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Why did Joe Biden’s poor performance in the debate last night come as a surprise to many on the left? The responses of two people writing in today’s Guardian give a clue:
Rebecca Solnit:
Trump’s positions on anything and everything shift and slide at will, and he lies about his own past with pathological confidence – in this debate he both denied that he had sex with Stormy Daniels and that he praised the white supremacists who stormed Charlottesville in 2017. More substantively he lied – unchallenged, except by Biden – about his role in the January 6 coup attempt, and the CNN pundits did not trouble him further about his crimes.
Lloyd Green:
Trump lied aplenty. He acted as if he never had said there were “good people” on both sides in Charlottesville, and pretended that he hadn’t dissed America’s war dead.
Emphasis added in both quotes. Why have I bolded the parts about Charlottesville? Because it seems that neither Rebecca Solnit nor Lloyd Green were aware that in that speech about Charlottesville, Trump said literally seconds later: “I’m not talking about the neo-Nazis and the White Nationalists, because they should be condemned totally – but you had many people in that group other than neo-Nazis and White Nationalists, OK? And the press has treated then absolutely unfairly. Now, in the other group also you had fine people, but you also had troublemakers.”
Check for yourselves by watching this video of the 2017 press conference in which Trump referred to “Fine people on both sides” from CNBC news: “President Donald Trump On Charlottesville: You Had Very Fine People, On Both Sides” Aug 15, 2017.
Here is my transcription, with timestamps, of Trump’s answers to journalists’ questions in the relevant section of that press conference. I have not attempted to transcribe the questions, but everything Trump said is there. Bear in mind that it was very noisy, with people constantly shouting over each other, hence Trump’s constant repetition of “Excuse me – excuse me”.
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0:04 I’m not putting anybody on a moral plane. What I’m saying is this: You had a group on one side, and you had a group on the other, and they came at each other with clubs, and it was vicious, and it was horrible, and it was a horrible thing to watch. But there is another side. There was a group on this side, you can call them the left – you’ve just called them the left – that came violently attacking the other group. So you can say what you want, but that’s the way it is.
0:35 Well, I do think there’s blame, yes, I think there’s blame on both sides. You look at – you look at both sides, I think there’s blame on both sides. And I have no doubt about it, and you don’t have any doubt about it either. And – and – and if you reported it accurately, you would say-
0:56 Excuse me, excuse me [inaudible] and you had some very bad people in that group, but you also had people that were very fine people – on both sides – you had people in that group – excuse me, excuse me, I saw the same pictures as you did. You had people in that group that were there to protest the taking down of, to them, a very, very important statue, and the renaming of a park from “Robert E. Lee” to another name.
1:27 George Washington was a slaveowner. Was George Washington a slaveowner? So will George Washington now lose his status? Are we going to take down – excuse me – are we going to take down – are we going to take down statues to George Wash–
1:42 How about Thomas Jefferson, what do you think of Thomas Jefferson, you like him? OK, good, are we going to take down the statue, because he was a major slaveowner. Now, are we going to take down his statue? So you know what, it’s fine. You’re changing history, you’re changing culture,
1:57 and you had people – and I’m not talking about the neo-Nazis and the White Nationalists, because they should be condemned totally – but you had many people in that group other than neo-Nazis and White Nationalists, OK? And the press has treated them absolutely unfairly.
2:14 Now, in the other group also, you had some fine people, but you also had troublemakers, and you see them come with the, with the black outfits and with the helmets and with the baseball bats. You get – you had a lot of bad – you had a lot of bad people in the other group too.
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Despite what Trump actually said being on video for all to see, the mainstream media has repeated thousands of times that Trump praised the neo-Nazis and white supremacists, or that his “both sides” comment was intended to equate the entire group of left wing protesters to neo-Nazis and white supremacists, rather than to equate the extremists of the right to the extremists of the left, and to equate the fine people on the right (whom he explicitly defined as being those who were NOT neo-Nazis or white supremacists) to the fine people on the left.
Which journalists are lying and which genuinely believe this disinformation? It is reasonable to assume Rebecca Solnit and Lloyd Green genuinely believe it. They probably would not have wanted to make themselves look foolish in public, and, besides, the poor lambs probably get their news from the Guardian and the other organs of what is still called the “quality” press.
