Defacing the Alamo is a real bad idea

Rod Dreher shares a communication that makes clear just how ratcheted up the situation has become:

The Alamo is the ultimate symbol of Texas's distinct identity. And while that's so, the history of the battle that took place there is a universally applicable testament to honor and loyalty to community.

It had been established as a mission in the late 1700s. In the 1830s, it was still surrounded by wilderness; the village of San Antonio was a few miles away. 

After Mexico became an independent nation in 1821, it had not paid much attention to its far-northern territory. US citizens from places like Tennessee had been moving there in greater numbers for years. By the 1830s, however, Mexican general and dictator Santa Ana was showing interest in exerting greater control of settlements in the area. 

To make a long story short, scouts had gone out from The Alamo and come back reporting that Santa Ana's forces were on their way and were in fact about two days away. 

One evening after supper, William Barrett Travis, the leader of the militia formed among the compound's menfolk called for the others to join him in the courtyard. He unsheathed his sword and drew a line in the dust. He invited the rest to cross the line, symbolizing their decision to defend their home. There was one lone holdout. Travis respectfully acknowledged his choice and bid him good luck.

When Santa Ana arrived, a bloodbath ensued. Every last man died defending the compound. 

Weeks later, General Sam Houston's rallying cry at the Battle of San Jacinto was "Remember The Alamo!'

That spirit is still strong. 

Pray that there's not more trouble, because it wouldn't take much for all hell to break loose. 

Vicious dogs and ominous weapons

So, what do you think? Is this anything remotely close to an appropriate tone for a US president to be setting at this combustible moment?

See new Tweets

Conversation

Donald J. Trump

@realDonaldTrump

Great job last night at the White House by the U.S. 

@SecretService

. They were not only totally professional, but very cool. I was inside, watched every move, and couldn’t have felt more safe. They let the “protesters” scream & rant as much as they wanted, but whenever someone....

Donald J. Trump

@realDonaldTrump

....got too frisky or out of line, they would quickly come down on them, hard - didn’t know what hit them. The front line was replaced with fresh agents, like magic. Big crowd, professionally organized, but nobody came close to breaching the fence. If they had they would….

Donald J. Trump

@realDonaldTrump

....have been greeted with the most vicious dogs, and most ominous weapons, I have ever seen. That’s when people would have been really badly hurt, at least. Many Secret Service agents just waiting for action. “We put the young ones on the front line, sir, they love it, and....

....good practice.” As you saw last night, they were very cool & very professional. Never let it get out of hand. Thank you! On the bad side, the D.C. Mayor, 

@MurielBowser

, who is always looking for money & help, wouldn’t let the D.C. Police get involved. “Not their job.” Nice!

There's just a little too much glee taken with the adjectives, it seems to me. Also the "vicious dogs" image is just a little too reminiscent of some memories harbored by some still-living Americans. And then there's the obligatory calling out of another office-holder by name for the purpose of laying on some blatant nastiness.

And this guy has the gall to bitch about Twitter's concern over the gathering momentum of his meltdown.

Trump did the right thing re: China, perhaps the WHO as well; the executive order re: Twitter and the tweet about looting and shooting? Not so much

Credit must be given where it's due. The VSG made the right move announcing in this afternoon's press conference that the US is going to eliminate policy exemptions for Hong Kong now that it's no longer autonomous. his rhetoric made clear that China has served notice that it's one of the world's bad guys.

This is going to make life inconvenient for US-headquartered companies with business ties to Hong Kong, but a stand had to be made.

Likewise, the World Health Organization has shown by the way it has soft-pedaled China's role in the global spread of the coronavirus that it is not without biases that run counter to its ostensible mission.

It is not nitpicking, however, to note that Trump did not say a word about the George Floyd murder and the ensuing now-nationwide urban unrest. A call for things like healing and justice would have been a much-welcomed way to start off the presser. And it might have been useful as a way to start walking back that awful "when the looting starts, the shooting starts" tweet.

Also, his executive order that seeks to create new regulations on social-media companies is off-base in several ways. Any such regulation would need to come from the legislative branch. More fundamentally, Twitter et al are privately owned organizations and in no way beholden to anybody but their shareholders. (Can you tell I've been hanging out with libertarians lately?) And to those who would immediately retort that they're so big and influential that they pretty much constitute public utilities, I would reply by saying that acting in a responsible manner and keeping blatant lies, vicious invective and threats off of their sites is good for the bottom line.

Memo to the Trumpists: calling for regulations is not a conservative way of proceeding.

A typical day in Trumpworld: a good move, two bad moves.

