The Lie of Portland’s Antifa

By Douglas Murray

Sunday, June 30, 2019

There was a time when “anti-fascist” meant what it said. People who opposed fascism called themselves “anti-fascists.” But then the term slipped. The definition of “fascist” became hazy from over-use and so the term “anti-fascist” also began to move. This might seem to be a theoretical matter. But it is one that ends up encouraging and condoning horrific scenes like those in the center of Portland on Saturday.

For some time, self-described “anti-fascists,” or Antifa, have been finding spurious and imaginary reasons for demonstrating in the city. Though these are less like demonstrations than carnivals of civil disobedience, violence and intimidation. One of the very few journalists to have taken an interest in the repeated shutting down of the city center by these groups has been the young journalist Andy Ngo. Despite the police apparently regularly handing over the city to Antifa to do what they want, there has been relatively little coverage of this whole story in the mainstream press. And despite being repeatedly hounded and intimidated by anti-fa, on Saturday Ngo once again went to cover events in Portland.

This time, Antifa went even further than they have before, with several of their number assaulting Ngo, stealing his equipment, and repeatedly smashing his face with weapons and projectiles. It appears that the Portland police once again stood by and allowed this to happen.

There are several things to note here. First, the journalism business is awfully good at patting itself on the back. Whenever some auto-cue reader gets some mild criticism the whole industry goes into full-on “war on the free press” mode and starts handing out bravery awards. But in Portland on Saturday journalism really was under assault, in the form of a mob deliberately targeting somebody who was trying to perform the job that too much of the media fails to do. If the journalism business is interested in a little professional solidarity, now might be the time to express it.

Second, anyone in any doubt over who the fascists and the anti-fascists are today should watch the footage of Ngo being attacked. Might the fascists be the thugs who wear face masks in the middle of the day in an American city and carry out mob assaults on journalists?

Of course there are those who do not think this. According to one C. J. Werleman, it is the journalist Ngo who must be held accountable for his own assault. According to Werleman (a deeply confused figure), Ngo, who is the young, gay child of immigrants, is in fact someone who “was [sic] participated in white supremacist instigated violence.”

Andy Ngo, who is one of the leading amplifiers of Islamophobia in US, and who was participated in white supremacist instigated violence, was beaten up by Antifa in Portland today.

If anyone wonders why there are so many qualifiers in that characteristically inelegant sentence, it is because Werleman is trying to excuse an act of actual violence by implausibly pinning a charge of violence on a nonviolent person who has just been violently assaulted.

That’s an especially kooky and uncommon extreme of society that you can glimpse just there. But the truth is that it is also part of a logical continuum from the hysteria that part of America has been imbibing for three years now. If you keep telling people that the fascists are coming, then there will be some people who will believe you. Others will simply use the excuse to go and have what they think of as a good time and violently assault people under the guise of doing good works.

I am sure the Portland police will come up with some excuse for why they keep failing to protect their city and its inhabitants. And I’m sure that most journalists will continue to pretend that violent civil disobedience in the center of American cities in broad daylight is really not worth anyone’s time focussing on. But the real lesson of Saturday is that anybody interested in genuine anti-fascism should from now on aim themselves directly at Portland’s Antifa. These are the people of our day who behave most like fascists. It is high time that they were treated as such by officialdom and civil society alike.

The Disciplinary Corporation

By Kevin D. Williamson

Sunday, June 30, 2019

Nike, the athletic shoe giant, has pulled a product off the shelves in response to a storm of social-media protest. The product was a sneaker collaboration with sportswear brand Undercover, whose principal designer, Jun Takahashi, published these unspeakable words on Twitter: “No extradition. Go Hong Kong!”

Nike says it made the decision “based on feedback from Chinese consumers.” Just so.

The context is this: Hong Kong, a free, liberal, democratic, self-governing city was handed over to the powers that be in Beijing — a clutch of corrupt, brutal, dishonest, organ-harvesting, gulag-operating murderers — as part of an agreement with the United Kingdom, who once had sovereignty over Hong Kong as a colonial power. Beijing wants Hong Kong to be more like the rest of China, and the people of Hong Kong do not. They recently took to the streets to force the reversal of a decision that would have subjected Hong Kong residents to extradition to the so-called People’s Republic of China for certain crimes rather than be tried in Hong Kong under Hong Kong law. Because the junta in Beijing has no compunction about drumming up charges for political purposes, this would have represented a noose around the neck of every dissident in Hong Kong. Jun Takahashi tweeted his support for liberal democrats against mass-murdering national socialists.

