Rod Dreher's Blog, page 540

Front Porch Republic @ Notre Dame

Hey, look at this, from our friends at Front Porch Republic:

Join us on October 8 at the University of Notre Dame (Bond Hall) for our 6th annual meeting. The title is Populism, Power, and Place. We’ve got a fantastic line-up of speakers and we’re going to have a great time.

Program begins at 9:00 and will conclude at 5:00pm.

Panel 1: Promoting Local Economies:

Philip Bess, Elias Crim, Susannah Black

Panel 2: Populism and Place:

Bill Kauffman, Jeff Taylor, Michael Federici

Lunch: Keynote Address: Patrick Deneen

Panel 3: The Benedict Option:

Rod Dreher

Panel 4: Beauty and the Revitalization of Culture:

Jason Peters, Andrew Balio, James Matthew Wilson

You won’t want to miss this one. Register here. Seating is limited, so don’t put it off.

I’ll be talking about stuff from the upcoming Benedict Option book, which you can pre-order here. This will be my second visit to Notre Dame, and this time, I promise to wear pants.

The Necessity Of Trust

David Brooks writes today that the country is buried under an “avalanche of distrust.”  Both presidential candidates are remarkably untrustworthy people, but they didn’t come from nowhere. Public and private trust is plummeting. Excerpt:

The true thing about distrust, in politics and in life generally, is that it is self-destructive. Distrustful people end up isolating themselves, alienating others and corroding their inner natures.

Over the past few decades, the decline in social trust has correlated to an epidemic of loneliness. In 1985, 10 percent of Americans said they had no close friend with whom they could discuss important matters. By 2004, 25 percent had no such friend.

When you refuse to lay yourself before others, others won’t lay themselves before you. An AARP study of Americans aged 45 and up found that 35 percent suffer from chronic loneliness, compared with 20 percent in a similar survey a decade ago. Suicide rates, which closely correlate with loneliness, have been spiking since 1999. The culture of distrust isn’t the only isolating factor, but it plays a role.

The rise of distrust correlates with a decline in community bonds and a surge of unmerited cynicism. Only 31 percent of millennials say there is a great deal of difference between the two political parties. Only 52 percent of adults say they are extremely proud to be Americans, down from 70 percent in 2003.

Reading this put me in mind of the fragmented world that produced Dante Alighieri. His exile in mid-life was the result of betrayal (specifically, by the pope). In the great poem he wrote from that exilic experience, the Divine Comedy, the Dante meditates at length of the importance of vows. Dante (both the poet and his fictional self) comes from a world where almost nobody can trust anybody else. Constant warfare has torn society apart. Urban dwellers lived in constant fear that during the night, a traitor in their midst might open the city gates and let in soldiers of the enemy city. Without trust, life became hell, and the Tuscans made it hell for themselves.

This is why the lowest circles in the Inferno — that is, the part of the pit of Hell closest to the bottom, where Satan dwells — is reserved for Traitors. There are four classes of traitor, the worst being Judecca, named for Judas Iscariot. All the damned punished there are frozen in ice, immovable for all eternity. In Dante’s imaginative scheme, the infernal punishments fit the earthly crime. A traitor lives and moves without loyalty to anything but himself. He is unconstrained by vows or obligations to God, his family, his lord, or anyone. In Hell, he cannot move at all, and has to endure the coldness that was in his heart, forever.

The collapse of social trust in medieval Tuscany had an enormous effect on social and political life. If you go to Florence today, you will notice that many of the oldest buildings look like fortresses. That’s because the wealthiest families of Dante’s day and afterward had to build their homes as towering refuges from attack by other Florentine families.

I wrote the other day in this space about sociologist Zygmunt Bauman’s concept of “liquid modernity.” It’s his description of the condition we in the West live under, in which cultural change happens so fast that no customs or institutions have time to solidify. Bauman writes that liquid modernity produces people who do not make vows or any kind of lasting connections, because that would impede their movement, and thus their ability to succeed. What makes for a successful person in liquid modernity?

To refuse to be ‘fixed’ one way or the other. Not to get tied to the place. Not to wed one’s life to one vocation only. Not to swear consistency and loyalty to anything and anybody. Not to control the future, but to refuse to mortgage it: to take care that the consequences of the game do not outlive the game itself, and to renounce responsibility for such as do. To forbid the past to bear on the present. In short, to cut the present off at both ends, to sever the present from history, to abolish time in any other form but a flat collection or an arbitrary sequence of present moments; a continuous present. 

Once disassembled and no more a vector, time no longer structures the space. On the ground, there is no more ‘forward’ and ‘backward’; it is just the ability not to stand still that counts. Fitness — the capacity to move swiftly where the action is and be ready to take in experiences as they come — takes precedence over health, that idea of the standard of normalcy and of keeping that standard stable and unscathed. All delay, including ‘delay of gratification,’ loses its meaning: there is no arrow-like time left to measure it.

And so the snag is no longer how to discover, invent, construct, assemble (even buy) an identity, but how to prevent it from sticking. Well constructed and durable identity turns from an asset into a liability. The hub of postmodern life strategy is not identity-building, but avoidance of fixation. [Emphasis mine — RD]

How do you rebuild social trust when the values and structures (economic and cultural) condition people today to behave in ways that make that trust impossible to accumulate? In a culture that sees vows not as pillars of strength but obstacles to self-fulfillment, isn’t chronic suspicion a rational response?

Romper Room For Liberals

‘Once upon a time…’ (NZGMW / Shutterstock.com)

From San Francisco to Park Slope, Brooklyn, comes Drag Queen Story Hour. Excerpt:

A block from where that interaction is the home of the original Drag Queen Story Hour, at the Harvey Milk Memorial Public Library/Eureka Branch, a regular event created by the LGBTQA literary non-profit RADAR Productions to bring together two audiences with a natural affinity for one another: Kids and drag queens. (Both love dress-up and exuberance and confounding boring people’s expectations.)

Now, RADAR Productions is working with the Feminist Press and the Brooklyn Public Library to bring this bedazzled event to kids on the other side of the country. “Drag Queen Story Hour breaks down our most stifling ideas about gender while lifting up play, fierceness, and femininity for all,” said Jennifer Baumgardner, the Feminist Press’s publisher.

If there’s one thing little children need, it’s to have their most stifling ideas about gender broken down. That won’t mess with their heads at all. The writer sat for an interview with this particular story-reading drag queen, Lil Miss Hot Mess. More:

“Drag queens and kids are a natural fit, but also transgressive, duh,” she told me. “It’s the final frontier for drag queens! Kids don’t have the baggage of gender; they’re full of excitement around play and glamour. In San Francisco I was doing a shoot for an ice cream store and there was a little girl watching, just staring at me. I was like a princess or a superhero to her. Kids pick up on the extra bit of fantasy. We were introduced and she was so polite. [She said] ‘How do you doooo?’ as if I were the queen. She was clearly looking for the language to talk to me.”

Lil Miss Hot Mess is Jewish:

Lil Miss Hot Mess said that her feelings about Judaism became somewhat conflicted as she became involved in San Francisco’s Occupy movement, protesting Israel’s policies toward the Palestinians. Perhaps, I suggested, her Jewish drag characters were a way to feel more embracing toward her religion. “It’s definitely a way of reconnecting with my Jewish identity,” she allowed.

Because masquerading as a woman is a Jewish thing? I had not heard that.

Perhaps San Francisco and New York can send drag queens as educational missionaries to us in the Deplorable-American community. Many of our children are horribly stifled by our outdated ideas of gender.

The Useful Myth Of Mighty Whitey

Politico has a couple of interesting interviews focusing on the question, “What’s going on with the white working class?”

[Politico‘s Glenn] Thrush: If we’re looking statistically—and who the heck knows what’s really going to happen, but Nate Silver is giving Hillary Clinton around an 80 or 90 percent chance of winning as of today—what becomes of these folks without Trump? How does this manifest itself in the political dialogue? Is this group going to go quietly into the good night?

