Just one question: Has Michael Moore looked in the mirror lately?

The New Neo Posted on by

Perhaps not:

Or maybe Moore is just speaking of himself in the third person, as some people are wont to do. Then again, perhaps a white person who turns against “white people” become an honorary person of color and therefore escapes the “white people” taint. And a “privileged white person” who turns against “privileged” white people likewise gets some sort of points he/she would otherwise not have in the intersectional sweepstakes.

Again: rules of the blog

The New Neo Posted on by

Boy, I go away for a while and the comments get taken over by squabbling. I don’t mind a small amount of it, but no more than that. So, to repeat a post I wrote some years ago on the same subject—

I don’t have time to constantly police this blog for personal fighting. But I find it takes away from the point of the blog when that sort of thing comes to dominate too much in the comments section.

I don’t mind a little of it; I realize it’s inevitable, and I understand that a blog comments section isn’t an especially genteel place, nor should it be. But I do mind when it goes on for a while. I don’t have time to determine who’s right and who’s wrong in any given altercation, nor do I believe it should be my job, although sometimes I try to do it.

Defending oneself is fine, but if the defense includes an unprovoked attack, that’s not okay and will be deleted if I see it. If it goes on and on, I will consider banning the offender.

We really should be focusing our energies on the truly important issues facing us. That doesn’t mean everything has to be serious—certainly not!—but I’m adopting a less tolerant attitude for this sort of repetitive personal sniping.

Rebuilding Notre Dame: is it an art museum, a tourist attraction, or a cathedral?

The New Neo Posted on by

I suppose at this point, realistically speaking, it’s something of all of them. I wouldn’t have even asked the question if Notre Dame hadn’t burned, but now that the rebuilding is being planned, it seems relevant.

As commenter “Snow on Pine” wrote this morning:

Stein’s question was, were the people crying on the streets in Paris crying primarily over the loss of a building that was, in essence, an exquisite art museum and testament to their past—a crowded tourist exhibit, or were they crying primarily over the destruction of a building that was perhaps the chief symbol of their living Christian faith?

Similarly, was Macron’s pledge to rebuild Notre Dame a civic pledge to rebuild what is basically an art museum, or was it an act of faith, a pledge to rebuild perhaps the chief symbol of the Christian faith of the people of France?

I cannot answer the question. I do know that the people in the streets of Paris who were crying as they saw the fire were sad and shocked. It was probably about a number of things, some of which they may not have thought much about previously, such as what exactly Notre Dame the building means to them and to France (not necessarily the same) at this point. Was it mostly the Catholic faithful assembled there, praying and singing? And what percentage of the whole does this now represent?

In a previous post from 2016 on the loss of Christian faith in Europe, I quoted the 19th Century British poet Matthew Arnold, and in this 2006 post I quoted the British Philip Larkin in his 1955 poem “Churchgoing” on the subject of churches in an age of waning faith. He describes a cycling trip in England, where he stops to rest at a church much smaller than Notre Dame:

Up at the holy end; the small neat organ;
And a tense, musty, unignorable silence,
Brewed God knows how long. Hatless, I take off
My cycle-clips in awkward reverence,
Move forward, run my hand around the font.
From where I stand, the roof looks almost new-
Cleaned or restored? Someone would know: I don’t.
Mounting the lectern, I peruse a few
Hectoring large-scale verses, and pronounce
“Here endeth” much more loudly than I’d meant.
The echoes snigger briefly. Back at the door
I sign the book, donate an Irish sixpence,
Reflect the place was not worth stopping for.

Yet stop I did: in fact I often do,
And always end much at a loss like this,
Wondering what to look for; wondering, too,
When churches fall completely out of use
What we shall turn them into…

France is presently engaged in deciding exactly what Notre Dame is to France and its people these days. Personally, I hope it’s built the way it was—minus the flammability, if possible. But I don’t have any say in the matter.

