Today in 1967, Jimi Hendrix released “Purple Haze”:
Three years later, Hendrix made his last concert appearance in Great Britain at the Isle of Wight Festival, which also featured, for your £3 ticket …
No comments on Presty the DJ for Aug. 26
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Ted Cruz’s Wisconsin Republican primary win over Donald Trump was credited in large part to the united front of conservative radio hosts Charlie Sykes, Mark Belling, Vicki McKenna and Jerry Bader against Trump. (Because Trump is neither a Republican nor a conservative.)
So what now after Trump got the nomination anyway? Darren Hauck looks at Sykes:
Since last year, the most influential political talk show host in Wisconsin has found out just how hard it is to be a #NeverTrump conservative on right-wing radio. Ever since Sykes began denouncing Donald Trump on the air—which he does just about every time he talks about the presidential election—he’s strained his relationships with the listeners of his daily radio show.
Sykes’ many arguments with listeners over Donald Trump’s serial outrages have exposed in much of his audience a vein of thinking—racist, anti-constitutional, maybe even fascistic—that has shaken Sykes. It has left him questioning whether he and his colleagues in the conservative media played a role in paving the way for Trump’s surprising and unprecedented rise.
A few days before the Wisconsin congressional primary in early August, Sykes seized on remarks by Speaker of the House Paul Ryan’s opponent, Paul Nehlen, that raised the idea of deporting all Muslims, even American citizens. It’s the kind of inflammatory rhetoric that has become the norm during a presidential cycle that has featured Trump’s calls for immigration bans on Muslims, loyalty tests and mass deportations. A friendly and round-faced guy with glasses, Sykes, 61, doesn’t even try to conceal his disgust, but a large segment of his listeners, like Audrey from Oshkosh, are eager to defend ideas that Sykes believes violate fundamental conservative principles.
“Yeah! Let me make a comparison, and I don’t mean this in a bad way,” Audrey says. “They’re talking about phasing out breeding of pit bulls. Well, not all pit bulls are bad.”
“You’re comparing American citizens, Muslims, to rabid dogs,” Sykes responds.
“No, I’m saying, they’re talking about phasing out the breed because so many are bad. No one wants to phase out poodles! I mean, there’s no Lutherans doing this! We never know when one of these people are going to be radicalized.”
“One of these people,” says Sykes.
Sykes ends the call. He’s silent, broadcasting dead air. He looks upset, like he’s stopped breathing. He goes to a commercial break.
“OK, that doesn’t happen very often,” he says off-air. “I’m not usually absolutely speechless.” He says his listeners never talked like this until recently.
“Were these people that we actually thought were our allies?” he asks.
Sykes remains confident that Trump will lose badly in November, and he is equally fearful that Trump will drag longtime Republicans, like Senator Ron Johnson of Wisconsin, down with him. This has Sykes thinking about the long-term future of the party and what might have precipitated its looming collapse. He wonders: Did “the faux outrage machine” of Breitbart.com and other right-wing outlets foment the noxious opinions that Trump has stoked so effectively on the trail?
“When I would deny that there was a significant racist component in some of the politics on our side, it was because the people I hung out with were certainly not,” Sykes says. “When suddenly, this rock is turned over, there is this—‘Oh shit, did I not see that?’
“I kind of had that reaction this morning, with that woman: Did we ignore this? There’s got to be some serious introspection, because of the things that we either didn’t see, or that we ignored, or that we enabled.”
***
Few people outside Wisconsin had heard of Sykes until this spring, when his explosive interview with Trump became national news. In the 17-minute confrontation a week before the Badger State’s primary in April, Sykes exposed several flaws in Trump’s candidacy, including his lack of preparation and obsessive grudges. “Before you called into my show, did you know that I’m a #NeverTrump guy?” Sykes asked. “That I didn’t know,” Trump replied. Sykes gave Trump several chances to back off his feud with Ted Cruz over online insults about each other’s wives, but Trump couldn’t let it be. “He started it,” Trump kept saying. “We’re not on a playground,” Sykes replied. “We’re running for president of the United States.”
When Cruz beat Trump—the #NeverTrump forces’ last big win—many credited Sykes with a key role. “Midday with Charlie Sykes,” on 620 WTMJ-AM, where he’s been a host for 23 years, reaches 200,000 listeners a week in the Milwaukee area alone, and more beyond. Sykes is Wisconsin’s most prolific conservative media personality: He also hosts a weekly TV show and edits the website Right Wisconsin and the Wisconsin Policy Research Institute’s magazine Wisconsin Interest. His support has boosted conservative candidates across the state, most notably Scott Walker. Sykes and the governor are close, often exchanging texts and emails. Sykes supported Walker throughout his rise to power, the fierce backlash to Wisconsin’s 2011 anti-union law, and the failed 2012 gubernatorial recall.
