Monday, February 26, 2018
Saturday, February 24, 2018
Understanding the California Mind - VDH
Understanding the California Mind
By Victor Davis Hanson| February 19, 2018
Nancy Pelosi gave a marathon speech on illegal immigration the other day. But how would she know much about the realities of open borders, given her palatial retreat in Northern California and multi-millionaire lifestyle that allows wealthy progressives like herself to be exempt from the consequences of her own hectoring? In the end, the House minority leader was reduced to some adolescent racialist patter about her grandson wishing to look more like his Mexican-American friend. I was thinking of the San Francisco Democrat’s speech last week, during a brief drive into our local town, in a region that is ground zero of California’s illegal immigration experience. Illegal immigrants are neither collective saints nor sinners, but simply individuals who arrive from one of the poorest regions in the Americas, without legality or much in the way of English, or high school education. They encounter an American host that has lost confidence in its once formidable powers of assimilation and integration as well as its ability to mint Americans from diverse races, religions, and ethnicities.
Instead, American culture has adopted an arrogant sense that it can ensure near instant parity as redemption for supposed past –isms and –ologies. That may explain the immigrant’s romance for Mexico to which he fights any return, and the ambiguity about America in which he fights to stay. We dare not mention illegal immigration in California as a factor in the state’s implosion. But privately, residents assume it has something to do with the 20 percent of the state’s population that lives below the poverty level. Illegal immigration plays a role in the fact that one-third of the nation’s welfare recipients lives in California and that one of four state residents was not born in the United States—or that one-half of all immigrant households receives some sort of government assistance, and that one in four homeless people lives in California.
A record of nearly $30 billion a year is forecast to be sent this year as remittances home to Mexico. If the sum is assumed to be wired largely by the reported 11 million illegal aliens, then illegal immigrants are sending per capita around $2,700 home per year. Again, in per capita terms, a household of five would average about $1,100 sent home per month to Mexico—a generosity impossible without the subsidies of the American taxpayer. (Some might wonder whether the U.S. could tax that sum to build the wall or at least declare that proof of remittances disqualifies one for public support.) Much Ruin in a State On the way to town, I passed three neighbors’ parcels. All have something in common: several families are living on lots zoned for single-family residences in an array of illegal sheds, shacks, and stationary trailers. The premises are characterized by illegal dumping, zoning and building code violations, illegal electrical hook-ups, and petty misdemeanors of unlicensed dogs and strays.
I remember similar such rural settlements from my early youth in the 1950s, over a decade after the final end of the Great Depression. Now, in our back-to-the-future state, we see some concrete reminders of what my parents used to relate about life in the 1930s. In this strange “day in the life” melodrama, at the dry cleaner in town, a car collided with mine in the parking lot. We both got out to inspect the fender-bender damage (he had more damage—maybe in the range of $500-800—than I did—probably around $400). I showed him my license, registration, and insurance authentication and asked him to do the same to complete the exchange of information. But he seemed either to have no license, registration or insurance authentication or was reluctant to show me what he had. I suggested then that we call the police to verify our likely insurance claims, and let them determine whether either one of us was at fault. He said no and suggested instead cash, as if perceived comparative damage outweighed assigning culpability. He spoke limited English. I gave him $50 in cash (all I had in my wallet) and he sped out. I figured that my damage would not have exceeded the insurance deductible and his was likely greater. I suppose he felt a possible insurance claim was not worth even theoretical exposure to deportation. Our negotiation was calm and respectful.
On the way home, I went a different route. The roadside of an adjoining farm parcel has become a veritable dump: I stopped and counted the following sorts of trash piled by the almond orchard: two infant car seats; one entertainment center, three bags of wet garbage, one mattress, one stroller, five tires, and a stack of broken cement, paint cans, and drywall. Pulling into my driveway, I noticed that a pit bull mix had been dumped at my house during my brief absence (I have already five rescue dogs). We called the animal control officer and are waiting for a reply. I think the result will be predictable, as in the case of my recent misadventure in purchasing expensive solar panels: though they were installed over three months ago, I am still waiting for Pacific Gas and Electric Co., the local utility, to hook the idled system to the grid. Some time ago I was bitten by two dogs while biking down a rural avenue nearby. The animals’ owners did not speak English, refused to tie up the unlicensed and unvaccinated biters, and in fact let their other dogs out, one of which also bit me. It took four calls to various legal authorities and a local congressional rep to have the dogs quarantined in an effort to avoid rabies shots. The owners were never cited.
The California solution is always the same: the law-abiding must adjust to the non-law-abiding. So I quit riding out here and they kept their unvaccinated, unlicensed, and untied dogs. All that is a pretty typical day, in a way that would have been atypical some 40 years ago. Traveling Halfway in Reverse In California, civilization is speeding in reverse—well aside from the decrepit infrastructure, dismal public schools, and sky-high home prices. Or rather, the state travels halfway in reverse: anything involving the private sector (smartphones, Internet, new cars, TV, or getting solar panels installed) is 21st-century. Anything involving the overwhelmed government or public utilities (enforcing dumping laws, licensing dogs, hooking up solar panel meters to the grid, observing common traffic courtesies) is early 20th-century.
Why is this so, and how do Californians adjust? They accept a few unspoken rules of state behavior and then use their resources to navigate around them.
