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.”

Trump to send federal troops…

The New Neo Posted on by

…to crime-ridden cities:

President Trump is deploying 100 federal agents to Chicago to help combat rising rates of some crimes – a move that marks an expansion of the White House’s intervention into local law enforcement as Trump continues to position himself as the “law and order” president.

The “surge” of agents announced on Wednesday to Chicago and other American cities is part of Operation Legend – named after 4-year-old LeGend Taliferro, who was fatally shot while sleeping in a Kansas City apartment late last month – and comes as federal law enforcement officers have already descended on Portland, Ore. and Kansas City, Mo.

“The effort to shut down police in their own communities has led to a shocking explosion of shootings, killing, violence, murders,” Trump said during a speech in the White House’s East Room. “This rampage of violence shocks the conscience of our nation and we will not stand by and watch it happen.”

One of the many goals of the mayors who stood by while crime soared in their cities was the idea that it was a win/win situation for them. That may seem odd – why would rising crime, particularly in black communities, be something leftist mayors would want? One reason is that part of the left’s agenda has long been to demonize police and replace them with people they are able to better control. The current mayors are also eager to please their leftist constituencies. But in addition, the goal is to thwart Trump and put him in a lose/lose situation: looking bad if he does nothing, and looking bad (Tyrant! Tyrant!) is he does something.

He’s decided to do something:

While sending federal agents to aid local law enforcement is not unprecedented – Attorney General Bill Barr announced a similar surge effort in December for seven cities that had seen spiking violence – the type of federal agent being sent, and some of their tactics, have raised concerns among state and local lawmakers.

Usually, the Justice Department sends agents under its own umbrella, like agents from the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives or the Drug Enforcement Agency. But this surge effort will include Department of Homeland Security Investigations (HSI) officers, who generally conduct drug trafficking and child exploitation investigations.

No matter what Trump did or didn’t do, they’d condemn him in the strongest possible terms. For example:

“The president is attacking progressive cities with troops who are unwelcome and unskilled,” Portland Mayor Ted Wheeler said in a letter signed by 16 mayors calling on Trump to reverse his orders. “Militarized agents are terrorizing the American people. We must stand together for peace and reform, and against these un-American tactics.”

I could have written that for him; anyone could have, it’s so predictable. The repercussions of all of this really depend on whether the American public is wise to the game. Just a few years ago I believe they would have been. Now, who knows? Too many people lack common sense or a sense of history, and the media is complicit.

Michelle Malkin on anarcho-tyranny in the US

The New Neo Posted on by

In this essay, Michelle Malkin uses a term I had never heard before but which I think fits what’s happening in the US today:

It’s not “socialism” or “communism” under which we suffer. Our dangerously chaotic, selectively oppressive predicament is more accurately described as “anarcho-tyranny.” The late conservative columnist Sam Francis first coined the term in 1992 to diagnose a condition of “both anarchy (the failure of the state to enforce the laws) and, at the same time, tyranny — the enforcement of laws by the state for oppressive purposes.”

The “criminalization of the law-abiding and innocent,” Francis expounded, is achieved in such a state through: “exorbitant taxation, bureaucratic regulation; the invasion of privacy, and the engineering of social institutions, such as the family and local schools; the imposition of thought control through ‘sensitivity training’ and multiculturalist curricula; ‘hate crime’ laws; gun-control laws that punish or disarm otherwise law-abiding citizens but have no impact on violent criminals who get guns illegally; and a vast labyrinth of other measures.”

I think this has been brewing for a long time. The COVID-Floyd one-two punch brought it out into the open more forcibly, but it’s been happening right along and the explosion was inevitable, just waiting for the spark.

Malkin describes what happened in Denver recently:

It was rank-and-file cops in Denver who watched as my patriotic friends and I tried to hold a Law Enforcement Appreciation Day this past Sunday and were besieged by Black Lives Matter and antifa thugs who had declared that their sole intent in invading our permitted celebration was to “shut us down.” I livestreamed the chaos as pro-police attendees were beaten, including the organizer Ron MacLachlan, who was bloodied in the face and head just a few feet from me by black-masked animals. One antifa actor wielded her collapsible baton just inches from me.

The cop-haters had obstructed traffic on their five-minute march from their unpermitted event at the Colorado State Capitol to our permitted space.

No cops intervened.

Unprovoked, the cop-haters blared airhorns, sprayed our faces (mine included), burned an American flag, punched, shoved and menaced and took over our stage.

No cops intervened.

More at the link.

