RUTHFULLY YOURS

One is supposed to begin the new year imbued with optimism, so accept my apologies for the long face and grim tidings. I hear very little debate about about the most pressing issues but many war cries from the new tribalists. Folly, I fear, isn’t marching, it’s galloping.

I am pretty sure that Donald Trump was unfazed on hearing that new Democratic Congresswoman Rashida Tlaib had promised to “impeach the motherf****r.” She’s the first Palestinian Muslim elected to Congress. She draped herself in the Palestinian flag after winning the Democratic primary last year. She ain’t no friend of the Jews or of Israel. She supports the BDS campaign and also a one-state solution. Goodbye, Israel, a pity about the ensuing slaughter. She was joined when being sworn in by Palestinian-American activist Linda Sarsour, another piece of work. Weep for the times.

For form’s sake, Tlaib’s comrades dutiful demurred on her language but admired her authenticity. Anything is forgivable, even a likeness of his decapitated head held aloft, if Trump is the target. Two things strike me.

The first is that the times are changing for the worse before our very eyes. Islam is becoming part of the fabric of our societies while Islamic societies are busy marginalising and driving out minorities, particularly Christian ones. This isn’t something which is creeping up all unbeknown. Muslims are populating the West, bringing with them a scriptural guide which has inspired barbarism down the centuries.

The Left’s love-in with Islam is locked-in. But, please, please save us from conservatives who explain that most Muslims are peaceful and moderate. Blind Freddy knows that. However, those of us with our common sense still intact also know that the immutable, irredeemably nasty scripture, wielded by rabble-rousing imams, ever lurks in-waiting to corrupt Muslim minds.

Now I understand and applaud efforts to reach out to Muslims. Once resident, Muslims must be treated as kindly as everyone else. But it is a numbers game. There is far more chance of Enlightenment values being universally shared if those not steeped in them, more particularly, if those whose values are antithetical to them, do not form larger and larger proportions of the population. This is a general proposition, by the way, when it comes to shaping immigration and deciding who should be invited in and who shouldn’t.

Of course, this is silly of me, we all know that bad things don’t really happen. We need to celebrate unlimited diversity and multiculturalism and why not throw in abortion on demand and gay marriage. And, while we are at it, a “Two Minutes Hate” session directed at white men (and white women) is cathartic for the ever-growing victimhood.

The horrible thing about the Two Minutes Hate was not that one was obliged to act a part, but that it was impossible to avoid joining in. Within thirty seconds any pretence was always unnecessary. A hideous ecstasy of fear and vindictiveness, a desire to kill, to torture, to smash faces with a sledge-hammer, seemed to flow through the whole group of people like an electric current, turning one even against one’s will into a grimacing, screaming lunatic. (1984)

Trump recently gave press conference with three representatives of border patrol standing behind him. The event was mocked by Joe Scarborough and company on MSNBC because the three guys were bald (which I take personal offence at and am seeking a safe space) and because they were white. “This wall is not a wall, it is a let’s keep America white again.” The only problem: two of the guys were Latino but obviously not unwhite enough for ‘Morning Joe’. In California, a Women’s March was cancelled in December because those participating would have been predominantly white – hang the content of their characters. Just two examples of many.

The second thing that strikes me, also for the worse, is the way enough voters to win the day occupy a policy-free political mind space. At least when it comes to policies which are general in their effect. For example, those critical of Trump as man seem oblivious to the effect his policies have had in producing record low Hispanic and black unemployment. They simply couldn’t care about that. Similarly, Corbyn could well be elected in the UK despite having the kind of socialist policies which have always created unemployment and misery. Shorten is likely to be elected this year despite having taxation and renewable energy policies which are bound to kill jobs.

It’s a fair bet that few voters would specifically vote for fewer jobs. Yet, the relevant policies, which alone tell the tale of job creation, make up very little of the political debate. It is true that tribalism and personal likes and dislikes have always counted in the minds of voters but now they seem to count for everything. It seems likely to be a product of identity politics; of which, of course, targeting despised whites is a part.

If people segment themselves on the basis of their sex, their sexual orientation, their skin colour, their indigenousness, their ethnicity, their religious/cultural affiliations, it lessens the focus on policies which impinge on people across the board. Of course, policies which impinge on particular groups (e.g., the LBGT community) get a run. Forget it otherwise; it’s back to raw emotions, epitomised by Congresswoman Tlaib’s gutter language.