1) Law enforcement in California hinges on ignoring felonies to focus on misdemeanors and infractions. Or rather, if a Californian is deemed to be law-abiding, a legal resident, and with some means, the regulatory state will audit, inspect, and likely fine his property and behavior in hopes of raising revenue. That is a safe means of compensating for the reality that millions, some potentially dangerous, are not following the law, and can only be forced to comply at great cost and in a fashion that will seem politically incorrect. The practical result of a schizophrenic postmodern regulatory and premodern frontier state? Throw out onto the road three sacks of garbage with your incriminating power bill in them, or dump the cooking oil of your easily identifiable mobile canteen on the side of the road, and there are no green consequences. Install a leach line that ends up one foot too close to a water well, and expect thousands of dollars of fines or compliance costs.
2) Elite progressive virtue-signaling is in direct proportion to elite apartheid: the more one champions green statutes, the plight of illegal aliens, the need for sanctuary cities, or the evils of charter schools, so all the more the megaphone is relieved that housing prices are high and thus exclusionary to “them.” The more likely one associates with the privileged, so too the more one avoids those who seem to be impoverished or residing illegally, and the more one is likely to put his children in expensive and prestigious private academies. One’s loud ideology serves as a psychosocial means of squaring the circle of living in direct antithesis to one’s professions. (I do not know how the new federal tax law will affect California’s liberal pieties, given the elite will see their now non-deductible state taxes effectively double.)
3) California is no longer really a single state. Few in the Bay Area have ever been to the southern Sierra Nevada foothill communities, or the west side of the Central Valley, or the upper quarter of the state. Coastal California is simply far more left-wing than other blue states; interior California is far more right-wing than most red states; increasingly, the former dictate to and rule the latter. The sharp divide between Massachusetts and Mississippi requires 1,500 miles; in California, the similar cultural distance is about 130 miles from Menlo Park to Mendota.
Add California’s neo-Confederate ideas into the equation—such as nullification and sanctuary cities—and we seem on the verge of some sort of secession. (Would the Central Valley follow the path of West Virginia, split off, and remain in the Union?)
4) The postmodern 21st-century state media in its various manifestations is committed to social justice, not necessarily to disinterested reporting. Few read about environmental lawsuits over the planned pathway of a disruptive high-speed rail project; not so in the case of planned state nullification of offshore drilling. In many news accounts, the race and ethnicity of a violent criminal are deduced in the cynical (and often quite illiberal) reader comments that follow. Is the newspaper deliberately suppressing news information to incite readership, who, in turn, through their commentaries flesh out the news that is not reported and simultaneously spike online viewership by their lurid outrage?
Folk wisdom in California translates into something along the following lines: an unidentified “suspect” in a drunk driving accident that leaves two dead on the side of the road can for some time remains unidentified; a local accountant of the wrong profile who is indicted by the IRS has his name and picture blared. Progressive Winners and Losers There are progressive exceptions: universities—in email blast warnings to students and faculty about mere suspects seen on campus in connection with reported burglaries or sexual assaults—are not shy in providing physical characteristics, dress, and perceived racial identities. The media, in other words, feels by massaging its coverage of California realities, it can serve an invaluable role in guiding us to our fated progressive futures—with exceptions for income and class. Californians, both the losers and beneficiaries of these unspoken rules, have lost confidence in the equal application of the law and indeed the idea of transparent and meritocratic government. Cynicism is rampant.
Law-abiding Californians do whatever is necessary not to come to the attention of any authorities, whose desperate need for both revenue and perceived social justice (150,000 households in a state of 40 million residents pay about 50 percent of California income tax revenue) is carnivorous.
A cynical neighbor once summed up the counter-intuitive rules to me: if you are in a car collision, hope that you are hit by, rather than hit an illegal alien. If someone breaks into your home and you are forced to use a firearm, hope that you are wounded nonlethally in the exchange, at least more severely than is the intruder. And if you are cited by an agency, hope it is for growing an acre of marijuana rather than having a two-foot puddle on your farm classified as an inland waterway. I could add a fourth: it is always legally safer to allow your dog to be devoured by a stray pit-bull than to shoot the pit-bull to save your dog. In the former case, neither the owner nor the state ever appears; in the latter both sometimes do. In a state where millions cannot be held accountable, those who can will be—both to justify a regulatory octopus, and as social justice for their innate unwarranted privilege.
Content created by the Center for American Greatness, Inc. is available without charge to any eligible news publisher that can provide a significant audience. For licensing opportunities for our original content, please contact licensing@centerforamericangreatness.com.
By Victor Davis Hanson| February 19, 2018
Nancy Pelosi gave a marathon speech on illegal immigration the other day. But how would she know much about the realities of open borders, given her palatial retreat in Northern California and multi-millionaire lifestyle that allows wealthy progressives like herself to be exempt from the consequences of her own hectoring? In the end, the House minority leader was reduced to some adolescent racialist patter about her grandson wishing to look more like his Mexican-American friend. I was thinking of the San Francisco Democrat’s speech last week, during a brief drive into our local town, in a region that is ground zero of California’s illegal immigration experience. Illegal immigrants are neither collective saints nor sinners, but simply individuals who arrive from one of the poorest regions in the Americas, without legality or much in the way of English, or high school education. They encounter an American host that has lost confidence in its once formidable powers of assimilation and integration as well as its ability to mint Americans from diverse races, religions, and ethnicities.
Instead, American culture has adopted an arrogant sense that it can ensure near instant parity as redemption for supposed past –isms and –ologies. That may explain the immigrant’s romance for Mexico to which he fights any return, and the ambiguity about America in which he fights to stay. We dare not mention illegal immigration in California as a factor in the state’s implosion. But privately, residents assume it has something to do with the 20 percent of the state’s population that lives below the poverty level. Illegal immigration plays a role in the fact that one-third of the nation’s welfare recipients lives in California and that one of four state residents was not born in the United States—or that one-half of all immigrant households receives some sort of government assistance, and that one in four homeless people lives in California.
