Post-America chokes on its own toxicity

This is one of those days on which it seems like the only two sensible reactions to the state of post-American culture are weeping and hurling.

Well, and of course praying.

A lot of what this post is going to cite and discuss has to do with the accelerated pace of the rot since the Trump phenomenon got underway, but that's not the whole picture. Ultimately, Trump, and the hate that emanates from his support base, and also from the Left that wants to see him destroyed by any means necessary, are the fruits of trends that have been poisoning this country for decades.

And now it's at the point where some people whose position, on the surface, is the good and right one are sabotaging even that, caught up as they are in the coarseness with which most people now communicate, as I shall discuss shortly.

I'd like to start with Erick Erickson's Resurgent post from yesterday in which he discusses what he and his family have been through since he publicly declared that he couldn't support Trump:

Over the course of the campaign in 2016, we had people show up at our home to threaten us. We had armed guards at the house for a while. My kids were harassed in the store. More than once they came home in tears because other kids were telling them I was going to get killed or that their parents hated me. I got yelled at in the Atlanta airport while peeing by some angry Trump supporter.

We got harassed in church and stopped going for a while. A woman in a Bible study told my wife she wanted to slap me across the face My seminary got calls from people demanding I be expelled. And on and on it went. When I nearly died in 2016, I got notes from people upset I was still alive. When I announced my wife had an incurable form of lung cancer, some cheered. All were directed from supposedly evangelical Trump supporters convinced God was punishing me for not siding with his chosen one. For a while, given the nature of what we were getting in the mail, my kids had to stop checking it.

It's really like that.

And I guess you know about Michelle Wolf's appearance at the White House Correspondents' Dinner.

I suppose the place to start with regard to this is to point out that there was a time when that level of basic crudeness would not have been found at a Washington social event at which people were dressed elegantly and eating from fine china, glass and silver. But that's so obvious it's kind of a banal observation now, isn't it. Almost elicits a reaction of "Oh, please, to what year do you want to turn back the clock?"

In particular, the nastiness of Wolf's "jokes" about Sarah Huckabee Sanders encapsulated Wolf's overall tone and generated an exchange that in itself was full of poison.

Take the Daily Beast's Marlow Stern's reaction, for example:

The White House purposely sent Sarah Huckabee Sanders and Kellyanne Conway to the #WHCD to then feign outrage at the jokes made at their expense, so... don't fall for it

Does "cynical" even begin to scratch the surface? His assumption is that they were sent there to be lightning rods, to draw out snark that might then garner outrage among Trump supporters.

Except consider this tweet from Brad Thor, know to be vigorously opposed to Trump, to the point where he's considering a primary run against him in 2020.

Dear @PressSec - it took a lot of dignity, guts, and class to sit through what you did tonight. You personified professionalism. Thank you.

For which he came in for this kind of response:

She lies everyday at the podium and says horrible things about various people like our former FBI Director. She deserves no courtesy.

And the thread then takes a turn of digression that makes Comey the point.

The treasonous Comey? Lol! He is a disgrace to the FBI. You must be a supporter of honest Hillary? Don’t even get me started.  

The atmosphere demands that one take a black-or-white position on James Comey, an enigmatic, complex and flawed man, a man who has a longtime friend in Andrew McCarthy, who will vouch for his admirable qualities, even as he expresses dismay at his recent poor judgement (The book and the book tour were bad ideas, and the continuing mystery surrounding the way he handled the Hillary Clinton email case is discomforting):

I am fond of Jim Comey and have been for 30 years. I vigorously disagree with both his handling of the Clinton emails investigation and the manner in which the FBI has conducted what is supposed to be a classified, counterintelligence probe of Russia’s interference in the 2016 election — not a public, government-orchestrated campaign of insinuation that Trump was complicit in Russian perfidy.

No doubt because of my personal regard for him and respect for his high-end ability, I am inclined to cut the former director slack. He was thrust into a no-win situation: It is not his fault that Democrats nominated a criminal suspect, or that Republicans nominated an irregular politician heedless of the norms of discretion and distance that a president should maintain when dealing with his law-enforcement subordinates. Comey aside, I had no better friends in nearly 20 years as a federal prosecutor in New York than Dan Richman, the Columbia Law School prof through whom Comey transmitted information to the New York Times, and Pat Fitzgerald and Dave Kelley, Comey’s lawyers. These aren’t just former colleagues of mine; they are old friends. I haven’t tried to speak to any of them about this matter, but my esteem for them weighs on me — as does my duty to be an honest analyst. How well I resolve that tension is not for me to say; I can just tell you it is real.

See how far afield we've gotten? All because in 2018 post-America, everyone has to be either a total villain or a white knight. And, yes, due to her job, Sarah Huckabee Sanders has to cast aspersions on Comey in her press briefings. Sanders works for a loathsome being who directs her to speak thusly. And her father, who has always been disappointing and has, since the Trump phenomenon got underway, had his respect-worthiness diminish markedly, is no doubt a factor in her loyalty to Trump, which is bewildering, given her Christian moorings. I really hope she reaches a point at which she can no longer hold that job. But, as with the case of Comey, in this rancid atmosphere, she must either be a scurrilous scumbag or an uncommonly noble paragon of virtue. She is not allowed to be a complex human being.

And then we come to the biggest vulnerability that someone like Sanders sets herself up for, because, as noted above, she does indeed work for a president who is indeed a loathsome being.

Republicans calling Michelle Wolf disgusting and vulgar must not remember the dude they elected bragging about grabbing women by their vaginas whilst cheating on his wife with porn stars.

There's not much room for squirming past that one.

