I am an American in my Principles and wish we would let them alone to govern or misgovern themselves as they think proper.”
With these politically incorrect words, written in a letter to Baron William Mure of Caldwell during the turmoil of 1775, the Scotsman David Hume (1711-1776) forever became an honorary American citizen. And by his influence, he became an uninvited but welcomed delegate to the American Constitutional Convention.
Hume’s good friend and executor of his literary estate, Adam Smith wrote about political leadership in a time of “turbulence and “disorder.” It is a brief passage and one quite applicable to Americans in the early twenty-first century. Smith tells us in the mid-eighteenth century there are two types of political leaders in any society: one is a person of the “system” while the other is a person of the “public spirit.” The man of the “system”:
holds out some plausible plan of [social] reformation which, [he] pretends, will not only remove the inconveniences and relieve the distresses immediately complained of, but will prevent, in all time coming, any return of the like inconveniences and distresses. . . . The system man is intoxicated with the imaginary beauty of this ideal system, of which they have no experience, but which has been represented to them in all the most dazzling colors in which the eloquence of their leaders could paint it.
Contrarily, the man of the “public spirit”:
will accommodate, as well as he can, his public arrangements to the confirmed habits and prejudices of his people; and will remedy as well as he can, the inconveniences which may flow from the want of those regulations which the people are averse to submit to.
These descriptions are not just the chronologically bound musings of an eighteenth-century Scottish philosopher but observations that can be applicable to twenty-first–century American political society. Smith describes American “intoxicated idealistic” activists who want to “immediately” eradicate, eviscerate, and expunge anything that offends their sensibilities. We live in an age “drunk” with political power.
David Hume was a “public spirit” man through and through, and wrote reflectively, systematically, and widely to this end. He left a body of substantial work that effectively combats the age of dictatorial rationalism from a secular vantage point. Hume’s writings provided political guidance, social security, and economic direction for America’s Founding Fathers as they created a constitution (with all its flaws) for a new and more just Republic. Hume’s ideas, which were so influential to the colonials can still provide guardrails for contemporary American political discourse. David Hume’s influence in the shaping of American political society from its very beginning codification will be shown and his benefit for contemporary American society to preserve our union will become evident.
In eighteenth-century America, Hume’s seminal works were read by college students and young leaders throughout the colonies. The colonials wrote in Humean phraseology, presumably to those who also understood Hume’s thought. Hume’s notions of experience and skepticism, the uniformity of human nature, commerce, culture, factions, interests, customs, social institutions, and most importantly, the “science of politics,” were avidly studied, absorbed, and promulgated by the leading colonial minds. As Jeffry Morrison put it, “the ideas and language of Hume were in the colonial air.”
Hume’s political writings fit the pragmatic temper of the new Americans. From every state at the Constitutional Convention his ideas found purchase in the delegates’ debates, letters, and essays. What the Founding Fathers found attractive in Hume was his Scottish common sense, and his freedom from political and religious mysticism and convictions. Hume’s powerful practical intellect grounded in experience resulted in political compromise, the art of the experience. It is no paradox that Americans have always continued to have faith in their religion but skepticism in their politics. That is, we Americans expect our religion to be metaphysical, but we expect our politicians to be very physical. Thus, there is a sense in which Hume’s religious “mitigated skepticism” has its political application in the American civil experience.
As diesel fuel prices rise across the country, the Department of Homeland Security is fielding requests for Jones Act waivers. While the government should approve these waivers, it seems likely that it will pursue a more permanent solution — to repeal the law altogether.
Otherwise known as the Merchant Marine Act of 1920, the Jones Act requires that any cargo carried between domestic ports must be transported on American-manufactured ships flying the American flag and manned by a mostly American crew. Initially aimed at protecting the U.S. shipping industry from foreign competition, the act artificially limits the supply of cargo ships, making it more costly to transport refined diesel fuel across the country. When energy shortages arise, governors often apply for waivers to get fuel delivered to their states from domestic refineries without having to wait for American ships to become available. Such waivers would not be necessary if the law were permanently revoked. Thankfully, there are strong indications that the Jones Act is facing a final repeal.