[Emory University historian Carol] Anderson: No, we are going to be dealing with it after Trump because Trump merely tapped into what was already there. What Richard Nixon’s “Southern strategy” tapped into was a layer of resentment in what was then the solid Democratic South, as well as the working-class white ethnic enclaves in the North and in the Midwest. It was very targeted. It stirred that pot. It told them that your ills, your stunted economic growth and opportunities, are because of them. And the “them” becomes racialized, and it worked so well that we get to this point where now you’d get a Paul Ryan who realizes that when they talk about “we couldn’t directly go after Trump because we were afraid of turning off his base, of getting his base to turn on us,” that base is what the GOP has been nurturing since 1968.

Thrush continues the questioning in a separate interview with “Hillbilly Elegy” author J.D. Vance. Excerpt:

Glenn Thrush: Obvious question, but an important one: Why do you think Donald Trump’s tone resonates so much with white working-class people?

J.D. Vance: His apocalyptic tone matches their lived experiences on the ground. The no-bullshit tone, the anger …

Thrush: Why don’t Democrats, apart from Bernie Sanders, seem to get it?

Vance: I certainly think a lot of liberals are able to see what these people are going through, but there is this weird obsession—a preoccupation—with the belief that the Trump movement is all about racism. The Trump people are certainly more racist than the average white professional, but it doesn’t strike me that this is the 1950s. There is a certain amount of racial resentment, but it’s paired with economic insecurity, and a willingness to believe Trump and a lot of the things that he says, despite evidence that a lot of it isn’t true. I really worry if this becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy. If he’s couching what he’s talking about in a racial resentment, and progressive elites are saying, “All these people are racist and xenophobic,” people’s attitudes are going to change and they are going to become more racist over time. That’s probably happening here. I actually think that Donald Trump is changing the way people think about other groups of people in a very negative way.

Read the rest of both interviews here.

There’s a lot that can be said about these interviews, but I’ve chosen these two excerpts to make a point. Notice how the Emory historian falls back on the tried-and-true narrative of how the GOP racialized the grievances of whites, and exploited them for political gain (“It told them that your ills, your stunted economic growth and opportunities, are because of them”). And there is no doubt some truth buried beneath all that. J.D. Vance is strong in his book on how poor whites sabotage their own prospects by believing that they are helpless pawns in somebody else’s game. It is not the case that some white guy in Breathitt County who can’t be bothered to show up for work faithfully is poor because a Mexican immigrant has taken his job. That’s on him. That’s the kind of thing Vance is talking about. In his book, Vance talks about how he personally saw poor white welfare cheats ripping off the system, while at the same time denying that they were doing so (and probably thinking that blacks are the real welfare scammers).

However, it strikes me that what Anderson points to is exactly what the Democrats and liberal elites (such as academics) do to black Americans. They point to whites and say to blacks, “Your ills, your stunted economic growth and opportunities, are because of them.” And we can’t deny that there is more than a little truth to that as well, in a historical sense. The problem is the same dynamic that J.D. Vance identifies in poor white communities: it removes any sense of moral agency, of self-responsibility, from the lives of poor black people. It is not the case that a black male who drops out of high school and cannot find reliable work is denied material progress because of white racism. A young black woman cannot have children out of wedlock and expect the road to stability and economic success to be anything but steep. Whites aren’t making her have babies. And so on.

We have this weird thing in American life in which many people, on both the left and the right, seem incapable of thinking in gray terms when it comes to race, class, and economics. It’s either 100 percent the fault of racism, or 100 percent the fault of lazy people who ought to be bootstrapping their way out of poverty. Why can’t both be true to some extent? That there really are structural and historical barriers to blacks (and poor whites) rising, but that individual initiative and individual moral choices (for both blacks and whites) really do matter as well.

And there’s this, discussed by TAC editor Dan McCarthy in his cover story for the magazine about class and current politics:

Sanders has been more in line with his party’s orthodoxy on that issue. But that didn’t save him from being attacked by Clinton backers for having an insufficiently nonwhite base of support. Once again, what might have appeared to be a class conflict—in this case between a democratic socialist and an elite liberal with ties to high finance—could be explained away as really about race.

Race, like religion, is a real factor in how people vote. Its relevance to elite politics, however, is less clear. Something else has to account for why the establishment in both parties almost uniformly favors one approach to war, trade, and immigration, while outsider candidates as dissimilar as Buchanan, Nader, Paul, and Trump, and to a lesser extent Sanders, depart from the consensus.

The insurgents clearly do not represent a single class: they appeal to eclectic interests and groups. The foe they have all faced down, however—the bipartisan establishment—does resemble a class in its striking unity of outlook and interest. So what is this class, effectively the ruling class of the country?

But, as usual, I digress. Here’s a very good Boston Globe story about what it’s like to be white in Norcross, Ga., a community that has undergone tremendous change in a very short time because of immigration. Here’s a section of the piece that resonated with me, because 13 years ago I interviewed people like this woman in Irving, Texas, a Dallas suburb:

Some longtime residents have turned to state and county officials to change zoning and housing laws in a bid to preserve the old ways.

A leader in this effort is Faye McFarland, who cleans homes for a living and keeps a US flag flying near her front door.

The 70-year old recalled living in Germany when her husband was in the Army. None of the Germans catered to her wants and ways then, and she doesn’t see why she’s expected to do so now.

Her main complaint came when a Guatemalan family moved into a tiny ranch house next door. She said she counted 15 people living there. But what really set her off was that the family seemed to be running a siding and roofing business out of the home. About a dozen cars would be parked outside and supplies would be piled up, an eyesore in a residential neighborhood.

She felt like she was living next to a warehouse, and at night there would be work trucks parked on the lawn. Her new neighbors, she said, would simply pay fines for violating the zoning law but didn’t change the way they were living.

“My quality of life was absolutely destroyed with all those folks and all of those vehicles,” McFarland recalled.

She began going to City Council meetings. Armed with photographs and persistence, she’d make her case over and over. “We would put up the pictures and say, ‘This is what I have to live beside,’ ” McFarland said.

The council finally passed an ordinance: Now only up to four cars can be parked on a driveway of a house in Norcross. Additional vehicles need a permit from the city.

Norcross Mayor Bucky Johnson said the ordinance has worked. “We had people parking all over the place,” he said. “We don’t have that situation anymore.”

And McFarland’s neighbors, perhaps tired of her calling various law and code enforcement agencies all the time, packed up and moved out.

“We have fought for this neighborhood,” McFarland says. “We have really had to fight.”

To a lot of people in power — both Republicans and Democrats — people like Faye McFarland are at best and embarrassment and at worst “deplorables.” The Faye McFarlands of the world have judged rightly that the Establishment doesn’t give a rat’s rear end about them. There will not be Emory professors offering theories about why the Democratic Party, academics, and liberals in the media — as well as big-business conservatives — frame the Faye McFarlands as enemies of what is good and right and decent, for the sake of disempowering them.

Bless Annie Linskey of the Boston Globe for simply giving them a voice in a news story. The Washington Post‘s great Stephanie McCrummen does this too, for poor whites on the fringe (remember this piece about Dylann Roof?). I’ve come to anticipate articles written by Mike Cooper, a lawyer and Democrat who lives in small-town North Carolina, and who writes with critical sympathy about the lives of the working-class and poor whites he sees. He has a new piece in US News about how Trump is a false idol for people who are truly suffering. Excerpt:

Trump’s followers are anxiously falling out of the middle-class and can’t afford to retire. Their jobs were destroyed by smartphones and they’re too old to enroll in community college with their kids.

Western civilization went from rewarding their hard work to rendering them useless, so Trump’s Americans mourn the economy they built with their own sweat. Their heart is broken and they feel no sense of honor in the call center or behind the counter of the dollar store. They don’t want welfare. They just want their dignity back.

