Tuesday roundup

Dems had a retreat in West Virginia last weekend and it appears they now have thought the better of the idea of automatically filibustering any SCOTUS nominee that DJT puts forth. Seems the strategy now is to wait for a second vacancy (which will presumably be to replace a swing-vote or lefty justice) and then put up their fuss.

Re: acting AG Sally Yates and the immigration order: It was a dumb idea to leave her in that position, but it was a dumb idea for her to grandstand, given that the Constitution says that all executive power rests with the president. She had to go.

Once arguably America's premier character-formation organization for male adolescents, the Boy Scouts, long on their way to irrelevance, seal the deal with the new policy of allowing transgendered youth to join.

The California legislature is set to make the entire state a sanctuary for illegal aliens.

Strong - unhinged? - words from the head of the EU:

EU President Donald Tusk ("president" is a misnomer; Tusk wasn't elected by European voters, of course, because that's how Europe rolls) wrote a letter to 27 EU heads of state listing Donald Trump as a threat along with communist China, dictatorial Russia, and murderous radical Islam:

An increasingly, let us call it, assertive China, especially on the seas, Russia's aggressive policy towards Ukraine and its neighbours, wars, terror and anarchy in the Middle East and in Africa, with radical Islam playing a major role, as well as worrying declarations by the new American administration all make our future highly unpredictable.

Tusk went on to describe the United States under President Trump's leadership as the most difficult challenge for the EU:

Particularly the change in Washington puts the European Union in a difficult situation; with the new administration seeming to put into question the last 70 years of American foreign policy.

The Senate Health, Labor, Pensions and Education Committee votes to send Betsy DeVos's nomination to the full Senate.

Do city slicker and country mouse now find each other culturally unrecognizable?

Seems like I'm running across a lot of must-reads for you folks lately.

Here's the one for today, "America's Great Divergence" by Alena Semuels in The Atlantic.

It really doesn't cover any completely new territory. Its theme, the growing cultural (and, of course, economic) divide between urban America and small-town / rural America has been addressed in the book Hillbilly Elegy by J.D. Vance as well as numerous recent NRO articles by Kevin Williamson. The way for this kind of inquiry was paved a few years ago by the book Coming Apart by Charles Murray.

Still, Semuels offers us several valuable insights and visceral vignettes.

She launches her observation with a comparison between two central Indiana residents leading vastly different lives:

Ashley Gabbert and Dan Dark are both white Indiana residents in their early 30s, but their lives look nothing alike.

Gabbert, 32, lives in this town in one of the poorest counties in Indiana, where she works the night shift—10 p.m. to 6:30 a.m.—for an automotive parts manufacturer. Her life now is a step up from the decade she spent working in fast food, which wasn’t “much of a career,” she told me at the local Walmart, where she was shopping for groceries. Working in fast food, she’d frequently encounter drug users as they pulled up to the drive-in window, needles alongside babies in the backseat of their cars. Like 80 percent of people in rural America, Gabbert doesn’t have a bachelor’s degree.

Dark, 33, lives in the increasingly metropolitan city of Indianapolis, where he runs a creative consultancy doing videos and marketing work for a variety of clients. Dark, who is a college graduate, works when he chooses, often from his downtown home or from the coffee shops and bars springing up around downtown Indianapolis. He loves to travel—he recently returned from Iceland—and goes out to meet friends almost every night of the week. The same night Ashley Gabbert was prepping for her night shift by dropping her 11-year-old daughter off with her mother, Dark was cooking a venison stew for a meat-and-bourbon potluck dinner thrown by a friend. “I’ve built my life around flexibility,” he told me.

Semuels zeroes in on the point in recent history at which the divergence exemplified by the different lives led by Gabbert and Dark got underway:

For a century leading up to 1980, poorer regions were catching up to richer regions of the country in terms of wages, as an oversupply of workers in richer regions drove wages down, while an undersupply in poorer regions drove wages up. But this “convergence,” as economists call it, petered out with the rise of computers, according to research by the University of Chicago doctoral candidate Elisa Giannone. Beginning in the 1980s, as computers made certain people more productive and valuable in the labor market and made other people obsolete, wealthy regions with educated workers began to do better and better. Between 1940 and 1980, wages in poorer U.S. areas grew faster than wages in richer places by 1.4 percent per year. But starting in the 1980s, wages in poorer places stopped catching up to those in richer ones, Giannone says.

Like the above-cited works, Semuels depicts the trappings of each setting with telling details: the heroin needles, dollar stores and economic-development directors busting their brains trying to figure out what kinds of business to lure to their small towns to start turning things around versus the bike lanes, poetry slams and upscale bars of the cities.

Semuels concludes with the reasonable observation that Trump's promises of using a combination of good tax policy and bad measures like protectionist browbeating are not going to bring anything like the former robustness to the Connersvilles of America.

Probably wisely, she does not venture into the realm of offering a big, handy solution.

The comments underneath the article add some noteworthy perspectives to what Semuels has offered.

Of course, early on, we get the fetid combination of collectivism and snobbery (not to mention slanderous hyperbole):

Republicans don't want to spend money on education and they damn sure don't want the tripartite governing system where labor has a position on the boards of companies that Germany has. Germany doesn't have a history of management killing labor in the streets so there isn't the adversarial relationship that we have here. They also don't have the infatuation with wealth that we have here. They don't pay top executives anywhere near what we pay ours. That system is politically impossible in America precisely because working class whites have decided that instead of getting together with working class people of all colors, they would rather vote republican. They have prioritized God, Guns and Gays over their economic interests. I'm not judging that choice because it's totally reasonable that people can have different priorities, but the Republican Party has been the party of capital since it's founding. The idea that they are going to start supporting workers rights is laughable.

Another commenter tempers that one's zeal for the German system with some cross-cultural perspective - but still winds up looking favorably on  a collectivist approach:

I am somewhat familiar with Germany. I have quite a few German friends, I havetravelled extensively in Germany and I speak the language. I have lived and worked in neighbouring countries with quite similar (though not fully simlar) cultures, the Netherlands and Norway.

I agree with Marathag that the German approach has much to offer.

