Poll contradictions on Roe, Dobbs, and abortion indicate many Americans are confused and/or misinformed

The New Neo Posted on by

Which comes as no surprise.

The MSM and so many politicians have made it their business to misinform and confuse. It can be very politically expedient. Also, it’s pretty easy to get confused about court rulings; it’s not as though most people wade through them by actually reading them, and it’s not as though they’re a cinch to understand even when they are read. Yes, the main points are usually easy to get – although often distorted in the media. But the details of the reasoning behind those main points aren’t all that simple to understand and often require careful reading and extra background knowledge.

I got my own education in that problem about ten years ago, when Romney was running against Obama. Some discussion connected with politics was going on in my book group, and during the course of it I made a reference to federalism being the principle behind something or other. I got various blank stares and “What’s that?” in response. Most or perhaps all of these people were college graduates, but quite a few of them seemed to never have heard of what I was referencing.

And if you think about it, some background knowledge about the powers retained by the federal government versus those allowed to the states, the history of that principle and the arguments for why our government was set up that way, would also be necessary to understand Roe and Dobbs and have a truly informed opinion about it.

When I thought about that day of the 2012 book group conversation (which was not about Roe, by the way), I realized that, had I not gone to law school and/or had I not become very interested in politics so many years later, I might have not known or cared all that much about federalism, either. Looking back on my school days, I know that we certainly must have studied government. But how much did we study it and, more importantly, how much had I remembered about federalism from that long-ago high school course? Probably not all that much. Maybe mostly the phrase “states’ rights,” which was strongly associated with bad stuff like the Civil War and Governor Wallace of Alabama. So that might have been all I would have remembered of the subject.

So now we get this sort of thing:

These results are just mind-numbing because they are nothing but a ball of contradictions. 55 percent do not approve of the overturning of Roe…

But the biggest “huh” moment comes when you see that 72 percent (!) of Americans believe that abortion should be banned after 15 weeks. Guess that that requires? The overturning of Roe (and Casey).

To summarize, you’ve got far more than a super-majority in favor of a provision that requires the ending of something they claim they don’t support ending. Again, it’s just mind-numbing.

So are Americans just really dumb? Or are they being fed so much misinformation that they don’t even know that they hold contradictory positions? I think the answer is mostly the latter. The media have been relentless in conflating the ending of Roe with a supposed federal ban on abortion that simply doesn’t exist.

Polls seem to be indicating that Dobbs isn’t going to make much of a difference in people’s voting decisions in 2022. Who knows? It’s certainly the case, though, that the Democrats are really hoping it will make a difference and that the difference will favor them.

But they’re also talking a lot about “codifying” Roe. That’s an interesting word: codifying. It’s being used right now to mean “Congress passing a bill to make abortion the federal law of the land, superceding state laws that various states are trying to pass.” In other words, it’s one of those euphemisms meant to disguise what’s really happening, which is that SCOTUS said this is an issue for the states and the Democrats are saying that no, it’s a federal issue and they have the power to pass legislation to make it the law of the land and take away the right of states to make their own laws on this. If they actually accomplished this, wouldn’t the Court probably say it’s unconstitutional? Perhaps, or perhaps more threats from the left would manage to intimidate the conservative justices.

At the moment, it’s likely that such a “codification” of Roe would be blocked by either Manchin or Sinema and their opposition to ending the filibuster. But I don’t think that the Democrats really give a rat’s patootie about passing it right now, and in fact I think they don’t want to do so. I think what they really want is to use it as a campaign issue and rallying cry in 2022 to whip up people to vote for them in order to supposedly pass it in the new Congressional session.

If they ever really had to hammer out the details of such a law, though, it would be interesting to see what they would come up with. If it’s too moderate, they would not just be “codifying” an abortion right and stopping red states from banning it, but wouldn’t they also be keeping states such as New York and California from passing the extremely lenient bills those states would like to pass? Doesn’t this cut both ways? It seems to me that such a “codification” is a potential minefield for the Democrats, so they might want to keep it in the realm of discussion only.

Oh, and executive action.

An overview of Uvalde: Part II

The New Neo Posted on by

[Part I can be found here. You can find my discussion of the ALERTT report on Uvalde here.]

