JOSH HAMMER: The Toxicity of the Permanent Outrage Mentality.

IN A SANE WORLD, LET ALONE A JUST ONE, THERE WOULD BE TRIALS:  The Death of Outrage over COVID.

People died alone. Children were (and are still being) permanently harmed. People lost everything they’d ever worked for. People committed suicide. Our economy suffered a deep wound from which millions might yet die.

All so the democrats could steal an election and leverage themselves into power.

There need to be trials. And there needs to be the certainty this won’t happen again.

JOHN HINDERAKER: Enough with the outrage.

Like pretty much all conservatives, I have consistently criticized riots and other forms of political violence for many years. That includes yesterday’s Washington, D.C. riot. You can’t say the same about liberals, however. Until yesterday, one might have thought that liberals consider rioting and other forms of political violence to be as American as apple pie.

You could write a book in support of that proposition, but for now let’s cite just a few examples. Do you remember when President Trump was inaugurated on January 20, 2017? Leftist Democrats rioted in Washington that day. That riot was arguably worse, more violent and more destructive, than what happened in D.C. yesterday. The liberal rioters destroyed stores, set vehicles on fire and battled with the police. Six police officers were wounded.

I don’t recall a single Democratic office-holder denouncing the Democrats’ Inauguration Day riot, and the Associated Press came perilously close to praising the rioters.

Over the ensuing four years, Antifa and Black Lives Matter rioted countless times, bringing devastation to cities like Portland, Seattle, Kenosha and Minneapolis. Did any Democrats denounce these riots? Not that I remember. Many Democrats endorsed them, or seemed to do so. . . .

And let’s not forget James Hodgkinson, even though every reporter in America apparently has. Hodgkinson was the Bernie Sanders campaign volunteer who tried to assassinate the entire House Republican baseball team and very nearly succeeded, inflicting grievous and permanent injuries on Congressman Steve Scalise. Hodgkinson was not the usual 20-something loner, he was a middle-aged union official who was not insane, but just full of hate. His Facebook page was festooned with over-the-top attacks on Republicans, taken directly from speeches by Bernie Sanders and every other prominent Democrat.

Yeah, I was accused of “whataboutism” for noting this earlier. But “whataboutism” is just a deflection-word for when Democrats’ dishonesty is pointed out. If you’re going to stand up for “decency” and “principles” then you need to have some of both.

UPDATE: A friend writes:

Flipside of whataboutism:

When you endorse one group’s mob violence, you’ve endorsed all mob violence. Which means the Dems pretty much own what happened on Capitol Hill.

Well, I saw a purported libertarian on Facebook trying to argue that Black Lives Matter’s violence was okay but invading the Capitol was not because reasons, but it wasn’t very persuasive.

KRUISER’S MORNING BRIEF: Grande Order of Fake Outrage Edition.

Our friends on the left, alas, aren’t so carefree and fun-loving. We’ve discussed the permanently aggrieved nature of the modern progressives before. As I am often accused of never having anything nice to say about the other side, let me try something new here: I frequently find myself marveling at their ability to continue to surprise me, especially with their ability to concoct outrage and/or resentment in almost any given situation.

Take, for example, the young women’s rights writer for The Guardian, who finds the Starbucks policy of asking for people’s names a trigger for resentment.

Everything is problematical.

HE WHO TROLLS LAST… When Trump Tweets, the Left’s Outrage Machine Shudders.

Stephen Miller:

The anti-Trump group Grab Your Wallet called for a boycott of L.L. Bean stores, even though the company itself has offered no political position on Trump or anything else for that matter really. This is how it usually starts.

Suddenly, however, the left finds itself somewhat outmatched and ill-equipped, because now they are up against the most powerful pushback tool they’ve ever faced: Donald Trump’s Twitter account.

Trump took to Twitter on Thursday to announce his support for Linda Bean. “Thank you to Linda Bean of L.L.Bean for your great support and courage. People will support you even more now. Buy L.L.Bean,” he wrote.

He also mistakenly included the twitter handle of a lobster restaurant in Maine, thinking it was the LL Bean company hashtag. So they are having a fun day now as well. You can bet a handful of left-wing websites are trying to figure out where the restaurant stands on gay marriage.

Trump is a master at branding. It’s one of the few things he’s managed successfully over the decades. His product launches fail, but the name and the branding carry on, and it carried him to the White House. Republicans in the primaries had no idea how to counter it. Hillary Clinton had no idea how to stop it. Trump knows he can tweet out support of a company, or insult them, and cause their brand to rise in prominence, their stocks to fall in value.

The Obama campaign took his powerful personal brand, wedded it to Big Data, and the result was a permanent political campaign which the GOP never did figure out how to fully counter.

Trump has done something similar, but he runs his permanent campaign more like a guerrilla action — a social media version of Mao’s Long March.

UPDATE (From Glenn): A reader emails: “Just spent >$500 with them online. On stuff I really don’t need. But it felt so good. Haaaaa! Eat that, boycotters!”

Question: When do businesses start deliberately trolling the left to reap the additional business it generates?

THE ABOLITION OF AMERICA: In “Cecil the Lion and America’s Broken Outrage Meter” at Real Clear Politics, Heather Wilhelm writes, “One of the joys of the digital age, at least to many, is the thrill of discovering a new World’s Most Despicable Person:”

You know the drill: First, some poor sap says or does something dumb or politically incorrect. Next, mobs of wild-eyed, unhinged keyboard cops swoop in to judge, shame, excoriate, and issue over-the-top condemnations. Finally, if they’re lucky, the Mean Typing League might even manage to destroy a life or a reputation or a business or two, not to mention everyone’s general faith in humanity.

