Of all the Virginia officials in trouble, Justin Fairfax may be the one on the way out

The New Neo Posted on by

It’s hard to say what will happen politically in Virginia these days, there have been so many surprises lately. But it seems that of all the accused public officials in the state, it’s Lieutenant Governor Justin Fairfax who may be the one to go. Even the Democrats are asking him to resign, and yet when the news of Governor Northam’s youthful blackface escapades (or at least, a photo of someone’s escapade on his med school yearbook page) surfaced, it was widely held that Fairfax would be an excellent replacement.

But then a credible allegation (see this for my discussion of the word “credible”) of sexual assault surfaced against Fairfax. Now, “credible” doesn’t mean “true”—it merely means “possibly true.” But then a similar accusation against the lieutenant governor was made by another woman, and this one seems to have turned the tide against Fairfax:

The thing that makes the accusation of the second woman, Meredith Watson, especially strong is that she apparently wrote about it to a friend in an email dated 2016, long before the accusation by Fairfax’s other accuser Vanessa Tyson became public, and that they seem to be describing incidents that were similar. Here’s more about Watson’s email:

The statement also says Watson told her friends about the incident in a “series of emails and Facebook messages” that are in the firm’s possession. In one of those emails, obtained by The Daily Beast, Watson told a Duke alumni who invited her to a 2016 Fairfax fundraiser that Fairfax raped her…

“Justin raped me in college and I don’t want to hear anything about him,” Watson responded to the email on Oct. 25, 2016. “Please, please, please remove me from any future emails about him please.”

In Facebook messages also obtained by The Daily Beast, Watson sent someone a link to an article about Fairfax running for the state’s lieutenant governor spot in March 2017. “This is absolutely disgusting! This dude raped me,” she wrote.

Watson then went onto say that she wanted “to say something” because she thought he “shouldn’t be running for office but she didn’t know what to do. When the individual suggested she speak out, Watson expressed doubt.

“But let’s face it, rape accusations barely carry any weight” without a name attached, she wrote.

The firm, Smith Mullin, also claims they have corroborating statements from Watson’s former classmates.

I am not, and never have been, in the camp of “believe the woman.” And even now, it is possible that both of Fairfax’s accusers are lying, and that they had some sort of motive to lie to friends earlier. But an email with a date is evidence of a different order—it establishes the strong likelihood that Watson made the claim before she had ever heard Tyson’s claim—unless of course they knew each other and had been in communication in some way.

That latter sort of possibility is one of the reasons we ordinarily have trials to establish guilt or innocence. A story can seem airtight on the surface and yet fall apart on investigation. But in the court of public opinion—which is where this is being tried—the story of this particular accuser and the documentation behind it makes a much stronger case than the accusations against someone like Kavanaugh, for example, which were remarkably weak.

As I wrote back in 2014 in a more general discussion about evaluating such he-said/she-said accusations:

I don’t care how many women pile on with similar stories; it’s the quality and timing of their stories that matter. Yes, women (and men, and children) sometimes lie, and not all that infrequently either. They also often tell the truth. However, I would be more convinced it was the truth if the people telling these rape stories were coming forward before the other stories had been publicized.

Timing and documentation of that timing are of the utmost importance in evaluating such stories. And with the Fairfax accusations, we have something that many of the other cases lack: an early and documented second accuser unlikely to have been influenced by the first.

Does that mean that both accusers are telling the truth? No. They could both be lying, and it could be a coincidence that their stories seem similar. They could both be mistaken. Their memories could be flawed, or if not their memories then their perceptions at the time. They may not have communicated their reluctance for such sexual contact, even though they think they did.

As I indicated earlier, those are the sorts of questions lawyers could explore in a court, with many protections for the defendant. But I don’t think this will ever come to that, and in the absence of a full exploration of the evidence, I’d say it appears more likely than not that Fairfax committed these acts, although he strongly denies them. That opinion of mine rests almost entirely on the timing and documentation of Watson’s (the second accuser’s) accusations.

Is a border deal in the offing?

The New Neo Posted on by

This is being reported:

Democrats appear willing to agree to funding for some new fencing in targeted areas as well as upgrades to existing barriers, they told the Washington Examiner.

The deal is likely to cover far fewer miles than Trump wants, however, and the barriers will be far less robust than the steel slat wall Trump favors.

Shelby would not disclose whether Trump would agree to less than the $5.7 billion he has requested for border barriers, or a wall, as he calls it. But he hinted Trump may be willing to make a deal on price.

Blah blah blah. I don’t buy any of these reports; I’ll believe a deal when I see one. I really don’t see Trump caving as much as this report says, particularly on the issue of wall vs. fence.

