Tuesday roundup

Hold on to your wigs, folks. Today's roundup is a thunderous Niagara Falls-level cascade of must-reads. "Doozy" and "humdinger" fall far short of being adequate depictions.

I gave some thought to breaking this into individual posts. There will be some fairly lengthy excerpting to the linked source material. But I think consolidation in one spot is going to work best.

Matt Taibbi comes at his journalism and opinion writing from a left-of-center perspective, but he's certainly not one who can be pigeonholed. The son of an NBC News reporter, he spent several years in Russia, Uzbekistan (where he played professional baseball) and Mongolia (where he played professional basketball). He's a freelance writer and podcaster, with stints along the way at Rolling Stone and The New York Press. He doesn't mince words, which is probably the source of his appeal for Bill Maher, who had him cover the 2008 presidential election cycle for Real Time.

Lately he's been less inclined to guard his lefty bona fides than ever.

His latest at his Substack site is a righteous takedown of the book White Fragility by Robin DiAngelo. Searing stuff:

A core principle of the academic movement that shot through elite schools in America since the early nineties was the view that individual rights, humanism, and the democratic process are all just stalking-horses for white supremacy. The concept, as articulated in books like former corporate consultant Robin DiAngelo’s White Fragility(Amazon’s #1 seller!) reduces everything, even the smallest and most innocent human interactions, to racial power contests. 

It’s been mind-boggling to watch White Fragility celebrated in recent weeks. When it surged past a Hunger Games book on bestseller lists, USA Today cheered, “American readers are more interested in combatting racism than in literary escapism.” When DiAngelo appeared on The Tonight Show, Jimmy Fallon gushed, “I know… everyone wants to talk to you right now!” White Fragility has been pitched as an uncontroversial road-map for fighting racism, at a time when after the murder of George Floyd Americans are suddenly (and appropriately) interested in doing just that. Except this isn’t a straightforward book about examining one’s own prejudices. Have the people hyping this impressively crazy book actually read it?

DiAngelo isn’t the first person to make a buck pushing tricked-up pseudo-intellectual horseshit as corporate wisdom, but she might be the first to do it selling Hitlerian race theory. White Fragility has a simple message: there is no such thing as a universal human experience, and we are defined not by our individual personalities or moral choices, but only by our racial category. 

If your category is “white,” bad news: you have no identity apart from your participation in white supremacy (“Anti-blackness is foundational to our very identities… Whiteness has always been predicated on blackness”), which naturally means “a positive white identity is an impossible goal.” 

DiAngelo instructs us there is nothing to be done here, except “strive to be less white.” To deny this theory, or to have the effrontery to sneak away from the tedium of DiAngelo’s lecturing – what she describes as “leaving the stress-inducing situation” – is to affirm her conception of white supremacy. This intellectual equivalent of the “ordeal by water” (if you float, you’re a witch) is orthodoxy across much of academia.

DiAngelo’s writing style is pure pain. The lexicon favored by intersectional theorists of this type is built around the same principles as Orwell’s Newspeak: it banishes ambiguity, nuance, and feeling and structures itself around sterile word pairs, like racist and antiracist, platform and deplatform, center and silence, that reduce all thinking to a series of binary choices. Ironically, Donald Trump does something similar, only with words like “AMAZING!” and “SAD!” that are simultaneously more childish and livelier. 

Perhaps the most irritating thing about SCOTUS Chief Justice John Roberts's chiming in with the court's left-leaners in the June Medical Services v. Russo case is the fact that in a nearly identical case about a similar Texas law, he dissented when the majority upheld it. He was right to do so then, of course. His flimsy excuse for voting the other way this time is that, hey, a precedent was set. Stare decisis, you know. That's the kind of logic that would have kept Dredd Scott and Plessy v. Ferguson in place. A National Review editorial today points out that this fealty to precedent is not a consistent thing with him:

He has been perfectly willing to overrule precedents in the past. Some of them were of much longer standing. Janus v. AFSCME (2018), on public-sector unions, overruled Abood v. Detroit (1977). Some of them involved cases that presented nearly identical fact patterns. Gonzales v. Carhart(2007) upheld a ban on partial-birth abortion of a type that had been struck down in Stenberg v. Carhart (2000).

The piece says that Roberts "has reinforced the notion that he is the most politically calculating of the justices."

A die-hard lefty activist who started his path down that road going to Nicaragua in the 1980s to show solidarity with the Sandinistas and later went to Asia to expose working conditions in Nike factories has, at least on the subject of the global climate, had a conversion experience:

On behalf of environmentalists everywhere, I would like to formally apologize for the climate scare we created over the last 30 years. Climate change is happening. It’s just not the end of the world. It’s not even our most serious environmental problem. 

I may seem like a strange person to be saying all of this. I have been a climate activist for 20 years and an environmentalist for 30. 

But as an energy expert asked by Congress to provide objective expert testimony, and invited by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) to serve as Expert Reviewer of its next Assessment Report, I feel an obligation to apologize for how badly we environmentalists have misled the public.

Here are some facts few people know:

• Humans are not causing a “sixth mass extinction” 
• The Amazon is not “the lungs of the world”
• Climate change is not making natural disasters worse
• Fires have declined 25% around the world since 2003
• The amount of land we use for meat — humankind’s biggest use of land — has declined by an area nearly as large as Alaska
• The build-up of wood fuel and more houses near forests, not climate change, explain why there are more, and more dangerous, fires in Australia and California
• Carbon emissions are declining in most rich nations and have been declining in Britain, Germany, and France since the mid-1970s 
• Netherlands became rich not poor while adapting to life below sea level
• We produce 25% more food than we need and food surpluses will continue to rise as the world gets hotter
• Habitat loss and the direct killing of wild animals are bigger threats to species than climate change
• Wood fuel is far worse for people and wildlife than fossil fuels
• Preventing future pandemics requires more not less “industrial” agriculture

I know that the above facts will sound like “climate denialism” to many people. But that just shows the power of climate alarmism. 

In reality, the above facts come from the best-available scientific studies, including those conducted by or accepted by the IPCC, the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO), the International Union for the Conservation of Nature (IUCN) and other leading scientific bodies. 

Brace yourself, buddy. Your former associates are going to try to make your life miserable.

I really, really gave consideration to devoting an entire post to this one. We've had the book from Bolton, the letter from Mattis, the remarks from John Kelly, but there's never been anything so comprehensively indicting about what a threat to national security the Very Stable Genius is as this expose by Carl Bernstein at CNN:

In hundreds of highly classified phone calls with foreign heads of state, President Donald Trump was so consistently unprepared for discussion of serious issues, so often outplayed in his conversations with powerful leaders like Russian President Vladimir Putin and Turkish President Recep Erdogan, and so abusive to leaders of America's principal allies, that the calls helped convince some senior US officials -- including his former secretaries of state and defense, two national security advisers and his longest-serving chief of staff -- that the President himself posed a danger to the national security of the United States, according to White House and intelligence officials intimately familiar with the contents of the conversations. 