If you’ve been following my posts on Uvalde, you know I’ve been working on a long post (or several posts) about the testimony by McCraw and others before the Texas Senate. Now, in the middle of that, another report has been issued, this one by the Texas House itself and this time a lengthy one, almost 80 pages. I read it last night in its entirety and plan to incorporate it into my posts, which obviously takes even more time.

But this post will serve as a summary introduction, plus a focus on one specific. It’s a cliche to say “this could be a book,” but there really is so much to say that it could be a book. I’m not planning to write that book, although someone probably will, and I hope that person does the subject justice. There also will be more detailed reports forthcoming from various agencies, because I don’t think the investigation has been completed.

Nevertheless, I’m far more impressed with the newest report than with anything else that’s come out so far. It manages to clarify a few things (at least somewhat) that were murky before, and adds some new information. In addition – and in my experience this is quite unusual – it’s written in manner that’s relatively easy to understand and I see in it a real attempt to get the story of a complex situation right.

I’ve written two previous posts on McCraw’s presentation to the Texas Senate (see this as well as this). McCraw is the Texas Department of Public Safety head, and although his talk only dealt with evidence from videos and audios of that day, it led to a hypothesis on my part about what was happening that day that caused the police to consider the situation that of a barricaded shooter rather than an active shooter – something that was key to even beginning to figure out why they acted as they did (or rather, failed to act). And now this newly-released legislative report offers even more evidence that would tend to confirm my hypothesis.

You might wonder why I’m still writing so much about Uvalde. After all, the dogs bark and the caravan has moved on, and is there really much more to say? The reason I’m doing this is that I find it not only an intensely tragic event, but also a fascinating (although horrifying) and instructive demonstration of how things can go horribly wrong, especially in the way that information is conveyed, received, and interpreted, and is then acted on or not acted on. That is sometimes the case both during a crisis and then later on when people read about it and analyze and describe it.

When we read about an event such as Uvalde, we become – at least in our own minds, at least many of us – the omniscient observer. We get a whole bunch of information from different sources – some of it incorrect – and most of us come to quick and sometimes implacable and immovable conclusions about what went on. And yet we are far from omniscient, although more reliable information becomes available over time. But as we know, people have trouble changing their minds, and when intense emotions are involved such as with Uvalde, it’s even more difficult to be objective. This is only human.

One paradoxical thing is that, although first responders are present at the scene, and one would think that means they know more than we ever do, in fact that often know less if the scene is large and chaotic with a lot going on and many people involved, as well as things unknown and unseen that are only revealed later.

As people responding to a crisis get word of an event or a sequence of events and rush to deal with it, they must create a preliminary story in their minds of what’s happening there. We all need such perceptions in order to properly evaluate what’s happening and to plan our responses. But we can’t get locked into these early notions; we have to take in new information – from what we observe at the scene, from what others are telling us (on phone or radio or in person) – and in real time, under pressure, revise our story of what’s happening and what’s an appropriate and effective response.

Whatever else was going on to cause the failures in Uvalde, poor communication and coordination was at least one of the things that hampered the response of the Uvalde police that day. there is virtually no question about that. Also, poor communication later – in the press and by spokespeople – has sometimes made it difficult for the rest of us to get a clear picture of the situation.

With Uvalde there’s a great temptation to give a simple explanation such as “the police were gutless cowards.” Not only would that explain a lot, but it would mean there is a relatively easy solution: get braver people in there. I just don’t think it happens to fit the facts as presented, although it’s certainly possible it was true for some of the people there. From our standpoint, the initial conclusion by Arredondo and other officers that it was not an active shooter situation requiring extremely aggressive action seems seems absurd. How could they be in a school, with a shooter holed up in a classroom and shooting a few times over the course of an hour – even if they perceived during that period that those shots were only being fired towards the hallway where police were – how on earth could this ever not be an active shooter situation? It boggles the mind and leads to the almost inescapable charge of cowardice, because that seems the only coherent explanation. But I see other possible explanations to which some of the evidence points.

So that’s my introduction to this long-promised series of posts. One specific which I plan to elaborate on in some detail in a later post is my current conviction that the root cause of the officers’ initial conviction that this was a barricaded shooter situation was a combination of the receipt of very incomplete and in some cases incorrect information (compared to what we’ve learned since), the timing of their arrival, the aforementioned terrible coordination and communication, and probably a stressed mindset that had trouble believing the worst. That last is my speculation, but I think it’s valid psychologically, although extremely unfortunate.