Will the Left have a say?:

Over the course of the past few centuries, the cathedral has played a role in major historical events, from the coronation of kings to the crowning of Napoleon to the requiem mass of President Charles de Gaulle. And Notre Dame has served as a symbol of not just French historical identity, but Catholicism in general. “It has a double meaning,” says Jean-Robert Armogathe, a French Catholic priest and historian who served as the chaplain at Notre Dame from 1980 to 1985. “It has been the center of Catholic life and of France for 800 years.”…
But for some people in France, Notre Dame has also served as a deep-seated symbol of resentment, a monument to a deeply flawed institution and an idealized Christian European France that arguably never existed in the first place. “The building was so overburdened with meaning that its burning feels like an act of liberation,” says Patricio del Real, an architecture historian at Harvard University. If nothing else, the cathedral has been viewed by some as a stodgy reminder of “the old city — the embodiment of the Paris of stone and faith — just as the Eiffel Tower exemplifies the Paris of modernity, joie de vivre and change,” Michael Kimmelmann wrote for the New York Times….

Although Macron and donors like Pinault have emphasized that the cathedral should be rebuilt as close to the original as possible, some architectural historians like Brigniani believe that would be complicated, given the many stages of the cathedral’s evolution. “The question becomes, which Notre Dame are you actually rebuilding?,” he says. Harwood, too, believes that it would be a mistake to try to recreate the edifice as it once stood, as LeDuc did more than 150 years ago. Any rebuilding should be a reflection not of an old France, or the France that never was — a non-secular, white European France — but a reflection of the France of today, a France that is currently in the making. “The idea that you can recreate the building is naive. It is to repeat past errors, category errors of thought, and one has to imagine that if anything is done to the building it has to be an expression of what we want — the Catholics of France, the French people — want. What is an expression of who we are now? What does it represent, who is it for?,” he says.

Twitter has been loaded with even more vitriol, as is the nature of Twitter. I certainly hope that Twitter isn’t “who we are now.”

Anticipating the Mueller report

The New Neo Posted on by

The fuller Mueller report is supposed to be released on Thursday. It’s a no-brainer to say the Democrats will react as though it indicates Trump was guilty of obstruction at the least and perhaps more, no matter what it actually says. The longer version will give them ample opportunity to nitpick over each word and phrase.

Here’s Byron York on the matter, with a list of five things the report won’t resolve. Most of them won’t be resolved because they cannot be resolved; short of finding someone else’s fingerprints and DNA in a murder case, plus a confession, a person can’t be proven innocent (maybe not even then). Russiagate is not a case involving that sort of forensic evidence anyway, and more importantly, Trump’s opponents have no intention of ever accepting any finding that doesn’t implicate him.

William Jacobson of Legal Insurrection has more, with predictions. Please read the whole thing.

Notre Dame is heavily damaged but will survive

The New Neo Posted on by

There are many many stories on the Notre Dame fire and the aftermath so far. For example:

Some will call it a miracle. According to Notre Dame’s heritage director, only one piece of architecture inside the sacred building has been damaged.

Laurent Prades told The Associated Press that the high altar, which was installed in 1989, was hit and harmed by the cathedral’s spire when it came crashing down in the flames. “We have been able to salvage all the rest,” said Prades, who witnessed the recovery first hand overnight.

“All the 18th-century steles, the pietas, frescoes, chapels and the big organ are fine,” he said. Among the most famous elements inside the cathedral, Prades added that the three large stained-glass rose windows have not been destroyed, though they may have been damaged by the heat and will be assessed by an expert.

That’s so much better than we were led to believe, which makes the reporting on the fire during the heat (literally) of the moment seem less than stellar (no surprise there). But truly, the fire did appear to be a much more destructive conflagration at the time.

Now the rebuilding will start:

Rebuilding the Notre-Dame Cathedral in Paris could take decades after it was gutted by a fire, experts warned Tuesday, even as its top priest expressed hope he could celebrate mass there within years…

France has experience of reconstructing cathedrals, including one in Reims that was severely damaged by shelling during World War I and another in Nantes that was gutted by fire in 1972.

