Another political changer shunned by friends

The New Neo Posted on by

It’s an old old story, but one that continues to interest me. Evan Barker writes that at the beginning:

I’d worked in politics nearly half my life, starting out as an intern on Barack Obama’s campaign when I was only seventeen years old, then as a field organizer for Hillary Clinton’s campaign. Before Obama won the primary in 2008, I was an alternate delegate for Hillary in Kansas’ third congressional district, one of the youngest ever in the state of Kansas.

After a series of disappointments with the establishment, I eventually found my way to the Bernie side of the party …

So she’s established her Democrat bona fides and even her leftist bona fides. However, something happened to her on the way to the 2024 election, and that something can be summarized as Kamala Harris (although certainly not just Kamala Harris):

A lot of people have asked me what the exact moment was at the DNC that made me realize I wasn’t on board with the party I’d worked for nearly half of my life. The truth is, it was everything. The crowd that mindlessly chanted “joy”, the vasectomy van offering free tacos, the coronation of a candidate with zero policies or platform available, and the final straw: Oprah Winfrey. Her tone deaf lecturing turned me off so much, I left the building, getting an uber straight to my hotel, where I booked a flight home a day early, not even staying for Kamala’s acceptance speech.

I wouldn’t agree that Kamala had zero policies or platform, but although she certainly seemed unable to discuss her platform coherently, the platform she did have was IMHO pernicious. That doesn’t appear to have been Barker’s problem with Harris, because even though Barker technically qualifies as a changer she’s certainly not on the political right even now.

Nevertheless, she’s been shunned for having been unwilling to vote for the empty Kamala:

In the past year, nearly all of my old political friends have stopped speaking to me. One of them said: “fascism doesn’t look good on you”, another said “why couldn’t you have waited until after the election?” The social ostracism has trickled out into my non political life, too. I’ve lost friends I’ve known for fifteen years. My toddler stopped getting invited to birthday parties. He was rejected from preschool. We even had to move to a new town.

Now that we are more than half a year into a second Trump presidency, I’ve been asked numerous times if I regret my decision to ditch the Dems, or if I’d publicly say sorry for what I did.

The answer is NEVER.

In fact, more Democrats should’ve had the courage to speak out about Kamala’s candidacy, and the direction of the party in general. …

If the Democrats want to become a winning party again, they need to recognize that policy, and not messaging has led them to defeat. This means they need to stop only defining themselves against Trump, and decide what they are going to stand for. The days of mealy mouthed corporate speak are over. What the public craves more than anything is authenticity.

Besides this, Democrats need to come to terms with accepting more heterodoxy within their own party. Throw the purity tests in the trash can. It isn’t a moral failing to have a different opinion when it comes to immigration, gender ideology, or identity politics. If the Dems want to truly be the party of diversity, then diversity of thought must be included.

Good luck with that, Evan. Those days are gone. Will they ever come back? Can they ever come back? I doubt it, although of course I could be wrong. I certainly don’t think it will happen in my lifetime. I don’t even think it will happen in Evan’s lifetime, and she’s pretty young.

Nevertheless, Democrats might win the presidency and/or Congress (and certainly the House) again, and rather soon. Someone such as Evan is still in the minority in her party, and many Democrats are still very energized to vote against the GOP.

Depression and rage: the Nashville school shooter and the Minneapolis school shooter, plus Columbine

The New Neo Posted on by

One can’t help but notice the similarities between Robert (“Robin”) Westman of the recent Minneapolis school killings and Audrey (“Aidan” ) Hale of the Covenant School shooting in Nashville. There are differences, of course, starting with the fact that Westman was a biological male and Hale was a biological female, and ending with the fact that Westman killed himself and Hale was killed by police.

But the resemblances are striking. Both had not only identified as trans and had given themselves new unisex names, but they also wrote copiously prior to their crimes, were fascinated and inspired by other school shootings and shooters, and both targeted students at religious schools that the perps had themselves attended. Perhaps this latter was more from familiarity and opportunity than anything else. But it’s hard to believe it didn’t involve special animosity at some level, although according to the final police report on Hale:

… [T]he 28-year-old [Hale] relished fond memories of The Covenant School and wanted “to die somewhere that made her happy,” Nashville police said.