A record of nearly $30 billion a year is forecast to be sent this year as remittances home to Mexico. If the sum is assumed to be wired largely by the reported 11 million illegal aliens, then illegal immigrants are sending per capita around $2,700 home per year. Again, in per capita terms, a household of five would average about $1,100 sent home per month to Mexico—a generosity impossible without the subsidies of the American taxpayer. (Some might wonder whether the U.S. could tax that sum to build the wall or at least declare that proof of remittances disqualifies one for public support.) Much Ruin in a State On the way to town, I passed three neighbors’ parcels. All have something in common: several families are living on lots zoned for single-family residences in an array of illegal sheds, shacks, and stationary trailers. The premises are characterized by illegal dumping, zoning and building code violations, illegal electrical hook-ups, and petty misdemeanors of unlicensed dogs and strays.
I remember similar such rural settlements from my early youth in the 1950s, over a decade after the final end of the Great Depression. Now, in our back-to-the-future state, we see some concrete reminders of what my parents used to relate about life in the 1930s. In this strange “day in the life” melodrama, at the dry cleaner in town, a car collided with mine in the parking lot. We both got out to inspect the fender-bender damage (he had more damage—maybe in the range of $500-800—than I did—probably around $400). I showed him my license, registration, and insurance authentication and asked him to do the same to complete the exchange of information. But he seemed either to have no license, registration or insurance authentication or was reluctant to show me what he had. I suggested then that we call the police to verify our likely insurance claims, and let them determine whether either one of us was at fault. He said no and suggested instead cash, as if perceived comparative damage outweighed assigning culpability. He spoke limited English. I gave him $50 in cash (all I had in my wallet) and he sped out. I figured that my damage would not have exceeded the insurance deductible and his was likely greater. I suppose he felt a possible insurance claim was not worth even theoretical exposure to deportation. Our negotiation was calm and respectful.
On the way home, I went a different route. The roadside of an adjoining farm parcel has become a veritable dump: I stopped and counted the following sorts of trash piled by the almond orchard: two infant car seats; one entertainment center, three bags of wet garbage, one mattress, one stroller, five tires, and a stack of broken cement, paint cans, and drywall. Pulling into my driveway, I noticed that a pit bull mix had been dumped at my house during my brief absence (I have already five rescue dogs). We called the animal control officer and are waiting for a reply. I think the result will be predictable, as in the case of my recent misadventure in purchasing expensive solar panels: though they were installed over three months ago, I am still waiting for Pacific Gas and Electric Co., the local utility, to hook the idled system to the grid. Some time ago I was bitten by two dogs while biking down a rural avenue nearby. The animals’ owners did not speak English, refused to tie up the unlicensed and unvaccinated biters, and in fact let their other dogs out, one of which also bit me. It took four calls to various legal authorities and a local congressional rep to have the dogs quarantined in an effort to avoid rabies shots. The owners were never cited.
The California solution is always the same: the law-abiding must adjust to the non-law-abiding. So I quit riding out here and they kept their unvaccinated, unlicensed, and untied dogs. All that is a pretty typical day, in a way that would have been atypical some 40 years ago. Traveling Halfway in Reverse In California, civilization is speeding in reverse—well aside from the decrepit infrastructure, dismal public schools, and sky-high home prices. Or rather, the state travels halfway in reverse: anything involving the private sector (smartphones, Internet, new cars, TV, or getting solar panels installed) is 21st-century. Anything involving the overwhelmed government or public utilities (enforcing dumping laws, licensing dogs, hooking up solar panel meters to the grid, observing common traffic courtesies) is early 20th-century.
Why is this so, and how do Californians adjust? They accept a few unspoken rules of state behavior and then use their resources to navigate around them.
1) Law enforcement in California hinges on ignoring felonies to focus on misdemeanors and infractions. Or rather, if a Californian is deemed to be law-abiding, a legal resident, and with some means, the regulatory state will audit, inspect, and likely fine his property and behavior in hopes of raising revenue. That is a safe means of compensating for the reality that millions, some potentially dangerous, are not following the law, and can only be forced to comply at great cost and in a fashion that will seem politically incorrect. The practical result of a schizophrenic postmodern regulatory and premodern frontier state? Throw out onto the road three sacks of garbage with your incriminating power bill in them, or dump the cooking oil of your easily identifiable mobile canteen on the side of the road, and there are no green consequences. Install a leach line that ends up one foot too close to a water well, and expect thousands of dollars of fines or compliance costs.
2) Elite progressive virtue-signaling is in direct proportion to elite apartheid: the more one champions green statutes, the plight of illegal aliens, the need for sanctuary cities, or the evils of charter schools, so all the more the megaphone is relieved that housing prices are high and thus exclusionary to “them.” The more likely one associates with the privileged, so too the more one avoids those who seem to be impoverished or residing illegally, and the more one is likely to put his children in expensive and prestigious private academies. One’s loud ideology serves as a psychosocial means of squaring the circle of living in direct antithesis to one’s professions. (I do not know how the new federal tax law will affect California’s liberal pieties, given the elite will see their now non-deductible state taxes effectively double.)
3) California is no longer really a single state. Few in the Bay Area have ever been to the southern Sierra Nevada foothill communities, or the west side of the Central Valley, or the upper quarter of the state. Coastal California is simply far more left-wing than other blue states; interior California is far more right-wing than most red states; increasingly, the former dictate to and rule the latter. The sharp divide between Massachusetts and Mississippi requires 1,500 miles; in California, the similar cultural distance is about 130 miles from Menlo Park to Mendota.
