A group of vile racists in Charlottesville, VA, planned a rally for Saturday, “Unite the Right,” in part to protest the removal of a statue of Confederate General Robert E. Lee. The protest was met predictably by a counter-protest, including by members of the “Antifa” movement, the left’s violent protest wing.
The Charlottesville newspaper, The Daily Progress, has the best description of the events of Saturday. We strongly recommend everyone read it to learn how both sides were prepared for violence. It’s still unclear how the violence broke out, although by most accounts the police were inadequate to the task of keeping the two sides separate. Given the desire for both sides for a confrontation, it was probably expecting too much of the police to keep order completely, and the city did try to change the venue to make the rally safer.
As the violence escalated, a state of emergency was declared and the rally, comprised of the KKK, Nazis, the “alt-Right,” and other racists, was canceled. Unfortunately, the violence didn’t end.
A young man from Ohio, James Fields, allegedly intentionally drove his car into the crowd of demonstrators, killing at least one person and injuring 19 others, an act of terrorism similar to terror vehicle attacks elsewhere. He is currently charged with second degree murder.
The day’s tragedies continued with the crash of a helicopter containing two state troopers who were monitoring the events on the ground. Both were killed.
The lesson some would draw from the events of Saturday is that free speech is too high a price to pay, that Nazis and other racists should not be allowed to have free speech, or for that matter anyone that the left deems unacceptable. Glenn Greenwald has an article in The Intercept defending the ACLU and its defense of the rally planners in Charlottesville after the city council tried to move the rally. As the article points out, the ACLU is no friend to the racist organizers of the rally, but they recognized (just as they famously did in Skokie, IL) that defending the right to unpopular, even racist hate speech, is defending the right to all speech. Unfortunately, that understanding, always fragile in America, is rapidy becoming lost.
And, on cue, groups like One Wisconsin Now (OWN) are already using the violence in Charlottesville to attack a bill in the Wisconsin legislature that would protect free speech on college campuses by punishing those that would disrupt the free speech of others. Of course, OWN is mischaracterizing the bill, claiming it would punish people for protesting. It does not. It only punishes those would try to prevent others from speaking.
Republican legislators should not be cowed by this tactic of a political left that wishes to preserve their ability to decide what speech can and cannot be protected, expressing that power through mob violence. As liberal writer Peter Beinart in the Atlantic points out, “Antifa believes it is pursuing the opposite of authoritarianism. Many of its activists oppose the very notion of a centralized state. But in the name of protecting the vulnerable, antifascists have granted themselves the authority to decide which Americans may publicly assemble and which may not. That authority rests on no democratic foundation.”
The real lesson of Charlottesville is that racist speech should be condemned loudly and often, but confronting the racist organizations with violence is not the answer. Because, as Beinart also points out, while attempting to suppress racist speech through violence, the left is becoming racism’s greatest ally in spreading the hate. The “alt-right” will just attract more adherents convinced that their speech needs to be defended by violence, too. In the escalating political fire, the First Amendment freedoms we cherish are those that will be at risk.
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The Wall Street Journal:
As ever in this age of Donald Trump, politicians and journalists are reducing the violence in Charlottesville, Virginia, on Saturday to a debate over Mr. Trump’s words and intentions. That’s a mistake no matter what you think of the President, because the larger poison driving events like those in Virginia is identity politics and it won’t go away when Mr. Trump inevitably does.
The particular pathology on display in Virginia was the white nationalist movement led today by the likes of Richard Spencer, David Duke and Brad Griffin. They alone are to blame for the violence that occurred when one of their own drove a car into peaceful protesters, killing a young woman and injuring 19 others.
The Spencer crowd courts publicity and protests, and they chose the progressive university town of Charlottesville with malice aforethought. They used the unsubtle Ku Klux Klan symbolism of torches in a Friday night march, and they seek to appear as political martyrs as a way to recruit more alienated young white men.
Political conservatives even more than liberals need to renounce these racist impulses, and the good news is that this is happening. The driver has been charged with murder under Virginia law, and Attorney General Jeff Sessions opened a federal civil-rights investigation and issued a statement condemning the violence: “When such actions arise from racial bigotry and hatred, they betray our core values and cannot be tolerated.” Many prominent conservatives also denounced the white-nationalist movement.
