I am always amazed by the faith that people have in government. Scour the newspaper any day of the week and you will read stories detailing the many failures of the federal, state, and local governments or agencies, and of their stupendous ability to commit the same mistakes over and over again. Yet these agencies are the one that people turn to in times of troubles or needs.
Astonishing.
Take the June 26th edition of the Wall Street Journal. There you’ll find a piece on how the Small Business Aid program has a significant fraud risk, according to the Government Accountability Office. That’s unfortunate for a program riddled with implementation problems that leave many small businesses unable to apply, while many large ones had no problems getting one of the available small-business loans.
And then there’s the report about how the IRS paid $1.4 billion in stimulus payments to dead people. That’s correct: dead people. According to the report, “The IRS, which was trying to get the money out quickly, didn’t use death records from the Social Security Administration as a computerized filter in the first three rounds of payments, according to GAO.”
One common reaction to these two stories is that Congress was rushing, everyone was panicking, and pundits were clamoring that we must go big or even bigger than big. But if that’s the problem, how to explain the $137 billion in improper payments made in 2018? For the record, this staggering level of improper payments happens every year. And then there’s the fact that we can’t even measure how many improper payments take place in the Department of Defense because that agency fails its audits on a regular basis—hence no one really knows where all the money goes. Yet here we are, always trusting the same government to somehow do better this time around.
On that same page in the Journal you can also read how “Battered U.S Wine Importers Brace for Higher Tariffs.” As the Journal reports, “The U.S. Trade Representative’s office, which imposed 25% tariffs on wine, cheeses, olives and other products from the European Union in October, is now considering raising levies to 100%, citing a lack of progress in negotiating a settlement and eliminating subsidies for Airbus SE.” Never mind that the president has finally hinted that he knows full well that Americans—the same Americans who have nothing to do with the Boeing-Airbus dispute—are paying the tariffs.
Yet, President Trump, and pretty much everyone in the Democratic Party, happily contributes to this new protectionist wave. Sadly but predictably, barely anyone in the Republican party is pushing back against the president and his protectionism sidekicks, Peter Navarro, Robert Lighthizer, and Wilbur Ross.
Scanning further down the page of the Wall Street Journal report you learn that thanks to government-imposed lockdowns, “140,000 Businesses Listed on Yelp are still Closed Because of Covid-19 Pandemic.” Depressingly, you read, “A large minority of that set, 41%, has shut for good, according to Yelp.”
It is not surprising: businesses cannot be kept closed for months and then survive having done nothing. Yet many states haven’t reopened fully in order to allow businesses to survive by reorganizing their activities to keep consumers and employees safe.
That’s in spite of the academic evidence that lockdowns were a mistake. In fact, upon hearing that the number of cases—which as Don Boudreaux points out is quite different from the number of deaths— is increasing, some states are now announcing that they’ll pause reopening.
Yet, the fact that the number of cases will go up as the economy reopens was fully expected since as a share of the population few people have actually been exposed to the virus. If a rising number of cases is reason enough to stop everything – reason enough to again coerce the economy and life into deepfreeze – while we await a vaccine quickly that might, or might not, arrive, what do we think is going to happen?
Governors around the country should end the lockdown and give businesses a shot at saving their businesses by reinventing some of the ways they serve their customers. Full reopening is no guarantee at all that consumers will come back quickly, of course.
New data confirm what we already knew; namely, that many people did not wait for the governments to lock down the economy to stay home and shelter in place. Such fear-based behavior contributed much to the economic collapse. That means that most consumers will be careful and watch out for their health and that of others without government decrees telling them to do so this time around too. But at least give consumers and businesses a chance to find what works for them once the economy is reopened.
I conclude with a report from the Washington Post. One is about Trump’s refusal to encourage people to wear masks. This, of course, comes on the tail of Dr. Fauci’s admission that he had intentionally misled the public about the usefulness of wearing masks so that they could be directed to health-care professionals.
“He also acknowledged that masks were initially not recommended to the general public so that first responders wouldn’t feel the strain of a shortage of PPE. He explained that public health experts “were concerned the public health community, and many people were saying this, were concerned that it was at a time when personal protective equipment, including the N95 masks and the surgical masks, were in very short supply.”
It’s interesting that Americans started wearing self-made masks long before this Fauci admission showing that maybe they were buying it. However, for the most part, Americans continue to trust Fauci. David Henderson, though, does not.
Seriously, reading the newspaper on a daily basis should make everyone question government’s intervention in our lives. But based on the support for both a populist protectionist Republican like Trump and his Democratic opponent for the presidency, Joe Biden, it doesn’t. So what are we to do?
I believe we should continue fighting the battle of ideas because when we are deep into the mess that both parties, and their underlying ideologies, are creating, some people will look for answers and for solutions outside the state. As Milton Friedman once said, “That, I believe, is our basic function: to develop alternatives to existing policies, to keep them alive and available until the politically impossible becomes the politically inevitable.”
I take that task seriously.
Finally, I certainly feel obligated to intellectuals of the past who have fought for our freedoms in what were arguably even more depressing times. For that reason, I dedicated my professional life to answering Friedrich Hayek’s call to action that
“We must make the building of a free society once more an intellectual adventure, a deed of courage…. Unless we can make the philosophic foundations of a free society once more a living intellectual issue, and its implementation a task which challenges the ingenuity and imagination of our liveliest minds, the prospects of freedom are indeed dark. But if we can regain that belief in the power of ideas which was the mark of liberalism at its best, the battle is not lost.”
This, I believe, is why we continue fighting.
via ZeroHedge News https://ift.tt/38nKy9X Tyler Durden
This question is in the news because of the St. Louis controversy (see, e.g., here and here); but I thought I’d discuss it more broadly, because the answer is surprisingly unsettled.
[1.] To begin with, recall that, as a general matter, you can lawfully use deadly force to prevent death, serious bodily injury, kidnapping, or rape, if you reasonably fear such harm. In about half the states, you can use it to prevent robbery (forcible theft from your person). And in some states, you can use it to prevent arson (even arson that doesn’t threaten death or serious bodily injury, such as arson of some outbuilding) or burglary of your home or possibly even your business or workplace.
But you generally can’t use it if all you reasonably fear is mere trespass on your open land (e.g., your lawn) or minor vandalism or even a physical battery short of serious bodily injury. You can use nondeadly force to stop such lesser harms, but not deadly force. For more details, see this post, but let’s rely on this (admittedly oversimplified rule) for now.
[2.] If you can lawfully use deadly force, then you can lawfully threaten deadly force, e.g., by pointing a gun at someone or saying “get out of here, or I’ll shoot you.” So if, for instance, you tell a trespasser that they’re trespassing (or even threaten nondeadly force to tell them to stop trespassing), and they turn on you and credibly threaten to kill you (the St. Louis man’s story), then you can generally use deadly force to protect against that threat.
[3.] If you can’t lawfully use any force (for instance, against people who aren’t trespassing but are merely peacefully protesting on a public sidewalk, even in front of your house), then you can’t lawfully threaten deadly force, either.
[4.] But say that protesters are trespassing, so you’re allowed to use nondeadly force to eject them: Perhaps they are on your driveway or your lawn. I don’t know the Missouri law on whether residents of a gated community where the roads and sidewalks are private may use nondeadly force to eject trespassers, so let’s turn to the clearer case where they are on your own property, or are threatening to damage your property in a fairly minor way (as opposed to, say, through arson or some other especially harmful action).
