In Trump’s DC court appearance today, he pleaded not guilty on all counts. Then he spoke before leaving the area:
David Brooks gets half a clue, and then blows it all
Brooks’ column is entitled, “What If We’re the Bad Guys Here?” To refresh your memory, Brooks is the resident guy on the right at the Times, but as tradition dictates he’s really a very strange kind of mushy-middle straddler. He also was famous as the guy who fell in love with the perfect crease in Obama’s pants and, as far as I know, has never fallen out of that love.
You may say “why read Brooks?”, and it’s a good question. My answer is that people like Brooks fascinate me. Intelligent but not wise, he often half gets it and half doesn’t, and seems to be attracted to the surface of things rather than their depth. In that, I think he’s not so very unusual, and as such it’s of interest to look at what he’s saying and the way he thinks.
His column contains a rather good description of how today’s “elites” – among whom he places himself, so there’s some insight there – have isolated themselves from many other Americans and incurred their wrath. But he seems to think that the worst thing about that is that it’s led to the rise of Donald Trump.
A sample of the column:
Trump’s poll numbers are stronger against Biden now than at any time in 2020.
What’s going on here? Why is this guy still politically viable, after all he’s done? …
… [We anti-Trumpers tell a story in which] we anti-Trumpers are the good guys, the forces of progress and enlightenment. The Trumpers are reactionary bigots and authoritarians. Many Republicans support Trump no matter what, according to this story, because at the end of the day he’s still the bigot in chief, the embodiment of their resentments, and that’s what matters to them most.
I partly agree with this story; but it’s also a monument to elite self-satisfaction.
So let me try another story on you. I ask you to try on a vantage point in which we anti-Trumpers are not the eternal good guys. In fact, we’re the bad guys.
Brooks then goes on to a fairly comprehensive description of the isolation, selfishness, and – yes, I’ll use the word – privilege that so-called elites have set up for themselves and perpetuated. Here’s just one small part of what he writes about that:
The ideal that “we’re all in this together” was replaced with the reality that the educated class lives in a world up here, and everybody else is forced into a world down there. Members of our class are always publicly speaking out for the marginalized, but somehow we always end up building systems that serve ourselves.
The most important of those systems is the modern meritocracy. We built an entire social order that sorts and excludes people on the basis of the quality that we possess most: academic achievement. Highly educated parents go to elite schools, marry each other, work at high-paying professional jobs and pour enormous resources into our children, who get into the same elite schools, marry each other and pass their exclusive class privileges down from generation to generation.
As I said, it’s rather long and covers a lot of ground. But there’s something curious about it, which is that he doesn’t seem to acknowledge that Trump is supported not just as a reaction by the underclass to elitism. There are plenty of educated people, and/or wealthy people, who support Trump as well, people who have a lot of achievements and a high IQ. Brooks doesn’t attempt to explain them; instead, he offers a reductionist “story” about Trump supporters as fleeing away from elites and towards Trump in reaction to those elites. That explanation seems to me to be true. But there’s a great deal more going on, and it has to do not just with elite privilege and exclusiveness and reaction against it, but with love of America, appreciation of history and the wisdom of the Constitution, and a host of other positive elements and policies that Trump offers.
But Brooks can’t afford to admit that, because he hates Trump.
Here’s where Brooks reveals his Trump-Derangement and self-serving blinders. These are the last two paragraphs of his piece [my emphasis]:
Are Trump supporters right that the indictments are just a political witch hunt? Of course not. As a card-carrying member of my class, I still basically trust the legal system and the neutral arbiters of justice. Trump is a monster in the way we’ve all been saying for years and deserves to go to prison.
But there’s a larger context here. As the sociologist E. Digby Baltzell wrote decades ago, “History is a graveyard of classes which have preferred caste privileges to leadership.” That is the destiny our class is now flirting with. We can condemn the Trumpian populists all day until the cows come home, but the real question is when will we stop behaving in ways that make Trumpism inevitable.
