Leftist pundits continue to bamboozle post-Americans about how the current Supreme Court comes to decisions

 This. is another one of those generous-excerpt posts, because Romesh Ponnuru of the American Enterprise Institute has offered up a prime example of how pundits committed to a secular future for the West get readers who have lost the capability to make necessary distinctions all riled up about the current makeup of the Supreme Court:

Pamela Paul’s recent op-ed in the New York Times was notable for two things. The first is an incendiary title (“Your Religious Values Are Not American Values”) that fortunately does not convey a tone sustained throughout the piece. Paul ends with a conclusion so tepid that nearly all the religious conservatives she means to denounce could agree with it: “This Fourth of July, let’s bear in mind that what many Americans value in this country is its inclusion and protection of all, regardless of their beliefs.”

The second is this passing smear, the most specific criticism she offers: “Unfortunately, the conservative majority of the Supreme Court has demonstrated that, like many Republican politicians, when it comes to freedom of religion — and yes, that must include freedom from religion — those justices are willing to put their own faith above all else.”

The link, where she supposedly demonstrates the accuracy of this accusation, goes to her own op-ed from two years ago furiously attacking the 6–3 decision in Kennedy v. Bremerton School District:

This court’s right-wing majority is following the dictum of our Trumpian age: Objective truth doesn’t matter. Subjective belief — specifically the beliefs of the court’s religious-right majority — does. The Kennedy decision wasn’t based on the facts but on belief in the face of facts. Moreover, those six justices are determined to foist their beliefs on the rest of the country.

Paul believes that the assistant football coach who brought the case, Joseph Kennedy, had coerced players to submit to his proselytizing: “Students who walked off the field rather than take part in Kennedy’s prayers may have risked losing playing time and perhaps a path to a football scholarship. No athlete on a public-school team should have to pray to play.”

Sorry, but none of this is what the case was about — although Justice Sotomayor’s dissent artfully misdirects its readers into thinking as Paul does.

The truth can be found in Justice Gorsuch’s opinion (and also in Ed Whelan’s coverage of the case for NRO). Here’s Gorsuch:

The contested exercise before us does not involve leading prayers with the team or before any other captive audience. . . . At the District’s request, he voluntarily discontinued the school tradition of locker-room prayers and his postgame religious talks to students. The District disciplined him only for his decision to persist in praying quietly without his players after three games in October 2015. [Emphasis in original.]

Maybe Paul would have had a point if Kennedy had continued his previous practice, been disciplined by the district for it, and then gotten the Supreme Court to rule that he had a First Amendment right to flout its directive. But that’s not what happened. The real scandal in the case is that three justices were willing to okay the district’s indefensible behavior — and that for two years running, many in the press, including Pamela Paul, keep distorting the facts of the case. “Objective truth doesn’t matter,” indeed.

Now, an interesting question arises, namely, whether Paul knew what the real gist of the case was, or whether she lazily didn't dig deep enough to find that out. I'm betting on the former. I'd say it bugs her so much that the coach still had the right to pray privately after games that she framed her column the way she did on purpose.

                

Disentangling the Alitos' situation from the Very Stable Genius's fortunes

 I may have mentioned this before here at LITD in some context, but I'll draw your attention presently to a post I wrote at The Freemen Newsletter last November titled "The Conflation Problem."

I do know that I've discussed the problem here before. It started once the GOP went all in for Trumpism, and has only gotten worse in the nine-year interim.

The Washington Post and CNN et al love nothing more than to brand drool-besotted yay-hoos like Marjorie Taylor Greene and Charlie Kirk as conservatives. And the drool-besotted yay-hoos love nothing more than to brand the likes of Liz Cheney as traitorous decidedly non conservatives.

The task of disentangling the real deal from Trumpism is one of the main things I write about, and discuss with my colleagues.

A lot of principled - I think - folks have made some kind of Faustian bargain in order to reach the widest audience. 

For instance, Guy Benson is a sociocultural observer with his head on straight, but he unfortunately has chosen to have the garbage site Townhall be a main outlet for his columns.

But his piece today is so important that I'm going to hold my nose and link and excerpt anyway.

It's on the business about the Alitos' flags, and it's rich with substantiation for his position, which is that it's all designed to erode the Supreme Court's independence and fealty to the Consittution:

Let's be explicitly clear: They are not doing so because they are genuinely concerned about "ethics." They are not doing so because there are clear violations or conflicts of interests at play (this cynical brigade has shown zero interest in similar or more flagrant potential issues involving the Court's leftist contingent).  They are doing so because the Court's conservative majority is denying them the outcomes they desire.  It's that simple.  They are laboring to tear down an institution that stands in the way of their extreme ideological project because they view and demand power as their ideological birthright. 