The Democratic Party cut their cultural connection to these Americans, Republicans took them for granted and it took Washington almost a decade to realize working-class whites were dying from their own despair. It was too late.

Trump promised victories when no other politician seemed to care. But he’s a false idol taking advantage of honest fears.

I agree with this. The heartbreaking thing is that Trump’s not going to do anything for these people. Some of the problems they face are beyond any politician’s ability to fix. Here’s the thing, though: long after Trump has left the scene, they are going to continue being the Establishment’s villains. They wouldn’t put it in these terms, but many of them are aware that liberals in positions of power control public discourse to marginalize their voices, while granting privileges to other groups solely on the basis of race, gender, and sexuality. It’s called “celebrating diversity” when they do it, but called bigotry when these whites do it. This is not news. What is news this political year is that these slurs are starting to lose their power.

Don’t get me wrong: I have a strong aversion to political organizing around race and tribe, given the history of white supremacy in power in this country, and the heady power that comes with a mob mentality. But the identity politics embraced and proclaimed by the Left validates political organizing around race and tribe. And the way liberal and progressive elites tend to demonize everyone to their Right (don’t believe men should use the women’s room? BIGOT!), and attempt to dispossess them, may compel whites to organize that way simply as a matter of self-protection. God help this country if that happens.

By stigmatizing and/or ignoring people like Faye MacDonald, and valorizing others solely on the basis of racial, sexual, and gender identity, the Left has been inadvertently laying the groundwork for something very, very nasty in this country. And the decline of Christianity, especially among the working class, has removed a restraining factor. As Ross Douthat has said, if you don’t like the Religious Right, just wait to see the Post-Religious Right. It’s coming. The fact that Donald Trump defeated the entire GOP establishment to become the Republican Party’s nominee for president shows that it’s already here.

That Emory historian can say that white working-class racism is going to outlast Trump because the Republican party has been stoking it for decades, but she is blind to the role that progressive bigotries play in this process, because if she’s anything like most socially progressive elites in academia, media, business, law, and government, she sees those bigotries as virtues.

UPDATE: Forgive me for those rambling, inchoate comments. Like many of you, I’m struggling to understand what’s happening in US politics, and finding something to dislike and distrust about everything and everybody. I’m glad that a blog is just a writer’s sketchbook, not a place for polished work. For a much more coherent discussion of these themes, read Joshua Rothman’s smart, detailed, favorable New Yorker review of J.D. Vance’s great book. Especially these parts:

Why is hillbilly culture so defensive, insular, and frozen in time? Vance argues that—because no culture exists in a vacuum—hillbillies are only partially to blame. In the course of his journey from Middletown to the Marines to Yale, Vance finds that hillbilly pessimism is, in its toxicity, equalled by the disdain that metropolitan people feel for those they call “rednecks” or “white trash.” The Marine Corps is a genuine American melting pot and, for Vance, a transformative experience. But, at Yale, Vance learns that he’s better off hiding the details of his upbringing. He elides the fact that he was raised mainly by his grandparents (a normal circumstance where he comes from), and begins talking about his “grandmother” and “grandfather” even though, at home, he calls them “Mamaw” and “Papaw.” He braves Whole Foods, learns to make cocktail-party chitchat, and endeavors to keep his voice down in public (restaurant screaming matches are unexceptional among Middletown couples). He is shocked by the extreme and near-universal affluence of his classmates.

White poverty, Vance comes to feel, is a source of special shame: no one at Yale sees dignity in it. Instead, they define themselves in opposition to people like him. One professor says that, in his opinion, Yale Law shouldn’t bother accepting students from non-Ivy League schools, since it’s not in the business of “remedial education.” Vance takes a new friend to Cracker Barrel, one of his family’s favorite restaurants, but the friend can’t enjoy it—to him, it’s just “a greasy public health crisis.” There’s nothing Vance is prouder of than his service in the Marines, and yet his fellow-students routinely express contempt for the military—it never occurs to them that there’s a veteran in their midst. Vance often feels like a class traitor who’s grown “too big for his britches.” At the same time, he’s tempted to give up on the project of socioeconomic ascent. “It’s not just our own communities that reinforce the outsider attitude,” he concludes. “It’s the places and people that upward mobility connects us with.”

And:

It’s through these back doors of memory and family history that “Hillbilly Elegy” arrives at its broadest subject: our hopelessly politicized approach to thinking about poverty. At least since the Moynihan Report, in 1965, Americans have tended to answer the question “Why are people poor?” by choosing one of two responses: they can either point to economic forces (globalization, immigration) or blame cultural factors (decaying families, lack of “grit”). These seem like two social-science theories about poverty—two hypotheses, which might be tested empirically—but, in practice, they are more like political fairy tales. As Kelefa Sanneh wrote earlier this year, the choice between these two explanations has long been racialized. Working-class whites are said to be poor because of outsourcing; inner-city blacks are imagined to be holding themselves back with hip-hop. The implicit theory is that culture comes from within, and so can be controlled by individuals and communities, whereas economic structures exert pressures from without, and so are beyond the control of those they affect.

This theory is useful to politicians, because political ideologies function by identifying some people as powerless and others as powerful. The truth, though, is that the “culture vs. economics” dyad is largely a fantasy. We are neither prisoners of our economic circumstances nor lords of our cultures, able to reshape them at will. It would be more accurate to say that cultural and economic forces act, with entwined and equal power, on and through all of us—and that we all have an ability, limited but real, to harness or resist them.

Rothman concludes his reading of “Hillbilly Elegy” by saying:

As individuals, we must stop thinking about American poverty in an imaginary way; we must abandon the terms of the argument we’ve been having—terms designed to harness our feelings of blame and resentment for political ends, and to make us feel either falsely blameless or absurdly self-determining.

Please do read the whole thing. It’s worth it. And if you haven’t yet read “Hillbilly Elegy,” what are you waiting for?

Governing The Deplorables

On the day she is said to have been diagnosed with “pneumonia,” Mrs. Clinton delivered a notorious speech in which she denounced “xenophobes,” among others, as fit for a “basket of deplorables.” People who are for open borders and globalism have a habit of dismissing their opponents as xenophobes — that is, people who fear (and therefore loathe) foreigners.

A reader has sent in an essay by Georgetown professor Jason Brennan, in which he argues that we can avoid stupid decisions like the Brexit vote if we institute an “epistocracy,” system through which smart people who know things rule. Excerpt:

In an epistocracy, political power is to some degree apportioned according to knowledge. An epistocracy might retain the major institutions we see in republican democracy, such as parties, mass elections, constitutional review, and the like. But in an epistocracy, not everyone has equal basic political power. An epistocracy might grant some people additional voting power, or might restrict the right to vote only to those that could pass a very basic test of political knowledge.

A literacy test as a requirement of holding the franchise? How could that possibly go wrong? More:

Any such system will be subject to abuse, and will suffer from significant government failures. But that’s true of democracy too. The interesting question is whether epistocracy, warts and all, would perform better than democracy, warts and all.

All across the West, we’re seeing the rise of angry, resentful, nationalist, xenophobic and racist movements, movements made up mostly of low-information voters. Perhaps it’s time to put aside the childish and magical theory that democracy is intrinsically just, and start asking the serious question of whether there are better alternatives. The stakes are high.

During the Cold War, some of the smartest people in the West believed the most monstrous things. In 1982, the leftist intellectual Susan Sontag said this at a gathering of the left in New York City to show support for the Solidarity trade union:

Imagine, if you will, someone who read only the Reader’s Digest between 1950 and 1970, and someone in the same period who read only The Nation or the New Statesman. Which reader would have been better informed about the realities of Communism? The answer, I think, should give us pause. Can it be that our enemies were right?

Any reader of Tolkien understands that simple Sam Gamgee is more important to the good of the world than the brilliant Saruman — and why. Knowledge and wisdom are not the same thing.