Asked how long the rebuild could last, Eric Fischer, head of the foundation in charge of restoring the 1,000-year-old Strasbourg cathedral, which recently underwent a three-year facelift, said: “I’d say decades.”

“The damage will be significant. But we are lucky in France to still have a network of excellent heritage restoration companies, whether small-time artisans or bigger groups,” he told AFP.

Fischer said the ability to rebuild the colossal cathedral in a manner that respects its original form and character would depend on the plans, diagrams and other materials available to the architects.

Money has been pledged, plenty of it.

And of course, although authorities have labeled the fire as accidental rather than terrorism, the actual terrorists have celebrated it as “retribution and punishment,” of course.

I think this is a good time to point you to this post of mine, entitled “Europe and the Sea of Faith.”

Fire in Notre Dame

The New Neo Posted on by

[BUMPED UP and UPDATED]

This is a breaking story, so there isn’t much known about it (or its causes), but there’s a huge fire in Notre Dame in Paris and the roof and spire have collapsed.

UPDATE 5:54

Paris’ Notre Dame Cathedral has been saved from “total destruction,” according to a French fire official, after a massive fire ripped through the structure on Monday and caused the roof and main spire to collapse.

While it will take another three or four more hours to contain the fire, the official said the two towers have now been saved. That news come as a sign of relief after one of the towers caught fire earlier in the evening. Earlier, a French Interior Ministry official had said that firefighters might not be able to save the cathedral.

About 400 firefighters have been fighting to save the building and its contents. I’ve read conflicting reports and don’t know whether the following is true, but one report mentioned that although the wooden interior is gone, the most precious artwork and relics had all been stored elsewhere.

There is really no news on the cause of the fire, although you can easily speculate that the two leaders are accident and terrorism. Whichever it is, however, the symbolism of the decline of a great culture and a great religion springs obviously to mind.

UPDATE 6:20

Here is a Twitter thread about the special difficulties of fighting a fire in a building such as Notre Dame.

UPDATE 11:58 Good news. Much of the inside of the cathedral appears to have survived.

Whatever happened to “if you can’t stand the heat, get out of the kitchen?”

The New Neo Posted on by

If you go into politics, you should expect to be criticized. And if you say something in a speech or an interview, that statement is fair game.

Or at least, it used to be that way. One thing Americans didn’t want from their politicians and elected officials was whining and complaining that they were victims.

That all changed. Now, quoting a speech and criticizing it is doing a violence to a person. Now, any criticism of a person belonging to a minority group (other than white men, of course) is sexism or racism or a combination of all the “isms” that might apply.

Cases in point, of course, are Ilhan Omar and AOC, although they are hardly the only ones. Criticize what Omar said and you’re inciting violence against her. Take a look at this Twitter thread and you’ll see ample illustration of what I’m talking about.

It’s tempting to say this is a girl thing. But it’s not—it’s least, it’s certainly not solely that, although my guess is that it generally appeals more to women than men. But on that Twitter thread you’ll see men chiming in. And in fact, the first national politician I ever noticed doing it was Barack Obama. It struck me quite early on that complaining, making excuses, and in particular labeling any criticism by his opponents as racist (and/or allowing his surrogates to do it for him) was going to be standard for Obama’s campaign. You can see one typical post of mine on the subject here, written in August of 2008:

So, any reference to any physical characteristic of Obama is racist, because the only thing “typical white people” see when they look at a black person is that blackness. Although, if white Americans are as obsessed with race as Noah seems to think they are, how could they ever forget Obama’s race even if his body were never mentioned by the opposition?

That is never explained in Noah’s convoluted reasoning. After all, since Obama himself uses his own photo in his ads—wouldn’t this also remind people that (gasp!) he’s a black man?

What’s next? Is McCain to be banned from mentioning Obama at all?