I'm pretty sure the above tweet comes from a left-leaner, but I'm also pretty sure the one below comes from a right-leaner - i.e., the one kind of person in all this who ought to know better than to take this occasion to point out Sanders' precarious position.

Sarah Huckabee has zero shame and goes out there and lies to the nation daily on behalf of a despicable conman.

But, as we can see, it takes no time at all for a simple expression of admiration for a moment of composure to turn into a cesspool of tribalist gotcha, absolutist takes on figures in precarious professional positions, and, of course, nasty juvenile ways of expressing it all.

The sum total of it all is a demonic cacophony that leaves scant room for maturity, self-respect, and humility.

It gets later in the day by the microsecond.

God help us.

The only resolution to the basic human predicament

I just followed an Internet trail that led me to a website I've bookmarked and will be checking in with frequently, I'm quite sure. Just look at some of the tantalizing article titles featured on the front page. Juicy questions, no?

I'd not heard of J. Warner Wallace, who runs the website, before I followed this trail of writings. It started with a column he has today at Townhall.  The column is a real wet blanket in a certain sense. He cites the findings of a recent Pew study, and they don't bode well:

Our Numbers Are Shrinking – Only 56% of Americans say they believe in God “as described in the Bible.” The number of people who claim a belief in God – or who self-identify as Christian – is steadily shrinking each year according to Pew surveys conducted over the past decade.

Our Members Are Less Educated – Of those who have a high-school education or less, 94% say they believe in God as described in the Bible. But, as our collective educational level increases, our collective belief decreases. Of college graduates surveyed, only 45% believe in the Biblical God. 

Our Ranks Are Aging – The younger we are, the less likely we are to believe in the Biblical God. While 65% of Baby Boomers believe in God as described in the Bible, only 43% of millennials hold a similar view (a recent Barna survey also revealed that Gen Z Americans, ages 3-18, are far more likely to be atheists than older age groups). 

Our Understanding Is Withering – Of those who identified themselves as Christians, only 80% said they believed in the Biblical God. 20% said that they believed in a higher power or spiritual force, other than the God described in the Bible. 

To be candid, the uplift he offers after putting forth these figures is rather thin gruel. The study finds that "88 percent of Americans believe in some kind of God / higher power / spiritual force, even if that being is not the God of the Bible." A starting point, I guess.

But I followed some of the links he inserts in the course of the column, which led me to his website, and then to some particular posts therein.

This one, entitled "Why Some People Simply Will Not Be Convinced," is good.

As is this one, entitled "I'm Not A Christian Because It Works For Me."

I think we can safely say that one reason for the dismal stats cited in the Pew study is that the entire notion of sin is a turnoff for post-Americans. It was for me. And to be sure, the subject is often presented in an egregiously boneheaded fashion. We've all seen the little pamphlets that think they're getting the secular person who has just happened upon them excited with a message like "So we can see that we deserve Hell and death. But the good news is that Jesus died for our sins so that we might escape such a fate!" I know my response was always, "Save that crap for somebody else, pal."

I've said before - a few times - that one of the last sticking points for me was that the Christian scenario looked like a rigged game. God gives us this gift of our free will, but we're inevitably going to use it to sin and thereby incur God's wrath, and then we have to perform this particular ablution in order to get right.

But I finally had to admit to myself that, at some level, every last human being - myself most definitely included - is broken. Has issues. Falls short of perfection, even if you want to define perfection as the Platonic state of the ideal, or the Buddhist state of enlightenment. As the trite old saying puts it, nobody's perfect.

Now, there's a predicament. What's the way out of that? To see that that is so, and then to think that after we die, we'd just experience bliss. that eternity would be peachy-keen, just doesn't add up. It amounts to the same thing as atheism. It saps the meaning out of life in this realm. None of our thoughts and actions, and none of what we experience as a result of interacting with others, would make any sense. We'd have no basis for defining right and wrong, good and bad.

So we need a release valve, an escape hatch.

God has to be the kind of god the Bible describes. It's the only way anything is going to mean anything. It's the resolution to the questions the ancient philosophers had.

I was a tough customer. Even in the last few seconds before I said yes to Jesus - and I'd been going back to church for quite some time by then - I was scouring my mind, asking if there wasn't some other model of reality that was at least equally valid.

But there comes a point at which it's not so much you approaching Him as it is Him drawing you in the rest of the way. The dynamic flips.

God said, "Quit squirming and let me love you."

And once I did, I was filled with a sense of compassion for all the stages I went through prior to that moment.

That's the element we need to bring to any conversations we have with spiritual-but-not religious post-Americans, as well as secular agnostics (which I know all about, since that's what I had become), the ones who say, "There may be some kind of higher power, but it's not real high on my list of things to think about."

These are all points on the journey, the journey that ends at the foot of the Cross. From that vantage point, we can see that God smiles on any of those who are not so embittered as to be willfully rejecting it altogether.

He'll see them up close and personally eventually. In fact, he'll let go of his plow and run across the field, with tears streaming down his face, saying, "My child has come home!"

Then again . . .

Naval War College professor Tom Nichols noted today, in a series of tweets, that these recent moves didn't require any risk or sacrifice on Kim's part:


I am not enough of an internal North Korea politics expert to know why Kim is doing what Kim's doing. But from a 30,000 foot IR perspective, I have just a couple of ideas.

