Rod Dreher's Blog, page 569

Orlando: The Reichstag Fire

Hold your Godwins, please. The term “Reichstag fire” refers to the 1933 arson at the German parliament building, committed by at least one communist. Hitler, the new chancellor, did not let this crisis go to waste. He took advantage of the outrage over the attack to push for sweeping laws suppressing communists, the Nazis’ political rivals. In this sense, Orlando is a “Reichstag fire” event, I predict, because it is a genuine and appalling atrocity that will lead to the demonization, in law and in custom, of orthodox Christians and any who disagree with whatever LGBTs and their allies want.

It’s going to happen. Social and religious conservatives had better get ready for it.

We already saw this yesterday, with this statement by Democratic Congressman Don Beyer from Virginia:

Number three, we must recognize that homophobia cannot be contained. Hatred breeds hatred. We are horrified that one man targeted LGBT victims at two a.m. on an Orlando Sunday morning. But we are not blameless, when we tell government contractors it is okay to discriminate against someone because they are gay or lesbian – or tell transgender school children that we will not respect their gender identity.

Our sincere, sustained message of inclusion will create a powerful wall against LGBT hate.

Got it? You oppose laws allowing transgendered males into the women’s bathroom and locker room, you are complicit in Omar Mateen’s slaughter. The only way to stop future massacres, presumably, is to suppress speech and thought we don’t like.

Catholic Bishop Robert Lynch, whose Florida diocese paid $100,000 to settle a claim made by a former employee who accused Lynch of sexually harrassing him, is on the train:

Second, sadly it is religion, including our own, which targets, mostly verbally, and also often breeds contempt for gays, lesbians and transgender people. Attacks today on LGBT men and women often plant the seed of contempt, then hatred, which can ultimately lead to violence. Those women and men who were mowed down early yesterday morning were all made in the image and likeness of God. We teach that. We should believe that. We must stand for that. Without yet knowing who perpetrated the PULSE mass murders, when I saw the Imam come forward at a press conference yesterday morning, I knew that somewhere in the story there would be a search to find religious roots. While deranged people do senseless things, all of us observe, judge and act from some kind of religious background. Singling out people for victimization because of their religion, their sexual orientation, their nationality must be offensive to God’s ears. It has to stop also.

 

It is certainly true that Christians who hate gays and abuse them are sinning and should repent. But what is “victimization”? Does that include opposing same-sex marriage, or transgender bathroom bills? Does it include affirming what the Roman Catholic church teaches about homosexuality? That’s how people are taking the bishop’s remarks. Here’s Zack Ford at Think Progress, spurning the prayers and good wishes of Baptist leader Russell Moore, because Moore upholds the biblical view of sexuality, but embracing Bishop Lynch:

One religious leader, however, actually demonstrated that there is another option. Bishop Robert Lynch, who serves the Catholic diocese of St. Petersburg, Florida, didn’t try to reconcile the beliefs his Church espouses. He took responsibility. … The United States Conference of Catholic Bishops has dedicated millions of dollars to opposing LGBT equality over the years. Bishop Lynch may be the first actively serving member of that organization to admit that these efforts may have had consequences for LGBT people.

Ford goes on to list what conservative Christians must do, including:

If people who share Moore’s beliefs reach out to their LGBT neighbors now or in the future, they should consider that what they want us to feel might not be the same as what we actually hear.

If you want us to feel love, then do not tell us our sexuality is wrong or that the only way to be right is to be celibate. What we hear is actually that we are unworthy of love.

If you want us to feel equal, then do not try to justify refusing us jobs, housing, or goods and services in the name of your religious beliefs. What we hear is that we deserve to be treated as second-class citizens.

If you want us to feel community, then do not tell us that you cannot condone our marriages. What we hear is that our families are not welcome to share a neighborhood with yours.

If you want us to feel dignity, then do not tell us that we cannot be transgender or try to tell us what bathrooms we can or cannot use. What we hear is that you aren’t actually interested or invested in understanding who we are or supporting our wellness.

And so on. Otherwise, “sympathy without affirmation rings hollow; it is unworthy of our gratitude.” Ford, good progressive that he is, says “do not encourage us to demonize Islam or pass the blame onto terrorism.” Of course not, even though the mass murderer was an Islamic terrorist. We must remember who the real enemy is here: Russell Moore and people like him. People like me.

I don’t know how widely shared Ford’s view is among the LGBT community and its allies, but I suspect it is general, and it is sincere. What Ford and those who agree with him are doing is demanding that we give up what we believe to be true, or nothing we say about love, respect, and the rest of it matters.

I believe this will be the line that emerges out of Orlando. And the campaign will happen because it’s in the playbook. GLSEN has over the years managed to get its teaching programs mainstreamed in schools under the guise of stopping bullying and making schools “safe.” The stated theory is that if you really want to stop bullying, you will teach children that there’s nothing wrong with homosexuality, transgenderism, etc. That is to say, it’s not enough that kids be taught respect and tolerance; kids must be taught that what orthodox Christianity says is not only wrong, but by implication makes schools unsafe.

It has been an extraordinarily successful campaign. And we are about to see it scaled up to the national level. Any Republican politician, and any religious leader, who opposes what the LGBT activists and their allies in the Democratic Party want is going to be tarred as having the blood of Orlando victims on their hands.

I anticipate the comments to this post: “How dare you worry about how this is going to affect your community when we haven’t even buried the victims yet?!” And that reaction, however inadvertently, is part of the campaign. Zack Ford, Rep. Beyer, Bishop Lynch and others are using the Orlando atrocity to advance goals, political and religious. I don’t doubt their sincerity. Nor do I doubt, not for one second, how effective they are going to be.

