The Golden Age of Mass Delusion

By Kevin D. Williamson

Wednesday, November 30, 2016

Texas has passed a regulation requiring that human corpses be disposed of in accordance with the state’s regulation for the disposal of human corpses. That this exercise in tautology was necessary — and that it is controversial — is a reminder that we live in the golden age of mass delusion.

The underlying question here, which properly understood isn’t a question at all, has to do with abortion, and what it is that an abortion does. The biological answer to that question is straightforward: An abortion is a procedure in which a physician or another party kills a living human organism, either prior to birth or in the course of inducing a birth. About the three relevant criteria — 1) living, 2) human, 3) organism — there is no serious question: The tissue is living tissue, not dead tissue; it is human tissue, not rutabaga or koala bear tissue; it is arranged into an individual organism rather than an organ or a tumor or an extension of the maternal body.

Because the biology is straightforward, maintaining the fiction that abortion is something other than the premeditated killing of a living human being requires a retreat into poorly wrought metaphysics. The same people who will lecture you about science eight days a week inexplicably embrace pre-modern superstitious notions of “ensoulment” and work up some fine angels-dancing-on-the-head-of-a-pin material about “personhood,” the legal construction one uses when one is trying one’s best not to notice that what happens in an abortion is killing and that what is killed is a distinct and individual human being.

The abortion ethic is based on a lie: that the procedure involves nothing more than the elimination of a meaningless clump of cells. That lie is bound up in a nest of lies of which it is one particularly poisonous constituent, all of which are aimed at denying the relationship between sex and procreation or at denying the deep and wide-ranging consequences of attempting to disrupt that relationship. And that larger tangle of lies is itself only a constituent of an even more sprawling mess of confusion and deceit holding that men and women are interchangeable social units, that motherhood and fatherhood are social fictions that were dreamt up rather than evolved, and that you, Sunshine, and your desires are the very center of this universe.

The dead baby in the surgical tray makes all that nonsense rather hard to sustain.

Texas governor Greg Abbott approved a proposal yesterday that would forbid treating the bodies of the dead like used bandages or other medical waste, instead requiring that they be cremated or buried. The burials, if they come to pass, will be surreal affairs. What would one say? Would the mother attend?

The rule does not apply to miscarriages or to “abortions that take place at home,” presumably a reference to pharmaceutically induced abortions.

The abortion lobby is apoplectic, which is what it always is, which must get exhausting. NARAL Pro-Choice Texas protests that the move is a “transparent” attempt to burden abortionists. “The rules target physicians that provide abortions and the hospitals that care for patients,” says Blake Rocap, the lawyer for the group. “Transparent” is a funny choice of word: NARAL is an organization that refuses even to say its own name — it is formerly the National Abortion Rights Action League — or to acknowledge what sort of “choice” it is advocating. 

Yes, the Texas rule is transparent: It is a transparent attempt to force Texans to face reality.

It probably will not prevent (at least not directly) a single abortion from taking place, and, though the particulars of their condition is unknowable, it seems unlikely that a grave or a dignified cremation will make the victims feel any better about having had their lives snuffed out before they had had a chance to take a breath, much less to take a step or fall in love. The dead, Private Joker informs us, know only one thing: that it is better to be alive — though Christians, who in one month will celebrate the Feast of the Holy Innocents, take a different view. Whichever story is closer to the truth, death is death is death.

But our children are not garbage. Not the living ones, and not the dead, as resolute as their parents may be in treating them as though they were. Reality will not be denied. Not for very long. Not in Texas. Not anywhere.

It’s Time for Honest Talk about Muslim Immigration

By David French

Wednesday, November 30, 2016

At 9:52 a.m. on Monday morning, a silver Honda jumped a curb at Ohio State University and plowed directly into a crowd of students, sending bodies flying through the air. As students rushed to help, a young Somali immigrant, Abdul Razak Ali Ratan, got out of the car and began attacking horrified students with a butcher knife. All told, eleven people were wounded before a university police officer shot and killed Ratan, ending the attack.

Ratan is the third Muslim immigrant to mount a mass stabbing attack in 2016. The first occurred at an Israeli-owned deli in Columbus, Ohio, the second at a mall in Saint Cloud, Minn., and the third Monday at Ohio State. The attacks together wounded 25 people. The latest stabbing comes on the heels of Afghan immigrant Ahman Khan Rahami’s September bomb attacks in New York and New Jersey that left 29 injured.