First, what does it cost Kim to do any of this? Nothing. He has faced down the United States, given Trump the finger, matched our rhetoric, and in return he's....kept his nuclear arsenal and gotten a summit out of it. A win by any definition for North Korea. /2

Kim has solidified his family's legacy, and now it's time to get rid of those sanctions. So he placates China, and reaches out to SK...again, offering *nothing* in return but vague "one day, we'll all be 'denuclearized' together" promises. /3

In one swoop, Kim has done all this: - raised himself to "international leader" stature - gotten the US to treat him like a peer - kept his nuclear program - cracked open the chance for ending at least some sanctions - gotten the royal treatment in SK without involving the US /4

If, on top of all this, he's ending his testing because he blew up his own testing site accidentally, than it's a great time to take a breather. So far, all I see here is gain for the Norks. The gain for everyone else is: no war in Korea, which is great. /5

But to attribute this to tough US diplomacy strikes me as reversing causality. (Again, I'm willing to be shown evidence from Korea experts here.) NK has weathered the US storm with a defiant GFY on nukes. Now they can afford to look magnanimous. /6

And since the US leadership and policies are so unstable, Kim's able to make the case that this should be an "in the family" arrangement in Asia that excludes the kooky Americans. That's how it seems to me, anyhoo. /7x

Worth considering. As I say, it strikes me as premature to conclude whether this ushers in an era of unicorns and rainbows or is a big ruse by Kim. From my perspective, there's still a missing-element feel to all this.

Maybe, in the lone case of North Korea, what is repulsive and counterproductive in all other respects is just the ticket

These photos of Kim from recent weeks are pretty stunning, no? Shaking hands with Mike Pompeo. Setting foot in South Korea, sitting with South Korean president Moon and signing documents of intent to end the state of war.

Let's be careful here. It is such an abrupt about face for a dictator who was posing an existential threat to the Unites States, Japan and South Korea two months ago that we probably don't have enough facts to ascribe it unequivocally to one thing.

But surely Donald Trump's presence and style are a factor.

Veteran White House reporter Keith Koffler, writing at the NBC News website, seems to think so:

History — and in particular, the American voter — has a way of calling forth the right person to lead at the right time. Trump is a flawed man — self-indulgent, megalomaniacal, a bit paranoid, driven by self-interest and implacably domineering. But these “flaws” also make him a big character, and as he prepares to confront Kim and the other great tyrants of the age, Americans can feel assured that they have chosen the right man for the moment.

Not too long ago, the struggles among great nations were defined by ideology, as democracy and communism competed for allegiance around the world. During that age, a relatively non-ideological, nonintellectual man like Trump might have had trouble understanding the thinking animating Russian and Chinese communists, hampering his ability to confront them. But with realpolitik and raw ambition supreme, Trump is the man for this current age of crisis.

The president will have no problem understanding the motivations of Kim and the other tyrants he faces, including Russian President Vladimir Putin, newly anointed Chinese President-for-life Xi Jinpingand Iranian supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei. And Trump has the outsized strength of personality to combat them — unlike any of his rivals in the 2016 presidential election.

Republican voters were offered several “nice” alternatives who were raised to be respectful, yet they chose the guy who’d wipe his mouth off with your tie. Then the general public concurred.

A moment like this requires those of us holding the basic position that we do - that it's basically a bad thing that someone with this nature is the US president - to rise above the impulse to retreat into tribalism.

To the extent that the Very Stable Genius factor is driving unprecedented events in North Korea, we must be grateful that we could well be spared the dire scenario that looked disturbingly possible (likely?) quite recently.

No, LITD is not going Trumpist.

Koffler's line in the last paragraph from the above excerpt - "the guy who'd wipe his mouth off with your tie" - is not only great writing, but spot-on, and it's horrible that he rose to the top - unless it has staved off apocalypse.

Some kind of stance to be expressed along the lines of "I don't care if he accomplishes that. I hate him and that's all I want to talk about when the subject arises" is utterly useless.

Along with the Three Pillars and an expectation for the decorum in which the VSG is utterly lacking, conservatism is about living in the real world, and the facts seem to indicate that Kim's recent turnabout is due to some degree to having taken Trump's measure.

That's all it means. Trump may well - probably will - cause some messes of one kind or another with his personality and (lack of) character. But we will have at least been granted the breathing space to live to see what they are.

That's not insignificant.

 

This is horrible

One of the most reliable outposts of actual conservatism on the Web has been mutilated by its corporate parent:

Salem Media, owner of the influential conservative outlet RedState, froze the site on Friday and dismissed many of its writers.

Bloggers were locked out of their accounts -- some just temporarily, while the cuts were made, and others permanently. 

Erick Erickson, the site's longtime editor who left in 2015, tweeted about what he called the "mass firing" on Friday morning. 

"Very sad to see, but not really surprising given Salem's direction," he wrote. "And, finally, after all these years, they've turned off my account." 

Multiple sources told CNNMoney that they believed conservative critics of President Trump were the writers targeted for removal. 

"Insufficiently partisan" was the phrase one writer used in a RedState group chat. 

"They fired everybody who was insufficiently supportive of Trump," one of the sources who spoke with CNNMoney said, adding, "how do you define being 'sufficiently supportive' of Trump?" 

But if it was about politics, it was also about money. 

Related: Trump's call to 'Fox and Friends' explains why we don't hear much from him

RedState writers work on contract and are paid based on the amount of traffic to their posts. 

"Those who had been under a contract with a higher per-click rate were mostly all tossed, only keeping those who were pro-Trump even if their traffic was comparable," another one of the sources said on condition of anonymity. 

"Of those who make less under their contracts, they mostly tossed those who had been openly critical of the president," the source said. "It seems to have been a cost saving measure, but the deciding factor between any two people seems to have been who liked the president and who didn't." 

Salem had no immediate comment. But an internal memo obtained by CNNMoney confirmed the housecleaning. 

"We had to make some tough changes to RedState today," Townhall general manager Jonathan Garthwaite wrote in the memo. "While these changes are painful, they were necessary once we reached the conclusion that we could no longer support the entire roster of writers and editors." 

