Friday, August 18, 2017

What Lincoln Might Say About Charlottesville

By Rebecca Ryskind Teti| August 18, 2017

Something like hate stirs within me at the sight of the swastika unfurled on American soil: a powerful, visceral reaction against white supremacy as the complete antithesis of both the American Founding, which I love, and the person of Christ, whom I love by an order of magnitude more and strive to live up to. The heart knows: here is an enemy, mortally opposed to the principle that all persons are created equal and ought to be judged not by any accident of birth, but by the content of their character.

An additional reason I hate the Nazi flag and the white supremacist creed is that it has such power to stir blind rage in me. In the abstract, I understand at all times that good and evil run through every human heart. But no other group of people makes me know so readily that I have murder and mayhem in me, too: I feel it the instant I see them marching under that flag or hear their vile chants.

I want to suggest looking at the events in Charlottesville a different way.

I don’t know about your social media feeds, but mine have absolutely blown up with talk about Charlottesville this week, and to a person all posts have been laden with a level of urgency, passion, revulsion, and alarm. The authors hate racism, they hate white supremacy, they hate the violence that takes innocent life and don’t want to be associated with it. They don’t want it to spread; they want it put down.

There have been some disagreements expressed about what precisely happened and what should have been said, but the disagreements have been between people who hate white supremacists and people who hate white supremacists but don’t understand why people won’t condemn the Antifa anarchist violence too; or people who hate white supremacists and resent having their political positions tarred with it in any way. What unites the debaters is resolute rejection of the white supremacist creed.

If the numbers to be gleaned from the earliest reports are correct (it’s strange that we have no good numbers still), the Nazis in Charlottesville were perhaps no more than 500 bad dudes who deserve to be condemned—and just about everyone hascondemned them. The very reason everyone is talking about this with such pain and horror is that the great majority of Americans have that visceral reaction to white supremacy that I feel. They despise racism, deeply regret the history of slavery and its legacy, and long for racial harmony and equality. That is not the mark of a racist people. That’s something to feel good about, even while we are a very divided nation, politically speaking.

I think it’s important to notice this because the white supremacists and the Antifa extremists who came armed to oppose them are both s—t-stirrers. They exist for the precise purpose of ginning up hate. They strive to provoke violent confrontation, and their method is to get us all to believe the worst of each other—to think that the Americans who believe in the brotherhood of man are few and the majority are bad people, secretly harboring racist tendencies.

That is not true. There were, again according to initial reports, a few hundred white supremacists. There were additionally some 1,000 counterdemonstrators, of whom maybe 200 were Antifa. Which means that even in Charlottesville, the peaceful counter-demonstrators appear to have outnumbered the wicked people fighting each other, and the one murderer.

A few hundred wicked people fighting each other must not be allowed to make us all hate and suspect each other—or else they win, and we normal people (with our beautiful and necessary political debates and differences) do not.

The Nazis want us to hate blacks, Jews, Catholics, immigrants, and ultimately everybody. Antifa wants us to soak in the righteous rage the Nazis provoke until we feel ourselves justified in doing anything to discharge that rage.

In 1838, Abraham Lincoln addressed the Young Men’s Lyceum with a sober warning about how vigilante justice threatens our political institutions. If the United States were to die, he warned, it would likely not be at the hand of a foreign enemy, but by suicide. He hoped he was being over-cautious, but he noted with alarm the rise of vigilantism in his day:

there is, even now, something of ill-omen, amongst us. I mean the increasing disregard for law which pervades the country; the growing disposition to substitute the wild and furious passions, in lieu of the sober judgment of Courts; and the worse than savage mobs, for the executive ministers of justice. This disposition is awfully fearful in any community; and that it now exists in ours, though grating to our feelings to admit, it would be a violation of truth, and an insult to our intelligence, to deny. Accounts of outrages committed by mobs form the every-day news of the times.

What Lincoln wrote of some gamblers who were hanged in Vicksburg is about what most of us think of white supremacists:

They constitute a portion of population that is worse than useless in any community. . . . If they were annually swept from the stage of existence by the plague or small pox, honest men would, perhaps, be much profited by the operation.

