that countries must meet to qualify to trade with America. These cover almost everything on the leftist wish list, including protecting religious freedom and human rights, signing the Paris Accords, fighting public corruption, combating sex trafficking, stopping tax evasion, and enforcing labor rights. She’d renegotiate every existing trade deal in accordance with her purity criteria. But given that no country on the planet, not even America, currently lives up to her lofty standards, global trade would basically come to a grinding halt under her.

This is totally cuckoo, and it makes Trump look like a veritable trade dove. “Elizabeth Warren’s trade policy is even more protectionist and unilateralist than Donald Trump’s,” writes Daniel Drezner in The Washington Post. Yet if she’s the Democratic nominee, he says he’d “hold his nose” and vote for her.

And that, in a nutshell, is why Sanders and Warren have no qualms about indulging their extremist anti-trade fantasies. They believe that moderates are so desperate to get rid of Trump that they will vote for any Democrat. In addition, an extremist strategy will energize their progressive and labor base. A majority of voters in a swing state like Michigan might be put off by their protectionism. But labor unions that Trump managed to woo away with his trade-bashing might return to the Democratic fold if they double down on his mantle.

Time will tell if this strategy will work. But one thing is for certain: If Sanders or Warren win, they will hammer the final nail in the Trump-made coffin of free trade, no matter how much ordinary Americans want the cause to live on.

A version of this column originally appeared in The Week.

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Today Hollywood regularly turns Philip K. Dick‘s stories into movies, but no motion pictures based on his work existed when the novelist was alive. He did get to see some incomplete excerpts from Blade Runner, but that film wasn’t finished until after Dick’s death in 1982.

That’s not to say he never witnessed any other adaptations of his work, though. As early as 1956, the NBC radio series X Minus One, a science fiction anthology, aired episodes based on two Dick short stories, “Colony” and “The Defenders.”

Below I’ve embedded the show’s version of “The Defenders.” It isn’t the most artful radio drama you’ll ever hear, but it’s a pretty interesting artifact—a take on the Cold War that doesn’t exactly fit the stereotype of 1950s network fare. I’ll save any spoilery discussion until after the embed:

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Dick’s original story was about a war between the United States and the Soviet Union. Here the countries’ names are different—they’re the “Western Confederation” and the “Asian Confederation”—but that’s a pretty thin disguise. The citizens of both countries have moved underground to avoid the radiation on the surface, letting military robots do the actual fighting. Almost all production is geared toward the war effort, and the media are filled with reports of the terrible atrocities being conducted above the Earth’s crust.

Eventually—spoiler alert!—we learn that the whole war is a fraud. The surface isn’t radioactive at all, the robots aren’t actually fighting, and the masses huddled underground are being fed propaganda. (“We have a full-time division of a-class robots who do nothing but photograph the progress of a fictitious war using scale models. The entire destruction of San Francisco…took place on a tabletop.”) Interestingly, the rival superpowers’ governments aren’t behind the conspiracy. In fact, they’re being fooled too. The fraud is being maintained by the robots.

That might suggest that the story is a critique of the military-industrial complex—an argument that a runaway war production machine is operating on its own logic and keeping everyone else in the dark. But in another twist, the robots turn out to be quasi-benevolent. They believe the war is irrational, but they don’t think they can convince the human race of that. So they’ve appointed themselves the caretakers of humanity’s old cities and farmland. They’ve been destroying our munitions as soon as the weapons are sent to the surface, and they plan to reopen the world to us once we’ve outgrown “the need to direct your hatred of yourself away from you and on to others.” It’s as though the false world in The Matrix is being run by the supercomputer from WarGames, which has started reading Jung and lecturing everyone about shadow projection.

When a Western military leader finds out the truth, his first thought is that the other side’s underground settlements are unprotected, making this the perfect time to nuke the Asians into oblivion. He’s stopped when one of his own soldiers shoots him.

That’s right: Fragging saves the day. Probably not what you expected from a network show in 1956.

(To hear X Minus One‘s other Philip K. Dick adaption, go here. For past editions of the Friday A/V Club, go here.)

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