J. Robert Oppenheimer is back in the news with the movie “Oppenheimer” hitting screens across the country. As a movie, I give it “thumbs up”. It was well-scripted, acted, and moved at a captivating pace. Hats off to Christopher Nolan.
As history, I have my doubts.
Oppenheimer’s place in the period before, during, and after World War II is a much more contentious topic and should be. Was he a man of dubious loyalty, maybe even going so far as to engage in espionage? More interestingly, could his philosophical sympathies cloud his judgment in managing Los Alamos? These questions cannot be answered in a movie. Sympathy for the man abounds, possibly richly deserved, but some aspects of the real story are missing. One thing is glaringly clear: nothing, absolutely nothing was mentioned, or in any way referenced, of the Venona project and its WWII decrypts of Soviet communications from the US to Moscow, or the confirmatory information gleaned from the briefly opened Soviet archives after the downfall of the Soviet regime in 1991.
J. Robert Oppenheimer
PBS added to the Oppenheimer lore with a recent American Experience documentary, “The Trials of J. Robert Oppenheimer”, with the same blank spots as the movie. Number one, the “trial” wasn’t a trial. It was a panel to determine whether to pull Oppenheimer’s security clearance. Step back one moment from the Hollywood-made aura about the man, however, and look at the facts. Fact number one, no evidence has come to light of Oppenheimer’s involvement in espionage. So, as a matter of law and logic, the claim of alleged treason is simply a suspicion at best. On the other hand, the raw insights gleaned from Venona and Soviet archives presents a more complicated picture.
For a clearer assessment of the period, PBS ironically came to the rescue some years back with Nova’s “Secrets, Lies, and Atomic Spies” which was primarily based on the historical work of John Haynes and Harvey Klehr (watch it below). The documentary and the book, “Venona: Decoding Soviet Espionage in America”, point to serious Soviet penetration of the US government and the Manhattan Project. The movie mentions the espionage of Klaus Fuchs, but the reality is that the illicit activity didn’t end there.
Arlington Hall, Va., where the decrypting took place.
Americans acting as Soviet agents were littered throughout Roosevelt’s administration. Lauchlin Currie, FDR’s chief economic adviser, Harry Dexter White, Assistant Secretary of the Treasury, Alger Hiss at the State Department, and a smattering of others in intelligence and federal law enforcement agencies were identified in Venona decrypts and later confirmed in Soviet archives as sources of America’s most important secrets. Some 300 Soviet cover names were identified in the decrypts with only about 100 attached to specific individuals. One of the unidentified was “Quantum”, and he was clearly somebody very, very important at Los Alamos.
The movie to its credit mentioned Klaus Fuchs, but there was more at Los Alamos. One such person was Theodore Hall and his friend and Harvard confidant, Saville Sax. Fuchs and Hall, independent of each other, provided sketches and descriptions to the Soviets of the plutonium bomb used on Nagasaki. Shortly after the successful Trinity test in July 1945, the Soviets and the head of their nuclear effort, Igor Kurchatov, had in their hands what we had achieved and how. Possibly this explains Stalin’s nonchalance when informed by Truman of this “super weapon” at Potsdam.
Lauchlin CurrieTheordore Hall
For me, the media productions unwittingly say more about the cultural milieu in our academic communities at that time as well as today. Already left leaning, the onset of the Depression confirmed Marx’s critique of capitalism for many academics, just like today’s Great neo-Marxist Awakening on our campuses. Is it all that surprising that Oppenheimer, like many others, was swimming with the subcultural current?
Who was “Quantum” and what role did Oppenheimer’s well-documented interaction with known communists and involvement in communist front activities have on his standing as a possible security risk? Suspicions were heightened, especially after the Venona decrypts were making the rounds through federal authorities.
Yet, until informed otherwise, sympathies doth not necessarily make a traitor. Oppenheimer was a man constantly torn between his deep-seated beliefs and his work. It was probably true for many at Los Alamos. Some let their sympathies get the better of them. Fuchs was captured at Heathrow airport trying to escape. Ted Hall escaped prosecution most likely due to the difficulty of using the decrypts in court and the reluctance of US authorities to expose our decrypting activities. Many others were fingered but avoided the bar of justice for the same reason.
It’s a story that at the very least would add greater depth to the movie, not only making a good movie but also better history.
Please watch “Secrets, Lies, and Atomic Spies”. You’ll find it interesting in light of the movie.
Audi’s Hildegard Wortmann, Audi’s head of sales and marketing
Electric vehicles are still nuts, and still useful to make revolution pay. Some titans of industry will smatter themselves with ill-repute to make a buck from current revolutionary fad-thoughts. For instance, the junk-thought associated with the religio-ideological cult of climate change. For instance, the corporate heavies angling for advantage at Audi and most of the rest of the auto industry.
Revolutionaries don’t care one twit about the bigwigs except as useful idiots. How useful? Lenin put it quite succinctly: “The Capitalists will sell us the rope with which we will hang them.” Right now, the fire breathing zealots of the cult are oblivious of your needs to get to work or have a little vacation happiness to make life a bit more pleasant. They want to shackle you to the ev whether it works for you or not. And there is no shortage of corporate honchos who, like vultures, would like to ride the wave for fun and profit. Some may actually believe the jargon.
Case in point: Ms. Hildegard Wortman, Audi’s head of sales and marketing, who said,
“. . . why we are doing this. Not to sell another technology; we are doing this to decarbonize, and we need to come to an end with fossil fuels.”
I’m skeptical. The cult dominates the state and then uses the state to make the people conform. For Wortman and Audi, why not hitch a ride on the crusade, because the commissars are going to force the folks into buying them anyway. Push the propaganda for it will contribute to the bottom line. Heck, it’s been done before. It’s the tried-and-true practice of crony corporatism to ally with the ruling zealots with the guns.
If you are going to cater to the revolution for fun and profit, may as well go all the way. May as well patronize the whole program, including the Frankfurt School/Marcuse/Gramsci neo-Marxism that is reflected in the wokedom of “critical (race, legal, gender) theory”. Go to the Audi website and you’ll find:
“The colonial mythology of technology that saw us as superior to nature and shepherded only the Eurocentric technologies through to the present was wrong. Rather than continuing a narrow view of technology informed by our distance from nature, we must acknowledge that the Enlightenment mythology of technology was just one way and not the only way for humankind to progress.”
Is this from Audi, or the Princeton’s ASB?
An electric vehicle with its humungous batteries will span our “distance from nature”? Take a look at the pictures below. Is this uniting us with nature or gouging into it?
This and the two following images: Lithium mines for those ev batteries
Two of 40,000 children working in lithium mines in the Congo.
Pardon my cynicism but what happens after they’ve forced us into filthy, foul-smelling mass transit, sitting beside injecting drug addicts and the psychotic, and into an ev, and then pull the rug out from under us with blackouts and mandatory closures of the mines producing the battery materials? The same people who want you in the ev also don’t like cars, electric or fossil fuel, period. Their crocodile tears come to mind in regard to your predicament.
Indeed, rope selling for Audi and a descent into the 19th century for the rest of us.
RogerG
Read more here:
* Audi’s Hildegard Wortmann interview at “Audi’s Hildegard Wortmann: ‘Edutainment’ needed to boost consumers’ confidence in EVs”, Larry P. Vellequette, Automotive News, 7/30/23, at https://www.autonews.com/executives/audi-sales-marketing-exec-says-ev-marketing-must-change
* The Audi statement of wokedom: “Five theses on progress”, in interview with New York-based Julia Watson, at https://www.progress.audi/progress/en/julia-watson-describes-her-stance-using-five-theses-on-progress.html#:~:text=The%20colonial%20mythology,humankind%20to%20progress.