This is dangerous, both to "our democracy," about which they purport to care very deeply, and to the targeted justices.  We've witnessed the Democrats' Senate leader specifically threaten members of the Court by name, earning a rare rebuke from the Chief Justice.  We've seen ugly, menacing protests outside the family homes of various justices.  And we've even seen a thwarted assassination attempt against Justice Brett Kavanaugh, which garnered shockingly little coverage.  As always, "civility" and "rhetoric" media panics cut in one direction among the progressives who run America's widely-distrusted, 'elite' newsrooms.  And it's from those newsrooms that the current, ludicrous controversy has emanated -- driven by activists, and picked up by elected Democrats.  It's ginned-up nonsense.  It's embarrassing.  And it's all so transparent.  The country is supposed to be scandalized by an upside-down American flag flown outside of Justice Sam Alito's home in early January 2021.  The country was then instructed to be further appalled by the discovery of another, 'insurrectionist-linked' flag flying at his vacation home.  

Justice Alito has explained the 2021 incident, drawing incredulous heckles from the Left, but it turns out that his account aligns with contemporaneous reporting from the Washington Post.  Indeed, back at the time, the Post looked into the matter and found the episode so unremarkable that they didn't even run a story on it.  But here we are, years later, and the manufactured outrage machine insists that everyone simply ignore this [the fact that WaPo determined it was a non-story at the time].

It getting 'out of hand' was the whole point, of course.  But the fact remains that the Post dug into this flap more than three years ago and declined to report on it after concluding that the upside-down flag was hoisted by the justice's wife, over a neighborhood dispute.  The dispute, it seems, originated from bouts of profane rudeness from left-wing residents: "Alito said that a neighbor had posted a sign saying 'F**k Trump' near a school bus stop and then a sign attacking his wife, Martha-Ann Alito. On a walk, the justice told Fox, the Alitos got into an argument with the neighbor, who used the term 'c**t' at one point. His wife then flew the inverted flag," which is a sign of distress.  But the New York Times' breathless reporting in recent days is designed to conjure up the impression that Alito is a pro-Capitol-riot, 'stop the steal' lunatic.  Facts that were explored and dismissed at the time have been resurrected and distorted, as part of a shameless political hit job.  As for the other 'problematic flag,' what an embarrassing attack:

Rather than retreat in humiliation, the Times doubled down this week with a follow-up report of yet another flag—this one right-side up—spotted at the Alitos’ vacation home in New Jersey. The left tells us that the 1775 Pine Tree flag was spotted among Jan. 6 protesters! And moreover, that its catch phrase, “an appeal to heaven,” derives from a radical character—John Locke. The Times somehow fails to let readers know that the flag is a longtime symbol of independence; that it was designed by George Washington’s secretary; was flown on ships commissioned by Washington; has been honored, commemorated and flown over state capitols; and is the official maritime flag of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts. It is currently displayed outside the office of the speaker of the House. Dozens of historic flags were toted to the Capitol on Jan. 6, as were copies of the Constitution and pictures of the American eagle. Are they all now symbols of “insurrection”?

Benson then notes that the Appeal to Heaven flew at San Francisco City Hall last year.

Another big story of the current news cycle is the conclusion of Trump's falsifying-of-business-records trial in New York. 

Now, I'm inclined to think that serious, respect-worthy legal minds such as Andrew McCarthy have the better argument - namely, that Bragg and Merchan have been licking their chops at the prospect of incarcerating the Very Stable Genius, at the expense of a sound legal case. 

But there's the matter of focus, and I have trouble - as I have for some time - with Byron York's emphasis on the legal flimsiness and those who de-emphasize that. Today, at The Washington Examiner, he zeroes in on the change in George Conway's thinking:

“Not all that long ago, I thought that the trial currently being held … seemed the least serious of the cases against him,” wrote George Conway, the conservative lawyer-turned-Biden megadonor, in the Atlantic earlier this month. “But I feel the need to admit error. The truth is, I’ve come around to the view that People v. Trump is, in at least some ways, the perfect case to put Trump in the dock for the first time, and — I hope, but we’ll see — perhaps prison.”

Why is that? Conway, one of the more aggressive members of the anti-Trump resistance, wrote that he now believes the Manhattan case perfectly exposed what he says are Trump’s myriad lies. But for the resistance, the most salient fact about the Manhattan trial is this: It is happening. It is getting done before the election, which is the most important consideration for Democrats who pray that a Trump conviction could change the dynamics of a presidential race in which Trump leads President Joe Biden.

True enough, but there's something damn weasel-y about overlooking this major aspect of the matter:

 doesn’t it look a little incongruous for House Speaker Mike Johnson, who makes a point of putting his Christian faith front and center, to make the prosecution’s zeal the main point? Yes, there is a solid rule-of-law angle to this, and precedents could be set that would subject future presidents to ever-more-frivolous legal challenges.

And yes, Michael Cohen has done his credibility no favors over the past few years, but come on, nobody doubts that Trump had a tryst with Stormy Daniels (the included a bonus spanking with a rolled-up magazine) or a months-long affair with Karen McDougal, all while Melania was home with an infant Barron. Nobody doubts there were other dalliances as well.

For the I’m-not-voting-for-a-pastor crowd, I’d ask how confident they are that things would go well on a policy level in a. second Trump administration. 