As I’ve read and thought about Uvalde in the nearly two months since it happened, one image that keeps coming to mind, strangely enough, is a scene from the novel Catch-22. If you’ve ever read it you probably remember it, because it’s the climax of a theme that builds throughout the book: the death of Snowden. Without revealing too much (in case some haven’t read it and intend to do so some day), I’ll say that the reason I make the analogy is that in that scene the main character Yossarian is engaged in solving what he thinks is the problem (a problem that’s already bad enough), while he neglects to do a full examination of what’s actually going on with Snowden and therefore entirely misses the far more horrific reality.

Now for one detail in the new report that I think will give you an idea of how the first stories we hear, and the ones on which we base conclusions, can be very wrong. You may recall that in the ALERTT reported, as well as newspapers, it was said that one Uvalde police officer had a chance to take the shooter out even before he entered the building, when he was in the schoolyard. It would involve a literal longshot by the officer, and the story is that he asked permission but by the time it was given it was too late and the shooter had entered the school itself. This is a heartbreaking and infuriating prospect.

Please ponder what the new report says about that incident:

On arrival at the school [early on], SSgt. Canales saw cars stopped and a man shooting a gun. He grabbed his rifle, put a magazine into it, and grabbed an extra magazine. He saw people at the funeral home pointing in the direction of the school, and he heard somebody say the attacker was in or near the building. SSgt. Canales entered an open gate where he met Lt. Javier Martinez, also of the Uvalde Police. Lt. Martinez also heard the report of a vehicle accident with shots fired. He drove toward the intersection of Geraldine and South Grove, and as he arrived, he saw a man on the side of the road pointing. He jumped out of his car, popped the trunk to get his vest…

One of those officers testified to the Committee that, based on the sound of echoes, he believed the shooter had fired in their direction. That officer saw children dressed in bright colors in the playground, all running away. Then, at a distance exceeding 100 yards, he saw a person dressed in black, also running away. Thinking that the person dressed in black was the attacker, he raised his rifle and asked Sgt. Coronado for permission to shoot…

So far that conforms with what we’ve read previously, right? Except that this was the case:

Sgt. Coronado testified he heard the request, and he hesitated. He knew there were children present. He considered the risk of shooting a child, and he quickly recalled his training that officers are responsible for every round that goes downrange. According to the officer who made the request, there was no opportunity for Sgt. Coronado to respond before they heard on the radio that the attacker was running toward the school. The officers testified to the Committee that it turned out that the person they had seen dressed in black was not the attacker, but instead it was Robb Elementary Coach Abraham Gonzales.

There is quite a bit more detail in the report about the coach in the schoolyard. But it turns out to have almost certainly been a good thing that the officer never fired. It’s a cautionary tale about initial reports as well as how the media shapes our views, and I think it also highlights the multiple dilemmas first responders face. Those who felt that it was clear this officer should have fired from far away into a group of children and teachers/coaches turn out to have been wrong – in this case. Sometimes they will have been right. But it’s the responders who have to make the split-second decisions with the stakes being lives. Often they make the right decisions, and sometimes they make very wrong ones. At Uvalde, there were some right ones and some very very wrong ones.

Roundup

The New Neo Posted on by

Some days there’s just so much news a roundup is in order.

(1) The Chinese economy appears threatened right now due to a mortgage crisis:

As of July 12, homebuyers in 22 Chinese cities had threatened to stop their mortgage payments over construction delays and sinking real estate prices, affecting 35 projects, Citigroup analysts wrote in a note. As of Monday, that figure had surged to over 80 cities, affecting over 200 projects, according to data from E-house China Research and Development Institution, a Chinese real-estate database.

Homebuyers’ discontent is spreading both offline and online. Now, Chinese online platforms are deleting crowd-sourced documents and social media posts tabulating the number of mortgage boycotts and project delays nationwide, according to a Bloomberg report.

(2) The ever-persuasive Joe Biden gets nowhere with the Saudis and his request for oil.