The calls caused former top Trump deputies -- including national security advisers H.R. McMaster and John Bolton, Defense Secretary James Mattis, Secretary of State Rex Tillerson, and White House chief of staff John Kelly, as well as intelligence officials -- to conclude that the President was often "delusional," as two sources put it, in his dealings with foreign leaders. The sources said there was little evidence that the President became more skillful or competent in his telephone conversations with most heads of state over time. Rather, he continued to believe that he could either charm, jawbone or bully almost any foreign leader into capitulating to his will, and often pursued goals more attuned to his own agenda than what many of his senior advisers considered the national interest.

Does this surprise you?

Trump incessantly boasted to his fellow heads of state, including Saudi Arabia's autocratic royal heir Mohammed bin Salman and North Korean dictator Kim Jong Un, about his own wealth, genius, "great" accomplishments as President, and the "idiocy" of his Oval Office predecessors, according to the sources.

In his conversations with both Putin and Erdogan, Trump took special delight in trashing former Presidents George W. Bush and Barack Obama and suggested that dealing directly with him -- Trump -- would be far more fruitful than during previous administrations. "They didn't know BS," he said of Bush and Obama -- one of several derisive tropes the sources said he favored when discussing his predecessors with the Turkish and Russian leaders.

Then-DNI Dan Coats expressed his worry to subordinates that the VSG was "undermining the coherent conduct of foreign relations and American objectives around the globe."

Big-time damage to our most important alliances:

Next to Erdogan, no foreign leader initiated more calls with Trump than Macron, the sources said, with the French President often trying to convince Trump to change course on environmental and security policy matters -- including climate change and US withdrawal from the Iranian multilateral nuclear accord. 

Macron usually got "nowhere" on substantive matters, while Trump became irritated at the French President's stream of requests and subjected him to self-serving harangues and lectures that were described by one source as personalized verbal "whippings," especially about France and other countries not meeting NATO spending targets, their liberal immigration policies or their trade imbalances with the US.

But his most vicious attacks, said the sources, were aimed at women heads of state. In conversations with both May and Merkel, the President demeaned and denigrated them in diatribes described as "near-sadistic" by one of the sources and confirmed by others. "Some of the things he said to Angela Merkel are just unbelievable: he called her 'stupid,' and accused her of being in the pocket of the Russians ... He's toughest [in the phone calls] with those he looks at as weaklings and weakest with the ones he ought to be tough with." 

The calls "are so unusual," confirmed a German official, that special measures were taken in Berlin to ensure that their contents remained secret. The official described Trump's behavior with Merkel in the calls as "very aggressive" and said that the circle of German officials involved in monitoring Merkel's calls with Trump has shrunk: "It's just a small circle of people who are involved and the reason, the main reason, is that they are indeed problematic." 

He thought he was sucking up to adversaries by bragging about himself. Such is his weird assumption bout he way anybody else but himself thinks:

The calls with Putin and Erdogan were particularly egregious in terms of Trump almost never being prepared substantively and thus leaving him susceptible to being taken advantage of in various ways, according to the sources -- in part because those conversations (as with most heads of state), were almost certainly recorded by the security services and other agencies of their countries.

In his phone exchanges with Putin, the sources reported, the President talked mostly about himself, frequently in over-the-top, self-aggrandizing terms: touting his "unprecedented" success in building the US economy; asserting in derisive language how much smarter and "stronger" he is than "the imbeciles" and "weaklings" who came before him in the presidency (especially Obama); reveling in his experience running the Miss Universe Pageant in Moscow, and obsequiously courting Putin's admiration and approval. Putin "just outplays" him, said a high-level administration official -- comparing the Russian leader to a chess grandmaster and Trump to an occasional player of checkers. While Putin "destabilizes the West," said this source, the President of the United States "sits there and thinks he can build himself up enough as a businessman and tough guy that Putin will respect him." (At times, the Putin-Trump conversations sounded like "two guys in a steam bath," a source added.) 

The pullout of US troops from Syria can be directly traced to his phone conversations with Erdogan.

He was far more interested in how Jared and Ivanka thought his phone calls went than in the views of Fiona Hill, Rex Tillerson and H.R. McMaster. He never read briefing materials to prepare him for calls.

States such as Oregon, Kansas, Texas and Arizona are reversing course on their re-openings in face of COVID-19 case upticks. 

Even if we give him the benefit of the doubt and chalk it up to tone-deafness, that's not much; he's tone-deaf more than he's not

So the Very Stable Genius has removed the tweet including a video of supporters at The Villages, in which one guy in a golf cart sporting a MAGA hat is chanting, "White power!"

The damage is done. South Carolina Senator Tim Scott was forthright about its reprehensibility. John Bolton said that either possibility - that it was a deliberate tee-hee or that, so taken in was he by the overall adulation from the Villages crowd, he was oblivious to the chanting guy - is plausible. DNC chair Tom Perez wasted no time having a field day with it.

Not a good way to kick off a week that follows a really bad week, especially since the other big story today is everybody's effort to get to the bottom of the Russian-bounty-to-Taliban-fighters story. The VSG's claim that there's absolutely nothing to it rings a little hollow, given that it's been picked up by outlets considerably beyond the New York Times now.

If he's got some 5-D chess up his sleeve, he'd better be playing it.

Just because we find Trump unfit doesn't mean that we can forget that the Left wants to eat us for lunch

I have not had much use for The Federalist of late, but there is an important piece up at that site right now. It raises the need for consideration of several levels of the present societal dynamics before us.

It's by Glenn T. Stanton, and is a response to a New York Times piece by Peter Wehner and Jonathan Rauch, two public intellectuals who are friends despite coming at many issues from decidedly different perspectives.

Wehner is one of those figures who has irritated me many times over the years, but not enough for me to write him off. He has some solid conservative credential. he served in the Reagan, Bush 41 and Bush 43 administrations. He wrote a book with Arthur C. Brooks on why the free market makes us more moral. He's pro-life and advocates a resolute foreign policy He's currently with the Ethics and Public Policy Center. He's concerned about seeing that Christian faith is able to thrive in our undoubtedly increasingly secular society, which is a good thing. He understands that Trump has been horrible for conservatism.

Still, he has exhibited more than a touch of what I call Reasonable Gentleman Syndrome - a condition similar to being a RINO, I suppose - over the years.

