The furor around General Milley

The New Neo Posted on by

The left scrambles to pretend that what General Milley did was no big deal. You can see some reports here, here, here, and here.

There’s a great deal to digest. But one thing in particular caught my eye, which I found at Althouse’s, and which features the following quote from this WaPo article:

[Milley’s] decision…to place himself between Trump and potential war was triggered by several important events — a phone call, a photo op and a refusal to rule out war with another adversary, Iran. The immediate motivation, according to the book, was the Jan. 8 call from Pelosi, who demanded to know, ‘What precautions are available to prevent an unstable president from initiating military hostilities or from accessing the launch codes and ordering a nuclear strike?’ Milley assured her that there were ‘a lot of checks in the system.’ The call transcript obtained by the authors shows Pelosi telling Milley, referring to Trump, ‘He’s crazy. You know he’s crazy. … He’s crazy and what he did yesterday is further evidence of his craziness.’ Milley replied, ‘I agree with you on everything.'”

If that really is from the official transcript of the call, it’s very revealing – particularly that last sentence.

COVID and liberty: understanding the basic principles of the republic and Western civilization

The New Neo Posted on by

It seems self-evident that without an understanding of and commitment to our own basic principles, the underpinnings of both our government and our institutions are undermined. At some point – and we can argue about exactly when it happened – in the last century (maybe with its beginning even earlier), the right stopped paying attention as the left took over the institutions ordinarily tasked with performing the transmission of such things to the next generation. This includes, in particular, education, popular entertainment, the church, and the press.

The right may have thought these things were on automatic, and that not much attention needed to be paid. Little by little, as they were undermined, it either was not noticed, or thought localized or trivial.

Then all at once it became very very apparent. But by then it was either way too late, or at least so late that the scope of the effort required to undo the harm seemed (and still seems) enormous and perhaps impossible. The institutions and shared beliefs that had once seemed so solid remained only as facades and hollowed-out shells, if that.

It’s only in the last decade or so (accelerating during the Trump years, on watching the self-styled “Resistance”) that it’s become clear that the philosophy of “the ends justifies the means” has become acceptable operating procedure not just to far left activists (who always believed that), but to most rank and file Democrats. It’s also become clear that way too many Republican legislators lack either the will or the guts or the ability to fight it, and that there are powerful other forces working for it behind the scenes – the administrative state and all the agencies, as well as foreign interests such as China.

Commenter “PA Cat” draws our attention to this Tablet article that focuses on COVID and China, but it’s a good example of what I’m talking about:

Lockdowns, the mass quarantine of both sick and healthy people, have never before been used for disease mitigation in the modern Western world. Previously, the strategy had been systematically ruled out by the pandemic plans of the World Health Organization (WHO) and by health experts of every developed nation. So how did we get here?

Indeed; good question. We have plunged into something unprecedented in the West, and which was sold to us as highly temporary. Remember that? It’s hard to overestimate the changes that have been wrought by these lockdowns, not just in patterns of societal interaction and assembly that have lasted for hundreds if not thousands of years, but in people’s thinking about how acceptable or unacceptable such things are.

More:

Mass lockdowns of entire countries as a technique for fighting disease sprung into the world’s consciousness on the order of Xi Jinping, general secretary of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), who fomented a global propaganda offensive targeting Western governments and media.

China didn’t just give us the disease; it gave us the template on how to fight it. We only implemented these lockdown measures in a half-hearted way compared to China, but it was enough to send shock waves through our society and economy.

One after another, world leaders tipped over like dominoes, their national bureaucracies falling in line to cease all social and economic activity for the first time in history. In March 2020, the Dutch government commissioned a cost-benefit analysis concluding that the health damage from lockdown would be six times greater than the benefit. The government then ignored it, claiming “society would not accept” the optics of an elderly person unable to get an ICU bed.