And Nike sided with the mass-murdering national socialists.

Swoosh: There goes your soul.

Nike likes to position itself as a courageous sponsor of dissidents in the economically and racially charged world of sports, for instance giving the heroic treatment to controversial former NFL quarterback Colin Kaepernick in a series of cinematic advertisements. Irrespective of your view on the particular merits of Kaepernick and his national-anthem protest, that is the sort of thing one likes to see a big corporation such as Nike do — to say, in essence: “Yes, this is potentially unpopular, and we may lose a few sales over it, but we’re Nike, and we’re big enough and rich enough to do what we think is right.” But of course there is rather less to it than that. Nike, like any politician testing the winds of the moment, has polling to guide it, as Yahoo! Sports reports:

The poll revealed a deep racial, political and generational division when it came to player protests. Specifically, divisions in which a majority of white NFL fans supported disciplining players for not standing for the anthem versus a majority of the NFL’s African-American and Latino fans who didn’t. The sources also said a majority of Republican NFL fans supported the disciplining of players versus a majority of Democrats who didn’t, and a majority of Baby Boomer NFL fans significantly supported discipline more than both Generation Xers and Millennials.

Maybe Nike was being bold — or maybe Nike just did the math and calculated that supporting Kaepernick would appeal to its growing future markets and that that was worth paying a price with its older shrinking markets. Given Nike’s performance in the Undercover matter, it is difficult to give the company and its executives the benefit of the doubt. Red China is an awfully large market, and little Hong Kong is just one city beset on all sides by butchers and brutality. If Colin Kaepernick takes a knee for “March of the Volunteers,” there will be Hell to pay.

The unfortunate and deeply stupid evolution of mob politics in our time is the subject of my new book, The Smallest Minority, Chapter 5 of which is titled “The Disciplinary Corporation.” Ochlocracy — mob rule — sometimes takes the form of rioting or other kinds of open violence, as in the case of Antifa, but more often it consists in the mob bullying third parties — government or, increasingly, businesses — into implementing the mob’s agenda. The vectors of causality can get complicated: If anybody thinks that the Chinese nationalist pressure on Nike was entirely extraneous to the actions of the Chinese state is dangerously naïve. Mobs lean on politicians, but politicians also whip up mobs. In articulating his infamous “fire in a crowded theater” standard — in a case that involved the question of whether the Democrats could lock up war protesters — Oliver Wendell Holmes created our ruling tautology: The government must prohibit the expression of unpopular political ideas, he argued, as a matter of public order, because the mob would not tolerate the expression of those unpopular political ideas, in that case the Socialist party’s criticism of the war effort and conscription. The state consults the mob and the mob presses the state: It becomes a matter of shouting “Fire” in a crowded feedback loop. The evolution of the corporation as an instrument of explicit political discipline in its role as investor and in its role as employer is troubling. A certain kind of old-fashioned libertarian socialist (oxymoronic, or simply moronic, as that formulation may sound to the modern ear) understood the modern state and the modern bureaucratic corporation as being sides of a coin, twin creatures of the same regimenting and centralizing impulse. That line of criticism has much to recommend it, and contemporary conservatives should take note of it.

Nike is willing to act as an instrument of Chinese nationalism, just as firms such as Facebook and Google are willing, and sometimes even eager, to knuckle under to political pressure from governments as different as the one in Beijing and the one in Berlin. Sometimes, this is obviously crass commercial self-interest, but sometimes it is ideological as well. The corporation’s role in American community life is not merely economic: The corporation is a source of status and indeed a source of meaning for those affiliated with it, and what guides the executive decisions within Facebook and Twitter is as much ideological as financial calculation. What ideology will our corporate giants embrace? That is one of the most important and least explored questions of our time.

The news from Nike is not good.

