So, here’s the good news. On what sometimes seems the inexorable course towards progressive capture, we can see multiple fronts of resistance, and the early congealing of independent-minded forces, from the rational Right to the traditional liberal-left. Our society may never regain the feistiness of previous eras, and our new elites might continue marching through our institutions. But as they become increasingly discredited, they would be unwise to forget that all long marches one day come to an end.
So there you have it. Mass Formation Psychosis. The Madness of Crowds. And The End Of The Progressive March Through Institutions. All connected somehow. Hope in the midst of despair.
An aside on claims that DeSantis was absent from his job: This is, ultimately, a process story. Process stories, though much beloved by the political media, tend to break through to the greater public and do real damage only if the voters actually think the politician is doing a bad job, or if they think the politician is hiding because they are actually unwell. Then again, ever since Mark Sanford’s absence from office turned into a sexual-affair story that ended his career in statewide office, people in politics have taken the view that a missing politician might be hiding something bigger.
But it was foolhardy to go after DeSantis on this for related reasons: It was the Christmas holidays. DeSantis has young children. He’s likely got a busy reelection schedule in 2022, perhaps followed by a presidential campaign. And his wife is battling breast cancer. Nobody would really begrudge the man spending a little more holiday time this year with his family.
Still, Florida Democrats are nothing if not fools. And the DeSantis haters nationally only loathe and fear him all the more for the sheer number of times they thought they had him only to see him, like the Road Runner, sprint away undamaged while his pursuers wiped the shrapnel off their own faces.
So, Nikki Fried (vying with Charlie Crist to be DeSantis’s hapless opponent this November) pushed hard on the “where is Ron?” theme. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, when caught vacationing in Florida, played that card as well: “Hasn’t Gov. DeSantis been inexplicably missing for like two weeks? If he’s around, I would be happy to say hello.” MSNBC’s Joy Reid claimed that DeSantis was “not governing during a crisis; and sunning his belly on vacation instead.”
There Is Ron
After letting this go on for two weeks, DeSantis answered his critics: He had been busy instead accompanying his wife to her cancer treatments. As he explained:
“I just looked at my wife. I’m like, ‘going to the hospital with you is not a vacation for you, I know that,’” DeSantis said. “This is something that as a husband, I think I should be doing. I’ve accompanied her to all her chemotherapy treatments. She’s there for a long time. I’m there most of the time.” “But it’s a draining thing,” the Governor added. “When she’s done with it, it’s not something that’s great to see.”
DeSantis said that for many people, including those who had gone through breast cancer treatments, “the notion that would be considered a vacation is offensive to a lot of those folks, and they understand what you’re doing.”
This was a textbook example of a perfect rope-a-dope. DeSantis could have shut down his critics earlier; instead, he let them wallow in their “trend this on Twitter” antics and increasingly overwrought rhetoric before finally wading in to present a reason for being out of the public eye that is beyond public criticism.
DeSantis then turned the knife on Ocasio-Cortez and other critics of his relatively unrestrictive COVID policies who nonetheless enjoy decamping to Florida for vacations:
“If I had a dollar for every lock-down politician who decided to escape to Florida over the last two years, I’d be a pretty doggone wealthy man, let me tell you,” DeSantis said Monday. “I mean Congresspeople, mayors, governors, you name it.”
“It’s interesting, though, the reception that some of these folks will get in Florida because I think a lot of Floridians say, ‘Wait a minute. You’re bashing us because we’re not doing your draconian policies and yet we’re the first place you want to flee to, to basically to be able to enjoy life,’” the Republican governor added. “So I’m not surprised to see that continuing to happen.”
Related: DeSantis Delivers Smackdown to Reporters One-By-One Best of 2021 (Video).
Hey, WaPo editorial board — remember how you pushed Northam as some sort of racial healer, while gleefully spreading the bullshit claims that longtime milquetoast GOP pol Ed Gillespie was some sort of Stormfront stalking horse? Maybe you should resign, too, hacks. Don’t try to pretend this is just about the rottenness of Virginia’s Democratic Party. You’re part of the rot yourselves.