(3) We’ve known about the 1619 Project for quite some time, and its goal to rewrite American history and place slavery at the absolute center of it as unforgiveable original sin, motivating and dominating everything else. But meanwhile this sort of thing has also been going on for quite some time outside of most people’s awareness:

[Jeffery Tucker, founder of the Brownstone Institute]… recounted his previous visit to [Monticello] as being full of grandeur with a “sense of majesty about the place.”

“No longer,” he told host Brian Kilmeade. “It is depressing and demoralizing and truly upsetting.”…

Tucker described the house as looking like a rummage sale with contemporary paintings hung inside. He said tour guides repeatedly diminished Jefferson’s accomplishments, claiming his reputation is “wildly overblown.”

They won’t tear Monticello down, unlike the Jefferson statues. Instead they’ll use it as an opportunity to attempt to induce loathing and shame in visitors. And it’s not just Jefferson; it’s Madison, too:

No American flags fly at Montpelier, Madison’s plantation home in rural Virginia, and not a single display focuses on the life and accomplishments of America’s foremost political philosopher, who created our three-branch federal system of government, wrote the Bill of Rights and the Federalist Papers, and served two terms as president.

Instead, blindsided tourists are hammered by high-tech exhibits about Madison’s slaves and current racial conflicts, thanks to a $10 million grant from left-leaning philanthropist David M. Rubenstein.

“I was kind of thinking we’d be hearing more about the Constitution,” one baffled dad said when The Post visited the president’s home this week. “But everything here is really about slavery.”…

If the left has its way, everyone will be taught that all of American history is really about slavery.

(4) Speaking of Joe Biden, more evidence emerges from Hunter’s laptop:

…Eric Schwerin, the president of Hunter Biden’s investment company Rosemont Seneca Partners, was “named as a calendar invite recipient on 21 of 30 listed meetings, with a green check frequently indicating his confirmed receipt of the invite for meetings with the vice president.”

Previously released visitor logs from the Obama administration indicate that Schwerin visited the White House 19 times between 2009 and 2015.

Biden has long denied having anything to do with Hunter’s business or business partners.

(5) In a mall in a suburb of Indianapolis, a shooter kills three people and is shot dead by a man with a gun:

Ison also confirmed Sunday that the shooter was shot and killed by a man visiting the mall. The Good Samaritan, as police called him, was armed with a handgun.

Identified by police as a 22-year-old from Bartholomew County, the Good Samaritan had a legal gun permit and is fully cooperating with police.

“The real hero of the day was the citizen that was lawfully carrying a firearm in the food court and was able to stop the shooter almost as soon as he began,” Ison said.

He was lawfully carrying, but the mall had a gun-free policy. I would imagine the killer was aware of that policy and hoped to take advantage of it. Fortunately the other guy was carrying anyway, and here’s what the mall spokesperson had to say: “We are grateful for the strong response of the first responders, including the heroic actions of the Good Samaritan who stopped the suspect.”

I wonder whether they’re rethinking their policy on guns.

Those days before air conditioning

The New Neo Posted on by

It seems a bit like ancient history, doesn’t it? But when I was growing up and for quite a while afterwards, air conditioning was a rare luxury.

We didn’t have it in houses, except for the occasional bedroom. We certainly didn’t have it in cars. Not in schools, either. And subways? Fugetaboutit.

And in New York in the summer it can get awfully hot. Summer meant sweat. Summer meant seersucker suits for the men and light cotton or linen dresses for the women. When I was a toddler, we were fortunate enough to go for a month or so to a rented cabin at a lake, and my father commuted up there for the weekends.

My bedroom at home had very little ventilation. Even with the two tiny windows open it could be oppressive in there on a hot still night. There was a large fan that could be hauled in, but all it did was circulate the heavy air, and even as a kid it was hard to sleep. My parents finally got an air conditioner in their bedroom, and my brother and I would haul in cot mattresses to put on their bedroom floor on the worst nights.

In New York City, school lasted until June 30th and began again the day after Labor Day. Those last few weeks in June could be awfully hot, coupled with the lame-duck situation of not too much learning going on towards the end anyway. Boring, tedious, draining. Some summers after school was finally over I went to sleep-away camp, and although that was a solution to the heat, it was located in the mountains and often so bitterly cold there that I remember almost never having any desire to plunge into the ice-cold lake, although we were forced to do so every day.

