"The major Iowa newspaper that published a political cartoon depicting MAGA voters yelling racial slurs at Republican presidential candidate Vivek Ramaswamy issued a formal apology..."

"... over the weekend after the GOP hopeful slammed the depiction as 'shameful.' The Quad-City Times executive editor Tom Martin wrote on the paper’s website Friday that the 'inexcusable' cartoon was intended to 'criticize racist ideas and epithets' but instead featured a phrase that 'is racist and insensitive to members of our Indian American community.'... [The cartoon] depicted a campaign rally... Ramaswamy was drawn, saying, 'Hello my MAGA friends!' Three angry White men in the crowd each responded to his appearance with a racial slur. One screamed, 'Muslim!' getting the candidate’s religion wrong. Ramaswamy is a self-professed Hindu. Another [yelled]... 'Get me a slushee, Apu!!!' and a third [yelled]... 'Show us your birth certificate!!'"

The NY Post reports.

Before the apology came out, Ramaswamy tweeted: "It’s sad that this is how the MSM views Republicans. I’ve met with grassroots conservatives across America & never *once* experienced the kind of bigotry that I regularly see from the Left. Iowa’s ⁦ @qctimes ⁩ absolutely has the right to print this, but it’s still shameful."

Let me connect this post to the previous one, about the chant at the Drag March — "We’re here! We’re queer! We’re coming for your children!" Somebody thinks they're being very funny and they're cocooned with people who like the direction the satire is going.

Not laughable at all.

I'm reading "Cancel Culture Claims Another Scalp" by John Hinderaker (at Power Line), which is about the Bret Stephens column on the "genius" of Jews. I blogged about the column, here, before the Twitter outrage cranked up.  I said:

So, according to Stephens, there are the people who can build things and do things in the real world. They can perform feats of engineering or devise military strategy. But those things are "prosaic," and — in Stephens blunt view — not what Jews do with their "prodigious intellect." Jews — in Stephens view — stand apart from these practical things and "question the premise and rethink the concept," they "ask why (or why not?)," they see absurdities and "maintain[] a critical distance." It may be good to value different kinds of intelligence and to roughly opine that there are the people who do things in the real world and people who stand back and observe and critique everything, but it's a big problem to put a group — even your own group — in the second category.

I was focusing on the danger to Jews that was inherent in the praise Stephens was attempting to offer. The outrage on Twitter (and elsewhere) was more about the use of IQ data from a paper co-authored by the anthropologist Henry Harpending. Hinderaker is critical of that outrage:

[L]iberals promptly swung into action, in many cases weirdly accusing Stephens of perpetuating an anti-Semitic stereotype.

Hinderaker quotes "Bret Stephens under fire for NY Times column on Jewish intelligence" (Jewish Telegraphic Agency):

But the Southern Poverty Law Center said that Harpending was an anthropologist who possessed a white nationalist ideology and promoted eugenics, which was studied and practiced by the Nazis.

Hinderaker comments:

I would’t take the SPLC’s word for anything, and there is something laughable about a supposed pro-Nazi who publishes an article finding that Jews have high IQ scores. 

Wow! I do not find that laughable at all. Whatever may or may not be true about Harpending, it is not inconsistent with anti-Semitism to believe that Jews are especially intelligent! Bigotry takes many forms, and the stereotypes about some groups include the notion that they have lower intelligence, but other stereotypes — for other groups — have the idea that they are more intelligent. That can be a basis for admiration, but it can be — and has been — a source of fear and the desire to disempower the people who you might imagine are deviously arranging the world to hurt you.

"J.K. Rowling spent Thursday once again demonstrating a perplexing inability to pipe down and enjoy her millions."

"This time, the Harry Potter author wasn’t retconning diversity into the series she finished writing over 12 years ago or disclosing that before indoor plumbing, the wizards of her universe used to just poop themselves and magically vanish the evidence away. Instead, Rowling tweeted her support for Maya Forstater, a tax expert whose firing from a think tank over transphobic comments and subsequent court battle has generated a great deal of controversy in the U.K. In so doing, Rowling seemed to align herself with a virulently anti-trans group of otherwise liberal women, most often referred to as trans exclusionary radical feminists or TERFs."

