Equality, Coolidge, and Mamdani

The New Neo Posted on by

I found this quote from Calvin Coolidge at Instapundit. It’s an excerpt from Coolidge’s speech on the 150th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence:

About the Declaration there is a finality that is exceedingly restful. It is often asserted that the world has made a great deal of progress since 1776, that we have had new thoughts and new experiences which have given us a great advance over the people of that day, and that we may therefore very well discard their conclusions for something more modern. But that reasoning can not be applied to this great charter. If all men are created equal, that is final. If they are endowed with inalienable rights, that is final. If governments derive their just powers from the consent of the governed, that is final. No advance, no progress can be made beyond these propositions. If anyone wishes to deny their truth or their soundness, the only direction in which he can proceed historically is not forward, but backward toward the time when there was no equality, no rights of the individual, no rule of the people. Those who wish to proceed in that direction can not lay claim to progress. They are reactionary. Their ideas are not more modern, but more ancient, than those of the Revolutionary fathers.

So someone like Mamdani is a reactionary.

Furthermore, all men – meaning “mankind” or human beings – are created equal, which does not mean that their lives, achievements, income, or luck will be equal. Nor is it the task of the federal government – or local government – to make those things equal. That’s one of the main problems with leftists such as Mamdani, whose vision of equality of outcome (rather than equality of opportunity) quickly turns into a nightmare.

And in pursuit of that equality of outcome we get preferential treatment for historically downtrodden groups such as black Americans, which led Mamdani – who is not black and was not American at the time – to have claimed “black or African-American” status in an effort to get preferential treatment in a college application:

New York City mayoral candidate Zohran Mamdani is facing an uproar in the wake of the revelation that he claimed he was “black or African American” and “Asian” on an application to Columbia University, according to a NY Times report. He did not get in, but putting that in the application would likely have upped his chances of getting in. He told The NY Times on Thursday he did not consider himself “black or African American” but an “American born in Africa.” He claimed he didn’t do it to increase his chances but to reflect the fullness of his background. However, the question on the application is about race, not about his place of birth.

Mamdani, whose parents are Indian, was born in Uganda but came to New York City when he was a child. He is not black and was not a U.S. citizen at the time of the application.

Can you imagine if Elon Musk claimed to be “black or African-American”? Mamdani will get away with it with his supporters, but that’s not only because he’s a leftist but because he’s “brown” (of Indian ethnicity). I don’t know whether being Indian gets an applicant much these days; perhaps it’s lumped in with “Asian,” which is most definitely not an advantage.

When I first heard this story, I wondered at the fact that the Times mentioned it. But I quickly realized that even the Times is probably aware that Mamdani as mayor would be bad for the city. What is also of interest is how flat-footed and lethargic Cuomo’s campaign must have been, to not have unearthed some of these tidbits that could conceivably hurt Mamdani.

For Independence Day: on liberty

The New Neo Posted on by

[NOTE: This is a repeat of a previous post from many many years ago. It was written in the springtime during a visit to New York City. Reading it now, I find myself more hopeful about the state of the country than I have been in many years. I realize that liberty remains very tenuous, and yet it felt a great deal more tenuous just a year ago.]

I’ve been visiting New York City, the place where I grew up. I decide to take a walk to the Promenade in Brooklyn Heights, never having been there before.

When you approach the Promenade you can’t really see what’s in store. You walk down a normal-looking street, spot a bit of blue at the end of the block, make a right turn–and, then, suddenly, there is the city.

And so it is for me. I take a turn, and catch my breath: downtown Manhattan rises to my left, seemingly close enough to touch, across the narrow East River. I see skyscrapers, piers, the orange-gold Staten Island ferry. In front of me, there are the graceful gothic arches of the Brooklyn Bridge. To my right, the back of some brownstones, and a well-tended and charming garden that goes on for a third of a mile.

I walk down the promenade looking first left and then right, not knowing which vista I prefer, but liking them both, especially in combination, because they complement each other so well.

All around me are people, relaxing. Lovers walking hand in hand, mothers pushing babies in strollers, fathers pushing babies in strollers, nannies pushing babies in strollers. People walking their dogs (a preponderance of pugs, for some reason), pigeons strutting and courting, tourists taking photos of themselves with the skyline as background, every other person speaking a foreign language.

The garden is more advanced in time than gardens where I live, reminding me that New York is really a southern city compared to New England. Daffodils, the startling blue of grape hyacinths, tulips in a rainbow of soft colors, those light-purple azaleas that are always the first of their kind, flowering pink magnolia and airy white dogwood and other blooming trees whose names I don’t know.

In the view to my left, of course, there’s something missing. Something very large. Two things, actually: the World Trade Center towers. Just the day before, we had driven past that sprawling wound, with its mostly-unfilled acreage where the WTC had once stood, now surrounded by fencing. Driving by it is like passing a war memorial and graveyard combined; the urge is to bow one’s head.