Thursday roundup

It's been 28 years since the United States tested a nuclear weapon. Shay Khatiri at The Bulwark makes a cogent argument that the current contemplation of a resumption of testing is well-founded. The post-Cold War breathing room we enjoyed is no more. We're in another era of great-power competition, and we can ill afford any slop in our nuclear preparedness:

Nuclear tests exist for several reasons. The first is to ensure the safety and reliability of our nuclear weapons. We don’t want our nukes to detonate where they shouldn’t—that’s what we mean by safety. And we want to make sure that they do detonate where we need them to—that’s reliability. There are two main types of nuclear delivery systems: gravity bombs and non-gravity bombs. (For the purposes of simplicity, we can set aside less common delivery systems, such as mines and nuclear munitions.) Gravity bombs are those that you drop out of a plane. Non-gravity bombs are delivered by a missile, mostly cruise and ballistic; these could be launched from air, land, and sea (the “nuclear triad” that candidate Trump was unaware of back in 2015). Different temperatures, altitudes, pressures, speeds, and other conditions risk unintended detonations of nuclear weapons. It is to make sure that both the “physics package”—the nuclear warhead proper, the part of the weapon that detonates—and the delivery system meet our requirements for safety and reliability that we have nuclear testing.

Since Joe Biden has pledged to appoint a black woman to the Supreme Court if he's elected president - a guarantee no doubt more pressing for him now, in light of his, um, unfortunate utterance at the end of his interview with Charlemagne Tha God - it behooves us to consider whom he might choose. Kevin Daley at The Washington Examiner looks into some choices that are probably on his radar. It's not an uninteresting group of people. They have some interesting credentials. The extent to which any of them would instinctively lean left in rulings from the bench is not necessarily discernible from their careers to date. He looks at previous judging experience, any clerking they've done, private practicing of law, and where they were educated. Here's the lineup:

There are two broad groups Biden might select from, the first including sitting judges on federal and state courts, the second with more academic backgrounds. The leftwing group Demand Justice, which is pressing Biden to release a shortlist of potential nominees, has released its own list, which is heavy on academics and cause lawyers. A Washington Free Beacon analysis found the most likely candidates are U.S. District Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson, California Supreme Court Justice Leondra Kruger, and U.S. District Judge Leslie Abrams Gardner, with Stacey Abrams as a possible wildcard pick.

Here's a taste of the kind of detail that doesn't lend itself to stereoptyping:

Jackson had an unlikely ally in former House speaker Paul Ryan when she was nominated for the federal bench. The judge's husband, Patrick Jackson, is the twin brother of Ryan's brother-in-law William Jackson. Ryan introduced Jackson during her 2012 confirmation hearing before the Senate Judiciary Committee.

"Our politics may differ, but my praise for Ketanji's intellect, for her character, for her integrity, it is unequivocal," Ryan told the committee.

Her confirmation would mark the first time that two African Americans have served together on the Supreme Court. Jackson lunched with Justice Clarence Thomas as a Supreme Court clerk and recounted the experience to Kevin Merida and Michael Fletcher for their 2007 book, Supreme Discomfort: The Divided Soul of Clarence Thomas.

"I just sat there the whole time thinking: ‘I don't understand you. You sound like my parents. You sound like the people I grew up with,'" Jackson said. "But the lessons he tended to draw from the experiences of the segregated South seemed to be different than those of everybody I know."

Jackson's time in private practice could complicate her prospects. Her résumé—which runs a wide range of law practice—includes experiences liberals will admire, like a three-year tour in the federal public defender's office and a clerkship for Justice Stephen Breyer. Yet she also advised corporate clients for nearly a decade, first for a Washington arbitration boutique, then at such "BigLaw" standbys as Goodwin Procter and Morrison & Foerster. 

And I wasn't aware that Stacey Abrams had a sister on the federal bench. That sister's marriage is a pretty interesting footnote:

Abrams's personal life is particularly compelling. Her husband, Jimmie Gardner, was falsely imprisoned in a West Virginia penitentiary for 26 years, following wrongful convictions for sexual assault and robbery. Gardner was a victim of the notorious laboratory technician Fred Zain, who fabricated or manipulated evidence in dozens of cases to help state prosecutors obtain convictions. Gardner was released in 2016 and married Abrams two years later.

John Hinderaker at Power Line shares the coverage of last night's Minneapolis riot from Kyle Hooten of Alpha News, which is kind of a citizen-journalism outfit based in the Twin Cities.  Hooten got right in there and shot some pretty graphic documentation of the mayhem.

The Imaginative Conservative offers a lot of book reviews that are really more than just examinations of one particular book. They are contemplations of the entire subjects of the books in question. There's a really good one up right now. It's a review by Cicero Bruce of Climbing Parnassus: A New Apologia for Greek and Latin by Tracey Lee Simmons.

The review - we should really think of it as an essay on the general topic of classical languages - gets one thinking about why these languages were considered so important to the notion of a proper education in the early days of our nation:

The last century heard from other apologists for Greek and Latin besides those recollected above. Most, though, were among what Mr. Simmons describes as the last group of writers, reared and educated between 1870 and 1920, “whose early exposure to classical rigors at school allowed them as adults to be literary masters and gourmands.” This band of cultivated men consisted of W. Somerset Maugham, R.W. Livingstone, Rupert Brooke, Ronald Knox, C.S. Lewis, Albert Jay Nock, Robert Graves, and Louis MacNeice. It also included W.H. Auden and Evelyn Waugh, in whom Mr. Simmons finds especial inspiration.