But I also agree with Zeeky34 that the German approach is rooted in a economic, political and educational culture that is vastly different from the US way of doing things (here, am lumping together for clarity states as divergent as Louisiana and Washington State).

My best bet, based on my experiences and understanding, is that for parts of the USA to become more like Germany would require substantial changes in educational funding, educational culture - a higher appreciation among both parents and young people for vocational training, for example - wage policies, employer-employee relations, the position of unions (unions are much stronger in Germany), etc. etc.

Beyond that, even more fundamental questions would be interesting: the importance of trust in the government, which I suspect is higher in Germany than in the USA; historical path dependency; the difference in size between the US and German economy; etc. etc.

But that is more something for an essay ;-)

There is the Mike Rowe-esque argument that shop classes would do the trick. My own observation on this is that their disappearance is more inaccurate generalization than actuality. High-school programs  preparing young folks for manufacturing careers - some of them conceived by education coalitions and implemented in several counties at a time - are actually fairly prevalent.

Of course, the identity-politics crowd has to play its victim card:

I grew up in small town Ohio where I was bullied for being queer. I moved to Seattle with nothing but 2 suitcases and made a life for myself. These "good people" tend not to be too good to anyone who is different.

And this:

Small towns are really rough on people who are 'different', I know it quite well myself. Humanity is not exactly known for its tolerance of differences.

As I was leaving little rural Tennessee town last night I had a cop blue light me and check out my id. Not fitting in is difficult. 

This would be in line with what Semuels says about how urban areas - she found it true in Indianapolis and even more so in coastal urban centers like Seattle - voted overwhelmingly for the Democrat ticket in last November's election.

Which gets to a point worth pondering: While the urban living of the college-educated professional is more multifaceted, lively and stimulating, it is leftist at its foundation.

Consider the universities in which the cities slickers have received their education. Here at LITD we have written exhaustively about their descent into utter madness, with gender-studies majors, safe spaces, trigger warnings, juice bars and gyms in dorms, and mob intimidation of conservative speakers.

Yes, you can become quite savvy in some field such as medicine, informatics or supply-chain management, but your worldview is almost certainly going to be colored some shade of blue, unless you are really courageous or focused.

Semuels is correct; there is no magic formula, no one big policy initiative that can ameliorate this cultural dichotomy between the nation's Connersvilles and its Indianapolises.

But I can see something missing from both milieus, something that imparts a brittleness that may be more obvious in the rural setting but is present in the urban setting nonetheless. Quick question: what is conspicuously absent from the entire set of discussions and observations above? Is it not a common assumption that life is to be lived for something beyond the self, a sense that this world is ultimately governed by One who desires good for all that He has created and whose guidance is there for the asking?

Of course, determining just when He was bumped out of the picture would require a historical survey beyond the scope of this post. But is there any denying that bumped He was?

You probably knew I was going to wind up there, didn't you?

And lest you think I am assigning the brunt of the problem to the secular urbanite, consider, per Semuels's voting-behavior findings, that rural America went overwhelmingly for a hedonistic, bombastic narcissist with little to no grounding in Scripture-based spirituality. Small-town dwellers saw him as the repository of all their angst and aspirations.

It's just a rule of thumb I'm coming to see is applicable at any seeming impasse: when it appears that answers are nonexistent, it's time to turn to the King of Yes.

File this one under "When Wonkery Comes Up Short."

It would, it seems to me, go a long way toward preventing city slicker and country mouse from finding each other culturally unrecognizable.

The evolution of a viewpoint

As have myriad opiners since Friday, I have posted a great deal about the immigration order and its aftermath.

I am on record as saying the following in this post:

On balance, I like what has occurred over the last 24 hours. It serves notice to the world that we are serious about knowing as much as possible about the sources of the threat, and acting swiftly on that knowledge. It is of a piece with DJT's order to Mattis et al to present him with a plan for destroying - not "degrading,"  - ISIS.

Earlier today, I posted a friend's Facebook jeremiad about it, the gist of which was a listing of historical precedents. I said the parallels looked valid to me.

But, as I say in the post immediately under this one, messages to the world about being adamant about our security, and parallels to past immigration policies are now, it is clear, overriden by the political damage wrought by the order's ham-handed execution.

 For further bolstering of my assertion (beyond the spot-on Commentary piece by Noah Rothman discussed in the most recent post) that this is now the central issue in the cluster thereof, I offer a National Review editorial:

Trump’s order displays much of the amateurism that dominated his campaign. There seems to have been no guidance provided by the White House and the Department of Homeland Security to the officials nationwide who would be responsible for executing the order; and on Saturday, as refugees were being detained at airports across the country, it was reported that local officials were struggling to contact Customs and DHS higher-ups.

As did Rothman, the NRO editors employ the d-word:

Most of this confusion could have been avoided if the White House had slowed down, taken time to brief the officials responsible for carrying out the order, and ensured that the legal details were airtight. Instead, it seems that White House political advisers overrode cautions from DHS lawyers and pushed the order forward, to their own detriment. The country is now embroiled, once again, in spectacular protests, and reasonable policy has been drowned in outrage. The White House’s approach here has probably damaged future efforts in this area. 

For even further bolstering, I offer this afternoon's Guy Benson piece at Townhall:

 . . . key administration figures were never looped in, and potential allies in Congress were blindsided, a growing number of whom were left with little choice but to publicly question and condemn elements of the plan Trump dropped on their heads.

In the comment thread underneath the post reprinting my friend's Facebook rundown of historical precedents, a commenter said, to paraphrase, that it appears that the legislative branch has been hopelessly eclipsed by the executive branch.

My response:

Beginning the morning after the election, I called for the new Congress to be assertive and robust, to be proactive with its own agenda so as to be able to stand up to Squirrel-Hair. 

Said Congress so far gets about a B minus at that.

That grade may be going up a little. The growing number of potential Congressional allies alluded to by Benson is a picture of a wide array of types of Republicans.

Benson also, at the end of his piece, says that a certain other development of the last 72 hours, the elevation of Steve Bannon to a seat on the National Security Council principals committee, may wind up sparking even greater outrage than the immigration order.

In any event, the combination of the two developments is sure to taint, if not overshadow, tomorrow's SCOTUS-pick announcement.

