Month: January 2021

In Summary

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I feel compelled to say something about President Trump and recent events, but realize that I would merely be repeating things I’ve said in my few most recent posts. So I will briefly summarize, and then move on to other things in 2021.

1. The President did not meet any legal definition of incitement.

2. The President’s claim that the election was stolen has not actually been thoroughly investigated, much less disproven. The narrative — that the courts rejected it so it can’t be true — is nonsense: evidence is examined in trial, not in pre-trial review. We simply don’t know the extent of the fraud, and we don’t know that the President is wrong — nor to what extent.

3. I condemn unlawful riots, regardless of the motivation of the rioters. I condemn the 500+ riots of 2020 brought to us by a demonstrably false claim that police disproportionately kill young black men and do so with impunity. I condemn the one riot of 2021 brought to us, I believe, by people who believe the as yet unresolved claim that fraud determined this election.

4. If the President has been “unpresidential,” I can live with that: at no time since his inauguration has he been treated in a presidential fashion. Having never been shown the respect due his office, I won’t fault him for his behavior now.

5. And, finally, I think that there is no sense or justice for impeaching a President for making a claim that hasn’t been disproven and may be true or mostly true, and who has committed no crime.

—–

Powerful institutions silence opposing voices so that they can lie with impunity. The truth can defend itself: being the truth is always its greatest strength, and it will almost always prevail — if it is allowed to speak. This is why tyrants control the press, imprison dissidents, and force confessions.

The gravest injustice this year is not the 501st lawless riot. It is the silencing of so many voices by powerful institutions like Twitter, Facebook, Amazon, and Google. Be wary of anyone who tells you that depriving people of their voice is in everyone’s best interest.

“The Fourth Branch of Government”

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Last night Amazon, Apple, and Google shut down Twitter’s competitor, a small social media company called “Parler.”

Twitter has been blocking and censoring conservative voices for a long time. When they became blatant about it, and particularly after blocking the nation’s fourth largest newspaper for running a factually correct story that was critical of candidate Biden’s son Hunter, people began leaving Twitter and moving to Parler, which promised free speech without bias and censorship.

So the tech giants shut Parler down.

They have “reasons.” Tyrants always have “reasons” until they don’t need reasons anymore and can just do what they want.

Don’t let anyone convince you that this is just or right. We have very narrow laws that limit certain kinds of speech. They’re narrow for a reason, the product of centuries of legal wrangling and debate. What the tech giants are doing is saying that the laws aren’t good enough, and that, “for the common good,” it’s necessary to restrict speech beyond what the law prohibits. They’re taking it upon themselves to decide which protected speech is worthwhile and which is not, and to prohibit us from engaging in the kind they don’t think is worthwhile.

There is a new elite rising, a class of smart, young, educated, well-paid person who believes that people shouldn’t be allowed to say things that experts — that is, that their preferred experts — think are incorrect. They think that their superior intelligence, information, and judgment give them the right to silence views they consider harmful or irresponsible.

They will go on at great length to make their case, but it always come back to this: free speech is good, but only if it’s the *right* speech. Laws aren’t sufficient to protect us from wrong thinking, and so they’re going to help out. For the common good. For the people.

Tell them to stuff it.

—–

As one of those smart young technocrats commented yesterday on one of my posts:

“We are witnessing the halted of fascism enabling platforms. The fourth branch of government is speaking….”

So let me ask you: do *you* remember voting for Twitter, Google, Apple, and Amazon to represent you, to govern you, and to decide what you can and can’t say? Can you find this “fourth branch of government” in the Constitution?

Bigger Than Trump

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Having now reviewed everything I can find on what the President actually said at the protest in D.C., I can state with confidence that he did not cross a line into legally actionable speech. The bar set for classifying speech as criminal is pretty high, and the President did not even come close to meeting it.

Try to set aside what you think about President Trump. That’s a stretch goal for a lot of us, but let’s stretch: consider, for just a moment, that there might be an issue here that’s bigger than the President himself, and that could have repercussions that go far beyond January of 2021.

Those who call for the President’s removal from office are asking that punitive action be taken — in fact, that the most punitive action which can be taken, in the case of the Chief Executive, be taken — for his exercise of constitutionally protected speech.

Let that sink in. If the most powerful man in the United States can receive the highest punishment which Congress can mete out for the non-crime of speaking in a way that offends many people, then what protection does anyone have to speak freely? What does it mean to set a precedent that a sitting President can be removed from office for constitutionally protected speech?