Jason Brennan further articulated his epistocratic views in a Chronicle of Higher Education essay that’s paywalled. Here’s an excerpt:

Voters are dumb because democracy makes them dumb. Democracy spreads power among a vast number of people; everyone gets an equal but tiny share — expressed through our vote — so small that none of us have an incentive to use our power wisely. The chance that an individual vote will make any difference in a national election is on par with the odds of winning Powerball. Voters have every incentive to remain ignorant about politics and to indulge their worst biases.

We cannot “fix” democratic ignorance, because we cannot change the incentives built into

democracy. But perhaps we can mitigate the problem by changing our political system. What if instead of trying to make voters better informed and more reasonable, we tried to screen out the least reasonable and most misinformed voters? What if instead of a democracy, we had an epistocracy?

Brennan is not wrong to criticize the flaws in democracy. Giving people the vote is no guarantee that they will use it wisely. But restricting the vote to the cognitive elite is no solution. I would rather be ruled by the first thousand people through the gates at the Daytona 500 than the people in that room Friday night with Hillary Clinton and Barbra Streisand. Guess who holds more power already in our society? That’s right: the cognitive elite. That’s how it works in a meritocracy. Prof. Brennan’s epistocracy would only give them more — for our own good.

Anybody stupid enough to think that rule by experts, by “the best and the brightest,” would make America a better place ought to be compelled to watch Errol Morris’s great 2003 documentary The Fog Of War: Eleven Lessons From The Life Of Robert S. McNamara. And it’s less impressive but still interesting sequel, of sorts, The Unknown Known, about Donald Rumsfeld and the Iraq War. McNamara was tragic; Rumsfeld is simply smug. Neither man was stupid, nor were the people they surrounded themselves with, who took the nation, and people far less intelligent than they, into two foolish and unwinnable wars.

The reader who sent me the link to the Brennan essay is a professor at a major university. He writes:

Sad that an academic would trot out this tired old elitist b.s. at a time when we ought to be demonstrating some sort of ecumenical concern for our society rather than further distancing ourselves from any and all who don’t share our “enlightened” views. But I guess I’m not surprised.

I am no fan of racism, sexism, and the litany of deplorable thoughtcrimes that Mrs. Clinton mentioned on Friday. But I am genuinely frightened of powerful people like those gathered in that room who get to define what constitutes racism and all the rest, and use that as a way to destroy heretics who deviate from their puritanical gospel.

The denunciation of “xenophobia” by globalist elites is part of the broader project of what Roger Scruton calls “oikophobia,” or fear of the familiar. Rusty Reno elaborates on that point:

Today’s emphasis on multiculturalism and “diversity” participates in this vision of the future, one in which differences are overcome and borders are irrelevant. It’s species of utopianism, to be sure, but it has a powerful grip on the moral imagination of the West.

In this view, national interest is an impediment to progress. Concerns about identity are, by definition, forms of ethnocentrism bordering on xenophobia. This is why the upsurge of populist concern about immigration—which I take to be a synecdoche for wide-ranging anxieties about the long-term significance of many social changes—are so vigorously denounced by mainstream politicians, journalists, and political commentators. It’s also why Hillary Clinton doesn’t isolate Trump by employing a more moderate and sensible nationalist rhetoric. The same goes from Angela Merkel. She is almost certain to persevere, in order to remain true to what she believes will best serve the common good, not just of Germany, but of the whole world.

Globalization has a unifying dimension, which we rightly applaud. At the same time, though, globalization is associated with economic and cultural changes that are dissolving inherited forms of solidarity—the nation foremost, but local communities, as well, and even the family. This dissolution encourages an atomistic individualism, which in turn makes all of us more vulnerable to domination and control.

By my reading of the signs of the times, the dangers of dissolved solidarity in the West are far more dire than our present upsurges of ethnocentrism and nationalism. It is atomized societies that are susceptible to demagogues—not societies that enjoy strong social bonds and organic communal solidarity. Islamic extremism thrives where traditional Muslim societies are disintegrated by the pressures of globalization.

And so does Trumpism. As distasteful and even as dangerous as I find Trump, Hillary’s “basket of deplorables” comment to her Manhattan contributors reminds me that she is in some ways even more distasteful and dangerous, because she speaks for the Establishment, and all its collective power. If you are any kind of social or cultural conservative, or immigration restrictionist, and you think Hillary was not talking about you, but only the rough people, you had better think twice. She speaks for those who like to think of themselves as epistocrats, but who are really cognitive-elite oligarchs.

Lying Hillary’s Deplorable Weekend

Hillary Clinton has seen better weekends. Friday there was the “basket of deplorables” remark at the LGBT/Barbra Streisand fundraiser in NYC (can’t get more liberal elite than that), and then it was her whatever-it-was getting into the van yesterday. A couple of friends e-mailed me separately to say how freaky and/or amusing it is to watch liberals on TV and on social media deny that what anybody can plainly see happened, happened. That is, we all saw that Hillary Clinton had a strange, scary health episode in which she could not stand, and went stiff before collapsing forward into her van. It went from “no big deal” to “you are sexist for saying it’s a big deal” to “she’s got pneumonia, let’s move on.”

That woman might have pneumonia, but there is something much more serious wrong with her. Who ya gonna believe, spinning liberals, or your lyin’ eyes?

David P. Goldman, in a column addressing her obnoxious “deplorables” comment, writes:

Americans are by and large forgiving people. They’ll forgive Bill for cavorting with Monica “I did not have sex with that woman” Lewinsky in the Oval Office and imposing himself on any number of unwilling females. They might even forgive Hillary for losing tens of thousands of compromising emails on an illegal private server and then repeatedly lying about it in a way that insults the deplorable intelligence of the average voter. But the one thing you can’t do is spit on them and tell them it’s raining. They’ll never forgive you for that. They’re hurting, and they rankle at candidates who rub their faces in it.

Mitt Romney’s campaign was unsalvageable after the famous 2012 “47% remark,” by which he simply meant that the 47% of American workers whose income falls below the threshold for federal taxes would be indifferent to his tax cut proposals. The trouble is that these workers pay a great deal of taxes–to Social Security, Medicare, and in most cases to local governments through sales taxes and assessments. After a covert video of his remarks at a private fundraiser made the rounds, Romney spent the rest of the campaign with the equivalent of an advertising blimp over his head emblazoned with the words: “I represent the economic elite.” Clinton has done the same thing with the cultural elite.

There are racists and homophobes in the Trump camp, to be sure. Everybody’s got to be somewhere. Trump is no Puritan, however, and really couldn’t care less what sort of sex people have, or who uses what bathroom (as he made clear), or who marries whom. He built a new country club in Palm Beach two decades ago because the old ones excluded blacks and Jews. He’s no racist. He’s an obnoxious, vulgar, salesman who plays politics like a reality show. I’ve made clear that I will vote for him, not because he was my choice in the Republican field (that was Sen. Cruz), but because I believe that rule of law is a precondition for a free society. If the Clintons get a free pass for influence-peddling on the multi-hundred-million-dollar scale and for covering up illegal use of private communications for government documents, the rule of law is a joke in the United States. Even if Trump were a worse president than Clinton–which is probably not the case–I would vote for him, on this ground alone.

She really has done that with the cultural elite. The media should question her closely about what, exactly, qualifies someone for membership in her litany of Deplorables (racist, sexist, homophobic, xenophobic, Islamophobic, etc.). Where does she draw the line between decent people who hold opinions she considers wrong on issues related to these groups, and bigots? The truth, I believe, is that there is no line for her, as there is no line for many on the cultural left. The trend in leftist cultural politics is to demonize and no-platform anyone on the cultural right. You will have noticed in Hillary’s remarks, the Trump supporters she gave a pass to are those who don’t share his cultural views, but those who plan to vote for him because they are economically depressed. Me, I have been appalled by some of the things Donald Trump has said about members of these groups Hillary has singled out (e.g., I thought his attack on Khizr Khan was offensive), and heaven knows there are some genuinely nasty people in Trump’s camp. But I am certain that Hillary Clinton cannot distinguish between ordinary cultural conservatives and raging bigots.

