I was thinking maybe I’d declare this blog to be a Jussie-free zone at this point (not a Free Jussie zone). But then I saw what Trevor Noah at The Daily Show has been doing on the topic, and I had to post this video.
Pretty funny stuff:
Those gentleman Republicans
Jeffrey Hart, who died recently, was a highly respected longtime conservative thinker and writer who had been a professor of English literature at Dartmouth for three decades. Scott Johnson, who studied under him there, wrote a tribute that clearly shows he had the highest respect for Professor Hart.
I didn’t know Hart, nor am I familiar with his writing, and I trust Scott Johnson’s judgment on the huge value of his life’s work and the inspiration he was as a teacher. But this obituary for Hart in the Times contains some statements Hart made in his later years that illustrate almost perfectly a phenomenon I was writing about recently: the person on the right who is a gentleman, looking for fellow gentlemen or gentlewomen. Here’s an excerpt from that comment of mine, in which I describe as “these people” this type of Republican and/or conservative and what he/she is looking for in a politician:
Bush senior was a patrician Yalie, very old school country club Republican, with impeccable credentials. He passed muster in that respect…[He was one of the] gentlemen and moderate Republicans who played by the rules…
Reagan was sui generis. But he was also a gentleman too—which Trump is not. That is one of the main reasons these people hate Trump—he’s not playing by the rules of the well-educated, classy gentleman (even though he actually is quite well-educated and grew up very rich).
That’s what I mean when I wrote about their wanting someone like Trump to demonstrate class and education by certain airs and signs. In other words, act like a gentleman.
These days, people who have this preference for gentlemen in politics usually hide it; I’ve never heard of someone openly admitting it. But Hart wasn’t hiding it at all in his quoted remarks, which occurred during the Bush II administration:
Professor Hart explained his personal politics in an interview with the cultural critic James Panero in 2006 in the Dartmouth Alumni Magazine.
“My conservatism is aristocratic in spirit, anti-populist and rooted in the Northeast,” he said. “It is Burke brought up-to-date. A ‘social conservative’ in my view is not a moral authoritarian Evangelical who wants to push people around, but an American gentleman, conservative in a social sense. He has gone to a good school, maybe shops at J. Press, maybe plays tennis or golf, and drinks either Bombay or Beefeater martinis, or maybe Dewar’s on the rocks, or both.”
I’m thinking some of this may have been meant to be a bit tongue-in-cheek, a reference to certain cliches about conservatives. Without knowing Hart at all, I really can’t say. But it also seems serious as well, and if so it would explain better than I could some of the spirit that animates the later hatred of Trump that comes from NeverTrumpers on the conservative side, particularly those who have long dwelled in the realms of acadame.
The Panero interview quotes an op-ed Hart wrote in 2005:
The Bush Presidency often is called conservative. This is a mistake. It is populist and radical, and its principal energies have roots in American history, and these roots are not conservative.
That’s one of the ways in which Hart justified his opposition to someone like George W. Bush: that Bush was not really conservative. And most conservatives would agree that Bush was not really a conservative, so that contention by Hart is not particularly puzzling. What is puzzling was the fact that Hart apparently voted for John Kerry in 2004 as a reaction—after all, if Bush wasn’t conservative, what on earth was John Kerry? Later Hart voted for Obama, twice—a bit puzzling because I would think that in many ways he would have been attracted to gentleman Romney, except for the fact that Romney is a Mormon, which may in Hart’s eyes have been something like being an evangelical.
Here’s the larger context of one of the Hart quotes I mentioned earlier:
Like the Whig gentry who were the Founders, I loathe populism,” Hart explains. “Most especially in the form of populist religion, i.e., the current pestiferous bible-banging evangelicals, whom I regard as organized ignorance, a menace to public health, to science, to medicine, to serious Western religion, to intellect and indeed to sanity. Evangelicalism, driven by emotion, and not creedal, is thoroughly erratic and by its nature cannot be conservative. My conservatism is aristocratic in spirit, anti-populist and rooted in the Northeast. It is Burke brought up to date. A ‘social conservative’ in my view is not a moral authoritarian Evangelical who wants to push people around, but an American gentleman, conservative in a social sense. He has gone to a good school, maybe shops at J. Press, maybe plays tennis or golf, and drinks either Bombay or Beefeater martinis, or maybe Dewar’s on the rocks, or both.”
