Rod Dreher's Blog, page 534

Nationalists Vs. The ‘Who, Whom?’ Left

So, Milo Yiannopoulos is about to go on at LSU across town, and I’m not there. I spent most of the afternoon in bed asleep, having another *&%$# mononucleosis episode, and I’m still trying to recover. It’s weird how it manifests episodically, and how there’s no way to predict what’s going to instigate it, or how bad it’s going to be. Today was especially not good. I’m sorry that I won’t be able to have a first-hand report for y’all.

Today I read a student op-ed in the LSU Daily Reveille by Anjana Nair, an undergraduate woman and self-described “minority,” who lamented the fact that Milo was being allowed to speak on campus. In the United States. Of America. She wrote, in part:

I once thought I loved free speech. As someone involved in media, the First Amendment was my best friend. That is, until I faced the reality that people, like they do to all good things in the world, abuse it and use it as justification for reckless and hateful behavior.

One of the main proponents of this pseudo-patriotic ideology is a man is bringing his controversy to an already vulnerable University community: Milo Yiannopoulos.

This is something. Maybe I’m remembering my undergraduate years as a student journalist at LSU in a poetic haze, but I can’t recall any of us, liberal or conservative, ever calling for censorship of political speech on campus. In fact, I think we would have been ashamed to publish such an opinion. If not, we ought to have been. But then, we didn’t think of ourselves as “vulnerable.” More:

Progressive movements can sometimes be quite overwhelming. It’s hard when a white man has to watch minority groups gain equality in the world. Now, all the sad white men who have been taken out of the spotlight have banded together under one supreme leader — Trump — who will lead them to the promised land of white supremacy once again.

How convenient for Anjana Nair. All her political opponents are nothing but racists and sexists. Worse, they have the gall to ignore the right of people like her never to confront speech that makes them feel distress (“This in turn leads to an atmosphere in which only the ones inflicting the harmful speech feel comfortable”).

And there’s this howler:

It’s a battle in which old ideologies don’t account for modern day realities. When the First Amendment was written, it couldn’t have accounted for Twitter battles and social media showdowns influencing human opinion and behavior. It couldn’t have foreseen the existence of people like Yiannopoulos and Trump, who force us to define what abusive speech is.

If only the Founding Fathers had been able to foresee the existence of Twitter, they never would have written the First Amendment. For the first time in American history, we have to define what abusive speech is. Ay yi yi…

Here’s the thing: Anjana Nair’s opinion is not limited to undergraduate snowflakes. Damon Linker, himself a liberal, has a powerful column today arguing, in effect, that the basic view that Nair expresses in crude form is widely shared has blinded liberals to the world they actually live in. Excerpts:

The latest and most ambitious of these liberal hit pieces is by Vox‘s Zack Beauchamp, who marshals a range of academic studies to defend the view that the electoral success of right-wing movements across the Western world — from the rise of Trump and the outcome of the Brexit referendum to recent strong showings for far-right parties in European countries from France to Hungary — is not mainly a product of economic anxiety but rather a result of “racism, Islamophobia, and xenophobia.”

As Beauchamp puts it in a summary statement that verifies what an awful lot of liberals appear to believe: “The ‘losers of globalization’ aren’t the ones voting for these parties. What unites far-right politicians and their supporters, on both sides of the Atlantic, is a set of regressive attitudes toward difference. Racism, Islamophobia, and xenophobia — and not economic anxiety — are their calling cards.” (In another passage, Beauchamp adds that “the privileged” are “furious that their privileges are being stripped away by those they view as outside interlopers.”)

There you have it — a perfect distillation of liberalism in 2016: Trump voters and their analogues overseas have “regressive attitudes.” They’re motivated by bigotry, fear, and selfishness, all of which makes them angry that various outsiders are threatening to take away their abundant “privileges.” They certainly have no justification — economic or otherwise — for their grievances.

Linker says that the deeper ideology motivating liberalism is “the desire to delegitimize any particularistic attachment or form of solidarity, be it national, linguistic, religious, territorial, or ethnic.” So:

Concerned about immigrants disregarding the nation’s borders, defying its laws, and changing its ethnic and linguistic character? Racist!

Worried that the historically Christian and (more recently) secular character of European civilization will be altered for the worse, not to mention that its citizens will be forced to endure increasing numbers of theologically motivated acts of terrorism, if millions of refugees from Muslim regions of the world are permitted to settle in the European Union? Islamophobe!

Fed up with the way EU bureaucracies disregard and override British sovereignty on a range of issues, including migration within the Eurozone? Xenophobe!

As far as humanitarian liberals are concerned, all immigrants should be welcomed (and perhaps given access to government benefits), whether or not they entered the country illegally, no matter what language they speak or ethnicity they belong to, and without regard for their religious or political commitments. All that matters — or should matter — is that they are human. To raise any other consideration is pure bigotry and simply unacceptable.

What liberals like this really despise, says Linker, is people’s attachment to ordinary human things. This is why they can only understand it as bigotry when people resist those who try to take those things away from them. Read the whole column. 

Milo Yiannopoulos is not Russell Kirk any more than Donald Trump is Edmund Burke. The point here is simply that far too many liberals have fallen into the lazy habit of refusing to grant any moral standing to their opponents, and deciding that they don’t have to take them seriously, because these people are nothing but haters — and the power of the state (or the university) should be marshaled to silence them. You want to know why some people are voting for Trump? Because they perfectly well understand that a Hillary Clinton administration would be filled with people like this.