In those days cars had little side vents that did almost nothing at all to circulate air, and if you wore shorts or a skirt you’d stick to the vinyl seats. My family once drove through the Mohave desert in the summer – ’nuff said.

There was one place that was reliably air-conditioned: movie theaters. It could be so cold inside them, though, that one had to remember to take a sweater or risk shivering through the entire film.

Even when I was a teenager and young adult, neither the New York subways nor the ballet classes I attended were ever air-conditioned. The sweaty bodies in close quarters exacerbated the heat, and the humidity in a dance class became formidable. Dancers’ hands would keep sliding off barres which had became slick with sweat, and sweat dripped onto the floor and pooled there. We could have used a few of those guys who appear during basketball games to towel the floor. Every dancer had a little towel draped over the barre with which to try to absorb some of the sweat that stung our eyes and made our leotards sopping wet.

And now I think it’s about time for this:

We hold these truths to be self-evident: Trump is a lawless authoritarian who tore up the Constitution

The New Neo Posted on by

Commenter “JFM” writes:

I’m very confused when people on the left start, in all media, talking about Trump as “lawless” and “ripping up the Constitution”. Where did he do that? When did he do this?

And commenter “Wendy Laubach” adds:

JFM–I read this almost every day, the casual statement that the Republican party has embraced authoritarianism and that Trump was a lawless dictator. There is never any explanation, just as there is none for the “everyone knows” assumption that Trump’s term was nonstop “chaos.” It’s amazing how many people will read assertions like this in the paper, or hear them on TV, and adopt them serenely and uncritically.

The phenomenon is indeed very noticeable, and has been almost from the start of Trump’s political journey. It is in the nature of a creed – a formal statement of faith – rather than an observation requiring proof, defense, or even discussion.

Not only that, but belief in this creed is also a badge of honor and a sign of belonging to the righteous and the reasonable. Disagree with it, or even ask that an example be given, and receive disdain. You will be marked as an outsider to virtue, and perhaps even a Trump supporter or Trump defender, which puts you beyond the realm of reasoned discourse.

I am not overstating this. It’s not universal, of course, but it is very common on the left and even in rank and file Democrats. I think it accounts at least in part for the position of the NeverTrumpers. The effect is amplified, as all such effects are, by the echo-chamber nature of the left and of the MSM. If all the “smart people” believe that Trump is all those awful things, the only ones to doubt it must be dumb or evil or both. And a related conclusion is that if Trump is tearing up the Constitution, then the opposition is also justified in cutting constitutional corners and “cutting a great road though the law to get after the devil.”

All of this goes way beyond logic and way beyond any refutation through argument on the part of someone on the right. The weight and amount of evidence that would be required to refute it would be enormous, and even then the recipient of the information would have to be at least somewhat open to it on some level. This goes to the heart of people’s identity as good people who opposes evil, and since Trump is evil one must oppose him in order to be good.

I first noticed the strength of this feeling early on, when MAGA hats became the supposed symbols of racism, frightening and terrible to behold. Never before do I recall having seen the campaign symbols of the opposition be demonized to that extent, even if the opposition was despised (as it was, for example, with Reagan and George W. Bush). Now something that seemed so innocuous – a hat with an acronym that stood for “Make America Great Again” – was said to transmit tremendous evil.

Propaganda is a very real thing with very real effects, and Trump has been the target of negative and relentless propaganda from the beginning. The perceptual mental edifice that propaganda has built over the years is enormously strong.

Jose Alba and assault: update on the NY bodega case

The New Neo Posted on by

More has been revealed about the incident leading up to the death of Austin Simon at the hands of bodega employee Jose Alba. If you’re not familiar with the story so far, please see this previous post of mine on the subject.

Read the newer article and you’ll see what I’m talking about. It’s based on the release of a version of the videotape that also contains audio. It starts with the now familiar story of the woman’s EBT card not going through when she wanted to buy her 10-year-old daughter (who was present) a bag of chips, the woman’s resultant anger, and her angry contention that Alba had snatched the bag of chips from the daughter.

The audio reveals a conversation that went like this, after the card failed to go through:

“Did you put food?” the girlfriend can be heard on video asking Alba about how he rang up the sale.

