Numerous left-leaning strategists have freely admitted that COVID was a god-send to the "never let a crisis go to waste," grow-government, camp.  At this point it's clear to everyone across the spectrum that the pandemic emergency has been a Golden Goose of homeric proportions.  But it's not alone in the cornucopia of crises.  While the public has shouldered the cost of massive infrastructure bills decade after decade (remember Obama's massive "shovel ready" pitch?), bridges and roads continue to crumble.  What goes with all that?  Reflect on the value of perpetual crisis (and decrepitude).  The strategy is just as evident on the local level.  A fortune - tens, hundreds of millions - has been fleeced from the public and wasted on special interest schemes that have done nothing but exacerbate good water and river management (crippled forestry, industry, and dairy to boot).  Read on.

Joe Biden and the Uses of Nihilism
Victor Davis Hanson, January 31, 2022 - Blade of Perseus
American Greatness

Chaos is the new, the intentional, normal. A pandemic of nihilism has been unleashed upon the land. As in Lord of the Flies, when laws, rules, protocols, traditions, and customs are mocked and dismantled, primitive human nature in the raw is unleashed. 
​
Madness now reigns in every quarter, from the iconic to the irrelevant to the fundamental. Statues of Lincoln, Douglass, and Jefferson are toppled or defaced. The rules of capitalization have been altered. We are told that 1619, not 1776, was our founding date—and this by a “civil rights” activist-journalist who had no idea of the date that the Civil War began.

Quite quickly after the revolutionary boilerplate, America began reverting to its natural Hobbesian or Thucydidean essence. If you dispute that, look at looted packages along the Union Pacific tracks in Los Angeles. Try walking the nocturnal streets of Chicago or Baltimore. Visit the sidewalk homeless of San Francisco. Fly over our constipated ports. Drive into our empty new car dealerships. Pull up to our European-priced gas pumps. Shop in the emptying shelves of our Sovietizing food and discount stores. The common theme of the upcoming Super Bowl halftime show, apparently, is that the entertainers must have written lyrics threatening the police, denigrating women, using the N-word . . . and be worth $100 million.

Of course, that is what the elites celebrate, as people struggle to buy food, gas, and cars. The police are under attack and being killed on the street. The public is bewildered about criminals not being punished, workers paid to stay home, and biological men commandeering women’s sports. 

Abnormal is normal; normal is despised and discarded.

Friends and associates of all races and ethnicities are increasingly suspicious of each other. They are fleeing to the ancient refuge of tribal solidarity. Red states are hated, although they function, and are sought out; blue states are praised, even as they fail and residents flee. Our “leaders” are doing their best to confirm the age-old invective of our enemies that e pluribus unum simply cannot work.

Americans keep being pounded with “Vaccination! Vaccination! Vaccination!”—but never with commensurate advice on therapies, affordable drugs, and pragmatic protocols to survive COVID-19, as it often breaks through to the already thrice vaccinated.

Americans could tolerate the misinformation and the contradictions emanating from the CDC, the NIH, and NIAID. But only if the deceptions were issued with some humility and qualifiers, reminding us of our shared ignorance about the mysterious virus. Instead, pompous and insufferably sanctimonious bureaucrats sent out flurries of false knowledge, as if they were religious edicts, with implied medieval punishments for the apostates. Apologies never follow.

The public cannot fathom the border. Prior presidents hunting for cheap political gain (Republicans for more labor, Democrats for new constituents) were lax on immigration enforcement. Yet no president has ever deliberately invited in more than 2 million foreign nationals—entering illegally, impoverished, unvaccinated, untested, and without background checks. No prior president has not only violated his oath of office to enforce the laws of the United States, but simply and intentionally destroyed the law as it was written. Apply the Left’s 2019-2020 impeachment standard to Joe Biden’s first year, and he would be impeached the minute a Republican majority captured the House.

Americans sense the United States is losing all influence abroad, as allies gravitate to or appease China and Russia. The public does not lament the loss of global clout and prestige alone. Rather, the people also fear the end of the ancient American strategy of keeping foreign enemies far distant from the homeland.

As they figure out the themes of the present madness, Americans become troubled as they attempt to fathom the characteristics of the ongoing nihilism.
 
One, they see much of the sudden anarchy as self-induced, deliberate, agenda-driven, and as correctible as it was avoidable. In other words, the catastrophe of 2021 was no accident, but a tactic in service of a strategy.

Two, they conclude that the nihilism intentionally targets the despised middle class—those who tend to obey the rules, who pay their taxes, who don’t get arrested, who largely keep quiet—and who are standing in the way of a revolution. These Americans are underrepresented in crime, in upward mobility, and on most college campuses, but overrepresented in suicide rates and the death tolls in optional wars abroad.

For their part, the hoi polloi conclude that the more that they are libeled as “victimizers,” the more they are becoming the actual victims. Indeed, the heroic “victimized” are the ones most often flouting the law, committing violent crimes, and tearing down the institutions that in bygone days provided security and prosperity for everyone.
 
Three, ordinary citizens feel the law has utterly vanished. Sometimes it simply is ignored, as we see with revolving-door criminals who kill, maim, and loot with near impunity. Sometimes the law simply is asymmetrically applied. The administration correctly jails those convicted of illegally entering the Capitol and trashing the chambers of government, but it then grants de facto amnesties to the thousands who deliberately injured, torched, and looted for 120 days of riots, death, and mayhem in 2020.
 
Joe Biden meanders through his photo-ops indifferent to American civilization collapsing around him. His first year was the most disastrous of any presidency in history. Should that calamity continue, Biden will be known by posterity as the most inept president to have held office.

So why does he not take to the bully pulpit to deplore the current smash-and-grab, carjacking, and murder epidemic now reaching either all-time highs or levels not seen since the 1970s? Does Biden have a shred of empathy for the widow of a murdered policeman, the spouses and parents of those mowed down in Waukesha, the children shot dead in Chicago?

Joe Biden defended his policies by saying that automobile price spikes account for one-third of the spiraling consumer price index. So what? Does that mean inflation is somehow tolerable—as if citizens don’t drive cars most days of their lives? 

Is Biden aware that his administration’s core inflation definition and the consumer price index itself exclude energy as well as food price increases? What the real inflation rate is no one knows—but all understand that what we see and feel every day is far worse than what we are told. 

Biden has never explained to us the humiliation in Afghanistan—other than to whine that the generals failed to warn him of his own folly. Does he know why now Vladimir Putin again ponders attacking his neighbors—but did not between 2017 and 2020?
 
Did Biden ever consider the fast-tracking of pipelines, more fracking, a restoration of 2020 levels of oil and gas production, and more leases granted to avoid America’s continued dependence on the Russians and the Middle East? Instead, Biden begged Russia and the Saudis—both of whom he has derided—to pump more of the oil he despises, and which we have in abundance but will not use.

Did Biden once say stop the new racial tensions, or argue that Americans should worry first about the content of our character not the color of our skins? Has he ever worried about the racial cauldron he has lit and fueled? Not at all. 
Instead, Biden has done his best to inflame race through his own vile racist slurs. The recent “you ain’t black,” “junkie,” “boy, “negro,” are added to his prior inflammatory repertoire of “clean African-American,” “put y’all back in chains,” and the racist Corn Pop saga. 

Second, Biden demagogues race to win the support of his base of racialists. Has any president ever announced ahead of time that only those of a particular race and gender would be eligible for selection as his running mate and first Supreme Court nomination? At least Harvard keeps quiet about its racialism and does not flaunt the idea that it systematically discriminates against Asians.

So, in a vast multiracial democracy of tribal competition and tensions, Biden has done his best to turn Americans against each other—and has succeeded in a fashion that would have made his old Dixiecrat Senate mentors Robert Byrd and James O. Eastland proud. 

The mystery is perhaps not that nihilism has swept through America as effectively as Omicron, but why the president and the Left unleashed it. So, what explains the madness? 

First, Biden is cognitively challenged to the point of not being physically or mentally able to meet the challenges of the presidency. His handlers know it. The media knows it. And the public knows it, too. 

Irony has become the Left’s enemy. After screaming that Donald Trump should be removed under the 25th Amendment, that he should take a mental competency test, and that everyone from the acting director of the FBI to Ivy League psychiatrists must scheme to prove he was nuts, they all have grown silent. The Left’s quiet reflects that they are terrified that anyone else might successfully do to a genuinely enfeebled and failed president what they themselves attempted to do to a cognizant and successful president.

Biden’s assigned task in 2020 was to put a familiar “centrist” veneer on a radical agenda. Thereby, the hard Left, with the help of COVID-19 and Silicon Valley, could push that agenda past an unsuspecting public. Upon election, Biden would not revert to old Joe from Scranton deploring the leftist tool that he had become.

The movers of the agenda are the hard Left of the Democratic Party, those who circle around Bernie Sanders, the Obamas, Elizabeth Warren, and “the squad.” The shock troops are Black Lives Matter, Antifa, the millions on the campus, and the internet mob. The more confusion, chaos, and anarchy that follows, the more of their agenda they hope to push through, if not by legislative vote, then by executive edict, court decision, or simply ignoring the law. 

The third catalyst of the woke chaos are the hyper-rich—the franchise owners of the Left. These are the huge donors who nourish the think tanks, the media, the PACs, and the legal teams—the Zuckerbergs, the Soroses, the Bezoses and the rest of the Silicon Valley plutocracy. 

Equally important are the hypocritical professional classes—the tech upper-echelon, the media cohorts, the corporate lawyers and CEOs, the various university professoriate and administrations, the celebrities, the professional athletes, and the bicoastal movers and shakers. On the one hand, they are assuming that Americans won’t actually vote for their neosocialist utopias, which can be enacted only by changing the rules or demography or both. And on the other hand, they are hedging that their money, influence, and power will insulate them and their own from the stampede at the border, the growing criminality in the cities, price hikes that batter the middle classes, and the tribalism and racialism they helped to greenlight.

In normal times, such hard-left agendas have no resonance. But during a plague, lockdown, riots and arson, during murder and mayhem, chaos and anarchy?

- - -
You may want to visit Dr. Hanson's website that offers both public and subscription content.