A decade later Hart was, unfortunately, suffering from the dementia which ended up causing his death. So he never had a chance to express his opinion of Donald Trump. One can only imagine what it would have been, but my guess is that he would probably have been a firm member of the NeverTrumpers.
Victor Davis Hanson in The New Yorker: Trump as tragic hero
Victor Davis Hanson has given a fascinating interview to Isaac Chotiner of The New Yorker.
The interview is well worth reading if only for the thesis that Hanson, a classics professor, offers about Trump:
Do you feel that in some ways he is a hero out of Greek myth?
Yeah, as long as we understand the word “hero.” Americans don’t know what that word means. They think it means you live happily ever after or you are selfless. Whether it is Achilles or Sophocles’s Ajax or Antigone, they can act out of insecurity, they can act out of impatience—they can act out of all sorts of motives that are less than what we say in America are heroic. But the point that they are making is, I see a skill that I have. I see a problem. I want to solve that problem, and I want to solve that problem so much that the ensuing reaction to that solution may not necessarily be good for me. And they accept that.
It reminds me of Trump saying that people will get sick of winning. It seems like you are saying we have gotten sick of it, and that is the tragedy of Trump.
I think so. I tried to use as many examples as I could of the classic Western, whether it was “Shane” or “High Noon” or “The Magnificent Seven.” They all are the same—the community doesn’t have the skills or doesn’t have the willpower or doesn’t want to stoop to the corrective method to solve the existential problem, whether it is cattle barons or banditos. So they bring in an outsider, and immediately they start to be uneasy because he is uncouth—his skills, his attitude—and then he solves the problem, and they declare to him, whether it is Gary Cooper in “High Noon” or Alan Ladd in “Shane,” “I think it’s better you leave. We don’t need you anymore. We feel dirty that we ever had to call you in.” I think that is what is awaiting Trump…
How does this fit, in a Greek sense, with the man we are often confronted with—constantly tweeting, spending much of his day watching cable news, obsessed with small slights. Do these things, allowing for the modern context, also remind you of great heroes of myth?
Have you read Sophocles’s “Ajax” ever? It’s one of his best plays.
No, I haven’t.
You have a neurotic hero who cannot get over the fact that he was by all standards the successor to Achilles and deserves Achilles’s armor, and yet he was outsmarted by this wily, lesser Odysseus, who rigged the contest and got the armor. All he does is say, “This wasn’t fair. I’m better. Doesn’t anybody know this?” It’s true, but you want to say to Ajax, “Shut up and just take it.” Achilles has elements of a tragic hero. He says, at the beginning of the Iliad, “I do all the work. I kill all the Trojans. But when it comes to assigning booty, you always give it to mediocrities—deep-state, administrative nothings.” So he stalks off. And the gods tell him, “If you come back in, you will win fame, but you are going to end up dead.” So he makes a tragic, heroic decision that he is going to do that.
I think Trump really did think that there were certain problems and he had particular skills that he could solve. Maybe in a naïve fashion. But I think he understood, for all the emoluments-clause hysteria, that he wasn’t going to make a lot of money from it or be liked for it.
The article is interesting for what it presents of Hanson’s thoughts on the matter. But it’s also interesting because of the subtext, which is a cat-and-mouse game the interviewer believes he’s playing with Hanson. In the latter game, I’m not sure who wins, but I am pretty sure it depends on the bias of who is reading.
