Europe is one restless place these days

Much is made, and much of it properly so, over the tensions in Trump's relationships with the leaders of key ally nations (as Rich Lowry puts it, "Trump tends to view foreign countries like contractors trying to scam him in a development deal"), but a few of them are up to their eyeballs in domestic political challenges that add a layer of complexity to the mix. One could say that their holds on power are tenuous.

There's the situation of Merkel in Germany:

Chancellor Angela Merkel, who staked her legacy on welcoming hundreds of thousands of migrants into Germany, agreed on Monday to build border camps for asylum seekers and to tighten the border with Austria in a political deal to save her government.

It was a spectacular turnabout for a leader who has been seen as the standard-bearer of the liberal European order but who has come under intense pressure at home from the far right and from conservatives in her governing coalition over her migration policy.

Although the move to appease the conservatives exposed her growing political weakness, Ms. Merkel will limp on as chancellor. For how long is unclear. The nationalism and anti-migrant sentiment that has challenged multilateralism elsewhere in Europe is taking root — fast — in mainstream German politics.

Ms. Merkel agreed to the latest policy after an insurrection over migration policy led by her interior minister, Horst Seehofer, threatened to bring down her coalition.

Then there's the situation of Macron in France:

President Emmanuel Macron will gather both houses of parliament at the opulent Versailles Palace on Monday for what has become an annual address on his plans for overhauling wide swathes of French society and institutions.

His office has given little indication of the issues Macron will cover during his hour-long speech, which comes as his ratings continue to tumble.

This week, lawmakers will begin debating his call for constitutional changes aimed at streamlining the legislative process, including shrinking the number of seats in the National Assembly and the Senate by a third.

He has already pushed through corporate tax cuts, eased labour laws, reformed the university entrance system and revamped state rail operator SNCF despite stiff union resistance.

But a growing number of critics, including some in his own centrist Republic on the Move party (LREM), accuse the former investment banker of neglecting the concerns of voters on the lower rungs of the economic ladder.

Recent comments that France spends "a crazy amount of dough" on social security programmes did little to soften his image as the "president of the rich", as he is called by opponents.

Macron's regal, top-down style has also raised hackles, with some MPs on both the left and right boycotting his Versailles speech as the latest sign of a "monarchical" drift.

They cite in particular his threat to override resistance to his parliamentary overhaul by calling a referendum "if necessary".

"The president is reducing parliament to a simple spectator," Marie-Noelle Lienemann, the Senate's Socialist vice-president, posted on Twitter, announcing she would join a boycott of the speech.

The leftwing France Unbowed party, which is also snubbing the event, said they would organise a protest on social media.

"Tomorrow we're going to get a long speech on 'my life, my work' that will be all about him," Christian Jacob of the rightwing Republicans party complained on French television Sunday.

Macron has also taken heat over the cost of bussing out hundreds of lawmakers to France's former royal seat and deploying dozens of Republican Guards who will flank his ceremonial entry -- estimated at 300,000 euros ($350,000).

- Seeking balance -

The Versailles speech could be a chance for Macron to burnish his social justice bonafides in the face of wavering poll numbers.

"I hope he's going to talk about poverty," said Senate president Gerard Larcher, referring to a plan which was supposed to be announced this month but has now been pushed back to September.

An Odoxa survey published Thursday found that just 29 percent of respondents thought Macron's policies "fair", and while 75 percent declared him "dynamic", only 45 percent considered him "likeable".

His speech also comes amid reports his government will announce thousands of job cuts in France's fiscal and customs administrations in the coming days, reviving fears over Macron's pledge to cut 120,000 public sector jobs.

"The president will lay out the principles of his action for the coming year and put them in perspective, but it's not a speech for going into the details of his announcements," a source in his office told AFP.

Macron has vowed to slash state spending, among the highest among wealthy countries relative to its economy, in order to balance the French budget for the first time in over 40 years.

He has said he wants to make social benefits more effective in terms of getting recipients out of poverty.

Yet the president himself has given fodder to critics after recent reports that he and his wife Brigitte had ordered a lavish new set of porcelain tableware for the Elysee Palace worth some 500,000 euros.

"A shift is expected from policies based solely on accounting and budget logic," LREM lawmaker Frederic Barbier wrote in Le Monde daily on Saturday.

"Even if we see some social advances, the balance still hasn't been found," he said.

Then there's the situation of Theresa May in Britain:

 Theresa May is fighting for her political life today after Boris Johnson accused her of killing Brexit and his allies backed him to be a 'brilliant' PM.  

Mr Johnson used his decision to quit as Foreign Secretary to declare war on her Chequers plan for leaving the EU.

Warning that the UK was heading for colonial status, he said the Brexit dream was ‘dying – suffocated by self-doubt’. 

He claimed Mrs May was sending negotiators ‘into battle with the white flags fluttering above them’ and surrendering control to Brussels. Following a chaotic day of resignations and rumours, Downing Street is now braced for a potential leadership challenge.

Sources insisted the Prime Minister would stand and fight for the national interest while her allies derided Mr Johnson, saying he offered no solutions on Brexit. 

Boris also faced criticism in many quarters for taking the time to stage the photos of himself signing the resignation letter and was branded a 'poundshop Churchill'.