From "After a Transphobic Tweet, J.K. Rowling Can No Longer Be Considered an LGBTQ Ally" Slate).

Here's the tweet that's provoking some people:

Dress however you please.
Call yourself whatever you like.
Sleep with any consenting adult who’ll have you.
Live your best life in peace and security.
But force women out of their jobs for stating that sex is real? #IStandWithMaya #ThisIsNotADrill

— J.K. Rowling (@jk_rowling) December 19, 2019

Here's what's linked at that "poop" reference:

"It’s certainly embarrassing for those who expressed concern or solidarity with Smollett to consider that we’ve likely been misled, our empathy for the actor misplaced."

"But don’t confuse your very reasonable embarrassment and anger in the wake of having been duped for a more permanent kind of harm. No one who invokes the name of Jussie Smollett to cast doubt on real victims would have believed them, but for this. Homophobes who regularly link gays to pedophilia or believe that same-sex marriage is a sign of civilization’s downfall weren’t on the brink of a change of heart, but for this. Neither were racists like U.S. Rep. Steve King, who believe that America won’t be America unless the majority of her population is white. People who believe these ugly things, and the much larger group who don’t believe anything except that it’s not their business to care, don’t seize on hoaxes because an isolated case proves they are right. They do it because they will use anything and everything to distract from the fact that they are wrong.... [T]here’s no larger message here, and we’re not all victims of his crime. Haters, proverbially, are going to hate. They did it before, and they won’t miss a step after this sad, weird story is done. We may get sick of hearing Jussie Smollett’s name repeated in lieu of an actual argument. But those of us who understand that one hoax doesn’t invalidate countless true stories of homophobic or race-based violence will not be deterred."

From "Why Jussie Smollett’s Alleged Hoax Won’t Change How Anyone Feels About Hate Crimes" by Evan Urquhart at Slate. The commenters at Slate are not buying Urquhart's spin. From the most up-voted comment:

We're not talking about Gov. Northam anymore.

I wonder why. Is it just a matter of time? Steel yourself when they all come after you and wait. They'll go somewhere else soon enough.

Or did something else happen that drove the story out of the news? Was it just big news — Trump's "emergency"? Or something that specifically offset the Northam story — maybe the Jussie Smollett  story: Maybe some people don't want to think about why Northam made himself into a fake black man if we're worried that Jussie Smollett made up some fake white men.

Smollett's possibly fake white men were outright hateful and they make black people feel that they are hated, and Northam's fake black man was more ambiguous, perhaps more mockery than hate and even possibly admiring (if it really was about imitating Michael Jackson). And, of course, what Smollett did — if he did it — happened just a couple weeks ago and Northam's idiocy is more than 30 years in the past.

ADDED: If it turns out that Smollett staged an elaborate hoax, how do you think it will/should be resolved? Obviously, one answer is criminal prosecution and punishment.

But — especially if he would continue to assert that he was attacked — it might be better for everyone involved if Smollett were allowed to escape all punishment if he would only clearly explain that it was a hoax, acknowledge that it was very wrong, and give a sincere apology. I'd be happy to forgive if we could get out a strong message that hoaxes like this are cruel and destructive.

Another scenario I've pictured is something about mental illness and rehabilitation. We'd learn that Smollett is unwell and will get treatment, which is problematic because it might feel like another hoax.

By the way, I hope it's a hoax. Aware that I'd prefer it to be a hoax, I'm wary of talking about it as a hoax at all. Maybe it happened, and if it did, Smollett deserves empathy for both the attack and the doubting of his integrity.

AND: A montage of media people and politicians conveying Smollett's allegations as if they were proven facts:

The All-Star Game was not a good event for the Milwaukee Brewers.

