The New York state abortion law

The New Neo Posted on by

Here’s my quick take on the law just passed on abortion in New York state.

My first observation is that it’s an attempt to get a law in place that will set state rules for abortions if Roe v. Wade is overruled. I doubt very much that the latter will occur. But anyway, that’s the stated reason, and if there really is a repeal that isn’t just for some small element of Roe, and the right to set the abortion law is thrown back entirely on the states, each state will be passing such laws and they will be widely varied in their effect.

What are the main changes the New York law puts in place? The most controversial one—and rightly so—is the provision about late-term abortions. Roe and the later cases related to it don’t allow states to ban abortions prior to 24 weeks, but after that states are given a certain amount of leeway (see this for a state-by-state description of the current laws). New York’s prior law allowed late-term abortions when the fetus wasn’t viable and/or to save the life of the mother. The new law adds the provision that late-term abortions can be performed to preserve the mother’s health, and that includes mental health. Some other states have a similar provision (19 states, with another 20 limiting the “health” part to physical health).

So the New York law is hardly unique in this respect.

I’m troubled by abortion and have written about the topic quite a few times before (see these, and see this for a more personal story).

Late-term abortions are both especially horrific and especially sad—as well as an enormous flash point. Many of them occur with a baby that was wanted. Late-term abortions are rare, but some of them occur because a fetus has expired or is so malformed that its life would be short and full of suffering, and some occur in order to save the life of the mother.

Especially troubling is that provision about the “health” of the mother. This, in my opinion, amounts basically to abortion on demand of a fetus that is most likely viable. I’m old enough to recall very well the situation prior to Roe, when in certain states at certain times (I forget exactly which ones), abortion was banned and there was a legal exception made to save the life or health of the mother, and that included psychological health (at the time, these were almost never late-term abortions). Back then the psychological health provision was used to mean almost anything a psychiatrist said it meant. In practice, it could just mean that a woman was very upset. It seems to me that the psychological health provision could be used that way now in New York to allow late-term abortions essentially on demand, which would be a terrible thing.

More:

The updated New York law leaves it to doctors to decide when a woman’s health is at risk. Opponents argued that the law should have defined what constitutes a threat to a pregnant woman’s health.

Republican lawmakers say the change gives too much discretion to doctors, and could open the door to late-term abortions that are not medically necessary.

Here’s another fairly major change for New York:

The [new law] allows licensed nurse practitioners, physician assistants and licensed midwives to provide abortions, in addition to physicians.

The bill’s authors say the change is essential for rural parts of the state where women have limited access to doctors and it could take weeks before they can see a doctor.

Opponents say the change extends beyond the scope of Roe v. Wade and will ultimately result in an increase in the number of abortions in the state.

Senate Republicans argued that by allowing non-physicians to perform abortions, it will endanger the health of more women. The bill’s sponsors noted that most abortions today occur when a doctor administers a pill to a patient early in a pregnancy.

Would it also allow non-physicians to perform late-trimester abortions? I’ve tried to find the answer and so far haven’t discovered it. If so, though, it would seem even worse.

So far I’ve also been unable to locate whether the new law contains a second-physician provision for late-term abortions. This is what I mean:

Some states require the involvement of a second physician when a later-term abortion is performed.

14 states require that a second physician attend the procedure to treat a fetus if it is born alive in all or some circumstances.
9 states…require that a second physician certify that the abortion is medically necessary in all or some circumstances.

New York’s old law—the one that allowed late-term abortions only to save the life of the mother (or when the fetus was not viable) required a second physician to attend, according to the chart at that site. So it used to be one of those 14 states in the quote above. Whether it remains so, I do not know.

Nathan Phillips’ Vietnam service: in his own words

The New Neo Posted on by

I had originally thought Nathan Phillips had been cagey enough to merely use phrases that gave the impression he was a Vietnam vet who actually, you know, went to Vietnam. In other words, phrases such as “Vietnam times vet.”

But he’s said a lot more than that:

Phillips not only lied and claimed to have served “in theater” (every usage of that term I’ve ever seen means in some sort of conflict or war setting), he then lied about his lies:

…Thursday [today, that is] on the “Today Show”…

When asked to clarify whether he was saying that he served during the Vietnam war, but not in the war, Phillips adamantly denied ever saying that he was in theater.