Although the law is not without its die-hard defenders:
Jones Act lobbyists have knives out to defend their pet policy. In 2020, the Marine Transportation System National Advisory Committee, an organization that includes cargo ship owners and builders, sent an email to a government agency recommending that “all past and present members of the Cato and Mercatus Institutes” be charged with treason. Their crime? Advocating the repeal of the Jones Act. Such extreme defensive measures show how vulnerable Jones Act supporters feel — clearly, proponents of the act sense that the political tide is turning against them.
It’s about time, too. The only reason it has lasted this long is that the benefits of the Jones Act are highly concentrated within small groups such as ship owners, ship manufacturers, crew members, and the unions that represent them. These groups have a huge incentive to lobby the government to keep it. And because they work closely with each other, they’re also easy to organize into groups such as the Marine Transportation System National Advisory Committee. Meanwhile, the marginal cost to everyone else has been negligible enough that it hasn’t been worth the time and effort it would take to lobby against the act — until now.
Pence doesn’t say. Instead, he focuses on the challenges to the electoral vote count in Congress, which he would preside over on Jan. 6. Pence writes that he “welcomed” Sen. Josh Hawley, R-Mo., co-sponsoring objections from House Republicans “because it meant we would have a substantive debate,” adding, “Without a senator’s support, I would have been required to dismiss House objections without debate, something I didn’t want to do.”
You see, Pence tries to have his cake and eat it, too. He says he supported “debate” around the “concerns” about the election — but doesn’t actually address the substance of those concerns or the purpose of the debate. Hawley may have avoided endorsing any of the conspiracies Trump was spreading directly, but he also had to know that Trump was the source of the vast majority of the concerns in question. It was all an exercise in self-promotion, not an attempt to clarify the record, and Pence should know that.
This is gonna leave a mark:
. . . let’s not even touch on the conversation with Trump that Pence recounts at the end of the op-ed, except to say that I haven’t read an epilogue that self-indulgent since the seventh “Harry Potter” book.
Ian Bogost's piece at The Atlanticentitled "We're Witnessing the End of Social Media" is garnering a lot of buzz right now, and it is worthy of discussion. He applauds the recent misfortunes of Twitter and Facebook, saying that they have mutated the way human beings are designed to interact and form communities:
t’s over. Facebook is in decline, Twitter in chaos. Mark Zuckerberg’s empire has lost hundreds of billions of dollars in value and laid off 11,000 people, with its ad business in peril and its metaverse fantasy in irons. Elon Musk’s takeover of Twitter has caused advertisers to pull spending and power users to shun the platform (or at least to tweet a lot about doing so). It’s never felt more plausible that the age of social media might end—and soon.
Now that we’ve washed up on this unexpected shore, we can look back at the shipwreck that left us here with fresh eyes. Perhaps we can find some relief: Social media was never a natural way to work, play, and socialize, though it did become second nature. The practice evolved via a weird mutation, one so subtle that it was difficult to spot happening in the moment.
The shift began 20 years ago or so, when networked computers became sufficiently ubiquitous that people began using them to build and manage relationships. Social networking had its problems—collecting friends instead of, well, being friendly with them, for example—but they were modest compared with what followed. Slowly and without fanfare, around the end of the aughts, social media took its place. The change was almost invisible, but it had enormous consequences. Instead of facilitating the modest use of existing connections—largely for offline life (to organize a birthday party, say)—social software turned those connections into a latent broadcast channel. All at once, billions of people saw themselves as celebrities, pundits, and tastemakers.
A global broadcast network where anyone can say anything to anyone else as often as possible, and where such people have come to think they deserve such a capacity, or even that withholding it amounts to censorship or suppression—that’s just a terrible idea from the outset. And it’s a terrible idea that is entirely and completely bound up with the concept of social media itself: systems erected and used exclusively to deliver an endless stream of content.
But now, perhaps, it can also end. The possible downfall of Facebook and Twitter (and others) is an opportunity—not to shift to some equivalent platform, but to embrace their ruination, something previously unthinkable.
At the Washington Free Beacon, Aaron Sibarium alerts us to a particularly insidious bank-loan concept: looking at how borrowers measure up in terms of diversity practices when deciding whether to lend them money:
Amid an uptick in race-conscious hiring programs throughout corporate America, many prominent businesses are now writing racial and gender quotas into their credit agreements with banks, tying the cost of borrowing to the companies’ workforce diversity, a Washington Free Beacon analysis found.