After performing this ritual cleansing, one assumes, those involved feel slightly better about themselves. This sense of inner peace and superiority has not yet been scientifically measured, but it lasts, alas, for only a few fleeting days. That’s when it’s time to find a new World’s Most Despicable Person.

This week, that person is Dr. Walter James Palmer, a dentist from Minnesota with the unfortunate habit of paying copious amounts of money to kill large, exotic animals around the globe. Earlier in July, as the world discovered this week, Palmer messed with the wrong large, exotic animal: Cecil the Lion, one of Africa’s most beloved and famous lions, a favorite of wildlife researchers, and the “star attraction” of Zimbabwe’s Hwagne National Park.

I, like most of humanity, had never heard of Cecil the Lion until this week—thanks to the Internet, he now has approximately five million devoted new best friends, who had also, oddly, never heard of him until now—but there are several videos of him circulating online.

Read the whole thing. In his UK best-selling 1999 book The Abolition of Britain, Peter Hitchens, the Tory brother of the late Christopher Hitchens, reflected upon a moment when England seemed to have permanently lost its collective national mind, and a once sane, sober country had vanished forever. As Hitchens told CSPAN’s Brian Lamb on Booknotes:

LAMB: One of the things in your book, you have as a subtitle, “From Winston Churchill to Princess Di”–or Princess Diana. Why did you bracket this book between Winston Churchill’s death and Princess Di’s death?

Mr. HITCHENS: The crucial chapter and really the point around which the whole book revolves is the one which compares the two funerals of Winston Churchill in 1965 and Princess Diana. And the difference between them seems to me to sum up very eloquently the way in which the country has changed, the self-discipline of the people and their attitudes, the way in which the way in which the two things were …..It’s obviously two very different kinds of people, but here were two funerals in London of revered and much-loved figures. And they were utterly different, as if they’d taken place in different countries, and, in fact, they had taken place in different countries. The Britain of Princess Diana was an utterly foreign place to the Britain of Winston Churchill. And it seemed to me to be a good starting point.

This actually came to me during the bizarre weeks after Princess Diana’s death, when voicing any kind of criticism of the hysteria was pretty much taboo. And I did the sort of thing that Chinese dissidents used to do in the days of Mao Tse-tung. If they wanted to write about a political controversy, they’d actually write about one that had taken place in some dynasty 3,000 or 4,000 years before which they felt paralleled it. And I wrote about Winston Churchill’s funeral to make the points that it had been so different. And everybody got the message.

LAMB: What were the differences?

Mr. HITCHENS: The differences are in — first of all in the open showing of emotion. Now some people might say let it all hang out, show exactly what you feel. The trouble is that, in the case of British people, if they let it all hang out, quite a lot of what they let hang out isn’t very nice. We are a pretty bloodthirsty and violent lot, especially when we get outside out own borders and start misbehaving. And we need to restrain ourselves. And one of the reasons we’ve been so peaceful for so long is that we have. That was very much in evidence at the Churchill funeral and very much less in evidence at the Diana funeral when people applauded, for heaven’s sake, at a funeral, which is completely un-English, whereas in Churchill’s time, people queuing up to file past his coffin might occasionally dash a tear away from an eye and consider that to be slightly embarrassing. That’s one difference.

And the other differences were really in the whole shape and face of the country. Britain in 1965 was still a serious country, still scarred by what was seen by most people as a recent war, still very much a country living in the afterglow of imperial greatness, also quite a lot poorer and, in some ways, the better for it in that the self-indulgence which comes with affluence hadn’t really begun to take hold. And this whole feeling of a country self-disciplined for a serious purpose as opposed to a frivolous country weeping and wailing about a princess who was really a glorified film star with a crown on her head.

Will we look back on the outrage mob devouring* a dentist with penchant for Teddy Roosevelt-style big game hunting while simultaneously ignoring or shrugging while reading about the grizzly Planned Parenthood story as a similar inflection point in America’s history?

*Both doxxing him, to let the mob know where to mass with their torches and to destroy his business, and in some cases literally threatening him with death.

TAKE THAT, GAVIN NEWSOM! How Texas shrank its homelessness population — and what it can teach California.

San Jose’s homelessness response team visited Houston earlier this year. City and county representatives from the Los Angeles area went last fall. They came away jealous of some of the advantages Houston has over California cities – such as the lower housing costs that make it easier for the Texas metropolis to find or build homes for people.

But the Californians also were impressed by the way the city coordinates with the county and other local organizations, prioritizes funding for permanent housing instead of temporary shelters and finds places for people before clearing encampments.

“What those folks are doing – really focusing on housing folks – is working,” said Alex Visotzky, senior California policy fellow for the National Alliance to End Homelessness.

In April, two city council members from the East Bay city of Richmond headed to Austin to tour a 51-acre tiny home community that provides permanent housing for 350-and-counting homeless residents. Elected officials from Sacramento trekked to San Antonio to see a 1,600-person shelter that offers everything from dental care to counseling – serving nearly the city’s entire homeless population in one place.

Many experts agree California can learn something from these homeless solutions. But unless the Golden State fixes its housing affordability crisis decades in the making, copying the Lone Star State will get us only so far, said Eric Tars, legal director of the National Homelessness Law Center.

“Elected officials in California are desperate for quick-fix solutions,” he said. “They want a silver bullet to be able to solve homelessness for them. And so when they see results like what’s happening in Houston…they say, ‘that’s great, we want that.’”

As Thomas Sowell wrote about the Bay Area’s ultra-expensive real estate, it’s “The Housing Price of Liberalism.”

In this part of California, liberalism reigns supreme and “open space” is virtually a religion. What that lovely phrase means is that there are vast amounts of empty land where the law forbids anybody from building anything.

