It occurs to me that…

The New Neo Posted on by

…if Trump manages to drain any portion of the swamp, it will be because he represents an irresistible target to the swamp denizens, and in the extremity of their zeal to get him they reveal themselves in ways that are especially noticeable and outrageous.

And then, because Trump himself isn’t afraid to say things that other more polite politicians would never be caught uttering, he sets a tone that is more combative toward his critics, spurring them on to greater heights of frenzy.

Remember, for example, the furious eruptions of the Trump opposition—the ridicule, the outrage—when Trump declared that the Obama administration had wiretapped Trump Tower? The media focused on the word “wiretapped,” which Trump later said wasn’t meant literally but as a shorthand for spied on or used surveillance on. But at this point, his statement seems rather pedestrian, doesn’t it? That’s true for so many of the things Trump said that originally seemed way off-base even to some of his supporters.

I was curious to see what I wrote at the time about that original wiretapping tweet of Trump’s, so I went back and found this post from March of 2017. It was very early in his presidency. Looking back on it now, I see that I had a bit of a beef with him saying what he said through a tweet, but otherwise thought it not unlikely that he would end up being vindicated in some way. It’s interesting to look at the comments there, too, for example this comment of mine

I think I indicated in my post that I wish he hadn’t tweeted this this way, but had instead presented a case.

However, that doesn’t mean that a case won’t be presented. Trump likes to get his opponents all riled up and then surprise them by being more sober and grounded than they expected.

But implying [any spying that was done on him] was okay because it was legal misses the point almost entirely. The point is that it might have represented a case of using the justice system to get a political opponent. That’s a no-no, even if legal. A president [in this case I was talking about Obama and the departments under him] is given enormous powers. He or she should not abuse them, even in ways that are legal.

Interesting. If you read the post, it seems there was a lot of information out there already about the FISA warrants on Trump associates. It’s astounding that so far it’s taken two years and change for a lot of related information to come out more fully.

And apparently, we’re not finished yet.

A done Deal

The New Neo Posted on by

Well, well, well:

“I am pleased to inform you that The United States of America has reached a signed agreement with Mexico,” President Trump tweeted Friday night.

“The Tariffs scheduled to be implemented by the U.S. on Monday, against Mexico, are hereby indefinitely suspended,” he added.

“Mexico, in turn, has agreed to take strong measures to stem the tide of Migration through Mexico, and to our Southern Border,” he said.

“This is being done to greatly reduce, or eliminate, Illegal Immigration coming from Mexico and into the United States. Details of the agreement will be released shortly by the State Department. Thank you!”

Gibson’s Bakery wins lawsuit against Oberlin

The New Neo Posted on by

If you read Legal Insurrection regularly, you’ve probably been following their in-depth coverage of the trial in which a long-time family-run business in the town of Oberlin, Ohio, sued the college. The verdict is now in, and the plaintiffs have won:

According to our reporter in the Courtroom, the jury awarded $11 million. Here are the details: Allyn W. Gibson was awarded $3 million, David Gibson $5.8 million, Gibson Bros. $2,274,500. Next Tuesday there will be a separate punitive damages which could be a double award (meaning tripling the $11 million to $33 million).

Go to the link for the details. Professor Jacobson writes:

The verdict sends a strong message that colleges and universities cannot simply wind up and set loose student social justice warriors and then wash their hands of the consequences. In this case, a wholly innocent 5th-generation bakery was falsely accused of being racist and having a history racial profiling after stopping three black Oberlin College students from shoplifting. The students eventually pleaded guilty, but not before large protests and boycotts intended to destroy the bakery and defame the owners. The jury appears to have accepted that Oberlin College facilitated the wrongful conduct against the bakery.

More from post-trial statements:

Lee Plakas, who handled much of the month-long trial and who gave the closing argument, said this case “is a national tipping point.”

“What the jury saw is that teaching students and having them learn how to be upstanding members of the community is what colleges are supposed to do, not appease some students who they are afraid of,” Plakas said. “People around the country should learn from this, that you can use the legal system to right the wrongs, even if the one doing the wrong is some huge institution who thinks they can do anything they want.”

Roger Copeland, a retired Oberlin College professor of theater and dance, was in the courtroom and seemed ecstatic after the jury came back with their verdict. Prof. Copeland is somewhat famous in the courtroom for getting this response on a Raimondo text to co-workers after a letter-to-the editor he wrote was critical of the school for their handling of the Gibson’ affair. “Fuck him,” Raimondo responded in a text message about Copeland. “I’d say unleash the students if I wasn’t convinced this needs to be put behind us.”