The toll continues. Muslim immigrants Tamerlan and Dzhokhar Tsarnaev killed five Americans and wounded 280 in the Boston Marathon bombing and subsequent shootouts. Muslim immigrant Muhammad Abdulazeez killed five men and wounded two in attacks on military recruiting stations in Chattanooga, Tenn. Muslim immigrant Tashfeen Malik accompanied her first-generation Muslim-American husband to attack a Christmas party in San Bernardino, Calif., killing 14 and wounding 22. First generation Muslim-American Omar Mateen — son of Afghan immigrants — carried out the deadliest domestic terror attack since 9/11, killing 49 and wounding 53 at Orlando’s Pulse nightclub.

And if you think these are the only terrorist immigrants — or terrorist children of immigrants — you’re sadly mistaken. The Heritage Foundation has maintained a comprehensive database of terror plots since 9/11, a database that includes foiled attacks. The number of Muslim immigrants involved is truly sobering. For every successful attack, there are multiple unsuccessful plots, including attacks that could have cost hundreds of American lives.

After all these incidents, can we finally have an honest conversation about Muslim immigration — especially Muslim immigration from jihadist conflict zones?

When we survey the American experience since 9/11, two undeniable truths emerge, and it’s past time that we grapple head-on with them. First, the vast majority of Muslim immigrants — no matter their country of origin — are not terrorists. They won’t attack anyone, they won’t participate in terrorist plots, and they abhor terrorism. Some even provide invaluable information in the fight against jihad. That’s the good news.

The bad news is the second truth: Some Muslim immigrants (or their children) will either attempt to commit mass murder or will actually succeed in killing and wounding Americans by the dozens. All groups of immigrants contain some number of criminals. But not all groups of immigrants contain meaningful numbers of terrorists. This one does. It’s simply a fact.

Moreover, there isn’t an even geographic distribution of terrorists. We don’t have as many terrorist immigrants from Indonesia, India, or Malaysia as we do from Pakistan, Afghanistan, Somalia, or from the conflict zones in the Middle East. It’s much less risky to bring into the country a cardiologist from Jakarta than a refugee from Kandahar.

If the Democrats wish to maintain immigration from jihadist conflict zones, they need to rid their rhetoric of the language of “Islamophobia” and tell the truth. If they want to continue admitting refugees from jihad zones, they need to make the case that meeting the humanitarian needs of an an extremely small fraction of the world’s Muslim refugees is worth the cost of importing a small number of mass murderers. They must make the case that the human toll in America is the price we must pay for national compassion. Of course no Democrat wants a terror attack to occur, but Democrats must understand and acknowledge that under present policies, such attacks will occur — despite our best efforts to stop them.

But I’d submit that America can show compassion without opening its borders to an uncertain number of jihadist killers. We can maintain and expand existing safe zones in the Middle East. We can project power to continue to roll back ISIS and provide space for people to return to their homes. We can implement new tests for immigrants and restrict immigration from volatile regions. At the same time, we can avoid paranoia and appreciate the peacefulness and patriotism of the vast majority of our existing Muslim population.

The Trump administration has an opportunity to implement a rational policy — one that rewards friends, preserves Muslim homes in the Middle East, and protects our borders far more effectively than did the Obama administration. In the 15 years of American engagement since 9/11, we have worked with a host of interpreters, allied soldiers, and sympathetic officials — many of whom have endured enormous risks to fight jihad. We should welcome these people with open arms. Muslim immigrants from outside jihadist conflict zones should be welcome as well, provided that they do not profess allegiance to the ideology of our enemies.

During the Cold War, American law denied entry to the United States to any alien who wrote, published, or advocated “the economic, international, and governmental doctrines of world communism or the establishment in the United States of a totalitarian dictatorship.” We continue to maintain an escalating series of ideological litmus tests for visa recipients and green-card holders. We can and should expand those tests to deny entry to any visitor or immigrant who advocates the doctrines or ideas of ISIS, al-Qaeda, Hamas, Hezbollah, the Taliban, and any other recognized terrorist organization — including by expressing support on social media for the goals, theology, politics, or leadership of those organizations. Indeed, the list should expand beyond known terrorists so that we’d exclude those who support the doctrines or ideas of the Muslim Brotherhood or the Iranian Revolution.

