Sunday roundup

 Sorry for the prolonged absence. Let's just say some health issues arose. Alas, it's a new day and there's much to avail ourselves of, so let's get started.

Greg Weiner has a piece at Law & Liberty entitled "Why We Cannot Just 'Follow the Science'" that makes clear that other actors besides those who collect and analyze data need to have a say in drawing public-policy conclusions. He begins by citing the opprobrium Jopn Stewart came in for as a result of a recent conversation with Stephen Colbert, in which Stewart made the following remark:

“Science is incredible,” Stewart told Stephen Colbert. “But they don’t know when to stop.” And then he went, apparently, too far:

Can I say this about scientists? I love them and they do such good work but they are going to kill us all. … Here’s how I believe the world ends. … The world ends, the last words man utters are somewhere in a lab. A guy goes, ‘Huhuh, it worked.’

But why should his view get dismissed out of hand? 

Paul Waldman of The Washington Post, reasonably arguing that celebrities should swim in their own lanes was particularly defensive of experts:

[Stewart’s] attack on expertise reminds us why expertise is so important. … That’s not to say that experts don’t often have biases or blind spots, because they do. Sometimes, they can be catastrophic. But it’s not because experts can’t be trusted, it’s because something kept them from seeing what they should have, or — perhaps more often — they just didn’t have enough information to arrive at the best judgment.

That view of experts is built atop a romantic idea of human nature. Substitute “politicians” for “experts,” and one can see why. Are we so far removed from the 20th century that scientific and technocratic abuse is unthinkable? Waldman may be correct that most experts mean well, but that does not address the reality that people with power need to be watched. Expertise can become tyrannical when it denies the authority of politics to question it. That is not to accuse any individual of doing so, but a theory of complete deference to experts—besides entangling itself in internal tensions—abdicates political responsibility.

There is a direct line between an ethic of deferring to experts and early 20th century Progressivism, a movement whose leaders—like Woodrow Wilson—would not all survive today’s scrutiny. Wilson himself is proof that expertise can be helpful or haughty. It can inform judgment or so ensconce itself in rigidity that accommodation to circumstances becomes impossible.

Early Progressives, like Lester Frank Ward, were so enamored of expertise that they thought the scientific method could be applied to politics. Their motive bears emphasis: In Dynamic Sociology, Ward argued that expertise was necessary because citizens were ignorant. The point was to empower “the few progressive individuals by whose dynamic actions social progress is secured.” The use of experts could “place [Americans] upon the highway to a condition of intelligence which, when attained, will in turn work out the problem of inaugurating a scientific legislature and a system of scientific legislation.”

Never mind the condescension. This is a road to abuse. Especially in today’s academic climate of hyper-specialty, scientists might well not see either the potential dangers of their work or, more important, sources of knowledge beyond it. Stewart’s prediction of scientists wreaking disaster—delivered, again, as a comedic rant—should not be dismissed out of hand.

While we're on the subject of the politicization of the word "science," Benjamin Zycher of the American Enterprise Institute says that righties - principled righties willing to engage in substantive discussion of particular issues, anyway - have the better argument where climate matters are concerned, but they need to formulate a way to participate in the conversation and stay away from dismissive bonehead-isms:

So long as Democrats can get away with presenting theirs as the “party of science,” they will continue to operate with a significant strategic advantage when it comes to public debates on climate policies that will have profound impacts on the country for generations to come. Instead of merely dismissing the faux science that lends support to climate alarmism as a “hoax,” conservatives must do more to engage with and reclaim the growing body of scientific evidence that supports their climate-change realism.

Stephanie Slade at Reason asks why fusionism wouldn't still be a viable way forward.  Fusionism was the basis for the rise of the 20th century conservative movement. It was basically the brainchild of Frank S. Meyer, one of the original editors of National Review. The problem for those 1950s-era thinkers seeking a way to unite libertarians - with their free-market purism and hands-off approach to individual behavior choices - with traditionalists, who brought a fealty to a transcendent order, and its implications for individual choice. There's been a lot of talk about how, since the lay of the world-stage land is so different in the post-Cold War era, the fusionist alliance is hopelessly fractured. Slade asks, is that necessarily so?

The central insight of fusionism is that the common good is best achieved when the state stays focused on protecting rights and liberties, leaving individuals and voluntary associations to do the rest. To be clear, there is nothing easy about that answer.