This is what those of us who opposed DJT through the closing of polls on November 8 warned about.

A horrible move tactically, but, as we know, that's how he rolls

Your must-read-in its-entirety piece for today is "A Disastrous Day for Trump" by Noah Rothman at Commentary.

And, as I usually do when I tell you to read something in its entirety, I will tease you with a few money lines.

There's this:

On Saturday, Donald Trump revealed once again why the insidious cult of the manager is a blight upon the American imagination. In the process, he also sacrificed his credibility and humiliated his core supporters.

In the campaign season, Donald Trump sold himself to the public as first and foremost a fixer. His principal qualification for high office was his lack of experience in government and a healthy disrespect for the political process. He was populist, yes, but also non-ideological. To the extent that his policy preferences could be expanded upon in detail, they drew from both Democratic and Republican prescriptions. Trump presented himself as above the petty ideological squabbles that have paralyzed Washington for decades. He was invested only in what worked.

The lie to all this was laid bare on Saturday amid a remarkable display of executive rigidity and incompetence.

And this:

Those who believe in the necessity of this executive action and the value of restrictions on both legal and illegal immigration should be livid with this president. A reckless administration carelessly mishandled their policy preferences. In response to the draconian and needlessly injurious execution of this policy, spontaneous mass protests overtook America’s transportation hubs and galvanized Donald Trump’s opposition. The scope of the political damage done both to their cause and its champion in the White House is unclear, but damage has been done. 

A number of tempting positions are available to me at this moment, including "We tried to tell you slavish Trump-bots" to "We who were #NeverTrumpers to the bitter end have clean hands; we don't have to own the non-conservative aspects of what he does."

And I guess such positions are a significant part of where I'm coming from.

But I think about Rothman's use of the word "damage," a two-syllable summation of his entire essay.

There will be more.

And I think about the posts at this site over the months since July 2015 that I have directed to those Trump-bots, posts in which I named names and let some contempt flavor my prose.

Contempt is an attitude that can get spiritually corrosive real fast, so it requires careful handling.

But there is no one to blame but DJT's water carriers for the sidelining of the three-pillared conservatism (a term I employ even as I'm aware of the risk of it making my argument tiresome) that informs everything about my worldview.

Yes, sidelining. To the rejoinder "How can you say that? Look at all the great cabinet appointments. Look at the de-fanging of the EPA, the forward movement on pipelines, the three final contenders for the SCOTUS nomination," I need only point to what Rothman articulates with searing precision.

And while we're talking about contempt, how about the way the Trump-bots use of amorphous terms like "globalism" and "elites" to gin up frenzy, their setting up of trade deals as some sort of primary culprit in the decline in manufacturing-sector employment, and their conflation of bona fide squishes (Jeb Bush, Lindsey Graham, John Kasich) with principled conservatives made sure that the it-has-to-be-Trump wildfire spread through the right-of-center voting populace?

I'm not saying that the Left would not have staged mass exhibitions of outrage in response to the moves of a President Cruz or a President Rubio, but there would have been no pollution of the principles involved, so that defense of those moves would not be hobbled by awkward qualifications.

So to those who are still of the he-has-a-whole-new-style-but-boy-does-he-have-the-lefties'-panties-in-a-wad mindset, I say, "I'd watch it if I were you. This is only the beginning of hopelessly messy conflagrations you are going to have to try to take sensible stands on."

How I want to tell myself that maybe this is a one-off egregious lapse in judgement.

But I've been studying this whole phenomenon closely and I know better.

It was a mistake to nominate him.

Another take on the immigration order & subsequent dustup

A Facebook friend (also a friend in the offline world) posted the following. It's a little different from any of the takes I've shared here so far, in that it enumerates a lengthy list of historical precedents. In that sense, it performs the valuable service of exposing the shrillness and emptiness of the outcry from the left:

(This is your trigger warning...don't say I didn't give you the cahnce to scroll away!)
Okay, okay, okay...enough is enough for f**k sake! 

Who has actually taken the time to read and understand what the hell is going on, instead of losing your collective minds about a so called "Muslim ban" handed down through Executive Order? 

Why are we not concerned with our own hard fought safety? Why aren't we not concerned with the blood bought sovereignty of our own Country? This is not the first time, and will not be the last time that this sort of thing happens...please take note of the party of those who have made these decisions in the past...

7 other times the US banned immigrants:

-President Chester A Arthur(R) -May 16,1882 via the Chinese Exclusion Act

-President Franklin D. Roosevelt(D) -World War II
As millions of people became refugees during World War II, US President Franklin D Roosevelt argued that refugees posed a serious threat to the country's national security. Drawing on fears that Nazi spies could be hiding among them, the country limited the number of German Jews who could be admitted to 26,000 annually. And it is estimated that for most of the Hitler era, less than 25 percent of that quota was actually filled.

-President Theodore Roosevelt(D) -March 3, 1903 via the Anarchist Exclusion Act
In 1903, the Anarchist Exclusion Act banned anarchists and others deemed to be political extremists from entering the US.
In 1901, President William McKinley had been fatally shot by Leon Czolgosz, an American anarchist who was the son of Polish immigrants.
The act - which was also known as the Immigration Act of 1903 - codified previous immigration law and, in addition to anarchists, added three other new classes of people who would be banned from entry: those with epilepsy, beggars and importers of prostitutes.
The act marked the first time that individuals were banned for their political beliefs.

-CONGRESS(Democrat Majority in BOTH houses) -August 23,1950 via the Internal Security Act of 1950
The Internal Security Act of 1950 - also known as the Subversive Activities Control Act of 1950 or the McCarran Act - made it possible to deport any immigrants believed to be members of the Communist Party. Members of communist organisations, which were required to register, were also not allowed to become citizens.
Truman opposed the law, stating that it "would make a mockery of our Bill of Rights".
Sections of the act were ruled unconstitutional by the Supreme Court in 1993. But some parts of the act still stand.

-President Jimmy Carter(D) -April 7, 1980 via sanctions
Following the 1979 Iranian hostage crisis, during which the US embassy in Tehran was stormed and 52 Americans were held hostage for 444 days, American President Jimmy Carter cut diplomatic relations with and imposed sanctions on Iran. He also banned Iranians from entering the country.