Over the past two years, each of those companies has secured a lending agreement, known as a credit facility, that links the interest rate charged by banks to the company’s internal diversity targets, creating a financial incentive to meet them. If the business achieves its targets, it won’t have to pay as much interest on the loans it takes out; if it falls short, it is required to pay more.
Under the terms of BlackRock’s $4.4 billion credit facility, for example, Wells Fargo will lower the firm’s interest rate by 0.05 percent if it hits two benchmarks—a 30 percent increase in the share of black and Hispanic employees by 2024, and a 3 percent increase in the share of female executives each year—or hike the rate by the same amount if it misses both.
The agreements, which typically involve multiple banks, are effectively credit cards for businesses: Rather than make a onetime loan, lenders extend a continuous line of credit that companies can dip into at will, either to cover operating costs or as a rainy day fund for emergencies. That means changes in a facility’s interest rate—even modest ones like BlackRock’s 0.05 percent diversity adjustment—can have an appreciable effect on a business’s bottom line.
Companies have advertised these agreements as proof of their progressive bona fides. Trimble CEO Rob Painter, for example, said the company’s credit facility—which conditions interest rates on the percentage of female employees—illustrates Trimble’s "commitment" to "gender diversity in the workplace." In press releases announcing their own credit facilities, executives at BlackRock, Prudential, and Definity say the agreements demonstrate their commitment to "accountability."
But critics see something far more sinister: a form of blatant discrimination that will harm consumers, credit markets, and the rule of law.
"If a bank penalized a company's credit rating because it had too many women or was too racially diverse, we would be appalled," said one senior government regulator, who managed a nine-figure credit facility as a lawyer in private practice. "This is the exact same thing, except the penalized target is white men."
Who originated DEI? Why DEI and not another set of laudable values? Does “equity” refer to opportunity or result? How do those of mixed race fit in diversity assessments? Is the goal of racial representation proportionate to that of the population, the history of marginalization, or something else? DEI terms are defined so obtusely that they can refer to a spectrum of policiesfrom mere platitudes to radical agendas including litmus tests and racial quotas.
The older I get, the more reluctant I am to lend any writer or thinker with whom I'm currently resonating my full enthusiasm. I've been burned too many times. But Andrew T. Walker, who teaches Christian ethics at Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, is currently addressing things that need broader discussion. In his latest piece for World, entitled "Why Is America Coming Apart?", he takes dead aim at what is really going on:
What would have been revolutionary in 2008, like “gay marriage,” seems almost “traditional” to many Americans in 2022, by the sheer force of its cultural normalization in America. Drag Queens dancing in front of children is as recreational as baseball in some parts of the country, or so it seems. Mainstream medical guilds now suggest that confused children and teens mutilate their bodies to tranquilize the mind. Public schools when I grew up might have been secular, but they weren’t morally insane or propagandizing students in cultural self-hatred like I routinely hear about now. Major media outlets are entirely compromised by a groveling deference to wokism and identity politics. The left once called for abortion to be “safe, legal, and rare,” but the move to de-stigmatize abortion and gloat about it has moved the needle in a ghoulish direction.
The surrealism of our simmering unrest is explainable, I think, in the near total collapse of Christianity as America’s underlying public ethic. At least for the moment, put away questions about Christian Nationalism. What I’m observing is the final stripping away over the last few years of the last thin layer of Christian veneer. No secularist will say this out loud, of course. Because that would mean restoring virtues that figures like former Supreme Court Justice Anthony Kennedy believe are incompatible with liberty. Such virtues can only be grounded in a transcendent account of the universe.
At Medium, Drew Shepherd looks at how a Christian might address the charge of hypocrisy:
. . . if we stick to the notion that Christianity should be dismissed because its followers act contrarily to their claims, we must first go to the source to see what those claims actually are.
Because if you’re looking for biblical evidence that says Christians never do wrong, you’re out of luck:
For I know that good itself does not dwell in me, that is, in my sinful nature. For I have the desire to do what is good, but I cannot carry it out. For I do not do the good I want to do, but the evil I do not want to do — this I keep on doing. Now if I do what I do not want to do, it is no longer I who do it, but it is sin living in me that does it.