Those “basket of deplorables” remarks struck a resonant chord within social and cultural conservatives, precisely because it confirms the evidence we have been seeing with our own eyes for a long time: that liberal elites see no enemies to the cultural left, and nothing but enemies to the cultural right. If Hillary is elected president, she will use the powers of the state to go after us and our institutions hammer and tongs.

Her fainting on Sunday also strikes a resonant chord, for reasons David Goldman cites in his first paragraph. The Clintons lie. That’s what they do. Their pattern is:

1. It didn’t happen.

2. OK, it happened, but it wasn’t a big deal, and we’ve got to get back to work doing the business of the American people.

3. Only haters say it’s a big deal.

We saw the same pattern emerge from the Clinton camp over the course of Sunday afternoon, regarding Hillary’s serious health episode. Presumably we are now not supposed to be concerned about whether or not she is leveling with the American people about her health situation because if you start asking those questions, Trump will win. Therefore, we must not ask those questions, and demonize anyone who does. You see the same thing in institutions with serious wrongdoing to hide, for example:

1. Priests did not molest those children.

2. OK, priests did molest those children, but it was only a few, and it shouldn’t distract from all the good work of the Church going on right now.

3. Only anti-Catholic bigots say it’s a big deal.

Apply this pattern to any similar situation involving a public figure or an institution, and you’ll see the same thing.

Regarding Hillary, it’s worth revisiting the late Christopher Hitchens’s 2008 case against Hillary, in her contest with Barack Obama. Excerpt:

Seeing the name Hillary in a headline last week—a headline about a life that had involved real achievement—I felt a mouse stirring in the attic of my memory. Eventually, I was able to recall how the two Hillarys had once been mentionable in the same breath. On a first-lady goodwill tour of Asia in April 1995—the kind of banal trip that she now claims as part of her foreign-policy “experience”—Mrs. Clinton had been in Nepal and been briefly introduced to the late Sir Edmund Hillary, conqueror of Mount Everest. Ever ready to milk the moment, she announced that her mother had actually named her for this famous and intrepid explorer. The claim “worked” well enough to be repeated at other stops and even showed up in Bill Clinton’s memoirs almost a decade later, as one more instance of the gutsy tradition that undergirds the junior senator from New York.

Sen. Clinton was born in 1947, and Sir Edmund Hillary and his partner Tenzing Norgay did not ascend Mount Everest until 1953, so the story was self-evidently untrue and eventually yielded to fact-checking. Indeed, a spokeswoman for Sen. Clinton named Jennifer Hanley phrased it like this in a statement in October 2006, conceding that the tale was untrue but nonetheless charming: “It was a sweet family story her mother shared to inspire greatness in her daughter, to great results I might add.”

Perfect. It worked, in other words, having been coined long after Sir Edmund became a bankable celebrity, but now its usefulness is exhausted and its untruth can safely be blamed on Mummy. Yet isn’t it all—all of it, every single episode and detail of the Clinton saga—exactly like that? And isn’t some of it a little bit more serious? For Sen. Clinton, something is true if it validates the myth of her striving and her “greatness” (her overweening ambition in other words) and only ceases to be true when it no longer serves that limitless purpose. And we are all supposed to applaud the skill and the bare-faced bravado with which this is done. In the New Hampshire primary in 1992, she knowingly lied about her husband’s uncontainable sex life and put him eternally in her debt. This is now thought of, and referred to in print, purely as a smart move on her part. In the Iowa caucuses of 2008, he returns the favor by telling a huge lie about his own record on the war in Iraq, falsely asserting that he was opposed to the intervention from the very start. This is thought of, and referred to in print, as purely a tactical mistake on his part: trying too hard to help the spouse. The happy couple has now united on an equally mendacious account of what they thought about Iraq and when they thought it. What would it take to break this cheap little spell and make us wake up and inquire what on earth we are doing when we make the Clinton family drama—yet again—a central part of our own politics?

What do you have to forget or overlook in order to desire that this dysfunctional clan once more occupies the White House and is again in a position to rent the Lincoln Bedroom to campaign donors and to employ the Oval Office as a massage parlor? You have to be able to forget, first, what happened to those who complained, or who told the truth, last time.

At some point, probably very soon, we are going to find out that Mrs. Clinton is much sicker than she has disclosed, and that she has known this for quite some time. We might get it from the Clinton camp, but we will probably get it from a Wikileaks document dump, the one Julian Assange claims is coming this fall. The stolen trove of State Department documents Wikileaks released earlier this year had within them a particular memo that Jake Sullivan, one of Hillary’s top advisers, sent to her as Secretary of State. It was only noted in late August by a few right-wing websites, most of them fringe-y, at the time, but it’s worth revisiting in light of Sunday’s events.

The State Department document (see the whole thing here) reports the results Clinton adviser Jacob Sullivan found from his research on the drug Provigil, a controlled drug used to treat symptoms of Parkinson’s disease, multiple sclerosis, and Alzheimer’s. Basically, it keeps you awake without being addictive.

Why would Mrs. Clinton have Jake Sullivan, her deputy chief of staff and a top foreign policy expert, research this drug? It is certainly possible that the Secretary of State was exhausted from her busy schedule, and needed a little help, especially when flying back and forth on overseas trips. But it is reasonable to ask if a Secretary of State who was so tired she needed a drug to keep going has the stamina to be president under any circumstances. More important, it is reasonable to ask, in light of Sunday’s health scare, if there is something more serious wrong with her. Does she have Parkinson’s, multiple sclerosis, or some other condition like it?

No matter what the Clinton spin machine says, these questions won’t go away. And when they are finally answered, I believe we are going to be confronted by the same old thing about the Clintons: the lies. Damon Linker says the campaign’s lies about Hillary’s health are a serious self-inflicted wound. He says that if you take the current Clinton campaign narrative about her health — that she was diagnosed with pneumonia on Friday, but continued on with her campaign schedule — that still makes the campaign deceptive:

So the campaign chose to lie. The potential reward was considerable: namely, an absence of politically damaging news stories about Clinton’s medical condition. But the risk was enormous — and it’s blown up in their faces. Because now the story isn’t just that Clinton is ill. It’s that, once again, she’s untrustworthy — and this time about her own health.

That’s why the announcement that she has pneumonia will only fuel more speculation about Clinton’s physical condition, with potentially no end in sight. The world saw her collapse, and 90 minutes later, the candidate looked America in the eye and proclaimed that she was feeling great. Except now we know that she wasn’t.

What if she doesn’t recover quickly?

If she appears weak and frail for more than a few days? Then, yes, she’ll face perfectly reasonable questions about whether she’s physically up to serving as president. But worse, she’ll confront lingering doubts about what, precisely, is ailing her. “It’s pneumonia,” the campaign will proclaim over and over again. To which a skeptical America will justifiably reply, “Yes, we can tell that you’d like us to think so. But we have no reason to trust that’s true.”

Political trust is a fragile thing. Once it’s gone, it’s exceedingly difficult to get back — and without it, there’s no basis on which to dismiss conspiracy theories that even normally level-headed observers will begin, for perfectly understandable reasons, to entertain.

Until this weekend, I thought Clinton health rumors were just right-wing conspiracy mongering. That confidence collapsed when Mrs. Clinton did, on the streets of New York. The story now has two narrative lines: 1) How sick is Hillary, really?, and 2) Why did she lie about it?

