“Will you tell me how to prevent riches from becoming the effects of temperance and industry? Will you tell me how to prevent riches from producing luxury? Will you tell me how to prevent luxury from producing effeminacy intoxication extravagance Vice and folly?”
– John Adams, letter to Thomas Jefferson, December 21st 1819
Big news tonight about a meeting between President Trump and Kim Jong Un. Most commentators, including many I respect, are suggesting that Mr. Trump is being played, just as previous presidents were. I’m not so sure. Here’s why.
What’s different this time around is that Trump is using a different lever, and he isn’t using it directly against North Korea.
Who does North Korea depend on for its survival?
China.
What does China depend on for its economic survival?
Trade with the United States.
I’ll leave it there.
Yesterday the 9th Circuit Court Of Appeals allowed a children’s climate-advocacy group to proceed with a lawsuit against the Trump administration for not preventing global warming. The suit argues, with a straight face, that inaction by the Federal government to produce what the plaintiffs believe to be necessary carbon-reduction policy violates the children’s Constitutional rights — and the Court finds this plausible enough to let the suit go forward.
Madness.
“We must own up to the fact that laws and regulations alone cannot produce a civilized society.”
If you didn’t listen to the John Batchelor show last night, you missed an informative (and worrisome) conversation between the host and Professor Stephen F. Cohen about the new U.S. – Russian arms race.
The issue is this: since the fall of the Soviet Union, the U.S. has abandoned the commitment to parity that prevented mutual destruction during the Cold War. The expansion of NATO beginning in the 1990’s, and the abrogation of the ABM treaty by George Bush, pushed Russia, apparently deprived of effective retaliation to a U.S. first strike, and confronted by NATO forces now deployed right up to its borders, into an increasingly tight corner. On March 1st, Vladimir Putin announced that Russia now has a new generation of nuclear weapons that render our missile defenses obsolete — and if his claims are true, the new weapons not only restore parity, but have given Russia tactical (and therefore strategic) superiority.
You can hear the discussion in two parts, here and here. See also the relevant section of Putin’s March 1st speech, here.
Here’s an interesting item: politics and geology.
It’s a reminder also of how much warmer the Earth once was, long before your SUV ruined everything.
If you’re familiar with Patrick Buchanan, you won’t be surprised to know that his latest column is a ringing defense of tariffs.
An excerpt:
“Trade wars are not won, only lost,’ warns Sen. Jeff Flake.
But this is ahistorical nonsense.
The U.S. relied on tariffs to convert from an agricultural economy in 1800 to the mightiest manufacturing power on earth by 1900.
Bismarck’s Germany, born in 1871, followed the U.S. example, and swept past free trade Britain before World War I.
Does Senator Flake think Japan rose to post-war preeminence through free trade, as Tokyo kept U.S. products out, while dumping cars, radios, TVs and motorcycles here to kill the industries of the nation that was defending them. Both Nixon and Reagan had to devalue the dollar to counter the predatory trade policies of Japan.
Since Bush I, we have run $12 trillion in trade deficits, and, in the first decade in this century, we lost 55,000 factories and 6,000,000 manufacturing jobs.
Does Flake see no correlation between America’s decline, China’s rise, and the $4 trillion in trade surpluses Beijing has run up at the expense of his own country?
The hysteria that greeted Trump’s idea of a 25 percent tariff on steel and 10 percent tariff on aluminum suggest that restoring this nation’s economic independence is going to be a rocky road.
In 2017, the U.S. ran a trade deficit in goods of almost $800 billion, $375 billion of that with China, a trade surplus that easily covered Xi Jinping’s entire defense budget.
Read the rest here.
With a hat-tip to Bill Vallicella, here’s Rod Dreher commenting on this year’s Best Picture, The Shape of Water. (If you aren’t familiar with the story — due, perhaps, to your having been in a coma for several months — it is about a woman who enters into a romantic and sexual relationship with an anthropoid fish-creature.)
Mr. Dreher offers an acute comment from a reader:
[T]he turmoil we’re witnessing is basically a transfer of power from “regular” people to the freaks. Everything previously deemed inferior, abnormal, marginal, obscene is now not only normalized but embraced, even glorified. In his book The Antichrist, Nietzsche denounced Christianity as a perversion of all good and healthy values. He called for a total revolution in values, to overturn Christian morality and replace it with its opposite. That’s what we’re seeing now, at a very deep level.
This wouldn’t matter that much if our new lords weren’t so full of rancor and determined to get their revenge on those who humiliated them, hence the attacks on the various “privileges” that systematically target the representatives of the old order: patriarchy, masculinity, heterosexuality, “whiteness” and — yes — Christianity. As a member of a minority group, this shouldn’t worry me so much, as many aspects of said “old order” were not worth preserving or friendly to me. But I’m telling you, what is coming threatens to be much worse because it’s revenge, not justice.
Revenge it is. Another of Mr. Dreher’s commenters quotes Jimmy Kimmel, hosting the Academy Awards on Sunday, on another popular movie:
“We don’t make films like [pederasty celebration] ‘Call Me By Your Name’ for money, We make them to upset Mike Pence.”
Whither hence, readers?
Around the Outer Cape in the off-season I’m reminded of how many people here are capable of subduing, commanding, and profitably plying the proximate physical world, and how stark the contrast is with the cosmopolitan, soft-handed symbol-manipulators who spend their time and money here in the summer. A great many of the people who live year-round in my little town — with the general exception of retirees from elsewhere — have these skills, and knock together a living building and repairing things, and/or pulling food from sea and marsh and forest. (The sexes seem sharply distinguished as well, which I think is not a coincidence.)
In Gurdjieff‘s system of inner work, the practice of “self-remembering” stressed awareness of the body. This is effective because the grounding of our experience in the physicality of the body is what brings us back to our actually existing selves in the present moment: to what is real, now. Practical engagement with the physical world works in the same way to keep a life of symbols, ideas, and abstractions from becoming wholly unmoored from reality and drifting off into cloud-castles and hallucinations. The physical world, and its truths, are stubborn, and persistent, and in the end will make their claim on our attention, whether we like it or not.
This division, between those who must in some way engage and control the physical world in their work and those who do not, is a chief feature of the great cultural fissure in present-day America.
It all makes me aware, when I’m in New York, of how brittle and technology-dependent the whole shebang is nowadays. if something goes badly and suddenly wrong — a Carrington Event or something like that — it won’t be pretty, and it would be good not to be in the cities.