Why on earth do the Democrats care whether it’s a wall or fence? Simple: they don’t, really. But since a wall was such a signature part of Trump’s campaign and SOTU promises, they are determined to deny it to him.

The Green New Deal and the left’s grand plan [Part I]

The New Neo Posted on by

[NOTE: This is such a huge topic that I’m splitting it into parts.]

There’s a lot of derision on the right about the Green New Deal. It goes something like this: it’s so stupid, and so against what the American people want, that it exposes the left to ridicule and will ultimately facilitate the re-election of Donald Trump.

Well, maybe. Maybe that will happen. But I have grave doubts, and I don’t think the GND is stupid. Yes, it may be stupid in the sense of violating our current knowledge about energy generation, or what is practical, as well as financial reality, and the like. But it’s not meant to make sense in that way; it’s meant to make political sense.

But how can that be, if most people can see through it? My answer is that I don’t think most people can see through it, and certainly not enough to make it a losing proposition for most Democratic candidates to hop on board.

But how can I say that? Isn’t it very very extreme, so extreme it will alienate people? For the answer, just do what I did: spend a few hours reading MSM sites and seeing reactions from Democrats. It’s an education in how the GND is being responded to, and why the Democratic candidates have all hopped aboard the extremist green social justice jobs for everyone train.

Last night I watched a clip of some liberal spokesperson or other being quizzed by a conservative as to what she agreed with in the details of the GND. “Its spirit” was all she could come up with, but for her it was enough. She seemed embarrassed when asked about particulars and couldn’t endorse any, but she pooh-poohed—almost ridiculed—the need for details.

I doubt there are many Democratic politicians able to defend many (if any) of the GND manifesto’s specific provisions. And yet many have endorsed it. Why is that? For example, Kamala Harris is all in; she is the proposal’s co-sponsor, and tweeted this after its release:

California senator Kamala Harris (D.) has signed on as a cosponsor of Green New Deal legislation unveiled on Thursday morning, writing in an email to supporters that climate change is an “existential threat to our country, our planet, and our future.”

Harris announced her support for the plan shortly after she launched her presidential run last month, but the details of the proposed federal government-led economic overhaul of the country were not released until Friday…

“Bold action takes bold leadership,” said the 2020 presidential contender, “and I’m grateful to Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez [D., N.Y.] and Senator Ed Markey [D., Mass.] for leading the charge on this critical resolution.”

Nancy Pelosi is no dummmy; she seemed on the one hand to look down on the GND, but on the other hand she apparently set the tone for the spokesperson I saw on the show (liking the spirit). Pelosi had stated this:

“Frankly, I haven’t seen it, but I do know it’s enthusiastic, and I welcome all the enthusiasm,” Pelosi told reporters, just hours before Green New Deal sponsors Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) and Sen. Ed Markey (D-MA) held their own press conference…

It will be one of several or maybe many suggestions that we receive,” Pelosi told Politico. “The green dream or whatever they call it, nobody knows what it is, but they’re for it right?”

See? She is playing both ends here, and AOC played her own part of the game quite well in response:

…I think it is a green dream. I don’t consider to be that a dismissive term,” she said. “Nancy Pelosi is a leader on climate, has always been a leader on climate, and I will not allow our caucus to be divided up by silly notions of whatever narrative. We are in this together.”

The article makes it clear that Pelosi wants some climate change legislation. My guess is that it’s just as I wrote yesterday—hers will seem mild compared to AOC’s. They are indeed in this together.

Since virtually all the Democratic candidates are on board with the GND, this should be used in 2020 by Republicans in the campaign against them. That’s obvious. So why are so many Democratic candidates doing it (and read this article for a refresher on how awful the GND is)?

They know their base will love it—especially young people, but more about that later. And Democrats are counting on the notion that most of the rest of the public will not be paying much attention to the details of the GND, or at least will like the “enthusiasm.”

I was very curious how on earth the MSM would spin this to make it sound plausible. I had little doubt that they would, however, because their goal has been to support the Democrats. I decided to read this New Yorker piece as an example, and I learned exactly what I wanted to know.

If you had read it without reading the Green New Deal text, you’d think the GND to be a rather moderate, ho-hum, slight extension of things that had gone before (ABC took a similar approach). You would have no idea of its lunacy, its extreme radicalism and sweep, and its utter impossibility of implementation without beggaring the country. And of course, most people will almost certainly not read the text of the Green New Deal; they will rely on the MSM to tell them what it really is, and the MSM will keep the focus soft and fuzzy and friendly.