The Clintons lie to protect their power. Clinton partisans will tell themselves, and the rest of America, that whatever happened on Sunday, and whatever series of tales the Clinton campaign has been telling to manage the story, we have to push it all aside to keep Donald Trump from winning. Feminists did the same thing back in the 1990s with Bill Clinton’s abusive, exploitive relationships with women. But not everybody who dislikes Trump hates him so much that they are willing to overlook Clinton’s lies, especially if they are not about things that happened in the past, as with her husband’s lies in the 1990s, but about things that weigh on her ability to perform as president.

Plus, Bill Clinton had a lot of charisma with which he shielded himself. Hillary has none. People may admire her, but they do not love her. That matters.

Hillary’s lies about her health and her “deplorables” remarks do not make Trump a better person, or a better candidate. But they do make him a slightly more plausible one with some voters than he was going into the weekend. When an election is as close as this one, that kind of thing matters.

And, given the horrible-and-growing-more-by-the-day choice facing voters this fall, there’s this coulda, woulda, shoulda, in light of the elderly Democratic nominee collapsing on the street:

Imagine a 44 year-old GOP candidate today

— John Podhoretz (@jpodhoretz) September 12, 2016

Something Is Very Wrong Here

A new angle. That poor woman. Look at her, gone stiff. What on earth is wrong with her? Does pneumonia do that?

I believe she is much sicker than they’ve let on. I hope I’m wrong. This video is unnerving.

Life Before 9/11

My oldest child, Matthew, was not quite two years old on 9/11. He has no memory of the event, though it happened before our very eyes, including his. We were living in Brooklyn then, at the waterfront, with a clear view of New York harbor. We did not see either plane hit, but were inside our apartment when the second plane struck the south tower. We heard people on the street screaming just before the impact, heard the horrible sound, and felt our building shake from the concussion. I was a columnist for the New York Post then, and ran on foot out of the apartment and across the Brooklyn Bridge, hoping to get into lower Manhattan to cover the story. I stopped several times on the bridge to interview dazed people, some of them bloody, staggering out of the Wall Street district and across the bridge to safety.

It never once occurred to me that either tower would fall down. In fact, I ran into one of my Post colleagues, a reporter who wasn’t due to come to work till that afternoon, out riding her bike. We stood on the bridge together trying to make sense of what was happening. I told her I was going to get as close as I could.

“Don’t,” she said. “Those things are coming down.”

I looked at her like she had lost her mind, and told her no, that wasn’t going to happen.

Less than a minute later, the south tower fell. The sound was like a roaring waterfall. I ended up going back to Brooklyn. Julie, with baby Matthew in her arms, shrieked when I walked in, with a light coating of dust on me. She had not been able to reach me on my mobile phone (cell service collapsed when the north tower did), and did not know if I was alive or dead.

Driving to New Orleans on Friday for the concert, Matt, now approaching 17, asked me what life was like before 9/11. I had never thought about that. It was kind of like asking what life was like before the Internet. The Internet has become so much a part of daily life that it’s hard to recall when it wasn’t here.

I told Matt that I think the biggest change is that the country is far more anxious now than it was before. We had just come off the 1990s, a decade in which the Cold War ended, the economy was booming, and America stood astride the world as the lone hyperpower. That all ended on 9/11. The shock of the event is hard to convey to a young man who has grown up knowing war and global terrorism as part of his daily life (though thank God, not as a local phenomenon, at least not for him). I remember that fall of 2001, sitting at a sidewalk cafe in Manhattan with a friend, both of us talking soberly about what we would do with our families if terrorists set off a dirty bomb in Midtown. We were dead serious, and it was by no means a crazy conversation to have in those days. Once you’ve seen the unthinkable, you know that anything can happen.

I don’t have those thoughts anymore, and haven’t for a long time. But you never quite feel secure in the world after you’ve lived through something like that, at least not if you saw it up close (“it” being not only the event, but the aftermath; I remember the burning sensation in my nasal cavity that lasted for weeks, and was caused by something in the smoke from the pile at Ground Zero. Anyway, I told Matt that 9/11 showed us that we were not invulnerable after all. Then the Iraq War showed us that we were not a hyperpower capable of ordering the world according to our will. These were hard lessons to learn as Americans. And then, in 2008, came the economic crash, which revealed how unstable our economy was.

That terrible day inaugurated an era of great anxiety from which we have not yet emerged. I was thinking this morning about how strained the social fabric of America seems to be today, and thought back not to 9/11/01, but a year later. On that date, I walked from Brooklyn with a friend to the one-year memorial service at Ground Zero. Only dignitaries and family members of the dead were allowed onto the site; the rest of us gathered outside, along the perimeter of the hole, which was surrounded by fences. Eerily, at on or very close to 8:45 a.m., a year to the moment from when the first plane hit the Twin Towers complex, a strong, steady 45-mph wind appeared, blowing from the same direction as that plane. I remember the direction, because I observed before the wind started that had I been standing on that very spot a year ago, the plane would have entered the north tower directly above my head.

The wind seemingly came out of nowhere, and it started just as the ceremony began at Ground Zero. It’s the kind of wind that you associate with a storm front moving in. But there was no storm. The skies were clear. It blew with a freakish ferocity, all throughout the Ground Zero event, in which people present read aloud the names of all the dead. I had become separated somehow from my friend, and ended up a couple of hours later inside Trinity church on Wall Street, where the Archbishop of Canterbury led a memorial prayer service. The wind was still howling outside when I went into the church, just as it had been constantly since just before 9 that morning. At some point during the service, we heard the bells ring outside the church, at Ground Zero, signaling the end of the names ceremony. It wasn’t long before the Anglican service ended too. When I exited the church, the winds had stopped. I can’t say for sure that the gale ended as soon as the last name was read, bringing the Ground Zero ritual to a close, but it definitely ended after the Trinity service began.

Like I said, it was eerie.

Later that day, back home in Brooklyn, I received an e-mail from my friend, who lived at that time in my neighborhood. When she got home from Ground Zero, she noticed that a small antique American flag she had framed under glass and hanging on the wall of her office had torn in two, right down the middle. She found it unnerving, and invited me over to see it. She swore that it had never been like that, and to the best of her reckoning, had somehow come apart that morning, during the ceremony.

Understand: this antique American flag was inside her apartment, framed under glass, and hanging on her wall. Something tore it. True, it might have come apart earlier, and my friend only noticed it that day, but I don’t think so. She looked at that flag every single day. On this day, September 11, 2002, it was torn.

It unsettled us both, because it seemed so blatantly ominous. Over time, I forgot about it. This morning, on 9/11/16, it came to mind again. I think it was actually an omen, but even if it is just an accidental symbol, I think it reveals a lot about how America is different today than it was before September 11, 2001.

Anyway, I put the question to you: How is America different today than it was before 9/11?

How Sick Is Hillary?

No doubt about it, Hillary Clinton’s fainting episode in NYC today is big, big news. It was not that hot in the city today. The Washington Post‘s Chris Cillizza, who last week dismissed talk that her Labor Day coughing fit meant anything, nails why:

Coughing, I wrote, is simply not evidence enough of any sort of major illness that Clinton is assumed to be hiding. Neither, of course, is feeling “overheated.” But those two things happening within six days of each other to a candidate who is 68 years old makes talk of Clinton’s health no longer just the stuff of conspiracy theorists.

Whereas Clinton and her campaign could laugh off questions about her health before today, the “overheating” episode makes it almost impossible for them to do so. Not only has it come at a time when there was growing chatter — with very little evidence — that her health was a problem but it also happened at a 9/11 memorial event — an incredibly high-profile moment with lots and lots of cameras and reporters around.

Her campaign may well try to dismiss this story as nothing more than an isolated incident, meaning nothing. (Democrats were already pushing the story of George W. Bush fainting in 2002 after choking on a pretzel, via Twitter.)

But the issue is that Clinton kept reporters totally in the dark for 90 minutes after her abrupt departure from the 9/11 memorial service for a health-related matter. No reporter was allowed to follow her. (Clinton has resisted a protective pool for coverage because Donald Trump refuses to participate in one.) This is, yet again, the Clinton campaign asking everyone to just trust it. She got overheated! But she’s fine now!