I would add a couple of things to Linker’s analysis. One, cosmopolitan conservatives — some libertarians, and business Republicans — are guilty of the same thing. The globalist types, I mean. Along these lines, a reader e-mails this story from the Telegraph reporting that the OECD has reversed its earlier warning that a pro-Brexit vote would wreck the British economy. The reader says:

I think this story from Britain about how the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development has completely reversed its forecast for the post-Brexit economy is interesting in light of your post about what happens if Trump wins.  I think far too many of the people who operate at the highest levels of finance and government live in such invincible ideological and cultural bubbles that they can’t even tell when their analysis is being warped by the reigning groupthink and passions of the clique they travel in.

Even worse, some of them may know its wrong, but excuse their fear-mongering as helping the “greater good.” I think there was a lot of that in the Brexit debate and I think there’s a good deal of it going on with this election.  I’m not voting for Trump and I think he’s bad for the country, but I don’t really have a lot of faith in the prognosticators at this point either.

Second, Linker is not entirely correct that cosmopolitan liberals demand that everyone give up their particularist attachments. To the contrary, if you are non-white, female, LGBT, worship in a non-Christian religion, or any combination thereof, you are encouraged to make your particular attachment central to your identity, and to claim privileges attached to it — while simultaneously denying the same to white, male, straight, Christians (or any combination thereof). 

They call it social justice when they do it, but bigotry when we do it. Is there any wonder that more than a few people who stand to be dispossessed by the advance of this ideology call it b.s., and have ceased to care if they’re called bigots for fighting it? If only at the level of intuition, more than a few of these people have come to understand that the liberal project has devolved away from old-fashioned liberalism, which is about principle, towards pure power politics of the “Who, whom?” variety (“The whole question is — who will overtake whom?” — Lenin).

Like I keep saying, the identity politics embraced and used as a cudgel by the Left logically legitimizes the same thing on the Right. The only thing that keeps it in check is the stern disapproval by elites in media, politics, academia and otherwise, who stigmatize anyone who disagrees as bigoted and eager to return, in Comrade Nair’s phrase, “to the promised land of white supremacy once again.” That, and the cowardice of conservative politicians who are so afraid of being called bigots by the media that they don’t defend principle, or the people who vote for them.

What happens when people who are told by these elites stop believing that they should be ashamed of themselves for the things they love, and when they stop believing that the Republican Party is interested in standing up for them? Donald Trump, that’s what. If nothing else, the inability of so many liberals to grasp this elementary truth is a massive failure of imagination. And it may well cost them the presidency this fall, in the same way that it cost the GOP elites control of their party.

It is hard to draw clear lines between loving what is one’s own and hating the Other. This is universally true of human beings. A very good thing about old-fashioned liberalism is that it at least tries to compel us to think about what is universal and what is particular, and how we can build a peaceful, workable world that balances them. We are losing that ability, and may have lost it. The Left’s being unable to tell the difference between a Klan rally and orthodox Christians at Sunday worship, and demanding that this moral blindness be written into law, is destroying liberalism, and with it the possibility for peaceful co-existence.

The Charlotte Riot

Here is a startling Charlotte TV station’s real-time updates of last night’s rioting. The basic story: Charlotte cops say that in trying to execute a search warrant, Keith Lamont Scott — who was not the target of the warrant — got out of his car in a parking lot and brandished a gun. Police say they ordered him to put down the gun, but he refused. One officer fired the shot or shots that killed Scott. Both Scott and the officer are black.

Scott’s family said he had a book, not a gun. Police say they recovered a gun from him, and that numerous witnesses saw them order him to drop the gun, and saw him refuse.

Then the riot began. Twelve cops were injured, and the mob destroyed at least one police vehicle. Excerpts from the timeline. Read from the bottom up:

Reporter Joe Bruno spoke with the driver who was stuck inside her tractor-trailer as looters stole her cargo.

The woman was taking car parts to Greensboro and feared for her life.

“I understand they want to make a statement, but they are hurting innocent people trying to make a living,” the woman told Bruno.

She repeatedly asked Bruno where police are while she’s trapped inside as people destroy her tractor-trailer and cargo.

2:15 a.m.: Protesters are looting from a tractor-trailer stuck in traffic.

1:40 a.m.: Protesters walked onto Interstate 85 blocking both directions at Harris Boulevard.

And then, rioters invaded a local Wal-mart to liberate TVs and other electronics for the sake of justice, or something:

Protesters are running from the Walmart as Charlotte police arrive. @wsoctv #WakeUpWith9 pic.twitter.com/nNl7xg7dkT

— Mark Barber (@MBarberWSOC9) September 21, 2016

This happened too:

This family was traveling on I-85 when they say #CLT protesters who were throwing rocks at drivers shattered their windshield. @wsoctv pic.twitter.com/Lz3Z3nU7iC

— Mark Barber (@MBarberWSOC9) September 21, 2016

We still don’t know what really happened in that parking lot. But the mob is sure that it knows, and that looting and violence is the right response.

Kellyanne Conway has Trump leashed so far:

Hopefully the violence & unrest in Charlotte will come to an immediate end. To those injured, get well soon. We need unity & leadership.

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) September 21, 2016

Hillary has responded personally (that’s what her tweets marked “-H” mean), and has apparently decided that the police were wrong:

Keith Lamont Scott. Terence Crutcher. Too many others. This has got to end. -H

— Hillary Clinton (@HillaryClinton) September 21, 2016

Notice that Trump focused (however softly) on the rioting, while Hillary focused on the victim of the police shooting. That’s a big, and not unexpected, difference. Question for the room: Which is the more important political fact about events of the last 24 hours in Charlotte: the shooting of Keith Scott, or the rioting that followed?

 

 

What If Trump Wins?

Writing in The New Yorker, Evan Osnos has a long, provocative piece exploring what would likely happen in the event of a Trump presidential victory. He talked to a number of people involved in politics, government, economics, foreign policy, and so on, asking them practical questions. The answers would be sobering, if sobriety were a thing we did anymore.

