Kevin D. Williamson puts the hundreds of newspaper editorials recently deploring Donald Trump’s criticisms of the establishment media into proper perspective.
If we want a culture of open and robust discourse, then we do not want a culture in which Brendan Eich is driven from his job for having an unpopular view on gay marriage. If we want a culture of open and robust discourse, then we do not want a culture in which there is an organized-campaign-style effort to have journalists dismissed from their positions for holding unpopular views, or a boycott every time the New York Times or the Washington Post (or, I suppose, The Atlantic) adds a columnist who is not likely to please the Bernie Sanders Campaign Historical Re-enactors Society at Reed College. It is true that none of these things is a formal violation of the First Amendment, because the First Amendment is a restriction on what kind of laws the federal government may enact. But calling CNN’s daily output “fake news†isn’t a violation of the First Amendment, either.
What’s actually at work here is a variation on “Heads I Win/Tails You Lose.†When the Left wants to stop an unpopular speaker from delivering remarks at Berkeley, then that’s just meeting speech with more speech and some firebombs. And, it’s true: There isn’t any First Amendment reason why you can’t have a riot at Berkeley every time Ann Coulter gets invited to speak there. But there are all sorts of other reasons.
If there is going to be more to freedom of speech than “Congress shall make no law†— which is what we should want — then that has to be true for everyone.
Freedom of the press is not some special license granted to organizations that incorporate as media companies. There is no intellectually defensible model of free expression that protects the editorial page of the New York Times but not Hillary: The Movie. Of course, it’s easy to think of a pretext for suppressing communication you don’t like: If you don’t like what Citizens United is saying, then you shut it down with “campaign finance reform,†which, we should remember, worked — until the Supreme Court stopped it. If you don’t like that oil companies fund organizations that criticize global-warming policies, then you claim that this amounts to “securities fraud.†If you don’t like that the NRA is an effective advocate for its positions, you use banking regulations to hamstring it financially. Don’t like somebody’s social or religious views? “Hate speech.†Easy as that.
We don’t need conjecture: We’ve seen how this goes. The Obama administration used the Espionage Act to punish whistleblowers, spy on journalists, and interfere with reporting it didn’t want done. Under Obama, the IRS targeted conservative nonprofits for harassment and more under the guise of enforcing the tax code — and it illegally disclosed private information about an advocacy group that irritated Democrats. The same people demand the power to set the terms for political debate, saying they want to “keep money out of politics,†a claim that it is impossible for any mentally functional adult to take very seriously.
Freedom of the press does not mean extending special privileges, legal or customary, to the New York Times and CNN. And freedom of speech means a lot more than the absence of formal censorship by the federal government. Formal protections for free speech are important and necessary, but they do not amount to very much without a free-speech culture to back them up.
H.W. Crocker III has written an alternative history novel in which George Armstrong Custer survives the Battle of the Little Bighorn and becomes a Western gunslinger, which demonstrates that he has some expert knowledge of the man’s political opinions, and he offers, in voice of the Alt-Right, American Greatness, eleven reasons why, if he were here and alive today, General Custer would be wearing a MAGA hat.
He liked hats, and though he was proud of his golden hair, it was thinning a bit. A hat could come in handy.
2. Red looked good on him—an essential part of his self-styled uniform in the Civil War was a red cravat. He didn’t care that such flash made him an easy target for snipers. Cutting a figure for the men was more important. And he wouldn’t have been intimidated from wearing a MAGA hat while walking the mean streets of Monroe, Michigan.
3. Custer was a conservative Democrat who would have been a prototypical Reagan Democrat and Trump Democrat, driven by deep-rooted patriotism.
He could be right. Custer was a Northern democrat, and had he survived the battle and returned east victorious as a national hero, he was angling for the Democratic Party’s nomination and could very possibly have won the nomination instead of Tilden.
Whether he could have done as well as Tilden did in the South, and decisively defeated Hayes, well, that is less clear. During the War, Custer was a brutal adversary, prone to insult his opponents, and there were good reasons for a Southern animus against him.
Would Custer have defended Confederate monuments, as Crocker claims? I’m less sure.
A group of anonymous right-wing street artists has multiplied President Donald Trump’s Walk of Fame star on Hollywood Blvd., following the destruction of his real one.
The group used 30 vinyl laminated Donald Trump stars to fill in blank squares along the path.
The artists, friends of infamous conservative street artist Sabo, work under the handle “The Faction.â€
“Keep taking down the @realDonaldTrump star, and we will further spread Trump Derangement Syndrome by installing a never ending stream of stars,†the artist tweeted along with a video.
Walter Kirin, in Harper’s (of all places), describes discovering that today, all the cool people, the rebels and outsiders, are the Trump supporters, while the sanctimonious, preachy types, the annoying conformist scolds are the liberals!