Rauch has characterized himself as an "unrepentantly atheistic Jewish homosexual." He's an interesting mix of traits. Edmund Burke and James Madison are among his first-tier objects of admiration. He firmly believes that two people of the same gender can be married. On the other hand, he opposes hate-crimes laws, or at least did in a 1991 New Republic article.

Anyway, Stanton takes on the argument the two of them make in the NYT:

Rest easy, orthodox Christians, Jews, and Muslims. The New York Times wants you to know there is no reason to fear your conscience protections being steamrolled by the juggernaut that is the queer politics machine.

In a hopeful op-ed titled “We Can Find Common Ground on Gay Rights and Religious Liberty,” with the rest-assured subtitle “It does not have to be all or nothing,” Jonathan Rauch, whom I value as a long and deeply respected friend, and Peter Wehner say the Supreme Court’s recent Bostock decision provides a golden opportunity for religious conservatives and gay activists to “make a deal.” They speak hopefully of mutually beneficial compromise, with both sides attaining their desired freedoms and protections.

While I trust their talk of compromise is well-intentioned, it is profoundly naïve. Both men are intimately aware of the way the queer movement’s leadership has framed the issue and how dutifully their media and elite partisans have carried their water for decades. Their message? Gay rights are civil rights. Full stop.

This truth claim is not a statement of fact. It is one of faith, ideological conviction, and rhetorical strategy. It is aspirational. The mission is for all to adopt this belief and condemn anyone who doesn’t as a hateful bigot. There is no middle ground.

The call of the day used to be “live and let live,” but no more. Now the call is, “You will respect and affirm everything about my new understanding of sexuality and gender, or else.”

This script has been most effective. But if gay and trans rights really are civil rights, their proponents know the first rule of civil rights is that you don’t negotiate them. True justice dictates you demand them, and don’t quiet down until you’ve attained the fullness of every last one. 

About the enthusiasm that Wehner and Rauch share for the Fairness for All Act, Stanton says this:

When a bill’s rosy title signals that if it is passed, all will be right with the world, it’s a good sign someone’s putting rouge on a pig. First, when you negotiate carveouts for religious protections — a first freedom — you give up, not gain, ground.

The Fairness for All Act provides protections for religious schools, colleges, and charities, but these are tremendously narrow and few given the breadth of possible encroachments that will occur as sexual and gender options continue to expand. This will leave not only religious organizations seriously vulnerable, but also medical and social-service professionals whose work is informed by religious convictions. 

What is unsettling about the terrain that Rauch and Wehner share is that it provides fodder to the Trumpists who say, "You pointy-headed think tank dweebs really have no clue how rabid the Left is, do you? How late the hour is, the kind of fight we must mount in the culture war at this stage."

It's a little tricky, because, yes, a fight must be mounted, but Trump's juvenile insults are supremely ineffective weapons.

Two things must be kept in view at all times: the Left's ferocity, and Trumpism's inadequacy as a countervailing force.

The Very Stable Genius seems not to have a clue about the position he's in

Nobody in the country beyond him and his die-hard base thinks his prospects are good.

As Peggy Noonan puts it at the Wall Street Journal, 

He hasn’t been equal to the multiple crises. Good news or bad, he rarely makes any situation better. And everyone kind of knows. 

As Windsor Mann puts it at The Week:

Trump's challenge as a non-challenger is to talk about anything other than his record. At his rally in Tulsa last weekend, he spent nearly 15 minutestalking about his ability to walk down a ramp and to sip water with one hand. This week — as seven states reported their highest numbers of coronavirus hospitalizations and as 1.5 million Americans filed for unemployment — Trump said the lobster industry was "back, bigger and better than anyone thought possible."

Trump isn't talking about the issues that matter most. He's talking about lobsters, "Obamagate," flag burning, and Confederate monuments because he doesn't want — can't afford — to talk about three crises: the health crisis, the economic crisis, and his presidency.
With nothing to brag about, he is spouting Nixonian catchphrases about "THE SILENT MAJORITY," notwithstanding the fact that his base is neither silent nor the majority. Trump seems to think that by saying or tweeting something, his words will become actualized — that if he says his supporters are the majority, that means they are. Instead of persuading people to support him, Trump is deceiving himself into believing they already do.

To many voters in 2016, the idea of an outsider "shaking things up" was vaguely appealing, precisely because it was so vague. As a political neophyte, Trump could make sweeping promises without having to defend or explain anything. His inexperience was a boon. Having never been tested in politics, he had never failed. He talked like a regular guy, which is to say, like someone who had no idea what he was talking about. He still talks that way.
Now we know the consequences of a Trump presidency: mass death, mass unemployment, civil unrest, an erosion of democratic norms at home, and growing distrust of America abroad. Trump may not learn from experience, but voters do.

As Tucker Carlson put it in the monologue to his FNC show last night,

Not many people are saying this out loud on the Right, but President Trump could well lose this election . . .  

What seemed awful the other day is normal now . . . If you don't vigorously defend your own worldview, then you lose. Bad ideas spread and quickly congeal into conventional wisdom. This is especially true right now, as everything in American life is up for grabs . . . Once big things start changing, they change more quickly than we expect. All of this means that this is precisely the time - tonight - to defend the institutions that we desperately need to keep in this country. Those institutions include the nuclear family, our freedom of speech, shall, independent businesses, absolute colorblindness under the law, the noble tradition of nonviolent protest . .  Those are the things that make America worth living in. We need to defend these things with everything we have. All of us, including the president. That is his hope of re-election . . . 

As Erick Erickson puts it in his Substack newsletter,

The election is not today. That is really good news for President Trump. If the election were today, the President would be toast. It is really ugly out there right now.

As Jonathan Easley and Brett Samuels put it at The Hill,

There is frustration in Trump World over the president's lack of discipline and his confrontational tone during a time of high anxiety over the coronavirus and civil unrest around the death of George Floyd while in police custody.  

And right there, face to face, on the FNC program of one of his most slavish devotees, the VSG did nothing to disabuse us of the notion that he is without a rudder:

Fox News’ Sean Hannity teed one up for the president during a Thursday interview that was filled with simple, leading questions.

Hannity asked Trump: “If you hear in 131 days from now, at some point in the night or early morning: ‘We can now project Donald J. Trump has been re-elected the 45th president of the United States’—let’s talk. What’s at stake in this election as you compare and contrast, and what is one of your top priority items for a second term?”

A completely stumped Trump decided to riff and wound up rambling off a mess of words that were tailor-made for the viral comedic sensation Sarah Cooper’s next lip-synch video.