“[Sykes’] contributions to the conservative movement in Wisconsin cannot be overstated,” Walker said in a written statement. “I value his friendship.” Walker’s support for freezing tuition at Wisconsin’s state universities parallels the ideas in Sykes’ eighth book, published this month: Fail U.: The False Promise of Higher Education, a thoughtful critique of the spiraling cost of college and the “culture of victimization on campus.”
So on this Friday in August, Sykes is juggling his many conservative roles—radio host, thinker, translator of Wisconsin political mores for the outside world. Young reporters from Vice and Milwaukee Public Radiointerview him about his book’s argument that spiking student debt isn’t worth it. New York Times, Wall Street Journal, and NBC political reporters ask him about the Ryan-Nehlen race and whether Trump will endorse Ryan. Meanwhile, he’s wrestling with his listeners, from whom he is feeling increasingly estranged.
“I am dealing with the daily flood of emails on how we’re never going to listen to you anymore,” Sykes says. Longtime listeners write him to say conservative talk radio should criticize Hillary Clinton and not Trump.
“If I lose listeners, that’s a price I’ve just got to pay,” he says. He’d rather say what he really thinks than fall in line with other broadcasters’ embrace of Trump. “I feel dumber every time I listen to Sean Hannity. I don’t want to be that guy.”
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Paul from D.C. is on the line.
“This is not the U.S. Constitution; this is not the Bill of Rights,” the speaker of the House responds after Sykes plays him Nehlen’s anti-Muslim comments. “This is not Wisconsin conservatives, Wisconsin Republicans. That kind of dark, grim, indefensible-thinking comment is going to be thoroughly rejected and repudiated Tuesday, I believe.”
Sykes sees an opening. “OK, so here’s my question: What would you say if Donald Trump is asked about this comment and refuses to disavow it? Would that be disqualifying for you?” Sykes’ face has turned red. He’s smiling.
“I’m not going to go into hypotheticals,” Ryan answers testily. “You and I have had these conversations. By the way, with any endorsement of anybody, there’s never a blank check. And you know that.”
This is how Sykes’ show has gone since Trump clinched the nomination: The biggest names in Wisconsin Republican politics call in—like Walker and Johnson—and the normally sympathetic host grills them about their support of Trump.
This time, Sykes reads from an especially punishing New York Times column, in which Ross Douthat claims Trump has “laid waste” to Ryan’s reputation for “moral and substantive authority.”
“I’m the speaker of the House,” Ryan replies. “With this job comes different responsibilities than, say, if I were just a congressman from Wisconsin. … This man won the votes fair and square. … As part of my responsibility for this job, I have the duty and obligation to honor this process.”
Sykes met Ryan when the speaker was first running for Congress, and he’s always been impressed with Ryan’s talent and intellect. They’ve matured together, Sykes says. For instance, they’ve both moved away from their earlier rhetoric about a country divided between “makers” and “takers.”
Wisconsin’s conservative talk-radio hosts are closer to Republican elected officials than radio populists elsewhere. They share pride in the successes of the state’s brand of conservatism: They brag about Ryan being the national Republican Party’s intellectual leader, and they celebrate Walker’s sharply conservative agenda. Decency is also a big part of the Wisconsin Republican self-concept, which clashes with Trump’s self-aggrandizing bombast.
“The elected officials in Wisconsin are all pretty much anti-Trump,” Sykes says. Nevertheless, nearly all of them endorsed Trump once he became the presumptive nominee. Sykes thinks none of them have their heart in it.
“Walker and Ryan have no illusions whatsoever about who Donald Trump is,” Sykes insists with the authority of a confidant. “They could have a conversation for an hour and a half with me, and everything [I] say about Donald Trump, there would be no disagreement. It’s just, at the end of the conversation, they would say, ‘Yes, but we can’t elect Hillary Clinton.’ I would say, ‘I can’t bring myself to vote for Donald Trump. I think he’s unfit to be president.’”
Sykes sympathizes with Ryan’s and Walker’s political quandary, but he’s unsparing in his critique of Reince Priebus, who, as the state GOP chairman, boosted Ryan and Walker’s careers before he ascended to the chairmanship of the Republican National Committee. After Priebus declared Trump the presumptive GOP nominee, Sykes stopped talking to him for a couple of months.
“I just didn’t want to hear about the Kool-Aid,” Sykes says after a long sigh. “Reince is a friend. Reince has no illusions about Donald Trump, but made this decision not just to support him, but to go all in. It was painful watching somebody who I knew knew better. That’s why I describe him as a tragic figure.”
Priebus, he notes, commissioned the famed post-2012 election “autopsy” that called on the GOP to become more inclusive. “To watch him bow and scrape before the Orange God King—it was difficult!”
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The reluctant right’s most powerful argument for supporting Trump, the future of the U.S. Supreme Court, doesn’t persuade Sykes—even though it affects someone close to him. His ex-wife, Diane Sykes, is on Trump’s short list for the U.S. Supreme Court.