Now we will see the price individual Christians are willing to pay to remain faithful. Now we will see how many Christians have the inner strength to obey Jesus’s command: “But I say to you, Love your enemies, bless them that curse you, do good to them that hate you, and pray for them which spitefully use you, and persecute you.”

When I talk about the need for the Benedict Option, this is part of what I mean: the need for orthodox Christians to come together in thick communities to keep our faith, to help each other through things like what’s to come, and to remind one another that no matter what, we cannot return hatred for hatred. That is forbidden to us.

Omar Mateen Confidential

So, let’s see what we’ve learned about the Orlando terrorist today:

1. He was likely a closet case.

He had been drinking at Pulse at least a dozen times. From USA Today:

As investigators on Monday scoured the details of Orlando nightclub shooter Omar Mateen’s life, several regulars at the Pulse nightclub offered a startling revelation: They had seen Mateen there before, they said, drinking, arguing and talking about his family.

The FBI late Monday told USA TODAY that it was reviewing these eyewitness accounts, but that it wasn’t clear whether Mateen’s possible visits may have served as efforts to scout the target or whether he was a patron of the club. Orlando Police Chief John Mina on Monday said he had no information about the sightings.

Pulse patron Kevin West said the 29-year-old Mateen even messaged him on and off for a year before the shooting, using a gay chat and dating app called Jack’d, the Los Angeles Times reported.

What kind of devout Muslim goes drinking booze at a gay bar? You’re going to blame Islam for this guy? Really?

2. He was probably mentally ill.

His ex-wife said yesterday that he was bipolar. Today, there was this from a high school friend who said Mateen cheered on 9/11:

“He didn’t hide it,” Aahil Khan said of Mateen’s happiness at attacks on New York and Washington, D.C. “He said they suspended him because he was yelling to everyone that it was a good thing. He was the only one there who wasn’t upset that they attacked.”

“I feel like that was a big moment in his life, seeing” the attacks.

Khan said it was clear even then that Mateen was mentally ill.

“I felt sorry for him,” said Khan, who lost touch with Mateen after high school and believed his former friend was depressed, somewhat delusional and paranoid. “He couldn’t control his emotions.”

3. He was filled with rage at everybody.

From a co-worker of Mateen’s:

“There was never a moment where he didn’t have anger and rage,” Gilroy told “The Kelly File”. “And he was always loud and cursing. And anytime a female or a black person came by, he would use horrible words.”

On one occasion, Gilroy said, Mateen told him, “I would just like to kill all those [n-words]” after a conversation between Mateen and a black man. “A few times he mentioned homosexuals and Jewish people,” Gilroy said, “but we didn’t deal with them quite as often, so it was mostly women and blacks, because those were the people in front of us.”

Gilroy told Florida Today that he complained to his superiors several times about Mateen, but they refused to take action because, Gilroy claimed, Mateen was Muslim. Gilroy said he quit G4S in 2015 after Mateen began sending him dozens of harassing text and phone messages per day.

“Everything he said was toxic,” Gilroy told the paper, “and the company wouldn’t do anything. This guy was unhinged and unstable. He talked of killing people.”

This guy Mateen fits into nobody’s pet theory. Which won’t stop people from putting him there.

View From Your Table

Lake Balaton, Hungary

I may be wrong, but I think this is our first VFYT from Hungary. The reader, a Hungarian, writes:

Amid all this horrible news, a little relief: view from my table at Lake Balaton with some riesling in the bottle. Between the two glasses you can see Mount Badacsony in the background. The house dates back to the 1860s, it was a press house (used for making wine).

Here’s a photo of the reader’s lake house. I want to go to there!:

Scapegoating Of Christians Begins

A reader e-mails to say that at his company today, one of the executives sent out an e-mail to all employees, saying that in the wake of the Orlando attack, employees should register with the HR department as LGBT “allies,” and start attending the company’s LGBT events. The reader worries that if he doesn’t sign up as an ally, he will be marked out within the company as an enemy, especially in light of Orlando.

Another reader forwards an e-mail message his Congressman, Rep. Don Beyer (D-VA), sent to constituents. In it, he makes religious and social conservatives complicit in the Orlando massacre:

Number three, we must recognize that homophobia cannot be contained. Hatred breeds hatred. We are horrified that one man targeted LGBT victims at two a.m. on an Orlando Sunday morning. But we are not blameless, when we tell government contractors it is okay to discriminate against someone because they are gay or lesbian – or tell transgender school children that we will not respect their gender identity.

Our sincere, sustained message of inclusion will create a powerful wall against LGBT hate.

Another reader sends this outrageous column by CBC senior correspondent Neil Macdonald, in which he implicates all conservative religious believers in the Orlando mass murder.

You expect to see writers for Salon, Slate, Vox and other left-wing sites making that argument. But a US Congressman saying that if you oppose transgenders in girls’ locker rooms, you’re complicit with mass murder? It’s beyond disgusting.

And it’s just starting.

The other day, the Associated Press ran a piece talking about how alienated and anxious Evangelicals feel in the current moment. Excerpts:

Pastor Richie Clendenen stepped away from the pulpit, microphone in hand. He walked the aisles of Christian Fellowship Church, his voice rising to describe the perils believers face in 21st-century America.

“The Bible says in this life you will have troubles, you will have persecutions. And Jesus takes it a step further: You’ll be hated by all nations for my name’s sake,” he said.

“Let me tell you,” the minister said, “that time is here.”

