Roundup

The New Neo Posted on by

A roundup of recent news:

—Victor Davis Hanson presents a very gloomy picture of what might happen if Biden wins.

—Seattle’s police chief warns citizens of the dire results if the City Council is able to enforce its edict to take away the police’s best non-violent tools of crowd control. One would almost think the leftists of Seattle want to increase violence at the hands of police or at the hands of the rioters, in order to cause an even greater backlash (and we should probably leave out the “almost” in that sentence). The action of the Council has been temporarily blocked by a federal judge, but will that last?

–Hagia Sophia re-Islamized by Erdogan. I learned about Hagia Sophia long ago in my art history class, which was heavy on churches. Yes, churches:

Built in 537 as the patriarchal cathedral of the imperial capital of Constantinople, it remained the largest church of the eastern Roman Empire (the Byzantine Empire), except from 1204 to 1261 when it was converted to a Roman Catholic cathedral. In 1453, after the city’s fall to the Ottoman Empire, it was converted into a mosque. In 1935 Turkey established it as a secular museum. In 2020, Turkey re-established Islamic worship there and re-opened it as a mosque.

Built by the eastern Roman emperor Justinian I as the Christian cathedral of Constantinople for the state church of the Roman Empire between 532 and 537, the church was then the world’s largest interior space and among the first to employ a fully pendentive dome. It is considered the epitome of Byzantine architecture and is said to have “changed the history of architecture”.

Apparently Erdogan invited the Pope to the festivities:

Not only does Erdogan want the Pope to attend an event where the Turkish president anoints himself as the conqueror sultan by recreating the Islamic takeover of one of the world’s most famous churches, he also wants him to watch how Turkey covers up Christian symbols to allow Muslims to pray in the building…

Erdogan seems unaware that – unlike Islam’s divine shrines in Mecca, Medina and to a lesser extent Jerusalem – Hagia Sophia has no significance in Islam. In fact, Ottoman conquerors turned it into the sultan’s mosque as a proclamation that a new sheriff was in town, but otherwise did not even bother to Islamize its Christian name.

To Christians, however, Hagia Sophia has immense religious value. To start with, Constantinople is one of the five seats of Christ, together with Jerusalem, Alexandria, Antioch and Rome. Constantinople was Christianity’s New Rome. The city was built by Constantine the Great, who made Christianity the official religion of the Roman Empire.

Over the span of a millennium, Hagia Sophia saw generations of Christians holding mass, ceremonies and prayers in its halls. Relics of saints were buried in its gardens while frescoes depicting Christ, Mary, the disciples and saints were painted on its walls.

I disagree with the author about what Erdogan knows and doesn’t know. I think he knows this history full well.

If you believe this poll, the anti-racism cult hasn’t made inroads on too many Americans

The New Neo Posted on by

At least, not yet:

A new Rasmussen Reports national telephone and online survey finds that 75% of American Adults think the term “racism” refers to any discrimination by people of one race against another. Just 15% say it refers only to discrimination by white people against minorities. These findings have changed little in surveys for the past several years.

That’s encouraging, because it seems that most Americans hold to the old, tried-and-true, logical definition of “racism” rather than the Marxist, divisive, and might I say racist one touted by the anti-racism trainers.

And although there’s a slight difference in the numbers by race, it’s not all that different, and no race is characterized as majority racist:

Eighteen percent (18%) say most white Americans are racist. But 25% believe most black Americans are racist. Fifteen percent (15%) think most Hispanic-Americans are racist, while nearly as many (13%) say the same of most Asian-Americans.

More at the link. The poll was taken just a few days ago, so it presumably reflects recent events. Then again, do people tell the truth to pollsters? Especially about matters such as racial attitudes? I don’t answer polls about anything anymore, but then again I never did.

Here’s a description of the methodology:

…[A]utomated polling systems use a single, digitally-recorded, voice to conduct the interview while traditional firms rely on phone banks, boiler rooms, and operator-assisted technology…

Calls are placed to randomly-selected phone numbers through a process that ensures appropriate geographic representation. Typically, calls are placed from 5 pm to 9 pm local time during the week. Saturday calls are made from 11 am to 6 pm local time and Sunday calls from 1 pm to 9 pm local time.

To reach those who have abandoned traditional landline telephones, Rasmussen Reports uses an online survey tool to interview randomly selected participants from a demographically diverse panel.

After the surveys are completed, the raw data is processed through a weighting program to ensure that the sample reflects the overall population in terms of age, race, gender, political party, and other factors. The processing step is required because different segments of the population answer the phone in different ways. For example, women answer the phone more than men, older people are home more and answer more than younger people, and rural residents typically answer the phone more frequently than urban residents.

I’m surprised anyone answers these things anymore.

Forecasting Trump

The New Neo Posted on by

The left loves to tell us the awful things that Trump is about to do. And since Trump is infinitely flexible in his awfulness, sometimes those things are contradictory.

