I have a post up at Legal Insurrection that is a comprehensive look at what we know about the Terence Crutcher case so far (or at least, what we knew last night, when I did the bulk of the research and writing for it).
It has a very different focus than the posts I wrote on the case here at my own blog. The Legal Insurrection post focuses more on the law of the thing. Please take a look.
[Scroll down for more updates.]
More information on the Crutcher case is coming out, and the situation may be even worse than what I had discussed earlier today. The claim now is that Crutcher wasn’t even reaching into his car when he was killed, which was an important part of Shelby’s justification for firing. This new information is coming from the Crutcher family attorney, but it is supposedly based on the video evidence.
There is a video at the link which shows the shooting from two angles, plus Crutcher’s walk to the car that led up to it. I say “shows,” but it’s actually very hard to see what is happening, in part because there are so many police officers around him. But from what I can see (albeit incomplete), this does appear as though it might be a case of overkill (literally). Crutcher is walking slowly with his hands up, and seemingly cooperative. There is no visible struggle. The shooting happens so quickly that I don’t even think the other police officers were aware of what had happened. Then you hear the voice of a female officer (I assume it was Shelby, who had fired the shots?) yelling “Shots fired!” in a very agitated voice.
Here’s a part of the article that leapt out at me; note that it is Shelby’s attorney speaking here, so you can imagine this is the narration most favorable to her [emphasis mine]:
Shelby was en route to a domestic violence call when she encountered Crutcher, who she thought might be impaired, and then the SUV in the middle of the road, Wood said.
She asked Crutcher whether the car belonged to him but got no response, the attorney said. Crutcher began walking toward her with his hands in his pockets. She politely asked Crutcher to take his hands out of his pocket while they were speaking, Wood said.
“He does comply and puts his hands out of his pocket, and then puts his hands up in the air, which she thought was a little bit strange under the circumstances,” he said.
Really? Did it ever occur to her that with all the recent violence he might have been wanting to show her he was completely harmless and cooperative? Is Shelby the Goldilocks of police officers: hands in pockets is not enough, hands in the air is too much, hands dangling by the sides is just right?
Shelby thought—and for all I know, she may have been correct about this part—that Crutcher was either intoxicated or on some sort of drug. But, so what? Do we now seek to arrest people who are not being belligerent (at least, it has not been alleged that he was belligerent), just because they might be under the influence in some way? Do we kill them if they make sudden moves?:
“How could [Crutcher] be reaching into the car if the window is up and there’s blood on the glass?” Crump [one of the Crutcher family’s attorneys] asked, pointing to the photo on the easel. “The window is up. There’s a streak of blood on the window. It’s coming down the car door.”
Attorney Damario Solomon-Simmons contested Shelby’s attorney’s account, saying Crutcher was complying and made no sudden movements until he was hit with the Taser.
As for the allegations that Crutcher may have been intoxicated, Crump said it’s irrelevant. He pointed out that just Monday an alleged terrorist accused of placing bombs in New York and New Jersey and opening fire on police was taken into custody alive, yet Shelby felt she had to exact deadly force on Crutcher.
“If we started to condemn everybody to death who might have some drugs in their system, all our neighborhoods would be affected,” he said.
I can’t say I find a whole lot of disagreement with that. Let me add, however, that one of the New Jersey police officers who apprehended Rahami after a gunfight with him (an actual gunfight; not an imagined one) was shot in the chest, but was protected from harm by body armor. That gunfight with Rahami was not without risk, to say the least. But unfortunately, police officers must accept a certain amount of risk that goes with the territory. They cannot be shooting just because they are jittery or frightened; if so, they lack the temperament to be a police officer, which may be the case for Shelby.
One more quote, this time from Shelby’s lawyer:
…[Crutcher’s] left hand goes into the window,” at which point one officer deployed his Taser and Shelby fired her service weapon. Shelby had a Taser but did not take it out, the attorney said.
