The pattern is confirmed once again

 Examples abound of Donald  Trump's insistence on unwavering fealty. A cursory scroll of the Donald Trump category here at LITD yields a plethora going back to 2015.

However, I'm not sure there's ever been an instance so blatant as this (italics mine):

The day after President Trump fired FBI boss James Comey, the president phoned John Kelly, who was then secretary for the Department of Homeland Security, and offered him Comey's job, the New York Times' Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter Michael Schmidt reports in his forthcoming book, "Donald Trump v. The United States."

Driving the news: "But the president added something else — if he became FBI director, Trump told him, Kelly needed to be loyal to him, and only him."

• "Kelly immediately realized the problem with Trump's request for loyalty, and he pushed back on the president's demand," Schmidt writes. 
• "Kelly said that he would be loyal to the Constitution and the rule of law, but he refused to pledge his loyalty to Trump."

Why it matters: This previously unreported conversation sheds additional light on the president's mindset when he fired Comey. Special counsel Robert Mueller never learned of this information because the president's lawyers limited the scope of his team's two-hour interview with Kelly.

• "In addition to illustrating how Trump viewed the role and independence of senior officials who work for him, the president's demand for loyalty tracked with Comey's experience with Trump," Schmidt writes.

Behind the scenes: Schmidt reports that "throughout Kelly's time working directly with Trump, Kelly was repeatedly struck by how Trump failed to understand how those who worked for him — like Kelly and other top former generals — had interest in being loyal not to him, but to the institutions of American democracy."

• "Kelly has told others that Trump wanted to behave like an authoritarian and repeatedly had to be restrained and told what he could and could not legally do."
• "Aside from questions of the law, Kelly has told others that one of the most difficult tasks he faced with Trump was trying to stop him from pulling out of NATO — a move that Trump has repeatedly threatened but never made good on, which would have been a seismic breach of American alliances and an extraordinary gift to Putin."

Quote of the book: "Kelly has said that having to say no to Trump was like 'French kissing a chainsaw.'"

Notice how anyone who defends Donald Trump, as in claiming that his virtues outweigh his shortcomings, and cite judicial appointments and deregulation to substantiate the case, cannot refute facts to the contrary - specifically, the statements of this who have worked directly for him, such as the above-discussed Kelly, H.R. McMaster, John Bolton, and Miles Taylor. The number goes up considerably when one expands the bounds to those who served in various departments and agencies during Trump's administration, such as Alexander Vindman and Fiona Hill. 

I'm trying to fathom the mindset of anyone who would be okay with this. And people who pull that binary-choice stuff are okay with it, whether they'd admit it or not. 

A couple of situations over which the nation erupted in chaos over incomplete information

 A couple of weeks ago I wrote a post at Precipice entitled "The Whole Truth."  A couple of instances have come along since then that reinforce the point I was making, namely, that

[w]hen we do know the whole picture, though, we’re not only remiss but deceptive if we don’t put all the facts on the table. 

One is some new information about George Floyd that I included, as a link, in my Thursday Roundup, immediately below this post, here at LITD. That information has to do with how the Hennepin County chief medical officer views the role of fentanyl and methamphetamine in Floyd's death. 

Yesterday, at Knowledge Is Good, former state and federal prosecutor George Parry filled in the timeline by which the prosecutors there became privy to the toxicology report showing that Floyd was OD-ing at the time of his run-in with police. Upshot: That document didn't come to light until after charges had been filed against Chauvin et al:

These charges were based on the autopsy performed by the Hennepin County Medical Examiner’s Office and a private “re-autopsy” performed at the request of the Floyd family’s attorney. Based on those procedures, the medical examiner issued a revised autopsy report stating that Floyd had died of “cardiopulmonary arrest complicating law enforcement subdual, restraint and neck compression.” In short, Floyd’s death was allegedly caused by the manner in which the police had restrained him.

But the police defendants were charged before the medical examiner had received the report of Floyd’s toxicology screen by NMS Labs of Horsham, Pennsylvania.

Then, on May 31, 2020, NMS Labs forwarded Floyd’s toxicology report to the Hennepin County Medical Examiners’ Office.

And that’s when the proverbial fecal matter hit the fan.

At 7:30 p.m. on May 31, 2020, prosecutors “met” online with Dr. Andrew Baker, Chief Medical Examiner of Hennepin County, to discuss Floyd’s toxicology report. Take a look at this recently released June 1, 2020, memorandum by Assistant County Attorney Amy Sweasy of that discussion.

So there they were, staring at the just-received and damning toxicology report that blew to smithereens the whole prosecution theory that the police had killed Floyd. To their undoubted dismay, Dr. Baker, the chief medical examiner, had to concede that at 11 ng/mL, Floyd had “a fatal level of fentanyl under normal circumstances.” He also conceded that the fentanyl overdose “can cause pulmonary edema,” a frothy fluid build-up in the lungs that was evidenced by the finding at autopsy that Floyd’s lungs weighed two to three times normal weight.

This is consistent with Officer Kueng’s observation at the scene that Floyd was foaming at the mouth and, as found at autopsy, that his lungs were “diffusely congested and edematous.”

In other words, like a drowned man, Floyd’s lungs were filled with fluid. And that was the obvious and inescapable reason why Floyd kept shouting over and over again that he couldn’t breathe even when he was upright and mobile.