So I find this law at work: Although I want to do good, evil is right there with me. (Rom. 7:18–21 NIV)
These verses describe the apostle Paul’s struggle with sin in his life. And if the man who wrote a large chunk of the New Testament admitted he was a “hypocrite”, it’s no surprise that other Christians face the same problem.
Ecclesiastes also presented this truth in the Old Testament:
Indeed, there is not a righteous man on earth who continually does good and who never sins. (Eccles. 7:20 NASB)
And the apostle John followed with the same idea:
If we claim to be without sin, we deceive ourselves and the truth is not in us. (1 John 1:8 NIV)
No matter how clean some Christians appear or how outspoken they are, they will always contend with a form of evil in their life.
So since this problem is common among all Christians — even the ones who should know better — you’d think God would be angry at us all the time. At least that’s how most people think of God: as a harsh, unforgiving, ban-you-to-hell-because-of-what-you-did-in-second-grade Person. But these next verses from the book of Psalms paint a different picture:
Just as a father has compassion on his children, So the LORD has compassion on those who fear Him. For He Himself knows our frame; He is mindful that we are but dust. (Psalm 103:13–14 NASB)
God knows everything about our fragile makeup and the condition of our nature — He has compassion on us because of it.
He knows the Christian life involves doing the unnatural. And He knows we would never succeed without His help.
And my latest at Precipice is about how it's time for me to realize I'm no longer a fledgling Christian and that I can and need to engage the world with the assurance of someone whose been at this faith-walk thing a while.
There. That ought to keep you out of mischief this weekend.
Elon Musk is one of those figures whose presence on my radar screen was incidental. I knew the basics of his life story, was aware that he was the world's richest person, and could see that he had a slew of eccentricities. But I never regarded him as crucial to the direction of the world, at least in the short or intermediate term. Maybe one of his big ideas would eventually have some kind of major impact on human history, but not in the foreseeable future.
Then his purchase of Twitter became a thing, and speculation ran rampant as to where he'd take the company.
Okay. That seems like a natural reaction when Moneybags Number One makes such a move. But I didn't see how it was going to affect my ability to interact with the friends I've made on the site, or use it to disseminate LITD posts, Precipice essays or my occasional writings elsewhere.
Twitter's new owner Elon Musk appeared to have deleted a tweet posted on Sunday referencing an unfounded theory regarding the attack on the husband of U.S. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi at their San Francisco home.
The since-deleted tweet was in response to one by former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, who blamed the attack on hateful rhetoric by the Republican Party and linked to an L.A. Times story about how the suspect promoted far-right conspiracy theories online.
"There is a tiny possibility there might be more to this story than meets the eye," Musk replied to Clinton, linking to a site called the Santa Monica Observer that fact-checkers have described as a purveyor of hoaxes, including that Clinton herself had died and been replaced by a body double. The Observer did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
It's hard to find details about the allegation in the tweet now, since self-respecting news outlets are reluctant to perpetuate the unsubstantiated gay-lovers'-quarrel angle. But Musk's taking time to fool with it raises the question of why, as the new chief executive of a major social-media company, he doesn't have more important matters on his plate at present.
Whataboutists had some legit fodder to chew on in asking why coverage of the beating of a Marco Rubio canvasser was scant compared to that for the Pelosi incident.
There's also the rush among Dems, certainly, and the occasional Republican such as Mitt Romney, to show that they are Caring Human Beings by stating their hopes for Paul Pelosi's full recovery and their assertion that there is no place for this kind of behavior in a civil society. I don't want to ascribe anything but laudable motives to these people, but it just strikes me as a little icky, sort of a let-the-record-show-I'm-not-one-of-those-despicable-creatures-making-this-incident-worse gesture.
But the Dems among this bunch aren't above making hay over DePape's Qanon rantings on social media, as if he had it together mentally enough to be on board with the ultra-MAGA movement. He didn't. The guy lived in a nudist colony, for cryin' out loud, and had a slew of problems such as hard drug use. This is a pattern that has been detectable at least since that nutter in Tucson beaned Gabbby Giffords in the noggin. Most 21st century gun-wielders who shoot politicians or their associates more closely fit the model of unhinged marginal types than ideologically focused assassins.