Anyone who has taken Economics 101 knows that preventing the supply from rising to meet the demand means that prices are going to rise. Housing is no exception.

Yet when my wife wrote in a local Palo Alto newspaper, many years ago, that preventing the building of housing would cause existing housing to become far too expensive for most people to afford it, she was deluged with more outraged letters than I get from readers of a nationally syndicated column.

What she said was treated as blasphemy against the religion of “open space” — and open space is just one of the wonderful things about the world envisioned by liberals that is ruinously expensive in the mundane world where the rest of us live.

As Sowell writes, “Much as many liberals like to put guilt trips on other people, they seldom seek out, much less acknowledge and take responsibility for, the bad consequences of their own actions.”

MICK JAGGER’S ROCK’N’ROLL FIGHTBACK AGAINST LOCKDOWN:

The beauty of ‘Eazy Sleazy’ is that it is a libertarian bypass of so much of the culture wars surrounding Covid. In an era when the battle has apparently been raging between supercharged finger-waggers seizing a once-in-a-century opportunity to impose the nanny state and ostrich-headed loons citing ever more esoteric graphs, the song manages to dismiss both.

Lockdown? ‘We took it on the chin / The numbers were so grim.’ Conspiracy theorists? ‘Bill Gates is in my bloodstream / It’s mind control.’ As well as containing elements of Jagger’s well-observed wit, it’s also nice to be reminded of a time when musicians’ opinions went beyond the drearily conformist. There is also the entertaining concept of ‘shooting the vaccine’ – a geriatric nod to the idea that, after pushing 60 years on the road, the Stones’ days of heroin chic might be on the wane.

Seeing Jagger raging against being ‘Bossed around by pricks’ and ‘football’s fake applause’ feels rather what it must have been like seeing Bertrand Russell on an anti-Vietnam War march. A mind so readily associated with a past era is suddenly transposed into the present, showing up our anaemic and relentlessly policed public discourse today. Dave Grohl also deserves a nod for playing the straight man and piling in on the drums and bass. ‘Don’t want to be your monkey wrench… I’d rather leave than suffer this.’

The punky “Easy Sleazy” isn’t exactly the second coming of “Satisfaction,” let alone “Wild Horses” and “Midnight Moonlight,” but it’s great to see Jagger, 78, punching back against the seemingly permanent lockdown culture. It’s curious Jagger’s song seems to be much better received by rock fans (and was enthusiastically introduced by leftist DJ Jim Ladd on Sirius-XM’s Deep Tracks channel on Thursday night) than the earlier protest songs by Eric Clapton and Van Morrison in November. Perhaps timing is everything, with Morrison and Clapton having proved it’s still possible to protest the establishment.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KK79lF-ihoU

ROGER SIMON: Welcome to West China.

Did you ever wonder what it’s like to live in a one-party state?

Well, wonder no more. You’re living in one. The major means of communication—in today’s terms that means social media—have now been taken over completely by the left.

Not only has Donald Trump—still the president of the United States—been permanently banned from Twitter, its rapidly growing, open-to-all substitute Parler has almost simultaneously been de-platformed by Google.

You can’t get their app for Android anymore.

Apple threatens to be next, demanding Parler kowtow (by Saturday!) to Cupertino’s vision of what the world should be.

I suppose that’s a social-justicey-politically-correct totalitarianism led by left-leaning… or so they want us to believe… tech billionaires.

Sound Chinese?

More than a bit.

Think this was planned?

Just the other day I wrote of the “false flag” (left-wing provocateurs) behind the mayhem in the Capitol. Many in high places pooh-poohed what I and others were saying. I wasn’t too sure of it myself.

But let’s review what’s happened since:

Josh Hawley’s forthcoming book… on Big Tech, no less… is “canceled” by Simon & Schuster. Senator Hawley had been among the most outspoken about investigating the possibility of election fraud.

Twitter permanently blocks General Flynn. I guess they don’t think he has had enough already.

Twitter permanently blocks Lin Wood, the well-known attorney working to unmask possible fraud. Ditto for the courageous Sidney Powell.

Not to be outdone, Facebook blocks President Trump’s account. (Not sure who was first—Facebook or Twitter—not that it matters.)

More insidiously, Facebook starts to delete groups or forums of people who publicly stepped away from the Democratic Party because of its scandals. 

(Elsewhere it’s revealed that Facebook banned accounts at the behest of Hunter Biden.)

YouTube announces it will no longer distribute videos investigating election fraud and that producers of such videos will be punished if they do.

All this in a couple of days, the excuse being, in almost all cases, that the conservatives involved were instigating violence, the “outrage” that occurred at the Capitol.

This from the people who ignored exponentially more violence and destruction for months all across urban America.

Sense a strategy here? A plan?

I know—I’m one of those conspiracy mongers. Everything has been “debunked.” Indeed, it was “debunked” before it happened.

Only I’m not a conspiracy monger, my friends. I’m one of those guys who is perfectly willing to admit it was Lee Harvey Oswald working alone from the Texas Schoolbook Depository.

I’m the opposite. I’m a Occam’s Razor guy—what you see is what you get.

And Occam’s Razor tells me the United States is turning into a near clone of the People’s Republic of China.

As Glenn wrote last night, Trump warned you.

JOEL KOTKIN: The Rebellion of America’s New Underclass:

Like so many before them, our recent disorders have been rooted in issues of race. But in the longer run, the underlying causes of our growing civic breakdown go beyond the brutal police killing of George Floyd. Particularly in our core cities, our dysfunction is a result of our increasingly large, and increasingly multi-racial, class of neo-serfs.