* A general overview of Audi and the ev craze: “EVs Aren’t Undercooked, You’re Just Stupid”, Luther Ray Abel, National Review Online, 7/31/23, at https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/evs-arent-undercooked-youre-just-stupid/
If you’ve listened to someone often enough, you might already know what they’re going to say before they say it. This is not necessarily a criticism – heaven knows, it’s true of me on many subjects (talk to my wife and adult children). But sometimes the monotony repetitively takes you to some unacceptable opinions. This is my predicament with Victor Davis Hanson (VDH). It is well-known that Hanson is an unflinching supporter of Donald Trump to such an extent that any Trump criticism is heavily muted, when there’s ample grounds to be critical from any perspective, while other of Hanson’s views appear newly adapted to momentary Trumpisms and the meandering and muddled political movement that has recently come into being around him. It’s disturbing to me.
For the record, I am not new to VDH. I own and have read many of his books, attended to his commentary on Fox News, and have been an avid listener of his podcast, The Victor Davis Hanson Show, among others. I am well-versed on VDH’s positions; however, the Trump boosterism of late has been taken to absurd lengths.
How absurd? The movement attached to the Trump banner is a protectionist one, an opponent of entitlement reform, near isolationist in foreign policy, and will turn on a dime at the behest of the latest self-serving political burp of its leader. So, if DeSantis stands in the way, Trump will dust off the Left’s tax-cuts-for-the-rich and charge the Florida governor with the sin that he’s out to get your Social Security, and the legion of Trump parrots soon erupt in unison. If, as in 2016, Jeb Bush stands athwart Trump’s path, bash the Bushes, their “forever wars”, and the ill-defined “establishment”, going so far as to come close to imitating the abuse of returning Vietnam vets by anti-war activists. Trump’s loathing of John McCain, for instance, approaches those spittle-laced lows when he said, “He [McCain] is not a war hero” and “I am not a fan of people who surrender”, quite a statement from a candidate for commander-in-chief and later an occupant of that office. The fact that many vets remained loyal to this man is unfathomable.
John McCain’s courage, braving attacks over the skies of North Vietnam, refusal to be released ahead of his fellow Americans in the Hanoi Hilton, and torture at the hands of his communist jailers deserves more than “I am not a fan of people who surrender”. And all this coming from a man who benefited from five draft deferments. Go figure. The behavior hasn’t daunted Hanson’s Trump-praise.
Hanson’s silence over Trump’s protectionism is absolutely befuddling from a man of such a stellar academic background. There’s simply no recognition of the potential devastation that tariffs and other trade-protectionisms has wrought. His commentary avoids the role that homegrown government regulation, taxes, and union favoritism at all levels has played in hallowing out America, creating the Rust Belt. Reagan disbanded PATCO (the air traffic controller union) and fired its striking air traffic controllers; Trump masks the unions’ complicity in their own demise by patronizing them with a blame of foreigners.
Any Econ 101 student knows that a foreign company doesn’t pay a tariff, but apparently not Donald Trump or Hanson, if Hanson’s silence means anything. We hear plenty about “globalization” and “bi-coastal elites” from Hanson but nary a word about Trump’s blathering economic incoherency. Let me set the record straight, even if Hanson won’t: when taxed, companies are pass-through agencies – the new taxes (tariffs in this case) descend on the consumer, and always will, always with price increases, sometimes with fewer choices, and many times with the loss of jobs in other sectors. It’s a classic example of self-inflicted foot-shooting. Remember Smoot-Hawley? Look it up.
Then, how do you reinvigorate blue-collar work, a key interest of Hanson’s – and mine? Start by cleaning your own house. Answer this question: Why are American companies fleeing our shores? Or maybe this question: How is it that an illiterate peasant from the Chinese outback is more appealing than an American with generations of advanced cultural and human capital? The answer lies in more than labor costs. Hint: the first flight of American fabrication was to destinations below the Mason-Dixon line, thereby escaping the clutches of the AFL-CIO and the big-government and big-tax/regulation Democrat regimes above it.
Or, how about the devastating effect of our fascination with college-is-for-everyone? Taxpayer grants and student loans, with taxpayers on the hook, were fire-hosed to make it happen. Consequently, working with one’s hands became construed as placing a person barely above the apes in evolutionary development. It’s all so crassly dopey. Yet, the practical corollary to the largesse is a turn to the labor of semi-literate Chinese peasants so Americans can enjoy student loan debt, Sociology and ****-studies courses, their meth and the dole in depopulating neighborhoods, or extended adolescence in a growing number of failures-to-launch. Education in America is as much a disaster as Detroit. All of it homegrown.
In this respect, though, Hanson can be spot-on in his condemnation of the condition of our schools, K to grad school – but, Victor, please connect the dots. Tariffs and protectionism will do nothing but mask this glaring deficit. If you care about expanding opportunities in the “dirty jobs” sector and making the made-in-America chant more than a cover for union featherbedding, I suggest that we make our bed, clean our room, and, by God, make ourselves competitive rather than wallow in perpetual whinerhood. And it begins with classical curriculum, classical instruction, accountability, and the rejection of government as helicopter parent.
Speaking of government as helicopter parent, Trump has staked his name to hostility to entitlement reform, and particularly the two biggest ones, by far: Social Security and Medicare. They’re both headed to insolvency – Medicare first, soon followed by SS. Trump, as Hanson prostrates in silence, is waiting till we saddle every American child with unrecoverable future debt, or we can no longer defend ourselves with the two domestic fiscal behemoths gobbling up more and more of the nation’s purse. And to think that it’s only a cynical ploy to buy the votes of the seasoned citizenry with fiscal foolishness and outright lies. The Third Rail of Politics had better be reformed or we’ll have to get used to an America with the military gravitas of Canada. Reform is not an option.
No area is more infected with Trumpisms than in thoughts about America’s role in the world. In this respect, Trump’s “America First” chant has morphed into a cover for a new isolationism on the right. No issue exposes this new feature on the right more than Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. As a historian, Hanson must realize, in the current circumstance of a hyper-aggressive Putin, that the parallels with 1939 Europe are straightforward. Yet, Hanson dismissively expresses a quick and offhanded support for Ukraine as he muddles this backing with the new right’s pessimism about Ukraine’s longevity and our dwindling military stocks.
The incoherence should knock a sane person over the head. The lack of Ukrainian endurance could be a self-fulfilled prophecy by the incessant complaint about our “dwindling stocks”. More than the Ukrainian drain of our own military readiness, unwittingly, the new right is admitting that our superpower status is a joke. It’s an admission that we can’t defend our interests and supply a country the size of Uganda in their fight against being gobbled up. It’s 1938-9 Czechoslovakia and 1939 Poland all over again.
The Soviet Union kept the communist North Vietnamese in the field for a couple of decades, and we can’t aid a Uganda? What makes people like Hanson think that we can defend Taiwan against the #2 economy in the world with the largest army and navy? Ineluctably, this line of argument is a quiet admission that the “pivot” to face the CCP threat is a suicide mission.
Actually, Ukraine is a wakeup call. Stopping one leg of the new Axis in Ukraine is directly tied to stopping the other leg in the Pacific. Don’t think that for a moment that Xi and his minions aren’t watching our enfeebled internal debates about Ukraine. Instead, we ought to be alerted to getting our act together by injecting steroids into our defense industrial complex and conforming our defense capabilities to the new reality of “quantity has a quality all its own”, and stop grousing about our lack of 155 munitions. We can do that, first, by stopping our deficit-spending-till-bankruptcy, and restraining our utopia-searching and robbing-Peter-to pay-Paul domestic fiscal schemes. Our fiscal balance sheet can only tolerate so much greenie nonsense, equality-mongering, and blank checks to the elderly and everyone else “oppressed”. At least Rush Limbaugh had the temerity to call the AARP “greedy geezers”. Instead, with Hanson and Trump, we get fiscal insanity. Come on, Victor, speak up, make sense.