The main point here is that this story's only three days old, and it's already covered in layers of pure speculation. And the new owner of Twitter isn't helping matters any.
This is what we get in a nation so badly polarized - no, make that fractured - and so unable to distinguish the trivial and silly from the grave and profound. Too few care about objective truth to muster the patience for that to be revealed.
It's not going to get better. It's very late in the day.
Like a lot of conservative (that's conservative, not Trumpist) opiners, I've tried not to overdo the examination of how the Very Stable Genius's big-baby streak is on display with ever-greater frequency these days. Examples are so abundant, that pointing them out can get tiresome.
But this one merits discussion. Squirrel-Hair intends to veto the defense bill currently being crafted in Congress because it's not going to include repeal of Section 230.
will not be putting the Section 230 termination clause into the Defense Bill. So bad for our National Security and Election Integrity. Last chance to ever get it done. I will VETO!
This goes beyond the usual shenanigans that get unrelated items in bills ostensibly pertaining to one aspect of governance. This is about government inserting itself into matters way outside its purview.
On the right, the hullabaloo about “Internet censorship” and Section 230 isn’t really about free speech, it’s about power. As a free speech issue, the matter is pretty straightforward: Private companies can say—or allow to be said—nearly any damn thing they want on their platforms. This makes popular platforms very powerful, and some people don’t like that and want to exert power over them. Yes, there are legitimate issues at the margins, but for the most part the political energy behind all this argy-bargy is that a bunch of people (think the president and his most passionate supporters) should be able to say anything they want, including lies, on privately owned platforms without any editorial comment or discretion getting in the way. That’s an argument about power, plain and simple.
To think about the Constitution legalistically is to see it simply as a set of rules to be applied and interpreted, ultimately by judges. This view obviously makes sense up to a point. Judges have a foremost role in constitutional interpretation, and the Constitution is, in some of its most crucial respects, a form of law. But this view is easily taken too far, and so can encourage an excessively lawyerly constitutional practice that comes down to a search for technicalities that justify various uses of power and so narrows our understanding of what political life involves.
Now, mind you, he's not advocating for any kind of loosey-goosey living-document perspective:
This kind of broader constitutionalism is an extension of, not a substitute for, an originalist approach to judicial interpretation. Reading the text as it was written is the judge’s job, but the judge is just one constitutional actor, and not in every instance the appropriate or decisive one. Our grasp of that truth has been degraded over time, and our contemporary over-emphasis of legalistic and policy-oriented constitutionalism is the result of a kind of deformation of our constitutional culture, driven in part by some peculiar notions of the functions of the judge. Understanding how that has happened should help us see that a recovery of our constitutional order will depend on more than just appointing good judges. It will depend on our recovering a richer and more complete understanding of who we are as a people, and so of what our Constitution really is.
A new project of Principles First called The Pillars can help a citizen take this broad view. The first installment provides brief summaries of the contributions of great Enlightenment figures (and my heroes) to humankind's understanding of ordered liberty: Burke, Locke, Montesquieu, Sir William Blackstone and Adame Smith. Future installments will move the reader through successive eras and the thinkers about freedom associated with each.
Kurt T. Lash at Law & Libertysays universities need to do less "contextualizing" of Thomas Jefferson and put more focus on the thunderous documents he penned - not just the Declaration of Independence, but the Northwest Ordinance, which laid out a path for a slavery-free American future.
Maybe if self-identified conservatives spent more time pondering the above principles, American politics would be less subjected to the likes of Marjorie Taylor Greene and Laura Loomer, writes Kimberly Ross at ArcDigital.
An excellent essay at The Bulwark by Matthew Stokes looks at the effect that not having to dress like a grown-up professional to work in the wake of the pandemic is having on our mindset not only about work but our approach to life in general.
David Wurmser at Fox News says that the tectonic shift underway in the Middle East is rapidly diminishing the relevance of Palestinian foot-stamping:
Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif. . . . dismissed the agreements signed at the White House as “a distraction” by Trump from the coronavirus pandemic and complained that the Palestinian issue was not addressed.