Like its Medieval counterpart, today’s serf class consists of the permanently marginalized—like the peasants of feudal times, these people are unlikely to move to a higher station. This does not only apply to the residents of our ghettos and barrios. Many of our young people, white and otherwise, appear to have little or no hope of attaining the usual milestones of entry into the middle class—gaining a useful and marketable skill, starting a small business, or buying a home or other property.

Throughout much of the 20th century, this aspiration was very much alive as more and more people, including racial minorities and immigrants, entered the middle ranks. Now, in contrast, the doors are slamming shut for millions of Americans.

This trend has been made worse by the lockdowns surrounding the pandemic. Almost 40% of those Americans making under $40,000 a year have lost their jobs. The unemployment rate of those with less than a high-school diploma jumped from 6.8% on the month to 21.2%. For college graduates, it rose from 2.5% to 8.4%. Salaried workers have been laid off at roughly half the rate of hourly workers.

The biggest drops in hiring have been concentrated in recreation and travel, largely “personal contact” jobs that employ many low-wage workers. Employment in this sector has dropped 70% while remaining remarkably stable throughout the public sector and in such fields as computer networking.

Many young people, including college graduates, are now often employed in these low-wage industries. They are suffering the largest share of our job losses for any age group. In a new report, Data for Progress found that a staggering 52% of people under the age of 45 have lost a job, been put on leave, or had their hours reduced due to the pandemic.

This class of underemployed and unemployed youths appears to be represented among the rioters and looters that took advantage of peaceful and legitimate protests. Particularly telling has been the role played by predominately white radicals—whom Mike Lind hilariously labels “riot ninjas.” Although often emerging from largely privileged backgrounds, radicals—whether part of anti-fa or just freelance—can be seen as putting into action the political indoctrination they imbibed in college and, increasingly, even earlier.

The agenda of the new activists is nothing less than a total assault on the bourgeoisie. . . .

The most distinctive element of these disorders has been the intelligentsia’s almost wholly unqualified embrace of what urban historian Fred Siegel calls “the riot ideology.” This ideology holds that arson, looting, and even assault are legitimate and justifiable activities. Leftist outlets such as Slate, Vox, and Mother Jones excuse such violence “a reasonable reaction” to outrage over the Floyd murder. They imply that anyone who labels these disturbances as “riots” is clearly racist.

It has been still more amazing to see riot ideology embraced by top law enforcement officials such as Massachusetts Attorney General Maura Healey, and echoed by remarkably inept Mayors like Minneapolis’s Jacob Frey. Generally, the progressives have been unwilling to confront the role of largely white, anarchist groups, like Antifa, whose mostly youthful members can be seen on videos egging on violence—even against the objections of African-American protestors.

As a millennial friend observed, the people in her circle who are most into activism seem to be those whose careers are going badly. The activism gives them a feeling of importance, and a kind of respectability.

I’m reminded of what Kenneth Anderson said about the Occupy movement:

In social theory, OWS is best understood not as a populist movement against the bankers, but instead as the breakdown of the New Class into its two increasingly disconnected parts. The upper tier, the bankers-government bankers-super credentialed elites. But also the lower tier, those who saw themselves entitled to a white collar job in the Virtue Industries of government and non-profits – the helping professions, the culture industry, the virtueocracies, the industries of therapeutic social control, as Christopher Lasch pointed out in his final book, The Revolt of the Elites.

The two tiers of the New Class have always had different sources of rents, however. For the upper tier, since 1990, it has come through its ability to take the benefits of generations of US social investment in education and sell that expertise across global markets – leveraging expertise and access to capital and technological markets in the 1990s to places in Asia and the former communist world in desperate need of it. As Lasch said, the revolt and flight of the elites, to marketize themselves globally as free agents – to take the social capital derived over many generations by American society, and to go live in the jet stream and extract returns on a global scale for that expertise. But that expertise is now largely commodified – to paraphrase David Swenson on financial engineering, that kind of universal expertise is commodified, cheaply available, and no longer commands much premium. As those returns have come under pressure, the Global New Class has come home, looking to command premiums through privileged access to the public-private divide – access most visible at the moment as virtuous new technology projects that turn out to be mere crony capitalism.

The lower tier is in a different situation and always has been. It is characterized by status-income disequilibrium, to borrow from David Brooks; it cultivates the sensibilities of the upper tier New Class, but does not have the ability to globalize its rent extraction. The helping professions, the professions of therapeutic authoritarianism (the social workers as well as the public safety workers), the virtuecrats, the regulatory class, etc., have a problem – they mostly service and manage individuals, the client-consumers of the welfare state. Their rents are not leveraged very much, certainly not globally, and are limited to what amounts to an hourly wage. The method of ramping up wages, however, is through public employee unions and their own special ability to access the public-private divide. But, as everyone understands, that model no longer works, because it has overreached and overleveraged, to the point that even the system’s most sympathetic politicians understand that it cannot pay up.

The upper tier is still doing pretty well. But the lower tier of the New Class – the machine by which universities trained young people to become minor regulators and then delivered them into white collar positions on the basis of credentials in history, political science, literature, ethnic and women’s studies – with or without the benefit of law school – has broken down. The supply is uninterrupted, but the demand has dried up. The agony of the students getting dumped at the far end of the supply chain is in large part the OWS. As Above the Law points out, here is “John,” who got out of undergrad, spent a year unemployed and living at home, and is now apparently at University of Vermont law school, with its top ranked environmental law program – John wants to work at a “nonprofit.”

Indeed. Plus, just a reminder: In America, class war is disguised as cultural warfare, and cultural warfare is usually cloaked in talk of race.

Related: A New Class Problem.