“Well, one of the things that will be really great, you know, the word experience is still good,” Trump said while turning to the audience. “I always say talent is more important than experience. I’ve always said that. But the word experience is a very important word. It’s an, a very important meaning.”

The president continued to answer the question about some of the important issues he’d conquer during a second term if given the chance.

“I never did this before. I never slept over in Washington. I was in Washington, I think, 17 times. All of a sudden, I’m president of the United States. You know the story. I’m riding down Pennsylvania Avenue with our first lady and I say, ‘This is great,'” Trump said. “But I didn’t know very many people in Washington, it wasn’t my thing. I was from Manhattan, from New York. Now, I know everybody, and I have great people in the administration.”

Without taking a breath, Trump then pivoted to his former national security adviser John Bolton, whose new book about his time in the White House has gotten under the president’s skin—but also, who has nothing to do with the question Hannity asked.

“You make some mistakes. Like, you know, an idiot like Bolton. The only thing he wanted to do was drop bombs on everybody. You don’t have to drop bombs on everybody. You don’t have to kill people,” Trump said.

As those of us who always saw the colossal mistake the Republican Party was making in getting behind this guy, who watched the at least 100 reasons he was unfit to be president present themselves, we knew this day would come.

It's going to be what it's going to be. It seems likely that November 3rd is going to be a big night for Democrats, and that will be horrible for America. We'll get identity politics and the erasure of Western civilization's history on steroids, redistribution like we've never seen, and the imposition of such utter fictions as that the global climate is in trouble requiring the urgent reversal of human advancement, and that there are more than two genders.

Donald Trump may win, and that will horrible, too.

It's hard not to conclude that our civilization is not only well past its peak, but unraveling by the hour.

Nihilism in Madison

Let's put the exit question on the front end: Is this an instance of the Left eating its own to a sufficient degree to cause the general post-American public to conclude that these people don't have any aims beyond burning it all down?

A guy wielding a baseball bat and a bullhorn goes nuts in a Capitol Square restaurant in Madison, Wisconsin. His real name is Devonere Johnson, but is calling himself Yeshua Musa. He harasses a patron who walks away. Cops are summoned. Johnson resists arrest, to the point of escaping from the back of the police vehicle and running across the street, where he's tackled and sufficiently subdued to get him cuffed and back in the vehicle.

Turns out he's rather a fixture at local Black Lives Matter events.

A crowd gathered and blocked traffic. It engaged in some window-smashing at a couple of government office buildings. It chanted "Free Yeshua!" It toppled a statue of Hans Christian Heg, a Norwegian immigrant and abolitionist who served as a Union officer in the Civil War. It toppled a statue called Forward, erected in 1893 to commemorate the progress toward equality of Wisconsin women. It beat the holy snot out of a gay progressive Democrat state senator, kicking him in the head and leaving him lying on the ground. Thankfully, an ambulance was quickly summoned.

I repeat: is this the extreme Left's jump-the-shark moment, or are they just getting their head of steam?

Gohmert's outburst

The House Judiciary Committee held a hearing today to look into how Attorney General William Barr has behaved in his position - namely, that he has used it to advance President Trump's political fortunes.

Barr is one of those figures to whom I was willing to give the benefit of the doubt. He'd served in a policy position in the Reagan White House, had a confirmation hearing to be Attorney General under Bush 41 that's been described as "unusually placid" and was well-regarded by both Democrats and Republicans when he served in that position the first time. Amassed considerable business-law experience in the private sector. I resonate with his view on how Roe v. Wade was decided. I even resonated with his rather fiery October 2019 speech about religious freedom and the Biblical roots of American notions about freedom at Notre Dame law school, which ticked off all the right people (atheists and identity-politics militants).

But this year, he's really demonstrated the kind of lockstep personal loyalty to the Very Stable Genius that has been the dismaying moral downfall of so many I'd regarded as principled conservatives.

And that's what today's hearing is about.

Now, opening remarks were given by Donald Ayer, a Republican jurist who had also been appointed by Reagan and Bush 41 to various positions. In fact, he was succeeded by Barr as Deputy Attorney in the early 1990s. In fact, earlier, he and Barr had both clerked for DC US Court of Appeals Judge Malcolm Richard Wilkey.

Ayer has clearly soured on Barr of late. He's written two Atlantic articles on Barr's disturbing behavior.

So he makes a pretty obvious choice on committee chair Jerold Nadler's part to give opening remarks.

And that's where Gohmert comes in. Given that it's not unusual for opening remarks at hearings to go over the allotted time limit, it seems likely that the Texas congressman's real peeve was with the content of Ayer's speech:

While Ayer was speaking, Republican Rep. Louie Gohmert began tapping on his desk to disrupt Ayer's opening remarks because he had gone over his time limit. When Democratic lawmakers asked Gohmert to stop, he responded, "There's no rules about when you can make noise."

Nadler replied that he would enforce the five-minute rule for opening statements, but Gohmert pushed back, "Mr. Chairman, this is outrageous. Do you have no respect for the rules whatsoever?"

"He's two minutes beyond concluding, and you don't let us have that kind of time, you gavel down immediately, you're being grossly unfair," Gohmert continued, addressing Nadler. "This man has a written statement and he knew to cut it to five minutes, he couldn't do it. Either we have rules or we don't."

"The gentleman will suspend, the witness will continue," Nadler said.

"Then we can keep making noise," Gohmert responded, and began rapping his desk again.

The hearing briefly devolved into chaos as Gohmert and Republicans continued interrupting Ayer's testimony, and Democrats emphasized that it's fairly routine for opening statements to go over their allotted time limit.

Gohmert, to put it plainly, made an ass of himself.

Now, Gohmert has taken positions I align with on many issues (abortion, climate, hate crimes), but he has a history of flamboyant statements and outrageous behavior - the kind of thing that makes it not too much of a surprise that he has taken on a pretty strong Trumpist odor in recent times.

His stunt today mainly has the effect of reinforcing in the public mind the notion that the yee-haw  element has irrevocably taken over the Republican Party. He has not served what ostensibly are - or at least once were - his core principles well.

He created the image of Trumpism trying to shut actual conservatism up.

 

Just the same old you-will-sit-down-shut-up-and-get-your-mind-right agenda dressed up as modern organizational planning practices

I just  read a piece by John Rice, who heads an outfit called Management Leadership for Tomorrow in The Atlantic, and it's insidious as hell. Take the title, "The Difference Between First-Degree Racism and Third-Degree Racism." What a way to frame things. The first hints of where he's going already waft off his article.

