1954: an attack of political violence that few remember

The New Neo Posted on by

It happened in 1954, which isn’t all that long ago. But it might as well have been hundreds of years ago, because I doubt most Americans are aware of it. I’m pretty sure that if you were to stop 100 people on the street and ask them about it, none or few would have a clue what you were talking about.

So, what am I talking about? The Puerto Rican independence advocates who shot up the House of Representatives, wounding five members of the House, one seriously.

This happened during the “peaceful” 1950s:

When Lebrón’s group reached the visitor’s gallery above the House chamber, they sat while the representatives discussed the Mexican economy and issues of immigration. After Lebrón gave the order, the group quickly recited the Lord’s Prayer. She stood up and shouted, “¡Viva Puerto Rico libre!” (approximately, “Long live a free Puerto Rico!”) and unfurled the flag of Puerto Rico. The group opened fire with semi-automatic pistols directed toward the Representatives below.

Five representatives were shot in the attack. The wounded lawmakers were Alvin M. Bentley (R-Michigan), who took a bullet to the chest, Clifford Davis (D-Tennessee), who was shot in the leg, Ben F. Jensen (R-Iowa), who was shot in the back, as well as George Hyde Fallon (D-Maryland) and Kenneth A. Roberts (D-Alabama). House pages helped carry Alvin Bentley off the House floor. The representatives were treated and recovered.

Lebrón said she fired her shots at the ceiling, while Figueroa’s pistol jammed. Some 30 shots were fired (mostly by Cancel, according to his account), wounding five lawmakers. Upon being arrested, Lebrón yelled, “I did not come to kill anyone, I came to die for Puerto Rico!”

Lebron, by the way, was a woman.

The shooters were tried in the US and given lengthy sentences that were essentially life imprisonment. But guess what? Until I read it while doing research for this post, I had forgotten this little detail (if indeed I ever knew it):

Figueroa Cordero was released in 1978. One year later, in 1979, President Jimmy Carter pardoned the remaining Nationalists. Some analysts said this was in exchange for Fidel Castro’s release of several American CIA agents being held in Cuba on espionage charges, but the US said that was not the case. The Nationalists were received in Puerto Rico with a heroes’ welcome from roughly 5,000 people at San Juan International Airport

Good old Jimmy Carter.

Here’s Lolita Lebron’s 2010 obituary. You can see from the photo that she was quite the looker:

The former teenage beauty queen may have been a “terrorist” to most Americans, but she became an almost mythical hero, a kind of Joan of Arc, to many Puerto Ricans both on her native island and in their large New York community. Some, however, felt such violence was a step too far. Others compared her to legendary South American revolutionaries such as Mexico’s Emiliano Zapata and Pancho Villa or later to the Argentine-born hero of the Cuban revolution, Che Guevara. Stylised Che-style portraits of Lebrón began appearing in New York galleries and Che himself said he had been inspired by the gun-toting lady in the silk scarf, dangly earrings, bright lipstick and high heels…

After the Puerto Ricans were freed on 10 September 1979, they were feted as heroes during a tour of Puerto Rican communities in New York and Chicago. They were welcomed by tumultuous crowds, with banners proclaiming “Welcome Lolita!” when they flew into the Puerto Rican capital, San Juan. For the rest of her life, saying she did not regret her action but had renounced violence, Lebrón was known respectfully by her compatriots as Doña Lolita.

I thought about this incident during the recent Kavanaugh hearings, which featured many disruptions from the gallery and the need to escort some of the protestors out. At least we seem to have metal detectors and other protection now; I doubt a group could get in with semi-automatic pistols anymore. But I don’t doubt that there are some people who’d dearly love to (and they’re most likely not Puerto Ricans these days, unlike 1954), and I don’t doubt that they might find some creative way to outwit security and wreak havoc.

Trump the knuckleballer

The New Neo Posted on by

Victor Davis Hanson knows his classics, and the title of his latest article, “The Origins of Progressive Agony,” contains a word—agony—that English speakers usually take to mean “intense pain or suffering.” That is its first definition, but its second comes more directly from its Greek root, agon, a word that means “struggle or contest.”

Hanson’s essay is well worth reading in its entirety; a summary hardly does it justice. I believe he intends “agony” in both its meanings, suffering and contest, and I believe it is the correct word for what the left is going through right now. It is by no means clear who will win this struggle, long term.