WHY IT’S FAIR TO TALK ABOUT A “COUP:” ‘The Interagency’ Isn’t Supposed to Rule: The Constitution gives the president, not a club of unelected officials, the power to set foreign policy.

When the war on terror opened, with all the secret activity it required, professional cadres in the diplomatic corps, the military and the nation’s many intelligence agencies were able to transform interagency cooperative agreements that had existed since the Cold War into a de facto agency—a largely informal and virtual bureaucracy—with the assumed power, if need be, to determine and execute a foreign policy at odds with the intent of the president and Congress.

Last month’s testimony before the Intelligence Committee shed light on this club whose members are a permanent shadow government credentialed by family histories, elite schools and unique career experiences. This common pedigree informs their perspective of how America should relate to the world. The dogmatists of the interagency seem to share a common discomfort with a president who probably couldn’t describe the doctrine of soft power, doesn’t desire to be the center of attention at Davos, and wouldn’t know that Francis Fukuyama once decided that history was over.

The impeachment hearings will have served a useful purpose if all they do is demonstrate that a cabal of unelected officials are fashioning profound aspects of U.S. foreign policy on their own motion. No statutes anticipate that the president or Congress will delegate such authority to a secret working group formed largely at the initiation of entrepreneurial bureaucrats, notwithstanding that they may be area experts, experienced in diplomatic and military affairs, and motivated by what they see as the best interests of the country.

Given their track record, all of those qualifications are open to doubt. But what’s really behind the Deep State outrage at Trump is captured by this blog comment: “This charade is being conducted for many reasons. One reason seems to be that we cannot allow the deplorables to elect a POTUS.”

CHRISTIAN TOTO: Your Turn, Hollywood (Women’s March Edition).

Stars glommed on to the cause, letting themselves be captured on camera and interviewed by reporters along the way.

This year? We’ll have to wait until Jan. 19.

Of course, Sarsour’s ugly record wasn’t exactly secret prior to the first Women’s March. Perhaps her most outrageous statement?

This is a woman who said that Ayaan Hirsi Ali – who was a victim of FGM [female genital mutilation], escaped brutal conditions, and now must travel with bodyguards 24/7 – deserves to have her vagina taken away because Sarsour doesn’t agree with her worldview.

At a time when a decade’s old Tweet can alter, if not permanently stain, a career, this horrific statement has been roundly ignored by most reporters and every actress at the first two March events.

* * * * * * * * *

Will Hollywood news sites question any stars who previously attached themselves to the March knowing what we all know now? This reporter set up a Google Alert for the terms “women’s march hollywood” several weeks ago to keep tabs on the subject.

So far, it’s come up mostly empty. We’ll see if that changes in the next few days.

I’m so old, I can remember when Hollywood still posed as meaningful change being “on us.”

RICHARD FERNANDEZ: Ours To Reason Why.

If there’s one good thing about the political crisis triggered Trump’s decision to withdraw from Syria it’s been to make people realize the US is there. As Seth Harp in the New Yorker noted, it has done everything possible to conceal that fact. . . .

Perhaps more people than were ever aware of the combat presence in Syria are outraged the US is leaving it and that is a good thing. The lack of awareness was the result of the breakdown of the national security debate and the abdication by Congress of its role in war making. The public is now like a man waking up in a strange city with a 3 week growth of beard with no memory of how he got there.

As the Los Angeles Times noted the US inherited a whole bunch of shadow wars from the past administrations. “Before he took office in 2008, Barack Obama vowed to end America’s grueling conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan. During his second term, he pledged to take the country off what he called a permanent war footing. … U.S. military forces have been at war for all eight years of Obama’s tenure, the first two-term president with that distinction. He launched airstrikes or military raids in at least seven countries: Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria, Libya, Yemen, Somalia and Pakistan.”

But they all went into the back pages.

Well, they sat awkwardly with that Nobel Peace Prize.

FROM TWITTER’S ‘THINGS YOU CANNOT SAY’ DEPARTMENT: Megan Murphy is a Canadian feminist who has the audacity to make such outrageous claims as “men aren’t women.” Can you believe anybody would say such a thing? Well, Murphy won’t be saying it on Twitter any more because the SJWs banned her.

Which prompts this from Murphy:

“What is insane to me, though, is that while Twitter knowingly permits graphic pornography and death threats on the platform (I have reported countless violent threats, the vast majority of which have gone unaddressed), they won’t allow me to state very basic facts, such as ‘men aren’t women.’”

Over at The Federalist, Nicole Russell strips Twitter’s argument down to its bare essentials in the course of explaining why Jack Dorsey’s nose is as long, or maybe even longer, than Mark Zuckerberg’s.

THE IMPORTANT THING IS TO HOLD THE RIGHT ATTITUDES TODAY: How today’s academia risks outraging tomorrow’s historians. What should universities learn from their history with slavery? How about humility?

After all, the views of university professors have, if anything, become more uniform in recent years — and perhaps dangerously so.

It’s not just that academics claim consensus on issues such as manmade global warming. It’s not even their unflagging belief that the government is in the best position to determine how capital is allocated in our economy.

No: Modern academia also seems certain that gender is a “social construct” — and that surgically altering our bodies so they resemble those of the opposite sex is a good idea. A new survey, meanwhile, shows that less than a quarter of Americans think people should be able to legally change their sex. And while Americans have long been evenly divided on the question of abortion, one survey showed that 99 percent of Ivy League professors want no restrictions on abortion at all.

Diversity of opinion has been curtailed on campus so much that professors — even those with total job security — don’t want to rock the boat by disagreeing with the campus orthodoxy.

Maybe we’ll look back some day and conclude that we permanently disfigured thousands of young people in a misguided effort to “treat” a psychological disorder. Maybe we’ll see that abortion really was a moral outrage on par with slavery or forced sterilization.