The post-liberal temptation is to believe that government power can be a substitute for the hard labor of institution building and cultural change. It isn't. The solution must begin at home—on the front porch, around the kitchen table, and in the mirror. The law is not a magic wand. There are no magic wands, and there is no shortcut to the good society. 

This one's a long read, but worth your while. Aaron Hanna, a black conservative writing at Quillette, is willing to concede that, overall, yes, the agency of individual human beings must be at the forefront of discussions about race, but that those of his classification need to fully consider all factors involved:

To the great frustration of black conservatives, progressive black thought has dominated the intellectual and cultural landscape over the last few years (decades, many would complain). As a result, conservatives have spent a great deal of energy criticizing progressive intellectuals such as Ta-Nehisi Coates, Nikole Hannah-Jones, Ibram X. Kendi, and Isabel Wilkerson, rather than engaging in the kind of self-criticism that would help them develop their own arguments. Like most black conservatives, I am not convinced that racism/anti-racism is the best framework for advancing racial equality, that “caste” is the best metaphor for describing race relations in our country, or that movements to “defund” the police will decrease crime in majority black neighborhoods. But what do black conservatives offer other than criticism of progressive ideas?

CNN national security analyst Peter Bergen says that, no matter what voices from what sides insist that the US has been in Afghanistan too long and that that's the long and the short of the matter, the pullout now underway is going to be a disaster, and not just for the Afghan people:

Habiba Sarabi, an Afghan government negotiator engaging in talks with the Taliban, told CNN, "With the imminent removal of all United States forces in just a few weeks, the Taliban are moving rapidly, resulting in a swift deterioration in the security environment. We were caught off guard by the scale and scope of setbacks in the north."

The United States has contributed to the deteriorating security situation by consistently saying for more than a decade that it is leaving Afghanistan, which has undermined the Afghan government and strengthened the resolve of the Taliban who have won at the negotiating table from the Americans what they failed to win on the battlefield.

Without swift action by the Biden administration we could see in Afghanistan a remix of the disastrous US pullout from Saigon in 1975 and the summer of 2014 in Iraq when ISIS took over much of the country following the US pullout from the country three years earlier. That withdrawal was negotiated by then-vice president Biden.

The Foundation for the Defense of Democracies, a Washington-based think tank, assesses that the Taliban now control 25 per cent of the Afghan population, while the government controls 40 per cent of the population, and just over a third of Afghans live in regions that are contested between the Taliban and the government

The Taliban have seized 50 of the country's 370 districts since May, according to the United Nations. 

The premise of the many years of US-Taliban negotiations has been that the United States will draw down militarily in exchange for the Taliban severing relations with al-Qaeda -- the terrorist organization it harbored at the time of the planning and execution of the terrorist attacks against the US on September 11, 2001.

This has been, to put it charitably, a charade, according to the United Nations, which reported just this month that the two groups remain "closely aligned and show no signs of breaking ties." The UN report notes that Taliban-al Qaeda ties have actually "grown deeper."

Rod Dreher, writing at The American Conservative, says that Joe Biden should be denied communion by the Catholic Church:

 The dilemma the Catholic bishops face comes down to this: is the Catholic Church meant to be a part of society, marching along with it, or is it meant to stand in the middle of the road, telling society to STOP? I think this question is at the heart of the division I observed among French Catholics when it came to my book The Benedict Option. Older Catholics there — Catholics my age (54) and older — tended to think the book was too radical. Younger Catholics, by contrast, understood it and accepted it. (This wasn’t universally true; I’m generalizing.) The difference, I think, has to do with how they see the Church’s relationship to the modern world. The older Catholics had not accepted that if the Catholic Church is true to itself, it will be hated by the modern world. The younger ones had, and had cast their lot with Catholicism, contra mundum. 

It comes down to this: in this moment, is the Church (not just the Catholic Church) called to be prophetic, or therapeutic? I think that only by being prophetic — calling the world out — can it be therapeutic, and heal the world of its brokenness.

Biden now says he's willing to sign the bipartisan infrastructure compromise Congress has crafted, one the scope of which is narrowed to stuff that most folks would consider to actually be infrastructure, and wait until later to work on the do-gooder statist stuff the Dems wanted to see included. As a result, Republicans are back on board with a favorable view of it. 

 

 

 

 

Israel's post-Netanyahu coalition

 It's been apparent for some time that Netanyahu's shelf life was dwindling. His legal troubles over corruption charges are a major factor, but one also senses that the basic need of a nation-state for fresh political energy has become more of a driver in the country's dynamics.