In a reference to his decision to resign only after David Davis had quit as Brexit Secretary on Sunday night, one May loyalist said: ‘There’s not much honour in being second over the top.’

Mrs May also swiftly reshuffled her cabinet, bringing in Jeremy Hunt from Health to replace Boris as Foreign Secretary and Dominic Raab to replace Mr Davis.

But, in a significant intervention, Jacob Rees-Mogg last night backed Mr Johnson, saying he would make a ‘brilliant’ prime minister.   

What are the particulars and what are the parallels among these situations? With regard to particulars, in Germany, basically, the country finally gets it: It doesn't work to bring in hordes of Muslims from culturally alien lands who have no interest in assimilation. In France, it's a case of a politician who ran as a centrist but, once in office, saw the acute need to implement free-market measures, and is now experiencing the ire of statists. In Britain, it's a case of the ire coming from the right: Boris Johnson et al want a Brexit deal that really and truly asserts British sovereignty.

The main parallel is a restlessness in these societies that puts the lie to the notion that strikingly charismatic political figures, who seem to be bringing some unprecedented kind of vision to the table,  have more weight behind them than the trends of history. Here in the United States, the leftists thought they had such a figure in Barack Obama, and then the populists thought they had one in Donald Trump.  But the lessons learned are deeper than what some compelling personality says or does. In Europe, the trend we ought to discern is a strong desire for sovereignty and free markets.

Is it too late to hope that the next phase of the trend might usher in a yearning for the transcendence that found its formal form in the Church and that informed the continent's rise to greatness?

That might be a wish too far. It's probably best not to get too speculative. But one can pray.

The Wisconsin Supreme Court decision about the battle of the Marquette University professors, and what it says about where we are as a culture

Margot Cleveland at The Federalist has been comprehensively and incisively covering the case of Marquette University Associate Professor John McAdams. It appears her interest in the matter was piqued by the fact that she is a Marquette graduate, although she never had McAdams or the other instructor in question, philosophy professor Cheryl Abbate, as teachers. It's also an interesting situation from a legal standpoint, and Cleveland has had a career in the field of law, clerking for a federal judge. She's also presumably a Catholic; she's taught at Notre Dame for many years.

The basics of the case are these:

McAdams’ November 9, 2014 post at his Marquette Warrior blog condemned philosophy instructor Cheryl Abbate for announcing to her Theory of Ethics class that “everybody agrees” on “gay rights,” and later telling a student who believed gay marriage deserved classroom discussion that “[i]n this class, homophobic comments, racist comments, will not be tolerated.”

McAdams’ blog post identified Abbate by name and linked to her webpage. Later, after national outlets picked up the story, Abbate began receiving emails and letters, some positive, some negative, and a few vile and threatening. Marquette held McAdams responsible for the third-party threats and suspended him.

A faculty hearing ensued. The resulting recommendation to Marquette's president was a suspension for one or two semesters for McAdams. McAdams, in turn, sued for breach of contract.

In Cleveland's post from January about the matter, she outlined the ten relevant points about it:

• Marquette promised not to fire faculty members for free speech 

• McAdams' blog post advocated academic freedom

•  McAdams did not 'harass,' 'attack' or 'shame' Abbate

•  McAdams violated no university rule by blogging about the incident
• There was name calling, but not from McAdams ( A few days after the blog post, Abbate called McAdams a “bigoted moron,” an “uncritical, creepy homophobic person with bad argumentation skills,” “a flaming bigot, sexist and homophobic idiot,” and for good measure added he had an “ugly face.”The chair of Marquette’s Philosophy Department also had some choice words, referring to McAdams in writing as a “right wing lunatic.” The chair also called the student who had complained about Abbate—identified in court proceedings only as JD—a “insulin [sic] little twerp,” a “little twit,” and a “jackass.”)

•  It is disingenuous to call Abbate a student (Yes, she was a graduate student, but like many graduate students she also teaches at the university.
  McAdams’ blog post focused on Abbate’s conduct solely as an instructor. He never once called her a student. )

•  Abbate attempted to get McAdams fired
• McAdams’ right to “full and free enjoyment” of academic freedom cannot be disregarded because third parties heckled Abbate.
• Abbate's transfer wasn't over this incident
• Marquette's hearing committee was a sham

 The matter made its way to the Wisconsin Supreme Court, which found in McAdams' favor.

Interestingly, as Cleveland points out, even the dissent makes one of the most obvious points about the whole thing: by making a certain kind of choice regarding its institutional academic freedom - namely, jettisoning adherence to Catholic doctrine in its hiring decisions - it forfeited the right to punish McAdams on grounds of violating any kind of speech code:

Many wrongly believe academic freedom rests solely with faculty members, but the dissent, authored by Justice Ann Walsh Bradley, highlights that academic freedom includes two components: academic freedom of the faculty and academic freedom of the institution. Marquette’s “institutional academic freedom is inclusive of four ‘essential freedoms’: ‘to determine for itself on academic grounds who may teach, what may be taught, how it shall be taught, and who may be admitted to study.’”

