But Woodstock passed me by almost completely at the time. I read about it right after it happened, and it was just one of many hippy-ish events that happened during those years, albeit a photogenic one that was hyped to the skies as meaningful.
At the time, my mind was very much on other things. My boyfriend had just come home from fighting in Vietnam. I was looking for a place to live while in law school. I was very young, rather confused, and already utterly sick of the 60s.
The 60s had already not been especially kind to me. I was of the generation that started college in one world and ended college in a very different one. Whiplash. We began college subjected to rules about curfews and no boys in the dorm except in the public rooms (“four feet on the floor”), and we ended up with a free-for-all that never felt completely comfortable to me and in which I always felt like I didn’t belong.
Impulsiveness and dancing naked in the rain was not my natural element. Most of the social skills I had laboriously learned while growing up were no longer valued, and what was sought after now was a kind of mindless hazy hedonism mixed with mindless hazy thinking.
The fashions were fun. The music was fun. The rest of it made me very uneasy.
I still remember going to a single SDS meeting and being thrown by the anger, the nihilism, and the sheer stupidity I saw and heard there. Not for me, not ever, and that experience helped to inoculate me against the more extreme movements that happened during the 60s. But that doesn’t mean I emerged unscathed.
Neither did the US. As Paul Mirengoff writes in the article I linked at the outset of this post:
If Woodstock helped define a generation, that generation wasn’t the one at Woodstock. In the decades after the festival, radical holdouts gained control of America’s colleges and universities. The jury may still be out on the extent to which these misfits have helped define later generations, but arguably they have done so to a considerable degree.
Since the El Paso shootings, the Trump opposition has ramped up one of its favorite angles for attack: Trump is a racist! They think this is a winner.
That message was heavily pushed ever since Trump first declared his candidacy in his kickoff speech. The misleading message they promoted was that Trump had said that Mexican immigrants were all rapists. It was their preferred narrative, you might say. And that’s been an approach ever since: to take a word Trump actually used and to generalize it far beyond anything he actually said.
Collusion and obstruction were just detours along the way, different means to the same goal: Remove him. Or at the very least, defeat him in 2020.
Even the assassination talk they air so freely is a form of that: if all else fails, kill him.
That’s why they called themselves The Resistance right from the start. They wanted to frame this as a battle in WWII terms: Trump’s a Nazi and so are his supporters, and the rest of us are the brave Allies and their helpers in occupied lands. World War II was one of the last times it seemed to most Americans that we were on the side of Good and the other side was Evil. So metaphors about Trump are geared to imitating that particular conflict, and what may seem like over-the-top rhetoric on the part of the left is an attempt to invoke that sort of Good/Evil dichotomy.
And believe me, they’ve been pretty successful.
How does Trump play into that? He’s blunt. He doesn’t mind calling things by names that are not the usual diplomatic boilerplate. Whether it be “Rocket Man” for the head of North Korea, or “invaders” for the caravans of illegal immigrants trying to cross the border, he uses speech that the left and NeverTrumpers on the right feel is offensive and that they can exploit for their own purposes.
Today a commenter “The Other Chuck” got into an exchange with a few other commenters (and me) on this thread. Among other things, TOC wrote this:
What I cannot support is his toying with the alt-right and his continued demonization of “invaders” from the south. You can make all the excuses in the world about crazy gamers with AKs, that we’ve had them before, that they are a tiny fraction of the killers and killings nationwide, etc. The fact remains Trump got elected because he singled out illegal aliens as “invaders” and continues to hammer it away at rally after rally.
TOC is singling out one thing—Trump on illegal immigration—as the reason Trump got elected. I think there are many many reasons he got elected, and that is just one. Another big one is that he was running against Hillary Clinton and the extreme left. And that may have been the biggest reason of all that Trump was elected, although the appointment of judges and the revival of the economy were big ones, too.
More about the “invader” quote in a while, but first I want to add that TOC also invoked the shadow of Hitler and WWII and the Jews:
How many times must he rail against the “invaders” before you wake up and realize they are his foil, as the Jews were Hitler’s?
Trump has many other foils, too. And having “foils” does not equate those foils with Jews in WWII, nor does it make you Hitler or Hitlerian.