The memorandum ends with Dr. Baker’s devastating conclusion that “if Floyd had been found dead in his home (or anywhere else) and there were no other contributing factors he [Dr. Baker] would conclude that it was an overdose death.”

Translation: this toxicology report drives a stake through the heart of our murder case. How do we justify criminally charging these police officers and explain away our colossal screw-up?

It is quite telling that this explosively exculpatory June 1 memorandum was not released by the prosecution until August 25, 2020. All of which prompts these questions:

First, why did the prosecution wait three months to release this memorandum?

Second, if the prosecution had released this information in a timely fashion, would that have helped to quell the anti-police outrage that has fueled the nationwide orgy of rioting and looting?

Third, in light of Floyd’s toxicology results and the medical examiner’s assessment that Floyd’s fentanyl overdose caused him to essentially drown in his own bodily fluid, why haven’t the charges against all of the police defendants been dropped?

Think about it. This nation has been subjected to three months of its cities being torched and looted in response to an inaccurate narrative. 

And now, more details are emerging about the Jacob Blake situation:

the police dispatcher said a woman had called police saying “her boyfriend was present and was not supposed to be on the premises.” 

That certainly made it sound more like what I alluded to initially. If there was a warrant out for Blake for domestic abuse, sexual assault, etc. then it would make sense if a restraining order was in place. Now, most of these details are being confirmed. The New York Post reported last night that the woman in question was a repeat victim of Blake’s and she was the one who called the police to the scene after Blake pushed his way into her home and sexually assaulted her again. Before you click through and read the rest of that article, I will warn you in advance that the details of the assault are offered in a rather graphic form and may be disturbing to some readers.

The cops involved in the shooting of Jacob Blake — which touched off a fresh wave of angry, anti-police sentiment across the country — were attempting to arrest him for violating a restraining order stemming from an alleged sexual assault, The Post has learned.

Blake, 29, was forbidden from going to the Kenosha home of his alleged victim from the May 3 incident, and police were dispatched Sunday following a 911 call saying he was there.

The responding officers were aware he had an open warrant for felony sexual assault, according to dispatch records and the Kenosha Professional Police Association, which released a statement on the incident on Friday.

So this wasn’t some meeting of happenstance between Jason Blake and the police. They had been called to the scene by a repeat sexual assault victim. There was already a warrant out for Blake’s arrest and the cops were there to execute it. The cops knew about all of this before they arrived, explaining how they might have been prepared for a confrontation when they got there and their general approach in trying to take Blake into custody. Blake’s family is calling any discussion of his history prior to the shooting “garbage” but it certainly seems relevant. 

You should read the linked New York Post article to get fully elucidated.  This woman was damn scared of Jacob Blake.

It may be too much to ask in this overheated summer of 2020 that everyone insist on enough facts about these situations to preclude their coming to emotion-driven conclusions that have society-wide consequences. 

It doesn't take much - just a few of these situations that become the hot news of the hour without all relevant information on the table - for what remains of trust in post-America's news-reporting industry to fully evaporate. That void will be filled by common acceptance of the most inflammatory narrative out there, and the resultant anarchy will gain further momentum.

 

Thursday roundup

 This news item is, shall we say, unsettling:

Beijing has launched two medium-range missiles into the South China Sea in a scathing warning to the United States, as tensions between the superpowers soar, triggering World War 3 fears in the region. The move came on Wednesday morning, one day after China said a US U-2 spy plane entered a no-fly zone without permission. A source close to the Chinese military is understood to have told local media the missile launch was intended to send a warning to the United States.

I've written about Ross Douthat's book The Age of Decadence: How We Became Victims of Our Own Success before. I recall excerpting from and linking to the interview Rod Dreher did with Douthat about it at The American Conservative. I haven't read the book yet, but based on that interview and now this review by Charles Murray at Claremont Review of Books, I very much want to. 

Douthat structures his formulation thusly:

Douthat assesses contemporary life in terms of “the four horsemen” of decadence: stagnation, sterility, sclerosis, and repetition.

Murray's review also works as a stand-alone essay. He devotes some space to a subject I discuss a lot here at LITD:

The fourth of Douthat’s four horsemen, repetition, is different from the others. It is not just an indicator of cultural exhaustion. It is the thing itself. It is seen most easily in terms of the arts over the period that Barzun wrote about, 1500 to 1900.

The Renaissance produced three rich new (or to some degree rediscovered) cognitive inventions in the arts: linear perspective for the visual arts, polyphony for music, and the use of the vernacular for literature. The implementation of these resources was fostered by technological innovations—oil paints for the visual arts, improved instruments for music, and the printing press for literature. Through 1900, the combination of cognitive and technological innovation produced successive waves of wonderful new creations. But harbingers of exhaustion were discernible even in the 19th century, and became palpable not long into the 20th.

The visual arts represent the obvious example of deterioration. By mid-century, with a few admirable exceptions, the modern art world seemed determined to make itself the butt of jokes, as Tom Wolfe memorably described in The Painted Word (1975). Little has changed since.

In music, the disappearance of listenable music in the high culture (again with a few admirable exceptions) was accompanied by vibrant creativity in the popular culture, whether it took the form of jazz, the compositions of George Gershwin, the Broadway musicals of the 1940s and ’50s, or rock ’n roll during the 1960s and ’70s. But since the late ’70s? The increasing repetitiveness of composition and musicianship in pop music has been documented in technical journals, but it’s not necessary to resort to that level of subtlety. What’s the difference, really, between the music of the 1990s and the 2010s—between the music of Madonna and Lady Gaga, of Mariah Carey and Adele? Between the heavy metal or rock or rap of the 1980s and those genres now? Nuances distinguish them. You don’t need to resort to nuances to tell the difference between the music of the 1970s and 1950s or the 1950s and 1930s.