     How long have people been cooking with gas safely?  Natural gas (along with propane) is by far the cleanest of 'fossil fuels' - highly efficient.  For more than 100 years, gas has been used for lighting, cooking, and heating, often without powered vents. Come on.  "...risk to public health and the planet"?   That's large.
      There's a big push on right now locally to require everyone to "move to electricity."  Those making the demands have got to be clueless about the generating capacity that exists, and how limited "the grid" is (substations, wires, the distribution system).  Maybe these folks think that "electricity comes from outlets."   But there's no way that the electrical system can handle the quantity of energy demand that the zealots have in mind.   At the risk of being branded skeptics, WE do think the timing of articles like this while The Administration is pushing "Build Back Better" is no coincidence.
​

Gas stoves in kitchens pose a risk to public health and the planet, research finds

Washington Post, January 27 2022
Maxine Joselow

Stanford University study comes as cities across the country seek to ban natural gas in new buildings, prompting industry pushback
 
The appliances release far more of the potent planet-warming gas methane than the Environmental Protection Agency estimates, Stanford University scientists found in a study published Thursday in the journal Environmental Science and Technology. The appliances also emit significant amounts of nitrogen dioxide, a pollutant that can trigger asthma and other respiratory conditions.

Scientists and climate activists have increasingly urged homeowners to switch to all-electric stoves, water boilers and other appliances, even as the natural gas industry fights in New York and across the country to keep the signature blue flames of gas-burning stoves as a staple in American homes.

“If you have the financial ability to swap out a gas stovetop for an electric induction cooktop, I do think it’s a good idea,” said Rob Jackson, a Stanford earth science professor and co-author of the study. “It’s a good idea for the planet and for air quality.”
Nationally, more than one-third of households — about 40 million homes — cook with natural gas. In California, 60 percent of households favor the popular fuel.
The researchers in Thursday’s study measured emissions from stoves in 53 homes across seven California counties. They used their findings to estimate that methane emissions from gas stoves in the United States have a comparable climate impact to about 500,000 gas-powered cars driven for a year, Jackson said.

The battle over climate change is boiling over on the home front
Methane, the main component of natural gas, is the second-largest contributor to climate change among greenhouse gases. Although it dissipates more quickly than carbon dioxide, it is more than 80 times as powerful in the first 20 years after it is released into the atmosphere.

The researchers also found that more than three-quarters of the methane emissions occurred when the gas stoves were turned off, suggesting that leaks persist even when the appliances are not being used for cooking or heating. Emissions of nitrogen dioxide, meanwhile, were more closely correlated with the amount of gas burned.

Tim Carroll, an EPA spokesman, noted that the agency previously has not included emissions from inside homes and buildings, known as “post-meter” emissions, in its Greenhouse Gas Inventory, an annual report on every sector of the U.S. economy. But the agency plans to update its approach.

“EPA looks forward to reviewing the new study,” Carroll said in an email. “While post-meter leak emissions (including leak emissions from stoves) are not currently included in the GHG Inventory, EPA plans to incorporate an estimate for these post-meter emissions in the upcoming 2022 GHG Inventory.”

The American Gas Association, a trade group that represents more than 200 companies, has defended the industry’s efforts to reduce its climate impact, noting that total methane emissions from natural gas systems have declined 16 percent from 1990 to 2019 and that residential natural gas use amounts to only a small portion of U.S. emissions.

“We are committed to going even further by investing nearly $30 billion each year to modernize our system and $4.3 million every day to help our customers and communities shrink their carbon footprint through energy efficiency improvements,” Karen Harbert, the association’s president and chief executive officer, said in a statement.

The group added that agencies such as the EPA and the Consumer Product Safety Commission “closely monitor and have evaluated homes with natural gas piping and natural gas appliances and have never taken action to limit their use.”

The EPA does not regulate indoor air pollution because it lacks the authority to do so under the Clean Air Act, which covers only sources such as automobiles, power plants and other industrial facilities.

But in 2018, the EPA set a one-hour outdoor exposure limit of 100 parts per billion for nitrogen dioxide, a common pollutant that forms when fossil fuels such as oil, gas and coal are burned at high temperatures. Exposure can have a range of harmful effects on the lungs, including increased asthma attacks and inflammation of the airways, according to the American Lung Association.

Thursday’s study found that families who don’t use their range hoods or who have poor ventilation can surpass the one-hour outdoor standard within a few minutes of stove usage, particularly in more cramped kitchens, which are more common in poorer communities.

“It’s definitely an environmental justice issue because lower-income households are more susceptible,” said Eric Lebel, a senior scientist at PSE Healthy Energy, a research institute in Oakland, Calif., who worked on the study as a graduate student at Stanford.

New York City last month became the largest municipality in the country to ban gas use in new buildings, overcoming opposition from the fossil fuel industry and real estate developers. The New York City Council, a majority-Democratic body, voted to require new buildings under seven stories to go electric by December 2023. Taller buildings have until 2027.

In recent years, gas bans have spread from liberal enclaves in California to bigger cities across the country, including Boston, Denver and Seattle. Last week, New York Gov. Kathy Hochul (D) proposed the first statewide gas ban by 2027, a move that climate activists cheered while calling for a faster timeline.

The gas industry has waged a campaign in statehouses across the country to preempt such bans, arguing that they deny consumers choice of a reliable fuel. Republican-controlled legislatures in Southern states including Alabama, Kentucky and Texas have passed industry-backed bills to prevent cities from restricting fossil fuel use.

Frank Maisano, an energy policy expert at Bracewell, a law and lobbying firm, who has worked with gas industry clients, criticized the methodology of Thursday’s study.
The researchers conducted the study by “wrapping kitchens in plastic, which is in no way a realistic measure of the circumstances in a typical home,” Maisano said in an email. “It is too bad that we aren’t trying to find out more important things about indoor air quality rather than pushing a political agenda centered around electrification.”

The study’s authors said they stand by their findings, which went through a rigorous peer-review process. Jackson added that he hopes the conclusions persuade some Americans to ditch gas stoves for induction cooktops, which can boil a pot of water in nearly half the time of a conventional burner, despite often costing more upfront.
​
“Some people have an affinity for gas stoves,” he said, “but if we could just get them to try electric cooktops, they would never go back.”

     It's been over sixty years since the "the big three" tv networks (ABC, CBS, NBC) went national.  In many places they provided all tv entertainment over the air. "Competition being what competition is," content was driven by advertising revenue.  While from the start commercial tv did offer some high quality plays and other highbrow material as specials, "educational" content was limited. When public broadcasting was first proposed the cause was noble.  Now, 30-40 years on, scores of special interest material is available 24-7, much free or nearly-so.  There's a river of subscription and specialty programming available on cable networks like Discovery, Science, Ovation, BBC (constant cooking, home improvement, sci-fi, and much-much more) plus YouTube and subscription streams.  You get the picture.  None of this is news, really.
     The big issue addressed below is the matter of public broadcasting's bias, political speech being paid-for with public funds. [Some may not have noticed, but Seattle's deeply-progressive "non-profit" Crosscut acquired KCTS-TV (channel 9).]

Fire Public Broadcasting
Mike Gonzalez - National Review, Jan 26 2022

End Taxpayer Funding for NPR
​NPR and PBS routinely present woke opinion as fact, and broadcast views that are anathema to at least half the country. Time to yank their taxpayer dollars.

Public broadcasting ceased long ago to reflect the views of the American public. Today, in fact, it serves coastal elites who disdain the public. Its most recent controversy is but the latest reminder of its insufferable toadyism toward Acela-corridor views — and why it should finally be weaned from the taxpayer’s dime.

Yes, I know that NPR and PBS claim that the percentage of their budget that is borne by the taxpayer — grants from the Corporation for Public Broadcasting and “federal agencies and departments” — is in the single digits. That is misleading, as it fails to account for local radio affiliates that get gobs of taxpayer money. But let’s take them at their word. In that case, it shouldn’t be hit so hard if we tell public broadcasting to just rely on its membership model and sponsors.

Asking conservative Americans to contribute to public broadcasting’s coffers is, on the other hand, a form of despotism. As Thomas Jefferson wrote, “to compel a man to furnish contributions of money for the propagation of opinions which he disbelieves and abhors, is sinful and tyrannical.” The dead white man from Virginia may no longer be quoted by the public broadcasters, but he still wrote the Declaration of Independence.

PBS and NPR reflect only the views of either the administrative state or the identitarian Left — regularly using, for example, the term “Latinx,” which is embraced by 2 percent of Americans of Latin background but offends 40 percent. The imposition of woke gender psychosis matters more to employees of NPR and PBS than the view of rubes named Gonzalez or Perez, who are increasingly turning conservative anyway, so they can be ignored.

The public broadcasters also religiously use, in newscasts not opinion items, such terms as “the Big Lie” and the January 6 “insurgency,” as if they were unquestioned facts and not mere phrases used only by those on the left of the American spectrum.

They pretend, in other words, that when conservatives raise questions about election integrity, it constitutes not just a lie, but the Big Lie. But when the Left does the same thing, as President Biden just did preemptively with the 2022 midterms, they nod along in sage agreement. Likewise, they assume that the riot on the Capitol constituted an insurgency, but not the many months of riots and protests that Black Lives Matter organized across the country throughout 2020.

Its latest controversy is a direct result of this woke provincialism. Nina Totenberg, the Supreme Court beat reporter at NPR, related on Thursday that Chief Justice John Roberts had asked Associate Justice Neil Gorsuch to wear a mask, and that Associate Justice Sonia Sotomayor had attended hearings virtually because of Gorsuch’s behavior. All three justices have publicly denied all aspects of this story, but NPR is digging in.

I am, perhaps, in a minority that sides with NPR on this one. Sotomayor’s staff must have leaked this to Totenberg, who ran with it. Sotomayor herself then must’ve thrown Totenberg under the bus.

However, it is also clear why Totenberg ran with it. She’s a fixture of the Washington swamp, whose denizens would triple-mask to go to the restroom. Covid has given them an excuse for avoiding something they already hated doing, visiting “fly-over country,” so they are never around Americans for whom masks are anathema. Gorsuch, in not wearing a mask, was engaging in what is, to them, risky, antisocial boorishness.

NPR and PBS routinely air views that are stomach-churning to at least half of America, propounding the idea that America is systematically racist, that whites enjoy “privilege” no matter what their station in life, and that slavery is at the very center of our national narrative, constituting our sole origin story.