Beyond this basic test, it is simply not in America’s national interest to admit refugees, visitors, or other immigrants from zones of jihadist activity unless they have a demonstrable record of loyalty to or cooperation with the United States or its allies. When we know that our enemy is seeking to infiltrate and indoctrinate these specific populations (and has greatest access to these populations), the burden of proof for immigration or entry should be squarely placed on the immigrant. If refugees need our aid, we should aid them in the Middle East.

During the primary, Trump outlined a number of immigration proposals, including proposals for “extreme vetting,” temporary suspension of immigration from “dangerous and volatile” regions that have a “history of exporting terrorism,” and establishing some form of additional ideological litmus tests as a condition for entry. He has also advocated establishing “safe zones” for Syrian refugees in Syria.

This is a promising start, but within weeks, he’ll have to get specific. It will be his responsibility to maintain Muslim alliances, protect America’s enormously profitable international tourist trade, and maintain the free flow of commerce across international borders, all while keeping out those men and women who seek to slaughter Americans in the streets. With the exception of his overbroad and misguided proposed temporary Muslim ban, Trump has been at his hard-headed best when it comes to understanding the need for a nation to protect its borders. Monday’s events at Ohio State demonstrate that it’s time to put his broad ideas into precise and effective practice.

Column Fidel Castro Died As He Lived — Praised By Useful Idiots

By Jonah Goldberg

Monday, November 28, 2016

Fidel Castro died as he lived: to the sound of useful idiots making allowances for his crimes. (That’s not my term: It was Lenin who called liberal apologists for Communism “useful idiots.”)

The gold medal in the Useful Idiot Olympics should probably go to Justin Trudeau, the prime minister of Canada. In a statement, he expressed his “deep sorrow” upon learning that “Cuba’s longest serving president” had died.

One can only imagine what George Orwell could do with that one word, “serving.” Castro did not serve, he ruled a nation of servants, often cruelly, while making obscene profits for himself and his family.

To listen to some Castro defenders, you’d think the scales of justice can balance out any load of horrors, so long as the substandard healthcare is free.

“Fidel Castro was a larger than life leader who served his people for almost half a century,” Trudeau continued, repeating that word. “While a controversial figure, both Mr. Castro’s supporters and detractors recognized his tremendous dedication and love for the Cuban people who had a deep and lasting affection for ‘el Comandante.’”

Again, where is Orwell’s red pen?

“El Comandante”: The term drips with affection, doesn’t it? Castro’s “detractors”? Would those be the families of the thousands he had executed? The survivors of Castro’s Caribbean gulag? Those who didn’t drown trying to escape?

Trudeau’s expression of “deep sorrow” was typical of a whole genre of Castro eulogies. His apologists have tended to romanticize the “revolution” and parrot Cuban state propaganda – literacy rates! Free healthcare! – while dispensing antiseptic euphemisms for the brutal reality of what the revolution wrought.

At least when people note that Hitler built the autobahn and Mussolini made the trains run on time, they’re usually being ironic. To listen to some Castro defenders, you’d think the scales of justice can balance out any load of horrors, so long as the substandard healthcare is free and the schools (allegedly) teach everyone to read.

As much of the American left is openly mooting whether or not the American president-elect is a dictator in waiting, one has to wonder whether they would take that bargain: No more elections, no more free speech, no more civil liberties of any kind, but socialized medicine and literacy for everyone! American political dissidents, homosexuals, journalists and the clergy, just like in Cuba, can languish in prison or internal exile, but at least they’ll be able to read the charges against them.

Such un-nuanced arguments always make leftist eyes roll. As University of Rhode Island professor Eric Loomis put it, “Castro: It’s Complicated!” cautioning against thinking “in terms of simplistic moral judgments.” It seems to me that when people want to ban simplistic moral judgments, it’s usually because simple morality is not on their side.

Here’s my Fox News colleague Geraldo Rivera on Twitter: “Conservatives mocking nuanced view of #FidelCastro make me gag-What do they say about @realDonaldTrump? #RonaldReagan? RichardNixon? #Elvis?

Orwell’s red pen is too good for such asininity. Lest there is something I don’t know about Elvis, none of these figures were brutal unelected despots responsible for the murder of their own people (10 times as many deaths as those credited to Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet).