Europe is finally waking up to the need to address the increasing menace from Russia, ramping up its production of materiel, as well as looking at how to effectively man the continent’s collective military force, to positioning nuclear missiles in a more forward manner,

No, I'm not for sleazy tactics in the bringing down of Donald Trump. But I'm damn sure all for bringing him down.  

Anybody who's cool with voting for someone so devoid of character and consistency, who thinks he could solve the world's hot-spot crises with the power of his charm, and that he could do so transactionally  - that is, in insisting on a quid pro quo for the aggressed-upon parties in each case - is no conservative.

"But it's going to be a binary choice in November."

No, it's not. You can stay home and rest well at night knowing the eternal record book shows that you weren't a party to either form of American ruination. 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Forbes's display of cowardice winds up being pointless

Recall the item in the Tuesday Roundup below about the climate activist who concluded that the alarmist nature of the movement was completely unfounded and that he owed the world an apology for peddling falsehoods and profoundly mistaken notions?

I linked to a site called Environmental Progress at which it appeared, and it's still there. It seems it also appeared at Forbes, but it's not there anymore.

John Robson at National Post looked into why that magazine took it down. As best he could, anyway. He still can't find a substantive reason:

Their reply, which would make a seasoned politician or bureaucrat blush, read, in its entirety, “You can attribute the below statement to a Forbes spokesperson. Forbes requires its contributors to adhere to strict editorial guidelines. This story did not follow those guidelines, and was removed.”

I responded tartly: “Thanks. But obviously this statement raises fresh questions, particularly: 1. Which guidelines did it not follow? 2. In what way did it not follow them? 3. How often do you remove a story for violating those guidelines?”

Not to worry. As I say, it's still up at Environmental Progress, and generously excerpted here at LITD.  And the book from which it comes, Apocalypse Never, is Amazon's number-one best-seller in its climatology category.

So Forbes didn't get much payoff for its kowtow to the jackboots.

Thursday roundup

This first item actually goes back to mid-March, but I recently came across it, and it makes a great deal of sense to me. Plus, the two participants in the conversation bring up From Dawn to Decadence by Jacques Barzun, one of my favorite books. Barzun's tome is a look at the 500 year period from 1500 to 2000, through the Renaissance and the Enlightenment and the Romantic period and the Industrial Revolution to - well, our present time of decadence.

It comes up in the course of this podcast interview by Richard Reinsch of Law & Liberty of New York Times columnist Ross Douthat, which also is presented in print form. They're discussing Douthat's new book, The Decadent Society: How We Became Victims of Our Own Success.

Douthat's central point is that American inventiveness has slowed down, a resulting ennui has settled in, and, well, you know what they say about idle hands.

A taste:

Ross Douthat:
So the Decadent Society is an attempt to, in a certain way, put a name on the weird anxiety that pervades the developed world, the Western world and the United States of America, where we have this combination of tremendous wealth and technological proficiency, which makes some people argue that these are the best times in the history of the world, but at the same time a lot of discontent, anxiety and ennui, which gets manifested in everything from the sort of populist and socialist rebellions in our politics, to rising rate of depression and suicide, and deaths of despair as they get called and so on. And so the argument I make in the book, is basically that we have entered a very particular kind of civilizational state that I’m calling “decadence” and I’m using that term to mean not chocolate dipped strawberries and weekends in Vegas, though those might be part of it, but a kind of stagnation, repetition, and decay at a high level of civilizational development.

Richard Reinsch:
One of the definitions, to talk about the definition of decadence you give in the book, you build on Jacques Barzun’s book, From Dawn to Decadence, which I think came out in 2000. I remember reading it in 2001 and that book has stuck with me. It’s one of the reasons why I really enjoyed reading your book because building on Barzun’s definition of decadence, Barzun talks about moving in fits and starts, but not really getting anywhere. The Decadent Society sees no path forward and it’s institutions function painfully. Maybe talk more about that because you also dismiss a definition of decadence that on my worst days, I find myself sort of glomming onto which is weak, sort of hedonistic luxuriating, weak and unable to defend ourselves. Unwilling to see the purpose in defending ourselves and so we’ll go into the good night, but maybe talk about that.

Ross Douthat:
Right. So yeah, I am very directly borrowing from Barzun and you could see this book, in part, as a sequel both to his book and in certain ways to Francis Fukuyama’s famous book, The End of History, which came out 10 years earlier. And the combination of those two arguments basically makes the case that Fukuyama was right, in a sense, not permanently and forever, but right that Western civilization has sort of passed beyond some of its great ideological debates and entered into a period of stability, that was also in danger of becoming a period of boredom and disappointment and sterility. And then Barzun, in a somewhat similar way, made the case that this is something that happens generally to civilizations at a certain point.

That they enter into periods where their once vigorous institutions become sclerotic, where their ambitious explorations hit frontiers that they can’t necessarily explore. And for us, I think that’s the most obvious in the demise of the space age basically, that we went from a period where people imagined that the frontier was going to open further into space. And now that’s sort of left to Silicon Valley billionaires to pursue and maybe they’re getting somewhere. But there’s no cultural imagination around space travel the way there was in the 1960s. So frontiers are closed. Institutions don’t work that well anymore. There’s sort of a loss of both pride in the past and confidence in the future and it doesn’t go all the way to the definition that you suggest only because I think that people sometimes underestimate how long a decadence period can last. So there’s an assumption that because you have institutions that don’t work as well anymore because you have a loss of civilizational confidence, there must be a kind of iron logic to history where the barbarians are waiting at the frontier and they’re going to come in and put the palaces to the torch.