In a recent post I declined to comment on the proposed imposition of new tariffs, pleading ignorance of the subject. The uncommonly astute blogger calling himself “ZMan”, however, has a definite opinion. An excerpt:
The fact is, the current trade regime ushered in after the Cold War, has proven to be the boondoggle critics like Pat Buchanan warned about 30 years ago. Open trade with Canada, an English-speaking first world country, is mostly beneficial. Trade with Mexico, a third world narco-state that now operates as a pirate’s cove for Chinese and American business, has been a disaster. NAFTA has made Mexico a massive loophole in American labor, tax, environmental and trade policy. A loophole ruthlessly exploited by China.
The current trade regime is also at the heart of the cosmopolitan globalism that seeks to reduce nations to a fiction and people to economic inputs. This neoliberal orthodoxy has eroded social capital to the point where the white middle class is nearing collapse. It’s not just America. The collapsing fertility rates in the Occident are part of the overall cultural collapse going in the West. Slapping tariffs on Chinese steel are not going to arrest this trend, but it does open the door for cultural critiques of the prevailing orthodoxy.
That’s the reality our betters would just as soon not allow back into the conversation. The fact is, a nation is its people. What defines France is the shared character and shared heritage of the people we call French. What defines a people is not the cost of goods or the price of labor. What defines a people is what they love together and what they hate together. It is the collection of tastes and inclinations, no different than family traditions, that have been cultivated and passed down from one generation to the next.
Even putting the cultural arguments aside, global capitalism erodes the civic institutions that hold society together. Instead of companies respecting the laws of host nations and working to support the welfare of the people of that nation, business is encouraged to cruise the world looking for convenient ports. There’s a word for this form of capitalism. It’s called piracy. Global firms flit from port to port, with no interest other than the short term gain to be made at that stop. Globalism is rule by pirates.
This resonates well with my view of globalist capitalism generally, and of its innate antipathy to national particularity. The usual arguments for and against free trade are economic, but at this point in my life, and in my study of history and culture, I have come to believe that there are far more important things than money.
Read the rest here.
Planned Parenthood tweeted this the other day:
Some men have a uterus.
Some men have a uterus.
Some men have a uterus.
Some men have a uterus.
Some men have a uterus.
Some men have a uterus.
Some men have a uterus.
Some men have a uterus.
Some men have a uterus.
Some men have a uterus.
Some men have a uterus.— Planned Parenthood (@PPIndKentucky) March 2, 2018
In my study of communist societies, I came to the conclusion that the purpose of communist propaganda was not to persuade or convince, nor to inform, but to humiliate; and therefore, the less it corresponded to reality the better. When people are forced to remain silent when they are being told the most obvious lies, or even worse when they are forced to repeat the lies themselves, they lose once and for all their sense of probity. To assent to obvious lies is to co-operate with evil, and in some small way to become evil oneself. One’s standing to resist anything is thus eroded, and even destroyed. A society of emasculated liars is easy to control. I think if you examine political correctness, it has the same effect and is intended to.
Don’t let them do this to us. Don’t give in.
While responding to a comment to a recent post just now, I wanted to add a link to an earlier item of mine: Can Progressivism Really Be A Kind Of Religion?
I thought the quickest way to find it might be to look it up in Google. I typed in the title, and … nothing. (This is odd, because Google used to give my website fairly high priority in search-result rankings.)
I went to DuckDuckGo, a search engine that doesn’t filter results, and my post was at the top of the list. I went back to Google and put the title in quotes, but my post still didn’t appear.
Have I now run afoul of Google’s heresy-detectors? Have I been added to some Index Librorum Prohibitorum? It seems odd, as I am a relatively obscure site, and pretty tame as far as heresies go. Indeed, one result that did appear was an article at Social Matter linking to my post, and I’d have thought that SM would be a far more visible feature of the reactionary skyline than this humble dwelling, and one that throws a much larger shadow upon the Cathedral’s towering facade.
Maybe this is due, somehow, to my having changed the title of the blog recently (though the URL didn’t change). I wonder.
A foreground item in the news in these last days has been President Trump’s announcement of tariffs on various goods. As with everything else he says or does, (or, for that matter, anything that any prominent person says or does these days), there has been pugnacious disagreement.
I’m not going to comment on this one. Why? Because I don’t know enough to have an opinion. The question of trade protections — subsidies, tariffs, and negotiated preferences — has existed since trade between nations began, and has been an important part of American history since the continent was settled. It has always been the subject of contention and disagreement. Right now I’ve been reading the complete correspondence between John Adams and Thomas Jefferson, and it was a difficult topic for them too, often raised in their letters.
Ludwig Wittgenstein famously said: “Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent.” That’s my position on tariffs. Sorry to disappoint.
If you know more about this than I do, readers, your comments are welcome.
It’s a dreary day here, and I find myself at a loss for anything interesting to say. Instead, then, I give you Russian politician Valentina Petrenko. And her hair.
I was back at my old alma mater, Power Station Studios, earlier today. It’s on West 53rd Street in Manhattan. Nearby, some expensive apartment buildings have gone up. If you’re lucky enough to afford one of these tony residences, here’s your front door:
Is it me, or did we miss a turn somewhere?
South Africa is moving rapidly toward “expropriation without compensation”: the confiscation of white-owned farms and transfer of them to black owners.
Displacement of white farmers in Africa has happened before, in places like Kenya and Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe). Agricultural productivity plummeted. It will do so here as well.
In his book Suicide of the West — which I recommend to you all — James Burnham, writing in 1964, described what had happened in Kenya:
[T]ake the famous White Highlands of Kenya that liberal publicists are fond of citing as an example of colonial and racist exploitation. The Highlands are the part of Kenya that, by its temperature, rainfall and soil, makes successful farming possible. They comprise in all about 45,000 square miles. Of these, 37,000 square miles are, as they have been in the past, farmed by African Negroes. The Europeans have been farming about 4,500 square miles, one-tenth of the lot: virtually all developed from scratch in the course of the past sixty years. From these 4,500 square miles the Europeans have been raising sufficient commercial crops to make up 80 percent in value of Kenya’s export total of all goods and products””the factor on which Kenya’s long-run economic development inevitably depends.