“I’m exhilarated by this verdict,” Copeland said, whose wife Michele worked at the school in food service and testified she was under orders by the school to cut the business off from the cafeteria bagels and pastries they provided because of the student unrest.

“What is most amazing about this trial is that the public was able to see what the process really was in how the school goes about its business,” Copeland said. “It’s almost like the mask has been ripped off the face and we can now see what the face really looks like.”

Much much more at the link.

Oberlin claims it was just defending students’ free speech rights (which is kind of funny, coming as it does from SJWs). That would, however, be a good defense—except that the plaintiffs proved to the jurors’ satisfaction that Oberlin’s participation in the campaign against Gibson’s (based on false accusations) went far beyond that.

Trump’s tariffs and Mexico: the Deal

The New Neo Posted on by

I recently wrote this post about Trump’s proposed tariffs on Mexico, and the condemnation of them. In it I said:

Regarding those tariffs and all the criticism thereof—I’m not saying tariffs are a good idea to actually implement, but I was under the impression that at the moment they are a bargaining chip, an opening bid in a complex negotiation. Isn’t that how these things tend to work? The tariff proposal (or actual tariffs, if they are implemented) may not be successful, but so far isn’t this one of those Art of the Deal things? I thought that was glaringly obvious.

Glaringly obvious that was the intent and the plan, anyway, to not have to actually implement the tariffs but to use them to change Mexico’s defiance into cooperation on illegal immigrants, particularly those using Mexico as transit from other areas. Not all plans are successful, but people should at least give Trump credit for using a certain tactic in furtherance of a strategy—although “giving Trump credit” does not compute with a lot of people.

The jury’s still out, but it looks as though so far this tactic has borne fruit. Remember, the idea was not actually to have to put the tariffs into effect; it was to get Mexico to take certain steps regarding illegal immigrants passing through that country on the way here.

Most people can’t admit errors, so that’s why this tweet is unsual:

More here:

The Mexican government is reportedly offering a slate of immigration-related concessions to appease the Trump administration as it seeks to prevent the imposition of tariffs on exports to the U.S.

Mexican negotiators are offering to deploy thousands of National Guard troops to its border with Guatemala and enact sweeping changes to its asylum laws, moves that are expected to prevent a significant number of Central Americans from illegally entering the U.S., The Washington Post reported Thursday.

President Donald Trump set a June 10 deadline for the Mexican government to demonstrate it would do more to stem illegal immigration from its country, or else face a 5% tariff on all its goods. The threat sparked immediate negotiations between U.S. and Mexican delegations in Washington, D.C. — which are expected to continue for the rest of the week.

Mexico, according to two officials who spoke with The Post, agreed to send up to 6,000 National Guard troops to its southern border with Guatemala, a major chokepoint for Central American migrants in their northbound journey to the U.S. That move is expected to immediately yield results in squashing the number of illegal immigrants.

Additionally, Mexican negotiators are prepared to revamp their asylum rules in the region. Under the proposal, Central Americans seeking asylum would have to remain in the first country they entered after leaving their homeland.

Now, it remains to be seen if this will actually be enforced. But so far those are very promising developments. Trump’s threats have extra power because other countries believe he’s just bold enough (or ballsy enough or reckless enough) to actually do what he threatens, if things don’t work out.

If this entire tariff-threatening approach is successful, I would like to see every single pundit who excoriated Trump for it eat crow.

A person can hope.

Ilhan Omar scandals—or should-be scandals

The New Neo Posted on by

Ilhan Omar is in a pack of trouble. Or she would be, if she weren’t a member of several intersectional groups generally protected by the MSM, the Democrats, and the left (that’s redundant, I know): Democrat, leftist, woman, Somalian, immigrant, Muslim:

Also please see this article from Scott Johnson at Powerline, entitled “Ilhan Omar’s Blizzard of Lies.”

More, more, and more on Mueller

The New Neo Posted on by

It appears that the elusive Christopher Steele will be testifying:

Former British spy Christopher Steele has agreed to meet in London with U.S. officials regarding the dossier, The Times of London is reporting.

A source close to Steele told the newspaper he plans to meet with American authorities within the next several weeks, but only about his interactions with the FBI and only with the approval of the British government.