And of course sometimes that happens. But you can also have empires and cultures go on a long time in periods that are essentially stagnant. The Roman empire goes 400 years from its Caligulan stage to the actual demise of the empire in the West. And in our case, we’re in this sort of unusual, not sort of, this entirely unusual position of being the first true world civilization, even more so than ancient Rome. And we also have a situation where a lot of empires and countries and cultures that might be seen as our rivals maybe are actually converging with us in decadence in different ways. That they aren’t poised to leap past us. And if that’s the case, then you could imagine what I call sustainable decadence as something that lasts if not centuries, at least some generations past our present moment where I’m writing.

Sheesh. Just about the time I consider that maybe alarm bells about mainstream media leftism are overblown, I run across something like this:

During a wildly offensive segment on Friday’s CBS This Morning, both the hosts and their left-wing guests repeatedly accused all white people of being born with racial “privilege” and taught to be racist as children. The discussion then turned to demanding white people “stop denying their racism” and admit to practicing discrimination.

The conversation occurred late in the 8:00 a.m. ET hour as part of CBS’s one-hour special, Race for Justice, examining race relations in the United States. It was particularly astonishing to watch wealthy co-host Gayle King – Oprah Winfrey’s best friend who once vacationed with the Obamas on a yacht – lead a segment lecturing others about their “privilege.”

“Nationwide protests against inequality are encouraging more people to have discussions not only about race but also white privilege,” King proclaimed. She then eagerly introduced two far-left authors to rant on the topic: “Robin DiAngelo is a sociologist and she’s author of this book, White Fragility: Why It’s So Hard for White People to Talk About Racism. I love this title. She joins us with the author of How to Be an Anti-Racist, CBS News contributor Ibram X. Kendi.”

“I would like you to explain what white privilege is exactly and why white people have such a hard time seeing it. Because it’s so clear to most black people I know,” King scolded. DiAngelo not only delivered the predictable left-wing talking points on the subject, she made sure to declare that dissent would not be tolerated:

White privilege is the automatic taken-for-granted advantage bestowed upon white people as a result of living in a society based on the premise of white as the human ideal, and that from its founding, established white advantage as a matter of law and today as a matter of policy and practice. And it doesn’t matter if you agree with it, if you want it, if you even are aware of it, it’s 24/7/365. And one of the reasons why it’s so hard for white people to see it – well, there are many reasons – but one is that it serves us not to see it. We come to feel entitled to that advantage. We’re told that we deserve it and that we earned it. And we take great umbrage when that is challenged.

King followed up by matter-of-factly citing an outrageous claim in DiAngelo’s book: “You write, too, Robin, in the book, that kids from the age between 3 and 4 are intuitively taught that being white is better, that you are superior. I thought that that was an interesting thing.” The supposed “journalist” didn’t even question the disgusting claim.

On Monday, the broadcast turned to radical “experts” to insist that white Americans have been “taught” to have “contempt for black life.”Later in the discussion, fellow co-host Anthony Mason turned to Kendi and fretted: “Ibram, you’ve said that to get – to end white privilege you have to deal with racism first, right?” Kendi – who has excused the anti-Semitism of Democratic Congresswoman Ilhan Omar and argued that common phrases like “blackmail” were racist – launched into a tirade convicting every white person in America of racism:

And I mean, as Robin, you know, talked about, it is critical for white people, for people in general, to stop denying their racist ideas, to stop denying the ways in which policies have benefited them, to stop denying their racism, and to realize that actually the heartbeat of racism itself is denial, and the sound of that heartbeat is “I’m not racist.” 

David Thornton at The Resurgent on how an agenda is driving the pronouncements of some public-heath officials:

There is a rumor going around on social media that the pandemic is over. That isn’t the case, but you’d never know it from public health officials around the country who seem to have tossed social distancing restrictions out in favor of the right to protest.

“A case in point is a recent article in Slate that details an open letter from infectious disease experts at the University of Washington, who write that “protests against systemic racism, which fosters the disproportionate burden of COVID-19 on Black communities and also perpetuates police violence, must be supported.” The letter has been signed by more than 1,000 medical experts from around the country.

Wait. Isn’t there a pandemic on?

Former NFL player and current Congressional candidate Burgess Owens has written a compelling piece at Newsweek entitled "Drew Brees Was Right The First Time."

Another piece from a while back (2018) that is quite relevant at the moment. David French at National Review on why qualified immunity should be ended.

The snowflake/jackboots score another one: a UCLA professor is suspended for refusing to grant some kind of special leniency to black students on their final exams, because George Floyd. 