When I read the article, Chotiner’s lead-in descriptions of Hanson leapt out at me as being a debunking of the opinions of the man he is set to interview (supposedly respectfully). He can’t do away with Hanson’s obvious academic achievements and honors, but he distorts Hanson’s record outside of academia in a way that is meant to discredit Hanson in the reader’s mind before even reading any of Hanson’s words in the interview. One small example:
…[Hanson] has a history of hostility to undocumented Mexican and Central American immigrants, who he claims are undermining American culture, and to African-Americans who speak about the persistence of racism…
Speaking of “hostility,” that’s a hostile summary description of Hanson’s work that’s patently unfair to Hanson, and yet meant to label him as a bigot at the outset. That Hanson’s responses to the interview are so thoughtful and interesting merely makes it even more important that Chotiner set it up in the readers’ minds in a way that the reader knows that he or she is not supposed to seriously pay attention to the actual thoughts of this bigoted person.
Chotiner also frames his questions in a way that makes his own bias known, although rather subtly. Hanson is much smarter than Chotiner (not to mention far more well-versed in the classics), but Chotiner is better at the spin and the propaganda.
Is it “The Greatest Constitutional Crisis Since the Civil War”?
Conrad Black has an article in American Greatness with the title “The Greatest Constitutional Crisis Since the Civil War.” Here’s an excerpt:
The most immense and dangerous public scandal in American history is finally cracking open like a ripe pomegranate. The broad swath of the Trump-hating media that has participated in what has amounted to an unconstitutional attempt to overthrow the government are reduced to reporting the events and revelations of the scandal in which they have been complicit, in a po-faced ho-hum manner to impart to the misinformed public that this is as routine as stock market fluctuations or the burning of an American flag in Tehran.
For more than two years, the United States and the world have had two competing narratives: that an elected president of the United States was a Russian agent whom the Kremlin helped elect; and its rival narrative that senior officials of the Justice Department, FBI, CIA, and other national intelligence organizations had repeatedly lied under oath, misinformed federal officials, and meddled in partisan political matters illegally and unconstitutionally and had effectively tried to influence the outcome of a presidential election, and then undo its result by falsely propagating the first narrative. It is now obvious and indisputable that the second narrative is the correct one.
The authors, accomplices, and dupes of this attempted overthrow of constitutional government are now well along in reciting their misconduct without embarrassment or remorse because—in fired FBI Director James Comey’s formulation—a “higher duty” than the oath they swore to uphold the Constitution compelled them. Or—in fired FBI Deputy Director Andrew McCabe’s words—“the threat” was too great. Nevermind that the nature of “the threat” was that the people might elect someone he and Comey disapproved of as president, and that that person might actually serve his term, as elected.
The article goes on to describe some of the details of what happened, and the players involved. It’s worth reading the whole thing for a refresher course in what you probably already know.
But despite the fact that I agree that this is a constitutional scandal of extremely major proportions, I disagree with Black’s conclusions when he writes:
The collapse of this grotesque putsch, under the irresistible pressure of a functioning attorney general and Senate committees that are not hamstrung by NeverTrumpers, will cause a revulsion against the Democratic Party that will be seismic and prolonged.
I think he very gravely underestimates the power of belief, propaganda, and confirmation bias. I think the number of people who will have minds changed by this is very small. I could be wrong, but that’s what I see so far.
The media pushed its own narrative for two years, and I believe that has had a tremendous effect. The left, of course, was ready to believe it, and for the hard left truth doesn’t matter, only the ends that justify the means. For the people who are more in the middle, the relentless daily drip drip drip has its effect. Minds and opinions become hardened in a certain belief system, and not too many people are willing to change those opinions even in the face of strong evidence that the opinions are wrong, even very wrong.
The MSM knows this. They know their power. And their power exists even though a lot of people don’t trust them these days. It’s paradoxical, but the hammering home of a story—even from somewhat suspect sources—has the effect of habituating people to that story and making it seem more plausible. The sheer weight and number of the stories, even if each one is suspect and/or is later shown to have been shaky or even incorrect, still has a cumulative effect for many people.