Rush Limbaugh at National Review Institute’s fall gala, 2019. (Lila Photo)
Making sense is what we need at this stage in our country’s history, and all-to-frequently we aren’t getting it. The reign of incomprehensibility even affects the language that we use to discern the difference between liberal and conservative. Check this out: Hanson labeled as “liberal” conservatives who are still conservative but weary of Trump. His charge that National Review is “liberal” is particularly stunning. One can only conclude that Hanson’s distinction between liberal and conservative hinges on a person’s or organization’s stance toward Trump. So, Victor, which one of these articles in the July 31 issue of National Review is “liberal”?
• “Family Policy Meets Deficit Politics: For solutions, consider the supply side”: a call for the use of conservative economics (supply side) to assist families.
• “Throwing Off China’s chains”: a defense of those in and outside of Communist China who risk their lives – many already lost them – to resist the tyranny.
• “Our Chosen Chains: Smartphones, handguns, and the destructive use of freedom”: an article on the debilitating effect of modern media, especially social media, on ourselves and our children.
• “The Restrained Roberts Court: Pace their critics, the justices respect precedent”: a retort to the leftist complaint that the Robert Court is “activist” as well as a defense of originalism, the conservative jurisprudence.
• “Supreme Modesty: Conservatives have saved the Court from itself”: the piece speaks for itself.
• “Elite Universities’ Affirmative-Action Reaction: Biased admission practices are no way to address historical injustice”: a defense of the Court’s Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard decision that banned racial favoritism in college admissions.
• “A Year after Bruen: The current Second Amendment test leaves questions”: the article defends the Court’s protection of the Second Amendment in recent cases but admits there are problems that still need clarification.
Et cetera.
A conservative position is manifest in every issue. I’ve been a subscriber since the early 1980’s.
The same is true for National Review Online. Don’t take my word for it; go see for yourself (https://www.nationalreview.com). The woke would go ballistic. But here’s the crux: on the whole, the magazine is no fan of Trump and is mostly pro-Ukraine. I can only conclude that since Hanson is at least modestly pro-Ukraine, the decisive factor for being “liberal” is whether one is a Trump fan or not. If you can’t countenance Trump’s appalling behavior, narcissism, incessant capacity to make foes of friends, and gross immaturity to blame others for his own misfortunes, you must be “liberal”. What?!
I’ve had enough of Trump after voting for him twice. Am I now a “liberal” by Hanson’s metric? Funny, I don’t think and feel like one.
For want of a better explanation, Hanson appears to have fallen victim to presentism, what I call the tyranny of the present. Strange for a historian of antiquity. In the minds of many people, current happenings and concerns are of overriding existential import, more so than anything else … ever! Some people get caught up in the cognitive and emotional fevers of the moment, like a social contagion. Today, the personage of Trump looms large … undeservedly so. Trump is too small a vortex to cram the actual meaning of conservative/liberal. Trump is only the fascination of the moment. He too will pass. One more GOP election disappointment to add to the growing list ought to perform the cure.
A stone-faced Donald Trump pled not guilty to a 34-count felony indictment in a Manhattan courtroom in April 2023. Trump is the first U.S. president, former or current, to be charged with a crime.
I’ve been a Republican for almost the entirety of my adult life. As a conservative, where else is one to go?
Now, my party has a love-struck teenage fixation on Donald Trump. Regardless of the reason for the infatuation, he stands head and shoulders above the rest in the Republican 2024 field, according to polls. But that’s a sampling within a minority of the total electorate. While Trump is dearly loved among a majority of that minority, he is thoroughly detested in the general electorate. Nominating Trump will make the Democrats’ task so much easier.
The fact of broad disgust toward Trump is only one part of the bad political calculus for the GOP. The majority of a minority seems intent on making Trump the face of the party at a time when he faces multiple criminal investigations across many fronts – namely Atlanta and Special Counsel Jack Smith – some of them more serious than others. The majority of the minority callously sweeps aside these legal threats as if they were Russia Collusion all over again. That would be a mistake. Expect these existential threats to more fully hit the fan after he secures the nomination. For the three months of the 2024 election season, the party will be saddled with a criminal defendant at trial and quite possibly a perp-walk post-election, whether he wins or loses the election.
As for his down-ticket pull – remember the results of 2018, 2020, and 2022? – a criminal defendant to lead the charge only worsens the party prospects across the board, state and federal. An improbable win on election day would mean immediate impeachment and removal from office, with criminal sentencing later, by a decidedly hostile Congress. Thinking beyond the momentary thrill of the political lust, a GOP trainwreck looms.
The guy is abhorred in the general voting public, and that isn’t just an opinion. FiveThirtyEight lays out the evidence. In eight polls from June 27 to July 11, Trump’s unfavorables outrank his favorables by no fewer than 12 points. By July 18, the level of detestation ballooned to 16.1 points. He’s no more likeable than Biden (see below). For Democrats, if you’re saddled with political dead weight (Biden or any of the other substitute lightweights), bring your opponent down to your level, and that means assisting the Republicans in seppuku (suicide) – nominating Trump. A bad hand quickly becomes a winnable one.
At this moment, Republicans are choosing seppuku while the Democrats face their own existential threat from No-Labels. The group has a greater potential of siphoning off votes from Democrats uneasy about adolescent genital mutilation (gender-affirming care) without parental consent or knowledge, abortion at any time prior to the exit from the womb (maybe after), boys in girls’ bathrooms, locker rooms, sports, kowtowing to the CCP, the crime, the crime, and more crime.
No doubt, though, the Republican base is intent on making it possible for the Democrats to escape their vicious wrongdoing. The Democrats have to live down their noxiousness, but the great leveler is Donald Trump. Look at the numbers. They haven’t changed much and will only get worse for the GOP as we proceed to election day 2024.
Yep, Donald Trump is the Democrats’ best friend . . . and maybe their only hope.
RogerG
Read more here:
* “Latest Polls”, FiveThirtyEight, July 18, 2023, at https://projects.fivethirtyeight.com/polls/favorability/donald-trump/
Dr. Meredithe McNamara testifies as an “expert” witness on gender-affirming care to Congress, July 12, 2023.
As if to warn us of the “expert” trap, Christopher Baur of University College London wrote in Research Square,
“Expert opinion is the lowest level of evidence because it is highly prone to bias. Compared to all levels of evidence above, experts are more likely to selectively choose evidence that confirms their prior assumptions or beliefs, may be more prone to conflicts of interest, and may be so selectively focused on one field that they lose sight of the broader picture, which biases their perspective. Expert opinion should be viewed cautiously and not necessarily taken at face value.” (see below)
****************
Please watch Rep. Dan Crenshaw take apart Dr. Meredithe McNamara, an “expert” of gender-affirming care – i.e., chemical and surgical interventions in adolescents. If you want to see an example of an “expert” debasing themselves, the clip is very enlightening.
First, notice the “expert’s” self-confidence bordering on arrogance when she began a response to Crenshaw with “Sir, are you aware . . .”, when he was. Many “experts” aren’t aware that they are partisan activists for an ideology. Yes, ideology. Break it down; it isn’t rocket science, or any other real science. The care begins with a child’s self-diagnosis and from there many children could very well be placed on a treadmill to transition, i.e., puberty blockers, cross-sex hormones, and the removal of body parts. If it was my child, I wouldn’t let the kid come within 10 degrees of longitude of that “doctor”.
People like McNamara aren’t “experts”. Truth be known, they are social revolutionaries. She couldn’t, when pushed, name a single scientific review of extant studies to buck up her opinion. Her only refrain was a banal recourse to “Standards of Care” of the movement’s evangelists in the World Professional Association for Transgender Health (WPATH). Given the group’s stridency, it may as well be WARPATH.
Dr. Meredithe McNamara tried the same schtick in testimony before the Florida joint medical board committee on her favorite hobby horse: gender-affirming care – i.e., chemical and surgical interventions in adolescents. You can read about it here: “Pro-Pediatric Gender Transition Doc Gets Slammed By Medical Professionals For ‘False Claims’”, Christina Buttons, Daily Wire, Nov. 19, 2022, at https://www.dailywire.com/news/pro-pediatric-gender-transition-doc-gets-slammed-by-medical-professionals-for-false-claims.
