Why were the anti-Trump protests yesterday called "Hands Off"?

That was my first question, and it led to a series of questions:

• Generally, I would think, it is the role of the President to take charge, to handle all problems, and to get things done. A "hands-on" President sounds like an effective, active President, so it sounds as though it is an objection to the elected President being President. That reads as anti-democratic to me.

• If these protesters were libertarian, the slogan "hands off" would make more sense. These would be people wanting government to do as little as possible. But even then, much of what Trump is doing is cutting back government, making it smaller, more like the libertarian ideas. The tariffs are an exception to that, but you get my point. His hands are ON many government programs for the purpose of ending them or cutting them back. The protesters want to preserve big government.

• I think the tariffs are a means to an end of eliminating the tariffs against us. If that's what's really going on then the tariffs are not an exception and could be characterized as getting government out of free trade.

• Trump has been making big moves that have won cooperation from his antagonists. I'm thinking of the universities and law firms that backed down when confronted with financial loss.

• He has good reason to think that huge moves are needed or people will just resist and drag it out and wait it out. He needs shock and awe. The response "hands off" seems weak. Who will "hands off" convince? How did that slogan emerge?

All of that is for the annals of Things I Asked Grok. If you want to see how Grok answered, here's the link. Those are all prompts, by the way, so don't assume I believe all those assertions. It's a bit like teaching law school: You frame ideas to engage your interlocutor. You don't profess belief. You open things up for a better look.

One thing I saw is that the "Hands Off" slogan came from the abortion-rights discourse. But Hands Off My Body is a libertarian concept. 

"This is America showing itself because it was never in you in the first place. So why am I upset that you're upending something..."

"... that was never in you in the first place? I'm not saying that we shouldn't be upset. We definitely should be upset. But why are we-- we can't be upset at people that it was never in them in the first place to even care about somebody else."

Said a black woman, heard in episode 857 of "This American Life," "Museum of Now."

She is commenting on the removal of the 2-block-long, 50-foot-tall words, "Black Lives Matter," that had been set in concrete in a street near the White House.

Prompted by the question, "Is this more honest, actually, that they actually are ripping this up?," we hear her struggling in real time to understand why the de-installation of the motto wasn't upsetting her or wasn't upsetting her that much.

One might say the original installation was propaganda and pandering. Jackhammering it out of there said something accidental and authentic.

"Bowser caving immediately to the faintest hint of pressure on the name of the plaza is somehow even more cynical than the move to name it Black Lives Matter Plaza in the first place."

Said Olúfẹ́mi O. Táíwò, a Georgetown philosophy professor (who, we're told, is black).

He's quoted in "Black Lives Matter Plaza Is Gone. Its Erasure Feels Symbolic. The movement that prompted 'Black Lives Matter' to be painted in bold yellow near the White House is in retreat. Its leaders are asking what comes next for social justice" (NYT). From the article:

The death of “Democracy Dies in Darkness."

I'm reading "The Washington Post’s New Mission: Reach ‘All of America’ /This week, The Post began trying out a new mission statement: 'Riveting Storytelling for All of America'" (NYT):

After Donald J. Trump entered the White House in 2017, The Washington Post adopted a slogan that underscored the newspaper’s traditional role as a government watchdog: “Democracy Dies in Darkness.” This week, as Mr. Trump prepares to re-enter the White House, the newspaper debuted a mission statement that evokes a more expansive view of The Post’s journalism, without death or darkness: “Riveting Storytelling for All of America.”

The new slogan is terrible. The old slogan was also terrible, but at least it was ridiculous. "Riveting Storytelling for All of America" is just really dumb — a dumb slogan expressing the opinion that America is dumb, but what are you going to do? 

"The Washington Post will not be making an endorsement of a presidential candidate in this election. Nor in any future presidential election."

 "We are returning to our roots of not endorsing presidential candidates. As our Editorial Board wrote in 1960: 'The Washington Post has not "endorsed" either candidate in the presidential campaign. That is in our tradition and accords with our action in five of the last six elections. The unusual circumstances of the 1952 election led us to make an exception when we endorsed General Eisenhower prior to the nominating conventions and reiterated our endorsement during the campaign. In the light of hindsight we retain the view that the arguments for his nomination and election were compelling. But hindsight also has convinced us that it might have been wiser for an independent newspaper in the Nation's Capital to have avoided formal endorsement.'" 

That's "A note from the publisher," William Lewis, of The Washington Post, "On political endorsement."