They use your dollars, in other words, to change your country through the use of critical race theory as well as woke gender ideology.

NPR, for example, recently carried a four-part series asserting that white kids are racist and that the Census Bureau is too white, and complaining that white congregations are using hymns written by African slaves to chant for social justice.

PBS is no better. It recently went to bat for the George Soros–backed rogue prosecutor in Philadelphia, District Attorney Larry Krasner, whose reluctance to prosecute criminals has contributed to record murder levels there.

The residents of the City of Brotherly Love who are seeing their loved ones perish, the millions of Americans who hate masks and lockdowns or who despise having their supercilious woke betters calling them names they loathe, shouldn’t have to pay to be insulted. It is outrageous that they are forced to contribute to the salary of political activists like Yamiche Alcindor who use PBS and NPR as their platforms.

In 2008, the writer David Mamet told the story of the moment he turned conservative. He and his wife “were riding along and listening to NPR,” he recalled. “I felt my facial muscles tightening, and the words beginning to form in my mind: Shut the f*** up.”
Many of us have had that moment. For the years 2021 to 2023, the Corporation for Public Broadcasting has requested half a billion dollars from Congress. Time to spend that money elsewhere.171

MIKE GONZALEZ is a senior fellow in Heritage’s Allison Center for Foreign Policy and its Angeles T. Arredondo E Pluribus Unum Fellow. His most recent book is BLM: The Making of a New Marxist Revolution.  

     In 1858 Abraham Lincoln said, "A house divided against itself cannot stand."  While almost 164 years have passed since that poignant point was made, polarization and division are being stoked and honed for political and personal gain. Grievance is a business.  Official directives are being expanded and laid down from Washington DC and Olympia to institutions like courts and our public schools, demands for nebulous "equity" no matter how specious the claim.  Divisive and emotionally torturous teachings are aimed squarely at the young and uninformed.  What's worse, grievance has become a tangible currency benefitting factions that generate and promote their own discord.  Read on.

A House Aggrieved Cannot Stand
Adam Ellwanger
The American Mind - Salvos, Jan 22 2022

Our rulers stoke a civil
conflict because they want
to win it.

Over the course of history, societies have chosen different forms of moral currency. In Rome, your virtue was determined by your nobility of ancestry and comportment. In Medieval Europe (and the first two centuries of the American republic, perhaps) piety was the determinant of moral virtue. Today, grievance is America’s moral currency. Understanding this is key to understand exactly what a civil war would be about.

January 6, 2022 brought the first anniversary of the turmoil at the Capitol. In addition to neurotic public remembrances, the date brought with it a wave of hand-wringing furvor over whether we are approaching another civil war. The prospect of a civil war is more than clickbait. The acrimonious division that was previously contained to the political realm now sets the terms of social interaction everywhere: in schools, restaurants, the workplace, the grocery store, the church. It is the price our establishment pays for its own radicalization. Confronting the civil strife that this rolling revolution creates is a dangerous thing to even talk about—when respected voices broach the subject, this signals to the masses that such a conflict is a possibility, and that increases the possibility of it occurring.

The coverage from outlets such as Politico and The New Yorker displays two types of “civil war” articles. In one, the author pretends he has no idea what such a war would even be about. In the other type, the risk of conflict is attributed wholly to the alleged delusions and purportedly violent tendencies of the political right. The former embodies a lame attempt at obfuscation; the latter suggests that one side of the conflict holds all the culpability for the rising aggression. But in their dissembling, both types inadvertently show that the true cause of the conflict would be a battle over the legitimacy of mass grievances and the deliberate refusal of those in power to address—or even acknowledge—them. Through their incessant denial that the public’s concerns have any merit, the media is fanning the coals that would ignite such a war.

Politico exhibits the idea that there are no grievances: “One side unreasonably believes that President Joe Biden’s 2020 presidential victory was stolen, and the other side reasonably fears that former president Donald Trump’s followers are so slavishly under his spell that they are willing to hijack the legal apparatus guaranteeing free and honest elections in order to facilitate his return to power in 2024.” It’s that simple: one side is full of unreasonable, hypnotized conspiracy theorists, and the other side is rational, patriotic defenders of Democracy who would have no problem at all, if not for the threat posed by the yokels who unjustifiably oppose them.  

The New Yorker’s reporter believes the civil war might occur because troglodytes and bigots have given up on democracy: put differently, they have grievances, but not ones that deserve any attention. For example, David Remnick claims the current strife exists because people were worried about what Obama’s 2008 victory represented: it “vividly underlined the rise of a multiracial democracy and was taken as a threat by many white Americans who feared losing their majority status.” Remnick goes on to say, without evidence, that the conflict is fueled by “the consuming resentment of many right-wing, rural whites who fear being ‘replaced’ by immigrants and people of color, as well as a Republican Party leadership that bows to its most autocratic demagogue and no longer seems willing to defend democratic values and institutions.” The institutional left is entirely innocent in deepening these divisions: “The battle to preserve American democracy is not symmetrical. One party, the GOP, now poses itself as anti-majoritarian and anti-democratic.”

Moral Currency and Political Power
When “grievance” is mentioned on the right, it is often invoked derisively to refer to today’s fetishization of “systemic injustices.” Throughout the late twentieth century, as the left became increasingly dependent on the votes of racial, linguistic, and ethnic minorities, Democrats encouraged those groups to understand historical hardships and injustices as debts that had to be paid in the present, perpetually. The paying of these debts took the form of many legal, economic, and educational reforms aimed at addressing these grievances, reforms which also served to justify the expansion of the state. Over the decades, many Americans logically came to the realization that leveraging these grievances (a way of calling in a debt) was a way to reap sociopolitical rewards.

Joshua Mitchell’s recent book ably demonstrates how these realities establish a moral economy. Grievance becomes currency—it can buy things. Like a kind of money, people are incentivized to collect and spend their grievances. I do not mean to suggest that certain minority—or majority—groups do not have some legitimate grievances; they do. Minorities and majorities both know well what can be gained from leveraging their grievances. When grievance serves as the moral currency in a society, it is natural that every individual will seek to realize whatever gains can be had from demanding satisfaction. The problem today isn’t the existence of grievances, or even a will to redress them. The problem is the fetishization and commodification of grievance.

Today’s populist discontent is a byproduct of the grievance economy—and a backlash against the unfair rules by which it operates. When moral virtue is determined wholly by the grievances held by a particular individual or class, this encourages an endless deliberation about which grievances are legitimate (and thus, embody real debts), and a toxic calculus to determine who has more grievance (and therefore, a more compelling demand for redress). In short, the people with the most grievances become the good people—people whose concerns are granted a disproportionate weight in public life. The people who purportedly have fewer grievances are implicitly marked as bad people—people whose demands for political satisfaction can be safely ignored.

The effect of this grievance economy is that you have an entire nation of people who have been trained to be aggrieved, but the regime rules by ensuring that certain grievances will be routinely dismissed. These are deemed to have arisen from historical “privilege”—privilege that must be surrendered so as to pay the debt to the aggrieved. Many people who seem to have little privilege are nevertheless deemed as beneficiaries of it. These are the rural, white members of the working class who have been abandoning the Democratic party at a rate identical to the one at which the left has fetishized minority grievance. When a society implicitly states “grievance is what matters,” but tells certain aggrieved groups that their gripes are illegitimate, it is no surprise that this creates alienation. Because a large government like ours is justified precisely on the grounds of its responsiveness to all the needs of its citizens, this alienation is understandably directed at the regime and its clients. As a result, our leaders’ dismissal of public grievances leads to one more grievance.

The irrepressible question is whether the citizens the media blames for our nation’s intensifying conflict have legitimate grievances, and, if so, why?

A Long Train of Grievances
Over the last 50 years, our leaders progressively outsourced our manufacturing, which had served as the backbone of middle-class economic stability. Not only did the government not incentivize companies to stay in America--the state actively accelerated the departure. This loss of millions of middle-class jobs finally produced a generation with significantly less wealth than their forebears—something that hasn’t happened since before World War II.

For a half century, the state refused to secure the border. Amnesty was periodically provided to those who had entered illegally, which incentivized others to come. Non-enforcement of labor laws that would bar illegal immigrants from working put low-skilled American workers in direct competition with foreigners, who would accept lower pay, making low-wage jobs harder to get. By the arrival of the Obama era, our elites were moving from a mere tolerance of illegal immigration to an endorsement of it: after all, many of the new arrivals were ethnic minorities—an aggrieved class in need of deference.
The influx of illegal immigrants has flooded the nation with drugs: notably, the often-fatal opioid fentanyl, almost all of which comes from our geo-political rival China. This results in an epidemic of addiction and drug death among the very groups most impacted by the betrayals referenced above.

To make matters worse, the monetary policies of the Federal Reserve and the flood of government spending have further undermined the purchasing power of what little money the working class is able to earn. The endless printing of money only increases a stupefying national debt. Of course, Americans’ diminished purchasing power is increasingly irrelevant, as a supply chain crisis (an effect of our dependence on foreign manufacturing) ensures that many needed goods are not available.

Moreover, a complete lack of accountability among our leaders fuels the alienation of typical American citizens. Obama’s IRS worked to combat conservative fundraising to minimize its influence in the 2012 election. No one was held accountable. States like California and Colorado are allowed to enact policies that directly subvert existing federal law——and it is tolerated. Obama admitted he had no legal authority to act unilaterally to address immigration——then he ordered DACA anyway, an effective amnesty for millions of people who entered the country illegally. The courts affirmed it.
Hillary Clinton illegally used a private server to conduct her business as Secretary of State and deleted over 30,000 emails from those servers, in direct violation of a subpoena. Not only was no one held accountable for the violation of data security protocols, but no one was held accountable for the destruction of evidence.

With the 2020 election on the horizon, all the institutional powers in America colluded to undermine and sabotage the Trump reelection campaign: creating misinformation disguised as news stories to damage Trump, while censoring any damaging stories to the Biden campaign by labelling them “misinformation.” This is to say nothing of the litany of procedural abuses that were implemented at the state and federal level to weaken the Trump vote, increase the Biden vote, and loosen rules to ensure election integrity in ways that would favor Biden. Much of this activity was patently illegal. Weeks later, after the inauguration, the media gleefully admitted to this malfeasance. But no one was held accountable.