In answer to Brooks’ question in that last sentence: never, if Brooks’ column is any example. Because that next-to-last paragraph is a triumph of elitist stupidity, arrogance, and simple-minded justification. Brooks states that of course the charges against Trump are not just a political witch hunt – but Brooks feels no need to explain why that might be the case, but merely seems to claim it’s a self-evident truth that it is not politically motivated. The stretching of the legal elements of a crime to the breaking point, in order to charge Trump? No problem for Brooks. The fact that Trump, Biden’s main political rival, is indicted by the DOJ under Garland, in the venue and with a judge most likely to convict? No problem for Brooks. The unprecedented nature of such a charge? Brooks is fine with it. The fact that Hunter Biden was given a sweetheart deal by the same DOJ? Just peachy keen with Brooks, and no evidence of political bias.
And then the bizarre statement that Trump is a monster. What does that even mean? What is a “monster” in the political sense? Just as Obama’s pants crease proved to Brooks that he was erudite and sophisticated both as man and thinker, and would make a great president, so something about Trump (his hair? his bragging?) makes him a monster. And not just a monster, but a monster “in the way we’ve all been saying for years? Who is this “we,” keemosabe? And what have you been saying that describes him as a monster? That he watched prostitutes pee on a bed? What preposterous and untrue things do you still believe? Or is your revulsion mostly esthetic?
And Brooks says that Trump is a monster who deserves to go to prison. Is that because he’s guilty of a crime? If so, what crime, and on what are you basing your idea of his guilt? Are you even thinking of trying to counter substantive arguments that he is not guilty? Or is his guilt merely assumed? And if it’s assumed, is it really because you basically trust the legal system and neutral arbiters of justice? I suspect that, if you do, it’s because in recent years you usually like the results.
It also seems to me as though, at the end there, Brooks got tired. He knew he had to put in some sort of “bad Trump” disclaimer, but he was too weary to do it effectively and just put in a sort of telegraphese for other “elites” who agree with him on Trump’s obvious guilt and obvious monstrosity. No need to argue it or prove it. It’s virtue-signaling par excellence.
Roundup
A roundup is practically required today, there’s so much news. And this just scratches the surface.
(1) The transcript of Devon Archer’s testimony can be found here. It’s quite long, of course; I have only read bits and pieces so far. Here’s some discussion of it:
He continued saying that having the “Biden brand” attached to the company made people “intimidated to mess with them” from a legal standpoint. He also testified that the “Biden brand” referred mostly to Joe Biden because he “brought the most value to the brand.”
The Archer testimony does not, however, appear to support the idea that Burisma wanted Shokin fired.
(2) DeSantis will be debating Gavin Newsom. Should be interesting. They both seem positively fetal in age compared to the usual politicians these days. It also solidifies the idea that Newsom may be the replacement for Joe, if the Democrats find it in their interests. I hope they debate sitting down, though, or that DeSantis stands on a box. Newsome is 6’3″ and DeSantis is supposedly 5″11″.
(3) It will probably surprise no one here that the White House pressured Facebook to adjust its algorithm in order to make it less likely that people would be directed to content by “polarizing” conservatives.
(4) In the Trump J6 indictment. Professor Jacobson asks, “Where is the crime?”
(5) This one’s worth watching again:
(6) The US credit rating downgrade.
They’ll be indicting Trump for it soon.
Is the current generation of boys becoming more conservative? And what of girls?
Maybe. According to this article:
In annual surveys over the last three years, roughly one-quarter of high school seniors self-identified as conservative or “very conservative” on the Monitoring the Future survey, a scholarly endeavor that dates to the 1970s. Only 13 percent of boys identified as liberal or very liberal in those [last three] years.