But didn’t anyone point out to the Guardian the many debunkings by Scott Adams (https://x.com/ScottAdamsSays) and others of what Adams calls the “Fine People Hoax”? Hey, I tried to do it repeatedly when commenting on those few Guardian articles that allow comments these days. About five per cent of my many attempts slipped through; the other 95% of them were censored immediately.
The same went for my comments about the genuineness of Hunter Biden’s laptop, however polite, however well-referenced. Deleted immediately.
The same went for my comments detailing the many times that Joe Biden came out with provable falsehoods (although he probably believes them, poor chap) or descended into meaningless gabble. Deleted immediately. And I am sure that in keeping its readers and its writers safe from disturbing evidence of Biden’s decline, the Guardian was only following the lead of the New York Times and the rest of the “respectable” media.
And thus the Democrats and their friends wove the net in which they now find themselves trapped.
“New polling data shows that support for LGBTQ rights is dropping precipitously in Canada”, writes Adam Zivo in the National Post, “and while many queer activists will inevitably blame the far right for this development, the fact is that they themselves helped sabotage their own public support.”
The article continues:
Their abrasiveness and militancy has alienated the public, and though a strategic shift is needed, I fear that community leaders will fail to understand this until it is too late.
According to this year’s edition of the Ipsos LGBTQ+ Pride Report, which polled adults in 26 countries, support for queer rights has decreased across the globe since 2021. Several metrics suggest that the starkest changes occurred in Canada.
This year, only 49 per cent of Canadian respondents believed that people should be open about their orientation or gender identity (down 12 points from 2021), while support for LGBTQ people publicly kissing or holding hands fell to 40 per cent (down 8 points). Fewer Canadians want to see openly gay or bisexual athletes (50 per cent, down 11 points) or more LGBTQ characters on screens (34 per cent, down 10 points).
Decreases in the popularity of groups supposedly protected by activists happen so predictably that I have concluded it is what the activists, consciously or unconsciously, wish to see. It gives them something to do.
Via Daniel Sugarman, I found this article by Talia Jane in the New Republic.
Before I quote from it, I must apologise for quoting myself. Over the last few days, I, like many other people, have talked about several instances of blatant Jew-hatred in New York. So that this post will stand alone, I am going to repeat part of what I said then:
The video [posted by “KosherCockney”] shows a bunch of supporters of the Palestinians, their faces hidden by keffiyehs or black ski masks, who have evidently just poured into a New York subway carriage. The ordinary travellers stand rigid or sit hunched with their eyes down, trying to avoid being selected.
The leader of the pro-Palestinians says, “Raise your hand if you’re a Zionist.”
Activists: “Raise your hand if you’re a Zionist.”
Leader: “This is your chance to get out.”
Activists: “This is your chance to get out.”
Understandably, none of the travellers raise their hands.
The progressive says with satisfaction, “OK, no Zionists. We’re good.”
I do not think it is an exaggeration to hear in that sentiment an echo of the Nazi term “Judenfrei”.
I urge you to watch the video if you have not yet seen it. Now read how Talia Jane describes it:
The fourth incident Biden references is perhaps the most disingenuous: Protesters filled subway cars while commuting from Union Square to Wall Street during Within Our Lifetime’s protest. As the car filled with pro-Palestine demonstrators, one protester jokingly remarked to the car, “Raise your hand if you’re a Zionist. This is your chance to get out,” a nod to the density of pro-Palestine protesters on the subway train. This remark was reinterpreted by the mayor as a threat, with calls to identify the protester and a spokesperson for the mayor stating, “Threatening New Yorkers based on their beliefs is not only vile, it’s illegal and will not be tolerated.”
“I was just kidding. Can’t you take a joke?” Bullies learn to say that in the school playground. Antifa activists and other racist persecutors quickly graduate to the the group version: “Can’t you people take a joke?” As a line to use while intimidating members of the public, it is effective in several ways. It both shields the racists from being punished for threatening behaviour, and torments their victims a second time, by forcing them to either deny that it was all a joke and admit how afraid they were, or to pretend to laugh along for fear of worse, and thus become complicit in their own humiliation. Both of these responses give the fanboys and fangirls like Talia Jane a good laugh.
