NABJ: The First Six Minutes

Via Threads.

I don't think Trump precisely means to praise the fictional criminal; I think his idea is that Lecter is a typical example of a border-crossing asylum seeker, which is equally nuts. But he can't help showing the appreciation for Lecter's comic stylings.

TRUMP:

First of all, I don't think I have ever been asked a question in such a horrible manner, first question. You don't even say "Hello, how are you."

In fact, Rachel Scott began the Trump interview at the National Association of Black Journalists convention by thanking the former president for showing up.

SCOTT:

Mr. President, we so appreciate you giving us an hour of your time.

Only then did she ask her question (given his long history of racially insensitive remarks—such as telling congresswomen of color to "go back to where you came from", calling Black district attorneys "animal" and "rabbit" and Black journalists "losers" whose questions are "stupid and racist"—"why should Black voters trust you?") That's the first lie in the first six minutes of the transcript. More, big and little, follow.

***

For the record: Identity Politics

 A sequence that got disjointed into a bunch of different threads, presented here in part just so I could organize it a little better.

The guy who gave the invocation at the anti-Hillary "fart-in" at the 2016 Democratic convention is telling us how to communicate with working people?https://t.co/P8FvtUAbOk

— Steve M. (@nomoremister) June 2, 2022

Heh, I didn't know that.

Did you read the article or just responding to my tweeted summary?

— Nathan Becker🇺🇸 🕊🗽 (@netbacker) May 31, 2022

Identity Politics

 

Caitlyn Jenner announced she's running to be governor of California. I checked her website and there's nothing about any platform or policies but there are links to buy merchandise. That's all you need to know about her priorities right there.

— Fifty Shades of Whey (@davenewworld_2) April 23, 2021

I mean, what do you expect? This is what they do now. Doesn't make me think there's anything insincere about the campaign, just that policy isn't its subject matter. Even the merch isn't, though it's important, not so much as a fundraising strategy, I think, as a vehicle for expressing brand identification. 

I get a little dizzy trying to comprehend the way Republicans play identity politics, because it has different levels that seem superficially to contradict each other: they pick representatives from more or less marginal groups, sometimes relatively sober examples like Senator Tim Scott of South Carolina, sometimes really silly ones like this Caitlyn Jenner thing, and then get shocked and indignant with how the Black community, or the LGBTQ+ community, or whoever it might be, don't welcome them. 

Identity politics with David Brooks: The wolves are in the henhouse

National Geographic lightweight house via Daily Mail. 

David Brooks's hot take on the Trump-Putin summit ("The Murder-Suicide of the West", taking off from Jonah Goldberg's new title but adding the murder part for added drama, apparently)  was that it was like when C.S. Lewis's mother died, not that he was there, it was in 1908, but he's read about it, and it's pretty sad, she had cancer and the kid was only ten, and they shipped him off to a boarding school with a psychotic headmaster afterwards, so that it may not sound exactly like the Trump-Putin summit to you, but the thing is Trump has broken up with Europe, and Europe is our mother, as Americans, the source of democracy, universities, good manners, luxury hotels, and public parks! Trump is taking our Mom away! He's stuck her in an assisted-living facility and he's dating that trampy little Russia!

I'm barely kidding:

For the Record: Is Samantha Bee a Traitor to Feminism?

The main thing wrong with the expression used by the comedian Samantha Bee to describe Senior Counselor to the President Ivanka Trump, by which I mean the only thing wrong with it, was that it gave Republicans a way of distracting us from the issue Bee was talking about, which didn't seem to be a part of any of the news stories, but as I learned from Steve, it was the issue that's obsessed me all week. Some idiot kid set me off last night:

If you think feminists call for a double standard and giving women advantages they don't deserve that's because you don't understand.

Feminists call for EQUAL RIGHTS and equal responsibilities. When a woman is vicious and corrupt Bee calls her out just as she would a man.

— Post-Impressionist Liberal (@Yastreblyansky) June 1, 2018

Brooks is Asking This Sincerely

Hannah Arendt in the US, 1944. Photo by Alamy, via The Guardian.