With “experts” like these, we might be better off with tribal shamans.
RogerG
Read more here:
* Christopher Baur can be read at “What is the Hierarchy of Evidence?”, Research Square, Nov. 17, 2021, at https://www.researchsquare.com/blog/what-is-the-hierarchy-of-evidence
Reagan had policy chops having spent decades reading, thinking, writing, and engaging with policy pundits to establish what he thought and why. Not so with Trump. Yet, he is the darling of strident and nuttier elements on the right.
Complexity at almost any level isn’t high on the list of those things appreciated by many people, maybe most, especially if the forces at work don’t stare the average person in the face. A popular default position is the childlike reduction of circumstances into a single person, such as the economic boom that is attributed solely to Trump by his congregation of worshippers. Don’t bother them with the details.
Like the Age of Augustus for Rome, we have that “Trump” economy (’17-’19), the “Bush” financial crisis (’07-’08), the “Reagan” boom following the “Reagan” recession, the “Hoover” depression (’29-’32), etc., etc. The adolescent fantasy is particularly acute when considering economic matters. It’s almost as if, in presidential elections, that we are choosing a god to deliver us from the vagaries of life. Quickly, millions of economic actors as free and independent producers and consumers, technological trends, social disruptions in the form of the decline in public morality and the family, huge government incentives and disincentives to be both unproductive and productive, and misbegotten popular beliefs are erased in a mad rush to praise a group’s patron saint. No wonder that we get so much wrong because many of us understand so little. Now isn’t that a clear condemnation of our system of education?
Nature abhors a vacuum, and the same is true in a person’s head. A lack of knowledge leads to the resort to the equivalent of magic. For instance, one person is our savior or master villain. Seldom is it that simple. A classic example of this mass psychomotor tic is the so-called “Trump” economic boom. Trump boosters reduce everything to the “genius” of Trump. In fact, the guy was more of a braggadocious surfer than a George Washington or reincarnation of ancient Rome’s Cincinnatus.
Trump benefitted from two years of united Republican control of the elective branches of the federal government in the first half of his only term as president. To address the huge government discouragements to be productive, the Republican playbook was unleashed. Not long after Trump took the oath, Congress under a Republican majority and Speaker Paul Ryan and Senate Leader Mitch McConnell set to work to reverse the neo-socialism of the prior Pelosi Congress and Obama administration. The Congressional Review Act was dusted off to veto by congressional vote the Obama rampaging Leviathan’s regulations in the workplace and EPA. Trump had no idea, but he was around to sign the repeals. See, deregulation works, as predicted in the free-market sermons of the Chicago school economists (Friedman, Stigler, etc.).
The Tax Cuts and Jobs Act of 2018 was festooned with the free-market, small-government ideas that have been bouncing around Republican circles and conservative think tanks since Reagan. If a nation wants to keep its businesses, stop beating them over the head with one of the highest capital gains tax regimes in the world.
If you want your people to be productive, put down the tax lash that was applied to their backs too. Republicans for years were slammed with “tax cuts for the rich”, so this time around, most of the benefits accrued to the middle class while additional slices of the population were removed from the tax rolls entirely. These ideas bounced around the Republican caucus for decades, long before Trump came down the escalator to bash “the swamp”. Trump showed and expressed no interest or knowledge in the intricacies of tax policy, except maybe what directly affected the family real estate empire. He had no idea about the strategic triad in national security nor supply-side economics. He’s not a reader nor deep thinker. He just happened to be the man behind the Resolute desk to hector the Republican caucuses to give him a trophy (a win) so he could revel in the Roman-like triumph of a signing ceremony. In that sense, narcissism proved useful.
Paul Ryan, Speaker of the House, and Mitch McConnell, Senate Majority Leader, in 2018 at the time of the passage of the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act.
Trump’s ubiquitous self-aggrandizement has been routinely applied to increased domestic energy production during his term. Simply put, Republicans don’t have the Democrats’ fossil-fuel phobia, which is a healthy beginning. It’s not necessarily a Trump thing; it’s the Republican Party platform of many iterations past. They’ve always wanted to open up ANWR, and I don’t know of many Republican leaders opposed to pipelines. They got through without a hitch when the GOP was in charge, pre-Trump. Ditto for approving domestic production on public lands. Trump only did what was established GOP doctrine.
The GOP was itching at the chance to rescind the donkey party’s draconian fuel-efficiency standards, which was a sleight-of-hand way to coerce you into a frivolous electric vehicle and ditch the far more practical piston-driven family sedan. Expressing the GOP’s longstanding faith in free markets, when the GOP is in power, the free-to-choose philosophy has dominant sway. The dictat was lifted like some of the other near-totalitarian nonsense of the donkey party. Not necessarily a Trump thing, a free-market GOP thing.
The results were a repetition of the Reagan-era boom, which is just shorthand for the implementation of the outlook coming out of the Hoover Institution, Heritage, and the American Enterprise Institute, the free market Club for Growth, etc. – some of them predating Reagan, and some bashed today by Trump for insufficient toadying.
The Federalist Society, the source of many of Trump’s judicial picks, dates back to the second year of Reagan’s first term. Without that Federalist Society list, who knows, we might be faced with Trump’s older sister, Mary Trump Barry, sitting on a federal circuit or the Supreme Court. To no surprise, Trump relied on the originalist Federalist Society to secure the support of an originalist GOP in order to appoint originalist judges. Even an ill-read Trump could figure that one out.
Speaking of Mary Trump Barry, appointed by Reagan as a US Attorney and later elevated by Bill Clinton to a district judgeship, she has some misgivings about her brother. Obviously with some animus, Trump’s niece, Mary L. Trump, recorded Mary T. Barry in a conversation about her brother. Speaking of a hot mic, this one sizzles. Mary Barry:
“All he [Trump] wants to do is appeal to his base. He has no principles. None. His goddamned tweeting and lying… oh my God. I’m talking too freely, but you know. The change of stories. The lack of preparation [he doesn’t read]. The lying. Holy shit…. It’s the phoniness of it all. It’s the phoniness and this cruelty. Donald is cruel.”
If this was an episode of Family Feud, it would be a civil war with the direct family offspring versus the extended one.
The country was rewarded by the GOP’s Reaganomics in the two years of unified Republican control of the elective branches of government. From Jan. 2017 to Jan. 2019, Trump was one of 290 Republicans in the 115th Congress and the 45th presidency: 238 R congressman (majority) + 51 R senators (majority), + the R chief executive. The “I”, “I”, “I” of Trump is such a gross exaggeration that it borders on a lie.
The Pelosi House that took office in Jan. 2019 couldn’t stop the positive wave of Reaganomics through the economy. Average family income grew by $4,600 in 2019 alone, and all racial groups benefitted; the poverty rate plummeted; inflation hovered around the fed’s target; unemployment for all groups hit historic lows. Frequently, the quarterback is accorded the limelight, but how many weren’t the next Tom Brady because their career ended with an ambulance trip to the hospital due to a porous line, or their receiver corps was plagued with slow feet and stone hands? Trump just so happened to benefit from a great offensive line and receivers. And there wasn’t a Hillary around to protect the donkey party’s entrenched collectivism.
It didn’t take long for that self-proclaimed “winner” to be outed as an inveterate loser. In 2018, he lost the House. In 2020, his antics cost the Republicans the presidency and the Senate. In 2022, a Trump endorsement was the kiss of death, except in the deepest blood-red precincts.
Now, a good portion of registered Republicans seem prepared to trade their party identity for that of a lemming. What didn’t work in 2018, 2020, and 2022 is enthusiastically embraced for 2024 according to polls. Einstein’s formulation of insanity keeps coming to mind – doing the same thing and expecting a different result.