An ocean of Kool-Aid was guzzled on Laura Ingraham's show last night

Laura Ingraham was one of the very first hard-core Trumpists. In 2015, when several appealing and viable Republican candidates for president were still in the running, she started disingenuously framing the race as a dichotomy between the Very Stable Genius and Jeb Bush, who was polling near the bottom of the pack.

Since then, she's spent every microsecond of her professional life burnishing her bona fides as a throne-sniffer.

She outdid herself last night on her FNC program. She had the nation's premier expert on the coronavirus pandemic, followed by a psychologist better known as a television personality and book hustler than he is for the field in which he's trained.

She was set straight by Anthony Fauci when she tried the couldn't-it-just-go-away line on him:

“On the question of a vaccine, we don’t have a vaccine for SARS,” Ingraham said. “We don’t have a vaccine for HIV, and life did go on, right? So the idea that we’re definitely going to have a vaccine, we didn’t really approach much else in the same way as we’re pegging going back to normal with a vaccine, did we?”

Fauci responded by pointing out the stark differences between HIV, the virus that caused SARS and the novel coronavirus. He said HIV was “entirely different” because researchers developed effective treatments that allow people to live with HIV/AIDS. And SARS, he said, disappeared on its own, which ended efforts to develop a vaccine.

“I think it is a little bit misleading, maybe, to compare what we’re going through now with HIV or SARS,” Fauci told Ingraham. “They’re really different.”

“But, we don’t know,” Ingraham said in response. “This could disappear. I mean, SARS did pretty much disappear. This could as well, correct?”

“You know, anything could, Laura,” Fauci said. “But I have to tell you, the degree of efficiency of transmissibility of this is really unprecedented in anything that I’ve seen. It’s an extraordinarily efficient virus in transmitting from one person to another. Those kind of viruses don’t just disappear.” 

Fauci spent the rest of his time on “The Ingraham Angle” explaining the need for a piecemeal approach to reopening the economy. He stressed that states should meet all of the criteria in each phase of the White House’s guidelines before moving on to the next and remaining vigilant, and willing to close down again, for renewed outbreaks.

Next up was Dr. Phil, who peddles the "reasoning" that other causes of death statistically dwarf COVID-19:

Dr. Phil, who has a doctorate in clinical psychology but is not licensed to practice medicine, spoke about the mental toll of isolation under the stay-at-home orders aimed at slowing the spread of coronavirus. He suggested more people will suffer mental-health issues, like anxiety and depression, because of job losses and economic impacts of the pandemic than will catch the virus.

That’s when the TV psychologist compared coronavirus deaths to those caused by automobile accidents, smoking and drowning. Fauci has criticized the comparison to car accidents in the past, calling it a “false equivalency.” 

“We have people dying, 45,000 people a year die from automobile accidents, 480,000 from cigarettes, 360,000 a year from swimming pools, but we don’t shut the country down for that,” Dr. Phil said.

Memo to Dr. Phil: none of those forms of checking out are contagious.

Ingraham's show is preceded by one hosted by another of the original slavish leg-humpers, Sean Hannity, who had as his guest Dr. Oz, another television personality and book hustler. He's better known as a pop health consultant that as a surgeon, which he also is.

Dr. Oz's remarks were so offensive he's since had to apologize:

Dr. Oz is backtracking on comments he made on Fox News amid the coronavirus pandemic.

The TV doc (real name: Mehmet Oz) faced backlash for saying on Hannity that schools should reopen to get the country going again — as that “may only cost us 2 to 3 percent in terms of total mortality.” He said those deaths “might be a trade-off some folks would consider.”

The Dr. Oz Show host has since apologized, saying he he “misspoke” when he minimized the risk and potential loss of life.

“I’ve realized my comments about risks around opening schools have confused and upset people, which was never my intention,” he said in a recorded video. “I misspoke. As a heart surgeon, I spent my career fighting to save lives in the operating room by minimizing risks.”

He continued, “At the same time, I’m being asked constantly: How will we be able to get people back to their normal lives. To do that, one of the important steps will be figuring out how do we get our children safely back to school. We know for many kids, school is a place of security, nutrition and learning that is missing right now. These are issues we are all wrestling with and I will continue looking for solutions to beat this virus.”

Earlier today, I posted an essay at Precipice, my Substack page,  on the essentiality of extending grace wherever possible at this precarious moment. I understand that the case could be made that there's little grace to be detected in what I'm writing here. About that I say this: seeking to be an agent of grace at every opportunity does not preclude pointing out the dissemination of poison. Trumpism, when heated to a boil, is a poisonous flavor of Kool-Aid and must be recognized as such. It leads people under its spell to abandon all sense of responsibility in order to advance the glorification of their cult leader.

It cannot go unremarked upon.

 

 

 

Some folks really need to consider that they're playing with fire

It was too much to ask, wasn't it?

However noble the impulse, it turns out to have been a fool's errand to hope that post-America could rise to the level of unity that the United States of America could muster in such instances as responding to the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor.