I didn't watch the game. I don't like the All-Star Game, so I only checked out the National Anthem and left. I prefer normal games, but I was interested enough to see how the Brewers performed. I found this in WaPo:

Racist, homophobic and misogynistic tweets that Milwaukee Brewers reliever Josh Hader sent in 2011 and 2012 surfaced as he pitched in Tuesday night’s All-Star Game at Nationals Park, turning his appearance into an embarrassing stain for Hader and a public-relations nightmare for Major League Baseball.

After Hader surrendered a three-run homer in the eighth inning, several Twitter users — starting, it seems, with an account named MLB Insider Dinger — found and retweeted messages Hader sent as a 17-year-old. The tweets included numerous uses of the n-word and an allusion to “white power” next to an emoji of a closed fist. One tweet read only, “I hate gay people.” Another referenced wanting women only for sex, cooking and cleaning....

Hader discovered that the tweets had surfaced after he exited the game.... When the National League clubhouse opened to media, Hader was standing alone at his locker, his blond hair pulled into a bun. Reporters surrounded him. A public-relations official asked reporters to wait. Another PR man said to the other: “Give it a second. We got a couple more [reporters] coming. We got a bunch more.”...

Before the game ended, Hader had deleted his old tweets and locked his account. He said he would accept any suspension or punishment.... “I’m ready for any consequences for what happened seven years ago,” he said. “Like I said before, I was young, immature and stupid. There’s no excuses for what was said or what happened.”...

The weird thing is that those old tweets hadn't been deleted before last night. Really, that's inexplicable. The team's management is inept not to notice and attend to that sort of thing. It took giving up a 3-run homer in the All-Star Game to get anyone interested enough to look into his social media. It's some kind of measure of how unimportant and important social media is. What a screw-up!

"[T]he types who surfaced in Charlottesville on Saturday are certainly human beings of the most repellent and disgusting sort, murderous too..."

"... pretty much violent, evil sociopaths. I wouldn't mind if they were all rounded up, put in a space ship, and sent on a one-way trip to Alpha Centauri.... What happened in Charlottesville isn't us. It's just a small group of real bad people. Indict them, convict them, and lock them up for a long as possible. The rest of us should move on."

Writes Roger Simon in a post that's been linked to twice in the last 2 hours at Instapundit — first by Ed Driscoll...

ROGER SIMON: Is Charlottesville Really What’s Going on in the USA?

Read the whole thing.

... and second by Glenn Reynolds...

I WAS GOING TO WRITE SOMETHING ABOUT CHARLOTTESVILLE TODAY, but honestly I don’t think I could do better than Roger Simon. I do want to echo his comment that, for all the racial tension we see in the media and in politics, out in the actual world black and white people seem to be getting along pretty well. I wrote something about that here.

Somehow, I still believe that people are really good at heart. I look at those people — with their cheesy tiki torches, their cosplay shields, and their lack of female companionship — and I see them as lost souls. I'd like to invite them down off the ledge and into a more rational, loving human existence.

I wouldn't throw them in a basket of deplorables or shoot them on a one-way trip to Alpha Centauri. I wouldn't "Indict them, convict them, and lock them up for a long as possible." If any individual commits a crime, enforce the criminal law following the same standards of due process that apply to everyone else and impose a fair sentence. But don't go after people because you hate them as a group, and don't use criminal law to squelch thought and speech.

Less hate. More love. Less censorship. More speech.

Glenn Loury and I resist the resistance to Trump.

In this hot new episode of Bloggingheads (recorded on Friday), Glenn Loury objects strenuously to the effort to treat Trump as abnormal, and I agree. Despite that basic agreement, we find a lot to talk about:



The tags indicate the range of subject matter. The topics listed at the BHTV website are:

The “normalizing Trump” debate
Trump’s desire to keep judges “in check”
Political posturing around Gorsuch and Garland
Should judges infer that Trump wants a Muslim ban?
Glenn defends the Shelby County ruling on voting rights
Ann defends Citizen’s United

The NYT joins the violent fun: "Attack on Alt-Right Leader Has Internet Asking: Is It O.K. to Punch a Nazi?"