Here’s Hanson’s description of what happened right after Trump won in November of 2016:

Progressives soon woke up to the reality that without power they were unable to stop Trump, and so they embraced any desperate means necessary to trap the ogre. The effort proved as frenzied as it was impotent: boycotting the inauguration, suing over state voting machines, using the courts to stymie Trump appointments and executive orders, appealing to the emoluments clause and the 25th Amendment of the Constitution, and winking and nodding at the assassination chic of celebrities and politicos such as Johnny Depp, Peter Fonda, Kathy Griffith, Madonna, Robert de Niro, Snoop Dogg, and a host of others. The many methods to subvert Trump’s presidency or fantasize about his gory death were as varied as the number of faux-accusers who would come out of the woodwork to smear Brett Kavanaugh. And the result was eerily the same: the more the impotent frenzy, the more it discredited its source.

It was a sort of boomerang situation, in which the child’s traditional taunt “bounces off me and sticks to you” seemed to come true over and over. The left kept thinking it had driven a stake through the vampire’s heart, only to find that it had missed the mark.

Blacks Lives Matter, Antifa, and #MeToo were all in a sense weaponized to do what elections had not. Finally, in exasperation, Democrats have begun demonizing the Electoral College itself, which has gone from the legal basis of Obama’s treasured “blue wall” to a relic of old, white male Founders who supposedly favored rural hicks over the better people of the cities. Progressives now damn the idea of a nine-person Supreme Court and mysteriously praise the discredited, hare-brained scheme of FDR to pack the court with progressive toady judges.

This is not new. The left only likes any institution as long as they see it as benefiting them. FDR’s original court-packing scheme was in the furtherance of progressive politics, so it is no surprise that the current-day left would be in favor of it. But they’d be against it if the right were proposing it, of course. It’s purely situational.

It is also no coincidence that Democrats are called “Democrats” and Republicans “Republicans.” The Electoral College and the Senate are nods to the fact that the US is a republic rather than a pure democracy. The House is much closer to a democratic legislative body than the Senate, because although the House is representative, those representatives reflect population differences far more closly than the Senate (which totally ignores population and only reflects state entities) and the Electoral College (a sort of middle way between the two). One of the most profoundly frustrating elements of the 2016 presidential election for Democrats was the fact that Hillary actually did win the popular vote, so it makes perfect sense that Democrats would take out their ire on the Electoral College that had foiled them. So near and yet so far!

Another reason for Democrats’ agony is the nature of the contest against an opponent such as Trump. It’s a lesson the Republicans struggled with, too, during the 2016 primary season. Trump had a lot of rivals in the GOP during the primary vying for the nomination, and if you watched closely you saw that all of them, despite their brains and previous power and support, were caught flat-footed by his idiosyncratic approach. They simply didn’t know what to do with him. Conventional debate and conventional means didn’t seem to work; they’d never really seen anything like him in politics before, and they didn’t know how to meet his tactics and win.

During the primaries, Trump’s Republican opponents never quite figured out how to wrestle this particular alligator. In the time since he’s been president, some of the Republican NeverTrumpers are still going at it and failing, although most have given up the agon and praised him, albeit sometimes reluctantly. Now it’s the Democrats who are engaged in a struggle with this strange opponent, continually thinking “Gotcha!!” and continually being bested.

Which brings me to another metaphor, appropriate for this time of year: Trump as knuckleballer. The knuckleball pitcher confounds batters with the zaniness of the ball’s behavior once it leaves his hand. It doesn’t require extreme force but it’s not an easy pitch to throw and it’s a very difficult one to control. But it can make ordinarily good hitters look bad; they often just can’t figure out what’s going on, and they end up looking silly when they swing at a knuckler.

Here’s Wiki on the subject:

A knuckleball or knuckler is a baseball pitch thrown to minimize the spin of the ball in flight, causing an erratic, unpredictable motion. The air flow over a seam of the ball causes the ball to transition from laminar to turbulent flow. This transition adds a deflecting force on the side of the baseball. This makes the pitch difficult for batters to hit, but also difficult for pitchers to control and catchers to catch; umpires are challenged as well, as the ball’s irregular motion through the air makes it harder to call balls and strikes.