The problem, Lincoln noted, is that mobs act not on impartial evidence and sober judgment, but by terrifying whim. Unable to make distinctions, they snatch up the innocent with the guilty:

When men take it in their heads today to hang gamblers, or burn murderers, they should recollect, that in the confusion usually attending such transactions, they will be as likely to hang or burn someone who is neither a gambler nor a murderer as one who is; and that, acting upon the example they set, the mob of tomorrow, may, and probably will, hang or burn some of them by the very same mistake. And not only so; the innocent, those who have ever set their faces against violations of law in every shape, alike with the guilty, fall victims to the ravages of mob law; and thus it goes on, step by step, till all the walls erected for the defense of the persons and property of individuals, are trodden down, and disregarded.

In other words, the mob, if tolerated, will eventually come for each of us.

That’s not the worst of it. Unchecked, vigilantes grow emboldened and behave worse. Meanwhile, Lincoln notes, peace-loving people who love their country and would die for it, when they find themselves calumniated, their property destroyed and their family members injured, will eventually become disgusted with a government that won’t protect them and turn on it. And once a people has no attachment to its government, anarchy ensues. A constitution without a people loyal to it has no power whatsoever to protect anyone’s rights.

In other words, the mob, if tolerated, will eventually come for each of us.

This is the consummation both white supremacists and Antifa, a Communist/anarchist group each devoutly wish: the destruction of our mutual commitment to each other and to the constraints on power embodied in the Constitution and necessary for self-government.

They want us to walk around on tenterhooks, suspecting our neighbors, so that we will feel justified in breaking into unruly mobs until the rights to free speech, freedom of assembly, and all the freedoms of a free people are crushed by us ourselves. Their ultimate aim is to destroy the principles of the Declaration and the Constitution of what was conceived to be, and still can be, the freest nation on earth.

Read the Lyceum speech and see if Lincoln does not have a prescient word for our own times. Blind passions are the enemy of self-government, Lincoln taught. We require instead cool heads, sound morals, and a reverence for the political institutions that keep us free. Now is not the time to turn on America. It’s the time to be American.

Leftist police chiefs and leftist rioters — a dangerous combination

AUGUST 16, 2017 BY BOOKWORM 26 COMMENTS

A former police officer’s tale about the 1979 White Night riots in San Francisco shows a disturbing pattern when you have a Leftist police chief or mayor.

I spoke yesterday with a friend, a former San Francisco police officer, who told me something very interesting about the White Night riots that devastated San Francisco in May 1979. I remember the riots well, as I lived in the City at the time, but the behind-the-scene details were fascinating and illuminating. Here’s what I learned:

George Moscone became the Mayor of San Francisco in 1976. Today, he would be called a Progressive. Back then, he was simply a Democrat who represented the electorate’s shift away from the old-fashioned, working- and middle-class Democrats who once had a say in San Francisco politics.

One of Moscone’s first tasks as mayor was to appoint a new Chief of Police. Traditionally, police chiefs came from within the ranks of the San Francisco Police Department, which was a solidly working- and middle-class organization with conservative social views, that was just branching out into having women and minorities serve.

Moscone, however, bypassed the SFPD when looking for a new chief and, instead, appointed Charles Gain, an African-American who had been serving as Chief of Police in Oakland. At the time, Gain was widely perceived as being extremely “liberal” — as the Left defines that word, rather than the classical definition.

When he became Chief, Gain decided that the SFPD needed an image overhaul. He therefore ordered that all police vehicles should be painted baby blue, so as to appear less threatening. The police officers, when driving around in their light blue paddy wagons likened themselves to a diaper delivery service. Gain was also extremely supportive of gays, something that didn’t sit well with traditional police officers.

Given Moscone’s and Gain’s Progressive politics, it’s scarcely surprising that Dan White, an elected supervisor who was an old-fashioned, working class San Francisco conservative, would clash with them. Eventually, White announced that he was retiring as Supervisor.

Conservative elements in the City, including police officers, begged White to reconsider, so he asked for his old job back. However, the Progressives on the Board of Supervisors, including Harvey Milk, the first openly gay politician in America, lobbied against his reinstatement, so that they could get a firm lock on Leftist politics in San Francisco. Moscone had no problem with this agenda and refused White’s request to be reinstated.

White was extremely distraught. Unfortunately, his wife, who might have provided emotional ballast for him at this time, was out of town. So it was that Dan White sneaked into City Hall on November 11, 1978 and assassinated both Moscone and Milk. Most San Franciscans were saddened but gay San Franciscans were completely devastated. An icon had died.