Can you threaten deadly force even when you can’t lawfully use it? On that, states disagree. The LaFave & Scott Criminal Law treatise tells us that “merely to threaten death or serious bodily harm, without any intention to carry out the threat, is not to use deadly force, so that one may be justified in pointing a gun at his attacker when he would not be justified pulling the trigger.” Likewise, Black’s Law Dictionary defines “nondeadly force” to include a “threat of deadly force, such as displaying a knife.” (See this post on the Siwatu-Salama Ra case from Michigan.) That seems to be the majority view.
Kendrick was accused of “knowingly exhibit[ing], in the presence of one or more persons a .45 Caliber pistol, a weapon readily capable of lethal use, in an angry or threatening manner.” “The Missouri Supreme Court has held that unlawful use of a weapon by exhibiting it in an angry or threatening manner constitutes ‘deadly force’ for the purpose of … justification defenses.” State v. Cummings (Mo. Ct. App. 2017) (citing State v. Parkhurst (Mo. 1992)). Thus, the … statutory elements that must have been established by substantial evidence in order for Kendrick to inject the issue of self-defense in this case are [in relevant part -EV]:
[a] that Kendrick … reasonably believed physical force was necessary to defend himself from what he reasonably believed to be the use or imminent use of unlawful force of another (section 563.031.1);
[b] that Kendrick reasonably believed deadly force—that is “‘physical force which is used with the purpose of causing or which a person knows to create a substantial risk of causing death or serious physical injury'”—was necessary to protect himself against death, serious physical injury, or {“any felony involving the use or threat of physical force or violence against any individual, including but not limited to murder, robbery, burglary, arson, kidnapping, assault, and any forcible sexual offense”}, or was necessary to use against a person who had unlawfully entered, attempted entry, or remained after unlawful entry into his residence (section 563.031.2(2), (3)); ….
The evidence, viewed in the light most favorable to Kendrick, established that Williams was unarmed, raised his voice, and pushed Kendrick three times before Kendrick retrieved a handgun. Thus, Kendrick “‘introduced a deadly instrument into what had been, at most, a simple battery and significantly raised the level of violence.'” “‘[D]eadly force [including, in Missouri, the threat of deadly force -EV] cannot be used to repel a simple assault and battery.'” Instead, “[d]eadly force is only justifiable when the defendant reasonably believes that such deadly force is necessary to protect himself from death, serious physical injury, or any forcible felony.” Here, the evidence established, at most, that Williams committed a simple assault and battery against Kendrick. There was no evidence that Kendrick reasonably believed deadly force was necessary to protect himself against death, serious physical injury, or any forcible felony.
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This question is in the news because of the St. Louis controversy (see, e.g., here and here); but I thought I’d discuss it more broadly, because the answer is surprisingly unsettled.
[1.] To begin with, recall that, as a general matter, you can lawfully use deadly force to prevent death, serious bodily injury, kidnapping, or rape, if you reasonably fear such harm. In about half the states, you can use it to prevent robbery (forcible theft from your person). And in some states, you can use it to prevent arson (even arson that doesn’t threaten death or serious bodily injury, such as arson of some outbuilding) or burglary of your home or possibly even your business or workplace.
But you generally can’t use it if all you reasonably fear is mere trespass on your open land (e.g., your lawn) or minor vandalism or even a physical battery short of serious bodily injury. You can use nondeadly force to stop such lesser harms, but not deadly force. For more details, see this post, but let’s rely on this (admittedly oversimplified rule) for now.
[2.] If you can lawfully use deadly force, then you can lawfully threaten deadly force, e.g., by pointing a gun at someone or saying “get out of here, or I’ll shoot you.” So if, for instance, you tell a trespasser that they’re trespassing (or even threaten nondeadly force to tell them to stop trespassing), and they turn on you and credibly threaten to kill you (the St. Louis man’s story), then you can generally use deadly force to protect against that threat.
[3.] If you can’t lawfully use any force (for instance, against people who aren’t trespassing but are merely peacefully protesting on a public sidewalk, even in front of your house), then you can’t lawfully threaten deadly force, either.
[4.] But say that protesters are trespassing, so you’re allowed to use nondeadly force to eject them: Perhaps they are on your driveway or your lawn. I don’t know the Missouri law on whether residents of a gated community where the roads and sidewalks are private may use nondeadly force to eject trespassers, so let’s turn to the clearer case where they are on your own property, or are threatening to damage your property in a fairly minor way (as opposed to, say, through arson or some other especially harmful action).
Can you threaten deadly force even when you can’t lawfully use it? (Assume they are merely trespassing, and you don’t reasonably believe them to be threatening something much worse.) On that, states disagree. The LaFave & Scott Criminal Law treatise tells us that “merely to threaten death or serious bodily harm, without any intention to carry out the threat, is not to use deadly force, so that one may be justified in pointing a gun at his attacker when he would not be justified pulling the trigger.” Likewise, Black’s Law Dictionary defines “nondeadly force” to include a “threat of deadly force, such as displaying a knife.” (See this post on the Siwatu-Salama Ra case from Michigan.) That seems to be the majority view.
Kendrick was accused of “knowingly exhibit[ing], in the presence of one or more persons a .45 Caliber pistol, a weapon readily capable of lethal use, in an angry or threatening manner.” “The Missouri Supreme Court has held that unlawful use of a weapon by exhibiting it in an angry or threatening manner constitutes ‘deadly force’ for the purpose of … justification defenses.” State v. Cummings (Mo. Ct. App. 2017) (citing State v. Parkhurst (Mo. 1992)). Thus, the … statutory elements that must have been established by substantial evidence in order for Kendrick to inject the issue of self-defense in this case are [in relevant part -EV]:
[a] that Kendrick … reasonably believed physical force was necessary to defend himself from what he reasonably believed to be the use or imminent use of unlawful force of another (section 563.031.1);
[b] that Kendrick reasonably believed deadly force—that is “‘physical force which is used with the purpose of causing or which a person knows to create a substantial risk of causing death or serious physical injury'”—was necessary to protect himself against death, serious physical injury, or {“any felony involving the use or threat of physical force or violence against any individual, including but not limited to murder, robbery, burglary, arson, kidnapping, assault, and any forcible sexual offense”}, or was necessary to use against a person who had unlawfully entered, attempted entry, or remained after unlawful entry into his residence (section 563.031.2(2), (3)); ….
The evidence, viewed in the light most favorable to Kendrick, established that Williams was unarmed, raised his voice, and pushed Kendrick three times before Kendrick retrieved a handgun. Thus, Kendrick “‘introduced a deadly instrument into what had been, at most, a simple battery and significantly raised the level of violence.'” “‘[D]eadly force [including, in Missouri, the threat of deadly force -EV] cannot be used to repel a simple assault and battery.'” Instead, “[d]eadly force is only justifiable when the defendant reasonably believes that such deadly force is necessary to protect himself from death, serious physical injury, or any forcible felony.” Here, the evidence established, at most, that Williams committed a simple assault and battery against Kendrick. There was no evidence that Kendrick reasonably believed deadly force was necessary to protect himself against death, serious physical injury, or any forcible felony.
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From Brummer v. Wey, decided by Judge Lucy Billings on Jan. 17, but just posted on Westlaw:
[D]efendants [Benjamin] Wey and NYG Capital move to compel production of 33 documents that plaintiff [Prof. Christopher Brummer] and FINRA [the Financial Industry Regulatory Authority] claim are protected from disclosure … as attorney work product or … as material prepared in anticipation of litigation. FINRA’s privilege log further characterizes the subject of eight withheld documents as “mitigation of litigation risks arising out of public statements concerning anticipated litigation.” …
[T]he documents … are … proposed strategies by a public relations firm and comments by plaintiff and FINRA on those strategies, for plaintiff and FINRA to counteract and thus mitigate damages from the defamatory statements concerning plaintiff on the internet, [arising] from his work with FINRA, about which he sues. That defamation, not this litigation or its anticipated commencement, prompted this public relations campaign. Depending on defendants’ future conduct, the firm, APCO Worldwide, proposed as part of the campaign the creation of new, readily searchable online text and images positively portraying plaintiff, unrelated to the litigation.