Long ago I read the memoir of prominent knuckleball pitcher Jim Bouton, and later as a Red Sox fan I watched many a game pitched by knuckleballer Tim Wakefield:

And here’s a knuckleball in slow motion:

Michael Avenatti…

The New Neo Posted on by

…is having a bad month:

On Monday, a federal district court judge in California ruled to dismiss Stormy Daniels’ defamation lawsuit against President Donald Trump…

Trump lawyer Charles Harder released a statement claiming that with the lawsuit’s dismissal, the president is entitled to compensation for his legal fees.

Fall 2018, Kancamagus Highway

The New Neo Posted on by

No year is the same as any other year, but this fall the New England foliage has been kind of odd. Somewhat muted, for one thing. And we’ve had lots of rain, which always means that the early, more brilliant colors—the scarlets and oranges—drop prematurely.

But it’s always beautiful along the Kancamagus Highway in northern New Hampshire. Here are some of this year’s photos. I won’t say it’s impossible to take a bad picture there, but you have to try really really really hard to accomplish it:

Just for comparison, here are a few I took in 2015 along the same spot. That was an especially brilliant year for color; I think you can see what I mean about the reds and oranges:

Elizabeth Warren’s DNA results

The New Neo Posted on by

Elizabeth Warren’s claim to have Native American ancestry hasn’t been a question I’ve dealt with on this blog except very briefly, in passing. I’ve left that to others, in particular Legal Insurrection, which has gone into it many times in some detail.

Well, now Warren has released a summary of the results of a DNA test, and Professor Jacobson at LI has covered that, too:

Elizabeth Warren is not Native American. Her ancestry has been traced by Cherokee genealogists back to the early 1800s, as far back as there are records, and there are no Native American ancestors…

If Warren can show she truly is a descendant of the original peoples of North America via a DNA test, that’s the start, not the end. She will not have proven she was justified in claiming Native American status for employment (and career advancement) purposes. She still would have to prove the second part of the test, that she maintained cultural identification through tribal affiliation or community recognition.

…I’ve also argued that the focus on a DNA test was a mistake, because Warren likely either had taken or would take a DNA test that would show some miniscule markers from original North American peoples, and she would then declare she was right.

And so it has come to pass. The Boston Globe, Warren’s go-to outlet, reports on a DNA test Warren took. It does not show she is Native American. It shows “strong evidence” of a single ancestor going back 6-10 generations. It’s a very thin analysis, and does not support the headlines being generated that Warren is Native American.

(added) Yet the Globe ran a headline in the print edition (unlike the online edition) suggesting the results proved Warren’s ancestry. Warren has tweeted that print edition headline—“Warren Reveals Test Confirming Ancestry”…

Much more at the link.

The gist of the actual findings is that Warren’s native American ancestry is less than that of the average American of European origin, and probably somewhere between a possible high of 3% to a low of under 1%. Here’s a chart from this site explaining what a 6th generation back percentage would be; 6th generation is the most recent Native American ancestor Warren might have according to her published results, and it could be as far back as 10th generation.

Here’s the chart:

To put that in further perspective, most non-African people have more Neanderthal ancestry than 1%, and some have more than 3%. In fact, non-African people have a Neanderthal contribution that is “usually somewhere between 1 and 4 percent.”

In addition, here’s what percentages as low as Warren’s generally mean:

In general, DNA showing ethnicity below about 5% is viewed as somewhat questionable and below 2% is often considered to be “noise.”

So Warren’s tests indicate no meaningful Native American ancestry to speak of at all—basically, it’s meaningless noise, and her Native American heritage could easily be even less than that of the average American of European origin, rather than more. And yet she’s trumpeting it, as is the MSM (at least in the headlines, although the fine print might have some caveats).

As for the MSM, it’s become far worse than meaningless noise.

NOTE: Sometimes when I’m bored and get into YouTube surfing, I’ve looked at videos of people opening their DNA results and reacting to them on camera. Often, black Americans state that they’ve been told family legends of having Native American ancestry. Every single video I’ve seen so far features the person who said that opening the results and being surprised at having no significant Native American ancestry at all. I have little doubt that, till that moment, the people involved believed their family legends, which seem rather common. Perhaps that was also originally true for Warren, although she may have just been cynically using the claim to advance her career. But all she had to say was that she believed the family legend and is now learning it’s not true, and I think that would have been the end of it. Instead, she’s apparently trying to prove her ancestry with completely meaningless results.