“What I’ve always said is I’ve never stepped foot in south Vietnam. And that’s — I don’t know how clear — how much clearer can that be, you know?”

One of the interesting things about Phillips—besides being a con artist liar, that is—is that he keeps being tripped up by video evidence. He’s enough of a publicity-seeker that there is a video trail that he’s made that contradicts his current lies (that is true of his encounter with the Covington students, although the video trail that discredited him there wasn’t one he made himself or even had previously known about).

On the other hand, Phillips is probably correct in counting on the MSM to protect him from any charges of lying. We’ll see whether any of this becomes common knowledge.

A few more details about Phillips’ history:

Phillips also reportedly has a criminal history. A May 9, 1974 article in The Lincoln Star reported that Phillips, then 19 years old, was “charged with escaping from the Nebraska Penal Complex where he was confined May 3,” according to The Washington Examiner. He also reportedly had a charge of destruction of property dropped in 1973 and pleaded guilty to assault on June 19, 1974, for which he paid a fine of $200.

Phillips later reportedly served one year of probation for underage possession of alcohol and was charged in 1978 with driving without a license.

He also went AWOL three times during his stint in the military.

Quite a few people have been doing their homework on this guy—but it sure hasn’t been the MSM.

[NOTE: There’s also no indication Phillips was honorably discharged, another claim of his. This report states that he did not receive an honorable discharge, but I haven’t seen too much more about that. I doubt that at the time he made these videos making these claims, he thought he’d ever be the subject of enough attention to have people fact-checking him. So he felt free to state whatever he wanted.]

Covington and the politics of aggressive standing

The New Neo Posted on by

The starting point for this post was one of NBC’s Savannah Guthrie’s remarks to Nick Sandmann in her recent interview with the teenager:

There’s something aggressive about standing there. Standing your ground. You both stood your ground.

Both? Actually, Nathan Phillips didn’t stand his grand. Guthrie’s remark is typical of the more subtle ways in which the MSM has distorted the story (there are more overt ways as well). Phillips voluntarily walked up to Sandmann and got a few inches from him, beating a drum. That’s moving towards someone to invade that person’s space, both physical and aural.

The person whose space is invaded then has a choice of what to do. What are the choices? Let’s see.

Sandmann chose to stay put and smile, facing Phillips. It was an evil, disrespectful smirk, loaded with white-boy privilege and racist bile screams the Twitter mob.

In Sandmann’s interview, at one point he says:

…in hindsight I wish we could have walked away and avoided the whole thing.

Perhaps it’s more accurate to say he wishes Phillips had never come up to him in the first place. At any rate, I have some advice for Sandmann: it wouldn’t have mattered. If Sandman had somehow managed to walk away from Phillips, one (or more) of these things would have almost certainly resulted: Sandmann would have been criticized for disrespecting Phillips by walking away, and/or Phillips would have followed him beating that drum all the while, and/or Phillips would have focused the same technique on another boy.

So many people hated Sandmann’s smile (excuse me, smirk). But what if he hadn’t smiled? What facial expressions would not have constituted facecrime on the part a white preppy-looking teenaged boy (in a MAGA cap! Let’s not forget the MAGA cap!) being confronted by Phillips and his up-close-and-personal drumming and chanting? A grim face on Sandmann would have been considered even more “aggressive,” wouldn’t it? And laughing would have been even more disrespectful. Telling Phillips to get away? Perish the thought—racist! Turning his face away? Disrespectful again.

I’m not just trying to be cute here. I am serious in saying I believe there was nothing Sandmann could have done that would have changed the outcome, once he was selected as the target for the confrontation and the recording of the exchange on video by Phillips, who was accompanied by people with videocameras filming it from the start.

Enormous numbers of people considered Sandmann guilty on sight because of the categories of person to which he belongs, and because of what propaganda has guided them to believe. I almost wrote “guilty until proven innocent,” but that is too kind to those among them who will not even accept proof of innocence. They want him guilty, because it suits their political and their emotional purposes.

What’s going on in Venezuela?

The New Neo Posted on by

Hundreds of thousands of Venezuelans have turned out to demonstrate against the Maduro government, and this appears to include may former Maduro supporters:

Even the poorest areas, the beating heart of the country’s socialist government set up by Hugo Chavez, emptied as people joined the demonstrations.