Of course when plaintiff anticipated commencing this litigation, he, his attorneys, and APCO Worldwide anticipated that he might need to respond to inquiries about the litigation or respond to retaliatory defamation by defendants and might use the litigation as another opportunity to explain and counteract the defamation. If other media portrayed the underlying facts or the litigation inaccurately, APCO Worldwide proposed to correct and halt the spread of misinformation.
Consequently, plaintiff’s attorneys were kept abreast of the proposals, to advise APCO Worldwide and plaintiff in the event the proposals might negatively impact the litigation or expose plaintiff to liability for any statements by him about defendants: hence the label, “mitigation of litigation risks arising out of public statements concerning anticipated litigation.” The documents reveal no such event, however, nor any advice by plaintiff’s attorneys, other than their concern that they be kept abreast.
While the work product protection may extend to an attorney’s information, impressions, or observations conveyed to experts retained as consultants to assist in analyzing or preparing plaintiff’s action, the documents at issue thus show that the attorneys conveyed no such information, impressions, or observations, nor did APCO Worldwide assist in analyzing or preparing plaintiff’s action. The documents include no communications by attorneys that are the product of their legal training or skills or that reflect any legal research, analysis, theory, strategy, or conclusion. Their occasional communications reflect only their desire to be apprised of APCO Worldwide’s, plaintiff’s, or FINRA’s proposed public relations strategies in the event they called for the attorneys’ input. To the extent that any FINRA attorney offered public relations advice, it was only public relations advice, not legal advice. Therefore the documents include no attorney work product.
The documents also make abundantly clear that they were not prepared primarily for purposes of the litigation, but to mitigate the damage to plaintiff’s reputation, rehabilitate his reputation, and assure that his communications in an effort at mitigation would not instead call more attention to the claimed defamatory statements and amplify the harm from them. Defendants are entitled to this relevant information regarding plaintiff’s efforts to mitigate the past and future effects of the claimed defamation and any communications that might reveal the impact of the defamation on plaintiff’s reputation and his mental and emotional condition, whether minimal or severe.
Relevance of the material to the litigation does not equate to material prepared in anticipation of litigation. The latter is material regarding how plaintiff intends to prove his mitigation of damages, not the facts regarding his mitigation of damages. Even his strategies as to how he communicates to his professional community or the public and to whom he communicates about the claimed defamation and whether his communications call attention to the defamation and enhance rather than mitigate his damages still bear on mitigation and do not amount to strategies as to how he will plead or prove defamation, damages, or their mitigation.
In sum, APCO Worldwide’s advice to plaintiff and FINRA and their comments on that advice, which they shared with their attorneys, but to which the attorneys did not contribute, was to assist plaintiff in his public relations strategy, not in his litigation strategy, in rehabilitating his reputation, and in mitigating his damages. At most, APCO Worldwide provided plaintiff advice regarding how to communicate about the litigation so as not to enhance his damages, but not how to prepare, present, or support his claims in the litigation so as not to enhance his damages or for any other purpose in the litigation….
Readers might recall this case from when an appellate court reversed an injunction against defendant’s publishing “images depicting … lynching in association with plaintiff.” The underlying defamation damages lawsuit, though, continues.
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From Brummer v. Wey, decided by Judge Lucy Billings on Jan. 17, but just posted on Westlaw:
[D]efendants [Benjamin] Wey and NYG Capital move to compel production of 33 documents that plaintiff [Prof. Christopher Brummer] and FINRA [the Financial Industry Regulatory Authority] claim are protected from disclosure … as attorney work product or … as material prepared in anticipation of litigation. FINRA’s privilege log further characterizes the subject of eight withheld documents as “mitigation of litigation risks arising out of public statements concerning anticipated litigation.” …
[T]he documents … are … proposed strategies by a public relations firm and comments by plaintiff and FINRA on those strategies, for plaintiff and FINRA to counteract and thus mitigate damages from the defamatory statements concerning plaintiff on the internet, [arising] from his work with FINRA, about which he sues. That defamation, not this litigation or its anticipated commencement, prompted this public relations campaign. Depending on defendants’ future conduct, the firm, APCO Worldwide, proposed as part of the campaign the creation of new, readily searchable online text and images positively portraying plaintiff, unrelated to the litigation.
Of course when plaintiff anticipated commencing this litigation, he, his attorneys, and APCO Worldwide anticipated that he might need to respond to inquiries about the litigation or respond to retaliatory defamation by defendants and might use the litigation as another opportunity to explain and counteract the defamation. If other media portrayed the underlying facts or the litigation inaccurately, APCO Worldwide proposed to correct and halt the spread of misinformation.
Consequently, plaintiff’s attorneys were kept abreast of the proposals, to advise APCO Worldwide and plaintiff in the event the proposals might negatively impact the litigation or expose plaintiff to liability for any statements by him about defendants: hence the label, “mitigation of litigation risks arising out of public statements concerning anticipated litigation.” The documents reveal no such event, however, nor any advice by plaintiff’s attorneys, other than their concern that they be kept abreast.
While the work product protection may extend to an attorney’s information, impressions, or observations conveyed to experts retained as consultants to assist in analyzing or preparing plaintiff’s action, the documents at issue thus show that the attorneys conveyed no such information, impressions, or observations, nor did APCO Worldwide assist in analyzing or preparing plaintiff’s action. The documents include no communications by attorneys that are the product of their legal training or skills or that reflect any legal research, analysis, theory, strategy, or conclusion. Their occasional communications reflect only their desire to be apprised of APCO Worldwide’s, plaintiff’s, or FINRA’s proposed public relations strategies in the event they called for the attorneys’ input. To the extent that any FINRA attorney offered public relations advice, it was only public relations advice, not legal advice. Therefore the documents include no attorney work product.
The documents also make abundantly clear that they were not prepared primarily for purposes of the litigation, but to mitigate the damage to plaintiff’s reputation, rehabilitate his reputation, and assure that his communications in an effort at mitigation would not instead call more attention to the claimed defamatory statements and amplify the harm from them. Defendants are entitled to this relevant information regarding plaintiff’s efforts to mitigate the past and future effects of the claimed defamation and any communications that might reveal the impact of the defamation on plaintiff’s reputation and his mental and emotional condition, whether minimal or severe.
Relevance of the material to the litigation does not equate to material prepared in anticipation of litigation. The latter is material regarding how plaintiff intends to prove his mitigation of damages, not the facts regarding his mitigation of damages. Even his strategies as to how he communicates to his professional community or the public and to whom he communicates about the claimed defamation and whether his communications call attention to the defamation and enhance rather than mitigate his damages still bear on mitigation and do not amount to strategies as to how he will plead or prove defamation, damages, or their mitigation.
In sum, APCO Worldwide’s advice to plaintiff and FINRA and their comments on that advice, which they shared with their attorneys, but to which the attorneys did not contribute, was to assist plaintiff in his public relations strategy, not in his litigation strategy, in rehabilitating his reputation, and in mitigating his damages. At most, APCO Worldwide provided plaintiff advice regarding how to communicate about the litigation so as not to enhance his damages, but not how to prepare, present, or support his claims in the litigation so as not to enhance his damages or for any other purpose in the litigation….