Whether through endless tweets, or campaign rallies that mimic Nuremberg in the 1930s, he has found his focal point, and they are brown skinned refugees, like the ones killed in El Paso.
Where to begin?
First of all, Trump has made it crystal clear that he is not talking about legal immigrants, ever. He is only talking about illegal immigrants of any race or creed. That many of them happen to be Hispanic is irrelevant; many (perhaps most?) legal immigrants are Hispanic, too,and Trump has no beef with them.
So although if you are in favor of open borders, you might say that Trump doesn’t favor illegal immigration and you disagree with that position of his, it is simply false to say this has anything to do with racism. It has to do with illegal immigrants being lawbreakers.
What’s more, “invaders” is exactly correct for the large groups (“caravans”) of illegal immigrants who marched here (with leftist help, quite organized) shouting militant slogans and invading their fellow Latin American and Central American countries along the way, not always welcome in those countries by any means. Many Mexicans considered them “invaders” as well. These caravans of illegal immigrants planned to storm the border and overwhelm the guards there, and thus gain illegal entry. And they were extremely explicit about that.
Those are the people who are rightly called “invaders.”
I don’t watch Trump rallies ordinarily, but I was curious to see how he actually has used the words “invaders” and “invasion.” So I decided to get transcripts of his rallies. Although I have no intention of spending hours checking this, I checked two recent trasncripts, this from a mid-July rally in Raleigh NC, and this from 8/1 in Cincinnati, as well as this rally from two years ago in Phoenix. I did a search on each page for “inva” which should have lead me to either “invasion” or “invader” or “invaders” if those words had occurred, and I got nothing.
So it is clear that Trump does not use that word in every speech.
When does he use it or when did he use it? As far as I can tell, it was in connection with the huge illegal caravans that seemed to reach a crescendo last fall. The word seems quite appropriate to me:
Comparing any of this to the Holocaust is an abomination. For starters, Jews were legal residents and citizens of the countries in which they and they families resided, in many cases for many centuries. They were being rounded up in those countries in which they resided, their goods confiscated, and on pain of death sent to death camps to be murdered, or labor camps with conditions so dreadful that they would probably only survive a few months there. By trying to leave, they were running away from virtually certain death and torture.
The caravans are voluntary. People are coming for economic reasons, as well as to escape turmoil in their own countries that is not specifically directed at them. Crime, for example. Poverty. Many people from all over the world want to come here for very similar reasons, and they have to wait in line to come here legally. The people in the caravans should be no different. And anyone with a bona fide claim for asylum can make that claim as well, and they don’t have to be in the US to do it.
And of course, for a certain percentage of the people in the caravans, entering illegally is just the tip of their lawbreaking activities. They are habitual lawbreakers, child smugglers, and/or gang members. That is the case, and although we don’t know what percentage of the whole this group is, the legal immigration system is designed to weed them out. But the “invaders” want to overwhelm that system illegally.
Let me repeat again what TOC wrote: “[Trump] has found his focal point, and they are brown skinned refugees, like the ones killed in El Paso.”
A lot is packed in there, isn’t it? The implication is that it’s their “brown skins” that Trump’s against, when there’s nothing he’s ever said or done that indicates any problem with brown-skinned people per se. Invoking El Paso in that sentence links Trump’s blunt talk about illegal immigration with mass murder [see ADDENDUM below], as though discussing an unpleasant reality and a legal remedy for it (a wall or deportation) necessarily provokes murderous hatred.
And last but not at all least in that quote, there’s the idea that illegal immigration has been Trump’s “focal point.” But it’s only one of the themes he harps on, the economy being another that I would argue is far more central to his message. In fact, back when I was no Trump fan at all, I analyzed his original speech—the one where the MSM jumped on him for supposedly saying Mexicans coming here are rapists—and I was surprised to discover that the portion on immigration was a very very small part of his speech. Unfortunately, I can’t find the post where I did this, but I can find a transcript of his speech, and you can see for yourself that immigration, illegal or otherwise, was a rather minor part of it.
Back on July 2, 2015, I wrote a post about the controversy over his remarks about immigrants in that very first speech. I’m going to reproduce my post here in full to end the present post. It’s fascinating—to me, anyway—to look back and see what I said right at the beginning, when I couldn’t stand Trump:
You can’t say Trump isn’t getting press. That’s his thing, in addition to making money: attention-getting.