There were plenty of other examples, but what they all had in common was that at the time the approach seemed new to me from a national political candidate. Perhaps there was something similar previously that I just never noticed, but if so I don’t recall it. I hadn’t followed Obama’s campaign for the senate seat in Illinois, but if I had to guess I’d say he didn’t use that approach (anyone with information on it, please offer it in the comments).

It seems to me that until Obama’s presidential campaign, stiff upper lips were required for national candidates of all sexes and all races, including candidates for Congress. For example, I don’t remember Elizabeth Dole—or for that matter, even Hillary Clinton—doing the “all criticism of me is sexism” thing prior to Obama’s national campaign. I don’t remember similar tactics from candidates such as Ed Brooke or Carol Moseley Braun or Shirley Chisolm. I think they wanted to show how tough they were, and Americans of the time demanded toughness in general from candidates.

Somehow Obama broke that mold. One of the very first posts I ever wrote about Obama was this one, in which I noticed candidate Obama’s general tendency to “offer up excuses too easily.” It was one of my first observations about him, and although the racial excuses hadn’t begun yet, the tendency to make excuses was noticeable because it was so very different, such a break from what had formerly been considered acceptable behavior from candidates. So the difference wasn’t just Obama or those who followed him—it was a change in attitude of the voters.

That change in attitude has been guided along not just by candidates, but by the leftists (feminists, socialists, thought police, and the like) in academia. Even college students are taught not to toughen up but to complain at everything that might hurt their feelings. The left can say pretty much whatever it wants and cry “Freedom of speech” if anyone tries to silence them, but the right is accused of not just all the various bigoted “isms” whenever someone on the left is criticized, particularly a person of any protected minority (or majority, such as women) group, but of actual violence.

The idea that speech is violence is current on campuses today and has been for quite some time. Candidates Omar and AOC and the rest are well aware that the public, particularly younger voters, have been primed and prepped to take such accusations very seriously. But it’s not just young people who now buy into this. It’s the entire left, which seems to constitute the an increasing majority of the makeup of today’s Democratic Party.

Is Russiagate worse than Watergate?

The New Neo Posted on by

Yes, it is.

And not just worse; much worse.

Nunes has worked tirelessly for more than two years to expose what our masters in deep-state Washington would bury from the glare of public scrutiny: the evidence that the entire Trump-Russian collusion narrative was a partisan effort, first, to undermine the Trump presidential campaign and, when that failed, to cover up the effort while still working assiduously to destroy the Trump presidency…

As I have been saying for a couple of years now, this is the biggest scandal in American history. It dwarfs Watergate. Indeed, it challenges the fundamental integrity of our democratic—i.e., accountable—institutions. It challenges, too, the sacrosanct ideal of the separation of powers. Finally, it challenges the presumption of basic fairness and open competition without which our republic could endure in name only…

In a recent column for the Washington Examiner, Devin Nunes wrote that “It is astonishing that intelligence leaders did not immediately recognize they were being manipulated in an information operation or understand the danger that the dossier could contain deliberate disinformation from Steele’s Russian sources.” It is in fact so astonishing, he goes on to note, that it is positively incredible, not in the sense of amazing but in the root sense of not credible.

“It’s now clear,” Nunes says, “that top intelligence officials were perfectly well aware of the dubiousness of the dossier, but they embraced it anyway because it justified actions they wanted to take—turning the full force of our intelligence agencies first against a political candidate and then against a sitting president.”

Please read the whole thing.

Me and TurboTax

The New Neo Posted on by

[NOTE: I did my taxes by hand this year, as usual, and once again I began to wonder about halfway through why I do such a thing. Isn’t everyone just plugging numbers into a computer program these days, or using an accountant if their taxes are remarkably complex? I remembered that last year I had tried TurboTax and had a bad experience with it, but I didn’t remember the details. Then I read this post from last year. And I remembered. Oh, how I remembered! So I thought I’d repeat the post in honor of Tax Day.]