Things became infinitely worse in May 1979, when Dan White was found guilty only of voluntary manslaughter, rather than First Degree Murder (which carried with it the death penalty). The verdict came about thanks in large part to what was derisively called “the Twinkie defense.” White’s attorney had found a psychiatrist who would testify that White ate so much junk food, especially Hostess Twinkies, that he suffered from diminished capacity.

After Milk died, his constituents from San Francisco’s predominantly gay Castro District mourned. After Dan White was acquitted, they got angry, very, very angry. Immediately after the verdict become public, a crowd of about 500 members of the LGBT community (or gays, as they were then called, regardless of gender or predilections) promptly gathered in the Castro District and, in response to activist Cleve Jones, began to call others out of the bars and restaurants to join them. Eventually 1,500 people headed on foot from Castro Street to CityHall.

The protesters picked up more people along the way, until a group 5,000 strong descended on the plaza in front of City Hall. Wikipedia reports that Dianne Feinstein, who had become mayor by default after Moscone’s assassination (which launched her on the national stage), was unsure what to do. That, according to the police officer to whom I spoke, is true. However, what is not true is that the Police Chief was also befuddled and unable to act.

According to the police officer giving me an insider’s version of events, the police were given specific orders to “stand down.” Without any active policing, it was inevitable that this churning, growing mob would become violent. Marchers broke windows at City Hall, attacked police officers and their police cars, and eventually, in true mob fashion, began destroying everything they could.

It’s not to their credit that a group of police officers who were not friendly to gays later that same night went against Chief Gain’s orders and raided a gay bar, sparking new riots. Having said so, it’s also not surprising that they carried out that raid. The original riots, in addition to staggering property damage, had injured 61 officers, some quite badly, as well as 100 other people.

Things have changed a great deal in the SFPD since then. Heather Fong, who was San Francisco’s police chief from 2004 to 2008, was openly lesbian. The SFPD routinely has a sizable LGBTQ etc. contingent in the Gay Pride Parade. And of course, the SFPD stands idly by during the Up Your Alley Fair or the Folsom Street Fair, when people openly engage in sex and BDSM activities on San Francisco street. (For the Up Your Alley Fair link, please be warned that the content is sexually explicit.)

Having shared with you the police officer’s view of events, I want to focus on one fact that came to light: That’s the claim police officer’s claim that the Leftist police chief, while he did send officers to the rapidly swelling march on City Hall, he also told them to stand down. Does that sound familiar? It should:

In April 2015, when rioters took the streets of Baltimore to protest Freddie Gray’s death, the police were told to stand down. Progressive mayor Stephanie Rawlings-Blake famously (or infamously) stated openly, “We gave those who wished to destroy space to do that.”
In February 2017, when violent rioters stopped Milo Yiannapoulos from speaking on the Berkeley campus and then took to the streets, although the cops assembled, they did not act. Subsequent orders were that they were told to stand down. It came to light later that Berkeley’s mayor was a member of an Antifa Facebook group.
In August 2017, in Charlottevilles, Virginia, after fascists from the Left and fascists from the Right clashed, leading a schizophrenic to use a car as a weapon, it emerged that the Democrat mayor had given the police orders to stand down — even though it was apparent that both sides in this pond scum protest came ready to do violence.

Do you see a pattern? I do. To may way of thinking, four iterations of Leftist politicians specifically telling police not to keep order constitutes a pattern. I’m also willing to bet that, using the power of crowd sourcing, you can think of other times when Progressive mayors or police chiefs, faced with manifestly inflammatory circumstances, nevertheless ordered the police to stand down, guaranteeing mayhem. When you have a pattern like this, there are two explanations: Either all Progressive city leaders are mindless drones who coincidentally all think alike . . . or you have a deliberate plan to sow chaos in America.

As a coda to all of this, Dan White served five years of his seven-year sentence. Less than two years after his release from prison, he committed suicide. Because he had served honorably in the Army during the Vietnam War, he is buried in the military cemetery in San Bruno, south of San Francisco.

At Charlottesville, Antifa and Neo-Nazis

Where I stand on Charlottesville and Confederate monuments

Posted by Bookworm

At Charlottesville, Antifa and Neo-Nazis proved to be birds of a feather; and blacks are right to want to remove Confederate monuments from public spaces.

I’ve been rather conspicuously silent about events in the South. As you know, I like to wait until the hysteria settles and facts emerge to throw in my two cents. Here are those two cents, in no particular order:

1. This needn’t have happened. The Charlottesville police stood down, which is a common tactic in Democrat-run cities when the loony Left is on the prowl.