This isn't distanced journalism. This is an invitation to hate and exult in violence. Because it's okay if they're a Nazi.

Challenge yourself, New York Times. Ask first whether what you are doing is more Nazi-like.

You are amplifying violence, giving voice to the justification of violence, pointing at people as targets and amplifying the argument that they deserve violence, and seeming to preen at some delusion of being on the cutting edge. (And it's just sad that you think it's cool to see an internet meme and that there's something cool about Bruce Springsteen.)

There's also the irony of making a despicable character sympathetic.

The NYT article has a single author, Liam Stack:

Liam Stack covers breaking news and social and political issues for the New York Times express desk. An Arabic speaker, he worked for seven years as a Middle East correspondent, covering authoritarianism and revolution in the Arab world.

Interestingly, given the internet-savvy posing, the NYT does not have comments enabled for this article. I wanted to blog about the reaction of NYT readers, but there's nothing there. Why?

Should we talk about the incident or how the press covered it?

"Vicious Hate Crime in Chicago Whitewashed by Press."

ADDED: I looked to see how the NYT handled the story. On a front page sidebar right now, there's:



Race is clearly stated. What's not mentioned is that the "white teenager" is mentally disabled. And the word "beaten" doesn't describe the attack accurately at all.

On the "U.S." page within the NYT there's:



That's a big reference to race, but with no specificity about which races are involved and who's attacking whom. Again, the verb is "beat" (not "torture").

The newest article — which went up in the last hour — is not linked from the front page or the U.S. page. I found it by searching the archive: "The Latest: Police: Race Not Motive Behind Video Attack." This is an AP article, with no photograph or video.

Chicago police say they don't believe a man beaten in an assault broadcast live on Facebook was targeted because he was white. 

But the attackers are saying "Fuck white people" as they torture the white man! How did the police arrive at this strange belief?

Police spokesman Anthony Guglielmi said Thursday morning that charges are expected soon against four black suspects. Guglielmi says the suspects made "terrible racist statements" during the attack, but that investigators believe the victim was targeted because he has special needs, not because of his race.

I didn't watch the video. I don't intend to. Do the attackers make statements about the young man's disability? Does the fact that attackers choose a weak victim mean that no other factors were involved? Would they have selected a mentally disabled black victim if they'd found one first?

Guglielmi says it's possible the suspects were trying to extort something from the victim's family. Video from Chicago media outlets appears to show someone off-camera using profanities about "white people" and President-elect Donald Trump. Chicago Police Superintendent Eddie Johnson said Wednesday that the victim has mental health challenges, and he called the video "sickening."

Guglielmi said police are working with prosecutors "to build the strongest case."

I guess one way to build "the strongest case" is to forget about the hate crime element. It's just one more thing the government has to prove. But why then ever prosecute hate crimes? If you already have a physical attack, why make proving the case more difficult? Answering that question, the government must avoid viewpoint discrimination. It must not be that you go the extra distance and charge a hate crime when the hate goes in the way that you want to highlight for public consumption and you forget about it when it doesn't serve your agenda.

AND: As you consider whether the attack was motivated by racism against white people, consider whether the press coverage exemplifies racism against black people. Ironically and unwittingly, the journalists' speech betrays a negative stereotype about black people — that their words are not to be taken as seriously as the words of white people. That is an old and shameful stereotype.

MORE: The hate crime question focuses on whether the victim was selected because of his race, and the police seem to think that the man's disability is what made him a target. We can understand how cowardly people looking for a victim might choose someone weak. That's also a reason for choosing a female or an old or a small victim. It seems easier. But victims have multiple characteristics. If you were looking for an easy victim, you might select a small, old, disabled female. Now, add race. If you were an evil coward looking for the easiest victim, would you take race into account? Remember the Wisconsin State Fairground attacks in August 2011:

Police in West Allis, Wis., say some attacks by black teenagers on white people outside the gates of the Wisconsin State Fair on Aug. 4 were racially motivated and should be prosecuted as hate crimes.