As I look at the skyline from the Promenade, I know that those towers are missing, but I don’t really register the loss visually. I left New York in the Sixties, never to live there again, returning thereafter only as occasional visitor. The World Trade Center was built in the early Seventies, so I never managed to incorporate it into that personal New York skyline of memory that I hold in my mind’s eye, even though I saw the towers on subsequent visits. So what I now see resembles nothing more than the skyline of my youth restored, a fact which seems paradoxical to me. But I feel the loss, even though I don’t see it. Viewing the skyline always has a tinge of sadness now, which it never had before 9/11.

I come to the end of the walkway and turn myself around to set off on the return trip. And, suddenly, the view changes. Now, of course, the garden is to my left and the city to my right; and the Brooklyn Bridge, which was ahead of me, is now behind me and out of sight. But now I can see for the first time, ahead of me and to the right, something that was behind me before. In the middle of the harbor, the pale-green Statue of Liberty stands firmly on its concrete foundation, arm raised high, torch in hand.

The sight is intensely familiar to me – I used to see it frequently when I was growing up. But I’ve never seen it from this angle before. She seems both small and gigantic at the same time: dwarfed by the skyscrapers near me that threaten to overwhelm her, but towering over the water that surrounds her on all sides. The eye is drawn to her distant, heroic figure. She’s been holding that torch up for so long, she must be tired. But still she stands, resolute, her arm extended.

NOTE: I was going to add a photo of the Statue of Liberty here. But instead I was very taken with a video about how the statue was constructed. I’d never previously thought about the challenges involved and how they were surmounted, but I learned about them here:

Okay, explain this one

The New Neo Posted on by

In 2017 I got a wonderful new refrigerator. I fell in love with it instantly, and my love for it has only deepened as it ages. But about a year ago its light went out.

I was going to replace it. I meant to replace it. I had every intention of replacing it. But as time went on I realized I did just fine without the light. The light in my kitchen illuminated the inside of the refrigerator quite adequately. So I put the task off and put it off, because changing the light in this particular model is actually a bit labor intensive.

As I said, a year passed. I had almost forgotten that refrigerators have lights, because I really didn’t miss mine.

And then suddenly, about three days ago – what do you think happened? The light went on when I opened the fridge. And it’s been working just fine ever since.

So my question is: what happened? It’s a complete mystery to me. I did nothing differently. Nothing at all happened of which I’m aware that might have affected my refrigerator. And yet it’s been working perfectly.

Go figure.

Congress passes the BBB – and before the Fourth, as well

The New Neo Posted on by

From the NY Post:

The GOP-led House passed the One Big Beautiful Bill Act in a 218-214 vote Thursday following hours of relentless arm-twisting and deliberation that included the longest floor speech and longest procedural vote in the body’s 236-year history.

In the end, just two Republicans, Thomas Massie of Kentucky and Brian Fitzpatrick of Pennsylvania, voted against the measure after Trump held 11th-hour White House meetings Wednesday with more than a dozen holdouts — before deploying his Truth Social account in the final stretch.

“Largest Tax Cuts in History and a Booming Economy vs. Biggest Tax Increase in History, and a Failed Economy. What are the Republicans waiting for??? What are you trying to prove??? MAGA IS NOT HAPPY, AND IT’S COSTING YOU VOTES!!!” Trump, 79, erupted just after midnight.

I wrote about the bill at some length this past Tuesday. It’s not perfect – fancy that. It has things to like and things to not like, and to top it all off it’s so long that it will take a while to get clear on what’s actually in it and what isn’t. The Democrats, of course, mischaracterize it as awful, but what else is new? The proof will be in the results.

Trump is right, though, that doing nothing was going to lose votes for members of Congress. People are fed up, and the tax cuts were due to expire. I don’t think anyone should underestimate how difficult it was to herd the GOP cats into passing this when the majorities are razor-thin. It’s quite an accomplishment for Johnson and Thune, and I doubt it would have happened if McCarthy and especially McConnell had still been in there.

More:

The final vote was further delayed by House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries (D-NY) reading letters from constituents who expressed concern about their Medicaid benefits being stripped.

The House Democratic leader would end up using his “magic minute” of debate against the bill to stall its passage for almost nine hours, shattering the record previously held by former House Speaker Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) in 2021 during his opposition to the Build Back Better Act.

“It’s an utter waste of everyone’s time, but you know, that’s part of the system here,” Johnson groused to reporters about Jeffries’ stall tactics.

“It takes a lot longer to build a lie than to tell the simple truth,” the speaker later clapped back during a floor speech just before voting on the actual bill took place.

Trump will sign it, of course.