“Hale bore no grudge against the school or staff” and considered them to be “‘innocents’ and victims on par with herself,” the Metropolitan Nashville Police Department said.

If you want to read the elements of Hale’s manifesto the FBI ultimately released, see this. I’ve only looked at about the first third, but the overwhelming impression I receive is one of profound depression. One would think that would drive a person to suicide rather than murder-suicide, and yet – apparently due to a desire to go out in a blaze of notoriety and gain a fame in death that has eluded the person in life – the person chooses not just suicide but to cold-bloodedly kill the most innocent and heartbreaking victims of all.

Westman wrote this about his depression:

Further along in the manifesto, Westman wrote: “I have wanted this for so long. I am not well. I am not right. I am a sad person, haunted by these thoughts that do not go away. I know this is wrong, but I can’t seem to stop myself. I am severely depressed and have been suicidal for years. Only recently have I lost all hope and decided to perform my final action against this world.”

This overwhelming depression was also a motive, and perhaps the primary one, for at least one of the Columbine killers – Dylan Klebold – and possibly a motive for them both, although rage, nihilism, and psychopathy seems to have been more prominent for Eric Harris. I’ve written many posts on Columbine (see this), so I won’t go into too many details about them in this post, except to add the following [emphasis mine]:

The two teens’ attack on the Jefferson County High School was meant to “kickstart a revolution” – a rebellion they could ride to infamy, according to one of five home videos the seniors made in the weeks leading up to the April 20 bloodbath. …

Those videotapes show two teens filled with rage, sick of life and mocking their family and authority. The only remorse the two Columbine High School students showed on the tapes was to their parents …

Sitting next to Klebold, 17, Harris out lined their scheme to kill “niggers, spics, Jews, gays, f—ing whites” to “kickstart a revolution.”

“It’s going to be like f—ing Doom,” Har ris said. “Tick, tick, tick, tick .Haa! That f—ing shotgun is straight out of Doom!” Klebold: “I hope we kill 250 of you.” The seniors then debated if Steven Spiel berg or Quentin Tarantino would better direct the film of their lives and the massacre just weeks away.

Harris and Klebold are so famous they are still being discussed today, which was one of their goals.

But back to Westman and Hale. Why do some melancholy young people decide to take their depression out on others? The desire for notoriety seems to be a huge factor, but I don’t think it really explains it. Way back when I was in college taking courses in what was then called Abnormal Psychology, I remember being taught that suicide is rage turned against the self and homicide is rage turned towards others, but depression is often behind the rage. In murder-suicides, the rage seems to be towards both self and others, combined with depression – but again, that doesn’t really explain the mystery, does it? There seems to be a toxic brew of rage, depression so bad it leads to despair, social media, desire for fame, and often a hatred for life itself.

Were Westman and Hale receiving hormones, which can also mess people up? I don’t know and haven’t found anything about that. Most school shooters come from intact homes (I wrote about that in these posts and also dealt with the common idea that SSRIs are at fault; the evidence for that is unclear). Westman’s parents were divorced, but I don’t know whether his father was in his life much; both Columbine killers had intact homes, and Audrey Hale’s parents were together as well.

Eric Harris – of all people – quoted Shakespeare’s The Tempest thusly on the question of parental responsibility:

Good wombs hath borne bad sons …

I’ll leave the mystery there for now.

NOTE: The left is of course pushing its preferred political angle, which is gun banning and don’t demonize trans people, you vicious hateful Republicans!

The NY Times looks at gay men working in the Trump administration

The New Neo Posted on by

What a strange article. The attitude is that these men are some sort of curiosity [emphasis mine]:

Mr. Moran, 44, is the pasha of a new power tribe in the capital: the gay men of the Trump administration.

These are the A-Gays. They’re (mostly) out, they’re proud (to work for President Trump) and they have big jobs inside (or alongside) this administration. They wield influence all over town, from the Pentagon to the State Department to the White House to the Kennedy Center. …

The most powerful out gay man in the Trump administration is Mr. Bessent. There are a handful of others in the Treasury Department. Other A-Gays include Tony Fabrizio, the president’s longtime pollster; Trent Morse, an outgoing deputy assistant to the president; Richard Grenell, who was put in charge of the Kennedy Center; and Jacob Helberg, an under secretary of state. These are just some. There are lots of other lesser-known men who make up the tribe.