Due to Netanyahu's positions and accomplishments as prime minister over two stints in the job have assured him a prominent place in Israeli and world history (bolstered by his role in the 1976 Entebbe raid). He has understood that Israel is a Western nation despite where it's situated geographically. He's understood the stakes regarding the threat from Jihadists, the Assad regime in Syria and the Iranian regime and acted wisely in situations in which those stakes might be raised.

it's time, though, for fresh perspectives.

The coalition about to take power, as represented by the historically unprecedented trio of political leaders, is going to have to muster an abundance of tact, patience and willingness to communicate constantly within itself. It seems, at the outset, anyway, that, for all the diversity among the three, that it has a decent chance of proving itself stable and capable of maneuvering effectively. After all, where are the serious challenges? There are no other viable players at the moment among Israel's parties and coalitions.

These are three interesting individuals, to be sure.

Naftali Bennett was born in Haifa in 1972 to a couple from the United States that had marinated in leftist politics while at UC Berkeley, but, upon visiting Israel after the 1967 Six-Day War had a dramatic transformation of viewpoint. Bennett and his brothers were raised as Orthodox Jews. Bennett served in the Israeli military and saw combat. He's still a reservist. He married his wife, a pastry chef, and studied law at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. He moved to the US for a while and became a software entrepreneur. The pull of political involvement brought him back to Israel, joining Likud and then the Jewish Home party. He had several influential portfolios, including in the fields of education and diaspora affairs. 

His relationship with Netanyahu began to fray as he got more active:

Bennett had previously viewed Netanyahu as his mentor. He looked up to him so much that he even named his eldest son, Yoni, after Netanyahu's brother, who was killed in 1976, Reuters reported.

Their working relationship soured after a mysterious falling out in 2008 at the end of Bennett's tenure as his chief of staff, according to The Washington Post. The argument was, according to Israeli media reports, related to Netanyahu's wife, Sara.

A year later, they clashed again after Bennett criticized Netanyahu for slowing down settlement construction, the Post added.

In 2018, tensions between Netanyahu and Bennett escalated. Bennett wanted to be Defense Minister but was thwarted by Netanyahu, who then took the job for himself, Reuters reported.

Bennett announced that his party, Jewish Home, would leave Netanyahu's government. He later reneged and remained in the coalition, The Times of Israel reported.

He is a staunch opponent of a Palestinian state. While certain elements might find this outrageous at this late date, there is now a track record of many decades during which the search for some kind of way to establish one has led to naught. 

Yair Lapid brings a decidedly different perspective to the triumvirate, at least regarding religion:

Yair Lapid is a former opposition leader and television anchor who has forged a coalition alliance that will, if approved by parliament Sunday, unseat Israel's longest-serving prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu.

When Lapid founded his centrist Yesh Atid (There is a Future) party in 2012, some dismissed him as the latest in a series of media stars seeking to transform his celebrity into political success.

But his fiercely secularist party finished second with 17 seats in March elections, Israel's fourth inconclusive national vote in less than two years.

He was mandated last month to form a government after Netanyahu failed in his own efforts to build a post-election government.

Lapid cobbled together a coalition of bitter ideological rivals, ranging from right-wing religious nationalists to conservative Muslim Arab citizens of Israel, and the Knesset will either approve or scupper his bloc on Sunday.

His improbable alliance is all the more remarkable given recent intercommunal clashes between Jewish and Arab citizens, sparked by the latest conflict between Israel and Hamas, the Islamist group that controls the Palestinian enclave of Gaza.

Under the coalition deal, Lapid would assume the premiership only after a two-year stint at the top by his main coalition ally, nationalist hardliner Naftali Bennett.

Despite having engineered the alliance, 57-year-old Lapid would initially serve as foreign minister.

A former news anchor known for his chiselled good looks, Lapid is the Tel Aviv-born son of the fiercely secular former justice minister Yosef "Tommy" Lapid, another journalist who left the media to enter politics.

His mother, Shulamit, is a novelist, playwright and poet.

Lapid was a newspaper columnist and has also published a dozen books. His role as a presenter on Channel 2 TV boosted his stardom.

An amateur boxer and martial artist, he once featured on lists of Israel's most desirable men.