Mr. Trump was widely criticized for his initial statement Saturday afternoon that condemned the hatred “on many sides” but failed to single out the white nationalists. Notably, David Duke and his allies read Mr. Trump’s statement as attacking them and criticized the President for doing so.
The White House nonetheless issued a statement Sunday saying Mr. Trump “includes white supremacists, KKK, Neo-Nazi and all extremist groups” in his condemnation. As so often with Mr. Trump, his original statement missed an opportunity to speak like a unifying political leader.
Yet the focus on Mr. Trump is also a cop-out because it lets everyone duck the deeper and growing problem of identity politics on the right and left. The politics of white supremacy was a poison on the right for many decades, but the civil-rights movement rose to overcome it, and it finally did so in the mid-1960s with Martin Luther King Jr. ’s language of equal opportunity and color-blind justice.
That principle has since been abandoned, however, in favor of a new identity politics that again seeks to divide Americans by race, ethnicity, gender and even religion. “Diversity” is now the all-purpose justification for these divisions, and the irony is that America is more diverse and tolerant than ever.
The problem is that the identity obsessives want to boil down everything in American life to these categories. In practice this means allocating political power, contracts, jobs and now even salaries in the private economy based on the politics of skin color or gender rather than merit or performance. Down this road lies crude political tribalism, and James Damore’s recent Google dissent is best understood as a cri de coeur that we should aspire to something better. Yet he lost his job merely for raising the issue.
A politics fixated on indelible differences will inevitably lead to resentments that extremists can exploit in ugly ways on the right and left. The extremists were on the right in Charlottesville, but there have been examples on the left in Berkeley, Oakland and numerous college campuses. When Democratic politicians can’t even say “all lives matter” without being denounced as bigots, American politics has a problem.
Mr. Trump didn’t create this identity obsession even if as a candidate he did try to exploit it. He is more symptom than cause, though as President he now has a particular obligation to renounce it. So do other politicians. Yet the only mission of nearly every Democrat we observed on the weekend was to use the “white supremacist” cudgel against Mr. Trump—as if that is the end of the story.
It isn’t, and it won’t be unless we confront this underlying politics of division. Not long ago we were rereading Justice Clarence Thomas’s prophetic opinion in Holder v. Hall, a 1994 Supreme Court ruling on dividing voting districts by race.
“As a practical political matter,” he wrote, “our drive to segregate political districts by race can only serve to deepen racial divisions by destroying any need for voters or candidates to build bridges between racial groups or to form voting coalitions.” Writ large, Justice Thomas was warning that identity politics can destroy democratic trust and consent.
Or put a different way 50 years ago …
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Daniel Henninger could be writing in some respects about Milwaukee and Madison:
This is the summer of ’17 for people who live in politically blue northern cities, but few would call it the best days of their lives.
New Yorkers are living through the “Summer of Hell,” the phrase that defines a city whose ancient transportation infrastructure has finally hit the wall. It’s hard to say who got the worst of it—the commuters trapped for 45 minutes without air or lights on a southbound F train or the riders in Harlem who were evacuated after the tracks caught fire.
Naturally, Mayor Bill de Blasio says the solution is a $700 million tax increase on “the wealthiest in our city.”
In Chicago, more than 100 people were shot over July Fourth weekend, with 14 ending up dead. So naturally Mayor Rahm Emanuel has filed a sanctuary-cities lawsuit against the federal government to protect the city’s immigrants.
Hartford, Conn., at the brink of insolvency, last month hired a law firm specializing in bankruptcy. The owners of dozens of destroyed businesses sued the city of Baltimore in June for mishandling the mayhem, two years after the riots ended.
For decades, urban liberalism has sold itself as a compact between government and taxpayers. The people paid, and with that revenue liberal politicians would deliver infrastructure, services, economic opportunity and civil order. But liberal governance, instead of keeping its side of the bargain, is at a dead end.
Writing in City Journal last year on the widespread fiscal distress of northern cities, Stephen Eide noted a study which found that “among the 1,100 census tracts in major metropolitan areas with poverty rates of 30 percent or more in 1970, only about 100 had seen their poverty rates drop below the national average by 2010.”
Defenders of the liberal model argue that cities like New York, San Francisco and Los Angeles are changing into sophisticated, cosmopolitan hubs that attract a new class of young professionals who will restore urban America. Instead, many of these urban revivals are producing a phenomenon economists now call “racially concentrated areas of affluence,” or RCAAs.