As a Catholic, Jesuit institution, Marquette possesses the right to exercise these four “essential freedoms” consistent with its guiding values, described by the dissent as the “holistic development of students” and a “commitment to the Jesuit tradition and Catholic social teaching.” Marquette could, then, have hired only faculty members willing to instruct students consistent with the university’s professed Catholic mission, in which case it could fire faculty members who do not live up to that commitment.

But it didn’t, as is obvious from the university’s decision to employ an instructor who, in contradiction of clear church teaching, taught students that “everybody agrees” on “gay rights.” Marquette instead promised faculty members the right to individual academic freedom, without regard to the university’s Catholic character. By committing itself “not to impair the full and free enjoyment of legitimate personal or academic freedoms,” Marquette forfeited its right to reign in McAdams’ speech as purportedly contrary to the university’s mission.

In its news release, Marquette hinted that it intends to reassert its institutional right to academic freedom, explaining that “in light of today’s decision, Marquette will work with its faculty to re-examine its policies, with the goal of providing every assurance possible that this never happens again” (emphasis added). Of course, by “this,” Marquette means public criticism of an instructor. If only the Jesuit university meant assuring faculty members do not silence student speech, especially speech defending Catholic teaching against a professor’s heresy. That is something I could get behind.

Further up in her most recent essay, she makes another large point that applies to so much coming across our radar screen today: Our culture is so toxic that an avalanche of vitriol out of anyone's control is likely to be catalyzed by anyone who speaks up for God's natural order.

An encapsulation of the UN's overall worthlessness

US ambassador to the UN Nikki Haley has a piece at NRO today on the idiotic UN report on poverty in our country.

The report demonstrates the collective cluelessness that arises when an international body is formed that gives equal weight to scum regimes and sane, grown-up countries trying to live by humane values and achieve the various forms of advancement that make their societies livable.

ast month, the United Nations released a report about poverty in America. A single researcher spent two weeks in our country, visiting four states, Puerto Rico, and Washington, D.C. His report was harshly critical, condemning America for “punish[ing] those who are not in employment,” among other farcical notions.

Everyone knows there is poverty in America. Thousands of public officials at the federal, state, and local levels of government attempt to address poverty, as they should. Thousands more nonprofit, charitable, and religious organizations honorably dedicate themselves to fighting poverty in our country.

Think about how this self-congratulatory assemblage of tyrants and grandstanders has chosen to spend its time, money and human energy:

 It is patently ridiculous for the U.N. to spend its scarce resources — more of which come from the United States than from any other country — studying poverty in the wealthiest country in the world, a country where the vast majority is not in poverty, and where public and private-sector social safety nets are firmly in place to help those who are.

Instead, the U.N. might have studied poverty in the Congo, where 60 percent of the entire population lacks the basics of food and electricity. Or Burundi, where the typical annual income is $280. Or Venezuela, where narco-state dictators have driven a once prosperous country into the ground with an inflation rate over 25,000 percent, and where diseases that were once thought eliminated are now reappearing. 

When there are many dozens of countries where poverty consumes most of the population, and where corrupt governments deliberately make the problem much worse, why would the U.N. study poverty in America? The answer is politics.

Take a closer look at what the U.N. report says we should do about poverty. It reads like a socialist political manifesto of higher taxes, government-run health care, and “decriminaliz[ing] being poor” (never mind that nowhere in America is it a crime to be poor). 

The report also distorts and misrepresents the facts about poverty in America in ways that a biased political opponent might. For example, it states that 18.5 million Americans live in “extreme poverty” and 5.3 million live in “Third World conditions of absolute poverty.” In fact, these numbers fail to incorporate the vast majority of welfare assistance provided to low-income households, such as food stamps, Medicaid, and refundable tax credits. The report also exaggerates poverty by excluding pension and Social Security assets from its calculations. The truth is that America’s median household income has hit record highs. Wages have risen faster under President Trump for low- and middle- income earners than for high earners. And for the first time on record America now has more job openings than unemployed workers.

The best way for the US to proceed on any policy matter, from North Korea to African poverty to Iran-Arab tensions, is to ignore the UN. Leave it completely out of the proceedings. As an entity with  a mission distinct from that of any of the countries comprising it - well, that's not exactly correct; its mission hews pretty closely to those of, say, Venezuela, Iran and Russia -  it has not and cannot have any idea what a nation-state like the United States is all about. Its input is of absolutely no value.

 

Are you surprised?

Comparisons to the Agreed Framework and the Six-Way Talks seem to grow more apt by the day:

North Korea slammed what it called the United States' "gangster-like mindset" in denuclearization talks just hours after US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo described the high-level negotiations as "productive" and insisted progress was made.

"We had many hours of productive conversations," Pompeo told reporters Saturday in Pyongyang before boarding a flight to Tokyo. "These are complicated issues, but we've made progress on almost all the central issues. Some places, a great deal of progress. Other places, there's still more work to be done." 

North Korea, however, poured cold water on the talks, saying the "attitude" of the US was "regrettable" and not in the spirit of the June 12 summit in Singapore between President Donald Trump and North Korean leader Kim Jong Un. 

"We expected the US to bring constructive measures to build confidence in accordance with the spirit of the US-NK Summit," the statement carried by state-run news agency KCNA said, according to a CNN translation of the Korean version of the statement. "However, the attitude of the US in the first high-level talks held on the 6th and 7th were indeed regrettable."