“This is the zombie apocalypse”, tweeted Shoshanna Keats Jaskoll. “You need to watch this.”
You do need to watch it. The “zombie apocalypse” is jokey fiction. This is real and not funny. It happened in New York a few days ago.
Here is the same scene from a different angle. The tweet by Drew Pavlou says,
This is genuinely blood-curling.
Hamas murdered 364 Jewish civilians at the Nova music festival – one of the worst terrorist massacres in modern history. And people in New York City actually celebrate the bloodshed with zombie like call-and-response chants defending the massacre
The speaker leading the chants is not the woman with the long hair, as I thought at first, but the woman intermittently visible on the left wearing a Muslim hijab-and-keffiyeh combination over a combat shirt and black jeans. Judging from their clothing, the crowd is a mixture of Muslims and Leftists. Compiled from both video clips, here is my transcript what the leader and the crowd said,
Leader: “Fuck the Nova music festival”
Crowd: “Fuck the Nova music festival”
Leader: “AKA the place”
Crowd: “AKA the place”
Leader: “where Zionists decided to rave”
Crowd: “where Zionists decided to rave”
Leader: “next to a concentration camp”
Crowd: “next to a concentration camp”
Leader: “That’s exactly what this music festival was.”
Crowd: “That’s exactly what this music festival was.”
Leader: “It’s like having a rave”
Crowd: “It’s like having a rave”
Leader: “Right next to the gas chambers”
Crowd: “Right next to the gas chambers”
Leader: “during the holocaust”
Crowd: “during the holocaust”
Pro-Palestinian activists like this style of repeating chants. I think it is because they feel they need not take responsibility for their own words if they are just repeating what their leader said a second ago. Here is another recent example, posted by “KosherCockney”.
The video shows a bunch of supporters of the Palestinians, their faces hidden by keffiyehs or black ski masks, who have evidently just poured into a New York subway carriage. The ordinary travellers stand rigid or sit hunched with their eyes down, trying to avoid being selected.
The leader of the pro-Palestinians says, “Raise your hand if you’re a Zionist.”
Activists: “Raise your hand if you’re a Zionist.”
Leader: “This is your chance to get out.”
Activists: “This is your chance to get out.”
Understandably, none of the travellers raise their hands.
The progressive says with satisfaction, “OK, no Zionists. We’re good.”
I do not think it is an exaggeration to hear in that sentiment an echo of the Nazi term “Judenfrei”.
Then there’s Trump. The New York State district attorney, Alvin Bragg, is a Democrat with powerful political motives to bring down the likely Republican nominee. That should be a scandal but, in the ethical muddle of our age, it seemingly isn’t. The actual charges concocted by Bragg against Trump I leave for the legal experts to parse. None of them rose to the level of Clinton’s server or Biden’s garage sale of secrets. But Trump is the monster that haunts the nightmares of the privileged class. He must be prosecuted in multiple times and places, convicted, fined hundreds of millions, imprisoned, annihilated, pulverised.
The whole process stinks of desperation.
– Martin Gurri
Colchester always looks prosperous when I go there. There are designer clothes at prices I cannot afford in its charity shops. I think of it as a place where the last serious incident of anti-social behaviour was in AD 61. Not so, according to the Telegraph:
How libraries changed from local sanctuaries to antisocial behaviour hotspots
All the crime in British libraries has traditionally been contained between the covers of our books – any rowdiness instantly quelled by the librarians’ famous “Shh!”
But in Colchester, Essex, that idyll increasingly resembles fiction. Over the past three months, the city’s local library has recorded a shocking 54 incidents of antisocial behaviour, forcing librarians to consider donning bodycams for their own protection.
Books have been snatched from the shelves, tossed about and destroyed. An irreplaceable collection of local 18th-century maps has been defaced with obscene sketches. A glass door has been shattered, fires have been lit on the carpet tiles of the quiet study area and staff have been subjected to appalling verbal abuse and – on one occasion – a physical assault.
Non-paywall version of the story here.
It continues,
Perhaps most worrying of all, however, is that the Essex librarians are far from alone, with similar learning sanctuaries across the country now battling a wave of criminality and disorderly behaviour.