For example, there’s been a spate of articles on how, if Trump loses in November, he will refuse to concede and refuse to leave. At the same time, we have pieces like this one in which the ever-obnoxious James Carville says that Trump stands a good chance of dropping out of the race before the election to avoid a defeat.

What do these two versions have in common? Quite a bit, actually. One is that of course – of course – the polls are correct and Trump will lose the election. Yay, team! Another is that Trump is a loose cannon, poised to do just about anything the left can imagine.

Both predictions have something else in common: the idea is that since Trump will inevitably lose, if he does by some strange chance end up winning – as in 2016 – he is an illegitimate president whom the Democrats must spend all their energy trying to remove, utterly discredit, and/or block.

The Breakdown of Higher Education

The New Neo Posted on by

This new book by John M. Ellis certainly deals with a topic that’s timely – or actually, somewhat behind the times, because the damage the left has done to education has already been so great. Apparently, the last section of the book deals with suggested solutions, which sounds valuable.

Of course, it’s not just higher education that’s broken down. Lower schools are most definitely involved as well. It’s very late and getting later.

Tom Cotton has an interesting proposal, but it has no chance of passing in the current Congress:

Senator Tom Cotton (R-Arkansas) introduced the Saving American History Act of 2020, a bill that would prohibit the use of federal funds to teach the 1619 Project by K-12 schools or school districts. Schools that teach the 1619 Project would also be ineligible for federal professional-development grants.

Under the bill, the Secretaries of Education, Health and Human Services, and Agriculture would be required to prorate federal funding to schools that decide to teach the 1619 Project—determined by how much it costs to plan and teach that curriculum. Any federal funds intended for low-income students or special-needs students are not affected by this legislation.

“The New York Times’s 1619 Project is a racially divisive, revisionist account of history that denies the noble principles of freedom and equality on which our nation was founded. Not a single cent of federal funding should go to indoctrinate young Americans with this left-wing garbage,” said Cotton.

“Censorship! Thought control! ” will be the cry of those who favor the 1619 Project’s adoption in our school systems. But at what point is the federal government required to support all the decisions of local school boards? Nothing in the bill prohibits the teaching of the mendacious 1619 Project’s alternative history (or for that matter, all the other leftist history that’s been taught in school systems for many years). It merely says that the federal government shouldn’t have to pay for it.

A radical idea, I know.

More on the travesty that was Spygate

The New Neo Posted on by

See this.

Most of the readers here already know the gist of the Russiagate/Spygate story, and have long been outraged at what happened. But to everyone else I would love to say, Yoo hoo, does anybody care about the long-running attempted coup of a duly-elected president?

I suspect the answer for a lot of them would be “no.” For many, Trump has been so demonized for so long that they would approve of any method that promised to get him out of office. Quite a few would include assassination.

I first noticed this quite a few years ago, when it apparently became acceptable (to a lot of people, although not to me) to casually wish for Trump’s assassination or death in what was otherwise an ordinary conversation. The fanning and encouragement of this kind of toxic hatred leads to a willingness to say that the ends justify the means.

Most people are not Sir Thomas More in that respect. Most people don’t understand that following the rule of law protects us all.

I have come to the conclusion that most people agree with Roper in the above clip (and of course, we know what happened to Sir Thomas More, with the other man in the video, Richard Rich, testifying against him). This recognition has led me to a sense of despair, which I struggle against.

Trump and the urban black vote

The New Neo Posted on by

There have been periodic hints that some black people who would ordinarily vote Democratic – which is over 90% of black people – might lean towards Trump this time. I tend to doubt it. After all, we’ve heard it before (2016), and it didn’t pan out. Plus, the good economic conditions that fostered the prediction for 2020 are gone.

On the other hand, maybe. Black people, particularly in deep blue cities with large black populations, have been ill-served by the Democratic Party – and “ill-served” is an understatement.

Their neighborhoods have been trashed, and a fair number of those doing the trashing seem to be young white people dressed in black and answering to the description “anarchists.” Crime has risen, shootings are way up, and even little children have been killed as a result. All the victims have been black, as far as I know. And the only thing the left seems willing to do is to call for less policing rather than more.

It seems to me that Trump’s sending in federal agents in an attempt to quell the violence, and explicitly citing the increased loss of black lives as the reason he must step in, could tip some of these voters to him. If so – and I remain tentative about suggesting it will happen – it could affect results in states such as Michigan, and it certainly could impact the popular vote totals.

Dershowitz: on being ostracized because of politics

The New Neo Posted on by

[Hat tip: commenter “Barry Meislin.”]

This new piece by Alan Dershowitz is interesting to me for many reasons, not the least because he demonstrates his usual sense and yet continues to find it difficult to surrender his allegiance to the Democratic Party – despite disagreeing with most of what the party stands for these days. To me, his dilemma and its persistence illustrate how hard it often is to change a type of party affiliation that Zell Miller once likened to a “birthmark.”