Add California’s neo-Confederate ideas into the equation—such as nullification and sanctuary cities—and we seem on the verge of some sort of secession. (Would the Central Valley follow the path of West Virginia, split off, and remain in the Union?)
4) The postmodern 21st-century state media in its various manifestations is committed to social justice, not necessarily to disinterested reporting. Few read about environmental lawsuits over the planned pathway of a disruptive high-speed rail project; not so in the case of planned state nullification of offshore drilling. In many news accounts, the race and ethnicity of a violent criminal are deduced in the cynical (and often quite illiberal) reader comments that follow. Is the newspaper deliberately suppressing news information to incite readership, who, in turn, through their commentaries flesh out the news that is not reported and simultaneously spike online viewership by their lurid outrage?
Folk wisdom in California translates into something along the following lines: an unidentified “suspect” in a drunk driving accident that leaves two dead on the side of the road can for some time remains unidentified; a local accountant of the wrong profile who is indicted by the IRS has his name and picture blared. Progressive Winners and Losers There are progressive exceptions: universities—in email blast warnings to students and faculty about mere suspects seen on campus in connection with reported burglaries or sexual assaults—are not shy in providing physical characteristics, dress, and perceived racial identities. The media, in other words, feels by massaging its coverage of California realities, it can serve an invaluable role in guiding us to our fated progressive futures—with exceptions for income and class. Californians, both the losers and beneficiaries of these unspoken rules, have lost confidence in the equal application of the law and indeed the idea of transparent and meritocratic government. Cynicism is rampant.
Law-abiding Californians do whatever is necessary not to come to the attention of any authorities, whose desperate need for both revenue and perceived social justice (150,000 households in a state of 40 million residents pay about 50 percent of California income tax revenue) is carnivorous.
A cynical neighbor once summed up the counter-intuitive rules to me: if you are in a car collision, hope that you are hit by, rather than hit an illegal alien. If someone breaks into your home and you are forced to use a firearm, hope that you are wounded nonlethally in the exchange, at least more severely than is the intruder. And if you are cited by an agency, hope it is for growing an acre of marijuana rather than having a two-foot puddle on your farm classified as an inland waterway. I could add a fourth: it is always legally safer to allow your dog to be devoured by a stray pit-bull than to shoot the pit-bull to save your dog. In the former case, neither the owner nor the state ever appears; in the latter both sometimes do. In a state where millions cannot be held accountable, those who can will be—both to justify a regulatory octopus, and as social justice for their innate unwarranted privilege.
Content created by the Center for American Greatness, Inc. is available without charge to any eligible news publisher that can provide a significant audience. For licensing opportunities for our original content, please contact licensing@centerforamericangreatness.com.
Monday, February 19, 2018
Mass Shootings Point to a Problem—and It Isn’t Guns
Mass Shootings Point to a Problem—and It Isn’t Guns
I’m a father of four children who all attend public school. My love for them and their value to me and to society are immeasurable. When they enter their school building, where they spend the most time outside of our home, I want to know they are safe and have confidence that they are being protected. That is the hope of every parent regardless of party affiliation or political persuasion.
But in the wake of the terrible tragedy at the Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida, the debate has begun once again regarding guns. The gun control advocates wasted no time in calling for severe restrictions on the civil liberties of law abiding Americans. You can bank on many of the Left continuing to promote policies that not only fail to prevent future violence, but also infringe upon the rights of every American.
We’ve tried banning so-called “assault weapons.” In 1994 Bill Clinton signed The Federal Assault Weapons Ban, which banned not only magazines with a capacity larger than 10 rounds, but also created an entirely arbitrary list of banned features that classified a firearm as an assault weapon. Banning these largely cosmetic features had absolutely no effect on gun crime.
When the ban expired in 2004, a study funded by the Department of Justice stated that “By most estimates, assault weapons were used in less than 6 percent of gun crimes even before the ban.” It should be noted, too, that during the ten-year ban, mass shootings went up over the previous ten years. Even the left-leaning Guardian admits: “The 1994 federal assault weapon ban, after all, showed no evidence of impact on overall gun violence.”
The answer to these school shootings is not banning guns. And, being a realist, no matter where you stand on the issue of guns, a full-on ban simply isn’t going to happen in the short term, and likely never will. Gun ownership is too ingrained into the American psyche. There are too many firearms in the hands of Americans who are sane, responsible, and take gun safety seriously ever to make such a feat possible.
What is needed now isn’t political gamesmanship, but a realistic conversation about what can be done right now to prevent these types of horrendous acts of violence from happening in the future.
While these murderous psychopaths who commit these acts of horror and mayhem aren’t driven by any normal human desire, there’s still a logic to the locations they choose to attack: their violence is centered on soft targets, places that have little security and very little chance of resistance. Imagine banks not having security and then broadcasting to the general public the lack of armed guards or security precautions. We would think that insane. How much more valuable are our children? And yet we do precisely the opposite of what we do with our money when it comes to our schools by advertising that they are almost completely unprotected.
Politicians have done their level best to make our schools some of the softest targets there are right now. Liberals work tirelessly to make “gun free zones” that often are the most likely to be attacked. It’s time to repeal the 1990 Gun-Free School Zones Act, which in the real world means in most places all the normal law abiding people on school grounds have precisely zero guns when a heavily armed insane person shows up.
After 9/11, we made our airports and planes more difficult to attack. While I’m not suggesting we create anything like a TSA for our schools, it’s time to have a conversation about “hardening” schools. That includes physical barriers and restrictions on entry to make campuses and schools less open to those who might target children. In my kids’ grade school in Northern Virginia, there is only one point of entry where you must stand before a camera and show your driver’s license before being allowed into the school. While these precautions are by no means impermeable, they can dissuade attacks, slow down attackers, and allow authorities time to respond.