Then again, maybe that was the outlier. Really, when else has the nation so rallied? The Civil War was the antithesis of coming together. There was a brief - very brief - moment of unity after the September 2001 attacks. We started politicizing hurricane responses a few short years later. After identity politics thoroughly polluted our institutions ranging from universities to corporations to the realm of arts and entertainment to religion, it had probably become impossible to assume a common purpose for anything predicated on our basic roles as Americans.

And then, in terms of our choices for president, we swung between a standard-bearer for the view that America had been inherently unfair throughout its history, was in need of fundamental transformation and had much to atone for on the world stage, to a huckster peddling a return to some kind of tawdry and vaguely conceived "greatness" that cobbled together a mishmash of elements from irreconcilable worldviews.

It was enough to make a continent-sized nation state dizzy indeed.

And then came this, a crisis with no precedent that could provide any set of guidelines. It was ripe for a cacophony of hot takes, accusations and reciprocations.

No one is permitted to have an assessment along the lines of, "Given the sociocultural circumstances going into this, we did about as well as could be expected." This crisis either has to be treated with the kind of urgency that leaves questions of permanent damage to individual sovereignty sidelined indefinitely, or minimized so that we can have a V-shaped economic recovery and put this episode behind us like a bad dream.

Let's here address what could be seen as refutations to my point. Both Gavin Newsom and Andrew Cuomo have praised President Trump's cooperation and quickness to provide material resources they've requested. That's encouraging indeed.

But we'd be remiss to overlook the fact that Newsom has said that the current crisis presents an "opportunity for reimagining a [more] progressive era as it relates to capitalism" and that "we see this as an opportunity to reshape the way we do business and how we govern." Cuomo's track record shows that he is no less an inhabitant of that end of the ideological spectrum, having announced legislation in January of this year to permanently ban fracking, and and a year earlier signing a bill legalizing abortion up to the moment of birth.

Democrats in Congress have twice now, since this virus has brought our economy to its knees, held up aid packages that would get cash money directly into the hands of businesses and individuals in order to load those packages up with wish-list nods to environmentalism and identity politics.

And left-of-center elected officials quite plainly have accomplices in the news-reporting industry - "the mainstream media." Two things about that: A.) It's undeniable and on display daily across an array of print, broadcast and online outlets, and B.) There are solid, responsible fact-gatherers and analysts at most of those same outlets. It's childish to paint them with such a broad brush that point B doesn't get acknowledged.

That the preponderance of the journalistic realm has leaned left has been a fact for decades. It went after Reagan and both Bushes with an aggressiveness that stood in glaring contrast to its treatment of the Clinton and Obama administrations. If there is a heightened intensity to its attack-mode way of operating in the Trump era, it's due to the fact that, in addition to the normal seething resentment that a Republican won the most recent election, Trump, as everyone who is not a diehard Trumpist can see, is uniquely obnoxious, narcissistic, petty, and impulsive among U.S. presidents, at least in the last 150 years.

And now, having set the table thusly, I say this: It is that factor - Trump's unfitness - that is the more significant influence on our difficulty with being effective in responding to the COVID-19 crisis. There is, of course, what he does and doesn't do that directly affects day-to-day attempts to meet the challenge, but, at least as importantly, how the blind fealty to him among his cult worshippers clouds their ability to take in the full array of considerations before us.

Let's start with the man himself, though. Only a Trumpist unwilling to take his full measure - a columnist willing to title a piece "The Very Remarkable Donald Trump," for instance - can overlook ominous expressions of authoritarianism such as this:

For the purpose of creating conflict and confusion, some in the Fake News Media are saying that it is the Governors decision to open up the states, not that of the President of the United States & the Federal Government. Let it be fully understood that this is incorrect....

....It is the decision of the President, and for many good reasons. With that being said, the Administration and I are working closely with the Governors, and this will continue. A decision by me, in conjunction with the Governors and input from others, will be made shortly!

or petty, unseemly and distracting preoccupations such as this:

Just watched Mike Wallace wannabe, Chris Wallace, on

@FoxNews

. I am now convinced that he is even worse than Sleepy Eyes Chuck Todd of Meet the Press(please!), or the people over at Deface the Nation. What the hell is happening to

@FoxNews

. It’s a whole new ballgame over there!

Now, on to what slavish devotion is bringing out in his slavish devotees. It's made Wayne Allen Root call for replacing Doctors Birx and Fauci with Larry Kudlow at the daily briefings. It's made Laura Ingraham call for Trump to announce to said doctors a firm May 1 date for "opening the country back up" and demanding that they deal with formulating a protocol to accommodate that.

It's led the likes of engineer-entrepreneur-Senate candidate Shiva Ayyadurai to float conspiracy theories about Dr. Fauci being a puppet of "Big Pharma." It's made it necessary for Dr. Fauci to need a security detail.

What do these people, from the Very Stable Genius on down, envision after this "opening the country back up" has been accomplished? I'm not even just talking about the very real public-health risks involved. I'm not even just talking about the reconsiderations American business will need to undertake regarding its heavily China-dependent supply chains. Do they not see that very real transformation has taken place regarding who we are culturally and spiritually? You do not sequester the entire populace in its homes for two months or more and expect it to re-emerge as if the whole episode were a mere hiccup in our history.