I don’t think we would have accepted lockdowns seventy-five years ago or even twenty years ago, no matter where they came from. It was understood that risk was always part of life and that there was no avoiding it, and that the cost of trying to do so would represent a “cure” that was worse than the disease. What preceded our acquiescing to lockdowns (or more than just that 2 weeks to “flatten the curve”) was fear and the desire to control all negative outcomes, plus the idea that we had the knowledge to do so.

I suppose you could call it a kind of hubris. At any rate, we have lost a great deal, much of it psychological and philosophical. And by “we,” I mean the developed Western world. It didn’t take much, either; this virus was nowhere near as bad as the storm we weathered in 1918 without destroying ourselves.

The article goes on to say that we believed fraudulent news that China had controlled the virus through lockdowns. I had once assumed that reports of Chinese success in that endeavor was most likely a lie by China, but at some point I decided that we really don’t know. It might even be true that China controlled it by Draconian measures.

But so what? Does that mean that it would be worth it for us to do the same in order to fight a virus of some lethality but not so very out of the ordinary? In other words, what price liberty? After all, “Hitler made the trains run on time” and all that. We have long known that tyrannies are better at some things than messy republics are. We have to decide whether giving up our liberty is worth it to us.

If our children haven’t been taught to value liberty, it’s very easy for them to surrender it. And that’s what’s been happening. From the start of the COVID mess I noticed huge generational gaps – at least, for the people I know – which followed a seemingly counter-intuitive pattern. It was older people like me who were somewhat more cavalier about the virus: less likely to support lockdowns and more likely to assert that in a pandemic losses are inevitable. It was our children who were much more lockdown-friendly. That breakdown may not be universally true, but my own observations (and those of friends) led me to believe that the attitude was in line with a greater concern for absolute and total safety that I’ve noticed recently in a lot of young people.

More from the article:

Journalists have flailed about to construct reality in a way that pleases the CCP and their investors while being at least remotely plausible to their middle class readers. To date, this is the best they’ve come up with: A supervirus emerged that was so deadly only Chinese totalitarianism could stop it; it caused spontaneous death in Wuhan (but nowhere else) until Xi’s two-month lockdown of Wuhan eliminated it from all of China (but nowhere else), while a steady stream of “variants” now demands indefinite lockdown measures.

Journalists’ downplaying and suppressing any information that contradicts this science-fiction narrative has left those that trust them confused and scared, faced with a seemingly unbeatable virus with inexplicable characteristics and a crisis that makes no logical sense. “The science” changes constantly, sometimes overnight…

…[There] is a widespread government and media-inspired terror of the virus that is wildly out of proportion to the relatively moderate health risks it poses…

For the public to be so egregiously misinformed about their actual risk from COVID-19 renders democratic accountability for lockdown measures impossible. Even more so because, as a study by Cardiff University demonstrated, the primary factor by which citizens judge the threat of COVID-19 is their own government’s decision to employ drastic lockdown measures. “We found that people judge the severity of the COVID-19 threat based on the fact the government imposed a lockdown—in other words, they thought, ‘it must be bad if government’s taking such drastic measures.’ We also found that the more they judged the risk in this way, the more they supported lockdown.”

A feedback loop creating a cycle of lockdowns.

This is the ending of the essay, and I have bolded the part that is directly related to the point I’m making in this post:

From journalists and judges to politicians and common professionals, the public has granted health officials one exception after another to their most fundamental rights, and they’ve been misled every step of the way. Whether out of gullibility, face-saving incompetence, or something worse, they’ve brought the world to a frightening place.

For political watchers, it’s been baffling to watch leaders muddle through the most inexplicable geopolitical debacle since the Thirty Years’ War. It is equally terrifying to know that a policy catastrophe of this scale is possible in the 21st century. But judging by his regime’s activities and the story of how all this began, at least one world leader was well aware of this potential.

For Xi Jinping, lockdown was never about a virus. It was about sending a message: that stripped of all disguise, the illusion of virtue, competence, and commitment to human rights among the Western political class is nothing more than conformity with easily subvertible norms and institutions passed down by prior generations. As lockdown policies grind on into their 18th month, it’s increasingly difficult to disagree with him.

