Donald J. Trump
@realDonaldTrump
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With Universal Mail-In Voting (not Absentee Voting, which is good), 2020 will be the most INACCURATE & FRAUDULENT Election in history. It will be a great embarrassment to the USA. Delay the Election until people can properly, securely and safely vote???
“He can suggest whatever he wants. The law is what it is. We’re going to have an election that’s legitimate, it’s going to be credible, it’s going to be the same as we’ve always done it,” Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.), the chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, told reporters.
Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa), who is in the line of succession for the presidency as the president pro tempore of the Senate, dismissed Trump’s tweet as just the opinion of one person, noting that it would take an act of Congress to change the date of a federal election.
“It doesn’t matter what one individual in this country says,” Grassley said. “We still are a country based on the rule of law. And we must follow the law until either the Constitution is changed or until the law is changed.”
House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) similarly said he opposes pushing back the date of the election. “No way should we ever not hold an election on the day that we have it,” McCarthy told reporters.
AFFH is easily one of President Obama’s most radical initiatives, on a par with Obamacare in its transformative potential. In effect, AFFH gives the federal government a lever to re-engineer nearly every American neighborhood — imposing a preferred racial and ethnic composition, densifying housing, transportation, and business development in suburb and city alike, and weakening or casting aside the authority of local governments over core responsibilities, from zoning to transportation to education. Not only the policy but the political implications are immense — at the presidential, congressional, state, and local levels.
Donald J. Trump
@realDonaldTrump
I am happy to inform all of the people living their Suburban Lifestyle Dream that you will no longer be bothered or financially hurt by having low income housing built in your neighborhood...
Donald J. Trump
@realDonaldTrump
·
I am happy to inform all of the people living their Suburban Lifestyle Dream that you will no longer be bothered or financially hurt by having low income housing built in your neighborhood...
Many of us now feel old, detached even, before our time. The beliefs, attitudes, mores that our parents, clergy, coaches, teachers, and other authority figures, almost unconsciously imparted to us, seem increasingly like museum pieces. Should we consign individualism, competitive striving, personal accountability, to say nothing of a belief that we live and act under God and the moral law, to an antiquated, bigoted past? In is the new victim slick and its reduction of the person to gender and race—its symbology sits on your Nike apparel, emblazoned on sporting venues, touted by leading corporations. Out is the fabric of liberty and order, honesty and sobriety, diligence and thrift. The symbology of these virtues may become synonymous with white supremacy, the ontological core of American identity, we are increasingly told. The Smithsonian Museum for African American History and Culture has pedagogical plans on this front.
We confront the following question: “what if the “self” that is “realized” under the conditions of liberal capitalism is a self that despises liberal capitalism, and uses its liberty to subvert and abolish a free society?” This question was asked forty eight years ago by Irving Kristol in his magnificent 1972 lecture “Capitalism, Socialism, and Nihilism,” delivered to the twenty fifth anniversary meeting of the Mont Pelerin Society. Kristol understood well the problems of liberal democratic society when it is detached from metaphysical and spiritual goods. He underscores what he thinks are the tendencies for such an order: a vacuous liberty increasingly perceived as unworthy of defending and the turn to a pathological, if not socialist tinged, notion of the good. The outcome, Kristol feared, would be a sickness leading to death. His insights in this essay clear a path forward during our own sickness in 2020.
Immanuel, a pediatrician and a religious minister, has a history of making bizarre claims about medical topics and other issues. She has often claimed that gynecological problems like cysts and endometriosis are in fact caused by people having sex in their dreams with demons and witches.
She alleges alien DNA is currently used in medical treatments, and that scientists are cooking up a vaccine to prevent people from being religious. And, despite appearing in Washington, D.C. to lobby Congress on Monday, she has said that the government is run in part not by humans but by “reptilians” and other aliens.
Immanuel gave her viral speech on the steps of the Supreme Court at the “White Coat Summit,” a gathering of a handful of doctors who call themselves America’s Frontline Doctors and dispute the medical consensus on the novel coronavirus. The event was organized by the right-wing group Tea Party Patriots, which is backed by wealthy Republican donors.