From that article:

It is an even clearer sign than growing Democratic support for single-payer health care that the era of Clintonian triangulation is over—that the question leading Democrats are asking is not whether the Party should move left but how far left it should go.

The resolution is also in keeping with the Democratic Party’s longstanding strategy on climate—the Party has long assumed, probably correctly, that major climate action is unlikely unless addressing the crisis is woven securely into the Party’s economic agenda. A job guarantee, as radical as it seems, is an extension of the same logic that led the Obama Administration to tout the creation of green jobs.

The job guarantee is not some thing that was arbitrarily tacked on; it is integral and a way to sweeten the attraction to the average voter. Another big clue is here:

Of course, no bill they propose will be taken up unless Democrats win the White House in 2020, unseating a President who has claimed repeatedly that climate change is a hoax.

Got it? This GND initiative is a counter to Trump, that troglodyte non-believer in AGW. The GND is not meant to be serious legislation for now, but to burnish the Democrats’ reputation as caring about climate change and the Republicans’ reputation for not caring. And the Democrats are counting on just about no one—except the right, and the far left—to read what’s actually in the GND.

Meanwhile, think about this: the Democratic Party wins these days by appealing to blocs of voters who will vote nearly monolithically for Democrats. Just as one example, black voters. “Young people” are also a bloc that puts Democrats over the top in many races. And many many of today’s young people are terrified of AGW. They have been taught in school from early grades on that it is a dire problem staring us in the face, and that—as AOC has helpfully pointed out prior to releasing the GND—the planet is at risk in the next decade and something drastic must be done or the world is in dire peril. If a person believes that, and believes that science supports it, that person will almost certainly vote for people advocating extreme measures—particularly if that person is unaware of the science and math and history that make those measures very very dangerous as well as unlikely to succeed. The idea is that desperate measures require desperate defenses, and the Democrats are at least willing to take measures that the GOP will not.

Do not estimate the powerful appeal of this to many many people. The Democrats have no intention of passing anything like these proposals for now. The plan for now is to use it all for a cudgel in 2020 and gain more power, and then they can do just about anything they want.

It may not work, but it’s not stupid—not if your goal is power and control.

What the Green New Deal wants to eliminate: the nuclear power plant, and then the cow fart

The New Neo Posted on by

Or is it the other way around?

From OAC’s Green New Deal [emphasis mine]:

…[W]e are calling for a full transition off fossil fuels and zero greenhouse gases…we spell this out through a plan that calls for eliminating greenhouse gas emissions from every sector of the economy. Simply banning fossil fuels immediately won’t build the new economy to replace it – this is the plan to build that new economy and spells out how to do it technically. We do this through a huge mobilization to create the renewable energy economy as fast as possible. We set a goal to get to net-zero, rather than zero emissions, in 10 years because we aren’t sure that we’ll be able to fully get rid of farting cows and airplanes that fast, but we think we can ramp up renewable manufacturing and power production, retrofit every building in America, build the smart grid, overhaul transportation and agriculture, plant lots of trees and restore our ecosystem to get to net-zero… It’s unclear if we will be able to decommission every nuclear plant within 10 years, but the plan is to transition off of nuclear and all fossil fuels as soon as possible.

As many in the comments section here have pointed out, if they were really serious about this they would be pushing nuclear energy, because alternative sources could not supply the requisite amount of power. But the way the document reads, it seems there will be an attempt to get rid of many farting cows sooner rather than later, and the rest will be eliminated later on. The time frame is a bit unclear—as is just about everything about this extraordinary document—but war on farting cows has surely been declared.

Does AOC plan to give every cow in the US simethicone (I’m just asking, on behalf of a flatulent bovine friend)? Or is she planning to kill all the cows en masse, have a few last BBQ feasts, and call it a day on beef? Those who are lactose-intolerant, like me, might not care all that much about the end of milk, but she might lose the votes of cheeseheads in Wisconsin.

What’s more, AOC and her Green Deal partners don’t seem to even know all that much about cow farts, or at least they’re not fully up-to-date on them. It’s actually not cow farts that are the real methane-rich offenders, it’s cow burps. And no, I’m not being facetious; I wrote about the topic in this post. And here’s more on the subject.

The entire Green New Deal document is worth reading, by the way, for its almost-unhinged quality of unbridled enthusiasm, wild optimism, and complete lack of consideration of any physical and financial realities.