But this is because the Europeans have the best land, the capital and so on, ideology at once protests. The facts teach otherwise. Much of the Highlands land””considerably more than the 4,500 square miles that were the European maximum””is at least as good; all of it is of the same basic character. Comparative studies have been made of African and European farming operations that are closely comparable in all respects, including available capital. They show that the European-farmed land produces approximately four times as much per square mile as the African-farmed land: approximately £4,300 in annual value as against £1,100. It is certain that the economic condition of the Highlands, and thus of Kenya as a whole, will continue in the next period the worsening that began several years ago, and that there will be less food for Kenya’s inhabitants. As the Europeans continue to leave, their highly productive, technically advanced and efficiently managed farms are being broken up into subsistence plots or small uneconomic units, both types largely in the hands of incompetent Negroes. Very probably thousands of acres of the Highlands will revert rather soon to the sterility in which the Europeans found them sixty years ago, cropped down to sour bare soil, perhaps, by cattle and horses kept to expand a tribe’s prestige and status rather than its food supply. It may not be long before the rising young nation of Kenya is added to the list of those living by the surplus food of the citadel of world imperialism. There is no mystery here. It is simply that the native leaders of Kenya’s African inhabitants want other things more than they want food.
South Africa’s white farmers have been under brutal assault for many years now, but things are quickly going to become even more dangerous for them. I imagine many of them are already making arrangements to leave. (I expect they would be welcome in Eastern Europe.)
Meanwhile, the world will watch as South Africa becomes, not Wakanda, but another Zimbabwe.
Our e-pal Bill K. sends along this link to a mordant little item at Gates of Vienna. The gist:
– Emmanuel Macron, the newly elected French President, has no children.
– German Chancellor Angela Merkel has no children.
– Austria’s Chancellor Sebastian Kurz has no children
– British Prime Minister Theresa May has no children.
– Italian Prime Minister Paolo Gentiloni has no children.
– Holland’s Mark Rutte,
– Sweden’s Stefan LÁ¶fven,
– Luxembourg’s Xavier Bettel, and
– Scotland’s Nicola Sturgeon, all have no children.
– Jean-Claude Juncker, President of the European Commission, has no children.
So: if you’ve wondered why the leaders of Western Europe don’t seem to care about its future, a fair question is: why would they?
One commenter makes the heartening point that the presidents and prime ministers of the Visegrad nations — Poland, Hungary, Slovakia and Czechia — have 26 children between them. Another reminds us that Marine le Pen has three.
The future belongs to those who show up for it.
Our reader, the indefatigable JK, has sent along a column by David French about “gun-violence restraining orders”, or GVROs. Mr. French argues that they are a plausible compromise between the community’s collective interest and the individual right guaranteed (not “granted”, mind you!) by the Second Amendment.
Mr. French outlines some limitations that would, in his opinion, need to be in place:
While there are various versions of these laws working their way through the states (California passed a GVRO statute in 2014, and it went into effect in 2016), broadly speaking they permit a spouse, parent, sibling, or person living with a troubled individual to petition a court for an order enabling law enforcement to temporarily take that individual’s guns right away. A well-crafted GVRO should contain the following elements (“petitioners’ are those who seek the order, “the respondent’ is its subject):
1. It should limit those who have standing to seek the order to a narrowly defined class of people (close relatives, those living with the respondent);
2. It should require petitioners to come forward with clear, convincing, admissible evidence that the respondent is a significant danger to himself or others;
3. It should grant the respondent an opportunity to contest the claims against him;
4. In the event of an emergency, ex parte order (an order granted before the respondent can contest the claims), a full hearing should be scheduled quickly ”” preferably within 72 hours; and
5. The order should lapse after a defined period of time unless petitioners can come forward with clear and convincing evidence that it should remain in place.
Really the question is: at what point in a descent into madness does a person become incapable of being a reliable party to the social contract that forms the framework under which our rights are respected? We already exclude some parties: children, felons, non-citizens, etc.
Mr. French continues:
Let’s empower the people who have the most to lose, and let’s place accountability on the lowest possible level of government: the local judges who consistently and regularly adjudicate similar claims in the context of family and criminal law.
Advocates for GVROs have been mostly clustered on the left, but there is nothing inherently leftist about the concept. After all, the GVRO is consistent with and recognizes both the inherent right of self-defense and the inherent right of due process. It is not collective punishment. It is precisely targeted.
I haven’t yet looked to see if there have been challenges to the constitutionality of California’s law. I have a feeling that, given the Second-Amendment limitations that even conservative members of the courts have already found permissible, it would be allowed to stand. I would also strongly prefer that such laws be left to the States (but then there are very, very few things that I ever prefer to see implemented at the Federal level).
My inclination is that this is a reasonable proposal. Unlike the ignorant, ineffective, and inflammatory “solutions” that cringing Eloi hoplophobes seek to impose on every law-abiding American, GVROs might actually save a life now and then, while having a minimal, and far more justifiable, impact on our rights and liberties.
Might they be subject to abuse? Yes. But if they are imposed narrowly and individually in local courts, with demanding criteria, the tradeoff might be an acceptable one. (Readers will know that I am no moderate when it comes to gun rights — but the other side of the tradeoff is to have people like Nikolas Cruz armed for slaughter. Nothing is simple.)
What say you, readers?
P.S. David French responds to a critic, here.
P.P.S. Needless to say (but I’ll say it anyway): no matter what we end up doing about GVROs, we should protect our schools. How can any reasonable person disagree?
Strength of will is the Second Amendment of the personal virtues: the one that secures all the others.
Now and then it’s good to step back from the dumpster-fire of current events and media. A quiet rainy day in the Outer Cape, with my lovely wife off in Europe visiting our grandson, is such an occasion.
I spent the day with my friend Alec, an avid outdoorsman, who has very generously been teaching me fly-fishing. (Being of Scottish heritage, this is something that is surely in my blood, but I’ve neglected it all my life.) The narrow land around Wellfleet is dotted and crisscrossed with ponds and streams and estuaries, alive with trout and bass and pan-fish, and I realized a while back that to live here and not to take up fishing would be to waste a great blessing.
So, little by little, under Alec’s patient and expert tutelage, I’ve been getting the hang of it. Today he began to teach me the art of tying flies, and I managed to assemble two “Wooly Buggers“. It is with immense satisfaction that I report they came out surprisingly well. I think I’m hooked.
We spent the rest of the afternoon in his truck, bumping along sandy fire-roads in the woods, as Alec showed me some of his favorite hidden spots. We’ll fish them in the spring.
I hope you will forgive me for not commenting on the new FISA memo, or the assault on the NRA, or any of the rest of it. My enthusiasm for that sort of engagement ebbs and flows, and just now I’ve had enough to last me for a while. It’s unwholesome to dwell on that stuff too much. Sometimes it’s better just to go for a walk in the woods.