Trust a Clinton? That’s a big ask under normal circumstances, and these are not normal circumstances. Look, I feel sorry for both candidates. They’re old people, and the campaign schedule they follow is grueling. It would be hard on anybody. But the presidency is also grueling, and now there is reason to wonder if Clinton is up to it.

Donald Trump got a lot out of referring to Jeb Bush as “low energy.” Just you wait now.

See it happen here:

UPDATE: Noah172 posts this fascinating close-up video showing a small metal object falling out of Mrs. Clinton’s pants leg as she staggers getting into the van. Doctors, is this a thing?:

UPDATE.2: Scott Adams:

If humans were rational creatures, the time and place of Clinton’s “overheating” wouldn’t matter at all. But when it comes to American psychology, there is no more powerful symbol of terrorism and fear than 9-11 . When a would-be Commander-in-Chief withers – literally – in front of our most emotional reminder of an attack on the homeland, we feel unsafe. And safety is our first priority.

Hillary Clinton just became unelectable.

The mainstream media might not interpret today’s events as a big deal. After all, it was only a little episode of overheating. And they will continue covering the play-by-play action until election day. But unless Trump actually does shoot someone on 5th Avenue, he’s running unopposed.

UPDATE.3: From a physician:

I am in internist in a large metro area.

It is my job to make diagnoses often with just my eyes and nose and ears alone – this is especially true in the geriatric community.

It is with great consternation that I have seen and read physician evaluations of Mrs. Clinton in the news media. You should never make diagnoses like that without having the patient right in front of you.

Furthermore – some of the videos that have been put forward to support these claims have just been looney-tunes.

All that being said – I am deeply concerned about this video.

Mrs. Clinton clearly suffered a syncopal episode while getting into that van today. The “overheating” excuse is just ridiculous – a normal healthy individual would never do that type of thing in 80 degree weather unless they had just completed a marathon or something profoundly strenuous. That just does not occur. That immediately puts the lie to the “overheated” excuse that her campaign came up with.

Well you say – could it have been a fainting spell? Possible – but in my 30 years experience as a physician, “fainting spells” or vasovagal episodes do not usually require 4 or 5 people to throw someone in a van. Furthermore – in that type of event the person almost always slinks straight down or backwards – NOT FORWARDS. Mrs. Clinton very clearly is going forward.

I see the metal object in that video – I haven’t a clue what that could be – nothing in my experience as a physician looks quite like that – could it have been an inkpen? Regardless – the far far more telling issue that you can clearly see in that video around the time the metal is dropped is Mrs. Clinton’s right foot. It was clearly being dragged along the street with the anterior portion down on the concrete. I am certain this is how the shoe came off. The comportment of this foot could only mean one thing – her brain or her spinal cord was offline – if ever so fleeting – during that moment. Her right foot was acutely flaccid. There are but a few things that can cause this type of issue:

BRAIN or Spinal Cord TRAUMA – no way this happened

An overdose of powerful sedatives or general anesthesia – again – this seems to not be the case

A seizure – not likely – this type of thing usually occurs in the post-ictal phase after a tonic-clonic seizure – and people who are having this type of thing – DO NOT WALK TO A VAN.

A Stroke or TIA – It is possible but not likely – given her interview on the street just an hour later. It would have had to have been a very very fast TIA or transient ischemic attack to recover this quickly – the recovery on this is usually hours or days.

The most likely diagnosis – in my mind – an acute cardiac arrhythmia – either ventricular tachycardia – or more likely atrial fibrillation with a rapid ventricular response. A FIB with RVR is very very commonly associated with people feeling flushed or overheated – for quite extended periods of time – dizziness and nausea are also possible. When they exert themselves – it is not unusual at all for them to have complete syncope like she appeared to do today. If not afib with RVR – it is possible there could have been some other supraventricular tachycardia – there are several different types.

(A side note – this is NOT without precedent in modern American presidential history – If you will recall the incident where George H W Bush stood up and vomited all over the Prime Minister of Japan at a state dinner. That incident was precipitated by exactly this – AFIB with RVR.)

Why am I gravely concerned about this diagnosis?

In my experience as a physician – this can happen at any time – however – it typically and often happens at times of great stress. Cardiac arrhthymias can be very easy to control – or very difficult to control. However – this has often meant “retirement” for my business executive patients down the years – the syncopal events can simply happen at very inopportune times and cause all kinds of havoc for the person and his/her company. This is NOT the type of thing that I would want my President to have during a very stressful time.

My fear is that it is fully known what is wrong with her – and this is being hidden from the American public.

By the way – the diagnosis of “pneumonia” being put forth by her physician – Dr. Bardack – is just simply imbecile. A patient who would have this kind of event with pneumonia – would NOT be up and walking around an hour later. If this type of thing happens during pneumonia or any other infection, the patient is almost always suffering from sepsis – and not up and walking. Again – this is imbecile. Third year medical students know better than this.

By the way – as an internist – I have been very very concerned about the reporting of the physicians covering Trump and Clinton. There is something clearly mentally wrong with Trump’s personal physician. I am not sure what is wrong with that guy – but something clearly ails him. The scrutiny there was deserved and as of yet has not been answered even remotely by the Trump campaign. For the life of me – I do not know why there has not been equal attention on Dr. Bardack – Mrs. Clinton’s physician. It has been known for a few weeks to internists in America connected to social media THAT Dr. BARDACK IS NOT BOARD-CERTIFIED by the American Board of Internal Medicine. If you look at the website for the American Board of Internal Medicine – and look her up – abim.org – you will find that SHE IS NOT BOARD-CERTIFIED. Why would Mrs. Clinton release a medical statement from a non-Board Certified physician? I have been puzzled by the fact that the national press has made such a deal about the failings of Trump’s physician (rightly so) – but chirping crickets about the obvious board issues with Dr. Bardack. Any ideas about that?

UPDATE.4:

1979

UPDATE.5: Another update from the internist:

A few clarifying points to my earlier post –

First of all – let us talk about walking pneumonia.

I have no doubt that Mrs. Clinton may have been diagnosed with pneumonia on Friday. That is entirely possible. 70 year olds have pneumonia all the time. My point is that pneumonia in and of itself – WOULD NEVER make someone do what happened today. I am fully aware of walking pneumonia – and indeed – by definition – it is “walking”. It is a type of pneumonia caused by very specific organism(s) that are much different than those types that will put you in the hospital. The point being – walking pneumonia will produce ill symptoms – often a cough and overall malaise – but will never ever cause a syncope like episode. Pneumonia or reaction to antibiotics simply do not produce what happened today in the absence of many other grave symptoms – and believe me people would not be walking through a parking lot with these symptoms.

I want to clarify the cardiac arrhythmia issue as well. AFIB with RVR is but one of many types of rhythm problems that could be going on – it is by far the most common therefore the most likely. This is what happens when people have afib: the atria – the top chambers of the heart – are beating in total chaos. Normally – your AV node protects the bottom part – ventricles – or pumping chambers from being exposed to the chaos. You can go for long times months even years without any problems at all. However, ever so often the AV node fails in its protection – the chaos from above is transported to the ventricles below and suddenly the bottom of the heart is beating 150, 160 whatever. Just think how you feel after 15 minutes on a treadmill. Running hard. Heart rate of 150 – light-headed and short of breath. Now imagine that you get off the treadmill – and your heart just keeps right on going at 150. In about 10 minutes you will begin to feel very bad. This is manifested in different ways by different people. Shortness of breath is very common. The feeling of being flushed or hot is very common. Nausea and vomiting are very very common. But your heart will not slow down. After several minutes of this – even the most simple exertion like walking – can lead to such low blood pressure that you will have syncope (pass out). That is why AFIB with RVR is so high on the differential diagnosis of the tape I saw today.