The Chavez dream of a utopian socialist society is a distant memory now. The country is broke, inflation over a million percent, the currency worthless and government supermarkets empty of food and almost everything else.

In one of the city’s main squares thousands upon thousands gathered to see their hero, the speaker of the national assembly, Juan Guaido. He did not disappointment them.

Why now? The country’s been a basket case for a long time. Some of the timing has to do with finding a charismatic champion in the 35-year-old Guaido.

The police and military are still with Maduro, however. That’s extremely important. All over the world, turning points come for dictators when—and usually only when—one or both of those institutions decides it will no longer defend and protect and do the bidding of said dictator.

I hadn’t followed the build-up to this, and am not familiar with Guaido, Trump has lent his verbal support to Guaido, as have the leaders of Argentina, Brazil, Canada, Paraguay, Costa Rica, Colombia, Peru, Chile, Guatemala, and Honduras.

Another factor in the timing is that Maduro (Chavez’s successor) was recently sworn in after “winning” another term under a very suspicious election widely considered fraudulent. And I mean widely:

Last May’s election was boycotted by the opposition and Mr Maduro’s strongest opponents were blocked from taking part.

The European Union and the US say the result was fraudulent.

And not just Trump and the EU (united at least on something), but also the OAS.

In retaliation, Maduro has told US personnel to leave the country, and:

US secretary of state Mike Pompeo has said the US will now conduct relations through Mr Guaido.

Mexico, Bolivia, Russia and Turkey have all sided with Mr Maduro.

It’s lonely at the top sometimes.

This is an attempted coup; it’s not a fair and free election. But Maduro was not elected fairly either, and he and his predecessor have ruined the country. It’s not hyperbole to say that Venezuelans are desperate and many are starving, an outrage in a country that used to be rich.

Guaido is promising free elections. But don’t they always? I hope he’s telling the truth, because he seems to be Venezuela’s only hope to free itself from the socialists who have been destroying it for much of the twenty-first century.

Some statistics on how many illegal immigrants never show up for their hearings

The New Neo Posted on by

This information was compiled by US immigration courts and recently given to Congress. The numbers apply to fiscal year 2017:

—43 percent of all aliens free pending trial failed to appear for court in 2017.
—Since 1996, 37 percent of all aliens free before trial disappeared from court.
—Aliens abscond from court more often today than they did before 9/11.
—Deportation orders for failing to appear in court exceed deportation orders from cases that were tried by 306 percent.
—46 percent of all unaccompanied children disappeared from U.S. immigration courts from 2013 through 2017.
—49 percent of unaccompanied children failed to appear in U.S. immigration courts in 2017.

It stands to reason that those who don’t appear are those with the most to hide—or, regarding the children, those who are being most exploited.

More:

In any other court system, such dysfunction would cry for redress. Only in U.S. immigration courts can litigants literally abandon their cases without fear of incarceration or removal, while litigants in nearly any other state or federal court risk arrest, contempt, and new charges for the same conduct. Federal law — 18 U.S.C. § 3146 — imposes penalties from one year all the way to 15 years or more for absconding from a U.S. district court or circuit court of appeals. Not so in federal immigration courts. Rarely, if at all, are aliens held accountable for the same misconduct that in other court systems would land them —or citizens— in jail and in some instances brand them felons.

Even more rarely are those who abscond from court ever found much less removed…

Never in 22 years of reporting has EOIR (i.e., Executive Office for Immigration Review, the Justice Department agency that manages the courts) squared with Congress and given an accurate description of failures to appear. Since 1996, it has dramatically understated FTA rates in its annual reports. In 2017, EOIR stated the FTA rate for all cases was 28 percent, never mentioning this number includes aliens whose trials occurred in detention facilities. In other words, EOIR calculates the FTA rate — or what it now calls the for all cases rate — by including those who could not evade court…

When accurate accounting is used, failure to appear rates in some years doubled the rates EOIR declared to Congress.

Please read the whole thing.

Truth, lies, and videotape: the CNN interview with Nathan Phillips

The New Neo Posted on by

When you read the transcript of this interview CNN did with Nathan Phillips, it’s good to remember that it occurred last Saturday, when Phillips was enjoying his fifteen-minutes-plus of fame and the longer video hadn’t come to public attention yet. It illustrates the extreme deference paid by CNN to the man and showcases his feelings and his point of view.