Last night CNN put on a televised “Town Hall” meeting on guns. I didn’t watch it, but from what I’ve heard my impression was that it was neither civil nor productive. (Astonishing, I know.)
Charles Cooke comments on it, here. He calls it a “disaster for our discourse”.
All comity and presumption of goodwill is rapidly boiling away in America. A glance at the history of civil wars, going all the way back to Rome, should fill any honest observer of the current scene with a dark foreboding. We are at the point now where a critical threshold is being crossed: the widespread ascription of irremediable moral evil to a rival political faction. This is a prerequisite of, and generally a precursor to, publicly sanctioned violence. I hope I am exaggerating the severity of this crisis, but I fear I am not.
P.S. Just wondering: in the aftermath of the Parkland atrocity, has anyone blamed the shooter? If so, I must have missed it.
As the din of political combat intensifies all round us, and comity and goodwill vanish in the smoke and fires of battle, I thought it might be good to remind ourselves of what real statesmanship and patriotism look like, and to remember that even in the darkest times it is possible to rise, however briefly, above the fray to remember our common humanity, and to reflect on the brevity of our lives and the transience of our worldly aims.
Take a breath, then, and read Winston Churchill’s eulogy for Neville Chamberlain, who had died just as Hitler was laying waste to London in the early days of the War. Try, if you can, to read it slowly, and to hear it in the great man’s voice.
Here’s a legal article with an “arresting” preamble:
I hope to convince you in the next hour, some of you, that the greatest single threat to our freedoms, the freedoms set forth in the Bill of Rights, is not from Iraq or Iran. I don’t think it’s from North Korea. I don’t think it’s from the extremists of the Muslim world. The threat, as it has always been throughout history, is internal: It is from within. But I do not think it is terrorists or extremists on the right. I hope to convince a few of you that the greatest single threat to our freedoms today comes from a group consisting largely of American housewives. They call themselves the Mothers Against Drunk Driving. MADD.
Can the author make the charges stick? Have a look here, and decide for yourself.
Here’s a article that asks the question: if Russian trolls are indictable for election-meddling as unregistered foreign agents, why not Christopher Steele? Why not, as criminal co-conspirators, Fusion GPS, Perkins Coie, the DNC, and the Clinton campaign?
For those who would ban all guns in private hands — and I know many of you personally — some Q & A:
What are arms for?
They are power multipliers. Who has arms has power over those who do not.
What does it mean to be sovereign? What is it that distinguishes the sovereign from whom he rules?
The sovereign has power over those he rules.
In America’s democratic system, who is sovereign?
The people are sovereign.
If arms confer decisive power, and the people allow themselves to be disarmed by the State, who gains power? Who loses power?
The State gains power; the people lose power.
If the people cede their arms to the State, then, who is really sovereign?
Clearly it must be the State, and no longer the people.
Any questions?
Today I paid a visit to one of the Outer Cape’s old burial grounds: the Pine Grove cemetery in Truro. It’s a remote spot, some distance down a wooded dirt road off one of Truro’s smaller byways.
The place has some notoriety: in 1969, a man named Tony Costa murdered, sexually violated and dismembered (in that order, apparently) four young women in a small brick crypt there. You can read about it here. The little crypt is still there, with a loose wooden door. I went in; the inside contains some macabre graffiti. It’s a strange thing, to be in such a place, and I didn’t linger.
I did spend some time looking around the graveyard. It being a Monday afternoon in February, a time when the Outer Cape is almost deserted, I had the place, and its silence, all to myself.
The cemetery goes back over 200 years, and the names on the older graves are familiar out here: Ryder, Rich, Lombard, Atwood, Higgins. I am always affected by the way old cemeteries telescope the lives of families — lives as rich and complex as any of our own, with the full measure of joy and sorrow, hope and disappointment, toil and leisure, love and loss — into a few names and dates, and a mossy patch of earth. You see the tiny graves of young children — “Dear Bertie” was one — and you can’t help adding up the dates to imagine the loneliness of a woman who survived her son by forty years, and her beloved husband by twenty.
One thing I noticed was how many of the men were lost at sea, and how young. Many of them were in their teens. I thought about their brief lives and awful deaths, and the worry, waiting, and, finally, grief of a mother or a wife — all of it borne so long ago, and all of it put away forever, now, under some moss and grass in a piney wood under an empty sky.
Another thing I noticed: how many of the women in the older graves were named “Thankful”. These “hortatory” names were popular among the Puritans of Sussex, but less so among the East Anglian communities that were the source of so much of early New England settlement. It makes me curious about the geographical origins of these Outer Cape families.
“Thankful”. Not a very fashionable idea these days, I’m afraid, despite all we have to be thankful for. Quite the opposite, it seems.
We hear ad nauseam that more-enlightened countries around the world have lower homicide rates than the US because they have fewer firearms in private hands. This is repeated so often that a great many people simply believe it to be true. The correlation, however, actually goes the other way, as I demonstrated in this post from 2015.
I’ve just run across an article from 2014 that looks at the numbers in considerable detail (including a helpful Excel file you can download). Read it here.
Nobody has written with more clarity on the web of intrigue surrounding Russia, the FISA court, the Mueller probe, election-tampering, possible abuses of power by the Obama-era FBI, DOJ, and IRS, and alleged “collusion” than the former Federal prosecutor Andrew McCarthy. His latest column explores, with lucidity and detail, the difference between a criminal investigation and a counterintelligence operation, and why the distinction matters. He also examines the powers of the President regarding such things, and the question of what “obstruction of justice” could possibly mean as applied to the Chief Executive.
It’s one of his best so far. Read it here.
I’ve once again raised the comment-form caching issue with my hosting service, Bluehost. I’m hoping that this time they will get it sorted out, once and for all. Thank you for your patience.
It’s happened again: a massacre at a school, a shock of grief and horror and powerlessness in the face of evil, and a spasm of reaction on the part of hoplophobes, sheltered liberals, mainstream media, and Democrat opportunists (a Venn diagram with extensive overlap) to demonize gun-rights advocates and to call for government to “do something”. That “something” invariably involves, in some way or other, a wish to make guns, especially scary-looking ones, go away, no matter how irrational that is, how much it involves the abrogation of essential rights, how practically and politically impossible, and, ultimately, how ineffective such an attempt would be.
The one thing that could actually work: protect the schools. We protect our banks, celebrities, and politicians with guns. We protect our children with… signs.
I’ve written again and again about this. I’ve offered some excellent links for the reader, and will give you a few of them again at the end of this post. I also encourage you to look over our collected posts on the topic, here.