[Shelby’s attorney] told CNN in a follow-up interview that his client had her gun out because she was the only officer there for a few minutes and she thought Crutcher was armed. The second officer had a Taser because the “proper tactic … in that scenario is for second person … to have less lethal (weapon),” said Wood, a former police officer.
If the window was actually closed—as the Crutchers’ attorney says it was (with a photo to prove it, supposedly)—then how could Crutcher’s hand “go into” the window? Did Shelby not know the window was closed? In addition, is it standard operating police procedure for an officer to draw a weapon every time the officer “thinks” a person might be armed, even with no aggression from that person and no actual hint of a weapon? And why did Shelby think Crutcher was armed? I’ve seen nothing in any of the reports I’ve read that indicates a good reason (or even any reason at all) that she might think that. Is it because initially he had his hands in his pockets, even though he had removed them when asked? Is hands in pockets a capital offense?
[ADDENDUM: By the way, a lot of discussion of the Crutcher shooting mentions that “police” or “police officers” were responsible. Actually, it was one police officer, Shelby, and it’s not at all clear that the other officers will back her actions up.]
UPDATE 12:15 AM: It has always been obvious that new information would be coming out that could change things. Now there are reports that Shelby says Crutcher had put his hands in his pockets several times. However, no one is alleging that he had put his hands in his pockets before the fatal shot was fired. It is alleged that his hands were up as he walked to the vehicle, and that he then seemed to be reaching inside the vehicle (or about to reach inside it), which is what caused the decisions to fire the taser and the shots. I’ve read conflicting reports on whether the window was open or not (a potentially important detail). I also read that the side of the vehicle he was approaching—the driver’s side—had already been searched or cleared by Shelby, and if so I’m not sure why she would have thought there could have been a gun right there.
Also, there is a report that a vial of PCP was later found in the car, and that “Crutcher had been incarcerated on a drug-related conviction for nearly four years and was released on parole in 2011.” If true (and I can only find that story about the prior incarceration in one paper, so I begin to wonder), that is certainly supportive of the idea that he was on some sort of drug at the time of the fatal encounter, although toxicological testing will reveal whether or not that is true. At any rate, it is not determinative of whether deadly force was justified (nor did the officers know his drug-related state at the time). What is relevant for determining that is his behavior during the encounter, and whether it justified the perception that he represented a threat of the type that would have allowed the use of deadly force.
…is this the end of Brangelina?
Is anyone surprised?
[NOTE: Actually, you may have noticed I haven’t written anything about Donald Trump today. Every now and then I need to take a Trump vacation.]
This incident looks like the real thing: a trigger-happy cop panicking and killing an innocent black man, Terence Crutcher.
We don’t know enough about it to make a final judgment, but so far the fact situation looks bad. The exchange was videoed. If you read the description of the chain of events, it’s difficult to understand why this happened, but the following appear to be factors worthy of note:
(1) Only one police officer shot at Crutcher, which happened simultaneously with another officer’s tasering him.
(2) The officer who shot him (Shelby) had recently undergone drug-recognition training, which I suppose might have predisposed the officer to panic if it seemed the individual might be under the influence of drugs. Shelby claims to have felt Crutcher was under the influence of PCP.
(3) The officer who shot him was a woman. I don’t know how that factors into it, but in general female officers have been found to be less likely to shoot rather than more.
(4) The initial exchange wasn’t videoed, but Shelby reported that Crutcher was rather passive (she came on the scene because his car had broken down in the middle of the road) and unresponsive. However, he had made no aggressive moves, and by the time the incident was being videotaped he had been cooperative and following orders. Right before the shooting, however, he was walking towards his vehicle with his hands high in the air, and then:
Shelby shoots when Crutcher’s “left hand goes through the car window” ”” but no weapon was ever found on him or inside of his car. Wood says that Shelby had cleared the driver’s side of the car prior to the shooting.