They’re overwhelmingly white and tend to have a certain kind of look. Close cropped haircuts. Windowpane suits. Golf shorts. They’re not the type to be telling anyone their pronouns or using the word “queer.” And they aren’t the least bit offended that the leader of their party continues to stoke a moral panic about transgender people.

They’re gay. But they’re still Republicans.

There’s no “moral panic” in Trump or the GOP about transgender people. There’s outrage at (a) the insistence on forcing language on people, particularly language that denies biological reality (b) the invasion of biological males into protected female areas such as women’s sports and ladies’ rooms (c) the medical transition of young people, and the negation of parental rights in order to do so (including lies told to parents about suicide among these kids, in order to coerce them into giving consent). I might add – particularly in light of the shooting discussed in the post right below this one – the fact that a significant number of trans people are mentally ill and that should be the emphasis for treatment rather than the medical and/or social transition of teenagers.

What’s more, is the Times article’s author ignorant of the fact that the trans movement feeds off of homophobia, often trying to convince kids who would otherwise enter the gay world as adults that transition is a solution to their own internalized homophobia? Therefore it’s by no means a given that gay people support the trans movement.

Then there’s this:

“The funny thing is, I had a lot of girlfriends who wanted to move here,” said Natalie Winters, the D.C.-based right-wing media darling who is a protégé of Steve Bannon. “They thought the dating scene would be really great, that MAGA would bring in a whole wave of, like, you know, eligible, conservative, smart, enterprising men.”

Instead, she said, “everybody’s freaking gay.”

The article is by no means all negative:

“The gay left just can’t handle the fact that President Trump loves the gays,” said Casey Flores, a 34-year-old MAGA gay who moved to Washington in April and started a job at the Kennedy Center as a fund-raiser.

“This idea that Republicans hate gays, that’s just so not the case, as clearly evidenced by all of us,” Mr. Flores said, referring to all of his gay friends who moved to Washington to work for Mr. Trump. “We’re so over it. We just want to help the country.”

Comments I saw from readers are mostly negative – the “all they care about is power” type of thing.

Fatal shooting of Catholic school children at Minneapolis church

The New Neo Posted on by

Terrible news: two Catholic school children have been murdered at a church in Minneapolis by a shooter who then turned the gun on himself. The shooter has been identified:

The deranged gunman who slaughtered two children and injured at least 17 others who were attending morning mass at a Catholic school in Minneapolis has been identified — as a disturbing video believed to have been posted by the shooter shows “kill Donald Trump” and “for the children” scrawled on gun magazines.

Robin Westman, who is in his early 20s, opened fire through the stained glass windows of Annunciation Catholic Church during a celebratory back-to-school Mass filled with children, around 8:30 a.m. Wednesday.

Police are investigating whether a series of sick YouTube videos shared on an account hours before the shooting was connected to Westman, law enforcement sources told The Post.

In one video, a hand slowly turns the pages of a red notebook, which is laid out on top of what appears to be schematic gun diagrams. …

Videos posted to YouTube show multiple weapons — including a semi-automatic rifle and a shotgun. Magazines were scrawled with “for the children” and “kill Donald Trump.”

It almost goes without saying that this guy is/was a nut case. Certainly doesn’t seem to be a Trump supporter. The gun angle will be played up by the left, of course. There are various rumors swirling around: trans (biological male), a manifesto, that sort of thing. I suppose we’ll find out in time – or perhaps not.

Minneapolis has been the scene of four multiple-victim shootings in the last 24 hours, with one other victim killed.

RIP.

UPDATE 2:20 PM:

That was pretty quick: the shooter is confirmed to have been a man who identified as female as a teenager and at 17 changed his name from Robert to Robin. The article I just linked uses “she” pronouns for Westman, which seems awfully woke of them at this point.

In addition, Westman’s mother was an employee at the school the children attended.

Hanson: why the Democrats went crazy

The New Neo Posted on by

Victor Davis Hanson attempts to answer this question: “What Made the Democratic Party Go Crazy?”