In Kent, such institutions witnessed a 500 per cent increase in antisocial incidents affecting staff and library users between 2020 and 2023, while in Bristol, several libraries were forced to close or change their opening hours over the school holidays last year to deter unruly young visitors.
Note the timeframe. I suspect that this startling 500% increase in antisocial incidents in Kent public libraries between 2020 and 2023 was a ripple from the Black Lives Matter tsunami finally making landfall after crossing the Atlantic. However that is but the latest book in a multi-volume saga. The article speaks of any rowdiness being ‘instantly quelled by the librarians’ famous “Shh!”’ When did that last happen, 1975? Perhaps there really were Shh-ing librarians like that once. My imagination gives them beehive hair and cat-eye glasses. Never actually saw one though, and in the 1980s I spent vast amounts of time in the local public library. All my life, trendy young librarians lived in terror of being thought to be that sort of librarian, and the fear never went away while they gradually turned into old librarians who’ve still got their CND badges in a drawer somewhere.
No longer the silent book storage and study areas of old, libraries have evolved to become “community hubs” offering a wide range of free or affordable services to visitors of all ages. You can go to a library to access the internet and use printers and photocopiers. They host knitting clubs, manga drawing sessions and bereavement support meetings. Often they’ll loan out medical equipment such as blood pressure monitors, with many becoming Covid vaccination centres during the pandemic. A new Scottish scheme even offers up musical instruments for users.
In Colchester’s library, parents and grandparents are supervising toddlers clambering around a small soft play area situated on the two-storey building’s ground floor.
There is nothing wrong with the manga drawing or the soft play areas in themselves. Nor do I have any automatic objection to a library, in the sense of a place whose primary purpose is to make books available to the public, also hosting activities such as Drag Queen Story Hour, as Colchester library has done. Although I do think the famous Rainbow Dildo Butt Monkey whom Redbridge council commissioned to do the rounds of its children’s libraries in 2021 might have been a little off-putting to certain demographics.
If public, government-run libraries were private, commercially-run libraries as once existed in the UK – Boots the Chemist used to run a mass-market circulating library – we could have lively competition between the “We’re not your grandma’s library” libraries and the “We are your grandma’s library” libraries. I am sure there is room for both.
But that is a dream. In the real world, low as its fees were, “Boots Book-Lovers’ Library” could not compete with the government-subsidised version which proudly boasted it was free to all. And the generations of public librarians since then thought they were being non-authoritarian by taking that “to all” literally. “The library isn’t just about books”, they said. The banks of computers pushed the books into a corner. “The library isn’t just for swots”, they said. “We won’t make you stay quiet”, they said. It stopped being a quiet haven for swots. “We are inclusive”, they said. “The library is for all sorts of people.” And, lo, no one was excluded and all sorts of people came.
The Telegraph is playing with us…
Donald Trump jury reaches verdict in historic hush money trial Updated 2 minutes ago
No, they don’t say what the verdict is.
Update: Guilty.
What effect will this have? Personally, I suspect the Democrats have caught a tiger by the tail. They saw some polling in 2020 that said X per cent of voters would be less likely to vote for someone if they had been convicted of a crime and thought, “Aha, this is how we do it”. But it all looks very different when the election is 159 days away. They should have watched more Yes, Minister.
Bernard: “And as you know the letters JB are the highest honour in the Commonwealth.”
Hacker: “JB?”
Sir Humphrey: “Jailed by the British. Gandhi, Nkrumah, Makarios, Ben Gurion, Kenyatta, Nehru, Mugabe, the list of world leaders is endless, and contains several of our students.
(From Season 2,Episode 2 “Doing the Honours”.)
A spell in the clink is not quite so certain a predictor of future high office when the jailers are your own countrymen, but the principle still holds. If the Democrats are really as afraid as they claim to be that Trump will make himself into a second Hitler, they should have considered where the first one got time to write his bestseller.
By the way, there is much of current interest in that 43-year-old episode, including discussion of British universities being dependent on overseas students and what Sir Humphrey calls the “catastrophic” possibility of a pro-Israeli Foreign Office.