2. Trump is correct that there were good people attending the event on both sides. The young woman who died, Heather Heyer, was one such person — and one, moreover, who had a truly moral, decent mother. I’ve read that there were others there who were not Richard Spencer supporters, but who were supporting free speech against Antifa’s thugs. Still, it was a stupid thing to say.

3. There were innumerable bad people at Charlottesville, both fascist Antifa thugs and fascist White Supremacist thugs. They’re all foul thinks and the Left is genuinely evil in its efforts to paint Trump and his supporters as fellow travelers of those White Supremacists. As a wise teen I know asked, “If you support me, and I hate you and everything you stand for, does that mean that the media gets to say that I support you just because you support me? I don’t think so.” The same teen, incidentally, said “extremism creates opposite extremists.” He hadn’t even read the Daniel Greenfield article from which I quote below when he said that.

4. There is nothing that Trump could have said about Charlottesville that would have assuaged the media. Nothing. And in talking with his supporters, I see them say that, no matter how inartfully Trump phrased things at his press conference, he was correct in the substance of what he said and they continue to applaud his bold frontal attacks against the media.

5. The media has a consistent double standard: Antifa, which is a burgeoning movement and can be seen as the militant arm of the campus Left (just as the KKK was the militant arm of the Democrat Party), is designated as a freedom fighting movement. White Supremacists, who are a teeny fraction of the American population, far less than the KKK was during its ascendancy in the 1920s and probably less than the Antifa mob, whether on campus or off, is treated not only as evil (which it is) but as representative of all conservatives.

6. When Antifa runs out of White Supremacists to attack (and it will, given the latter’s small numbers), the ground will have been laid for Antifa to attack all conservatives on the ground that they too are White Supremacists.

7. Antifa and the White Supremacists have a few things in common: They’re violent and they hate Jews. IowaHawk nailed it:

Antifa purports to be pro-black, but it advocates political policies that have seen the destruction of black communities, everything from generational welfare (rather than help for those who can’t help themselves), to affirmative action (which makes all black achievements suspect), to constant apologies for violent, destructive behavior (which relieves blacks from the responsibility to heal their own communities), to keeping guns out of the hands of law-abiding citizens (something that leaves them at the mercy of armed thugs). For Antifa and the Left to claim to be not-racist, even as they relentlessly push policies that destroy a community makes Antifa no better than the White Supremacists.

8. Given their similarities, I loath all who showed up at Charlottesville spoiling for a fight and would cheerfully consign both types of fascists to the pits of Hell. (And when I use the word “fascist,” I use it in the accurate sense of groups that rely upon violent tactics to silence speech, intimidate opponents, and create a government to carry out their totalitarian goals, goals that empower the state while dis-empowering individuals.)

9. Muslims or others on the Left who commit terrorist acts are always mentally ill; white schizophrenics who commit terrorist acts are always evil racists. The media is consistent every time. Ann Coulter says it well.

10. The media’s decision to give both these bottom dwellers so much air time is fertilizer for extremism. Daniel Greenfield says it best:

The left killed civil rights and replaced it with black nationalism. The racial supremacism of black nationalism that killed those officers is everywhere. Ta-Nehisi Coates and Ibram X. Kendi are lionized as brilliant thinkers instead of hateful racists, Amazon has ordered a black nationalist secessionist fantasy from Aaron McGruder and Showtime aired ‘Guerilla,’ a miniseries glamorizing Black Panther terrorism.

But racism is a two-way street. So is violence. Extremists feed into each other.

You can’t legitimize one form of racism without legitimizing all of them. The media may advance this hypocritical position. Obama used the shameful “reverse racism” euphemism that distinguishes between black and white racism. But propaganda and spin don’t change the physics of human nature.

Either all racism is bad. Or all racism is acceptable.

Charlottesville is what happens when you normalize racism and street violence. Every normalization of extremism equally normalizes the extremism of the opposite side.

A civil society depends on a consensus. ‘Racism is bad’ is an example of such a consensus. If you normalize black nationalism, you will get more white nationalism. If you normalize leftist street violence against Trump supporters, you will also get more street violence against leftists.

Extremists want to eliminate the consensus of civil society. They want to destroy the idea that there’s any solution except violence through confrontations that show the helplessness of civil society.