RedState, a 13-year-old blog that was founded by Erick Erickson, is one of several sites in Townhall Media's portfolio. Townhall, in turn, is owned by Salem Media Group, a conservative media company that also operates radio stations and publishes books. 

Salem has previously been scrutinized for its treatment of radio hosts who weren't toeing a pro-Trump line during the presidential campaign. 

A source with ties to RedState said bloggers had been "wondering if this was going to happen at RedState," meaning "anyone who wasn't a big fan of Trump would be dumped." 

RedState has been reflective of the divides within the GOP and the conservative movement, with a spectrum of writers with varying reactions to Trump's political choices and personality conflicts. 

Garthwaite did not respond to a followup request for comment on Friday. 

His initial email to writers said, "there's no getting around the fact that this is awful news, but I value your contribution to RedState and I hope you will stick with it through this tough period and keep RedState going." 

However, some contributors then received a separate email indicating that they were out. Their accounts were locked, meaning publishing rights were revoked. 

Caleb Howe, one of the site's lead editors, was among those dismissed. 

He cryptically tweeted on Friday, "There is a right way to do something and a f---ed up way." 

His tweet aimed at an unknown person, saying, "You can call me back or you can watch this unfold right here, guy." 

Howe did not respond to requests for comment from CNNMoney

I'd been detecting a funny odor wafting off Townhall for some time. Most days, one can still find some actual conservative columnists, but there's always an ample supply of Trumpists as well.

I saw a subsequent tweet from Erickson, who, upon leaving Red State founded The Resurgent.  He says that, even though The Resurgent has budget troubles, he's offering to bring all the fired RS writers onto the Resurgent payroll. That's the kind of heart Erickson has.

I can't pay them, but any of them are free to guest blog here.

There's still National Review and the Weekly Standard. Ben Shapiro. Kevin Williamson.

And LITD.

Principles are immutable.

I know they're personally indispensable to me. I wouldn't go anywhere without them.

Donald Trump has not "grown on me." I think he's unfit from a character and maturity standpoint to be president, or an influential public figure generally. I did when he was just a reality-show host and brand-hustler. I did when he descended the escalator at trump Tower in July 2015, and I do now.


Prayers for RS - and Salem.

The best overview of America's current world-stage challenges I've come across

American Enterprise Institute scholar Gary Schmitt has a new book out, called Rise of the Revisionists: Russia, China and Iran.  He has written the introduction, and there are essays by other AEI world-affairs specialists on each of the countries mentioned in the title:

Frederick Kagan's "Russia: The Kremlin's Many Revisions," Dan Blumenthal's "China: The Imperial Legacy," and Reuel Marc Gerecht's "Iran: The Shi'ite Imperial Power"

There's a concluding chapter by Walter Russell Mead that sums up how America should engage each of these spheres:

In the concluding essay, Walter Russell Mead explains why international relations realists are inclined to define a state's behavior narrowly. As a result, they do not provide an adequate road map for policymakers to use in developing strategies to confront that behavior. "Thucydides was no realist in the modern, American, and academic sense of that term." Today's realism "is a weak and denatured creature, compared to the complex vision of Thucydidean realism, and the costs to analytic coherence are serious." 

No, Thucydides' notion of realism went like this:

He also has been called the father of the school of political realism, which views the political behavior of individuals and the subsequent outcomes of relations between states as ultimately mediated by and constructed upon the emotions of fear and self-interest.^[3] His text is still studied at universities and military colleges worldwide.^[4] The Melian dialogue is regarded as a seminal work of international relations theory, while his version of Pericles' Funeral Oration is widely studied by political theorists, historians, and students of the classics.

An abridged version of Schmitt's introduction appears today at AEI, and it's important reading. Here's his - and Mead's - application of Thucydidean realism to the 21st century scenario of the three revisionist powers:

In Mead's account, in the world of Thucydides, peoples and leaders are moved by a complex mix of interests, fate, and passions, and "no concept could be less congenial" to the Father of History "than the idea that domestic politics and regime type are largely irrelevant to the study of international relations"—which holds true for both autocratic and liberal regimes. In short, it pays to know, in depth, what is driving a state and its leaders; to understand that those drivers cannot be divorced from a country's internal governance; and to realize that, even with such an understanding, unknown and uncontrollable factors will still intercede to shape and limit any strategy.

The way these powers are acting is straight out of the way Athens regarded Melos in Thucydides' telling of it:

When a regime's character is factored in, tensions appear virtually inevitable. China, Iran, and Russia all assert a civilizational challenge to the Western liberal democratic order. It is difficult to know how deeply the three countries' general populations hold their leaders' views, but for the leadership in each, ideology is certainly an important source of legitimacy for their non-liberal rule at home. 

Coexistence with prosperous, relatively powerful democratic neighbors, whose own relations are largely based on the trust and norms that come from similarity of rule, is a circle hard to square. Even Iran, whose neighborhood is hardly filled with liberal democratic states, must continually strive to keep Iraq, Lebanon, and Syria in a state of chaos, lest a more liberal, majoritarian Shi'ite state emerge and threaten the Islamic Republic's claims to be the only legitimate form of rule for its sect. And the notion that a nation carries a special civilizational role becomes even more important for the leadership to sustain when their ability to meet domestic needs and expectations appears to come up short—a problem Russia, Iran, and, increasingly, China have had.

Schmitt then goes on to make clear that this isn't just some abstract  exercise:

Of course, the question is: Why should we care? None of the three states directly threatens the United States. Indeed, arguably, if relations are tense, it is largely because Washington has pushed back against revisionist efforts—often about matters far from our shores and at times over issues for which we have no formal opinion (for example, about who has sovereignty over this or that islet in the South China Sea), no treaty obligation (as with Georgia or Ukraine), or no historical tie (as in Syria).

