Author Archives: Dana Pico

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The lunatics are running the asylum The New York Times surrenders to the 'woke'

Those of us who pay attention to the media have been aware of the turmoil in Times Square. Most amusing is the fact that the New York Post has to report on The New York Times.

The Gray Lady’s convulsions continue.

Former New York Times Executive Editor Jill Abramson says she’s dismayed by the troubles surrounding the New York Times op-ed section, particularly the departure of its editor James Bennet after he published a commentary by a U.S. senator calling for military force to quell riots.

“I don’t think that James Bennet should have been forced out at The Times,” Abramson told The Post, adding she “felt terrible” about it.

“He and I worked together in the Washington Bureau of the Times and I think he is one of the great journalists of our time. So I was very sad to see him pushed out,” Abramson said.

Abramson, who led the Times newsroom from September 2011 to May 2014, expressed sympathy for Bari Weiss, who shockingly resigned from the op-ed desk this week in a blistering open letter to publisher A.G. Sulzberger. Weiss said she’d been bullied and criticized by a Twitter-obsessed Times culture increasingly intolerant of any ideas outside its progressive, leftist orthodoxy.

There’s more at the original.

We have previously noted the ‘turmoil’ at the Times, and that, just a few days later, editorial page editor James Bennet was fired resigned, and deputy editorial page editor James Dao was demoted reassigned to the newsroom. We noted Bari Weiss Twitter thread that “The civil war inside The New York Times between the (mostly young) wokes the (mostly 40+) liberals is the same one raging inside other publications and companies across the country. The dynamic is always the same.” A few days later, Miss Weiss was gone, too.

And, of course, we noted how the Gray Lady retained young reporter Ali Watkins, even though she had been sleeping with one of her sources, though the Times at least tried the fig-leaf cover of reassigning her to a different beat.

Well, there is a rather simple solution. Get rid of your child staffers!

Miss Weiss noted, in her resignation letter, that:

My own forays into Wrongthink have made me the subject of constant bullying by colleagues who disagree with my views. They have called me a Nazi and a racist; I have learned to brush off comments about how I’m “writing about the Jews again.” Several colleagues perceived to be friendly with me were badgered by coworkers. My work and my character are openly demeaned on company-wide Slack channels where masthead editors regularly weigh in. There, some coworkers insist I need to be rooted out if this company is to be a truly “inclusive” one, while others post ax emojis next to my name. Still other New York Times employees publicly smear me as a liar and a bigot on Twitter with no fear that harassing me will be met with appropriate action. They never are.

Miss Weiss used the terms “unlawful discrimination” and “hostile work environment” in her letter, something which should have immediately alerted the Times management and its attorneys that there is a huge potential legal problem. Assuming that Miss Weiss’ allegations are true, the Times maintained and paid for an internal chat system which some employees used to harass, on the basis of religion and ethnicity, another employee, to the extent that it forced the employee to resign. How is that not a firing offense?

At the very least, the Times ought to research and discipline all employees who created the hostile work environment, and specify that inter-company communications systems may only be used for professional communications.

But it’s worse than that: The editors of The New York Times quickly surrendered to the woke in its newsroom:

New York Times Says Senator’s Op-Ed Did Not Meet Standards

After a staff uproar, The Times says the editing process was “rushed.” Senator Tom Cotton’s “Send In the Troops” essay is now under review.

By Marc Tracy, Rachel Abrams and Edmund Lee | June 4, 2020

Executives at The New York Times scrambled on Thursday to address the concerns of employees and readers who were angered by the newspaper’s publication of an opinion essay by a United States senator calling for the federal government to send the military to suppress protests against police violence in American cities.

James Bennet, the editor in charge of the opinion section, said in a meeting with staff members late in the day that he had not read the essay before it was published. Shortly afterward, The Times issued a statement saying the essay fell short of the newspaper’s standards.

And here comes the money line:

“We’ve examined the piece and the process leading up to its publication,” Eileen Murphy, a Times spokeswoman, said in a statement. “This review made clear that a rushed editorial process led to the publication of an Op-Ed that did not meet our standards. As a result, we’re planning to examine both short-term and long-term changes, to include expanding our fact-checking operation and reducing the number of Op-Eds we publish.”

There you have it: Not only are the editors going to ‘expand’ their fact-checking of other people’s opinions, but they are going to reduce the number of outside opinion pieces they publish.

It was a matter of safety, don’t you know!

The new York Times is the most respected newspaper in the country, with a reputation for seriousness, sobriety, and maturity. But by surrendering to the “woke,”¹ the Times is surrendering to silliness, drunkenness and immaturity. The Gray Lady has repainted herself with the rainbow.²

The only way for the Times to regain its seriousness is to get rid of the unserious people. Just fire them all, and hire sensible reporters and writers to replace them. When your staff are significantly composed of people sympathetic with antifa and the crazies who set up the Capitol Hill Autonomous Zone, they are too far gone and too lacking in sane judgement to be working for you. Let them serve coffee at a Starbucks or something, and hire some of the good reporters out there, some of whom have lost their jobs due to industry downsizing, who have demonstrated some common sense.

A hint for the Times: the #woke and #BlackLivesMatter and #CancelCulture aren’t your customers in the first place! Those people get their news from television and internet click bait.
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¹ – From Wikipedia:

Woke (/ˈwoʊk/) as a political term of African-American origin refers to a perceived awareness of issues concerning social justice and racial justice. It is derived from the African-American Vernacular English expression “stay woke“, whose grammatical aspect refers to a continuing awareness of these issues.
By the late 2010s, woke had been adopted as a more generic slang term broadly associated with left-wing politics and cultural issues (with the terms woke culture and woke politics also being used). It has been the subject of memes and ironic usage. Its widespread use since 2014 is a result of the Black Lives Matter movement.

I shall confess to sometimes “ironic usage” of the term. To put it bluntly, I think that the ‘woke’ are just boneheadedly stupid.
² – Yes, by using the rainbow, I am mocking the “LGBT+” movement, which I consider to be scientifically unsound, morally wrong and culturally stupid. Every bird, every reptile, and every mammal on earth can distinguish between males and females of their own species, but the LGBTQ+ movement have lost that ability.
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What would the left see as going too far?