That’s true of black nationalists and white nationalists, of Communists and Nazis, of Antifa and Vanguard, of the tankies and hipster Nazis of the Alt-Left and the Alt-Right. They’re a set of evil twins and when you unleash one, you unleash the other. Their real enemies aren’t each other, but everyone in the middle. The bourgeois normies who don’t want to replace society with their totalitarian nightmare.

Street violence raises the bar so that only the violent will participate in protests. If you “no platform” campus speakers, then the only speakers you get will be those willing to face bomb threats, arson, and physical assaults. If you fire people for their views, political activism becomes the province of anonymous trolls and unemployed street thugs. Extremism limits political discourse to extremists.

If Democrats really want to stop the rise of Neo-Nazi violence, there’s a very easy way. Stop normalizing black nationalism and the Alt-Left. End the racist witch hunts for white privilege. Make it clear that street violence is unacceptable and that racism is bad no matter who it comes from. Allow people you disagree with to express their views without trying to destroy their lives.

(Read the rest here.)

11. Up to a certain point, I agree with those who want to tear down the statues in the South. Immediately after the Civil War, the North imposed its political will on the South, treating the South like a defeated enemy. Defeated enemies don’t get to glorify their political and military leaders. Instead, they need to learn a whole new game.

However, thanks to Lincoln’s assassination, which placed Democrat Andrew Johnson in the White House, Reconstruction ended almost as soon as it began.

Although the Constitution now forbade slavery, the South was able to do its best to reconstitute it’s antebellum ways. The South once again subordinated blacks; it created a dreamy, romantic myth about its pre-war past (a myth supported by such bestsellers as The Klansmen, which D.W. Griffith turned into Birth of a Nation, a film much beloved by Democrat Woodrow Wilson, and Gone With The Wind, a fantastic, epic romance wrapped in a mantle of reverence for the antebellum South and its Confederate soldiers); and it erected monuments all over the place as if it had actually won the war. One of the most common representations is of Nathan Bedford Forrest, a brilliant general, an unspeakably cruel man, and an ardent racist who was one of the Founders of the KKK.

For over 100 years, right up until the Civil Rights movement, both to buy Democrat votes and to stitch our riven country back together, political class in D.C. allowed the South to wrap itself in the trappings of victory. Imagine if you will that we had pulled out of Germany in 1945, and the Germans had consoled themselves by constantly returning to the glories of the Third Reich, including blatant discrimination against Jews and the flagrant display of swastikas, along with plaques and statues commemorating Hitler and Goering. Jews, gypsies, gays, etc., would have felt insulted and alienated, and I think the same holds true for blacks.

I am not advocating erasing the images of and honors to all American slaveholders. Things have to be taken in context. Some of the Founding Fathers were indeed slaveholders, but it was legal at the time and they are remembered, not for owning slaves, but for providing an incredible framework for a nation conceived in liberty. We can continue to honor Washington, Jefferson, and Madison for these accomplishments, even while acknowledging that they were flawed men whom history eventually proved wrong.

The Confederacy, however, was on the wrong side of history in its own time. Its values were rejected in bloody fury in real time. Southerners ought never to have been allowed to build monuments to an institution that was righteously destroyed, nor to honor with conspicuous public displays the men that aggressively and violently advanced an inherently immoral system.

The anarchic destruction now raging through the South is wrong because it violates the civil contract of a nation governed by law, not by mobs. Having said that, though, the law, not the mobs, should get rid of public homages to those who fought and lost a war to defend slavery and to those who, long after they lost the war, continued in those discriminatory ways. Amongst the latter, I highly recommend removing from public property anything that honors Woodrow Wilson and Franklin Roosevelt, both of whom were fantastically racist.

I also suggest looking askance at LBJ, who trapped blacks on welfare as securely as blacks were trapped in slavery one hundred years before Johnson’s time. After all, Johnson didn’t act out of the good of his heart. He acted because, as he said, with the passage of his Great Society laws, ““I’ll have those n*ggers voting Democratic for the next 200 years.”

And those are my thoughts.

Photo credit: Punch 2, Charlottesville, August 12, 2017, by Evan Nesterak. Creative Commons license; some rights reserved.

Silicon Valley Billionaires Are the New Robber Barons

August 17, 2017 12:26 pm / Leave a Comment / victorhanson

by Victor Davis Hanson// National Review

Progressives forget their history of breaking up mega-corporations as they lionize tech giants such as Apple, Google, and Facebook.