Why is he #2 on the Republican candidate list? Because a lot of people like his big, brash mouth, and because there are so many other candidates competing. I don’t think Trump has a chance of actually winning the nomination [NOTE: by August of 2015 I had reversed that opinion and thought he did have a chance of being nominated], but he will draw from the “I’m sick of the Republican Party” crew and get a certain not-so-small percentage of Republicans to favor him.
Which brings us to the fallout from his immigration remarks. Let’s look at what he actually said:
“When Mexico sends its people, they’re not sending their best,” Trump said. “They’re sending people that have lots of problems and they’re bringing those problems with us. They’re bringing drugs. They’re bringing crime. They’re rapists.”
“And some I assume are good people,” he added.
But it’s not just Mexico that’s dumping all of it’s problems in the U.S., Trump continued. “It’s coming from all over South and Latin America and it’s coming probably, probably, from the Middle East. We don’t know.”
Was Trump’s main problem hyperbole, the failure to say it the other way around, as in: “Most of the people coming here are good people, but many are bringing their problems with them—drugs, crime, rape”? Would that have gotten any attention at all?
I don’t know. But Trump is defending his rape remarks as true, and there certainly is some evidence to back him up (see this, this, this from HuffPo, and this from Amnesty International).
I guess it’s okay to say when they’re the ones saying it. From Amnesty:
Kidnapping for ransom isn’t the only risk. Health professionals report that as many as six in ten migrant women and girls are raped on the journey. And activists repeatedly raise concerns that abducted women and girls are vulnerable to trafficking.
From HuffPo:
But while many of these girls are fleeing their homes because of fears of being sexually assaulted, according to the UNHCR, they are still meeting that same fate on their journey to freedom.
Rape can be perpetrated by anyone along the way, including guides, fellow migrants, bandits or government officials, according to Fusion. Sometimes sex is used as a form of payment, when women and girls don’t have money to pay bribes.
The assaults are so common that many women and girls take contraceptives beforehand as preventative measures.
So it’s not only coyotes doing the raping; fellow-migrants are involved as well.
The media and liberals are hyper-concerned with campus rapes whose high numbers are largely a myth. But they seem to show little concern for these women—as long as its Trump bringing it up.
As for drugs, there’s this, from a 2006 House Committee on Homeland Security report:
The U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration reports that the Mexican drug syndicates operating today along our Nation’s Southwest border are far more sophisticated and dangerous than any of the other organized criminal groups in America’s law enforcement history. Indeed, these powerful drug cartels, and the human smuggling networks and gangs they leverage, have immense control over the routes into the United States and continue to pose formidable challenges to our efforts to secure the Southwest border. The cartels operate along the border with military grade weapons, technology and intelligence and their own respective paramilitary enforcers. This new breed of cartel is not only more violent, powerful and well financed, it is also deeply engaged in intelligence collection on both sides of the border.
You can read more general statistics on illegal immigrants and crime here. And, as Ann Coulter’s recent book indicates, the problem is hardly limited to illegal immigrants; many legal immigrants are a problem, too, because the type of screening process that used to be in place no longer is.
Coulter points out that we have “a media determined to cover up immigrants’ crimes.” The reaction to Donald Trump is an indication of that, but it’s not just the media. It’s businesses who are boycotting him, because anyone who says the sorts of things Trump has said—which, although hyperbolic, are based on a core of truth, a truth that cannot be told—must be shunned. American now no longer cares what’s actually happening to the country, as long as we talk about it in a politically correct manner.
The narrative—it’s everything. And you wonder why politicians get so mealy-mouthed?
[ADDENDUM: There is now a controversy over the manifesto that has been attributed to the El Paso shooter. Did he write it? Did he post it? If not, who did, and where? And by the way, that article I just linked distorted what the 8chan owner said. He did not say the manifesto was posted at Instagram. He said that the shooter ordinarily used Instagram to post things, and then that the manifesto was uploaded to 8chan by a person who was not the shooter. No one seems to know who that was, but I assume we’ll hear more as time goes on. However, the narrative has already been set: that this is the El Paso shooter’s manifesto and will remain so in people’s minds, whether it is ever authenticated or not.]