This story has been complex, with many twistings and turnings and details. It takes extraordinary interest and patience and attention to read the whole thing, put the pieces together, and sort it out for oneself objectively. Realistically speaking, what percentage of people is going to do that? I believe that most people will just accept the narrative presented by the media outlets of their choice.
Genetic modification and the law of unintended consequences
I read two articles today that dovetailed with each other, although one concerns humans and the other mosquitoes. Then again, haven’t humans and mosquitoes long been intertwined?
The twins, called Lulu and Nana, reportedly had their genes modified before birth by a Chinese scientific team using the new editing tool CRISPR. The goal was to make the girls immune to infection by HIV, the virus that causes AIDS.
Now, new research shows that the same alteration introduced into the girls’ DNA, deletion of a gene called CCR5, not only makes mice smarter but also improves human brain recovery after stroke, and could be linked to greater success in school.
“The answer is likely yes, it did affect their brains,” says Alcino J. Silva, a neurobiologist at the University of California, Los Angeles, whose lab uncovered a major new role for the CCR5 gene in memory and the brain’s ability to form new connections.
The article is a bit cryptic about why this was done. But it highlights the fact that, particularly in countries with fewer rules about the ethics of scientific research and practice, these sorts of rogue experiments will increasingly be done. And it is nearly impossible to predict their ultimate results, except to say that science fiction scenarios easily come to mind.
Or literature. How much will these girls’ memories be enhanced, if the report is true? (It seems that one always needs to add “if the report is true” these days.) Since I often think in terms of literary references (is there a gene for that?), the story in the article make me think of a fictional story: “Funes the Memorious.” For Funes, enhanced memory was not necessarily a great thing, although he seemed to enjoy it. From the story by Borges:
Funes…reveals that, since his fall from the horse, he perceives everything in full detail and remembers it all. He remembers, for example, the shape of clouds at all given moments, as well as the associated perceptions (muscular, thermal, etc.) of each moment. Funes has an immediate intuition of the mane of a horse or the form of a constantly changing flame that is comparable to our (normal people’s) intuition of a simple geometric shape such as a triangle or square.
In order to pass the time, Funes has engaged in projects such as reconstructing a full day’s worth of past memories (an effort which, he finds, takes him another full day), and constructing a “system of enumeration” that gives each number a different, arbitrary name. Borges correctly points out to him that this is precisely the opposite of a system of enumeration, but Funes is incapable of such understanding.
I wrote that “Funes is an extreme example of memory run amok to the point of being dysfunctional.” What will happen to Lulu and Nana? I’m not saying they will turn into Funes, of course. But still, the effects are unpredictable and not necessarily as anticipated, and certainly not part of the original plan, which had to do with HIV resistance.
Which brings us to article number two. This one is about genetically modified mosquitoes:
Scientists have launched a major new phase in the testing of a controversial genetically modified organism: a mosquito designed to quickly spread a genetic mutation lethal to its own species, NPR has learned.
For the first time, researchers have begun large-scale releases of the engineered insects, into a high-security laboratory in Terni, Italy.
“This will really be a breakthrough experiment,” says Ruth Mueller, an entomologist who runs the lab. “It’s a historic moment.”
The goal is to see if the mosquitoes could eventually provide a powerful new weapon to help eradicate malaria in Africa, where most cases occur.
Malaria is still a big killer in Africa, although it could be fought with DDT. But DDT is no longer commonly used because of environmental concerns; I wrote about the problems here, as well as the fact that those concerns seem overblown.
Seems to me that this mosquito engineering has much larger potential adverse consequences than DDT. If I had to choose between the two methods of dealing with malaria, at the moment I’d say I prefer DDT:
The lab was specially built to evaluate the modified insects in as close to a natural environment as possible without the risk of releasing them into the wild, about which there are deep concerns regarding unforeseen effects on the environment.
“This is an experimental technology which could have devastating impacts,” says Dana Perls of Friends of the Earth, an environmental group that’s part of an international coalition fighting this new generation of modified organisms.