[ADDENDUM: The Cherokee Nation is not impressed, to say the least:

…Using a DNA test to lay claim to any connection to the Cherokee Nation or any tribal nation, even vaguely, is inappropriate and wrong. It makes a mockery out of DNA tests and its legitimate uses while also dishonoring legitimate tribal governments and their citizens, who ancestors are well documented and whose heritage is prove[n]. Senator Warren is undermining tribal interests with her continued claims of tribal heritage.

Ouch.]

[ADDENDUM II: I used to think that Elizabeth Warren was smart. I disagreed hugely with her politics and her tactics, but long ago she seemed intelligent. I can’t say I’ve been paying all that much attention to her in recent years, but today’s DNA caper seems an indication that if she ever was smart, being in DC so long has caused her to lose whatever savvy she may once have possessed.

In other words, why on earth would she think that releasing these DNA test results would help her cause? On the contrary, the move makes her look like an absolute fool. In doing so, she also robs herself of the “Well, I sincerely thought I was a Cherokee because my family told me that, so it was an innocent mistake” defense. There was nothing mistaken about releasing those tests—she must know they disprove her claims rather than proving them—unless she’s become so stupid she doesn’t even know what percentages mean.

Alternatively, she thinks the American public is abysmally stupid. I certainly hope that particular bet turns out to be wrong.]

The ballet “Concerto Barocco”: different dancers bring something completely different

The New Neo Posted on by

“Concerto Barocco” is a Balanchine ballet that was created in 1941 as an exercise for his students. But it is an indisputable masterpiece that seems nearly as fresh today as when it was choreographed. It has the dancers interpreting and reflecting the intricacies of its Bach score without parroting the music slavishly, or doing anything clichéd. The ballet is one of those rare and perfect marriages of music and movement.

The steps themselves are not all that difficult; after all, Balanchine only had students to work with at the time, and technique in general was nothing like as advanced as it later became. The ballet depends on other elements for its beauty and charm: its intense musicality and its inventive, complicated, and somewhat mathematical patterns.

“Concerto Barocco” has been performed by many dancers over the years. As with all ballet choreography, the quality of what the viewer sees—tone, feeling, emphasis, attack, beauty, pace—depends on the dancers of the hour, and not just their technique by any means. I plan to demonstrate that by cueing up the same short segment (about a minute and a half long) done at three different times by different casts so that you can compare and see what I’m talking about. I’m going to show them to you in reverse order of time, to show what we’ve gained and what we’ve lost.

But first here’s a short overview of the role of the corps, which is onstage for the entire 20 minutes of the ballet and dancing up a storm the whole time. Here’s just a little except (a bit over a minute) to show you what I mean, featuring a 2012 version done by the mother ship, the New York City Ballet. As the narrator says: “Hear the dance; see the music”:

Next we have the segment I’m using to compare different versions in different years. It features the two female soloists. I couldn’t find a recent New York City Ballet video that contains this particular passage, so I’ve used the following one, which showcases what appears to be the Paris Opera Ballet. I don’t have the year, but it seems fairly recent (two of the dancers have only very recently retired and one is still performing, so I’m guessing it’s some time between 2005 and 2015). It’s not atypical of the sort of thing you often see today. Here, the solo dancers emphasize their technique and a sort of twisted off-balance esthetic. I’m really not sure what’s going on in terms of what they’re trying to convey, but it’s my least favorite version of the three. I get a sense of strain, stress, and rush, and although they’re dancing on the music they don’t let it flow through them:

This next video is of the New York City Ballet, and it is exceptionally beautiful. It was made in 1966 (a bit blurry, but well worth bearing with that). It features one of the greatest dancers of all time, Suzanne Farrell, when she was 20 or 21 years old. Commentary is almost superfluous here, but I’ll just say that Farrell brings to this (as she brought to virtually all things she danced) a very rare spiritual quality and a spectacular technique that is masked by her exceptional fluidity of movement and her surpassing musicality. She is the second soloist to enter, from the right of your screen, the sweet Apollonian calm in the eye of the storm:

Lastly we have one of the ballet’s very earliest casts. This is Balanchine’s company the New York City Ballet again in 1951, just a few years after the ballet was created. Note the complete absence of strain. Nothing is forced, all is gentle, charming, restrained, and smooth as silk, and yet the movements remain clearly defined (particularly with Le Clercq):

[NOTE: If you want to watch the entire ballet instead of the short segments I’ve selected, just click on the YouTube logo for either the first or the second videos, or both, and you can watch it. Unfortunately, for the third segment, that’s all there is.]