It’s probably premature to try to analyze this, but my sense is that a small number of police officers have become so wary of being shot that they are over-reacting. Interacting with a person who may be high on drugs (or who appears to be high on drugs; we don’t know whether Crutcher actually was, but we will probably find out) is an inherently dangerous activity, and evaluating the degree of dangerousness is not easy. But police officers should not be shooting an erratic drug user or mentally ill person (that’s happened, too) merely because he or she doesn’t exactly follow orders and reaches into his/her car, whatever race that person might belong to. The other officer on the scene who tasered Crutcher certainly didn’t think this required a bullet.
Why did Crutcher go back to the SUV and reach into the car? We may never know. We know there was no weapon there (as did Shelby, apparently). We know his hands were up prior to that, but then he reached into the vehicle.
What we do know is that people with an agenda will make the most of this extremely unfortunate chain of events.
It’s such a familiar story.
After acts of terrorism (or even non-terrorist mass shootings) we hear one of two refrains: he (or she, but it’s almost always a “he”) was a quiet and regular guy and no one saw it coming; or everyone knew he was bad news.
The latter story is more common. Extremely common. A history of fighting with family and/or neighbors, threats, small offenses, sometimes relatively minor violence, an aura of strangeness or anger, involvement in lawsuits. For non-terrorists, often a history of some sort of mental problems and violence, often going way back. For terrorists, often a naturalized immigrant from a Muslim country, plus multiple trips back home or to other Muslim countries, and recent increased religiosity.
Rahami fit the basic pattern, as you can easily tell from a host of articles detailing his history of family strife (including a stabbing of his brother). He had had an illegitimate child with a high school sweetheart. He had made many trips to his native Afghanistan (he had come here as a child), some lengthy. He brought back a wife from Pakistan.
And in 2014 his father had reported to the FBI that he suspected his son was a terrorist:
The father, Mohammad, told New Jersey police in 2014 that Rahami was a terrorist when his son was arrested after a domestic dispute and accused of stabbing his brother.
The information was given to the Joint Terrorism Task Force led by the FBI in Newark, New Jersey. Officials opened a so-called assessment and interviewed the father ”” who then recanted, the paper reported.
An official said the dad made the comment out of anger at his son. It was unclear if Ahmad was also interviewed…
“He stabbed my son. He hit my wife. And I put him in jail,” Mohammad said after speaking with FBI agents at his home Tuesday.
In 2014, the younger Rahami was arrested on weapons and aggravated assault charges for allegedly stabbing his brother in the leg, The Times reported.
He spent over three months in jail, a high-ranking law enforcement official told the paper, but a grand jury declined to indict Rahami.
FBI Assistant Director William Sweeney referred Monday to a “domestic incident” in which he said the “allegations were recanted.”
The father also now says he didn’t know anything about Kahami’s recent attack, and hadn’t really thought he was a terrorist.
With that sort of fact situation and others like it being so common, what to do? And the answer “ban Muslim immigration” doesn’t cut it for many reasons (see this, for example), including the fact that these people emigrated here 15 years ago and have become citizens. How many other radicals or potential radicals like Rahami are already here, both in the US and in Europe? I don’t know the exact answer—no one does—but we know there are enough to cause major trouble and to be very difficult to track.
The more general problem of prevention and predictability is not limited to terrorists, either; it’s somewhat similar to the issues I discussed in this post about preventing mass murders in general. Preventive detention of citizens who have not been found guilty of anything is not an American value, nor should it be. But PC thought that bends over backwards to be kind doesn’t help at all, and fear of lawsuits such as the one Rahami’s family had filed against the city of Elizabeth probably play into that desire to be extra kind to immigrants of the Muslim persuasion:
According to the [2011] lawsuit, filed in U.S. District Court in Newark, the Rahami family said Elizabeth police officers repeatedly forced the closure of their family restaurant, First American Fried Chicken. The lawsuit alleges one man frequently entered the restaurant and told family members “Muslims don’t belong here” and “Muslims are trouble.”