I often wonder: among those who support the various state governors’ and city mayors’ actions curtailing our constitutional rights to fight the spread of COVID-19, is there any step they could take that they would consider a step too far?

  • A Louisville judge has ordered a man who has been exposed to — the article did not specify ‘tested positive for — COVID-19 be fitted with ankle monitors, the type used to track some criminals and sex offenders on parole, but who has refused to self-quarantine. Two other Louisville residents who live in homes with someone who has tested positive are under similar ankle monitoring, including one who tested negative.
  • Governor Andy Beshear (D-KY) has had a hotline set up for informants neighbors to snitch on people non-compliant with his orders. Mr Beshear has also ordered that anyone entering the Commonwealth from neighboring states to self-quarantine for fourteen days, placed an armed deputy to enforce house arrest outside the home of a Nelson County man who tested positive but refused to self-quarantine, and ordered the state police to photograph license plates in church parking lots to see which parishioners are violating his orders suspending church services.
  • The state police in Pennsylvania are enforcing Governor Tom Wolf’s (D-PA) stay-at-home orders by citing a woman for ‘taking a drive’ for no ‘approved’ purpose.
  • The Philadelphia Police, whom the appropriately-named Commissioner Danielle Outlaw has ordered not to pursue petty crimes during the coronavirus emergency, pulled a man not wearing a mask off a SEPTA bus after he refused to debark.
  • Mayor Bill de Blasio (D-New York City) has stated that “the city could shut down certain places of worship if people continued to violate the state’s stay-at-home mandates and continue congregating for religious services there,” and that if religious leaders to not obey his orders, city officials “will take additional action up to the point of fines and potentially closing the building permanently.”
  • Governor Phil Murphy (D-NJ) stated that the police will break up any big parties and that the party-givers will be heavily fined.
  • Governor Gina Raimondo (D-RI) ordered the police to stop anyone with New York plates for questioning, and sent police and the National Guard “going door-to-door” in coastal communities, asking people if they’ve been to New York and requesting their contact information.
  • The sheriff of Wake County, North Carolina, ordered his department to stop processing background checks for new applications to purchase firearms.
  • Tarrant County, Texas, Commissioners, the majority of whom are Republicans, set fines and a jail term for up to 180 days for anyone who violates their emergency orders.
  • Mayor Jim Kenney (D-Philadelphia) issued ‘stay-at-home’ orders and banned “outdoor gatherings of any kind will be allowed unless they are related to essential businesses like food or medicine.”

These things are all violations of our First Amendment-guaranteed right of peaceable assembly and free exercise of religion, our Fourth Amendment-guaranteed right to be secure in body and property from government intrusion absent due process and a warrant, and our Fifth- and Fourteenth Amendment guarantees against deprivation of liberty and property absent due process of law.

Given that the majority seem to be cheering these authoritarian actions, these suspensions of our constitutional rights, because they are supposedly necessary, by elected state and municipal officials, I have to ask: just what would be a step too far even for the supporters of such actions?

  • An example: If someone said on social media, in response to Governor Beshear’s order that those entering the state must self-quarantine, “This is why we have the Second Amendment,” — note that I expressed that in terms which do not constitute a direct threat against anybody — would the left believe Mr Beshear went too far if he sent the state police to search the man’s house for weapons?
  • A nurse posted on Twitter that she quit her job because the hospital didn’t have enough Personal protective Equipment (PPE) and she was being exposed to COVID-19 patients, would the supporters say the governor of her state went too far if he said she could not resign and ordered her back to work?
  • If a state had too many people under self-quarantine orders to be able to enforce such against them, could the state then round up those people and place them in ‘camps’ where they could be monitored by guards?
  • If someone who had been exposed to the virus refused to be tested and refused to self-quarantine, could the state force him to be tested, and incarcerated until the test results came back, and keep him incarcerated or under house arrest for two weeks if the results came back positive?

Other scenarios could be constructed.

If we assume that those who support the actions of the various officials are intelligent people, concerned about our constitutional rights but believing that the protection of society somehow outweighs them, they must have some idea of what would be a step too far. I, for one, am interested in how such people think.

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COVID-19: It is our Constitution which is at the greatest risk of death

I have been critical of the illegal and unconstitutional actions some of our nation’s governors and mayors have taken during the COVID-19 crisis, who believe that they can use the COVID-19 emergency to violate the Constitution, but Mayor Bill deBlasio (NSDAP-New York City) takes first prize in the fascist authoritarian derby:

NYC may close churches, synagogues that don’t comply with coronavirus orders, de Blasio warns

By Vandana Rambaran | Fox News | May 29, 2020

New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio warned Friday that the city could shut down certain places of worship if people continued to violate the state’s stay-at-home mandates and continue congregating for religious services there.

“A small number of religious communities, specific churches and specific synagogues are unfortunately not paying attention to this guidance even though it’s so widespread,” de Blasio, a Democrat, said at a news conference on the coronavirus outbreak.

City officials have continued to work rigorously to control the spread of COVID-19 as cases climbed over 1,000 on Sunday despite statewide closures of schools and non-essential businesses.

His Dishonor said:

No faith tradition endorses anything that endangers the members of that faith. So, the NYPD, Fire Department, Buildings Department, and everyone has been instructed that if they see worship services going on, they will go to the officials of that congregation, they’ll inform them they need to stop the services and disperse. If that does not happen, they will take additional action up to the point of fines and potentially closing the building permanently.

The First Amendment to the Constitution specifies:

Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.

The Fourteenth Amendment has been used by the Supreme Court to ‘incorporate’ the Bill of Rights, including the First Amendment, to include state and local government action. Yet His Dishonor would prohibit the free exercise of religion, the way that some others have attempted to abridge the right of the people peaceably to assemble.

These idiotic mayors, and Mr deBlasio is but one of those who believes he has the right to be an authoritarian dictator, need to be slapped down, slapped down hard. They think that they are saving lives, but what they are doing is killing our constitutional rights. If we surrender them, ‘temporarily,’ because it’s an ’emergency,’ who can know when the next ’emergency’ will see them surrendered again.