Some uneasily pro-Trump Republicans assure themselves that Congress would put the reins on a President Trump. Not so fast:

What, exactly, can a President do? To prevent the ascent of what the Anti-Federalist Papers, in 1787, called “a Caesar, Caligula, Nero, and Domitian in America,” the founders gave Congress the power to make laws, and the Supreme Court the final word on the Constitution. But in the nineteen-thirties Congress was unable to mount a response to the rise of Nazi Germany, and during the Cold War the prospect of sudden nuclear attack further consolidated authority in the White House.

“These checks are not gone completely, but they’re much weaker than I think most people assume,” Eric Posner, a law professor at the University of Chicago, said. “Congress has delegated a great deal of power to the President, Presidents have claimed power under the Constitution, and Congress has acquiesced.” The courts, Posner added, are slow. “If you have a President who is moving very quickly, the judiciary can’t do much. A recent example of this would be the war on terror. The judiciary put constraints on President Bush—but it took a very long time.”

Besides:

Trump could achieve many objectives on his own. A President has the unilateral authority to renegotiate a nuclear deal with Iran, to order a ban on Muslims, and to direct the Justice Department to give priority to certain offenses, with an eye to specific targets. During the campaign, he has accused Amazon of “getting away with murder tax-wise,” and vowed, if he wins, “Oh, do they have problems.”

Any of those actions could be contested in court. The American Civil Liberties Union has analyzed Trump’s promises and concluded, in the words of the executive director, Anthony Romero, that they would “violate the First, Fourth, Fifth, and Eighth Amendments to the Constitution.” Romero has said that the A.C.L.U. would “challenge and impede implementation of his proposals,” but that strategy highlights the essential advantage of the President: the first move. “The other branches are then presented with a fait accompli,” according to a 1999 paper by the political scientists Terry M. Moe and William G. Howell. After the September 11th attacks, Bush signed an executive order authorizing warrantless surveillance of Americans by the National Security Agency, and, though lawmakers voiced concerns, and lawsuits were filed, the program continued until 2015, when Congress ordered an end to bulk phone-metadata collection. Similarly, Obama has used his powers to raise fuel-economy standards and temporarily ban energy exploration in parts of Alaska and the Arctic Ocean.

Here’s something that will keep us up nights:

For many years, Trump has expressed curiosity about nuclear weapons. In 1984, still in his thirties, he told the Washington Post that he wanted to negotiate nuclear treaties with the Soviets. “It would take an hour and a half to learn everything there is to learn about missiles,” he said. “I think I know most of it anyway.” According to Bruce G. Blair, a research scholar at the Program on Science and Global Security, at Princeton, Trump encountered a U.S. nuclear-arms negotiator at a reception in 1990 and offered advice on how to cut a “terrific” deal with a Soviet counterpart. Trump told him to arrive late, stand over the Soviet negotiator, stick his finger in his chest, and say, “F*ck you!” Recently, a former Republican White House official whom Trump has called on for his insights told me, “Honestly, the problem with Donald is he doesn’t know what he doesn’t know.”

We talk about how Hillary Clinton is “Nixon in a pants suit” (I have used that phrase on multiple occasions), but in a way, Trump is a more reckless version of Tricky Dick:

Watching Trump on the campaign trail, Timothy Naftali, the former director of the Nixon Presidential Library, said, “Trump tweets what Nixon knew not to say outside his inner circle, and we know what he said from the tapes. What Nixon would do is project onto situations the conspiracies that he would have concocted if in the same position. Nixon was convinced that the Democrats were spying on him. So he spied on them. To himself, he rationalized his actions by saying, ‘I’m only doing what my enemies are doing to me.’ ”

Surprisingly, the Chinese will probably be pretty chill with President Trump:

In some cases, Trump’s language has had the opposite effect of what he intends. He professes a hard line on China (“We can’t continue to allow China to rape our country,” he said in May), but, in China, Trump’s “America First” policy has been understood as the lament of a permissive, exhausted America. A recent article in Guancha, a nationalist news site, was headlined “trump: america will stop talking about human rights and no longer protect nato unconditionally.”

Shen Dingli, an influential foreign-policy scholar at Fudan University, in Shanghai, told me that Chinese officials would be concerned about Trump’s unpredictability but, he thinks, have concluded that, ultimately, he is a novice who makes hollow threats and would be easy to handle. They would worry about the policies of a President Hillary Clinton, who, as Secretary of State, oversaw Obama’s “pivot” to Asia, intended to balance China’s expansion. “She is more predictable and probably tough,” Shen said. “Human rights, pivoting—China hates both.”

There’s a lot more, so read the whole thing. I have a few reactions.

1. This piece is the voice of the Establishment speaking out against Trump, who threatens it. It is rich reading Michael Chertoff, who served in the administration of the president who took us into Iraq after 9/11, warning how “reckless” President Trump would be. Also, the economic alarms sounded in the piece by Larry Summers ought to be considered in light of the fact that he, along with Robert Rubin and Alan Greenspan , set the economy on a course for the 2007-08 crash. A committed Trump voter will not be persuaded by this piece, simply because he discounts the authority of the people quoted in it.

2. But that’s as foolish as taking everything they say at face value. Not everybody quoted in the piece is ideological, and some even work for Trump. The people Osnos quotes may not be infallible, but they know a lot more about their fields than you or I do. Is it really wise to doubt the top financial analyst who said if a President Trump repeated candidate Trump’s reckless public speculation that the US would consider defaulting on its sovereign debt, the global economic consequences would likely be calamitous?

3. A Trump presidency would be destabilizing in a way we have never seen before. Trump is not a conservative; he’s a radical. That’s why so many people like him. But we should think hard about whether or not we can afford for someone as powerful as the American president to be a radical. True, Ronald Reagan was a transformative president who struck fear into the heart of Establishment Washington. Reagan understood that the sclerotic Establishment needed shaking up. Trump, though, is no Reagan. Reagan had a vision, and he had convictions. Trump only has attitude, and a very thin skin.