Elizabeth Mayor Chris Bollwage confirmed the longstanding issues with the family, but said the city’s actions against their restaurant were strictly code-related.
“It was strictly about neighbors calling about noise,” Bollwage said. “It was never ethnicity or religion or beliefs or anything like that.”
Then again, this particularfamily did turn out to be “trouble,” didn’t it?
On the “literally” thread, commenter expat asked a burning question:
Maybe you can help me figure out whether the duck who lives with my cousin’s chickens is literally transspecies. His egg was abandoned by his mother in the creek that is literally 10 feet from the chicken yard. He was hatched by one of the chickens and decided to remain with them despite the fact that he could easily escape back into the creek where his relatives swim by regularly. I haven’t checked for position papers from the LGBT community on transpecieism, so I don’t know where I stand on whether he is literally a chicken.
I long for a simpler life when you could look in a dictionary to find such answers.
Well, I don’t shy from the tough questions, but that one’s really tough. Who can fathom the mind of a chicken?
Expat’s cousin’s duck, of course, has been imprinted, although that doesn’t answer the question. It’s possible that the duck doesn’t feel that it’s a chicken, it feels that the chickens are actually ducks.
Which brings us to the wonderful YouTube, which has video on practically everything. On a hunch, I searched for something about Konrad Lorenz and imprinting. Sure enough, bingo!
And as far as whether we might be able to understand what chickens might think, let’s hear from Neruda (I assume a similar sentiment could be expressed about ducks):
…I’m tired of the harsh sea
and the mysterious earth.
I’m tired of chickens–
we never know what they think,
and they look at us with dry eyes
as though we were unimportant…
Once more, with feeling, in Spanish:
…Estoy cansado del mar duro
y de la tierra misteriosa.
Estoy cansado de las gallinas:
nunca supimos lo que piensan,
y nos miran con ojos secos
sin concedernos importancia…
[ADDENDUM: Then there’s the Churkendoose of my youth. Until I looked it up just now I thought the recording was made by Danny Kaye. Turns out it was Ray Bolger.]
In all the furor over the New York bombings and the capture of the suspect-at-large, let’s not forget the Minnesota mall stabbings:
The man who stabbed nine people at a Minnesota mall before an off-duty police officer fatally shot him has been identified as 22-year-old Dahir A. Adan, federal law enforcement sources and two Somali community leaders who are in contact with Adan’s family said Monday.
Adan went to college in St. Cloud and worked for a private security firm at the time of the attack, the community leaders told CNN.
Shades of Orlando, where the perp had been working in security. Not exactly reassuring.
More here:
St. Cloud, a 67,000-person town about 65 miles northwest of Minneapolis, is home to one of Minnesota’s larger immigrant Muslim communities. In recent years, the community there has faced conflicts with other Minnesota residents, including incidents that have led to damage to mosques and opposition toward at least one new house of worship, according to the StarTribune…
Police and witnesses said the attacker, wearing a private security company uniform, entered Crossroads Mall on Saturday night around 8 p.m. CT. Inside the mall, he made a reference to Allah and asked at least one person if they were Muslim before he attacked…
Though the mall’s security teams were on site, the security officers were not armed.
Of the nine people stabbed, St. Cloud Mayor Dave Kleis said, three people were still hospitalized, including one person who remains in life-threatening condition.
And it’s also not the least bit surprising how Adan was finally stopped:
Amid the chaos, Jason Falconer, an off-duty police officer from nearby Avon, killed the suspect as he threatened other shoppers…
At a news conference Sunday afternoon, the mayor and police chief praised Falconer, a part-time officer and former police chief of Albany, Minnesota, for taking action. Both officials said they had viewed a surveillance tape from Macy’s which revealed details of the confrontation.
“His heroic actions are exemplary of having witnessed what he did as the suspect was lunging at him with a knife,” Kleis said. “Not only did he fire, the suspect went down, came back up on three different occasions. He protected others from being injured and potentially loss of life. Clearly, a hero.”