In a utilitarian age like ours, wrote the former, “the modern revolt against centering the school curriculum around the study of Latin and Greek is understandable,” although it is “deplorably mistaken.” Auden avowed that few persons of his generation ever “kept up” their Greek and Latin after leaving school, but he was certain that something of real value abided nonetheless: “Anybody who has spent many hours in his youth translating into and out of two languages so syntactically and rhetorically different from his own learns something about his mother tongue which I do not think can be learned in any other way.” Such effort, he added, “inculcates the habit, whenever one uses a word, of automatically asking, ‘what is its exact meaning?’ ”

Waugh agreed. Although in later life he admitted to remembering no Greek and to having never read Latin for pleasure, he expressed no regrets for having devoted countless hours of his boyhood to the supposed dead languages: “I believe that the conventional defense of them is valid; that only by them can a boy fully understand that a sentence is a logical construction and that words have basic inalienable meanings, departure from which is either conscious metaphor or inexcusable vulgarity.”

Both Waugh and Auden thought that persons never schooled in Greek and Latin suffer a most unfortunate deprivation, a sentiment shared wholeheartedly by Mr. Simmons. Those who have been most deprived ever “since classical education became ‘undemocratic,’ ” Auden observed, “are not the novelists and poets—their natural love of language sees them through—but all those, like politicians, journalists, lawyers, the man-in-the-street, etc., who use language for everyday and nonliterary purposes.”

The White House is going to take a pass on issuing a midyear economic update.  

The Very Stable Genius's presumption of what his powers are keeps getting more scary

On the heels of the VSG's Twitter tear about Joe Scarborough came his tweet about layoffs at The Atlantic, composed in his signature look-what-a-loser-and-failure-this-person / organization-is style, a typically head-scratcher characterization ("boring but very nasty magazine"), and the cruelty he's increasingly displaying these days (taking glee in people getting laid off).

And now his preoccupation is social media, in particular, Twitter. (You know, the platform he uses to denounce it.):

Conversation

Donald J. Trump

@realDonaldTrump

Republicans feel that Social Media Platforms totally silence conservatives voices. We will strongly regulate, or close them down, before we can ever allow this to happen. We saw what they attempted to do, and failed, in 2016. We can’t let a more sophisticated version of that....

Donald J. Trump

@realDonaldTrump

....happen again. Just like we can’t let large scale Mail-In Ballots take root in our Country. It would be a free for all on cheating, forgery and the theft of Ballots. Whoever cheated the most would win. Likewise, Social Media. Clean up your act, NOW!!!!

The first thing to say about this is that it once again demonstrates that the VSG is no conservative. There's a very simple fact that's relevant here that any actual conservative would bake into his premise for remarking on this matter: Twitter is a privately owned corporation. It's no a public utility, like your city's water service. The old rule that if you don't like the way the organization does things, you don't have to engage its services is screamingly applicable here.

And by the way, buster, I don't much like your tone at all. "Clean up your act, NOW!!" Who the hell do you think you are, anyway? I'll bet the suits at Twitter feel the same way.

But even if there were some reason for government to be involved in Twitter's affairs, it would not be within his purview to take action. He may or may not know this; he's not particularly well-versed in how the powers of the federal government are Constitutionally assigned:

While Congress could pass legislation further regulating social media platforms, Trump “has no such authority,” said former federal judge Michael McConnell, who now directs Stanford Law School’s Constitutional Law Center. “He is just venting.”

“There is absolutely no First Amendment issue with Twitter adding a label to the president’s tweets,” added Jameel Jaffer, executive director at the Knight First Amendment Institute at Columbia University, who won the case that prevents Trump from banning his critics from his Twitter feed. “The only First Amendment issue here arises from the president’s threat to punish Twitter in some way for fact-checking his statements.”

But Jack Balkin, a Yale University law professor and First Amendment expert, said that’s not Trump’s point.

“This is an attempt by the president to, as we used to say in basketball, work the refs,” he said. “He’s threatening and cajoling with the idea that these folks in their corporate board rooms will think twice about what they’re doing, so they won’t touch him.”

For Rutgers University media professor John Pavlik, who studies online misinformation, Trump is simply trying to fire up his political base.

“For Trump,” he said, “this is about politics.”

And another thing: Is this an appropriate subject of preoccupation for the US president during a time of pandemic and economic struggle?

Minneapolis

Cross-posted at Precipice.

This is beginning to feel a lot like the long hot summers of my youth, circa 1964-68. So many riots began over particular law-enforcement incidents, became statements of generalized rage, and then deteriorated into the looting of stores and burning of buildings.

The unrest has spread from Minneapolis, where George Floyd's horrific death occurred, to Los Angeles.

The video of what happened to Floyd is damn hard to watch. Any conclusion other than excessive force motivated by rank cruelty would be hard to draw. A crowd gathered and implored the officer with his knee on Floyd's neck to let up. One person in the crowd was an EMT with the Minneapolis Fire Department.

The first step the city has taken - firing the officers - is the correct one. The city will now have to begin an investigation that will have to be both thorough and swift. The catalyst of the incident - police responding to a report of a forgery in progress - will have to come under intense scrutiny. I know that Lady Justice's blindfold needs to be securely in place here, but I'd say the odds are good that those officers will then be arrested on various charges.