To prevent any unforeseen effects on the environment, scientists have always tried to keep genetically engineered organisms from spreading their mutations.
But in this case, researchers want the modification to spread. So they engineered mosquitoes with a “gene drive.”…
But critics fear that gene-drive organisms could run amok and wreak havoc if they were ever released into the wild. The insects could inadvertently have a negative effect on crops, for example, by eliminating important pollinators, they fear. The insects’ population crash could also lead to other mosquitoes coming with other diseases, critics say…
“This is a technology where we don’t know where it’s going to end. We need to stop this right where it is,” says Nnimmo Bassey, director of the Health of Mother Earth Foundation in Nigeria. “They’re trying to use Africa as a big laboratory to test risky technologies.”
The experiment is a key step in the Target Malaria project. The project’s major funder is the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation…
That last bit doesn’t surprise me one iota. I wrote about Gates in that post of mine I linked earlier, and added that it was ironic that Gates wasn’t also championing the use of DDT now. It could save enormous numbers of lives. It’s ironic, but it doesn’t surprise me.
White nationalist arrested on weapons charges
Lt. Christopher Paul Hasson was arrested last Friday:
A Coast Guard lieutenant and self-proclaimed white nationalist was arrested on charges of illegal drug and weapons possession on Friday. But authorities say the charges are just the “proverbial tip of the iceberg” and that the man is a “domestic terrorist, bent on committing acts dangerous to human life.”
This guy wrote some scary stuff, privately and published only to himself: many threats to liberal and leftist public figures, much white supremacist talk. He also wrote that he was “dreaming of a way to kill almost every last person on the earth.” He thought maybe a plague of some sort might do the trick. Here’s the sort of thing he had in drafts on his computer:
I think a plague would be most successful but how do I acquire the needed/ Spanish flu, botulism, anthrax not sure yet but will find something.
Interesting idea the other day. Start with biological attacks followed by attack on food supply. . . Have to research this. Two pronged attack seems it might be more successful. Institute a bombing/sniper campaign.
I have little doubt that there are currently people in the US like Hasson, plotting mass terror. I have little doubt that some are on the left and some on the right. How do we find them? How can we tell who is going to actually commit an act of terror and who is just “dreaming” about it, writing notes on a computer? On what grounds do they get detained, and when?
In fact, that’s true of contemplating or planning any crime. Is writing on your computer, amassing some weapons (not anthax, but ordinary weapons) in accordance with gun laws, actionable? I don’t think so.
Fortunately for us, Hasson seems to have violated some gun and drug laws and could be arrested on those grounds, so we don’t have to get into the question of how serious he was about his terrorist attack plans. But what if he hadn’t violated (or allegedly violated) any such laws? What if the only crime of which he’d been guilty was thoughtcrime?
If Hasson had conspired with someone, and that person had gone to authorities, they might be able to charge Hasson with conspiracy (see this):
Conspiracy has been defined in the United States as an agreement of two or more people to commit a crime, or to accomplish a legal end through illegal actions…
Conspiracy law usually does not require proof of specific intent by the defendants to injure any specific person to establish an illegal agreement. Instead, usually the law requires only that the conspirators have agreed to engage in a certain illegal act.
Under most U.S. laws, for a person to be convicted of conspiracy, not only must he or she agree to commit a crime, but at least one of the conspirators must commit an overt act (the actus reus) in furtherance of the crime.
But I don’t think any of this applies to Hasson. I haven’t seen any allegations of conspiracy.
You can find the motion for detention pending trial here (scroll down). He’s being charged with the following:
…possession of a firearm and ammunition by an unlawful user or addict of controlled substances) and simple possession of Tramadol, which is an opioid and a Schedule IV controlled substance.