Clearly, we have an armed hero who was trained to react to a situation like this. It’s very fortunate that the terrorist went for the wrong man—who turned out to be the right man.
Ahmad Khan Rahami, a man suspected in connection with the recent New York and New Jersey bombings, has been captured after a shootout with police in New Jersey:
The FBI had earlier released a wanted poster for the 28-year-old Rahami, who was said to be operating a 2003 Blue Honda Civic bearing NJ registration D63EYB. He may be related to five people who were taken into custody for questioning by the FBI in connection with Saturday night’s bombing in Chelsea…
The governor of New York now says it looks like Manhattan bombing could be act of terrorism with foreign connection…
“This was an intentional act, but we do not know the motivation. That’s what we have to do more work on,” said Mayor Bill de Blasio. “We know there was a bombing. We will be very careful and patient to get to the full truth here.”
There are, of course, many questions. The five people were taken into custody after a “traffic stop of a vehicle of interest in the investigation.” What made this vehicle “of interest”? My guess is that either there was a surveillance video that identified a car or person (and then that person’s vehicle) in connection with the bombing, or perhaps this was a person or cell already known to police.
As for motivation, initial disclaimers that this was not a terrorist act seems to have been incorrect; we’ve seen this sort of revision often. We still don’t know for absolute certainty—as de Blasio is careful to note—but one can safely conclude, as the governor seems to have done, that it is highly, highly likely it was an act of terrorism. And not just terrorism; Islamist terrorism, either perpetrated by an official cell of a terrorist group or by a bunch of sympathizers (or perhaps just one).
Rahami is an Afghan refugee and naturalized citizen:
His last known address was in Elizabeth, N.J., the city where authorities found pipe bombs in a garbage can Monday morning.
The FBI raided the Elizabeth address in the morning. The apartment is above a restaurant run by Rahami’s father, called First American Fried Chicken.
How ironic.
The article goes on to say that Rahami junior was considered by customers to have been “a chilling presence” in the restaurant.
Here’s how the initial bombing in New Jersey unfolded, and it’s clear things might have been worse:
An explosion blew apart a garbage can along the route of a planned 5K charity race to benefit U.S. Marines and sailors that drew thousands of runners. If the start of the race had not been delayed due to a vast amount of participants, authorities said the blast would have gone off as the area was filled with runners. But the explosion occurred when few people were in the area, and no one was injured
The race was canceled after the blast, and authorities quickly determined that the explosion was more than a prank because of the sophistication of the device which had multiple pipe bombs wired together, though only one went off.
Shades of the Boston marathon, with a military connection.
The later explosion in the Chelsea neighborhood of Manhattan, thought to be connected, was more successful (at least from a bomber’s point of view). It injured 29 people.
[NOTE: As everyone except those who’ve been living under a rock for the past year knows, we have an election coming up in about seven weeks. In terms of politics, the person I can imagine this incident helping is Donald Trump.]
[ADDENDUM: As often happens, there’s a lot more detail in this British report, including the following:
The backpack was discovered in a wastebasket near Elizabeth Station by two men at around 8:30pm, Elizabeth Mayor Chris Bollwage said, adding: ‘They took the package out of the wastebasket because they thought it was of some value to them.’
Seeing wires and a pipe, the men then dropped the bag and called police – who dispatched a robot to disarm the devices.
However, footage from the scene shows the robot accidentally cutting the wrong wire on one of the IEDs, causing a huge explosion. One of the robots was damaged, but no one was hurt in the blast.
Also at 8.45pm, FBI agents in New York detained five New Jersey men on the Belt Parkway near the Verrazano-Narrows Bridge in Brooklyn.
Their car was said by authorities to contain a weapons stash and bomb-making equipment. The men, who were believed to be heading to an airport, were taken to Federal Plaza in Manhattan for questioning.