All of this is to say nothing about the misery inflicted on the middle class by authoritarian lockdowns and the medical establishment’s unconstitutional political power during the Covid-19 pandemic.

These examples point to two compounding injuries. Affected citizens suffer the indignity of a government that routinely denies their grievances a place in the political process by ruling through policies it sets against them. It was this hostile disregard that led to the rise of a figure like Trump, an outsider who promised to address their concerns. The second injury did even more to amplify the current opposition to the regime: when the people elected Trump, the elite powers ensured that he would not be able to govern, and then ensured that he would not be reelected. Essentially, the state told Americans: “Not only will we not address your grievances, we will also enact safeguards so that you may not elect someone who will.” Thus, the people who claim to be defending American democracy have negated what little democratic power many citizens actually held.

As a coda to this litany of abuses, the elite institutions tell these citizens not only that their grievances are illegitimate, but that those grievances are imagined.

Then they pretend they have no idea why Americans are angry.

Sovereignty on Its Head
Today, the United States government has inverted the idea of sovereignty: it carefully takes account of the external demands made upon our nation by foreign powers and peoples, while it sees itself as internally sovereign in relation to the people it rules. The state does not recognize its obligation to respond to certain classes of citizens—and when the people use their vote to register their discontent with this abdication of duty, the state ensures that this discontent will be contained and neutralized.

In a democracy, the regime itself is not meant to be sovereign in relation to the citizens it governs: that’s authoritarian autocracy. Democratic government is not independent from the will of the people—on the contrary, if it won’t address their grievances, then it must yield to a majority of citizens’ decision to install officials who will. Ultimately, grievance is also the political capital of our society—the state holds sole power to decide whose grievances are legitimate and whose are not. The resolute rejection of the grievances claimed by half the country has understandably provoked an enormous anger. The continued refusal of elites to acknowledge these grievances only accelerates our cultural fragmentation—and thus increases the chances of what would surely be a catastrophic “civil war”—one that they claim they do not want.

Adam Ellwanger is Professor of English and director of the graduate program in rhetoric and composition at the University of Houston—Downtown. Reach him at @TheHereticalTruth on Parler.

WE just discovered this brand new video about "the rights retained by the people" - the 9th Amendment.  Here, some stellar law professors explain how a series of landmark opinions by past Supreme Courts have made a mess of this essential (and actually VERY clasically liberal) constitutional principle.

The video's kinda long, but super timely.  WE have absolutely no idea how faithful Trump's appointee will or will not be to The 9th, but maybe she will be.

And, readers - weigh-in below!   This IS a blog.  Use whatever 'Spartacus' handle you please.  This is a forum for ideas, not egos, so debate has always been welcomed by the excavators (and we're all excavators).

The passing of Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg is the hot-hot-hottest topic in the news.  As WE write, partisan zealots and most punditry exhibit a woeful lack of knowledge and understanding of SCOTUS's history and constitutional function.  Why is there so much breast-beating going on, with fanatics tearing out their hair and gnashing their teeth?  They fear the next judge won't lean the way they want (screw doctrine, objectivity, facts, and the law - we want our x,y,z and we're not going to get it any other way).

WE dredged-up a scholarly piece written last fall that's not only instructional but prophetic.  Ilya Shapiro is a uniquely qualified legal scholar; and this explains that Supreme Court appointments have always been contentious, since the founding.  But more, he describes the REAL crisis, that "The third branch of government has become the source of our greatest political contention because it isn’t doing its job."  This is long, but there's plenty to reflect on.

Crisis at the Supreme Court
 The third branch of government has become the source of our greatest political contention because it isn’t doing its job
by Ilya Shapiro

When Justice Charles Evans Whittaker retired in March 1962 after just over five years on the Supreme Court—he had suffered a nervous breakdown and was famously paralyzed with indecision—John F. Kennedy had his first opportunity to shape the high court. The youthful president selected a man of his own generation, Byron White. White had met JFK in England while on a Rhodes Scholarship—after having been runner-up for the Heisman Trophy and spending a year as the highest-paid player in the NFL—and the two became fast friends.
 
White was a vigorous 45 and serving as the deputy attorney general under Robert F. Kennedy. Kennedy formally nominated him on April 3, 1962. Eight days later, White had his confirmation hearing, a quick 90 minutes including introductions and supporting testimony from various bar-association officials (during which the nominee doodled on his notepad). What questioning there was largely concerned the nominee’s storied football career. The Judiciary Committee unanimously approved him, and later that day so did the Senate as a whole, on a voice vote. My, how times have changed.
 
The battle to confirm Brett Kavanaugh reminded us yet again that the Supreme Court is under the same toxic cloud that has enveloped all of the nation’s public discourse. Ironically, Kavanaugh was nominated in part because he was thought to be a safe pick, more easily confirmable than other short-listers and with a long public career that had been vetted numerous times. Despite attempts to portray him as extreme, he was firmly part of the legal establishment, specifically its conservative mainstream—and had displayed a political caginess that made some on the right worried that he would be more akin to Chief Justice John Roberts than Justices Antonin Scalia or Clarence Thomas. As it turned out, of course, 11th-hour sexual-assault allegations transformed what was already a contentious process into a partisan Rorschach test. All told, Kavanaugh faced a smear campaign unlike any seen since at least Robert Bork more than 30 years ago.
 
In 1987, Senate Democrats had warned President Ronald Reagan that nominating Bork—then a judge on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit after having had a storied career as an academic and government lawyer—would provoke an unprecedented fight. On July 1, 1987, the very day that Reagan announced this pick, Senator Edward Kennedy went to the Senate floor to denounce “Robert Bork’s America,” a place “in which women would be forced into back-alley abortions, blacks would sit at segregated lunch counters, rogue police could break down citizens’ doors in midnight raids, schoolchildren could not be taught about evolution, writers and artists could be censored at the whim of the government, and the doors of the federal courts would be shut on the fingers of millions of citizens.” It went downhill from there, as Bork refused to adopt the now well-worn strategy of talking a lot without saying much. The Senate rejected him.
 
Confirmation processes weren’t always like this. The Senate didn’t even hold public hearings on judicial nominations until 1916—and that innovation was driven by the unusual circumstances of 1) the resignation of a justice (Charles Evans Hughes) to run against a sitting president (Woodrow Wilson) and 2) the first Jewish nominee (Louis Brandeis). It wouldn’t be until 1938, with (also Jewish) Felix Frankfurter, that a Supreme Court nominee actually testified at his own hearing. A quarter century later came Byron White, whose testimony lasted 15 minutes and largely had to do with his football record.

That said, judicial nominations have always been political footballs. For the republic’s first century or so, close confirmation battles and unsuccessful nominees were a fairly regular occurrence—including withdrawn and postponed nominations, or those upon which the Senate deliberately failed to act.
​
George Washington had a chief-justice nominee rejected by the Senate. James Madison, the fourth president, also had a nominee bounced. And John Quincy Adams, who himself had declined a nomination from Madison, had a nominee “postponed indefinitely” during the lame-duck period after Andrew Jackson had stopped his bid for reelection.
 
President Jackson was then thwarted in appointing Roger Taney to the Court, but a change in Senate composition allowed Taney to become chief justice a year later (and eventually author of the worst decision in American history, Dred Scott). John Tyler, who assumed the presidency in 1841 after the one-month presidency of William Henry Harrison, never lived down his nickname of “His Accidency.” Congressional Whigs disputed his legitimacy, and their policy disagreements extended to judicial nominations: The Senate rejected or declined to act on four Tyler nominees (three of them twice) before finally confirming one.
 
Wait, there’s more. Millard Fillmore was prevented from filling a vacancy that arose during his tenure, as was James Buchanan. Congressional elimination of Supreme Court seats stopped Andrew Johnson from replacing the two justices who died during his presidency. For various reasons, it took Ulysses S. Grant seven nominations to fill three seats. Grover Cleveland ran into senatorial traditions regarding seats reserved for certain states, at the discretion of that state’s senators—which he overcame only by nominating a sitting senator (whereby courtesy trumped tradition).
 
Twentieth-century Presidents Warren Harding, Herbert Hoover, Dwight Eisenhower, Lyndon Johnson, Richard Nixon, and Reagan all had nominees rejected—although Harding and Ike got their picks confirmed after resubmitting their names. FDR never had anyone rejected, but his court-packing plan was, both in Congress and at the polls. And LBJ’s proposed elevation of Justice Abe Fortas led to what is the first and only successful filibuster of a Supreme Court nominee; Fortas never even gained majority support after both parties’ senators raised ethical objections. Douglas Ginsburg withdrew before President Reagan could formally send his name to the Senate—for having smoked marijuana with his Harvard law students—and became the Drug War’s last public casualty. (Has the career of any other official in the past 30 years been hurt by revelations of drug use?)
 
Then of course there is Merrick Garland, President Obama’s nominee to fill Antonin Scalia’s seat and the first nominee on whom the Senate took no action since President Rutherford B. Hayes’s nomination of Stanley Matthews in 1881. Very soon after Scalia died, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell announced that his caucus would not hold any hearings or votes on a replacement nominee until after the election. Obama announced Garland’s nomination a month later, and there was no question he was qualified. This wasn’t about qualifications: It was a political argument that this significant vacancy shouldn’t be filled until voters—who had handed the Senate back to the GOP two years earlier, after having reelected Obama two years before that—had their say.
 
This seemed like unprecedented obstructionism, but, as we’ve seen, plenty of nominees have never gotten hearings or votes—and the last time a Senate confirmed a nomination made by a president of the opposing party to a high-court vacancy arising during a presidential-election year was in 1888. Just like the Senate could decline to take up a bill passed by the House, or a treaty signed by the president, it could surely decide how to exercise its constitutional power of “advice and consent.” Democratic senators had said as much; both then–Judiciary Committee Chairman Joe Biden in 1992 and now–Minority Leader Chuck Schumer in 2007 had argued that a Republican president shouldn’t get to appoint justices in the last year of his term.
 
As we know now, McConnell’s gambit worked: Not only did it not hurt vulnerable senators running for reelection—Judiciary Committee Chairman Charles Grassley won by nearly 25 points in supposedly swing-state Iowa—but the Supreme Court vacancy held the Republicans together and provided the margin for Donald Trump in key states. Trump rewarded that part of his electoral coalition with the nomination of Neil Gorsuch.
 