Similarly, we must increase our schools’ ability to have onsite response. We trust our kids to these teachers for roughly eight hours a day. Many schools employ police officers as School Resource Officers, but it’s time to increase their use across the country. We should also consider allowing teachers and administrators to be trained and certified as security guards.
Schools in Texas and Colorado have already decided to allow qualified employees to carry firearms at school, after proper training and background checks. Depending on the state, teachers could be trained over the summer. School districts could fund the training, with anywhere from 12 to 72 hours worth of training needed to be certified security guards. We trust teachers every single day to nurture our students academically, setting them up for success throughout life. We should extend the same trust to keep them physically safe at school, if they so choose.
What also needs to be addressed is how background checks are completed. It’s clear the Florida shooter had issues that were visible to many around him, yet was still able to purchase an AR-15. We need to have a conversation about how background checks are completed, the depth and rigor of the background checks, and the ability of federal, state, and local authorities to access every piece of information needed to ascertain whether someone should be allowed to purchase a firearm.
No one can dispute that recent perpetrators of mass gun violence should not have been cleared for gun ownership of any type. In the same way federal, state, and local law enforcement departments continue to face challenges in sharing information and data in real time (so-called “interoperability”), we must find a way to ensure that licensing agencies have the ability to access the information they need to make legitimate and accurate decisions on potential licensees.
But every time a politician attempts to make a good-faith effort to solve what everyone acknowledges is a gaping hole in gun licensing, the progressive, anti-gun lobby looks to take that opportunity to deny legitimate gun owners their Constitutional rights. Instead of working with their colleagues across the aisle, they try instead to throw sand in the gears of taking steps toward real safety. Either folks want legitimately to make a difference, or they want to play games for broader political purposes. If it’s the former, great. If it’s the latter, then they are part of the problem we are facing, not part of the solution.
Three Billboards - Andrew Klavan
Three Billboards: A Surprising Meditation on God's Grace
CHAT 103 COMMENTS
[FULL SPOILERS OF THREE BILLBOARDS OUTSIDE OF EBBING, MISSOURI.]
I don't care about super hero movies. They tell me they represent an American mythology, but it's a childish mythology: heroics without tragedy — and there are no heroics without tragedy. It's mildly annoying that leftist identity mongers have co-opted such a popular form to reimagine history as it never was: a woman wins the battles of World War I; an African nation invents Western civilization. But then, Superman was never a particularly realistic representation of Truth, Justice and the American Way either. So why shouldn't women and black people have childish fantasies too?
In any case, I spent Black Panther's record breaking weekend going to see Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri. It's a lovely little film which, surprisingly, turns out to be a meditation on God's grace in the midst of evil. (I am not the first personto notice this.) As I've commented before, so much so-called "Christian" film-making is G-rated, happy-talk trash, it's just an absolute joy to come upon a grown-up work which — as telegraphed by an early appearance of a character reading the Catholic Flannery O'Connor's A Good Man Is Hard to Find — deals with God's presence in the midst of real and terrible life.
Frances McDormand plays Mildred, an Ebbing woman whose daughter has been raped and murdered. The crime has gone unsolved for seven months, so she rents three billboards that question the competence of the town's Police Chief Willoughby, played by Woody Harrelson. (All the actors in the film are terrific. Harrelson is spectacularly great.) From the very start, you expect this to be a story about a tough feminist taking on sexist, racist corruption. But the film wrong-foots those boring expectations almost immediately. Mildred is a sympathetic character but no heroine. She's unpleasant and unkind throughout. Chief Willoughby, on the other hand, turns out to be a more or less decent guy, suffering from a fatal illness. He just couldn't catch a break in solving the murder. When he asks Mildred what she would have had him do to break the case, she unleashes a series of vengeful fantasies against the male population which, as Willoughby points out, would violate their civil rights. Even in the face of evil and injustice, freedom must be preserved.
It is only after Willoughby dies, that you realize he is — and has been all along — a stand-in for the Christian Godhead, radiating the terrible grace of freedom and forgiveness on the good and the bad alike. Mildred's billboards are an understandable expression of grief and fury against that God: why, if He is good, is there evil and injustice in the world? But evil is part and parcel of the freedom Willoughby (i.e. God) protects.
At the core of the story is Willoughby's seemingly incomprehensible patience with his mind-bogglingly stupid and racist officer Dixon, played by Sam Rockwell. How can he let this awful character continue at his station? But after Willoughby dies, you realize he has treated Dixon as God would treat him: accepting his wickedness with patient love while offering him a path to grace.
The final scene is one of the best resolutions of a film story in years: Mildred and Dixon, two miserable people, coming together on a journey of vengeance — and just beginning to wonder if there might not be another way. Unlike most "Christian" films, it's moving and uplifting stuff because it's so true to the hearts we have and the life we know.
Apparently, there's been some controversy about the film after leftists realized that what seemed like a feminist screed was, in fact, something else entirely. Well, good. Feminists have lost their way. Let them go and watch another showing of Wonder Woman and assuage their endless anger with dreams of a world that never was. Three Billboards is about this world, and the God who loves it in all its terrible beauty.
Fire The FBI Chief.
THIS IS WHAT, THE FOURTH MAJOR SHOOTING WHERE THE AUTHORITIES WERE WARNED IN ADVANCE?
Kevin Williamson: Fire The FBI Chief.