Apparently we have learned nothing from history, nothing. In 1933, President Paul von Hindenburg, at the urging of Reichskanzler Adolf Hitler, issued a decree suspending the freedom of speech and of the press, the freedom to organize and assemble, and the privacy of postal, telegraphic and telephonic communications. Warrants for house searches and orders for confiscations as well as restrictions on property were also made less difficult to get, all because of the ’emergency’ of the Reichstag fire. Scream “Emergency, emergency!” and it seems that you can get anything passed, in 1933 Germany, and 2020 America.

It wasn’t long after, slightly less than a month actually, that the Reichstag and Reichsrat passed the Enabling Act, which allowed the cabinet, technically, but the Reichs Chancellor, in practice, to issue decrees which had the full force of parliamentary-passed law, making Adolf Hitler’s dictatorship legal and official.  In the United States, in 2020, we haven’t even taken that step, but are allowing governors and mayors to get away with ruling by decree, and they are doing so to almost universal praise by the very people on whose rights they are trampling.

It is incredible, really. The left have been screaming that President Trump is a fascist and a dictator ever since November 9, 2016, but they are meekly accepting dictatorial actions and authority by several Democratic governors and mayors. Sadly, a few Republican executives have done the same things.

Der Führer’s dictatorship was a popular one.  He took strong steps to fight the Depression, dramatically cutting unemployment (though workers’ rights were greatly curtailed), he ended what the people saw as the injustice of the Versailles Treaty, put on the spectacular show of the 1936 Olympics in Berlin, and incorporated Austria and part of Czechoslovakia into the Reich, all without war. Oh, certain people didn’t like it: homosexuals, Gypsies and, most of all, the Jews, but the vast majority of the public were not homosexuals or Gypsies or Jews, and much of the public helped the Nazi regime by pointing out who the ‘undesirables’ were.

And the authoritarianism of our mayors and governors seems to be popular here as well. There are 1,600+ responses to Governor Phil Purphy’s (NSDAP-NJ) tweet, in which he said,

NO CORONA PARTIES. They’re illegal, dangerous, and stupid. We will crash your party. You will pay a big fine. And we will name & shame you until EVERYONE gets this message into their heads,

and the vast majority were positive. It had 71,200+ “likes” on Twitter, and idiots like Vanessa Shives responding:

Dear @GovMurphy  why can’t you just arrest them so they have a criminal record that follows them for the rest of their lives?

In Kentucky, we have been treated to the spectacle of fawning adoration of Governor Andy Beshear (NSDAP-KY), who had ordered the virtual house arrest, enforced by armed guards, of a COVID-19 positive man who refused to self-quarantine.

Gun grabbers like Governor Murphy, Tom Wolf (NSDAP-PA) and John Carney (NSDAP-DE) included gun stores in their ‘non-essential’ business closure orders, trying to restrict people’s Second Amendment rights, though the latter two eventually backed off.

This will not end well. To paraphrase Benjamin Franklin, so many have surrendered essential liberty in the hopes of some temporary security from COVID-19. Dr Franklin was literally risking his life to sign the Declaration of Independence, while Americans today are mostly risking far less. While potentially deadly, most of those who do contract COVID-19 survive it, though uncomfortably for a couple of weeks.

The greater risk of death is to our constitutional rights, not because the Constitution has changed, but because so many have proven so willing to surrender their rights.

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Coronavirus Is Exposing the Economic Ignorance of the Left

Maureen May, a nurse writing in The Philadelphia Inquirer, said:

The federal government has the ability to launch the mass manufacture of equipment for the fight against COVID-19 through the Defense Production Act. On the state level, we urge Gov. Tom Wolf to take all actions to retrofit manufacturing facilities in Pennsylvania.

The shortage of some medical supplies to deal with the COVID-19 problem has developed into something of a liberal meme: why don’t our government leaders do something about this?

Well, the federal government does not have the ability to launch the mass manufacture of equipment if there are no idle production lines which can be started up, and with the orders for things pouring in, American manufacturers of the necessary supplies have already moved to full capacity production. That didn’t require an order from President Trump; market forces pushed that. If President Trump used the Defense Production Act to order more, he might, with massive government investment to build it, get private industry to build the facilities necessary, but such would almost surely never be ready until after the crisis has ended.

The author urged Governor Tom Wolf (D-PA) “to take all actions to retrofit manufacturing facilities,” and with that, she possibly recognized that the production lines for greater production did not currently exist. There are shuttered production facilities all across the Keystone State, but turning decades-abandoned steel mills into facilities for the production of medical equipment would take years. Roofs have to be fixed, building interiors exposed to the weather will take months of clean-up to be fit for the manufacture of medical equipment, architects and engineers will have to design the production facilities, construction crews and equipment suppliers will have to build to plans and install equipment, road and rail lines will have to be repaired, heating and air conditioning will have to be installed, plumbing and electrical work will have to be done, and everything inspected throughout the course of the ‘retrofitting’ process, with everything up to snuff on OSHA regulations, the sanitary requirements of medical equipment production, and workers will have to be hired and trained. This isn’t like walking into a room and turning on the light switch.

But, let’s assume that President Trump does invoke the DPA, and a few new factories are built to produce medical gloves and masks and respirators. By the time they’re built, the crisis will almost surely be over, but the additional production capacity will now be there. So much of our medical supplies are currently produced overseas, primarily in Mexico and China, because it’s cheaper to make them there. CNBC reported that, in 2017, the average hourly wage for factory workers in the People’s Republic was a whopping $3.60 per hour. That was a steep rise, and more than five times the hourly wage for factory workers in India.

Once the medical equipment situation stabilizes, that new industrial capacity in the United States is going to find itself competing with factories in Sri Lanka, where the average factory worker makes 50¢ an hour. A lot of people complained when President Trump raised some tariffs to help American manufacturing, but steep tariffs on medical supplies would be needed to keep those new American production lines working. And that, of course, means that health care costs will rise again.

Maureen May is a nurse, and I shall assume a good one. Regrettably, she doesn’t seem to know very much about production, manufacturing or economics, and the editors of The Philadelphia Inquirer, who should have at least some idea about production costs, given that the paper has been through two bankruptcy auctions in recent years, chose not to correct her.