Justice Gorsuch ended up being confirmed 54–45, but only after the Senate decided, on a party-line vote, to exercise the “nuclear option” and remove filibusters for Supreme Court nominations. That returned Senate procedures to what they were 15 years earlier. A Senate majority can still stall a nomination—we could see more Garlands—but not a minority.
 
The elimination of the filibuster for Supreme Court nominees was the culmination of a tit-for-tat escalation by both parties, with partisan disagreements over when it all began. The Gorsuch denouement was retaliation for the Garland blockade, which in turn followed Harry Reid’s nuking of filibusters for lower-court and executive-branch nominees in 2013. That came a decade after Reid used the tactic to block George W. Bush’s nominations—most notably Miguel Estrada, whom Democrats didn’t want to see in position to become the first Hispanic justice (not counting Benjamin Cardozo, whose ancestors were Sephardic Jews from Portugal).
 
More significant, by filibustering Gorsuch, Democrats destroyed their leverage over future, more consequential vacancies. It’s not at all clear that moderate Republican senators would’ve gone for a “nuclear option” to seat Brett Kavanaugh in place of Anthony Kennedy—I think it’s pretty clear they wouldn’t have—but they didn’t face that dilemma. What’s more, they won’t face it if President Trump gets the chance to replace Justices Ginsburg (86 years old) or Stephen Breyer (81), which would represent an even bigger jurisprudential shift.
 
Given the battle we saw over Gorsuch and Kavanaugh, too many people now think of the justices in partisan terms. That’s too bad, but not a surprise when contrasting methods of constitutional and statutory interpretation now largely track identification with parties that are more ideologically coherent than ever. And confirmation hearings will continue to be kabuki theater, educational about legal doctrine but not illuminating the nominee’s judicial philosophy.
 
Why is all this such a big deal? Why all the focus on one office, however high? Sure, 2016 and 2018 were election years, but it’s not like either governance or politics grinds to a halt. If Secretary of State John Kerry had died or resigned in the last year of the Obama presidency, it certainly would’ve been an important political moment—with Republicans grilling his would-be successor on President Obama’s foreign-policy record—but there’s no doubt that the slot would have been filled if someone with generally appropriate credentials were nominated. Even a vacancy in the vice presidency wouldn’t have lasted unduly long, though Republicans would’ve jockeyed to extract concessions for not having Speaker Paul Ryan be first in the presidential line of succession.
 
But executive appointments expire at the end of a president’s term in office, while judicial appointments long outlast any presidency. A president has few, if any, constitutional powers more important—at least in domestic policy—than making judicial appointments. Justice Scalia served nearly 30 years on the Supreme Court, giving President Reagan’s legal-policy agenda a bridge well into the 21st century. An important ruling on nonprofit-donor disclosures was made in April 2016 by a district judge appointed by President Johnson (Lyndon, not Andrew).
 
Pundits always argue that judicial nominations should be among voters’ primary considerations when choosing a president. But the Supreme Court’s future truly did hang in the balance in 2016. The election was so consequential in part because people knew that its winner would have the first chance in more than 25 years to shift the Court’s ideological balance, either strengthening the conservative majority or tilting it to the left. Indeed, the Court now stands starkly split 5-4 on many issues: campaign finance, the Second Amendment, religious liberty, and regulatory power, to name just a few. If Hillary Clinton had been able to appoint a progressive jurist—even a “moderate” one—jurisprudence in these areas would be headed in a substantially different direction.
 
And that goes just as much or more for the lower courts, which decide 50,000 cases annually even as the Supreme Court decides fewer and fewer. Every four-year term, the president appoints about a fifth of the judiciary. Last Inauguration Day, there were already 105 vacancies—and that has risen to about 150. When Obama took office, only one of the 13 appellate circuit courts had majorities appointed by Democratic presidents; when he left, nine did. Donald Trump has now begun to reverse that, with one circuit (the Philadelphia-based Third) having flipped and others on the brink. Indeed, this administration set a record with 30 circuit judges confirmed in its first two years—about the same as Bush and Obama combined at that point in their presidencies.
 
Senatorial brinksmanship over judges and justices is symptomatic of a much larger problem that began long before Kavanaugh, Gorsuch, Garland, Clarence Thomas, or even Bork: the Supreme Court’s own self-corruption, aiding and abetting the warping of federal power by Congress and the executive branch. The judiciary now affects public policy more than it ever did—and those decisions increasingly turn on the party of the president who nominated the judge or justice.
 
Even if politics has always been part of the process, and even if more judges were rejected in our country’s first century than its second, we still feel that something is different now. Confirmation hearings are the only time that judges go toe-to-toe with politicians—and that’s definitely a different gauntlet than even President Tyler’s nominees ran. Is it all about TV and Twitter, the 24-hour news cycle and the viral video? Is it that legal issues have become more ideologically divisive? No, it’s not that there’s been a perversion of the nomination process, more demagogic political rhetoric, or even the novel use of filibusters. Those are consequences of a larger phenomenon: As government has expanded, so has the importance of the judiciary.
 
Under the Constitution by which the country lived its first 150 years, the Supreme Court hardly ever had to strike down a law; congressional debates forestalled most unconstitutional measures. But as the Court has allowed the federal government to grow, so has the Court’s own power to police the federal programs its own jurisprudence enabled. For example, the idea that the General Welfare Clause justifies any legislation that gains a congressional majority—as opposed to limiting federal reach to truly national issues—emerged in the Progressive era. After 1937’s so-called switch in time that saved nine—when the Court began approving grandiose legislation of the sort it had previously rejected, perhaps in order to forestall FDR’s court-packing scheme—no federal legislation would be struck down until 1995.
 
It was the Court that thus politicized the Constitution, and the confirmation process, by laying the foundation for judicial mischief of every stripe—particularly by letting laws sail through that should be struck down. As the Court has let both the legislative and executive branches swell beyond their authorized powers, so have the laws and regulations that it now interprets. Competing theories battle for control of both the U.S. Code and Federal Register, as well as determining—often at the whim of one “swing vote”—what rights will be recognized. So of course judicial confirmations are going to be fraught.

​At the same time, courts are reactive institutions: Even the most “activist” need a case or controversy, rather than reaching out to make rulings out of thin air. It’s Congress that’s the aggressor, both daring the courts to strike down significant pieces of legislation and passing broad legislation that leaves it to the administrative state to produce the legal rules by which people live their daily lives.
 
Senator Ben Sasse gave a pithy summary of this dynamic in his opening statement at the Kavanaugh hearings:
 
     “For the past century, more legislative authority has been delegated to the executive branch every year. Both parties do it. The legislature is weak, and most people here in Congress want their jobs more than they want to do legislative work. So they punt most of the work to the next branch. The consequence of this transfer of power is that people yearn for a place where politics can actually be done. When we don’t do a lot of big political debating here in Congress, we transfer it to the Supreme Court. And that’s why the court is increasingly a substitute political battleground. We badly need to restore the proper duties and the balance of power to our constitutional system.”
 
In other words, Congress doesn’t complete its work; rather, it passes the political buck to a faceless bureaucracy and to a court system that has to determine whether whatever federal agencies devise is within spitting distance of what the Constitution allows. What’s supposed to be the most democratically accountable branch has been surrendering its responsibilities and avoiding hard political choices since long before the current polarization.
 
Indeed, the “gridlock” of the last decade is a feature of a legislative process that’s meant to be difficult by design, but it’s been compounded of late by citizens of all political views being fed up with a situation whereby nothing changes regardless of which party is elected. Washington has become a perpetual-motion machine. The courts are the only actors who can throw in a monkey wrench from time to time, a deus ex machina correcting an otherwise unholy system. That’s why people are so concerned about the views of judicial nominees—and why there are more protests in front of the Supreme Court than in Congress.
 
It’s also why the judicial nomination and confirmation processes are going to be more cognizant of partisan considerations. This wasn’t a problem when partisanship mainly meant rewarding your cronies. But it’s a modern phenomenon for our parties to be so ideologically polarized, and therefore for judges nominated by presidents from different parties to have notably different views on constitutional interpretation.
 
How Do We Fix It?
 
Is there anything we can do to fix this dynamic, to turn down the political heat on Supreme Court vacancies? Reform proposals abound: term limits, changing the size of the Court, setting new rules for the confirmation process, and more.
 
The most frequent suggestion is to institute term limits, which has the advantage of 1) predictable vacancies rather than the current randomness and 2) each nomination being “worth” less because the justice would serve fewer than the 25 or 30 years to which we’ve become accustomed. If justices had staggered 18-year terms, for example, we could have vacancies every two years and each presidential term appointing two justices. That sounds pretty good, but it would almost certainly take a constitutional amendment to accomplish. Moreover, it turns out that 18-year term limits are unlikely to have really changed the ideological balance of the Court over the past 50 years or so. It may not even have decreased the justices’ average age, because people in their 60s would start being considered again. Still, if it would increase public confidence in the Court, it’s worth contemplating.
 
Next we come to expanding the size of the Supreme Court. The idea is identified with left-wing activists sore about the Kavanaugh confirmation, as well as historical baggage from FDR’s day, but the concept has no inherent partisan slant. Indeed, presidents of both parties would continue nominating however many justices there are. In addition to issues of judicial administration—the Court could hear more cases and more efficiently process certiorari petitions if it had more members—there would logically be less significance to each of, say, 19 seats than nine (and presumably fewer 10–9 decisions than 5–4 ones now). We could also set an even number of justices, as some countries do, which would require at least a two-vote margin to take any action. And no constitutional amendment is required to adjust the Court’s size; we’ve had as few as six and as many as 10.
 
The problem comes in getting to the new number, whatever it is. If we were designing a judiciary from scratch, we could depart from the current Supreme Court structure in all sorts of ways. But we’re not, so how do you get to an expansion of any kind that won’t result in a similar expansion the next time the opposing party is in power? Even if today’s court-packing Democrats were to offer a deal whereby each party gets to pick nominees, the GOP would turn it down because a 5–4 ratio is better than a 7–6 one. Presumably you would need a transition period, such that the additional seats only open up far enough into the future that we don’t know who’ll be in the White House. Politicos tend to be risk-averse, so I’m not sure that 10 years or, say, 12 (three presidential terms) would be enough. And even if one of these “delayed expansion” plans went through, wouldn’t the same sort of natural attrition that ultimately benefited FDR—by the end of 1941, only two of the justices he inherited in 1933 remained—also work its magic to change the Court’s balance to reflect long-term political developments? So we’re back to simple (and nakedly partisan) tit-for-tat escalations.
 