I’m not going to rehearse all of that now. But I will quote something I wrote back in October, after the Las Vegas massacre:
I am 61 years old. I grew up in a rural area of west-central New Jersey. When I was a boy, all the households around me had a gun or two. We boys used to stack up hay-bales and put targets on them (a charcoal briquette was a favorite choice) to shoot at with a .22. Schools and scout-troops often had rifle ranges; I myself got a marksmanship Merit Badge while at summer camp with the Boy Scouts. I don’t recall being aware of any gun laws at all; you could buy ammo at the general store. (Gun safety was a big deal, though, and kids were taught to handle firearms carefully and respectfully.)
This was the state of normal (non-urban, middle-class, predominantly white) American culture half a century ago. Guns were an unexceptional part of that bygone world, and were easily accessible to all of us (you could order pretty much any gun you liked through the mail, by sending cash in an envelope!). Somehow, though, we hardly ever murdered each other, and mass shootings were very, very rare.
Something has changed, obviously. And it isn’t access to guns.
To those on the Left, shrieking for the government to make the pain stop by exerting more control — you celebrities, politicians, editors, and yes, you goodthinkful liberals that I know personally here in New York, many of whom I have called friends — I’ll say this:
While you were, over the last half-century, systematically destroying, displacing, denouncing, and dismantling the historic American nation and its civil society — all moral norms, every basis of public commonality, all respect for our history and heritage, public expression of religion, the nuclear family, sexual restraint, and every natural structure and category and hierarchy that held civilization together and gave young people a framework within which to learn dignity and duty and gratitude and belonging and meaning and self-control — while you were doing all that, what did you think was going to happen? And now you want to “fix” the moral and social wreckage you’ve created by disarming us against your future predations upon our rights, our culture, and upon the society we still hope, against hope, to restore and preserve?
Go to hell. This sickness is your fault, not ours. You will not degrade us any longer. If you want our arms, come and take them.
Some links:
‣ Larry Correia’s outstanding essay covering all parts of the gun-control argument.
‣ Five Thirty Eight: Mass Shootings Are A Bad Way To Understand Gun Violence.
‣ “I used to think gun control was the answer. My research told me otherwise.”
By now you may have heard of a movie called Black Panther. It’s a Marvel Comics offering about a fictional, technologically advanced African Utopia called Wakanda. I haven’t seen the movie (I don’t think it’s even out yet), but I can certainly understand all the buzz, and why America’s black community would be happy to have a unifying and uplifting movie to rally to.
One thing I’ve noticed, though, is the extent to which the picture seems, to many people, not to be fictional at all. I recall seeing, for example, an NBC tweet saying that the splendor and sophistication of Wakanda (which, if I understand correctly, derives its wealth from the existence of a miraculous mineral called “vibranium”) “will prove to the colonialists that if they had not interfered with Africa, we’d be so far advanced.”
Well, with all the publicity the film’s getting, I’m sure any colonialists still at large in the world will take note. But at the risk of seeming stingy, Wakanda doesn’t exist — and I do think it’s a bit of a reach to use a thing that doesn’t exist to prove a historical counterfactual.
Perhaps the best way to understand this is as a cultural variation of Anselm’s ontological argument: Wakanda must exist.
Most Tuesday nights at 10 p.m., the radio host John Batchelor (whose program, as I have mentioned before, is one of the most interesting and penetrating news sources in all of media) has an hour-long discussion with the Russia scholar Stephen F. Cohen about the new Cold War. If you take any interest at all in this increasingly ominous situation, I urge you to listen; you can catch the show live on WABC AM (770) if you are in the New York area, or you can stream the show live, free of charge, from anywhere using the iHeartRadio website or mobile app. The Batchelor show is also available as podcasts after the fact, here.
Meanwhile, here’s a summary of Professor Cohen’s recent commentary on what the press call “Russiagate”, and he calls “Intelgate”.
Cohen believes that we have stupidly squandered all hope of detente and strategic partnership with Russia, who might have been a worthwhile friend in this new era of global realignment. I think he is exactly right, and that we have conducted ourselves with terrible and prideful unwisdom.
I think perhaps I’m turning the corner, now: no more fever, at least, though I’m still shockingly depleted. I say “shockingly”, but I suppose I should face facts: I’ll be sixty-two in April, and although I’ve always had the constitution of a lion, and have almost always managed to fight off whatever virus or bug has threatened to get hold of me, nothing lasts forever. Perhaps I’ll even get a flu shot next year. I have to say, though: if this is to be the “new normal”, I say the hell with it.
I’ve been too addled to read much, or write at all, and haven’t really paid any attention to the news. I did notice, though, that our mainstream news outlets seem to be fawning over Kim Jong-Un’s sister, who is attending the Olympics, and that they have got some well-deserved heat for it. (CNN, for example, said she was “stealing the show!” — as if she were Kate Middleton or some other society-column luvvie, instead of the director of the Propaganda and Agitation Department of the world’s most brutally oppressive dictatorial regime.)
Again I am tempted to use the word “shocking” — because it ought to be — but by now it’s hard for me to be shocked by this. Our culture has become so degraded, its organs of perception and discrimination and comprehension so atrophied, that we’ve lost all moral and intellectual depth, and all sense of extension and persistence in time. We have become as children, captured by one shiny thing after another, informed only by the feelings of the moment.
Even the one thing we now seem to care about to the exclusion of everything else — the ostentatious piety of championing “victims” and denouncing their “oppressors” — is forgotten here. Think of that! Here we have a real oppressor — one whose family actually enslaves, tortures, starves and murders truly helpless men, women, and children — and she is wafted to celebrity by a doting press. How is this possible? The answer is simple: she is not Western, not male, not capitalist, and not white — and Donald Trump has declared her family to be enemies of America. This should tell you everything you need to know about what really motivates our mass-market media.
It’s easy just to go numb to it all — it’s in our nature, after all, to get used to awful things that don’t go away — but every now and then the awful depth of this insanity, this pathology, jumps back into focus, and it is terrifying.
As someone who is very rarely unwell, it’s always a jolt to be reminded how debilitating a nasty cold can be, especially as I get a bit older. Writing seems to be quite out of the question this evening (indeed I stared at the page for a good two or three minutes just now just to assemble this sentence).
Back before long, insh’Allah.
Update, Feb. 10: Getting worse, not better. I’m afraid this must be the flu. Please browse our archives, or try the “Random Post” link at upper right. (See also Jacques’ most recent comment, here, on a world gone mad.