-President Ronald Reagan(R) -1987
Under President Ronald Reagan, the US Public Health Service added Aids to its list of "dangerous and contagious" diseases. Senator Jesse Helms' "Helms Amendment" added HIV to the exclusion list.
(B.H.Obama completed a process begun by G.W.Bush to lift the ban in 2009)

-President Barrack Hussein Obama(D) -2011 via State Department action
The Us Department of State confirmed that at the President's direction they stopped processing Iraqi Visa requests for 6 moths or more in 2011. 

Additionally the current travel ban is not a "Muslim Ban." Regardless of religion, people traveling from/through or have passports from the included countries will be detained at the borders for further vetting. 

According to a 2010 study and released January 2011, Islam has 1.5 billion adherents, making up over 22% of the world population. 

According to the Pew Research Center in 2015 there were 50 Muslim-majority countries. 

So I guess singling out 7 of the 50 countries that have been pumping out militants for more years than I have been alive is now somehow a "Muslim Ban?" When will stop marginalizing the issues and open our collective eyes and see it for what it is. OUR ULTIMATE SAFETY! No one protests the FAA, TSA or the airlines when the TSA gets a bit too grabby. No, everyone calls it a necessary action to keep everyone safe in the air...
So I now call BS! Call everyone a hypocrite! if we are throwing names around, let's play. 

This is NOT A PARTY ISSUE! This is NOT A RACE ISSUE! This is an issue with a shit load of people losing their damned minds over something that is perfectly legal, and historically done to PROTECT YOUR ASSES FROM THREATS YOU CAN'T SEE! Presidents on both sides have made these decisions! 

Take note that the tone an tenor is leading in the US the last 10 years is building up to a legitimate civil uprising and when you are forced to choose a side, I pray you are awake enough, informed enough, wise enough to make the right one! Either way, I will be our front defending your God given and Constitutionally GUARANTEED Rights to make the wrong one, most likely with one or more of the evil Satan spawned fire arms everyone wants banned so badly.

I can't see any holes in his argument. All the cases he cites seem like valid parallels to me.

(This is, of course, a separate issue from the ham-handedness with which the current ban was implemented.)

LITD readers, I'm sure he welcomes your comments.

I still think, however, that the John Hinderaker piece at Power Line to which I linked yesterday comes as close to the last word on the subject as anything I've come across.

It's looking more and more like California seceding would be a good thing

Nature denial becomes official policy in the Golden State:

If you were expecting any sort of change in the rather “unique” culture of California after the last election you can probably forget it about it. If anything, they’re going full speed ahead in being really, really California now. A new piece of legislation introduced this week will make a change to driver’s licenses, birth certificates and other official records allowing the state’s denizens to break free of those pesky old labels about being either male for female. Coming up soon you may be able to select none of the above.

California driver’s licenses and birth certificates could have a third option for gender in addition to male or female under legislation unveiled Thursday by Democratic lawmakers.

The bill by state Sens. Toni Atkins (D-San Diego) and Scott Wiener (D-San Francisco) would establish a new nonbinary gender marker for official state documents.

Lawmakers framed the measure as an expansion of rights for transgender, intersex and other people who do not identify as male or female.

“It will keep California at the forefront of LGBTQ civil rights,” Atkins said at a Capitol press conference. 

No word yet on what the third option will be called, but the article suggests that in addition to “M” and “F” they may go with “X.”

There’s more to the new law than just a third box on a form you fill out at the DMV, however. There were already provisions in Golden State law allowing you to change your gender from one side to the other despite your obvious chromosomal framework, but they at least wanted you to put in the effort of going through some sort of medical treatment and providing proof of same. Not any more, campers! That was too burdensome. Now you can just go in to your local state offices, tell them that you don’t really feel like your old sex anymore and you’re good to go. Oh, and you don’t even have to be an adult. People under the age of 18 will be able to do the same. It’s not mentioned whether or not the parents need to be involved in this little detail.

There will be two main reactions in the rest of the country: "This is madness" and "Finally people have control over their gender identities."

I really don't see how that divide gets bridged.

The immigration order, the judge's stay and the aftermath of that - initial thoughts

First, check out the Heritage Foundation's timeline of jihadist attacks on US soil since 9/11/01 and note the uptick in frequency since 2015.

The agents on the ground who deal with border security every day are buoyed by the order:

"Morale amongst our agents and officers has increased exponentially," said a joint statement from the National Border Patrol Council and National ICE Council.

"The men and women of ICE and Border Patrol will work tirelessly to keep criminals, terrorists, and public safety threats out of this country, which remains the number one target in the world – and President Trump's actions now empower us to fulfill this life saving mission, and it will indeed save thousands of lives and billions of dollars," it added.

The statement on behalf of the agents for the immigration, customs and border protection was a powerful endorsement of Trump's action as he his under fire from critics of his actions.

And let's be clear about what the judge's stay does and does not cover. It "only pertains to persons detained who, prior to the Executive Order, had valid visas or refugee applications already approved, or legally entered the U.S. from one of the 7 countries subject to the Executive Order."


I would recommend a RedState piece by Patterico  in which he looks at the argument put forth in a NYT op-ed by the libertarian Cato Institute's David J. Bier and the response to that by Andrew McCarthy at NRO. His conclusion:

Ultimately, McCarthy’s piece, praised by many who support Trump’s order on a policy level, is revealed to be overly deferential to the executive. It applies a legal framework for interpreting legislative texts that rejects textualism and would make lefties smile. It appears to misunderstand the difference between Congress’s authority to change its mind on an immigration matter, and a President’s ability to reject Congress’s judgment in this area. And finally, it misstates the arguments of Bier, the target of his criticism.

It could be that Bier is ultimately wrong and that Trump’s order is legal. But not, I think, for the weak reasons offered by Andrew McCarthy.

But know this: those showing up to protest at JFK airport last night were interested in neither these legal fine points nor the increasing jihadist threat to our nation.

On balance, I like what has occurred over the last 24 hours. It serves notice to the world that we are serious about knowing as much as possible about the sources of the threat, and acting swiftly on that knowledge. It is of a piece with DJT's order to Mattis et al to present him with a plan for destroying - not "degrading,"  - ISIS.