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COVID-19 is the New Reichstag Fire

Following the electoral victories of the Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei in 1932, and the parliamentary chaos that resulted from no able to form a majority government, General Kurt von Schleicher was replaced as Reichskanzler by Adolf Hitler, appointed by President Paul von Hindenburg on January 30, 1933. Reichskanzler Hitler quickly began accumulating power — the Chancellor’s position was actually rather weak under the Weimar Republic — and then, following the staged Reichstag fire, President von Hindenburg, on the urging of his Chancellor, issued the Verordnung des Reichspräsidenten zum Schutz von Volk und Staat, the Decree of the Reich President for the Protection of People and State, which suspended many of the civil liberties of the German people. Since the positions of power in the government were held by the Nazis, this decree, along with the subsequent Ermächtigungsgesetz, the Enabling Act of 1933, enabled Reichskanzler Hitler to stifle individual liberties and rule by decree.

On the basis of Article 48 paragraph 2 of the Constitution of the German Reich, the following is ordered in defense against Communist state-endangering acts of violence:

§ 1. Articles 114, 115, 117, 118, 123, 124 and 153 of the Constitution of the German Reich are suspended until further notice. It is therefore permissible to restrict the rights of personal freedom, freedom of expression, including the freedom of the press, the freedom to organize and assemble, the privacy of postal, telegraphic and telephonic communications. Warrants for House searches, orders for confiscations as well as restrictions on property, are also permissible beyond the legal limits otherwise prescribed.

This is all well known, so surely no free and democratic state would make take such actions again, right?

“Govern me, daddy”: Kentucky Governor Andy Beshear a clean-cut sex symbol for the coronavirus age

People are now lusting after Kentucky’s “hot Mr. Rogers” because of his calm and empathetic leadership

by Erin Keane | March 21, 2020 | 6:54 PM EDT

Of all the wild turns 2020 could have taken, I doubt anyone had “Kentucky’s new governor becomes a sex symbol during the coronavirus crisis” on their bingo card, but here we are. Or rather, here we were until Democratic Gov. Andy Beshear, 42, delivered a loving yet stern call-out during his press briefing Wednesday to defiant bingo halls that weren’t closing to enforce social distancing to reduce the spread of COVID-19. These updates, live-streamed daily at 5 p.m. Eastern time, have become must-see and -listen events for Kentuckians thanks to Beshear’s combo of trustworthy information, empathy, and uplifting we’re all in this together messages. “If you are a bingo parlor in Pike County, you ought to be closed by the end of today,” he said, with unmistakable concern in his eyes. “Those parlors cater to an older and more at-risk crowd.” Forget being brave enough to face the toilet paper-hoarding supermarket crowds, there’s a new benchmark for courage: Andy Beshear’s not scared of angering stir-crazy grandmothers in order to protect his people.

“Govern me, daddy,” cracked Natasha Collier of Lexington on a Reddit thread in response to Beshear’s decisive leadership. When I reached out to ask her about her post, Collier told me that was her response to “a lesbian friend of mine who said that she was starting to develop a crush” on Gov. Beshear too. They’re not alone; just in my social circle I’ve noticed Andy Thirst where before none existed. Turns out competence and empathy, perhaps, are the biggest turn-ons.

Erin Keane is the Editor in Chief for Salon, the very liberal e-zine for which Amanda Marcotte writes, which lets you know just how kooky-left the place is. Mrs Keane grew up in the Bluegrass State, so I suppose it isn’t surprising that she would have paid additional attention to the Commonwealth’s Governor, but her article is truly fawning.

Plenty of the love for Beshear is fatherly or platonic, of course. A Facebook group, “andy beshear memes for social distancing teens,” has become a go-to repository for images comparing Beshear to everything from the Mandalorian (babysitting Kentuckians, represented by Baby Yoda) to Disney’s “The Lion King” father Mufasa (Kentuckians are Simba, of course). He’s cast as Jason Momoa tackling Henry Cavill standing in for a bingo parlor. By decree of the admins, the memes are supposed to be wholesome, and mostly they are. Nevertheless, innuendo persists. In one post, “SNL” star Pete Davidson is cast as Andy Beshear with Kentuckians represented by Ariana Grande, licking a lollipop and looking up at him in unfiltered lust; an image of Jeff Goldblum suggests that while Beshear is focused on keeping Kentuckians safe, some constituents wish he would, um, sexually choke them at the same time.

Yeah, “sexually choke” is probably the right description, because, like so many other Democratic — and sadly, a few Republican — Governors out there are trampling on the civil liberties of the public. As we have previously noted, Mr Beshear has placed a 53-year-old Nelson County man into what amounts to house arrest, forcing a COVID-19 positive individual who refuses to self-isolate to remain in his home, with an armed guard outside to prevent him from leaving. This was done without any due process of law, without any day in court for the man, and the left are cheering this!

What will the armed deputy do if this man decides to leave his home? Will he shoot him?

The Fourteenth Amendment states, in part:

No State shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States; nor shall any State deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.

Yet the Commonwealth of Kentucky, led by Führer und Reichskanzler Beshear, are using existing state law to deny this man his liberty, without any due process of law, ans Salon’s Editor in Chief is apparently getting sexually excited over it. Should we have to remind Americans that the German people were getting very, very excited and happy over Reichskanzler Hitler’s strong and decisive actions during the Depression? Mrs Keane seems to be absolutely gushing about Mr Beshear “sexually chok(ing)” his fans . . . and other Kentuckians as well.

Of course, it’s not only in Kentucky where governors are simply suspending civil rights to fight COVID-19. Governor Tom Wolf (D-PA) is doing similar things, ordering all ‘non-essential’ businesses to close down, including the possibility of imprisonment for failure to comply.

Today’s left just love some strong leadership, and that it tramples upon our civil rights, well they don’t care about that, not as long as the leadership is being shown by a Democrat, and not that evil fascist dictator Donald Trump! Mrs Keane is right there, her right arm raised in salute, shouting “Seig heil!” right along with the rest of the crowd.

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The Left Love Them Some Authoritarianism!

Benjamin Franklin once said, “Those who would give up essential Liberty, to purchase a little temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety.” It would seem that Tony Perman, an associate professor of music at Grinnell College, deserved neither Liberty nor Safety:

Coronavirus in China kept me under quarantine. I felt safer there than back in the U.S.