It also showcases what an incredible, pathological liar Phillips is. Just about everything he says there isn’t just untrue, it’s an inversion of the truth, as can be demonstrated by evidence in the long video. But he’s displaying the mindset I wrote about yesterday in this post:

Phillips…got his interviews and he got to frame the story, and although almost every word he said was wrong, he never thought his narrative could be disproved.

The only reason it was disproved (for those with eyes to see and ears to hear) was that someone else was videotaping the whole thing, not just the part he wanted to air. Almost certainly unbeknownst to Phillips, someone else had started recording long before Phillips moved into the crowd of boys.

But at the time he gave the CNN interview, he was still in a state of unawareness that a longer video existed and would ever come to light. So he could lie to his heart’s content and think himself immune from being discredited.

That’s Phillips, but what of CNN? The media operation has had quite a few days to comment on its own interview. Any self-respecting news organization worthy of the name ought to have done a great deal more to correct the impression made by Phillips’ words than CNN has. CNN made an attempt so half-hearted it’s almost laughable, with efforts such as this:

Since the [CNN] interview, the diocese in charge of the school has denounced the students’ actions, a lawmaker has defended them and the boy in the video, Nick Sandmann, has denied characterizations of his and his classmates’ behavior and said he was simply standing in front of Phillips to let him know he wouldn’t be baited into an altercation.

Also, several new videos have surfaced, including one showing the students engaging in a “Tomahawk chop,” mocking the Native Americans, and another showing a group of Hebrew Israelites hurling slurs and epithets at the teenagers both before Phillips arrived on the scene and after he left.

That’s it. That’s all I could find from CNN in the article that presents the interview transcript, all that CNN has to say there about the new videos which disprove nearly everything Phillips said in the interview, and also don’t show much from the boys that could be characterized as “mockery” of the Native Americans. Also, CNN’s description doesn’t even come close to describing the intensity and offensiveness of what was happening to the boys for a solid hour at the hands of the Black Israelites (and note also that CNN refers to them as “Hebrew Israelites”—probably the least common of the many names they go by, and a very misleading one at that).

This is how Phillips describes the Black Israelites in the CNN interview (a group he never names, but it’s clear he’s talking about them), as well as the Covington boys’ reactions to the Black Israelites:

…[T]here were some folks there that were expressing their (First Amendment) rights there, freedom of speech. … Then there was this young group of young students that came there and were offended by their speech, and it escalated into an ugly situation that I found myself in the middle of…

Oh, what I was witnessing was just hate? Racism? Well, hate. What I’m saying is that when these folks came there, these other folks were saying their piece, and these others they got offended with it because they were both just expressing their own views. And if it’s racism, that’s what it was because the folks that were having their moment there, they were saying things that I don’t know if I agreed with them or not, but some of it was educational, and it was truth, and it was history about religious views and ideologies, but these other folks, the young students, they couldn’t see it. They had one point of view, it seemed, and that was that their point of view was the only point of view that was worthwhile. And that’s now what I was feeling…

I didn’t feel that I could just stand there anymore and not do something. It looked like these young men were going to attack these guys. They were going to hurt them. They were going to hurt them because they didn’t like the color of their skin. They didn’t like their religious views. They were just here in front of the Lincoln — Lincoln is not my hero, but at the same time, there was this understanding that he brought the (Emancipation Proclamation) or freed the slaves, and here are American youth who are ready to, look like, lynch these guys. To be honest, they looked like they were going to lynch them. They were in this mob mentality.

That’s what I mean by an inversion of the truth. The longer video—the one Phillips never thought would surface—shows the situation to be quite the opposite. The verbal aggression was totally on the side of the Black Israelites—verbal attacks and bullying of the most vile and abusive (as well as racist) kind. It is a euphemism to describe what they said to the boys as mere “slurs and epithets” (as CNN did, in its weak attempt at a corrective).