Mars’ big, salty northern ocean likely formed about 3.4 billion years ago. The ocean’s existence is widely accepted by Mars researchers, Rodriguez said, but there is considerable debate about its nature.
For example, some scientists believe the ocean was relatively long-lived, if quite cold. But others don’t think the ancient Martian climate could have supported stable bodies of surface water for long, and therefore argue that the ocean froze over very quickly — perhaps in a few thousand years or less.
The new study, which was published in late June in the Journal of Geophysical Research: Planets, bolsters the former viewpoint.
Rodriguez and his colleagues, led by François Costard of the French National Center for Scientific Research, built upon several years of previous research into the ocean and its imprints on the landscape of ancient Mars.
For example, Rodriguez led a 2016 study that identified huge lobes in the northern plains — features that strongly resemble marks left by tsunamis here on Earth. The team determined that the lobes were carved out by two different mega-tsunamis, which flooded the region more than 3 billion years ago.
Mars does not have significant plate-tectonic activity, so the big waves were probably unleashed by impacts. So, Costard, Rodriguez and their colleagues hunted for craters left behind by the cosmic culprits, narrowing the search over the next few years.
That search may now be over, at least for one of the two impactors. Multiple lines of evidence point to Lomonosov, the scientists report in the new study. For example, Lomonosov is in the right place, it’s the right age (as determined by crater counts), and it looks a lot like marine craters here on Earth.
Lomonosov fits the bill in other ways as well. For instance, the crater is about as deep as scientists think the shallow northern ocean was at the time of impact.
For years they were riding on “Wait for the Mueller report!” hype and hope.
It was going to sink Trump. It was going to destroy him on collusion and/or obstruction, and that in turn would lead to Trump’s impeachment or at the very least a sure and ignominious defeat for him in 2020.
Funny thing, though. Despite enormous expense and the marshaling of many partisan forces, the Mueller report – and then the testimony of the diminished Mueller himself – was a bust.
The left was then faced with two choices. The first was to accept the inevitable and engage Trump on the issues, offering the public their own agenda as an alternative along with some candidate who might seem to the public to be better than Trump. Or, as many others have put it: all they needed to do was not be crazy.
They’ve chosen crazy – but they’re hoping it’s “crazy like a fox.” You be the judge:
A former FBI assistant director used numerology on MSNBC Monday to link neo-Nazism to President Donald Trump’s decision to fly flags at half-staff to honor the victims of shootings in El Paso, Texas, and Dayton, Ohio.
Frank Figluizzi floated the unsubstantiated conspiracy theory during an interview with Brian Williams.
Figluizzi, an MSNBC contributor, said Trump’s decision will appeal to neo-Nazis and supporters of Adolf Hitler because of the date that the flags will return to full mast. Earlier on Monday, Aug. 5, Trump ordered flags to be lowered for three days in order to honor the 31 victims of the two mass shootings.
Figluizzi said that he was “not going to imply” that Trump deliberately timed the flag maneuvers to appeal to neo-Nazis, but then he laid out his theory to an unflinching Brian Williams.
“The president said that we will fly our flags at half mast, until August 8th. That’s 8/8. Now, I’m not going to imply that he did this deliberately, but I am using it as an example of the ignorance of the adversary that’s being demonstrated by the White House,” he said…
“The numbers 88 are very significant in neo-Nazi and white supremacy movement. Why? Because the letter ‘H’ is the eighth letter of the alphabet, and to them the numbers 88 together Stand for ‘Heil Hitler.’ So we’re going to be raising the flag back up at dusk on 8/8,” he continued.
Williams appeared to accept Figliuzzi’s rationale….
However, I think we can safely say that Figliuzzi isn’t actually crazy. If he was, he wouldn’t be using the transparent “I’m not going to imply that he did this deliberately” ploy. If Figliuzzi actually were crazy, he would say that Trump did this deliberately, and he would believe what he said.
But despite his denial, the un-crazy Figliuzzi is indeed implying that Trump did this deliberately – at least, Figliuzzi is implying that to the portion of his audience that has gone off the deep end into utter paranoia about Trump. What portion that is I don’t know, but I think the numbers are sizeable who believe Trump to be an actual Nazi.