Dsvid F. Brooks, "Speaking As a White Man", which sounds hilarious, of course, because we all know David Brooks isn't speaking as a white man but as the raceless and genderless voice of pure reason, a kind of Ken doll of the mind (even the passionless multicentenarians of 32,000 years from now in Shaw's Back to Methusaleh are divided into He-Ancients and She-Ancients, but Brooks thinks it's so obtrusive to insist on one's gender as if you thought it might make a difference, and really not very genteel to force on other folks the possibility that you might possess a dick), just wants somebody to answer a simple question:

How much are you in control of your own opinions? I ask this sincerely because, as you’ll see, I’m trying to think this through and I’m not sure how.

No, he's not asking this sincerely because, as you'll see, it's not the question he wants to explore, he's thought it through already, and he knows exactly how he wants to approach it.

What he really wants to know is how he can stop people from insisting that they are black, or gay, or Zoroastrian, and insisting that that gives them a right to say they know something he doesn't know and challenge him, because it makes him feel bad. And his chosen way of addressing it is to complain that the blacks and gays and Zoroastrians of today, unlike those of the good old days, have adopted the belief that your opinions are entirely dependent on your identity and that nobody can have thoughts that are not black or gay or Zoroastrian or white man's thoughts and that must explain why they keep telling him to shut up.

Or something.  I'm just trying to read this through and I'm not sure how.

Brooks: Pay a little attention to us Herrenvolks

The Gunpowder Plot conspirators, not Democrats, via Wikipedia. Guido Fawkes, third from right, looks nothing like that stupid mask—he did not wear a fucking soul patch.

Just in case you think I'm being overoptimistic about the Democrats' exit from the government's weekend shutdown, you're not alone. So does Michelle Goldberg, the New York Times's new Voice of the Left (more relaxed than Krugman, less relaxed than Egan, and almost as fashion-forward if that's possible as Kristof), who's downright enraged ("Schumer Sells Out the Resistance"), vicariously:

It’s hard to overstate how disgusted many progressive leaders are. “It’s Senator Schumer’s job as minority leader to keep his caucus together and stand up for progressive values and he failed to do it,” Ezra Levin, a co-founder of Indivisible, a left-wing advocacy group modeled on the Tea Party, told me. “He led them off a cliff. They caved.” (An Indivisible chapter is planning a Tuesday evening protest outside Schumer’s Brooklyn apartment.) Representative Luis Gutiérrez, Democrat of Illinois, said in a statement, “This shows me that when it comes to immigrants, Latinos and their families, Democrats are still not willing to go to the mat.”

....Democrats reinforced their reputation for fecklessness. “Make no mistake: Schumer and Dems caved,” tweeted Fox News’s Brit Hume. “What a political fiasco.” It makes me sick to say it, but he’s right.

And it's not just savvy Brit Hume, but world-class concern troll David F. Brooks ("Democrats Go for the Jugular! (Their Own)"), making me suspect that I must have been right in the first place.

Brooks is in his good old Iraq-era snarky mood, too, more cheerful than I've seen him in years, as if he were smelling a real war coming:

The Oppressions of David Brooks

17th-century English print via May Morning Oxford.

So it looks like David Brooks ("The Retreat to Tribalism") went to this lecture Jonathan Haidt gave, "The Age of Outrage", at the Manhattan Institute last November. It was a big deal, Haidt was wearing a tux, and said that society is like a maypole, or kids dancing around a maypole, but in an especially odd way:

Imagine three kids running around a maypole, forming a chain with their arms. The innermost kid is holding the pole with one hand. The faster they run, the more centrifugal force there is tearing the chain apart. The tighter they grip, the more centripetal force there is holding the chain together. Eventually centrifugal force exceeds centripetal force and the chain breaks.

No, that's Brooks; Haidt just has an ordinary pole. Brooks's mistake is funny, too, because Haidt unlike Brooks knows exactly what a maypole is and uses the image more than once to make what I think is a kind of Straussian argument about the value of religion: gods are maypoles, the ribboned ones where at the end of the dance the maidens have twisted a colorful pattern around the pole as a byproduct, and in the same [?] way the worship of the gods "weaves" or "binds" the members of the community together, into a social coherence that's just as valuable as a newly decorated pole, though that seems a little confused: are the community members the ribbons, which are indeed bound together, or the maidens, who aren't, but move to some other activity when the dance is over?