The #MeToo Moment Is on Life Support

By Christine Rosen

Tuesday, June 25, 2019

A recent accusation by writer E. Jean Carroll that Donald Trump sexually assaulted her more than 20 years ago has emerged as the latest example of our cultural confusion over how to handle such allegations, especially when they are made about a public figure. It’s also a signal that the #MeToo movement remains a morally muddled enterprise. Even the New York Times, which broke the Harvey Weinstein story and has followed up with further investigative reporting about other accusations of assault, felt the urge to apologize for not making the Trump allegations front-page news, despite their inability to corroborate Carroll’s story.

The trickle-down effects of #MeToo continued to be felt, often in bizarre ways. Harvey Weinstein is still embroiled in legal proceedings related to multiple charges of assault and harassment, and a former member of his legal team, Ronald S. Sullivan, Jr., became the subject of a student-led campaign to oust him from his teaching position at Harvard Law School and his role as faculty dean of Winthrop House on campus. He kept his faculty position but the school refused to renew his appointment as dean, citing students’ claim that they felt “unsafe” because of the work he had done to defend Weinstein. As Sullivan argued in an opinion piece in the New York Times, “Unchecked emotion has replaced thoughtful reasoning on campus. Feelings are no longer subjected to evidence, analysis or empirical defense. Angry demands, rather than rigorous arguments, now appear to guide university policy.”

These are also the things that have, unfortunately, too often continued to guide the #MeToo movement. Consider one of the most egregiously misleading #MeToo charges: those made against comedian Aziz Ansari. In 2018, Ansari was accused of sexual assault in an article that appeared on the website Babe.net (the website, which trafficked in poorly written think pieces about subjects such as walks of shame, described itself as a place for women “who don’t give a f**k” and is now, mercifully, defunct).

Ansari’s accuser, who refused to identify herself, described a date she had with the comedian as an assault, even though by her own admission she eagerly agreed to go back to his apartment and engaged in consensual sexual activity with him. Her conflation of Ansari’s somewhat caddish behavior with rape was an act of deliberate character assassination and the fact that so many #MeToo supporters enthusiastically demanded Ansari’s head on a platter merely because one person made a questionable claim about him undermined the movement. As Bari Weiss argued at the time, the only thing Ansari was guilty of was not being a mind-reader.

Flash forward to the present day, when Ansari’s fellow comedian and friend Mindy Kaling posted a picture of her ticket to a recent Ansari stand-up performance on Instagram with the compliment, “Funniest shit ever.” She was mobbed by angry commenters who claimed she was unfairly “rehabbing” a rapist (Ansari has only recently begun performing again). As one person posted, “Super disappointed that you’d flaunt your support of this man over your support of victims. What’s next, you gonna go hang out and bullet journal with Kavanaugh?” Another said she was unfollowing Kaling’s account because “as a survivor, this is disappointing.”

To her credit, Kaling defended Ansari; as the Boston Globe reported, she said, “I am a champion of women. I am also a champion of my friend and do not believe they are mutually exclusive. I don’t know your experience, but I respect however you react—sorry to see you go.” Harvard University administrators could learn something from Kaling’s willingness to defend her principles.

As the Sullivan and Ansari cases suggest, there is still a lot of confusion about the presumption of innocence when it comes to sexual assault allegations—in Sullivan’s case, even participating in the constitutionally protected right to offer the accused a legal defense was enough to earn him pariah status (and hateful graffiti about him sprayed on buildings on Harvard’s campus).

But #MeToo’s force has been unevenly applied to politicians. Remember Virginia Lieutenant Governor Justin Fairfax, who has also been accused of assault? He’s still in office and hasn’t faced any repercussions. In fact, as he recently told the Richmond Times-Dispatch, he is “very hopeful about the future” and says, “We’ve gotten a lot of encouragement about future political steps. I’m thinking very seriously about 2021.”

He went so far as to imply that the sexual assault allegations leveled against him by two women have made him more popular, not less. “Many people a year ago would not have recognized me, now they really do,” Fairfax told reporters. “People come up to me at gas stations, they say, ‘Hey, we recognize you. We love you. We know what they are saying about you is false.’” His accusers’ efforts to testify under oath before the Virginia General Assembly about their claims continue to be blocked by Democrats in the state.