His second paragraph recounts the undeniably impressive arc of his father's life:

My father, Emmett Rice, and I had hundreds of conversations about race and racism from the time I was a boy until a few weeks before he died, in 2011, at 91 years old. He was the most intellectually curious person I have ever known. He grew up in South Carolina in the Jim Crow era of the 1920s and ’30s. Despite losing his father when he was only 7, he graduated from college, served in World War II with the Tuskegee Airmen, earned a doctorate in economics, and became one of the seven governors of the Federal Reserve Board in the 1980s. 

He concludes the paragraph by saying, "Racism chased him and burdened him every day of his life." Come on. Even after he'd become a Federal Reserve Governor? Raw racism?

Well, you see, there are degrees of racism.

Back to that in a moment. Rice mentions his father in order to formulate a cost-benefit model:

Thirty years ago, my dad gave me his playbook to put racism to rest, and it inspired me to dedicate my career to executing his vision. Dad’s playbook included one insight that all Americans should hear, at least those who hope that when it comes to addressing racism, we can do better. As an economist, he told me that we have to “increase the cost of racist behavior.” Doing so, he said, would create the conditions for black people to harness the economic power essential to changing the narrative in white America’s mind about race.

That, in Rice's construct, necessitates a quantifiable metric for determining how racist an organization is:

We can ratchet up that cost in several ways, starting today. The first step is to clarify what constitutes racist behavior. Defining it makes denying it or calling it something else that much harder. There are few things that white Americans fear more than being exposed as racist, especially when their white peers can’t afford to come to their defense. To be outed as a racist is to be convicted of America’s highest moral crime. Once we align on what racist behavior looks like, we can make those behaviors costly.

The most well-understood dimension involves taking actions that people of color view as overtly prejudiced—policing black citizens much differently than whites, calling the police on a black bird-watcher in Central Park who is asking you to obey the law, calling somebody the N-word to show them who is boss. This is racism in the first degree. If officers anticipated that they would be held fully accountable for bad policing, they would do more good policing and we could begin healing the wounds they’ve inflicted on black people for centuries. 

Then he gets to his second degree, and brings in Colin Kaepernick - he of the Che Guevara tee shirt, Castro cap and socks depicting law enforcement officers as actual pigs. That's not a trivial or irrelevant aspect of who Kaepernick is. It ought to me mentioned when Kaepernick is brought into a discussion.

Then, in the course of depicting the third degree in his formulation, he engages in some irony that one wonders if he's aware of. He insists on quantifiable data regarding diversity within a corporation, but then makes the sweeping generalization that some people - who happen to be black - that are perceived to be work harder actually don't:

The final, most pernicious category undergirds the everyday black experience. When employers, educational institutions, and governmental entities do not unwind practices that disadvantage people of color in the competition with whites for economic and career mobility, that is fundamentally racist—not to mention cancerous to our economy and inconsistent with the American dream. For example, the majority of white executives operate as if there is a tension between increasing racial diversity and maintaining the excellence-based “meritocracies” that have made their organizations successful. After all, who in their right mind would argue against the concept of meritocracy?

When these executives are challenged on hiring practices, their first excuse is always “The pipeline of qualified candidates is too small, so we can only do so much right now.” Over the past 20 years, I have not once heard an executive follow up the “pipeline is too small” defense with a quantitative analysis of that pipeline. This argument is lazy and inaccurate, and it attempts to shift the responsibility to fix an institution’s problem onto black people and the organizations working to advance people of color. When asked why they have so few minorities in senior leadership roles, executives’ most common response is “There are challenges with performance and retention.” To reinforce their meritocracy narrative, white leaders point to the few black people they know who have made it to the top, concluding inaccurately that they were smarter and worked harder than the rest.

Then he makes the assumption that black people within an organization have their focus compromised with a tangle of head trips about how they're perceived and even how they perceive themselves:

Organizations cannot be meritocracies if their small number of black employees spend a third of their mental bandwidth in every meeting of every day distracted by questions of race and outcomes. Why are there not more people like me? Am I being treated differently? Do my white colleagues view me as less capable? Am I actually less capable? Will my mistakes reflect negatively on other black people in my firm? These questions detract from our energy to compete for promotions with white peers who have never spent a moment distracted in this way. I wager that 90 percent of the white executives who read these last sentences are now asking, particularly after recent events, “How did we miss that?” This dimension of racism is particularly hard to root out, because many of our most enlightened white leaders do not even realize what they are doing. This is racism in the third degree, akin to involuntary manslaughter: We are not trying to hurt anyone, but we create the conditions that shatter somebody else’s future aspirations. Eliminating third-degree racism is the catalyst to expanding economic power for people of color, so it merits focus at the most senior levels of education, government, and business.

That's nothing short of an insult to millions of Americans who happen to be black. Are they not individuals with particular thought processes that may or may not include race considerations? It's quite an assumption to be making to say that they all have race at the forefront of their approach to their work. Why would we not find the same range of approaches that we would with any other demographic classification?

Now we get to the meat of what he's after. The same coercive impetus one finds in any leftist enterprise is on full display here:

Employers whose efforts to increase diversity lack the same analytical and executional rigor that is taken for granted in every other part of their business engage in practices that disadvantage black people in the competition for economic opportunity. By default, this behavior protects white people’s positions of power. The nonprofit organization that I have built over the past 20 years, Management Leadership for Tomorrow, has advanced more than 8,000 students and professionals of color toward leadership positions, and we partner with more than 120 of the most aspirational employers to support their diversity strategy, as well as their recruiting and advancement efforts. Yet I have not seen 10 diversity plans that have the foundational elements that organizations require everywhere else: a fact-based diagnosis of the underlying problems, quantifiable goals, prioritized areas for investment, interim progress metrics, and clear accountability for execution. Expanding diversity is not what compromises excellence; instead, it is our current approach to diversity that compromises excellence and becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy.

We can increase the cost of this behavior by calling on major employers to sign on to basic practices that demonstrate that black lives matter to them. These include: (1) acknowledging what constitutes third-degree racism so there is no hiding behind a lack of understanding or fuzzy math, (2) committing to developing and executing diversity plans that meet a carefully considered and externally defined standard of rigor, and (3) delivering outcomes in which the people of color have the same opportunities to advance.

Companies that sign on will be recognized and celebrated. Senior management teams that decline to take these basic steps will no longer be able to hide, and they will struggle to recruit and retain top talent of all colors who will prefer firms that have signed on. The economic and reputational costs will increase enough for behavior and rhetoric to change. Then more people of color will become economically mobile, organizations will become more diverse and competitive, and there will be a critical mass of black leaders whose institutional influence leads to more racially equitable behavior. These leaders will also have the economic power to further elevate the cost of all other types of racist behavior, in policing, criminal justice, housing, K–12 education, and health care—systems that for decades have been putting knees on the necks of our most vulnerable citizens and communities.