Readers might recall this case from when an appellate court reversed an injunction against defendant’s publishing “images depicting … lynching in association with plaintiff.” The underlying defamation damages lawsuit, though, continues.
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“Every normal man must be tempted, at times, to spit on his hands, hoist the black flag, and begin slitting throats.” – H.L.Mencken
After writing a particularly depressing article where I come to a logical conclusion, based upon the factual evidence of all previous Fourth Turnings, I always wonder whether I’m being too pessimistic and peddling doom, like many of the clickbait websites. The conclusions I reached at the end of my last two articles were particularly gloomy and made me wonder whether I was going too far. I thought maybe I was too pessimistic and my predictions of civil chaos and global disorder were overblown.
“A failure to meet the challenges ahead with bravery, grit, good judgement, adherence to our Constitutional principles, and a fair amount of luck, could lead to a defeat from which we will never recover. No one knows how and when the climax of this Crisis will play out, but the acceleration towards our rendezvous with destiny is in motion.” – Fourth Turning Accelerating Towards Climax – May 10
It just so happened I published my last article on May 24, predicting a 2nd Civil War. I figured we might have a couple years to prepare, as there is likely five to ten years before this Fourth Turning reaches a climax. Little did I know a black man with a long criminal background, high on fentanyl and resisting arrest in Minneapolis, would be killed by a white police thug named Derek Chauvin, who had seventeen complaints against him over his illustrious career, on the day after my article was posted. Oddly, it seems this murder will be our Fort Sumter/Pearl Harbor of this Fourth Turning.
“I know the Deep State (The Party) has no intention of relinquishing power and has no interest in our well-being or what is best for future generations. They are consumed by greed and an unquenchable thirst for power. They won’t blink in sentencing millions to a death sentence. It will require guile, guts and guns to defeat this entrenched vicious enemy. Voting for a different faction of the Party will not change our path or our fate. Only determined resistance using whatever means necessary and a willingness to sacrifice our lives for the sake of our children and grandchildren, along with a good bit of luck, can give us a chance to defeat The Party.
Our choice is to continue to accept beatings from the Captain and consent to their vision of the future – a boot stomping on our faces forever, or a 2nd Civil War. I didn’t say the choices were good. But that’s the unpleasant truth.” – What Would Cool Hand Luke or Virgil Hilts Do? – May 24
The death of George Floyd, if it had not been caught on video, would have been a two-paragraph story on page fourteen of the Minneapolis Star Tribune. Instead, his death was used by numerous political factions to ignite a worldwide firestorm of protests, riots, looting, murders, and wholesale destruction of businesses and neighborhoods. His elevation to sainthood by the left-wing media, left wing politicians, and race baiting hucksters like Al Sharpton has been nothing but a coordinated attempt to further destabilize the country and bring down Trump.
The virtue signaling by corporate CEOs worried about profits, left wing Hollywood egomaniacs, sports figures who think their opinions matter, and the Silicon Valley social media titans of allowable speech, has been a pathetic display of pandering and kneeling before BLM thugs and ANTIFA terrorists.
The last month has been a surreal concoction of lawlessness, battles in the streets, political cowardice, mainstream media malfeasance, and an almost incomprehensible descent into madness. While normals watched events play out on their TVs in disgust and bewilderment, since they were still locked down by politicians who gleefully encouraged protestors (aka rioters) to spread coronavirus, three funerals for George Floyd (JFK got one) somehow devolved into BLM and ANTIFA terrorist activities across the globe.
Then the propaganda machine kicked into high gear peddling a false narrative about systematic racism destroying the country, as weak-kneed white leaders began kissing the feet of Sharpton and his race baiting loyalists. The utter falsity of everything we are seeing, hearing, and being told by “experts”, “journalists”, and politicians is breathtaking in its audacity. But at least the stock market is up.
Our second Civil War is underway, except only one side is fighting. At first, it seemed like the initial protests against police brutality were spontaneous, but it became immediately obvious political operatives used this incident as an opportunity to inflict their Marxist ideology upon the nation, with the support of left wing media outlets and opportunistic Democrat politicians, who saw this as another opportunity to undermine the Trump presidency.
Anyone who questions the narrative is immediately condemned as a racist, with the leftist mob out for blood, figuratively by trying to get them fired, or literally by physically assaulting them and their businesses. When identical protests/riots blossomed in Democrat controlled urban paradises across the U.S. and then in foreign capitals in Europe, it was clear there was big money bankrolling this effort to undermine traditional society and destroy our two hundred and thirty one year culture of liberty and freedom.
Those mysterious pallets of bricks appearing at riot central in every Democrat controlled city in America didn’t deliver themselves. Whatever peaceful intent some protestors may have had was hijacked by centrally coordinated organizations hell bent on destroying the moral and ethical foundations of our country.
I haven’t written anything in over a month because I’ve been trying to decipher the truth about this coordinated effort to destroy the underpinnings of our civilized society. Just as the impeachment scam was ending and the Russiagate conspiracy was about to be revealed as a coup attempt engineered by Obama, Biden, Comey and their band of Deep State minions, the Covid-19 pandemic conveniently engulfed the world in fear, with medical “experts” declaring millions would surely die unless we closed the global economy and sheltered in our basements.
These “experts” convinced Trump to destroy the economy, with 46 million Americans having to file for unemployment, and the true unemployment rate soaring above 20% (not the BLS lies of 13.3%). All this for a virus that will not kill 99.97% of the U.S. population and will kill only .5% of those infected. If Democrat governors had properly locked down nursing homes the deaths would have been cut in half.
When the Covid hysteria looked like it was subsiding, with cases, hospitalizations, and deaths declining, all of a sudden we became a racist society requiring every white person in America to kiss the feet of oppressed blacks (black unemployment was at an all-time low prior to the Covid plandemic). White people who never owned slaves had to bow down and apologize to black people who had never been slaves.
Martin Luther King’s dream of living in a nation where people would not be judged by the color of their skin, but by the content of their character, had suddenly devolved into a nation where white people were required to beg for forgiveness from self-appointed black debt collectors because a bad cop killed a black felon, high on fentanyl.
The demands of BLM and ANTIFA are incoherent, laughable and designed to never be met. Paying trillions in reparations to people who were never slaves and getting rid of police in the urban ghettos, where black people murder black people at an astounding rate, might be two of the dumbest ideas in the history of ideas. But this fake racism crisis is just another excuse to consolidate power into the hands of the ruling class.
None of what is happening in this country is a bottom-up grassroots effort, but a top-down coordinated attempt to seize power by unelected wealthy men who operate in the shadows. Sadly, the general public doesn’t realize how they are being manipulated by those in control. Edward Bernays explained it clearly in 1928, and with the advent of social media corporations using their platforms for evil, controlling the masses and herding them in the direction chosen by the controllers has never been easier.
“The conscious and intelligent manipulation of the organized habits and opinions of the masses is an important element in democratic society. Those who manipulate this unseen mechanism of society constitute an invisible government which is the true ruling power of our country. …We are governed, our minds are molded, our tastes formed, our ideas suggested, largely by men we have never heard of. This is a logical result of the way in which our democratic society is organized.
Vast numbers of human beings must cooperate in this manner if they are to live together as a smoothly functioning society. …In almost every act of our daily lives, whether in the sphere of politics or business, in our social conduct or our ethical thinking, we are dominated by the relatively small number of persons…who understand the mental processes and social patterns of the masses. It is they who pull the wires which control the public mind.” –Propaganda
I’ve never been a big fan of current day policing, with their bloated ranks, no-knock raids, militarization at the behest of the military industrial complex, shaking down the public for government revenue, and using their unions to protect bad cops. In civilized regions of the country, the police are virtually unnecessary. But, in the Democrat run urban shitholes, where the agitators are screeching for defunding the police, cops are the only thing keeping those cities from becoming a living hell.