In literature, serious American fiction was redefined continually through the first 60 years of the 20th century. Compare the distinctive sensibilities and styles apparent in the voices of Henry James, F. Scott Fitzgerald, William Faulkner, Saul Bellow, James Baldwin, and John Updike. How are the sensibilities and styles of the best authors in the 2010s distinguishable from those writing in the 1980s?

* * *

Does the picture improve when we turn to the new platforms that the 20th century gave us, film and television? For most of the 20th century, those new platforms fostered steadily improving creations. The film industry still produces the occasional gem, but the gems are increasingly buried beneath the pile of superhero franchises and recycling of old material. Consider: among the 25 top-grossing films in 2019, just three—12%—had a story line and characters that had not already appeared on screen. The others were all sequels or remakes. By way of comparison, the percentage of new stories and characters for the top-25s from 1950 to 1979 was 90%.

The closest thing to an exception to the curse of repetition is television, which has produced a torrent of high-quality miniseries over the past 20 years. But, Douthat points out, there’s a caveat even for television: “it’s telling that even the great shows of the early 2000s often felt vital and relevant precisely because they were so good at holding up a mirror to frustration, futility, repetition, decay, corruption—in a word, to decadence”—and here he cites The Wire, House of Cards, Breaking Bad, True Detective, and Girls as examples. And, he adds, even television’s golden age appears to be increasingly replaced by a different age “in which the flood of content is overwhelming but also often algorithmically optimized, tending inevitably toward its own forms of repetition, mediocrity, the safe imitation of more daring forms”—a transition exemplified by the abrupt deterioration of Game of Thrones in its final season.

Murray and Douthat stress that the kind of decadence being examined in this book is not wha might first come to mind:

As you will have gathered by this time, Douthat’s version of decadence is far different from decadence as many of us used to think of it. In the 1970s—the decade of Studio 54, open marriages, mainstream porn, powder cocaine at upscale parties, and skyrocketing crime—we seemed to be headed toward the hedonistic dystopia portrayed in Anthony Burgess’s A Clockwork Orange. It now appears that Aldous Huxley was more prophetic than Burgess. Douthat argues that society is moving toward a “comfortable numbness.” Crystal meth is still with us, but the drugs with the broadest appeal now are downers such as marijuana, heroin, and opioids, more like the soma of Brave New World than mania-inducing uppers. Virtual realities, whether they consist of sex robots or wraparound gaming headsets, offer other kinds of escape. These new uses of drugs and virtual realities “don’t solve social problems; indeed they worsen them…but at the same time, they prevent those problems from having the broader consequences that a society without so many drugs and distractions would expect to experience.”

Brave New World also appears to have been more prophetic than George Orwell’s 1984. Douthat describes the kindly despotism that is likely to oversee decadent societies as “the pink police state”—a state that merely nudges if possible, shoving only when necessary. The pink police state will protect civil liberties of pleasure and consumption and the freedom to be “safe.” The unprotected civil liberties will be freedoms of speech, religion, and privacy.

Jason Whitlock at Outkick rips BLM and the professional sports industry that has gone all in for it with bracing vigor: 

[LeBron] James is the Al Sharpton of sports, an agent of chaos working closely with politicians who use racial division to rally voter support. Al Sharpton, Jesse Jackson and black ministers can no longer deliver black voters to polling booths. The task has now been handed to James, Colin Kaepernick and black athletes. It’s their job to inflame the emotions of black people and get us to vote for Joe Biden like our lives depended on it. 

As you know, I don’t vote. I reject the pervasive dishonesty in politics. As it relates to BLM, the man or woman sitting in the White House has absolutely nothing to do with how police engage with a resisting suspect. President Barack Obama was in office when Michael Brown tussled with officer Darren Wilson. 

The politicization of Jacob Blake is a byproduct of political dishonesty. The prevailing sentiment propagandized by BLM that police are intentionally targeting black men is a political ploy. 

Jacob Blake, George Floyd, Eric Garner and Rayshard Brooks are not examples of “systemic racism.” If anything, they’re examples of “systemic resisting arrest.”

The police, even bigoted police, are not nearly as dumb as BLM supporters would have you believe. LeBron James has foolishly suggested that police officers are intentionally hunting, targeting and killing black men. When discussing the actions of Kenosha police, James said:

“Or maybe he just left the house saying that, ‘Today is going to be the end for one of these black people.’ That’s what it feels like. It just hurts. It hurts.”

Police are not that stupid. Killing a criminal suspect complicates and jeopardizes the life of the police officer, even if he’s not convicted of a crime. You think Darren Wilson is somewhere happy he was involved in the death of Michael Brown?

Speaking of BLM, what happened when Star Parker of UrbanCURE tried to take a message of uplift and empowerment into several post-American cities, as she recounts at Townhall,  is a blood-curdling reminder of how far along the Left is in imposing its program of stomping human dignity into the dust:

We purchased billboard space in hard-hit cities across the nation and posted a short, time-tested message that strikes at the heart of what drives poverty.