I grew tired of the term "racism" a long time ago. For one thing, it's misused a lot, and as a writer, precise application of terms means a great deal to me. Racism is the belief that races can be arranged hierarchically, that races are superior or inferior relative to one another. It is not the same thing as bigotry. Bigotry toward ethnic groups that are broadly classified as being in the same race as one's own - say, in the case of someone of Northern European descent looking askance at someone from Latin America - is not racism. It is not racist to point out that the coronavirus started in China.

But black Americans for a long time - centuries - lived under the dual oppression of being objects of both racism and bigotry. Is that still true? There are a few things to parse in the search for an answer to that question. It's hard to argue that actual racism is still prevalent, given the fact that we've had a black president, that there are black leaders in fields ranging from business to medicine to national security. Now, whether there is still prevalent bigotry in America could be, and indeed is, the subject of intensive study.

The above-mentioned process by which the wheels of justice will turn in the George Floyd case may not tell us what went on in the hearts-of-hearts of those four officers. That's not going to be the question at hand in a courtroom, which is as it should be. Trying to get at that has always been my problem with the concept of hate crimes. If they exhibited behavior that falls under the definition of murder, or being an accessory to murder, or any number of other applicable statutes, penalties are on the books to address it.

Where things get sticky is that we have to take into account some facts. The wave of unrest that roiled the nation in the middle of the last decade over the Michael Brown's death in Ferguson, Missouri was a case of misplaced rage. A grand jury, and indeed, the Obama administration's Justice Department, led by a black Attorney General, found officer Darren Wilson innocent.

Black opinion columnist Larry Elder assembled some data as the Colin Kapernick controversy unfolded that bears examination:

Out of the 965 people killed by the police in 2015 (as of Dec. 24), the Post reported (on Dec. 26) that "less than 4 percent" involved an unarmed black man and a white cop, the fact pattern most commonly referred to by anti-police activists like Black Lives Matter. Last year, The Washington Post put the number of unarmed black men killed by the police at 17, less than the number of blacks likely struck by lightning. Twenty-two unarmed whites were killed by the police. Any death that results from police misconduct is one death too many, but the point is that police killing of a suspect is rare, no matter the race of the suspect or the cop. And a police shooting of an unarmed black male is still more rare.

But blacks are routinely and disproportionately being stopped, pulled over and/or arrested due to police misconduct, right?

No, not according to numerous studies, many by the government. Take traffic stops. In 2013, the National Institute of Justice, the research and evaluation agency of the Department of Justice, published a study of whether the police, as a result of racial bias, stop blacks more than other drivers. The conclusion? Any racial disparity in traffic stops is due to "differences in offending" in addition to "differences in exposure to the police" and "differences in driving patterns.”

According to Philippe Lemoine, writing in National Review, a white person is, on average, more likely to have interactions with the police in any year than a black person, 20.7 percent vs. 17.5 percent. It is true that a black person is more likely to have multiple contacts with the police. But according to the data, multiple contacts with the police are rare, as well. Lemoine writes that 1.2 percent of white men have more than three contacts with the police in a year versus 1.5 percent of black men.

But in 2020, one has to juxtapose the foregoing with some things we haven't seen in a while, such as the vigilante killing of Ahmaud Aubrey in Georgia earlier this year, and now this.

Okay, what does this mean for the nation as a whole?

I'd venture that it is part of an overall spiritual inventory that our national soul is screaming for. There is little about our shared life as a country that is not rotten. Sorry, but there it is. We have much to atone for, and this kind of thing is no small part of it.

But let us be wary of diagnoses or proposed remedies that ascribe collective guilt. It's clear that two or more decades of diversity circles and white-privilege seminars have not improved the cultural climate.

The way out of our country having to experience any more of these cyclically occurring tinderboxes is what the best spokespeople on the subject - think Dr. King at the Washington Mall in August 1963 - have always said it was: looking at people as invididual souls. The rioters currently burning buildings in Lost Angeles are thinking of their skin color first, and as a result, inflicting severe economic harm on people far removed from what happened to George Floyd thousands of miles away in Minneapolis.

We either cultivate or abuse or God-given dignity as individual human beings. Recognizing that fact is the key to any kind of real and lasting freedom for any of us.

Putting Deep-State-ism in perspective

One of the most unnerving aspects of polemical discourse is when it's approached on the level of latching onto arcane bits of behavior by public figures in an attempt to point out some supposedly pivotal moment in national history. Players in web-of-intrigue scenarios are reduced to villain and hero stick figures whose nefariousness or nobility can be discerned from some phone calls they made, or emails they sent, or meetings they took.

This is why I have not had much to say about the whole bag of snakes that comprises the Mueller report and subsequent revelations such as Susan Rice's January 17, 2017 email to herself.

If one has to go to such lengths as proclaiming, "Tonight I will show you that this newly unearthed chain of emails is a bombshell the likes of which American history has never seen!," it casts a great deal of doubt on the depth of one's basic convictions about the life of the nation generally.

In other words, let's not get all shook about this, okay?

Look, it doesn't take someone with extraordinary powers of perceptivity to see that Hillary Clinton was a power-mad presidential aspirant for decades, driven by a sort of feminist determination to prove she had at least the chops for the job that her husband, whom she has always disliked intensely, had, as well as more basic motives such as greed and getting a kick out of having as many people under her thumb as possible. She's also always been quite arrogant, which is why she continued to conduct official correspondence on her private server even after she'd become Secretary of State.