Back in late November of 2016, the New York Times lamented, in its smugly named “Interpreter” column, that democracy was suddenly in danger around the world. (What might have happened around then that would have put them is such a frame of mind? I feel as if I’m forgetting something…) They called upon two boyish boffins who, having “crunched data”, announced that the warning lights are flashing red. This, we are to understand, is both surprising, and bad.
We read:
Political scientists have a theory called “democratic consolidation,’ which holds that once countries develop democratic institutions, a robust civil society and a certain level of wealth, their democracy is secure.
“Political scientists”. Well, if science is what they’re doing, then their theory ought to be falsifiable, if I remember my Popper correctly. It makes me wonder if they’ve crunched the data for, say, Athens, Rome, Berlin, Caracas…
Anyway, the key datum in this piece is that the number of people who consider it “essential” to live in a democracy has declined — “plummeted” says the Times — in an assortment of prosperous democracies, particularly among the younger generation. This, says one of the striplings who did the research, “should have us worried”.
Really? It doesn’t worry me at all. Indeed it fills me with hope that we might be rearing a new generation of exceptional perspicacity and good sense. How on earth could anyone not an imbecile read the vast and varied book of history and conclude that it is “essential” to live under democracy — or, for that matter, under any particular form of government at all? “Red lights flashing”, you say? Good. Let them flash. Let us examine democracy for what it is: one possible form of government among many, with inherent and irremediable liabilities, and such a frightening track-record at the time of America’s founding that Framers tried their utmost — and failed nevertheless — to keep it at bay. The article left me feeling upbeat and refreshed.
“Well, fine,” I hear you ask, “but why mention it now? That article’s more than a year old.”
Here’s why: a post I ran across just recently over at Unamusement Park. Go and have a look. And if the name of the second party quoted seems familiar to you, you can refresh your memory here.
Patriotism makes concrete the joining of the self to something that is external, larger than oneself, and abstract enough not to get too bogged down in details, but also immanent in one’s immediate surroundings, in the world one actually lives in. (Religion does this too.)
Globalist universalism is too remote. The individual makes his commitment to it, then resumes natural, ordinary, local life, but with a vital sense of belonging leached away. This is a terrible trap — or a convenient means of abdication. Either way, it does a nation no good.
OK, logophiles: below the fold is a list of the words that, according to this item at Slate, David Foster Wallace had circled in his dictionary. (I would link each word to its definition, but it would take me hours, and I can’t be bothered. Looking them up should help you pass these long evenings in the hibernaculum.)
The Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee has just released an interim report on its investigation into the skulduggery surrounding the Clinton email server. For your convenience, I’ve saved a copy here.
Yesterday’s post was a look at the tension and strife afflicting present-day America. In a comment, reader ‘Magus’ said:
Obligatory libertarian quote: if the Constitution/US political framework set up by founders was unable to prevent the current state of affairs it was either complicit in it or failed to stop it.
Either way, it was faulty.
I’ll respond, for starters, with a less-than-obligatory pedantic nitpick: the conditional ‘if’ was unnecessary. Clearly the Constitution has been unable to prevent the current state of affairs, because here we are.
That aside, though, the question is a good one: why was the Constitution unable to prevent the current state of affairs? Is it reasonable for us to expect the Framers to have come up with a Constitution that could have done the job?
Having never tried my hand at writing a Constitution, let alone a Constitution that must be agreeable enough to all concerned as to be ratified by a diversity of States with widely varying economies and local cultures, I’ll say that the task might be trickier than it seems.
Take, for example, the question of amendments. If a Constitution is to serve for decades or centuries, it will surely be tested by circumstances wholly unforeseeable to its designers. Make it too inflexible, and it will become useless and obsolete, and will simply be ignored, or discarded. But if we make it too easily altered, then it ceases to be a Constitution at all: rather than being the bones of a nation, it is no more than a garment, subject to every passing fashion.
Consider also the question of the judiciary. Unelected and unaccountable, the Supreme Court has has taken unto itself a sovereign and absolute power, beyond the reach of any appeal by the people. Yes, this power is limited by the Court’s inability to rule proactively; it can only exert its authority when a case is brought before it. But it is precisely those questions of the deepest national import that do come before it, and its rulings depend, often, on the whim of a single Justice. Once rendered, those rulings are the absolute law of the land. In this way the Court can usurp, as capriciously as any tyrant, the legislative and executive power — and the people can do nothing about it, short of amending the Constitution, which in a nation riven by factional strife is a practical impossibility. But without a strong judiciary, what is there to prevent the other branches from ignoring the Constitution altogether? Without some means of validating legislative and executive action against the strictures of the “supreme law of the land”, why have a Constitution at all?
You begin to see, I hope, how difficult all of this is. The Constitution that the Framers created was, in my opinion, a work of genius, and it served the nation well for what was, in terms of the histories of republics, an impressively long time, under rapidly evolving conditions. (If you disagree with all of this, I’ll ask you to set aside an hour or two of your time, and write a better one.)
But a constitution is not a nation. It is only a plan for the structure of a nation: a blueprint, an architectural diagram that describes the contours and load-bearing members of an edifice that must ultimately stand up, or fall down, in the real world — and in engineering terms, the reliability of a structure depends upon the materials we build it with. If you are building a nation, those materials are its people, and their culture.
Here we come to the heart of the matter. The plain fact is that building a working system from nothing ”” and nothing, or perhaps just a lot of rubble, is what we would likely be starting with, if we were actually to get the chance to try our own hands at government-building ”” is almost certain to be far more difficult than we, in our armchairs, might imagine. Given the latter-day condition of the American people and culture, the likelihood is that should the gathering storm break upon us, and the cataclysm come to pass, our little plans and designs will be swept away in a far more untidy process than we would prefer, and elementary Power will find its way to the top. Even the startlingly original edifice we call the American Founding was built, not ex nihilo, but on a deep and unshaken foundation of British traditions, and raised by a broadly homogeneous people who, for all their regional variations, had a very great deal in common.
This, then, is what is essential for success, far more so than this or that political form: a basic commonality that can be a foundation for comity and cooperation; a sharing of culture, history, folkways, and heritage that is sufficient for the private life of the home to extend smoothly into the public square without the perceived infringements of social liberty that lead immediately to divisive resentments; and some broad agreement on those things that are to be held sacred, and that form the basis of civic virtue.
With those things in hand, there are all sorts of political systems that can work tolerably well, but without them there are none. It is the great tragedy of our time that we have squandered them all. Might a better Constitution have prevented that? I doubt it very much.