One African-American teenager arrested Wednesday confirmed witness statements suggesting that the large group of black teens, who had originally fought among themselves, specifically targeted white people as they spilled out of the large fairgrounds on the outskirts of Milwaukee at closing time. According to the West Allis Police, he said he personally picked out white people because they were "easy targets."

Trump condemns bigotry in all forms and envisions an inclusive America premised on our own American dream.

I picked out this clip from Trump's Cincinnati "Thank You" rally. I wish I had a transcript. Perhaps later.

A passage in my casebook that I've read many times struck me as funny this year — after the presidential election.

I'm preparing my class using my all-time favorite casebook —  "Religion and the Constitution" — and I got to this passage in the section about teaching evolution. I'll boldface the thing that hit me in a new way:

"When she outed herself to me as a Trump supporter, I realized I had finally found the 'silent majority.'"

"I looked at her, this suddenly strange girl who sleeps a few feet away from me, my college roommate. The silent majority has seen me put on my head scarf in the morning and take it off at night. The silent majority has touched my face, done my makeup, watches 'Gilmore Girls' religiously. The silent majority occasionally enjoys sliced mango before bed. We fought; I packed. This was Tuesday evening, so I headed to my friend’s dorm, where a small group of us, mainly black women, tried to find solace in one another as the country slowly fell to red. I tried and failed to speak, to write. I ignored my roommate’s lengthy texts...."

So begins Romaissaa Benzizoune, an NYU freshman, who has an op-ed in the NYT titled, "I’m Muslim, but My Roommate Supports Trump."

I thought that was well written. It made me want to read to the end of the story. Do the friends make up?

I got to "it is no surprise that our argument proved hopeless" and  "There was no reasoning with her" and "My roommate’s reasoning reflected an 'us versus them' mind-set mind-set that has defined this nation for as long as it has existed" — that's in the middle of the column — and I felt queasy.

The roommate is a specific, identifiable individual. She might as well have her name printed in The New York Times. We haven't the details of the argument or anything close to a quotation of what the very young woman may have said. We hear only the conclusion: She was immune to reason and stuck in a mind-set that is stereotypically American. I'm stunned by the unfairness toward this real person.

I read to the end of the piece. I finally encounter a quote from that unnamed, identifiable individual called "my roommate." It's a 2-word quote:

My roommate’s main defense of Mr. Trump during our argument was that he didn’t mean the “stupid things” he said. 

The writer rejects any comfort that might lie in the notion that Trump didn't mean all the things he said. She ends, not with any reconciliation with the roommate, but distancing herself from this person she has lived with in close contact. The writer dedicates herself to writing and to the masses of people who are not in the group with her roommate:

Now that an us-versus-them system has been voted into office, I want to write for those who feel like the latter, the “them.”

And that's where she ends, convinced that it's an us-versus-them system, that her roommate — her nameless but identifiable roommate — is the other, and hot to intensify the us-versus-themness of it all.

ADDED: Whatever happened to diversity? Benzizoune had originally thought her roommate was like her, but then she was "this suddenly strange person." Benzizoun's college experience turned into something universities normally encourage: confrontation and dealing with diversity. 

Benzizoune's response was to reject her roommate and to go out and find a more homogeneous group to hang around with. And then she outed the roommate to the whole world, exposing her to contempt and hostility in The New York Times.

After gaining access through the imposed intimacy of roommateship in a university that (I'm sure) promotes diversity, she betrayed this woman — who is perhaps  18 years old — and invited hatred. She did it deliberately, with fervor, and facilitated by the most powerful newspaper in America.

And it seemed justified. Why?