You'll be recognized and celebrated if you get with the program and there will be nowhere for you to hide if you don't.

Look, Mr. Rice, a company that, say, makes widgets or sells hamburgers or provides engineering services to oil fields or engages in investment banking is focused on delivering that product, and appropriately so. Requirements for the particular functions needed to profitably deliver that product are colorblind. I'll bet your dad knew that.

Not only does this kind of mischief get us further away from people seeing themselves and each other as individuals with the full range of traits found in human beings generally, it is rather explicitly anti-free-market. Rice would have some kind of entity - his firm, I suppose - come into privately owned organizations and preform inspections, like some government agency such as OSHA.

Because race is a perennially sensitive subject in our society and the climate is particularly raw at the moment, it becomes a cudgel by which the Great Dismantling Project can make big strides toward obliterating a private realm within our society.

You will not be permitted to actually own anything, such as a business. You won't even be able to own the thoughts inside your head. They will become the property of the collective, and you will make them available for scrutiny on demand.

That's exactly what Mr. Rice's bottom line is.

Barney & Clyde - Season 2, Episode 12

It's here.

Pour yourself something bracing and pull up a stool to the virtual Libation Station and join us for a look at

YOU’LL NEVER BE WOKE ENOUGH - JK Rowling (pronounced like bowling) is subjected to trolling… The famous Harry Potter Author has the audacity to acknowledge the existence of women. STARTING FROM ZERO - We examine the People’s Democratic Republic of CHAZ/CHOP and the comparisons between it and the 1871 Paris Commune, the late-1960s Bay Area hippies scene and the 20th century experiment in one-party socialism. THE FINE LINE BETWEEN CARING VS GRANDSTANDING - Do black lives actually matter to the Black Lives Matter organization?

An underwhelming return to the arena circuit

Well, now.

So much for that makeshift stadium outside Tulsa's Bank of Oklahoma Center, which was supposed to accommodate overflow crowds. It was dismantled while the sun was still high in the sky. Entire sections within the Center went empty.

The Very Stable Genius has attempted to frame it as protestors keeping fans away. It doesn't seem to be washing.

He did get a big round of applause for taking a drink of water with one hand.

The fact of the matter is that actual conservatism never died. It was expected to wither away as Trumpism elbowed its way to primacy within the Republican Party. New journals such as The Dispatch and The Bulwark were expected to die on the vine. Principles First was expected to go nowhere.

Reality had other plans.

With each passing day, it becomes more clear that Trumpism is not a coherent worldview, but rather a cult built around one of the most unfit presidents in US history.

There's probably not time to make an abrupt turn between now and November. But an actually effective voice for the immutable principles, and for truly workable ways to apply them to the matters currently on the nation's plate, is present on the scene.

Saturday roundup

For the first several years after identity politics had ruined the humanities in our universities, it was still possible to point to the sciences and say, "At least there's one area on campus in which the pursuit of objective truth is still sacrosanct."

Not anymore. Some major journals that focus on physics, chemistry and biology, as well as schools themselves are going in for "other ways of knowing":

A popular idea here is that different groups have different “ways of knowing,” different modes of sense-making, and even different epistemic paradigms. To insist on the exclusionary standard of “Western rationality” would therefore amount to suppressing black, Indigenous, or even female knowledges. And, since knowledge and power are said to form an indissociable nexus, the insistence on universal scientific standards is, by this logic, connected to the perpetuation of (male) white supremacy.

The way to remedy this injustice, some therefore argue, is to explicitly politicize science so as to reveal it as a culturally biased enterprise. In Canada, where I live, this political project is often referred to as the “decolonization of the university,” and operates under the institutional umbrella of EDI (Equity, Diversity, and Inclusion). Though it sometimes couches itself in utilitarian or incremental terms (a demand for, say, better, more effective teaching methods that serve to develop the potential of all groups), the most far-reaching EDI initiatives effectively subordinate science to political activism and even mystical obscurantism.

In its most elaborate form, EDI subjects science to the same treatment as has already been meted out to the Western literary canon: a relentless deconstructionwhereby each axiom, value, and commitment is presented as infected by cultural imperialism. This method of criticism has led, for example, to such oddities as feminist philosopher of science Sandra Harding’s suggestion that Newton’s laws might be accurately referred to as “Newton’s rape manual.” These critiques were once confined to social commentary that was distinct from the actual work of scientists. As I’ve learned first-hand, that may be changing.

Andrew T. Walker has a piece at Christianity Today entitled "Bostock Is As Bad As You Think." He says that to think that the Religious Freedom Restoration Act will protect faith-based institutions from the encroachment of tyranny is dangerous wishful thinking:

On Thursday, Senate Democrats attempted a voice vote to pass the Equality Act, legislation profoundly hostile to religious liberty. To do this by “unanimous consent” only signals that Democrats, with the wind at their backs, have little desire to defend religious freedom and are advancing a take-no-prisoners approach in their culture war victory.

In a move that demonstrates just how cowed Republicans are in wanting to spend any political capital on defending religious liberty, only three Republican Senators rose to challenge it: Senators Josh Hawley, Jim Lankford, and Mike Lee. Were it not for these three Senators, the Equality Act would surely become law. Even still, given Monday’s ruling, it seems that the spirit of the Equality Act has indeed become law, and all that awaits are its future entailments elsewhere in federal law.

A lesser-known feature of the Equality Act undermines the argument that RFRA will sufficiently protect religious dissenters. To understand why the Religious Freedom Restoration Act is not the permanent salve some declare it to be, consider that a provision of the Equality Act aims at specifically undoing RFRA of its provisions where they come in conflict with sexual orientation and gender identity. The firewall heralded as the last preserve of religious liberty is already on the chopping block.

Toxic legislation with little resistance is not a good sign for religious liberty’s future. And yet, here we are.

The Left's desire to stomp God-based living into oblivion has been made quite explicit:

In 2016, Harvard Law professor Mark Tushnet infamously compared those with traditional views about sex and gender to racists and Nazis. He was more than honest about what victors in the culture war ought to do: Give them no quarter. Writes Tushnet,

For liberals, the question now is how to deal with the losers in the culture wars. That’s mostly a question of tactics. My own judgment is that taking a hard line (“You lost, live with it”) is better than trying to accommodate the losers, who – remember – defended, and are defending, positions that liberals regard as having no normative pull at all. Trying to be nice to the losers didn’t work well after the Civil War, nor after Brown. (And taking a hard line seemed to work reasonably well in Germany and Japan after 1945.) I should note that LGBT activists in particular seem to have settled on the hard-line approach, while some liberal academics defend more accommodating approaches. When specific battles in the culture wars were being fought, it might have made sense to try to be accommodating after a local victory, because other related fights were going on, and a hard line might have stiffened the opposition in those fights. But the war’s over, and we won.