The recent decision by President Biden to slap tariffs on a range of Chinese imports, including electric vehicles, has gone through with relatively little political noise and pushback. There was a time a while ago when certain figures in the Republican Party and part of the mainstream media would have been alarmed by this, given how widely free trade was accepted as a default position, with caveats about protecting sectors deemed vital for security, or because of things such as blatant abuse of intellectual property. Nowadays, it appears that mercantilism, and special interest lobbying power that drives it, is as strong as ever.
The Wall Street Journal writes ($):
The way to defeat Beijing economically is by making America more competitive. This means playing to traditional strengths of innovation, low taxes and regulation, and trade alliances. Mr. Biden has done the opposite. His Administration has blocked critical mineral mining projects. It has attacked domestic fossil-fuel production and petrochemicals, which contributes to pharmaceutical production.
Of course, the question is who is being “defeated”, if at all, by hammering the economy of China? Will it be the Chinese Communist Party, which in many ways is more or less a sort of Mafia, or the regular Chinese people? Let’s not forget that tens of millions of Chinese citizens have been lifted to a standard of living that would have been a shock to those familiar with the terrible Mao-induced catastophes/crimes of the Great Leap Forward in the 50s and the Cultural Revolution of the mid-60s.
While I suppose that deliberately impoverishing China – which is what some people might want to see – is the goal, regardless of the human costs – I see it as right to pursue two broad courses – encourage prosperity around the world and resist the most egregious abuses. It is also a fact worth considering that it is not, in general, prosperous countries that attack other rich ones. It usually tends to be countries that are in decline for various reasons – often self-induced – that lash out against their real or presumed opponents. A China that wants to conquer Taiwan, for example, or mess with the West in various ways, is in my view motivated by a sort of nagging insecurity as much as anything else. China has done far more to harm itself by its clampdowns under Xi than anything that Biden, Trump or whoever is likely to do. And protectionism is, as I explain below, a very blunt instrument that causes widespread collateral damage and self-harm.
The newspaper notes that one bad policy begets another, as politicians try to offset the bad effects of their previous policy:
The Biden tariffs are a classic example of how bad industrial policy is compounded by another bad policy in the name of fixing the first mistake. Thus Mr. Biden wants to use tariffs to raise the price of EVs that he wants everyone to buy. It’s bananas.
It is. The long-term negative consequences of rising protectionism will be complacency, sloth, special pleading, shoddier products, and the rest. This may take years to manifest itself. It is not even as if the tariffs being imposed by the Biden administration are to be offset by large tax cuts domestically. In the late 19th Century, the various administrations after the US Civil War did impose tariffs, but domestic taxes were puny compared with what we have now.
In any event, arguments that protectionism “protects” seem to be as weak as they ever have been. And there are the downstream impacts to consider: by making imports of solar panels, cars, cooking oil or whatever more expensive, it increases costs not just to consumers, but also to intermediate manufacturers who use these things. Import tariffs on steel drive up the cost of everthing made with steel, to give one simple example.
There is also the corrupting effect that protectionism has, as explained by Phillip W Magness:
In economic terms, tariffs deliver a “rent” by transferring a portion of the consumer surplus from exchange to beneficiary producers who no longer face import competition. The collective action advantages of concentrated interest groups enable lobbying efforts to coalesce around tariff-benefitting industries, which then divert resources away from productive economic activities and into seeking favors through the political system. On net, the concentrated benefits received by politically savvy industries are dwarfed by the combination of deadweight losses on consumers and political losses due to rent-seeking to obtain more tariffs.
Magness also notes another myth about tariffs that modern-day protectionists like to lean on:
As Douglas Irwin has shown, the claimed correlations between late nineteenth-century American industrialization and protectionism are both exaggerated and spurious. Economic growth in sectors that did not face heavy import-competition—think of transportation, communication, and utilities—generally outpaced the tariff-beneficiaries of industrial manufacturing. The United States also had the unique advantage of a large, geographically diverse internal commercial base in this period. Nor were tariffs the unambiguous benefit to industry that Cass claims. They raised the prices on imported capital goods like heavy machinery, which likely impaired many of the same industries that benefited from tariffs on their own goods.