It's also obvious that the meeting on the tarmac in Phoenix between Bill Clinton and Loretta Lynch was fishy as hell, especially given the timing.

There's probably a lot in all of it that should send some folks to the hoosegow, but is it really worth tying up the resources of the current iteration of the Justice Department to keep pursuing it all?

Now, the July 5, 2016 presser that Comey gave continues to perplex me. He spent fifteen minutes outlining why the DoJ ought to prosecute Madame Bleachbit, only to wrap things up by recommending that they not.

Comey's perplexing generally. Prior to all this, he'd had a reputation as an uncontroversial straight shooter. He helped prosecute the Gambino crime family. He stood by severely weakened John Ashcroft, who was in an intensive care unit with gall bladder surgery complications and was being pressured to continue the Bush administration's domestic surveillance program. Bush himself was impressed enough by this display of integrity and loyalty to make changes to the program. Comey was a registered Republican until recently.

And then came all the events looked at by the Mueller investigative team.

It's pretty clear that there was a clique within the DoJ / FBI that had it in for Donald Trump once he became the Republican presidential nominee. You don't have to do too deep of a dive to see that Peter Stzrok, Lisa Page and Andrew McCabe thought it would be horrible if Donald Trump became president, and conducted themselves professionally driven by that sentiment. The FISA warrants, the Steele dossier and the role of Fusion GPS - all shady as hell.

Then there's the role of Michael Flynn. Was he set up? A pretty solid case can be made that he was. Of course, the overheated types would chime in with, "Hell, yes, he was! They ruined the life of a distinguished civil servant!"

Now, let us remember that he did tell a falsehood about his Russia contacts, and he was a paid foreign agent of both Turkey and Russia. In the hand-off-the-baton meeting Obama and Trump had in January 2017, Obama advised Trump not to hire Flynn as national security adviser:

Obama’s warning pre-dated the concerns inside the government about Flynn’s contacts with the Russian ambassador, one of the officials said. Obama passed along a general caution that he believed Flynn was not suitable for such a high level post, the official added.

The overall point here is that palace-intrigue scenarios are the wrong places to go looking for answers to the question of whether someone is fit to be us president or not.

My reasons for vehemently opposing Barack Obama did not have much to do with the scandals that arose during his time in office, even the "scandal" Trump calls Obamagate. My problem with Obama, my moniker for whom here at LITD during his time as a figure of central focus was The Most Equal Comrade, was that he'd been a hard-core leftist pretty much all his life. His mentors were the likes of Frank Marshall Davis, Frances Fox Piven, Heather Booth, Greg Galluzzo, Jeremiah Wright, Rashid Khalidi and Bill Ayers. He thought America was fundamentally unfair and needed to be transformed. I'm far more disturbed by the plain old policy-level stuff he was able to get enacted - think the "Affordable" Care act, EPA regulations, the JCPOA - than scandal-type matters.

And my reasons for vehemently opposing Donald Trump are that he is solely motivated by self-glorification. He is a phony. He doesn't care about the Republican Party, much less conservatism. He doesn't have the slightest grasp of the foundational principles of Western civilization. He gives lip service to Christianity for entirely self-serving reasons. He doesn't read anything, from briefing papers to novels to works of philosophy or history. He has no depth. He has a track record of sybaritic abandon that I suspect he's till proud of. He's petty and vindictive. He demands loyalty but does not return it.

So I don't consider this whole re-dredging of the web of shenanigans discussed above a front-burner issue. The existence of a so-called Deep State is not among the five most pressing issues on our nation's plate at the moment.

Don't fixate on the shiny object. Reserve most of your focus for the pandemic, the economic situation, the leftist agenda of the Democrats and Donald Trump's obvious unfitness to be president.

China brings the hammer down

A statement by Secretary of State Mike Pompeo acknowledges that Hong Kong can no longer be considered autonomous.  A confluence of events has made this possible. Every other country in a position to have exerted any kind of influence has been preoccupied with its own coronavirus predicament. The pandemic dampened the resistance fervor within Hong Kong itself, and proved a useful tool for the CCP to use to quell unrest.

This new security law that the Chinese Communist Party has imposed on Hong Kong is quite open-ended. "Sedition, foreign influence and secession" can and no doubt will be interpreted widely.

Given Hong Kong's status as a major financial center, this is sure to change the economic dynamic for the Pacific rim and around the globe.

China will surely be emboldened now regarding its relationship with Taiwan and South China Sea territorial claims currently disputed by the Philippines, Vietnam and other southeast Asian nations.

It's time for not only Western governments but businesses as well to reconsider the footing on which they engage China. Quite obviously, US corporations can't uproot their supply chains overnight, but planning for shifts to countries that don't constitute a blatant threat, which China has unmistakably shown itself to be, needs to start. The US government needs to shore up its alliances in China's neighborhood, and increase its naval presence in the region's international waters.

History is a funny thing. One day, a nation that the world had long been treating as problematic but essential in the shaping of the world-stage dynamic confirms the world's worst fears and shows that it is indeed a rogue element and nobody's idea of a responsible partner in the search for stability.