“No normative pull at all.” What does that mean? It means the Judeo-Christian understanding of sexuality and gender are not remotely persuasive or deserving of protection. It means to leave no room for it to flower or grow, especially if it is a hindrance to social justice. This hypothesis is what a lot of us have been saying for some time: Nothing within the internal logic of progressivism explains why there should be robust protections for those holding beliefs deemed harmful to society.

Are we really to believe that cultural elites so brazenly contemptuous of historic Christian belief will have the magnanimity to leave cultural and public space for those who they liken to racists to continue in their bigotry? We can hope, but I am not optimistic.

The unredacted version of Bolton's book makes clear just how unfit to be president Donald Trump is:

Vanity Fair has seen unredacted pages from the book and it’s clear why the White House tried to keep Trump’s words secret: they are deeply embarrassing and illustrate Trump’s naked politicization of America’s foreign policy.

According to an unredacted passage shown to Vanity Fair by a source, Trump’s ask is even more crudely shocking when you read Trump’s specific language. “Make sure I win,” Trump allegedly told Xi during a dinner at the G20 conference in Osaka, Japan last summer. “I will probably win anyway, so don’t hurt my farms.… Buy a lot of soybeans and wheat and make sure we win.”

The Very Stable Genius is solely driven by self-glorification:

Bolton writes that Trump told Xi on a phone call ahead of their G20 meeting: “I miss you,” and then said, “this is totally up to you, but the most popular thing I’ve ever been involved with is making a deal with China.… Making a deal with China would be a very popular thing for me.’”

The you-don't-have-to-dismantle-our-departments-we're-bailing trend in the law enforcement field is present in DC:

Nearly three-fourths of Washington's Metropolitan Police Department said in a poll that they are considering leaving the force amid a police reform bill recently passed by the D.C. Council. 

The proposal would require law enforcement body camera footage to be released to the public more quickly following a police-related shooting and would restrict when officers can use lethal force. It also would prohibit the department from purchasing military-style equipment from the federal government. 

Local lawmakers stopped an attempt by one council member at large who proposed to limit the size of the force and cap it at 3,500 from its current size of 3,863. However, several hundred on the force revealed to the D.C. Police Union, which represents 3,600 Washington officers, detectives, and sergeants, that they are looking to leave anyway. 

According to the survey of 600 local law enforcement members, of the 71% considering leaving, 25% may retire earlier than planned, 35% are seeking jobs at other law enforcement agencies, and 39% are considering leaving law enforcement altogether.

For the first time in more than eight years, Iran is obstructing inspections of its nuclear facilities.  

The Fulton County district attorney gets ahead of himself and causes an Atlanta Police Department walkout

In a USA Today op-ed, former federal prosecutor Michale J. Stern makes clear that Paul Howard was playing fast and loose with the procedure he was supposed to follow:

Atlanta's district attorney, Paul Howard, announced felony murder charges Wednesday against the officer who shot Brooks.

American Bar Association rules prohibit prosecutors from making pretrial statements that could influence public perception and prejudice an accused's ability to get a fair trial. Howard violated this rule by making a lengthy presentation of evidence that supported his position and ignored key facts that did not. Judges, prosecutors and defense attorneys typically refer to Howard's impropriety as trying the case in the press.

A new and disturbing allegation presented by the district attorney is that the officer kicked Brooks after he was shot. Though acts after an event can be considered reflective of an earlier intent, the pivotal actions in this case will focus on what happened in the seconds before the shooting.

In Georgia, an officer is entitled to use deadly force when he reasonably believes his life is in danger or he’s at risk of receiving a serious physical injury. When this case goes to trial, the jurors will be instructed that they must consider the context of Brooks attacking the officer, grabbing the Taser and shooting the Taser at the officer. This analysis includes the possibility that if Brooks hit the officer with the stolen Taser, he could grab the officer’s gun and shoot him.

Howard's claim that Brooks never presented himself as a threat just ain't so. He had turned to face Rolfe and fired the taser at him. A freeze frame from the surveillance video makes that clear. 

When one watches the entire video, one can see that the exchange between Rolfe and Brooks was characterized by a vibe of mutual respect. Rolfe explained repeatedly that his first concern was whether Brooks was safe to drive a car. Even after Brooks had lied about not having driven the car and had made it clear he didn't know what city he was in, Rolfe made every effort to give Brooks a chance to minimize the trouble he'd be getting into.

Brooks's sudden burst of resistance at the moment of handcuffing was an abrupt shift in the tone that had been established. When one knows a little backstory, it seems reasonable to consider the possibility that, even if he were not going to get in a great deal of trouble over this specific incident, Brooks realized that a DUI arrest would squelch his probation and send him back to prison on the four charges, including child cruelty and family battery, he'd been convicted of in 2014.

Atlanta cops were not pleased with the way Howard handled this, and expressed as much by calling in sick in large numbers just before shift change last night. 

This exacerbates a trend that was already underway before the Brooks incident. A week ago yesterday, a piece by a Tulsa, Oklahoma police commander named Travis Yates entitled "You Won't Need To Abolish Us - Why Many Police Officers Like Me Are Quitting The Force" was published and quickly became widely disseminated. On June 4, dozens of Louisville police walked out on that city's mayor as he addressed them during roll call before a shift.

The gossamer thread by which our civilization hangs is perilously frayed. With every disingenuous characterization of what goes down when a cop tries to do his job professionally and respectfully, it frays a little more.

Bolton

For someone who has always been a what-you-see-is-what-you-get kind of guy, controversy seems to follow John Bolton. His 2005 nomination to be US ambassador to the UN drew opposition not only from Democrats but Republican Senators George Voinovich and Richard Lugar. Bush wound up having to make a recess appointment. And then there was the recent stint as national security advisor to Trump. It seemed to start our well enough. Trump praised Bolton and during that period when there was so much shuffling of personnel in the foreign policy area of the administration, said that he wanted to find a place for Bolton in it.

But things went south and reached a nadir with the Ukraine affair. Bolton likened it to a drug deal and summoned his team to his office to express his displeasure at what was going down.

Of course, the Ukraine situation led to Trump's impeachment. There was much hue and cry within the conservative-but-opposed-to-Trump camp - "never Trumpers," if you will (disclosure: that would be my bunch) - that he didn't testify before the House. He did state that he was willing to testify before the Senate, but that body never called any witnesses. The accusation was that he'd refrained from testifying to maximize sales of his upcoming book. Just today, I saw a tweet from a writer I otherwise pretty much agree on everything with that called Bolton a mercenary and a coward.