The statement added, according to an English-language version of the statement released by KCNA: "The US is fatally mistaken if it went to the extent of regarding that the (Democratic People's Republic of Korea) would be compelled to accept, out of its patience, the demands reflecting its gangster-like mindset."

The country called the outcome of the discussion "worrisome" and argued that the "cancerous issues" the US delegation raised were the same ones that had "amplified" distrust and the risk of war with past administrations, resulting in previous talks ending in failure.

Trump just plain jumped the gun. The whole thing was handled ass-backwards. If you want to have a summit with Kim - an ill-advised idea under any circumstances and in any administration - you start with much lower-level contacts and make clear what it's all going to lead up to. Yes, such an approach is going to fall apart long before any summit, but at least there's no "forward movement" based on vague assurances and impossibly broadly stated goals.

Pompeo probably made way too clear for North Korea's comfort what the U.S. position is: North Korea gives up its nuclear program and its missile inventory and then maybe we talk about community-of-nations and economic-cooperation stuff.

But his boss, as he has throughout his real-estate and brand-hustling careers, had this idea that both sides in any negotiation have an it's-just-business mindset in which nothing is taken personally - or, in the case of a nation, the cultural and national-purpose levels are as up for bargaining as anything else on the table. Trump is used to situations in which, no matter how raw a relationship is rubbed, no matter how many insults are hurled, no matter how the bargain raises the stakes unacceptably to the other side, a "master deal-maker" can get to a bottom line that holds.

None of this is to say that the position held by Pompeo, Bolton and their staffs is wrong. On the contrary, it's exactly right. It appealed to the Very Stable Genius because it was "tough," and because, by golly, nobody does tough like Donald Trump, getting to a truly denuclearized North Korea was basically going to be a walk in the park.

So, for his own narcissistic reasons, Trump entered into the same folly that his three predecessors did for their own particular reasons.

But each time hopes are ramped up and then the effort deteriorates, the danger level ratchets up a bit more.

Memo to Trump and indeed anybody considering some historic, visionary engagement with North Korea: Forget it. Just treat it like the mortal enemy it's going to be as long as it exists.

It's this kind of stuff - today's edition

The Very Stable Genius's rallies are, even more than his tweets, the mode of expression by which we get the most unvarnished version of his "message," such as it is. You can always count on a hefty dose of bombast, incoherent word salads, and language that requires making kids leave the room.

But it's been a while since he went on the kind of tear we saw last evening in Great Falls, Montana.

Where to start? How about with his utterly unnecessary - well, as we'll see, most of his remarks were utterly unnecessary - mockery of the Peggy Noonan-penned phrase signature slogan of the George H.W. Bush administration?

“Thousand points of light. What does that mean? I know one thing. Make America Great Again we understand. Putting America first we understand. Thousand points of light, I never quite got that one. What the hell is that?”

How about doubling down on his enthusiasm for the Foxconn deal in Wisconsin, a deal based on tax credits the cost of which is going to outweigh any benefit?

And what was up with choosing Elton John, of all celebrities, as the performer with whom to compare crowd size in the obligatory boast about that topic? (Maybe Elton was fresh on his mind given what he sent Mike Pompeo to Pyongyang with - more about that shortly.) And that business about "hopefully the brain is attached to the mouth"?

Or in reference to what was this statement? "It's a rigged deal, folks, it's a rigged deal. I used to say it.  It's a rigged deal. It's a disgrace." It seemed untethered to anything on either side of it. And the insertion of the sentence "I used to say it" right into the middle of that particular outburst. Is there any significance to it?

And what was the point of bringing up Elizabeth Warren and taunting her about taking a DNA test? ("I will give you a million dollars to your favorite charity, paid for by Trump, if you take the test so that it shows you're an Indian.") Also another example of grammatical sloppiness. Will he give the million dollars to her or to the charity?

Then there's the remark about the first responders who took the grandstander off the Statue of Liberty. ("I wouldn't have done it. I would have said, 'Let's get some nets.'")

And juxtapose these two:

"Putin's fine. He's fine. We're all fine. We're all people."

with how Europe . . .

". . . kills us with NATO and then [Germany] goes and makes an oil and gas deal with Russia. So they want us to go and protect them against Russia yet they pay billions for Russian oil and gas and we're the schmucks that are paying for the whole thing."

Okay, so that's a bit - certainly not all the eye-poppers, but several of them - about the rally.

Then there's Pompeo's trip to Pyongyang, which is already going to be a challenge, given intelligence that's come to light since the Kim-Trump summit about continued missile-and-nuke activity.

But you have to wonder how Pompeo feels about this little assignment:

U.S. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo left for North Korea on Thursday for denuclearization talks and brought two gifts for leader Kim Jong-un. 

One is a letter from U.S. President Donald Trump and the other an Elton John CD with his song "Rocket Man."

Sources in Washington said the gifts reflect Trump's expectations that Kim will follow through on the pledges in an agreement the two signed at their summit.

One diplomatic source in Washington said, "The 'Rocket Man' CD was the subject of discussion during Trump's lunch with Kim. Kim mentioned that Trump referred to him as 'rocket man' when tensions ran high last year" after a series of nuclear tests and missile launches by the North. "Trump then asked Kim if he knew the song and Kim said no."