“OK, mama, let me do it another time. My God,” Alba says.

“There’s money on there,” she insists.

The footage, which was edited, then cuts to other customers, and the woman yells from off camera, “You can’t touch my daughter. Don’t snatch that out of my daughter, you f–king piece of shit!”

Lovely lady.

More:

Alba is not seen in the footage taking away the chips.

The woman goes on to say “I’m gonna bring my n– down here and he gonna f–k you up. My n— is gonna come down here right now and f–k you up!”

So that’s the prelude to Austin Simon’s arrival on the scene, almost certainly setting up a very strong and completely understandable expectation on the part of Alba that if Simon arrived it would be with the intent of doing him harm, perhaps grave harm.

And so when Simon – a much younger and fitter man – entered, he immediately went behind the security barrier that separates store clerks from the customers, and greeted Alba this way:

Then Simon can be seen walking in and going immediately behind the counter.

“What’s up with you? N—-r what is wrong with you?” he demands.

That’s Simon talking to Alba, by the way – not the other way around.

There’s quite a bit more at the link, but that’s the most important new information. It makes it even more clear what threats Alba faced, and why he felt that his life and limb were at stake. But as we know, he’s been charged with murder.

Also, the girlfriend is seen from another video angle stabbing Alba in the arm, but that seems to be during or right after Alba was stabbing Simon. She has not been charged at all so far or even named.

Once upon a time there used to be a crime known as assault which was part of the familiar phrase assault and battery. Here’s the old definition of assault:

Assault is generally defined as an intentional act that puts another person in reasonable apprehension of imminent harmful or offensive contact. No physical injury is required, but the actor must have intended to cause a harmful or offensive contact with the victim and the victim must have thereby been put in immediate apprehension of such a contact.

I’m not sure whether “mere words” (such as those uttered by the girlfriend about getting her boyfriend to come and f*** Alba up) could ever have been defined as “assault,” even if followed by a battery (a touching). But it’s moot now, because now assault is usually defined differently, and that is the case in New York, which has various degrees of assault that all require an injury of some sort to have occurred.

However, there’s also a crime in NY called menacing, which I’d never heard of before but which seems somewhat similar to the old definition of assault. Menacing is defined as “intentionally plac[ing] another person in ‘reasonable fear of physical injury, serious physical injury or death.'” Verbally threatening is included, and I think it is pretty clear from the audio that Simon’s girlfriend could be successfully prosecuted for menacing, which carries a penalty of up to six months’ imprisonment.

I’d be shocked if Bragg ever decided to prosecute her for that.

As far as the girlfriend’s stabbing of Alba goes, I’m not so sure that would be a crime if in fact it occurred while Alba was in the act of killing Simon. Even though it may have been justified self-defense on the part of Alba, the girlfriend was trying to save her boyfriend’s life, which I believe (I’m not an expert on this) would make it self-defense on her part, because “self-defense” includes an act committed in the course of trying to save the life of another.

So, why weren’t the charges against Alba dropped the minute prosecutors saw the video, especially with the audio? (Rhetorical question.) Bragg says oh well, I’m thinking about it. But IMHO he can afford to drop the charges now because he’s already gotten his message across, which is don’t defend yourself or you could be charged with murder. And you better hope there’s video to document things, or it will be even worse for you.

The Democrats’ climate agenda is on hold…

The New Neo Posted on by

…for the moment, courtesy of Joe Manchin.

Although Biden may try to muscle it through anyway, with that tried and true method of bypassing the legislature known as “executive action”:

President Joe Biden vowed Friday to take “strong executive action” in response to moderate Democratic Sen. Joe Manchin torpedoing his party’s efforts toward writing sweeping climate action and tax legislation.

“If the Senate will not move to tackle the climate crisis and strengthen our domestic clean energy industry, I will take strong executive action to meet this moment,” Biden said in statement, while overseas in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia. Biden didn’t mention Manchin specifically.

The President vowed to “create jobs, improve our energy security, bolster domestic manufacturing and supply chains, protect us from oil and gas price hikes in the future, and address climate change,” but did not provide specifics on what kind of action he would take.

If they’re anything like his previous actions, they’ll come back to bite him in the butt.