Puritanism, Mencken said, is “the haunting fear that someone, somewhere may be happy.†But liberal puritanism is slightly different. It fears that the wrong sort of people might be happy, or that their happiness might be of the wrong kind. I’d seen examples of it on Twitter, in snarling remarks about Trump’s porn-star mistress, his age difference with his wife, his multiple marriages, his rumored romps with Russian prostitutes. The ostensible charge was Trump’s hypocrisy and that of his evangelical supporters for pardoning such lewdness in their leader, but sometimes I sensed disgust in the attacks not only with Trump, but also with sex, in all its messiness. When Jimmy Kimmel recently referred to Trump as Pumpkin ÂMcPornHumper, the hint of sniffy distaste was unmistakable.
If Trump’s presidency is a national emergency and opposing it the equivalent of war—though I prefer sticking with the political process—then there isn’t much room for liberals to be liberal in the ways I found so attractive as a boy. Indeed, I see evidence that certain liberal principles, the ones that impressed me in the Seventies, have eroded. Back then, for example, the CIA was understood to be a nest of liars and psychopaths who toppled democratically chosen leaders, lied to the public to start wars, and ran sick experiments on innocents using drugs and mind-control techniques. In Three Days of the Condor, a thriller from the period, Robert Redford plays a lowly CIA officer who discovers that the agency is nothing more than a crime ring. These days, however, with Trump playing the heavy, the CIA is revered by many liberals as a bulwark of integrity, its missions sacred, its conclusions unimpeachable, and its former director, John Brennan, worthy of a high-profile cable news job. The FBI draws similar adulation, never mind its history of spying on the likes of Ernest Hemingway, John Lennon, and Martin Luther King Jr.
This great liberal switch from skepticism to sanctimony about the most powerful arms of the Establishment is matched by a viral fear of Russia that reminds me of the John Birch Society pamphlets I’d come across now and then when I was young. Somehow, instinct told me then that they were crazy, exaggerating the cunning of the enemy, the depravity of the collaborators, and the vulnerability of America. The liberal comedians who lampooned such claims on shows such as Laugh-In were my idols. They dared to speak the most radical truth of all in a time of panic and paranoia: the sneakiest adversary is the mind. The Cold War was real, of course, and deadly serious, as are the tensions with Putin’s Russia, but my liberal heroes of the Seventies discerned other dangers that were closer to home. Rigidity. Stridency. Shrillness. Self-righteousness. One way they answered the period’s harsh conservatism was to hang loose, not get uptight. Love, not war. Remember?
And Ned Ryun thinks all the Treason talk is pretty rich, coming as it does from the party that has generally made treason into a fashion statement and a class identifier.
The past week of Russia hysteria has me longing for the good old days. Like 2009, when a Democratic president could pull missile defense systems out of Poland and the Czech Republic to appease Vladimir Putin without facing charges of treason. Or 2010, when a former Democratic president could take a cool half-million from a suspected Russian government-backed source to speak in Moscow and that wasn’t considered treasonous, either. Or 2012, when no one was screaming for impeachment when a Democratic president on a hot mic assured the Russian president that he’ll have “more flexibility†on missile defense systems once he’s re-elected. Or when the previous Democratic administration helped Putin toward his goal of controlling the worldwide supply chain of uranium and that was really all about “resetting†relationships.
Business Insider points out that Trump may just be getting started on remodeling the Supreme Court.
Trump now stands to secure two justices in the first half of his first term. Presidents Barack Obama and George W. Bush appointed two justices each during their eight years in office.
Supreme Court justices, who serve for life after a presidential appointment and Senate confirmation, represent one of the longer-lasting marks a president can leave on the country, as the justices often serve for decades.
But Trump reportedly thinks he can get an additional two justices in.
In October, the news website Axios cited an anonymous source detailing private predictions by Trump that Justices Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Sonia Sotomayor would retire during his term.
“What does she weigh? 60 pounds?” Trump asked of the now-85-year-old Ginsburg, a source told Axios. The same report indicated Trump said Sotomayor, over 20 years younger than Ginsburg, was also in trouble because of “her health.”
“No good. Diabetes,” Trump reportedly said.
Sotomayor had a health scare in January with paramedics treating her for low blood sugar, but she quickly returned to work. Sotomayor says she’s vigilant about her Type 1 diabetes, which she’s had since childhood.
During the 2016 campaign, Trump often said he or his Democratic opponent, Hillary Clinton, could end up appointing five justices. …
Ginsburg and Sotomayor are liberal justices, so replacing both Kennedy and either of them with conservatives could change the court’s makeup for decades, possibly reversing decisions like Roe v. Wade.
Patricia McCarthy thinks that Donald Trump’s tweets are giving America a Wonderful Life and having one other major result.
It is clear to anyone paying attention that the fact that Donald Trump won the 2016 election has driven the leftists of America stark raving mad – all of them except those who have joined the Walk Away movement. Those not similarly open-minded hate him with a passion bordering on insanity.