Real damage

Distinguishing Trumpism from other phenomena that have appeared on the right over the last 70 years is not just an exercise in abstraction. When National Review showed the door to the John Birch Society and Ayn Rand's Objectivists in the 1950s, those movements had not wreaked palpable destruction on the nation's cultural foundation and social fabric, nor were they in a position to do so. The paleoconservative impetus of the 1990s likewise had nowhere near enough appeal to be a source of real danger.

Trumpism is different. It was a cluster bomb placed in the house of conservatism and detonated. It blew the walls out and cast its damage over a much wider swath of the American landscape.

The record of thought that had been the architectural drawings for that house was buried beneath the rubble of the blast.

And if that's too abstract for you, more visceral examples abound.

It's shattered hearts of good human beings, such as Timothy J. Klausutis, who has had the wound of his wife's untimely death nineteen years ago ripped open afresh by Donald Trump's maniacal and  vicious conspiracy-theory tweets about that incident, and by the sycophantic defense of those tweets by the icy-hearted White House press secretary this afternoon. 

Trumpism bent backwards the knuckles, in quintessential playground-bully fashion, of previously principled conservative leaders, watching with bared-teeth glee as they dropped to their knees. Mind you, those former movement leaders are not bystanders to the obliteration of their self-respect, but the hey-get-a-clue-this-is-the-only-game-in-town-now-for-Republicans message is hard to resist when a frenzied mob is screaming it:

He didn’t just burn the village, he sowed salt in the ground, too. He emasculated and destroyed the reputations of a rising generation of Republican leaders, who, depending on their story, will now be viewed as weaklings, co-conspirators, appeasers, racists, phonies, losers, or apostates.

Consider 2016 conservative runner-up Ted Cruz, who briefly stood up to Trump, only to be tamed by him. Or Marco Rubio, who said he didn’t trust Trump with the nuclear codes, but now warns it would be “catastrophic” for the cause of freedom if Trump loses.

The most promising young-ish conservatives have been, to some degree, compromised by Trump. If you embrace him, you look weak and intellectually dishonest. If you stand up to him (see Jeff Flake and Justin Amash), you’re toast. And if you try to have it both ways (see Nikki Haley and Ben Sasse), you look calculating, ambitious, and wishy-washy. This might be the worst strategy of all, because you'll never be Trumpy enough for the Trumpists, but you’ll also end up alienating the rest of us. 

Do I respect the above-mentioned people less than I did in 2015? Absolutely. But none of them could have foreseen a character test like Trumpism before July of that year. And one - Ted Cruz - held out until May of the following year. In fact, so did Mike Pence, who, as Indiana governor, hosted Cruz at the governor's mansion for breakfast the morning of the dark day that culminated in Cruz's bowing out of the race.

There's political damage right now as well. Support is eroding in two demographics that Trump is absolutely dependent on  - older Americans and evangelicals . The leftism that conservatism emerged to engage in a twilight struggle with is poised to fill the vacuum.

America is a much different place than it was fifty, certainly sixty years ago. Our civic bonds have eroded. Family formation and church attendance are at historic lows. Education has been thoroughly infected by identity politics. We make no art worth speaking of. Still, the people who inhabit this country want to believe that a sense of community can be shored up on some level. And they see that Donald Trump and his grotesque movement are the antithesis of that possibility.

This is not to offer an etched-in-stone prognostication. The economy could recover quickly, quickening the heartbeats of the materialist masses, convincing them that we'd "transitioned to greatness." It's entirely possible that Trumpism could hold sway for another few years, maybe morph into something even more foul.

That's what a savage, cold place 2020 post-America is.

Of course he would

He'd disrupt the logistics and financial planning of his party and completely disregard whatever the public-health recommendations are going to be in August if he can't get maximum adulation at the crowning moment of his sordid career:

President Donald Trump began a solemn Memorial Day railing against North Carolina Gov. Roy Cooper, a Democrat, ahead of the 2020 Republican National Convention, threatening to pull it out of Charlotte, where the convention is expected to be held August 24 to 27. 

Trump contended that Cooper is "unable to guarantee" that the arena can be filled to capacity. 

"I love the Great State of North Carolina, so much so that I insisted on having the Republican National Convention in Charlotte at the end of August," Trump said in a series of tweets. "Unfortunately, Democrat Governor, @RoyCooperNC is still in Shutdown mood & unable to guarantee that by August we will be allowed full attendance in the Arena. In other words, we would be spending millions of dollars building the Arena to a very high standard without even knowing if the Democrat Governor would allow the Republican Party to fully occupy the space."

He continued, "Plans are being made by many thousands of enthusiastic Republicans, and others, to head to beautiful North Carolina in August. They must be immediately given an answer by the Governor as to whether or not the space will be allowed to be fully occupied. If not, we will be reluctantly forced to find, with all of the jobs and economic development it brings, another Republican National Convention site. This is not something I want to do. Thank you, and I LOVE the people of North Carolina!"

The tweets completely blindsided party officials and those involved in planning the convention, who have repeatedly argued that health and safety will come first. The officials have insisted planning for the convention is on track.