The rest of the document is a listing of the reasons he should be detained pending trial, and consists of a description of his extremist views, dreams, plans, writings, and computer research, none of which he seems to have shared with anyone (he wrote a draft of an email that he sent to himself, for example). The contents are indeed violent and very ominous—as well as containing frequent references to the attack perpetrated by Breivik and the detailed plans Breivik had made. Around the time Hasson was writing all of this he was buying multiple weapons; more recently he was listing possible liberal targets and researching where they lived and that sort of thing. Altogether a chilling picture.
But—at least so far as I can see at the moment—he doesn’t appear to have committed any act of terrorism, or even threatened anyone except in his own writings to himself. It’s almost as though this was some sort of textbook law exam case, as I remember them—designed to describe a set of circumstances that places someone in a difficult gray area and asks the student what should be done and why.
I think it was wise to get this guy for the acts he’s actually committed, which is exactly what authorities have done so far in this case. I’m having some difficulty finding the possible penalties he could face if he’s convicted of the firearms and drug offenses, so I’m not sure whether even Hasson’s conviction on these charges would put him away for a significant amount of time.
But that doesn’t solve the question of what to do with anyone—left, right, or in-between—who has made detailed and obsessive plans for murdering people (few or many) and yet hasn’t done anything in terms of acts, except the possession of lawful weapons. I suppose the commitment laws could come into play if the person is judged to be suffering from a mental illness, but that tends to be quite ineffective and time-limited, as well as difficult to implement.
It all comes down to an old question: how much risk are we willing to accept in order to retain our liberty? We don’t want to be prosecuting thoughtcrime—at least, most of us on the right don’t.
More posts later
Going out for a few hours, so my later post or posts today will probably come out in late afternoon or early evening.
Till then…
Justice for Jussie
When it finally came it was a move that should surprise no one who’s been following the news at all:
“Empire” actor Jussie Smollett faces a felony charge of disorderly conduct for allegedly filing a false report claiming two men attacked him last month, a Chicago Police Department spokesman tweeted Wednesday night.
Smollett has turned himself in:
UPDATE: Chicago Police Detectives take #Empire actor #JussieSmollett into custody to face Class 4 Felony charge (punishable for up to 3yrs in prison) for Disorderly Conduct in Falsifying Police report. Bond Hearing scheduled for 1:30p in Cook County Criminal Court.#ChicagoPolice
— Tom Ahern (@TomAhernCPD) February 21, 2019
Yesterday I speculated on Smollet’s motive:
Attention and fame—fifteen minutes or longer—are potent [motives]. And of course, there’s also the desire to stir up political conflict over race to the detriment of the right.
I then went on to speculate at length in that post on a third possible motive, both for Smollett and for others engaged in similar hoaxes: the desire to be part of a noble group cause, such as the causes of the past in the fight against overt and violent bigotry against black people. I added:
I am not offering this post as any sort of excuse whatsoever. It is merely a description of a phenomenon. In the case of at least some race hoaxers, I really think this is part of the driving force to commit a dangerous and truly heinous crime that could have grave consequences, including riots and more hatred. I utterly condemn all race hoaxers and believe they should be prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law, but that doesn’t keep me from being interested in what might make them tick.
The police say that Smollett faked the attack because he was “dissatisfied” with his salary. That is no surprise either; probably he thought that he would become more famous, more sympathetic, more virtuous, and more heroic all at the same time as a result of his hoax. These things—the desire for money and the desire for appearing virtuous despite being exactly the opposite, as well as the desire to be part of a noble cause even if your actions are ignoble—can all co-exist.
Or perhaps I’m wrong and Smollet was merely motivated by money. That is certainly possible; I’ve been wrong about things before.
But whatever his motives, it certainly was a funny way to go about it, and I don’t mean funny ha-ha. As I said, I hope he’s prosecuted to the full extent of the law. This could have ended up much much worse if he and the brothers hadn’t been so incompetent as hoaxers. What if they had succeeded? It could have done immense harm to blacks and whites and everyone in-between.