Every year around this time I’m busy with my taxes. I like to joke that I may just be the person in the US with the highest ratio of tax complexity to income, because although I don’t make much money I have to fill out a lot of tax forms beyond ye olde 1040.

Self-employed and business owner, with multiple (relatively small) sources of income. Some investments with interest or dividends, a few modest capital gains and losses, and until recently I itemized my deductions. Then there’s the state.

Well you might ask: why not an accountant? I’d be paying quite a bit for not a whole lot, except of course some savings in time and stress. Also (and this may be the real reason), each year I learn (or at least, I think I learn) from the previous one, and each year I think it’ll now be a piece of cake to do this all myself.

It never is a piece of cake. More like chewing on hard crusts of stale bread, over and over and over.

But this year I made a decision. This year I’d buy TurboTax and use that. It made perfect sense. The ads (and even some actual human beings—friends—I talked to) said TurboTax would simplify things mightily and wasn’t very expensive at all. So I decided to do a little research online to decide what version to buy.

Well, it turns out that took a while. Many hours, actually, because first you have to answer some questions, and TurboTax informed me that I needed the most extensive and expensive version, which would be (I’m doing this from memory) something like $119 at the time. That seemed a bit steep, and maybe unnecessary; it was predicated on my being a business owner, but my business taxes are actually a very simple part of the equation for me.

So the next step was seeing what forms are actually supported by the different versions, because I know what forms I need to use. That took me quite some time to find; the information was buried rather effectively, but I finally found it after a rather frustrating search. Turns out that the not-quite-as-complicated and less-expensive version (“Premier”) would do quite nicely for me.

So that was the beginning of my sense of unease about TurboTax and its recommendations. That unease would only increase.

I decided to buy the downloaded version, because it would be a bit more secure. But when I bought it (from Target, which at that moment seemed the cheapest way to go), the website automatically added more sales tax than it should have. The irony was not lost on me: I was trusting TurboTax to be accurate about my federal taxes, but the process had already made an error about sales taxes.

I spent a tedious amount of time trying to correct that error, waiting on hold with Target (or someone somewhere in Asia answering the phone for Target), who ultimately said there was nothing they could do, but would refer me to some other team there. The amount of money involved in the error was relatively small, but by that time I’d worked up quite a head of steam about it, and spent another lengthy time on hold with the new people, who immediately admitted they’d done me wrong.

But they couldn’t fix it, either. They referred it to some other group which supposedly would give me the refund in a week or so. Fine. But I’d already spent approximately four or so hours on things related to TurboTax, and I hadn’t even looked at the actual program yet. How far could I have gotten with my taxes in that amount of time, doing them by myself in the old-fashioned way?

I took the next step, which involved downloading the TurboTax program. It didn’t work. I tried everything I could think of; still didn’t work. I Googled it and read the instructions for if you encounter downloading problems; very complex and still didn’t work.

Now it had been about six hours of wasted time with TurboTax. I wanted a refund, and I had no intention of using the product. So I called Target again, and this time the person who answered the phone (after a long wait) was adamant: TurboTax was not refundable. Period.

I started ranting, or what I’d call ranting. This product was defective. I couldn’t load it. Don’t they stand by their product? The answer was “no.” After quite some time with this, I asked to speak to a higher-up. She refused to connect me. We got into quite a loop; me insisting, she resisting. Finally she said that if she even tried, “they” (the higher-ups) would not accept my call. I got to the point of just repeating “I don’t want to talk to you anymore; connect me to someone else” over and over.

So finally she did, and whoever answered the phone immediately agreed to give me a refund.

Then I took a several-hour break from the whole thing; had to decompress. When I returned to my computer, I found that in the interim my browser had crashed. When the smoke cleared, there on the screen was what had never been there before: “Welcome to TurboTax!” or some such message. The download had been successful; I have no idea how many hours it took, but it was definitely more than one or two.