Russiagate revisited: new CIA review

The New Neo Posted on by

This is being treated as news, but didn’t we already know it?:

A bombshell new CIA review of the Obama administration’s spy agencies’ assessment that Russia interfered in the 2016 presidential election to help Donald Trump was deliberately corrupted by then-CIA Director John Brennan, FBI Director James Comey and Director of National Intelligence James Clapper, who were “excessively involved” in its drafting, and rushed its completion in a “chaotic,” “atypical” and “markedly unconventional” process that raised questions of a “potential political motive.”

Further, Brennan’s decision to include the discredited Steele dossier, over the objections of the CIA’s most senior Russia experts, “undermined the credibility” of the assessment.

The “Tradecraft Review of the 2016 Intelligence Community Assessment [ICA] on Russian Election Interference” was conducted by career professionals at the CIA’s Directorate of Analysis and was commissioned by CIA Director John Ratcliffe in May.

The “lessons-learned review” found that, on December 6, 2016, six weeks before his presidency ended, Barack Obama ordered the assessment, which concluded that Russian President Vladimir Putin “aspired” to help Trump win the election.

The review identified “multiple procedural anomalies” that undermined the credibility of the ICA, including “a highly compressed production timeline, stringent compartmentation, and excessive involvement of agency heads.”

More at the link.

On the right, many of the comments take the form of saying something like “not only did we already know this, but so what – will these people be prosecuted for their scurrilous lies?” The answer to the last part of that is probably not; I’m not sure that the dangerous and deplorable things they did were actually crimes in the legal sense, and none of them are still in office so they can’t be removed. And yes, we mostly knew what the report says in the general sense, but it’s more specific about the roles of Obama, Brennan, Comey, and Clapper.

Most people formed their ideas about Russiagate long ago and probably aren’t even reading the report, however, especially the details. It’s been almost ten years since Russiagate began – imagine that. And yet it was a shocking thing, and remains so. Ironically, Russiagate has contributed to people’s distrust of everything the government says, including when it emanates from the right – such as this report.

As for the NY Times, it does cover the new report, but the Times’ article has this ho-hum headline that could easily lead a reader to the conclusion that Russiagate was correct: “C.I.A. Says Its Leaders Rushed Report on Russia Interference in 2016 Vote – But the new review of the earlier assessment does not dispute the conclusion that Russia favored the election of Donald J. Trump.”

And here’s the article’s lede:

A C.I.A. review of its assessment of Russian interference in the 2016 election criticized the agency’s leadership at the time for rushing the effort but did not dispute the conclusion that Russia favored the election of Donald J. Trump.

The review also criticized John O. Brennan, who was the C.I.A. director when the assessment was written, for his oversight of the project and for too tightly controlling access to sensitive intelligence that formed the basis of the work.

That certainly would be unlikely to cause any Democrat to doubt Russiagate – or to read much further.

U Penn agrees to apologize for allowing men into women’s sports

The New Neo Posted on by

And not just “allowing” but rather forcing women to accept the invasion.

Here’s the latest:

Transgender swimming champion Lia Thomas will be stripped of University of Pennsylvania swimming titles after the Ivy League school bowed to pressure from the Trump administration.

The university will also issue formal apologies to every biological female competitor who lost out to a transgender competitor following an investigation by the Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights (OCR).

The probe found UPenn violated Title IX by “allowing a male to compete in female athletic programs and occupy female-only intimate facilities.”

“Today’s resolution agreement with UPenn is yet another example of the Trump effect in action. Thanks to the leadership of President Trump, UPenn has agreed both to apologize for its past Title IX violations and to ensure that women’s sports are protected at the University for future generations of female athletes,” Secretary of Education Linda McMahon said in a statement.

Swimmer Lia Thomas was and is, to all intents and purposes, a fully-equipped post-pubescent biological male. He had no business being in a woman’s locker room, and the fact that U Penn forced such a thing on its female swimmers was a terrible offense.

So, at the very least, the university won’t be doing that anymore – until, of course, Democrats take control of the federal government and redefine what Title IX means.

Or perhaps the left has learned its lesson on this, although I wouldn’t count on it. And by “its lesson,” I mean the practical lesson that forcing men into women’s locker rooms isn’t a popular stance, and may have contributed heavily to Democrats’ losses in 2024. I don’t expect that the left would learn the moral lesson or the lesson about biology.

On Islam and the definition of “religion”

The New Neo Posted on by

I noticed a discussion in the comments today about whether Islam is a religion, so I thought I’d feature a link to this previous post of mine on the subject of the definition of “religion.”

That post – which I suggest you read – focuses on the legal definition, and obviously people often use the word in more than the legal sense. But I think that Islam is a religion by any definition that comes to mind, at least for me.