The looting and killing would become the norm. We already have real world examples in Baltimore and Chicago. When a few bad cops were caught on tape killing black men the reaction was to pull back from the worst neighborhoods. They are now lawless kill zones. Blacks murdering blacks by the dozens is completely ignored by BLM because it doesn’t fit their narrative of being oppressed by the white man.
The attempt to extinguish history by pulling down statues of historical figures and renaming buildings, military bases and schools, under the guise of defeating racism, is once again laughable in its infantilism. The overwhelmingly white domestic terrorists destroying public property, with the unresponsive consent of Democrat mayors across the land, couldn’t answer ten basic questions about U.S. history, but they are the judge and jury of what constitutes racist monuments?
Again, you need to step back and ask yourself, why weren’t these monuments pulled down in the 1960s during the Civil Rights protests or during the eight years of the Obama presidency? It’s because those at the top believe it is in their best interests to create civil strife and havoc at this time. They know emotional issues like racism and fear of invisible viruses are the way to keep the masses distracted and at each other’s throats.
Having escaped my basement office for a week at the Jersey Shore last week, a semblance of normalcy and reality crept back into my life. Reality is not what you see on the boob tube and on twitter. We are a country of 330 million with approximately 127,000 deaths “with Covid-19”, and 43% of those were from nursing homes. Over 30% were from NYC metropolitan area. Other than a few other Democrat controlled urban havens like Chicago, Detroit, Boston and Philly, the rest of the country has been mildly impacted by this virus. The hysteria is unwarranted.
The corporate media has purposely given the impression the entire country was experiencing rioting and looting. Again, a few thousand paid agitators got to perform on camera for the new reality TV show called Pretend to Destroy America in order to Defeat Donald Trump. Loving a good reality show, Trump has played his part with the bible holding walk through the rioters. Once the ratings for this show began to decline, back to Covid Will Surely Kill You.
Meanwhile, the Jersey Shore was filled with people going to the beach, jogging, bicycling, fishing, eating out, enjoying live bands, and strolling on the boardwalk. There were some mask wearers, but the majority were unmasked. People were friendly and not fearful. The black people, Hispanic people, Asian people and white people all cohabitated on the beaches and boardwalk with no violence, animosity or racial strife. This is because there is no racial strife among normal people not pushing an agenda or attempting to create discontent for a profit.
The vast majority of Americans just want to go about their lives in peace, earning a living, and enjoying their free time with friends and family. But the competing factions within the bigger Deep State umbrella have chosen to use average Americans as pawns in their game of power and rent seeking. The demographics of the protestors, overwhelmingly white, 25 to 50 years old and democrat, either reveals them as having only goal of bringing down Trump or proving their degrees in gender studies has left them with no critical thinking skills.
Watching leftists turn on each other, destroying their own cities, railing against policing policies in cities run by Democrats for the last five decades, tearing down statues erected by Democrats, and declaring resistance against the party which actually freed the slaves, keeps me riveted with anticipation for their next ironic choice. Seeing Hollywood elitists getting ruined over old tweets or blackface skits is delightful.
Watching one of the worst presidents (Democrat) in U.S. history, Woodrow Wilson, have his name dragged through the mud as a racist, is also enjoyable, but his far worse offenses included the introduction of the personal income tax, dragging the country into World War I after campaigning against doing so, and the ultimate treasonous act of creating the Federal Reserve.
Jerome Powell and his merry band of digital money printers are the real story. The financial system was already seizing up as we entered 2020 and the Fed was already in emergency mode, keeping the patient alive with QE4 being pumped into the veins of Wall Street banks and hedge funds. The pandemic and subsequent economic shutdown provided the perfect cover for the Fed to generate ten trillion dollars out of thin air to rescue their owners and the corporate interests who benefit from their largesse as first in line for the newly printed fiat.
The plebs were thrown $1,200, while small business owners had to beg borrow and steal to try and survive. Mega-corps have either thrived or have been resuscitated by the Fed. Propping up zombie corporations and eliminating the creative destruction of capitalism has destroyed the concept of free markets. The big get bigger, the rich get richer and the poor get poorer.
The Fed has created the largest wealth gap in U.S. history and bears responsibility for the approaching civil war and eventual financial collapse of our debt saturated system. The money (debt) creation doesn’t actually benefit the 1%, but the .1% – funneled directly into their ever increasing bank accounts.
The entire stock market rally has been driven solely by the Fed’s $3 trillion increase in their balance sheet. The Fed balance sheet has “fallen” from $7.2 trillion on June 4 to $7.1 trillion today. Is it a just a coincidence the Dow hit its rally high of 27,572 on June 8 and has fallen to 25,015 as of Friday? Of course not. The Fed was being roundly ridiculed by well respected investment icons for creating the greatest bubble in history, so they stopped their expansion.
Now the shit is hitting the fan. The Fed needs a new Covid-19 lockdown as an excuse to fire up the printing presses again. The Democrats need another lockdown to keep the economy in depression until November 4. At least half the nation isn’t going to buy another lockdown narrative, as pandemic deaths keep hitting new lows. The exoneration of General Flynn and the investigation by Durham into the coup attempt has the potential to set off a new set of fireworks.
A decade’s worth of history has happened in the first six months of this year. The next four months are likely to be even more eventful. An election taking place during a civil war has only occurred once in history – 1864. The right has not taken the bait thus far. Whether this is a wise choice is to be determined. If the left continue to purposely destroy cities, ruin the economy, while utilizing mail ballot fraud in winning the presidency and Senate in November, the right will be angry they allowed that to happen.
I don’t see either side accepting the result on November 4. The real violence will get going before the inauguration in January. Martial law and blood being shed in large quantities is now more likely than not. Throw in a resumption of the stock market crash and this Fourth Turning will really intensify. We’ve reached the boiling point and those controlling the temperature are still turning it up.
The resolution is uncertain, but it isn’t looking positive. Defeating the forces of darkness will require courage, strength, hardness, love of liberty, and a certain amount of luck. If you aren’t prepared for what’s coming, then start preparing now.
“It does not take a majority to prevaill… but rather an irate, tireless minority, keen on setting brushfires of freedom in the minds of men.” – Samuel Adams
Over the past several years, a social justice philosophy has arisen that is less a political program than a religion in all but name. Where Christianity calls for people to display their moral worth through faith in Jesus, modern Third-Wave Antiracism (henceforth TWA) calls for people to display their moral worth through opposition to racism. In the wake of the murder of George Floyd, this vision has increasingly been expressed through procedures, routines, and phraseology directly patterned on Abrahamic religion.
America certainly has work to do on race. For one, while cops do not kill black people more than white people, they harass and abuse black people more than white people, and the real-life impact of this is in its way just as pernicious as the disparity in killings would be. If the tension between black people and the cops were resolved, America’s race problem would quickly begin dissolving faster than it ever has. But making this happen will require work, as will ending the war on drugs, improving educational opportunities for all disadvantaged black children, and other efforts such as steering more black teenagers to vocational programs training them for solid careers without four years of college.
These are real things, upon which we must behold scenes like in Bethesda, where protesters kneeled on the pavement in droves, chanting allegiance with upraised hands to a series of anti-white privilege tenets incanted by what a naïve anthropologist would recognize as a flock’s pastor. On a similar occasion, white protesters bowed down in front of black people standing in attendance. In Cary, North Carolina, whites washed black protesters’ feet as a symbol of subservience and sympathy. Elsewhere, when a group of white activists painted whip scars upon themselves in sympathy with black America’s past, many black protesters found it a bit much.