I tuned in to CNN after Trump’s Oval Office address on border security. Leaving aside the visceral hatred of Trump, it was all superficial politics. Had Trump moved the political needle? Not once, did I see an attempt to grapple with the substance of whether more and better physical barriers were required. In fact, the need for physical barriers used to draw support across the aisle – which is why lots of fencing is already in place. But that was when policy had a more prominent place in political contests.

Are there any underlying economic, social or political trends which are promising?

https://www.city-journal.org/jazmine-barnes-murder

Anti-cop activist Shaun King says that his involvement in the campaign around the Jazmine Barnes murder was not driven by reports that a white man had killed the seven-year-old girl, who was gunned down in Houston on December 30. According to Barnes’s mother and 15-year-old sister, the white driver of a pickup truck had pulled up next to the family’s car before opening fire. The accusation set off a frenzy of hate-crime allegations and blanket coverage by the New York Times. King offered a $100,000 reward to anyone who located the suspect.

As it turned out, Jazmine Barnes was killed by two black men, who opened fire on her mother’s car because they thought that they were targeting enemies of their gang. King passed along a tip about the real killers to the Houston police, and now says that he merely “internalized the pain of the family and tried to search as if it were my own child who was killed.” Race, in other words, had nothing to do with his activism.

It’s worth remembering, though, the many other black children who have been victims of drive-by shootings without leading King to launch a national crusade.

A sampling: in March 2015, a six-year-old boy was killed in a drive-by shooting on West Florissant Avenue in St. Louis, as Black Lives Matter protesters were converging on the Ferguson, Missouri, Police Department to demand the resignation of the entire department. In August 2015, a nine-year-old girl was killed by a bullet from a drive-by shooting in Ferguson while doing her homework in her bedroom, blocks from the Black Lives Matter rioting thoroughfare. Five children were shot in Cleveland over the 2015 Fourth of July weekend. A seven-year-old boy was killed in Chicago that same weekend by a bullet intended for his father. In Cincinnati, in July 2015, a four-year-old girl was shot in the head and a six-year-old girl was left paralyzed and partially blind from two separate drive-by shootings. In Cleveland, three children five and younger were killed in September 2015, leading the black police chief to break down in tears and ask why the community only protests shootings of blacks when the perpetrator is a cop. In November 2015, a nine-year-old in Chicago was lured into an alley and killed by his father’s gang enemies; the father refused to cooperate with the police. All told, ten children under the age of ten were killed in Baltimore in 2015; twelve victims were between the age of ten and seventeen.

https://www.nationalreview.com/2019/01/trump-civil-military-relations-tensions/Tensions between the two sectors are woven into the fabric of the American republic.

As Tom Nichols, my friend and former colleague at the Naval War College, noted recently in The Atlantic, Americans don’t often think about civil-military relations, and that’s a good thing. It means that paratroopers are not normally seizing communications centers, and tanks aren’t rolling down Pennsylvania Avenue toward the Capitol.

But since U.S. civil–military relations are generally healthy, when Americans do talk about them, they often do so in apocalyptic terms. Each example of civil–military tensions, it seems, portends a crisis. Nichols’s essay is a case in point: President Trump, he writes,

has taken a dangerous path, excoriating retired military leaders who criticize him and lavishing praise and make-believe pay raises on the active-duty military voters who he believes support him. A precious heritage built on the dual pillars of military obedience to civilians and civilian respect for military professionals is now at severe risk.

Someone reading that essay would have to conclude that, under Trump, U.S. civil–military relations have entered a unique period of crisis.

But that is not the case. To understand why, it is useful to understand that U.S. civil–military relations can best be described as a bargain among three parties: the uniformed military, civilian policymakers, and the American people. Periodically, in response to social, political, technological, and geopolitical changes, this bargain must be renegotiated. In this case, as in many previous ones, what seems to be a crisis is more likely a transition as the civil–military bargain is in the process of being renegotiated.

There is no question that many of Trump’s actions, including his excoriation of some retired generals and flag officers critical of him, as well as his dismissive remarks about Secretary of Defense Jim Mattis after effusively praising him when the latter resigned, have inflamed civil–military tensions. But the 2016 presidential campaign should have made it clear that Trump’s approach to the military would be unconventional.