Officials said the men were from the same family, that there could be more suspects at large, and that a terror cell may be operating in the area.
So if all of this is true, we learn that the men were all members of the same family, they were carrying explosives in the SUV, and the NJ wastebasket bomb was discovered by people scavenging around in the trash for something of value and finding, to their consternation, the makings of a bomb.
There’s also this on how Rahami was located, after police had announced he was a suspect and released his photo:
He was spotted sleeping in the doorway of a bar called Merdies on Elizabeth Avenue in Linden, New Jersey, not far from his home in the town of Elizabeth.
Bar owner Harry Barnes initially told him to move out of the doorway in Spanish, as he didn’t want the man to be injured on broken glass lying on the ground.
When Rahami replied in English and looked up, the owner realized who he was and ran across the street to another business he owns to call 911.
After police arrived, Rahami pulled a gun on them and began shooting. One officer was hit in the hand and another in his vest. Rahami himself was shot in the shoulder and subsequently arrested.
And then, in another touch that (if true) will probably come as no surprise, we have this:
An investigation by Dailymail.com revealed Monday that the Rahamis had filed a complaint against local police, whom they said persecuted them, forcing the family to close their restaurant earlier than necessary on evenings.
The suit also said that locals had met them with racist language and told them Muslims do not belong in the area.
It was dismissed with prejudice – meaning that it cannot be resubmitted to court – in 2012.
This was a very serious terrorist attempt that fortunately went mostly wrong. That bomb (or actually, bombs) at the Elizabeth, NJ train station could have injured or killed large numbers of people but was found and detonated before rush hour began.
Thinking about it, and noting how much of the action centered in New Jersey, I’m wondering whether this whole group wasn’t already generally suspect and then the location of some of the bombs gave police an idea they might be the culprits.]
By now many of you have probably read the “Flight 93 Election” essay by Publius Decius Mus, a piece that’s gone viral. It was recommended to me by a great many people, and among them are no small number of people I respect—even people I respect very very deeply.
So of course I read it, with that sort of recommendation. And I also very much expected to like it—why wouldn’t I? I didn’t expect to agree with everything in it, of course; that would be rather odd, although possible. But I certainly expected to agree with the basic premises.
So I was surprised when I did not. And since people have continued to praise it so highly, I figured I’d better write about it.
Near the beginning of the essay, Publius states what appears to be the foundation of much of his argument, that the election is like Flight 93:
…[C]harge the cockpit or you die. You may die anyway. You””or the leader of your party””may make it into the cockpit and not know how to fly or land the plane. There are no guarantees.
Except one: if you don’t try, death is certain. To compound the metaphor: a Hillary Clinton presidency is Russian Roulette with a semi-auto. With Trump, at least you can spin the cylinder and take your chances.
This is the old familiar argument with a Flight 93 twist, which is the only new thing about it. Otherwise, it’s the idea of sure death versus Russian roulette, one we’ve argued again and again on this blog, and with which I disagree as an analogy. My most detailed discussion of the argument occurred in this post, so just go there and read if you want to refresh your memory.
But if it’s Flight 93—as Publius says—and the voters are the passengers (the country is the plane, I suppose), who are the hijackers? I assume he thinks it’s Hillary and the left. Where is Trump? Is he one of the passengers? Is he waiting on the ground for a safe landing , to take over afterwards? Is he in the cockpit with the hijackers, battling it out, too?
To continue the Flight 93 metaphor, however, Democrats and leftists who are voting for Hillary think Trump is the hijacker trying to crash the plane, and Hillary and the left are on the other side fighting to rescue it. And many people on the right who have a lot of trouble voting for Trump think that Trump and Hillary are battling it out in the cockpit as hijackers and that each will crash the plane (whether they want to or not), but that they’ll take it to somewhat different places to crash it. And they think that perhaps Trump will take it to a place that will cause even more casualties and more suffering than Hillary would.