Progressives used to pressure U.S. corporations to cut back on outsourcing and on the tactic of building their products abroad to take advantage of inexpensive foreign workers.

During the 2012 election, President Obama attacked Mitt Romney as a potential illiberal “outsourcer-in-chief” for investing in companies that went overseas in search of cheap labor.

Yet most of the computers and smartphones sold by Silicon Valley companies are still being built abroad — to mostly silence from progressive watchdogs.

In the case of the cobalt mining that is necessary for the production of lithium-ion batteries in electric cars, thousands of child laborers in southern Africa are worked to exhaustion.

In the 1960s, campuses boycotted grapes to support Cesar Chavez’s unionization of farm workers. Yet it is unlikely that there will be any effort to boycott tech companies that use lithium-ion batteries produced from African-mined cobalt.

Progressives demand higher taxes on the wealthy. They traditionally argue that tax gimmicks and loopholes are threats to the republic.

Yet few seem to care that West Coast conglomerates such as Amazon, Apple, Google, and Starbucks filtered hundreds of billions in global profits through tax havens such as Bermuda, shorting the United States billions of dollars in income taxes.

The progressive movement took hold in the late 19th century to “trust-bust,” or break up corporations that had cornered the markets in banking, oil, steel, and railroads. Such supposedly foul play had inordinately enriched “robber baron” buccaneers such as John D. Rockefeller, Andrew Mellon, Andrew Carnegie, and J. P. Morgan.

Yet today, the riches of multibillionaires dwarf the wealth of their 19th-century predecessors. Most West Coast corporate wealth was accumulated by good old-fashioned American efforts to achieve monopolies and stifle competition.

Facebook, with 2 billion monthly global users, has now effectively cornered social media.

Google has monopolized internet searches — and modulates users’ search results to accommodate its own business profiteering.

Amazon is America’s new octopus. Its growing tentacles incorporate not just online sales but also media and food retailing.

Yet there are no modern-day progressive muckrakers in the spirit of Upton Sinclair, Frank Norris, and Lincoln Steffens, warning of the dangers of techie monopolies or the astronomical accumulation of wealth. Amazon, Apple, Microsoft, and Facebook are worth nearly $1 trillion each.

Conservatives have no problem with anyone doing well, so their silence is understandable. But in the Obama era, the nation received all sorts of progressive lectures on the downsides of being super-rich.

Obama remonstrated about spreading the wealth, knowing when not to profit, and realizing when one has made enough money. He declared that entrepreneurs did not build their own businesses without government help.

Yet such sermonizing never seemed to include Facebook, Starbucks, or Amazon.

The tech and social-media industries pride themselves on their counterculture transparency, their informality, and their 1960s-like allegiance to free thought and free speech. Yet Google just fired one of its engineers for simply questioning the company line that sexual discrimination and bias alone account for the dearth of female Silicon Valley engineers.

What followed were not voices of protest. Instead, Google-instilled fear and silence ensued, in the fashion of George Orwell’s 1984.

On matters such as avoiding unionization, driving up housing prices, snagging crony-capitalist subsidies from the government, and ignoring the effects of products on public safety (such as texting while driving), Silicon Valley is about as reactionary as they come.

Why, then, do these companies earn a pass from hypercritical progressives?

Answer: Their executives have taken out postmodern insurance policies.

Our new J. P. Morgans dress in jeans and T-shirts — like the late Steve Jobs of Apple or Mark Zuckerberg of Facebook — appearing hip and cool.

Executives in flip-flops and tie-dyes can get away with building walls around their multiple mansions in a way that a steel executive in a suit and tie might not.

The new elite are overwhelmingly left-wing. They head off criticism by investing mostly in the Democratic party, the traditional font of social and political criticism of corporate wealth.

In 2012, for example, Obama won Silicon Valley by more than 40 percentage points. Of the political donations to presidential candidates that year from employees at Google and Apple, over 90 percent went to Obama.

One of the legacies of the Obama era was the triumph of green advocacy and identity politics over class.

No one has grasped that reality better that the new billionaire barons of the West Coast. As long as they appeared cool, as they long as they gave lavishly to left-wing candidates, and as long as they mouthed liberal platitudes on global warming, gay marriage, abortion, and identity politics, they earned exemption from progressive scorn.

The result was that they outsourced, offshored, monopolized, censored, and made billions — without much fear of media muckraking, trust-busting politicians, unionizing activists, or diversity lawsuits.