Has our intelligence apparatus determined that Kim will react as a good sport? Conversely, what is the chance he'll take great offense?

I can't think of any one-word characterization of this presidency more apt than "bizarre."

Just flat-out bizarre.

Pruitt out at EPA

Sigh of relief here at LITD.

Deputy EPA chief Andrew Wheeler to replace him for the time being.

Don't know much about him, but a cursory look at his bio indicates to me that he has his head on straight.

What I still don't understand is why Trump didn't go with the great Myron Ebell in the first place.

Recklessly squandering the source of our greatness

This is going to be another of those posts that largely consists of generous excerpts from something I link to. It's that important.

The linked piece is by Heidi Munson and it's at The Resurgent. It is about something that is one of the main themes here at LITD: the question of how much more societal brittleness our nation can withstand.

The statistics would indicate that the continuity of our essential identity is unlikely. Consider this:

We are the anomaly. Except for the state of Massachusetts, America has the longest lasting constitution in the history of the world. In contrast, France has had 16 constitutions since ours has been ratified. Venezuela has had 25, Haiti 23, Ecuador 20. In the last century alone, Russia has had four, and Poland has had seven. Since we haven’t lived through the tumult of revolutions, we take our stability for granted and assume it will last in perpetuity. We are fools if we think that.

Which, of course, begs the question "why."

The question we ought to pause and consider is: what has been the cause of our stability? Americans are no different than any other humans around the globe, so it’s not us. We could credit the Constitution, but that didn’t magically appear out of a vacuum. The creators of that document did so from the perspective of a particular worldview, and we would not have gotten that document from any other. 

Those involved in framing our Constitution had a specifically Judeo-Christian worldview. No, not all of them were Christians, nor were they attempting to form a theocracy (in fact, it was because of their worldview that they didn’tform a theocracy). Their worldview provided them with an accurate understanding of human nature: humans are terribly flawed and require laws. However, did we mention that humans are terribly flawed? Therefore, those with power are also terribly flawed, and thus, checks must be placed on that power. As James Madison said, “But what is government itself, but the greatest of all reflections on human nature. If men were angels, no government would be necessary. If angels were to govern men, neither external nor internal controls on government would be necessary.” 

Because they knew the destructive nature of humans with ultimate power (aka, “government”), they placed “the chains of the Constitution,” on them. They did so, however, with the understanding that the citizens of the republic would be self-governing. This is a necessary component for freedom. As Benjamin Franklin said, “Only a virtuous people are capable of freedom. As nations become corrupt and vicious (stemming from the word “vice”), they have more need of masters.”

Yeah. Those “old, dead white guys,” as they are so often described, weren’t so dumb, huh? 

What we see going on today is the structure of our Judeo-Christian worldview—which no one notices any more because “it’s always been this way”—being used (or, rather, abused). At the same time, we are violently ripping out the foundation upon which we’ve been standing these 200+ years. We want the benefits of the Judeo-Christian worldview (e.g., liberty, peace, prosperity, etc.), but we want to be rid of the worldview itself (which is what our entire nation rests on). We don’t realize that thousands of years of history and philosophy went into the crafting of the two most profound and momentous political documents in the history of mankind: the Declaration of Independence and the U.S. Constitution.

To paraphrase G.K. Chesterton, before removing a fence, wisdom would suggest you look into why it was put there in the first place. Likewise, we foolishly think we can destroy our foundation and no harm will come to us as a result. Before you go back to hating people on Twitter today, perhaps we could take a moment to ponder what America will be like after we have torn her down brick by brick. Unless you’re a fan of less freedom, you may not like what you see. 

There is no substitute for what we have to do to rescue America. 

 

The 2018 LITD Independence Day post

In recent years, when preparing to write this post, the question before me has been whether or not my rhetorical device of referring to this country as "post-America" is still applicable.

Believe me, I understand that there's no arguing with the perspective that, in myriad undeniably significant ways, no human beings have ever had it better than Americans have it on July 4, 2018. Cell phones, laser surgery, economic opportunity, declining crime rates and all that.

But there's also no denying the extremely poor state of the nation's spiritual health. Pick your arena for citing examples: entertainment, education, law, "journalism." A nation in good shape would not have elected either its current president nor his immediate predecessor.

The polarization gets worse by the day. Any attempt to construct a chart of the fracturing is nearly impossibly complex. The days when the Right consisted merely of an Establishment and a conservative movement seem like a quaint and distant memory. We now have the intrusion of the Trump phenomenon, which has, along with itself, splintered the conservative movement into numerous shards. On the Left, the New York House-seat Democrat primary victory of Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez over incumbent Joe Crowley crystallizes an even further leftward shift in a party that was already unrecognizably leftist when it catapulted an Alinskyite community organizer to its top rung in the previous decade.

Still, the forces of fealty to the Three Pillars of conservatism are not extinguished.

New to this site? Alright, Independence Day is as good a time as any for us to revisit the Three Pillars, so we're all on the same page. I'm not the first pundit to articulate them. In fact, the towering giant of our worldview, Ronald Reagan,  spoke of them.