"washing the feet of the organizers and asking for forgiveness."
Such rituals of subservience and self-mortification parallel devout Christianity in an especially graphic way, but other episodes tell the same story. Many conventional religious institutions are now rejecting actual Christianity where it conflicts with TWA teachings. At the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, a chaplain was forced to resign after writing a note exploring the contradiction between roasting the police as racist and the Christian call for love of all souls. Unitarianism has been all but taken over in many places by modern antiracist theology, forcing the resignation of various ministers and other figures.
The new faith also manifests itself in objections to what its adherents process as dissent. A friend wrote on Facebook that they agreed with Black Lives Matter, only to have another person—a white one, for the record—post this reply: “Wait a minute! You ‘agree’ with them? That implies you get to disagree with them! That’s like saying you ‘agree’ with the law of gravity! You as a white person don’t get to ‘agree’ OR ‘disagree’ when black people assert something! Saying you ‘agree’ with them is every bit as arrogant as disputing them! This isn’t an intellectual exercise! This is their lives on the line!”
This objection seems studiously hostile until we compare it to how a devout Christian might feel about someone opining that he “agrees” with Jesus’ teachings, as if the custom were to think one’s way through the liturgy in logical fashion and decide what parts of it makes sense, rather than to suspend logic and have faith.
The religious analogies pile higher by the week. Third-Wave Antiracism even has (metaphorical) sacrificial victims. The New York Times‘ food columnist Alison Roman is on suspension for criticizing in passing Marie Kondo and Chrissy Teigen for going commercial. Her sin? Criticizing not one, but two, people “of color.” (Kondo is Japanese, Teigen half white and half Thai.) Teigen has openly said that she does not think Roman deserves to be canceled for what she said, but no matter. At the Times, the TWA must have its way.
A great many intelligent people clearly consider all of the glowering postures, verbal laceration, and dismissals to be somehow an advance over how social change worked in America in the past. The seismic civil rights victories of the 1960s came about through protest, no doubt. But absent in the annals of how we got from Selma to the election of Barack Obama is this focus on individual psychology as opposed to national social and political structures.
Martin Luther King was under no impression that all white people were going to fully “love” all black people. He spent his time working for gradual change in the world as we know it via endless exchange and consultation with the powers that be, not agitating for a vague utopian conception of a society devoid of any racist sentiment. No matter what evidence people find of King’s fundamental radicalism, radicalism in his day was not centered around this recreationally aggrieved performance art, much less obsessively seeking to excoriate and destroy people suspected of impure thoughts.
Woke white liberals get yelled at by Black Lives Matter for being too woke and engaging in self-flagellation. pic.twitter.com/xx5ZdfGat1
The TWA adherent might object that today’s strategy is a second step—that the battle of yore was against overt segregation and disenfranchisement, but today making an even more equal society requires this different approach.
But why is all of this agitprop and joyous defenestration an advance over forging political change in the ways that have had such effect in the past? Those of us watching incongruously and needlessly acrid media posts and the yanking down of statues cannot help thinking the real motivator of the TWA posture is a simple joy in indignation and destruction, along with the comforts of group warmth. The white TWA adherent cherishes displaying virtue. The black TWA adherent has fallen for the Siren call of the noble victim complex, affording one the status of a Cassandra, a survivor, even the granter of absolution, as we see in some of the protest videos.
TWA people, to be sure, claim that all of this is ultimately about changing society. But in practice, the performance and fury are the main meal while the mundane but urgent work of changing society seems distinctly underplayed. One treatise on white privilege after another gives this away, such as Őzlem Sensoy and Robin DiAngelo’s Is Everyone Really Equal? After almost 200 pages of teaching the reader that being a good antiracist requires bowing down to any claims anyone not white makes about race, we assume that the final chapter might show how this counterintuitive ideology is supposed to change the actual world. Instead, that chapter simply repeats the minatory mantras from the previous chapters.
If TWA were really a political program, it would focus much more readily on making change from the grassroots on up; the psychological cleansing would feel like a prelude cherished by a few but best gotten past as quickly as possible. The idea that political work must be preceded by a massive mental overhaul of the nation is not self-standingly obvious. It is a tragically fragile proposition that reveals TWA as in essence not politics but Sunday school.
The TWA world might raise another objection, one that must be heeded. Without the fever pitch of these voices, and the dread they instill in any white person chilled at the possibility of being outed as a racist in today’s society, Tina Fey would not have pulled a few episodes of 30 Rock out of streaming because they had blackface depictions, the Dixie Chicks would not have renamed themselves The Chicks, there would still be an awful lot of statues of Confederate racists standing, and Rhode Island would not be excising the word plantation from its full name. The TWA message asks whites to look inside themselves to examine the ways they contribute to racism. This is happening to an unprecedented degree.
Yet we can be quite sure that the TWA position on these things, no matter how many and no matter how widespread, will be to dismiss them as mere optics, as if such things weren’t what they seemed to be calling for in their furious policing of psychology. The new line will be that these changes didn’t matter because they left “structures” of society in place. This bait and switch will not be a cynical ploy, but an inevitable outgrowth of the fact that TWA is a matter of ideology and attitude, not progress and pragmatism. Its liturgy requires that America always be a racist snakepit, redeemable only by a mysterious day when the U.S. “comes to terms with” racism. Just what those terms would be is never specified for a reason, which is that if there really were no racism the TWA adherents would lose their sense of purpose. (No, reparations won’t do it. Look under the hood of the most prominent calls for reparations and you’ll see that they say reparations would only be a “beginning.”)
In any case, to be sure, names and icons are just optics. More substantively, TWA has helped create some movement in America’s conversation about the cops, a problem central to black Americans’ sense of discomfort and dismissal in America. But there are two problems.
One is that truly reforming 18,000 different police departments, as well as the byzantine laws that quietly detour and destroy so many lives, will be a long, hard job of the kind King and his comrades so diligently and patiently forged. TWA activity, so focused on smoking out racist imagery, seems ill-suited to participate meaningfully in actual on-the-ground toil of this kind.
And second, we must ask: Is it necessary, for the cops to reform, that a food columnist be suspended for dissing a half-Thai model or that sincere Unitarian ministers lose their jobs?
Because this is so very much a TWA moment and because its perspective has been creeping into the fabric of educated American society over several years, we are becoming desensitized to how ancillary to civic progress is this peculiar, furious, and fantastical indoctrination. We seek sociopolitical change, yet we find on the vanguards a contingent who have founded a new religion. They insist hotly that they “really are right,” because racism is bad, isn’t it?
Indeed it is. But it is also bad for increasing numbers of Americans, out of fear for their social acceptance in wider society, pretend to subscribe to the semi-coherent tenets of an anti-empirical faith feigning higher wisdom with big words and manipulative phraseology. They see themselves as the heirs of bygone heroes who would actually have been sickened by them. Progressive Americans’ task is not to learn charismatic but purposeless self-flagellational routines, but to fight injustices with sense and logic. Only TWA adherents think the two are the same.
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Asked by Fox News host Sean Hannity last Thursday to detail his top priorities for a second term in the White House, President Donald Trump descended into an incoherence remarkable even by his standards. At the end of the ramble, though, he said something interesting: “I have great people in the administration. You make some mistakes. Like, you know, an idiot like [former National Security Adviser John] Bolton. All he wanted to do was drop bombs on everybody. You don’t have to drop bombs on everybody. You don’t have to kill people.”
That bit about Bolton, excised from the babble preceding it, has the seed of an idea that really would make a historic second term: Stop bombing people.Make good, finally, on your promise to end our endless wars.