UPDATE: 17 days later, the NYT publishes an op-ed by the roommate, who says:

My roommate has since apologized to me, but in the meantime I have felt the glare of her friends and been heckled on campus by other students. I have been labeled “racist,” “sexist” and “xenophobic” on Facebook. I have been called a “white without a conscious,” a “misogynist,” a “bigot” and a “barbarian” online by people all over the country.

She proceeds to tell us about her background, as if she needs to distance herself from the white-privilege slur with the news that she's half-Hispanic. But she's mostly conciliatory, eager to encourage us to all get along.

Chelsea Clinton, speaking in Madison to an audience of "a few hundred," said children are getting bullied in school because of the "Trump effect."

We're told — by Milwaukee Journal Sentinel reporter Jason Stein — that Chelsea "gave examples" of this "Trump effect" bullying that she attributed to what she called "an almost daily diet of hate speech" coming from Trump.

I could have walked down the street and joined what Stein calls "a young crowd of supporters... at the upscale Overture Center for the Arts." But I chose not to. I'm just a little lazy at night. And the World Series was on. And frankly, I don't like seeing famous people. It feels creepy. Like that waiter playing the role of waiter that we were just talking about.

Anyway, speaking of bullying, I should link to Scott Adams's post yesterday calling the Democrats "The Bully Party":

If you have a Trump sign in your lawn, they will steal it.

If you have a Trump bumper sticker, they will deface your car.

[I]f you speak of Trump at work you could get fired.

On social media, almost every message I get from a Clinton supporter is a bullying type of message. They insult. They try to shame. They label. And obviously they threaten my livelihood.

We know from Project Veritas that Clinton supporters tried to incite violence at Trump rallies. The media downplays it.

We also know Clinton’s side hired paid trolls to bully online. You don’t hear much about that....

Joe Biden said he wanted to take Trump behind the bleachers and beat him up. No one on Clinton’s side disavowed that call to violence because, I assume, they consider it justified hyperbole.

Team Clinton has succeeded in perpetuating one of the greatest evils I have seen in my lifetime. Her side has branded Trump supporters (40%+ of voters) as Nazis, sexists, homophobes, racists, and a few other fighting words. Their argument is built on confirmation bias and persuasion....

One way to bully is to call the other person the bully. Chelsea could be said to be part of that activity.

And as far as that "almost daily diet of hate speech" Chelsea spoke of — where does it come from? Does it come from Trump or does it come from Trump's opponents who are paraphrasing him? I think most of the noise comes from the paraphrasers, and the question is whether they are: 1. Interpreting Trump accurately and getting us to see dog-whistling for what it really is, or 2. Distorting what Trump says into something it's not that they want you to think it is.

Whatever the paraphrasers are doing, they are relying on 2 important beliefs: 1. Listeners hate the idea that the paraphrasers are making so clear, and 2. The hard-core daily beating rained down on Trump will never turn him into a sympathetic character.

That first belief might not be true or not true enough. At some point, on some level, listeners might feel, instead of aversion to Trump, fears and needs that send them into Trump's arms. And that second belief is dangerous: These ham-handed attacks are so crude and exaggerated that they exceed the crudeness usually attributed to Trump. We're told to hate crude brutality by people who look increasingly crude and brutal.

UPDATE: Just this morning a man with a pickax and a sledgehammer, wrecked the Donald Trump star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame.

Hillary introduces America to the term "alt-right" — the "emerging racist ideology" — and Trump calls Hillary a "bigot."

Do you want to talk about race or do you want to talk about words?

Because we could talk about what "bigot" means. It could mean only those who consciously embrace the idea that some group is despicable, or it could also cover those with unwanted feelings of hate that they are struggling with, or it could include everyone who has even unacknowledged feelings of only slight disgust toward some other group, or it could extend even to people who don't care enough about groups other than their own and have failed to go very far out of their way to do something to help the when they experience misfortune and suffer economic hardship. It's that last thing that Donald Trump is saying about Hillary, so he's making a good point, wrapped within a complicated linguistic issue that might — if people get caught up in it — ultimately work out in his favor. It's the same point as: "What have you got to lose?" Who cares about the tenderness of the hearts of the white people who want black people to vote for them? Shouldn't you vote for the candidate who will help you and your community? Isn't the real bigotry — the bigotry that matters — the bigotry that comes in the form of relegating your community to disorder and depression? We could talk about that.