To give you a taste of the document’s flavor, here are some of the more wild-eyed quotes. It may give readers a warm fuzzy glow to contemplate such a dream, and then a feeling of deep dread about what it would entail and what the chances are of achieving it. Whether it’s a cynical ploy for power, or whether the authors actual believe it can and should be accomplished, it demonstrates rather perfectly what C. S. Lewis wrote:

Of all tyrannies a tyranny sincerely exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive. It may be better to live under robber barons than under omnipotent moral busybodies. The robber baron’s cruelty may sometimes sleep, his cupidity may at some point be satiated; but those who torment us for our own good will torment us without end for they do so with the approval of their own conscience.

Here are a few selected Green Deal quotes about what they intend and expect to accomplish:

Promote justice and equity by stopping current, preventing future, and repairing historic oppression of frontline and vulnerable communities

Totally overhaul transportation by massively expanding electric vehicle manufacturing, build charging stations everywhere, build out high-speed rail at a scale where air travel stops becoming necessary, createaffordable public transit available to all, with goal to replace every combustion-engine vehicle

Restore all our damaged and threatened ecosystems

Provide high-quality health care, housing, economic security, and cleanair, clean water, healthy food, and nature to all

Now, what could possibly go wrong?

A lot of people are ridiculing the manifesto. And it’s true that it reads like something from The Onion. I’ve poked some fun at it here, too, but I take its essence very seriously, and I think it’s an error not to do so. There are people—many people, in this country and elsewhere, a great many of them young adults—who believe these things are both possible and desirable, and can be achieved if only we have enough will and dedication, and fearless leaders to show the way.

The Green Deal manifesto may sound ridiculous to the majority of people at the moment. And, as I said earlier, the group responsible for it may have overplayed its hand for now. But—as commenter “physics guy” wrote earlier:

[AOC] is bringing to the national stage the “sustainability” movement which has been percolating on campuses for about 6-8 years.This movement seeks to advance all the progressive/socialist/Marxist agenda using as a core, the climate change scenario. It then expands “sustainability” to include not only environmental, but social ‘sustainability”. It claims that social justice cannot be accomplished without first fixing the environmental aspect. A key component is to eliminate all fossil fuel use and replace with solar and wind. Of course that would plunge the world into chaos, but these people don’t seem to care or understand that.

If it wasn’t AOC, it would have been some other person around her age that has been indoctrinated with this “sustainability” nonsense on campuses. As the left totally controls higher education, to see what they have planned in a few years just spend some time on college campuses. That’s where they are testing out all their ideas and strategies.

The Green New Deal is a test. It may be premature—in fact, it is premature, and its proponents are well aware of that. But it’s a way of appealing to the leftist base and getting the public used to the most extreme ideas of the movement. The less extreme ideas won’t seem so radical after that.

[ADDENDUM: I was just watching an interview with Mark Steyn (on Tucker Carlson) where he said, “I always take a flatulent cow on an airplane with me as an emotional support animal.”]

Democrats have big big plans for you

The New Neo Posted on by

The Democrats’ new election and campaign finance bill may have escaped your attention and gotten lost in the shuffle. But it deserves scrutiny:

Today [Feburary 6, that is], House Democrats are holding hearings on a monstrous, 571-page election- and campaign-finance-reform bill called the “For the People Act of 2019.” I can think of other, more accurate, names — like the “First Amendment Demolition Act,” or perhaps the “Federalism Repeal Act,” or maybe, most accurate of all, the “Constitutional Lawyers Enrichment Act,” because the passage of the law would trigger a full decade (at least) of litigation on numerous constitutional fronts.

Please read the whole thing. The gist of it is to bring elections under federal control rather than state, but there’s much more. The Orwellian title is a nice touch, too.

But the Democrats, particularly their growing-ever-more-large-and-extreme leftist wing (seemingly headed by freshman AOC), have many more plans for all of us some day. That day is not today—the Green New Deal probably would not even pass in the House right now, and of course the Republican-controlled Senate would not approve. But that Republican majority only rests on a few senators and could easily change in 2020. And as an example of the far left wishlist, here’s part of the Green New Deal:

This morning, Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez released an overview of her “Green New Deal” which threatens “a massive transformation of our society.”

Below are the details of the proposal…

“Upgrade or replace every building in US for state-of-the-art energy efficiency.”…

The Green New Deal is “a 10-year plan to mobilize every aspect of American society at a scale not seen since World War 2 to achieve net-zero greenhouse gas emissions.”

Plans to ban nuclear energy within 10 years if possible.

“It’s unclear if we will be able to decommission every nuclear plant within 10 years, but the plan is to transition off of nuclear and all fossil fuels as soon as possible.”…

“Build out highspeed rail at a scale where air travel stops becoming necessary”…

“Ensure that all GND jobs are union jobs that pay prevailing wages and hire local.”…

Ocasio-Cortez doesn’t provide any insight into how the trillions of dollars in spending will be paid for other than claiming, “The Federal Reserve can extend credit to power these projects and investments and new public banks can be created to extend credit”.