And if the MSM and many politicians and celebrities on the left hadn’t immediately jumped to believe Smollett, the hoax wouldn’t have done them any harm, either. As it is, it should be doing their reputations harm. As it is, though, they’ll probably ignore their own shame and hope it will go away.
And it probably will go away, too, at least in the eyes of their supporters. Memories are short, and human beings can rationalize away quite a lot. But perhaps next time a few more people, just a few, won’t be so quick in the rush to judgment.
Race hoaxes, virtue-signaling, and the desire for the heroic
In all the verbiage about Justin Smollet and other race hoaxers, there’s been talk of motive. Attention and fame—fifteen minutes or longer—are potent ones. And of course, there’s also the desire to stir up political conflict over race to the detriment of the right.
But I think for most people another very strong motivator is a more complex one. People usually want their lives to have meaning, and one way to gain meaning is to engage in a great and heroic struggle against enormous and evil forces. Sometimes that struggle is against hatred, and in that fight a person often suffers at the hands of the haters.
There is no question that a battle of this type is part of the history of black people in America. And there are quite a few heroes in that struggle who are much celebrated today.
What can a young person do if he or she wants some of the same intensity of purpose? The person doesn’t even have to be all that young, either; he or she can be someone old and nostalgic for more heroic days (although I don’t think that’s anywhere near as common as the phenomenon in the young, especially if the older person is old enough to remember how bad it really was then compared to now).
So how does one become a hero? Of course, there are plenty of bona fide ways that have nothing to do with race. But not everyone sees him or herself in those roles. Some people want the glory without the work, and they don’t mind lying in order to get it. They tell themselves that the lie is justified because of their heroic and virtuous cause.
It’s not just race hoaxers, either who exhibit this phenomenon. It’s also The Resistance, whose members fancy themselves fashioned after the Resistance in WWII. This current Resistance is ridiculous in that conceit, but I think their attempt involves a yearning for the heroic. It also involves much else, of course, including a hefty dose of virtue-signaling narcissism as well as a shallow knowledge of history. But a desire to be involved in a group that’s dedicated to a great cause is part of it.
Let us not forget that “group” aspect. People are lonelier today than when I was young, despite (or maybe in part because of) the internet and social media and all that connectedness we supposedly have. Connected to whom? Connected for what? Connected how? Virtue-signaling—saying we are connected to a group with “good intentions”—is one possible answer to that lacuna.
You may think I’m being much too kind to race hoaxers in giving them any hint of good intentions. Perhaps I am. But I don’t think so. And I am not offering this post as any sort of excuse whatsoever. It is merely a description of a phenomenon. In the case of at least some race hoaxers, I really think this is part of the driving force to commit a dangerous and truly heinous crime that could have grave consequences, including riots and more hatred. I utterly condemn all race hoaxers and believe they should be prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law, but that doesn’t keep me from being interested in what might make them tick.
Sandmann sues the WaPo
Here’s the text of the complaint.
Paul Mirengoff has a pretty good analysis of this particular suit’s prospects:
It’s worth noting, however, that much of the alleged defamation by the Post consists of quotations from Nathan Phillips, the jerk who confronted the Covington students. Some of it consists of the Post reporting what the students’ own arch-diocese said about them when it rushed to judgment.
The Post will argue, I assume, that it isn’t defamation to quote an eyewitness who got facts wrong. The complaint tries to head off this argument by alleging that the Post “recklessly relied on Phillips.”…
…I wonder what the implications are of allowing lawsuits against newspapers based on their choice of sources. If the Washington Post can’t rely on biased sources, its national news pages would be quite thin…
The Post reported, without quoting anyone, that the Covington students chanted “Build That Wall,” something the complaint says didn’t happen. But is it defamation to wrongly accuse someone of chanting this? Certainly it will make some people think worse of the students (and some think better of them). But the Post reported accurately that Sandmann and others wore MAGA hats. Would chanting “Build That Wall” add any loss of reputation to that already induced by the hats?