But Figliuzzi is also implying much more than that. He’s also implying that even if Trump isn’t a neo-Nazi outright, he’s in sympathy with neo-Nazis and the neo-Nazis understand that. And Figliuzzi is also implying that even if Trump isn’t giving a deliberate “Heil Hitler!” dog whistle, Trump is nevertheless so stupid that he doesn’t know that obviously his followers will see a US flag at half-staff until 8/8 as a clear and unequivocal shout-out of support for Hitler.
Of course. Doesn’t everyone understand this?
Furthermore, whatever the small number of neo-Nazis in this country might think, Figliuzzi wants all Democrats to know that Trump’s supporters are indeed neo-Nazis and that Trump keeps throwing them fish, either purposely or stupidly, and that if you vote for Trump you’re voting for the encouragement of neo-Nazis.
That’s my theory on what he’s doing – and on what a lot of other people on the left are doing as well. They are playing on the suggestibility of their listeners and deliberately stoking their hatred and fear, hoping to motivate them to go to the polls in 2020 and vote for Anyone But Trump.
It has become clear that whoever the Democratic nominee ultimately is, he or she will be a very strange and very weak candidate. And Democratic leaders and operatives are realizing that they must hype fear of Trump to bigger and bigger heights if they want to have any hope of winning in 2020.
[NOTE: Since red flag laws are under serious consideration in the wake of various new shootings, I thought I’d recycle a two-year-old post on the subject, slightly edited. The post was originally written about Pulse nightclub shooter Omar Mateen, but it could apply to any number of shooters who have been known to be trouble a long time before they go on their murderous rampages, and yet nothing effective is done to prevent the violence from happening.]
Omar Mateen was adorned with red flags, absolutely festooned with them.
We already know that law enforcement was warned about Mateen, investigated him, and decided there was nothing they could do because he had not acted on his beliefs.
According to Omar Mateen’s fifth-grade classmates, the 10-year-old future terrorist was once suspended for two weeks after he threatened to bring a gun to school and kill all of his classmates.
Leslie Hall – one of Mateen’s classmates at Marisopa Elementary School – told TMZ that Mateen was a bully and frequently harassed both students and teachers.
Mateen reportedly told a group of students that he planned on bringing a gun to school to kill everyone there, a threat which “was not received as a joke.” Multiple former classmates confirmed the incident to TMZ.
Pulse nightclub shooter Omar Mateen’s troubled school days included an incident where he was charged with battery and another where a school official said he was suspended for cheering the Sept. 11 attacks two days after they took place.
On Thursday, the Martin County School District released records showing Mateen was suspended 15 times when he attended junior high and high school from 1999 until 2003. At least two of those suspensions were the result of violent incidents.
Mateen’s final suspension was on Sept. 13, 2001, and was issued by a school administrator named Evelyn Stettin. In a conversation with Yahoo News on Thursday, Stettin said Mateen was suspended for celebrating the 9/11 terrorist attacks, which [had] occurred two days earlier.
He was very pleased to see it happen,” Stettin said of the attacks. “We took him out of class, and we were trying to, you know, talk with him, and we had a school psych present, but basically he didn’t show any remorse. Nothing. I mean he was pretty happy it happened.”
Stettin said school officials discussed Mateen’s reaction to the terrorist attacks with his parents. She suggested Mateen’s parents were unconcerned by the incident.
“We spoke to the parents and they didn’t really do very much about it, let’s put it that way,” Stettin recounted.
And this guy Mateen was later accepted to become a prison guard, and then a security guard:
When he applied for the Department of Corrections job, Mateen had to explain a 2001 criminal charge for battery and disturbing a school function.
In a one-page handwritten letter to prison officials, Mateen said he was charged following a May 2001 fight with another student in his math class at Martin High School. The letter, dated Sept. 26, 2006, says the disruption charge was later dismissed and that he received probation for the battery charge.
Mateen was later let go for other reasons. And I suppose that, in the absence of other evidence, that note of his could have been convincing. It does happen, after all; people do reform, they do see the light. But put it all together—which no one did—especially the 9/11 cheering, and you get a very bad picture of an explosive human ready to go off, and already in sympathy with Islamic terrorists.