This is an absurd argument that fails to recognize the historic importance of the agreements signed Tuesday to advance the long-sought goal of peace between Israel and its neighbors. Certainly, much remains to be accomplished, but the agreements with the UAE and Bahrain are highly significant.
In truth, the real abandonment of the Palestinian people has come from their own leaders, who refuse to make a peace with Israel that would lead to a vast improvement in the lives of the Palestinians with new opportunities for trade, jobs and regional cooperation.
Two years ago, Trump critics also blasted his decision to move the U.S. Embassy in Israel from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem, claiming this would end any chances for peace. They were proven wrong by the UAE and Bahrain.
At the core of the European diplomatic slight, the American left’s dismissiveness, and the symbolic but irrelevant launching of missiles by terrorists in Gaza was the belief that the resolution of the Palestinian issue is a precondition to advance regional peace.
And yet, four peace treaties reveal quite a different pattern. President Trump understand this, which is why he pursued peace between Arab nations and Israel rather than giving Palestinians a permanent veto of all efforts to end 72 years of Arab hostility toward the Jewish state.
Importantly, a major driver of the decision by the UAE, Bahrain and hopefully more Arab nations to normalize relations with Israel is the threat the Arab World sees from Iran, which is hostile not just to Israel and the U.S. but to Sunni Muslim Arab states. It makes sense for the Arab nations to join with Israel and the U.S. as allies against the Iranian menace.
Apparently neither Hamas, which started right in with a rocket barrage aimed at Israel after the deal was signed, nor Fatah, get the message:
The Palestinian Authority will sever ties with any country that opens an embassy to Israel in Jerusalem, a top Palestinian official warned on Sunday, after Serbia and Kosovo announced that they will be doing so in the near future.
“Palestine will sever its relations with any country that will move or open its embassy to Jerusalem,” PLO Executive Committee Secretary-General Saeb Erekat tweeted on Sunday.
To cap off a week in which the VSG said we may never know who won the 2020 presidential election, and in which he said that all he knows about the Q phenomenon is that it "likes" him, he fired off these tweets today:
Many doctors!
He then uses the occasion to sow more seeds of doubt about the stability of our electoral system:
Going full tinfoil hat on his own FDA.
He has an uncle who is a MIT physicist! Do not doubt his public-health expertise!
The Federalist Society has provided the pool of possible federal judges that Trump has considered. Olsen has been irritatingly favorable in his overall assessment of Trump's performance to date.
These are not men that the die-hard throne-sniffers can dismiss as "Never Trump."
They have been, to quote Irving Kristol, mugged by reality.
Remember yesterday, how, with one tweet, the Very Stable Genius put stink all over a very good policy move? How it opened up new avenues of opportunity for leftists who not only cannot stand the VSG as an individual but know what a great job he does of presenting the worst possible image of conservatism?
With Universal Mail-In Voting (not Absentee Voting, which is good), 2020 will be the most INACCURATE & FRAUDULENT Election in history. It will be a great embarrassment to the USA. Delay the Election until people can properly, securely and safely vote???
Hello, my name is Donald Trump and I want to sound as insecure about my political prospects and as clueless about what federal law requires as possible.
Republicans, who, as I have said over and over and over again since mid-2015, should have never taken him seriously, are distancing themselves from this nonsense:
“He can suggest whatever he wants. The law is what it is. We’re going to have an election that’s legitimate, it’s going to be credible, it’s going to be the same as we’ve always done it,” Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.), the chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, told reporters.
and
Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa), who is in the line of succession for the presidency as the president pro tempore of the Senate, dismissed Trump’s tweet as just the opinion of one person, noting that it would take an act of Congress to change the date of a federal election.
“It doesn’t matter what one individual in this country says,” Grassley said. “We still are a country based on the rule of law. And we must follow the law until either the Constitution is changed or until the law is changed.”
House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) similarly said he opposes pushing back the date of the election. “No way should we ever not hold an election on the day that we have it,” McCarthy told reporters.
Let us not kid ourselves. If he can ratchet up the ridiculousness levels we've seen this week, it's not going to plateau there.
The current election cycle is nearing its final phase. Both major parties have their presidential candidates. That's so locked in that it's not of much consequence that neither party will be able to hold anything approximating a normal convention this summer.