The answer is that, since World War II's end, Washington has understood that, strategically, Europe, East Asia, and the Middle East are the three most important theaters to the United States and that general peace and global prosperity depend on deterring non-liberal, would-be hegemons from disrupting those regions' stability. If history is any guide, the lesson learned has been that ignoring trouble on those fronts only postpones the difficulty and raises the cost of eventually dealing with it.

He takes a square look at the choices the US faced concerning the actions it has taken so far in each sphere:

Undoubtedly, the Great Recession of 2008 and the costly, indecisive wars in Afghanistan, Iraq, and Libya have soured large segments of the American public and their representatives on adopting a forward-leaning American strategic posture. With economic problems at home following the recession of 2008, the benefits of such efforts have appeared less than satisfactory.

But this invites two questions: What would the regional and geopolitical situations have been if Washington had not acted? And, as noted already, were the indecisive results a product of strategic overreach, flawed implementation, or a lack of sustained commitment to the task at hand—or some combination of these? The point is not that a forward-leaning posture can prevent costly policy mistakes but rather that one should not simply assume that the larger strategy is to blame for those mistakes. 

Nor should we assume that we cannot afford a forward-leaning strategy for Eurasia. Although its primacy is more contested today than in the after-math of the Cold War, the United States remains the world's only superpower. And while the West—the US and its democratic allies—has seen its overwhelming share of global economic and military power shrink in recent years, it still accounts for some 60 percent of the world's wealth and military spending. Moreover, although the contesting, revisionist powers have the advantage of operating in their own neighborhoods—meaning the US has the more complex and diverse task of responding to challenges far from home—the US has significant, close allies in each region that have begun to spend more on their militaries in the face of the threats posed by China, Iran, and Russia. 

Nor have the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan bankrupted the US. At the height of the campaigns, total defense spending (personnel, procurement, operations, etc.) as a percentage of GDP never rose above 5 percent, well below Cold War levels. Today, the base defense budget hovers at 3 percent or less.

In short, if the US and its allies wanted to do more to contest these revisionist powers in the realm of hard military power, they could. It is really a matter of policy choices and priorities. 

And here's a bracing truth that is hard to fully let in - but that must be let in nonetheless:

 China, Iran, and Russia have all read Washington's reluctance [to continue to lead as it had since the end of World War II] as an opportunity to advance their own plans and have done so in a manner that the American public has noticed. Even absent a major confrontation, American politicians may sense greater instability and greater prospects for conflict. This may lead them to argue the case for reversing course and, with the help of our allies, obtaining the benefits of deterring and containing the revisionist powers. To paraphrase Tocqueville, when it comes to American statecraft, Americans need to relearn the merits of acting on "self-interest rightly understood"—that is, looking not simply to one's immediate interest, but understanding that today's sacrifice may produce a longer-term and more substantial advantage.

We come back to that inescapable observation: None of these three powers, and indeed, none of the smaller and less powerful countries that reside in their spheres of influence, has anything like the values that inform the American character.

And those values have been diminished and distorted elsewhere in the West.

In short, America is exceptional and indispensable. We must lead.

There's that business about nature abhorring a vacuum.

 

 

 

LITD's take on the VSG-Kanye West-John Legend dustup

These are all Godless, ego-driven people who are, if they are moving the cultural needle at all,  doing so in a counterproductive way.

Thursday roundup

The foremost development requiring our contemplation is the UK government's barbaric treatment of its most vulnerable citizen, Alfie Evans.

Three key paragraphs from David French's NRO piece about it:

With no God over the state, the state then becomes not the defender of liberty but the definer of liberty. You have no freedoms except those bestowed by the state, and those freedoms are defined entirely by the various branches of government. There is no inherent parental authority. There is no inherent right to life. There is only the justice the state gives according to the standards the state dictates.

And . . .

The long-term threat to the American experiment isn’t found in any given policy, but rather in a lost philosophy. Americans are shedding a belief in God at an alarming rate. In elite circles, fundamental liberties like free speech and due process are scorned and mocked as tools of white supremacy or oppressive patriarchies. Federalism has been reduced to a tactic of political opposition, not a bipartisan principle of self-governance.

If you don’t want America to become Britain — if you don’t want to wake up one morning to find the American state defying loving and prudent parents to declare that death is in a child’s “best interests” — I would suggest that you not wait until America is secularized, centralized, and authoritarian. I’d suggest that you not wait until the moment when the state has seized the power to act like Britain, and you’re reduced to arguing, “I know the government can do this, but it shouldn’t.”

Bill Cosby - he of the classic 1963 comedy album I Started Out As A Child, the Jell-O pudding commercials, and the Cliff Huxtable America's-dad situation comedy role - is found guilty of sexually violating Andrea Costand. 

Mike Pompeo is confirmed as Secretary of State.

Joy Reid learns that nothing expressed in cyberspace is never not permanent:

In a 2007 blog post, MSNBC host Joy Reid attacked TV host Rosie O'Donnell using misogynistic and fat-shaming language and defended future president Donald Trump.

After Reid apologized for old homophobic blog posts in December 2017, her blog "The Reid Report" was effectively taken off of the Internet Archive's Wayback Machine thanks to an exclusion request added by the website's operators. But a mirror of the Wayback Machine operated by the Library of Congress remains unaffected, and several of Reid's posts are still visible on that site.

In a January 9th blog post, Reid weighed in on the celebrity feud between "The View" host O'Donnell and Trump. Earlier in the feud, Trump had called O'Donnell "a real loser," a "slob" with a "fat, ugly face," and "fat little Rosie."