The chart there is especially interesting. I tried to download it to put it here, but I had a lot of trouble and finally gave up. Follow that Hill link and go to the chart entitled “Political identities of 12th-grade boys,” and you’ll see that in the mid 1970s it was the reverse – significantly more liberal than conservative for the boys. Then the two numbers stayed closer – although conservatives predominated – for many decades, until in the last few years the gap widened again with conservatives much more strongly in the lead.
Other things of note: most boys of that age don’t identify as anything, politically. So this really just measures those with strong feelings. But if there is a higher percentage of conservative boys these days, it makes perfect sense. The left has warred on boys in general and white boys in particular. Why wouldn’t boys see them as the enemy? In addition, men tend to vote more conservatively than women. And lastly, if a boy wanted to be rebellious in earlier years, liberalism or leftism were the ways to go. Nowadays it’s a revolutionary act – especially when in school – to be conservative.
Not so for the girls. If you look at the chart labeled “Political identities of 12th-grade girls,” you’ll see that more girls have identified as liberal rather than conservative for the entire time the surveys have been done, and in the last few years the gap has only widened. The widening seems to have occurred from the fact that more girls identify as liberal (around 30% now) rather than any big change in the percentage who identify as conservative.
More:
But the leftward drift of young women alone has sufficed to move the needle on young adults as a whole …
The rightward drift of high school boys is comparatively subtle. Indeed, when it comes to politics, most boys seem reluctant to pick a side. In the 2022 Monitoring the Future survey, the largest group of senior boys, more than two-fifths, claimed no politics at all, answering the liberal-conservative question with “none of the above” or “I don’t know.”
Apathy? Ignorance? Annoyance at being asked questions by pollsters? Fear of negative repercussions if the answer is non-woke? Acknowledgment that they are growing and changing and that today’s answer might not be tomorrow’s?
Open thread 8/3/23
If you want some of the legal details of the Trump J6 indictment …
… you can find them here, in a post by Professor William Jacobson at Legal Insurrection.
ADDENDUM: Please also see this post of Ace’s.
And if you want an idea about what the left is saying, there’s always, “Why Jack Smith’s January 6th Trump Indictment Is So Smart,” an opinion piece in The New York Times.
The Trump J6 indictment: dark days for the republic
It used to be that people on both sides of US politics understood that the bar should be very very very high for the indictment of a major candidate for president or an ex-president, particularly any prosecution for matters that have to do with political acts or actions. This – and I suppose, some sort of integrity – led both sides to hold off. Impeachment/conviction was a substitute, a political process that could serve to remove a president, although it had never actually happened that a president was removed that way, despite attempts, because the Founders had purposely made the bar quite high for conviction in the Senate.
And this was the case even if only because each party thought such an act of prosecution might come back to bite them if the other party ever came to power.
But the Democrats are acting like they have nothing of that sort to fear anymore. And maybe they don’t, whether by hook or by crook. It’s ironic that this indictment stems from the fact that although Trump was claiming that the 2020 election was won by Biden through fraud, he actually knew that of course there was no fraud at all. And yet the indictment serves to indicate to the American people just the opposite – that the Democrats may indeed have committed fraud because this weakly-drawn and apparently politically-motivated indictment makes it clear the Democrats will stop at nothing in their quest for power. So, why not fraud, too?
Today Ann Althouse has a post in which she discusses this article written by Richard L. Hansen that appeared in Slate. Both Althouse and Hansen are (in Althouse’s case retired) law professors, she at the University of Wisconsin and he at UCLA. Here’s an excerpt from Hansen’s piece, which is entitled “U.S. v. Trump Will Be the Most Important Case in Our Nation’s History”:
After nearly a decade of Trump convincing many in the public that all charges against him are politically motivated, he’s virtually inoculated himself himself against political repercussions for deadly serious criminal counts. He’s miraculously seen a boost in support and fundraising after each indictment … One should not underestimate the chances that Donald Trump could be elected president in 2024 against Joe Biden—especially if Biden suffers any kind of health setback in the period up to the election—even if Trump is put on trial and convicted of crimes.