More:

“I said, ‘Chuck until we see the July inflation figures, until we see the July, basically Federal Reserve rates, interest rates, then let’s wait till that comes out so we know that we’re going down a path that won’t be inflammatory, to add more to inflation,’ ” Manchin told Hoppy Kercheval on Talkline. “He says, ‘Are you telling me you won’t do the other right now?’ I said, ‘Chuck, it’s wrong, it’s not prudent to do the other right now.'”

I haven’t trusted Manchin in the past, but during the Biden administration he’s been a champ. I still don’t trust him, however. What does “right now” mean? Manchin is not up for re-election this fall, so he’s not talking about that in terms of himself. Does he mean it’s not smart to rile the voters prior to November, but if the Democrats keep control of the legislature it can all be done after that? I don’t know, and perhaps only Joe Manchin does.

Georgetown law professor calls justices who disagree with her “lawless”

The New Neo Posted on by

That’s persuasive, right?

Feldman is emblematic of the decline of legal reasoning and of reasoning as a whole in academic life. Law schools have long been the bastion of the “critical” approach to scholarship and argument, beginning in the late 1970s with Critical Legal Studies. I’ve written at some length about the movement and its philosophy in this post.

Of course, Feldman (and it’s certainly not limited to her) believes that it is she who is the one defending the rule of law. She calls the present SCOTUS “actively rogue.” Ironic, since it was actually the Roe court that was rogue in terms of reaching way past anything that is in the Constitution, and even some liberal law professors used to recognize that. The Dobbs court was actually trying to reinstate the primacy of the Constitution, which isn’t the least bit “rogue” except in the sense that it overturns the Roe precedent. But I doubt the left would be at all perturbed at overturning precedent if the action was in a cause they supported.

Here’s Feldman:

Again: people can take whatever tone they like toward me…I will not be intimidated into accepting theocratic decrees as legitimate legal reasoning in a secular, pluralist democracy.

That argument – that Dobbs was based on religion – is false on the face of it. But I’ve heard other people I know state with great conviction that this is all about religion, and nothing can dissuade them because of course they are mind-readers – as is Feldman. This is part of the source of the great animus towards this decision.

I’ve written about this point of view in this previous post:

(4) Many women on the left have bought the “Handmaid’s Tale” sort of scenario which goes like this: rigid fundamentalist Christian men are trying to control the reproductive organs of women and will stop at nothing till they get total control. This fear has been drummed up incessantly for many years.

(5) Many also believe that the Catholics on the Supreme Court are intent on imposing Catholicism on everyone and the ruling in Dobbs originates in their Catholicism. There is no separation of church and state here (#5 relies on their not understanding that the ruling actually takes the Court out of the business of ruling on abortion at the federal level, but there are plenty of people who not only don’t understand that but who are not interested in even listening to that sort of assertion, much less crediting it).

Feldman is a law professor, and so she of course understands that Dobbs “actually takes the Court out of the business of ruling on abortion at the federal level,” but she feels free to ignore it here and pretend this is a theocratic decree masquerading as legal reasoning.

Looking at Feldman’s Wiki page, I see that – among other things – she’s a big champion and supporter of Christine Blasey Ford. In addition:

In 2020, Prof. Heidi Feldman of the Law Center tweeted that “law professors and law school deans” should “not support applications from our students to clerk for” judges appointed by President Trump. “To work for such a judge,” Ms. Feldman continued, marks a lawyer as lacking in the character and judgment necessary for the practice of law.”

So Feldman’s been on this crusade of delegitimizing the judges and justices duly appointed by the opposition for quite some time, and has even tried to deprive them of clerks by appealing to Georgetown and other law schools to not “support applications” from their students to clerk for these vile and evil judges. That this sort of recommendation from a professor is considered fine and dandy at an institution such as Georgetown Law School tells us a lot. It has become especially common post-Trump, because Trump is a lawless Hitlerian figure in their minds (or they pretend that he is; I actually think they really believe it, however) and any tools are appropriate to oppose him and anyone who might support him and who ever supported him. I have encountered this type of thinking over and over among ordinary people I know, as well.

And here is a clear expression of it by Feldman:

“In more ordinary times, we can study and teach U.S. law against a background that presidents, governors, state and federal legislators, and judges on all courts have a basic commitment and aspiration to rule of law and to justice,” Feldman wrote.