4. On the other hand, the Establishment needs destabilizing. From the Osnos piece:

Randall Schweller, a political scientist at Ohio State University, told me, “I think we’re just at a point in our history where he’s probably the right guy for the job. Not perfect, but we need someone different, because there’s such calcification in Washington. Americans are smart collectively, and if they vote for Trump I wouldn’t worry.”

There was a reason Trump beat what pundits had considered the best GOP presidential field in ages: a plurality of Republican voters didn’t want what they were selling. If you find this mystifying, then I would suggest that you are out of touch with what’s happening in this country. Trump (and Sanders) didn’t come from nowhere. A large number of Americans have waning confidence in the system as it is. Perhaps the most depressing thing about Hillary Clinton is the sure confidence that she means Four More Years Of Staying The Course. The only thing more depressing is the idea that the only thing standing between that and America is Donald Trump. If Hillary wins, I expect her term to be like Francois Hollande’s in France: desultory, tiresome, and tired.

5. On the other hand, giving the power of the American presidency to a man of such vanity, arrogance, incuriosity, and recklessness — negative qualities that the destabilizing visionary Ronald Reagan never had — could be catastrophic. Osnos concludes that nervous Trump voters who tell themselves not to worry, that Congress and other forces will restrain him, are fooling themselves:

Trump presents us with the opposite risk: his victory would be not a failure of imagination but, rather, a retreat to it—the magical thought that his Presidency would be something other than the campaign that created it.

6. By the way, for those who think Trump will chart a new, unorthodox economic course should note that his chief economic adviser is Stephen Moore, the founder of the Club For Growth and an unreconstructed supply sider. Excerpt from the Osnos piece:

Moore visited Trump on his plane, and, during a series of meetings, he and others crafted an economic plan based on the cornerstone of supply-side economics: cut taxes to encourage people to work and businesses to invest. “That’s basically the theory there,” Moore said. “This is the signature issue for conservatives since Reagan went into office. This has been the battle between the left and the right. The liberals say tax rates don’t matter”—for stimulating growth. “We say they do.”

“This is the signature issue for conservative since Reagan went into office.” Huh. Not for this conservative. The idea that what America really wants and needs is more Reagan-era supply-side economics; the concept that this is the message of the 2016 campaign season — well, it’s remarkable. And this is who Trump is listening to on economics.

7. Economics, foreign policy, domestic policy are all on Osnos’s radar — but he completely ignores culture. That’s huge. This may well be because he’s deep inside the liberal cultural bubble and can’t even imagine how it feels to be a Deplorable. He should read Ross Douthat today. Ross talks about how fed up a lot of people are with the kind of social liberalism that jumps down professional goofball Jimmy Fallon’s throat for having treated his guest Donald Trump like a normal person, instead of History’s Greatest Monster. Excerpt:

It isn’t just late-night TV. Cultural arenas and institutions that were always liberal are being prodded or dragged further to the left. Awards shows are being pushed to shed their genteel limousine liberalism and embrace the race-gender-sexual identity agenda in full. Colleges and universities are increasingly acting as indoctrinators for that same agenda, shifting their already-lefty consensus under activist pressure.

Meanwhile, institutions that were seen as outside or sideways to political debate have been enlisted in the culture war. The tabloid industry gave us the apotheosis of Caitlyn Jenner, and ESPN gave her its Arthur Ashe Award. The N.B.A., N.C.A.A. and the A.C.C. — nobody’s idea of progressive forces, usually — are acting as enforcers on behalf of gay and transgender rights. Jock culture remains relatively reactionary, but even the N.F.L. is having its Black Lives Matters moment, thanks to Colin Kaepernick.

Douthat says these gains create problems for the Democrats. For one, it makes liberals confident that they can roll over cultural conservatives, and will be pushing elected Democrats to do just that. For another:

At the same time, outside the liberal tent, the feeling of being suffocated by the left’s cultural dominance is turning voting Republican into an act of cultural rebellion — which may be one reason the Obama years, so good for liberalism in the culture, have seen sharp G.O.P. gains at every level of the country’s government.

This spirit of political-cultural rebellion is obviously crucial to Trump’s act. As James Parker wrote in The Atlantic, he’s occupying “a space in American politics that is uniquely transgressive, volatile, carnivalesque, and (from a certain angle) punk rock.” (The alt-right-ish columnist Steve Sailer made the punk rock analogy as well.) Like the Sex Pistols, Parker suggests, Trump is out to “upend the culture” — but in this case it’s the culture of institutionalized political correctness and John Oliver explaining the news to you, forever.

That, plus this analysis by Notre Dame law professor Rick Garnett (who, like me, is not planning to vote for either candidate this fall), points to something even smart liberals like Evan Osnos can’t seem to grasp about why lots of people fear Hillary more than Trump:

Although Trump is a dangerously unfit and morally objectionable candidate, I am clear-eyed, I think, about the law-and-policy consequences of Clinton’s election and administration. Many of these will be, from my perspective, bad. The Democrats’ platform this year has moved to the left and, in particular, that party’s stated position on abortion rights and funding is deeply unjust. More important than a party’s platform, however, are an administration’s personnel. A Clinton administration will be carefully staffed with well-credentialed, competent, ideologically motivated people. They will interpret regulations, enforce rules, exercise discretion, and control funds in a wide range of consequential departments and agencies. In the modern administrative state, and particularly after President Obama’s embrace of an expansive view of executive power and regulatory authority, this is where the action is.