We as a country are starting to realize that we don't have to live with radical Islam.

UPDATE: A must-read piece about all this is "Is Trump's Immigration Order the Worst of Both Worlds?" by John Hinderaker at Power Line.


You owe it to yourself to read the whole thing, but here's the conclusion:

The problem goes much too deep to be addressed by this kind of stopgap measure. What we need is a wholesale revision of our immigration laws, commencing from the principle that immigrants should be admitted only if there is good reason to believe that their presence will be beneficial to existing American citizens. 

As for refugees, there is no humanitarian case for admitting them at all: at enormous cost, we protect a tiny percentage of the refugee population, while subjecting them to an alien culture to which many will never adapt. It makes more humanitarian sense to devote those resources to protecting a far larger number of refugees where they live, or close to where they live, in a familiar culture.

What is involved in getting us there?

State sovereignty for the Big C but not for thee

California's overweening view of inter-state relations is Exhibit A in the polarization of American society:

The Golden State is symbolically showcasing its commitment to tolerance and inclusion… by cutting off state funds for travel (including for college athletic competitions) to states that the legislature deems insufficiently socially liberal. Governing magazine reports:

California has banned state-funded travel to Kansas after determining that the Sunflower State is one of four in the nation with laws that it views as discriminatory toward gay people.

The policy could prevent public universities in California from scheduling sporting events with Kansas teams and raises the question of whether teams will travel to Wichita in 2018, when the city is scheduled to host two rounds of the NCAA men’s basketball tournament. […]

Kansas is on the travel prohibition list because of a 2016 law that enabled college campus religious groups to require that members adhere to their religious beliefs and standards.

Just to be clear about the infraction that landed Kansas on the list: Some universities have “all-comers” policies for student group membership, meaning that no student can be excluded from any campus organization on account of his or her beliefs. Technically, this means that Democratic students could join the College Republicans, that Zionist students could join Students for Justice in Palestine, and so forth. But the biggest controversy (which led to the Supreme Court decision Christian Legal Society vs. Martinez) often has to do with Christian student associations that seek to require that all members subscribe to a Biblical view sexual morality—that is, that sex should take place only between married men and women. The Kansas state legislature wanted to ensure that the university didn’t enact an “all-comers” policy that would force student religious groups to violate their beliefs, so it passed a law stating that these groups can create their own criteria for membership.

In other words, this is not Jim Crow applied to the LGBT community. This is an eminently reasonable (if debatable) policy for how to balance religious freedom and gay rights. In fact, four out of nine Supreme Court justices ruled that such a policy is required at public universities to maintain freedom of association.

And thus does good will become an ever more precious commodity in post-America.

And one for the bad-move side of the ledger

Moving forward with the Keystone XL pipeline is a great move, but why will it not use the least expensive steel available?

Two more for the great-move side of the ledger

Kneecapping the previous regime's favorite tool for imposing tyranny:

President Trump is seeking to slash the number of workers at the Environmental Protection Agency by at least half, leaving it significantly gutted as the administration mulls further cuts, the former head of Trump's EPA transition team said Friday.

"Let's aim for half and see how it works out, and then maybe we'll want to go further," Myron Ebell said now that he has returned to his position as director of the Center for Energy and Environment at the Competitive Enterprise Institute. Ebell left the Trump transition team a week ago.

Ebell told the Associated Press that Trump is likely to seek significant reductions in the agency's 15,000-person work force. Slashing half of the work force would leave 7,500 at the agency, which would dramatically reduce its capacity to move out regulations quickly.

Other reports say Ebell advised the Trump administration to make the staffing level to be on par with that 45 years ago when the EPA was started during the administration of former Republican President Richard Nixon. That would mean as few as 5,000 employees would remain.

And Christian refugees will finally be getting proper attention:

The United States could prioritize the resettlement of Christian refugees over members of other religious groups, President Trump said on Friday.

“They’ve been horribly treated,” Trump said in an interview with Christian Broadcasting Network anchor David Brody. “Do you know if you were a Christian in Syria it was impossible, at least very tough, to get into the United States?”

“If you were a Muslim you could come in, but if you were a Christian, it was almost impossible and the reason that was so unfair, everybody was persecuted in all fairness, but they were chopping off the heads of everybody but more so the Christians. And I thought it was very, very unfair. So we are going to help them.”

When asked by Brody if he saw helping persecuted Christians abroad as a “priority,” Trump promptly replied, “yes.”

Now, if Prime Minister Theresa May can school him on the importance of NATO - and the importance of being wary about Putin, we'll be buoyant on pretty much all fronts.

 

Nikki Haley: bringing the right attitude to her UN-ambassador position

Check this out:

New US Ambassador Nikki Haley strutted into the UN on Friday with a blunt message to American allies: “For those who don’t have our backs, we’re taking names.”

The former South Carolina governor made the remark to reporters as she arrived at the world body’s headquarters in Manhattan to present her credentials to UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres.

“Our goal with the administration is to show value at the UN and the way that we’ll show value is to show our strength, show our voice, have the backs of our allies and make sure that our allies have our back as well,” she said.

“For those that don’t have our back, we’re taking names, we will make points to respond to that accordingly,” President Trump’s envoy said.

Haley, who has little foreign policy and no US federal government experience, said that at the US Mission to the organization, “You are gonna see a change in the way we do business. It’s no longer about working harder, it’s about working smarter.”

She said Trump wants her to put “fresh eyes” on the UN.

“Everything that’s working, we’re going to make it better,” she said. “Everything that’s not working we’re going to try to fix, and anything that seems to be obsolete and not necessary we’re going to do away with.”

She then hopped on an elevator and went to the 38th floor to meet Guterres, who became UN chief on Jan. 1. They then went into his office for a private sit-down.

Magnificent!

Friday roundup

New Marist poll finds a majority of American women want abortion restricted, don't want tax dollars funding it, think it's morally wrong, and think it hurts women in the long term.