More:

Clendenen said he saw “a lot of fear, a lot of anger” in his church after the Supreme Court [Obergefell] ruling. He said it made him feel that Christians like him had been pushed to the edge of a cliff.

“It has become the keystone issue,” he said, sitting in his office, where photos of his father and grandfather, both preachers, are on display. “I never thought we’d be in the place we are today. I never thought that the values I’ve held my whole life would bring us to a point where we were alienated or suppressed.”

And:

Some good may come of these hard times, he believes. Conservative Christians who have been complacent will have to decide just how much their religion matters “when there’s a price to pay for it,” he said. Christianity has often thrived in countries where it faces intense opposition, he noted.

Preaching now, Clendenen urged congregants to hold fast to their positions in a country that has grown hostile to them. And as the worship service wound down, he issued a final exhortation.

“Don’t give up,” he said. “Don’t let your light go out.”

Read the whole thing.

I have not the slightest doubt in my mind that if Hillary Clinton becomes president, the scapegoating of orthodox Christians of all kinds around LGBT issues will get much worse. The line will be that of the CBC’s Macdonald, who said:

Islam may be more overt about its homophobia than the other major religions — anyone who’s worked in the Middle East has heard some fool in high office declaring that there are no gays in Islam, and therefore no AIDS — but the fact is, conservative iterations of all the monotheistic faiths are deeply and actively and systemically anti-gay.

The sacred monotheistic texts contain prohibitions that would by just about any legal definition be considered hate speech in the modern secular world. …

Fundamentalists and traditionalists of all three faiths not only regard such passages as divine instruction, they actually portray their homophobia as a matter of religious freedom; something noble, protected by constitutions and essential to democracy, when in fact they are working to oppress and deny fundamental rights to people based solely upon the sexuality with which they were born.

The assault on orthodox Christians in particular and religious liberty in general will become much more intense. There can be no doubt at all that if Hillary Clinton becomes president, it will be turned into federal policy. Mark my words: under a Clinton administration, the IRS will be used to deny the tax-exempt status of Christian colleges that don’t capitulate.

Most conservative Christians I know find Donald Trump to be an excrescence. But as the attacks on Christians mount, and the campaign to demonize religious liberty as cover for hatred goes into overdrive, they will have to consider more carefully whether or not to vote for Trump as a matter of self-protection. As the AP story said:

Trump uses rhetoric that has resonance for Christian conservatives who fear their teachings on marriage will soon be outlawed as hate speech.

“We’re going to protect Christianity and I can say that,” Trump has said. “I don’t have to be politically correct.”

Every conservative Christian I know who has told me he or she is voting for Trump, despite everything, has said fear of what Clinton will do to religious liberty is at the heart of their decision. I get that. Boy, do I get that. And this week, it’s becoming ever clearer.

Who Owns The Orlando Massacre?

If you have the time, watch that ten-minute clip from SkyNews. In it, the gay journalist Owen Jones storms off the set of a program because he believes that the host and the other guest are downplaying the hatred of homosexuals angle to the Orlando shooting.

I have to say I’m somewhat sympathetic to him here. I don’t like it when, in the wake of Islamic terror attacks, commenters reflexively fall back on departicularizing language, e.g., “It was an attack on our freedom,” or “It was an attack on us all.” This sometimes seems to be a way of evading difficult truths. There is no way to divorce what happened in Orlando from the killer’s pathological hatred of gays. Jones is right to call them on it.

But I’m also somewhat sympathetic to the others on the program. It seems to me that Jones was trying to force them to say that the attack was about nothing other than homosexuality. That was his entire contribution to the discussion — and that is too reductive. Whatever the flaws in their discussion — and again, Jones made a good point, even if he got stuck on it — I took the host and the other guest to be trying to express simple human solidarity with the gays killed in the nightclub. I sympathize with the female guest on the show who tells Jones that she resents his attempt to “claim ownership of the horror of this crime.” She’s right that there is a tendency among some gay commenters (the always-excitable Mark Joseph Stern is a prime example) and their allies to bully people into reacting to the atrocity in approved ways.

The battle for control of the narrative is ugly.

Islam, Homosexuality, & Capital Punishment

Omar Mateen’s imam said he had no idea the guy had been radicalized. Excerpt:

Dr Rahman said he had not feared Mateen could be radicalised, because he had worked security and gone to the police academy.

“He was working security, he was working for the police department, so we assumed there was a background check. Why would we think anything like that? We were thinking that he might be a safety factor for us,” he said.

“Our impression was the family was very pro-American, that they were maybe more aligned with American than us,” he added.

Despite the fact that another young man who had visited the mosque on occasion became America’s first suicide bomber in Syria in 2014, Dr Rahman said the teaching at the mosque was peaceful and moderate.

“This is nothing that the Mosque is teaching them,” he said. “They get it from the Internet.”

My guess is that the imam is telling the truth, but that’s just a courtesy, assuming honesty until given a clear reason to think otherwise. My experience in Dallas in dealing with Muslim leaders a decade ago makes me wary, though. Back then, it was nothing but lies, bullying, and character assassination from their side. Here’s a piece I wrote in 2008 detailing my many run-ins with local Muslim leaders, particularly Mohammad Elmougy, an Egyptian-born hotelier who was at that time the leader of the Dallas area chapter of CAIR. Excerpts:

When I had the opportunity to ask a question, I told Dr. Syeed that his sentiments were laudable, but if ISNA really stood for peace and tolerance, why did it have on its board …and then I rattled off a list of board members and their direct connections to Islamic extremism. Dr. Syeed had been polite and professorial to that point, but at that point, he dropped his mask. He literally shook his fist at me, said this inquisition was worthy of Nazi Germany, and that I would one day “repent.” I told him mine was a fair question, and that I would appreciate an answer. I didn’t get one. But I had learned an important lesson about how groups like his operate: by evading legitimate queries, and browbeating journalists into retreat by calling them bigots and persecutors.