And so, whether or not the Democrats control Congress, committed but largely unaccountable activists, lawyers, and think-tankers will aggressively and creatively use a variety of tools, including litigation, accreditation, licensing, contracting conditions, funding-eligibility determinations, and “Dear Colleague” letters, to pursue their goals. I expect they will do what they can—which is a lot—to undermine or overturn reasonable limits on abortion, remove barriers to and increase support for embryo-destructive research and physician-assisted suicide, hamstring school-choice and education-reform efforts, narrow the sphere of religious freedom, and continue divisive “culture wars” campaigns.

Also unfortunate, in my view, will be the effect of a third consecutive Democratic administration on the federal courts. About a third of federal judges are Obama appointees and the next administration will replace hundreds who were selected by Reagan and the first President Bush. Both the Supreme Court and the courts of appeals will move significantly to the left, and the effects of this shift will not be limited to, say, a more permissive stance regarding gun control and campaign-finance regulation. There is every reason to think that a 6-3 “liberal” Court could backtrack on letting parochial schools participate in voucher programs, on allowing states to ban euthanasia, and on permitting limits on late-term abortions. The Court’s role in civil society and in our country’s moral and policy arguments, which is already unhealthily outsized, would increase.

This is huge. To be fair to Osnos, his piece is about what a Trump administration would likely do, not what a Clinton administration would do. The truth is, it’s hard to predict what kind of people Trump would fill the federal bureaucracy with, and what kind of impact they would have on culture, in the sense Garnett means. Personnel is policy, though. From a cultural conservative point of view, though, as repulsive and vulgar as Trump is personally, there’s no question that the kind of militant liberal ideologues that would come with a Hillary Clinton administration will be out in the cold under Trump. And for some of us, that’s the best thing — maybe the only good thing — about him.

Trump Killed Outrage

If Donald J. Trump becomes president, we’re going to stumble towards 2020 preparing apologies to Warren G. Harding. Is there anybody else in the country whose political career would survive revelations like this? The Washington Post writes:

Donald Trump spent more than a quarter-million dollars from his charitable foundation to settle lawsuits that involved the billionaire’s for-profit businesses, according to interviews and a review of legal documents.

Those cases, which together used $258,000 from Trump’s charity, were among four newly documented expenditures in which Trump may have violated laws against “self-dealing” — which prohibit nonprofit leaders from using charity money to benefit themselves or their businesses.

In one case, from 2007, Trump’s Mar-a-Lago Club faced $120,000 in unpaid fines from the town of Palm Beach, Fla., resulting from a dispute over the size of a flagpole.

In a settlement, Palm Beach agreed to waive those fines — if Trump’s club made a $100,000 donation to a specific charity for veterans. Instead, Trump sent a check from the Donald J. Trump Foundation, a charity funded almost entirely by other people’s money, according to tax records.

There are more examples. And then:

More broadly, these cases also provide new evidence that Trump ran his charity in a way that may have violated U.S. tax law and gone against the moral conventions of philanthropy.

“I represent 700 nonprofits a year, and I’ve never encountered anything so brazen,” said Jeffrey Tenenbaum, who advises charities at the Venable law firm in Washington. After The Post described the details of these Trump Foundation gifts, Tenenbaum described them as “really shocking.”

“If he’s using other people’s money — run through his foundation — to satisfy his personal obligations, then that’s about as blatant an example of self-dealing [as] I’ve seen in a while,” Tenenbaum said.

Whole thing here. 

Last week, Jonathan Martin wrote in the NYT:

In fact, this past week offered a vivid illustration of how little regard Mr. Trump has for the long-held expectations of America’s leaders. He is not only breaking the country’s political norms, he and his campaign aides are now all but mocking them.

More:

Routine falsehoods, unfounded claims and inflammatory language have long been staples of Mr. Trump’s anything-goes campaign. But as the polls tighten and November nears, his behavior, and the implications for the country should he become president, are alarming veteran political observers — and leaving them deeply worried about the precedent being set, regardless of who wins the White House.

“It’s frightening,” said Vin Weber, a former Republican congressman from Minnesota. “Our politics, because of him, is descending to the level of a third-world country. There’s just nothing beneath him. And I don’t know why we would think he would change if he became president. That’s what’s really scary.”

Stephen Hess, who served in the Eisenhower and Nixon administrations, could not even contemplate the prospect of Mr. Trump as commander in chief.

“It’s incredibly depressing,” Mr. Hess said of Mr. Trump. “He’s the most profoundly ignorant man I’ve ever seen at this level in terms of understanding the American presidency, and, even more troubling, he makes no effort to learn anything.”

In 1998, in his book The Death Of Outrage: Bill Clinton And The Assault On American Ideals, conservative moralist Bill Bennett wrote:

In the end, the President’s apologists are attempting to redefine the standard of acceptable behavior for a President. Instead of upholding a high view of the office and the men who occupy it, they radically lower our expectation.

Last month, Bennett chastised anti-Trump Republicans, calling them people “who suffer from a terrible case of moral superiority and put their own vanity and taste above the interest of the country.”

Did somebody say something about moral decline?

UPDATE: I believe that if Trump becomes president, he will eventually be impeached, and on solid grounds. He cannot help himself. It’s going to be one damn thing after another.

Killing Terence Crutcher

What on earth did poor Terence Crutcher do to deserve killing? He was standing by his car, with his hands up. He was not armed, and had no gun in his car. From NPR:

In the recording from the Tulsa police helicopter, an officer is heard saying of Crutcher as he walks in front of Shelby, “Looks like that’s a bad dude, maybe on something.”

Officers had been called to the scene by passers-by who had reported a vehicle abandoned in the road. “He took off running,” a woman told a 911 operator, saying that the man said his vehicle might blow up. She added, “I think he’s smoking something.”