Women lied, black men died

The New Neo Posted on by

The Democrats thought Brett Kavanaugh was a safe target. Accusing a white prepster named “Brett” would be a great way to achieve several goals: stopping him from changing the balance of SCOTUS in favor of conservatives, and showing solidarity with women and with #MeToo. Who on earth would identify with Kavanaugh except other white preppy guys on the right, and they weren’t going to vote for Democrats anyway, so no great loss.

Well, it turns out that some women are concerned about the men in their lives, too. False accusations can ruin nearly anyone (women included, although I’m not sure how many women consider that aspect).

However, another obvious group that might look at the Kavanaugh hearings and become concerned about what was happening to him is black men. If that sounds counter-intuitive to some people, it certainly doesn’t sound counter-intuitive to me. It occurred to me, while watching the proceedings, that black men might not take too kindly to this little exercise in Believing Women No Matter What.

After all, Clarence Thomas—the man whose position during confirmation for SCOTUS presented the closest analogy to what Brett Kavnaugh faced thirty years later—didn’t call his own hearings “a high-tech lynching” for nothing. Thomas was reminding the country of a terrible past in which black men were lynched not metaphorically but actually, and to whom unspeakable atrocities were committed, merely on the word of a white woman accusing them of rape or other more minor sexual advances. This is not ancient history, either. It is a history that the majority of Americans—and certainly virtually all black Americans—know about.

Why didn’t it occur to Democrats that their approach to Kavanaugh might bother black men as well as white ones? My theory is that Democrats now think so completely along racial lines that it probably wouldn’t occur to them that a black man could identify with something happening to a white man, and a preppy white man at that. That must be why writer Jemele Hill of the Atlantic could write something like this [emphasis mine]:

On Tuesday night, I was in an auditorium with 100 black men in the city of Baltimore, when the subject pivoted to Brett Kavanaugh. I expected to hear frustration that the sexual-assault allegations against him had failed to derail his Supreme Court appointment. Instead, I encountered sympathy. One man stood up and asked, passionately, “What happened to due process?” He was met with a smattering of applause, and an array of head nods.

Hill, who is a black woman (formerly a sportswriter), assumed that these black men would identify with the woman’s story of sexual assault, rather than the man’s story of false accusation. She thought they would accept and perhaps join in with the Democrats’ ridicule and demonizing of Kavanaugh’s rage at being falsely accused.

I’m not a black woman; Jemele Hill is. I don’t pretend for a moment to have my finger on the pulse of the black community or the feelings of black men, and yet I’m not the least bit surprised at their reaction. Anyone with even a smattering of historical knowledge, or a particle of imagination and empathy, should probably have expected it. I am virtually certain that Hill has enough historical knowledge (since I don’t know her, I have no idea about the imagination and empathy part) to have predicted it herself. And yet she did not; her politics blinded her.

David French (a man, but not a black man) has written this piece on the topic, in which he points out that it’s not just knowledge of history that drives this reaction on the part of black men, although that’s part of it. Black men are also the disproportionate targets of a tremendous percentage of the rape and/or sexual abuse accusations today, particularly in Title IX proceedings which have virtually eliminated due process. Between their history of having been lynched (the very definition of the lack of due process) and the reality of being accused of sexual crimes in the kangaroo courts of today’s colleges, is it any wonder that the black man speaking up so “passionately” (Kavanaugh spoke with passion, too) in that meeting Jemele Hill attended was “met with a smattering of applause, and an array of head nods” from the assembled group?

Hill was obviously shocked, however [emphasis mine]:

If you think Kavanaugh receiving some measure of support from black men in inner-city Baltimore is as strange as Taylor Swift suddenly feeling the need to become a modern-day Fannie Lou Hamer, then brace yourself: The caping for Kavanaugh does make a twisted kind of sense. Countless times, black men have had to witness the careers and reputations of other black men ruthlessly destroyed because of unproved rape and sexual-assault accusations.

Why “strange”? And why “twisted”? There’s nothing strange or twisted about it unless your mind is so set along separatist racial and class lines that you think black men can never empathize with the plight of a white man, and vice versa.

Hill continues [emphasis mine]:

Kavanaugh’s emotional defense of his reputation against the claims of a sympathetic white woman resonated with these unlikely allies. And it wasn’t just in Baltimore, at the town hall organized for Ozy Media’s “Take On America” series. This bizarre kinship was something I noticed in my Twitter mentions, too, where black men were tossing out examples of how white lies had wrecked black lives.