Nonetheless, the liberal pundit was on Team Donald.

"How much longer until that chubbed-out shrew Rosie O'Donnell gets her fat ass canned by Babwa?" Reid asked, in an imitation of "The View" co-host Barbara Walters' first name.

"How much longer will the freak show that is ‘The View' continue to darken our television screens?" she continued. "How much more kick-ass funny can Donald Trump be???"

The indispensable Ben Shapiro rocks the house at Liberty University:

After thanking the YAF and opening with a prayer for Alfie Evans, Shapiro launched into something that many would consider a badly needed talk about a badly needed system:

The United States echoed that message from its very inception. George Washington stated in his First Inaugural Address, “Since there exists in the economy and course of nature an indissoluble union between virtue and happiness; between duty and advantage… the propitious smiles of Heaven, can never be expected on a nation that disregards the eternal rules of order and right, which Heaven itself has ordained.”

The very basis of our politics, then, lies in the recognition that rights without virtues lead to chaos, and that virtues without rights lead to tyranny. Only by balancing public rights with private virtues can we truly uphold freedom and pursue happiness.

One half of the equation, though, seems to have gone awry in modern America.

We have been taught that our rights are paramount, which is fine, but we’ve also been taught that we have no duty to be virtuous. In fact, anyone who says that we have a duty to be virtuous is harming you, microaggressing you, ethnocentrically mansplaining to you in cisgender fashion.

Shapiro then highlighted that a virtuous society cannot be brought about by a centralized government, despite the fact that collectivist politicians promise Eden if they’re just put into power.

How can anyone expect us to be virtuous, the argument goes, when the system itself is so deeply flawed? How can we blame people for being immoral when the system is biased in favor of a few white rich men at the top? First we have to fix the system – then human beings themselves will change. Virtue will become natural; we’ll all just magically become wonderful great people. All we have to do to make this magical thing happen is hand over all our freedoms to a centralized government – and that government will then provide us new rights, better that the old God-given ones. Instead of the right to free speech, the government will provide us a right not to be offended; our feelings will be protected.

Instead of a right to life, the government will provide us the right to kill unborn babies. Instead of a right to create and keep the wages of our labor, the government will provide us a nice, comfortable social safety net, without us actually having to do the work.

Then, after all that’s done, human beings will magically become better. We’ll become good, if all this happens.

Shapiro notes that this is the philosophy of collectivism, which promises more than it can possibly give if you would just give up yourself to it:

Collectivist philosophy, however, thinks differently; they expect us to give our individual striving up; no more striving, no more struggle, all we have to do is trade our individual responsibility for the comfort of collective power. Collectivist philosophy points out that individual virtue isn’t natural – it is a struggle. And we can avoid that struggle by handing over all power to a Nanny State. Judeo-Christianity says, “You’re free, and therefore you must give”; collectivist philosophy says, “You are unfree, and thus the state must take on your behalf.”

Shapiro goes on to describe how collectivism goes directly against the nature of humans, and the will of God by putting it up against each of the Ten Commandments in order in what is a very eye-opening comparison.

David Marshall at The Stream offers a great takedown of GQ magazine's inclusion of the Bible in a list of 21 famous books that one need not read.

 

This morning's Fox & Friends phone-in: vintage VSG

The Very Stable Genius was in rare form this morning. Maybe he was tired of having to be mindful of being articulate during the Macron state visit. In any case, he cut loose and gave us a taste of what got his slavish devotees all fired up in 2015:

President Donald Trump appeared to acknowledge Thursday for the first time that his attorney Michael Cohen represented him as part of a payment to adult film star Stormy Daniels.

"He represents me like with this crazy Stormy Daniels deal, he represented me. And from what I see, he did absolutely nothing wrong," Trump said in a phone interview on "Fox and Friends."

Trump's mention of the scandal engulfing Cohen was part of a breathless and nearly half-hour free-flowing rant on the cable news show, in which the president touched on everything from North Korea to rapper Kanye West to Dr. Ronny Jackson, who had moments earlier withdrew his nomination to head the Department of Veterans Affairs.

His penchant for couching his role in things in a way that makes it sound like he has to be told what that role is was on display:

Trump on Thursday was adamant that whatever federal authorities are investigating, "I've been told I'm not involved."

His materialism came through, as well as his thoughtless approach to being a husband. I mean, couldn't he have said a word or two about what she means to him on her birthday?:

 He began by mentioning that Thursday is the 48th birthday of his wife and first lady, Melania Trump, and that's why he was calling in. He admitted: "Maybe I didn't get her so much. I got her a beautiful card."

 With regard to the Pompeo - Kim meeting over Easter weekend, he says basically, yeah, everybody involved kind of said why not, and put it together on the spur of the moment:

Trump said that CIA Director Mike Pompeo, who has been nominated to be secretary of state, wasn't supposed to meet with North Korean leader Kim Jong Un, but that "they arranged ... while he was there to say hello."

At least this week anyway, Kanye West is "smart." (In VSG world, people basically fall into two categories; they're either "smart" or they're "losers.") He plays the identity politics card, assuming that that is why Kanye likes him:

On rapper West, who tweeted positively about the president: "I have known Kanye a little bit, and I get along with Kanye ... but Kanye looks and sees black unemployment at the lowest it's been at the history of our country. He sees Hispanic unemployment at the lowest it has been in the history of our country. He sees, by the way, female unemployment, women unemployment, the lowest it has been in now almost 19 years. He sees that stuff and he is smart."