And he later fulfilled that early potential through action, with terrible consequences.
The problem is that, even knowing all this, it’s unclear what could have been done to have prevented it. We don’t do preventive detention for thoughtcrime or speech in the absence of criminal acts. Mateen was born here as a citizen and could not be deported. You might say that his parents should not have been let into this country back in the 80s (that’s the ideological test for immigration that I’ve suggested before), but once it had already happened it couldn’t be remedied without violating his rights as a citizen.
Whether it’s a terrorist or a “regular” mass murderer, when you look back there are almost always these sorts of signs, often beginning in childhood. For example, how often do we hear of a mass murderer that he had long been perceived as a dangerous person, and yet until he (it’s most often a “he,” so I’m not being sexist here) acts out some violence there is little to be done that wouldn’t compromise liberty, because any proactive remedy is likely to be overused and/or misused against others.
Remember how the Soviets misused their mental health system to incarcerate dissidents.
How do we separate the truly dangerous from those who are verbally threatening but won’t do much? How can we do it without compromising our basic liberties? We must figure out how to protect ourselves, but protection and liberty are often at odds, and it can be very difficult to know where and how to draw the line when a threat of this magnitude presents itself. But the threat is to liberty itself, in the end.
Quite a conundrum.
[NOTE II: The following is a slightly-edited portion of another post I wrote a while back, explaining how “red flag” laws work.]
“Red flag” laws are statutes that allow for preventive and temporary removal of firearms from persons deemed dangerous who have not yet committed any crimes, with a court hearing coming later. These laws work like this [emphasis mine]:
The laws allow weapons to be seized for a brief time – typically two or three weeks – after which a petitioner, usually a police agency, must go back to court to let a judge decide whether the gun owner’s behavior amounts to a threat to himself or others and whether the weapons should be held longer.
Such laws would have to be carefully crafted and administered to avoid abuse, because the potential for abuse is clear. Is it possible to do this? Is the will there to do this? I have to say I don’t trust the government to use these laws only wisely and well.
The attack on Obama’s record by some of the more far-left Democratic presidential candidates is unsurprising, despite the fact that Obama is still a highly regarded figure among Democrats.
For one thing, they want to take this country much further to the left than he ever did, because they seem to think that’s a winning hand. I hope they’re wrong about that, but that’s their calculation. Obama paved the way, of course, and the Overton window has moved quite a bit. But if they were to praise Obama unduly, they would inadvertently be praising Biden, who peddled along as his Veep and would get the draft if the other candidates lauded Obama overly.
Thus, the condemnation—not of Obama himself, but of some of his policies.
Meanwhile, think about Biden himself. What does he bring to the plate, other than having a lot of experience in government (not necessarily good experience, but experience nonetheless) and having been Obama’s VP?
Biden never had much of a following prior to being picked by Obama. Maybe he did in Delaware; after all he was the US senator from Delaware for 36 years, from January 1973 to January 2009, beginning when Biden was 30 years old. Delaware is a very blue state, and unless someone had tried to unseat Biden, he was going to be elected term after term.
Biden ran for president in 1988 and didn’t do all that well. Among other things, he was dogged by plagiarism charges. He didn’t try again till 2007-2008:
Overall, Biden had difficulty raising funds, struggled to draw people to his rallies, and failed to gain traction against the high-profile candidacies of Obama and Senator Hillary Clinton; he never rose above single digits in the national polls of the Democratic candidates. In the initial contest on January 3, 2008, Biden placed fifth in the Iowa caucuses, garnering slightly less than one percent of the state delegates. Biden withdrew from the race that evening, saying “There is nothing sad about tonight. … I feel no regret.”
Biden’s appeal seemed relatively local and limited to habit and to Delaware. He was perceived as affable and somewhat mediocre. But Obama saw that he could be useful to Obama’s candidacy, acting as the voice of experience and moderation:
Despite the lack of success, Biden’s stature in the political world rose as the result of his 2008 campaign. In particular, it changed the relationship between Biden and Obama. Although the two had served together on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, they had not been close, with Biden having resented Obama’s quick rise to political stardom, and Obama having viewed Biden as garrulous and patronizing. Now, having gotten to know each other during 2007, Obama appreciated Biden’s campaigning style and appeal to working class voters, and Biden was convinced that Obama was “the real deal.”