Publius doesn’t seem to consider this thought. Now, you don’t have to agree with it to need to at least consider it, rather than pretend it doesn’t exist as an argument. But right at the outset of the essay, I noticed that and was troubled by the omission.
Then Publius went on to his next theme. This quote summarizes it best, I think, and can be found in paragraph five and in a couple of paragraphs that follow:
One of the paradoxes””there are so many””of conservative thought over the last decade at least is the unwillingness even to entertain the possibility that America and the West are on a trajectory toward something very bad…
If conservatives are right about the importance of virtue, morality, religious faith, stability, character and so on in the individual; if they are right about sexual morality or what came to be termed “family values”; if they are right about the importance of education to inculcate good character and to teach the fundamentals that have defined knowledge in the West for millennia; if they are right about societal norms and public order; if they are right about the centrality of initiative, enterprise, industry, and thrift to a sound economy and a healthy society; if they are right about the soul-sapping effects of paternalistic Big Government and its cannibalization of civil society and religious institutions; if they are right about the necessity of a strong defense and prudent statesmanship in the international sphere””if they are right about the importance of all this to national health and even survival, then they must believe””mustn’t they?””that we are headed off a cliff.
But it’s quite obvious that conservatives don’t believe any such thing, that they feel no such sense of urgency, of an immediate necessity to change course and avoid the cliff.
I’m going to be uncharacteristically blunt here and say that my reaction to this was “WTF??” Because I barely recognize what he’s talking about, and I spend a lot of time—a lot of time—interacting with conservatives both on this blog and elsewhere.
Oh, there’s definitely a group like that, a strain like that (and hey, maybe they’re even correct). But as far as I can see, the main adherents to that point of view is a small group of pundits—both well-known and not so well-known. At any rate, those are the people Publius goes on to criticize in his essay, some of them by name such as Matthew Continetti, on whom he spends a great deal of time.
Excuse me but, once again, WFT? I’m sure Matthew Continetti has his following, but for the rank and file conservative he’s hardly a blip on the radar screen. In the eleven-plus (!) years I’ve been writing this blog, I’ve mentioned him three times in passing. But I don’t mean to pick on Continetti (although Publius does); it’s true for me of the lot of them. And I think mine is a common attitude among a great many conservatives.
As I read Publius’ essay, it seems to me that this “what, me worry?” pundit class has really got his goat, and it also seems to me that he way over-emphasizes both their influence and how many people on the right share their views. Because, from my sojourn here in the blogging and blogosphere trenches, I can say that it’s not the prevailing sentiment. The prevailing sentiment has been we’re in a heap of trouble, and have been for years—desperate desperate trouble. That point of view is hardly confined to Trump supporters.
The disagreement is over the remedy for that trouble. I could write a book (literally!) about some of the questions I will merely touch on here, but I’ll summarize by saying that the main disagreement is whether voting for Trump has any chance of changing that. A great many people who cannot stand Trump (note that I don’t say “neverTrumpers,” because that’s a much much much smaller part of the group I’m referring to) and will either not vote for him at all or will vote for him with fear, trembling, and a sense of hopeless foreboding, cannot stand him precisely because they think that although we are in very desperate straits he will not help at all and is even somewhat likely to make the situation worse. Again, to write all the scenarios they see as possible would necessitate that book of which I spoke, but for now I’ll just say there are myriad ways in which many people on the right foresee that they could happen. Agree with them or disagree with them, but Publius has ignored them and acted like they don’t exist.
Actually, if many of the readers here and on many other blogs I read regularly are at all representative, they feel such a sense of urgency and danger to this country that they feel it may be too LATE to avoid the cliff; that we may be already in free fall. But even more importantly, they just don’t (for the most part) think that Donald Trump will stop that fall or change that trajectory; au contraire. They think he is both a symptom of liberty’s death throes and an instrument for hastening its death just as much as Hillary Clinton is, or perhaps even more (just a different kind of death).