Those “norms and institutions” were passed down more recently without inculcating the reasons behind them: why they are important, how they function to protect us, and what the dangers are in subverting them in what is perceived as a crisis. Without knowledge of those things, adherence to those “norms and institutions” is hollow. It is so weak it can be knocked over and destroyed by a threat as relatively minor as COVID, which although destructive is nothing like as bad as what many past generations weathered. This destruction would not have occurred had the ground not been fully prepared.

California dreaming: Newsom survives easily, as expected

The New Neo Posted on by

Governor Newsom of California survives the recall with about two-thirds of the vote. So apparently most Californians like it there just the way it is, which is hard for outsiders to understand.

There may have been some voting fraud, but I really doubt any was needed in order for Newsom to win. The large population centers on the coast are tremendously blue, and they carry the state. In San Francisco County it was 86.7% against recall, and LA wasn’t far behind at 73.6%.

Other parts of California beg to differ. But they are small in population:

The largest margin in favor of the recall came in Lassen County, where 82.9% of voters opted to remove Newsom from office, with all precincts reporting. Lassen County has about 30,000 residents.

Other counties voting in favor of the recall were: Del Norte, Siskiyou, Modoc, Shasta, Tehama, Butte, Plumas, Sierra, Yuba, Sutter, Glenn, Colusa, El Dorado, Amador, Calaveras, Stanislaus, Tuolumne, Mariposa, Madera, Fresno, Kings, Tulare, Inyo and Kern.

There’s a handy map at the link, but I can’t reproduce it here because of copyright, so you’ll have to go there to see it. It shows the coastal strip versus the central part of California – two different worlds in one state.

Here’s an article from two and a half months ago by Michael Anton that explains some of this, even though it was written long before the vote:

…[O]ne must understand that when we say “California,” what we really mean is a thin, rarely more than 50 miles wide and mostly much narrower strip of land from just north of the Marin Headlands to just south of the Coronado Bridge, plus a few outposts such as Napa, Tahoe, and Palm Springs. The rest—the parts with all the ranches and farms, oil wells and rail junctions, warehouses and meth labs—may as well not exist.

But they do exist, and are integral to modern California, in the same way that galley slaves were integral to ancient triremes, yet best left unacknowledged and unseen.

How does the California economy work? Here’s how, according to Anton:

The implicit deal, which I’ve called the “San Francisco Compromise,” is that, first, the left does nothing that directly threatens oligarchic wealth or power. It can tax and spend all it wants, so long as those taxes are easily bearable—and, to the extent possible, legally avoidable—by California’s grandees. And so long as the other policies that increase oligarchic wealth are never questioned, so that at the end of the day it almost doesn’t matter what California tax rates are; whatever they are, the rulers can afford them. The lefties also agree to use their considerable rhetorical power to whitewash and lionize the oligarchs.

For their part, the oligarchs take their cues from leftists on matters of passionate conviction that don’t directly threaten said wealth or power and spend some of their lucre on lefty institutions and make-work jobs.

This works out tremendously well for the oligarchs who, like all elites, are outnumbered and need defenses and justifications for their privilege. And it works out very well for the lefties who are, for the most part, otherwise unemployable—certainly not in any profit-making industry that pays well enough to live in coastal California.

What about everybody else? Aye, there’s the rub. Most of them don’t have it so good. In my 2020 book The Stakes, I describe modern California as crowded, costly, congested, crumbling, incompetent, filthy, dangerous, rapacious, profligate, suffocating, prejudiced, theocratic, pathologically altruistic, balkanized, and feudal. Those interested in the details may peruse the first chapter, in which I attempt to demonstrate each of these claims.

If you’re very rich in California – and a lot of people are – it’s very nice. If you’re not very rich and are merely middle class, it’s not very nice and can in fact be extremely not-nice.