In her speech, Immanuel alleges that she has successfully treated hundreds of patients with hydroxychloroquine, a controversial treatment Trump has promoted and says he has taken himself. Studies have failed to find proofthat the drug has any benefit in treating COVID-19, and the Food and Drug Administration in June revoked its emergency authorization to use it to treat the deadly virus, saying it hadn’t demonstrated any effect on patients’ mortality prospects.
“Nobody needs to get sick,” Immanuel said. “This virus has a cure.”
In our time, the New York Times journalist Nikole Hannah-Jones has been celebrated as the genius behind the Times‘s 1619 Project, which is an attempt to — in the Times‘s word — “reframe” American history around slavery. No longer should 1776 be considered the year of America’s birth, but rather 1619, the year the first African slaves were brought to the New World. Jones won the Pulitzer Prize this year for her work on the project. It is based on a fundamental historical falsehood — a malicious and destructive one too: that the purpose of America was to preserve slavery.
A number of historians — none of them conservatives — called Jones and her team at the Timesout on this lie (see here for a list of some of the names, and their criticism). This is a lie that could have tremendous consequences. As Princeton historian Sean Wilentz, himself a man of the left, has said:
“To teach children that the American Revolution was fought in part to secure slavery would be giving a fundamental misunderstanding not only of what the American Revolution was all about but what America stood for and has stood for since the Founding.”
But Jones’s lie is politically useful in advancing the identity-politics goals of progressives. Oprah Winfrey and Lionsgate are going to make a series of films and feature television shows based on the 1619 Project. They are changing the cultural memory of Americans, in a way that deceives people about what America was, and is. Nobody can possibly deny that slavery was a terrible stain on this nation, but it is an evil whose existence stood as a rebuke to the Founders’ ideals. It took a Civil War to finally end the malignant institution — but it did end, at the cost of between 600,000 and 750,000 American lives.
The reason we’re talking about it now is that Sen. Tom Cotton, Republican of Arkansas, is sponsoring legislation that would prohibit the use of federal tax dollars to teach the 1619 Project in American classrooms. Whether or not such legislation is wise is certainly debatable. What’s caused the ruckus is this section from a story in the Arkansas Democrat Gazette:
In the interview, Cotton said the role of slavery can’t be overlooked.
“We have to study the history of slavery and its role and impact on the development of our country because otherwise we can’t understand our country. As the Founding Fathers said, it was the necessary evil upon which the union was built, but the union was built in a way, as Lincoln said, to put slavery on the course to its ultimate extinction,” he said.
Instead of portraying America as “an irredeemably corrupt, rotten and racist country,” the nation should be viewed “as an imperfect and flawed land, but the greatest and noblest country in the history of mankind,” Cotton said.
This is being wildly misconstrued as some sort of justification for slavery. What Cotton is saying simply is that the United States could not have existed if the non-slave states had not agreed to accept the slave states. It was a doomed compromise, a one we eventually had to go to war over, but it launched the country. Cotton is pointing out the tragic nature of the compromise that made America possible as a nation united under the Constitution. He is not defending slavery, which would be as insane morally as it would be politically. He is repeating a similar point that Abraham Lincoln made in an 1855 letter to Joshua Speed, a friend of his who owned slaves:
You ought rather to appreciate how much the great body of the Northern people do crucify their feelings, in order to maintain their loyalty to the Constitution and the Union.
Do you see?
San Francisco Giants pitcher Sam Coonrod refused to kneel in solidarity with the Black Lives Matter movement ahead of the team’s season opener Friday, saying he would feel “like a hypocrite” because of his Christian faith and personal beliefs.
“I don’t think I’m better than anybody. I’m just a Christian,” he told reporters. “I believe I can’t kneel before anything but God, Jesus Christ. I chose not to kneel. I feel if I did kneel I’d be a hypocrite. I don’t want to be a hypocrite.”
He added that he “just can’t get on board with a couple things I’ve read about Black Lives Matter. How they lean towards Marxism and … they said some negative things about the nuclear family.”