This one makes you really, really wonder about the guy. He doesn't have time, but he always watches:

On watching the media:"Now frankly, I don't have time for two reasons. It's too much and I don't have time, but I would watch whether it's good or bad. I always watch." 

And that's a rhetorical turn that bears some pondering. Not having time is a reason for not having time.


This one won't surprise you at all. Now, if he'd shown an ounce of humility or given credit to the entire team, that would have been a man-bites-dog story:

On what grade he should get after a year in office: "I would give myself an A-plus. Nobody has done what I have been able to do, and I did it — despite the fact that I have a phony cloud over my head that doesn’t exist."

But this one may be the wildest blurting of the whole thing - for one, because the Electoral College is how he won, but two, because some of his slavish devotees fancy themselves as conservatives - i.e., people who understand the importance of the Electoral College:

President Donald Trump on Thursday voiced support for doing away with the Electoral College for presidential elections in favor of a popular vote because the latter would be “much easier to win.”

The president’s support for a popular-vote presidential election came as an aside during a freewheeling Thursday morning interview with “Fox & Friends,” the Fox News morning show he is known to watch and from which he receives almost unflinchingly positive coverage. Trump made the remark amid a larger point about public figures who publicly support him in turn benefiting from a boost of popularity from Trump supporters.

I believe the guy when he says he doesn't drink. But does anybody who falls anywhere within the most generous range of what's normal talk like this without some kind of agent besides his own biochemistry being involved?

Distinguishing conservatism from Trumpism becomes more important all the time

Because of the current political climate, leftists have a handy rejoinder to right-of-center arguments on a range of issues. It goes something like this: "So you're okay with this level of White House chaos, this degree of scandal and palace intrigue, and Trump's embarrassing utterances via Twitter and at his rallies?"

And there are plenty of Very Stable Genius supporters who will make the brief concession that it would be better if those aspects of this presidency weren't attendant to the developments that do indeed please conservatives. At the other end of the range of Trumpist reaction is the proclamation that the guy, even his personal style, has grown on them, that it's a bracing antidote to the cultural atmosphere imposed by the Left, and formerly mainstream Republicans' ever-so-polite acquiescence to it. In the middle are those who say policy moves so greatly overshadow matters of style and character that the latter aren't worth discussing.

I say "Formerly mainstream Republican" because there's no denying that Trump, by virtue of his nomination and election victory, has changed the face of the Republican Party.

But, as we know, conservatism and Republicanism have never been anything like synonymous terms. Conservatives have been dismayed at the stuff of which every presidential candidate - whether he won or lost - was made since Ronald Reagan. (The argument that we were spoiled by such a fortuitous turn of events as his two terms has the odor of capitulation, in the name of "a realistic view of history" about it, I think.)

There are a few types of Trumpists with regard to how they articulate their skewed view that Trump's accomplishments - few of which are actually, or at least primarily, his - have rendered what they still derisively refer to as "Never Trumpers" so marginalized as to be irrelevant. You have the attempt at an intellectually coherent view, such as is put forth by Chris Buskirk in his essays at American Greatness. In his latest, he says Trumpism actually constitutes a conservative renaissance emanating from the heartland due to the ineffectuality of "coastal, high-church conservatism." This is basically the position of Brian C. Joondeph, who chimes in frequently at The American Thinker, although he brings a bit more attitude to his articulation of it. Then there are the attitude-besotted Townhall columns of Kurt Schlichter, who has coined an entire lexicon to map out his terrain. For him, "Fredocons" (derived from the name of the Corleone brother who dishonored the family in The Godfather) are to be juxtaposed against "normals." You know, effete little dweebs versus heartland people who use technical skills and their hands to put food on their families' tables.

What no one along the spectrum described above will do is offer more than one or two specific examples of who they're talking about when it comes to conservatives who still find Trump objectionable. They always go for the low-hanging fruit of Bill Kristol, who has indeed had some lapses in judgment since the Trump phenomenon got underway, and who does carry himself in a way that lends itself to macho mocking. They always go for the moderates like Jennifer Rubin and David Brooks, the New York Times's and the Washington Post's ideas of what a conservative is.

But they are never willing to seriously address what the likes of Jonah Goldberg, Erick Erickson, Charlie Sykes, Mona Charen, Susan Wright or Stephen Hayes have to say. One senses that they'd rather not skate too closely to such substance.

I got a kick out of a tweet I saw a few days ago - I forget who posted it - that reposted Trump's utterance from a few years back that National Review was failing so badly it was about to go out of business. It was clearly a blurting more driven by ego than an analysis of the magazine's circulation numbers or financial health.

Speaking of National Review and ego, today, NRO writer Jibran Khan revisits a Donald Trump Playboy interview from 1990 that puts Trump's bluster and winners-and-losers worldview on full display. Khan's point is that that basic trait is the one thing about which Trump has been consistent over the years:

Trump attributes all success — not only in business, but also the charity work of Mother Teresa and the mission of Jesus Christ— to “ego.” By the same token, failure comes from a lack of ego, and the recipe for doing better is “egotizing.” In 1990 Playboy interview he connected this concept directly to economic policy:

I think our country needs more ego, because it is being ripped off so badly by our so-called allies; i.e., Japan, West Germany, Saudi Arabia, South Korea, etc. They have literally outegotized this country, because they rule the greatest money machine ever assembled and it’s sitting on our backs. Their products are better because they have so much subsidy. We Americans are laughed at around the world for losing $150 billion year after year, for defending wealthy nations for nothing, nations that would be wiped off the face of the earth in about 15 minutes if it weren’t for us. Our “allies” are making billions screwing us.