But I've come up with my own formulation. I wanted to keep them devoid of shorthand. I was looking for ways to express them that would encompass any and all specific questions about the way human beings ought to organize themselves into livable societies, and I think I have.

They are as follows:

1.) Free-market economics, which begins with the premise that a good or service is worth what buyer and seller agree that it is worth - period. No other party has any business being involved in that agreement - certainly not government.

2.) An understanding that Western civilization has been a unique blessing to humankind. (Judeo-Christian morality, Greco-Roman model of representative democracy, the great scientific and artistic achievements.)

3.) A foreign policy based on what history tells us about human nature. This plays itself out as our allies knowing we have their backs, our adversaries respecting us, and our enemies fearing us.

Anyway, as I say, there is a swath of America that understands them and remains committed to seeing them upheld and implemented on the culture and policy levels. Despite the best efforts of the two other main groupings in post-America, that swath has not been extinguished.

In a post yesterday, I put that thusly:

It's interesting, isn't it? Trump lives rent-free inside the heads of enraged hard leftists, and those of us who, while applauding the good moves, particularly judicial appointments and deregulation, find him ideologically unmoored and loathsome on a character level, live rent-free inside the heads of the [Emerald] Robinson and [Kurt] Schlichter types.

Meanwhile, we just proceed according to our principles. To the two groups above - progressives and populists, for shorthand - our continued existence is something they dare not acknowledge.

This is encouraging particularly with regard to the understanding that the guidance provided by God's mighty hand is, as always, vital to this country continuing to exist in some recognizable form. Not many people do understand that anymore. But some do, and we're not going to be silenced or brainwashed.

Speaking of shorthand, here's a tidy way of putting that. There are still people in this country who will, upon reading aloud the Declaration of Independence, listening to the United States Marine Band rendition of the National Anthem, or the Mormon Tabernacle Choir's version of the Battle Hymn of the Republic today, be unable to refrain from openly weeping and trembling. The love of human freedom and gratitude to God for giving it to us burns hot within them.

That's how we know all is not lost.

All is not lost. Even if only as an idea, tattered from battle, like the flag Francis Scott Key saw from his jail-cell window, the United States of America lives.

God, as always, is up to something great in human history.

Happy Independence Day.

Tuesday roundup

Great David Harsanyi piece at The Federalist entitled, "Hey, Democrats, The System Doesn't Need to Be 'Fixed' Every Time You Lose an Election":

If you’re under the impression that the system exists merely to facilitate your partisan agenda, it’s not surprising that you also believe it’s “broken” every time things don’t go your way. This is why so many Democrats argue that we should “fix” the Electoral College when they lose a presidential election and “fix” the filibuster when they run the Senate and now “fix” the Supreme Court when they don’t run the Senate.

Regarding the Supreme Court, what does he recommend? Go into the voting booth assuming that at least one SCOTUS pick is going to be part of what you're choosing:

In any event, there is simple solution: voters should assume that every president will name at least one Supreme Court justice and vote accordingly. The last president who didn’t was Jimmy Carter, and the one before him was Andrew Johnson.

Bernard Hudson, a fellow at Harvard's Belfer Center, on the apparent denouement of the conflict in Yemen:

The deadly civil war in Yemen has reached a climax after three ugly years. No one can know for sure, but it looks like the coalition led by Saudi Arabia is on the verge of a major victory that could push the Iranian-backed rebels into an enduring cease-fire.

The legitimate Yemeni government, backed by Saudi Arabia, Bahrain and the United Arab Emirates, is poised to retake control of the vital port of Hodeidah, Yemen’s fourth-largest city and its principal port on the Red Sea. Yemen depends on imports to survive and Hodeidah is the port of entry for most outside goods. International aid groups worry a long-term siege there could disrupt the already-limited flow of medicine and food into the country. But the pain is worth the gain – especially for U.S. interests – because of Hodeidah’s strategic importance.

Jim Treacher at PJ Media on Seattle's new anti-drinking-straws ordinance:

If you're caught using one of the newly verboten drinking implements by Seattle's Straw Gestapo, and you don't have a note from your doctor, you will be fined $250. Hey, it's a small price to pay for protecting the planet, right?

What a liberal paradise Seattle is. You can smoke all the weed you want and the cops can't touch you, but you'll need to bring your own straw with you on the resulting Taco Bell run.

Remember how excited everybody got when Narenda Modi was first elected Prime Minister of India? He was going to usher in an era of free-market initiatives that would turbocharge India's economy. Sadanand Dhume at the American Enterprise Institute says that, as Indian politics heat up in the sunup to next year's elections, we're seeing his underperformance in stark relief. He also notes a deterioration in public discourse that may make you react along the lines of, "Oh, no, not there, too."


She's far from the first to take note of the phenomenon of the fading of civic organizations and what it's done to our social fabric - there was the book some years ago by sociologist Robert D. Putnam called Bowling Alone,  and a National Review piece by Slade O'Brien on the topic, to cite two examples, but today's Townhall piece by Salena Zito is an important contribution to the conversation.