Since their 1999 divorce, Diane Sykes has risen from local judge to federal appeals court judge and has developed a national reputation as a respected conservative jurist. In a February debate, Trump offered her as an example of a judge he might appoint to the high court.
Sykes says he’s “very close” to his ex-wife. “She would be absolutely fantastic for the court,” he says. “That would be an outstanding choice.” There’s just one problem. “I don’t trust [Trump] that he will appoint the people he says. I don’t believe the promises he’s making aren’t negotiable. He’s backed off virtually everything.”
This does not mean he can contemplate voting for Trump’s opponent. (When pressed, he says he’s willing to consider voting for Libertarian Gary Johnson.) “Hillary is awful and potentially corrupt within historically understandable parameters,” says Sykes. He holds his hands about a foot and a half apart. “She’s awful like that.”
Then Sykes throws his arms out wide. “Trump is potentially awful at thislevel,” he says.
In Sykes’ eyes, Trump is “a serial liar, a con man, a fraudster, a narcissist and authoritarian.” Clinton, meanwhile, is “a welfare-state liberal Democrat” and “big government” supporter with her own character problems.
“In any other scenario, Hillary Clinton’s lying about her emails, and her pay-for-play relationship with the Clinton Foundation would be disqualifying issues,” he argues. “The only reason they’re not disqualifying is because Donald Trump is a fundamentally more repellent, dishonest figure.” He predicts Trump will lose Wisconsin, take Ron Johnson’s Senate reelection bid down with him, and poison the Republican Party’s chances to ever make inroads with women, minorities and the young.
He predicts doom for the GOP ticket in Wisconsin in November. Trump, he says, is “uniquely unpopular in the biggest Republican areas of the state”—meaning the Milwaukee suburbs, where Sykes’ show has its deepest reach. Though Sykes thinks Johnson is an “outstanding” and “fantastic” U.S. senator, he thinks the Tea Party favorite will lose to liberal Russ Feingold, who’s running to take his old seat back. Trump’s unpopularity will trickle down the ballot and wound Johnson, Sykes thinks: “It’s not going to be pretty.”
Besides, Sykes notes, Wisconsin’s conservative revolution is based almost entirely on success in off-year elections. The Badger State hasn’t gone for a Republican presidential candidate since 1984. (George W. Bush lost Wisconsin by less than 1 percent in 2000 and 2004, but Barack Obama won it overwhelmingly in 2008 and 2012.)
“After November, the #NeverTrump conservatives will basically find themselves in the wilderness,” Sykes says. “Our role is going to be opposition to whatever is the ruling regime installed next year. I don’t want to be complicit in it one way or another.”
Instead, Sykes wants to help Ryan-style conservatives take the Republican Party back from Trump’s angry nationalists. “I hope to spend next year writing my next book,” Sykes says, “which will be titled Howthe Right Lost Its Mind.” He wants to figure out why, in his opinion, things went so wrong for the conservative movement. One problem, he thinks, is his fellow talk-radio hosts.
“Talk radio made itself relevant by beating up on other Republicans, vilifying other Republicans,” he says. “It fed this faux outrage machine that raised expectations unrealistically”—for instance, asking why Congress didn’t repeal Obamacare, though Obama’s veto pen made it mathematically impossible. Later, he would tell Business Insider’s Oliver Darcy that talk radio’s attack on mainstream-media bias has backfired, because its listeners now dismiss legitimate media fact-checking as untrustworthy.
Sykes warns his listeners to step outside the “alternative reality bubble” of Breitbart.com and other right-wing websites. Part of his audience thinks he’s sold out, he complains, because he won’t parrot dubious claims they’ve read on such sites. “A lot of the conservative talk shows around the country embrace almost whatever comes over the transom,” he says.
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Eight days after the Nehlen show, a Milwaukee policeman fatally shot an armed black man, 23-year-old Sylville Smith, after he fled from a traffic stop. Rioters burned down stores, injured police, threatened and even attacked reporters, fired gunshots, and shot an 18-year-old white man in the neck. On the following Monday, the first day back on the air, Sykes drops his coverage of the presidential race and devotes his entire show to the unrest, Milwaukee’s story of the year.
“A riot—not an uprising, a riot,” he says. Sykes sounds like a conventional conservative on this issue, blaming cultural and family breakdowns and criticizing a black Milwaukee alderman for rhetoric that he thinks excuses violence. But he also subtly challenges himself and his audience by bringing on Mikel Holt, a columnist for the Milwaukee Community Journal, the city’s black newspaper, and taking callers from the city, not the Republican-leaning suburbs. Holt pushes back against some of Sykes’ assertions that city politicians have provided poor leadership, and he argues for drawing clear distinctions between the rioters on one side and idealistic activists and law-abiding city residents on the other.
“This was a really important message for my audience to hear,” Sykes says the next day, “that some of stuff they’re seeing on TV is not representative of anything more than a small minority of the community.”