Today’s intellectual elites have no interest in questioning such practices, let alone stopping them. But don’t worry: They can say they’re sorry later.

Hey, the progressive eugenicists never paid a price.

THEY DON’T CALL HIM THE “LITTLE IDIOT” FOR NOTHING: Singer Moby After Trump: ‘Americans are Either Really Stupid or Incredibly Bigoted….Really, Really Dumb People.’

I’m so old, I remember when musicians tried to increase their fan base through flattery, rather than deliberately making their appeal “more selective,” as legendary fictitious manager Ian Faith would say.

Moby’s star power has diminished significantly over the last decade, but if the media are going to rail against “Fake News,” his recommendations that the left deliberately lie to voters in 2004 are worth taking a second look at:

“No one’s talking about how to keep the other side home on Election Day,” Moby tells us. “It’s a lot easier than you think and it doesn’t cost that much. This election can be won by 200,000 votes.”

Moby suggests that it’s possible to seed doubt among Bush’s far-right supporters on the Web.

“You target his natural constituencies,” says the Grammy-nominated techno-wizard. “For example, you can go on all the pro-life chat rooms and say you’re an outraged right-wing voter and that you know that George Bush drove an ex-girlfriend to an abortion clinic and paid for her to get an abortion.

“Then you go to an anti-immigration Web site chat room and ask, ‘What’s all this about George Bush proposing amnesty for illegal aliens?’”

As Jonah Goldberg wrote in February of 2004, shortly before Andrew Sullivan endorsed Kerry and permanently broke from the right, “A couple of weeks ago, several liberal bloggers announced that they wanted their readers to deliberately make up fake emails and send them to NR because they found the real emails we were posting in the Corner too unhelpful to their cause. So far they’ve all been way too stupid to fool us, but that could change. And now, last night, Andrew Sullivan received an email that he — and I, and a lot of our mutual readers — think was made up. Whether it was or wasn’t, it now seems safe to predict that the Moby-Moore fringe of liberalism is ratcheting-up it’s ends justify-the-means approach to political discourse. Get ready for the Age of Mobyism, it won’t be pretty.”

The Age of Mobyism flowed pretty seamlessly into the Age of Vox; and along the way, a surprising number of Democrat operatives with bylines were willing to admit they had no problem with deliberate lying and obfuscation to advance the DNC-MSM cause. If the MSM really does want end the scourge of “fake news,” theirs is an awfully big swamp to drain.

(Classical reference in headline.)

THE ONGOING, DESPERATE PROVOCATION: The Bolsheviks know only one way to revolution and power.  Find aggrieved minority, form false movement of said minority, have them commit more and more outrageous chaos-inducing transgressions until the government oversteps and kills vast numbers of them.  Then use that as a vehicle to power.  They don’t realize in the states they’re not playing with the government (who might be largely on their side.)  No, they’re juggling fire in a powder keg. Baton Rouge shooter identified, and his belief system is no surprise.

RHODES TO RUIN: Postmodern politicking didn’t start with the Obama Administration, but it has reached its apotheosis with Ben Rhodes.

How much could someone who was in his early thirties when the Obama Administration began, and who is without any relevant education or life experience in foreign and national security policy, actually know about the subject? Anyone who doesn’t find just the question frightening, let alone all the likeliest answers, must be about as young and presumptuous as Rhodes.

Beyond the startling and the frightening there is also the outrageous, particularly in regard to the Iran deal. “Rhodes strategized and ran the successful Iran-deal messaging campaign,” Samuels writes. And the most appropriate way to think about what Rhodes was thinking as he did this is supplied via Samuels by former White House strategist David Axelrod: “I think they’ve approached these major foreign-policy challenges as campaign challenges, and they’ve run campaigns, and those campaigns have been very sophisticated.”

That’s exactly right: It’s the permanent campaign, as it has been called by many others. It’s a phenomenon that did not start with the Obama Administration—remember Karl Rove, for example. But it went into overdrive with the Obama Administration, where practically everyone in the White House, and in many Schedule C enclaves beyond, has behaved like a Karl Rove. And certainly this younger crowd’s facility with using social media for spin purposes wildly outpaced that of any of its predecessors. . . .

The American public, such as it is, was had. It was spun into dizzy disorientation. But was it therefore lied to?
That’s an interesting question. A normal person, which is to say someone not rendered overly “sophisticated” by the ethical derangement that comes from staying too long in Washington, DC, would say “yes.” But that has not been the audible response to Samuels’s revelations. Note the contrast here with summary but persisting conclusions about George W. Bush and his Administration. Certainly in chic circles in Europe, but also here in the United States, it has become part of the common book of left-wing devotionals that the Bush Administration knowingly, cynically, and very willfully lied about WMD in Iraq. This isn’t remotely true, but such is the derangement caused by rabid partisanship that the afflicted are not willing, most of the time, even to acknowledge any moral distinction between being inadvertently mistaken and knowingly lying. . . .

Nevertheless, the fact of the matter is indisputable: As I have written several times over the past few years, the truth was always the reverse of what President Obama often declared: “Better no deal than a bad deal.” The President’s real view was better a bad deal than no deal, because no deal meant a likely need to use force in the context of two other Middle Eastern wars that were neither concluded nor going particularly well. Indeed, some at the NSC engaged on the issue were actually candid enough, or foolish enough, to tell some interlocutors that from the start. The rest of us had to infer it.