During the Kavanaugh hearings, I argued that it was critical that the Senate confirm the nominee following the vague and unsubstantiated allegations made by Ms. Ford. A failure to do so would diminish the Senate’s authority by signaling that any future nominee could be derailed by nothing more than an unverifiable claim of past misbehavior.

Something even greater than that is at stake here. If we remove the sitting President, a man who received, barely two months ago, the support of more than seventy million Americans, that decision should be rooted in the most profound and solid Constitutional reasoning. Anything less elevates virtue signaling above the Constitution, and both endorses and enshrines the left’s view that the right not to be offended transcends freedom of speech and the rule of law.

If this disregard for law and the Constitution were coming only from the left, from people who already held neither law nor the Constitution in high esteem, I could almost overlook it as merely more of the unprincipled toxicity of the progressive movement. But some on the right are falling for this too.

It’s time to put one’s feelings about the President aside, and to take a hard-headed look at the law and the Constitutional principles that are at stake. Everyone’s right to free expression is in the dock right now. That serves a left that has already embraced censorship and controlled speech. We on the right must do better.

The Last Four Years

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It’s easy to react in the moment, but the Trump Presidency is more than the moment. Now it’s coming to the end, and I want to say a couple of things about it.

First, I’d like to thank the President for being a good President for most of his four years in office.

Dear President Trump,

When I helped elect you in 2016, I hoped that you would be a bulwark against the transformation that eight years of Obama had started, and that seemed destined to continue unchecked under a Clinton administration. I didn’t expect you to be a gracious man, a tactful man, or a conservative chief executive. You were one of those things, and that was enough: you were a conservative President, and you exceeded my expectations.

Thank you, Mr. President, for appointing hundreds of good judges, and giving us a Supreme Court that is likely to show the Constitution some respect.

Thank you, Mr. President, for getting us out of the Paris Accord, and for clearing the way for America to become an energy superpower. Now that we’ve demonstrated that we can do it, perhaps the next President won’t muck it up too much.

Thank you, Mr. President, for presiding over an historic outbreak of peace in the Middle East. Thank you for ending the Iranian deal that would likely have led to that country’s nuclear dominance of the region, with only Israel to keep them in check.

Thank you for expressing love for my country, for not mocking me for speaking only English, for not berating me for being a businessman and building something for myself. Those seem like very low bars, yet the man who preceded you couldn’t clear them — didn’t even try.

Thank you for excoriating a press that is mired in corruption and dishonesty, and that has manipulated and betrayed the citizenry for decades. I think we owe a lot of the current skepticism of the press to your efforts, however rude and sometimes clumsy they were.

Thank you for reminding the Republican party that businesses are both big and small, and that the middle of the country can’t simply learn to code. You promised at your inauguration that you wished to represent all Americans, and you delivered on that promise.

So thank you for four years that were better than I ever expected, four years that stopped and occasionally reversed the damage done by your predecessor. I never thought we’d get a reprieve, but we did and I appreciate it.

I never mistook you for a man of particular dignity and grace, never thought you’d exercise great self-control or restraint. But you suffered an unconscionable amount of abuse, persevered through attacks that would have disheartened most, and continued to work and to stay within the Constitutional boundaries. I never imagined you’d experience the relentless onslaught you did, nor, to be honest, would I have guessed that you’d have handled it as well as you did. I thank you for that as well. You provoked the worst from your opponents; that is probably ultimately a good thing, as we needed to see them clearly.

I think you were cheated out of victory, if not through outright electoral fraud (though I won’t rule that out) then by a unified opposition of liars and censors — mainstream media and tech giants, politicians and institutions. You still have to leave office, and I’d like to see you go with grace and dignity, but as I said I never really expected those things from you and it would be unrealistic to ask you to discover those qualities now. I can accept a graceless and undignified exit now; I require only that you dutifully fulfil the law as you step down.

You did a good job, and you got a raw deal. You spared my country four years of Clinton.

So thank you.
An American

A Comment About Mob Violence

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Let me lay out my assumptions right up front, before making the point I want to make.