Our laissez-faire attitude, prioritization of personal freedom and utter lack of government leadership have left Americans confused and exposed.

by Tony Perman | March 14, 2020 | 11:17 AM EDT

When my family returned to the United States after six weeks of quarantine in Shanghai, our friends and relatives responded with congratulations and relief that we were finally safe. Less than a week since arriving back home, however, we don’t quite share our loved ones’ sentiments. We felt safer in Shanghai as conditions improved than we do in the U.S.

Our anxiety was triggered as soon as we stepped on American soil. In China, airport medical checks happened before we were allowed into areas with other passengers. At Chicago O’Hare International Airport, we waited in line with hundreds of other passengers at border security before finally being identified as having just returned from China. At that point, we were escorted to the side by an apologetic young man in a Centers for Disease Control and Prevention jacket who checked our temperatures and gave us a packet informing us that, as individuals traveling from China, the CDC requested we isolate ourselves as much as possible for 14 days. Airport staff never even asked where we were going.

I’ve now lived through a coronavirus quarantine in the two countries, and the differences are stark well beyond their airports. In China, the obligation to isolate felt shared and the public changed their habits almost immediately. Sterilization, cleanliness and social distancing were prioritized by everyone at all times. Rightly or wrongly, the Chinese state’s heavy-handed approach seemed to work.

In contrast, individual liberty is the engine that drives American exceptionalism. There are certainly valid questions about how much of it to sacrifice in the name of the public good, but our laissez-faire attitude, prioritization of personal freedom and utter lack of government leadership have left Americans confused and exposed.

There’s more at the original.

There are, of course, many reasons to feel safer in the People’s Republic of China: the crime rate is extremely low, and private ownership of firearms is almost entirely forbidden. From Wikipedia:

Political power grows out of the barrel of a gun (Chinese: 枪杆子里面出政权; pinyin: Qiānggǎn zi lǐmiàn chū zhèngquán) is a phrase which was coined by Chinese communist leader Mao Zedong. The phrase was originally used by Mao during an emergency meeting of the Communist Party of China on 7 August 1927, at the beginning of the Chinese Civil War. Mao employed the phrase a second time on 6 November 1938, during his concluding speech at the sixth Plenary Session of the CPC’s sixth Central Committee; again, the speech was concerned with the Civil War, and now also with World War II. A portion of the 1938 speech was excerpted and included in Mao’s Selected Works, with the title “Problems of War and Strategy”. Finally in 1964, the central phrase was reproduced again and popularized as an early quotation in Mao’s Quotations from Chairman Mao Tse-Tung.

The Chinese Communist Party knew all of that, and that is why they made private ownership of firearms illegal: the Communists didn’t want anyone else to have political power.

And thus China is safe, far safer than the United States in many respects. People are very safe there . . . as long as they keep their mouths shut, don’t rock the boat, and do as they are told. The “prioritization of personal freedom” is something nobody has to worry about in the People’s Republic, because it doesn’t exist. Criticize the Chinese government, the way Dr Perman did ours? That will earn you a quick trip to the police station, and probably many, many years being taught the error of your ways in prison, and Chinese prisons are not nice places.

It is easy for the Chinese government to impose the conditions they wanted: the people knew, do it or go to jail.

I am loathe to credit this response to some kind of ingrained “collectivism” that has developed during decades of Communist Party rule, but the communal buy-in to the need for universal behavior change was astonishing. Certainly the reality of authoritarian control, the subservience of the individual to the state or the collective, and the pressure to conform made widespread habit change both more feasible and acceptable, even if due to fear of retribution. But there was a palpable “all for one and one for all” ethos.

Perhaps Dr Perman, who seemingly approves of Communist controls, given that his wife and he moved their family to Shanghai “to give our son the chance to live a Chinese life,” is loathe to attribute the collective response to decades of tyranny, but I am not. The “subservience of the individual to the state or the collective” is apparently something he was willing to accept if he was going to emigrate from the US to the PRC.

Of course, he’s hardly the only American to do that. Führer und Reichskanzler Beshear nutzt COVID-19 als eigenes Reichstagsfeuer, und die Demokraten heben die Arme und rufen: Seig heil!

So, yes, we can impose more stringent protections against COVID-19 . . . if we are willing to surrender the “individual liberty (that) is the engine that drives American exceptionalism.” Dr Perman apparently is; real Americans, not so much.

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Déjà Vu All Over Again

Early 2016 is reborn! From The New York Times:

No, Not Sanders, Not Ever

He is not a liberal, he’s the end of liberalism.

By David Brooks | Opinion Columnist | February 27, 2020

A few months ago, I wrote a column saying I would vote for Elizabeth Warren over Donald Trump. I may not agree with some of her policies, but culture is more important than politics. She does not spread moral rot the way Trump does.

Now I have to decide if I’d support Bernie Sanders over Trump.

We all start from personal experience. I covered the Soviet Union in its final decrepit years. The Soviet and allied regimes had already slaughtered 20 million people through things like mass executions and intentional famines. Those regimes were slave states. They enslaved whole peoples and took away the right to say what they wanted, live where they wanted and harvest the fruits of their labor.

And yet every day we find more old quotes from Sanders apologizing for this sort of slave regime, whether in the Soviet Union, Cuba or Nicaragua. He excused the Nicaraguan communists when they took away the civil liberties of their citizens. He’s still making excuses for Castro.

To sympathize with these revolutions in the 1920s was acceptable, given their original high ideals. To do so after the Hitler-Stalin pact, or in the 1950s, is appalling. To do so in the 1980s is morally unfathomable.

There’s much more at the link.

David Brooks is yet another of the conservative #NeverTrumpers, and while liberals like Bari Weiss, a fellow Times opinion writer, and others have been spreading Mr Brooks’ message, much of the left have no use for him.

Mr Brooks wrote a similar article in March of 2016, with virtually the same title, “No, Not Trump, Not Ever.” His complain then, as now, is less about the individual than it is about populism.

Populism is a political approach that strives to appeal to ordinary people who feel that their concerns are disregarded by established elite groups, but nothing in that definition naturally pushes it to the right or the left. Being an “us against them”, plebeians versus patricians type of philosophy, populism is somewhat defined by whom the elites happen to be. In 2016, for Donald Trump’s voters, as well as the Brexiteers, it was the liberal political establishment, while, in the same year, for the #BernieBros, it was capitalism and the economic elites.

The two articles by Mr Brooks are not mirror images of each other. In the newer, he claims that Mr Sanders is more revolutionary than he claims to be, and that his partisans are so disgusted with the system that they want to tear it down.