An area gets RCAAed when the residents who pack themselves into it are mostly white people whose median incomes are unprecedentedly greater than the city’s poverty level. Some of the most RCAAed cities are liberal duchies like Boston, Baltimore, Chicago and Philadelphia.
Economists for Citigroup have called cities like New York and San Francisco “plutonomies”—urban economies propped up by a plutocratic minority, which is to say, young professionals inured to both taxes and nearby poverty. But they vote their “consciences.”
Progressives are acutely aware of this embarrassing reality in cities under their control. A writer for In These Times identified the problem as “a lack of revenue caused by the refusal of Wall Street banks, big corporations and millionaires to pay their fair share in taxes.” Put forth solutions, he said, “to make them pay.”
“Make them pay” might work if the U.S. were East Germany, so that the wealthy could be captured and jailed as they tried to escape across the border.
We’re not living yet under a President Sanders or Warren, so the steady, documented outflow of residents will continue from New York, Connecticut, Illinois, Maryland, California and New Jersey.
Many of those now climbing over the Democrats’ blue walls were willing to live under the original liberal governance model that existed before 1960 because it recognized the legitimacy of private economic life. The wealthy agreed then to pay their “fair share.”
Today, private economic life, especially that of the urban middle class, is no longer a partner in the liberal model. It’s merely a “revenue source” for a system whose patronage is open-ended welfare and largely uncapped public-employee pensions. I’d describe the liberal-progressive governing strategy as ruin and rule.
Not widely noticed is that liberalism’s claimed beneficiaries—black Americans—are also fleeing its failures. Demographers have documented significant black out-migration from New York, Michigan, California and Illinois into Florida, Georgia, Texas and North Carolina. North to south.
Now comes the summer-of-hell infrastructure crisis. Residents of the northeastern slab from New Jersey to Boston have been living off infrastructure created by their grandparents and great-grandparents during the golden age of American capitalism.
They are now asking the federal government, meaning taxpayers who live in parts of the U.S. not hostile to capitalism, to give them nearly $15 billion to replace the 100-year-old train tunnel beneath the Hudson River. Why should they? Why send money to a moribund, dysfunctional urban liberal politics that will never—as in, not ever—clean up its act or reform?
Maybe we need a new default solution to the urban crisis: Let internal migration redistribute the U.S. population away from liberalism’s smug but falling-apart plutonomies.
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We begin with an interesting non-musical anniversary: Today in 1945, Major League Baseball sold the advertising rights for the World Series to Gillette for $150,000. Gillette for years afterward got to decide who the announcers for the World Series (typically one per World Series team in the days before color commentators) would be on first radio and then TV.
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I was, perhaps ironically, at a concealed-carry class when news of what happened in Charlottesville, Va., Saturday started filtering out. (For those who don’t think it’s a dangerous world, that and Saturday night’s triple homicide at Great Lakes Dragaway in Union Grove should disprove your mistaken belief.)
Facebook Friend Rick Esenberg had the two best thoughts I’ve seen on what happened:
I should think that the universal reaction to [Saturday’s] events ought be condemnation. It gets harder when we begin to muse about some larger meaning. My own sense is that we ought to think carefully about where identity politics takes us. I consider myself to be on the political “right” — at least as I understood that term prior to last year. To me, being on the right meant absolute equality before the law, individual freedom and limited government. It meant encouraging a robust civil society and a commitment to what I am not afraid to call Western values. It meant rejection of both the licentious and authoritarian tendencies of the “intersectional” left and the blood and soil nationalism and authoritarianism of the rightest parties of Europe. I don’t think Donald Trump is a champion of the “alt-right.” In fact, I don’t think that he represents anything in particular — he seems to have no firm convictions about anything – but is a product of disparate and conflicting forces. One of them, however, is a very different view of the American right – a view that is every bit as post-constitutional, illiberal and authoritarian as that which has come to characterize much of the American left. It is very much a product of the notion that we need a Saul Alinsky of the “right.” But the risk is that in trying to save our values — individualism, freedom, subsidiarity and a common morality that we root in the Judeo-Christian tradition, we wind up destroying them. I don’t think that Donald Trump has much — if anything — to do with what happened today in Virginia. What bothers me is that he does not understand what to do about it. …
I do not believe that Trump “empowered” the idiots in Virginia. But here’s what’s wrong with his statement in response. To be sure, the racist white nationalist march was constitutionally protected speech. For those who do not understand why that is so, I’d be happy to explain. But that does not mean that it is within the bounds of respectable political discourse. Its a marginal movement that gets more attention that it’s numbers warrant. But it’s no less vile for that. Referring to it as part of “all sides” of our political community confers a certain respectability that it does not deserve. Doing so also reflects a certain studied tone deafness on his part. I am not prepared to call Trump a racist or a tool of the Russians. But, knowing that many people feel that he is both, he has still has this bad habit of behaving in ways that feed their beliefs. An obstreperous guy writing on FB can do that, but a President should not.