My faith in the program was nil, but I was curious, so I went a little further. If the upshot was that it seemed to be working well, I’d eat crow, call Target again, and say I didn’t need the refund I’d fought for.

The next step was that I needed to update, said the instructions, even though the thing had just loaded. And then (you may have guessed it) the updates all failed, some of them with big warnings in red saying things like “Critical update failed!”

Not exactly trust-inducing.

Next were some questions. Very elementary questions like—where can last year’s tax return be found on your computer? Well, of course mine wasn’t even on my computer; I’d done it all by hand. But TurboTax, in its less-than-infinite wisdom, didn’t have “nowhere” as a choice. Their assumption was that of course you had your taxes somewhere on your computer; doesn’t everyone? It took some time for me to figure out how to work around that, and then get going with the next few questions.

The next questions were all geared to helping TurboTax figure out what forms I needed, but I already knew exactly what forms I needed, so it all was a waste of time. At this point what was my tally of time wasted with TurboTax—seven hours? eight? I didn’t know for sure, but I knew I’d had enough. And the stress had been greater than the stress of just doing my taxes by myself.

So I uninstalled the program from my computer and called it a day.

There, I feel better now.

My taxes are almost done, in less time than it took me to figure out that TurboTax wasn’t for me. I may even get the completed tax forms sent out before the last possible minute, although last-minute mailings are a personal tradition of mine. But TurboTax will not become one.

Ilhan Omar and the victimhood competition

The New Neo Posted on by

Here’s Sebastian Gorka on Ilhan Omar and some other freshman Democrats in the House:

Behold the face of the Democratic Party: minority, young, and racist. This is the fruit of identity politics. Be it Omar, who is on the cover of the current issue of Newsweek, Rashida Talib (D-Mich.) who signaled the need to obliterate Israel on her first day in office, or the leader of the pack, Alexandria Ocasio Cortez (D-N.Y.), a proud supporter of the anti-Israel BDS movement, the “new faces” of the DNC constitute a united front in their hatred for our Semitic brethren.

And no matter what Pelosi says, Omar will not be reined in.

Let me add that I think it is no accident that these faces are for the most part young, minority, female, and attractive. No, I am not saying those characteristics are necessary in order to be anti-Semitic and/or leftist, because that’s not the least bit true. What I am saying, or trying to say, is that those characteristics make the message more palatable, the person more electable, and facilitate the speaker’s wrapping herself in the cloak of sainted victimhood protectiveness.

More:

To call Stephen Miller a “white nationalist” [which Omar did] is more than simply obnoxious, given that white nationalism is an ideology which targets those of color generally, and Jews specifically.

Now, Jews are not people of color, unless they are Ethiopian Jews or other Jews who actually are also people of color. But white nationalists are certainly anti-Semites, and it is just another example of the knife-twisting in which Omar likes to indulge (with a pretty smile) to call Stephen Miller a white nationalist.

But Omar keeps going:

…[A]a disturbing video surfaced on social media in which the congresswoman casually described the mass murder of 2,977 people by jihadists on September 11, 2001 as an event where “some people did something.” This was before she used 9/11 as the justification for the establishment of the Council on American Islamic Relations (CAIR), a Hamas-front founded in 1994. A federal court in 2008 designated CAIR as an unindicted co-conspirator in the largest terrorist-financing trial in American history. The FBI had to sever all ties with the group exactly because of its ties to the Holy Land Foundation and its leaders who were convicted in that trial for sending $12.4 million to Hamas from the United States.

Gorka’s last paragraph is a clarion call:

Freedom of speech is a right of all Americans. But so is our choice to denounce, call out, and recall racists. Ilhan Omar is the most flagrantly racist figure in politics today. Every day her vile beliefs and words are tolerated by Nancy Pelosi and her fellow partisans is a day that proves just how morally bankrupt and devoid of any legitimacy the Democrats have become.

Omar has a huge number of fans, as you can see if you go to this YouTube video of her appearance on Steven Colbert’s show and read the comments there.