A liberal sees inequality and tries to reduce it. A populist sees remorseless class war and believes in concentrated power to crush the enemy.

Four years previously, he wrote:

Trump voters are a coalition of the dispossessed. They have suffered lost jobs, lost wages, lost dreams. The American system is not working for them, so naturally they are looking for something else.

In the older article, the author, noting Mr Trump’s stunning, unexpected electoral success, is explicit in his contempt for the American voters:

The voters have spoken.

In convincing fashion, Republican voters seem to be selecting Donald Trump as their nominee. And in a democracy, victory has legitimacy to it. Voters are rarely wise but are usually sensible. They understand their own problems. And so deference is generally paid to the candidate who wins.

And deference is being paid. Gov. Rick Scott of Florida is urging Republicans to coalesce around Trump. Pundits are coming out with their “What We Can Learn” commentaries. Those commentaries are built on a hidden respect for the outcome, that this is a rejection of a Republicanism that wasn’t working and it points in some better direction.

The question is: Should deference be paid to this victor? Should we bow down to the judgment of these voters?

He was less dismissive, explicitly, in the newer article, but it remains implied:

There is a specter haunting the world — corrosive populisms of right and left. These populisms grow out of real problems but are the wrong answers to them. For the past century, liberal Democrats from F.D.R. to Barack Obama knew how to beat back threats from the populist left. They knew how to defend the legitimacy of our system, even while reforming it.

Mr Brooks’ argument boils down to one simple thing, the old Wizard of Id cartoon in which the town crier yells, “The peasants are revolting,” to which the king replies, “You can say that again.”

Mr Brooks, whose net worth is estimated at $9 million, is definitely not one of the peasants. His political instincts are at least moderately conservative, but he was perfectly fine with 2016 Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton, saying that she was determined, industrious even though somewhat unimaginative. To him, Mrs Clinton, though she’d doubtlessly have been further to the left than he would have liked, would still be a safe muddle at least somewhat close to the middle. For the patricians, a muddle in the middle is just what they want. It keeps them nice and safe and protects their status. Had he been in the Continental Congress on July 2, 1776, when Congress officially declared our independence, he would have voted against it.

But Mr Brooks, in his rhetorical question asking whether the judgement of the voters should be respected, at least recognized part of the problem:

Moreover, many in the media, especially me, did not understand how (Trump voters) would express their alienation. We expected Trump to fizzle because we were not socially intermingled with his supporters and did not listen carefully enough. For me, it’s a lesson that I have to change the way I do my job if I’m going to report accurately on this country.

No, his cronies and he were not “socially intermingled” with Mr Trump’s supporters, as the dismissive attitude of the coasties expressed by the term “flyover country” so potently demonstrated. As I noted on September 6, 2016, Heather Long, now of The Washington Post but then for CNN Money, reported that “Most Americans think unemployment is a lot higher than 5%. Americans think the economy is in far worse shape than it is.”

The U.S. unemployment rate is only 4.9%, but 57% of Americans believe it’s a lot higher than that, according to a new survey by the John J. Heldrich Center for Workforce Development at Rutgers University.

The general public has “extremely little factual knowledge” about the job market and labor force, Rutgers found.

It’s another example of how experts on Wall Street and in Washington see the economy differently than the regular Joe. Many of the nation’s top economic experts say that America is “near full employment.” The unemployment rate has actually been at or below 5% for almost a year — millions of people have found jobs in what is the best period of hiring since the late 1990s.

But regular people appear to have their doubts about how healthy America’s employment picture is. Nearly a third of those survey by Rutgers believe unemployment is actually at 9%, or higher.

I pointed out than that while the ‘official’ U-3 unemployment rate was 4.9%, the U-6 unemployment rate for August, 2016 was 9.7%,¹ not too far off of the ‘common people’s’ estimate that it was “9%, or higher.”

The esteemed Mr Brooks may have recognized his disconnect with the commoners in flyover country, at least back in 2016, but that doesn’t seem to have changed his vision: he really cannot see, cannot understand, what the voters are thinking and feeling.

In this, President Trump ought to be very concerned. It has been reported that Senator Sanders is the opponent most Republicans want to win the nomination, believing that the kooky commie would be the easiest to beat, but remember, Mrs Clinton wanted Mr Trump to win the GOP nomination in 2016, thinking that he would be the easiest candidate for her to defeat. These things don’t always work out the way people expect.
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¹ – U-6 unemployment is defined as “Total unemployed, plus all persons marginally attached to the labor force. Persons marginally attached to the labor force are those who currently are neither working nor looking for work but indicate that they want and are available for a job and have looked for work sometime in the past 12 months. Discouraged workers, a subset of the marginally attached, have given a job-market related reason for not currently looking for work. Persons employed part time for economic reasons are those who want and are available for full-time work but have had to settle for a part-time schedule.

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Hold them accountable!

The case of Hugo Villanueva-Morales has made the news. Mr Villanueva-Morales and Javier Alatorre, 23, are the suspects in the Tequila KC bar mass shooting in Kansas City, Kansas. Mr Alatorre has been apprehended and charged with four counts of murder, but Mr Villanueva-Morales is still at large. In the shooting, Mr Villanueva-Morales had, allegedly, been kicked out of the bar, left, got Mr Alatorre, and the two then returned to the bar and started shooting.

The mass shooting hasn’t attracted quite as much attention from the gun control press, possibly because the motive wasn’t some form of white supremacy but an intoxicated rage, and, I have to wonder, because the alleged perpetrators aren’t evil white men.

It also turns out that Mr Villanueva-Morales is a previously convicted felon, so he was in violation of gun control laws already, simply by having a weapon. And he shouldn’t have been able to commit the crime at all, because he should have already been in jail. From the Kansas City Star:

Judge gave KCK mass shooting suspect probation last year instead of 9 years in prison

By Katie Bernard | October 9, 2019 | 12:03 PM

More than a year before Hugo Villanueva-Morales allegedly walked into a packed Kansas City, Kansas, bar and began shooting, a Leavenworth judge had given him probation instead of nine years in prison.

In doing so the judge, who made news earlier this year for another controversial sentencing decision, departed from state sentencing guidelines over the objections of prosecutors.