The billboards show a picture of a young black man or young black woman and say: "Tired of Poverty? Finish school. Take any job. Get married. Save and invest. Give back to your neighborhood."

 

The billboard then refers to Proverbs 10:4, which says, "A slack hand causes poverty, but the hand of the diligent makes rich."

This is a message delivered with care and love. It's a message I know is true.

 

It is so true that it produced an immediate reaction from Black Lives Matter, which contacted the billboard company, Clear Channel Outdoor, demanding that the billboards be taken down.

Claims from Black Lives Matter -- laced, of course, with profanity -- that our message is racist, inaccurate and self-hating are a crude distortion of reality.

And, yup, Clear Channel caved.

Now that Kenosha has had a taste of this summer's urban mayhem, perspectives there are shifting, which has the New York Times worried for political reasons:

 I’m guessing the Democrats’ internal polling on the current rioting and protesting is looking really bad, because the New York Times this morning declares a five-alarm fire with this new story (I’ve bolded some revealing bits of the reportage):

How Chaos in Kenosha Is Already Swaying Some Voters in Wisconsin

. . . [S]ome voters who were less sure of their choice said the chaos in their city and the inability of elected leaders to stop it were currently nudging them toward the Republicans.

And some Democrats, nervous about condemning the looting because they said they understood the rage behind it, worried that what was happening in their town might backfire and aid the president’s re-election prospects.

Ellen Ferwerda, who owns an antique furniture store downtown just blocks from the worst of the destruction that is now closed, said that she was desperate for Mr. Trump to lose in November but that she had “huge concern” the unrest in her town could help him win. She added that local Democratic leaders seemed hesitant to condemn the mayhem.

“I think they just don’t know what to say,” she said. “People are afraid to take a stance either way, but I do think it’s strange they’re all being so quiet. Our mayor has disappeared. It’s like, ‘Where is he?’”

Observation: If you “don’t know what to say” about rioters, you won’t know what to do about it either. More:

Mr. Geraghty said he disliked how Mr. Trump talked but said the Democratic Party’s vision for governing seemed limited to attacking him and calling him a racist, a charge being leveled so constantly that it was having the effect of alienating, instead of persuading, people. And the idea that Democrats alone were morally pure on race annoyed him. “The Democratic agenda to me right now is America is systematically racist and evil and the only people who can fix it are Democrats,” he said. “That’s the vibe I get.”

Mr. Geraghty said he understood peaceful protesting but felt frustrated with Democratic leaders who seem afraid of confronting crowds when things turn violent. He was angry at the statement by Gov. Tony Evers on Sunday, which in his view took sides against the police in a knee-jerk way that worsened the situation. . .

Don Biehn, 62, owner of a flooring company, was standing in line at a gun store on Tuesday afternoon. He said that he had never bought a pistol before, but that he had a business to protect. A former county board supervisor, Mr. Biehn said he had been calling county and state officials for days, trying to explain how grave the situation was. . .

He added: “It’s chaos — everybody is afraid.” Mr. Trump, he said, “was not my man,” but now he is grateful he is president. He said he seemed to understand in a way that other politicians did not. “There’s nobody fighting back,” he said. “Nobody is paying attention to what’s going on.” . . .

Priscella Gazda, a waitress at a pizza restaurant in Kenosha, . . . said she had voted only once in her life — for Mr. Obama in 2008.

“I’m not the one who would ever vote,” she said. But after the chaos in her town, this year is different. “I am going to vote for Trump,” she said. “He seems to be more about the American people and what we need.”

Michael Brendan Dougherty at National Review comes to a grim conclusion: the Republican Party is utterly impotent with regard to the culture war:

We need something less ambitious. Republicans must answer a simple question this week: What’s the point of us?

The true answer is that the best conservatives can hope for is divided government. And I don’t mean just the formal constitutional offices being held by two parties. Even if Republicans occupied every seat in the House and Senate and Trump occupied the White House, the result would still be divided government.

Why? Because the Left has captured much of the permanent government. All of the culturally formative institutions of American life — public education, academia, the entertainment industry, and, increasingly, the rest of corporate America — are controlled by progressives, and as such are a gravitational force dragging the country leftward.

Don’t believe me? Neil Gorsuch ruled earlier this year that the 1964 Civil Rights Act protects transgender rights, even though it was passed years before academics invented the concept of transgenderism. The Big Tech companies are run by progressives. The sports leagues are bending the knee too. Major international corporations, while willing to meet with Republican politicians and occasionally throw a max-dollar contribution to a GOP congressmen to keep the regulators off their backs, will turn around and give a seven-figure donation to a progressive NGO or activist group.

The last four years should have proved that Republican officeholders — and Trump in particular — cannot achieve conservative aims in this environment. They can’t keep the Little Sisters of the Poor out of federal court. They can’t stop public schools from adopting the 1619 Project as the basis of their history curriculums. They can’t stop the government from funding “social science” that is designed to portray allegiance to family, place, and faith as fascistic, dangerous, and oppressive. And they can’t stop the riots. Trump can’t end the interminable foreign wars other Republicans started, and he can’t get the intelligence community or the military to stop leaking embarrassing information to the press. He can’t even get a cabinet confirmed.

Hennepin County's chief medical officer says that George Floyd was so loaded on fentanyl at the time of his run-in with police that he was basically OD-ing:

The Armed Forces Medical Examiner filed a memorandum agreeing with the Hennepin County Medical Examiner’s final conclusion that Floyd's death was a homicide, saying, “His death was caused by the police subdual and restraint in the setting of severe hypertensive atherosclerotic cardiovascular disease, and methamphetamine and fentanyl intoxication.”