The truth is that the Electoral College doesn’t choose a god. It elects a chief executive to carry out the laws, and that’s it. Trump didn’t invent sensible economics. Heck, the little that he knows was given to him by the constellation of Republican advisers that attend to every Republican president.
Even Trump couldn’t screw up what was handed to him in 2017 to 2018. What he did manage to do was to see to it that it didn’t last beyond Jan. 2019. First, Pelosi seized the House gavel, then Schumer took the one in the Senate, and at the same time, a senescent oldster campaigning from his basement rest home bested him and moved into the White House. That orange-haired “winner” is a loser, loser, loser, thrice over.
Trump tries to take all the credit that rightfully belongs to a throng of conservative pundits, think tanks, and public figures. Instead, a bombastic clown dominates the scene. Four charges from Mary Trump Barry keep resonating: “lack of preparation”, “lying”, “cruel” and “phoniness”. That says about it all.
And to think that a large number of Republicans want to do it all over again. Amazing, absolutely amazing.
RogerG
Read more here:
* The comments of Mary Trump Barry can be read in a Wikipedia post, and in the Washington Post (Aug. 22, 2020), “In secretly recorded audio, President Trump’s sister says he ‘no principles’ and ‘you can’t trust him’”, Michael Kranish, at https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/maryanne-trump-barry-secret-recordings/2020/08/22/30d457f4-e334-11ea-ade1-28daf1a5e919_story.html
* The success of Trump’s unacknowledged Reaganomics can be read in “The Biden Economy and How It Could Be Fixed”, Andrew Puzder, Imprimis, Hillsdale College, March 2023, at https://imprimis.hillsdale.edu/wp-content/uploads/2023/04/Imprimis_Mar_3-23_8pg_4-3Web.pdf
Transgenders going topless at the White House recently
Iran’s ruling class of fanatical mullahs regularly bashes the United States as the Great Satan. The question is, are we at this juncture trying to prove the rabid imams right?
American embassies display the LGBTQ+ flag throughout the world, including societies who maintain millenniums-old proscriptions on homosexual and other unconventional sex-related behavior. Such norms are deeply, culturally embedded and thus resistant to change by embassy flag waving or ambassadorial pronouncements. U.S. government interference in domestic affairs will probably be met with a native-born counter revolution. An Ibo tribesman walking the streets of Lagos might not give much thought to the rainbow flag on the U.S. embassy building, but once informed, chances are, he’ll meet the flag’s meaning with disfavor, and, by so doing, begin the long mental process of seeing America as the enemy of his way of life.
The pride flag on the US embassy to the Vatican, of all places
The view of the United States in these traditional societies may emerge as one resembling Babylon in much traditional Christian eschatology. Babylon symbolizes evil. God’s wrath awaits it in the last days. Similar apocalyptic scenarios exist in Islam. Certainly, discrimination, execution, and torture of homosexuality is an affront to decency, but don’t expect societies with little in common with San Francisco to be so gung-ho in embracing our sexual revolution.
Are we alienating more than the vast majority of the world’s population who live in traditional societies? On many fronts such as pushing pernicious pedagogy, glamorizing our hedonistic cultural revolution in our movies, the propagation of our faddish neo-Marxist “equities” nonsense (the woke stuff), greenie extremism, etc., America is at the tip of the spear. And, now, we have staked out the most extreme position on transgenderism and “gender affirming care” (GAC), far beyond where our European colleagues in western civilization are willing to go.
Consider: gender dysphoria is the only branch of health care in which a self-diagnosis is the basis of treatment. More commonly, your doctor’s most requested input from you is, “It hurts there.” Then, he would apply his training, knowledge, and experience. In many places today, anyone, a kid or adult, can come into a health care facility and express disenchantment with their gender and from there it could easily be a quick path to puberty blockers, cross-sex hormones, and reassignment surgery – the so-called “gender-affirming care” (GAC). It’s the kind of logic-jumping that one associates with an ideologue, for that is what transgenderism is. How do you turn the self-diagnosis of “I feel” into objective, physical, empirically-validated truth? It’s nonsense. It’s simply the possession of a strongly-held belief and it’s off to radical action. Caution, alternatives, and disagreement cannot be tolerated, the true signs of an ideology at work.
As one would expect, California has its fingerprints all over America’s newfound sexual extremism. As is true with all extremists, there’s no room for other views, which leads the radicals to try to control the state in order to criminalize disagreement. “Gender-Affirming Care” (GAC) is all the rage for America’s progressive ruling class. The treatment formula is simple: GAC = drugs and surgery, with a little psychological push known as “counseling” for good measure. Those who disagree may even lose their kids. California is busy passing laws to lay the long arm of the law on parents who dissent from the California legislature’s party line.
More about California in a moment but one thing must be made clear: unsurprisingly, many of its most enthusiastic proponents come from people who’ve “transitioned” or parents who encouraged their own children to embark on this irreversible course. The transgender Rachel (formerly Richard) Levine is the current US Assistant Secretary of Health, and vocal advocate of doing to kids what he/she did to himself/herself. To keep justifying his decisions to himself, and seeking solace in making it easier for others to follow the same path, he engages in outright lies when he says, “. . . there is no argument among medical professionals about the value and the importance of gender-affirming care.” Anything goes for an ideologue. The lie is obvious, as you’ll see in a bit.
US Assistant Secretary of Health Rachel (formerly Richard) Levine
Such arrogant and condescending overconfidence is displayed by California Assemblywoman Lori Wilson. So strongly does she seek reaffirmation for her encouragement of gender transition for her own child that she wrote AB 957. Her choice, her opinion of “gender affirming care”, is written into the bill, and parents who favor a different approach could lose custody of their children in divorce proceedings. If it’s such a good idea for custody battles in cases of divorce, there’s no obstacle to its application to all families. Previously, the California Department of Social Services issued a mandate for fealty to “gender-affirming care” (drugs and surgery) for foster-parent applicants. Anything goes for an ideologue like Wilson and California regulators. These zealots reside in a state whose governing class thinks – or, more honestly, wishes – that the issue is settled when most clearly it is not.
California Assemblywoman Lori Wilson
Wilson’s legislative monstrosity is the latest in a line of California-sponsored extremism on transgender experimentation, with our kids as guinea pigs, sometimes over the protests of the kids’ parents. Residing in another state is no protection. If your child in Florida is bombarded with hints of gender dysphoria on TikTok and is anxious about his or her parents’ reaction, that anxiety can find a release without parental consent or knowledge in an underground railroad to California under SB 107 (2022, effective Jan.1, 2023). Your kid arrives in California, God knows how, the state takes your kid into “protective custody”, the child can undergo “transition”, and the Golden State’s authorities are prohibited from notifying the parents if the offending state restricts the medicinal and surgical mutilation of adolescents.
In an act of life imitating art, California has turned itself into H.G. Wells’ “Island of Dr. Moreau”, a place where a Dr. Moreau creates hybrid animal/humans by vivisection. California has turned itself into an island where hybrid boy/girls with an irreversible chromosomal composition in almost every cell of their body will now be subjected to puberty blockers, constant and life-long infusions of cross-sex hormones, and extensive reconstructive plastic surgeries to create XY girls or XX boys. Call it human gender vivisection.
A scene from 1977 film adaptation of “The Island of Dr. Moreau”
Of course, the zealots need a crisis to stampede an unknowing public into accepting these drastic measures. An alleged epidemic of teen suicide fits the bill. There simply is no credible evidence that anything pushed by Rachel (formerly Richard) Levine or Lori Wilson – their “gender-affirming care”- has any positive effect on the suicidal tendencies of self-proclaimed gender dysphoric teens. Historically, the crisis-of-the-moment tactic is a favorite of radicals wishing to rationalize their extremism. But if you strip away the rhetoric, stare at the issue with strict rationality, it’s horrific.