Further down:

More than a year ago, in August 2018, Villanueva-Morales pleaded guilty to trafficking contraband in the Lansing Correctional Facility, where he was serving time for a 2011 aggravated robbery in Wyandotte County.

Trafficking contraband in prison is a charge that can carry more than nine years in prison.

Leavenworth Judge Michael Gibbens instead sentenced him to two years of probation because he “accepted responsibility” according to court documents.

Prosecutors opposed the decision.

“We did argue for prison,” said County Attorney Todd Thompson. “But there’s no way anyone could foresee this horrific tragedy from a possession of synthetic marijuana case in prison.”

Gibbens did not respond to The Star’s request for comment.

Gibbens is the same judge who made national news earlier this year when he reduced the sentence of a convicted sex offender because he said the 13 and 14-year-old girls who were victims in the abuse were actually “aggressors.”

The Star’s story has more on Mr Villanueva-Morales’ rap sheet, but that’s not necessary for this article. The alleged perpetrator is the same kind of bad dude we far too frequently read about, and an idiotic judge, who had the opportunity to keep Mr Villanueva-Morales locked up swallowed some sob story and gave him probation, in effect turning him lose on the streets of Kansas City, Kansas.

The article noted that the Kansas state legislature, following Judge Gibbens decision in the child molestation case, changed the law to disallow judges from reducing sentences on sex crimes against minors just because the children might have been willing participants. But no disciplinary action was taken against the judge, because even though he is boneheadedly stupid, he apparently broke no laws.

And that’s the problem: public servants in the lawful performance of their duties are not accountable for the consequences of their actions. But, make no mistake about it: if Messrs Villanueva-Morales and Alatorre actually are the killers, then Judge Gibbens is just as responsible for Everardo Meza, 29, Alfredo Calderon Jr., 29, Francisco Garcia Anaya, 34, and Martin Rodriguez-Gonzalez, 58 being stone-cold graveyard dead as the shooters! If Messrs Villanueva-Morales and Alatorre are convicted of this crime, Judge Gibbens should be right there with them, sharing the same prison cell.

He won’t, of course, because he was simply exercising his judgement in the performance of his duties, but his terrible judgement left four people dead and five others wounded. He should be publicly shamed, shunned by everyone who knows him, and driven from the bench. People should refuse to do business with him. Pickets should be set up outside of his home. The families of the victims should try to sue him, personally, into penury and homelessness, and while such a lawsuit probably wouldn’t work, it would expose him to more ridicule and public shaming, and cost him a good deal of money in legal fees.

We need to hold public officials accountable for the consequences of their decisions. Law enforcement officers who let illegal immigrants go rather than turning them over to ICE should he be held personally and criminally liable for any further crimes committed by those illegals. Judges who let off hardened criminals with light, or no, sentences upon conviction, should he held personally, and criminally, liable for crimes committed by the thugs they had the power to send to prison, but did not.

Hold them accountable!

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Once Again, The New York Times Opines Against First Amendment Protections . . . For Wrongthinkers

In 1971, President Richard Nixon sought a restraining order to prevent The New York Times and The Washington Post from printing more of the so-called “Pentagon Papers,” technically the Report of the Office of the Secretary of Defense Vietnam Task Force, a classified history and assessment of American policy and operations in the Vietnam war. The Times and the Post fought the injunctions in court, the Times winning in New York Times Co. v. United States, 403 U.S. 713 (1971). The Times was all about the First Amendment and Freedom of the Press.

Well, that was then, and this is now:

Free Speech Is Killing Us

Noxious language online is causing real-world violence. What can we do about it?

By Andrew Marantz¹ | October 4, 2019 | 6:01 AM EDT

There has never been a bright line between word and deed. Yet for years, the founders of Facebook and Twitter and 4chan and Reddit — along with the consumers obsessed with these products, and the investors who stood to profit from them — tried to pretend that the noxious speech prevalent on those platforms wouldn’t metastasize into physical violence. In the early years of this decade, back when people associated social media with Barack Obama or the Arab Spring, Twitter executives referred to their company as “the free-speech wing of the free-speech party.” Sticks and stones and assault rifles could hurt us, but the internet was surely only a force for progress.

No one believes that anymore. Not after the social-media-fueled campaigns of Narendra Modi and Rodrigo Duterte and Donald Trump; not after the murder of Heather Heyer in Charlottesville, Va.; not after the massacres in a synagogue in Pittsburgh, two mosques in Christchurch, New Zealand, and a Walmart in a majority-Hispanic part of El Paso. The Christchurch shooter, like so many of his ilk, had spent years on social media trying to advance the cause of white power. But these posts, he eventually decided, were not enough; now it was “time to make a real life effort post.” He murdered 52 people.

That the editors of the Times considered this an important article is demonstrated by the title graphic, a bit more ornate than is typical:

It was spread full sized across the screen, taking up both the width and depth of my fairly large-sized monitor. This was a can’t-not-notice display, something the editors use to grab your attention.

Mr Marantz, the author, continued:

Having spent the past few years embedding as a reporter with the trolls and bigots and propagandists who are experts at converting fanatical memes into national policy, I no longer have any doubt that the brutality that germinates on the internet can leap into the world of flesh and blood.

The question is where this leaves us. Noxious speech is causing tangible harm. Yet this fact implies a question so uncomfortable that many of us go to great lengths to avoid asking it. Namely, what should we — the government, private companies or individual citizens — be doing about it?

He has now made the argument of speech causing tangible harm, pretty much the opposite argument made by the Times in 1971, when the government claimed a “clear and present danger” in publishing the Pentagon Papers. Speech, at least the unregulated speech of “trolls and bigots and propagandists,” has caused direct harm, and, of course, he argued that free speech, in the form of “social-media-fueled campaigns,” helped elect right-wing leaders Narendra Modi, Rodrigo Duterte, and, of course, the evil Donald Trump. No wonder Mr Marantz is appalled!

The author’s bias is apparent in so many ways. The speech he decries is all from the right side of the political spectrum. Not a word was published against the speech of Antifa, which has led to violence from the far left in this country. There was no criticism of speech by those supporting the socialist regime in Nicaragua or advocating the same socialism which led to totalitarianism and as many as 100 million deaths in the old Soviet Union, in Communist China, in Pol Pot’s Cambodia and North Korea. No, he was concerned that a social media campaign helped elect Donald Trump!