Bus as Ocasio-Cortez says, “the question isn’t how will we pay for it, but what will we do with our new shared prosperity”.

More at the link.

It’s almost humorous, isn’t it? Like a child’s fantasy. But OAC and her colleagues on the far left are no children, and they are very serious about what they want. As I wrote yesterday, they take the long view. One of the many things going on here is that what sounds far-fetched and ridiculous today can become mainstream tomorrow, as this group knows. They put out extreme ideas that they know have no chance of passing, in order to accustom the public to these ideas and desensitize people, particularly young people who might be most attracted to them and least likely to think about the expense. It’s a political version of John Lennon’s “Imagine.” But this is in deadly earnest.

If you think you already know about all the weird things in Virginia politics lately—well, think again

The New Neo Posted on by

Just to recap—Democrats Northam and Fairfax and Herring—the governor and the first and second in line to replace him—are all in a heap of trouble. But next in line is a Republican who is House Speaker, Kirk Cox.

But here’s the additional fact (some of you may already know this, but I certainly didn’t) via Chris Cillizza:

…[The Democratic Party of Virginia] has been ascendant in recent years — having held the governorship for all but four years since 2001 and now controlling both of the state’s US Senate seats and seven of the state’s 11 congressional districts…

Cox is speaker solely because Republican David Yancey won a state House seat in early 2018 when his name was picked out of a bowl. Yes, this really happened! (The race was tied. If Yancey had lost the random drawing, the state House would have been split 50-50.)

You can read about it here. 2018 was a very very good year for the state Democrats in Virginia:

Prior to the Nov. 7 election, Republicans had a 66-34 majority in the House, but Democrats flipped 15 GOP-held seats while winning statewide races for governor, lieutenant governor and attorney general.

Here’s the story of how it came to a drawing for the tiebreaker:

[Republican] Yancey held a 10-vote lead over [his Democratic opponent] Simonds in unofficial results tallied on election night, but the Dec. 19 recount showed Simonds squeaking out a one-vote win. Republicans appeared to concede the seat but went into a final court hearing Dec. 20 armed with a surprise letter from a Yancey-aligned recount official suggesting a ballot that had been discarded should have been counted for Yancey. On the ballot in question, the voter filled in bubbles for both Simonds and Yancey but drew a line through Simonds’ bubble.

Simonds’ lawyers argued the ballot was an impermissible overvote and should be tossed out because the voter’s intentions weren’t clear. The judges sided with Yancey, saying the ballot met the criteria for an exception that allows voters to scratch out erroneous votes to clarify their choice.

And that, folks, could be the thing that ultimately gives Virginia a Republican governor. I very much doubt it, though, because I don’t think all three of the Democrats will resign. But what a long strange trip it’s been in Virginia, and not over yet.

Understanding evil

The New Neo Posted on by

[NOTE: This is a slightly-edited repeat of a post first published in 2007. I came across it yesterday when responding to a comment, and I though it might bear repeating.]

We may not be able to define evil, but most of us think we know it when we see it.

Unfortunately, that leads to equations such as Bush=Hitler and Trump=Hitler, or the bumper sticker I saw on a car that said, “War is just terrorism with a bigger budget.”

And it also leads to the false notion that we can truly understand the genesis of evil, when sometimes it’s hard enough to simply recognize it, and to deal with it in an appropriate and timely fashion.

Hannah Arendt caused a hue and cry when she watched the Adolf Eichmann trial and described the defendant’s demeanor as showing “the banality of evil” (scroll down to #6, here). Suzanne Field’s piece on evil [the article linked to has disappeared now, unfortunately], in Real Clear Politics, refers back to Arendt and describes instead what Field calls the “frivolity” of evil. Although I think “frivolity” is a poor choice of words, Field is making a good point nevertheless:

The devil wears many disguises, and one of them is the appearance of normality, perhaps the most dangerous phenomenon of all, because it’s a disguise unto itself.

Evil is real, but evildoers are all too human. In the photograph we know of him, Mohammad Atta’s eyes may look as though all human kindness had been scooped out of him, but his family probably didn’t see him that way—although the Portland Maine employee who watched him go by and onto that airplane on that fatal day said that he looked like a “walking corpse.”

Hitler had a strange look to us, but the German people found him highly charismatic and appealing. Ahmadinejad, as Fields points out, has no evil aura:

His clowning, his weaving, his bobbing, his smiling on the podium at Columbia University lent an air of normality to his lies and deceitfulness. He looked silly at times, but he didn’t frighten anyone with his stage presence.