It can be argued that NATO members need to step up their efforts to meet the 2 percent goal regarding their defense spending, but, as Andrew Malcolm at Hot Air explains, President Shoot-Off-His-Mouth's inflammatory letters to those countries' leaders is counterproductive, coming as it does before the Brussels summit:

Trump is underlining his unhappiness with NATO by having his first formal summit with Putin immediately after the NATO meeting.

Sowing divisions among NATO allies is a prime goal of Putin’s. Trump’s aggressive tactics fit that perfectly.

Few things would make Putin happier than to see reduced U.S. military forces based in Europe in a  strategic position to discourage or thwart Soviet, er, I mean, Russian military incursion of the invasive type Putin ordered in Georgia and annexing Crimea from Ukraine.

And now we come to the most important piece in this roundup: Jonah Goldberg's latest at NRO, entitled "Another Lazy 'Never Trump' Screed."  It's a takedown of a piece at The American Spectator by One America News Network White House correspondent Emerald Robinson. (Goldberg provides the link to that.)

I'm going to excerpt at length, given the importance of his points. There's this one, for instance. These Trump shills are shamelessly disingenuous in lumping all manner of disparate figures together based on their only common trait: finding Trump objectionable to one degree or another:

Her gloating, smarmy, gleeful thesis is that the Never Trumpers are dead or dying. She means this mostly figuratively but she does go out of her way to indulge in some unfortunate literalism in the case of Charles Krauthammer. (Going by the reactions on Twitter, apparently if you share her Trumpist exuberance, her celebratory tone doesn’t become distasteful when it comes to her discussion of Charles’s demise.) There is precious little “analysis” here, and most of it amounts to gloating assertions that the careers of people she labels “Never Trump” are in trouble.

She then goes on to explain why it happened, or at least claims to.

Now, before I go on, as much as I enjoy reading the musings of someone I’ve never heard of at a cable-news network I’ve never watched explain — in the pages of The American Spectator — the declining relevance of people at Fox, Bloomberg, National Review, and The Weekly Standard, I should make a general point. There is nothing new here. Pretty much every couple of weeks, someone writes another essay — usually timed to some real or perceived Trump triumph — about how the so-called Never Trumpers (almost always defined loosely, in bad faith, or not at all) have been consigned to the ash heap of history. Rarely has so much effort been exerted to prove irrelevance before. If Bill Kristol or Steve Hayes or David French or yours truly don’t matter anymore, why does our existence haunt these people so?

Then there’s the issue of whether it’s actually, you know, true.

Ms. Robinson writes:

Of course, Kristol was not alone in his contempt for Trump — he was only the most vocal and unhinged. Alongside him were other conservatives like Jennifer Rubin and George Will and Michael Gerson at the Washington Post; Bret Stephens at the Wall Street Journal; David Brooks and Ross Douthat at the New York Times; Jonah Goldberg and David French at National Review; Ramesh Ponnuru at Bloomberg; and Erick Erickson at RedState. A number of others, people like David Frum and Ana Navarro, committed political seppuku early and endorsed Hillary Clinton. Needless to say, the careers of most of these people have been curtailed dramatically.

First off, grouping all of these people together is lazy and dumb. You can’t compare the approach toward Trump of, say, Ramesh, David, and Erick to that of Jen Rubin or Ana Navarro. Or, I should say, you can’t if you’re a remotely informed or serious person. That’s the problem with nearly all of these “Never Trump” screeds: They use the term so promiscuously and selectively that it becomes little more than a straw man.

There's also Robinson's attempt to depict these people as being on the backside of their career trajectories:

Second, is it “needless to say” that the careers of most of these people have been curtailed dramatically? If it were, she wouldn’t need to assert it absent any proof. Bret Stephens moved to the New York Times; is that really a marked demotion career-wise? Since Trump was elected, Steve Hayes has been promoted to editor of The Weekly Standard. That doesn’t sound like career freefall to me. I don’t know about everyone mentioned here, but most seem to be doing okay. I was certainly worried that my positions would hurt sales of new book Suicide of the West — and they probably did — but it still debuted at No. 5 on the NYT bestseller list. Oh, and my podcast is doing great. More broadly, National Review and The Weekly Standard are thriving.

In short, Robinson doesn’t know what she’s talking about. My suspicion is that because she and her network are trying to become state TV in the Trump era, she’s pandering to her audience by telling them what they want to hear. There’s a lot of that going around these days. She might also be confused, thinking that the audience she is pandering to is the only one that matters. While it’s true that the people who take this woman seriously do not like many of her targets, by this standard, Alex Jones can claim our careers are tanking too. 

Goldberg doesn't miss anything about her vacuousness. Her penchant for trite phraseology gets duly noted.

Her “analysis” is equally deficient in fact and seriousness. It conflates disparate people into a single easy-to-slander label and then dresses up the same tired clichés and lazy epithets (RINOS!!111!) that I’ve been reading in comment sections and ALL CAPS emails for nearly 25 years. All that’s missing is a really biting bon mot about Georgetown cocktail parties.

The ugly and shallow Kurt Schlichter likes the cocktail-party image, too.

And, like Schlichter, she employs the alpha-male tactic as well:

Then there’s the atmospherics. Robinson, like so much of this crowd, is obsessed with impugning the manhood of her targets as if “real men” see the world the way she does. When I hear this stuff from male writers and pundits, I assume they’re overcompensating for something. In this case I can only assume it’s just more pandering to readers who need to be reassured.