A warning label should be affixed to California: “Warning: this state is dangerous to your mental and physical health.” One California State Senator, Scott Wilk of Santa Clarita, put it succinctly on June 13, 2023, in referring to Wilson’s bill, “If you love your children, you need to flee California.” Los Angeles resident and journalist Abigail Shrier, who is facing social persecution for not adhering to the party line, advises parents with children in schools afflicted with a transgender social contagion, “The moment you hear that [your child’s friends are transitioning or using “non-binary” language to describe themselves], get your kids out of that school!” To effectively do that, you may have to go state-shopping.
California State Senator Scott Wilk (R, Santa Clarita)
California has become a threat to the nation and world because what you see passing through the state legislature and across the governor’s desk is also the official outlook of the state’s fellow travelers running the show in the federal government. It’s going national. The loyal opposition is cornered in a narrow majority in one half of Congress. The executive branch and its ruling donkey party ape the donkey party’s super-majorities in the California legislature. And what they are doing is swimming upstream as our cultural amigos in Europe are having second thoughts about the transgender zealotry.
Clearly, for many in the European continent’s health care establishments, this rush to malform a child’s body has become deeply troubling. While formerly in the forefront of “transition” therapies in “gender-affirming care”, lately they have decided to pull back. In the UK, the brakes were put on it by a lawsuit. 23-year-old Keira Bell sued the National Health Service (NHS) and its Tavistock Centre gender identity clinic for improper care and treatment of her gender dysphoria beginning at age 16. Other young victims are waiting in line to take their crack at the country’s medical malpractice.
Keira Bell, as a boy after transition (r) and now after detransition
An independent investigation by pediatrician Dr. Hilary Cass chronicled practices at the clinic like the hurried and inordinate use of puberty blockers – by the way, originally used for chemical castration – which were prescribed for Bell after only three visits. In a report, the BBC’s Alison Holt wrote of Tavistock, “Former staff at the clinic have raised concerns that teenagers who want to transition to a different gender are being given puberty blockers without adequate assessment or psychological work.” It’s been a persistent complaint going back to at least 2009. A year of puberty blockers for Bell was followed by three more years of male hormones and a double mastectomy (breast removal). Indeed, “without adequate assessment” appears to be the nature of “gender-affirming care” at Tavistock and elsewhere, and the core complaint of the suing victims. Bell won. In the end, after the Cass report, the July 2022 obituary for the Tavistock Centre was announced by the UK’s National Health Service.
The Travitock Centre in London
Scandinavia, long a pioneer in transgender treatments, is having serious second thoughts and is making a mockery of Rachel (formerly Richard) Levine’s boast of one mind among “experts” in lockstep support of drug and cutting-induced changes to a child’s body. The Dutch let loose the tiger of “gender-affirming care” (GAC) for children in the 1990’s, but now are saying “Whooooaaaaa”! They are in the process of revising their earlier enthusiasm for what later came to be called “The Dutch Protocol”. As Dutch researchers Jan Kuitenbrouwer and Peter Vasterman wrote in their report on “The Dutch Protocol” about the use of puberty blockers, the first medical intervention in “transition”,
“More and more is becoming known about the long-term side effects of puberty blockers. They interfere with physical sexual development, hinder the development of the bones, can cause anorgasmia and infertility and interfere with the ability to make rational decisions.”
The Swedes, Finns, and Norwegians haven’t ignored the mounting evidence by 2022. A Finnish review of “gender-affirming care” recommended restrictions and a preference for talking therapy. Sweden’s medical authorities warn that the risks of GAC “currently outweigh the benefits.” Norway’s health care regulators expressed similar caution. French medical authorities chimed in with much the same worries. As it turns out, America stands out as the “wild west” in nearly unrestrained teenage genital mutilation in service of a radical ideology.
The appearance of a rising number of detransitioners and a growing recognition of a social contagion in gender dysphoria is making the contentions of Rachel (formerly Richard) Levine preposterous. Many young people regretting the hash that people like Levine have made of their lives will end up ranking “gender-affirming care” right up there with the race theories of Dr. Walter Gross, Hauptstellenleiter of the National Socialist Office of Racial Policy. Studies of detransitioners are all over the map but one U.S. study found that nearly 30% of transitioners stopped and reversed their medical interventions within 4 years, this in spite of the great social pressure to go through with it. For the push for transition, we don’t need droplets to spread a virus since the cell phone will do quite nicely.
Dr. Walter Gross, Hauptstellenleiter of the National Socialist Office of Racial PolicyNorman Spack of Boston’s Children’s Hospital and an early enthusiast of “gender-affirming care”
The social pressure comes in the form of a social contagion. Unlike COVID-19 whose vulnerable are older adults, the vulnerable are the impressionable, the young who are digitally getting the gender dysphoria virus. All of a sudden, it’s tween and teen girls, instead of boys, who are overpowering the stats according to Lisa Littman, formerly of the Mt. Sinai School of Medicine and currently Director of The Institute for Comprehensive Gender Dysphoria Research. How did this happen? The culprit rides in that rectangular device planted in your teen’s pocket. Social media on that screen plays to the comorbidities of gender dysphoria such as teen girls’ insecurities, mental conditions like autism, an exaggerated sense of envy, etc. Gender-affirming care’s reliance on teen self-diagnosis skips over the real problems. The mask is mistaken for the real face and off we go into the mutilation of children.
Any adult worth his or her salt, particularly those who raised kids, would know that kids aren’t very good at medical analysis. But the official policy of the U.S. is to not know any better than a teen as we push the rest of the world to join us in treating children as lab rats. Worse: practice gender vivisection to create hybrid boys and girls out of our offspring. Imagine America as the avatar of teenage genital mutilation. I’m sorry but that’s not a good look.
RogerG
Read more here:
* California Assemblywoman Lori Wilson’s AB 957 can be accessed at https://legiscan.com/CA/text/AB957/id/2698894/California-2023-AB957-Introduced.html
* California’s SB 107 is described at “Newsom signs bill to make California a refuge for transgender youth and families”, Brooke Migdon, The Hill: Changing America, 9/30/22, at https://thehill.com/changing-america/respect/equality/3668922-newsom-signs-bill-to-make-california-a-refuge-for-transgender-youth-and-families/. The bill can be read at https://leginfo.legislature.ca.gov/faces/billTextClient.xhtml?bill_id=202120220SB107.