Our wish for the mark of Cain, or cloven hooves, or some other clear sign of evil originates in the fact that it is only by their works that we know them, and by then it can be too late.

Of course, evil is sometimes telegraphed way ahead of time by words, and this is true in the case of Hitler and Ahmadinejad. Why are these words so often ignored by so many?

It’s easy to say it’s all just bluster. It’s easy to think we are too powerful to be seriously threatened by these little people who sound so crazy. Those who made that mistake with Hitler lived to regret it.

But one of the most fundamental errors people make when judging evil is to think we understand it, when we don’t. The fact that Hitler was most definitely a human being leads us to think that if we knew enough facts about him, we could explain the etiology of his evil.

But Hitler’s evil seems to have been much more than the sum of his parts—the illegitimacy, the lousy childhood, the failed art career, the anger at Germany’s WWI defeat. Try as one might—and many have tried—Hitler’s evil can be described and detailed but never understood nor, ultimately, explained.

The other fundamental error people make when judging evil is thinking it is less evil than it actually is, and more amenable to persuasion, argument, or kindness. Because those who do evil are human, we think they are subject to the same fears and doubts, loves and anxieties, concerns and scruples, as the rest of us. Perhaps when they were children they were, although in the cases of sociopaths and psychopaths the notion is that they were born lacking something we tend to call a conscience. At any rate, by the time we know about them, something quite unusual seems to be going on in their psyches.

I think of the example of Stalin who said, on hearing that his son had tried to commit suicide but had only managed to shoot himself in the stomach and live, “He can’t even shoot straight.”

People such as Stalin or Hitler or Ahmadinejad or Saddam Hussein are about power. That is the coin of their realm, and power is their mother tongue, even though they can learn to speak secondary languages in order to give the appearance of reasonableness. Do not forget that it is a facade, and do not believe that you know them. As Field points out about Ahmadinejad:

We may think he was humiliated by the hostility he confronted at Columbia, but maybe he, like Hitler, understands how to play it out to his advantage against the gullible, the feckless and the frightened.

Shakespeare, who may have understood human nature as well as anyone on earth and could speak about it better than anyone on earth, had something to say about all of this, of course. And so I’ll close with his words:

One can smile and smile and be a villain.

Pelosi isn’t just worried about Trump: she’s watching her left flank: the Justice Democrats

The New Neo Posted on by

Now, I don’t how far to the left Nancy Pelosi really is. Probably much further than she lets on. But my guess is that she’s not too happy about the radical wing of the Democratic Party, the one whose members stayed seated last night when President Trump said in his SOTU address that the US will never become a Socialist country.

They have a name, too: Justice Democrats. It’s the latest euphemism, I guess, because too much of the American public may have finally caught on to what “progressive” actually means. But who can be against progress and justice, right?

The Justice Democrats aren’t fooling around. And they’re not bothered by many of the considerations that dog their more moderate colleagues. The Justice Democrats (can we call them JDs for short?) must feel the time is right to lay at least a few of their cards on the table and to oppose the party members they call “radical conservatives.”

We know the name of the photogenic Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, but some of the others are quite obscure so far—and by “others” I include those behind her rise. From the article:

“I am talking about the radical conservatives in the Democratic Party,” said Saikat Chakrabarti [AOC’s chief of staff]. “That’s who we need to counter. It’s the same across any number of issues—pay-as-you-go, free college, “Medicare for all.” These are all enormously popular in the party, but they don’t pass because of the radical conservatives who are holding the party hostage.”

Not long ago, this would have been an outlier position even among American liberals. Today, it’s the organizing principle of a newly empowered segment of the Democratic Party, one with a foothold in the new Congress…

Although it’s Ocasio-Cortez who gets all the headlines, she arguably wouldn’t be in Congress in the first place without the group Chakrabarti founded: Justice Democrats, a new, central player in the ongoing war for the soul of the Democratic Party. It was the Justice Democrats who recruited her in a quixotic campaign early on, providing a neophyte candidate with enough infrastructure to take down a party leader. And it is the Justice Democrats who see Ocasio-Cortez as just the opening act in an astonishingly ambitious plan to do nothing less than re-imagine liberal politics in America—and do it by whatever means necessary.

If that requires knocking out well-known elected officials and replacing them with more radical newcomers, so be it. And if it ends up ripping apart the Democratic Party in the process—well, that might be the idea.

“There is going to be a war within the party. We are going to lean into it,” said Waleed Shahid, the group’s spokesman.