During that campaign, Donald Trump slammed the leadership of the U.S. military, claiming that “the generals under Barack Obama have not been successful. Under the leadership of Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton, the generals have been reduced to rubble, reduced to a point where it is embarrassing for our country.” He implied that, as president, he would replace Obama’s military leadership with generals and admirals who would not subordinate military effectiveness to “political correctness.”

https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-380-000-11546987811

This column doesn’t wish to seem hard-hearted but feels obliged to ask the various parties negotiating an end to the partial government shutdown why the affected agencies have been employing nearly twice as many workers as they deem necessary to fulfill their missions. Whether President Donald Trump, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer decide to call structures at the border walls or fences, they ought to at least explain how they are managing the public payroll inside the United States.

Various media reports have noted that the temporary closure of 25% of the government has forced roughly 420,000 federal workers deemed essential to continue working while some 380,000 who are not deemed essential stay home. If it were a business, this non-essential portion of just a quarter of our government would be among the largest private employers in the country. Does this mean that non-essentials approach 1.5 million across the entire government? As American businesses scour their communities for talent during an historic worker shortage, taxpayers seem to be paying to maintain the world’s largest reserve force of bureaucrats.

An incurious press corps seems largely uninterested in the appropriate size of the federal workforce. Numerous recent reports have covered the shutdown story largely as a tale of a villainous President inflicting uncertainty on civil servants who wonder when they will be able to pay their mortgages.

“As thousands of furloughed federal employees worry about when their next paycheck will arrive, their bills are piling up,” writes Renata Birkenbuel in a recent Newsweek story.

“Government Shutdown Leaves Workers Reeling,” reads a New York Times headline from January 3.

Government Executive magazine reported the next day on legislative efforts to ensure that federal shutdowns never again threaten federal paychecks:

Maryland’s Senate delegation on Thursday reintroduced a bill to ensure that federal workers furloughed during the partial government shutdown, and any potential future shutdowns, will be promptly given back pay once federal agencies reopen.

http://thefederalist.com/2019/01/08/yes-anti-zionism-is-anti-semitism/

In a recent New York Times op-ed titled “Anti-Zionism isn’t the same as Anti-Semitism,” columnist Michelle Goldberg defended Ilhan Omar, a newly elected House representative who has claimed that Jews have hypnotized the world for their evil works. A person can oppose “Jewish ethno-nationalism without being a bigot,” Goldberg explained. “Indeed,” she went on, “it’s increasingly absurd to treat the Israeli state as a stand-in for Jews writ large, given the way the current Israeli government has aligned itself with far-right European movements that have anti-Semitic roots.”

It’s true, of course, that anti-Zionism isn’t “the same” as common anti-Semitism. Anti-Zionism is the most significant and consequential form of anti-Semitism that exists in the world today. Anti-Zionism has done more to undermine Jewish safety than all the ugly tweets, dog whistles, and white nationalist marches combined. It is the predominant justification for violence, murder, and hatred against Jews in Europe and the Middle East. And it’s now infiltrating American politics.

What was once festering on the progressive fringes has found its way into elected offices and the heart of the liberal activist movement. As Democrats increasingly turn on Israel, Jewish liberals, many of whom have already purposely muddled Jewish values with progressive ones, are attempting to untether Israel from its central role in Jewish culture and faith for political expediency.

Now, of course, merely being critical of the Israeli government isn’t anti-Semitic. No serious person has ever argued otherwise. I’ve never heard any Israeli official or AIPAC spokesman ever claim that Israel is a “stand-in for Jews writ large,” nor have I ever heard an Israeli prime minister profess to speak for all Jews. (We have the ADL for that.) Israel has featured both left-wing and right-wing governments, and like governments in any liberal democracy, its leaders can be corrupt, misguided, or incompetent. Israelis criticize their governments every day.

https://amgreatness.com/2019/01/07/carlsons-invisible-political

In spite of policy differences on social issues—from gay rights to gun control to abortion—the steadying core of modern-day conservatism always has been the defense of the individual over the state. During the Reagan era, the movement witnessed in real time how the disassembling of statist economic policies could resuscitate a fossilized free-market system to the benefit of nearly all Americans.

Before Reagan’s election, libertarian economist Milton Friedman warned that our economic freedom is threatened constantly by the capriciousness and self-interest of politicians and their special interest benefactors—and that was not okay: “Both the fragmentation of power and the conflicting government policies are rooted in the political realities of a democratic system that operates by enacting detailed and specific legislation,” Friedman wrote in his 1980 book, Free to Choose. He continued:

Such a system tends to give undue political power to small groups that have highly concentrated interests, to give greater weight to obvious, direct, and immediate effects of government action than to possibly more important but concealed, indirect, and delayed effects, to set in motion a process that sacrifices the general interest to serve special interests, rather than the other way around. There is, as it were, an invisible hand in politics that operates in precisely the opposite direction to Adam Smith’s invisible hand. Individuals who intend only to promote the general interest are led by the invisible political hand to promote a special interest that they had no intention to promote.