But now, in what ordinarily would have been his sunset years, Biden is the frontrunner in the Democratic race against opponents half his age, merely because he is perceived as relatively safe. No one is enthusiastic about him, as far as I can tell. Few people ever were. But although never popular, he is the happy beneficiary of a set of unusual circumstances, and at the age of 76 (he would be about two weeks from 78 at the time of the 2020 election, and if he won he would be 78 when sworn in, the oldest president ever by quite a few years) he is poised for at least the possibility of the greatest success of his life.
No wonder Biden’s defending Obama. Obama’s choice of him as VP is what gave Biden this shining moment.
I have no idea whether Steyn’s cynicism is justified in the case of Johnson. But I will say this: with Trump and Johnson, we certainly have larger-than-life personalities.
I’ve often written about the social aspects of personal political change from left (or liberal) to right (or conservative). It often has negative repercussions socially and will cause some people to shun the changer, a little or a lot or even totally.
At times when I’ve written about this, I’ve had quite a few people on the right respond by telling me, “Well, if they shun you, then they weren’t really your friends in the first place. Good riddance!”
It’s probably meant well, but I think that’s poor advice. I wonder whether those offering it might either be natural loners, or people whose friends and family are nearly all on the right and/or who live in a red state. For many of us, real friends can be lost, or friends who previously seemed to all intents and purposes to be extremely real. Even previously close family can be lost.
“Lost” isn’t always the correct word. Some do break off entirely. But it’s much more likely that the relationship will continue but become much more contentious and difficult, or at the very least strained, cooler, and more distant. It can be subtle, too, leaving the changer wondering whether it’s a natural cooling that might have happened anyway, or whether the motive is politics. And it’s not as though people can be relied on to be honest about it when asked, either.
Plus, not all our friends are good friends—“real” friends—to begin with, but that doesn’t mean that mild friendships don’t have value. Even that sort of friend is part of one’s wider social circle and it matters to lose them and to have the circle shrink down or even evaporate. It depends how sociable one is, of course, but in general human beings are sociable animals and losing pleasant acquaintances matters to one’s mood and general happiness.
I avoid talking about politics except with a few friends who seem to be able to tolerate different viewpoints and be curious what I think. But just about all my friends know about my politics, and the avoidance of political talk can become stressful for them, too. Simply put, if they want to sit around and have some good clean fun like trashing Republicans, my presence puts a damper on it and in some cases causes them to self-censor. So it might just be more comfortable for them not to include me much. That’s what I suspect at times, anyway.
I’m used to it now, because it happened quite some time ago. But it’s ongoing, and Trump’s presidency certainly hasn’t improved things.
And I don’t think it helps to say, “Well, get some new friends.” For some that might work, but it’s not a solution for losing old friends, and it’s not something you can necessarily get by snapping your fingers. I’ve made a few new friends in recent years, but only a few, and new friends don’t replace those old ones with a shared and deep history.
If you want to see something heartwarming, take a look at this. It happened twenty years ago. But I had never heard of it before, and it’s quite a story:
I love those kids at the end. So precise!
I don’t know exactly why the father wasn’t searching for the daughters also, except that perhaps they were his stepdaughters and the half-siblings of the son.
I notice it constantly, even at times on conservative sites: white supremacist groups are routinely referred to as “far right.”
Maybe I’ve even carelessly referred to them that way at times in the past. I actually don’t know. But at any rate, I don’t plan to do so in the future, because tying these people to “the right” in any way, even with words such as “far” (or “alt”) prefacing them, is wrong. They do not espouse ideas that can be recognized as “the right.” They are their own entity.
The widespread practice of calling them “right” is a good example of how language is shaped by a media and a left intent on linking the right to abominable ideas such as racism, which is not part of the right. Do some white supremacists vote for Republicans? I wouldn’t doubt it. But that doesn’t make them of the right or on the right, far or near.
You might as well say that white supremacists are on the left, because they hate Jews and the left is the political party that seems to harbor the highest number of anti-Semites these days. But no, white supremacists are not really “far left.” As I said, they are their own entity.