In all the brouhaha from the right about Omar’s describing 9/11 as “some people did something”—a neutral, non-judgmental refusal to characterize the attack in any pejorative way—it’s often been lost that the main thrust of her mentioning it at all was to talk about how Muslims faced a backlash as a result. So not only did she fail to name the perpetrators as radical Muslims, or to say it was a heinous terrorist attack, but she focused on Muslims as the ultimate victims. And, as Jonathan S. Tobin points out, for the most part such a backlash failed to occur [emphasis mine]:

…[T]hose who have rallied to [Omar’s] defense have resurrected the myth of a post-9/11 backlash against Muslims. That has shifted the narrative of that trauma from one of an Islamist terror war against the West into one that focused on the victimization of Muslims. But the ability of Omar and her defenders to use it to effectively deflect charges of anti-Semitism and to essentially legitimize her as a public figure is something that out to alarm everyone, no matter what your politics or religious beliefs…

Omar refused to back down [for her earlier anti-Semitic remarks for which Congress was initially set to criticize her] and found herself the object of much public sympathy for what supporters claimed was an attempt to single her out solely because she was black, Muslim and an immigrant. Omar emerged triumphant from that fiasco. If there was any doubt about that, it was removed by the way Democrats instinctively moved to protect her from criticisms of her 9/11 remarks, and instead condemned the Post and Rep. Dan Crenshaw (R-Texas) as racists for calling her out.

In one sense, the kerfuffle is a typical inside-the-Beltway absurdity, with AOC asking Crenshaw—a decorated former Navy SEAL who lost an eye fighting in Afghanistan—what he has ever done to fight terrorism. But this is more than just the usual political tit-for-tat on Twitter.

In her speech to CAIR, Omar claimed that the group had been founded after 9/11 in order to defend Muslims against a backlash after the attacks. This is patently false. CAIR was founded in 1994 as a political front for the Holy Land Foundation, a group that raised funds for the Hamas terror group that was eventually shut down by the Treasury Department. Her support for CAIR is consistent with her backing for the anti-Semitic BDS movement.

But the broader point to be made here is the way the effort to shift the discussion about 9/11 from a seminal moment in the long struggle against Islamist terror to a mere excuse to discriminate against Muslims is now being used to downplay Omar’s anti-Semitism.

The debate about this mythical backlash has been going on for a decade, especially during the controversy over an abortive attempt to build an Islamic center within the shadow of the fallen World Trade Center towers. At that time, I wrote in Commentary magazine about the way false fears were being used to make Muslims appear to be the true victims of the slaughter. The mainstream media had accepted as truth the claims that Muslims had been the subjects of a wave of discrimination after 9/11, even though there was no objective proof to back up that assertion.

(Please see NOTE below for some further discussion of that issue.]

As Omar herself indicates here, she has an enormous intersectionality advantage due to her membership in several victimhood groups:

If you haven’t watched Omar before, please note her great charm. It’s an illustration of the Shakespeare quote: “That one may smile, and smile, and be a villain.”

[NOTE: On the issue of whether there really was a widespread backlash to 9/11, I want to point out that there were indeed a couple of extremely serious incidents post-9/11 in which Muslims were the intended victims, but these were few and far-between (please see this and this). I say “intended victims,” because, in a strange irony, two of the three people killed in these two crimes were a Hindu and a Sikh. The third was a Pakistani Muslim, and one other person wounded and left partially blind in one eye was a Muslim from Bangladesh named Rais Bhuiyan, who opposed his would-be murderer Stroman’s death penalty:

A year after the killings, [the murderer] Stroman expressed no remorse for his crimes. He wrote on his blog that what he did was not a crime of hate but an act of passion and patriotism. Up until his date of execution, Bhuiyan protested Stroman’s death sentence, believing he did not deserve to be executed. Bhuiyan sued and tried to stop the execution but was unsuccessful. Bhuiyan argued that his Muslim beliefs told him to forgive Stroman and that killing him was not the solution. The courts denied his requests.