Shelby, who is white, was one of four police officers who were standing at the rear bumper of Crutcher’s car as he stood next to his vehicle around 7:45 p.m. Friday. She’s also the officer who shot him once, in the upper body — and who then radioed, “Shots fired.” Police say another officer used his Taser on Crutcher at nearly the same time he was shot.

More:

Tiffany Crutcher then went on to tell the media gathered in Tulsa, “You all want to know who that big ‘bad dude’ was. That big ‘bad dude’ was my twin brother. That big ‘bad dude’ was a father. That big ‘bad dude’ was a son. That big ‘bad dude’ was enrolled at Tulsa Community College, just wanting to make us proud.

“That big ‘bad dude’ loved God; that big ‘bad dude’ was at church singing, with all his flaws, every week. That’s who he was.”

Tiffany Crutcher said her brother’s future was taken away because of negligence and incompetence — “and because he was a big ‘bad dude.'”

Three police officers were present, with weapons drawn, when Crutcher was shot dead. What kind of threat was he, really? The attorney for Ofc. Betty Shelby, who fired the shot, said:

Shelby’s attorney, Scott Wood, said Crutcher was not following the officers’ commands.

“He has his hands up and is facing the car and looks at Shelby, and his left hand goes through the car window, and that’s when she fired her shot,” Wood told the Tulsa World for a report Tuesday.

He must have done something, because a different officer tasered him at almost the same instant. But we don’t know yet. It’s not possible to see from the video. We should have learned by now to wait for the investigation before drawing conclusions. (A federal investigation is underway.) Whatever the outcome of the official inquiries, the fact remain that an unarmed black man was shot dead on the highway by a police officer. And that is at the very least a tragedy. We will see if it was a crime.

UPDATE: Oh, man:

Tulsa Police Sgt. Dave Walker later told the Tulsa World that investigators did recover a vial of PCP, the hallucinogen also known as Angel Dust, in Crutcher’s SUV.

But Crutcher family lawyers noted Tuesday that no drug tests had yet been done on the body.

“The toxicology has not come back,” said Crump. “She knew nothing about Terence Crutcher. For all she knew, he could have been the choirboy, the preacher, he could have been a drummer.”

Jasper said the drugs would not have been like Terence.

“It would have been out of character, he came from a faith-based family,” he said. But Jasper also noted that, even if his old friend was on drugs, “He deserved to be housed at a correctional facility, not a morgue.

Not so fast. Wait till the toxicology report comes back. If he was on PCP, that changes a lot.

UPDATE.2: A reader writes:

Y

ou write: “What on earth did poor Terence Crutcher do to deserve killing?”

I think I am in general more sympathetic to the BLM crowd than most conservatives. However, I think it’s important to recognize that while most victims of police shootings don’t “deserve” to be shot, nevertheless many (at least) of the officers involved are justified in shooting, especially considering that they have quite literally sworn to enforce the law – including laws that compel citizens to comply with their orders in certain situations.

Consider the following thought experiment: i am in a public park playing with my children. I am licensed to carry a concealed weapon and am doing so. My son’s shop teacher, whom I have never met and never seen, sees my son playing in the park and, knowing my son’s enthusiasm for axes in shop class, runs toward my son brandishing a new axe that he wants to show him. All I see is a strange man running toward my son brandishing an axe, and I shoot and kill him.

Did the shop teacher “deserve” to die? Obviously not. Was I “justified” in shooting him? Obviously. Is it a tragedy? Manifestly.

I think cops are in situations analogous to this a lot more often than people understand. And I see this tacit and false dichotomy – between what victims “deserve” and what officers are “justified” in doing – on social media all the time. It makes the waters of the discourse more murky and exacerbates the already considerable tension in our country these days. Had to say something.

Good point.

Milo Is Coming To LSU

That’s Courtney Murr, president of an LGBT student group at LSU, on a planned protest against Milo Yiannopoulos when he comes to campus on Wednesday night. The stupid, it burns. This comment just goes to show that the words “diversity” and “inclusion” are nothing more than left-wing terms that signal ideological uniformity and the exclusion of viewpoints the left dislikes. What’s funny is that the minds of people like Courtney Murr are so marinated in this rhetoric that they say nitwit things like this above, and do not grasp the contradiction.

Whenever I see or hear the words “diversity” or “inclusivity,” I know that somebody is up to no good. It’s not that there is anything essentially wrong with actual diversity, or actual inclusivity. It’s that these terms have been entirely vacated of real meaning by cultural politics.

Amusingly, left-wing protesters trying to prevent students from hearing Milo speak were punked into signing up for fake tickets.  Outrageously, LSU’s “Chief Diversity Officer” suggested ways the university could ban Milo from campus, citing him as a security threat. In other words, the Chief Diversity Officer wanted to prevent a controversial speaker from appearing at a public forum, to protect the campus from violent protest by the intolerant Diversity mob.

I have no interest in anything Milo Yiannopoulos has to say. But I am going to go to his speech, if only to support by my presence his right to speak at my alma mater. When I was an undergraduate there, I was the main guy who brought Sixties radical Abbie Hoffman to campus to speak. This was the 1980s. The College Republican group was strong and active. It was a very conservative campus. And to the best of my knowledge, no conservatives opposed to Hoffman tried to get Daddy the college administration to intervene to stop his speech. Those were better, more authentically liberal times.

Mayors And Muslim Migration

New York, Paris, and London have all been major targets of Islamic terrorists. Today, all three cities are governed by left-wing mayors: New York has Bill de Blasio (Democrat), London has Sadiq Khan (Labour), and Paris has Anne Hidalgo (Socialist). In an op-ed in today’s New York Times, they declare that immigrants are “our strength.” More:

But it is wrong to characterize immigrant and refugee communities as radical and dangerous; in our experience, militant violence is vanishingly rare.