And then he examines this head-scratcher from Robinson - namely, the assertion that all and any pundits who find Trump objectionable to one degree or another don't care, often because they are agnostics or Jews:

Her one actual attempt at an analytical point is her claim that the “conservative intellectuals didn’t understand the base’s concerns about religious liberty because they hardly cared for religion — which should have disqualified them long ago.”

Goldberg dispatches it handily:

It’s . . . a lie. I’ve written often in defense of religious liberty (indeed, one of my recent columns on the subjected inspired a call from the vice president to thank me for it). Charles Krauthammer and George Will have defended religious liberty and religion generally for decades. Are we really to take someone seriously who would suggest that Erick Erickson, Ramesh Ponnuru, or, my Lord, David French don’t take religious liberty seriously? 

It's interesting, isn't it? Trump lives rent-free inside the heads of enraged hard leftists, and those of us who, while applauding the good moves, particularly judicial appointments and deregulation, find him ideologically unmoored and loathsome on a character level, live rent-free inside the heads of the Robinson and Schlichter types.

Meanwhile, we just proceed according to our principles. To the two groups above - progressives and populists, for shorthand - our continued existence is something they dare not acknowledge.

An effort in Ohio to uphold basic freedom, the primacy of family, and respect for the way God designed the universe

This bill needs to become law as soon as possible:

In a recent court decision, Sylvia Sieve Hendon, an Ohio juvenile court judge, awarded custody of a gender-confused minor to the grandparents so he could defy his parents' wishes and get hormone therapy.  The decision alarmed lawmakers and parents in the state so much that new legislation is being considered to stop it from happening again.

Ohio House Bill 658 sets out clear guidelines regarding parental rights when children face the mental disorder of gender dysphoria. The bill ensures that parents have the final say on how to treat their children who are experiencing gender confusion and makes it illegal for anyone else to do so (like teachers or school therapists) without parental consent. The law also would make it illegal for a judge to remove a minor from his parents' custody for refusing to treat gender dysphoria with irreversible, dangerous drugs that can cause sterility and disrupt natural development. Further, the law would require any adult with authority over a child to inform the parents if the child is considering gender "therapy."

Transgender activists are intent on demonizing this law. From the gay publication Them, Mary Emily O'Hara writes,

Ohio  House Bill 658 would turn school employees, psychologists, and social workers into spies of a sort; the legislation mandates that they disclose to parents if a minor approaches them with questions about gender identity or seeks mental health care for gender dysphoria. And if they don’t inform the child’s parents — regardless of concern for the safety or wellbeing of the child — they would face felony charges.

In every school across this nation, teachers and counselors are prohibited from giving a minor Tylenol without parental consent, yet activists want them to be able to refer kids for body mutilation without telling their parents? Parents must give consent to send kids on field trips, watch movies, and even eat a hot lunch. Why is it offensive to inform parents when their minor child is having an identity crisis? What kind of educators would want to hide such a serious thing from the people who love the child the most? Parents in this nation are held responsible financially and otherwise for the well-being of their children. They take on all the risks and burdens of parenting and are responsible for anything their minor child does (and sometimes can even go to jail for it). Shouldn't parents get the benefit of making major decisions concerning those minors when it comes to something as life-altering as gender reassignment surgery or "therapy"? 

Pray that all those who will see this bill through the Ohio legislature don't waver in their courage. The forces of darkness will be relentless in trying to make that happen.

The fruits of patty-cake - today's edition

This is looking increasingly like Agreed Framework and Six-Way talks redux:

U.S. intelligence agencies have concluded North Korea is attempting to secretly make more nuclear fuel suitable for weapons despite the Singapore Summit earlier this month. The conclusions appear in an intelligence assessment which was first reported Friday by NBC News:

In recent months, even as the two sides engaged in diplomacy, North Korea was stepping up its production of enriched uranium for nuclear weapons, five U.S. officials say, citing the latest intelligence assessment. North Korea and the U.S. agreed at the summit to “work toward” denuclearization, but there is no specific deal. On Trump’s order, the U.S. military canceled training exercises on the Korean peninsula, a major concession to Kim.

While the North Koreans have stopped missile and nuclear tests, “there’s no evidence that they are decreasing stockpiles, or that they have stopped their production,” said one U.S. official briefed on the latest intelligence. “There is absolutely unequivocal evidence that they are trying to deceive the U.S.”

Four other officials familiar with the intelligence assessment also said North Korea intended to deceive the U.S.

NBC did speak to one unnamed source who felt North Korea’s decision to stop missile testing was an unexpected step in the right direction, but even he agreed North Korea seemed to be trying to deceive the U.S. The assessment also says North Korea has several undeclared nuclear sites in addition to the one they do acknowledge at Yongbyon.

The shills have their work cut out for them spinning the VSG's patty-cake as 5-D chess. And, just as in the case with speculating on where Kudlow and Moore  stand, in their private moments, on the fallout from tariffs, I have to imagine that the private conversations among the likes of Pompeo, Bolton and Haley, with regard to North Korea policy over the last three months, are of a "the-president-went-off-half-cocked" nature.