“The one thing we said is we were going to let people express themselves,” Kapler said. “We were going to give them the choice on whether they were going to stand, kneel or do something else. That was a personal decision for Sam.”
Coonrod said he meant “no ill will” by his gesture and added, “I’m not mad at someone who decided to kneel. I just don’t think it’s too much to ask that I just get the same respect.”
All the Giants pitcher did was exercise the right that all Americans have, at least theoretically. Freedom of choice. The right for which millions of Americans fought, with many dying. For that reason, Coonrod’s decision to stand rather than join his kneeling manager and teammates during a pregame moment of unity at Dodger Stadium should be above criticism.
He did nothing wrong.
He said plenty wrong, though, offering up an explanation that slid off his tongue and went dribbling down his chest like liquid contradiction.
"I'm a Christian,” he said.
When did real Christianity opt out of humanity? Give a pass to injustice and inequality? Decide that it’s disrespectful to offer support, if not shelter, to those in need? Does Coonrod not realize that pastors of all faiths are joining crowds around the world fighting for these very ideals?
But if Coonrod had taken a moment to inform himself, he would see motive behind this movement need not be affiliated with BLM but, rather, to bring greater awareness to the racial injustices that is its focus.
Ian Williams, NBC Sports Bay Area analyst and former 49ers defensive lineman, responded to Coonrod’s reasoning by calling BS on it.
“Let me make this clear,” Williams tweeted. “You don’t have to be on board with BLACK LIVES MATTER. But I do need you to be on board with EQUALITY FOR ALL and ENDING RACISM.
“It’s simple. If you don’t want those 2 simple things, you know what you are.”
Which is to imply Coonrod’s own interests are in conflict with protesting racial inequality.
Tucker Carlson said Thursday that coronavirus safety guidelines were really a plot to promote Democrat Joe Biden’s presidential campaign against Donald Trump. (Watch the video above.)
In a rambling segment that attempted to build his kooky case for a conspiracy to make America so unhappy that it would back the presumptive Democratic nominee, the Fox News host called Democrats “radicals” who “will do anything for control.”
“Democrats understand that the unhappier Americans become, the more likely they are to win,” Carlson said on his show. “Unhappy people want change, it is not complicated. So every ominous headline about the state of the country makes it more likely that Donald Trump will lose his job. The more that people suffer, the greater Joe Biden’s advantage. Democrats have a strong incentive, therefore, to inflict as much pain as they can, and that’s what they are doing.”
He even called Dr. Anthony Fauci, the infectious disease expert known for his level-headed guidance as a White House task force member, “capricious and transparently political.”
Nikki Haley
@NikkiHaley
We know how much
wanted to have a blowout convention.Proud of the selfless leadership he has shown in cancelling the convention. He has a great story to tell on how he turned our economy & foreign policy around. We look forward to sharing it in the next 100 days!
The Ronald Reagan Presidential Foundation and Institute formally asked the Trump campaign and the Republican National Committee to stop using the 40th president's name and image to raise money.
The request came in response to a fundraising appeal sent from the Trump Make America Great Again Committee, a joint effort of the Trump campaign and the RNC, offering two commemorative coins, one engraved with Reagan's image and the other with that of President Donald Trump to anyone who donates $45 or more for Trump's reelection. The email was "signed" by Trump.
The whole episode smells like Wolf trying to fulfill Trump’s strongman fantasy of sending soldiers into the streets under the Insurrection Act to crack the heads of looters in early June. POTUS ended up not doing that after he met resistance from Mark Milley and Mark Esper, but now here’s Wolf doing what he can to make the dream happen. Why aren’t these guys dressed like normal federal agents? What’s the excuse?Portland's long been the scene of rabble-rousing by snot-nosed far-left malcontents. Occupy Portland went into business in October 2011, about three weeks after Occupy Wall Street became a thing. In 2017 and 2018, Antifa, in the name of showing Patriot Prayer that "their hatred and violence has no place in Portland," showed up at Patriot Prayer rallies and interacted with rally-goers with - you guessed it, hatred and violence.