A trial is the best chance to educate the American public, as the January 6 House committee hearings did to some extent, about the actions Trump allegedly took to undermine American democracy and the rule of law. Constant publicity from the trial would give the American people in the middle of the election season a close look at the actions Trump took for his own personal benefit while putting lives and the country at risk. It, of course, also serves the goals of justice and of deterring Trump, or any future like-minded would-be authoritarian, from attempting any similar attack on American democracy ever again.
The whole thing is worth reading in order to get a sense of the mindset of a law professor such as Hasen, who is the head of something called the Safeguarding Democracy Project. The project was officially launched a year ago, and here is part of a description of Hasen and its mission:
… [Hasen is] a prominent election law professor who has criticized voter identification laws and accused Republicans of using the COVID-19 pandemic to keep Democratic voters from voting. In its mission statement, the project claims that Republicans who questioned the legitimacy of the 2020 election were acting in bad faith and that election integrity laws passed after the 2020 election “make it harder for some eligible voters to register and to vote,” threatening “the cornerstone of American democracy.”
I wonder whether Hasen believes what he says or whether he’s just using rhetoric to further his own political ends. I’m not sure which possibility would be worse; they’re both bad enough.
In her blog post, Althouse writes this about Hasen’s Slate article:
It is an egregious abuse of power to criminally prosecute someone for the purpose of educating the public and generating publicity for your political position.
And yet that is what Hasen is advocating, although he also at least seems to think that Trump is actually guilty of the crimes for which he is being indicted, and that they are in fact crimes and not just free speech and following constitutional rules for challenging an election.
One could rephrase that excerpt from Hasen’s piece this way: The American people are just too stupid to reject Trump, so we who know better must educate them. We’ve tried and tried already, including hearings in Congress directed by the Democrats and a few handpicked Trump-hating Republicans, but apparently that didn’t work and the voting public might just elect him again. So in order to re-educate those stupid stubborn voters, we must stage a show trial in order to ram the truth – our truth – down their resistant throats.
Hasen’s essay concludes with this penultimate statement:
But as I wrote last year in the New York Times, the risks to our system of government of not prosecuting Donald Trump are greater than the risks of prosecuting him.
Depends what you mean by “risks” and “system,” Professor Hasen. If you mean risks of incredible disruption and strife, in which at least half of US voters feel disenfranchised and perceive that their favorite candidate was railroaded by his political opponents for naked political reasons, I’d say the risk of prosecution is higher. But if you mean – and this is what I suspect you mean – that the risks are to “our democracy” (“democracy” being what we elite Democrats say it is, which is to keep us in power and get the booboisie to do our bidding, for their own good of course) – then I suppose that you had better prosecute Trump.
Althouse also writes:
I’m not a Trump supporter. I’m a believer in freedom of speech and the rule of law. I deplore the criminalization of politics.
As all Americans – and especially law professors – should. But fewer and fewer seem to hold that view these days.
Althouse then adds:
Hasen proceeds to fret about Trump’s ability to push the trial date beyond Election Day, win the presidency, put his own people in charge, pardon himself, and then “then sic his attorney general on political adversaries with prosecutions not grounded in any evidence.” Yes, that’s a lowly incentive for protecting freedom of speech and the rule of law: You might be able to take out your enemies, but when the tables turn, they are enabled and motivated to come after you. Hasen knows this. He admits it. But he won’t come out and say this prosecution is a terrible mistake.
That harks back to how I began this post, with the old-fashioned idea that such actions can come back to bite you in the end. However, as I also indicated, I don’t think that Hasen or other Democrats who believe as he does ever intend to relinquish power and let such a thing happen. To twist a phrase that Hasen himself used in his essay in regard to Trump, I think Hasen believes that the Democrats have “inoculated themselves against political repercussions” for what they are doing. That is why he not only doesn’t come out and admit that this prosecution is a terrible mistake, he also doesn’t think it. He thinks it’s an absolutely necessary corrective.