Of course, this is only a report from “a source close to Steele.” Who knows who that is, and whether the source is reliable?

More here:

We don’t yet know which investigators will be interviewing Steele in the coming weeks, but it’s a pretty safe bet that they’ve offered him some form of immunity in exchange for his candor. That should terrify the Democrats who enlisted him in their attempts to execute a Deep State coup against Trump.

If Steele spills the beans on his former handlers, the resulting prosecutions of former high-level federal officials would make Watergate seem trivial by comparison.

I’m not as optimistic as the author of that quote, Joe diGenova.

In addition, this latest from John Solomon was a big story yesterday:

In a key finding of the Mueller report, Ukrainian businessman Konstantin Kilimnik, who worked for Trump campaign chairman Paul Manafort, is tied to Russian intelligence.

But hundreds of pages of government documents — which special counsel Robert Mueller possessed since 2018 — describe Kilimnik as a “sensitive” intelligence source for the U.S. State Department who informed on Ukrainian and Russian matters.

Why Mueller’s team omitted that part of the Kilimnik narrative from its report and related court filings is not known. But the revelation of it comes as the accuracy of Mueller’s Russia conclusions face increased scrutiny.

Turns out there were a lot of things omitted from Mueller’s report.

And if you want a review of Mueller’s past prosecutorial history, here’s your opportunity.

Yesterday I discussed this article about what Mueller’s team did to his targets in the Russiagate probe. Today I want to add a few more quotes.

Jerome Corsi’s story:

.[Corsi] said Mueller’s investigators engaged in “Gestapo tactics,” including harassing his friends and family — as well as his sources. “They got abusive when they didn’t get what they wanted,” he said, “and they got nasty.”

…“They just keep thinking they could find something,” Corsi said.

He said the stress caused him to have “a nervous breakdown.”…

In the end, Corsi was drilled by Mueller’s team for more than 40 hours, and in the process, racked up more than $100,000 in legal bills.

“I still haven’t recovered physically or financially,” he told RCI, though he has received donations from a legal defense fund. “We’re just now putting our lives back together.”

He maintained that his “Kafkaesque” nightmare at the hands of Mueller was “nothing more than punishment for the crime of being a vocal supporter of Donald Trump.”

“It was a completely fraudulent way to conduct an investigation,” he said. “Usually you start with a crime and find the criminals. But in this case, they started with the ‘criminal’ and looked for the crime.”

In a $300 million lawsuit filed earlier this year against Mueller and the Justice Department, which oversaw Mueller’s office, Corsi alleged that Mueller’s team subjected him to warrantless surveillance, illegally leaked details about grand jury and other secret proceedings to reporters, and threatened to sabotage his “business and contractual relationships” unless he perjured himself in the Russia “collusion” probe.

“Mueller had been doing everything in his power to try to threaten and coerce Corsi into testifying falsely, through both illegal surveillance and defamation, in order to take down President Trump and have him removed from office,” the complaint states…

Corsi was never indicted and is no longer under investigation.

Many of Mueller’s targets have incurred enormous legal fees. This is one of the tools of an independent counsel, working for a government with very deep pockets and arrayed against witnesses whose pockets are considerably more shallow. One of the most upsetting things is that the government has inexhaustible resources and private people they target have to pay their own legal fees, not to mention the stress involved, which acts as pressure to lie to get the whole thing over with.

You might also want to refresh your memory on Roger Stone:

Like Corsi, Stone slammed Mueller’s “gestapo” tactics. Some former agents agree the raid was excessive.

“The charges are lying and obstruction, so they dress out like this was a Waco assault? C’mon,” retired FBI special agent Michael Biasello said, adding that Mueller clearly was trying to intimidate Stone.

Stone says Mueller’s agents have also probed into his emails, text messages, phone calls and bank records. He claims they sifted through his garbage cans and went so far as to interview his maid to ask if he was meeting with Russians at his home.

“For months, Mueller’s Russian investigation has tried to implicate me by saying I had direct knowledge of plans by WikiLeaks to release information damaging to Clinton’s campaign,” Stone said. “There is no evidence whatsoever to support this claim, even after at least 12 of my current and former associates have been browbeaten by the FBI and at least six of them were dragged before Mueller’s grand jury.”

He says he’s racked up more than $1 million in legal bills, and he fears his defense could wind up costing him double that sum and force him into bankruptcy.