  1. The President didn’t incite violence. His comments were within the boundaries of appropriate political discourse, whether or not he was correct in the views he expressed about the election. (In fact, I’m sure he was partially, though not wholly, correct.)
  2. I categorically condemn mob violence, and this instance is no exception: everyone who broke the law should be charged, tried, and, if convicted, punished. Whatever the motives of the lawbreakers (and I don’t know who they are or why they did what they did), I reject any claim they might have to legitimacy in their actions. Lock them up.

There. I hope that’s sufficiently clear. Now here’s the point of this post.

For months, businesses have been destroyed by lawless mobs. Billions of dollars of damage have been done to the private property of American citizens as shops were burned, windows smashed, stores looted. Through it all, the President called for a restoration of law and order, and offered federal support in that effort. In each instance he was rebuffed.

Because the destruction of private property and livelihoods doesn’t matter to folks on the left.

The Capitol break-in didn’t endanger anyone’s livelihood: no one will go out of business because of it, no Senator or Congressman will miss a paycheck or lose his life’s savings because thugs broke in to the building and damaged the nation’s property. Democracy, the Constitution, and the nation were not at risk.

The optics were terrible. But the optics were also terrible when Mainstreet USA was burning; the difference is that we didn’t see that, because the left didn’t care, and so didn’t want us to care either.

By all means prosecute the thugs who broke the law in D.C. this week, and good riddance. But remember that, when it came to demanding justice for regular American citizens faced with the loss of their jobs, businesses, incomes, and savings in the hundreds of Antifa and BLM riots this past year, it was the President who was calling for an end to the violence and the protection of regular American citizens. And the left fought that at every turn, choosing to side with lawlessness and the mob.

So to anyone who couldn’t be bothered to stand up for regular American citizens all summer long — and that’s essentially everyone in mainstream news and every Democratic politician at the state and federal level: go back and report on the tragedy of all those shuttered businesses and destroyed lives before expressing your faux outrage over this most recent event. And explain to me why all those people didn’t matter while they watched their hopes and futures burn.

Into the Great Unknown

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What we can say with certainty about the incoming government is that the values it brings into office are antithetical to our own. We know that: it’s a matter of public record, and we understand the fact of it even if we may be unsure of the magnitude of our disagreement. The incoming administration and the new Democrat-controlled Senate will wish to transform the country in ways we loathe. This much is certain.

Beyond that, we don’t really know very much. Systems composed of people are complex, responding and adapting in ways that are hard, often impossible, to predict. Sometimes a single individual, event, or virus can shift the entire political equation in unforeseen ways. We just don’t know; those who speak with certitude about the future demonstrate a lack of wisdom proportionate to their confidence in the predictions they make.

How will the Democrats deal with the deep schism within their own party? Will a 50-50 Senate allow the kind of radical changes many of us fear the Democrats will try to pursue? How long will Biden be able to maintain the fiction that he’s capable of carrying out the functions of his office, and how will his seemingly inevitable departure take place? What will happen in 2022 as a result of what seems likely to be poor decision-making from the Democrats over the next two years? How will our relationship to China evolve and/or deteriorate, given the leverage our adversary quite probably has over Biden’s corrupt and degenerate son?

We don’t know. We could win in a landslide in 2022. The Senate could be stymied by one or two prudent and/or cowardly Democrats who think it wise to avoid doing something so profoundly stupid as packing the Supreme Court, bringing in a new state, or opening the borders. Or they might do everything we fear, and America could be entering a new dark age. For that matter, China could share another virus with us, the next one worse than the current one to which we’ve grotesquely over-reacted.

We don’t know. So the fight goes on.

Don’t burn bridges between yourself and true allies. Find points of agreement on the right and lean into them. Encourage optimism in the face of the unknown. Avoid people who are too quick to accept and preach defeat: they don’t know the future any better than we do, and there’s nothing to be gained, neither strategic advantage nor honor, by surrender.

Be wary of people who argue for strategic losses, who say it’s better to lose the next fight because it sets us up to win later. The future becomes exponentially harder to predict as it recedes in time and as the chain of events lengthens. Fight for the most conservative plausible win in every case, because we really don’t know where a loss will take us. Keep it simple: try to win each battle as it comes up.

Most Americans hear only one side, that of a smug technocratic left ignorant of history and consumed with hubris. It is up to conservatives — people like us — to expose normal Americans to the facts and ideas they won’t otherwise hear, but that they will usually find persuasive because conservatism is closer to the truth, closer to what actually works and has been shown to work.

So now we go into the unknown together. And there are a lot of us.