Perhaps there’s a mole writing headlines at The New York Times
Here’s a screenshot of a NY Times article seen at Ann Althouse’s:
The headline at the top right is what brought me up short. I knew the Times would never be so honest as to admit what’s the real purpose behind the Trump indictment. But I initially had trouble seeing that headline as saying anything other than that Trump has been indicted in order to prevent a possible Trump win in the 2024 election.
The headline is unintentionally but bleakly humorous. We have to take our yuks where we can these days.
Open thread 8/2/23
And look who been indicted, just to round out the day
Trump, the real villain, is indicted for J6:
The 45-page indictment charges Trump with conspiracy to defraud the United States, conspiracy to obstruct an official proceeding, obstruction of and attempt to obstruct an official proceeding, and conspiracy against rights.
“This is nothing more than the latest corrupt chapter in the continued pathetic attempt by the Biden Crime Family and their weaponized Department of Justice to interfere with the 2024 Presidential Election, in which President Trump is the undisputed frontrunner, and leading by substantial margins,” the Trump campaign said in a statement received by PJ Media.
Donald Trump teased the indictment Tuesday afternoon, questioning the timing and calling it election interference and prosecutorial misconduct …
As Trump points out, the timing of this indictment is extremely suspicious. Not only could this have happened any time over the past two and a half years, but it comes a day after Hunter Biden’s former best friend and business associate Devon Archer’s bombshell testimony
Trump couldn’t be more correct.
The trial will be in the kangaroo court capital otherwise known as Washington DC.
Here’s Jonathan Turley:
…I felt that the Mar-a-Lago indictment was strong. This is the inverse. This is closer to the case against former Virginia Gov. Bob McDonnell where Smith was overturned by an unanimous Supreme Court…
— Jonathan Turley (@JonathanTurley) August 1, 2023
…The press conference held by Smith only deepened the unease for some of us. Smith railed against the January 6th riot and made it sound like he was indicting Trump on incitement. He didn't. The disconnect was glaring and concerning.
— Jonathan Turley (@JonathanTurley) August 1, 2023
As early as January 7, 2021, I and many others started comparing the events of the previous day to the Reichstag Fire in the way that the Nazis used the latter as a pretext to blame and suppress their opponents, and to grab more power. And indeed, it has played out in just that manner.
Devon Archer testifies: promoting the “brand”; firing Shokin
Yesterday the big news was that Hunter Biden’s former business associate Devon Archer testified before Congress and said that Joe Biden talked to Hunter’s business associates at least 20 times, but they all just chatted about stuff like the weather.
And of course, the left and the MSM are busy claiming that Joe Biden’s getting on the phone with these people sent no message whatsoever about the possibilities of doing business with any company with Hunter on the board, and how that might affect US policy towards that company. Nope; it was just about the weather, which after all is very important to us all. Hey, Joe didn’t even know who he was talking to – he was just being friendly old Joe.
We don’t have the transcript yet, although it’s been promised soon. But here are some of the comments on the testimony:
Goldman [a Democrat] claimed Archer had said Joe and Hunter’s business partners only exchanged ‘niceties’ like talking about ‘the weather, “what’s going on?”‘
But Republicans had a different retelling of Archer’s account.
Oversight member Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene told DailyMail.com in an interview Archer testified that ‘the Bidens were in the actual business of influence peddling.’
‘It’s extremely damning,’ she said, claiming that the 20 phone conversations Archer referred to were directly about business deals.
‘We have Devon Archer coming out and telling the truth that Hunter Biden and Joe Biden spoke over 20 times about his business deals, not about the weather, not about what was for lunch about his business deals,’ she said.
I don’t even know whether the Democrats think any of their disclaimers are believable to anyone but the most stalwart Biden voters, or whether they’re just thumbing their noses and laughing at the lot of us. It helps that Biden is so foggy. But that’s not what you’d call reassuring.