“Unlikely.” “Bizarre.” Hill can’t stop being gobsmacked by the common principles that unite this group with Kavanaugh and the obvious similarities. Race and class make it nearly impossible in her mind; that’s all she sees.

And yet she continues to make the case for exactly why these black men would identify with Kavanaugh:

A report released last year, examining 1,900 exonerations over the past three decades, found that 47 percent of the people exonerated were black, despite the fact that blacks make up only 13 percent of the U.S. population. In sexual-assault cases, blacks accounted for 22 percent of convictions, but 59 percent of exonerations.

Hill’s article is titled “What the Black Men Who Identify With Brett Kavanaugh Are Missing.” But basically, she makes a very weak to nonexistent case that they’re missing anything at all. She seems to be saying that because a higher percentage of black men than white men are accused of sexual assault and a higher percentage are convicted or exonerated, that somehow makes a difference and they shouldn’t identify with Kavanaugh. That’s a preposterous argument.

I’ll close with this video I found on YouTube, in which an eloquent black man explains how he feels about what happened to Kavanaugh:

[NOTE: I think the title of this piece would be a good slogan for the GOP to get into the public domain before election day.]

Brunson, US pastor held in Turkey, released

The New Neo Posted on by

This is very good news:

A Turkish court freed American pastor Andrew Brunson on Friday after he spent nearly two years in jail and more time under house arrest on charges related to terrorism and espionage. Brunson had become entangled in a diplomatic dispute between Turkey and the United States and American officials had been pushing hard for his release…

“We’re grateful to the president, members of Congress and diplomatic leaders who continued to put pressure on Turkey to secure the freedom of Pastor Brunson,” lawyer Jay Sekulow, who represents Brunson’s family, said in a statement received by the Reuters news agency. “The fact that he is now on a plane to the United States can only be viewed as a significant victory for Pastor Brunson and his family.”

It also seems to be a victory for President Trump, who has a good track record with this sort of thing, although I have no idea how much the pressure from the US caused Turkey to decide to releave Brunson. My guess is that it certainly had some effect.

Why was Brunson imprisoned in the first place? After all, he’d been in Turkey for two decades.

He was caught up in the post-coup sweep by Erdogan that Erdogan used as an excuse to lock up a host of people he thought represented a danger to him or an opportunity for him. The coup occurred in the summer of 2016 and I wrote about it several times (see this, for example). I had never heard of Brunson when I wrote this post about Erdogan’s plans, but it seems to me in retrospect that the reason Brunson was included in the sweep was to attempt to use him as a bargaining chip for Gulen, whom he blamed for the failed coup and who resides in the US.

Erdogan rounded up many thousands of people, using the failed coup as an excuse. But to Obama’s credit, he didn’t turn over Gulen to Erdogan. However, Erdogan explicitly suggested that the US accept a prisoner exchange in which Brunson would be released in exchange for the US turning over Gulen. This was not done; Brunson is on his way home, and Gulen stays here as well.

[NOTE: By the way, Erdogan is not exactly the duly-elected leader of Turkey, certainly not in any conventional way. He had been banned from running again by a term-limits law, but he got around that in a very clever manner, and then consolidated his power still further. Meanwhile, during the summer of 2016 coup, Barack Obama supported Erdogan against those who would overthrow him.]

Apparently Kanye West’s embrace of Trump represents a temptation that Democrats can’t resist

The New Neo Posted on by

It’s puzzling to me why the left doesn’t just ignore Kanye West, because all their over-the-top race-based criticism of West draws attention to—and actually validates—his message that the left and the media want black people to think only one way, their way. Mocking and reviling West by calling him crazy, a house negro, a minstrel, and (in probably the most absurd and offensive accusation of all) a white supremacist, isn’t really designed to win over the legions of Kanye fans, is it?

The people making these statements have turned what would probably have been a relatively minor photo-op for Trump and West into a cause célèbre, and by playing West’s rambling and yet totally comprehensible message over and over again they force people to pay attention to it.

I can’t see how they would imagine this to be a good move. And yet their hatred and fear drives them inexorably towards it like moths to a flame.