In a stroke of great luck yesterday, I just happened to catch Theresa May's speech to the GOP lawmakers' summit in Philadelphia. It rocked. It was a full-throated affirmation of the special US-UK relationship and its role as the cornerstone of Western civilization's greatness. Let's dispense with the aspect the nitpickers will inevitably bring up: No, she didn't call for ripping up the Iran nuke "agreement," but that was hardly the venue for such a pronouncement, and she did say Iran was the chief cause of terror and strife in the Middle East, and she did call for very strict policing of Iran's actions. But on energy, the free market, standing up to Russia and China, and bedrock Western values, she turned in a start performance for her American debut.

Border Patrol chief Mark Morgan gets the pink slip.

The entire senior management of the State Department resigns. Questions surround the move:

[Washington Post reporter Josh] Rogin’s own reporting calls into question his claim that the departing officials didn’t want to stick around. Kennedy “was actively involved in the transition and was angling to keep [his] job under Tillerson,” according to three State Department officials with whom Rogin spoke. 

In fact, it may be that all four of these officials are leaving involuntarily. Two senior administration officials now say that the Trump administration told the four that their services were no longer needed. This, the two officials say, is part of an effort to “clean house” at Foggy Bottom.

In the case of Patrick Kennedy in particular, it is no great loss:

Kennedy was implicated in the Benghazi fiasco. He was also involved in the Clinton email scandal. Fox News reported that Kennedy proposed a “quid pro quo” to convince the FBI to strip the classification on an email from Hillary Clinton’s server and repeatedly tried to “influence” the bureau’s decision when his offer was denied. 

Just what is keeping Curt Schilling from his rightful place in the Baseball Hall of Fame? 


TransCanada has reapplied for a permit to bring its magnificent Keystone XL pipeline across the border.

"A"CA repeal & replace: the time for forward movement is now

Now that the new era - and all that that implies - is a done deal, your Facebook feed is no doubt clogged, like mine, with the wails and moans and cornered-animal snarls of those offering dystopian scenarios of chaos and misery because, it is claimed, the Republicans have no plan to put something in place of the "A"CA once it is jettisoned.

It is an inaccurate picture of reality:

Senator Rand Paul offered his more libertarian approach on Wednesday, featuring a reliance on free-market innovation in coverage rather than mandates, interstate sales of policies, and broaden access to HSAs. His colleagues Bill Cassidy and Susan Collins offered a significantly different approach – giving each state the option to set up its own version of Obamacare, or choose a “free-market alternative.”

That approach still keeps in place some of the community-rating mandates while eliminating some of the other mandates on coverage, which makes it look like a bad system that has only been transferred to another level of government. Paul Ryan still has his “A Better Way” in the House, while Price will continue to work off his repeatedly offered legislation that closely resembles Ryan’s plan.

Some may see this multitude of options as evidence of chaos and division. Instead, it’s part of the necessary process of working through all the options to get to a consensus solution, one that may well include various parts of all these approaches. Until Republicans gained control of Congress and the White House and replacement became a real possibility, few were willing to do this work and risk the potential political backlash. Now, with not just the possibility but necessity of replacing a collapsing and failing experiment in a command economy, this work can begin in earnest. 

So it would be possible for the howling leftists to take a chill pill on this, were they not driven by their time-worn agenda of trying to make Republicans look heartless.

But, as Ed Morrissey points out at the linked piece, Pubs must forge ahead without pause. Dithering is fatal in this new landscape.

The best analysis of the Trump phenomenon I've seen in some time

Brilliant, actually.

I'd been trying to get at the core of just how it was that postmodernism has produced Squirrel-Hair, but David Ernst at The Federalist has beaten me to it. And nailed it:

Antiheroes have long found homes in Westerns, gangster movies, and crime dramas, such as Al Pacino’s portrayal of Miami drug kingpin Tony Montana in “Scarface.” Tony begins an epic decline and fall in the film with a nasty fight with his wife at an exclusive Miami country club. She publically humiliates him in front of a bunch of dumbstruck, WASPy, black-tie wearing, golf-playing white hairs by loudly accusing him of being a murderer, a drug dealer, and incapable of being a decent father.

If Tony were a classic hero, this would have been the beginning of his moral reckoning and his search for repentance. But this is “Scarface,” and Tony is no hero, so he responds to his public exposure as a criminal in polite society by turning the mirror back on his audience and dressing them down:

What you lookin’ at? You all a bunch of f—in’ a–holes. You know why? You don’t have the guts to be what you wanna be. You need people like me. You need people like me so you can point your f—in’ fingers and say, “That’s the bad guy.” So… what that make you? Good? You’re not good. You just know how to hide, how to lie. Me, I don’t have that problem. Me, I always tell the truth. Even when I lie. So say good night to the bad guy! Come on. The last time you gonna see a bad guy like this again, let me tell you.

A criminal’s longing to be accepted by rich people who aren’t criminals themselves isn’t a new theme. Nevertheless, considering that Oliver Stone wrote the screenplay, Tony’s rant is likely commentary about the hypocrisy of supposedly “respectable” people in cutthroat, capitalistic, Reagan-era America who are substantively no different than Tony is. All these well-to-do Miami types wouldn’t be caught dead associating with someone like Tony, even though they know full well that the cocaine business is making them all rich, and many of them probably abuse his product.

Thus, from Tony’s perspective, what’s the point of being decent when the people who supposedly model “decency” have none of it themselves? Wouldn’t a sign of moral contrition to these people be a perverted mockery of moral contrition? Wouldn’t it be degrading even for Tony?

Tony isn’t a hero or a villain: he’s an antihero. You probably won’t admit to rooting for him, but if you enjoyed watching him stick it to those (presumably) stuck-up hypocrites, then it’s likely that you did. He’s everything his wife said he was, sure, but at least he has the balls to be honest about it.

Trump replicated this scene in his inaugural address Friday, a “declaration of war” against “the establishment” whose “victories have not been your victories. Their triumphs have not been your triumphs. And while they celebrated in our nation’s capital, there was little to celebrate for struggling families all across our land.”
He acted similarly in a jaw-dropping performance at the Al Smith Dinner just days before his election. With every hiss-inducing joke at Hillary Clinton’s expense was an unsubtle middle finger to everyone else in attendance. Consider his opening remarks:

And a special hello to all of you in this room who have known and loved me for many, many years. It’s true. The politicians. They’ve had me to their homes. They’ve introduced me to their children. I’ve become their best friends in many instances. They’ve asked for my endorsement and they’ve always wanted my money. And even called me really a dear, dear friend. But then suddenly, decided when I ran for president as a Republican, that I’ve always been a no-good, rotten, disgusting scoundrel. And they totally forgot about me.