Notice the use of language here to obscure plain meaning. They are talking about Muslim migrants, but won’t say the M word. More:

Therefore, we must continue to pursue an inclusive approach to resettlement in order to combat the growing tide of xenophobic language around the globe. Such language will lead only to the increased marginalization of our immigrant communities, and without making us any safer.

Got it? The West needs to welcome more Muslim migrants to fight xenophobic language. And hey, if Europe’s Jews are too afraid to go to their synagogues on the High Holy days, too bad for them. The important thing is to fight xenophobic language by bringing in more foreign-born Muslims.

Our cities pledge to continue to stand for inclusivity, and that is why our cities support services and programs that help all residents, including our diverse immigrant communities, feel welcome, so that every resident feels part of our great cities.

“Inclusivity” and “diversity” are Orwellian words, in the sense that Orwell meant in his great short essay on “Politics and the English Language”. They are euphemisms meant to obscure what is actually being said by the speaker — in this case, “We need to bring in more Muslim migrants.” That’s a difficult thing for a politician to advocate in a time of random Muslim terror inflicted on those cities, so the politicians reach for euphemisms to manipulate public opinion.

More:

In New York and Paris, for example, municipal ID programs

NYC Mayor Bill De Blasio (a katz / Shutterstock.com)

have achieved great success in increasing a sense of belonging among immigrants and allowing for greater access to services like bank accounts and veterans benefits and city resources like libraries and cultural institutions. In less than two years, New York’s municipal ID program, known as IDNYC, has signed up over 10 percent of the city’s total population and garnered strong praise from a diverse coalition of community members, advocates and institutional partners.

Programs like IDNYC build safer cities because immigrants and refugees know that they are included and recognized by their governments.

That’s the theory, but how do we know these programs have worked? Obviously I don’t know that they haven’t worked, but simply asserting that these programs have reduced terrorism ought to be treated skeptically.

And, here we go:

Investing in the integration of refugees and immigrants is not only the right thing to do, it is also the smart thing to do. Refugees and other foreign-born residents bring needed skills and enhance the vitality and growth of local economies, and their presence has long benefited our three cities.

The general issue of immigration is a big deal, but that’s not what the public is objecting to in this case. It is afraid of Muslim immigration. What “needed skills” do refugees from the Muslim world bring to European cities? Only a week ago in Germany, industrialists brought the bad news to Mama Merkel:

Germany’s blue-chip companies will have to explain to Chancellor Angela Merkel on Wednesday why they have managed to hire fewer than 100 refugees after around a million arrived in the country last year.

Merkel, fighting for her political life over her open-door policy, has summoned the bosses of some of Germany’s biggest companies to Berlin to account for their lack of action and exchange ideas about how they can do better.

Many of the companies say a lack of German-language skills, the inability of most refugees to prove any qualifications, and uncertainty about their permission to stay in the country mean there is little they can do in the short term.

A survey by Reuters of the 30 companies in Germany’s DAX stock market index found they could point to just 63 refugee hires in total. Several of the 26 firms who responded said they considered it discriminatory to ask about applicants’ migration history, so they did not know whether they employed refugees or how many.

Of the 63 hires, 50 are employed by Deutsche Post DHL, which said it applied a “pragmatic approach” and deployed the refugees to sort and deliver letters and parcels.

“Given that around 80 percent of asylum seekers are not highly qualified and may not yet have a high level of German proficiency, we have primarily offered jobs that do not require technical skills or a considerable amount of interaction in German,” a spokesman said by email.

Germany needs workers. Its unemployment rate is only 4 percent. And still, it cannot find jobs for these refugees, largely because they cannot speak German and don’t have demonstrable skills. The economic situation is much worse in France, where

the unemployment rate is 10 percent overall, and a staggering 24 percent among youth. Hidalgo’s city, Paris, has a massive problem assimilating the Muslims who are already there. Where, exactly, are the benefits of which the mayors speak?

Finally:

We know policies that embrace diversity and promote inclusion are successful. We call on world leaders to adopt a similar welcoming and collaborative spirit on behalf of the refugees all over the world during the summit meeting this week. Our cities stand united in the call for inclusivity. It is part of who we are as citizens of diverse and thriving cities.

Diversity! Inclusion! Inclusivity! Who can possibly take these left-wing politicians seriously? Again: they are using this shopworn cant not to inform the public discussion, but to pre-empt it. And it’s not even good propaganda. It’s like the op-ed was generated by the Human Resources Department at Dunder Mifflin.

De Blasio, Khan, Hidalgo and politically correct politicians like them live in a bubble. By refusing to speak clearly about the challenges before us, they leave the platform open for people like Trump and the European populists.

UPDATE: I’m not sure why this is so hard to understand. Of course there is a moral argument for welcoming Muslim migrants. I don’t know how persuasive that argument is, but it’s there, and it’s a serious one. That is not the argument that these mayors make. They are making an economic argument — and it’s extraordinarily weak. Padding it with “diversity” and “inclusivity” cant only makes it more transparently feeble. You can’t very well respond to me pointing out that the economic argument the mayors make is terrible by saying, “Yeah, but morality! Christianity!”