* An examination of gender dysphoric suicide can be read at “Does ‘Gender-Affirming Care’ For Trans Kids Actually Prevent Suicide? Here’s What The Data Say”, Jay P. Greene, Ph.D., Heritage Foundation, 6/15/2022, https://www.heritage.org/gender/commentary/does-gender-affirming-care-trans-kids-actually-prevent-suicide-heres-what-the
* Scott Wilk’s comment on the danger that California poses for the state’s children can be found at “State Senator Warns About New Gender-Affirmation Law: ‘If You Love Your Children, You Need To Flee California’”, Real Clear Politics, 6/15/23, https://www.realclearpolitics.com/video/2023/06/15/california_state_senator_warns_if_you_love_your_children_you_need_to_flee_california.html
* The story on Keira Bell and the UK’s Tavistock gender identity clinic:
• “Tavistock transgender clinic could face mass legal action ‘from 1,000 families of children who claim they were rushed into taking life-altering puberty blockers’ weeks after NHS shut it down in wake of damning report”, Martin Beckford, The Daily Mail, 8/11/2022, at https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-11101661/Tavistock-transgender-clinic-facing-mass-legal-action-1-000-families.html
• “UK court rules against trans clinic over treatment for children”, Rachel Savage, et al, Reuters, 11/20/2020, at https://www.reuters.com/article/us-britain-lgbt-transgender-trfn-idUSKBN28B3AV
• “NHS gender clinic ‘should have challenged me [Keira Bell] more’ over transition”, Alison Holt, BBC News, 3/1/2020, at https://www.bbc.com/news/health-51676020
• “Shuttering the Tavistock”, Bernard Lane, Quillette, 8/5/2022, at https://quillette.com/2022/08/05/closing-the-tavistock-is-an-important-step/
• “Courage of the parents, patients and whistleblowers who refused to be silenced is revealed as controversial Tavistock children’s transgender clinic is to SHUT after damning report warned it was ‘not safe’”, Martin Beckford, The Daily Mail, 7/29/2022, at https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-11059641/Courage-parents-patients-whistleblowers-revealed-Tavistock-childrens-clinic-SHUT.html
* National Review has been forthright is presenting counter-arguments to the ones advanced by transgender activists:
• “California Is Losing Its Mind”, the editors, 6/14/2023, at https://www.nationalreview.com/2023/06/california-is-losing-its-mind/?utm_source=recirc-desktop&utm_medium=homepage&utm_campaign=river&utm_content=featured-content-trending&utm_term=second
• “The World Is Turning against Gender Experiments on Children”, the editors, 6/13/2023, at https://www.nationalreview.com/2023/06/the-world-is-turning-against-gender-experiments-on-children/
• “The U.S. Is an Outlier in ‘Gender-Affirming Care’ for Minors”, Madeleine Kearns, National Review Magazine, 5/25/2023, at https://www.nationalreview.com/magazine/2023/06/12/the-u-s-is-an-outlier-in-gender-affirming-care-for-minors/
* The Dutch are beginning to recognize caution in regards to “gender-affirming care”: “The Dutch Model is falling apart”, Rose Kelleher, Genspect, 1/2/23, at https://genspect.org/the-dutch-model-is-falling-apart/#:~:text=The%20decision%20of%20the%20well-respected%20Dutch%20newspaper%20NRC,and%20impairs%20their%20future%20ability%20to%20have%20children.
• The Dutch rethink about GAC began with a report in the Dutch newspaper NRC: “Trans Care Must Also Meet Medical-Scientific Standards”, Jan Kuitenbrouwer and Peter Vasterman, NRC, 12/30/22, at https://www.nrc.nl/nieuws/2022/12/30/ook-transzorg-moet-aan-medisch-wetenschappelijke-standaarden-voldoen-a4152945
* A review of the issue of detransition, though generally supportive of transgender treatments but acknowledging the persistent presence of large numbers of people who regret their “transition”, can be read here: “Take Detransitioners Seriously”, Daniela Valdes and Kinnon McKinnon, The Atlantic, 1/18/23, at https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2023/01/detransition-transgender-nonbinary-gender-affirming-care/672745/
* Lisa Littman’s groundbreaking report on rapid-onset gender dysphoria can be read at “Parent reports of adolescents and young adults perceived to show signs of a rapid onset of gender dysphoria”, Lisa Littman, PLOS ONE, 8/16/2018, at https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0202330
* More on rapid-onset gender dysphoria can be read in “Study of 1,655 Cases Supports the ‘Rapid-Onset Gender Dysphoria’ Hypothesis”, Society for Evidence Based Gender Medicine (SEGM), 3/30/23, at https://segm.org/study-of-1655-cases-lends-support-to-ROGD
* Please read John McCormack’s rebuttal to “2,000 Mules” at https://www.nationalreview.com/…/06/12/sorry-trump-lost/
John McCormack
I have been asked to watch Dinesh D’Souza’s “2,000 Mules” by people who believe it to be gospel on the November 2020 election. I didn’t because spending the money elsewhere mattered more to me. Heaven knows, I got the gist from a host of Trump-friendly publications and websites without the added expense. Being a man on the right, access is no problem. After reading about many of the same sources referenced by D’Souza in the film, D’Souza’s argument ranks up there with anything written by the author Dan Brown (“Angels & Demons”, “The Da Vinci Code”, and “Inferno”, etc.). The only difference between the two D’s is that Brown acknowledges his work to be fiction.
There is a debate here that needs to be aired. Trump, the leading contender for the Republican 2024 crown, is running on … what for it … November 2020. His contention that the election was stolen is the centerpiece of his campaign, along with the long trail of verbal abuse directed at anyone he doesn’t like, normally people who haven’t shown sufficient obeisance. He made it the focus of his return to the center stage, so it deserves a careful examination. John McCormack gives one of the best and most concise critiques of the Trump claims that I’ve come across.
First, from the get-go, the notion that a massive, sprawling plot mostly across five states, maybe more, involving hundreds of thousands of fellow conspirators with none of this huge crowd being detected or slipping up boggles the mind. That alone, without seeing the film, should cause a person to be very leery. There are millions of spine-tingling stories across the internet of mysterious dark forces bringing down the world. How is this one any different? They, like all tall tales of expansive conspiracies, have to maintain an inhuman level of operational secrecy. The absence of at least a few dufuses to spill the beans among the hundreds of thousands of participants (voters, couriers, organizers) simply can’t pass the smell test.
Here’s one rule for rationally assessing conspiracy claims: believability is in inverse proportion to the number of participants.
The “mules” in the film are the 54,000 couriers (not 2,000) who allegedly stuffed ballot boxes in key locations. None has been fingered by Trump’s army of independent bounty hunters, nor law enforcement, to prove the existence of the plot. Nor will the producers and publisher divulge the names of the left’s NGO’s who are supposedly at the center of the scheme. Dominion’s $787 million lawsuit award hangs over the producers and publishers who might be inclined to name some. Apparently, millions of dollars for over-priced attorneys and the need to bribe some in the jury pool is a bit too daunting to run the risk.
The database for the story consists of cellphone pings and security camera footage on adjacent buildings. I’m reminded of the techie acronym gigo: garbage data goes in, garbage comes out. Data doesn’t stand alone; it is massaged by prior assumptions. So, if you go into the issue assuming something is fishy, don’t be surprised that in your imagination a fish pops out. But it’s not a fish; it’s the lingering smell in your nostrils from cleaning the garbage cans the day before. The pings could be delivery and Uber drivers and the surveilled clutches of ballots at drop boxes turn out to be a family member legally depositing ballots for the family.
Not that fraud doesn’t happen. Of course, it does. It occurs in every election, and is made easier by ballot harvesting, no voter ID, and shot gunning ballots through the mail turning election day into election season. But it doesn’t happen like this. When you have elections like this, elections begin to lose respect and you end up fanning the imaginations of the already unhinged. That’s the real lesson of 2020.
Let’s go back to election day being . . . election day, and 70% of the ballots cast in-person. Add voter ID and we might have more people accepting the results. We don’t need to follow a self-serving narcissist into another electoral defeat. The GOP’s self-preservation should trump Trump.
Donald TrumpOedipus, King of ThebesMAGA/Trump supporters, 2023Dr. Faustus selling his soul to the devil
In 2015, I had this sinking feeling that once Trump sunk his tentacles into the GOP, he’d be hard to cleanse from the party’s bloodstream.
He is a tabloid personality with a harsh mouth and revels in political theatrics. Republicans, as it turned out, were in a mood for a drama queen in 2016, and many still are. They wanted somebody to “own the libs”. Trump first gave them drama about Obama’s birth certificate and followed it with a litany of juvenile banter in “crooked Hillary” (honestly, she may be), “slow/low energy/clueless/not a man” Jeb, “I’ve never seen a human being [John Kasich] eat in such a disgusting fashion”, and now he’s progressed all the way to “coward/weak/lazy/low life/gutless pig” Bill Barr. And to think that there are people who still defend this man and his behavior to this day. According to recent polls, he’s the overwhelming choice to be the Republican nominee. Disgusting. It’s enough for a rock-ribbed Republican such as myself to rethink my party registration. Is this what it means to be a Republican?
He’s embarrassing. I’m embarrassed.