This is another example of the point I made in my post yesterday about the VSG's stomping of Jeff Sessions into the ground: loyalty is a one-way proposition in Trumpworld. Those blindsided party officials are nothing to him.

He's lost Ann

The author of In Trump We Trust made it clear in a flurry of tweets over the weekend that she's no longer part of the crowd that so trusts.

Having long established her bona fides as a shoot-from-the-hip hothead who proudly revels in hyperbole and provocation, we shall see if this new stance has legs.

Ann Coulter has long been emblematic of the dismaying decline of public discourse in America. Over the years, when she's been on her game, she's displayed a razor-sharp wit and talent for discernment of the higher order. She was editor of the Michigan Law Review, clerked for a judge on the Eighth Circuit Court of Appeals, and was a litigator for the Center for Individual Rights.

But the capacity for playground-bully-ism and the tendency to quickly come unglued were showing up with greater frequency.

And right after the September 11, 2001 jihadist attacks, when she was writing for National Review, something went awry.

Jonah Goldberg's piece about it sums it up well:

In the wake of her invade-and-Christianize-them column, Coulter wrote a long, rambling rant of a response to her critics that was barely coherent. She’s a smart and funny person, but this was Ann at her worst — emoting rather than thinking, and badly needing editing and some self-censorship, or what is commonly referred to as “judgment.”

Running this “piece” would have been an embarrassment to Ann, and to NRO. Rich Lowry pointed this out to her in an e-mail (I was returning from my honeymoon). She wrote back an angry response, defending herself from the charge that she hates Muslims and wants to convert them at gunpoint.

But this was not the point. It was NEVER the point. The problem with Ann’s first column was its sloppiness of expression and thought. Ann didn’t fail as a person — as all her critics on the Left say — she failed as WRITER, which for us is almost as bad.

Rich wrote her another e-mail, engaging her on this point, and asking her — in more diplomatic terms — to approach the whole controversy not as a PR-hungry, free-swinging pundit on Geraldo, but as a careful writer.

No response.

Instead, she apparently proceeded to run around town bad-mouthing NR and its employees. Then she showed up on TV and, in an attempt to ingratiate herself with fellow martyr Bill Maher, said we were “censoring” her.

By this point, it was clear she wasn’t interested in continuing the relationship.

Her book titles became increasingly snarky over the years. Her persona became ever more brittle. Moments when some heart and humanity were detectable became increasingly rare.

At some point in the middle of the last decade, she became a one-note-johnny policy-wise, obsessing over immigration to the exclusion of all else. When the Trump phenomenon infected American politics, she was immediately on board. She once even famously claimed that she'd be cool with Trump performing abortions in the White House if he successfully rid the country of illegal aliens.

That's all changed now, apparently. The catalyst for her about-face was Trump's recent treatment of Jeff Sessions:

Coulter went on a tear after the president trashed his former attorney general Jeff Sessions.

Trump has endorsed Sessions’ GOP opponent in the Alabama Senate race, Tommy Tuberville, and recently tweeted that the people of Alabama should “not trust” Sessions because he let the country down with his now-infamous recusal.

Coulter went on a tear defending Sessions (calling him “the ONE PERSON in the Trump administration who did anything about immigration”), calling Trump a “moron” and a “blithering idiot,” and even saying, “I will never apologize for supporting the issues that candidate Trump advocated, but I am deeply sorry for thinking that this shallow and broken man would show even some remote fealty to the promises that got him elected.”

Here's a sampling of her Twitter rampage:

Ann Coulter

@AnnCoulter

Sessions HAD to recuse himself, you complete blithering idiot.  YOU did not have to go on Lester Holt's show and announce you fired Comey over the Russian investigation.  That's what got you a Special Prosecutor.

and:

Ann Coulter

@AnnCoulter

COVID gave Trump a chance to be a decent, compassionate human being (or pretending to be). But he couldn't even do that.

Myself, I think this is a fine development. Coulter had been one of the most high-profile faces of Trumpism. We all know what's going to happen now. The Very Stable Genius and his most fevered throne-sniffers are going to turn on her, and it's going to be ugly and juvenile. We will see like never before how this grotesque movement eats its own.

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Barney & Clyde Season 2, Episode 10

It's been a long two weeks, but your wait is over! Season 2, Episode 10 of the Barney & Clyde podcast is here!

Pull up a virtual barstool and join us at the digital libation station for your fortnightly installment of your favorite Libertarian and Conservative perspectives on the weighty matters of the day. In this episode: 

THE FINE LINE BETWEEN CARING AND GRANDSTANDING: Does Trump have the Authority to make Governors open churches? Do Governors have the authority to keep them closed? 

PURITY OF VISION AND FACTS ON THE GROUND: Is it possible to put together a non-leftist party with a discernible set of principles?

THE STATE AND THE INDIVIDUAL IN A TIME OF PANDEMIC: New Zealand warrantless searches and Rand Paul's fight against no-knock warrants in the US?

MEANWHILE, IN THE CIRCLE CITY: Indianapolis kicks restaurants while they're down, City plans to close Mass Ave to foot traffic despite protests from business owners they've already hurt.

You can support us at Patreon.com/barneyandclyde

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or twitter @barneyandclyde1

Something you think we should discuss? Send us your suggestions to barneyandclydeshow@gmail.com. Send us a video clip and we'll show it!