Great! I prefer this policy, especially if it is based on a real commitment to professional, high-level journalism. There's a crazy amount of bias, which drives me away from whatever they are hoping to push. My sympathy for Donald Trump, the target of so much unfairness, is a bit absurd. I'm supposed to hate him? You idiots have made me love him. But somehow now you are drawing the line. What game is this?

"These guys are just weird. That's where they are.... The fascist depend on fear. The fascists depend on us going back, but we're not afraid of weird people. No, we we're a little bit creeped out, but we're not afraid."

Said Minnesota Governor Tim Walz, in audio played in the new episode of the NYT "Daily" podcast, "The V.P.’s Search for a V.P."

The podcast host observes that the message — "Republicans are... just too weird for America" — "does seem like it's sticking a little bit."

Is it "sticking" or is it just the word that's getting said by people who say the same word at the same time. I'm thinking of those people who all used the word "selfless" when Biden accepted getting ousted.

Here's a whole NYT article on the emergence of "weird" as the word: "One Word Has Elevated Minnesota’s Governor to the Democrats’ V.P. Wish List/'These guys are just weird,' Gov. Tim Walz, a former schoolteacher, has said of the opposition."

"Commit great poems to heart, starting with those by Gerard Manley Hopkins and Edna St. Vincent Millay. Recite them aloud on solitary walks."

"Recite them aloud on solitary walks. Compose dirty limericks in your head. Read more for pleasure, less for purpose. Read, immediately, Marguerite Yourcenar’s 'Memoirs of Hadrian.' Imitate the writers or artists you most admire; you’ll find your own voice and style in all the ways your imitation falls short. Don’t post self-indulgent glam shots of yourself on Instagram, and please stop photographing your damn meals... Make only enough money so that you don’t have to think about it much.... Never join a cause if you aren’t fully familiar with the argument against it. Heed the words of Rabbi Hillel: 'Where there are no men, be thou a man.' Or woman...."

Says Bret Stephens, recounting what he said in a commencement address, in a conversation with Gail Collins, in the NYT.

Collins reacts: "That’s pretty damn good.... But I’m not going to go so far as to suggest student protesting is a bad or silly idea." Yeah, I guess students are never fully familiar with the argument against their cause.

"If you’re looking for a cool peninsula, you’ve found it bro."

From a discussion of U.S. state mottos at Reddit.

I'm enjoying the colorful map with all the mottos. I've been inspired to memorize them (other than the extra mottos some states have (one per state, please)).

Some states have crazily long mottos. (Massachusetts is my favorite overlong motto.) Some are super-short, the shortest being that of Rhode Island, which is also the smallest state. 

My personal favorite motto is Maryland's: "Manly deeds, womanly words."

The Washington motto got me playing this old song.

"She was a blank canvas, and we had a bucket of paint."

Said senior Trump adviser Chris LaCivita, quoted in "How Trump crushed Haley’s momentum — and came closer to clinching the nomination/The former president and his allies trained their attacks on the former U.N. ambassador in the week before the N.H. primary, which Trump won easily on Tuesday" (WaPo).

Behind closed doors, Trump’s team had long viewed Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis as the bigger threat.... They quietly agreed to allow Haley to surge.... But now it was time to train Trump’s full arsenal of attacks.... In what senior Trump adviser Chris LaCivita described as a “pincer” movement, Trump bombarded Haley from both ideological sides....

[Nikki Haley had been] a guarded candidate who was reluctant to fully engage with voters and the media, and whose tight, streamlined stump speech offered prescriptions for multiple problems — but without a clear sense of what her top priorities would be....

“She was a blank canvas, and we had a bucket of paint,” LaCivita said....

And here's something Governor John Sununu said Haley said to him, as she was (successfully) seeking his endorsement: 

"Man, this 'live free or die' thing is real — like you can feel it. I want to carry that to the White House."

How free are you if you're "guarded" and "reluctant" and reciting a "tight, streamlined stump speech"? You keep yourself free to be a blank canvas onto which others can project what they want.

Meanwhile, Trump isn't tight. He's very loose. I've been listening to his rally speeches. He's not guarded. He's freely expressive. But he's facing 91 felony charges, and his antagonists (some of them) picture him in prison. You can't "live free" there.

Ah, but you can, and he's already thought it through. He said this in Concord, New Hampshire last October:

"I don’t mind being Nelson Mandela because I’m doing it for a reason. We’ve got to save our country from these fascists, these lunatics that we’re dealing with. They’re horrible people and they’re destroying our country."

"Denmark welcomed a new king on Sunday in a ceremony that didn’t feature crowns or scepters or multiple robes..."