Before I read it, I’ll attempt two very quick answers: their antipathy to Donald Trump, and prior to that the electoral success of Barack Obama and the takeover of American cultural life in the wake of COVID lockdowns and the George Floyd death propaganda.

Maybe that’s more than two.

Except from Hanson’s piece:

There are four root causes …

Democrats became a utopian elite cadre of the very wealthy who would patronize and take care of the subsidized poor, both as psychological penance to assuage their guilt over their own newfound global riches and to solidify poorer voters with expansionary entitlements. …

From 2021 to 2025, 10 to 12 million illegal aliens had been added to the pool of some 20 million existing resident illegal aliens. The left sought to mainstream these immigrants—from mostly poor countries in Latin America, Africa, and Asia—into Democratic constituents, either in the first or by the second generation. …

Ironically, however, the Frankenstein monster of massive illegal immigration and DEI pandering proved fatal to the old liberal Dr. Frankenstein. …

The Rise of the Guilt-Ridden Professional …

As the new degreed aristocracy, no longer was their time and money needed to address adequate housing, fuel, food prices, transportation, or health care. Instead, they were freed to worry globally, especially about whether red-state hoi polloi’s ignorance might endanger their own beatific lives. …

Elite universities have become fabulously rich and globalized. …

Universities with new multibillion-dollar endowments opened global campuses abroad, without worry over the anti-American or anti-liberal values of their overseas partners. They sought billions of dollars in foreign contributions.

Endowments soared to 30, 40, and 50 billion in the Ivy League and elite campuses. Administrators and their staff grew exponentially to rival the number of students, all to handle the new all-purpose university (“Center for…[fill in the blanks of the oppressed or climate change brand]) that was therapeutic, left-wing, and indoctrinating.

The goal was no longer impartial education but overt ideological bias. …

The Democrats abandoned the middle class because they saw it as a global loser and themselves as worldwide winners. They now had the institutions and the big money, along with the leverage of millions of high-paid coastal professionals in law, the media, the university, and the administrative state to win elections by outspending, out-broadcasting, and out-regulating their clueless opponents.

All of that is true, but what I offered is true too. And I think that the cultural issues (especially in higher education) have been going on for many many decades, and somehow Democrats were nowhere near so out of touch as they have become since Trump took office and especially since 2020.

Roundup time

The New Neo Posted on by

It’s one of those days:

(1) When I first read about Trump’s EO on criminalizing the burning the American flag, I assumed it was an unconstitutional infringement on free speech. But I hadn’t read the wording, which turns out to have been crafted to try to avoid that. You can find an analysis here as well as here. An excerpt from the EO itself:

Notwithstanding the Supreme Court’s rulings on First Amendment protections, the Court has never held that American Flag desecration conducted in a manner that is likely to incite imminent lawless action or that is an action amounting to “fighting words” is constitutionally protected. See Texas v. Johnson, 491 U.S. 397, 408-10 (1989).

(2) Nigel Farage unveils his plan to control the influx of foreigners and deport them from Britain:

A five-page document was handed out to 200 attendees. It explains how Reform will leave the ECHR and disapply the Refugee Convention for five-years if elected in 2029. A new British Bill of Rights will be introduced, with all government departments required to make the migration crisis their number one ministerial priority. Some £2 billion will be put aside to achieve this goal. Aid and sanctions will be used as ‘carrot and stick’ to ensure cooperation from other countries. …

Unsurprisingly, many dwelt on the issue of illegal migrants returned to hostile regimes. Farage, echoing the line he articulated in the Times on Saturday was regretful but unapologetic about the need to deport those who come here illegally. Yusuf says that the ambition is for 600,000 people to be deported by the end of Reform’s first parliament.

Reform may be a single-issue party right now, but it’s probably the biggest issue in Britain at the moment. Previous governments pitted themselves against the wishes of the native British people, and probably many previous immigrants as well. And it was the Tories’ attitudes towards immigration – more or less indistinguishable from the left’s – that got them booted out.

(3) Did you know that there is a Miss Palestine about to compete in the Miss Universe pageant? Yes indeed, there is, and here’s some background that probably will not surprise you in the least:

A contestant in this year’s Miss Universe pageant will represent a country most nations don’t recognize, for a religious culture that rejects her, after winning a competition that apparently didn’t happen.