Facebook Friend Ken Gardner adds:
Fundamentally, the neo-Nazis who marched in Virginia over the weekend, the Bernie nut who tried to assassinate GOP Congressmen, the Berkeley riots, and the rest of them — on all sides of the political spectrum — are all the same people. They are all wannabe authoritarians and collectivists who are filled with hate for anyone who does not belong to their favored groups. They hate disagreement and crave both attention and obedience backed up by violence and threats of violence.
But Facebook Friend Tim Nerenz adds:Here is what I learned about America over the weekend. After 6 months of organization and promotion, the “largest white supremacist gathering in decades” drew only several hundred sick puppies from around the country on Saturday. Several hundred. And on Sunday, 52 million Americans went to church – where everyone is welcomed and we all drink from the same cup. 62 million Americans volunteer in any given year, and 83% of American adults give to charity. And 145 million Americans went to work today – where people of every race, gender, ethnicity, religious belief, orientation, and ability get along just fine. America is not those few hundreds who hate; it is those tens of millions who don’t. Let’s keep our perspective. -
Outrage is the currency of modern America. The Oxford English Dictionary defines it as “An extremely strong reaction of anger, shock, or indignation.”
Every day, another statement, joke or action provokes anger, shock and indignation against the hapless offender.
A dentist hunts a lion in Africa. Outrage! A woman tweets a joke before boarding a plane bound for Africa. Outrage!! A white cisgendered male op-ed writer mentions Africa in three different outrage examples. OUTRAGE!!!
It’s exhausting just to read about the outrage, so it must be debilitating to those peddling it.
Why do people get so offended?
I’ve never understood why people get offended by, well, anything. Even if someone attempts an insult, it’s up to you to choose whether to accept it as such. Just as you shouldn’t give others the power over your emotional state, you can’t be offended without your consent.
Or as some fancy-pants old white cisgendered male said, “Remember that it is not he who gives abuse or blows who affronts, but the view we take of these things as insulting. When, therefore, any one provokes you, be assured that it is your own opinion which provokes you.”
Epictetus wrote that in The Enchiridion, Greek for “the handbook,” which means I have appropriated Greco-Phrygian culture. And if you’re offended on behalf of that extinct ethnicity, you need to keep reading.
Let’s reinterpret this 2,000-year-old dead white male for modern audiences. When a thin-skinned audience member shouts “I’m offended!” at a stand-up comic, it only reveals the heckler’s fragile psyche and low self-worth.
Insult me? Then you must be an idiot
If you’re insulted when a co-worker holds the door for his female associate, you are projecting your hang-ups on what is most likely a simple act of politeness. If a Swedish bongo player sports blonde dreadlocks and you’re offended instead of amused, you have more baggage than a deposed Haitian dictator fleeing to Paris.
Perhaps I’m an outlier, but if someone tries to insult me, I don’t feel badly about myself — I just conclude that they’re an idiot. Some might find this attitude arrogant and they’re probably right. But if some humorless scold attacks me for being a white cisgendered male, that’s their problem, not mine. In fact, I pity them for not appreciating the single-malt, double-barreled awesome that I’m bringing.
Here’s an interaction I had on Twitter, the Algonquin Round Table of the digital age. One interlocutor noted that vaccinations might cause autism. (They don’t.) Another wondered if a government can mandate immunization. (Sure.) But shouldn’t parents have the right to say no? (Not if they put the community at risk; at least that’s how I see it.)
All fair questions and a fine debate to have. And on it went until one person replied with what he felt was the trump card: “That really offends me!”
To which I said, “So what?”