And it was misleading for Phillips to describe the Black Israelites’ behavior this way: “some of it was educational, and it was truth, and it was history,” as well as viciously mendacious of Phillips to say that the Covington boys “were going to hurt [the Black Israelites] because they didn’t like the color of their skin…[or] their religious views,” and “to be honest” (often the biggest “tell” of all that a whopper of a lie is coming) that the boys “looked like they were going to lynch” the Black Israelites. An incredible and truly vile thing to say to a national news organization. Nothing even remotely like that was happening; at no point did the boys seem about to attack anyone, and there was nothing bad said by the boys about the color of anyone’s skin.

But CNN doesn’t appear to feel the need to correct anything about this.

Want a sample of these “religious views” of the Black Israelites? Robby Soave has some of it at Reason:

Far from engaging in racially motivated harassment, the group of mostly white, MAGA-hat-wearing male teenagers remained relatively calm and restrained despite being subjected to incessant racist, homophobic, and bigoted verbal abuse by members of the bizarre religious sect Black Hebrew Israelites, who were lurking nearby. The BHI has existed since the late 19th century, and is best describes as a black nationalist cult movement; its members believe they are descendants of the ancient Israelites, and often express condemnation of white people, Christians, and gays. DC-area Black Hebrews are known to spout particularly vile bigotry.

They call them crackers, faggots, and pedophiles. At the 1:20 mark (which comes after the Phillips incident) they call one of the few black students the n-word and tell him that his friends are going to murder him and steal his organs. At the 1:25 mark, they complain that “you give faggots rights,” which prompted booing from the students. Throughout the video they threaten the kids with violence, and attempt to goad them into attacking first. The students resisted these taunts admirably: They laughed at the hecklers, and they perform a few of their school’s sports cheers.

If you’re interested in watching the video, you can find it here. I looked at some of the comments to the video posted at YouTube, and I’m going to reproduce a few that I found especially interesting:

As a black man, I’m embarrassed by these “Hebrew Israelites.” MLK is rolling in his grave.?

This story couldn’t have been more wrong. No wonder people believe trump when he says fake news?

Lmao at CNN – a “this video shows a different side to story” ……you mean the TRUTH??

WHY ARENT THESE GUYS THE CENTER OF THE CONTROVERSY???

Hard to imagine a more hate filled diatribe than what these teens were subjected to. They handled it better than most kids would. The reporting on this is 100% wrong in the mainstream media. NPR now makes a reference to this video, but no mention of the extreme racist and homophobic tirade against these white kids. And they are just kids. It’s the “adults” who started the fracas and acted like children. I feel sorry for the kids that have been wrongly blamed, even by their own school, for anything here.?

This one is simple, and it just might be my personal favorite:

Man I gotta rethink how quick I was to hate those kids?

This one’s much longer.It’s from a young woman who seems to have originally bought much of Phillips’ story as filtered through the MSM. But she’s a thinker:

I’ve watched this entire 2 hour clip about 3 times all the way through. I wanted to make sure I had no bias’s that saw what they wanted to see. After finishing my third watch I honestly can’t find anything disrespectful about these kids. If anything, things I thought were disrespectful (chanting along to the drum beat) have totally changed with context. The boys disapproved of the guy saying faggots shouldn’t have rights, they yelled back when the guys yelled at the one black kid, they asked questions like “why did you call us clan members” or “no one cares” (in reference to Jesus being black). They started chanting when they got tired of the religious racist nuts preaching. Then Nathan comes over with his drum for whatever reason and the kids think he’s on their side so they start chanting along to the drum beat (a natural human instinct to dance or chant to a drum beat. It’s seen in all cultures at all time periods, very much like the natives do). Then another video shows the maga kid gesturing to his friend to not respond to the native yelling “go back to Europe”. I mean wtf. This is reminding me of reading “1984” in high school. It’s straight out of the 2+2=4 scene. My god. I’m scared for the future of people don’t even WANT to find the truth.?

Phillips isn’t just a liar, he’s an Orwellian liar. And if it weren’t for this longer video, he would have been successful in his lies. Even now, he’s been fairly successful. If you polled Americans, how many have seen the longer video or even know much about it? How many have read the truth about what happened?

And why is CNN so reluctant to have them know the truth? In this case, the truth reflects poorly on the left, CNN, the MSM in general, Phillips, and the Black Israelites. It reflects well on the teenaged boys from Covington.

We can’t have that, can we?

[NOTE: By the way, National Review has been pretty good on this aspect of the story. David French wrote about Phillips’ lies here, and Charles C. W. Cooke opines on the same theme here.