We're at a point at which people had better consider that their utterances have consequences. Yes, economic resuscitation is an integral factor among those that need to be balanced. Yes, this is taking a toll on the psyche of a people known for action-taking. But when we are at the point of ginning up raw, inflamed animosity toward an objective public-health expert, when the U.S. president shows himself to be utterly ignorant of long-established understandings of the purviews of the federal-level executive and legislative branches, as well as of the relative purviews of the federal government and state governments, and when a public intellectual who had at one time rightly earned respect as a champion of our civilization's bedrock principles has so completely swallowed the Kool-Aid as to deny that we're in a pandemic, we're at an alarming juncture indeed.

It's often said by perpetual optimists these days that "we'll get through this." Of course we will. The kind of shape we'll be in when we do, though, depends on whether ostensible adults can get a grip on themselves and choose to assume little responsibility.

 

Dr. Fauci just keeps speaking the plain truth, and still, the Trump cult worshippers seek to villlainize him

He was just speaking with his customary candor:

Dr. Anthony Fauci said on CNN's "State of the Union" Sunday that "no one is going to deny" that more lives could have been saved during the coronavirus crisis if the Trump administration had implemented social distancing guidelines prior to March.

Why it matters: The New York Times reported Saturday that the administration’s top public health experts, including Fauci, concluded on Feb. 21 that the U.S. would need to move toward aggressive social distancing even if it would disrupt the economy and millions of American lives.

• The National Security Council office that tracks pandemics received intelligence reports in early January that predicted the virus would spread to the United States, per the Times.
• It began raising options like keeping Americans home from work and shutting down cities the size of Chicago to stop the spread of the virus. The White House ultimately did not announce social distancing guidelines until March 16.

What they're saying: "As I've said many times, we look at it from a pure health standpoint," Fauci said. "We make a recommendation. Often the recommendation is taken. Sometimes it's not. But it is what it is. We are where we are right now."

• "I mean, obviously you could logically say that if you had a process that was ongoing and you started mitigation earlier, you could have saved lives. Obviously, no one is going to deny that. But what goes into those kinds of decisions is complicated."

But the throne sniffers are out in force on Twitter, portraying him as being motivated by a desire to subvert the Very Stable Genius. 

The past six weeks have done nothing to diminish their worship of the man-child in the Oval Office.

It's true that most of the media - save for the Trumpist outlets and networks - leans left. They have for decades. They had it in for Reagan and both Bushes. They have it in for Trump for two reasons: the fact that he won the last election and the Democrat didn't, which always fuels their aggressive bias. and the fact that anybody - left, right, or in between - whose eyeballs are not floating in Kool-Aid can see how obnoxious and off-putting he is.

But that's at most half the story. Trumpists are every bit as unhelpful in this crisis.

Using "journalism" to dismantle Western civilization's underpinnings

Pervasive media bias has been widely acknowledged for decades now. Still, we must not become inured to it. I'm not even talking about "fake news." The facts in this story are probably as stated. But is it ever laden with subjective qualifiers.

No, actually, there is one glaring falsehood, and it gets its first trotting-out in the title: "Anti-LGBT Florida Schools Getting School Vouchers." These schools are not "anti-LGBT." The accurate characterization would be "with admissions qualifications that students adhere to sound doctrine regarding sexuality."

Here is the sly way the authors nod to objectivity and proceed to hammer home their in-your-face position:

The private schools defend their views about sexual orientation and gender identity, saying they are found in the Bible, the foundation of their faith. School administrators have a right to infuse those beliefs into school lessons and policies, they say, and parents using scholarships have a right to choose those religious schools for their children.

“Students don’t need to go to that school if they feel that is going to be a problem for their families and their lifestyles,” said Howard Burke, executive director of the Florida Association of Christian Colleges and Schools.

Burke’s association counts as members nearly 40 schools that take Florida vouchers and espouse anti-gay policies. “Don’t try to conform our programs into something they’re not established to provide," he said.

The debate touches on civil rights, religious freedom, past discrimination cases and the future of Florida’s school choice programs. It comes as the U.S. Supreme Court this week hears arguments in a Montana case about whether state scholarships can go to religious schools. The outcome could hinder or fuel the expansion of Florida’s scholarship programs.

Florida scholarship laws prohibit private schools that accept the tuition vouchers — earmarked for students from low-income families and for those with disabilities — from discriminating against students based on “race, color or national origin."

So far, so good. Schools accepting tuition vouchers shouldn't be able to discriminate on that basis. There's even a mention of the Florida Association of Christian Schools and Colleges position, which is just a statement of the primacy of free choice in school selection, But then comes the apples-to-oranges comparison:

 But they do not protect LGBTQ youngsters, and neither federal nor state laws require such safeguards.

Flawed juxtaposition. There's nothing in Christian doctrine that says it's a sin to be of a particular race, color or national origin.

And this lady needs to understand that there's no right to send one's kid to a particular school. She disqualified herself from being able to choose a Christian school when she "married" her "partner":

About eight years ago, Nicole Haagenson’s wife, Cari, received Florida scholarships for her two oldest children and tried to enroll them in Master’s Academy of Vero Beach school, which they’d previously attended when Cari was married to a man. The school refused to accept the girls, she said, when they learned their mother was in a relationship with another woman.