Once upon a time, that wasn’t a radical way of thinking on the Right. It was mainstream—it recognized that a behemoth of bigwigs could, and would, easily crush the little guy. The invisible political hand is not the baker and the butcher and the brewer, but rather the banker and the bureaucrat and the Bloombergs. And as we’ve seen in just one highly publicized case, when the baker defies the bureaucrat—to say nothing of the Bloombergs!—who suffers most?

But now that those same sentiments have been expressed, not just by President Trump but by Fox News host Tucker Carlson, they are considered heresy by the anti-Trump Right.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/272448/anatomy-trumpophobia-bruce-thornton

In an op-ed for The Washington Post, Mitt Romney launched a gratuitous attack on Donald Trump. Like his earlier criticisms, there’s not much of substance in this latest complaint, just recycled bromides typical of NeverTrumpRepublicans’ (NTR) obsession with style, optics, and “character.” As such, however, Romney’s screed is useful for analyzing the disgruntled elitism that explains not just Trumpophobia, but also the reasons for establishment Republicans’ alienation of millions of voters whose natural political home should be the Republican Party.

Romney begins with the by now stale assessment that Trump, despite his numerous achievements, “has not risen to the mantle of the office,” implying some recognized standard of “acting presidential” that Trump has failed to meet. But throughout our history, the definitions of such standards depend on what cohort of America’s electorate you talk to. Andrew Jackson certainly wasn’t “presidential” according to his predecessor John Quincy Adams. He skedaddled from DC to avoid Jackson’s inaugural festivities, when the White House was thrown open to ordinary citizens, including Jackson’s frontier and backwoods constituencies––“KING MOB,” according to Chief Justice Joseph Story–– who made “disgraceful scenes in the parlors,” as one journalist reported.

Second, these appeals to more recent ideas of presidential decorum imply that compared to previous presidents, Trump’s behavior is singularly reprehensible. But is Trump’s vulgar and braggadocios rhetoric more disqualifying than JFK’s or Bill Clinton’s sordid sexual escapades in the White House? Or LBJ’s barnyard epithets, racial slurs, duets with his dog Yuki, or penchant for rubbing himself against women? What’s “presidential” about Barack Obama fêting foul-mouthed, misogynist rappers at the White House? Or taking an interview with an internet carnival act who sat in a bath tub full of milk and Fruit Loops? Or using a sexual vulgarity to describe the Tea Party? Where were the NTRs and their lofty standards back then?

All such standards contain a good deal of subjectivity and hypocrisy, and they shift according to circumstance. They also reflect social class as well as regional variations. So too with Romney’s next specious claim, which occurs in the paragraph that summarizes the NTR’s indictment of the president’s character:

To a great degree, a presidency shapes the public character of the nation. A president should unite us and inspire us to follow “our better angels.” A president should demonstrate the essential qualities of honesty and integrity and elevate the national discourse with comity and mutual respect. As a nation, we have been blessed with presidents who have called on the greatness of the American spirit. With the nation so divided, resentful and angry, presidential leadership in qualities of character is indispensable. And it is in this province where the incumbent’s shortfall has been most glaring.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/gender-likability-and-opportunity-1154688864

Did you notice Friday’s news that the American jobs boom is proving especially beneficial to U.S. females? For some reason media folk seem focused only on two particular job seekers who tend to look for work in Washington, D.C.

Nationwide, conditions are highly encouraging. “Women have been driving this year’s improvements in labor force participation,” notes the Journal’s Lev Borodovsky. “Participation among women aged 25-34 years hit a multi-year high.”

Whether young or old, U.S. women are not just entering the labor market; they are gaining jobs. In the last 12 months, the number of employed U.S. women age 20 years and older has increased by more than 1.6 million, according to the Department of Labor’s household survey.

Labor’s separate establishment survey of employers shows more good news for female job seekers, with women rising as a percentage of the U.S. workforce. At the margin, as America approached the end of year two of the Trump era, it appears the U.S. economy was becoming more hospitable to women relative to men. This doesn’t easily fit into the popular media narrative about our times, so it may soon be lost in a flood of politicized analysis.