Against Stepford Politics

A reader left this comment:

I’m a leftist. I’ve long been disillusioned with the political elite, but this election is something altogether new in my experience. Maybe it’s that the disillusionment is more personal and closer to home. I feel like I’m in a desert. It’s as if friends and co-workers and the common “thought communities” I normally traffic in have become Stepford versions of themselves, sputtering predictable (and predictably lame) defenses of Clinton and everything she and the democratic party stand for. Yelling at anyone who disagrees because obviously it can only be ignorance or childishness. I’ve recognized the tendency on the left toward identity politics and usually have seen it as sincere, but insular and reductive and therefore unhelpful (and at times annoying). But now I really *see* it, and get what I didn’t get before: how a comfortable, non-reflective class, that is used to having nothing at stake in an election (it’s all a game), uses the emotion of identity politics so pervasively and smugly to distract from and never have to face its own failings and naked hypocrisy. It’s so obvious and disgusting to me now. And suddenly I’m on the other side of it! The mechanical rush-to-judgment and policing of boundaries of what is an acceptable view. If one good thing comes out of this election — and I don’t know that it will, but I hope so, and if what I’m experiencing isn’t actually in isolation — maybe it will be that we learn to finally see each other, on the left and the right, as just folks just trying to find and sort through what’s real and honest and sincere.

I find myself here, at TAC, for the first time with some regularity. I find myself searching for voices that are trying to interpret the strange and momentous events unfolding around us with some humanity — humanity toward those we may not share everyday perspectives or experiences with but may yet still have some things in common — rather than assuming an inevitable reversion to the mean, and slouching into worn prejudices. Reading columns at TAC, at times I feel a familiar reflex to disagree with this or that, but the disagreement seems different, less charged because more and more I find common cause and solidarity here. For example, the Benedict Option. It makes perfect and immediate sense to me, even if my version might more resemble a hippie organic vegan commune.

Dear Reddit: About That ‘VERY VIP’…

Hoo boy. Some Reddit users have done a bit of sleuthing. Via US News & World Report:

An army of reddit users believes it has found evidence that former Hillary Clinton computer specialist Paul Combetta solicited free advice regarding Clinton’s private email server from users of the popular web forum.

A collaborative investigation showed a reddit user with the username stonetear requested help in relation to retaining and purging email messages after 60 days, and requested advice on how to remove a “VERY VIP” individual’s email address from archived content.

The requests match neatly with publicly known dates related to Clinton’s use of a private email server while secretary of state.

Here’s the text of the initial reddit post by stonetear, dated July 24, 2014:

Hello all- I may be facing a very interesting situation where I need to strip out a VIP’s (VERY VIP) email address from a bunch of archived email that I have both in a live Exchange mailbox, as well as a PST file. Basically, they don’t want the VIP’s email address exposed to anyone, and want to be able to either strip out or replace the email address in the to/from fields in all of the emails we want to send out.

I am not sure if something like this is possible with PowerShell, or exporting all of the emails to MSG and doing find/replaces with a batch processing program of some sort.

Does anyone have experience with something like this, and/or suggestions on how this might be accomplished?

As US News helpfully points out:

On July 23, 2014, the House Select Committee on Benghazi had reached an agreement with the State Department on the production of records, according to an FBI report released earlier this month on the bureau’s probe of her email use.

There’s more.  And The Hill adds:

The identity of the “stonetear” user is not confirmed. Reddit users point to the fact that an account on the online marketplace Etsy for a Paul Combetta has the username “stonetear” and the inactive website combetta.com is registered to the email address stonetear@gmail.com.

If stonetear is Combetta, well, gosh, it’s almost as if Secretary Clinton sent down an order to destroy evidence that the State Department had agreed to turn over to the House committee. Nixon in a pants suit.

If there’s one thing you can count on the Clintons for, it’s skeezy drama. Whoever wins this fall, America’s executive branch is going to be governed by a liar.

UPDATE: A number of readers in the comments section says there is a benign explanation for this. Read the details in the comments, but basically they say Stonetear was simply trying to strip the e-mail address not to protect Hillary Clinton, but rather to keep the address from being made public when the documents were, to protect it for future use.

Identity Politics Of Deepest Trumpistan

A blogger named unagidon at the liberal Catholic magazine Commonweal has a short reflection on Arlie Russell Hochschild’s new book about white voters in a southwest Louisiana parish. Hochschild set out to figure out why these white people vote against their interests (in her view). Here’s what unagidon says:

What interested me about the book is that I come from an urban version of the same place.  I’m a working class boy.  When I was growing up, everyone’s aspiration was to become the supervisor or the detective.  If college entered the picture (and I was the first on either side of my family to go) then becoming a teacher or an accountant became possible.  Most of my family consider themselves conservative.  Since I know them all well, I’ve never considered them as stupid or even misguided.  So why Trump? And why now?

Unagidon takes a quote from the book from one of its subjects, then comments:

At first reading, a quote like this might look like what is going on here is simply racism.  These people are white people afraid that they are becoming a minority in the United States and that they are going to lose their privileged status.  However, I would argue that behind this is a belief that there is a finite set of resources available to the government that are not being allocated to them in the proportions that they deserve.  Their judgement of what those proportions could be skewed by racial beliefs.  Or it could be skewed by the simple fact that they don’t see their own communities and issues being addressed.  (Remember that Liberals tend to speak of blacks, gays, immigrants, Mexicans, Somalis, and the Syrian refugees yet to come as communities as well).  When these conservatives identify themselves as communities, based on race, religion, history, region, or almost anything else, they are mocked by the Left (who they see as running the government and the media) as backward, primitive, rednecks, hillbillies, etc.  And they feel insulted.

Trump is appealing to these people.

Unagidon continues:

We have to recognize that everyone has their own interest; that they feel part of their own community; that they see their communities as different from other communities…

If you’re not familiar with Commonweal, I should point out to you that it is very much not a pro-Trump magazine. Unagidon says it’s a shame that these people are turning to Trump to speak for them, but he (unagidon) makes a very good point here about white identity and the Left. I hate identity politics, but I really hate the double standard many on the Left have when it comes to practicing them. Trump is bad news for the country, for sure, but I don’t understand why it is considered normal and defensible for blacks, or gays, or Hispanics, to vote for Hillary because they perceive it to be in their interest as blacks, gays, Hispanics, etc. — but wicked for whites to do the same thing.