It’s not just Democrats; there is plenty of hypocrisy to go around when it comes to pursuing sexual assault claims against public figures. Any claim of sexual assault should be taken seriously, whether it’s made about a private citizen or the president of the United States (something Trump’s defenders, who were happy to believe Juanita Broaddrick’s claim that she was raped by Bill Clinton but now think “She’s not my type” is an appropriate response by Trump to Carroll’s, would do well to remember). Due process and the presumption of innocence should not be sacrificed on the altar of ideological commitments, whether those commitments are to politicians like Fairfax or Trump, or to a galvanizing social movement like #MeToo.

Maybe the Worst Answer to Any Question in Any Debate

By Noah Rothman

Thursday, June 27, 2019

 Ahead of Wednesday night’s primary debate between ten Democratic presidential aspirants—a sprawling slate of candidates that nevertheless accounts for only about 42 percent of the Democrats’ 2020 field—the Daily Beast offered some helpful pointers about what candidates should not do. This montage of the decade’s worst debate-stage gaffes and gimmicks was valuable, and it’s highly unlikely that Rep. Tim Ryan caught it. If he had, he might have avoided giving what was arguably the worst series of answers in any presidential debate in living memory.

“We’re going to talk about Iran right now,” said NBC News anchor Lester Holt, who proceeded to ask the Democrats how they would respond to an escalating series of violent provocations from Tehran, including multiple attacks on commercial shipping and the downing of an American drone. Most of the candidates dodged the question, preferring instead to claim that Iran is only lashing out violently because Donald Trump partially withdrew from the 2015 Iran nuclear accords. Notably, though, the candidates who professed their support for the Iran deal—Sens. Cory Booker, Amy Klobuchar, and Tulsi Gabbard—all declined to say that they would reenter the agreement as it stood when Barack Obama negotiated it. The Democratic field supports the “Iran deal,” but they’re apparently not sold on the JCPOA.

Flash forward a little later in the debate to the point at which Rep. Ryan was asked a foreign-policy question involving Tuesday’s Taliban-claimed attack in Afghanistan in which two American soldiers lost their lives. Rather than take the opportunity to position himself as a serious candidate in the race—a title for which he’s been vying throughout much of the campaign—Ryan pivoted back to the downing of an American drone so that he might strike a populist note.

“We must have our State Department engaged. We must have our military engaged to the extent they need to be,” he insisted. By contrast, he asserted, the Trump administration is disengaged. That’s obvious “because these flare-ups distract us from the real problems in the country.” That’s when Ryan swung for the fences. “If we’re getting drones shot down for $130 million because the president is distracted,” he said, “that’s $130 million that we could be spending in places like Youngstown, Ohio, or Flint, Michigan.”

Let’s break that down. First, the assault on U.S. soldiers by the Taliban, with whom we are presently negotiating to secure a settlement that will allow American troops to withdraw from Afghanistan, is a mere “flare-up” and a “distraction.” An attack on an American reconnaissance asset monitoring the vitally strategic Strait of Hormuz, where a rogue power is sabotaging flagged oil tankers, is also a distraction. And why deploy surveillance drones at all if they’re only going to be shot down by hostile foreign powers? We could just be investing the money we dedicate to the defense of the free navigation of the seas and the prosperity and security that accrue from that commerce to a highway overpass in the industrial Midwest.

Sensing blood in the water, Gabbard jumped at the opportunity to answer the question about the Taliban directly. But whereas Ryan might have adopted a more sensibly hawkish posture if he set out to make a cogent and relevant point, Gabbard struck out in defense of the Taliban.

“Is that what you will tell the parents of those two soldiers who were just killed in Afghanistan? Well, we just have to be engaged?” she asked. “As a soldier, I will tell you, that answer is unacceptable.” Ryan replied with the fact that, if the U.S. withdraws, “the Taliban will grow.” That’s fine with Gabbard. “The Taliban didn’t attack us on 9/11. Al Qaida did,” she insisted. “That’s why I and so many other people joined the military, to go after Al Qaida, not the Taliban.”

In response to this statement of capitulatory blindness, Ryan could only muster a weak note of protest. “The Taliban was protecting those people who were plotting against us,” he said before noting that America cannot simply withdraw behind its borders and hope for the best. “I would love to,” Ryan trailed off, appearing to sublimate into thin air.

By being less than forceful in his defense of the Bush administration’s decision to strike the hostile foreign power that provided financial and logistical support to Osama bin Laden, Ryan somehow managed to lose an exchange with a candidate who argued that the Taliban got a raw deal after September 11.