After I wrote a Morning News column about the Syeed encounter, I found myself identified on a local Islamic blog as” The New Face of Hate.” It turned out that the north Texas Muslim community had been engaged in a running battle with the Dallas Morning News since a series of investigative articles in the early part of the decade had uncovered alleged connections between the Holy Land Foundation charity and Hamas. The News’ reporter on the Holy Land story, Steve McGonigle, had had to be guarded for a while after threats, and the newspaper was picketed by local Muslims. Before I arrived, the newspaper had been making outreach efforts to the Dallas Islamic community in the wake of the Holy Land stories and indictments. And now I had come to town and spoiled things.

On a lark, I joined the Islamic blog’s listserv, to which several leading Dallas Muslims subscribed. I used my own name, which got me booted after a day or so upon discovery. Fortunately, in the short time I was on the site I printed out e-mails in which participants deliberated a plan to quietly approach unwitting business and religious leaders in the city and enlist them in a campaign to force the News’ publisher to fire me because of the threat I posed to the safety of Muslims.

“Dreher needs to be ruined,” one message said. Another suggested that “a campaign must be planned and carefully executed to expose this hate-monger and render him a joke.” I made all this public on the editorial board’s blog and sent copies to the newspaper’s lawyer. My guess is that aborted the whispering campaign before it could launch. But again, it was useful to see what journalists are up against.

More:

Two years ago, the editor-in-chief of my newspaper, a very fair-minded man, put together a working lunch in which Mohamed Elmougy, for years the leader of CAIR in Dallas, and I could meet to discuss our differences. Mr. Elmougy, who is no longer with CAIR but who had been for some time the leading public voice of Dallas-area Muslims, brought with him two associates. The editor-in-chief and the editorial page editor of the News accompanied me. Mr. Elmougy and I did most of the talking. It was a long meeting, but a cordial one. As we waited for the check, Mr. Elmougy said he didn’t understand why I considered Shaykh Yusuf al-Qaradawi, the popular satellite TV evangelist and spiritual advisor of the Muslim Brotherhood, to be violent. I responded by pointing out that Qaradawi has advocated executing homosexuals, and that he gave advice on his website about how a Muslim man can beat his wife in an Islamically correct way.

“That’s violent,” I told Mr. Elmougy. He slammed his hand on the table and said he agreed with the Shaykh, and that he wouldn’t apologize for it. He went on to tell a story about an adulteress who came to the Prophet asking for release from her sins. The Prophet ordered her stoned to death, said Mr. Elmougy, and declared that he could see her rejoicing in paradise. Mr. Elmougy finished his account by saying that things we Westerners consider to be unacceptable violence are considered by Muslims like him to be pro-family “deterrence.”

I thanked him for his candor, for admitting that he favors executing gays, wife-beating, stoning adulteresses, and chopping the hands off of thieves. I could tell, though, that my colleagues from the paper were shocked by what they had heard. American journalists simply aren’t used to hearing Islamic leaders in this country talk like that. And Islamic leaders in this country, I’d wager, are not used to being questioned sharply about their views. It’s also the case that Mr. Elmougy fits no Westerner’s idea of what a radical Muslim looks like. He is smart, well-dressed, professional, and to all appearances, Westernized. You simply don’t expect to be sitting in a fancy steakhouse and to hear a man who looks like the manager of a luxury hotel—which is what he was at the time—advocating medieval tortures. The cognitive dissonance can be overwhelming.

One more bit:

My next meeting with Mr. Elmougy came a year later, in the late autumn of 2006, when he led a delegation of local Muslim leaders in to the paper to meet with the editorial board, mostly to complain about, well, me, and to clear up misunderstandings that my supposedly biased rantings might have caused among my colleagues. The meeting was on the record, and I openly recorded it, later transcribing the session and posting it to the editorial board blog of the News. That transcript exposes how at least some Muslim leaders deal with media inquiries: through obfuscation, misdirection, and defensive accusations of bigotry. Allow me to dwell on this transcript to give you a flavor of how this sort of session goes. You can find the transcript archived at [link is now dead — RD]. Mr. Elmougy began the meeting by stating that his goal was to help journalists “find out how could we live in harmony …as opposed to pointing the finger.” He added that he wanted “to create some kind of comfort level,” and to end journalistic suspicion of Islam and Muslims. “We need to figure out a way [to] help you get rid of that.”

Notice what he’s doing here. He’s framing everyday journalistic practice—asking critical, skeptical questions—as an antisocial, even bigoted, act. He begins by trying to put his media audience on the defensive, as if they, the journalists, should be ashamed of themselves for their inquiries.

Read the whole thing.

I genuinely don’t trust US Muslim leaders or the American news media to report accurately about what’s going on. On the other hand, I don’t trust alternative media either, because the question of Islam in America is so fraught with ideological anxieties on both the Left and the Right that it’s impossible to know when you’re getting the truth, and when you’re being spun.