Mansour Abbas brings a religious informing of his views, but one that top-level leadership in Israel has never seen. He's a Muslim. He preached his first sermon at age 17 in a Jerusalem mosque. He's a dentist by profession, having received his education at old, established Israel universities, demonstrating that Arab Muslims have the same opportunities in Israel as Jews. He's the head of the United Arab List and represents it in the Knesset. He advocates a two-state solution, with East Jerusalem as the capital of a Palestinian state.

They commence their project today. What will probably establish a set of assumptions among Israel's allies and foes alike is the coalition's early responses to external developments. The May conflict with Hamas is still fresh in everyone's memory, and Iran continues to burnish his bona fides as a world-stage bad actor, sending warships into the Atlantic, showing itself not to be in any kind of rush to revive the JCPOA, probably primarily because it's poised to elect a hardliner, Ebrahim Raisi, as president. 

It' likely that Israel's moves in the next few weeks and months will not be any kind of sharp departure from those of the Netanyahu-led government. They will just come with a fresh perspective and a lack of baggage. 

The strangulation of our civilization by identity-politics militancy

 It's probably best to begin a discussion about this topic by making it clear that one can already see the cheapening of real concern about woke-ism. Trumpists have already elbowed their way onto the stage where the national standoff is taking place. In characteristically boneheaded fashion, they have co-opted talk of critical race theory's damaging influence, at least to a degree that allows those on the dismissive left  to write off concern as the unfounded fears of a bunch of yay-hoos. 

That's unfortunate, because identity-politics militancy is real, pervasive and metastatic. 

Examples from academe continue to proliferate:

A music theory professor at the University of North Texas published a critique of another scholar’s critical-race argument about music theory and his dean opened an investigation in the name of reaffirming “our dedication to combatting racism on campus and across all academic disciplines.” A Princeton professor of Classics came under fire for a dissenting letter against his colleagues’ racial justice demands and faced professional consequences as a result. A professor at University of North Carolina was accused of creating an “unsafe learning environment” for a pedagogical role-play exercise on social and economic justice.

Even at the at the University of Chicago, a school that has been on the forefront of free speech and civil debate and discourse with its Chicago Principles, a professor of geophysical sciences was attacked as “unsafe” for explaining his concerns about how his department was implementing diversity, equity, and inclusion initiatives; he rejected the idea that in order to hire more women in science, the university needed to lower its standards. And attempted cancelation has ensued.

Mobs coming for professors have become so commonplace that this phenomenon has petrified and silenced many students as well, students who regularly report wanting to hear a diverse set of ideas but are afraid to speak up, as well as the handful who challenge woke, intolerant ideas and make national news. A tribal mentality on college campuses built around progressive calls for reform has emerged, and students and professors who push back against these leftist ideas are essentially cancelled, leaving them at risk of ostracism, intimidation and facing threats of significant consequence.

A composer invited to participate in a Tulsa concert reflecting on the 100th anniversary of that city's race massacre did his level best to turn it from a unifying and humanizing event into a nasty display of impossible-to-heal bitterness: 

Composer Daniel Bernard Roumain has made a good career leveraging his skin color. He writes pieces with titles like “i am a white person who ____ Black people.” He argues that orchestras should “focus on BLACK artists exclusively” (capitalization in the original). He has solicited funding for a work written “EXCLUSIVELY for BIPOC [black, indigenous, and people of color] members of ANY orchestra.”

When a percussionist on Roumain’s Facebook page suggested that such a work would be divisive, Roumain told him to “speak less and try to listen and learn and understand more.” BIPOC musicians “FACE racism everyday” from their white orchestral colleagues, Roumain added. In fact, Roumain argues, white musicians’ contracts should be term-limited as reparations for “decades of benefitting from orchestral racism.”

Roumain’s racial-justice profile has earned him a seat on the boards of the League of American Orchestras and the Association of Performing Arts Presenters, as well as a faculty position at Arizona State University. He has been commissioned by Carnegie Hall and is working on film, TV, and opera scores.

He likely seemed a natural choice, then, to write a piece to commemorate the centennial of a race riot in Tulsa. That explosion of violence, from May 31, 1921, to June 1, 1921, followed a still-undetermined incident between a 19-year-old black male and a 17-year-old white female. Tulsa officials tried to protect the male from a possible lynching; armed black residents circled the jail where the teen was being held as another line of defense. Gunfire broke out around the jail, killing 10 whites and two blacks. In retaliation, white rampagers looted and set fire to hundreds of homes and businesses in the black section of Tulsa called Greenwood. Entire neighborhoods were reduced to ashes, leaving thousands homeless. A 2001 report by the Tulsa Race Riot Commission confirmed 26 black and 13 white deaths from the riots; unofficial estimates put the death toll at several hundred. Many more were wounded.