There’s that money thing again. It’s a very powerful and effective form of political intimidation.

Papadopoulos:

At one point, Papadopoulos said Mueller’s team even “threatened me with a Logan Act violation for helping Trump meet [foreign] leaders.”

Only two people have been charged with violating the Logan Act since it was passed in 1799. Both cases occurred before the Civil War; both defendants were acquitted.

“Even thinking about charging someone with a Logan Act violation is obscene and in my view profoundly corrupt,” former independent counsel Wisenberg said.

Papadopoulos said the piling on of charges convinced him to take a plea deal in which he copped to lying to investigators in exchange for minimal jail time. “I pled guilty when they came after me with FARA violations,” he told RCI.

But that didn’t stop the threats and intimidation. Led by Clinton supporter Rhee and Obama donor Andrew Goldstein, Papadopoulos said, Mueller’s prosecutors threatened to rip up the plea agreement to get him to confess that he shared what the so-called Russian agent allegedly told him in London about Clinton’s emails with higher-ups in the Trump campaign. Only, he never told anyone on the campaign about the yarn — and emails, texts and other evidence backed him up.

Still, during one interview at the FBI’s Chicago office, Mueller’s lawyers grilled him for seven hours on the subject, relentlessly asking, name by name, if he told various officials on the campaign. Without this critical piece of information, Mueller had no conspiracy. “I got the sense that I was the linchpin of their conspiracy case,” Papadopoulos said.

“Unfortunately, the truth was not what they wanted to hear,” he said. “No matter how much Mueller and his team wished I had told campaign members, I hadn’t.”

A frustrated Rhee (one of the lawyers on Mueller’s team) threatened to charge Papadopoulos with obstruction and throw him in prison for 25 years. She cited the fact he deleted his Facebook account, something his lawyer said he could do…

Looking back on his ordeal, Papadopoulos said he was railroaded. “Of course, they knew there was no collusion crime, especially in my case,” he said, adding that investigators just wanted “to use me for their war against Trump.”

There’s plenty more. Oh, just read the whole thing.

It’s almost impossible to adequately cover or even keep track of the revelations that are coming out now; there’s just so much. As I’ve said many times in the past, every single American should be deeply deeply disturbed by these activities. But plenty are not, or even applaud what they did in their Ahab-like effort to get at the root of all evil, Moby Trump.

Trump’s full D-Day remarks

The New Neo Posted on by

I am struck by the advanced age of all and the seeming physical frailty of some of the veterans, which is a reminder that in a few years there will be none left. “You are among the very greatest of Americans who will ever live.”

Mueller’s targets speak

The New Neo Posted on by

RealClearInvestigations interviewed 10 targets of the Mueller probe who are now out of danger of prosecution (for now, anyway) and have decided to speak up:

They include several people who became household names during the two-year probe – including George Papadopoulos, Carter Page and Roger Stone – as well as lesser-known figures whose lives were also upended and finances imperiled when they came into Mueller’s crosshairs. Only three of the 10, Papadopoulos, Stone and a political consultant named Sam Patten, were charged with a crime. Patten received three years probation but no jail time for failing to register as a foreign agent; Papadopoulos served 12 days for lying to federal agents; and Stone awaits trial on false statements, witness-tampering and obstruction charges…

Although they interacted with Mueller’s team at different times and in different places, the witnesses and targets often echoed each other. Almost all decried what they called Mueller’s “scorched earth” methods that affected their physical, mental and financial health. Most said they were forced to retain high-priced Washington lawyers to protect them from falling into “perjury traps” for alleged lying, which became the special counsel’s charge of last resort. In the end, Mueller convicted four Trump associates for this so-called process crime, and investigated an additional five individuals for allegedly making false statements – including former Attorney General Jeff Sessions.

Some subjects of investigation said Mueller’s agents and prosecutors tried to pressure them into admitting things to give the appearance of collusion. They demanded to know if they had spoken to anyone with a “Russian accent.” They threatened to jail them “for life” and to drag their wives or girlfriends into the investigation.

Former special prosecutors say the tactics used by Mueller’s team appear excessive.

No surprise there, although it’s outrageous.

Some have formally complained to the Justice Department that their privacy was violated. Others have filed legal complaints, maintaining the Special Counsel’s Office abused its authority. Corsi, for one, is suing Mueller personally for millions of dollars for unconstitutionally spying on him and harassing him and his family, as well as allegedly leaking secret grand jury information about him to the press in violation of his privacy rights. Still others want to see Mueller’s office criminally investigated for prosecutorial misconduct.