Money isn’t everything and not every new job represents a happy story. Some new hires are working by necessity more than by choice. But the overall picture is one of expanding opportunity and the robust job market for women surely exerts a positive impact on many more lives than most politicians will.

Though the latest economic news is particularly good for the gals, the guys also have a lot to celebrate given what can only be considered a blowout month of job creation and rising wages. Outside of government, both sexes seem to be waging a war on the post-2008 new normal.

But of course it’s what happens inside government that fascinates most of the press corps. Therefore many reporters have lately been most concerned about the opportunities available to two particular members of the U.S. labor force who, respectively, attended Yale’s law school and taught at Harvard’s.

Despite their expensive skills, former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D., Mass.) are, in a popular media telling, not well liked because of sexism. Annie Linskey and David Weigel recently wrote in the Washington Post:

Just hours after Elizabeth Warren announced her plans to run for president, a question began surfacing about a possible weakness. It wasn’t derived from opposition research into some facet of her life. It had nothing to do with her policy ideas.

https://www.nationalreview.com/2019/01/tucker-carlson-health-of-nations-markets/

Conservatives should heed Tucker Carlson’s advice. We shouldn’t assume that what is good for markets is good for all of us.

Tucker Carlson’s monologue heard round the world is interesting on its own terms. In it, he argues against a conservatism that consistently prizes commercial interests above those of everyone else. I encourage you to watch or read it in full. Yet the response on the right is as interesting as Carlson’s monologue itself, for it reveals a discomfort among some conservatives for balancing the tensions that exist in our coalition and in our ideology.

There is, by many on the right, an effort to sing the praises of market capitalism without acknowledging the tensions between our pro-market principles and everything else. I respect Ben Shapiro a great deal, but I found this paragraph in his response to Carlson curious:

Supply and demand economics has powered most of the world’s human beings out of extreme poverty, and led to the richest society in human history. It has allowed us to live longer, in bigger houses, in more comfort. It has meant fewer dead children and more living parents. If we’ve blown that advantage, that’s our own fault. Traditional conservatives recognized that the role of economics is to provide prosperity — to raise the GDP. The role of a social fabric and a value system is to provide meaning.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/272472/lara-kollab-and-disease-jew-hate-ari-lieberman

In medical terms, Lara Kollab’s career is dead on arrival or flat-lined. The prestigious Cleveland Clinic, where she was employed as a supervised resident, rightly fired her after only two months. Ohio’s Osteopathic Association informed me via Twitter that her medical training certificate is invalid because it was contingent upon her working in an accredited program. Because she was fired from the Cleveland Clinic, she is no longer in an accredited program. Moreover, because of the way medical residencies are scheduled, the earliest time that she can re-apply into another residency program is July 2020. Even then, it is doubtful that any hospital will accept her, except for perhaps Al-Shifa Hospital in Gaza, which also conveniently serves as a Hamas Headquarters in times of war with Israel.

For those of you who were in hibernation this past week, Kollab, whose parents are Palestinian and Muslim, posted numerous anti-Semitic comments on her social media platforms. She routinely referred to Jews as “dogs,” trivialized the murder of six million Jews during the Holocaust, claimed that “Zionists” controlled the media and “Israel runs America,” and repeatedly expressed a desire to inflict harm on Jews. But the one comment that put the nail in the coffin for Kollab was the tweet where she expressed her desire to provide her Jewish patients with the wrong medication, effectively poisoning them. Not exactly the sort of sentiment that’s consistent with the Hippocratic Oath and precisely the sort of sentiment you’d expect from the likes of Doctor Mengele.

On Friday, Kollab issued an apology of sorts through her lawyer. This represents the first step in Kollab’s attempt to salvage what’s left her tattered career and reputation. But the apology was equivocal and laced with deception and deflection. She claimed that the offensive, anti-Semitic posts were made years before she was accepted into medical school. That is false. The vile comments, which included deep-seated hatred of Israel and support for terrorism continued up until 2017 and constituted one steady and continuous stream of anti-Semitic invective. Her views remained constant and unchanged even after her acceptance to Touro.

One of the mysteries of the Kollab case is why she would choose Touro of all places. Touro accepts all students from diverse backgrounds and ethnicities but when it was established in 1970, its focus was on higher education for the Jewish community. Over the years, the college became recognized for its high educational standards and consequently attracted a broader and more diverse student body.