However, two other memos filed Tuesday from the Hennepin County Attorney’s Office about conversations with Chief Hennepin County Medical Examiner Dr. Andrew Baker paint a different picture about the nature of Floyd’s death.

In one memorandum filed May 26 after a virtual meeting with Baker, the Attorney’s Office said Baker concluded, “The autopsy revealed no physical evidence suggesting that Mr. Floyd died of asphyxiation.” Baker told the attorney his investigation was incomplete pending a toxicology report, however. 

The other memorandum filed June 1 by the Attorney’s Office indicated Baker said Floyd’s level of fentanyl was “pretty high,” and a potentially “fatal level.”

"[Dr. Andrew Baker] said that if Mr. Floyd had been found dead in his home (or anywhere else) and there were no other contributing factors he would conclude that it was an overdose death,” the June 1 memo said.  

Once again, Tucker Carlson shoots off his mouth and lands in hot water.  

 

 

 

 

Supremacist Without Evidence

The relevant facts that no one dares to mention

 Here we go again.

A 29-year-old man, Jacob Blake, who happens to black, was shot in a confrontation with police in Kenosha, Wisconsin. 

He was shot seven times in the backbit police and is now in serious condition in a Milwaukee hospital. 

The Kenosha police department has not released details beyond a rudimentary account.

Police were responding to a domestic situation that, by accounts on record so far, Blake was trying to de-escalate. But we don't know details about his conversation with police after being detained, or whether he had their position to return to his car. 

That didn't stop Democrat elected officials like Joe Biden and Wisconsin governor Tony Evers from inferring racism as the officers' motive involved and extrapolating to a general assessment that systemic racism is some kind of huge problem in our country.

Evers said in his pubic statement that

While we do not have all of the details yet, what we know for certain is that he is not the first Black man or person to have been shot or injured or mercilessly killed at the hands of individuals in law enforcement in our state or our country.

Joe Biden said that "[w]e are at an inflection point. We must dismantle systemic racism." 

These demagogues are stoking the situation for immediate political advantage. That's the long and the short of it. Of course there was no way they were going to wait for more details to emerge. 

This incident is emblematic of a pattern we've seen in the other two most-discussed police shootings since May. 

Blake, like Rayshard Brooks and George Floyd, had a criminal background:

According to Wisconsin Circuit Court Access online records, a Jacob S. Blake, same age and with an address in the same exact block where the shooting occurred, had a warrant issued for him on July 7 on pending accusations of misdemeanor criminal trespass to a dwelling with domestic abuse as a modifier; felony third-degree sexual assault with domestic abuse as a modifier; and misdemeanor disorderly conduct with domestic abuse as a modifier. A support action was dismissed, and the only other case that comes up is for not having a driver’s license.

A 2015 story in Racine Eye described how “Racine police say K9 Dozer had to help officers take a man into custody when the man refused to go quietly into custody after he pulled a gun at a local bar.” The man was described as Jacob Blake, 24, of Racine, which makes him the same age as the man shot by police on August 23. The Racine Eye story says he was charged with “one felony count of resisting arrest causing a soft tissue injury to a police officer and one misdemeanor count each of carrying a concealed weapon, carrying a firearm while intoxicated, endangering safety-use of a dangerous weapon, and disorderly conduct.” Those charges don’t show up on the circuit court website though.

That story further alleges, “Blake and two women were at the Brass Monkey tavern, 1436 Junction Avenue, Saturday when Blake got into an argument with another patron and pulled a black handgun. Blake pointed the gun at the other man, and the magazine fell to the floor. The bartender told Blake to leave, and he did but then pointed the gun through the window at patrons inside the bar before walking south on Junction Avenue.”

Police stopped Blake in a “high risk traffic stop” but he “exited the SUV and started walking toward officers and ignored commands to get down on the ground,” the story says. That’s when officers forced him to the ground and used a K9 when he kept resisting, the story adds.

Recall that Brooks, out on probation,  resisted arrest almost certainly because he knew he'd go straight back to jail on his  2014 conviction for false imprisonment, family battery and child cruelty. 

George Floyd had served time for an armed robbery during which he held a gun to a pregnant woman's abdomen. He had a track record of use of hard drugs and was in fact on fentanyl and methamphetamine at the time of his death. 

I've had the please-be-bigger-than-that tactic pulled on me for mentioning this last fact, but recordings subsequent to the original documentation show the police officers attempting to arrest him noticed that he was high and discussed it among themselves.

One more thing: all these guys have multiple children, but, except for Brooks, who wailed on his, no wives. Blake has a fiancé. Is she the mother of any of his kids?

I could see beings tisk-tisked over that as well, but, as Larry Elder tirelessly points out, with a great deal of substantiation, a home without a father living there and married to the mother of the children there is unlikely to be stable. Floyd's dad was out of the picture by the time he was two. At present, I can't find information on Brooks's or Blake's early family life. But in their roles as fathers, given that they were absent from home much of the time due to incarceration, the pattern is being perpetuated into the next generation.

The unrest in reaction to the Blake shooting has begun. A sheriff's department armored vehicle was cornered by a mob of thugs last night. Look for more.