Of course, not all religions promote good things (that’s covered somewhat in the previous post, as well, with examples such as suttee and female genital mutilation). But that’s a separate issue, although an important one.

Commenter “Cicero” writes:

Islam is an ideology, not a religion. It has found the soft underbelly of the post-Enlightenment West. An example is CAIR, the Council on American-Islamic Relations, a clearly political entity, as its name clearly indicates, which is a non-profit because it is ”religious”.

Those are two separate issues as well, in my opinion. The first – that Islam is not a religion but rather an ideology – is incorrect, in my opinion, because Islam has all the trappings of a religion in the legal and in the vernacular sense. However – as with most religions – a lot of other things come along with Islam in terms of its actual beliefs and practices. It’s not that Islam isn’t a religion. It’s that it is a suprasecessionist religion that wants to dominate the entire world and that it also is deeply intertwined with political goals. For example:

Political aspects of the religion of Islam are derived from its religious scripture … as well as elements of political movements and tendencies followed by Muslims or Islamic states throughout its history. Shortly after its founding, Islam’s prophet Muhammad became a ruler of a state, and the intertwining of religion and state in Islam (and the idea that “politics is central” to Islam), is in contrast to the doctrine of rendering “unto Caesar what belongs to Caesar and to God what belongs to God”, of Christianity, its related and neighboring religion.

Of course, many countries do have Christianity as an official religion (such as, for example, the Church of England), but they also have freedom of religious belief. In the US, the separation of church and state goes further in that no state religion can be established. That’s why the US Constitution and Islam proper are in inherent conflict. Although there are plenty of not-so-religions individual Moslems who aren’t interested in Islam taking over the world or the US government, the traditional beliefs of devout Moslems would include such a goal of takeover. In that sense Islam is both a religion and a political ideology.

CBS pays Trump in settlement of biased-editing lawsuit

The New Neo Posted on by

Trump’s on a roll.

Here’s the agreement reached in his lawsuit against CBS for deceptively editing a Kamala Harris interview to make her look better:

Paramount Global and CBS agreed on Tuesday to pay President Donald Trump a sum that could reach north of $30 million to settle the president’s election interference lawsuit against the network.

Trump will receive $16 million upfront. This will cover legal fees, costs of the case, and contributions to his future presidential library or charitable causes, to be determined at Trump’s discretion.

There is an anticipation that there will be another allocation in the mid-eight figures set aside for advertisements, public service announcements, or other similar transmissions, in support of conservative causes by the network in the future, Fox News Digital has learned.

I suspect that’s nothing much to CBS. But still, it’s a victory for Trump. And apparently they are also agreeing that in the future they will post entire transcripts for interviews with presidential candidates.

More:

Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., and eight Democratic colleagues sent a letter to Redstone in May asking her not to settle the lawsuit against CBS News, which they called an “attack on the First Amendment.” They called the potential settlement a “grave mistake” and “a blatant attempt to intimidate the media and those who speak out against him, President Trump.”

The letter also stated “presidents do not get to punish or censor the media for criticizing them” in the United States.

Nobody censored anyone – except for CBS, which censored (that is, made editorial decisions that were somewhat deceptive) the words of Kamala Harris. Trump wanted full disclosure of her words; how is that censorship? And he used a courtroom to duke it out with CBS. Of course, Trump has a lot of power as president. But CBS has a lot of power as a major network, and it has used that power over and over to put its finger on the political scales in favor of the left.

Sean “Diddy” Combs found guilty on the more minor charges

The New Neo Posted on by

You may or may not have noticed that I haven’t covered the Sean Combs trial. I’ve left that to others because I just don’t happen to be all that interested – I’m not a fan, and it’s clear he’s a sleazebag although whether he’s guilty of actual crimes isn’t something I especially wanted to follow.

But the verdict is in:

A Manhattan jury has found Sean “Diddy” Combs not guilty of racketeering conspiracy, the most serious of the charges he was facing, and the one that could have put him behind bars for life. This charge, which falls under the RICO Act, “alleged that Combs participated in a criminal enterprise. Prosecutors claimed he used his business empire to facilitate illegal activities,” according to NBC News.

He was also acquitted on two counts of sex trafficking, by force, fraud, or coercion. This charge relates to “allegations that Combs coerced individuals into engaging in commercial sexual activity,” as per NBC. If he had been convicted, he would have faced 10 years to life in prison for each count.

Combs was found guilty on two counts of transportation to engage in prostitution, a crime that carries a maximum penalty of ten years in prison. “This charge alleges that Combs knowingly transported individuals across state lines or internationally with the intent that they would engage in prostitution.”

From what I’ve read of his offenses – which isn’t much – a life sentence seems excessive. So perhaps this is the correct verdict. As for his fans, I’m not sure whether the trial disgraced him or enhanced his status.