“The FBI has a budget of $3.5 billion, almost all of which goes to salaries, benefits, and other personnel costs. Do you know how many employees the FBI field office in South Florida has? It has more than 1,000. Do you know how many employees the FBI has in total? It has 35,158 employees. It has 13,084 agents and 3,100 intelligence analysts. And not one of them could pick up the phone to forward vital intelligence gathered by the grueling investigative work of picking up the phone and taking a tip from a tipster. . . . For now, the FBI is in the stocks. Governor Rick Scott wants FBI director Chris Wray to resign. A self-respecting society would have him whipped.”
Kevin Williamson: Fire The FBI Chief.
“The FBI has a budget of $3.5 billion, almost all of which goes to salaries, benefits, and other personnel costs. Do you know how many employees the FBI field office in South Florida has? It has more than 1,000. Do you know how many employees the FBI has in total? It has 35,158 employees. It has 13,084 agents and 3,100 intelligence analysts. And not one of them could pick up the phone to forward vital intelligence gathered by the grueling investigative work of picking up the phone and taking a tip from a tipster. . . . For now, the FBI is in the stocks. Governor Rick Scott wants FBI director Chris Wray to resign. A self-respecting society would have him whipped.”
Friday, February 16, 2018
Impeach the Democratic Party - VDH
O
n February 7th, the Minority Leader in the House of Representatives, Nancy Pelosi, the epitome of a San Francisco liberal, treated America to an 8-hour lecture on why young illegal immigrants who benefited from President Obama’s (unconstitutional) DACA program should be allowed to stay in this country. Her speech marked the culmination of the Democratic Party’s bizarre pivot from its historical role of representing its constituents and (progressively-minded) U.S. citizens to representing illegal aliens instead. Pelosi reached a rhetorical crescendo when she recalled that her grandson had once declared that he wished he “had brown skin and brown eyes.” Seldom has the House of Representatives witnessed so touching an homage to the beauty and nobility (as liberals see it) of reverse racism.
The Honorable Congresswoman is entitled to her warped progressivism and her fashionable racism, however. This is still a free country, after all. What she is not entitled to, and what no Democrat is entitled to, is the active and purposeful subversion of U.S. laws. Democrats, lest we forget, are itching to impeach President Trump for allegedly obstructing justice in the course of the Mueller investigation into Russian election meddling. Trump’s “obstruction,” however, consists of criticism directed at an inquiry that is demonstrably flawed and biased, whereas his administration has complied with all of its legal obligations and fully cooperated with the special counsel’s office. Democrats, though, should begin to ask themselves: now that hurling charges of “obstruction of justice” is politically en vogue, could they be targeted too? The answer is yes, and the opportunity is close at hand.
The Democratic Party is pathologically obsessed with making excuses for illegal immigrants. Moreover, its reverse racism leads it increasingly to reject even the possibility that a single illegal immigrant could be criminally-minded or in any way “undesirable.” To make this suggestion even as a hypothetical is to invite derision and/or ostracism in liberal circles.
Since illegal immigrants are now officially beyond reproach, Democratic politicians have taken the logical next step: they have implemented “sanctuary city” policies in jurisdictions nationwide in order to frustrate the enforcement of U.S. immigration laws. Just recently, it was reported that the NYPD, acting under orders from Democratic politicians, has refused to comply with federal requests to hand over 1,500 illegal alien criminals for deportation. This is but the tip of the iceberg. “Blue” cities, counties, and states have implemented policies that explicitly discourage cooperation with ICE and the Border Patrol, and which in fact punish such cooperation; they have funded legal aid and other forms of assistance for illegal immigrants attempting to evade deportation; and they have given every encouragement to present and future illegal immigrants, promising them sanctuary from federal authorities.
The purpose of all this policy-making and posturing on the part of Democrats is obvious: it is to obstruct the enforcement of U.S. immigration laws! By contrast, President Trump has never suggested that laws against electoral interference, espionage, or treason should not be enforced—he has simply stated that he is innocent of all of these crimes. Democrats, on the other hand, brazenly admit their contempt for the law, and they flaunt their efforts to stymie its enforcement.
It is important to clarify the fact that harboring and giving assistance to illegal immigrants is already a crime in itself(see U.S. Code, Title 8, Section 1324), but systematic Democratic efforts to subvert, even nullify, our country’s borders and immigration laws seem to me like another form of criminality: they represent a conspiracy to obstruct justice much more shocking and elaborate than anything of which Republicans stand accused.
Long ago, I argued that the Department of Justice should prosecute Democratic politicians who openly violate Title 8 of the U.S. Code. The law specifies a penalty of up to 5 years’ imprisonment. If these penalties were applied, presumably the Democratic penchant for obstructing justice when it comes to immigration laws would evaporate overnight. That would be good for America, and it would be great for the Democratic Party, the legitimacy of which might thereby be restored.
Until the Justice Department acts, however, the House of Representatives should consider pursuing the political remedy of impeachment against those who undermine our laws. Judges, federal officials, and members of Congress who seek to obstruct the implementation of U.S. immigration laws should be subject to investigation, impeachment, trial in the Senate, and removal from office (or, depending on the circumstances, expulsion from Congress might be more appropriate).
After all, surely the actual crimes of Democrats deserve as much attention as the imaginary crimes of Republicans. That is not asking for much, is it?
The Democratic Party sorely needs a dose of reality, and the only thing that is preventing Republicans from administering it is the fear of a public backlash. The maintenance of our constitutional system of government demands that we act to preserve respect for the law, however. And let’s be clear: the law is, and always has been, on our side.