Miss Palestine will compete in the pageant for the first time ever in November — represented by Nadeen Ayoub, 27, who is also listed as founder and manager of the Miss Palestine Organization, the group behind her title.

The Post could not find any record of a Miss Palestine pageant having been held, the names of any other contestants, or ways for them to have registered to compete. …

She was reportedly born in the US and raised in Canada, and now lives in Dubai.

(4) Painting stolen by Nazis found after 80 years – and the manner of its finding is especially interesting:

A painting pillaged by the Nazis from a Jewish art collector during World War II has been found 80 years later — after it was spotted in a real estate listing for the home of a high-ranking Nazi’s daughter.

“Portrait of a Lady,” by the Italian painter Giuseppe Ghislandi, was spotted in the listing hanging over a couch in the living room of a home being sold in Argentina, where the owner’s dad, Goering aide Friedrich Kadgien, had fled after the war, according to The Telegraph. …

RCE researchers also claim to have spotted another missing painting — by Abraham Mignon, a 17th-century Dutch painter — on a social media page of one of the woman’s sisters.

Argentina, naturally.

(5) Trump attempts to fire Fed’s Lisa Cook for alleged mortgage fraud, and she plans to sue to keep her job:

Cook’s lawyer, Abbe Lowell, said Trump “has no authority to remove Federal Reserve Governor Lisa Cook. His attempt to fire her, based solely on a referral letter, lacks any factual or legal basis. We will be filing a lawsuit challenging this illegal action.”

Asked about that during his Cabinet meeting, Trump was dismissive, offering, “You always have legal fights.”

Can’t argue with that – judges have been very very busy in the last few years, as have lawyers.

Update on my ex-husband

The New Neo Posted on by

I spent the earlier part of today sitting in on my ex’s first home sessions with a nurse and then a speech therapist. So I decided it might be time for an update here for those of you who are curious how he’s doing.

The answer is that he’s making slow progress. He seems stronger on almost every dimension, although he’s still got a long way to go. I’m still quite involved in dealing with it, although the pressure on me has somewhat lessened. I choose to keep the details vague when I write about the situation here, in order to protect his privacy. But it’s really been a difficult experience for me – and of course for him.

He was in the hospital for a couple of days and then a rehab hospital for two weeks, and the latter recommended that he go to a step-down rehab facility for a few more weeks after that. They were very negative about the idea of his going home, but he insisted. At the time, I didn’t think he made the right decision, but at this point I’ve changed my mind because (knock wood) he’s doing better at home than they predicted and than I imagined. The visit from our son helped a great deal, too. He lives so far away, and he has a demanding job and a family, but he took four days off to devote to his father and I’m so so glad he did.

The program of home visits for a while from physical therapists and the like is one of the great benefits of Medicare. Of course, success depends on the patients’ practicing the exercises at home between visits, and I bet a lot of patients don’t manage to do that, especially if they live alone and have no one to nag them. My ex lives alone, but he has me to nag him.

Denmark’s experience with Palestinian arrivals

The New Neo Posted on by

Well, one thing you can say is that in Denmark it didn’t go as badly as it did in Jordan and Lebanon, where they tried to overthrow the governments. Then again, the number of Palestinians welcomed by Denmark was a lot more limited.

In 1992 the Danish Parliament gave asylum to 321 Palestinian refugees from Lebanon already living in Denmark illegally, and in 2017 they decided to study the results. Apparently, the report issued is now circulating on social media, and it’s quite interesting, to say the least:

… 67 of the 321 had received prison sentences of some kind, while 137 were subject to legal fines larger than $200. That is, more than 60 percent carried criminal records.

Welfare dependency was also widespread. A majority of the refugees received welfare benefits, according to the report, which tracked those benefits from 2007 to 2016. No fewer than 180 of the refugees, or 56 percent, received welfare benefits during the 10-year span. That figure peaked at 189 in 2016.

I don’t know how this compares to other immigrant groups in Denmark, but it certainly seems high.

There’s also this:

Denmark passed an integration law in 1999, seven years after it granted residency to the Palestinian refugees. It mandated a three-year introduction program for refugees that includes language lessons.