In other words: even if I have been a no-good, rotten, disgusting scoundrel, what does that make you? At least I don’t pretend to be decent; you people, on the other hand, have the gall to pretend that you’re any better than I am. Let’s dispense with the fiction that you would have treated me with any less contempt if I had bothered to live up to any of your standards of decency in the first place, and acknowledge that they have nothing to do with decency per se, and everything to do with power. Your presumption of any moral superiority is a willful, bald-faced lie, and I’m going to keep calling you on that crap until it puts me in the White House.

Many have argued that Trump is the product of political correctness (PC). This is true only in part. Rather, both PC and Trump’s response to it are fruits of the postmodernism that has long ascended to the heights of our culture: the nihilism in the common presumption that all truth is relative, morality is subjective, and therefore all of our individually preferred “narratives” that give our lives meaning are equally true and worthy of validation. Tony tellingly lectures his audience, “I always tell the truth, even when I lie.” His character was a man ahead of his time.

Postmodernism is the source of the emphasis that our culture puts on authenticity, and the scorn it directs towards phoniness. After all, if the only one true thing in the world is that all truth and morality are relative, then anyone who pretends otherwise is either an idiot or a fraud. Hence the contemporary appeal of the antihero, and the disappearance of the traditional hero.
Heroes who stand for traditionally good things in a world where everything supposedly “good” has long been discredited are corny Dudley Do-Rights who are at best too stupid to know better. Antiheroes, by contrast, ingratiate themselves with their audiences for their gritty realism and their candor, no matter how bad they are. Frank Underwood breaks the fourth wall with his viewers and brings them along for his evil schemes; Walter White’s moment of redemption is his final admission to his wife that he sells meth because he likes to, and not to do right by his family; and Tony Soprano establishes a close bond with his daughter early on when he admits to her that he’s not actually a “waste management consultant.” In the postmodern world, there is no greater virtue then authenticity, and there is no greater vice then phoniness.

Postmodernism is also the source of the assumptions underlying the glib jokes of late-night comedians who exhibit disdainful prejudice towards patriotism or religion, but show bitter judgment towards any form of perceived prejudice. It is the baseline for just about every plotline in funny shows about aimless, self-centered people like “Seinfeld,” “It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia,” and “Archer.” It is hyper-prejudice against prejudice, or in the words of Evan Sayet, “a cult of non-discrimination.” 

Seriously, are not Squirrel-Hair's remarks at the Al Smith Dinner every bit as thuggish as Tony's? And the narcissistic presumption that of course you've "loved me for many years" is quintessential S-H.

I realized I have excerpted rather large portions of his essay, but is his take not spot-on?

He then gets to precisely why Trumpism harms actual conservatism:

Enter the right-wing postmodern antihero. Unlike just about every other presidential candidate who ran on the Republican ticket, Trump grasps our postmodern culture intuitively, and put it to use with devastating effect.
If our opponents are going to accuse us of being evil-minded bigots, regardless of what we say or think, then what’s the point in bothering to convince them otherwise? Let’s play by their own rules of relativism and subjectivity, dismiss their baseless accusations, and hammer them mercilessly where it hurts them the most: their hypocrisy. After all, if there is no virtue greater than authenticity, and no vice worse then phoniness, then the purveyors of contrived PC outrage are distinctively vulnerable.

It's going to be interesting to see the back and forth over this piece in coming days. Perhaps - hopefully - Ernst himself will have more to say.

Because the way he concludes this essay kind of leaves one with a question: Is he lauding postmodernism's attack on phoniness and thereby S-H's loutishness? I don't think so. I think a close reading indicates that he wishes a real conservative could have prevailed so that the morally clouded nature of the 21st century thus far could have begun to be ameliorated.

Or, as I put it, we could have had Ted Cruz.

Another example of identity politics forcing the Left to eat its own

And if you closely examine what's going on here, you will see that it is an unforced blunder. There was no need for this, but City Hall felt it had to decide which demographic had the greater claim to being beleaguered, so the homosexuals lost out and now have to undergo "implicit bias" training:

Here’s a story you probably didn’t see coming. The City of Brotherly Love has a problem with bias in certain businesses and organizations and the Mayor has decided to do something about it. The troubles are centered in one particular district locally referred to as “the Gayborhood” because of the large number of LGBT oriented bars and services in the area. Sounds good so far. We don’t want people discriminating against gays and lesbians.

But hold the phone… that’s not the problem. It’s racial bias they are investigating. How do those two things intersect? Well, it turns out that the LGBT community in Philadelphia is primarily white and… how to put this delicately… they’re kinda racist. At least according to the mayor anyway. (Philly.com)

Bar owners and nonprofits in the Gayborhood must attend training sessions on fair business practices and implicit bias, the city announced Monday.

The mandates come as part of a report released Monday by the Commission on Human Relations that found widespread reports of racial tension and discrimination in the neighborhood, which often touts its inclusivity.

“Racism in the LGBTQ community is a real issue. It’s a real issue in our entire society, not only just in the LGBTQ area or in the Gayborhood,” Mayor Kenney said. “We need to do more to address it here in Philadelphia. We will do whatever else we need to do to see that the recommendations are adopted. And that possibly could include eliminating organizations who won’t change their ways by limiting our participation in their work financially.”

Now, I know what you’re probably thinking because there are two questions that immediately come to mind. The first is… wait a minute. Philly has a Gayborhood? Yes indeed they do and it’s prominently featured at the Visit Philly website.

The second question is probably along the lines of… can they do that? Well, that one may be a bit more complicated.

Reading through this coverage I honestly don’t see how this is legal. There was a report issued by the city’s Human Rights Commission after some hearings, but it doesn’t sound like any of these businesses – primarily bars – are being charged with a crime. But they are still going to be forced to take mandatory training classes, post certain educational materials and take other steps. Why does it only apply to bars in that one district? Isn’t racism bad anywhere you find it?