One hint as to why Rivera and so many others were smitten with Castro: he was an international celebrity. Rivera even tweeted a picture of himself grinning broadly in “el Comandante’s” presence along with his condolences. “RIP #FidelCastro Yes, a despot who ruthlessly suppressed dissidents. But he defeated a dictator & was the premier revolutionary of his time.”

“Premier revolutionary of his time.” It’s as if Rivera thinks this title provides moral cover. This is the thinking that allows vacuous hipsters to unselfconsciously shrug when you tell them that the Che Guavara on their T-shirt was a sadistic murderer. “Yeah, but he was cool.”

But among serious leftists, Castro’s radical chic is secondary. For them, Fidel’s revolution provided the slender hope that America was on the wrong side of history. It was a symbol of resistance – intellectual, political and spiritual – to Western yanqui hegemony. They loved Cuba for many of the reasons they hate Israel (despite its exemplary literacy rate and universal healthcare system). They think – wrongly – that Israel is an extension of Western colonialism while Cuba was a rejection of it.

Castro understood this better than anyone, which is why he was able to “serve” his people for so long.

The Green Party Is The Future Of The Democratic Party

By John Daniel Davidson

Wednesday, November 30, 2016

Green Party presidential candidate Jill Stein last week launched a quixotic recount bid in a handful of Midwestern states. As of Tuesday, Stein had raised nearly $7 million to finance lawsuits and recounts in Wisconsin, Michigan, and Pennsylvania, all states Donald Trump won in the November 8 election. Over the weekend, Hillary Clinton’s campaign said it would participate in order to ensure the process is fair.

Nothing will come of Stein’s recount (she earned less than 1.5 million votes nationwide) but her motivations probably have more to do with the future of the Democratic Party than with the outcome of the election, or even the fate of her own party. So far, Democrats’ reactions to their stunning defeat—weeping, riots, #notmypresident trending on social media—suggest the Democratic Party will turn even further to the Left.

That could well mean the Democratic Party turns into something like an enlarged Green Party: popular enough in progressive coastal enclaves, but not a party that can win a national election. In that case, Stein might as well stay in the headlines as long as she can.

Democrats Have Abandoned Working-Class Whites

It’s not all that far-fetched. Democrats have been drifting leftward for years, prioritizing issues like gay marriage and climate change as they reshape their coalition to rely on college-educated urban whites and lower-income black and Hispanic voters. That of course means abandoning working-class whites, whom Clinton lost by a staggering 39 points. Exit polls showed Trump’s margin among this group was the largest of any candidate since 1980.

The lesson Democrats should take away from 2016 is that they need a bigger coalition, one that includes blue-collar whites in the Rust Belt and Appalachia. The lesson they seem to have taken instead is that half the country is racist and sexist, and they don’t want those kind of people in their party.

This shift has been underway for some time. After Bill Clinton’s 1992 victory, Democratic strategists worried that working-class whites were going to abandon the party, and that Democrats couldn’t win national elections without them. Stanley Greenberg, a Democratic pollster and strategist who served as an adviser to Clinton’s ‘92 campaign, wrote a memo in 1995 warning that whites without college degrees were “the principal obstacle” to the president’s reelection. Democratic analysts like Ruy Teixeira agreed, arguing that a failure to bring working class whites back into the fold would doom Clinton’s reelection bid.

As it happened, Clinton did well with those voters, winning a plurality of them in both his elections. But Democrats have struggled ever since. In 2000, Al Gore lost working-class whites by 17 points. John Kerry lost them by 23 points in 2004. Obama also struggled, but improved Kerry’s margin, losing them by only 18 points in 2008.

By the time Obama was preparing to run for reelection in 2012, Democrats had all but given up on working-class whites. As Thomas Edsall noted in 2011, the Democratic analysts who had warned party leaders about the flight of the white working class in the 1990s had changed their tune in the Obama era. Greenberg wrote a 2011 memo with James Carville about the “new progressive coalition,” made up of “young people, Hispanics, unmarried women, and affluent suburbanites.” They made no mention of working-class whites.