In his later years of imprisonment, Stroman expressed remorse for his crimes. After learning that a surviving victim of his shooting spree was appealing to save his life, Stroman changed his views, and described Bhuiyan as “an inspiring soul”. His racist views were reportedly altered. He eventually spoke to Bhuiyan and thanked him for his compassion.

Stroman was executed in 2011.]

Sanctuary cities and Trump the Alinskyite

The New Neo Posted on by

Aside from the very specific charges connected with the whole Russiagate story, or anything about Trump’s politics, the Trump opposition has consistently followed certain basic themes in characterizing Trump’s performance as president in terms of his personality and capability. These are not mutually exclusive nor meant to be exhaustive, but they’re the main ones I’ve noticed:

(1) Trump is abysmally stupid.

(2) Trump is a crook.

(3) Trump is losing his mind or has lost it.

(4) Everyone in the Trump administration is about to desert him.

(5) Trump is a mean son of a bitch.

The MSM’s and Trump’s opponents’ reaction to Trump’s proposal to send illegal immigrants to sanctuary cities has featured mostly number five on the above list: Trump is a mean mean man. Just two examples should suffice; they are very typical of the genre [emphasis mine]:

Mayors from across the country were quick to respond to Trump’s latest portrayal of immigrants and sanctuary cities as threats.

In New York City, where nearly 40 percent of the population are immigrants, Mayor Bill de Blasio said Trump’s immigration policy was rooted in cruelty.

“He uses people like pawns,” de Blasio said in a statement. “New York City will always be the ultimate city of immigrants – the President’s empty threats won’t change that.”

In Philadelphia, known as the city of brotherly love, Mayor Jim Kenney said in a statement that his city “would be prepared to welcome these immigrants just as we have embraced our immigrant communities for decades.” He said the White House was demonstrating “the utter contempt that the Trump Administration has for basic human dignity.”

In turn, one can look at each of those statements, so similar to each other, and note how both mayors conflate “immigrants” with “illegal immigrants” as though the two types of arrivals are identical. This is entirely characteristic of the left as well; they want you to think the two groups are identical, too. But if a city failed to make a distinction between, for example, “shoppers” and “shoplifters,” its merchants might have a few objections after a while.

In addition, there’s the obvious question one might ask: why would it be “cruel” or “contemptuous” of “basic human dignity” to take people from camps across the border to a supposedly flourishing city that welcomes them? Nor is anyone penning them up in those cities; they are free, apparently, to go anywhere they wish in this land of opportunity.

And here I thought the word “sanctuary” meant “offering safety and refuge.” So, maybe not?

What Trump is doing here is what he’s done many times before, following Alinsky’s Rule #4: “Make the enemy live up to its own book of rules.” Actually, he’s following #5 and #6 as well, to a certain extent: “”Ridicule is man’s most potent weapon” and “A good tactic is one your people enjoy.” He might need to worry about #7 at some point, “A tactic that drags on too long becomes a drag,” but that point has not yet been reached, and Trump is usually rather good at switching things up anyway.

Trump is an Alinskyite, a term describing his tactics rather than anything about his political orientation. Whether Trump’s a natural at it or whether he’s purposely studied it I don’t know, but I think his use of Alinskyite methods is something that ties the left in knots, because although they are also practitioners of the Alinsky art, they have long considered that they own it and are rather unused to anyone on the right using it against them. It miffs them.

On another level, I think when they are talking about how cruel and callous Trump is with this sanctuary city offer, they actually mean that they think he’s toying with them, using the illegal immigrants as a rhetorical device for effect, and that Trump knows that the mayors of these cities (all blue blue blue) want none of it.

However, if it ever came to it—and I doubt it will—the mayors just might feel that they must accept the influx of illegal immigrants in order to prove that they’re not hypocrites. Then Trump will have made them live up to their own set of rules.