“Back when a racist photo first surfaced in his medical school yearbook, most Va lawmakers, our editorial page (and yours truly) said @GovernorVA should resign,” tweeted WaPo political columnist Karen Tumulty. “We were wrong.”
The Friday piece, titled “How Ralph Northam came back from the political dead,” marvels at how “few back-from-the-dead narratives have been as swift and sure-footed as the one Virginia Gov. Ralph Northam has managed this year.”
The Post cites Northam’s “astonishingly effective” focus on “racial equity and reconciliation” as having moved the needle in the direction of redemption, even after Northam denied a prior admission to having been in the photo, then admitted to donning blackface as Michael Jackson during a dance contest.
The outlet did mention a few other factors that led to Northam’s durability, including the fact that a Republican could have become governor if the top three Democratic leaders succumbed to the scandals they were currently embroiled in[.]
The angry calls and emails began flooding in after a blackface photo from Gov. Ralph Northam’s medical school yearbook page appeared on the Internet.
For several weeks following Feb. 1, 2019, the small staff of Northam’s community liaison office absorbed the anguish and profanity of a public that wanted Northam gone. Loved ones urged the staffers themselves to quit rather than take that punishment — especially those who were Black, such as Traci DeShazor, the leader of the liaison office.
But all of them stayed. And so did Northam. And now the Democratic governor and his administration prepare to leave office on Saturday under very different circumstances.
Over three tumultuous years, Northam recovered from the scandal to become what Sen. Tim Kaine (D-Va.) calls the most consequential Virginia governor of the modern era. Northam led a Democratic majority in the General Assembly to abolish the death penalty, expand access to the vote, legalize marijuana and pass a long list of other changes, large and small.
Kaine once joined the chorus calling for Northam to resign. Now, he says, “I’m glad he didn’t listen to me.”
Northam’s rebirth is as unlikely a story as any you might find in today’s polarized world of instant cancellation. It was driven partly by an extraordinary effort to connect with Black constituents across Virginia, a process that Northam says broke him down and built him back a better person — more aware of the ugly reality of race in America.
“I’m not sure I would have signed up for this experience, but it’s really just opened my eyes,” Northam said in an interview. He cited a favorite aphorism: “The eyes can’t see what the brain doesn’t know. My brain knows a lot more right now than it did before February of 2019. And I think that’s — that’s — that’s a good thing.”
But just as much, his comeback was driven by the capacity of those who were most insulted by the scandal to forgive and move on.
“Black Virginians gave the governor a second chance,” DeShazor said, “and I think he used that opportunity for good.”
—The Washington Post today; the article continues for many paragraphs in that hagiographic tone, along the way noting:
With partisan divisions flaring thanks to the Trump-inflamed climate in Washington, Northam stumbled into the national crosshairs that January by making unclear comments about a late-term abortion bill that conservatives seized on to accuse the doctor-governor of supporting infanticide. It was a false allegation, but Northam did little to clarify his remarks.
Curiously missing though from that “false allegation,” is a quote in the article of Northam’s actual words in the late January 2019 interview with a DC news radio station shortly before the yearbook photo was published:
“If a mother is in labor, I can tell you exactly what would happen. The infant would be delivered. The infant would be kept comfortable. The infant would be resuscitated if that’s what the mother and the family desired, and then a discussion would ensue between the physicians and the mother.”
He’s offering this to make the case that the new bill is less draconian than its right-wing critics claim. Yes, he allows, there will be situations where a child is delivered alive and then killed on the table on mom’s instructions — the logical end point of liberal abortion laws, as pro-lifers have warned about for years. But it’ll be “kept comfortable.” Why, they might even revive it if it isn’t breathing when it’s born, like saving the life of a death-row inmate during a suicide attempt so that he can be properly executed the next day.
What’s all the fuss about?