Tulsa Opera planned a concert called Greenwood Overcomes as part of the city’s riot centennial events. Eight black opera singers, accompanied on the piano by Metropolitan Opera assistant conductor Howard Watkins, would perform the works of 23 living black composers, as well as traditional songs and spirituals. Tulsa Opera commissioned four new works for the concert, the first commissions in its history.

Roumain received one of those commissions, and it was a peach: writing a short aria for mezzo-soprano Denyce Graves. Graves’s Metropolitan Opera debut as Carmen in 1995 received rousing acclaim, drawing international attention to her full-bodied vocal tone and smoldering stage presence. She would be the biggest star of the Tulsa concert; any composer would jump to have her perform his work.

Roumain titled his aria for Graves: “They Still Want to Kill Us,” referring, he explained, to “the murder of Breonna Taylor and George Floyd,” deaths that provide evidence of the “bloodlust sown deep within the American psyche.” Roumain’s titles are his calling card, into which he puts his greatest effort, he says—arguably an unusual emphasis for a composer; once he comes up with the name of a piece, the musical writing comes easily.

Roumain also wrote the aria’s lyrics, which begin with brief phrases about the rampage and end with:

They still want to kill us.
God Bless America
God Damn America.

Before Roumain composed the piece, Graves had sent him possible texts as an example of what might appeal to her. This was not it. Graves baulked at the aria as written. “I don’t have trouble with strong lyrics,” she explained in a written statement. “As a Black woman I am a huge supporter of all Black Lives, Black expression, and creativity.” But the aria’s concluding words did not “line up with my personal values,” she wrote. She could not “find an honest place to express the lyrics as they were presented.”

Roumain would not even consider changing the lyrics, so the Tulsa Opera removed the piece from the lineup. All turned out well, one might say. Really? This guy caused a dustup where none was remotely called for. His dark vortex sucked light from what was otherwise a dignified yet appropriately candid response to a dark episode in Tulsa history. 

What motivates a guy like Raj Patel to opine, in the pages of The Guardian, that that quintessential icon of American life, one that ranks with baseball, Mickey Mouse and Elvis Presley, actually has its roots in brutal oppression? 

Resting on gingham cloth, a sugar-crusted apple pie cools on the window sill of a midwestern farmhouse. Nothing could be more American. Officially American. The Department of Defense once featured the pie in an online collection of American symbols, alongside Uncle Sam and cowboys.

Not that apples are particularly American. Apples were first domesticated in central Asia, making the journey along the Silk Road to the Mediterranean four thousand years ago. Apples traveled to the western hemisphere with Spanish colonists in the 1500s in what used to be called the Columbian Exchange, but is now better understood as a vast and ongoing genocide of Indigenous people.

He similarly goes after the sugar and the gingham mentioned in his scenario:

Not that the sugar on the crust is uniquely American. Sugar cane was first brought to the US by Jesuits in 1751, but most US sugar remained an import until the Haitian revolution. When enslaved workers seized the French colony in 1791, European capitalists sought new sugar cane fields and workers. French merchants of sugar and slavery landed in Louisiana in the late 1700s. Within 50 years, the US produced a quarter of the world’s sugar cane, and New Orleans had become a concomitant hub of the slave trade. After emancipation, the economics of sugar shifted. The American civil war pushed the frontier of sugar westward. Hawaii’s sugar plantations grew during US Reconstruction. When the Philippines was a US colony between 1898 and 1946, Filipino workers were exempted from the “Asiatic barred zone”’ to work in the US sugar plantations in Hawaii, replacing more militant Japanese labourers.

Not that the gingham on which our apple pie rests is uniquely American. Columbus recorded cotton being used and worn during his first voyage by his Indigenous hosts. The gingham pattern likely originated in south-east Asia, the word deriving from the Malay genggang, a striped cloth that arrived in Europe as Europe colonized Asia. Cotton from India became central to the British East India Company, representing three-quarters of the corporation’s exports by 1766. As Sven Beckert’s Empire of Cotton tells, this war capitalism enslaved and committed acts of genocide against millions of Indigenous people in North America, and millions of Africans and their descendants through the transatlantic slave trade. In the process, cotton laid the basis of finance, police and government that made the United States.