I couldn’t find any coverage of this event, including Malkin’s roughing up, in the major pro-left MSM organs such as the Times or the WaPo or CNN. The first link Google gives led me to Breitbart, then to Malkin’s Twitter account, then to some local Denver news outlets (see this and this), then some YouTube videos, then a blog on the right, then an American Thinker piece, then the NY Post – and on and on, with nary a site on the left or a single major MSM outlet that isn’t on the right.

Americans are not getting the news of what’s happening at the hands of the anarcho-tyranny. And that’s by design, because it’s targeting those on the right. I don’t know if there are still enough Americans who would care if they knew, but the press is making sure they don’t know.

Meritocracy? What’s that?

The New Neo Posted on by

Meritocracy has been dying a slow and painful death for many many decades.

It used to be a basic American value. I don’t know when that began to change, but the first thing I noticed along those lines was many many decades ago when the gifted and talented programs that had flourished in schools when I was a child – keeping me merely somewhat bored in school rather than bored to tears – had been canceled. Why? I don’t think it primarily had to do with race at the time; to the best of my recollection it had to do with not making the children in the slower groups feel judged and found wanting. Whatever the reason, I recall thinking it was a turning point, and not a good one.

Now, many decades later, it’s come to this. First a little history, in which the Jews – as is often the case – were the canaries in the mine:

University began administering a standardized test to all applicants in 1905. Its effect was profound and immediate: historically a landing spot for the Protestant upper crust, the school began admitting far more public school kids, Catholics, and Jews.

The increasing number of Jewish students was a major concern for Harvard president and committed progressive A. Lawrence Lowell. He tried to implement a quota on Jews, then pivoted to an admissions process that used intangible factors such as “character” and “manliness.” It worked: Jewish applicants consistently fell short.

Which brings us to today:

In the name of racial equality, the woke now seek to dismantle meritocratic norms and return to the quota systems that practices like standardized testing were designed to relegate to the trash heap of history…

The New York Times’s classical music critic, Anthony Tommasini, is calling for the end of the blind symphony audition, which drove a tripling of women’s representation in the field, so that conductors can make race-based selections. The University of Connecticut School of Medicine, where merit is literally a matter of life or death, recently suspended admissions to its honor society because the GPA-based admissions criterion did not produce an honor society that, as Bill Clinton said, “looked like America.”

The SAT—which measures intellect better and more fairly than do intangible heuristics—is under fire. University of California president and former Obama official Janet Napolitano has joined the chorus of administrators at elite universities who complain that race-blind admissions aren’t producing the desired results.

It’s never enough, so the only solution is strict quotas in order to ensure exact representation according to a formula that produces the desired racial mix. In November the state of California – which had banned explicit affirmative action by way of quotas twenty-four years ago – will be voting on reinstating them:

Senator Holly Mitchell (D-Los Angeles), who was the sponsor of the Senate measure, said its passage in November would mean more state contracts for women and minorities and a closing of education gaps for minorities. At state universities, it will lead to “a more diverse atmosphere that enhances learning and encourages mutual understanding,” Mitchell said. She also predicted it would help produce more teachers of color in California’s classrooms.

In contrast, Senator Ling Ling Chang (R-Diamond Bar) recalled the state’s history of anti-Chinese discrimination and said she feared the bill will “fight discrimination with more discrimination.” Getting rid of Proposition 209, she said, would wrongly eliminate a ban on bias that has helped California flourish.

Senator Mitchell’s assertion that diversity “enhances learning and encourages mutual understanding” has become an article of faith, not to be challenged, despite some evidence against it. But there is little question that Ling Ling Chang is correct, and that this practice, if approved, will “fight discrimination with more discrimination.”

To many, that’s a feature, not a bug. And the Asians, who are the new Jews, will suffer.

More on the California proposal, which can be passed by a simple majority vote in November:

Three decades [after affirmative action quotas were banned in California], the changing political tides have drawn the argument over affirmative action back to the forefront: the once powerful Republican Party is now an afterthought as Democrats hold supermajorities in both chambers and all eight statewide officer positions, from governor to attorney general.

Along with the UC regents, the authors have amassed a powerful coalition, including groups like American Civil Liberties Union, California Teachers Association, NextGen California and the Anti-Defamation League. Members of the Legislature’s Black, Latino, Asian Pacific Islander, Women’s and Jewish caucuses are also backing ACA 5.

None of the committee members spoke against the bill Wednesday but dozens of people called in opposition. Some said affirmative action amounts to “reverse discrimination” while the Silicon Valley Chinese Association Foundation argued the practice is unconstitutional.