But it’s not just CNN that refuses to deal with the truth. Maybe I’ve missed it, but I’ve yet to see a single news outlet in the MSM deal with the magnitude of its errors (or its lies). Whether you believe they are errors or lies (or some combination of the two) depends on how you answer the “knaves or fools?” question regarding the MSM.

And in case you’re wondering, here are some examples of the tons of people who—thanks to the propaganda—cling ferociously to the original narrative.]

The Chinese economy

The New Neo Posted on by

I’m pretty sure that this change will have consequences for the world, but I can’t say I know what they will be:

A key driver behind China’s declining current account is that after having long been the world’s heavyweight saver and a huge buyer of foreign assets like Treasurys, the world’s most populous nation is now a big spender, and in early 2018, China got more of its growth from consumption than the U.S., the global king of consumer spending where some 70% of economic growth is due to consumer spending. And as China’s increasingly wealthy population spends more at home and abroad, its total trade surplus with the rest of the world has shriveled to a fraction of its former size.

In other words, China is rapidly becoming the next US.

This transformation of China into a consumption-driven economy has enormous implications for global capital markets, and impacts everyone from retirees investing in U.S. Treasurys to fund managers investing in emerging markets like Indonesia or India. It could, the WSJ notes, also eventually help ease some of the frictions between the U.S. and China.

Well, that very last bit would be good.

Defamation lawsuit, here we come: my hat is off to Attorney Robert Barnes

The New Neo Posted on by

It’s not a MAGA hat (I don’t own one and have no plans to), but my metaphorical hat is off to Robert Barnes, who has taken the Covington defamation case pro bono:

On Fox and Friends Wednesday morning, Barnes, who is representing the families at no cost, explained that because the kids are private citizens and minors, anything someone says about them that is false can be libel, according to the law. Rather than proving malice, “all you have to prove is negligence,” he said…

Barnes said he was representing the families in a possible class-action lawsuit pro bono because libel lawsuits are difficult for average citizens to bring as they are very expensive. “They cost between a quarter of a million and a million dollars in legal fees to bring,” he explained. “So I wanted to equalize the playing field. These are people who couldn’t afford to bring this claim on their own behalf. That’s why I offered my services for free because somebody needed to stop this from reoccurring.”

The attorney stated he was giving the the libelers 48 hours to correct and retract their smears.

“Everybody now is on 48-hour notice. So by Friday everybody needs to retract and correct any false statements they have issued about these kids. That includes any major member of the media, that includes any major celebrity, that includes anybody with a substantial social media platform. If you’ve said anything false about these kids, they are willing to extend you a 48-hour time period — a period of grace consistent with their Christian faith — for you to, through confession, get redemption and retract and correct and apologize.”

The lawyer warned that if libelers don’t do this by Friday, they may be “a defendant in a lawsuit because those lawsuits will start to occur next week.”

We’ll see what happens.

I don’t think mere removal is enough, although I’m not sure of the law on that. Barnes says “retract and correct and apologize,” but that might just be what the families want rather than a legal condition for dropping a suit against a particular person.

More:

Barnes told the Fox and Friends hosts that he is representing three different groups of families: the kids “who were at the Lincoln Memorial who have been libeled”; families of kids who have been in some of the photos and had false statements made about them based on those photos; and “alumni who feel that their entire school and everything associated with them has been libeled and they too want to seek legal remedy for these people who refuse to correct, retract or make any apology for their false statements.”

I’m all for it.

I think that too many people on Twitter forget that they’re not just playing some sort of verbal one-upmanship game in which the person being most clever and most outrageously nasty wins. They are bullying, defaming, and threatening real people, and teenagers at that.

The same people doing the bullying and threatening probably consider themselves part of the anti-bullying crowd, and don’t even recognize themselves as doing what they profess to hate. They need to learn that when you defame and threaten real people as part of an online mob, there are consequences.

Facecrime

The New Neo Posted on by

I’ve read Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four many times, but I haven’t opened it for a long long time. I recall a great many of his Newspeak terms—and I think his explanation of Newspeak’s nomenclature and aims is one of the most brilliant inventions of political literature and perhaps even literature—but I had forgotten this particular term until I was reminded of it yesterday.