Weinstein revisited

The New Neo Posted on by

One of the charges against Harvey Weinstein has been dropped:

The behind-the-scenes drama spilled into court, with Weinstein looking on, as the Manhattan District Attorney’s office elected to drop the lone charge stemming from Lucia Evans’ allegations that he forced her to perform oral sex on him in 2004, when she was a college student and aspiring actress.

Charges made by two other women are still included in the case against Weinstein, but I wonder how this news will affect the trial as a whole:

Prosecutors said in a letter unsealed Thursday that they learned weeks ago that a woman who was with Evans the night she met Weinstein had given the police detective a contradictory account of what happened, but the detective had instructed her to keep quiet, telling her that “less is more.”

The woman, prosecutors said, told the detective in February that Weinstein had offered them money to flash their breasts during the restaurant encounter. They initially declined but Evans later told her she had gone ahead and exposed herself to the film producer in a hallway.

The woman also told the detective — identified by Weinstein’s lawyer as Nicholas DiGaudio — that sometime after Evans’ office meeting with Weinstein, she had suggested what happened was consensual. Weinstein had promised to get her an acting job if she agreed to perform oral sex and she agreed.

According to the witness, who was not named in the court filing, Evans had been drinking and “appeared to be upset, embarrassed and shaking” when she told the story.

Evans was among the first women to publicly accuse Weinstein of sexual assault.

In the court of public opinion—the only court in which Weinstein has been tried so far—the charges against him have been almost universally considered so strong that his guilt is pretty much assumed. And yet he has not had his day in court.

Of course, the fact that one woman may have lied—or been mistaken, because perhaps she was drunk—about the nature of their sexual contact does not mean they all have lied or been mistaken. As I’ve said before, each accusation must be taken on its own merits (although few people seem to do that): even assuming that the weight of accusation indicates that Weinstein is guilty of some violations “does not mean that all his accusers are telling the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth.”

I also hark back to this post I wrote during the initial furor over Weinstein:

I don’t automatically believe or disbelieve anyone. When I hear charges of abuse, I try to evaluate the truth or falsehood of those allegations in a systematic way. I consciously try to apply the same standards to all, and to be consistent.

Here are just some of the elements I think people ought to take into consideration in terms of seriousness and/or truthfulness (most of these relate more to adult victims than to children):

Was the coercion overt? What was the age of the victim? Was “no” communicated by the victim (for adult victims only; for a child it’s irrelevant)? Was it just a verbal proposition by the accused with no behavioral follow-up? Was the offender a therapist or teacher or priest or parent? When did the victim report it—was there an enormous time lag? Does the victim have a separate grudge against the accused that might have motivated a false accusation? Is there any other evidence to back up the victim’s report? If so, how persuasive is that evidence? Was there any violence involved? Is the accused a politician who is currently running for office—and has the revelation come out right before the vote, with very little time to evaluate its truth or falsehood? Does the accuser have a history that indicates she/he is a habitual liar? Does the accused have such a history? Are there other alleged victims, and (this next part is very important and not often taken into account) did all the other victims tell their stories only after the initial accusations got a lot of publicity, or had their stories been told earlier? If the latter, was the story told to the police or other authorities, or to some friend or relative whose word we have to take for it? If we have one or more very credible accusations and then a new accusation comes out, is the new one in the mold of the old ones or does it up the ante dramatically? Has each accuser’s story remained consistent, or has it morphed?

There’s much more, but I think you get the idea. Since we don’t usually have a smoking gun (Anthony Weiner’s emailed photos, for example), we have to rely on this sort of thing.

I hate to see abusers go undetected and unpunished, free to continue their abuse with others. But I also hate to see people empowered to make false accusations that are insufficiently scrutinized and could ruin the life of a possibly innocent person. I’ve described the best way I know to try to figure out how to minimize both of these occurrences. Despite its flaws, I can’t think of a better way.

With Weinstein, there are so many stories that it is easy to think that most of them must be true. But that temptation must be resisted. The trouble is that truth and falsehood can be fiendishly difficult to ascertain in cases such as this. And here I’m going to say something that might be surprising—I’m not so sure that even Lucia Evans knows whether she gave consent or not.

Are people usually that clearly in touch with their own behavior, thoughts, and feeling around complicated situations of a sexual nature, in which fear mixes with desire to advance one’s career, and in which all of it is mixed with the liberal consumption of alcohol or other substances? The vagaries of memory are part of the problem as well, and revisionism can occur either much later or very shortly after the act in question. Regret, confusion, trauma, forgetfulness, defensiveness, rationalization—all can play into it in various ways for the alleged victim.