Or was all this weather talk a ploy to maintain plausible deniability about what the effect of putting Joe on the line would be? Can we believe that Joe, even when he was Obama’s VP, would talk to just anyone, knowing that his son was in business in places like Ukraine and China, and not caring who might be on the other end of the line? Is he so very stupid and unaware that he doesn’t realize that there would be the potential for misuse of the Joe Biden connection?
Joe’s pretty stupid. But I don’t think he was ever that stupid. Perhaps Biden’s defenders think that we’re that stupid, though.
Here are Joe’s previous disclaimers about knowledge (or lack thereof) of Hunter’s business dealings, to refresh your memory.
Archer also said that Hunter and Joe were selling “the brand”:
Joe was there to add value, said Archer, to “the brand” of corrupt Ukrainian energy company Burisma — which paid Hunter $83,000 a month while his father was VP, after which it cut his salary in half …
As Uncle Jim told Tony Bobulinski, another former business partner of Hunter’s, Joe is big on “plausible deniability,” a term coined by the CIA during the Kennedy administration to describe the practice of keeping the president only vaguely informed about illegal or unsavory activity so he can plausibly deny he knows anything if it becomes public knowledge.
And then there was the firing of the Ukrainian prosecutor, Shokin. Remember him? I wrote many posts about him way back when. Here’s what Archer had to say yesterday:
Archer, a former business partner at the Rosemont Seneca firm who was convicted in 2018 in a tribal bond fraud scheme, also told lawmakers that Hunter Biden was pressured in late 2015 to help deal with Prosecutor General Viktor Shokin’s corruption investigation as Joe Biden was preparing to travel to Ukraine.
“In December 2015, Mykola Zlochevsky, the owner of Burisma, and Vadym Pozharski, an executive of Burisma, placed constant pressure on Hunter Biden to get help from D.C. regarding the Ukrainian prosecutor, Viktor Shokin,” the committee explained, recounting Archer’s testimony. “Shokin was investigating Burisma for corruption. Hunter Biden, along with Zlochevsky and Pozharski, ‘called D.C.’ to discuss the matter. Biden, Zlochevsky, and Pozharski stepped away to take the call.”
A few days after that meeting, Joe Biden visited Ukraine as vice president and began an effort to force Ukraine’s president to fire Shokin, eventually threatening to withhold $1 billion in U.S. loan guarantees if the termination did not happen. Biden’s defenders have long maintained the firing was not related to Burisma and was a result of U.S. policy because the Obama administration felt Shokin was corrupt.
Shokin has denied being corrupt and claims his firing was a result of his probe of Burisma.
That was all quite apparent long before Archer’s testimony, but it’s interesting that he actually said the pressure did occur. One of the most interesting things of all is that Joe Biden actually bragged about it. Apparently he felt completely insulated from ever getting into trouble for this:
Solid. Translated: solidly behind Burisma.
Ah, but it was Trump who was impeached.
On Watergate versus Huntergate
It’s often said – at least on the right – that the Hunter/Joe Biden scandal is worse than Watergate.
Agreed. It’s worse in terms of what almost certainly happened, but it’s also worse in another way: the suppression of the truth. In Watergate, not only did the press eagerly investigate Nixon and the Plumbers, but the GOP abandoned him when the facts were revealed. That masked something else about Watergate, though, that has only become more clear in recent years: the tale would have been just a tiny footnote to history – if that – had the perpetrator been a Democrat.
I became convinced some years ago that the press would not have pursued Watergate except for the fact that it concerned a Republican, in fact the already-detested Nixon. And Huntergate (or whatever you want to call it) has only underlined that perception. No corruption is too egregious not to be covered up, rationalized, excused, or ignored if it’s committed by a Democrat.
It is hard to get cynical enough to keep up with events these days.