This doesn’t help you win an argument
A brusque response, but the anonymous stranger’s taking of offense is not my or anyone else’s concern; public health is. Harrumphing “that offends me!” has no bearing on any argument, pro or con. It’s a non sequitur revealing naught but a delicate constitution.
I don’t intend to argue the pros and cons of vaccination; that specific debate isn’t the point. As our culture has slid to the so-called “social justice warriors” of the left and the trolls of the “alt-right,” activists on all sides believe that their being offended carries some sort of moral authority as a victim. Does their sense of grievance make their arguments more compelling? It does no such thing.
British comedian Stephen Fry said it best:
It’s now very common to hear people say, “I’m rather offended by that,” as if that gives them certain rights. It’s no more than a whine. It has no meaning, it has no purpose, it has no reason to be respected as a phrase.
“I’m offended by that.”
Well, so [bleeping] what?
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The number one song today in 1965:
Three years later, the singer of the number one song in Britain announced …
Today in 1976, Chicago released what would become its first number one single, to the regret of all true brass rock fans:
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The number one song in Britain today in 1964 was brought back to popularity almost two decades later by the movie “Stripes”:
That same day, the Kinks hit the British charts for the first time with …
This was, of course, the number one song in the U.S. today in 1966:
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Today in 1968, Jimmy Page, Robert Plant, John Paul Jones and John Bonham played together for the first time when they rehearsed at a London studio. You know them as Led Zeppelin:
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There were two more reminders of the passage of time this past week.
One was reported by Rolling Stone:
Glen Campbell, the indelible voice behind 21 Top 40 hits including “Rhinestone Cowboy,” “Wichita Lineman” and “By the Time I Get to Phoenix,” died Tuesday. He was 81. A rep for Universal Music Group, Campbell’s record label, confirmed the singer’s death to Rolling Stone. During a career that spanned six decades, Campbell sold over 45 million records. In 1968, one of his biggest years, he outsold the Beatles. …
Campbell was a rare breed in the music business, with various careers as a top-level studio guitarist, chart-topping singer and hit television host. His late-career battle with Alzheimer’s—he allowed a documentary crew to film on his final tour for the 2014 award-winning I’ll Be Me—made him a public face for the disease, a role President Bill Clinton suggested would one day be remembered even more than his music.
“He had that beautiful tenor with a crystal-clear guitar sound, playing lines that were so inventive,” Tom Petty told Rolling Stone during a 2011 profile of Campbell. “It moved me.”
Campbell was a hugely popular singer, which may have obscured his guitar talent.
The other is reported by Channel3000.com:
Phyllis Leckrone, 81, the wife of UW Marching Band director Mike Leckrone, and the woman known to band members as “band mom” has died.
UW Marching Band spokesperson Jay Rath said, “She was a mother to generations of band students and her impact will live on in those countless lives.”
“She loved the whole Badger Band Family. She was known to many alumni members as the band mom,” a post on the UW Band Alumni Association Facebook page said.
A native of North Manchester, Ind., Phyllis and Mike met in junior high school and became childhood sweethearts. They were married 62 years. Phyllis taught with the Middleton-Cross Plains school district for more than 25 years, according to a news release.
Leckrone died early Tuesday morning surrounded by family after a long illness, Rath said. She is survived by her husband, five children, eight grandchildren and three great grandchildren. …
In lieu of flowers, the family asked that memorials be made to Phyliss’s favorite charity, St. Jude’s Children’s Hospital, www.stjude.org/donate.
The first thing to know about the Leckrones is that they were married for 61 years.I saw Phyllis a couple of times every year — on the two epic road trips we took, to the Hall of Fame Bowl in Birmingham, Ala., and Las Vegas, and at the annual UW Marching Band banquet in the Memorial Union. (Three words: “Fudge Bottom Pie.”) Compared to performance Mike, she was quiet. For that matter, non-performance Mike is quiet compared to performance Mike. I went to their house a couple of times as a rank leader; the Leckrones invited band leaders to their house before rehearsals began.
I also have become Facebook Friends with some of their kids. The only consolation I can offer is that it is the natural order of life that parents die before their children; no one who is a parent wants the reverse to happen. (There are, sadly, several people I marched with who have since passed away.)
Mike Leckrone became the UW Band director in 1969. So Phyllis had to share Mike with 200 to 250 college students every year for nearly 50 years. We remember Phyllis fondly.
Steve Prestegard.com: The Presteblog 