Here’s an article by Shahid that maps out the plan. This group means business. I suggest you read it.

Will they overplay their hand? I hope so, but I am not the least bit sure that will be the case. The ground has been prepared for them in so many ways, particularly the Gramscian march through education.

[ADDENDUM: AOC is quite popular in the Democratic Party, particularly among the young. See this.]

[ADDENDUM II: Roger Simon writes on a related subject.]

More blackface trouble in Virginia

The New Neo Posted on by

The Democratic AG Mark Herring of Virginia, who is third in line for the governorship (first the embattled governor Northam, then the accused lieutenant governor Fairfax, and next AG Herring), admits he wore blackface at a college party in 1980.

“In 1980, when I was a 19-year-old undergraduate in college, some friends suggested we attend a party dressed like rappers we listened to at the time, like Kurtis Blow, and perform a song,” Herring said. “It sounds ridiculous even now writing it. But because of our ignorance and glib attitudes – and because we did not have an appreciation for the experiences and perspectives of others – we dressed up and put on wigs and brown makeup.”

Said Herring, “This was a onetime occurrence and I accept full responsibility for my conduct.”

A veritable blackface epidemic.

I don’t think anyone is going to resign at this point; there are too many of them, and apparently the person next in line for the governorship is the Republican Speaker, Kirk Cox. Can’t have that.

Nor do I think any of them should resign. Dressing up in this way close to forty years ago for a college costume party—when people weren’t all that “woke” about PC implications—does not a racist make. If a person’s a racist, you have to come up with something a lot more recent and considerably more meaningful and purposeful (unless, of course, it’s about a Republican like George Allen, whose supposed offense, although new at the time of the controversy, was almost certainly unintentional).

The whole thing sent me on a trip down memory lane. I’m older than all these gentlemen, and I went to college back in a time when racism was real racism: overt and unmistakable. The civil rights movement had already made its major gains, but socially it was still quite usual for fraternities and sororities to be all-white. As a matter of fact, it wasn’t at all unusual for Jews to not be allowed into most fraternities and sororities either (interestingly, at the college I attended, it was only the Jewish fraternities and sororities that had some black members).

And yet I have zero recollection of anyone ever wearing blackface. To check, I took a look at one of my old yearbooks this morning. Many many photos of drunken party revels, as well as costumes (Hawaiian, Lederhosen, Vikings) but no blackface whatsoever. It wouldn’t have been considered to be in good taste even then, I think; I certainly never considered it to be.

But the 1980s seems to have had a spate of accusations of this sort of thing at college campuses; see this, for example, from the 1989 NY Times:

The incidents began in the spring of 1986, when the University of Wisconsin’s chapter of Kappa Sigma fraternity held a party featuring a ”Harlem room.” Watermelon and fried chicken were served in the room, which had trash on the floor and graffiti on the walls. Members wore Afro wigs and blackface makeup.

About a year later, the Phi Gamma Delta fraternity held a ”Fiji Island” party that displayed a caricature of a black man with a bone through his nose. And during last fall’s semester, the Zeta Beta Tau fraternity held a mock slave auction in which members wore Afro wigs and blackface during several skits.

That seems a lot worse than anything the Virginia politicians did. Are we now going to discover who attended, and hound them out of their jobs? I wouldn’t put it past the left, just to show how righteous they are, and even if it turns out that Democrats are the ones implicated.

[NOTE: By the way, for what it’s worth, I do remember Fiji Island parties. Pretty wild stuff, but I don’t recall any blackface. Also, to be pedantic, that “black man with a bone through his nose” would have been a Melanisian, technically speaking.]

State of the Union thread

The New Neo Posted on by

Here we go.

“Hoping we will govern not as two parties, but as one nation.” The Democrats stand late, but they stand.

What is the chance of that actually happening? Close to zero, I’d say.

Later Trump announces Buzz Aldrin—who salutes, wearing a big American flag tie.

The big theme so far is compromise. Alexandria Ocasion-Cortez, looking glum, stays seated.

Many (most? all? I’m not sure) of the Democratic women are dressed in white, in some pretense of victimhood:

“Today we stand together wearing white in solidarity with the women of the suffrage movement who refused to take no for an answer,” said Representative Brenda Lawrence, who is also the leader of the Democratic Women’s Working Group. “To an administration that has closed its eyes to women, we will be seen.”

Trump makes a clever ad lib right before saying that we have more women in Congress than ever before. Addressing the Democratic side (who were standing for a previous comment about women, but are starting to sit down), Trump says something like, “Don’t sit down yet, you’ll like this one, too.”