Since this is quite a lot to acknowledge, it is easier to misremember. In the drama of nationalist culture, the bloody and international origins of the apple pie are subject to a collective amnesia. In the imagining of American community, the dish is transformed into a symbol of domesticity. By 1910, it’s possible for a theatre review to celebrate a wholesome play, “as American as apple pie”.

In the world the likes of Patel envision, there is to be no convention, no pastime, no foodstuff left unexamined for its role in establishing white male capitalist tyranny.

There is no winning with these people. Theirs is the most movable goalpost in the history of the world.

Consider Robin diAngelo. She makes clear in her new book that white fragility is not merely, or even primarily, a problem among uncouth yay-hoos, but rather among her own ilk - that is to say, highly educated, culturally "sophisticated" progressives:

The worst of the worst, says Robin DiAngelo, are not those who identify as neo-Nazis or white supremacists or members of the KKK or the Aryan Brotherhood.

No: In her new book, “Nice Racism: How Progressive White People Perpetuate Racial Harm,” DiAngelo posits that white, liberal, intellectual, coastal progressives — you know, the people who used her first book, “White Fragility,” as an intellectual hairshirt — are the most bigoted, the most harmful, the greatest threat to racial equality.

As a professor of “multicultural education,” DiAngelo is credited with coining the phrase “white fragility” in 2011. Of late she’s developed this into a lucrative career — along with Ibram X. Kendi of “How to Be an Antiracist” and others — teaching white people why they’re racist. Oh, DiAngelo is white.

CEOs of multibillion-dollar multinationals force their rank-and-file to sit through her corporate scoldings ($15,000 a pop as of last summer).

As Maureen Callahan, author of the linked piece, says, blowback is happening, and from people whose credibility as responsible cultural observers is unquestioned:

Writing in the Atlantic last year, John McWhorter, the esteemed black linguist, author and Columbia professor, said that with “White Fragility,” DiAngelo “openly infantilized black people” and “simply dehumanized us.”

On NPR, McWhorter called it an “Orwellian indoctrination program” that “is racist . . . If you write a book that teaches that black people’s feelings must be stepped around to an exquisitely sensitive degree that hasn’t been required of any other human beings, you’re condescending to black people. In supposing that black people have no resilience, you are saying that black people are unusually weak. You’re saying that we are lesser . . . that’s discriminatory.”

Yes.

In the Washington Post, Carlos Lozadacalled “White Fragility” “oversimplified,” “self-serving,” and offering only “circular logic . . . nothing ever changes, because change would violate its premise.”

Medium: “A destructive book full of bad reasoning.”

Jonathan Chait (!) in New York magazine: “Kooky, harmful,” and espousing “outright racist ideas.”

Still, the insertion of the ideas of diAngelo, Ibram X. Kendi, and Ta-Nehisi Coates into America's school curriculum and corporate human-resources training materials is a done deal. Assertion of another viewpoint has to be done in reaction to it. 

Which gets us back to the matter of boneheads taking expression of alarm about this to the lowest level. Any conservative who wished to heed the exhortations to enter school-board races and other local-level arenas of action would have to spend considerable energy on distinguishing himself or herself from the rabble. The yay-hoos are not equipped to tangle with leftists whose position is "you-have-no-idea-what-the-actual-definition-of-CTR-is." If the squaring-off is left to the yay-hoos, it will quickly deteriorate into sloganistic accusations that ignore the essential point to be defended: namely, that a comprehensive approach to American history is a good thing, but must be undertaken without agenda. 

Does an emphasis on this aspect of the matter seem unduly preoccupied with a tangential aspect of it? I think not, for the reason that the Trumpist message to those who are non-Trumpist but alarmed about these developments is along the lines of "If-you-have-any-cojones-you-will-join-us-on-the-front-lines." They will assume the mantle of the genuinely concerned, and once again excommunicate anyone who doesn't qualify. And let us not forget the power of numbers they have within the Republican Party. 

Anyone who says that identity-politics militancy is a real and toxic threat to our civilization is stating a truism. But not everyone who so posits is equipped to articulate the reason this is so and offer a constructive alternative. 

The whole subject is too urgent to get wrong. 