“Leaking grand jury hearing information to the press is a crime,” said former Independent Counsel Sol Wisenberg. “It can never be justified.”

But they will try to justify it.

These 10 witnesses find it beyond ironic that some partisans are now faulting Mueller for not doing enough to find incriminating evidence against Trump and his associates – “He blew it!” liberal HBO political talk show host Bill Maher said. They find it chilling that, equally unsatisfied, congressional Democrats seek to re-interview Mueller’s witnesses. House Intelligence Committee Chairman Adam Schiff, D-Calif., has sent letters to some of the peripheral witnesses interviewed for this story, demanding they produce more documents and testify before his panel, forcing them to relive their nightmare.

These witnesses complain that Democrats are simply retreading old ground. They note that Mueller sent agents hopscotching across the country as well as overseas to look for evidence that Donald Trump and his men were tools of the Kremlin.

His witness list, which grew to more than 500, targeted conservative journalists and authors, conservative think tank analysts and Republican congressional staffers. Witnesses were compelled to comply with more than 2,800 grand jury subpoenas and nearly 500 search-and-seizure warrants. Casting an even wider net, Mueller also issued 230 orders for communications records and almost 50 orders authorizing use of “pen registers” – devices that record dialed numbers — to collect phone records on individuals, most of whom turned out to be innocent.

Please read the whole thing.

The question is the same one I’ve asked over and over: will there ever be payback?

Thoughts on viewing—and hearing—D-Day newsreels

The New Neo Posted on by

Online you can easily find many clips from documentaries and newsreels about D-Day. If you do (as I did today), you may almost immediately notice—as I did—the narration. The voices used back then had an utterly different tone from anything you hear today, except in parody: the voice of authority, pride, patriotism, trust, and belief in heroism.

It wasn’t always the same person reading the script. But it was always the same sound and the same sensibility. More even than the images themselves, that voice tells us what has changed:

D-Day: the 75th anniversary

The New Neo Posted on by

[NOTE: The following is a slightly-edited version of a previous D-Day post.]

Today is the 75th anniversary of D-Day, the Normandy landings in WWII that led to Western Europe’s liberation.

I wonder how many people under forty, either here or in Europe, now know or care what happened there. The dog barks and the caravan moves on.

The world we now live in seems so vastly different, including the relationship between the US and western Europe. But make no mistake about it; if threatened in a way that finally gets their attention, Europeans would be counting on us again. And I have little doubt that our armed forces would be up to the task; the question is whether our government and especially our press would.

About thirty-five years ago I visited Omaha Beach, site of the worst of the carnage. A quieter place than that beach and those huge cemeteries, with their lines of crosses set down as though with a ruler, you never did see.

omahacemetery.jpg

But the scene was quite different back in 1944. The D-day invasion marked the beginning of the end for the Germans.

The weather was a huge factor, and the Allied commanders had to make the decision knowing that the forecast for the day was iffy and the window of opportunity small. For reasons of visibility and navigation (maximum amount of moonlight and deepest water), the invasion needed to occur during a time of full moon and spring tides, and all the invasion forces had already been assembled and were at the ready. To postpone would have been hugely expensive and frustrating, but to go ahead in bad weather would have been suicidal.

This is how bad the weather looked, how difficult the decision was, and how much we owe to the meteorologists, who:

…were challenged to accurately predict a highly unstable and severe weather pattern. As [Eisenhower] indicated in the message to Marshall, “The weather yesterday which was [the] original date selected was impossible all along the target coast.” Eisenhower therefore was forced to make his decision to proceed with a June 6 invasion in the predawn blackness of June 5, while horizontal sheets of rain and gale force winds shuddered through the tent camp.

The initially bad weather ended up being an advantage in other ways, because the Germans were not expecting the invasion to occur yet for that reason:

Some [German] troops stood down, and many senior officers were away for the weekend. General Erwin Rommel, for example, took a few days’ leave to celebrate his wife’s birthday, while dozens of division, regimental, and battalion commanders were away from their posts at war games.

In addition, there was Hitler’s personality and his reluctance to give autonomy to his military commanders:

Hitler reserved to himself the authority to move the divisions in OKW Reserve, or commit them to action. On 6 June, many Panzer division commanders were unable to move because Hitler had not given the necessary authorization, and his staff refused to wake him upon news of the invasion.