A week earlier, Sykes had said Milwaukee’s racial divisions would also be a part of his coming reevaluation of the conservative movement. He’s thinking again about a 2014 New Republic piece that depicted Scott Walker’s political base in the Milwaukee suburbs as a hostile racial environment and argued that conservative talk radio hosts such as Sykes play a role. Sykes calls the piece “ridiculous,” “tremendously overblown” and a “really, really negative hit job.” But he says he’s going to grapple with it when he writes his next book.
“I’m going to reread it and go, ‘OK, as much as I really seriously hated this story’—this is the nagging thing in the back of your head—‘Is there some grain of truth in the criticism that I spent 20 years denying?’”
Do you know anyone from the world of the liberal commentariat who would conduct a self-examination that might counter the liberal shibboleths? I bet you don’t. (Of course, liberal talk radio has been and continues to be a commercial flop with rare exceptions, because it doesn’t bring in enough listeners and therefore enough ad revenue.)
Sykes (with whom I appeared on his “Sunday Insight with Charlie Sykes” TV show back in my business magazine days) is the object, if that’s what you want to call it, of the “Sykes effect,” his ability to influence GOP legislators within the sound of WTMJ’s signal, but not beyond it (such as in western and northern Wisconsin). I doubt his influence on the state GOP is going to diminish regardless of this election’s bad results, because he’s had influence in the GOP long before Trump decided it would be yuuuuuuuge to run for president. (Friends in high places, as they say.)
Sykes gets to continue on radio because of his ability to bring in listeners and therefore ad revenue, and that is unlikely to change once Trump’s candidacy goes away. (Certainly four years of Hillary! the Corrupt will provide Sykes et al with more than enough material.) WTMJ’s former owner, Journal Communications, and current owner, Scripps, has devoted significant resources to the Right Wisconsin platform, and Sykes really has an unprecedented role within Wisconsin radio right now. As long as Sykes is making money for Scripps, Sykes will get to keep doing that.
Sykes is also correct, by the way, that Trump is and will be a disaster for the Republican Party, though the party in Wisconsin and at the state level elsewhere will survive Trump.
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Yet another sign that Donald Trump is not a Republican is that he opposes free trade.
Who benefits the most from free trade? Consumers, which total nearly 100 percent of the public. U.S. Rep. Dave Reichert (R–Washington) gives the economics lesson Trump ignored:
The benefits of free trade to our economy are proven and easily seen: small business expansion, job growth, wage increases, lower consumer prices, and an overall strengthening of the economy. But the overwhelming benefits of trade can also be tracked through the journey of tiny hay seeds planted in the fertile soil of Ellensburg, Washington.
Calaway Trading is a hay and agricultural exporter headquartered in my home state of Washington. Founded in 1987, it has successfully expanded because of trade with Korea, Japan, China, Taiwan, the United Arab Emirates, and 11 other countries across the globe. Now one of the ten largest exporters of hay from the western United States, it has grown its employee base to over 100 workers. With export sales continuing to grow by 5 percent annually, the possibilities for this family-owned farm are endless.
Calaway Trading’s story of expansion through increased international trade is a narrative that is shared across industries for many American companies – both large and small. America’s agriculture, manufacturing, and services sectors have seen their production increase, sales grow, and revenues rise as they tap into the vast consumer base that lies across oceans and outside of America’s borders. With 95 percent of the world’s consumers living abroad, opportunity and trade have become linked.
This is especially true for small to medium sized companies, which make up 98 percent of America’s exporters. Like Calaway Trading, they have discovered that consumers outside our borders are willing to pay for high-quality American-made goods and services. But the extent consumers abroad are willing to pay for even the finest American products has its limits – and that is why strong trade agreements are critical for our job creators to remain competitive globally.
The connection between strong trade agreements and economic growth in the United States is simple, basic math. When we negotiate a trade agreement between the United States and a partner country, we break down tariffs and other barriers that country had in place to limit American businesses from reaching consumers inside their borders. That was the case when we negotiated a trade agreement with South Korea. Prior to that agreement, U.S. cherry growers faced a 24 percent tariff when they sold their cherries in Korea, but our agreement with Korea eliminated this tariff.
In the year after the agreement took effect, our cherry exports to Korea nearly doubled and have continued to grow, making Korea our third largest market for cherries. This is not our only success. Take for example the reduction of tariffs and other barriers that were limiting U.S. exports of pork to Colombia. Because of our trade agreement with Colombia, American pork producers can better compete with their foreign competitors and their exports have tripled in value, increasing the number of Americans they employ right along with it. These are just two examples of how trade agreements result in more jobs and more revenue here at home.
These facts have been confirmed by the independent International Trade Commission (ITC) in a recent report. According to the ITC, trade agreements have positively impacted our trade deficit, increased U.S. gross domestic product (GDP), and increased U.S. employment and wages. And for middle and lower income Americans looking to provide for their families, trade agreements have offered greater consumer choice and lower prices. Further, workers seeking a pay raise also benefit as U.S. trade jobs pay 13 to 18 percent more than non-trade related jobs.