Something else of concern that has been running through my mind since I saw that tape is yet another diagnosis that I neglected to put in the initial discussion. This is EXACTLY how people will react if they have an implantable defibrillator and it fires. This would be the same as having the big paddles put on you in the ER – and shocked. Over the past 20 years or so – we have been putting “paddles” directly into patients chest that fire and shock them whenever the computer that is attached to them perceives there is a problem. These patients would already have a diagnosis of a cardiac rhythm problem. One of two things in my experience happens. 1) The rhythm problem comes out of nowhere – and the patient is shocked. They would seem to drop to the ground instantly 2) Often, the rhythm problem is lurking for several minutes before the shock occurs. It all depends on the diagnosis and the settings of the device. But the patient will often feel very very weak and tired, dizzy, hot and light-headed in the seconds/minutes before the device fires. When it does fire however – most of the time – the patient goes down temporarily – just like Mrs. Clinton did today.

Will someone ask her please if she has a defibrillator in her chest? This may or may not be so – but do you want someone who can be shocked like that in charge of the country in a crisis?

I want to for personal reasons address concerns about my ethics in some of the above comments.

I agree – no diagnosis should ever be made without the patient being right in front of you. And many of the tapes and videos used in the past month about Mrs. Clinton’s health have been “out there”. I am not making a diagnosis on her – I am offering up medical facts about what could have caused something like this to occur. Common things occur commonly. This video today is clearly not from the lunatic fringe like some of the others I have seen this past few weeks. I am gravely concerned about this after what I saw today – and I wholeheartedly believe the voters need to know the whole story – whatever that may be – and what the campaign is telling and putting forth makes little sense medically speaking. As is so often in politics – it is the lies and confusion put forward to cover things up – that gets people in trouble.

I like most of America am absolutely dismayed with the choices we have this year for President. This video today did not help decrease my concern about this election.

Another question I have – and about this I need to be perfectly clear. Had I seen that video on any of my patients – and believe me – having things caught on video is actually very common in medicine today – my very very first reaction would be GET THAT PATIENT TO THE ER – I AM MEETING YOU THERE. Why on earth was Mrs. Clinton not rushed to the hospital???? — That issue alone brings up all sorts of concerning thoughts in my mind..

And about her personal physician – Dr. Raback. In my haste – to get the previous comment done – and typing quickly – I did not fully convey her status with the Board of Internal Medicine. (This is really in the deep woods) If you care to do some research about this issue – Board Certification and its maintenance is HIGHLY CONTROVERSIAL among internists now. (Please see drwes.blogspot.com for full details). She is listed as CERTIFIED – but NOT PARTICIPATING in MAINTENANCE. That means that she has made the decision not to maintain her certification. She passed her initial exams and was certified at some point in the past – but is not participating in maintaining this going forward. At some point – this will put her at great risk of being dropped from insurance panels, etc. This is a huge thorn in the side of the internal medicine community at this point. The whole thing is a total mess. It is an example of government regulation gone horribly awry. But the fact of the matter is that she is not participating in her continued certification – There are those in internal medicine who would think that to be not a good thing.

Just a few clarifying points.

I am not a journalist. I am a physician.

I am most certainly not trying to make a diagnosis – I am certainly not going on TV and making an expert opinion on this. That is foolishness. Just trying to present how a trained internist would think through and process this video today. I am just trying to do my duty to make sure people are aware that this looks far far worse than what is being put out for public consumption.

Solange Knowles: Race-Baiting Diva

So, Beyonce’s sister Solange was at the Kraftwerk concert in New Orleans too, and managed to turn her own rude and inconsiderate behavior into a racial incident. Check out this series of tweets:

Let me tell you about why black girls / women are so angry….

— solange knowles (@solangeknowles) September 10, 2016

I took my son, his friend, and my husband to see Kraftwerk in New Orleans…

Was very excited to dance and enjoy a band I love.

— solange knowles (@solangeknowles) September 10, 2016

We are 4 of about 20 black concert goers out 1500 here.

4 out of maaaybbe 20 out of 1500.

— solange knowles (@solangeknowles) September 10, 2016

We walk in, and one of my favorite songs, Machine, is on. I’m excited to tell my son about how hip hop sampled Kraftwerk. We are dancing.

— solange knowles (@solangeknowles) September 10, 2016

4 older white women yell to me from behind, “Sit down now” . I tell them I’m dancing at a concert. They yell, “u need to sit down now”…

— solange knowles (@solangeknowles) September 10, 2016

We are at an ELECTRONIC and DANCE music concert and you are telling…not asking me…to sit down. In front of my child.

— solange knowles (@solangeknowles) September 10, 2016

They proceed to throw something at my back….

— solange knowles (@solangeknowles) September 10, 2016

Now the old me……

— solange knowles (@solangeknowles) September 10, 2016

But in this moment, I’m just going to share my experience…

So that maybe someone will understand, why many of us don’t feel safe…

— solange knowles (@solangeknowles) September 10, 2016

…in many white spaces…

We don’t “bring the drama”….

Fix yourself.

— solange knowles (@solangeknowles) September 10, 2016

She posted another tweet characterizing this as a racist attack, but I’m not going to post that here because she dropped the f-bomb. She also reports that the object thrown at her was a lime wedge (she says “a lime,” but clearly meant lime wedge, because the theater served mixed drinks during the show, ergo the only limes in the house were wedges). You can read more of her tweets in the People magazine story about Solange confront white power at the Edmund Pettus Bridge Kraftwerk show.

This is aggravating and even kind of depressing. I was at that same show, at the Orpheum Theater, though seated in in the balcony. I paid about $75 a seat for our two seats. The orchestra level seats were a lot more expensive. Being on the floor, if the person seated in front of you stands up, you won’t be able to see.

Judging from these tweets, it never seemed to occur to Solange Knowles, a privileged multimillionaire who made her money in the group Destiny’s Child, that people who pay $150+ for orchestra-level seats at a concert in a theater have a right to see the damn concert. When she tells her two million Twitter followers that she was simply “dancing at a concert,” she neglects to say that this was a show in a Beaux Arts theater, and there was no way to dance without making it difficult if not impossible for the people behind you to see the show. Nope, she believes she should be able to stand up and dance no matter whose view she obstructs — and if you object, and happen to have white skin, you are a racist who made her feel “unsafe.” She showed no courtesy to the people behind her, but apparently felt that she had a right to behave like a jerk to them, and to call them racist for having the audacity to tell her to do like everybody else was doing, and sit down.

Nobody should have thrown a lime at her, or at anybody else. They should have asked an usher to make her sit down or leave. But look, I was there, and I saw that crowd. The only way that audience could have been less safe is if they had been on walkers or had been kindergartners. I was amazed by how much older the crowd was than I expected. I’m 49, and I’d say most people there were around my age. I saw some younger, and I saw more than a few who were significantly older. This was not an unsafe crowd in any sense of the word. 

From my seat in the balcony, I noticed someone on the front row dancing in at least part of the show. I remember thinking that it must be awful to be sitting behind her. Was it Solange Knowles? I dunno. I wouldn’t know her if she bit me on the nose, and I could only see a woman’s shoulder-length head of hair bobbing in silhouette.

Conclusion: Solange Knowles is a race-baiting diva. The reaction she got at the show on Friday night had nothing to do with her blackness, and everything to do with her rudeness. But because she characterized herself as a martyr to white oppression on Twitter, suffering on behalf of all black women everywhere, it got picked up by People, by E!Online and other outlets. Don’t you believe it.

She got this slam in at Louisiana:

And last thing…
I see folks saying "Well u live in Louisiana"….but I say I live in a city w THE most incredible, beautiful black. folk.

— solange knowles (@solangeknowles) September 10, 2016

Well, she does, but I bet most of them, like most other people in New Orleans of all races, are a lot more polite and less entitled than Solange Knowles apparently is.