I try to keep front to mind something an old friend who worked for years undercover in counterterrorism told me. She said that the best sources she had were Muslims who were sick of what was happening in their own community, and wanted to do something about it. You will never know about them, she said, because their lives depend on preserving their anonymity. The Muslim community in America, she said — this was back in 2002, so things may have changed — is dominated by Muslim Brotherhood hacks well-funded by the Saudis and other Gulf Arabs. Ordinary Muslims who just want to pray and to get on with their lives in America are intimidated by them — and their fears are often justified. Her point was to warn me not to jump to conclusions about what the broader Muslim community is or is not doing to fight terrorism. But she also warned me to be very careful about believing what their leadership says.

I hope that this mass murder will finally force American journalists to ask probing questions of US Muslim leaders about whether or not they agree with the sharia mandate that homosexuals ought to be murdered — and if they do not, why don’t they? Do you want to know what they really think, journalists, or do you only want to manage the news?

Note well that there is a world of difference between considering homosexuality to be sinful — as all three Abrahamic religions do (minus contemporary liberal versions of Judaism and Christianity) — and believing that gays should be put to death. So don’t make a false equivalence among the three.

Donald Trump, Loser

This long investigation by The New York Times into Trump’s casino business in Atlantic City is a revelation. How can you read this and believe the man is anything other than a charlatan? Excerpts:

His audacious personality and opulent properties brought attention — and countless players — to Atlantic City as it sought to overtake Las Vegas as the country’s gambling capital. But a close examination of regulatory reviews, court records and security filings by The New York Times leaves little doubt that Mr. Trump’s casino business was a protracted failure. Though he now says his casinos were overtaken by the same tidal wave that eventually slammed this seaside city’s gambling industry, in reality he was failing in Atlantic City long before Atlantic City itself was failing.

But even as his companies did poorly, Mr. Trump did well. He put up little of his own money, shifted personal debts to the casinos and collected millions of dollars in salary, bonuses and other payments. The burden of his failures fell on investors and others who had bet on his business acumen.

In three interviews with The Times since late April, Mr. Trump acknowledged in general terms that high debt and lagging revenues had plagued his casinos. He did not recall details about some issues, but did not question The Times’s findings. He repeatedly emphasized that what really mattered about his time in Atlantic City was that he had made a lot of money there.

You got that? He built his “success” on the backs of his investors, whom he bilked. More:

Mr. Trump assembled his casino empire by borrowing money at such high interest rates — after telling regulators he would not — that the businesses had almost no chance to succeed.

His casino companies made four trips to bankruptcy court, each time persuading bondholders to accept less money rather than be wiped out. But the companies repeatedly added more expensive debt and returned to the court for protection from lenders.

After narrowly escaping financial ruin in the early 1990s by delaying payments on his debts, Mr. Trump avoided a second potential crisis by taking his casinos public and shifting the risk to stockholders.

And he never was able to draw in enough gamblers to support all of the borrowing. During a decade when other casinos here thrived, Mr. Trump’s lagged, posting huge losses year after year. Stock and bondholders lost more than $1.5 billion.

All the while, Mr. Trump received copious amounts for himself, with the help of a compliant board. In one instance, The Times found, Mr. Trump pulled more than $1 million from his failing public company, describing the transaction in securities filings in ways that may have been illegal, according to legal experts.

Mr. Trump now says that he left Atlantic City at the perfect time. The record, however, shows that he struggled to hang on to his casinos years after the city had peaked, and failed only because his investors no longer wanted him in a management role.

He ruined a lot of small business owners who never got paid, or got paid pennies on the dollar, when he went bankrupt. And then there were his investors, who were weirdly mesmerized by this guy. More:

In retrospect, David Hanlon, a veteran casino executive who ran Merv Griffin’s Atlantic City operations at the time of the Resorts battle, said, Mr. Trump succeeded in repeatedly convincing investors, bankers and Wall Street that “his name had real value.”

“They were so in love with him that they came back a second, third and fourth time,” Mr. Hanlon said. “They let him strip out assets. It was awful to watch. It was astonishing. I have to give Trump credit for using his celebrity time and time again.”

Read the whole thing. Seriously, read it. This man might become the US president. Why are people so eager to believe him? Well, let’s ask Scott Adams, who predicted ages ago that Trump would win the nomination. Adams said that Trump may be ignorant of science, but he’s got an intuitive understanding of what science says works for politicians. Excerpts:

But here’s the wrinkle with the view that Trump is not a man of science. One of the things science knows for sure – without a smidge of doubt – is that humans are irrational and we can be influenced by many things…except the truth. Truth is useless for persuasion whenever emotions are involved.

You know what field has a lot of emotional content? Politics. All of it. It is all emotional, from top to bottom. In politics, facts are generally irrelevant. Facts do come in handy while performing the boring work of governing. But during an election, facts are just noise.

So when Rand Paul (for example) tried to win the nomination with his calm demeanor and command of the issues, he fizzled on the launchpad. No traction whatsoever. That’s because Rand Paul did not understand the SCIENCE of persuasion.

Yeah, it’s a science. See my Persuasion Reading List and check it out for yourself, especially the books Influence, Impossible to Ignore, and Thinking, Fast and Slow. The science of persuasion is robust and settled. People are irrational and their decisions are based on emotion, influence, and random variables. Reason is mostly an illusion.

Which of the many candidates for president this season is familiar with the SCIENCE of persuasion? Only Trump, until recently. He saved time and money by ignoring the stuff that doesn’t matter (facts) while putting all of his energy into the stuff that does. And it is working.

And that bothers a lot of people because we think we love reason, and we think we love the truth. What we don’t know is that we don’t really love reason (or use it) and most of what they think of as the truth is actually cognitive dissonance and bias. Human brains did not evolve to provide us with truth. Our brains evolved to keep us alive. So if the false movie in your head is different from the false movie in mine – but we both survive and procreate – nature is satisfied. Truth is irrelevant.