Mr Marantz, while exercising his First Amendment rights, clearly does not like the unregulated speech of others:

After one of the 8chan-inspired massacres — I can’t even remember which one, if I’m being honest — I struck up a conversation with a stranger at a coffee shop. We talked about how bewildering it was to be alive at a time when viral ideas can slide so precipitously into terror. Then I wondered what steps should be taken. Immediately, our conversation ran aground. “No steps,” he said. “What exactly do you have in mind? Thought police?” He told me that he was a leftist, but he considered his opinion about free speech to be a matter of settled bipartisan consensus.

I imagined the same conversation, remixed slightly. What if, instead of talking about memes, we’d been talking about guns? What if I’d invoked the ubiquity of combat weapons in civilian life and the absence of background checks, and he’d responded with a shrug? Nothing to be done. Ever heard of the Second Amendment?

So, he believes that it is a problem, is out of character, for a self-identified “leftist” to support freedom of speech? We did learn about his feelings concerning our rights under the Second Amendment; is it any wonder that conservatives don’t trust leftists?

Using “free speech” as a cop-out is just as intellectually dishonest and just as morally bankrupt. For one thing, the First Amendment doesn’t apply to private companies. Even the most creative reader of the Constitution will not find a provision guaranteeing Richard Spencer a Twitter account. But even if you see social media platforms as something more akin to a public utility, not all speech is protected under the First Amendment anyway. Libel, incitement of violence and child pornography are all forms of speech. Yet we censor all of them, and no one calls it the death knell of the Enlightenment.

No, actually. We punish the consequences of such speech, but we do not censor it. We do not have all speech going through government-controlled channels to nip such things in the bud before they ever hit people’s computer screens, but we can punish people for causing harm by speech. But perhaps that government-controlled channel is what he wants:

Congress could fund, for example, a national campaign to promote news literacy, or it could invest heavily in library programming. It could build a robust public media in the mold of the BBC. It could rethink Section 230 of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act — the rule that essentially allows Facebook and YouTube to get away with (glorification of) murder. If Congress wanted to get really ambitious, it could fund a rival to compete with Facebook or Google, the way the Postal Service competes with FedEx and U.P.S.

Facebook and YouTube get away with the glorification of murder? Might as well mention Hollywood, and the body count racked up by Arnold Schwarzeneggar’s Terminator series, Sylvester Stallone’s Rambo movies and, let’s be honest, every action-adventure movie ever made. Heck, even the Hobbit and Lord of the Rings movies were filled with death and destruction, albeit that it was mostly orcs and goblins who bit the dust therein.

But I digress. Mr Marantz apparently sees some great good in a government-controlled social media network, forgetting, perhaps, the old Russian saying, В Правде нет новостей, и в Известиях нет правды.² Government organs of information are controlled by the government, and if the BBC is mostly innocuous, it isn’t completely. Given how the British have criminalized certain speech, something happening in the United States as well, perhaps Mr Marantz might remember just who is President. Perhaps had such existed when Barack Obama was President, the government could have censored all of the information about Hillary Clinton and gotten her elected President, which would have made Mr Marantz happier, but Donald Trump is President now, and might be for the next 5¼ years. I’m guessing that he wouldn’t like an official social media channel controlled by conservatives.

Free speech is a bedrock value in this country. But it isn’t the only one. Like all values, it must be held in tension with others, such as equality, safety and robust democratic participation. Speech should be protected, all things being equal. But what about speech that’s designed to drive a woman out of her workplace or to bully a teenager into suicide or to drive a democracy toward totalitarianism? Navigating these trade-offs is thorny, as trade-offs among core principles always are. But that doesn’t mean we can avoid navigating them at all.

Those first two examples already have legal problems, in that they aren’t subject to prior censorship, but the speakers can be held liable for illegal actions.

The third, “drive a democracy toward totalitarianism?” That is what bothers Mr Marantz, given that he seems to believe that was what happened in 2016. I could argue that it is the policies enunciated by the various Democratic candidates, which include confiscation of some firearms, and restrictions on personal actions and vehicles with the “Green New Deal” proposals; why shouldn’t those be censored?

Mr Marantz suggested that it needn’t be the government, that private companies could “ban inflammatory accounts, take down graphic videos, even rewrite their terms of service.” That’s something they already do, far too much, with a decided tendency to censor conservatives much more than the left. Twitter bans “deadnaming” and “misgendering”, not allowing any discussion of whether the ‘transgendered’ really are the sex they claim to be rather than their biological sex — something The New York Times gave Parker Malloy space to claim actually promotes freedom of speech³ — and Mr Marantz himself noted, with some apparent glee, that two far-right speakers, Alex Jones and Milo Yiannopoulos, “have been permanently banned from all major (social media) platforms.”

The notion of banning “egregious actors” on the left?  That got no support, or even mention, by Mr Marantz.

Mr Marantz’s totalitarian impulses were evident in his concluding paragraph:

In one of our conversations, (John A. Powell, a law professor at the University of California, Berkeley) compared harmful speech to carbon pollution: People are allowed to drive cars. But the government can regulate greenhouse emissions, the private sector can transition to renewable energy sources, civic groups can promote public transportation and cities can build sea walls to prepare for rising ocean levels. We could choose to reduce all of that to a simple dictate: Everyone should be allowed to drive a car, and that’s that. But doing so wouldn’t stop the waters from rising around us.

The philosophy of the left is the impulse to control, to control everybody. It’s supposedly all for our own good, of course, so we couldn’t possibly object to that.

The New York Times has a long and distinguished record of being champions for First Amendment protections and freedoms . . . for itself. For other people? Not so much. The editors of the Times appear to believe in the freedom of speech for those who rightthink, but for those who commit the thoughtcrime of wrongthink, well, they don’t really deserve to be able to speak, do they? After all, it’s harmful to our civil society!
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¹ – Andrew Marantz (@AndrewMarantz) is a staff writer for The New Yorker. This essay is adapted from his forthcoming book, “Antisocial: Online Extremists, Techno-Utopians, and the Hijacking of the American Conversation.”
² – There is no news in Pravda, and no truth in Izvestia.
³ – Parker Malloy is a male claiming that he is female.
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