“It will divide California and pit one group of citizens against another simply based on their race, sex, color, ethnicity or national origin,” wrote the foundation in an opposition letter. “It will minimize the accomplishments of minority groups to a simple result of preferential treatment, a blow to their extraordinary hard work and sacrifice.”

Again – to the current Democratic Party, that’s the goal.

Robert Frost for our times

The New Neo Posted on by

[NOTE: This is a revised version of a previous post.]

Robert Frost’s poem “A Case for Jefferson” isn’t great poetry—even though it’s a poem by a master of the genre. It’s more in the vein of light verse, which Frost sometimes also wrote.

The treatment is light, that is. Not the subject matter:

A CASE FOR JEFFERSON

Harrison loves my country too,
But wants it all made over new.
He’s Freudian Viennese by night.
By day he’s Marxian Muscovite.
It isn’t because he’s Russian Jew.
He’s Puritan Yankee through and through.
He dotes on Saturday pork and beans.
But his mind is hardly out of his teens:
With him the love of country means
Blowing it all to smithereens
And having it all made over new.

By the way, the “Russian Jew” reference in the poem is not, IMHO, anti-Semitic. Frost is suggesting that “Harrison” (not ordinarily a Jewish name) doesn’t even have the excuse for his radicalism of being a Jew in Russia, subject to the pressures and ethos there. Harrison’s “Puritan Yankee through and through.”

“A Case for Jefferson” was first published in 1947, but I can’t find anything that says when it might have been written, although obviously it was prior to that. Frost later disavowed it as “dated,” (although he wasn’t able to see the future—the late 60s and of course the present—in which it became undated again), and thought it was bad as a poem.

Well, as I said, it’s not really a poem. It’s a ditty, a verse—but unfortunately, it’s not dated. I’m not sure it ever will be, because the strains in human thought it was describing seem to have a certain staying power.

More background on the poem and on Frost’s politics:

Frost held that not traditional religion and culture, but revolutionary Marxism and reforming liberalism were the true opiates of the people. Marxists and secular liberals rejected or were often agnostic about God, but they deified the party or the state; they rejected the traditional religious concept of heaven, but they believed in an eventual heaven on earth. They rejected religion and much in Western culture as superstition, but were themselves superstitiously addicted by the idea of progress through science and revolutionary ideology. What Frost called “the sweep to collectivism in our time,” which characterized the totalitarian ideologies of the twentieth century, could destroy the principle of limited political power even in America, through the growth of the federal bureaucracy under the New Deal. Frost attributed the political wisdom of dividing and balancing political power against itself to the religious orthodoxy of the Founding Fathers. They knew that only God had or should have absolute power, and their religion taught them that the moral and intellectual weaknesses of man required putting bounds to political power. When modern politicians play God they invariably promise far more than they can achieve as men, and the gap between their promises and their achievements is filled by the abstract slogans and dialectics of ideological propaganda. The language of revolutionists and reformers is characterized by the jargon of rationalized deceit. In a letter to Bernard De Voto in 1936 Frost wrote: “The great politicians are having their fun with us. They’ve picked up just enough of the New Republic and Nation jargon to seem original to the simple.” In 1939, in “The Figure a Poem Makes,” Frost said: “More than once I should have lost my soul to radicalism if it had been the originality it was mistaken for by its young converts.”

I knew absolutely nothing of Frost’s politics when I began to admire his poetry, and nothing of them when I started this blog and designed the photograph at the top, which features Frost’s collected works as the book with the dark cover above the Churchill biography.

[ADDENDUM: Some commenters have wondered why it’s called “A Case for Jefferson.” I’m not sure, but I found this:

To Thomas Jefferson, such would indeed be a case of democracy gone wrong…

[Frost is quoted as having said to Reginald Cook]: “I said to a person high up in the government lately, I said “As long as all my educated friends and Mrs. Roosevelt think that socialism is inevitable and can’t be avoided and has got to come that way, why don’t you and I hurry it up and get it over with? It couldn’t last…I wouldn’t favor that policy.”

Plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose.]

Fighting the White Fragility cult

The New Neo Posted on by

Some suggestions for responding to White Fragility trainers, particularly if your exposure to the program happens in the workplace.

The book White Fragility has also become very popular among book groups. In addition, it increasingly serves as fuel to cause discord in interpersonal relations among friends and family.

If you haven’t seen this explanation of some of the principles behind the anti-racism movement of which White Fragility is a part, please take a look. “Anti-racism” is a term of art, and not what it seems to be on its face.