The whole thing reminds me of the arguments around whether or not Hitler and the Nazis were on the right or the left. It’s absurd to think that either Hitler’s vicious racial policies or his central state control constitute anything even remotely on the right, but he is routinely referred to as being on the right and this idea has taken firm hold. And yet it is incorrect:
The Nazis certainly weren’t conventional socialists, if there can be said to be such a thing…
It is true…that Communists were among the most fervent anti-Nazis, both in Germany and elsewhere. But—as the Federalist article points out—this does not change the fact that both were primarily on the left. They were definitely different (as could be seen, for example, by the distinction between Nazi Germany and Stalin’s USSR). But it was in part a turf war. Both were devoted to statism vs. individualism, and both believed in government control of business as well.
In the end, I believe that Hitler actually is unclassifiable as either right or left. He advocated a unique combination of extremely bad and even evil ideas. He was a statist, however, which leans more firmly in the “left” camp. And yet propaganda to the contrary has had its effect, and Hitler is firmly labeled in most people’s minds as having been on the right.
And to the degree that white supremacists resemble Hitler in their racial views (although if you study Hitler, he hated a lot of white people, too, such as the Poles), there is a carryover in people’s minds from “Hitler was on the far right” to “white supremacists are on the far right.”
This perfectly fits the needs of the left, who have fostered this idea for generations. The fact that many of the white supremacists of the past were southern Democrats is purposely forgotten, like so many other inconvenient facts.
The shooter was a Trump supporter! No, the shooter was a socialist! So many shooters, so much opportunity for politicians and pundit alike:
In the case of El Paso, the murderer’s writings are anti-immigrant, but also apparently socialist in some respects. In the case of Dayton, the writings reportedly are avowedly socialist, anti-Trump, pro-Elizabeth Warren, and sympathetic to Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez.
Who cares? These are deeply disturbed, evil men. Their political views deserve no attention.
But they do get attention, plenty of it, heaps and heaps of it, in order to pin blame on some politician or political movement or other. And of course, the MSM conveniently minimizes coverage of manifestos (or portions of manifestos) that express leftist views, and maximizes and focuses on those that express views that can be spun as being on the right, such as white supremacy and racism in general, whether they are actually on the right or not.
And on and on it goes. The attempt to pigeonhole a crazy sociopathic murderer into one political group or other, in particular in order to hurt Trump, is standard and predictable.
All of it is garbage.
And, if anything, all this attention feeds copycats rather than discouraging them.
Even if a certain shooter writes in support of a certain candidate, this isn’t what drives the person. Emotional issues are the drivers. These manifestos are typically a pastiche of ideas, cobbled together from this and that and the other thing, baked in the heat of their feverish minds.
Remember the old saying “Even negative attention is better than no attention at all”? Shooters want attention, and they get it. If they can’t be the best at something good, they’ll be the best at something evil and try to have the highest kill count. And if they die in the attempt, they think so be it on some level, because their lives are wretched anyway.
Maybe their lives wretched because they have no social skills, or because they have a lousy family life, or because they’re hooked on drugs, or because they aren’t very bright, or because they just were born that way, or some combination of all of those things. Maybe they haven’t a clue why their lives are wretched, but they know it’s somebody else’s fault and the world owes them something. Even if shooters write down their reasons for killing, we will never know the truth because they themselves haven’t a clue.
They often egg each other on to greater heights via the internet. Weapon bans will not stop them; they will find the weapons they need to do the things they want to do.
And it seems they value their lives not at all, so it’s no problem for them to contemplate throwing their lives away and taking the lives of others as well, in a paroxysm of revenge on the world.
[NOTE: If you want to read a disturbing article, see this at Vox, reporting on a recent poll about loneliness:
…22 percent of millennials in the poll said they had zero friends. Twenty-seven percent said they had “no close friends,” 30 percent said they have “no best friends,” and 25 percent said they have no acquaintances.
It seems that approximately 25% of millennials in that poll consider themselves extremely alone and socially isolated. In that same poll, the figures were far lower for other demographics.
If true, this amount of isolation among young people is very alarming. Of course, the vast quantity of those who feel alone never go on to harm anyone. But social isolation is definitely a factor for many mass killers.]