I’d be curious what the results of that law were; seems that although language lessons are good, they just scratch the surface.

Assimilation into a new country and culture depends on various things: the previous culture from which the immigrants (illegal or not) come, how different that culture is from that of the host country, how willing and eager they are to leave not just their home country but their culture, what their reasons for coming are, how many arrive, whether they live in homogeneous enclaves in the new country, how generous the welfare system is, and what the assimilation demands are in the new country. Clinging to the old ways, depending on welfare, and in particular coming in order to spread one’s own culture and/or take over the new country would be a no-no (for example – with Palestinians in Jordan, the culture and background were similar, but the aims were to take over).

All lawfare isn’t created equal

The New Neo Posted on by

Commenter “Variant” writes, on the Bolton raid thread:

Trump is simply trying to settle petty personal grudges via Lawfare and we’re trying to justify it because it was done to him.

I prefer intellectual consistency on the right. I realize Trump isn’t conservative or consistent, but doesn’t mean we have to applaud this.

Regarding the second sentence of that comment, I suppose it depends what you mean by “conservative.” If “conservative” means playing it safe and being predictable, Trump certainly isn’t that. If it means being patriotic, being Jacksonian in foreign policy, wanting to shrink the cost of the federal government, being tough on crime, and advocating traditional definitions of man and woman, he’s quite conservative. But I doubt most people agree on the definition.

He’s strangely consistent as well, although unpredictable in his approaches. He’s very quirky and often insulting. But if you look at interviews with Trump on politics, starting when he was a fairly young man during the 1980s, his actual positions are – for the most part – remarkably consistent (see this).

But I’m especially interested in that first sentence of the comment, because it’s the sort of thing a great many people are saying – most are anti-Trumpers but not all of them. It rests, I believe, on the definition of “Lawfare” and whether it might sometimes be appropriate, and if so when.

Lawfare is defined here in this manner: “the use of legal action to cause problems for an opponent.” But if that’s lawfare, and one is against it in all circumstances, then there wouldn’t be consequences for political figures breaking the law unless the lawbreakers’ supporters would be the ones to bring charges. And although such things are not beyond the realm of possibility, they’re not at all common and not to be expected of politicians. The reality is that perps in one’s own political party who haven’t turned against the people in power in that party are very rarely going to face any consequences at the hands of that party, and therefore it’s usually up to the opposition to press charges when they are in power, even if the offenses are fairly egregious.

There need to be consequences for lawbreaking by politicians and in particular for serious lawbreaking by politicians. But at what point has the lawbreaking crossed the line at which it needs to be prosecuted? How serious does it have to be? And even when the legal charges against various politicians are the same, the particular fact situation in each case can make the seriousness of the offense very different.

For example, let’s think about classified material. Has a statute been violated merely by taking it and storing it? What level of classification is involved? Is the person authorized to take it and to even declassify it? Does it matter if the person shows it to another person, and to whom? And what about leaking it to the press? These questions differentiate the Trump classified material case from the Biden classified material case from the Hillary Clinton classified material case from the Bolton classified material case, and the details of the answers are highly important in deciding whether bringing charges would be justified and whether bringing charges might even be necessary in order to establish that there are consequences for lawless behavior.

The classified material case was the only one of the legal cases brought against Trump that wasn’t based on an absurdly novel and twisted interpretation of the law. Those other cases were what one might call pure lawfare undertaken for revenge and in order to prevent Trump from being elected. Those cases ended up backfiring, of course, but that was never a foregone conclusion and the people who brought them certainly believed there was a good chance the cases (or at least one of them) would either bankrupt Trump, and/or keep him from a second term, and/or even send him to prison.

As for the investigation of Bolton in a case involving classified material, we simply don’t know enough yet to decide how valid the investigation might be and whether any charges will come of it. But the allegations against Bolton being discussed are that “he sent ‘highly sensitive’ classified documents to his family from a private email server while working in the White House.” That seems potentially serious, if true. Sending them to family? From a private email server? If laws protecting classified documents are to have any meaning whatsoever, it seems as though behavior like that would need to have negative consequences.

It remains to be seen whether there are any legs to the allegations, and whether Bolton will be charged with anything.