So it’s hard for me to read the article with approval when the author makes a mistake so glaring and so basic it leaps out at me at the outset. To me, the Publius article does not address what’s really going on except among a smallish and very elite (pardon the expression) group of people. I’m not sure what circles Publius runs in, but they are very very different ones from mine.
There’s more in the article, though–much more (and I will not get to all of it here—because aforementioned “book”). He writes that “All of Trump’s 16 Republican competitors would have ensured more of the same” (“open borders, lower wages, outsourcing, de-industrialization, trade giveaways, and endless, pointless, winless war”). Now, I don’t know what the author of the piece was doing during the primaries of 2016, but I was busting my butt researching a great many of those 16 people, and that’s just not true. The parts I particularly object to are “open borders”(Ted Cruz?? No! Fiorina? No) and “endless, pointless, winless war.” Also, the Iraq war was a success by 2011, and only Obama’s abandonment made it a “failure.” One can argue about whether the Iraq war was worth it and whether it should have been begun, but it wasn’t winless except for the premature and complete retreat, and I certainly don’t see a hunger for more of the same in many of those sixteen GOP candidates.
Other things in the article that practically made my blood boil–Republicans “help ratify” single-payer? Excuse me? Not a single Republican even voted for Obamacare. And I bet that guy never read this post of mine (which is not about single-payer; just about Obamacare and the GOP more recently).
And Trump, a guy who even fairly recently had praised socialized medicine (something not one of the other candidates has ever done)—HE’S the only one who can stop this; the others couldn’t have? What is Publius smoking?
The American phenomenon Publius is actually talking about as the big problem, the one that has made people on the right (and not just Trump supporters!) desperate is what people in the blogosphere generally know and have been aware of for years–the Gramscian march of the left through institutions such as education, the press, religion, TV, film. People who don’t support Trump are of the opinion that Trump will not change that, but most of them don’t disagree that it’s not only a problem, it’s the problem.
A President Cruz would not have changed that, either, by the way. Only activism (hi, Eric! see just about any of his comments on this blog) will change that, if indeed anything can change it at this point. As Breitbart—the real Breitbart, not the Trump acolytes who’ve taken over the blog that bears his name—said, politics is downstream from culture, and boy is it ever true.
For some reason, this story, which is the talk of the internet right now, doesn’t interest me enough to write about it. More Trump blah blah blah, and then more blah blah blah about the Trump blah blah blah.
Trump rode the birther controversy for a while—particularly when Trump was thinking of running for the presidency in 2011-2012 but dropped out very early. And then he mostly dropped it. Now he’s really dropped it and said he thinks Obama was born in the US. That’s the summary version, without any of the details.
But it occurs to me that you may want to talk about it. So here’s your opportunity.
Or you can consider this an open thread to talk about anything you want.
In the post yesterday in which I mentioned that I’ve got 400+ drafts on this blog and about 100 on my old blog, reader Tom Murin asked: “How many of the drafts are about dance or makeovers?”
Some are, but it’s about the same percentage of the whole as you find in the posts on the blog. The subject matter of the drafts is just as varied as the posts—really all over the place in topic. But I thought it might be interesting to mention a few random ones that might be coming down the pike—some day:
Blue-green confusion
Swimming and the old man
History of shotgun weddings
Nuclear decisions and the chain of nuclear command
Taking religious texts literally
Are blacks disproportionately shot by police?
Two Emilys and one Robert
Early Communist: William Godwin
When the right falls for the left’s spin
How to vet immigrants without banning Muslims
I’ll stop there, but obviously I could go on. Four hundred is a lot of drafts. There’s quite a range of things that have grabbed my interest enough to write something about them, but they’re often such large topics that I don’t quite finish them and thus they end up in that drafts folder. Or, I write a post and I decide it’s kind of meh and I’m dissatisfied with it; not really quite good enough to pass muster, but I figure I’ll get back to it some day and improve it. Often I never do get back to it, knowing how way leads on to way.