The inconvenient truth about Trump is that he’s operating on a persuasion level because it is compatible with science. And science is awesome.

Trump is apparently a better liar than Bill Clinton, if you can imagine it.

Exploiting Orlando

I wasn’t going to post anything like this until tomorrow, but the sickening quality of the post-Orlando reaction is simply overwhelming, and is a story in and of itself:

What has happened in Orlando is just the beginning. Our leadership is weak and ineffective. I called it and asked for the ban. Must be tough

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) June 12, 2016

Omar Mateen was born in America. He is an American. This is scapegoating.

Hillary found her own customary scapegoat, which Charles C.W. Cooke called her out on:

He passed a background check. Twice. What’s your plan? https://t.co/8NzJxSY5Nl

— Charles C. W. Cooke (@charlescwcooke) June 12, 2016

President Obama put his own political spin on the massacre. From John Podhoretz’s column:

Omar Mateen called the cops to pledge his fealty to ISIS as he was carrying out his mass murderer in Orlando early Sunday morning. Twelve hours later, the president of the United States declared that “we have no definitive assessment on the motivation” of Omar Mateen but that “we know he was a person filled with hate.” So I guess the president thinks Mateen didn’t mean it? Here again, and horribly, we have an unmistakable indication that Obama finds it astonishingly easy to divorce himself from a reality he doesn’t like — the reality of the Islamist terror war against the United States and how it is moving to our shores in the form of lone-wolf attacks.

More:

So determined is the president to avoid the subject of Islamist, ISIS-inspired or ISIS-directed terrorism that he concluded his remarks with an astonishing insistence that “we need the strength and courage to change” our attitudes toward the gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender community. That’s just disgusting. There’s no other word for it. America’s national attitude toward LGBT people didn’t shoot up the Pulse nightclub. This country’s national attitude has undergone a sea-change in the past 20 years, by the way, in case the president hasn’t noticed.

Despite the inconvenient facts that the mass killer was a Muslim Democrat who pledged allegiance to ISIS, a transgendered ACLU staff lawyer reminds his flock who the REAL enemy is — conservative Christians and Republicans:

I don’t care who shooter claimed allegiance to. We don’t have to look beyond the hateful culture right here to understand how this happened

— Chase Strangio (@chasestrangio) June 12, 2016

Jeffrey Goldberg, bless him, makes an obvious point that’s astonishingly not obvious to very many people:

This needs to be reiterated: Orlando massacre can be about Islamism, access to guns, homophobia and mental illness, all at the same time.

— (((Goldberg))) (@JeffreyGoldberg) June 12, 2016

I expect the emerging story from the Left will be it’s all the fault of conservative Christians and the NRA, because the Left will not be able to bear the tension between two of its favorite causes: fighting “homophobia” and fighting “Islamophobia.”

From the Right the story will be, “Muslims! It’s the Muslims!” And they will have something of a point, especially as things like this come out, via Florida Today. According to a former co-worker of Mateen’s:

Gilroy, a former Fort Pierce police officer, said Mateen frequently made homophobic and racial comments. Gilroy said he complained to his employer several times but it did nothing because he was Muslim. Gilroy quit after he said Mateen began stalking him via multiple text messages — 20 or 30 a day. He also sent Gilroy 13 to 15 phone messages a day, he said.

“I quit because everything he said was toxic,” Gilroy said Sunday, “and the company wouldn’t do anything. This guy was unhinged and unstable. He talked of killing people.”

If it is true that the employers would not take action against Mateen because they feared being called Islamophobic, then that is damning — to them and their judgment. It reveals the peril of political correctness.

But here’s the thing: there will never be a way to stop lone wolves like Mateen. Blaming all the Muslims in America for this atrocity is unjust and dangerous. I don’t know that anybody in this country, left or right, has the ability to restrain themselves.

You probably have your own fears, but I believe that some on the Left will use this as a kind of Reichstag fire, to justify further cracking down on free speech, and demonizing Christians. I hope I’m wrong. I don’t think I will be.

Mass Murder In Orlando

Police say 50 dead, 53 injured, in mass shooting at Orlando gay nightclub, making it the worst mass shooting in US history. The shooter is dead too, killed in a firefight with police.

The killer’s name was Omar Mateen, and is reportedly the son of Afghan immigrants. As I write this on Sunday morning, authorities have indicated that Mateen may have connections with Islamic terrorists. His father tells NBC News that his son recently became enraged when he saw two men kissing in public in Miami, in front of his child. I will update this blog as we know more.

By now, we should all know not to get out ahead of the story and jump to conclusions. There is already a lot of contradictory information being bandied about in the media. Let us not blame innocent people for the act of a terrorist. I especially urge readers who want to use this hideous act of murder to confirm pre-existing beliefs to restrain themselves in their comments, at least until we have more facts on which to base our arguments. To this end, I will be especially vigilant about approving comments.

If you pray, please pray for the dead, the injured, and those who love them. Fifty people, shot dead in cold blood. Lord, have mercy on them.

Christian, your gay or lesbian neighbor is probably really scared right now. Whatever our genuine disagreements, let’s love and pray.

— Russell Moore (@drmoore) June 12, 2016

UPDATE: How about resisting the urge to use this event as an opportunity to reinforce your prior prejudices. I’m in favor of putting blame where blame belongs, but the fact is, we just don’t know enough about what really happened to justify blaming anything or anybody, other than Omar Mateen.