The Orwell quote describing it:

It was terribly dangerous to let your thoughts wander when you were in any public place or within range of a telescreen. The smallest thing could give you away. A nervous tic, an unconscious look of anxiety, a habit of muttering to yourself—anything that carried with it the suggestion of abnormality, of having something to hide. In any case, to wear an improper expression on your face (to look incredulous when a victory was announced, for example) was itself a punishable offense. There was even a word for it in Newspeak: facecrime, it was called.

Facecrime. That’s the offense the howling Twitter mob accused 16-year-old Nicholas Sandmann of committing. The fact that these people were purposely misled by propagandists doesn’t excuse them, because even if he had been smirking at a Native American elder playing the drum in his face, what’s the enormous big deal that would justify physical threats against him and his family? The facts that later emerged utterly contradicted the original propagandist story, of course, but in many people’s minds Sandmann’s facecrime persists and remains an unconscionable outrage.

In Orwell’s novel, the government is the main enforcer of this extreme social conformity and need to control one’s visage at all times. But even in the novel, one’s friends, co-workers, family, and/or anyone in the public at large could report and denounce you. These days it’s not the government, it’s fellow citizens who are the main conduits for facecrime accusations. Youth will not protect you if you check off the wrong demographics—and I think hatcrime (that’s not a typo) could be added to Orwell’s lexicon.

Twitter is the perfect mechanism for public shaming and metaphorical stoning. Orwell didn’t quite foresee Twitter, but he was no less a genius for that.

[ADDENDUM at 2:32 PM: A few minutes after I published this piece, I went to National Review just to see what they were talking about there today. An article by Kyle Smith entitled “Hatcrime and Facecrime” immediately caught my eye, for obvious reasons.

I think it’s pretty clear that Kyle Smith hadn’t seen my post when he wrote his. I hadn’t seen his, either, when I wrote mine. As they say, “great minds…”. Some ideas are just too good (or perhaps too obvious?) not to be thought of by multiple people, I guess.]

One way to deal with Nancy Pelosi if you’re president

The New Neo Posted on by

[Scroll down for UPDATE]

Override what she says and take the high road as you do it:

President Trump told House Speaker Nancy Pelosi in a new letter Wednesday that he still plans to deliver next week’s scheduled State of the Union address from the House floor even though Pelosi urged him to delay the speech because of the government shutdown.

The president, in his letter, said there are “no security concerns” surrounding the event, in response to Pelosi raising that as a potential issue because of the partial shutdown.

Therefore, I will be honoring your invitation, and fulfilling my Constitutional duty, to deliver important information to the people and Congress of the United States of America regarding the State of our Union,” Trump wrote. “I look forward to seeing you on the evening on January 29th in the Chamber of the House of Representatives. It would be so very sad for our country if the State of the Union were not delivered on time, on schedule, and very importantly, on location!”

I didn’t think of that particular approach—but then again, I’m not Trump.

Next move, Pelosi. The article points out that “House and Senate still must approve a concurrent resolution approving the use of the chamber for the State of the Union.” Pelosi controls the House, so it seems to me that she still could block this. But it would look petty—except, of course, to Democrats and the MSM.

Trump has alternatives venues, of course, if he is denied by the House. I happen to think the alternatives are better, but he might disagree.

UPDATE 9 PM:

Pelosi answered no. Now Trump is mulling over an alternate venue.

I can’t imagine that Trump ever thought she’d say yes to the idea. I believe this little dosey doe was all just theater, and that his goal was to re-emphasize her pettiness. And no doubt he’s been considering alternate venues for quite some time now, in a place a lot more friendly and enthusiastic towards him than the House or the House chamber.

An update on Nathan Phillips and the Catholics

The New Neo Posted on by

It’s not easy to keep up with all of this. But it’s been reported by the Catholic News Agency that Native American (and non-Vietnam-vet) Nathan Phillips and his merry band of drummers had an even busier Washington weekend than had previously been thought:

While chanting and playing ceremonial drums, a group of Native American rights activists reportedly led by Nathan Phillips attempted Jan. 19 to enter Washington, D.C.’s Basilica of the National Shrine of the Immaculate Conception during a Saturday evening Mass.