It was cocktail hour on the opening day of the new, Republican-dominated Congress, and the long, chandelier-lighted parlor of David Brock’s town house in Georgetown was filling up with exuberant young conservatives fresh from events on the Hill.”That was the opening sentence, in 1995, of a New York Times Magazine cover story called “The Counter Counterculture.” The author was the late James Atlas, and one by one, he introduced a series of characters. There was young David Brooks, then of The Wall Street Journal’s editorial page. There was Brock himself, best known at the time for his vicious investigations into the personal affairs of President Bill Clinton. There was David Frum—now a writer for The Atlantic—and his wife, Danielle Crittenden, with whom, years later, I co-wrote a Polish cookbook.
There are amusing details—expensive Georgetown restaurants where educated conservative elites pour scorn upon educated liberal elites—but the tone of the article was not negative. It included a parade of other names and short profiles: Bill Kristol, John Podhoretz, Roger Kimball, Dinesh D’Souza. I knew most of them at the time the article appeared. I was then working in London for The Spectator, a conservative political magazine, and my relationship to this group was that of a foreign cousin who visited from time to time and inspired mild interest, but never quite made it to the inner circle. I wrote occasionally for The Weekly Standard, edited by Kristol; for TheNew Criterion, edited by Kimball; and once for the Independent Women’s Quarterly, then edited by, among others, Crittenden.
I also knew, slightly, a woman whose appearance, in a leopard-skin miniskirt, was the most notable thing about the magazine’s cover photograph: Laura Ingraham, who had been a clerk to Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas and was then an attorney at a tony law firm. In the penultimate paragraph Atlas finds himself, near midnight, “careering through the streets of downtown Washington with Brock in Ingraham’s military-green Land Rover at 60 miles an hour looking for an open bar while the music of Buckwheat Zydeco blasted over the stereo.”As someone who only knows what Ingraham is about through consuming her radio, television and website output through the years, I know that I started seeing signs that she might not hold up as a spokesperson for basic conservatism. Some if it was a matter of demeanor. The infectious Type-A way she engaged life became a little tiresome. She started to seem nervous in television appearances, like her mind was already halfway on whatever she was going to do next. The way she'd describe ordinary interactions with people in her daily life hinted at an imperiousness that did not leave a good impression.
Since the 1990s, we had gone in radically different directions. She had left the law, drifted into the world of conservative media, and tried for a long time to get her own television show. Though these early attempts all failed, she eventually had a popular talk-radio program. I was a guest on the program a couple of times, once after the Russian invasion of the nation of Georgia, in 2008. Listening again to the conversation—the magic of the internet ensures that no sound bite is ever lost—I was struck by how consistent it was with the optimistic conservatism of the ’90s. Ingraham was still talking about America’s power to do good, America’s ability to push back against the Russian threat. But she was already groping for something else. During our conversation, she quoted from an article by Pat Buchanan, one of her mentors, who had repeatedly railed against the pointlessness of any American relationship with Georgia, an aspiring democracy, and lauded Russia, a country he imagined to be more “Christian” than his own.