It’s not difficult for everyone, but it often is, depending in great measure on the social, familial, demographic, and geographic context. I’ve discussed these things before, of course. But the reason I’m bringing them up again today is that for Dershowitz, for me, and I bet for a lot of other people, the price has become even greater lately in social terms as things have heated up.

The enmity can come at work or in clubs or other social groups, including relatives and friends. It can get very personal and even heartbreaking. Family and/or previously close friends can treat the person with increasing coldness, or engage in angrier and more frequent arguments, or outright shunning. Lucky is the person on the right – particularly the political changer – who doesn’t experience this and hasn’t experienced an increase in it lately. I certainly have.

Here’s Dershowitz:

I am on Martha’s Vineyard now where it is easy for me to socially distance because nobody wants to see me or talk to me — for the fact that I defended President Trump in front of the United States Senate…

As the result of taking that on — I thought it was patriotic and based on the Constitution — old friends of mine, people whose kids I recommended to college, people whose kids I helped bail out of jail at 3:00 in the morning, people whose fathers and mothers I helped represent pro bono [free of cost] when they were in trouble, will not talk to me, will not have anything to do with me. They are socially distancing from me without regard to the coronavirus, but that is the price you pay for principle today.

I am very happy living in my house with my family on Martha’s Vineyard, taking my walks every day, writing three or four op-eds a week, and I will continue to do that without regard to how I’m treated on Martha’s Vineyard. The idea of making a transition from the Democrats to the Republicans, I am not there yet. When Keith Ellison, who is now the Attorney General of Minnesota, was running to become chairman of the Democratic Party, I issued a public statement saying I would leave the Democratic Party if he had been elected — because he is a Farrakhan supporter, has a history of association with anti-Semitic causes. He lost the election, but he is now an Attorney General. It is an open question. Right now, as I sit here today, I am a liberal Democrat who is trying very hard to keep the Democratic Party bipartisan on the issue of Israel, and bipartisan on so many other issues of importance to all of Americans.

If I fail, if the Democratic Party moves even further away from where I stand, obviously I have an open mind on these issues.

I think that Dershowitz is fooling himself here. The Democratic Party already has moved so far away from where he stands that it is opposed to nearly everything in which he believes, and would destroy those things. But that’s very hard to acknowledge, after all these years, and Dershowitz is struggling.

Dershowitz is fortunate, however, in that his family still seems to be standing by him. Some people are not so fortunate.

How far are we now from the state China reached during the Cultural Revolution? [emphasis mine]:

“Nobody is more dangerous than he who imagines himself pure in heart,” wrote James Baldwin, “for his purity, by definition, is unassailable.” This observation has been confirmed many times throughout history. However, China’s Cultural Revolution offers perhaps the starkest illustration of just how dangerous the “pure in heart” can be. The ideological justification for the revolution was to purge the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), and the nation more broadly, of impure elements hidden in its midst: capitalists, counter-revolutionaries, and “representatives of the bourgeoisie.” To that end, Mao Zedong activated China’s youth—unblemished and uncorrupted in heart and mind—to lead the struggle for purity. Christened the “Red Guards,” they were placed at the vanguard of a revolution that was, in truth, a cynical effort by Mao to reassert his waning power in the Party. Nevertheless, it set in motion a self-destructive force of almost unimaginable depravity…

… “[W]orking groups” of ideologues [were] sent to administer schools. Under their tenure, schools became centers of activism rather than learning. Students were encouraged to create big-character posters exposing their own teachers, officials, and even parents. The accused were humiliated in daily “struggle sessions” in which their students and colleagues interrogated them and demanded confessions. The viciousness of these sessions rapidly intensified. Students beat, spat upon, and tortured—in horrifically creative ways—their often elderly teachers and professors. In one case, students demanded their biology professor stare at the sun with wide open eyes. If he blinked or looked away, they beat him. Even middle and elementary school students participated in the struggle sessions, sometimes beating their teachers to death with sticks and belt buckles…

Amid the hysteria, teachers, professors, and intellectuals did not dare to stand up to the students or defend their colleagues lest they suffer similar fates. But they could not escape by being bystanders. With every word and action becoming potential evidence of capitalist sympathy, teachers and intellectuals enthusiastically joined their students in the struggle sessions and screaming rallies…

In order to avoid persecution during the Cultural Revolution, many were quick to accuse others, thereby creating a feedback loop of ever intensifying ideological fanaticism and violence. Inevitably, the accusers became the accused, and the torturers became the tortured.

No one was safe.

I see no reason at this point to think that we are any different, and that it couldn’t happen here. in 2014 I first likened our student movement to the Red Guards of China’s Cultural Revolution. At the time, I called them “embryonic” Red Guards, but added that the development was ominous. I would no longer use the qualifier “embryonic.”