“With the rise of the Trump-Republican Party, this traction — the ability to argue within a shared expectation of commitment to rule of law and justice — has completely evaporated. Last term’s Supreme Court decisions are just the most recent high-profile evidence for this.”

It is intensely Orwellian, but Feldman fairly swells with righteousness.

Here’s another law professor who goes her one better (or worse):

St. John’s University law Professor John Barrett approvingly replied to the thread, tweeting that lawyers who fail to resist the Supreme Court are “Hitler’s butlers.”

“Lawyers are servants—butlers,” wrote Barrett. “But we get to choose whom and what we will serve. Rules of thumb: serve truth; assist people, not powers that hurt them; don’t do it for the money; don’t become Hitler’s butler.”

This isn’t merely about Dobbs, in case for some reason you thought it might be.

The cancellation of Jefferson at Monticello…

The New Neo Posted on by

…had actually already happened when I was there, around 2008. The docents were already droning on and on about slaves and Sally Hemmings, almost as though those were the main points of Jefferson’s life.

This NY Post article describes what’s going on there these days:

“The whole thing has the feel of propaganda and manipulation,” Jeffrey Tucker, founder of the libertarian Brownstone Institute and a recent visitor, told The Post. “People on my tour seemed sad and demoralized.”

The new emphasis is the culmination of a 10-year effort to balance the historical record, officials of the Thomas Jefferson Foundation, the nonprofit that owns the estate, have said

So I guess it’s gotten even worse. More:

“Half of the comments on Jefferson were critical,” wrote William Bailes of Chester, Virginia, in an online review after visiting in June. “Even my 11-year-old daughter noticed the bias.”

Tucker described his guide last month as “surly and dismissive” of Jefferson’s accomplishments…

…[O]n a visit this week, The Post found, the grievance has become the predominant theme at Monticello, from the ticket booth in the visitors center — decorated with a contemporary painting of Jefferson’s weeping slaves — to its final gift-shop display…

Books by critical race theory proponents Ibram X. Kendi and Ta-Nehisi Coates enjoy pride of place in the visitor center’s gift shop, while the smaller Farm Shop store displays five titles on Jefferson’s slaves — and a single biography of the man himself…

“The entire focus was on his mistress,” complained Wesley Stevens of Tulsa, Okla. “They are trying to rewrite history to make it seem like the Founding Fathers were terrible immoral creatures that happened to start a country.”…

The Thomas Jefferson Foundation is run by a roster of big-money Democratic donors and former Democratic officials…

Please read the whole thing, because excerpts don’t do it justice.

By the way – it’s much too complex a subject to explain here, but although it has become the Accepted and Obligatory Narrative that Thomas Jefferson was the father of Hemmings’ children, it is not what you’d call proven. It certainly seems to have at least been a male relative of Jefferson’s, however. If you want to wade through this or at least part of this challenge of the Thomas Jefferson theory, be my guest. Here’s a very brief treatment.

In line with all of this, I want to revisit a post of mine about something Allan Bloom wrote (in his 1987 work The Closing of the American Mind) about his own schooling, which occurred back in the 1940s and shows the seeds of all of this had already been firmly planted:

What began in Charles Beard’s Marxism and Carl Becker’s historicism became routine. We are used to hearing the Founders being charged with being racists, murderers of Indians, representatives of class interests. I asked my first history professor in the university, a very famous scholar, whether the picture he gave us of George Washington did not have the effect of making us despise our regime. “Not at all,” he said, “it doesn’t depend on individuals but on our having good democratic values.” To which I rejoined, “But you just showed us that Washington was only using those values to further the class interests of the Virginia squirearchy.” He got angry, and that was the end of it. He was comforted by a gentle assurance that the values of democracy are part of the movement of history and did not require his elucidation or defense. He could carry on his historical studies with the moral certitude that they would lead to greater openness and hence more democracy. The lessons of fascism and the vulnerability of democracy, which we had all just experienced, had no effect on him.

Of course, it’s much much worse now. I am pretty sure that Bloom’s professor respected America and its ideals; for the most part the academics and other elites in charge these days do not and are actively determined to destroy our respect for our past and make us hate our own country.

[NOTE: Here is Robert Frost’s take on related matters.]