.

This didn’t mean that the beaches were not heavily fortified and manned, especially Omaha:

[The Germans] had large bunkers, sometimes intricate concrete ones containing machine guns and high caliber weapons. Their defense also integrated the cliffs and hills overlooking the beach. The defenses were all built and honed over a four year period.

The number of Allied casualties was enormous. Reading about it today makes one appreciate anew what these men faced, and how courageously they pressed on despite enormous difficulties. This is just a small sampler of what occurred on Omaha Beach at the outset; there was much more to come:

Despite these preparations, very little went according to plan. Ten landing craft were lost before they even reached the beach, swamped by the rough seas. Several other craft stayed afloat only because their passengers quickly bailed water with their helmets. Seasickness was also prevalent among the troops waiting offshore. On the 16th RCT front, the landing boats found themselves passing struggling men in life preservers, and on rafts, survivors of the DD tanks which had sunk. Navigation of the assault craft was made more difficult by the smoke and mist obscuring the landmarks they were to use in guiding themselves in, while a heavy current pushed them continually eastward.

As the boats approached within a few hundred yards of the shore, they came under increasingly heavy fire from automatic weapons and artillery. The force discovered only then the ineffectiveness of the pre-landing bombardment. Delayed by the weather, and attempting to avoid the landing craft as they ran in, the bombers had laid their ordnance too far inland, having no real effect on the coastal defenses.

These obstacles and unforeseen circumstances were extraordinarily costly in terms of the human sacrifice that occurred that day. Note that I use the word “obstacles and unforeseen circumstances” rather than “mistakes.” Today, if the same things had occurred (particularly if while under the aegis of the Bush W. Bush administration), they would be labeled unforgivable errors rather than the inevitable difficulties inherent in waging war, in which no battle plan survives contact with the enemy.

Another historical footnote is the following passage from Eisenhower’s message to the Allied Expeditionary Forces: You are about to embark upon the great crusade, toward which we have striven these many months. It’s another sign of how times have changed; the word “crusade” has become verboten.

In his pocket, Eisenhower also kept another statement, one to activate in case the invasion failed. It read:

Our landings in the Cherbourg-Havre area have failed to gain a satisfactory foothold and I have withdrawn the troops. My decision to attack at this time and place was based upon the best information available. The troops, the air and the Navy did all that Bravery and devotion to duty could do. If any blame or fault attaches to the attempt it is mine alone.

The note was written in pencil on a simple piece of paper, and is housed in a special vault at the Dwight D. Eisenhower Library & Museum in Abilene, Kansas, a bit of thought-provoking fodder for an alternate history that never occurred—fortunately for all of us.

YouTube will be banning extremist videos

The New Neo Posted on by

I wonder what algorithm YouTube will use in this effort:

YouTube announced plans on Wednesday to remove thousands of videos and channels that advocate neo-Nazism, white supremacy and other bigoted ideologies in an attempt to clean up extremism and hate speech on its popular service.

The new policy will ban “videos alleging that a group is superior in order to justify discrimination, segregation or exclusion,” the company said in a blog post. The prohibition will also cover videos denying that violent incidents, like the mass shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Connecticut, took place.

YouTube did not name any specific channels or videos that would be banned.

“It’s our responsibility to protect that, and prevent our platform from being used to incite hatred, harassment, discrimination and violence,” the blog post said.

I’m going to go out on a limb now and predict that these rules will be over-enforced against those who are not PC and not on the left, and under-enforced against those on the left—and, just to take an example of that latter group, under-enforced against those advocating hatred and discrimination towards “privileged” white people.

Just a guess.

The scope of YouTube is immense; the article mentions that 500 hours of new video are uploaded to the site every minute. That actually seems lowish to me; I would have guessed more, YouTube’s scope is so vast.

This announcement on the part of YouTube is no surprise, however. This is the way things have been heading—towards the curtailing of speech. I am disturbed by the ease of spreading misinformation and hatred (and especially the toxic combination of the two) in the internet age, but isn’t the correct remedy for this sort of thing the one stated long ago by John Stuart Mills and SCOTUS justice Brandeis?:

We are dealing here with bad ideas, not physical blows or the absence of ideas. For that problem John Stuart Mill had the right answer long ago in his famous essay “On Liberty.” He said that we must allow for the expression of bad ideas — whether opinions or alleged statements of fact — because they may contain some grain of truth that corrects the conventional wisdom or, lacking that, provide a challenge to accepted beliefs, without which those beliefs in the long run become mere prejudices. As Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis advised, in his famous Whitney v. California opinion in 1927, “If there be time to expose through discussion the falsehood and fallacies, to avert the evil by the processes of education, the remedy to be applied is more speech, not enforced silence.”