It is not just American workers and families who recognize trade is the key to succeeding in the 21st Century economy. Our competitors across the globe are tapping into foreign markets too and are – and will continue – negotiating trade agreements with or without us. If we fail to implement trade agreements while our competitors race ahead to aggressively knock down trade barriers for their own benefit and increase their own market share, we will lose our competitive edge as our costs go up and opportunities drop. Sitting on the sidelines also means countries like China, not us, will be writing the rules and setting the standards the rest of the world will be forced to play by. Trade agreements give us tools to enforce our rights and make sure our trading partners are living up to their obligations.
Critics of trade often blame trade agreements for any negative development in manufacturing. I certainly acknowledge that sometimes trade can displace workers in particular sensitive sectors. I also agree that we should help these workers. In fact, I introduced bipartisan legislation last year, which became law, to provide cash benefits and training for workers affected by trade to give them the tools to remain in the work force. However, the majority of U.S. industries and their workers strongly benefit from trade agreements. Blaming trade agreements for any and all negative events ignores the dramatic influence technology and current economic environments have had on different sectors around the world. What once was done by many hands is now often done by machines and smart devices. Are opponents of trade willing to give up their cell phones to reignite the switchboard industry? Just as carriage makers surely took a hit with the invention of Henry Ford’s Model T, technologies evolve and industries, workers, and economies must adjust.
The best way to help our companies grow is by removing burdensome tariffs and opening up new markets, allowing us to generate new jobs, design and create more products here in the U.S., compete on a global scale, establish our standards abroad, and bring home more profits. American workers, businesses, and producers create and make the best products and services in the world – don’t we want to give them the opportunity to sell in markets around the globe? When we knock down barriers for our exporters, they always compete and win.
Free enterprise and competition pave the way to prosperity. These principles do not change when you cross national, regional, or party lines. If America is to remain the world’s economic leader, we must embrace trade and all it has to offer.
I cannot believe there are Wisconsin Republicans who have embraced Trump given the damage that would occur to Wisconsin’s economy were it not for agricultural exports.
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Does anyone find it a bit creepy that the number one song in Great Britain today in 1957 is about Paul Anka’s brother’s babysitter?
(Of course, 17 years and one day later came an even more dubious number one for Anka, but you knew that from reading this blog yesterday.)
Three years later, the number one single across the sea required no words:
Two years later, the number one U.S. single was a dance that was easier than learning your ABCs:
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Michael Goodwin:
Donald Trump may or may not fix his campaign, and Hillary Clinton may or may not become the first female president. But something else happening before our eyes is almost as important: the complete collapse of American journalism as we know it.
The frenzy to bury Trump is not limited to the Clinton campaign and the Obama White House. They are working hand in hand with what was considered the cream of the nation’s news organizations.
The shameful display of naked partisanship by the elite media is unlike anything seen in modern America.
The largest broadcast networks — CBS, NBC and ABC — and major newspapers like the New York Times and Washington Post have jettisoned all pretense of fair play. Their fierce determination to keep Trump out of the Oval Office has no precedent.
Indeed, no foreign enemy, no terror group, no native criminal gang suffers the daily beating that Trump does. The mad mullahs of Iran, who call America the Great Satan and vow to wipe Israel off the map, are treated gently by comparison.
By torching its remaining credibility in service of Clinton, the mainstream media’s reputations will likely never recover, nor will the standards. No future producer, editor, reporter or anchor can be expected to meet a test of fairness when that standard has been trashed in such willful and blatant fashion.
Liberal bias in journalism is often baked into the cake. The traditional ethos of comforting the afflicted and afflicting the comfortable leads to demands that government solve every problem. Favoring big government, then, becomes routine among most journalists, especially young ones.
I know because I was one of them. I started at the Times while the Vietnam War and civil rights movement raged, and was full of certainty about right and wrong.
My editors were, too, though in a different way. Our boss of bosses, the legendary Abe Rosenthal, knew his reporters leaned left, so he leaned right to “keep the paper straight.”
That meant the Times, except for the opinion pages, was scrubbed free of reporters’ political views, an edict that was enforced by giving the opinion and news operations separate editors. The church-and-state structure was one reason the Times was considered the flagship of journalism.
Those days are gone. The Times now is so out of the closet as a Clinton shill that it is giving itself permission to violate any semblance of evenhandedness in its news pages as well as its opinion pages.
A recent article by its media reporter, Jim Rutenberg, whom I know and like, began this way: “If you’re a working journalist and you believe that Donald J. Trump is a demagogue playing to the nation’s worst racist and nationalistic tendencies, that he cozies up to anti-American dictators and that he would be dangerous with control of the United States nuclear codes, how the heck are you supposed to cover him?”