You're not going to get the whole truth about this situation without relentless digging on your own. Most Americans don't have time for that, and will draw conclusions on incomplete and skewed data driven by an agenda. 

And thus does it get ever later in the day in post-America. 

 

The VSG's got himself a plateful of trouble

 We'll just bullet-point the highlights for now and see what merits deeper dives as the week unfolds. 

Suffice it to say that Trump is presently on the receiving end of the karma he's been catalyzing for some time.

• There's Steve Bannon's arrest by postal agents aboard a yacht owned by an exiled Chinese billionaire , the charges being related to his and his associates' alleged use on personal luxury items of money from a crowdfunding campaign ostensibly established to get the Mexico border wall built with private donations. 

• There's Kellyanne Conway's abrupt resignation as a senior White House advisor. She's one of those figures like Kayleigh McEnany who didn't get on board the Trump Train until there were no other GOP candidates left. Conway supported Cruz as long as he was a viable possibility. Actually, her husband George voted for the VSG in 2016 as well, having serious doubts about the VSG's ability to rise to the task of being president, but hoping for the best. I think Kellyanne's public statement is probably about right, that she needs to work on repairing relations within her family. 

• There's the tapes that Mary Trump made secretly of conversations over the last couple of years with her aunt, former federal judge Maryanne Barry, who is also Donald Trump's sister. This is stuff that didn't even appear in MT's recently published book. Barry says that the VSG has "no principles" and calls him "cruel."

• Sean Hannity, arguably the biggest suck-up in the entire VSG cult, gained weight from stress-eating and incessant vaping a short time into the Trump era, telling an associate, "If you were hearing what I'm hearing, you'd be vaping, too," referring to the multitude of private conversations that Hannity and Trump have had. Hannity has told several colleagues that Trump is bat-s--- crazy.

• Also according to the forthcoming book by Brian Stelter from which this tidbit is gleaned, several people who work at Fox News are concerned about the outsized influence at the network exerted by its hardcore Trumpists: Hannity, Laura Ingraham, Tucker Carlson and the Fox & Friends crew. 

  
  

Well, smarty-pants, can you name some for us?

 To cap off a week in which the VSG said we may never know who won the 2020 presidential election, and in which he said that all he knows about the Q phenomenon is that it "likes" him, he fired off these tweets today:

Many doctors! 

He then uses the occasion to sow more seeds of doubt about the stability of our electoral system:

Going full tinfoil hat on his own FDA.

He has an uncle who is a MIT physicist! Do not doubt his public-health expertise!

Should I cut Mike Pence more slack than I'm presently inclined to cut?

 I'm not going to revisit the entire history of my understanding of the formation of his worldview. Suffice it to say that his hometown is mine, that I have monitored the arc of his career - head of a statewide think tank, radio-show host, House member, governor, Vice President -  and that I have some firsthand knowledge of him and his family. I was at the victory party when, after several attempts, he was elected to the House, and I was at the event at which he announced his run for governor. I was taken as a guest to a Rotary Club lunch meeting at which Pence - then a talk-show host - introduced the guest he'd encouraged the club to book as its monthly speaker, none other than Russell Kirk. I've spoken one-on-one with him on a few occasions.

My point is that I know that in his heart he embraces conservatism. He based his career on advancing ideas and principles, not hustling a brand. 

That said, he knew which side the bread was buttered on in May 2016. On the day before the Indiana primary, he had Ted Cruz as his breakfast guest at the governor's mansion in Indianapolis. It was commonly understood that he was a Cruz supporter. Then came Ted's withdrawal from the race and the offer from the Very Stable Genius to be his running mate. I don't begrudge him the difficulty of the moment. But his approach to weighing his options made it clear that he intended to stay in politics and come as close to the brass ring as possible. Routes such as those taken by Jim DeMint, Jason Chaffetts or Trey Gowdy did not have sufficient appeal to Mike. 

So he made his Faustian bargain. 

He's been on cleanup detail ever since. 

It's led to some degrading situations. Here's the latest:

Vice President Mike Pence offered a faint rejection of the QAnon conspiracy theory Friday and denied hearing that President Donald Trump embraced the movement, but he stopped short of acknowledging the harm of the viral theory.

The conspiracy theory, which claims Trump and a government agent are secretly fighting a deep-state ring of child sex traffickers, was labeled a domestic terrorism threat by the FBI last year. A number of prominent Republicans have denounced the conspiracy theory, but Trump has been conspicuously uncritical of the movement, whose paraphernalia often appeared at his campaign rallies.

Speaking with CNN's John Berman on Friday morning, Pence claimed not to know much about the theory, saying he had little time to focus on conspiracy theories while heading the White House's coronavirus task force. When asked repeatedly if he would denounce the QAnon theory in particular, Pence said, "I dismiss conspiracy theorists out of hand."

"I said it's a conspiracy theory, I don't have time for it, I don't know anything about it. And honestly, John, I get it. I mean, I get that the media, particularly CNN chases after shiny objects," Pence said.

"This is not a shiny object," Berman retorted. "The FBI considers this a dangerous group."

Berman and Pence's back-and-forth comes two days after Trump appeared to embrace QAnon supporters during a White House news briefing. Though he stopped short of accepting the theory itself, Trump said of its supporters: "I don’t know much about the movement other than I understand that they like me very much, which I appreciate.”

Pence rejected that those comments amounted to Trump embracing the movement, saying, "I didn't hear that. I didn't hear anything. I heard the president talk about how he appreciates people that support him."