Maxine Waters has been a thoroughly corrupt member of the House for decades. In spite of her malfeasance, her constituents keep voting for her, though she does nothing for them. Her district is as blighted as it was when she was first elected. She has used her position ever since to enrich herself, her husband, and her daughter, living in a $4M mansion in Hancock Park while the voters who keep electing her live in South Central Los Angeles, an area as beset by homeless people as San Francisco.
Ms. Waters is a vile person who has repeatedly called for violence against any and all members of Trump’s Cabinet and his supporters anywhere they appear. Too many lefties have taken her rant as permission to attack Trump-supporters. So Trump tweeted:
Congresswoman Maxine Waters, an extraordinarily low IQ person, has become, together with Nancy Pelosi, the Face of the Democrat Party. She has just called for harm to supporters, of which there are many, of the Make America Great Again movement. Be careful what you wish for Max!
Truer words were never spoken! An angel got his wings. Trump’s tweets speak for the rest of us, the deplorables. He says what all of us, even Democrats, are thinking…with the exception of the black women in Congress who are furious that Schumer and Pelosi did not “protect” Waters from criticism!
Bill Jacobson explains why they are taking it so hard:
There’s a reason the left is freaking the hell out over the Kennedy retirement. The federal district and appeals courts have been the principal vehicles for achieving liberal political gains that could not be gained at the ballot box or through congressional elections. The Supreme Court, usually by a one-vote Kennedy margin (with the exception of Obamacare, where Roberts defected), also has served that role in fewer, but the most important, cases.
We are used to losing institutions. The left is not. They are waking up to the possibility that the judiciary may be restored to the neutral role it should play, and would no longer serve as a liberal super-legislature.
Niall Ferguson points out that the supposedly oh-so-smart people just don’t get it. Trump is winning.
To most highly educated people I know, President Trump is a Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad president.
For two years, the people with at least two university degrees (PALTUDs) have been gnashing their teeth about Trump’s every utterance and move. To the foreign policy experts, he is a bull in a china shop, trampling the “rules-based international order†underfoot. To the economics establishment, he is a human wrecking ball, smashing more than a half-century of consensus that free trade really works better than protectionism.
A striking feature of all this dire commentary is how wrong it has been so far. …
Despite all the trade war talk, the US economy is at full employment, the dollar is rallying, the stock market is up 30 percent since Trump’s election, and the only countries in any trouble are the usual suspects with their usual problems (e.g., Turkey).
It is not that Trump is an underrated genius, nor for that matter an idiot savant. It is just that his intuitive, instinctive, impulsive way of operating, familiar to those who have done business with him, is exposing some basic flaws in the conceptual framework of the PALTUDs. …
Think of the world as a three-empire system. It is dominated by the United States, China, and Europe, in that order. Each empire is evolving in a different direction. The American empire, having experienced overextension in Afghanistan and Iraq, has not retreated into isolation. Its latest step down the road to empire is domestic. …
All the accompanying symptoms of the transition from republic to empire are already visible. The plebs despise the elites. An old and noble senatorial order personified by John McCain is dying. A cultural civil war rages on social media, the modern-day forum, with all civility cast aside and character assassination a daily occurrence. The president-emperor dominates public discourse by issuing 280-character edicts, picking fights with football players, and arbitrarily pardoning convicted criminals.
Meanwhile, the Chinese empire becomes ever more centralized, ever more invasive of its citizens’ privacy, and ever more overt in its overseas expansion. The Western world regards Xi Jinping as an almighty potentate. Few observers appreciate the acute sense of weakness that has motivated his tightening grip on party and state and his surveillance of his own people. Few see the risks of imperial ventures such as the Belt and Road Initiative, which is drawing Chinese investment into economically unpromising and strategically dangerous locations.
The weakest of the three empires is the European Union. True, its central institutions in Brussels have the power to impose rules, fines, and taxes on the biggest American and Chinese corporations. But Europe lacks tech giants of its own. Its navies, armies, and air forces have melted away, so that it can scarcely defend its frontiers from penniless migrants, never mind hostile invaders. And the political consensus on which it has been based for the past 60 years —between social democrats and moderate conservatives in every member state — is crumbling under a nationalist-populist assault.
The logic of Trumpism is simply to bully the other empires, exploiting the fact that they are both weaker than the United States, in order to extract concessions and claim victories. The Chinese sincerely fear a trade war and will end up buying a very large amount of American produce in order to avoid one. The Europeans dare not stand up to Trump over his Iran sanctions and secretly agree with him about China, and so are reduced to impotent seething (Chancellor Angela Merkel of Germany) or sycophancy (President Emmanuel Macron of France, until last week’s G-7 summit). If they unite against him, he brings up Russia and divides them again.
To the PALTUDs, who remain so certain of their intellectual superiority to the president, all this is incomprehensible. They will continue to find fault with Trump’s every success, nitpicking their way through the small print, failing to realize that in the imperial transition such details cease to matter.