The United States has been floundering in Afghanistan for 19 years. We have been bombing Iraq since 2003, Pakistan since 2004, Somalia since 2007, Libya since 2011, Syria since 2014, and Yemen since 2015. Smaller U.S. military interventions—it is so difficult to know what to dub a “war” anymore—are ongoing in various African nations. U.S. bases pepper the Middle East, with thousands of troops at the ready to initiate, escalate, or stumble into conflict. These wars do nothing to help the United States and much to harm ordinary people who have the misfortune to live where Washington decides to fight.
American withdrawal from these conflicts would not spell their immediate end. But U.S. exit is a necessary condition for peace, even if it isn’t a sufficient one. The past two decades have made it inescapably clear that Washington’s military meddling cannot resolve the region’s political, religious, and cultural problems. Prolonging these wars only adds to the region’s suffering and chaos.
The second strength of Trump’s anti-bombing comment is its achievability. Speaking of constitutional procedure in Washington is increasingly farcical, but the president’s constitutional role as commander-in-chief does include the authority to end wars. The power to initiate conflict is given to Congress with the intent of slowing reckless rushes to violence, but there are no such barriers to ending military actions once initiated. Trump can stop bombing everybody at any moment of his choosing. He can withdraw troops whenever he likes. He could get started now—why wait for a second term?
That brings us to the idea’s third strength: It would make Trump’s many professions of interest in reforming American foreign policy into truths instead of indefensible lies. Like the three presidents before him, Trump pays lip service to restraint in U.S. foreign policy. He criticizes the length, cost, and humanitarian consequences of our wars. He promises to bring American forces home, to negotiate great treaties, to abandon futile nation-building projects.
And he does none of that. Trump has not ended a single war he inherited from his predecessor. He has escalated the war in Afghanistan, dropping a record number of bombs in 2019 (after setting a previous record in 2018). Afghanistan’s civilian, military, and police casualties are all at record highs as well. In drone warfare, Trump has found a signature Obama administration program he does not oppose; on the contrary, as The American Conservative‘s Daniel Larison reports, his “administration has significantly increased the tempo of drone strikes in a number of countries, and it has relaxed the rules governing the targeting of these strikes.” In Yemen, Trump has pushed past bipartisan congressional and public opposition to keep facilitating the horrific Saudi-led intervention.
This is the opposite of not bombing everybody. More bombs are falling. More innocent people are being killed.
Trump has always sent mixed messages on matters of war and peace. Part of him sees war as a drain on American resources, a distraction from domestic issues, and an opportunity to showcase his self-declared deal-making expertise in its resolution. This is the Trump who says, “Great nations do not fight endless wars.” But part of him—apparently most of him—is bloodthirsty, self-serving and mercurial, petty and short-sighted, easily swayed by bad advice, and infatuated with the most garish displays of military might.
That Trump, the vengeful Trump who is angry the arch-hawk Bolton has publicly embarrassed him, is the Trump whose jabbering to Hannity accidentally stumbled into a good second-term priority while casting about for something Bolton would not like.
It’s a shame that that’s all his comment appears to be. A president who spent four years not killing people would be an extraordinary president indeed.
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Over the past several years, a social justice philosophy has arisen that is less a political program than a religion in all but name. Where Christianity calls for people to display their moral worth through faith in Jesus, modern Third-Wave Antiracism (henceforth TWA) calls for people to display their moral worth through opposition to racism. In the wake of the murder of George Floyd, this vision has increasingly been expressed through procedures, routines, and phraseology directly patterned on Abrahamic religion.
America certainly has work to do on race. For one, while cops do not kill black people more than white people, they harass and abuse black people more than white people, and the real-life impact of this is in its way just as pernicious as the disparity in killings would be. If the tension between black people and the cops were resolved, America’s race problem would quickly begin dissolving faster than it ever has. But making this happen will require work, as will ending the war on drugs, improving educational opportunities for all disadvantaged black children, and other efforts such as steering more black teenagers to vocational programs training them for solid careers without four years of college.
These are real things, upon which we must behold scenes like in Bethesda, where protesters kneeled on the pavement in droves, chanting allegiance with upraised hands to a series of anti-white privilege tenets incanted by what a naïve anthropologist would recognize as a flock’s pastor. On a similar occasion, white protesters bowed down in front of black people standing in attendance. In Cary, North Carolina, whites washed black protesters’ feet as a symbol of subservience and sympathy. Elsewhere, when a group of white activists painted whip scars upon themselves in sympathy with black America’s past, many black protesters found it a bit much.
"washing the feet of the organizers and asking for forgiveness."
Such rituals of subservience and self-mortification parallel devout Christianity in an especially graphic way, but other episodes tell the same story. Many conventional religious institutions are now rejecting actual Christianity where it conflicts with TWA teachings. At the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, a chaplain was forced to resign after writing a note exploring the contradiction between roasting the police as racist and the Christian call for love of all souls. Unitarianism has been all but taken over in many places by modern antiracist theology, forcing the resignation of various ministers and other figures.
The new faith also manifests itself in objections to what its adherents process as dissent. A friend wrote on Facebook that they agreed with Black Lives Matter, only to have another person—a white one, for the record—post this reply: “Wait a minute! You ‘agree’ with them? That implies you get to disagree with them! That’s like saying you ‘agree’ with the law of gravity! You as a white person don’t get to ‘agree’ OR ‘disagree’ when black people assert something! Saying you ‘agree’ with them is every bit as arrogant as disputing them! This isn’t an intellectual exercise! This is their lives on the line!”
This objection seems studiously hostile until we compare it to how a devout Christian might feel about someone opining that he “agrees” with Jesus’ teachings, as if the custom were to think one’s way through the liturgy in logical fashion and decide what parts of it makes sense, rather than to suspend logic and have faith.
The religious analogies pile higher by the week. Third-Wave Antiracism even has (metaphorical) sacrificial victims. The New York Times‘ food columnist Alison Roman is on suspension for criticizing in passing Marie Kondo and Chrissy Teigen for going commercial. Her sin? Criticizing not one, but two, people “of color.” (Kondo is Japanese, Teigen half white and half Thai.) Teigen has openly said that she does not think Roman deserves to be canceled for what she said, but no matter. At the Times, the TWA must have its way.
A great many intelligent people clearly consider all of the glowering postures, verbal laceration, and dismissals to be somehow an advance over how social change worked in America in the past. The seismic civil rights victories of the 1960s came about through protest, no doubt. But absent in the annals of how we got from Selma to the election of Barack Obama is this focus on individual psychology as opposed to national social and political structures.
Martin Luther King was under no impression that all white people were going to fully “love” all black people. He spent his time working for gradual change in the world as we know it via endless exchange and consultation with the powers that be, not agitating for a vague utopian conception of a society devoid of any racist sentiment. No matter what evidence people find of King’s fundamental radicalism, radicalism in his day was not centered around this recreationally aggrieved performance art, much less obsessively seeking to excoriate and destroy people suspected of impure thoughts.
Woke white liberals get yelled at by Black Lives Matter for being too woke and engaging in self-flagellation. pic.twitter.com/xx5ZdfGat1
The TWA adherent might object that today’s strategy is a second step—that the battle of yore was against overt segregation and disenfranchisement, but today making an even more equal society requires this different approach.
But why is all of this agitprop and joyous defenestration an advance over forging political change in the ways that have had such effect in the past? Those of us watching incongruously and needlessly acrid media posts and the yanking down of statues cannot help thinking the real motivator of the TWA posture is a simple joy in indignation and destruction, along with the comforts of group warmth. The white TWA adherent cherishes displaying virtue. The black TWA adherent has fallen for the Siren call of the noble victim complex, affording one the status of a Cassandra, a survivor, even the granter of absolution, as we see in some of the protest videos.