Whoa, Nellie. The clear assumption is that many reporters see Trump that way, and it is noteworthy that no similar question is raised about Clinton, whose scandals are deserving only of “scrutiny.” Rutenberg approvingly cites a leftist journalist who calls one candidate “normal” and the other “abnormal.”
Clinton is hardly “normal” to the 68 percent of Americans who find her dishonest and untrustworthy, though apparently not a single one of those people writes for the Times. Statistically, that makes the Times “abnormal.”
Also, you don’t need to be a detective to hear echoes in that first paragraph of Clinton speeches and ads, including those featured prominently on the Times’ website. In effect, the paper has seamlessly adopted Clinton’s view as its own, then tries to justify its coverage.
It’s an impossible task, and Rutenberg fails because he must. Any reporter who agrees with Clinton about Trump has no business covering either candidate.
It’s pure bias, which the Times fancies itself an expert in detecting in others, but is blissfully tolerant of in itself. And with the top political editor quoted in the story as approving the one-sided coverage as necessary and deserving, the prejudice is now official policy.
It’s a historic mistake and a complete break with the paper’s own traditions. Instead of dropping its standards, the Times should bend over backwards to enforce them, even while acknowledging that Trump is a rare breed. That’s the whole point of standards — they are designed to guide decisions not just in easy cases, but in all cases, to preserve trust.
The Times, of course, is not alone in becoming unhinged over Trump, but that’s also the point. It used to be unique because of its adherence to fairness.
Now its only standard is a double standard, one that it proudly confesses. Shame would be more appropriate.
Trump and Clinton should be treated the same by the media. So should every politician and candidate. Politicians should be afraid of the media, because the media should curry no favor with any party, any politician, or any cause.
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What is the point of being the Libertarian Party’s presidential and vice presidential candidates if you don’t believe in libertarian principles?
Jim Geraghty poses that question:
Gary Johnson, speaking with the editorial board of the Los Angeles Times earlier this month:
I’m open also to the notion of a carbon tax. That it does have an impact, that it ends up being revenue-neutral. I’m not looking at this as a revenue generator, as much as there are costs associated with, there are health and safety issues with carbon.
It’s a shame the Libertarian Party couldn’t nominate, you know, actual libertarians this year. Even if you let Johnson off the hook on this not-very-detailed support for a carbon tax, Johnson and Weld praised Stephen Breyer and Merrick Garland as their kind of Supreme Court justices. That’s the pro-affirmative-action, anti-school-voucher, dissenting-against-Heller Justice Breyer.
Johnson’s the kind of Libertarian who doesn’t just want unrestricted access to abortion, but opposes cutting federal funding for Planned Parenthood. He thinks it’s okay for New Mexico to fine a photographer for refusing to work at a gay wedding, because “on the basis of religious freedom, being able to discriminate — something that is currently not allowed — discrimination will exist in places we never dreamed of.”
Finally, the vice-presidential nominee of the party that’s supposed to stand for individual liberty recently talked about how the most popular rifle in America and handguns are on par with nuclear weapons. No, really. I wish I was making this up, but there’s video.
“The five-shot rifle, that’s a standard military rifle; the problem is if you attach a clip to it so it can fire more shells and if you remove the pin so that it becomes an automatic weapon, and those are independent criminal offenses. That is when they become, essentially, a weapon of mass destruction. The problem with handguns probably is even worse than the problem of the AR15.”
This sort of language would be over-the-top coming from the Brady Campaign or Mike Bloomberg. It’s just inexplicable coming from the Libertarian ticket, and suggests that Weld is a fair-weather friend of the Second Amendment at best. No surprise to those of us who studied his record in office:
While failing to keep his fiscal promises, Weld also managed to make some moves on cultural issues that are seriously inconvenient for a Libertarian candidate in 2016. In 1993, as governor, he endorsed a slew of gun-control proposals: a statewide ban on assault weapons, a waiting period for buying handguns, a limit on the number of handguns an individual could buy, and a prohibition on handgun ownership by anyone under 21. “The purpose of this common-sense legislation is to remove deadly guns from our streets and to take weapons out of the hands of many teens who themselves are becoming deadly killers,” he said at the time. Great choices, Libertarians!
Great choices, Libertarians!
Not that Democrats or Republicans should talk. Perhaps Weld (or after him Mitt Romney) was as Republican a governor as you can get in Massachusetts. But when you have the Libertarian label you’d think you should not support gun control. Nor should you oppose religious freedom and support carbon taxes.
If I’m going to vote for a Libertarian, I want someone who actually believes what Libertarians are supposed to stand for. You’d think members of the Libertarian Party would want that too.
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Today in 1963, Little Stevie Wonder became the first artist to have the number one pop single and album and to lead the R&B charts with his “Twelve-Year-Old Genius”:
Today in 1974, one week after the catchy but factually questionable number one single (where is the east side of Chicago?) …
… the previous week’s number one sounded like Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony compared with the new number one:
Today in 1990, at the beginning of Operation Desert Shield, Sinead O’Connor refused to sing if the National Anthem was performed before her concert at the Garden State Arts Plaza in Homdel, N.J. Radio stations responded by pulling O’Connor’s music from their airwaves. To one’s surprise, her career never really recovered.