Maybe earlier presidential deceptions—Jefferson’s, Roosevelt’s, even LBJ’s, and there are plenty of others that could be cited—could retrospectively be justified by the circumstances. Maybe executive leadership subsumes the admissibility of manipulation, to a point. But a deception is still a deception, and why Obama (and Rhodes) should get a free pass here is a little hard to square with any definition of fairness or objectivity. But as Tom Stoppard put it years ago, the mainly liberal mainstream media in the United States is “a stalking horse masquerading as a sacred cow.” Further explanation isn’t really required.

Democratic operatives with bylines, taking marching orders from Democratic operatives without bylines.

ISIS MAKES THE EU MORE ANTI-ISRAEL, Evelyn Gordon writes at Commentary:

Israel, against all odds, showed no sign of collapsing; it kept getting stronger despite decades of unrelenting attacks. So to Europe, it must have seemed the perfect solution: The crocodile could keep attacking Israel forever, and Europeans would be permanently safe. All they had to do was make sure the beast remained fixated on Israel by maintaining a steady drumbeat of anti-Israel outrage.

Yet now, suddenly, that tactic no longer works – and like any weakling confronted with a bully, Europe is cravenly trying to divert the bully’s attention back to his former victim.

Read the whole thing.

I’M SENSING A THEME HERE: The San Francisco Chronicle of all places reports, “‘Social justice’ in contracts costs S.F. millions.” — huh; I thought the Chronicle was rather copacetic with that sort of thing.

Meanwhile, up north, Canada’s Small Dead Animals blog notes:

SDA reader, David, provided a link to a very interesting article. Even though the Vancouver School Board has an $8.4-million funding shortfall, they have to buy $405,725 worth of carbon offsets as per provincial government legislation instituted by BC’s last premier, Gordon Campbell.

Lest anyone forget, the Greens among us have frequently said that “going green” won’t cost us anything. Well, in this case 5 teachers are going to lose their jobs in order to pay for these absolutely ridiculous carbon offsets.

Oh and speaking of Canada and “social” “justice,” Mark Steyn alerts us to “The Criminalization of the Link” — the hyperlink that is:

If you wanted to confirm the notion that elections are a waste of time, you could hardly do it more swiftly than the new Canadian Conservative majority government is with its omnibus crime bill. Clause Five criminalizes the “hyperlink” — that’s to say, if you include a link to a site “where hate material is posted”, you could go to jail for two years.

I don’t recall this figuring as a policy proposal during the election campaign. I would imagine that almost no Tory voter is in favour of the proposal: The vast majority would be either opposed or indifferent, or bewildered as to why it’s happening at all. After all, at the last Conservative conference, the vote to scrap Section 13 was unanimous.

That last one — why’s it happening? — is easy to answer. It’s happening because it’s the kind of remorseless incremental annexation of individual liberty to which the permanent bureaucracy has become addicted. And, as I always say, the lesson of the post-Second World War west is that you don’t need a presidency-for-life if you’ve got a bureaucracy-for-life. It’s an outrageous law, poorly written.

Read the whole thing. While it’s still (more or less) legal.

MORE ON THE BNP’S SUDDEN SURGE, at The Belmont Club.

Leaks which showed how Labour intentionally flooded Britain with immigrants in order to gain a permanent political majority and rub multiculturalism in the faces of poor whites have provoked a storm of outrage in the UK. It plays directly into the BNP narrative of invasion abetted by leftist treason. The Telegraph reported that “Labour threw open Britain’s borders to mass immigration to help socially engineer a ‘truly multicultural’ country, a former Government adviser has revealed.” But it was manner in which the plan was sugar-coated which rankled the most. It was, if the leaks are to be believed, an ideological conspiracy sold as a plan to bolster the economy. It’s almost as if the Left set out to paint itself in the very same colors the BNP wanted it to don. . . . What the Left and Fascism share is a belief in the transformative power of the state. Both regard government as the “high ground” of society and not, as some Americans still believe, simply a necessary evil.

Irresponsible and dishonest government abets evil. Plus, some further thoughts from Andrew Ian Dodge. “There is nothing wrong with disliking the BNP. They are neo-Nazis. The problem is that the political establishment is in a tizzy, and they have no idea how to deal with them. . . . The major parties are not addressing the subjects on which the BNP are gaining votes. Citizens are expressing concern about the present level of immigration, Muslim extremism, and lack of equal access to jobs, education, and social housing. These topics are being addressed by the BNP, leading to increased support throughout the UK. The BNP received six percent of the overall vote in the May elections, gaining seats for the first time, and their support appears to have increased since then. The ‘anti-fascists’ are calling for violence against the BNP. . . . The BNP is reaching disenchanted Labour voters who have socialist instincts.”

SOUTH AFRICA LOWERS VOICE ON HUMAN RIGHTS:

After just three months as one of the Security Council’s nonpermanent members, South Africa is mired in controversy over what could be its great strength: the moral weight it can bring to diplomatic deliberations.

In January, South Africa surprised many, and outraged some, when it voted against allowing the Security Council to consider a relatively mild resolution on human rights issues in Myanmar, whose government is widely seen as one of the most repressive on earth.

Last week the government again angered human rights advocates when it said it would oppose a request to brief the Security Council on the deteriorating situation in Zimbabwe, where the government is pursuing a violent crackdown on its only political opposition. South Africa later changed its stance, but only after dismissing the briefing as a minor event that did not belong on the Council’s agenda.

This week South Africa endangered a delicate compromise among nations often at odds — the United States, China, Russia, France, Britain and Germany — to rein in Iran’s nuclear program.

Thabo Mbeki is a typical African leader, and he has been busily turning South Africa into a typical African nation, marked by support for other thugocracies, a paranoid, unscientific AIDS policy and support for the murderous Mugabe regime. That doesn’t leave much room for moral exceptionalism.