And then there are some truly radical possibilities. How about a “college of justices” whereby there are no permanent justices, but circuit judges who are randomly assigned to the Supreme Court for a set time period before returning to their previous courts? It’s an intriguing idea proposed by law professors Daniel Epps and Ganesh Sitaraman, but there would be less continuity on the Court—with jurisprudential zig zags that undermine the rule of law. And this would compel more nomination battles. For if all circuit judges who potential justices in an even more direct sense than they are now, then every circuit nomination will be marginally more fought over. Getting rid of permanent justices just shifts the political and media targeting instead of dispersing the toxic cloud.
 
Well, what about an expanded Court but one divided evenly among Republican appointees, Democratic appointees, and “neutral” justices who have to be picked by unanimous vote of the “partisan” justices? This is another Epps-Sitaraman proposal, which again gets points for creativity but loses many more for making things worse as far as Supreme Court politicization goes. After all, if two-thirds (or whatever portion) of the justices are explicitly designated with a partisan label, how does that help free the judiciary from political taint?
 
Setting aside Court structure, what about the confirmation process itself? Should we have rules for how many days after a nomination there must be a hearing and then a vote? Or maybe we should do away with hearings altogether, particularly given the nominees’ voluminous paper records these days? I’m not sure any of these formalistic changes would do anything given that it’s not so much a breakdown in “rules” that caused the poisonous atmosphere surrounding judicial nominations, but the other way around. Senators came to see judicial nominations as just as much or more important than legislation—correctly, in my view—so they started applying the same bare-knuckle political plays to them.
​
Outside-the-box thinking should be commended and proposals to ameliorate the confirmation process or reimagine the Court shouldn’t be discounted lightly, even if—particularly if—cosmetic or easy changes would enhance public confidence in the Supreme Court’s integrity. I’m willing to consider anything that would help show that there’s a difference between interpreting the law and making it, between judging and legislating.
 
In the end, all of this “reform” discussion boils down to rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic. And this Titanic is not the judicial-appointment process, but the ship of government. The fundamental problem we face, and that the Supreme Court faces, is the politicization not of the process but of the product. The only way judicial confirmations will be detoxified, and the only way we reverse the trend whereby people increasingly see judges as “Trump judges” or “Obama judges,” is for the Supreme Court to restore our constitutional order. Jurist, heal thyself!
 
Yes, depoliticizing the judiciary and toning down our confirmation process is a laudable goal, but that’ll happen only when judges go back to judging rather than bending over backward to ratify the constitutional abuses of the other branches.
 
The judiciary needs to once again hold politicians’ — and bureaucrats’ — feet to the constitutional fire by rejecting overly broad legislation of dubious constitutional warrant, thus curbing administrative-agency overreach and putting the ball back in Congress’s court. And by returning power back to the states, and the people. After all, the separation of powers and federalism exist not as some dry exercise in Madisonian political theory but as a means to that singular end of protecting our freedom.
 
These structural protections are the framers’ best stab at answering the eternal question of how you empower government to secure liberty while also building internal controls for self-policing. Or, as Madison famously put it in Federalist 51: “In framing a government which is to be administered by men over men [because men aren’t angels], the great difficulty lies in this: You must first enable the government to control the governed; and in the next place oblige it to control itself.”
 
The reason we have these heated court battles is that the federal government is simply making too many decisions at a national level for such a large, diverse, and pluralistic country. There’s no more reason that there needs to be a one-size-fits-all health-care system, for example, than that zoning laws must be uniform in every city. Let federal legislators make the hard calls about truly national issues such as defense or interstate commerce, but let states and localities make most of the decisions that affect our daily lives. Let Texas be Texas, California be California, and Ohio be Ohio. That’s ultimately the only way we’re going to defuse tensions in Washington, whether in the halls of Congress or in the marble palace of the highest court in the land.

WE just became aware of a brilliant effort, a new organization, that launched in London a few months ago, in early 2020 (launch video below).  WE so share the group's sentiments that we've added their logo and link to the 'Vator home page.

At launch, FSU's banners headlined George Orwell's critically important statement, "If liberty means anything at all it means the right to tell people what they do not want to hear.” (1918)

FSU's Toby Young wrote in The Spectator, "I hope the Union won’t just attract male, pale and stale conservatives, but liberals who’ve been judged insufficiently woke by their left-wing colleagues."

Trevor Phillips and others spoke at the launch, voicing concerns about 'speech apartheid.'   With the declaration of "racism" as a "health crisis" by the Public Health Department's advisory board (PHAB) and City of Bellingham, those who disagree about the cynicism of BLM and BIPOC find ourselves in real danger of being called a racist, losing our jobs, and being cancelled for free-speech and free thinking.  The chilling effect extends to other issues too:  COVID science and policy, climate change science and policy; all critique, however qualified, is lambasted.  Careers?  Cancelled.

Visit FSU's site, support them if you can.  It may well be that they'll gain a foothold in the USA soon.   A list of FSU articles (good reading!) is available at their Media Archives pages.  By the way, the motto audi alteram partem translates to "listen to the other side."  Tolerance and open-mindedness are the hallmarks of the marketplace of ideas and classical liberalism, and the policing of thought and speech are outrages that are a peril to enlightened and civil society.

"About the Free Speech Union
The Free Speech Union is a non-partisan, mass-membership public interest body that stands up for the speech rights of its members. How might we protect you?

• If you find yourself being targeted by a digital outrage mob on social media for having exercised your legal right to free speech, we may mobilise an army of supporters.
• If a petition is launched calling for you to be fired, when you’ve done nothing other than exercise your legal right to free speech, we may help you organise a counter-petition.
• If you’re no-platformed by a university—a feminist professor who challenges trans orthodoxy, for instance—we’ll encourage you to fight back and members of our advisory councils may be able to tell you what remedies are available to you.
• If you’re a student or an academic being investigated by your university for breaching a speech code, we may take up your case with the university.
• If you’re punished by your employer because you’ve exercised your lawful right to free speech, we’ll do our best to provide you with assistance or refer you to specialists who can help.

 
The FSU will also have a research arm that publishes papers analysing why free speech is in jeopardy and makes policy proposals about how to protect it, such as the creation of a network of free speech champions in Britain’s universities with the same standing as gender equality champions and diversity tsars. And the FSU will have an educational arm that organises social events in pubs (“speakeasies”), encourages university students and sixth formers to set up free speech societies, and stages regular public debates where people with opposing views will demonstrate that it’s possible to disagree passionately with each other in a courteous and good-humoured way.
​
The Free Speech Union is not just for those who make a living through the expression of ideas, such as academics, intellectuals, columnists, pundits, novelists, poets, playwrights, screenwriters, songwriters, comedians and actors. Anyone who feels their speech rights are under threat, or who cares about free speech as an issue, is welcome to join. Regardless of your profession, or whether you’re a student or a retiree, we may come to your defence if you find yourself under attack for exercising your legal right to free speech, whether by the courts or the police, by your employer, by colleagues or activists, or by outrage mobs on social media and elsewhere."

Not here?  Not in Bellingham?  Whatcom County?   Hell if it isn't.  "BLM" is very-present locally, and the moves being made are serious.  The proverbial "march through the institutions," our public schools, the local colleges, now even county government, is essentially over.  You've got hell to pay if you're not pro-BLM (BIPOC).  Why, racism here is even a "health crisis" - so say county health officials.  Prepare to take a knee and submit to re-education.  WE think it's time to call this out, for what it is, and it ain't good.

The Racial Marxism of BLM
By Matthew J. Peterson
September 1 2020
 
The revolution is the point.
 
A history that should never have been forgotten has long since been lost. It is time to refresh our memories. Black Lives Matter (BLM) does not represent the old Civil Rights Movement. It does not seek equality under the law. And it does not intend to stop until it overthrows the very idea and structure of America as we’ve known it. Under increasing pressure to acknowledge the dawning reality to which Americans are increasingly waking up, Joe Biden has finally said that looting and arson are, in fact, bad. But Pandora’s box has already been opened. The Democrats’ Vice-Presidential nominee, Kamala Harris, put us on notice in June: “everyone beware—because they’re not gonna stop…everyone should take note of that…they’re not gonna let up, and they should not—and we should not.”
 
What has been forgotten—perhaps because it is often purposely hidden—is that Antifa and BLM both were born from a peculiarly American form of radical and violent Marxism. The actual word used to describe this ideology is in one sense not important: understanding how those who lead and fund these groups think is what matters. In fact, as soon as one uses the word “Marxism” today, the activists and intellectuals begin scoffing in disdain.
 
One of the oddities of our time is the staleness of our political rhetoric. This is likely due to the fact that America today includes a greater percentage of older people than it did at any previous time in history. Much of the political language of both Republicans and Democrats is drawn from the Cold War. But it has lost its salience, particularly for those under 50.The American Right has long charged the American Left with covert Marxism. The young yawn at this, but it is unclear if they know what the charge even means. The Very Sure People in the upper middle class now double down in denial or worse, contradicting in speech what we see with our own eyes happening across America. In oh-so-educated, scoffing tones they remark: “These protests are not led by violent radicals. Everyone knows the violence comes from white nationalists. Antifa doesn’t exist. BLM hardly exists as one united front. BLM is not Marxist—how silly. This is the modern-day Civil Rights Movement. Don’t be on the wrong side of history.”
 
Besides, says the conflict-averse objector in our heads, the average Democrat is not a Marxist—in fact, the Democratic Party is now the party of American oligarchs—and Marxism in America is generally a watered-down version of anything recognizably Soviet or CCP.
 
This is true as far as it goes. But not in the case of Black Lives Matter.
 
The big foundations in America have been funding violent leftist radicals for a long time, and they too are now doubling down—not in denial, like many well-meaning but ignorant or cowardly Americans are, but in their payments to those willing to foment civic unrest. Most Americans still do not realize that what is now occurring on American soil is not an organic civil rights movement, but an elite-funded effort to destabilize the American way of life as we’ve known it: the complete overhaul of the principles of our justice system to put group “identities” above equal individual rights, the erosion of private property and private education, and the destruction of traditional families and moral culture.
 