The reference was a hint at other changes. At some point in the intervening years, her Reaganite optimism slowly hardened into something better described as a form of apocalyptic pessimism. This can be found in much of what she says and writes nowadays: America is doomed, Europe is doomed, Western civilization is doomed—and immigration, political correctness, transgenderism, the culture, the establishment, the left, and the “Dems” are responsible. Some of what she sees is real. The so-called cancel culture on the internet, the extremism that sometimes flares up on university campuses and newsrooms, and the exaggerated claims of those who practice identity politics are a political and cultural problem that will require real bravery to fight. But it is no longer clear that she thinks these forms of left-wing extremism can be fought using normal democratic politics. In 2019, she had Buchanan himself on her show and put the point to him directly: “Is Western civilization, as we understood it, actually hanging in the balance? I think you could actually make a very strong argument that it is tipping over the cliff.” Like Buchanan, she has also become doubtful about whether America could or should play any role in the world. And no wonder: If America is not exceptional but degenerate, why would you expect it to achieve anything outside its borders?Applebaum points up the irony with which a 2007 Ingraham speech is fraught:
few elements of ingraham’s trajectory remain mysterious. One is her frequent invocation of moral values, Christian values, personal values. During a 2007 speech, she told a group in Dallas that “without virtue there is no America. Without virtue we will be ruled by tyrants.” She then listed those virtues: “honor, courage, selflessness, sacrifice, hard work, personal responsibility, respect for elders, respect for the vulnerable.” None of these virtues can be ascribed to Donald Trump. More complicated is her participation in the opprobrium that the president heaps on all immigrants, and her own fears that legal immigration has undermined “the America we know and love.” Ingraham herself has three adopted children—all immigrants.And Applebaum does an admirable deep dig into the possible reasons for Ingraham signing on so unwaveringly to Trumpism:
I don’t know how she explains these contradictions to herself, because Ingraham wouldn’t speak with me when I tried to ask. She answered one email and then went silent. But there are clues. Some mutual friends point out that she is a convert to Catholicism, and a breast-cancer survivor who is deeply religious: She told one of them that “the only man who never disappointed me was Jesus.” The willpower required to survive in the cutthroat world of right-wing media—especially at Fox News, where female stars were often pressured to sleep with their bosses—should not be underestimated. This combination of personal experiences gives a messianic edge to some of her public remarks. In that same 2007 speech, she spoke about her religious conversion. If it weren’t for her faith, she said, “I wouldn’t be here . . . I probably wouldn’t be alive.” That was why, she said, she fought to save America from the godless: “If we lose faith in God, as a country—we lose our country.”
Professional ambition, the oldest excuse in the world, is part of the story too. Partly thanks to Trump, and her connection to Trump, Ingraham finally got her own prime-time Fox television show, with a salary to match. She has secured interviews with him at key moments, during which she poses only flattering questions. (“By the way, congratulations on your polling numbers,” she told him while interviewing him on the anniversary of D-Day.) But I don’t think, for someone as intelligent as Ingraham, that this is the full explanation. She ran a radio show throughout the many years in which Fox didn’t give her a television program, and I believe she will go back to running a radio show if it ever cancels her program. As in the case of so many biographies, picking apart the personal and the political is a fool’s game.
There are some clues to her thinking from other times and other places. The Polish writer Jacek Trznadel has described what it felt like, in Stalinist Poland, to be a loud advocate for the regime and to doubt it at the same time. “I was shouting from a tribune at some university meeting in Wrocław, and simultaneously felt panicked at the thought of myself shouting . . . I told myself I was trying to convince [the crowd] by shouting, but in reality I was trying to convince myself.” For some people, loud advocacy of Trump helps to cover up the deep doubt and even shame they feel about their support for Trump. It’s not enough to express tepid approval of a president who is corrupting the White House and destroying America’s alliances and inflicting economic catastrophe on the country: You have to shout if you want to convince yourself as well as others. You have to exaggerate your feelings if you are to make them believable.Applebaum's piece includes one concrete anecdote that further points up the irony of Ingraham's conversion:
She has known Trump since the ’90s; they once went on a date, though apparently that didn’t go well—she found him pompous. (“He needs two separate cars, one for himself and one for his hair,” she told some mutual friends.)Ingraham should have contemplated her impression of the VSG as pompous more deeply. It is the trait that has led to his present juncture (low poll numbers, a panicked campaign staff, a barrage of unflattering books about him). And the implications are far greater than an off-putting personality. There's foreign policy, for instance. Some serious repair is going to be needed in the wake of the way Trump has routinely insulted the leaders of our closest allies.