And as far as California elections go, it has become this way:

Formally, modern California is “democratic” in that people vote, but they always vote for the same things, or a for a series of interchangeable hacks who all believe and do the same things. Elections mean nothing in the sense that the real rulers can never lose. Voting simply provides the veneer of legitimacy…

All this is underwritten by the massive vote-banks that are California’s cities, which ensure one-party rule in Sacramento and in the judiciary, plus a lopsidedly leftist congressional delegation. Even today, after decades of middle-class exodus, millions of Californians still harbor Red State habits and political inclinations. But their preferences—like their votes—don’t matter because such people are demographically overwhelmed. Stay and pay, suffer and be ignored. Or leave. Either way, you’re not voting your way out of this. That’s the message Haute California hurls at dwindling Red California.

How is this accomplished? It’s the model for the entire US, if leftists have their way:

California’s real rulers don’t exercise their power in the manner of the oligarchs of old, nor even like machine bosses. It’s more using their complete control of all avenues of information—from grammar schools all the way up to prestige and social media—to tell only one cramped, constrained “story.”

There is much much more in the essay about how California got the way it is, and I suggest you read the whole thing. Yes, it’s depressing, and it also may mostly contain things you already know. But it’s still well worth reading for passages such as this one:

[There] was the infusion of more than $4 trillion (on paper, at least) into Silicon Valley and San Francisco that created the world’s richest elite, who enjoy advocating psychologically pleasing bromides, certain that they can exempt themselves from the real-world ramifications which fall only on distant others. California can be a very traditional society for the very wealthy, who can and do wall themselves off from the dysfunction they cause, live in gated communities, and send their kids to private schools. Such families, of course, also all employ Hispanic help—gardeners, maids, cooks, nannies—and so have both pecuniary and conscience-salving reasons to advocate for illegal immigration: doing so is a public show of noblesse oblige that helps legitimize their privilege. This new wealth and the way its owners spend it thus only intensified the state’s hard-left turn as elites voted for—and, more to the point, financed—ever-more radical politicians and ballot initiatives.

Author Anton points out that many Republicans have fled the state over the years, but he also mentions something I hadn’t thought about before, which is that many moderate Democrats left too, and that they were the ones that had kept the Democratic Party in California in check to a certain degree. Their departure is part of what enabled the California Democratic Party to make its hard-left turn.

What does the Israel COVID data indicate about vaccines and Delta?

The New Neo Posted on by

I keep reading ominous reports about the Delta variant of COVID and other potential variants and their effect on the vaccinated. To me the most important metric is not the number of cases, it’s the percentage of serious cases and deaths in the vaccinated versus the unvaccinated.

However, the statistics, even when available, are flawed and/or incomplete for several reasons. We would need to have reliable statistics on how many people (vaccinated and unvaccinated) who become seriously ill and are hospitalized with COVID are hospitalized because of COVID, and how many are primarily sick with other things and are going in “with COVID” in terms of a test or diagnosis but not because of it. We also would need to know how many have strong co-morbidities such obesity or diabetes. And yet I don’t seen many – or actually any, so far – statistics that indicate this in terms of variants such as Delta and vaccinated versus unvaccinated.

Israel is one of those countries which apparently keeps good statistics. But I have yet to see any reports – even from Israel – that include what I’d like to know. The best I could find was this:

The third wave of infections in the country has been bigger than the first two. In the first week of September, Israel recorded the highest number of cases per million in the world.

The Delta variant of the virus fuelled this surge. The share of Delta-positive sequences in Israel increased from 13% in the first week of June to 87% in mid-August indicating that the surge in cases was driven by the variant.

Data show that the efficacy of the vaccine in preventing infections against the Delta variant reduced, which led Israel to administer a third dose to fully vaccinated people. However, the share of severely ill patients and fatalities due the virus was low among the fully vaccinated, indicating that the vaccine continued to protect people against critical infection and death.

So it was Delta that was causing the increase in cases, and vaccination protected against serious illness for the most part. I also recall that until recently – until Delta hit, that is – Israel had had a relatively low number of COVID cases and COVID deaths per million, compared to other Western nations. And even now their figure for COVID deaths – 798 per million – is on the low side, although cases per million is high. So it is very possible that the Israeli population may have had little or only a moderate amount of naturally-acquired immunity to the disease prior to Delta, and that its unvaccinated people were especially at risk for that reason.