It will be interesting to see how this is received by the area's business owners. Will they rebel  and have their eyes opened to the pernicious nature of state schemes to get inside one's head - and one's business establishment - or will they self-flagellate and go willingly into the training gulag?

Time to admit it's a civil war

Read these two items in succession.

This report about former North Carolina governor Pat McCrory being chased down a Washington Street and the police having to step in. Video at the link.

And then read Dennis Prager's latest essay.

Getting a couple of big ones right on day three

Cuffing the hands of what had been an all-too-effective tool for tyranny when the previous regime was gripping America's throat:

Donald Trump plans to ban the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) from funding science, and “overhaul” its use of science from outside groups, according to a Monday report published in Axios.

The EPA is the agency charged with protecting America’s clean air and water, and under former President Barack Obama, it took significant steps to combat climate change.

Axios reporters Jonathan Swan and Mike Allen say they got a “sneaky peek” at the Trump transition team’s action plan for the agency. They did not publish the full plan, but summarized it and included this key excerpt:

“EPA does not use science to guide regulatory policy as much as it uses regulatory policy to steer the science. This is an old problem at EPA. In 1992, a blue-ribbon panel of EPA science advisers that [sic] ‘science should not be adjusted to fit policy.’ But rather than heed this advice, EPA has greatly increased its science manipulation.”

And the previous regime's deliberate hobbling of economic advancement gets an abrupt reversal:

President Donald Trump on Tuesday signed executive actions to advance approval of the Keystone XL and Dakota Access oil pipelines.

The decision to advance the pipelines cast aside efforts by President Barack Obama's administration to block construction of the two pipelines, while making good on one of Trump's campaign promises.

As he signed the documents Tuesday in the Oval Office, Trump also vowed to "renegotiate some of the terms" of the Keystone bill and said he would then seek to "get that pipeline built."

Beautiful and glorious.

As I've said a few times recently, it's clear that wise, principled people have the new president's ear.

Color me pleasantly surprised and delighted.

What would it take to restore the health and rightful place of the humanities in the university?

Two articles this morning each having to do with the state of the humanities, the sciences and education and society in general. The area in which the point of each dovetails bears some examination.

At The Weekly Standard, James Pierson and Naomi Schaefer Riley revisit a great trick that was played on the academy twenty years ago:

Twenty years ago, the academic journal Social Text published an article with the trendy title “Transgressing the Boundaries: Towards a Transformative Herme­neutics of Quantum Gravity." The article claimed that quantum gravity is nothing but a social and linguistic construct that physicists are trying to pass off as a genuine account of the universe around us. Theoretical physics, the article concluded, is just a bunch of meaningless words and symbols.

The actual meaningless words and symbols were those in the article itself, which consisted of high-flown gibberish. It was a postmodern spoof of postmodernism.

The article, author Alan Sokal would later write, was "a pastiche of left-wing cant, fawning references, grandiose quotations, and outright nonsense," all "structured around the silliest quotations" by postmodernist academics. He hoped by his hoax to make an important point: that humanities professors under the influence of postmodern doctrines had discarded basic standards of logic and proof and were prone to believe—even publish—utter silliness.

They say that the problem with Sokal's hoax was that it only dealt with the encroachment of postmodern gobbledy-gook on the hard-sciences realm - which, we must conclude, was a tacit giving of a pass to its infection of the humanities, where it originated.

And that metastasizing infection has widened and deepened the rift between the humanities classroom and the normal-people world:

Sokal's original hoax may have ridiculed "left-wing cant" but it did little to blunt the ascendancy of the left on campus. Fewer professors today would dare to take on the postmodernists in the manner Sokal did two decades ago. This should serve as a warning to those who think that professors in the hard sciences might act as a check on the absurdities committed by their colleagues in the humanities. Academe is now much more of an ideological monolith than it was two decades ago.

The general public has made no such movement to the left. Which means that over the decades, the gulf between academe and the taxpayers called upon to support it has widened. The tension between town and gown is growing, McClay points out, in part because highly ideological fields such as gender and race studies have broken out of the academic hothouse and into the mainstream of American life and politics.

As there is no longer any serious check on extremism from within the academic world, that check is going to have to come from the public at large as expressed through politics and elections. In this sense academia is no different from any other sector of American life: If it cannot regulate itself, it may eventually find itself regulated by others, and in ways not to its liking.

At NRO, Ian Tuttle responds to a piece that appeared on that site on Saturday by Varad Mehta, who had posited that  George Washington University had dropping its American-history requirement for its history majors was strictly a commercial calculation.

GWU is seeing fewer students signing up as history majors; the department’s funding is dependent on enrollment; ergo, it’s hoping this change and others make the GW history department more attractive to matriculating students. 

Fair enough.

Tuttle goes on to cite a passage from Mehta's piece in which he says that "we insisted they alter the requirements for history majors,"  and then quite rightly goes on to ask who Mehta presumes this "we" to be.

He takes us back to the 1980s, when conservatives began to take a serious look at the Leftist rot occurring within humanities fields. The most notable example of this was Alan Bloom's The Closing of the American Mind.

The upshot of the conversation on the Right since then has tended toward a view that the humanities were beyond fixing, and that fact, combined with the changing world of work worldwide, meant that the humanities were probably best left to wither. Hence unfortunate pronouncements such as that of Marco Rubio that one ought to study welding and probably not philosophy.

Tuttle concludes:

 . . . if “philosophy” is understood as “much of what passes for philosophy in institutions of higher learning today,” the sentiment is perhaps less galling. A degree is expensive, and people have to make a living. They also should be sufficiently educated as to be up to the tasks of citizenship.

GW’s curriculum change suggests that its history department, like many other departments in many prestigious universities, has decided to pursue one of those goals at the expense of the other. How that came to pass is, I think, more complicated than Mehta suggests. For this critic, at least, it’s precisely because the humanities are so valuable that GW’s decision is unfortunate.

What all this says to me is that, like other realms such as economic policy, world affairs and religious freedom, there is no substitute for bringing to bear the courage and intellectual rigor  required to save what is good and true about the study of philosophy, literature, music and history.

A world inhabited by real human beings - who have depth, wisdom, humility and sharp powers of discernment - depends on it.