The worst gaffe of his career

That, of course, would be the "you ain't black" remark he let loose with toward the end of his interview with radio host Charlemagne the God.

Gaffes are Biden's signature characteristic, and over the years he's come up with some cringe-inducing doozies. But this one makes explicit a trend that a certain type of gaffe of his has indicated over the years: condescension toward minority demographics.

Reaction has been immediate and strong. BET founder Robert Johnson, Guardian columnist Derecka Purnell, former Democratic Georgia state legislator Vernon Jones, Republican Michigan Senate candidate John James, South Carolina Republican Senator Tim Scott, and Fox News anchor Harris Faulkner have chimed in.

Biden's gaffe problem is similar to Trump's word salad manner of speaking. In each case, it's indicative of the truth that, fundamentally, the person doesn't take himself seriously.

Biden is the classic empty suit. His academic track record from high school through law school was lackluster. He focused on being a charismatic jock. He has gotten by on his knack for glad-handing. He got elected to the Senate at age 29 and never really considered doing anything else with his life. Oh, there was an occasional run for president, but one never got the sense that he was all-consumingly hungry for it. He'd found a comfortable perch, and never even really felt compelled to craft any memorable legislation.

He's been ahead of Trump in polls now for a while, which can be explained by - well, you know. We shall see how much damage this does.

We can look forward to another six months of two very small men vying to out-small each other.

What kissing the VSG's ring will get you

Remember that TV ad Jeff Sessions ran when he first announced he was running to get his old Senate seat back? The one in which he explicitly mentioned working for the Trump agenda and donning a red MAGA cap at the end?

I have to say I frankly was astounded. After the humiliation he'd come in for during his time as attorney general, he was willing to genuflect like that?

A lot of good it did him:

Donald J. Trump

@realDonaldTrump

3 years ago, after Jeff Sessions recused himself, the Fraudulent Mueller Scam began. Alabama, do not trust Jeff Sessions. He let our Country down. That’s why I endorsed Coach Tommy Tuberville (

@TTuberville

), the true supporter of our #MAGA agenda! https://secure.winred.com/tommytuberville/donate

He has responded in a way that demonstrates some semblance of spine, but it comes a little late in the game:

Conversation

Jeff Sessions

@jeffsessions

.

@realdonaldtrump

 Look, I know your anger, but recusal was required by law. I did my duty & you're damn fortunate I did. It protected the rule of law & resulted in your exoneration. Your personal feelings don't dictate who Alabama picks as their senator, the people of Alabama do.

He's learning what so many before him have learned: that the Very Stable Genius's insistence on loyalty is a one-way proposition. It will not be reciprocated.

Outside the sphere of the throne-sniffers, the VSG's support is not in good shape

This:

The conservative-leaning Rasmussen Reports poll released Thursday found that 23 percent of likely Republican voters across the country think that their party should "find someone other than Trump to be their nominee," according to the survey results.

The poll found that 70 percent said the Republican Party should stick with Trump, while 7 percent were undecided.

And aging boomers had been assumed to be his demographic stronghold. Not so fast:

Just a few weeks ago, the Pew Research Center announced that millennials overtook baby boomers as the largest generation in the country. More than 72 million strong, those born between 1981 and 1996 eclipsed their elders, a demographic reality that was inevitable. 

For the last decade, I have been one of the loudest voices preaching that Republicans are in trouble with this massive cohort of younger voters, that policy positions on both cultural and economic issues have increasingly put the GOP out of step with the millennial generation. Many of these trends have continued with the emergence of Generation Z, which tends to share many of the political views of its elder brothers and sisters, with a dash of heightened worry about climate change and emphasis on gender, racial, and gay and transgender equality. 

I am here to tell Republicans that while their struggle with younger voters still remains a critical long-term challenge, an even graver short-term threat has emerged: declining support among seniors. 

Despite double-digit losses among young voters over the last decade, Republicans have still maintained some electoral successes due to their support among older voters. The generation gap has cut both ways, with poor showings among the young being matched by strong showings among the old. And though millennials now outnumber boomers in raw numbers, older voters remain more likely to show up at the polls ( increases in youth participation in the last midterm elections notwithstanding).

And Biden's lead is the steadiest against an incumbent since 1944:

(CNN)Poll of the week: A new Monmouth University poll finds that former Vice President Joe Biden leads President Donald Trump 50% to 41%. When Rep. Justin Amash is included as the Libertarian Party candidate, it's Biden 47%, Trump 40% and Amash 5%. 

The poll is largely in line with the average poll since April that puts Biden 6 points ahead of Trump nationally. 

What's the point: Biden's lead is about as steady as it can possibly be. Not only is he up 6 points over the last month or so, but the average of polls since the beginning of the year has him ahead by 6 points. Moreover, all the polls taken since the beginning of 2019 have him up 6 points. 

The steadiness in the polls is record breaking. Biden's advantage is the steadiest in a race with an incumbent running since at least 1944. That could mean it'll be harder to change the trajectory of the race going forward, though this remains more than close enough that either candidate could easily win.

Team VSG has some rethinking to do.