Friday, February 9, 2018
Counterfeit Elitism - VDH
Counterfeit Elitism
hose damn dairy farmers. Why do they insist on trying to govern? Or, put another way:
Why are Republicans trusting Devin Nunes to be their oracle of truth!? A former dairy farmer who House intel staffers refer to as Secret Agent Man because he has no idea what’s going on.
Thus spoke MSNBC panelist, Yale graduate, former Republican “strategist,” and Bush administration speechwriter Elise Jordan.
Jordan likely knows little about San Joaquin Valley family dairy farmers and little notion of the sort of skills, savvy, and work ethic necessary to survive in an increasingly corporate-dominated industry. Whereas dairy farmer Nunes has excelled in politics, it would be hard to imagine Jordan running a family dairy farm, at least given the evidence of her televised skill sets and sobriety.
Republicans “trust” Devin Nunes, because without his dogged efforts it is unlikely that we would know about the Fusion GPS dossier or the questionable premises on which FISA court surveillance was ordered. Neither would we have known about the machinations of an array of Obama Administration, Justice Department and FBI officials who, in addition to having possibly violated the law in monitoring a political campaign and unmasking and leaking names of Americans to the press, may have colluded with people in the Clinton campaign who funded the Steele dossier.
“Elite” is now an overused smear. But it is a fair pejorative when denoting a cadre that is not a natural or truly meritocratic top echelon, but is instead a group distinguished merely by schooling, associations, residence, connections and open disdain. If this is supposed to translate into some sort of received wisdom and acknowledged excellence, ordinary Americans may be pardoned for missing it.
The frustration with chronic elite incompetence was a theme in the 2016 election. “Expert” pollsters assured us of a Clinton landslide. The media could not follow undergraduate rules of decorum and truthfulness. “Brilliant” Ivy League trained pundits preached that the Trump administration’s first year would be disastrous and without accomplishment. Televised legal eagles insisted that Robert Mueller by now would have indicted Team Trump on charges of Russian collusion.
Half the country no longer believes these self-appointed authorities, largely because there is no visible connection between what the self-congratulatory say and do and any commensurate discernable accomplishment.
After a half-century of “whiz kids,” “the best and the brightest,” and “we are the ones we’ve been waiting for,” Americans finally yawned and are moving on.
Deplorables, Clingers, and Those Not Worthy of WorryOne symptom of such a played-out elite is its blanket condemnation of the supposed blinkered middle-class—usually evident in their virtue-signaling outrage and in their inclination to contrast their own supposed enlightenment to the supposed ignorance of everyone else.
You could put half of Trump’s supporters into what I call the basket of deplorables. Right? They’re racist, sexist, homophobic, xenophobic—Islamophobic—you name it. And unfortunately, there are people like that… Now, some of those folks—they are irredeemable, but thankfully, they are not America.
So said Yale law graduate Hillary Clinton, in an incoherent, factually unsubstantiated, and politically disastrous rant that may have lost her the 2016 election.
Clinton all but wrote off 25 percent of America as “not America”—this from the 2008 primary challenger to Barack Obama who was blasted by progressives for pandering to just such a white gun-owning consistency.
Or as Barack Obama once said, Hillary Clinton is “talking like she’s Annie Oakley . . . Hillary Clinton is out there like she’s on the duck blind every Sunday. She’s packing a six-shooter. Come on, she knows better.”
Or as Clinton herself once put it, “[I’ve] found how Senator Obama’s support among working, hard-working Americans, white Americans, is weakening again, and how whites in both states who had not completed college were supporting me . . . There’s a pattern emerging here.”
It is hard to image the Yalie feminist Clinton having any sort of political career without attachment to president emeritus and spouse Bill Clinton, whose serial sexual harassment and assault she not only contextualized over four decades, but by serial defense fueled.
Yale law graduates are not dairy farmers. But those who milk cows know enough not to peddle lies that one can invest $1,000 in cattle futures, beat the one in a trillion odds, and pocket a speculative profit of $100,000, all through autodidactic study of “the Wall Street Journal”—about as a believable yarn as claiming 30,000 deleted emails on an illegal home-brewed server under government request concerned a wedding and yoga.
And it’s not surprising then they get bitter, they cling to guns or religion or antipathy to people who aren’t like them or anti-immigrant sentiment or anti-trade sentiment as a way to explain their frustrations.
Thus spoke candidate Barack Obama about another “they.” Obama apparently did not grasp that the so-called white population voted for him in greater numbers in the general election than it did for Al Gore or John Kerry, including the very constituency he wrote off as near Neanderthal.
On what criteria of excellence did Obama in 2008 justify separating himself from the objects of his stereotyped condemnations?
His stellar Columbia undergraduate transcript? His landmark editorship of the Harvard Law Review? His dynamic career as a state legislator and U.S. senator? The ethical manner in which he conducted his Illinois senate campaign? His savvy business deals with Tony Rezko? His limitless knowledge of geography?
All right, there are 47 percent who are with him, who are dependent upon government, who believe that they are victims, who believe the government has a responsibility to care for them, who believe that they are entitled to health care, to food, to housing, to you-name-it. That that’s an entitlement . . . my job is not to worry about those people. I’ll never convince them they should take personal responsibility and care for their lives.
So said Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney during the 2012 campaign, in a similar fashion to the condescension that lost Hillary Clinton the 2016 election and nearly cost Barack Obama the 2008 nomination.
Romney’s rhetorical sins were somewhat comparable to those of Clinton and Obama and similarly reflected an out-of-touch sense of superior wisdom and insight not always warranted. Did the multimillionaire Romney not know that many citizens of the 47 percent who work nobly as minimum-wage peach pickers or clerks understandably need assistance through health or education subsidies?