Those white outfits look kind of creepy and cultlike. And white is not a flattering color for most people. Too stark.

Absolutely adorable little girl, cancer survivor. Everybody claps with sincere enthusiasm this time.

Trump reminds us about how things are seemingly looking up regarding North Korea. That’s something easy to forget; like the dog that didn’t bark.

Ringing endorsement of liberty vs. socialism. Camera goes to Bernie, who has a poker face.

Very moving tribute to a Holocaust survivor and one of the American soldiers who helped to liberate the camp, sitting next to each other tonight.

In sum, I think it was an exceptionally clever speech, very well-delivered. The emphasis on unity and the things he wants to accomplish that Democrats could and should approve of made them look small if they didn’t stand up and applaud. Sometimes they stood, and sometimes they didn’t.

My guess is that it also is a better speech—and probably a different speech—than he would have delivered if it hadn’t been postponed till now.

Probably won’t change a single mind; certainly not many. So many people are set in stone. But it’s the best SOTU speech I can recall, and a strategic one as well. I usually start watching the SOTU speeches, but I usually can only last a few minutes before incredible boredom sets in. This was great theater, among other things, because it put the Democrats in the really interesting position of having to applaud—and then applaud again—a man they hate, or else look like sour America-hating fools.

NY’s Museum of Modern Art is getting a PC makeover

The New Neo Posted on by

This news may not be of any interest to you, but it’s of interest to me, because of the fondness I bear in my heart for the old MoMA, the one that existed before I was aware it even had the nickname “MoMA.” I went there as a young child and teenager, and it was a magical place, full of bright white walls and colorful—sometimes familiar and famous—modern paintings.

In the late 50s and the 60s, the time I’m talking about, the paintings there were indeed rather new, even the old ones such as impressionists—“new” compared to now, anyway. And they were the paintings and sculptures one learned about in classes about modern art, the modern art canon, as it were. Who determined what was included in this canon? Why, art historians, and to a certain extent the art market as it later developed (which was hardly independent of art historians and often had a built-in time lag; think of the struggling finances of Van Gogh, for example).

Who decides these things now? It’s still art historians, curators, and the like, I suppose. But now PC considerations are enormous in the art world, as in so many other arenas. So this is what MoMA (which recently got an absolutely huge influx of funds from donors) is planning:

As the Museum of Modern Art begins the final stage of its $400 million overhaul, it will close for four months this summer and autumn to reconfigure its galleries, rehang the entire collection and rethink the way that the story of modern and contemporary art is presented to the public.

The Picassos and van Goghs will still be there, but the 40,000 square feet of additional space will allow MoMA to focus new attention on works by women, Latinos, Asians, African-Americans and other overlooked artists like Shigeru Onishi, a Japanese experimental photographer, or Hervé Télémaque, a Haitian-born painter who is now 81.

If the comments to the article are any indication, a lot of people are unhappy about it, although some are pleased. My opinion? I haven’t been to that museum in many moons, and the last time I was there (about 15 years ago?) it was very crowded and filled with people taking cellphone photos of the famous pictures of their choice. I remember thinking that the whole experience was a falling-off from the memories of my youth, but I wasn’t really sure why and I didn’t spend all that much time there.

But “modern art” obviously didn’t stop with the 50s and 60s, so the museum probably needs to keep pace with the last few decades to be “modern” (otherwise it would need to rename itself). Whether “modern” in that sense is “good” is another story. I mostly detest what I know of most recent art, whether it be from the West or any other place on earth, although I must say that, with what I know of recent art in the West, recent art in other countries might actually be better on the whole.

I am largely unfamiliar with modern art around the world today, but my guess is that a lot of it might follow the obscure and sometimes repellent characteristics of recent art in the West. My strong impression of the latter is that most people do not go to look at it at all, and if they do it’s not with any joy.

MoMA is also planning to disperse this art around and sprinkle it into and among the older works. At least, I think that’s what this means:

Three floors of exhibition space will retain a spine of chronology, but the museum will now mix media, juxtaposing painting, sculpture, architecture, design, photography, performance, film and works on paper.

“A new generation of curators is discovering the richness of what is in our collection, and there is great work being made around the world that we need to pay attention to,” said Glenn D. Lowry, director of the museum. “It means that the usual gets supplanted now by the unexpected.”

Sounds like a jumbled mess to me. But I’m willing to wait and see; it could surprise me.

I’ve visited other museums in recent years and noticed how much PC thought has taken over, not necessarily in the exhibits (although that has happened, as well) but in the text that accompanies them. Same for zoos, by the way. It’s all about the progressive message.