Ryan has spent the hours that passed since the debate relitigating his fight with Gabbard in tersely worded statements, but he would be better served abandoning the case altogether and disappearing into the wilderness. There are more articulate advocates for America’s interests, not just in the Democratic Party but on last night’s debate stage. Ryan demonstrated that he’s not up to the task.

As They Confront China, Americans and Europeans Need Each Other

By Dalibor Rohac

Friday, June 28, 2019

Shortly before President Trump departed Washington to attend the G20 Summit in Japan, he proclaimed that “Europe treats us worse than China” during a television interview. Yet the existence of the summit itself, and especially the president’s meeting tomorrow with China’s leader, Xi Jinping, is a reminder that the United States and Europe still need each other and will continue to in the future.

To understand how the modern transatlantic alliance arrived at its current juncture, it is worth remembering its origins. European powers were laid in ruins after the Second World War. Their leaders, faced with the task of rebuilding their continent in the shadow of the Soviet Communist threat, were determined to do everything they could to prevent another global conflict. To achieve peace and prosperity, they allowed the United States to take a leading role in the post-war political organization of the continent.

Today, both the Second World War and the Soviet Union are just hazy memories. Europe is the world’s largest economy and the risk of war is minimal. The United States, meanwhile, no longer faces the challenge of containing the Soviet Union. Instead, it has to manage the economic rise of China and Beijing’s increasing assertiveness. It is no surprise that the transatlantic alliance has lost some of its cohesion.

Like President Obama’s attempted pivot to Asia, the Trump administration’s current focus on China is grounded in a sound strategic intuition. However, President Trump makes the mistake of lumping China and the EU together as America’s adversaries. In reality, the United States needs Europe to confront China. Americans and Europeans would be better able to hold China to account through existing multilateral trade structures and coordinated responses, rather than one-off bilateral “deals.”

If European countries continue to welcome Chinese investment and are unconcerned by the growth of Chinese influence, America’s job will be much harder. The ongoing argument about allowing China to build much of Europe’s next-generation 5G telecommunications network exemplifies the risks. It is not only Trump’s rhetoric that needs to stop in order to get Europe on the side of the U.S.. The United States has to present its allies with a coherent, intelligible strategy that Western governments can rally behind.

For decades, Europeans not only have relied on America’s military might but have also taken geopolitical cues from Washington. In spite of its being an economic superpower, the EU’s hard power remains underdeveloped. For all the talk of “strategic autonomy,” especially after Trump’s election, the continent lacks the strategic culture needed to operate independently of the United States. More than halfway through Trump’s term, Germany is hesitant to lead, and the U.K. has eroded its standing in the world by using all of its policymaking bandwidth to solve the Brexit conundrum.

Whether they like it or not, Europeans and Americans have to find a common language. In the present political environment the two sides of the Atlantic have a shared interest in ensuring the international rule set they created after World War II — and extended in the greater European space after the Cold War — are not revised in the coming decades by an authoritarian and economically powerful China. On the European side, the obstacles include the casual anti-Americanism exacerbated by Donald Trump’s bluster. Almost as many Germans, according to a recent poll, see the United States as a threat to world peace as Russia. Moreover, 72 percent of respondents want German foreign policy to be more independent of that of the United States.

Yet by far the biggest obstacle to a renewed transatlantic partnership is the knee-jerk distrust of the European project in American foreign-policy circles. The attempts to go behind the back of Brussels and strike deals with individual countries adds to the current distrust of the United States in Europe. Similarly, the expressions of support to Europe’s populist disrupters, such as the leader of the U.K.’s Brexit party, Nigel Farage, are not helping either.

Contrary to what many U.S. conservatives seem to believe, European nations are genuinely committed to the project of European integration. The EU may seem an oddity to many Americans, but it fulfills a role that even its most vocal critics on the European continent recognize as important. Nobody expects the United States to learn to love the EU. A good first step would be simply to accept that the occasional efforts by this administration to force Europeans into a choice between Brussels and Washington are invariably counterproductive.

The transatlantic partnership has never been perfect, and there have always been differences of opinion. However, that does not mean that Europeans and Americans do not need each other. They do — and politicians on both sides of the Atlantic would be well-advised to behave accordingly.