Republicans are in quite a bind. Officially, the party has wholly given itself over to the Trump phenomenon, although internecine squabbles such as the House dustups surrounding Liz Cheney make clear that not everyone is on board.
Still, the face that the party is obligated to present to the voting public at this late date is one of unwavering fealty to Donald Trump. Campaign material from pretty much any candidate for the national legislature or even state-level chambers is going to mention him prominently.
What's happening? For one thing, most of the country understands that while it doesn't much like the measures that have to be taken to address the coronavirus - masks, social distancing, pauses in state reopenings, quandaries over how or even if to reopen schools - they are necessary, given that neglect of them is shown to exacerbate its spread.
Most citizens admire the likes of Doctors Fauci and Birx and trust their expertise. They feel comfortable heeding such figures' admonitions.
A recent pattern of Trumpists unabashedly expressing diametrically opposite takes on the matter of public-health expertise demonstrates a new level of tone-deafness for that movement.
Sinclair Broadcast Group has made an eleventh-hour decision to "rework a segment" set to air on a cable show hosted by Eric Bolling (one of the long line of former Fox News personalities who had to leave that network over sexual-harassment scandals). The segment was going to suggest that Fauci has actually created the coronavirus. It was going to include an interview with Judy Mikovitz, who was prominently featured in the video "Plandemic" which went viral for a few hours last spring and then was abruptly and thoroughly discredited.
Seems Bolling and Sinclair are now looking at how to come up with a more "balanced" approach to their subject.
Speaking of Fox, two of its biggest current stars are also peddling rank coronavirus-related conspiracy.
In a rambling segment that attempted to build his kooky case for a conspiracy to make America so unhappy that it would back the presumptive Democratic nominee, the Fox News host called Democrats “radicals” who “will do anything for control.”
“Democrats understand that the unhappier Americans become, the more likely they are to win,” Carlson said on his show. “Unhappy people want change, it is not complicated. So every ominous headline about the state of the country makes it more likely that Donald Trump will lose his job. The more that people suffer, the greater Joe Biden’s advantage. Democrats have a strong incentive, therefore, to inflict as much pain as they can, and that’s what they are doing.”
He even called Dr. Anthony Fauci, the infectious disease expert known for his level-headed guidance as a White House task force member, “capricious and transparently political.”
In a conversation with Eric Trump, Jesse Watters notes that Twitter has cracked down on several thousand accounts related to QAnon, and goes on to say, "Q can do some crazy stuff, with the Pizza[gate] stuff and the Wayfair stuff, but they've also uncovered a lot of great stuff when it comes to Epstein and when it comes to the deep state." He and Eric then proceed to indulge in some whataboutism, mentioning that Antifa, Adam Schiff and JerryNadler have all posted some wild content on Twitter. Eric said that "some 22-year-old dweeb in Silicon Valley" holds the key to this year's presidential election.
The people mentioned above have been in the Very Stable Genius's thrall for some time, in some cases from the get-go.
We're still seeing saddening cases of figures who had resisted his power to recruit into the cult until more recently, such as Nikki Haley, who, even as recently as her stint as UN ambassador, was publicly parting ways with him.
wanted to have a blowout convention.Proud of the selfless leadership he has shown in cancelling the convention. He has a great story to tell on how he turned our economy & foreign policy around. We look forward to sharing it in the next 100 days!
The Ronald Reagan Presidential Foundation and Institute formally asked the Trump campaign and the Republican National Committee to stop using the 40th president's name and image to raise money.
The request came in response to a fundraising appeal sent from the Trump Make America Great Again Committee, a joint effort of the Trump campaign and the RNC, offering two commemorative coins, one engraved with Reagan's image and the other with that of President Donald Trump to anyone who donates $45 or more for Trump's reelection. The email was "signed" by Trump.
Of course, it was a colossal mistake for the GOP to ever take Donald Trump seriously, much less let him bully the party into treating him differently from other candidates in 2016. The list of disappointments who went from resolute opposition to his phenomenon to opportunistic and craven hitching of their wagons to it is long indeed.
But such people are not stupid. That they are Kool-Aid-besotted is the only explanation I can see why they are conducting themselves as they are rather than running for the exits and plotting how they are going to maneuver through the disaster that awaits as this year concludes.