White House press secretary Kayleigh McEnany said Thursday she had never heard Trump talk about QAnon, propping it as a media obsession off the president's radar.

Compare and contrast this weasel session with the forthright pronouncements from some of the few remaining public figures with Rs behind their names who aren't confirmed as cowards in this uniquely definitive summer:

• “QAnon is dangerous lunacy that should have no place in American politics” – Rep. Liz Cheney (R-WY), quoted by Politico reporter Melanie Zanona.

• “Why in the world would the President not kick Q’anon supporters’ butts? Nut jobs, rascists, haters have no place in either Party” Jeb! via Twitter.

• “Q-Anon is nuts — and real leaders call conspiracy theories conspiracy theories. If Democrats take the Senate, blow up the filibuster, and pack the Supreme Court – garbage like this will be a big part of why they won” – Sen Ben Sasse (R-NE), quoted by Wash. Post reporter Seung Min Kim.

I fully understand that Pence's position is different from what it was when he was in Congress. Any sign of daylight between him and the Trump Train would spell the end of his political prospects. 

But that's part of what being a conservative is all about. Central to the articulation of what this worldview is all about is character, digging deep to come up with the morally correct answers to dilemmas one faces.

One way of putting this is to restate something I have offered in many a forum for exchange in the past few years: I have to believe that he has on more than  one, two or thirty occasions in the last three-plus years come home to Karen and said, "I don't know if I can do this anymore."

He's at an interesting point in his existence as a human being, let alone as a historically significant American, a Christian, and all the other things that he is. He can either keep carrying water for this utterly ruinous phenomenon, or he can say, "This is so incongruous with what I am about that I must walk away."

 

 

 

The Lincoln Project, as a formal organization and a mindset, is proving to be as problematic as Trumpism and leftism

 It's a joy to watch conservative groups that vehemently oppose Donald Trump spring up throughout the land. They, and the publications taking that position as their editorial stance, are solid proof that Trumpism  has not marginalized the insistence on consistent principles, clarity, and decorum and character. We have not gone anywhere and our voice is strong. 

Many of these groups take the laudable position that the "Never Trump" tent (and I dislike that term as much as I ever have) should be big, that a considerable range of ideas is healthy as long as there is a shared commitment to some kind of agreed-upon definition of conservatism.

Some, though, stretch the fabric of this tent to the tearing point by adopting the mirror opposite of the binary-choice argument that the Trumpists make - that is, by an insistence on the necessity of supporting Joe Biden. 

Some take it that far and no farther, arguing that maintaining a Republican Senate majority assures the country a foil against the implementation of the kinds of identity-politics-and-redistribution-on-steroids policy moves that modern-day Democrats advocate. This seems to me to have a herding-cats implausibility to it. Who is clever enough to devise a strategy for exhorting voters to split the ticket in various far-flung states across this big country?

Some go all the way, arguing for a burn-it-all-down strategy that seems largely emotion-fueled. Proponents of this approach let their disgust with most, if not all, Senators and House members for not explicitly repudiating Trump override their considerations of hard politics realities, as well as those legislators' track records of support for real conservatism.

The Exhibit-A organization representing this position is The Lincoln Project. 

Wariness about its passing muster as an actually conservative group starts with a look at its four founders. Steve Schmidt and John Weaver boast a number of political-consultant bona fides between them, but they seem to be generally in the service of Republicans who are decidedly not conservatives, such as John McCain and Arnold Schwarzenegger. Between Weaver's stints on the 2000 and 2000 McCain campaigns, he worked for the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee. George Conway's vocal aversion to Trump is laudable and seems sincere, given that it's been a strain on his marriage. Rick Wilson seems to fit the description of a conservative on the level of abstract principles, but his demeanor, particularly his foul mouth, does nothing to help lift our national discourse out of the gutter. 

Then there's the matter of The Lincoln Project's funding:

By far the biggest donor has been Stephen Mandel, who gave the Lincoln Project — which, as far as I can tell, produces cheap b-roll-laden ads and takes nearly 90 percent of its budget in “operating expenditures” — a million dollars. Employees at his company Lone Pine Capital, it seems, have given the Democratic Party Senate committee $497,000 this year, $248,500 to the Democratic Congressional Campaign committee, and a bunch of money to other left-wing candidates. During the 2018 cycle, employees at Lone Pine Capital doled out $5,893,300 to Democrats and $1,333,333 to Planned Parenthood.

I’m confused somewhat by one of the other top names: Arturas Kerelis, who news reports say is actually an Internet grifter named Arturas Rosenbacher. Maybe the donor is a different person. Then again, it would fit. (It looks like his donation was refunded.) Amos Hostetter, who droppedover a million dollars on the Obama Foundation, and David Geffen have been giving money to Democrats decades before Donald Trump ever ran for president or “Trumpism” existed. As has another top Lincoln Project donor, Joshua Bekenstein, director of Bain Capital, who gaveDemocrats $3.5 million in 2018.

David Geffen! 

But I think we can also refer to Lincoln-Project-ism as a mindset. You will notice that those mentioned above who now take the gotta-vote-Biden position reserve their remaining modicum of respect for Republicans based on what we might call their RINO identities, also known as squishiness, or, to use a term coined here at Late in the Day long ago, Reasonable Gentleman Syndrome. 