She notes that there are still several talented reporters and editors at the Times, but that their integrity gets increasingly compromised by the realization that the only way to advance within the organization is to toe the line.Dear A.G.,It is with sadness that I write to tell you that I am resigning from The New York Times.I joined the paper with gratitude and optimism three years ago. I was hired with the goal of bringing in voices that would not otherwise appear in your pages: first-time writers, centrists, conservatives and others who would not naturally think of The Times as their home. The reason for this effort was clear: The paper’s failure to anticipate the outcome of the 2016 election meant that it didn’t have a firm grasp of the country it covers. Dean Baquet and others have admitted as much on various occasions. The priority in Opinion was to help redress that critical shortcoming.I was honored to be part of that effort, led by James Bennet. I am proud of my work as a writer and as an editor. Among those I helped bring to our pages: the Venezuelan dissident Wuilly Arteaga; the Iranian chess champion Dorsa Derakhshani; and the Hong Kong Christian democrat Derek Lam. Also: Ayaan Hirsi Ali, Masih Alinejad, Zaina Arafat, Elna Baker, Rachael Denhollander, Matti Friedman, Nick Gillespie, Heather Heying, Randall Kennedy, Julius Krein, Monica Lewinsky, Glenn Loury, Jesse Singal, Ali Soufan, Chloe Valdary, Thomas Chatterton Williams, Wesley Yang, and many others.But the lessons that ought to have followed the election—lessons about the importance of understanding other Americans, the necessity of resisting tribalism, and the centrality of the free exchange of ideas to a democratic society—have not been learned. Instead, a new consensus has emerged in the press, but perhaps especially at this paper: that truth isn’t a process of collective discovery, but an orthodoxy already known to an enlightened few whose job is to inform everyone else.Twitter is not on the masthead of The New York Times. But Twitter has become its ultimate editor. As the ethics and mores of that platform have become those of the paper, the paper itself has increasingly become a kind of performance space. Stories are chosen and told in a way to satisfy the narrowest of audiences, rather than to allow a curious public to read about the world and then draw their own conclusions. I was always taught that journalists were charged with writing the first rough draft of history. Now, history itself is one more ephemeral thing molded to fit the needs of a predetermined narrative.My own forays into Wrongthink have made me the subject of constant bullying by colleagues who disagree with my views. They have called me a Nazi and a racist; I have learned to brush off comments about how I’m “writing about the Jews again.” Several colleagues perceived to be friendly with me were badgered by coworkers. My work and my character are openly demeaned on company-wide Slack channels where masthead editors regularly weigh in. There, some coworkers insist I need to be rooted out if this company is to be a truly “inclusive” one, while others post ax emojis next to my name. Still other New York Times employees publicly smear me as a liar and a bigot on Twitter with no fear that harassing me will be met with appropriate action. They never are.There are terms for all of this: unlawful discrimination, hostile work environment, and constructive discharge. I’m no legal expert. But I know that this is wrong.I do not understand how you have allowed this kind of behavior to go on inside your company in full view of the paper’s entire staff and the public. And I certainly can’t square how you and other Times leaders have stood by while simultaneously praising me in private for my courage. Showing up for work as a centrist at an American newspaper should not require bravery.Part of me wishes I could say that my experience was unique. But the truth is that intellectual curiosity—let alone risk-taking—is now a liability at The Times. Why edit something challenging to our readers, or write something bold only to go through the numbing process of making it ideologically kosher, when we can assure ourselves of job security (and clicks) by publishing our 4000th op-ed arguing that Donald Trump is a unique danger to the country and the world? And so self-censorship has become the norm.What rules that remain at The Times are applied with extreme selectivity. If a person’s ideology is in keeping with the new orthodoxy, they and their work remain unscrutinized. Everyone else lives in fear of the digital thunderdome. Online venom is excused so long as it is directed at the proper targets.Op-eds that would have easily been published just two years ago would now get an editor or a writer in serious trouble, if not fired. If a piece is perceived as likely to inspire backlash internally or on social media, the editor or writer avoids pitching it. If she feels strongly enough to suggest it, she is quickly steered to safer ground. And if, every now and then, she succeeds in getting a piece published that does not explicitly promote progressive causes, it happens only after every line is carefully massaged, negotiated and caveated.
She had an interesting career before the Times and will have one going forward, but the dwindling number of post-America's newspaper readers will be the poorer for no having the fortune of her presence in the position she's leaving.Rule One: Speak your mind at your own peril. Rule Two: Never risk commissioning a story that goes against the narrative. Rule Three: Never believe an editor or publisher who urges you to go against the grain. Eventually, the publisher will cave to the mob, the editor will get fired or reassigned, and you’ll be hung out to dry.