The group of 20 demonstrators was stopped by shrine security as it tried to enter the church during its 5:15 pm Vigil Mass, according to a shrine security guard on duty during the Mass.

“It was really upsetting,” the guard told CNA.

“There were about twenty people trying to get in, we had to lock the doors and everything.”…

A source close to the shrine’s leadership corroborated the security guard’s account, telling CNA that during the Mass, Phillips and the group tried to enter the church while playing drums and chanting, and were prohibited from entering the building by security personnel, who locked the main basilica doors with the congregation still inside.

Just to give you the timeline, the incident with the Covington boys happened on Friday, the video went viral some time Saturday, and the attempted disruption of the Mass occurred late Saturday afternoon.

Phillips was just trying to do a bit of peace-making at the shrine, no doubt. And those nasty Catholics, disrespecting him by locking him out! Bigots!

There were a lot of visitors at the Mass because they had come from all over the country for the pro-life demonstration, as Phillips and his fellow-demonstrators almost certainly were quite aware.

The story is one of harassment, all right, but it isn’t Phillips who was harassed.

I’m still seeing tons of people who believe the original story about Phillips and the Covington teenagers, and are still spewing hatred towards the kids. After all, a lie gets halfway around the world before the truth has a chance to get its boots on.

And those boots seem to be hip-waders, sloshing through thick mud. Slow and arduous going.

[ADDENDUM: I’ve been meaning to put this story up somewhere, and I think this might just be the place. Phillips seems to be a serial victim of racist students he just happens to come across.]

This is the lesson to learn from all of this, if you haven’t learned it already

The New Neo Posted on by

I think of the Covington story and the Buzzfeed Cohen/Trump story as connected, even though their subject matters differ tremendously. The common meta-subject-matter of both, the lessons to learn from both, go like this:

(1) There is no limit to the degree to which the media will lie in order to hurt the right.

(2) It can start with a fringe-type of media source (usually reporting on something manufactured and/or distorted by a leftist activist unidentified as such in the report). Then the supposedly more reliable media, the MSM, will quickly pick up and run with it, with what you might call reckless disregard for the truth. This is not carelessness or accidental at all.

(3) If an exposure of the falsehood occurs and the truth finally comes out through some other conduit, there will be minimal or no apology or retraction from the original source or from the MSM. They will either double down or issue a fake and/or inadequate “apology,” often “apologizing” for some minor element they got wrong and leaving the thrust of the story and their errors intact.

(4) In the minds of most MSM readers and listeners, the story will therefore stand mostly as originally reported. Most readers probably won’t even catch any corrections that are issued, and the ones who do will either reject them or consider them of minimal import.

(5) Then without breaking stride, the MSM will go on to the next episode of the same game—because it works for them.

I finally noticed and comprehended this game about two years post-9/11—a process I’ve described in my “a mind is a difficult thing to change” series—and this was one of the main reasons for my political change.

The tactic is even more blatantly obvious now. But many people who self-describe as being on the right seem to remain blind to it. That’s one of the themes of this recent post of Ace’s, in which he quotes a Twitter user named davereaboi as writing the following (the “you” here is the supposedly conservative press):

People are furious that those of you who bought into it and couldn’t resist making knee-jerk Virtue Signaling condemnations have not yet learned about the nature of the enemy we’re fighting:

Activists are trained to set up these scenarios, the media runs with stories that are too good to check because they reinforce their biases. They do this on purpose. You just have to read Lefty activist literature. It’s all there, for decades. *Not knowing is your failure.*

That is the heart of the matter. How can intelligent people have been taken in by this? I really don’t know. It’s not just that they’re in the Beltway, or interested in virtue-signaling, although those things are part of it. At this point they seem incredibly stupid and destructive, or else only pretending to believe in what they say they believe.

At least if their apologies sounded sincere and complete I might give them the benefit of the doubt, even now. We all make mistakes. But to act this way over and over and over, with so little remorse and seemingly no learning at all, from people who are inclined to think themselves superior to the rest of us? No. Fools or knaves or both, take your pick.

That is why so much of the right’s ire in response to the Covington story has been directed at pundits supposedly on the right who fell for the lie. It’s sort of like an error in baseball, or an own-goal in soccer. Doesn’t that make fans much angrier than when the other team scores? We know what game the left plays. Why don’t all writers on the right know it, too?