The American media—and many politicians on the American Right—have failed to point out to the American people that BLM was created and is led by radical Marxist racialists. Their heroes and teachers are the violent radicals of the 1960s and ’70s. As Murray Bessette points out in “Listen When They Tell You Who They Are“, we know this because they tell us so. They call themselves “trained Marxists.” This doesn’t mean that they merely propose left-leaning economic policies like free healthcare for all. Instead, as Bessette says, they want to destroy the family and abolish private education and private property along with the police.
 
Most Americans still have no idea what they actually stand for. Since America is not racist, most people support the idea that black lives matter, because they believe that in America, all lives matter. But their own lack of racism is being used as a weapon against them. BLM and its elite backers reject both the old civil rights movement and America itself.
 
Even their main public policy prescription, now written in towering letters on our city streets—”defund the police”—does not reflect the views of over 80% of Black America. Yet BLM and friends now have hundreds of millions of dollars at their command, if not more, and some polls this summer reveal they have become more popular than our major political parties. How did this happen?
 
The Old Left Raised BLM From Birth
 
The fact that versions of Marxism have tried to make inroads in America for over a century is a matter of history, not conspiracy theory. Socialism was making inroads in America in the early part of the last century; the success of presidential candidates like Eugene Debs turned the Democratic party leftward as Democratic party figures like Franklin Delano Roosevelt sought to corral their vote. In frustration, the hard Left worked for decades on new ways to radicalize America.
 
As Mike Gonzalez reveals in the selection he’s graciously allowed us to publish from his new book, The Plot to Change America: How Identity Politics is Dividing the Land of the Free, Marxist intellectuals made the shift from “Marxism based on economic classes (the worker v. the bourgeois) into one based on immutable characteristics such as race, ethnicity, sex, sexual orientation and even disability status” early in the last century. And they brought this version of Marxism to America; their leading intellectuals like Herbert Marcuse “personally tutored the Black Panther leader Angela Davis.” The same Angela Davis whom Edward Luttwak tells us in “The End of the Long March” he saw gladly “participating in a Soviet Cold War propaganda operation” in Finland in the 1960s. The same Angela Davis who owned the weapons used in acts of domestic terrorism in 1970 is a hero and mentor to the founders of BLM.
 
There are many such cases. The BLM movement and their ideas, as Luttwak explains, arise from “the Old Hard-Core Left, a.k.a. the ‘red diaper’ children and grandchildren and even great-grandchildren of the Stalinist stalwarts of the Communist Party of America, who had themselves been driven to hide below the rocks by the just-in-time McCarthy persecution that removed Communists from public life and the trade unions, making it possible for the United States to mobilize for the Cold War.” It wasn’t until “the late 1970s, when finally, at long last, Marxism could sell,” in part because  “the combined effects of globalization and structural change…started impoverishing the less educated half of the American population.”
 
During that time, as Luttwak describes, “a new generation of the Old Hard-Core Left had finally found the weak flank of American society which they could penetrate, subvert, and then dominate: the teaching staff of America’s colleges and universities.” Besides switching out class for race and other identities as the new framework of the Marxist revolution, they brought a new concept with them: “white privilege.”
 
As Kyle Shideler reveals in “The Communist Roots of ‘White Privilege’“, Communists Theodore “Ted” Allen and Noel Ignatiev, aka Noel Ignatin, invented and taught the concept because they thought that the “‘white working class’ would never be compelled to rebel as long as they accepted [their] ‘white-skin privilege.’” This novel idea was taken up by the radical violent Left, including the Weather Underground, perhaps the most famous leftist domestic terrorism group in living memory. Today this racialist concept and its accompanying “struggle sessions”—in which participants must renounce their evil “whiteness”—is mandated by government, education, and the corporate world throughout the United States.
 
These early groups from the ’60s and ’70s helped shape BLM and Antifa’s tactics on our streets today.
 
Many an academic has revealed to me their surprise at how tightly BLM and friends cling to Stokely Carmichael’s Black Power, written in 1967, which was one of the first books to set forth the poorly constructed ideology we are witnessing play out today. Carmichael, who famously broke with the Black Panthers for allying with white people, went to Africa soon after writing his manifesto and founded the All-African People’s Revolutionary Party.
 
Consider Assata Shakur, the Black Liberation Army fighter who escaped to Cuba from a life sentence for murder. Shakur is a hero to BLM activists, who have posted pictures of themselves wearing T-shirts that say “Assata Taught Me.” Such shirts are often sold by vendors who sell BLM-related merchandise, and BLM teaches its foot soldiers to chant Shakur’s words while protesting.
 
Convicted terrorist Susan Rosenberg, once a part of the Weather Underground, ended up on the Board of Directors for the fundraising arm of BLM. This was possible because Bill Clinton pardoned her, letting her out of prison after she served only 16 years of what was originally a 58-year sentence.
 
Even if figures like Davis, Allen, Ignatiev, and the unrepentant Weather Underground terrorist Bill Ayers were sometimes complicit in violence, they generally went unpunished. Instead, they taught rising generations of young minds. That’s right—instead of jail time, all of the above got tenure (Ignatiev, even taught for a time at Harvard). Instead of being ostracized from polite company, many of these domestic terrorists became friends with the likes of Barack Obama (as Ayers did) and were celebrated in elite circles. After the Soviet Union collapsed, they still made the occasional trek to countries like Venezuela, fêting dictators like Hugo Chavez.
 
Daniel Di Martino is a freedom fighter who grew up in Venezuela: as he says in “Venezuelan Socialists Come for America“, his country’s history is an “important story for Americans to know because…both peaceful and violent protests have been organized by groups whose intention is to impose socialism à la Venezuela in the United States.” As Martino notes, BLM and friends have met and praised Chavez’s successor, Nicolás Maduro; flush with cash, cultural cache, and elite protection, they are now implementing Chavez’s playbook on American streets today.
 
The central problem, however, for BLM and its parent organizations is an old one. Marxism could never quite take hold in America due to a recalcitrant middle class. The concept of “white privilege” is one way to deal with the problem. Kevin Portteus outlines another:
To ensure the success of their project, the contemporary Left has abandoned all pretense of concern for American sovereignty and the integrity of America’s international borders, and has embraced a policy of unlimited mass migration, combined with the demand that America accept countless refugee migrants from the undeveloped and developing world. Concerns about drug trafficking, human trafficking, infectious diseases, gang violence, and terrorism are swept aside with arguments that any attempt to limit entry into the United States is racist and un-American.
​
The result is an imported revolutionary class. And although to be sure, as Alberto M. Fernandez argues in “The Communist LARP”, this is a “developing mass movement,” it is nevertheless funded, led, staffed, and allowed by American elites and the institutions they control. American elites of both parties have forced mass immigration on the American people over and against the will of the voters for decades now. It is the single biggest issue for Trump supporters. But it is in the elite’s financial interest to import cheap and easily manipulated labor: waves of the desperate and impoverished, as well as higher-end workers, ensure they can pay American workers less. It is also in the political interest of the Democratic Party, which captures the vote of the impoverished, giving them increasing political dominance and creating one-party oligarchies, as in California.
 
But immigration also helps the racialist Marxists, who have grown exponentially in power over the last two decades. They have now achieved what their teachers and mentors could never dream of: a violent, destabilizing insurrection masquerading as a popular civil rights movement with the support of a major political party and nearly every major cultural institution in the nation. The establishment Left still thinks it can control the movement, but it is clear what will happen--to them—if they do not. There’s a reason protestors keep putting guillotines outside of Jeff Bezos’s house.
 
Racialist America
 
As Peter Myers explains, “The present ascendancy of the woke Left on race is no triumph for civil rights, nor for social justice or any sort of justice, nor for democratic government,” which this movement opposes. What BLM truly wants is a new America. An America ruled by a racial version of Marxism: “a confederation of identity groups—especially of racialized identity groups—where moral authority and its ensuing social advantages are apportioned according to the relative strength of group claims to past and present aggrievement.” Jim Crow, in other words, but in reverse.
 
The government, of course, will be in their hands and the laws will be ordered accordingly. BLM utterly rejects the notion of equality under the law: they wish to enact a system of law and culture in which people will be judged by their race and sexual identity, not insofar as they are equally human. As Myers points out, “the ruling principle is disintegration, not integration; discord, not harmony; war, not peace. To persist on this path is to push the republic ever closer to either dissolution or despotism.”
 
And here we are. BLM and its associates, despite being the direct descendants of Marxist domestic terrorists, despite rejecting the principles of America itself, and despite holding views that are not even representative of the people they purport to represent, now have the resources and path they need to wreak the havoc they have been planning for years. They have already succeeded in causing more chaos than their intellectual parents. As ever, the Democratic Party refuses to oust or reject them from its ranks with vigor. Worse, outside of President Trump, many in the Republican Party are still too cowardly to denounce them—even as America burns.
 
Our failure to stop this movement decades ago is what led us to this moment. Now, we have no choice. It is time to stop pretending that BLM and Antifa are anything other than domestic terrorist groups led by radicals who seek to rip America apart.
 
Of course many if not most of those protesting today by simply marching in the streets have little understanding of the ideology driving the organizers and the worst of their trained foot soldiers. But that’s how revolutions work. BLM is what it claims to be: a racialist Marxist group that seeks to completely alter the American way of life. They have more power and resources now than any insurrectionary movement in American history. They will not stop until they are stopped.
 
This should not be a partisan issue. But if our political leaders on the Right and Left continue to refuse to specifically call them out for what they are and directly oppose them, America will continue to burn.
 
 
Matthew J. Peterson is Vice President of Education at the Claremont Institute and Editor of The American Mind. He directs Claremont’s annual fellowships and heads our initiative for a new center to support graduate level scholarship.