I have no idea what really happened between Harvey Weinstein and Lucia Evans. I have no idea which time she was telling the truth and which time she was lying or mistaken. Even further, I’m not at all sure whether we’ll ever be able to find out. And what’s more, I’m not so sure that either Harvey Weinstein or Lucia Evans themselves know the correct answer, either.

Rethinking Trump

The New Neo Posted on by

One aftermath of the Kavanaugh hearings is that quite a few NeverTrumpers on the GOP side have decided Trump’s not so bad after all, and have said so in print. Public declarations of having changed one’s mind about something important and basic are unusual, particularly for well-known pundits.

A mind is a difficult thing to change, indeed. And yet minds do change.

Those who follow this blog probably recall that during the primaries I was not a NeverTrumper, but I was very negative about Trump and would have preferred almost any of the other candidates (almost—I drew the line at Kasich) to have won the primary instead. This was for several reasons: I thought Trump had no political track record, I noted that his previous statements on politics were inconsistent and many were liberal and some were alarming, he had character flaws that were quite obvious, and I felt he was very likely to lose to Hillary Clinton and the prospect of her presidency filled me with dread.

But I always understood Trump’s appeal (for example, see this). And once he became the GOP nominee I always said that if he were to win I’d be happy, very happy, to be proven wrong about how he would perform. Since Trump has become president I feel that I’ve evaluated him fairly and objectively, and most of the time I’ve been pleasantly surprised. In fact, at this point, I’m no longer surprised to be pleasantly surprised when he does things of which I approve (which does not mean I approve of all things he does).

But one group I’ve never seen change their minds about Trump has been the Democratic Party and of course the left. It’s been total opposition and ridicule from the get-go. That’s why this article by Devin Stewart, a self-described Democrat and an adjunct professor of international affairs at Columbia University and New York University, surprised me.

Here are some excerpts:

Like most Democrats, I reacted to the stunning 2016 election of Donald Trump with a combination of confusion and dread. After all, Hillary Clinton was the favorite and, to Democrats like me, a Trump victory seemed to portend certain economic disaster, nuclear war, and pretty much the end of America as we knew it.

But now nearly two years into his administration, Trump has presided over a “winning streak” that includes a booming economy and stock market, an unemployment level at a nearly 50-year low, two Supreme Court appointments, no new foreign wars or domestic terrorist attacks emanating from abroad, a significant degree of progress on trade relations with Canada and Mexico, a “needed reset” on the China relationship, and the prospect of peace on the Korean Peninsula.

Perhaps it is time that even his opponents reconsider Trump…

Trump’s presidency marks a return to realpolitik and great power politics. No one knows what goes on in Trump’s mind or if even he believes he has a strategy. What matters is what Trump does, so this essay looks at his actions, considers the bias of his critics, and seeks a new way to understand his policies. It considers the possibility that Trump has a method to his madness…

Of course, the verdict on Trump’s effort with North Korea is not yet in. But much of the press has not paid sufficient attention to the progress Trump has already made. His approach has secured the remains of some American troops lost during the Korean War, contributed to successful inter-Korean talks, and promised a follow up U.S.-North Korea summit. He is trying an unorthodox approach, but it is too soon to render conclusions about them because we are right in the middle of it. Experiencing the discrepancy between mainstream coverage of North Korea and my own analysis was eye-opening….

Like many Gen-Xers who studied politics or international relations in the 1990s and 2000s, I absorbed this gospel of liberal internationalism almost completely. But Trump’s early successes have already caused me to question those tenets of my education.

The Trump Doctrine takes previous policy assumptions and turns them on their head. Trump’s “America First” approach is a reversion to the idea of realpolitik and great power competition. It is better suited to a moment in which American power is much less dominant. The president takes each state-to-state relationship on its own terms. That’s why he’s often antagonistic with allies and friendly with threatening dictators. The consequences of insulting friendly countries, such as Canada, might be hurt feelings in exchange for better trade terms, while souring relations with an antagonistic one, such as North Korea, could result in serious security threats. He pursues the optimal outcome in a utilitarian sense rather than follow previous rules about diplomatic etiquette.

The entire article is worth reading.

The author appears to still be a Democrat, but he’s clearly an open-minded one who thinks for himself. Writing an article like that is no small act of courage.