It is hardly possible to be a sentient being in the United States without observing that we are engaged an a great struggle for power. Politics always involves such wrangling, and of course our system of government was designed with that in mind, but in these last decades several trends, moving in one direction only, have brought us into a state of smoldering civil war.
First, the size, scope, and influence of the Federal government have increased steadily as power has flowed from the States to Washington. (There is perhaps no better chronicle and analysis of how this has happened, and why, than Robert Higgs’s Crisis and Leviathan, which I recommend to you all.)
Second, political and cultural commonality between the nation’s two great factions has almost entirely vanished, and with it all hope of comity and compromise. The political fissure has deepened to the point that it has become a moral conflict — and if I’m right about present-day liberalism being in fact a secular cryptoreligion, then it is a religious conflict as well, no different in essence from all the other wars of religion that have darkened the pages of history. Moral and religious conflicts are stubbornly resistant to conciliation or compromise, just as we see in America today. Who should be willing to compromise with evil?
Third, the arrival of the Internet, and the resulting decline of mainstream media’s monopoly on the dissemination of ideas and opinions, has done two things: it has brought everyone and everything into immediate contact with everything else, and has dissolved the distinctions between news, opinion, and propaganda. (I remarked at length on some of these effects several years ago, here.) Everything now collides with everything else with zero latency: unfiltered, unvetted, unmediated, and unreflected-upon. This new environment, in combination with universally enfranchised democracy, is the perfect Petri dish for cultivating hasty opinions, emotional responses, mass hysteria, and angry mobs — and those who pull the wires can be counted on to keep their own interests foremost.
Fourth, enormous waves of immigration from alien and incompatible cultures (together with a prevailing ideology in media and the academy that combines identitarian multiculturalism with grievance-mongering against the traditional American nation) has broken down what has always made immigration work in the past — an eagerness to assimilate, to blend into the mainstream national culture. These dislocated immigrants are cultivated as beneficiaries of government largesse, and their votes are counted on to support the growth of the federal Leviathan that nurtures them. Cultural traditionalists in America perceive this as an assault on what they have inherited and hope to preserve. (That they should feel this way about it is, to those on the other side of the Great Fissure, evidence of complete moral dereliction, justifying political and social severities up to and including physical intimidation.)
Finally, technology has made available unprecedented tools for supervision, surveillance, and subversion. These make it possible for the powerful to extend their eyes, ears, and arms in ways that even the most authoritarian tyrants of old could never have dreamt of.
Look at our situation. The media sorts itself into warring camps, jeering and mocking each other and insisting that everything the other side says is a lie. Free speech, and free inquiry, is all but extinct on our campuses; those who question the dogma of our new religion are shouted down and driven off, sometimes violently. Congress is bitterly, implacably divided; legislation proposed by one side is denounced as evil by the other, and is passed only by slim, party-line votes and parliamentary rule-hacking. Elections are bitterly contested, and their results defied; agents of the State itself conspire to rig and overturn them.
The reason we fight so bitterly over Federal power is simple: there’s so much of it that its possession becomes a glittering, and in some ways an existentially necessary, prize.
But — imagine an alternate United States, in which power is distributed in a sort of pyramid, with its base in local governments, and most of the administrative affairs that affect our lives are conducted by our townships, cities, and states. At the apex of this pyramid of power would be a small capstone, located in Washington, concerning itself only with those remote and universal things that involved the union and coordination of the States.
Can you imagine such a thing? The Framers did. They foresaw with a terrible apprehension exactly what befalls us now, and tried to the fullest extent of their genius to bequeath to us a system that would forestall it for as long as possible. But they knew even then that it was beyond hope without comity, commonality, and civic virtue, all of which are now scattered in the whirlwind.
As I wrote in the previous post, it’s time for this blog to have a new name. I chose the old one, waka waka waka, rather impulsively; its meaning was not obvious, and over the years many people assumed it had something to do with Fozzie Bear.
The original title came from a Fela Kuti song, “Coffin for Head of State”. In the song’s lyrics, the phrase referred to Mr. Kuti’s peregrinations in his African homeland (“walk-a walk-walk-a”), trying to make sense of things. The subheading of this blog was, for many years, “I go many places”, another line from the song. I chose the title because I imagined that the website wouldn’t be about anything in particular — and in those early days it wasn’t (although I did write a lot more, back then, about two topics of interest to me: natural history, and the philosophy of mind).
Looking back over the years, though, I can see a distinct evolution in my own thinking and interests. In particular the crisis in Western culture and civilization, and the need to understand how we came to such a pass, has come to the forefront. For fifteen years or more my own reading and study has centered on the history of the West, on philosophy and political theory, on the long story of Christianity and Islam (and the great and continuing struggle between them), on the place of religion in the world, on the persistent and awkward realities and diversities of human nature, and on the way cultures and civilizations flourish and die. I have learned that one must consult the past to understand the past, and so in studying history I have made a point of reading contemporary sources wherever I can. (This, perhaps more than anything else, has been for me a vital awakening.)
In this process my own understanding of the world has changed, and with it many of my beliefs about fundamental things. For example: I am no longer an atheist; my unjustifiable certainty on that score is gone. I have shed every trace of the unreflective leftishness of my youth. I no longer believe that humans populations everywhere are essentially the same in all important characteristics, having the same innate qualities and wanting the same things. I no longer believe that culture is a fungible or casually disposable artifact, or that culture is the cause, rather than an effect, of all differences and inequalities. With regard to democracy itself, I am now at the very least a heretic, if not an apostate. My apostasy extends also to the quasi-religion of scientism (which is not in any sense to say that I reject science itself, or the scientific method, or the astonishing power of rational inquiry). And so on.
All of this has been chronicled in these pages. This blog, over the thirteen years of its existence, has been the record of the movement, or progress, of one man’s mind. There is a phrase for this in Latin, suggested to me by my lovely wife Nina: motus mentis. This seems fitting.
So: no more waka waka waka. It’s been fun, but all things must pass.
I am going to stop capitalizing every word in my titles. I’m weary of the effort. I might change the name of the blog, too. It’s out of date, and I’m tired of it.
So, the Memo’s been published. “The mountain has labored, and brought forth a mouse.”
Sure, there are damning things in it — notably that the FISA petitioners at the FBI and DOJ knew the Steele dossier to have been a highly questionable political hack-job, paid for by the DNC and the Clinton campaign (pardon the redundancy there) through their bagmen Perkins Coie, but neglected to mention this to the FISA court — but there isn’t much in there that we didn’t really already know, and this warrant is only a small part of what appears to be an enormously complex and far-reaching story of government malfeasance.