UPDATE.2: The Washington Post tracked down Mateen’s ex-wife and interviewed her. She ID’d the Myspace photo making the rounds as a shot of him, which is why the Post is now using it, and why I am using it. From the Post article:

“He seemed like a normal human being,” she said, adding that he wasn’t very religious and worked out at the gym often. She said in the few months they were married he gave no signs of having fallen under the sway of radical Islam. She said he owned a small-caliber handgun and worked as a guard at a nearby facility for juvenile delinquents.

“He was a very private person,” she said.

The ex-wife said her parents intervened when they learned Mateen had assaulted her. Her father confirmed the account and said that the marriage lasted only a few months.

He was also a wife-beater, the ex-wife said.

These details are why I caution about a rush to judgment. Mateen was a Muslim, but as with many of these radicalized young men, he might well have seized a radical version of Islam to justify and to express violence and hatred he had within him. We just don’t know for sure yet.

UPDATE.3: Now we know for sure that he pledged allegiance to ISIS. Look, I know this is going to aggravate some of you, but I am doing my best to hold off on comments that rush to blame Islam, or the NRA, or immigration, or conservative Christians (yes, some are doing that) for this atrocity — at least today. I’ve been watching Twitter, and it’s sickening how eager so many people are to shoehorn mass murder into their own agendas, to justify their pre-existing hatreds. There will be legitimate points to be made about all these things, and I will entertain them in the comments thread of this blog. But not today. For at least one day, I will do my best to keep those voices politicizing this crime at bay. I did make one exception for a sometime commenter here who happened to have been at the Pulse nightclub last night, but who left early, and who is traumatized today by the events there. Pray for him, if you pray.

UPDATE.4: I have had to spike more comments than I published on this thread, because I didn’t want this thread on this day to degenerate into blame-casting (I shouldn’t have approved the “false flag” comment; mea culpa). I’m closing down comments here, and want to redirect you to this new post, where you are free to speculate as you like. I’m going to keep the worst remarks off that thread, but I don’t expect there will be much good.

Campus Drunk Confidential

A reader who is a veteran police detective in a major college town writes in response to the “What Is Consent To A Drunk?” post. I have removed identifying information at his request. He starts by saying that the four years he spent working in his department’s sexual assault division were the worst of his career. He explains below:

In the course of my career, I have responded to the hospital to investigate a report of sexual assault hundreds of times. Here is the down and dirty bottom line regarding 90%+ of reported adult sexual assaults: It’s the alcohol. Period. Full stop.

Of all of those hundreds of reported sexual assaults that I have responded to over the years, I can count the number of substantiated incidents of what Whoopi Goldberg so inartfully once termed “rape- rape” on both hands without taking off my shoes. I’m talking about the full on stranger rapes, the “Jack the Ripper drags a helpless woman into an alley” type of scenario that pops in most peoples’ minds when they hear the word “rape.”

Section wide, we probably average less than ten of those “nightmare” rapes a year in a city of 300,000 people. The rest of them, the overwhelming rest of them, are acquaintance rapes. And alcohol is at the bottom of the vast majority of those.

People who are removed from the social scene of young adults today can’t really comprehend how out of control alcohol abuse is among college students and other young people looking to party. I went to a “party school” myself and there was a lot of drinking in the mid- nineties. Thursday night was the big party night and I had a lot of classes on Friday mornings that were mostly empty.

But these kids today don’t want to just drink to get buzzed and have a good time. They drink with the goal of a black out. It starts with the “pregame.” Prior to going out to hit the bars with your fraternity bros or sorority sisters, you meet at someone’s house and have a couple of drinks there before you even leave. The idea is that you get a little buzzed before you leave, so you won’t spend as much money on overpriced drinks at the bars.

Of course, it doesn’t actually work out that way. They have two beers at home and then three, five, seven more at the bars. Plus the two shots that somebody bought them.

So by last call, they’ve had anywhere from five to God only knows how many drinks in about a four hour period. In a 115 pound sorority sister, that’s a hell of a lot of alcohol.

Oh, and did I mention how many of them are on medications that are contraindicated for alcohol? Given our pill-popping culture in general, I’ll just round up and say that all of them are. Especially mood altering medications and most especially Ambien.

Ambien, my God, the Ambien. Maybe it’s a regional thing, but sometimes it seems like they get it given to them like candy around here. Ambien, of course, intensifies the effects of alcohol, yet these kids pop their daily prescribed dose before or during the pregame, effectively “roofieing” themselves before they even leave the house.

And I’m still mostly talking about the women here. The men, the accused suspects, are usually drinking even more then the girls do. Judgement gets impaired all around.

Now, this self-intoxication by the victims does not excuse rape. But what gets reported to us isn’t “rape- rape” most of the time.

What gets reported is “Well, me and my girlfriends met at Lisa’s apartment to pre- game. I had a beer and a shot there. Then we went to This Bar and That Bar and I had three shots at the first place and an Appletini at the second place plus this guy gave me half his beer. So, we were dancing and then Lisa and Cindy left. So the guy who gave me half his beer said we should go to This Other Bar to meet his friend and we did. And I had two shots and then he bought me this mixed drink… I don’t remember what it was called or what was in it. And then I had another beer and we danced and I remember we were making out at one point in the bathroom and I gave him a blow job. Then I remember we left This Other bar-”

Needle scratch. Wait a minute. You gave him oral sex?

“Well, yeah…”

And there’s your other big piece of the reported sexual assault puzzle: Hook up culture. Everything up to PIV (penis in vagina) is on the table when you’re hitting the bar scene. It’s almost a given.