Another such Reasonable Gentleman is Mitt Romney. I'm sorry, but I don't have much use for this new-found admiration for Mitt as some kind of statesman the likes of which we need more of in this country. It was clear in 2012 that he didn't speak conservative as his first language, and, like McCain, went out of his way to avoid speaking plainly about Barack Obama's radical background.

And now comes a book by Stuart Stevens, who was Romney's chief strategist in 2012, which, as far as I'm concerned, sheds a lot of light on the pretty-much-leftist turn he takes in It Was All A Lie: How the Republican Party Became Donald Trump. 

His assessment of what conservatism has been about since its modern iteration's formative years sounds like it could have been cooked up by The Nation:

In the short version, Republican deceits began in 1964, when, writes Stevens, “Barry Goldwater ran on a carefully crafted platform of coded racism.” This was the era of “Goldwater’s Conscience of a Conservative, which became to conservatives what Mao’s Little Red Book was to the Red Guard.” William F. Buckley Jr. wasn’t any help in those days, on this account, advocating as he did limits on federal power along with the principle of a color-blind society that, says Stevens, we now know to be “perversely racist but reassuring to white people.” From which it follows that National Review’s founder was just “a more articulate version of the same deep ugliness and bigotry that is the hallmark of Trumpism.” He comes back to NR later on, pointing out that despite their own misgivings about Trump’s candidacy in 2016, some editors and writers have since been Trump’s well-wishers whenever he pursues conservative policies: “fanciful rationalizations.” The “racism” is gone but now NR’s problem is “moral collapse.”

After Goldwater came Richard Nixon, with appeals to “forgotten Americans” — “code words” for “white.” And then our 40th president with his stories of the “welfare queen,” an unkind term often attributed to him but which he never used, although for Stevens enough to prove “a direct line from the more genteel prejudice of Ronald Reagan to the white nationalism of Donald Trump.” And then George Bush with the Willie Horton ad . . . and so on all the way up to the nightmarish present, in a chronology every freshman in poli sci has heard chillingly recited to explain why, in national contests, Democrats don’t always win but always deserve to.

Apparently the assigned reading these days is Dog Whistle Politics by a University of California at Berkeley expert in “critical race theory” and “white and Latinx racial identity.” With special attention to the chapter “The White Man’s Party,” this book rates citation by Stevens as some authoritative treatment of Republican politics, along with some obscure study explaining “the Republican decision to exploit the race issue” in 1964. But to see what Goldwater’s “carefully crafted platform of coded racism” actually looked like, you have to go fetch it yourself. Republicans in 1964 pledged “full implementation and faithful execution of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, and all other civil rights statutes; . . . such additional administrative or legislative actions as may be required to end the denial, for whatever unlawful reason, of the right to vote; . . . continued opposition to discrimination based on race, creed, national origin or sex. We recognize that the elimination of any such discrimination is a matter of heart, conscience, and education, as well as of equal rights under law.”

Across the South, we’re to believe, ears went up at the dog whistle in this language, so subtle that even now no one else can pick it up. Even if Stevens’s point is that 1964 marked a sharp decline in African-American votes for Republicans, that proves only that the sum of Goldwater’s platform and convictions held less appeal to black citizens than did Lyndon Johnson’s activist government and Great Society agenda. As NR’s Kevin Williamson has skillfully explained, African-American support for Democrats began to rise long before the 1960s with the programs of the New Deal. Everything isn’t about race; presumably black voters acted in the belief that these economic policies best served their own and their country’s interests. And this despite the fact that many prominent Democrats themselves in that era, including LBJ, had disgraceful records on civil rights.

On that score it would have been relevant for Stevens to mention that Barry Goldwater — the most upright of men, whose reputation was good enough for the proud one-time “Goldwater Girl” nominated for president in 2016 — was a champion of and fundraiser for efforts to end segregation in Phoenix schools, in 1946 led the desegregation of the Arizona National Guard, and was a founding member of the Arizona NAACP. Easy to fault the senator now for overthinking constitutional objections to elements of the 1964 Civil Rights Act, despite his consistent votes for civil-rights bills before that, and to note adverse electoral consequences for his party. But to accuse Republicans of stirring up racial hatred with that man and that platform is a gross misstatement of fact.

As a rule of thumb, moreover, anyone so glib and presumptuous as to brush off as “ugliness and bigotry” the enduring political and moral legacy of William F. Buckley Jr. has, for that reason alone, no business involving himself in Republican affairs. And then there’s the “genteel prejudice” of Ronald Reagan: Here Stevens is referring to a man who one morning in 1982 read a Washington Post item about a persecuted black family in a white neighborhood in Maryland —  their home had been vandalized, a burning cross left on their lawn — and then ordered Marine One fired up and that very afternoon paid the family a presidential visit, just to show what he thought about racists: an act entirely consistent with everything else in his character and life.

This is all undeniably tricky. As I say, narrowly constructed litmus tests are probably just a recipe for further fracturing of our political landscape.

Still I would caution Principles First, a group with a truly admirable mission, to reconsider the hand of solidarity it has extended to the Lincoln Project and LP types. It appears that it's still firming up its list of speakers for its upcoming Convention on Founding Principles. I'd be encouraged to see more of the likes of Mona Charen and Amanda Carpenter, and less of the likes of Jennifer Horn.

How about booking Justin Stapley?

This must all be handled deftly. First and foremost, we must remember that we embrace something that needs and deserves defending - against Trumpists and against Democrats.