* * * * * * * *
The only spin the left is offering on Northam’s comments is that he must be describing an unviable fetus, a baby that’s too sick to live for long after delivery. That’ll probably be his spin too after the outrage wave reaches him. But that’s missing the point: Although the idea of a doctor killing a child on the table after it’s been born alive is especially gruesome, there seems to be no dispute that Tran’s bill would allow the child to be killed right up to the point of birth.
AKA, Lebensunwertes Leben, in the original German.
We do not need any research to know that Bragg’s policy will produce disastrous results — common sense tells us so and, given what we’ve seen in other cities where funding from George Soros has elected “progressive” district attorneys like Bragg, we know that life in New York City will become nightmarish. Prostitutes and drug dealers will ply their trades without fear of prosecution, carjackings and burglaries will skyrocket, and the daily death toll from drive-by shootings will shock the nation.
“Social justice” requires this. It is unfair for some people to live in safe neighborhoods with nice cars; to make things equal, every neighborhood in New York City must become as lawless and chaotic as the worst slums of the Bronx. While “social justice” will not improve the quality of life of allegedly “oppressed” minorities — indeed, black and brown people will be victimized at much higher rates — it will help accomplish Bragg’s real goal, i.e., to make life worse for white people in New York.
You’re not supposed to say this out loud, of course, but this is the ultimate meaning of all that “Critical Race Theory” noise.
The president often sounds to me like a man trying to perceive what the public wants and deliver it, which in fairness is what most politicians do. But he and his people are not necessarily good perceivers. On the pandemic, he isn’t sure if they want reassurance or an acting out of shared indignation or a stirring Churchillian vow—“I’m gonna shut down the virus, not the country,” he said during the 2020 campaign. But people know when you’re telling them what you think they want to hear, and they experience it as talking down to them. They wouldn’t mind that so much if they thought the politician talking down was their intellectual or ethical superior, but they don’t often get to feel that way.
A problem for the president is that when he tries to convey resolution or strength he often takes on tics—a lowered voice, a whispering into the mic, an overenunciation—that in his political youth were charming, but in old age are less so. I always thought in the 2020 campaign that his age was an unacknowledged benefit: the assumption was he must be moderate, old people are, what else is the point of being old? As he came in his first year to seem less moderate his age became less a benefit.
Is it naïveté or gaslighting that Noonan thinks that Biden is actually running the show in “his” White House?
Three decades later, the culture wars are again in full swing. The apoplexy with which governments have responded to calls to topple monuments since the death of George Floyd in May 2020 is not surprising but needs to be seen in this same context—a struggle for cultural hegemony.
This time around, the traditionalist lunatics have succeeded in taking over the asylum. Reactionary ideas hostile to the cosmopolitan, to Modernism, to modernity itself, are in the ascendant. Tory placemen (and they are generally men) are being appointed to the boards of cultural institutions such as the British Museum and the BBC. The thoroughly middle-class National Trust is under attack as “woke” for exploring colonialism (a similar report by English Heritage several years earlier provoked nothing like the same outrage). Laws are proposed that would hand out longer sentences for damaging a statue than for rape. A government “retain and explain” policy for monuments essentially amounts to retain everything and explain nothing.
This is not unique to Britain, of course—just look at Viktor Orbán in Hungary or the history wars in Poland, or the manufactured outrage by the Macron government over Islamo-gauchisme and mosques or other visual expressions of Islam. Switzerland, Spain and Denmark are among other countries gripped by minaret-phobia. In Germany and Eastern Europe, modern post-war city centres are being rebuilt as ersatz historic quarters full of fake traditional architecture. The same thing was happening under Donald Trump, who issued an executive order demanding that all new federal buildings be in a Classical style. Beauty and tradition have become dog-whistle words to white supremacists drunk on the Great Replacement conspiracy theory that sees a cultural genocide of Christian Europe at the hands of immigrants. Classicism is not inherently right-wing but traditional architecture has become a vehicle of choice for the Right and Far Right.