There is an important, and carefully written, bit of ambiguity in the memo:
The “dossier’ compiled by Christopher Steele (Steele dossier) on behalf of the Democratic National Committee (DNC) and the Hillary Clinton campaign formed an essential part of the Carter Page FISA application.
How “essential”? This is a key question, which, to the best of my knowledge, hasn’t been satisfactorily answered. Was it so central to the FISA application that the warrant would never have been issued without it? Voices on the Right are assuming this is the case, and the Left insists that it isn’t. It would be good to know. (Don’t get me wrong here: that they used it at all is appalling.)
[Update, February 3rd: The previous paragraph betrays careless reading on my part. In section 4 of the memo we see that “Deputy Director McCabe testified before the committee in December 2017 that no surveillance warrant would have been sought from the FISC without the Steele dossier information.”]
Despite all the fuss — and what a fuss there was! — this memo is just a small thing, the tiny tip of a very large iceberg. You can read it here. See also Libertybelle’s latest, which will point you also to a new item by Andrew McCarthy.
Tonight, all eyes are on the Nunes memo, which seems likely to be released tomorrow. But amid all the smoke and noise, various parties around the Internet have noticed that there may be other things afoot:
It was reported today that the Mueller team has announced that the sentencing of Mike Flynn has been “postponed”, due to the “status of the investigation”.
“Due to the status of the Special Counsel’s investigation, the parties do not believe that this matter is ready to be scheduled for a sentencing hearing at this time,’ the document, signed by Mueller and Flynn attorneys Robert Kelner and Stephen Anthony, said.
“The parties shall file a joint status report by no later than May 1, 2018, stating whether the matter should be scheduled for sentencing or whether a deadline should be set for filing another joint status report,’ said a related order signed by Judge Emmet G. Sullivan.
That’s interesting. Also interesting:
U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia Judge Rudolph Contreras took Flynn’s guilty plea on Dec. 1, 2017 ”“ but just days later, Contreras recused himself from the case.
A court spokesperson told Fox News that the courts do not disclose grounds for recusal.
The exoteric interpretation of this would be that Flynn’s still singing to Mueller about Trump/Russia collusion, and that it’s simply too soon to put the canary in the cage.
But given that all the fuss in Washington right now is about abuse of the FISA court to conduct illegal surveillance of the Trump team, there’s another possibility.
How was attention drawn to Flynn in the first place? By way of the FISA warrant. So here’s the esoteric version of the story:
If Flynn’s conviction depends on evidence gathered by a fraudulently obtained FISA warrant, and Mueller knows it, then Flynn must walk. Moreover, it is only by Flynn’s being charged in the first place with an actual crime that the FISA warrant is forced to come under legal scrutiny — for the possibility that it might be tainted evidence. If Flynn knew all along that illegal surveillance was underway, might he have set a clever trap by making false statements while being recorded, knowing that he was setting himself up to be charged with a “process crime” that would ultimately force the skulduggery out into the open? If this is correct, then it’s a very different set of people who are going to end up in trouble when Mueller finally puts his cards on the table.
Obviously I, an obscure and humble scrivener, have no way of knowing what’s really going on here. But it should be equally obvious that the braying media, on both sides of the aisle, don’t either. I think it’s also very safe to say that there is much, much more to this story than we will every know.
Of this, though, I think we can be sure: the next few weeks and months will not be boring.
Everyone’s abuzz about last night’s State of the Union address, and I’ll say that I enjoyed it quite a bit myself: it was an hour-and-a-half long trolling of the Democrats in a way that was at least eight years overdue. Their discomfiture was so acute that they lost all concern for the political optics of sitting on their hands, glaring, as Mr. Trump read off an impressive list of good things that have been happening lately for America and its people. It became very clear indeed that the actual state of the Union doesn’t really interest them much at all; the only thing that matters to them is the state of their power over it — which is at a providentially low ebb for at least the next several months. All of this was never supposed to happen, and the Left is very, very angry about it.
What’s that you say? The Democrats are simply upset over the fate of the poor “Dreamers”? This is now shown to be obviously, transparently false. In these last days, Mr. Trump has offered legal status to approximately two million of them. This is far more generous than anything Barack Obama ever put on the table, and is an offer, I’m sure, that any “Dreamer” would accept without a moment’s hesitation. It would grant them their fondest hope — and if the Democrats truly cared about them, as they so ostentatiously pretend to do, they would leap at the proposal themselves (which, I should point out, is as unpopular with many to Mr. Trump’s right as it is on the far Left).
So why don’t they? Why, instead, do they spit on it, and denounce it in the vilest terms? The answer is obvious: because it does not immediately give these illegal aliens the vote, and because the offer is contingent upon reducing indiscriminate immigration — legal and illegal — in the future. Let me put that another way: the Democrats will not take this offer, despite it giving so-called “Dreamers” what they most desire, because it is designed not to assure the Democrats of a continuing flood of new Democrat voters. That is all there is to it.
From the moment Trump made this offer, infuriating so many on the Right, it struck me as a feint. He knew the Democrats would never bring themselves to accept it, despite it being a godsend for “Dreamers”, and that this would make it obvious to all of America where their priorities really are. (This just shortly after the Democrats had already embarrassed themselves by shutting down the government for the sake of illegal aliens.)
On display again, also, was Mr. Trump’s uncanny knack for taking the Left’s framing and language and making it his own. (You may not recall, for example, that “fake news” was originally used as a bludgeon against Mr. Trump, but it was.) Last night, in a brilliant stroke, he seized another verbal whip from the Democrat’s hands: “Dreamers”.
“Americans are dreamers too!”, he said, to the loudest applause of the evening. How can anyone argue with that, and win?
For almost ninety minutes, the Democratic Party demonstrated, with the eyes of America and the world upon them, just how sullen and small they are, and where their true allegiances lie. Our civil war may only be beginning, but this bravura performance was a significant, and victorious, skirmish for our side.
Do forgive me, Readers, if I sound quite uncharacteristically chipper about all this tonight. It will pass.
Now my email’s broken. If you’ve been trying to email me and I haven’t replied, or you’ve gotten a message-undeliverable notice, that’s why. On the line with support again (my new hobby, it seems).
It’s a sign of the times that it’s so disturbing to be disconnected like this.
Update, 3 p.m. EST: email’s all fixed. (Was a DNS problem.) Still not sure about the comment-form caching issue, though.