Even if the suit against the WaPo ultimately won’t fly, it’s still well worth it to file it in order to serve notice on the WaPo and other media outlets that they might actually face some financial consequences some day. But I think some of the defamation lawsuits by Sandmann against individuals have a decent chance of succeeding.
I don’t know if Andrew McCabe has stopped beating his wife
And there are things that McCabe says he doesn’t know, either. Such as:
"Do you actually believe Russians ordered Trump to fire Comey?"
McCabe: "We don't know." https://t.co/4jOjEsxI8D
— Ben Domenech (@bdomenech) February 19, 2019
Some of the comments to that Ace post I linked to:
You’ll have to buy my book to find out!
Do we know if McCabe has the bodies of several dead children in his basement?
We do not know.
Do we really know if Trump is an agent of Saaaaatan? Well, of course we just don’t know. Definitively.
Trump is an interdimensional vampire from the right dimension. Prove me wrong.
“We don’t know?”
Good enough for me! IMPEACH!!!!
Despite the jokes that practically write themselves, the thought that McCabe was ever head of the FBI is a very sobering one.
[ADDENDUM: An article about another of McCabe’s lies. I think the author misses the point in one respect, however, when he characterizes it as “unbelievable.” McCabe has a still-large potential market for his book among the most fervent Trump-haters, whose appetite is still huge for this sort of thing.]
Al Sharpton on Jussie Smollett
No, this is not the Onion. Al Sharpton, race hoaxer extraordinaire, who was successfully sued for defamation by the lawyer Sharpton coaxed Tawana Brawley to defame and name as a perp, has said the following regarding the Jussie Smollett case:
When initial reports broke, Sharpton claimed “we should come with all that we can come within law enforcement to find out what happened and the guilty should suffer the maximum.” Now that the story appears to be very different, Sharpton “still maintain(s) that.” And if it is found that Smollett and these gentlemen did in some way perpetrate something that is not true, they ought to “face accountability to the maximum.”
Sharpton went on to talk about the confusion surrounding this very strange news report, before finishing with the very awkward double negative claim of “We cannot not get to the truth here.”
I wrote an article for PJ some years ago about the Brawley case and Sharpton’s role in it:
Tawana Brawley, much like UVA’s Jackie, was a young woman (Brawley was only 15 at the time) who concocted an elaborate lie to get out of a sticky situation. As with Jackie, it’s not at all clear that Brawley originally intended her accusations to go national, and she did not initially name any names. But pretty soon, egged on by police questioning and then by “advisors” including Sharpton, her story became enormously well-known, and alleged perpetrators were identified.
It later came out that Brawley previously had been physically abused by her parents, particularly a stepfather who was a violent man with a criminal past. She was afraid her parents would punish her for skipping school to visit a boyfriend; they had beaten her before under similar circumstances. Thus the ruse was born…
After Al Sharpton and several lawyers started to take charge of the publicity on the case, that’s when her charges got a great deal more specific and became a national scandal:
“Sharpton, Maddox, and Mason generated a national media sensation. The three claimed officials all the way up to the state government were trying to cover up defendants in the case because they were white. Specifically, they named Steven Pagones, an Assistant District Attorney in Dutchess County, as one of the rapists, and called him a racist, among other accusations.”
A grand jury ended up finding that no crime had occurred. But many members of the black community, whipped up by Sharpton and company, believed that Brawley had gotten a raw deal and that guilty and abusive white men had been let off scot-free…
…The falsely-accused Pagones won a $345,000 defamation judgment against Sharpton, Maddox and Mason, and a $185,000 default judgment against Brawley. But Sharpton himself has never paid a penny; his debt was paid off for him in 2001 by “supporters, including attorney Johnnie Cochran.”
Brawley was only 15 years old at the time, but Sharpton was an adult. What’s his excuse? He is still in the public eye 30 years later, making sanctimonious statements about an accountability he’s never faced himself except symbolically and temporarily. How many people today know a thing about what Sharpton did back then? Only us old folks.