 

 

 

The Trumpist poisoning of the GOP runs as deep as ever

 Not only do the Trumpists refuse to give up in Maricopa County, they use the word "dominoes" to describe their ultimate intent:

Arizona’s election results were certified on January 6, of course, and there were numerous legal challenges in Maricopa County, none of which concluded that county election officials committed any wrongdoing. Six months after Joe Biden won Arizona by 10,000 votes of the 3.3 million ballots that were cast statewide in the November election, rogue GOP officials continue to propagate baseless accusations of fraud despite the fact that local election officials took pains to ensure that the county tabulated votes correctly. 

Immediately following the November election, Maricopa County election officials oversaw a hand-count of a statistically significant sampling of ballots—47,000 votes—that were cast by county residents and tabulated by Dominion Voting Systems, the election company the county has used since 1998. The results from the first hand-count—which was staffed by volunteers from the Republican, Democratic, and Libertarian parties—were 100 percent identical to the initial total tabulated on Dominion’s voting machines. 

The Maricopa County Board of Supervisors then hired two additional elections companies to conduct a forensic audit of the Dominion voting software. The companies concluded that the installed software was certified by the U.S. Election Assistance Commission and the Arizona secretary of state and that there was no malware connected to the machines. Neither company found any evidence to suggest the software was connected to the internet or that any votes were switched from one candidate to another.

Arizona State Senate Republicans still weren’t convinced. Under the leadership of Senate President Karen Fann, they ordered a so-called forensic audit contesting the victories of Joe Biden and Democratic Sen. Mark Kelly. The Republican-led audit began on April 23 after a judge granted Fann’s subpoenas for ballots and other election materials. 

[Former Arizona Republican Party chair Randy] Pullen claims that the recount will be completed by the end of June. As of Wednesday, more than 1.7 million of the county’s 2.1 million ballots have reportedly been counted. 

The partisan operation has been criticized by Democrats and Republican election officials in Arizona for its lack of transparency and its failure to adhere to state election rules. Audit organizers also aren’t being shy about their long-term goals. “What will come out of this is the entire process for how you do this large of an audit will be written up,” Pullen said. “It will be a plan that someone else can take and use as the basis for doing something similar to this.”

The idea is already gaining traction among rogue Republicans in swing states. Three members of the Pennsylvania Senate toured Maricopa County’s election site Wednesday and told reporters they plan to launch a similar audit in their own state.  

In many ways, the audit can best be summarized by one word: “dominoes.” Arizona GOP leaders are hoping this Maricopa County audit will launch similar undertakings nationwide. “Arizona is the first domino that will fall, and then other states will look into irregularities, abnormalities, mistakes and potentially outright fraud that happened in their states as well,” state Republican Party Chair Kelli Ward said on Newsmax on May 1. 

Ward, who previously served in the Arizona Senate, has spent months cheering on the audit and stoking baseless conspiracy theories alleging that Dominion improperly influencing the November election.* On December 28, a lawyer for Dominion sent a cease-and desist letter regarding defamatory claims Ward has made about the company, and ordered her to preserve all documents that relate to the matter. (Trump’s former personal attorney Rudy Giuliani and Trump-aligned lawyer Sidney Powell are both facing $1.3 billion defamation lawsuits by Dominion.)

But Trump and his Arizona allies are undaunted. “Arizona Republican State Senators are engendering such tremendous respect, even adoration, for the great job they are doing on the Forensic Audit of the 2020 Presidential Election Scam,” the former president said in a statement on May 25. “Our Country is watching as early public reports are indicating a disaster, far greater than anyone had thought possible, for Arizona voters.”

Arizona state senators have made it clear that the former president and his closest allies are influencing the audit behind the scenes. “I have been in numerous conversations with Rudy Guiliani [sic] over the past weeks trying to get this done,” Fann wrote in an email to a constituent on December 28. (The message was obtained through a records request under the Freedom of Information Act by the nonprofit legal watchdog group American Oversight.) “I have the full support of him and a personal call from President Trump thanking us for pushing to prove any fraud.”

They're still making life hell for Brad Raffensperger and his family:

Late on the night of April 24, the wife of Georgia’s top election official got a chilling text message: “You and your family will be killed very slowly.”

A week earlier, Tricia Raffensperger, wife of Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger, had received another anonymous text: “We plan for the death of you and your family every day.”

That followed an April 5 text warning. A family member, the texter told her, was “going to have a very unfortunate incident.”