Romney was, of course, correct that someone like himself could never convince those culpable of unduly receiving entitlements to take responsibilities for their lives. But could someone else have done it through a general invigoration of the industrial and manufacturing sectors? Perhaps someone who used the pronoun “our” rather than “I,” and sought to jaw bone and persuade outsourcers and off-shorers to again create jobs in American in anticipation of a more favorable business, regulatory and energy climate, and as a way of helping “our miners,” “our farmers,” “our vets,” and “our workers”?
When a presidential candidate gives up on 47 percent of the country, or a quarter of the electorate or on an entire state, it is difficult to see any evidence of deep political insight. Elise Jordan no doubt found Romney a more fitting candidate than the raucous Trump. Yet neither a dairy farmer nor Trump so far has written off tens of millions of American as culturally hopeless.
Failure as SuccessMuch of 21st century elitism comes from the peculiar benefactions of what postmodern riches bring—a divorce from muscular labor and those who do it, an apartheid distance from the very objects of one’s affection and romance, and, above all, general worldly ignorance beneath the veneer of degrees, titles, awards, and memberships.
One thing middle America could do is to realize that no educated person wants to live in a shithole with stupid people. Especially violent, racist, and/or misogynistic ones.Corporations do not want to locate “call centers, factories, development centers, etc.” because they must also deal with the fact that small towns “have nothing going for them. No infrastructure, just a few bars and a terrible school system.
Thus spoke Melinda Byerley, an obscure founder of the Silicon Valley company Timeshare CMO. She became infamous for five minutes for this Facebook posting that served as a sort of credo of why coastal elites hated those unlike them
Of course, Silicon Valley’s vaunted infrastructure is a mess of congestion, decrepit roads, and corroding bridges. Google workers sleep in Winnebagoes. A muscular class from Mexico and Central America lives in sometimes deplorable conditions in places like Redwood City, juxtaposed to Atherton or Woodside. The tech elite have often fled the apparently “terrible” public schools. Bay area private academies have grown exponentially, in the fashion of Southern academies following court-mandated desegregation orders during the 1970s.
Saintly Illegal ImmigrationOne strange manifestation of elite contempt is a romance with illegal immigration—usually by needs conflated with legal immigration to caricature its opponents. Illegal immigration is often idealized in the abstract but rarely lived with in the concrete, and also is useful as a surrogate club with which to beat down the proverbial white working class.
These rural places are often 95 percent white…Are these counties marked by high social cohesion, economic dynamism, surging wages and healthy family values? No. Quite the opposite. They are often marked by economic stagnation, social isolation, family breakdown and high opioid addiction. …It is a blunt fact of life that, these days, immigrants show more of these virtues than the native-born.
So wrote New York Times columnist David Brooks.
Few in the supposedly white sinkholes oppose measured, meritocratic, diverse and legal immigration. What they “resent” is the antithesis: influxes of those who arrive, in illegal fashion, and often in need of expensive social services, who are used cynically by Democratic Party elites as future constituents. In other words, like Democratic Presidents Bill Clinton and Barack Obama prior to 2012, the white middle and lower classes want secure borders, some protections for entry-level U.S. workers from cheaper imported labor, conditions that facilitate the melting pot, and a return to obeying the law.
Brooks seems disingenuous in his references to “immigrants” without distinguishing legal from illegal. In Arizona, illegal aliens commit crimes at a much higher rate than do the native-born. Immigrant households from Central America and Mexico have the highest welfare costs ($8,251)—some 86 percent higher than the costs of comparable native-born households. Of the so-called “Dreamers,” about 5 percent graduated from college; about 20 percent dropped out of high school, and about one in a thousand served in the military. Such figures are not cited to demonize illegal aliens, only to remind Brooks that his unsympathetic white working class has genuine concerns about illegal aliens and no demonstrable opposition to measured, legal, and meritocratic immigration.
Look, to be totally honest, if things are so bad as you say with the white working class, don’t you want to get new Americans in? …You can make a case that America has been great because every—I think John Adams said this—basically if you are in free society, a capitalist society, after two or three generations of hard work, everyone becomes kind of decadent, lazy, spoiled—whatever.
Thus spoke Weekly Standard editor-at-large Bill Kristol, who likewise does not differentiate illegal from legal immigration, but who does seem intrigued with the idea not of just supplementing but replacing a supposedly played-out white working class beyond redemption.
But surely if there is decadent, lazy, spoiled white class it is not in places like Bakersfield or Dayton, but more likely on tony college campuses. There a new generation of “spoiled” elites is increasingly poorly educated but strident in its indoctrination. They are zealous about their claims on behalf of wisdom, but ignorant of any broad knowledge that might substantiate that zealotry.
Entry into the nation’s elite universities for mostly qualified applicants is enhanced by two avenues: minority status and elite white networking. The white working class lacks both, though caricaturing its imagined illiberality is a useful trope for elite whites to showcase their empathy to fellow minority elites and the gatekeepers who demand orthodoxy on these questions.
Our best and brightest, with the most impressive resumes and degrees, not the “decadent, lazy, spoiled, whatever” of Middle America ran up $20 trillion in national debt. Our best failed over a decade to achieve 3 percent economic growth. The supposedly smartest warped the health care system. The brightest could not translate overseas interventions into a strategic or cost-to-benefit advantage. The anointed eroded the border. The most knowledgeable gave us state nullification of federal law. The purportedly most ethical weaponized the IRS, the FISA courts, the DOJ, and the FBI, undermined the idea of free-speech in the university, and politicized everything from the eroding NFL to the increasingly irrelevant Oscars.
Our so-called elite, not the middle classes, has made a desert and called it success.
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