And we could talk about the political value of saying "alt-right," all right? I mean, who even knew that word until Hillary said it yesterday? Even when you know the word and hear the definition — which she had to provide in the speech since people don't know the term — do you know that this is a real social phenomenon that we need to worry about? Or should we wonder if Hillary is trying to scare us with a bogeyman?

The coming cascade of smart, educated people embracing Trump.

"It troubles me that there can't be a serious discussion about immigration issues because people are afraid of being called racist. People are afraid of being called a bigot. And I think one of the things that people like about Donald Trump — those who like him — is that he's going ahead and saying it, and it's creating a kind of inoculation against something people have feared so much, which is being called a bigot. It's just too effective to call people bigots, and a lot of people are very intimidated and silenced and don't even want to talk about certain issues because they don't want to be called that. So I think part of his popularity is: He goes there, he says it, he takes the hit, and it still works for him. So that's a kind of a liberating change in the discourse."

I say, beginning this clip from a video dialogue I recorded on Monday with Glenn Loury:



Glenn agrees with me, says Trump is not doing "dog whistle racism," and proceeds, eventually, to endorse the Trump idea "You either have a country or you don't" and that "if you don't control your border, you don't have a country." (Which Glenn even punctuates with "Duh.")

Glenn goes so far that I eventually prod him with "I think you're a Donald Trump supporter." He doesn't deny it. He even laughs as if it's his secret that I've uncovered. I then propose the theory that there are many people who are intimidated and silenced about being Trump supporters. They don't want to identify with a group that's reputed to be uneducated and dumb. They're afraid of looking like a racist. I predict a cascade when people who've been silent realize that they can say it out loud: "There could be this breakthrough, where a whole lot of people you wouldn't expect would suddenly start saying they were for Donald Trump."

I invite Glenn to start the cascade. If Glenn is for Trump — how liberating! Again, he doesn't reject the idea. He's smiling and seems excited at the idea. He's excited about the political science idea of a cascade. He'd like to research it and write about it and get credit for spotting it. He exhibits so much delight that he abruptly says "I think I should stop talking."

And I say: "I think you're delighted by the possibility of embracing Donald Trump." He says: "I'm excited and amused by the possibility."

IN THE COMMENTS: Glenn Loury writes:

I just want to clarify something. I AM NOT A (CLOSETED) DONALD TRUMP SUPPORTER!! I said as much during my conversation with Ann Althouse (listen to the whole thing.) Yes, I agreed with Ann that I don't see Trump's positions as dog-whistle politics meant to appeal to racists. And, I also agreed that some of Trump's formulations had a commonsense appeal ("you don't have a country without controlling its borders"; or, "friends and relatives of homegrown terrorists probably know something, and should tell what they know"...) But, while I do view the spectacle of Trump being the Republican nominee with a certain excitement and amusement, the chance I would ever vote for him is zero. As things now stand, I'm supporting Hilary ...

I respond:

Hi, Glenn. Thanks for commenting.

Of course, if you were closeted, you'd say you were not.

In any case, you decline the opportunity to live on the crest of the cascade, but it will be a more comfortable place soon, and the interesting question is why you didn't confront me about whether I am a closeted Trump supporter.

"When a homophobic preacher began spewing his hateful rantings on an M train this week...

"... one subway rider blessed with the voice of an angel decided to take matters into his own hands and shut him up...."

"As the cable shows signed off last night, it was dawning even on the most conventional pundits that the Republicans had not elected an escadrille of Republican archangels..."