WE hear about it all the time, "fascism" in America, most particularly that Trump is "a fascist."  What does that mean, really?  The Whittle video below delves into the meaning of the word, its true meaning.   Spoiler:  Fascism is collectivist, requiring the control of everything.  Fascism denies individual liberty, and it falls on extreme left end of the political spectrum <-- totalitarian.  And that couldn't be farther from the "right end" of the spectrum --> where total freedom falls (no control, anarchy).  This is a very spirited short video, one well worth a couple of minutes.
​

​A Mostly Peaceful G-File
Jonah Goldberg
September 4, 2020
 
Dear Reader (Including the four anonymous sources who claim I’m writing a 10,000 page anti-technology manifesto),
 
I know, we need to talk about it, but let’s hold off on The Atlantic story for a minute and instead focus on the report that national protests are “93 percent” peaceful. The opening paragraph from the Washington Post:
 
About 93 percent of the racial-justice protests that swept the United States this summer remained peaceful and nondestructive, according to a report released Thursday, with the violence and property damage that has dominated political discourse constituting only a minute portion of the thousands of demonstrations that followed the killing of George Floyd in May.
 
For the people who think the protests have been unfairly maligned—not unreasonably—this is a mic-drop fact that confirms their views. 
 
But think about this for a second: In World War II, 16 million Americans served in uniform, but “only” 1 million saw combat. I was promised there would be no math, so I’m open to correction, but I think that means only 6.25 percent of American soldiers during World War II saw combat. Does that mean I can say that our participation in a globe-spanning deathmatch for the world’s soul was 93.75 percent peaceful? And keep in mind, the denominator here is uniformed military. If you make it the total number of Americans—about 144 million during the height of the war—then World War II was 99.31 percent peaceful. If that’s the case, then what was all the fuss about?
 
If Boeing came out with a new plane that only crashed 93 percent of the time, would that be something to brag about? 
 
Now, I’m not saying it’s insignificant that most protests were peaceful. And if I were one of the peaceful protesters, I’d be pretty pissed at the idiots who gave the protests a bad name.  
 
I also think the report makes a plausible case that, in at least some instances, the effort to dispel the protests had the unintended effect of escalating violence. But assuming such efforts were lawful, warranted, and professionally conducted, the moral blame for protests turning violent lays entirely on the people who refused to disperse and responded instead with violence. As a prudential matter, using state power might have been a mistake. If a lone cop goes into a biker bar without backup to break up a fight, he or she would be procedurally wrong. But if the cop is overpowered and beaten up or robbed, the cop is not morally culpable. 
 
Anyway, this “93 percent peaceful” thing strikes me as an escalation of an annoying trend in the media. It’s an attempt to argue with data what CNN tried to argue with a chyron. 
 
Last week, CNN’s aired a graphic from Kenosha that read, “FIERY BUT MOSTLY PEACEFUL PROTESTS AFTER POLICE SHOOTING." 

​This may have supplanted “Fake but accurate” as the perfect encapsulation of the media’s reluctance to report news it finds inconvenient. 
 
It doesn’t matter if it’s technically accurate in some sense. The message it conveys is that you shouldn’t really pay attention to the inferno behind the reporter, because that would be unfair to the protestors or Joe Biden. Think of it this way: how often do reporters covering local fires emphasize, “Most of the buildings in this city aren’t burning right now”? 
 
There are some 800,000 police officers in the United States. Way more than 93 percent of them have never unjustly shot a black person, or any person. And yet, how often has the media uncritically allowed politicians and activists to say some variant of “it’s open season” on black men in this country?  How often have they asserted it themselves?
 
Just this week, Japanese tennis pro Naomi Osaka (whose father is Haitian) said “Watching the continued genocide of black people at the hand of the police is honestly making me sick to my stomach.”
 
Genocide? Really? 
 
I’m not trying to minimize the problem of police abuse, but why is there no check—no modicum of journalistic truth-squadding and basic skepticism—when people say these kinds of things? Whenever right-wingers talk with such rhetorical ridiculousness, there’s plenty of pushback. When Donald Trump says, falsely, that Portland is “ablaze,” the fact checkers hie to their firepoles and slide down to correct the record. And that’s fine by me. He’s the president and therefore deserves more fact-checking than pretty much anyone else. But the sheer numbers of people who say wildly irresponsible and untrue things on the other side of the cultural and political divide adds up over time to collective malpractice that’s every bit as significant. 
 
All of these people taking pictures from peaceful parts of New York, Portland, Chicago, etc., to dunk on people concerned with rioting and looting aren’t nearly as clever as they think they are. It’s the visual equivalent of “93 percent nonviolent,” or “Fiery but mostly peaceful.” If I were to tweet a picture of a white cop peacefully talking to a black man and say, “What police abuse problem?” I’d be rightly dragged for it. If I take a picture of a nice part of Beirut, would that mean a giant explosion didn’t happen there? If I snap a photo of my fairly lean feet, do I get to say “I’m mostly skinny”?
 
In my first column this week, I wrote about how so much of national debate is really a contest of competing narratives that are both wild exaggerations. 
 
Here’s the problem. There’s a difference between an exaggeration and a lie. A lie is a total fabrication: Cats are vegans. Ducks are made of uranium. Basset hounds are the fastest land animal.
 
An exaggeration, like a caricature, takes a truth and amplifies and distorts it for effect—sometimes dishonestly, but sometimes simply in order to convey some larger truth: “This flan tastes like the contents of a zombie baby’s diaper,” is an exaggeration, but it communicates an important truth: “Don’t order the flan.” 
 
Donald Trump’s exaggerations are very often dishonest, but that doesn’t mean there isn’t a truth lurking beneath. 
 
No, Portland isn’t “ablaze,” but there have been blazes. If all of Cleveland hasn’t been taken over by cannibal warlords, but the Tremont neighborhood has been, you won’t get far with most normal people by heaping scorn on them for freaking out over it.
 
You know what a normal person thinks when they see buildings on fire behind a reporter who’s saying the protests are “mostly peaceful?”
 
“I’m being lied to.”
 
Confirmation bias and President Trump.
 
Human brains are weird things, and not just because they’re squishy. When we hear or see things that confirm what we already believe, we don’t grab our analytical tools to question it. When we’re presented with something that contradicts what we already believe, out come the microscopes, measuring tapes, and the rest. 
 
Here’s a series of numbers: 2, 4, 6, 8 … 
 
If I asked you to fill in the next three numbers, you would probably say, “10, 12, 14.” Because you think the rule is that the numbers increase by two. 
 
But that’s not necessarily the rule at work here. The rule could actually be that the numbers are just getting bigger. The next three numbers could be 9, 10, 4,012. But we look at the pattern in front of us and leap to a conclusion. We are pattern-recognizing creatures. But sometimes—actually, pretty often—we impose a pattern on the information that isn’t there. That’s how conspiracy theories are born. We cherry pick the facts (or “facts”) that fit what we want to believe is true and screen out the others. 
 
Right now, American politics is being driven by two very loud minorities of protagonists who are supremely confident in their patterns—or if you prefer, narratives. 
 
Which brings me to the Atlantic story about Donald Trump calling deceased members of the military “losers.” I find the allegations entirely believable. He has a deformed character and the evidence for this is overwhelming. There are also plenty of indications that he holds these kinds of attitudes about military service. 
 
However, just because I find the allegations believable doesn’t mean I believe them in all of their particulars. I certainly think that Jeffrey Goldberg (no relation) believes his sources and published what he believes to be a true story. But without anyone on the record—never mind the contradictory statements from John Bolton—it’s entirely possible that the sources have some details wrong for one reason or another. (Trump’s own denials count for nothing with me.
 
What is interesting—and at times infuriating—is how none of it really matters. For some, any account of Trump’s behavior that isn’t laudatory must be false. They think it all must be a lie because the “Fake News” got the Russia story wrong, therefore every other allegation must be wrong, too. For others, the allegations must be wrong because Trump can do no wrong. The latter is just the latest example of “Orange Man Good,” or pro-Trump Derangement Syndrome. 
 
Of course, we hear a lot more—at least on the right—about anti-Trump Derangement Syndrome. And don’t get me wrong, I think anti-Trump Derangement is a real thing. For some, any negative story about Trump has to be true, including the ones that contradict each other. He’s both a fascist mastermind bent on destroying democracy and a moron who can’t spell “fascist.” (There’s a growing version of this on the right about Biden, too. He’s both the architect of an anti-black crime bill in addition to being a racist who said nice things about segregationists and he’s a pawn of Black Lives Matter. He’s “Sleepy Joe” and a pawn of Antifa simultaneously.) 
 
As Matt Taibbi correctly observes: “The paradox ensnaring America since November, 2016 is that Trump never intended to govern, while his opponents never intended to let him try.”
 
Again, I don’t think there’s “both sides” symmetry here. The mere fact that this story is believable demonstrates that. 
 
But what gets lost in all the screaming is that most people don’t care. I think people should, but I don’t blame them for having bigger priorities during an economy-crushing pandemic that’s still turning peoples’ lives upside down—particularly the lives of parents as school starts. 
 
For my entire adult life, the most damning criticism of the left has boiled down to their approach to both politics and culture: “You will be made to care.” About 25 years ago, the left decided that tolerance was no longer good enough. You had to celebrate whatever they celebrated and hate whatever they hated. “If you’re not part of the solution, you’re part of the problem” is the single most totalitarian idea in wide circulation in American life. There are no safe harbors. No room for dissenting speech. No allowance for different passions, concerns, or pleasures. Compliance or Cancellation is the rule. That’s the fascistic spirit animating those jackwads demanding that people having a quiet dinner must raise their fist in solidarity with them. 
 
I still think the left is worse in this regard, in part because they’ve had so much more practice during their Gramscian march through the institutions. But the right is catching up. Donald Trump isn’t opposed to cancel culture, he’s opposed to the other team’s cancel culture. He loves getting people fired and un-personed, and so does his fan base. Trumpism isn’t a philosophy or ideology, it’s a story—an allegory really—that begins and ends with one man as the savior, not of America, but of “us,” the only real Americans (I got a fundraising email from the Trump campaign that began “It’s YOUR Country—Not THEIRS!” Really, the 60  to 70 or so million Americans who won’t vote for Trump don’t have ownership of this country, too? So much for nationalism.) 
 
We’re in a battle of narratives—narratives that don’t actually speak to the lives of most Americans—made all the more asinine by the fact that the combatants are utterly convinced that they are the sole legitimate representatives of all Americans. Actually, that’s not right. We’re not in that battle, most of us are just witnessing it. And in a healthier republic, the peaceful but mostly disgusted majority could either do something about it, or be allowed not to care.

[additional items, including links...]