Those messages, which have not been previously reported, illustrate the continuing barrage of threats and intimidation against election officials and their families months after former U.S. President Donald Trump’s November election defeat. While reports of threats against Georgia officials emerged in the heated weeks after the voting, Reuters interviews with more than a dozen election workers and top officials – and a review of disturbing texts, voicemails and emails that they and their families received – reveal the previously hidden breadth and severity of the menacing tactics.

Trump’s relentless false claims that the vote was “rigged” against him sparked a campaign to terrorize election officials nationwide – from senior officials such as Raffensperger to the lowest-level local election workers. The intimidation has been particularly severe in Georgia, where Raffensperger and other Republican election officials refuted Trump’s stolen-election claims. The ongoing harassment could have far-reaching implications for future elections by making the already difficult task of recruiting staff and poll workers much harder, election officials say.

In an exclusive interview, Tricia Raffensperger spoke publicly for the first time about the threats of violence to her family and shared the menacing text messages with Reuters.

The Raffenspergers – Tricia, 65, and Brad, 66 – began receiving death threats almost immediately after Trump’s surprise loss in Georgia, long a Republican bastion. Tricia Raffensperger started taking precautions. She canceled regular weekly visits in her home with two grandchildren, ages 3 and 5 – the children of her eldest son, Brenton, who died from a drug overdose in 2018.

“I couldn’t have them come to my house anymore,” she said. “You don’t know if these people are actually going to act on this stuff.”

In late November, the family went into hiding for nearly a week after intruders broke into the home of the Raffenspergers’ widowed daughter-in-law, an incident the family believed was intended to intimidate them. That evening, people who identified themselves to police as Oath Keepers – a far-right militia group that has supported Trump’s bid to overturn the election – were found outside the Raffenspergers’ home, according to Tricia Raffensperger and two sources with direct knowledge of the family’s ordeal. Neither incident has been previously reported.

“Brad and I didn’t feel like we could protect ourselves,” she said, explaining the decision to flee their home.

And not just the Raffenspergers:

The intimidation in Georgia has gone well beyond Raffensperger and his family. Election workers - from local volunteers to senior administrators - continue enduring regular harassing phone calls and emails, according to interviews with election workers and the Reuters review of texts, emails and audio files provided by Georgia officials.

One email, sent on Jan. 2 to officials in nearly a dozen counties, threatened to bomb polling sites: “No one at these places will be spared unless and until Trump is guaranteed to be POTUS again.” The specific text of the threat has not been previously reported. The email, a state election official said, was forwarded to the U.S. Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), which declined to comment for this story.

It's a longstanding norm that presidents immediately preceding the current one don't weigh in on what is happening in the current administration, particularly in the realm of foreign policy. The Very Stable Genius has not one subatomic particle of regard for this convention:

Consider that Elise Stefanik recently replaced Liz Cheney as House Republican conference chair. We traded integrity, principles and a solid conservative voting record for this:

I'd thought that perhaps the Republican Party in my state (Indiana) was immune to this, but I see in an email I got today that the guest speaker at its spring dinner is going to be Sarah Huckabee Sanders.

There are still people I respect and to whose observations I give due consideration who insist that the GOP will remain the only other game in town along with the Democrats and that our nation's political system has weathered worse. I'm not seeing it. This is a 167-year-old party that has permitted its own ruination.

Conservatism is going to have to build something from the ground up. 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

There's nothing moderate about Democratic Congressional leadership, but even it has a line, and Ilhan Omar has crossed it

 The Representative from Minnesota let loose with one of the most grotesque moral equivalencies imaginable:

Rep. Ilhan Omar

@Ilhan

We must have the same level of accountability and justice for all victims of crimes against humanity. 

We have seen unthinkable atrocities committed by the U.S., Hamas, Israel, Afghanistan, and the Taliban.  

I asked 

@SecBlinken

 where people are supposed to go for justice.

Twelve of her Dem House colleagues used the form of an open letter to call her out and demand that she knock it off. They used the phrasing "urge Congresswoman Omar to clarify," but given the overall tone of the letter, it's pretty clear this was no open-ended suggestion.

Omar then took the opportunity to wax indignant and act like the term "clarification" was the crux of the matter. And then her spokesman Jeremy Slevin penned his own statement, accusing House Dems of "ginning up . . . Islamophobic hatred against" his boss.

Well, then the ball was back in the House Dem leadership's court, and this time, its statement carried the weight of Nancy Pelosi's name among the signatories:

Exit question: When can we see a similar display of spine among House Republicans when it comes to the antics and utterings of Marjorie Taylor Green and Matt Gaetz?