TWA people, to be sure, claim that all of this is ultimately about changing society. But in practice, the performance and fury are the main meal while the mundane but urgent work of changing society seems distinctly underplayed. One treatise on white privilege after another gives this away, such as Őzlem Sensoy and Robin DiAngelo’s Is Everyone Really Equal? After almost 200 pages of teaching the reader that being a good antiracist requires bowing down to any claims anyone not white makes about race, we assume that the final chapter might show how this counterintuitive ideology is supposed to change the actual world. Instead, that chapter simply repeats the minatory mantras from the previous chapters.
If TWA were really a political program, it would focus much more readily on making change from the grassroots on up; the psychological cleansing would feel like a prelude cherished by a few but best gotten past as quickly as possible. The idea that political work must be preceded by a massive mental overhaul of the nation is not self-standingly obvious. It is a tragically fragile proposition that reveals TWA as in essence not politics but Sunday school.
The TWA world might raise another objection, one that must be heeded. Without the fever pitch of these voices, and the dread they instill in any white person chilled at the possibility of being outed as a racist in today’s society, Tina Fey would not have pulled a few episodes of 30 Rock out of streaming because they had blackface depictions, the Dixie Chicks would not have renamed themselves The Chicks, there would still be an awful lot of statues of Confederate racists standing, and Rhode Island would not be excising the word plantation from its full name. The TWA message asks whites to look inside themselves to examine the ways they contribute to racism. This is happening to an unprecedented degree.
Yet we can be quite sure that the TWA position on these things, no matter how many and no matter how widespread, will be to dismiss them as mere optics, as if such things weren’t what they seemed to be calling for in their furious policing of psychology. The new line will be that these changes didn’t matter because they left “structures” of society in place. This bait and switch will not be a cynical ploy, but an inevitable outgrowth of the fact that TWA is a matter of ideology and attitude, not progress and pragmatism. Its liturgy requires that America always be a racist snakepit, redeemable only by a mysterious day when the U.S. “comes to terms with” racism. Just what those terms would be is never specified for a reason, which is that if there really were no racism the TWA adherents would lose their sense of purpose. (No, reparations won’t do it. Look under the hood of the most prominent calls for reparations and you’ll see that they say reparations would only be a “beginning.”)
In any case, to be sure, names and icons are just optics. More substantively, TWA has helped create some movement in America’s conversation about the cops, a problem central to black Americans’ sense of discomfort and dismissal in America. But there are two problems.
One is that truly reforming 18,000 different police departments, as well as the byzantine laws that quietly detour and destroy so many lives, will be a long, hard job of the kind King and his comrades so diligently and patiently forged. TWA activity, so focused on smoking out racist imagery, seems ill-suited to participate meaningfully in actual on-the-ground toil of this kind.
And second, we must ask: Is it necessary, for the cops to reform, that a food columnist be suspended for dissing a half-Thai model or that sincere Unitarian ministers lose their jobs?
Because this is so very much a TWA moment and because its perspective has been creeping into the fabric of educated American society over several years, we are becoming desensitized to how ancillary to civic progress is this peculiar, furious, and fantastical indoctrination. We seek sociopolitical change, yet we find on the vanguards a contingent who have founded a new religion. They insist hotly that they “really are right,” because racism is bad, isn’t it?
Indeed it is. But it is also bad for increasing numbers of Americans, out of fear for their social acceptance in wider society, pretend to subscribe to the semi-coherent tenets of an anti-empirical faith feigning higher wisdom with big words and manipulative phraseology. They see themselves as the heirs of bygone heroes who would actually have been sickened by them. Progressive Americans’ task is not to learn charismatic but purposeless self-flagellational routines, but to fight injustices with sense and logic. Only TWA adherents think the two are the same.
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Asked by Fox News host Sean Hannity last Thursday to detail his top priorities for a second term in the White House, President Donald Trump descended into an incoherence remarkable even by his standards. At the end of the ramble, though, he said something interesting: “I have great people in the administration. You make some mistakes. Like, you know, an idiot like [former National Security Adviser John] Bolton. All he wanted to do was drop bombs on everybody. You don’t have to drop bombs on everybody. You don’t have to kill people.”
That bit about Bolton, excised from the babble preceding it, has the seed of an idea that really would make a historic second term: Stop bombing people.Make good, finally, on your promise to end our endless wars.
The United States has been floundering in Afghanistan for 19 years. We have been bombing Iraq since 2003, Pakistan since 2004, Somalia since 2007, Libya since 2011, Syria since 2014, and Yemen since 2015. Smaller U.S. military interventions—it is so difficult to know what to dub a “war” anymore—are ongoing in various African nations. U.S. bases pepper the Middle East, with thousands of troops at the ready to initiate, escalate, or stumble into conflict. These wars do nothing to help the United States and much to harm ordinary people who have the misfortune to live where Washington decides to fight.
American withdrawal from these conflicts would not spell their immediate end. But U.S. exit is a necessary condition for peace, even if it isn’t a sufficient one. The past two decades have made it inescapably clear that Washington’s military meddling cannot resolve the region’s political, religious, and cultural problems. Prolonging these wars only adds to the region’s suffering and chaos.
The second strength of Trump’s anti-bombing comment is its achievability. Speaking of constitutional procedure in Washington is increasingly farcical, but the president’s constitutional role as commander-in-chief does include the authority to end wars. The power to initiate conflict is given to Congress with the intent of slowing reckless rushes to violence, but there are no such barriers to ending military actions once initiated. Trump can stop bombing everybody at any moment of his choosing. He can withdraw troops whenever he likes. He could get started now—why wait for a second term?
That brings us to the idea’s third strength: It would make Trump’s many professions of interest in reforming American foreign policy into truths instead of indefensible lies. Like the three presidents before him, Trump pays lip service to restraint in U.S. foreign policy. He criticizes the length, cost, and humanitarian consequences of our wars. He promises to bring American forces home, to negotiate great treaties, to abandon futile nation-building projects.
And he does none of that. Trump has not ended a single war he inherited from his predecessor. He has escalated the war in Afghanistan, dropping a record number of bombs in 2019 (after setting a previous record in 2018). Afghanistan’s civilian, military, and police casualties are all at record highs as well. In drone warfare, Trump has found a signature Obama administration program he does not oppose; on the contrary, as The American Conservative‘s Daniel Larison reports, his “administration has significantly increased the tempo of drone strikes in a number of countries, and it has relaxed the rules governing the targeting of these strikes.” In Yemen, Trump has pushed past bipartisan congressional and public opposition to keep facilitating the horrific Saudi-led intervention.
This is the opposite of not bombing everybody. More bombs are falling. More innocent people are being killed.
Trump has always sent mixed messages on matters of war and peace. Part of him sees war as a drain on American resources, a distraction from domestic issues, and an opportunity to showcase his self-declared deal-making expertise in its resolution. This is the Trump who says, “Great nations do not fight endless wars.” But part of him—apparently most of him—is bloodthirsty, self-serving and mercurial, petty and short-sighted, easily swayed by bad advice, and infatuated with the most garish displays of military might.
That Trump, the vengeful Trump who is angry the arch-hawk Bolton has publicly embarrassed him, is the Trump whose jabbering to Hannity accidentally stumbled into a good second-term priority while casting about for something Bolton would not like.
It’s a shame that that’s all his comment appears to be. A president who spent four years not killing people would be an extraordinary president indeed.
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