In any event, while they are different in many ways, it appears that both Mr Biden and Mr Trump are in agreement that tariffs are great. Whatever other qualities, or the lack thereof, may distinguish these men from each other and may persuade voters to jump one way or the other, or abstain, or just despair, it appears that on protectionism, we are back in an age as if Adam Smith and David Ricardo never existed.
This is the most repulsive, counter-productive advertisement I have ever seen:
But it is still less sinister and arrogant than this:
“Trump’s trial is a stupendous legal catastrophe”, writes Alan Dershowitz in the Telegraph.
I have been teaching, practising and writing about criminal law for 60 years. In all those years, I have never seen or heard of a case in which the defendant has been criminally prosecuted for failing to disclose the payment of what prosecutors call “hush money”. Alexander Hamilton paid hush money to cover up an affair with a married woman. Many others have paid hush money since. If the legislature wanted to criminalise such conduct they could easily enact the statute prohibiting the payment of hush money or requiring its disclosure. They have declined to do so.
Prosecutors cannot simply make up new crimes by jerry-rigging a concoction of existing crimes, some of which are barred by the statute of limitations others of which are beyond the jurisdiction of state prosecutors.
and
If the defendant were not Donald Trump and the venue were not Manhattan, this ought to be a slam dunk win for the defendant. Indeed, this extraordinarily weak case would never have been bought.
I am not a Trump political supporter. I voted for Joe Biden in the last election and I have an open mind about the coming election. But I want it to be fair. Whoever loses the election should not be able to complain about election interference by the weaponisation of the criminal justice system for partisan advantage.
All Americans, regardless of political affiliation, should be appalled at this selective prosecution.
I am curious as to whether Professor Dershowitz’s article will be appearing in any of the American papers as well as in the Telegraph. It is very common for British papers to reprint articles about American affairs, but a quick Google showed no sign of this one other than in the Telegraph itself. One would think an emeritus professor at Harvard Law School would have American newspapers queuing up to publish his views on one of the top U.S. legal stories of the day. Maybe the layers of editors and fact-checkers for which the American media are famed are just taking their time on this one.
AJ Edelman, OLY, MBA
@realajedelman
I received an email asking me to contribute to Yale for my class reunion.
My response:
“Last year I faced suspension and a trespassing charge if I returned to campus without proof of a 5th COVID shot.
Perhaps you can ask one of the fine Yalies bravely harassing their Jewish peers instead. They’re easy to find; they’re hosting a Jew hatred festival in the middle of campus and calling for violent intifada.”
12:30 AM · Apr 30, 2024
Now that’s what I call an effective non-violent protest.
“Which is it? Do you want to occupy the public space to express your dissent and invoke your absolute right to speak? Or do you want to beat on anyone who then exists in that same space and invokes their absolute right to document it?”
– a tweet from David Simon referring to a video posted by Logan Schiciano with the accompanying text “Unfortunately some protesters at Northwestern’s newly-formed encampment weren’t too thrilled with us reporting” in which a masked protester assaults the person filming them.
Remember the “Occupy” movement? The Occupy Paradox is this: “Upon what basis can an Occupy protest ask someone to leave?”
… because “This is private property” or any other version of “You have no right to be here” are open to some fairly obvious ripostes.
“We were here first” – “Er, not quite first. The actual owners of the space were there before you.”
“We are the 99%” – “We’re poorer than you, you middle class ****-ers”
“We represent the 99%” – “Who voted for you, then?”
“We are the official accredited Occupiers” – “We refuse to be defined by your oppressive structures, and hereby declare ourselves to be Occupying this Occupation!”
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Who Are We? The Samizdata people are a bunch of sinister and heavily armed globalist illuminati who seek to infect the entire world with the values of personal liberty and several property. Amongst our many crimes is a sense of humour and the intermittent use of British spelling.
We are also a varied group made up of social individualists, classical liberals, whigs, libertarians, extropians, futurists, ‘Porcupines’, Karl Popper fetishists, recovering neo-conservatives, crazed Ayn Rand worshipers, over-caffeinated Virginia Postrel devotees, witty Frédéric Bastiat wannabes, cypherpunks, minarchists, kritarchists and wild-eyed anarcho-capitalists from Britain, North America, Australia and Europe.
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