That quote is from an article written in 1991. Nowadays there are far fewer people who would subscribe to the ideas expressed there. You might say that neither Mills nor Brandeis foresaw YouTube, and that would probably be correct. And as a business, YouTube can probably do whatever it wants to right now with respect to such bannings (unless it ends up coming under the antitrust laws). But it still seems to me that the dangers of such bans are greater than the dangers of the supposed hate speech they censor, and that although neither Mills nor Brandeis foresaw YouTube, the principles the two men espoused still apply.

[NOTE: Videos that are against the law, such as child pornography, are of course different.]

The case of Noa Pothoven

The New Neo Posted on by

There are at least three elements involved in the case of Noa Pothoven, a 17-year-old girl in The Netherlands who was widely reported to have received state euthanization for severe depression and related suffering.

The first is the girl’s illness itself: was everything done that could have been done prior to this terrible event? The second is the issue of legal euthanasia in a country like the Netherlands; it has gone very far and is even available to those underage at times. The third is whether the reporters got the story of Pothoven’s death right.

Let’s take the third issue first: no, they got it wrong. This thread tales the tale, so I suggest you read the whole thing if you’re interested in the story, but the gist of it is that reporters in a hurry appear to have carelessly misread the original story in the original Dutch, failed to do the most basic research such as communicating with the reporter who wrote the story, and as a result the sensational story spread around the world.

Here’s the first tweet in the series; there are many more if you follow that link:

So much for the MSM issue. The truth appears to be that Pothoven was refused euthanasia and voluntarily starved herself.

As far as the other issues go, the first one—was everything done to help her prior to this?—it seems that a great deal was tried but not everything. Some entity—and so far I haven’t been able to determine whether it was the government or the medical profession—refused to allow at least one thing that might have helped her:

To me, that’s a big story that should have also been covered by the press, but so far I’ve only found articles that say electroshock therapy was refused her but don’t explain the process. To me, such a refusal might indicate a big problem within the system. There are a lot of misconceptions about modern electroshock therapy, which is quite different than the One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest variety and can be extremely helpful in cases of intractable and severe depression that’s been recalcitrant to other treatment efforts. I have no idea whether it would have made a difference for Pothoven, but it seems to me (at least, reading the bare bones of her story) that it would have been appropriate to try.

Here are some things that were tried [emphasis mine]:

A year earlier, they refused to give her permission for euthanasia because they thought that she should complete trauma treatment and that her brain should be fully developed before making such a decision.

Pothoven, who asked friends not to try to change her mind, wrote that she suffered from posttraumatic stress and anorexia in the wake of the sex attacks, according to The Sun in London.

Last year, she was admitted to the Rijnstate Hospital in Arnhem seriously underweight and with near-organ failure. She was put in a coma and fed with tubes.

In her 2018 autobiography, “Winning or Learning,’’ Pothoven said she was sexually assaulted at a friend’s party at age 11, then again a year later at another get-together, before being raped by two men on the street at age 14.

“I relive the fear, that pain every day. Always scared, always on my guard. And to this day my body still feels dirty,” Pothoven wrote.

She said she tried hospitalization and visits with specialists before eventually contacting the Life End Clinic in The Hague about a year and a half ago, without her family’s knowledge, The Sun reported.

I would like to know a lot more about previous attempts at treatment before coming to any more conclusions about what was done to help this girl. Anorexia, which appears to have been her main physical problem, can cause brain changes that spiral into death whether the sufferer wants that to happen or not, and treatment can be very difficult and specialized. This is a tragedy any way you look at it, and the case of Pothoven is probably an example of this phenomenon.

As far as the second issue goes—legalized euthanasia in The Netherlands and elsewhere with similar laws—I’ve dealt with related questions in previous posts such as this one as well as this.

RIP.

[NOTE: I don’t mean to suggest that these three issues are the only ones involved. There are many many others, including the role of parents. But I know so little about the details of this case that it doesn’t seem appropriate to comment on that. These people are suffering a great deal right now.]