Continued [comments in brackets and emphasis added]:

The rise in cases came despite the fact that nearly 60% of the country had received both doses of the vaccine as on September 8. From mid-July, Israel started administering a third dose to people aged over 60 who had received their second shot at least five months before. Over time, the eligibility was relaxed and as on Sept. 8, 28.9% of the population had received the booster shot.

The booster shot was introduced because the efficacy of Pfizer-BioNTech’s vaccine (which is Israel’s main vaccine) in preventing infection reduced, particularly against the Delta variant. However, its efficacy in preventing hospitalisation and severe illness remained high [even without the booster]. The table shows the results of efficacy studies of the vaccine over several time periods [the table can be found at the link].

As daily cases in the country started increasing in the second half of June, the number of patients hospitalised with severe illness also rose. However, the number of severely ill patients who are fully vaccinated fell over time, while the number of unvaccinated severely ill patients continued to increase. This indicates that the vaccine provides protection against severe illness.

Following a surge in cases, Israel saw a spike in deaths, particularly among the 60+ population, due to the virus in August. However, the majority of deaths occurred among patients who were unvaccinated while fatalities among those who were fully vaccinated remained relatively low. This points to the vaccine’s efficacy in preventing COVID-19 deaths too.

Here’s some more data:

Unvaccinated Israelis represent only about 20 percent of the population eligible for a vaccine, but they now constitute half of all serious COVID-19 cases in the country.

According to the latest figures from the Health Ministry, serious cases among unvaccinated Israelis keep on rising, and are on track to surpass those among the inoculated…

As of Tuesday afternoon, 330 out of 679 seriously ill patients were unvaccinated, while 16 were partially vaccinated and 333 were fully vaccinated. There are 168 patients currently in critical condition and 123 are on ventilators. Even so, the number of seriously ill vaccinated patients appears to have plateaued.

There are no serious cases in children under twelve, although that group remains unvaccinated.

As of August 21, the Health Ministry recorded 215.9 severe COVID-19 cases per 100,000 people among the unvaccinated over the age of 60, compared to 21 per 100,000 people among those who had received two doses of the Pfizer vaccine. This makes unvaccinated older people more than 10 times as likely to experience a severe case as their immunized counterparts.

And that is true despite the fact that the oldest and more vulnerable are far more likely to be fully vaccinated.

NOTE: As I’ve said many times, I am vaccinated but I support anyone’s right to remain unvaccinated.

Irony of ironies: General Milley did to Trump what he should have done to Biden

The New Neo Posted on by

The feckless General Milley, who did Joe Biden’s bidding in Afghanistan even though he knew it would be epically disastrous or who was so stupid himself that he didn’t even realize the consequences, did the following after January 6th:

Two days after the January 6 attack on the US Capitol, President Donald Trump’s top military adviser, Joint Chiefs Chairman Gen. Mark Milley, single-handedly took secret action to limit Trump from potentially ordering a dangerous military strike or launching nuclear weapons, according to “Peril,” a new book by legendary journalist Bob Woodward and veteran Washington Post reporter Robert Costa. Woodward and Costa write that Milley, deeply shaken by the assault, ‘was certain that Trump had gone into a serious mental decline in the aftermath of the election, with Trump now all but manic, screaming at officials and constructing his own alternate reality about endless election conspiracies.’ Milley worried that Trump could ‘go rogue,’ the authors write.

“You never know what a president’s trigger point is,” Milley told his senior staff, according to the book.

In response, Milley took extraordinary action, and called a secret meeting in his Pentagon office on January 8 to review the process for military action, including launching nuclear weapons. Speaking to senior military officials in charge of the National Military Command Center, the Pentagon’s war room, Milley instructed them not to take orders from anyone unless he was involved.