That was the same day that Iron Maiden won a lawsuit from the families of two people who committed suicide, claiming that subliminal messages in the group’s “Stained Class” album drove them to kill themselves.
As a member of the band pointed out, it would have made much more sense to insert a subliminal message telling listeners to buy the band’s albums instead of a message that, had it been followed, would have depleted the band’s fan base.
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The Washington Post’s Erik Wemple reports on the flagship publication of my former employer (other than Marketplace Magazine, R.I.P.):
The Milwaukee Journal Sentinel pulled a sneaky maneuver this summer. In mid-July it published a column on race relations by columnist James E. Causey containing the incorrect claim that the unemployment rate for white men in 1954 was zilch. It appeared that this fanciful statistic had been sourced from a website named YourBlackWorld.net.
Instead of fixing the column and adding a correction, the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel disappeared the entire thing. It never showed up in print, and the column’s link dead-ended. Then, after this blog inquired about the situation, it resurfaced the piece, this time with a correction.
More corrective action appears to be descending on the work of Causey, who wrote a compelling piece this past weekend about the violent protests around his Milwaukee neighborhood after a fatal police shooting of an armed man (he even scored a nice writeup on Poynter.org). In April, for instance, Causey wrote a piece about Gov. Rick Snyder’s handling of the Flint water crisis: “Michigan Gov. Rick Snyder should be charged.” A cached version of the column (captured on Aug. 14) turns up this explanation of the crisis:
It started in April 2014, when the state decided to temporarily switch Flint’s water source from Lake Huron to the Flint River as a cost-savings measure until a new supply line to Lake Huron was ready. That would have been fine, but the Flint River had a reputation of being nasty. Right after the switch, residents complained that the water was brown and it smelled funny. Residents started reporting hair loss, rashes and illness in 2014.
Compare that phrasing to a CNN piece dated Jan. 19, 2016, about three months before Causey’s column:
In April 2014 the state decided to temporarily switch Flint’s water source from Lake Huron to the Flint River as a cost-saving measure until a new supply line to Lake Huron was ready. The river had a reputation for nastiness, and after the switch, residents complained their water looked, smelled and tasted funny.
Virginia Tech researchers found the water was highly corrosive, and the city switched back to the Lake Huron water supply in October.In recent days, the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel has addressed this matter, among other deficiencies in Causey’s Flint story. An italicized passage at the top of the piece reads, “Correction: An earlier version of this column inaccurately attributed information about the water crisis in Flint, Mich., and inadequately attributed other information. The column also inaccurately described a quotation by Michigan Gov. Rick Snyder, who said it would not be unfair to compare the crisis to Hurricane Katrina.” No longer does the story contain the passage that mimics CNN’s formulation. Instead, it now reads this way:
The problems began after the state switched Flint’s water source from Lake Huron to the Flint River in April 2014. Almost immediately, residents complained of brown water and a foul odor. Some said they broke out in rashes and lost their hair, CNN reported.
That’s an improvement. Two other Causey columns also contain headlining corrections, one for poor sourcing and the other for poor attribution and crediting.
The Erik Wemple Blog asked Milwaukee Journal Sentinel Editor George Stanley how long the newspaper knew about the attribution problems and how he viewed them. He responded, “The explanations on the stories are the result of an internal review to set the record straight with readers — corrections that were addressed prior to any outside inquiry.”
The newspaper’s review may want to linger a bit on a Nov. 2015 column by Causey titled, “Diversity needed in the jury box.” It contains this description of a decision by a Kentucky judge Olu Stevens:
Stevens, who is black, dismissed the panel Oct. 14, because on the second day of jury selection, he was concerned that the pool of jurors that attorneys were to choose from had 37 white citizens and only three black citizens. Two of the three potential black jurors already had been eliminated.
Weeks before, Louisville’s WDRB.com wrote this:
In the recent case, on the second day of the drug trial on Oct. 14, Stevens said he was concerned that the panel of jurors attorneys were to choose a jury from included 37 white people and only three black citizens. And two of the three potential black jurors had already been eliminated.
This blog asked Stanley about that overlap; we are awaiting a response.
Inadequate attribution is one thing when the information is correct; it’s another when the information is bogus. As we reported earlier this week, Causey’s July column titled “Donald Trump’s right: We do have a race problem” contained these assertions about historic racial disparities: “In 1954, unemployment was zero for white men, and it was 4% for black men.” YourBlackWorld.net put the matter this way: “For white men in 1954, unemployment was zero. For African-American men in 1954, it was about 4 percent.” Both were wrong, but YourBlackWorld.net was wrong first.