"... to descend upon Capitol Hill. It was more like a murder of angry crows. Joni Ernst is not a moderate. David Perdue is not a moderate. Thom Tillis is not a moderate. Cory Gardner -- who spiced up his victory by calling himself 'the tip of the spear' -- is not a moderate. Tom Cotton is not a moderate. And these were the people who flipped the Senate to the Republicans. In the reliably Republican states, Ben Sasse in Nebraska is not a moderate.  James Lankford in Oklahoma is not a moderate. He's a red-haired fanatic who believes that welfare causes school shootings. Several of these people -- most notably, Sasse and Ernst -- won Republican primaries specifically as Tea Partiers, defeating establishment candidates. The Republicans did not defeat the Tea Party. The Tea Party's ideas animated what happened on Tuesday night. What the Republicans managed to do was to teach the Tea Party to wear shoes, mind its language, and use the proper knife while amputating the social safety net. They did nothing except send the Tea Party to finishing school."

Wrote Esquire's Charles P. Pierce, live-blogging the election results. I note that he called Scott Walker "the goggle-eyed homunculus hired by Koch Industries to manage their midwest subsidiary formerly known as the state of Wisconsin."

Yes, it's interesting to go back and relive Tuesday night from the perspective of someone who — we know in retrospect — is going to get deeply wounded.

A few stray observations about Pierce's style of humor:

1. Why is "red-haired" considered acceptable as an insult?

2. Why is it considered okay to call attention to what seems to be an eye disorder? Whether something is wrong with Scott Walker's eyes or not, the epithet "goggle-eyed" is disrespectful to all of the people who suffer from conditions like esotropia.

3. To speak of teaching the Tea Party "to wear shoes" is to try to be funny by evoking the stereotype of barefoot hillbillies. When will elite urban white people ever get the feeling that it's bigoted to mock rural white people? Oh, the answer is easy. You can find it in the book title "What's the matter with Kansas"? There's something wrong with these people as long as they fail to vote for Democrats.

(By the way, "escadrille" is how you say "squadron" or "small squadron" in French. I'll refrain from adding an anti-French kicker, given my attention to political correctness above.)

Actor spouting Islamophobia gets punched in the face and shouts "It's a social experiment! It's a social experiment!"

"A social experiment that ended with an actor posing as an Islamophobe getting punched in the face has shown that Canadians are prepared to defend Muslims in the face of overt racist abuse in the wake of a recent terror attack."



Via Metafilter, where somebody says "They got punched for committing sociology."

"[Bell] Hooks had just come from a seminar entitled 'Transgression: Whose Booty Is This?'"

"She said, 'Pussies are out. It’s bootylicious all the way.' [Laverne] Cox agreed. 'It is the age of the ass,' she said. 'Booty as cultural metaphor is really interesting. J. Lo made the ass a thing fifteen years ago, and now we have issues of ass appropriation.'"

From a New Yorker piece about a conversation between Bell Hooks, the longtime activist feminist, who's currently a Distinguished Professor in Residence of Appalachian Studies at Berea College, and Laverne Cox, the LGBT advocate and actress who's in the TV show "Orange Is the New Black."

Hooks proceeds to declare that she has "had an ironing-board butt all my life," and Cox responds with an observation about astrology, but maybe Hooks is not "into astrology," and Hooks says: "Oh, I’m into psychics, telepathics, you name it... All the paranormal world is very interesting to me." And both of them speak retrogressively about aging: "This aging thing is a bitch" (Hooks, 62 years old) and "I do not [reveal my age]. My official age is 'over twenty-one'" (Cox).

Observations:

1. Ageism is certainly one of the "-isms" that people still seem to feel safe about openly displaying. Maybe some day we will look back with shame at what bigotry we spouted.

2. It utterly amazes me that people who want to present themselves as intelligent and sophisticated nevertheless openly profess belief in astrology and other "paranormal" nonsense, including people like Hooks and Cox who are activists purporting to push the rest of the world forward into enlightenment. How can you get any footing to push when you're standing in blatant idiocy?

3. Asses. When will they be out?