I think I had read about this quite some time ago, but it takes on even more significance now that we have seen Milley’s opposite behavior with Biden. Sounds like a potential coup to me. Among other things, though, what should have happened instead is that Milley should have resigned if he thought such a thing was probable, and go public with his concerns, rather than taking matters into his own hands to contravene a Trump order that existed only in Milley’s fevered imagination.

Was this general really that shaken by the events of January 6th, which were relatively mild even compared to the year-long Antifa/BLM riots? And who knows whether this is even what happened – Trump “screaming at officials and constructing his own alternate reality” – or whether it was Milley’s alternate reality that’s being described. Although I have little doubt that Trump was screaming at people, surely this was not all that unusual not only for Trump but for other presidents, and not a sign of mental breakdown.

Not only that, but shouldn’t there be some protocol in place for the possibility of a POTUS mental breakdown no matter who might be the president? Should it really be up to a possibly partisan (actually, increasingly partisan) general going rogue himself?

It’s no stretch of the imagination at all to imagine Joe Biden “screaming at officials and constructing his own alternate reality.” In fact, it doesn’t take imagination at all, because we have seen Joe doing both in public. He screams at the American people or really anyone who criticizes him. He constructs an alternate reality – one that Milley may actually share – in which the Taliban weren’t obviously going to take over, leaving Bagram was of no special strategic importance, and our allies think what we did is just peachy keen.

Trump’s case for a fraud-driven election loss is rock-solid compared to that.

And yet Milley seems to have had no trouble carrying out Biden’s disastrous orders – or the orders of whoever was in charge. I happen to believe it was Biden plus unspecified others (Blinken, etc.), but I don’t know. If ever insubordination was called for or justified, it would have been then, and certainly resignation was called for and would have been the right thing to do. But I doubt it was even contemplated, either because Milley’s judgment was so abominable that he actually concurred with Biden’s decision, or because Milley was just too intent on clinging to his own position of power in government.

[NOTE: Of course, I need to issue a caveat because the whole thing is based on Woodward’s book. Woodward is partisan himself, so who knows what is true and what isn’t, what is exaggerated and what is as reported – in other words, about any of it, in particular about Trump’s behavior at the time. Trump seems quite well-balanced to me these days – as opposed to Joe Biden.]

Today is the California recall vote…

The New Neo Posted on by

…and I see no reason to be optimistic.

The polls indicate Newsom is not seriously threatened, and whether or not you believe polls are accurate, the truth is that California is a bluer-than-blue state. Yes, there are pockets of conservatives, and yes, Newsom has been an abominable governor, but if Californians don’t see it that way then it doesn’t matter.

What’s more, who has been leaving California lately? I’ve not seen any statistics on the politics of the leave-takers, but it stands to reason they would be predominantly the more conservative voters. Therefore California should become more blue, not less, as people leave. This just seems logical to me.

I don’t even think the issue of whether or not there is voting fraud needs to come into play. It’s certainly possible, and there are some reports indicating it may be happening. But I don’t think it’s necessary in order for Newsom to win.

Sorry to be such a downer, but that’s the way I see it.

ADDENDUM: By the way, I predict that if/when Newsom is retained, the vote will be framed by the left, the Democrats, and the MSM (but I repeat myself) as a great victory that represents a huge mandate for everything the Democrats want to do, rather than just California being predictably California.

The movement to withhold treatment from the unvaccinated

The New Neo Posted on by

It is pernicious, and some are shocked and fighting back:

A growing number of doctors have threatened to withhold treatment from the unvaccinated, sparking backlash from doctors and bioethicists who say such sentiments violate the Hippocratic Oath. Those critics are even more troubled by the silence from professional organizations tasked with upholding medical ethics.

Doctors in Tennessee, Florida, and Alabama have announced they will refuse to treat unvaccinated patients, while Dallas hospital workers reportedly discussed considering vaccinated status when delegating ICU beds. Such comments have infuriated top medical professionals. Dr. Brian Callister, governor of the Nevada chapter of the American College for Physicians, said doctors should never blatantly refuse to treat unvaccinated patients who are otherwise willing to comply with the rules set out by the practice.