That same year, Teixeria penned a report with John Halpin arguing Obama needed to do as well among working-class whites as he did in 2008, or at least keep within Kerry’s margin of loss. One of the “primary strategic questions” of 2012, they wrote, would be, “Will the president hold sufficient support among communities of color, educated whites, Millennials, single women, and seculars and avoid a catastrophic meltdown among white working-class voters?”

Like Clinton, Obama did well enough to win, but the writing was on the wall. Even before the election, Edsall could write with confidence that, “preparations by Democratic operatives for the 2012 election make it clear for the first time that the party will explicitly abandon the white working class.” Instead of appealing to widely shared concerns about the economy, Democrats would build their coalition around identity politics.

No Longer a Party of the Working Class

Obama’s 2012 victory confirmed all this. He did well among rural and suburban whites in the industrial Midwest and Northeast, but the Democrats’ future appeared to be a coalition that had little need for these voters. Democratic leaders accepted the notion that “demographics is destiny”—that growing numbers of minorities, especially Hispanics, meant Democrats could disregard the economic anxieties and fears of working-class whites.

Instead, so the thinking went, a coalition of college-educated urbanites and millennials, together with a strong turnout among minorities, would render working-class whites obsolete. Indeed, they would play virtually no role in Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign.

Once she secured the nomination in July, Clinton went out of her way to court the supporters of her primary challenger, Sen. Bernie Sanders, whose folksy socialism resonated with a younger cohort of potential Democrat voters. Clinton spent barely any time campaigning in the Rust Belt, assuming the “blue wall” of Pennsylvania, Michigan, and Wisconsin would hold for her as it had for Obama.

But it didn’t, which brings us back to Stein’s recount and the future of the Democratic Party. At the Democratic National Committee’s first post-election meeting, interim DNC leader and erstwhile CNN commentator Donna Brazile was giving “a rip-roaring speech” to staffers when she was interrupted by a young man identified only as Zach. He blamed Brazile and other party leaders for backing a flawed candidate and questioned why they should now trust her to lead the party. Then he said, “You and your friends will die of old age and I’m going to die from climate change. You and your friends let this happen, which is going to cut 40 years off my life expectancy.”

That statement captures precisely the logic of Green Party progressivism. If you really believe that climate change is going to kill you before you grow old, why wouldn’t you take an extreme position on climate policy? Why wouldn’t you be willing to place most of the economy under state control? Why wouldn’t you jail climate deniers? And if you lose an election, why wouldn’t you contest the results or, failing that, resist the incoming administration, even to the point of taking to the streets? After all, the world itself is at stake.

By the same logic, if you believe that most Trump voters must be racists and misogynists, why would you try to bring them back into a coalition based on left-wing identity politics?

Dems Doubling Down on Identity Politics

A recent New York Times column by Columbia University’s Mark Lilla argued that Democrats should walk back their focus on “identity liberalism,” the constant catering to discreet voter groups defined by race, gender, and sexual identity.

Lilla imagines a Democratic Party based on FDR’s famous Four Freedoms speech in 1941: the freedom of speech, the freedom of worship, the freedom from want, and the freedom from fear. By appealing to universal liberal principles, to “Americans as Americans,” Democrats could cast a much wider net, maybe even reassemble the Obama coalition.

But Democrats are unlikely to heed Lilla’s advice. Two of FDR’s four freedoms, the freedom of speech and worship, have consistently drawn the fire of Democrats under Obama. Every single Senate Democrat in 2014 voted to repeal the First Amendment, and Obama’s Justice Department appeared before the Supreme Court more than once to argue that Obamacare’s contraception mandate trumped Americans’ religious freedom.

Identity politics and the policy imperatives of social justice, climate change, and European-style socialism will probably be the guiding light of the Democratic Party and the American Left in the years to come, just as it is for the Green Party today. Slate’s Michelle Goldberg, apparently unconcerned with persuading actual voters, has argued for a confrontational approach: “If Democrats standing up for diversity makes Trump voters feel disrespected, the best response is a slogan popular among enemies of political correctness at Trump rallies: Fuck your feelings.”

Writing and shouting such things no doubt feels good to Democrats reeling from an election loss that’s exposed the weakness of their post-Obama coalition. But if Democrats choose to double down on left-wing talking points and progressive platitudes while ignoring the white working class, then they should get used to lining up behind the likes of Jill Stein and reconcile themselves to a long sojourn in the political wilderness.