"I don’t want to infringe on someone else’s religious belief,” Haagenson said. "But you should not be accepting public funding if you’re going to discriminate.”

Haagenson, a U.S. Air Force veteran and an information technology director at a Vero Beach company, ran unsuccessfully as a Democrat for the Florida House last year. She and her wife, who now parent a blended family with five children, want Florida’s voucher rules to change.

“Just because I’m gay doesn’t mean my kids can’t go to a great school,” she added.

Master’s Academy, which shares a campus with a church, describes “homosexual behavior” as “sinful and offensive to God" and explains neither gay students nor youngsters from homes that don’t uphold a “biblical lifestyle” can enroll.

Nice touch, the quotes around "biblical lifestyle."

Now, I suppose the argument can be made that Haagenson is justified in saying, "Hey, I want to send my kids to this particular school with a taxpayer-funded scholarship!"

Which may result in at least some Christian schools taking a pass on accepting scholarships if the program is amended:

The schools see the proposed legislation as an unconstitutional attack on their religious rights, and many likely wouldn’t change their policies, even if the scholarship law gets amended.

"I would say most schools would stop taking the scholarships. They are operating within their philosophy and their beliefs,” said Wesley Scott, executive director of the National Alliance of Christian Schools.

And can you believe this? The schools are allowed to set their own standards for teacher credentials, facility and curriculum! They "operate largely free of state oversight"! The horror!

As the Sentinel reported in its 2017 “Schools Without Rules” series, the private schools that take Florida scholarships operate largely free of state oversight, setting their own standards for teacher credentials, facilities and curriculum, which can fall short of the requirements the state imposes on its public schools.

Read the Orlando Sentinel series, "Schools Without Rules" »

The schools are also able to set their own admission standards, which could include rules about sexual orientation and gender identity as well as demands for church attendance and certain academic benchmarks, such as satisfactory test scores and good grades.

Of course, the authors take the historical tack, citing Christian schools that, in the past, did not accept black students, quite blatantly trying to lump that kind of discrimination in with the instance upon adhering to sound doctrine about sexuality. The gaping hole in this lame attempt to draw a parallel is exposed by the inclusion of a photo of Florida state senator Manny Diaz and Florida governor Ron DeSantis posing with Piney Grove Academy leaders Frances and Alton Bolden, both black, and two Academy students, both black. The caption says that "Piney Grove is one of 146 schools with anti-gay policies that the Sentinel found."

There's an expansion of the scope to show that the  "discrimination" can be found in other states. Indiana, Georgia and Maryland Christian schools make the authors' list of infamy.

And then the authors come full circle, wrapping up their "report" with more on the Haagenson sob story:

The rejection still stings for Cari and Nicole Haagenson, whose two oldest girls were refused admission when they wanted to return to Master’s Academy in Vero Beach. The school received at least $371,000 in state scholarship money to educate more than 60 students last year.

When Cari told her the children could not return to the school, Nicole initially assumed there had been a misunderstanding.

“I’m pretty sure they can’t discriminate against you,” she remembers telling her. "I was wrong. They definitely could, and they definitely did.”

The story is lengthy - one of those deep dives, doncha know - but it comes down to the question of what kind of say-so the government can have in a school's affairs if it's receiving government gravy. To what extent is a scholarship the same thing as good old receiving of tax-generated funds like public schools get? I think a strong case can be made that a scholarship is a little different, that it is a check to a family, given with the message, "go forth and find the educational institution that best suits the values you want to equip your kid with."

But if that argument can be shown to not hold up, then I'm all for tearing the whole playhouse down. That's right. Get government at the state or federal level completely out of the education business. This is one of those frontlines in the war for our culture that must not be dismissed with a roll of the eyes. It's not a crank and far-fetched position. In fact, when one brings it up in a debate with people like this article's authors, they have to fall back on the "education-is-a-public-good-like-roads" position. It is not. There's a narrow window of opportunity for a parent to instill as much of the family's values and sense of what's needed for someone to effectively engage the world throughout life, about eighteen years at the outside. That window must be protected. The alternative is saying that government should instill some kind of core set of values to be embraced by everyone growing up in our society. (Of course, there is such a core set of values, but government's hands should be nowhere near it.

We all know what the authors of this story mean to do: further entrench the notion that there is something inherently bigoted about Christian doctrine.

These schools are not "anti-gay." I would wager that their principals, admissions counselors and faculties, upon having to decline to enroll a gay student, or the student of a gay couple, pray for those applicants as they continue their search for a school that is a proper fit. Real Christians are not anti-anybody. The Gospel message is the ultimate in inclusivity.

But the key thing to remember here is that both parties, school and applicant, are free to respond to circumstances. They have agency. No one is being denied any  rights under the current structure of this scholarship law.

A little factoid that Leslie Postal and Annie Martin, the authors of this story, would no doubt rather didn't get brought up in the conversation.