The latest Trump dust up is his federal indictment under:
• 18 U.S.C. § 793(e), “Gathering, transmitting or losing defense information” (31 counts)
• 18 USC §1512, “Tampering with a witness, victim, or an informant” (3 counts)
• 18 U.S. Code § 1519, “Destruction, alteration, or falsification of records in Federal investigations and bankruptcy” (1 count)
• 18 USC § 1001, “Statements or entries generally” (concerns false statements, coverups, etc.) (3 counts)
The first 31 counts draw from Section 793 of the US Code which relates to parts of the old Espionage Act. If you look at the kinds of documents that were bouncing around at his Mar-a-Lago estate and elsewhere – intelligence briefings, contingent US military plans, foreign and domestic military assessments, etc. – this is much more than diary entries, gifts from one head of state to another, personal letters, etc. The highly sensitive nature of the documents demands a different treatment in law. That’s one of the reasons for Section 793 and not the Public Records Act.
The other 7 counts, if true, are evidence of Trump’s pure hubris. I suppose that if you’ve dodged so many bullets, you might come to think of yourself as immune. It’s as if he thinks that he is wearing an invisible Lakota Sioux ghost shirt which makes him invulnerable to the bullets from DC’s henchmen. Like other forms of magic, it works till it doesn’t (the one surviving ghost shirt from the 1890’s has dried blood around holes in it). In this case, there is an evidentiary basis in the indictment for obstruction of justice. They’ve got Trump on tape discussing attempts to mislead investigators and hide the documents, suborning others to commit perjury. Then there’s the corroborative testimony of people in Trump’s inner circle. Granted, the prosecution’s evidence will have to withstand cross examination and counter arguments by Trump’s legal eagles, but if the evidence is valid, it should raise more than a few eyebrows, with the possible exception of the most committed diehards.
Most troubling is the reaction of the media on the right. The commentary can be summed up in “double standard, double standard, double standard”. Very little of it focuses on the contents of the indictment. Some of it is silly in the extreme. Hugh Hewitt, a radio host that I respect for his generally calm and reasoned demeanor on air, expressed his disappointment that a rumored selling by Trump of classified information to the Saudis didn’t materialize in the indictment. His reaction after reading it: “Is that all there is?” Upon hearing that, I said, “What!?” Is the fact that the indictment failed to live up to the wildest speculation on MSNBC or the ladies on The View a real argument against it? Hewitt, you’ve got to be kidding.
He was dismissive of the first 31 counts, the claimed Espionage Act violations, ostensibly because of the unprosecuted transgressions by Biden, Pence, Hillary, and Clinton proteges like Sandy Berger – the double standard argument morphed into an excuse for the mindlessly casual treatment of highly sensitive national security papers. In effect, may as well shred this part of the US Code. This Hewitt response was without seeing the exact nature of the documents, which will come out in court. The prosecutors know this; Trump knows it; the legal eagles know it. If it turns out that all they’ve got is love letters between Trump and “rocket man”, or some such, the DOJ will be wiping egg from its face and providing one more reason to defenestrate the FBI and defang the Garland gang. If these documents prove to be extremely sensitive, the raw egg will be dripping down the face and all over the casual attire of a good portion of the right’s punditry class.
One of those in need of a washcloth will be Mollie Hemingway, a noted commentator in the conservative, pro-Trump firmament. Today (6/13/23), on Hewitt’s show, she ostentatiously proclaimed in hyperbolic bombast, “For me to take this [the fed’s Trump indictment] seriously . . . I need to see hundreds of Russia-collusion-hoax people in jail.” Ruminate on that rant for a moment. Until we retroactively correct for all those who got away, we cannot enforce the law. It’s ludicrous. She’s making the case to selectively not enforce the law à la Alvin Bragg or any of the other Soros-backed DA’s who have been recently inflicted on us. She does this while also admitting that the case against Trump in the indictment is troubling. Is she an advocate of ignoring the evidence till enough Democrat scalps are tied to her lance? Where does this line of illogic stop, at the point where the US Code is effectively eviscerated? Ignore the evidence against Trump till we get Hillary in chains?
If the highly classified nature of the documents proves genuine, while honestly not a fan of Karl Marx, his famous dictum will apply to this current crop of the right’s commentariat: “History repeats itself, first as tragedy, second as farce.”
The second batch of charges – those involving obstruction (of justice) – at least causes a pregnant pause for some of Trump’s past stalwart defenders. The guest lineup on Fox News was left with stumbling admissions of Trump in serious trouble. That’s when they were forced to elevate their assessment beyond their “double standard” shibboleth and into the details of the indictment. All the talk about “double standard” will ring hollow if in court the highly classified nature of the documents is born out and evidence of Trump’s perfidy and irresponsibility is shown to be valid.
The main problem for the media on the right is that they have manufactured a pickle for themselves. They have not cultivated a conservative audience but instead nurtured a Trump one. The creation of a base reliant on such an unstable personality is asking for trouble. This media runs the risk of alienating this base if they are forced to deal honestly with the facts. That audience is likely to be siloed in their own echo chamber and not appreciative of the exposure of their demigod emperor as not wearing any clothes. For most people, including Trump, nudity will not enhance their appearance.
The media on the right, right now, acts as if they are sitting on pins and needles. They reach for the thin reeds of silly arguments. They fail to come to grips with their central problem: they hitched their wagon to a wild horse. Or more accurately, they made a bargain with the devil. So, Trump is a reincarnation of Sophocles’ Oedipus, King of Thebes (see “Oedipus Rex”), experiencing the wages of his pure hubris, and the Trump base is impersonating Christopher Marlowe’s Dr. Faustus, selling one’s soul for instant gratification.
RogerG
Read more here:
* Jack Smith’s indictment can be found at https://storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.flsd.648653/gov.uscourts.flsd.648653.3.0.pdf?fbclid=IwAR0A-iRN3cPhLLJJwVT7jbt8WOR6ymkohVTX0v7r634xtVjR5SeHV7SeMp0
A photo published by the U.S. Justice Department showing boxes of documents stored in a storage room at Trump’s Mar-a-Lago club in Florida in 2021. (U.S. Justice Department/Handout via Reuters)
Well, it’s done. Trump is officially indicted by federal prosecutors. Yes, again, but this one may stick. One thing has always been true about Trump: he’s reckless in his language and behavior. He’s so provocative that his opponents want nothing more than to bury him. They tried in bogus impeachments and the outrageous Bragg indictment. But the Jack Smith indictment may be something different. Sometimes braggarts have the mental capacity to be stupid. If you read the indictment, if proven in court before a jury, Trump is not only mulishly stupid but quite possibly criminally so.
Read the indictment for yourself. Here it is: https://storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.flsd.648653/gov.uscourts.flsd.648653.3.0.pdf
I should have been more reserved in condemning the FBI’s raid on Trump’s Mar-a-Lago home on August 8, 2022. I was furious at what seemed to me to be just another DC hit job on Trump. Regardless, they discovered a treasure trove of classified documents that covered military plans, capabilities, military assessments of our friends and foes, etc., and rashly shared by Trump with friends and apologists like Kid Rock.
If established in court, the double-standard defense quickly loses its force. The acts are so egregious. Anyway, since Hillary, Comey, and Biden avoided prosecution, it is no defense for Trump. It’s an argument to throw the book at Hillary, Comey, Biden . . . and Trump. Constantly, our criminal justice system is wracked with a few convictions in a sea of non-prosecutions and acquittals of nearly identical circumstances. At a certain point, in flagrant situations, the law must be enforced. It’s too bad, though, that the feds, who have soiled themselves so blatantly in the recent past, are now tasked to bring Trump to the bar of justice.
I can understand the skepticism on the right. But we are now duly warned about putting our faith in a man who has the awful habit of being his own worst enemy. Maybe he actually believed his own rhetoric: “I could stand in the middle of Fifth Avenue and shoot somebody, and I wouldn’t lose any voters, OK?”
The ancient Greeks called it hubris which led to nemesis and on to personal destruction. The Trump saga reads like Sophocles’ tragedy, “Oedipus Rex”. Go ahead, go online and read a few synopses of the play. Trump is Oedipus, King of Thebes.
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