“It is absolutely unethical, period, end of story, to not treat a patient in need,” Callister told the Washington Free Beacon. “It is absurd and amoral for any physician to say they will not treat unvaccinated patients.”

Yes, but it is not surprising. The left has taken over the thought processes of a lot of Americans in the last few years. I wonder what the age range tends to be of those who are in the anti-anti-vaxxer movement versus those who, like Dr. Callister, are objecting strenuously to that movement. My guess is that the latter group is considerably older than the former.

Ah, but Sarah Palin was crazy for talking about the possibility of death panels.

Arizona door-to-door canvassing of 2020 voters…

The New Neo Posted on by

…has uncovered evidence either of massive fraud or massive error that could have affected the results.

Not that anything will be done about it after the fact. These things must be prevented before the fact. Will they be? Your guess is as good as mine. I tend to doubt it, alas.

Here’s an article about it, and here’s the report.

The Biden administration, the Arizona election authorities, and the left in general will all say the people being canvassed are lying, of course.

[NOTE: And please see this, about the California recall.]

What was George W. Bush referring to on the 9/11 anniversary?

The New Neo Posted on by

George W. Bush made these questionable remarks when speaking at the 20th anniversary of 9/11:

There is little cultural overlap between violent extremists abroad and those at home. But in their disdain for pluralism, in their disregard for human life, in their determination to defile national symbols, they are children of the same foul spirit and it is our duty to confront them.

The left and much of the right has assumed he was talking about January 6th, which is understandable on the part of the left but somewhat less so from the right, who should at least have also included the Antifa and BLM riots. But now a spokesman for Bush has issued a clarification, and I’ll assume it’s an official one approved by Bush himself:

“Those comments were certainly inclusive of but definitely not exclusive to January 6; rather all forms of extremism — attacks on schools and synagogues, on Blacks and Asians, etc,” the spokesperson said. “All forms of domestic extremism.”

It’s a fascinating glimpse into the mind of Bush that says a lot. This attitude is part and parcel of his tendency – and the tendency of many non-conservative Republicans – to do a sort of balancing act of condemnation. We hear: “on the one hand this, and on the other hand, that.” It is my opinion that such an equation is often not only stupid, but dangerous. It equates things that should not be equated.

To take Bush’s specific example, fanatic Islamic terrorism that kills 3,000 innocent people, most of them civilians, not as collateral damage but as the main event and in a vindictive spirit that seeks to conquer and subdue, is not the same as or even similar to either Antifa riots in the US or January 6th, both of which are also quite different from each other. Moral equivalence of these three things is absurd, and in particular 9/11 stands quite apart from the others.

The other two were essentially demonstrations. January 6th was not even especially violent or destructive, although there was some violence and some destruction. Antifa and company were more violent and more destructive, to be sure, but nothing in the realm of 9/11.

The January 6th demonstrators were protesting what they thought was a violation of democracy, and they wanted the official stamp on the results halted through the legal means of Congressional action. That was their aim, and the few who turned destructive and violent were the exceptions.

Antifa has a different aim. They are more akin to the self-styled revolutionaries of the 1960s. But in their demonstrations during 2020, the violence in which they engaged was for the most part to property, and although it sometimes was violent against people – especially the police – there was no widespread killing of civilians, much less thousands of them. On the scale of evil, 9/11 wins, hands down.

And what does “all forms of extremism” mean? Weren’t the heroes of the American Revolution “extremists”? Same for the abolitionists? It’s a weasel word that is purposely vague enough to allow nearly any interpretation, and plays right into the hands of the left.

But unfortunately, that’s an old habit of Bush’s.

NOTE: It’s also quite galling that Bush managed to emerge from his long Obama-era slumber to diss Trump for the last few years, but here’s my earlier explanation for Bush’s extra-special Trump-hatred. It has a long provenance, and Trump is by no means innocent, particularly many years ago, before he became president himself.