So, back to our narrative, our victim and the guy she just met “hook up” consensually and close down the bar and now its 2 AM and she can’t really remember much after that, just bits and pieces, until she woke up in a strange place next to a strange man.

The twist? It’s not the guy she was dancing with and gave oral sex to. It’s his roommate. She thinks she had sex, but she can’t remember. She went home and talked to her roommate and her roommate talked her into coming to the hospital.

So she has the exam and she’s got no physical injuries because nobody beat, punched, or choked her. And we talk to the guy and the roommate and their story is that she came home with them and she and the roommate sat up talking and smoking weed after the guy she came home with passed out in the living room and one thing led to another and the roommate had consensual sex with her too.

And out of this morass of bad decisions and contradictory claims, the social justice types want us to present a viable prosecution? Ain’t happening.

This story plays out with subtle variations over and over and over again. At the bottom of them all are “Demon Rum” and Hook- up culture. In some cases, the suspect’s behavior is more egregious, but not usually. Physical evidence, including DNA, isn’t the answer. Most of the time all a sexual assault examination proves is that the alleged victim had sex. It doesn’t prove whether or not the sex was consensual. There are no injuries because the body parts used for sexual relations are made to be stretched. It still almost always comes down to “he said- she said.”

At the end of the day, you end up with a mess that you can’t prosecute. And, in all fairness, I shouldn’t want to see it prosecuted. Probable cause is a pretty low standard. It doesn’t take much proof for me to arrest you, but when it comes to sexual offenses, I’ve always felt I had a duty to make sure I went beyond mere probable cause before I charged. The reason is that even if a suspect ends up beating the charge at trial down the road, all his friends and family members will know that he got arrested for rape for the rest of his life. That’s a stance that’s gotten me in Dutch with rape crisis counselors and the like a time or two over the years.

But no worries, because most of the time, the victim flakes out within a week, calls you up, and says she doesn’t want to proceed with the investigation anymore. So you pend that case and forget it and wait for the phone to ring again.

This is why I called my years primarily investigating adult sex crimes as “purgatory” at the beginning. So many cases end up being so pointless. It gets really hard when you’re dealing with people that we have legally declared to be “adults’ by virtue of their age who are still making terrible choices.

I’m afraid it sounds like I’m faulting the victims. And I guess I am, to a certain degree, but it’s a bit more nuanced than that. I have sympathy for these women and I believe that the vast majority of them do truly believe that they have been wronged. (An email about the ones I’ve come across who make false allegations out of spite, jealousy, or mental problems like the girl at UVA would be at least as long as this one.) On a moral and ethical level, based upon quaint standards of chivalry and gentlemanly behavior that no one seems to practice anymore but that the Disney corporation told these women from a young age that they should expect, they have been wronged. But that doesn’t mean a crime has occurred.

Years ago I took a class on Crime Prevention Through Environmental Design. One of the illustrations that the instructor used was that of the “Triangle of Crime.” In order to have a crime, you need three things: A Criminal, a Victim, and a Place for the crime to happen. Eliminate any one of those pieces and no crime occurs.

Eliminate the binge drinking and hook- up cultures that a vast, vast majority of reported sexual assault victims willingly participate in, and you would eliminate practically all reported sexual assaults in this country. Eighty percent of them at least would disappear because you would eliminate the victim side of the crime triangle.

We do not do our young people, be they men or women, any favors when we shrug off self- destructive behavior as just “sowing wild oats” in 2016 because it is well beyond that in our fallen and broken culture. Young people, though they may be of legal age for a lot of this activity, still need guardrails.

I don’t have a whole lot of hope personally that will change before I retire in a few years. I suspect it will get much worse.

I feel like I should close by mentioning my perspective on the Stanford sexual assault case. That case is not the typical drunken victim scenario that I’ve been going on about here, even though the victim did drink a lot. She had apparently moved past “blackout” to full- on unconsciousness and there’s no way that the suspect can claim some kind of misunderstanding or miscommunication. I would have killed to have the facts of that case during my time in purgatory, which I realize is a weird thing to say. Only a very grizzled veteran sex crimes detective can hear a story like that and think “What an awesome rape case to work! Witnesses! Suspects caught fleeing the scene! Beautiful, I tell you!”

That victim by all accounts is, for lack of a better term, a true victim of “rape- rape.” The judge’s sentencing decision is horrible. For one thing, it’s a very difficult thing to get a successful prosecution on a sex offense through a jury trial. There’s almost always one nut on a jury who thinks all women are asking for it or just can’t bring themselves to decide that the clean cut young man in the suit at the defendant’s table could have actually done something so horrible that will hang your jury.

My professional advice to anyone who is a victim of a sexual offense or who has a relative who is a victim of a sexual offense who has a case that is getting ready for a jury trial and the prosecutor comes to you and says “The defendant is willing to plead to a lesser offense, but it’s up to you if we make the deal or not,” is to agree to the deal. Juries are just completely unpredictable, especially when it comes to sex offenses. I’ve seen it happen too many times where a victim has to endure the public spectacle of a trial only to have the defendant acquitted, found guilty of a lesser offense anyway, or the jury hung. It’s very tough. Take the deal.

Kudos to the Stanford victim for following through. It’s absolutely terrible that the judge decided to insult her with the sentence he passed down.

The detective ends by saying that he’s looking forward to the Benedict Option book.

I can’t think this detective enough for writing with the perspective of what the campus “rape culture” looks like from the point of view of a cop who has to deal with it. As a father of kids who will all be of college age within the next nine years, this sobers me immensely (pun intended) about the task of preparing them for it.