Headquarters of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, FBI, The J. Edgar Hoover Building at 935 Pennsylvania Avenue NW in Washington, D.C., Thursday, March 23, 2017. Construction finished in September 1975, and President Gerald Ford dedicated the structure on September 30, 1975. (AP Photo/NewsBase)
I’VE SEEN THE BIDEN AND THE DAMAGE DONE: A reader sends this from his gas bill: Less usage, higher charges, thanks to Joe’s energy policies.
Political experts instantly assailed Pelosi’s judgment on social media. “What on earth,” wrote journalist Josh Barro. “Who thought this was a good idea[?]” Several pointed to a recent Voxarticle that explains why Hamilton (and other cultural artifacts of the Obama administration) “feels so cringe right now.”
Alas, the 81-year-old Pelosi is presumably not woke enough to understand why the decision to include Miranda in the ceremony was tantamount to committing violence against vulnerable communities.
ROGER KIMBALL: Trump in 2024? Maybe! “What’s certain is not too many Americans will be willing to hand over the honor of choosing the next president to Liz Cheney and her smug, entitled, and repellent confrères.”
There’s a sad tale inside that says everything about Kristof
In 2002, Kristof was instrumental in stoking a lynch mob mentality against a private citizen whom the columnist identified as a likely suspect in the deadly anthrax attacks that killed several people and targeted key members of Congress. The innocent man, Steven Hatfill, was ultimately exonerated and paid a handsome settlement by the Justice Department and some media outlets. Hatfill’s lawsuit against the New York Times was dismissed for the Catch-22 reason that he was by then (thanks to the newspaper) a public figure. As I wrote in 2011, an FBI supervisor investigating the case, Robert Roth, placed Kristof’s more outlandish statements on a wall in the Washington field office. To buck up his agents, Roth added a statement of his own: “One of the best things that can happen to you is to have this type of person criticize you.”
This is so familiar to me as I’ve watched Kristof claim that authorities wrongly convicted Kevin Cooper in the 1983 slaughter of Doug and Peggy Ryen, their 10-year-old daughter Jessica and Christopher Hughes, 11, who was sleeping over with his friend Josh Ryen, 8, who was left for dead. The evidence against Cooper is overwhelming and courts repeatedly have upheld his guilty verdict.
Earlier: Oregon Official: NYT Columnist Nick Kristof Ineligible for Gubernatoral Run: “At some point, though, Kristof should reallllly consider whether any of this is worth the effort. Kristof’s reliably on the Left, but so will any nominee Democrats produce in this primary, and most of his competitors have more experience in actual politicking than he does. Spending decades as a newsman and columnist at the NYT does not provide a solid grounding for executive potential in managing vast bureaucracies in state government.”
The chief meteorologist for Accuweather criticized transportation officials for effectively ignoring forecasts of a winter storm that hit the mid-Atlantic on Monday morning, saying engineers had adequate warning and could have prevented the I-95 gridlock.
Accuweather’s Jonathan Porter provided screenshots showing that his team predicted six to 10 inches of snowfall in the Washington, D.C., area. Up to 10 inches of snow ultimately fell across the D.C. metropolitan area, according to The Washington Post’s Capital Weather Gang, marking the highest total the region has seen since Jan. 2019 and one of the biggest snowfalls on record in the city.
Porter said the Virginia Department of Transportation (DOT) could have done more to prevent hundreds of motorists from being stranded overnight on a roughly 50-mile stretch of I-95 running from Richmond to D.C. Accuweather had issued its first snowstorm forecast on Sunday night and another one warning of “rapidly worsening travel conditions” on Monday morning.
“This is an opportunity for us to say we can’t let that happen again — this disaster was completely preventable, totally preventable,” Porter said. “We make accurate forecasts so people can make better decisions. Quite honestly, the fear so many people felt could have been avoided based on more proactive responses. This is an opportunity for creative solutions to be generated.”
InstaPundit is a participant in the Amazon Services LLC Associates Program, an affiliate advertising program designed to provide a
means for sites to earn advertising fees by advertising and linking to Amazon.com.