I think that kind of swift dismissal of a long-time public servant is symptomatic of the current tendency to write people off on the basis of recent moves that may still be explained satisfactorily, to render people one-dimensional figures whose score cards don't pass muster. Such a view doesn't take in the full measure of the person.

I'm more inclined to see Bolton as John Podhoretz does in a September 2019 Commentary piece entitled "Bolton's Integrity":

John Bolton has never trimmed his sails in pursuit of power or authority. He is who he is and always has been. He believes in the efficacy of American power and the need to project it to make America safer and improve its position in the world.

 He was steeped in conservatism from an early age. He ran his high school's Students for Goldwater campaign in 1964. He was law-school friends with Clarence Thomas. The reason for the dustup surrounding the Bush appointment was that Bolton clearly had his head on straight concerning what the United Nations was really all about.

Well, now the book is printed and bound. Copies are stacked in warehouses, awaiting a June 23 release.  Given that it was written so shortly after Bolton's tenure, and that the administration it discusses is still in office, it had to undergo a prepublication review. Bolton's lawyer, Charles Cooper, explains how exhaustive that was in a Wall Street Journal column:

Round one began on Jan. 23, as the impeachment trial was under way. Ms. Knight wrote to me that Mr. Bolton’s manuscript contained “significant amounts of classified information” and that she would provide “detailed guidance regarding next steps that should enable you to revise the manuscript and move forward as expeditiously as possible.”

A few days later Vanity Fair reported that “the president is out for revenge against his adversaries.” The article stated that the president “has an enemies list,” that “Bolton is at the top of the list,” and that the “campaign against Bolton” included Ms. Knight’s Jan. 23 letter. It also reported that the president “wants Bolton to be criminally investigated.”

On Feb. 7, two days after Mr. Trump’s acquittal, Ms. Knight suggested that “to further the iterative process, it would be most efficient for me to meet with [Mr. Bolton] to review each instance of classified information in detail.” Meantime, the White House had acknowledged that NSC staff briefed White House counsel Pat Cipollone about the book while Mr. Cipollone was leading the impeachment defense.

Mr. Bolton and Ms. Knight met on Feb. 21. That same day the Washington Post reported that Mr. Trump had “directly weighed in” on the prepublication review, “telling his staff that he views John Bolton as ‘a traitor,’ that everything he uttered to the departed aide about national security is classified and that he will seek to block the book’s publication.” The Post also reported that Mr. Trump vowed to a group of television news anchors: “We’re going to try and block publication of the book.” The president added, “After I leave office, he can do this.”

Mr. Bolton’s meeting with Ms. Knight lasted four hours. She later wrote that they “reviewed the preliminary results of three chapters in the draft manuscript in detail.” Mr. Bolton took five pages of handwritten notes as they discussed her specific concerns. Three days later, Ms. Knight wrote that the meeting had been “most productive,” and that “it would be most helpful to the process if we hold one or more following meetings . . . to discuss the remaining portions of the draft manuscript.” 

They met three more times in the first week of March for more than 10 additional hours. They meticulously reviewed each of Ms. Knight’s concerns in the remaining 11 chapters, producing 34 more pages of handwritten notes. Following her guidance and his own notes, Mr. Bolton revised his manuscript. By March 9 he had resubmitted all 14 chapters to begin the second round of the iterative review.

Mr. Bolton didn’t hear from Ms. Knight again until Friday, March 27, when she wrote, “I appreciate your efforts to address the classification concerns in the latest draft version you submitted. Many of the changes are satisfactory. However, additional edits are required to ensure the protection of national security information. To assist in making the additional required changes, I will provide a list of required edits and language substitutions to guide you in this next stage of revising the draft.” 

Her list amounted to 17 single-spaced pages of typed comments, questions, suggestions of specific alternative language, and citations to publicly available source material. Mr. Bolton worked through the weekend and responded in full on March 30, accepting the vast majority of Ms. Knight’s suggestions and proposing alternative solutions to others.

The third round of the review occurred in an April 13 phone conversation when Ms. Knight provided a much shorter list of remaining concerns after reviewing Mr. Bolton’s March 30 revisions. They agreed on these language changes, which were delivered to Ms. Knight on April 14.

During the April 13 call, Ms. Knight said she would review the full manuscript one more time, to recheck resolved issues and ensure she hadn’t overlooked anything. That final review resulted in two further phone calls, on April 21 and 24, in which she conveyed her final round of edits. Mr. Bolton promptly responded with the revisions by April 24. On April 27, after clarifying one previously discussed edit, Ms. Knight confirmed “that’s the last edit I really have to provide for you.” The lengthy, laborious process was over.
Yet when Mr. Bolton asked when he would receive the letter confirming the book was cleared, Ms. Knight cryptically replied that her “interaction” with unnamed others in the White House about the book had “been very delicate” and that there were “some internal process considerations to work through.” She thought the letter might be ready that afternoon but would “know more by the end of the day.” Six weeks later, Mr. Bolton has yet to receive a clearance letter. He hasn’t heard from Ms. Knight since May 7.
We did hear from the White House on June 8. John A. Eisenberg, the president’s deputy counsel for national security, asserted in a letter that Mr. Bolton’s manuscript contains classified information and that publishing the book would violate his nondisclosure agreements. 

Feeling that all the "i's had been dotted and "t"s crossed, Simon & Schuster let the presses roll.

The Very Stable Genius and his attorney general William Barr - who also had distinguished himself earlier in his career but is now indeed looking like he's had a big gulp of the sycophancy Kool-Aid - are fit to be tied:

Mr. Trump said he considers any conversation he has with another official “highly classified.” Presidents have claimed the authority to classify national security information and direct subordinates to do the same, but no president has claimed the total authority to prevent former employees from speaking about non-national security matters—and typically the First Amendment would protect such speech, experts say.

“Maybe he’s not telling the truth,” Mr. Trump said of his former national security adviser. “He’s been known not to tell the truth a lot.” He didn’t detail what he was referring to.

Attorney General William Barr, speaking alongside the president on Monday, said Mr. Bolton “hasn’t completed the process” of clearing the book. He didn’t respond to questions about why Mr. Bolton’s lawyer said the NSC had told him the process had been completed.

Mr. Bolton’s lawyer and a spokeswoman didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment.

At this late date and with no real grounds for stopping it, I'd say that the book will be in stores next week.

It will be interesting to see how Trump responds once the ship has sailed. His Twitter feed will be lively, no doubt.

His nervousness about book releases is surely compounded by the upcoming publication of a book by his niece, which is not going to be flattering.