NPR SALARIES: Michael Petrelis thinks that these are enormous. They don’t seem out of line to me, given that NPR is a huge national radio network with a very large audience. If NPR were pretending to be some sort of solidarity-with-the-working-class operation, I guess you could argue that six-figure salaries were hypocritical, but this would seem to put them comfortably within the Volvo-and-McMansion set that comprises the bulk of their audience, or at least the bulk of their donor base. And they certainly produce quality work, political slant aside.

UPDATE: A reader emails:

Lol that’s a heck of an angle Glenn. I can’t help to wonder if they didn’t have you on if you’d be so accommodating? I think a significant bulk of their support is from forced tax extracted out of the non-Volvo-and-McMansion set, like me. Don’t get me wrong here, political slant aside, of course.

Well, to the extent that they’re government supported there’s a point there, I guess. But I actually think that NPR’s money mostly comes from non-governmental sources. And it doesn’t seem like they have me on all that often, do they?

Anyway, others see it differently:

My concept of pay scales has been permanently damaged by years in Hollywood, but I think these salaries are low. In private radio, local morning jocks can get paid this much, and the NPR people are national.

That’s how it seems to me, and when some of my students stand to make upwards of $160K in their first jobs — more than I get paid — these NPR salaries don’t sound all that outrageous.

CHARGES OF JUNK SCIENCE:

While we at American Council on Science and Health have been determined to remain on the sidelines of the raging national debate about the fate of Terri Schiavo (this is largely a legal and ethical issue, not a scientific one), we cannot remain silent about the outrageous misrepresentation of scientific facts about this case that has been occurring in the past ten days.

The medical reality of Ms. Schiavo’s case is this: She has been in what is medically referred to as a “permanent vegetative state” for the past 15 years, ever since her heart temporarily stopped (probably due to the severe effects of an eating disorder), depriving her brain of oxygen. Brain scans indicate that her cerebral cortex ceased functioning — probably just after she experienced cardiac arrest in 1990. Ms. Schiavo’s CAT scan shows massive shrinking of the brain, and her EEG is flat. Physicians confirm that there is no electrical activity coming from her brain. While the family video repeatedly shown on television suggests otherwise, her non-functioning cortex precludes cognition, including any ability to interact or communicate with people or show any signs of awareness. Dozens of experts over the years who have examined Ms. Schiavo agree that there is no hope of her recovering — even though her body, face and eyes (if she is given food and hydration) might continue to move for decades to come.

Those are the harsh facts. . . .

Yesterday, there was another public challenge to Ms. Schiavo’s well-established diagnosis: Florida governor Jeb Bush announced that a “very renowned neurologist,” Dr. William Cheshire, had concluded that Terri had been misdiagnosed and that she was really only in a state of “minimal consciousness” rather than a persistent vegetative state. He used this “new diagnosis” to argue that “this new information raises serious concerns and warrants immediate action.”

As it turns out, Dr. Cheshire is not “renowned” as a neurologist — his limited publications focus on areas including headache pain and his opposition to stem cell research. Dr. Cheshire never conducted a physical examination of Ms. Schiavo, nor did he do neurological tests. . . . Let’s call tripe when tripe is served.

Ouch.

UPDATE: James Taranto links this report and observes:

Reading over the report on Schiavo prepared in 2003 by guardian ad litem Jay Wolfson (link in PDF) helps make clear why this last effort will not succeed. Many physicians have backed the PVS diagnosis, and the courts are unlikely to give much weight to an eighth or ninth opinion at this late stage.

The 38-page report is by and large a persuasive document, showing that the Florida courts did not lightly reach the conclusion that Mrs. Schiavo should die.

I certainly don’t know Ms. Schiavo’s condition, as I’m not a doctor and haven’t evaluated her — not that that’s stopping others. But I think it’s absurd to claim, as many are, that a cabal of liberal judges wants to murder Terri Shiavo because it is — in Peggy Noonan’s absurdly over-the-top phrase — “half in love with death.” To be fair, Noonan aims that phrase at others, really. But I think that many on the right have succumbed to hysteria here. This is a tragic situation, and it’s been turned into a circus.

UPDATE: Reader Jean Tuttle emails: “Mr. Reynolds, I worked as a nurse in ICUs and ERs. I have no idea what kind of brain damage Mrs. Schiavo has ,but I find it hard to believe her EEG is flat.The patients I saw with flat EEGs couldn’t breathe on their own, couldn’t move or make any sound. As I said before I don’t have any idea the amount of brain damage Mrs. Schiavo has, but I would bet the EEG isn”t flat. I think there is so much disinformation coming out of both sides of this ,that it is impossible to know what the facts are.”

That last part is certainly true.

ANOTHER UPDATE: Perhaps this column by Neal Boortz is an answer to Peggy Noonan: “Where do your concerns truly lie, with the eternal soul of Terri Schiavo, or with her earthly body?”

Sissy Willis has more thoughts on hysteria.

MORE: Gerard van der Leun says that Noonan was making a literary allusion that I missed:

Over the top? Perhaps, but more in the line of a literary allusion:

Darkling I listen; and, for many a time
I have been half in love with easeful Death,
Call’d him soft names in many a mused rhyme,
To take into the air my quiet breath;
Now more than ever seems it rich to die,
To cease upon the midnight with no pain,

— Keats, Ode to a Nightingale

And, as such, not really that much beside the point.

Hmm. I had forgotten that — I haven’t read that poem since high school — but I’m not sure that the allusion, if that’s what it is, fits Noonan’s message.

And reader Gerald Dearing emails with this observation, which makes a suitable capper for this post: “You know the debate has truly entered the realm of the surreal when Neal Boortz weighs in with a spirituality argument!”

Indeed.