After the unemployment gaffe, Causey’s column took a hiatus of several weeks. Stanley attributed that gap to a “special in-depth reporting project” that will stretch into next year.
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Mike Gonzalez apparently watched much more of the Olympics than I did, and enjoyed it immensely, particularly women’s gymnastics:
The only fly in the ointment has come via the news and the realization that politics and race have once again crept up into the Olympics, just as it has in the past. I picked up USA Today at a local supermarket one morning to read that the Final Five is proof of the triumph of “diversity.”
An editorial notes that race relations are at a nadir in America, “as evidenced by the intense battles over illegal immigration, policing and the Black Lives Matter movement.” All true, and the polls are there to prove it. But the editorial goes on to aver, “But diversity also improves America’s competitiveness, from the balance beams of athletics to the board rooms of the world economy.”
A quick check online that night turned up that a lot of people have been saying similar stuff stateside. Over at the Chicago Tribune, Heidi Stevens had this cris de coeur: “We need the Final Five to push back against the daily rhetoric that tells us we’re a divided, crumbling shell of our former selves.” Vox, as usual, got its knickers in a twist, celebrating the team’s diversity while bemoaning that its achievements “won’t calm race relations.”
America, however, has always been diverse and drawn upon this large talent pool to surmount existential moments, just as it did when during the Civil War, when an estimated quarter of the Union Army’s enlisted men were foreign born.
If this is what the writers mean by “diversity”—that we take people from all over the world, turn them into Americans, and benefit from their talents—then of course I am with them.
But the melting pot isn’t what is usually meant when people celebrate diversity.
In fact, as any college freshman can tell you, diversity and the melting pot are rival models of how to organize the country. The enforced affirmation of diversity above all else often detracts from the greater national identity, and thus the unity that makes a team succeed, whether it’s made up of five or 330 million.
The Final Five are indeed a victory for the melting pot—the idea that we all meld together into an American nation, forging out of many different elements one unified, stronger alloy. But their feat is a rebuke of diversity as it is indoctrinated in campuses and policed by all levels of government. The board rooms that USA Today refers to are in fact not diversifying fast enough even for the independent Securities and Exchange Commission, which is considering mandating stricter rules to force companies to disclose plans to make boards more diverse.
“Diversity,” thus, is enforced through means that are inimical to the success of the women’s gymnastics team:
- Affirmative Action: Diversity enforcers demand that participation in all aspects of society reflect the numbers of members of different groups. If the Final Five were, for example, the Final 10, they would be suspect if they did not include a member of the other two components of the ethno-racial pentagon, Asians and Native Americans. But Simone Biles, Gabby Douglas, Laurie Hernandez, Aly Raisman and Madison Kocian—two African-Americans, a Latina, and two white girls—as we keep hearing—obviously got their place in their elite group through meritocracy. They deserved to be there because of their talent as gymnasts. Period. If two of them had been replaced to wedge in a less-deserving Asian-American or Native American, the team would have suffered as a result.
- Ethnic Identity: Diversity emphasizes identification with sub-groups at the expense of the traditional touchstones of religion and country. Being a member of one of the oppressed groups deemed to have suffered from historic discrimination—a consideration even accorded to an immigrant whose ancestors could not have been kept poor by the very real legally sanctioned depredations that took place decades ago—is the important identity when it comes to the affirmative action discussed above. But the members of the Final Five give no indication that such racial or ethnic emphasis is present at all. Look up Hernandez, for example, and what jumps out is not that her parents are Puerto Ricans, but that she’s a strong Christian who’s been home-schooled from the third grade. She meditates daily on 1 Thessalonians 5:18 (“Give thanks in all circumstances”), a verse that’s hard to square with racial grievance mongering—which may be why it’s missing from most articles on this outstanding athlete. Just last week Hernandez told reporters she didn’t “think it matters what race you are. If you want to train hard enough to go to Olympics, then you’re going to go out and you’re going to do it. It doesn’t matter what skin color or who you are.” Again, not exactly Black Lives Matter.
- Official Multilingualism: This other shibboleth of the diversity movement would render Americans less able to pull together for a common purpose (for examples, please see Belgium and Canada in the industrialized world, and places too numerous to cite in the less developed world). But the Final Five work as one. Hernandez again: “We’re always building each other up and making sure that we’re cheering for each other and shouting ‘C’mon, you got it, confidence.’”
The melting pot cuts against the grain of all this, which is why it is denigrated and discouraged today from kindergarten on. The melting pot, in fact, is what allowed Reisman and Kocian—one Jewish and the other with one likely Czech ancestor—to be undistinguishable Americans. While the Czech immigration into Texas begins in the 1840s, many of the East European immigrants who came in through Ellis Island from 1890 to the 1920s weren’t even considered white at all, and neither of course were Jews for decades. The melting pot got rid of these differences, though of course African-Americans were kept out of it. The answer obviously is to extend one American identity to all, and to minimize our differences.
Steve Prestegard.com: The Presteblog 