Anyway with this pole it's the three kids who constitute the community, and the centripetal force that makes them hold tighter on to each others' hands is typically the wartime threat of external enemies, and what makes them keep running faster is the media, immigration and diversity, and the deadly dialectic of the "more radical Republican party" and the "new identity politics of the Left", which is different from the old identity politics of the Left, operated by Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., which brought people together, because of the "high social trust" that existed in the Jim Crow era—

Compelled to Choose.

Heroic Colonel Theodore Roosevelt in front of the American Museum of Natural History on Central Park West, flanked by his trusty shirtless abject minority attendants, American Indian at his right and African at his left. Photo by The Researching Librarian.

Shorter David Brooks, "How Trump Kills the G.O.P.", August 29 2017:

There was a notable absence of racism in the Republican party in the period from 1984 through 2003, when I worked for Republican journalistic organs and most of my friends were Republicans. It arrived sometime after 2005, when the party became the vehicle for white identity politics, which is not the same thing as simple racism but overlaps with it. White identity politics is probably worse than identity politics on the left, though I can't be sure. It is certainly wrong to make a parallel between Black Lives Matter and White Lives Matter, because claiming these are comparable ignores history and current realities. Nevertheless I just compared them. The worst thing about white identity politics is that it forces Republicans to choose whether they embrace it or not, which could lead to the party's dissolution.

I don't know, I'd say it's an even bigger problem for members of minority groups facing employment and housing discrimination, shut out of opportunity networks, casually harassed by police and sometimes murdered by them, imprisoned for crimes that members of the majority aren't imprisoned for, and deprived of voting rights, than it is for Republicans, on the whole, maybe that's just my opinion. Members of minority groups are remarkably missing from today's column, though. Indeed, all sorts of people were missing during the period when there was no racism in the Republican party, since it consisted only of the pleasant and urbane people in Brooks's social circle:

In that time, I never heard blatantly racist comments at dinner parties, and there were probably fewer than a dozen times I heard some veiled comment that could have suggested racism. To be honest, I heard more racial condescension in progressive circles than in conservative ones.

Oh, by all means, do be honest. "To be honest, I think my opponents are more evil than my comrades, though they insidiously claim they aren't." Speaking of identity politics. That's political identity identity politics. It's practically the oldest kind of identity politics there is, but you don't see me whining about it.

Trigger Warning: Some of the words in this post may have been written by Bret Stephens.

Bret Stephens of the New York Times addressing the graduating class at Hampden-Sydney College (and recycling the speech into a Wednesday column):

I’ve been thinking about safe spaces a lot lately. For those of you with the good fortune never to have heard the term, a “safe space” is not, as you may suppose, a concrete-reinforced room where you can ride out a tornado. It isn’t a bulletproof car, either.

Instead, a “safe space” denotes a place, usually on campus, where like-minded people — often sharing the same race, gender, sexual orientation or political outlook — can spend time together without having to encounter the expression of any ideas or opinions that they do not endorse.

Because the seniors at an all-male Presbyterian college in rural Virginia with an African American student population of 6.8% probably can't even imagine how horrible and soul-killing it is to be in the kind of situation you can wind up in at one of those schools like Brandeis or Wesleyan, voluntarily sequestered into a groupthink environment where like-minded people, often sharing the same race, gender, sexual orientation, or political outlook can spend time together without having to encounter the expression of any ideas or opinions that they do not endorse. Preach it, Brother Bret!

Actually they do have safe spaces at Hampden-Sydney. They just have different terms for them, like "fraternity", or "lacrosse team".

Cross-posted at No More Mister Nice Blog.

You can keep recycling this article, but you can't make it be about something else.

Image by Mabel Amber/Pixabay.

Everybody's dumping on poor Sabrina Tavernise and her Times "analysis" about how we liberals are never going to convert any Trump voters if we keep being so mean-ass about it and wounding their tender feelings (who's a snowflake?), by making fun of their #MAGA caps and refusing to go on dates with them.

I don't have much to add to Steve's take, in particular, except I think everybody (including Vacuumslayer and Roy) is missing one vital detail about 72-year-old Syracusan Ann O'Connell, one of Tavernise's three examples of the "moderate conservatives" we should be making nice to—a loyal Democrat (why, she voted for a Democratic presidential candidate as recently as 1996!) who has