As a younger man, Trump was extremely concerned about Japanese business success. He believed that, when it comes to real estate, “the Japanese will pay more than it’s worth just to screw us.” The fact that Americans would therefore be paid more for those buildings did not change Trump’s calculations: “If I ever wanted to sell any of my properties, I’d have a field day. But it’s an embarrassment!”

The familiar Trumpian theme of “losing” shows up here, but interestingly he seemed to consider American sales to the Japanese just as damaging as the imports from abroad he warns of today: “The Japanese double-screw the US, a real trick: First they take all our money with their consumer goods, then they put it back in buying all of Manhattan. So either way, we lose.” So if Americans are getting products from the Japanese for money, he characterizes that as the Japanese “taking” money rather than the Americans getting goods. But when the Japanese buy American real estate, it is the Japanese getting buildings rather than Americans “taking” money.

He does not limit this thinking to international trade alone, given his animus today toward Amazon, an American company that does billions of dollars of business in the United States. While Trump is likely driven by envy of Jeff Bezos’s fortune and anger at Bezos’s ownership of the “fake” Washington Post, the arguments Trump makes against the company aim to deny it a “win” by attributing its success to cheating the postal service (claims that do not seem to hold up).

In the decades since Trump’s Playboy interview, China’s turn from Marxist-Leninist economics led it to high economic growth and global economic power, whereas the burst of the 1980s bubble economy in Japan brought on an economic stagnation. With this development, China seems to have displaced Japan in Trump’s view of the economic landscape. This suggests that the president’s current focus on China could shift to the next rising power. Should Trump begin railing against Indian trade practices, it would disappoint Peter Navarro but would be in line with the current of his thinking.

Asked in 1990 about the first thing he would do in an imaginary world where he became president, Donald Trump responded, “Many things. A toughness of attitude would prevail. I’d throw a tax on every Mercedes-Benz rolling into this country and on all Japanese products, and we’d have wonderful allies again.” (How did Trump see himself achieving the presidency? As a Democrat, because “the working guy would elect me. He likes me.”) With the substitution of Chinese products for Japanese and Triumph motorcycles for Mercedes-Benz cars, this is what is happening 28 years later. Trade wars show “toughness,” but instead of having “wonderful allies again,” the U.S. is facing retaliation from China and Europe alike.

Trump’s appreciation of “toughness” seems to be linked to his belief in ego. He argues that Soviet negotiators and Chinese crackdowns after the Tiananmen Square protests showed toughness, which the U.S. lacks, allowing it to be “pushed around by everyone.” Fleshing this out, he explained in the same interview that a hypothetical President Trump “would believe very strongly in extreme military strength. He wouldn’t trust anyone. He wouldn’t trust the Russians; He wouldn’t trust our allies.” This show of toughness, which would be implemented through businessmen negotiating foreign policy, would ensure “respect around the world.” Again, this seems to be in keeping with the practice of the actual Trump administration, with Rex Tillerson taking the place of the 1980s business figures Trump was speaking of at the time. As with the trade policies, this has backfired in practice.

This is the essence of Trumpism on full display. It may offer momentary exhilaration, but it's not a program, much less a set of core principles.

The more distance the passage of time puts between me and the way I voted the first Tuesday in November 2016, the more I'm pleased with my decision (Evan McMullin). It was not a throwaway vote. It was not an endorsement of Evan McMullin. It allowed me to be able to support the laudable - conservative - developments that have transpired since, without having to own the rest of it.

We haven't gone away, and not only is Kurt Schlichter going to have to come to grips with it, but so is a post-American Left that thought the only force it was going to have to grapple with was a transformed Republican Party that has barely ever been a reliable weapon in the struggle for the nation's soul anyway.

Add another one to the list I compiled yesterday

A sports announcer in Oklahoma is made to puke all over himself for a perfectly innocent uttering:

Every now and then a news item pops up that is so ridiculous that you figure it's just got to be fake news, somebody's idea of a joke. You check the calendar to make sure it's not April Fools' Day. And when you realize it isn't, you come to understand that in our hypersensitive culture, a news story can be factual, accurate and preposterous all at the same time.

Which brings us to the TV play-by-play man for the Oklahoma City Thunder, a team in the National Basketball Association. The announcer, Brian Davis, was calling a game in which the team's star player, Russell Westbrook, was having another spectacular game. He had just made a pass setting up a basket -- one of a stunning 19 assists he made in the game -- when Davis put an exclamation point on the Westbrook pass, saying Westbrook was playing "out of his cotton-pickin' mind."

Davis is white and Westbrook is black, in case you haven't figured that out. And in case you have absolutely no knowledge of history, slaves once upon a time picked cotton in the South.

So reparations for the ugly past had to be paid, more than 150 years after slavery ended. How? By taking what passes for the moral high ground. The Thunder suspended Davis for one game. No fooling.

Never mind that cotton pickin' is a term used in the South by a lot of old white guys and old black guys as a genteel replacement for a harsher words, like damn.

"It's cotton pickin' hot today," sounds more refined to the southern ear than,  "It's damn hot today" or the even coarser, "It sure is effing hot today."

And then came the apology phase:

A team executive, Dan Mahoney, the Thunder's vice president of broadcasting and corporate communications, said the Thunder considered the comment "offensive and inappropriate" and announced the suspension.

But it gets worse. Davis, the play-by-play man, said while he meant no harm, he deserved what he got. "While unintentional, I understand and acknowledge the gravity of the situation," he said. "I offer my sincere apology and realize that, while I committed a lapse in judgment, such mistakes come with consequences. This is an appropriate consequence for my actions." 

The range of permissible discourse in post-America is narrowing by the hour. And the cultural overlords - the arbiters of what is okay to not only come out of one's mouth, but float around in one's mind - are just getting started.