"Denmark reinvented tradition on Sunday when 83-year-old Queen Margrethe II, Europe’s longest-serving monarch, gave up her throne, and her 55-year-old son became King Frederik X.... After she signed her abdication papers, Margrethe turned to her son and said, 'God bless the king.'... [T]here were no exceedingly heavy bejeweled crowns, no anointing of the monarch with holy oil behind a screen... 'We probably could have had a little more fuss, but not as much fuss as they do in Britain; that’s too much,' said Linda Martinsen, 56, who was standing close to the balcony. 'I don’t want to offend anyone, but it’s too much to wear a robe and a scepter,' Jakob Steen Olsen, a royal commentator for Denmark’s Berlingske newspaper.... 'The Brits are very heavy on mysticism. You have this old man being massaged with mysterious oils — it’s very weird. The Danish way is meant to show the link between democracy and royalty,' he said, as a contrast to 'how it was in the old days.... If it’s too ordinary, does the magic disappear?'"

From "Denmark remakes royal tradition with a new king — but no crown" (WaPo).

At some point, you've got to wonder, why do it at all?

It makes me think of the expression "Go big or go home" — which, I see, seems to have originated in a 1990s ad for "oversized Harley Davidson pipes."

"We’re not just disappointed. This is the end of democracy…. Democracy died tonight…. This was it. If we didn’t win tonight, the end of the U.S.A. as we know it just happened."

It's election day today, at long last.

The post title is something a disappointed voter said, in tears, in 2012, after the failure of the effort to recall the duly elected Governor of Wisconsin.

You can see video of the desolate man here, embedded in a post of mine from 2017. I used it in one of my 6 reflections on the Washington Post's new motto "Democracy Dies in Darkness."

I'm steeling myself for the emotionalism of the day. There will be winners and losers, but how desperately mournful will the losers be?

If you actually believed in democracy, you wouldn't assert that if you don't win, democracy has died... especially if you'd spent the last 2 years denouncing those who won't acknowledge the legitimacy of their own defeat.

"We take a human-centered approach to design a future massively better for everyone."

I love this phrase, painted on the window of a design firm in Munich, Germany:

 

Massively better.

The photo was taken by my son Chris, who also made this video walking around the Marienplatz ("Mary's Square"):

"Only an optimist would look around right now and feel convinced that there existed such a thing as a 'reasonable person'..."

"... let alone one who could be used as a standard in legal cases. But if you stop believing in reasonable people — even a person who is occasionally, initially fooled by something parodic — you stop believing that democracy is possible. If you don’t believe that most people are ultimately reasonable, why on Earth would you want them to be in charge of everything? Democracy, like parody, presumes that people are capable of noticing when someone is trying to dupe them. I have to think this is among the reasons autocrats distrust parody; not just because it shows them in a bad light, but because its underlying assumption is that people can see what is in front of them."

Writes Alexandra Petri, in "Parody is an act of optimism" (WaPo), after The Onion filed an amicus brief in a Supreme Court case, Novak v. Parma, about a man who was prosecuted for putting up a website that was a parody of a police department website.

Here's the brief. Excerpt:

"Kanye West made a statement at his surprise Yeezy fashion show on Monday, wearing a black sweatshirt with the slogan 'White Lives Matter' written across it."

"Fashion models in the rapper’s show also wore clothing with the message written across it, a response to the Black Lives Matter movement that was founded in 2013 following the fatal shooting of Trayvon Martin by George Zimmerman. Also posing with West, 43, was the right-wing commentator Candace Owens, who beamed while wearing a complementary version of the 'White Lives Matter' shirt, and Kanye's daughter North West, nine, was even roped into the event." 

The Daily Mail reports.

"All told, Whole Foods terminated workers in at least six states for wearing BLM apparel, according to a complaint brought by the National Labor Relations Board...."

"NLRB officials are now prosecuting Whole Foods, seeking a change in policy and reinstatement for the workers. The company’s defense has yielded one of the stranger spectacles in contemporary US labor law. Whole Foods not only denies doing anything wrong, it’s also effectively putting BLM on trial. 'At one point, President Trump referred to Black Lives Matter itself as, quote, "a symbol of hate," and like it or not, a significant number of the former president’s supporters share his view,' company attorney Michael Ferrell said during his opening statement at the NLRB trial in Boston this spring. Yes, Ferrell said, Whole Foods believes Black lives matter, but the BLM movement is 'controversial,' its protests have been marked by looting and violence, and the company had good reason to worry that stores would become dangerous if workers were allowed to show their support on the job. If Whole Foods is forced to permit employees to wear BLM logos, Ferrell said, then why not let them wear Confederate flag masks, or go shirtless?...'It is for Whole Foods’ leadership to decide,' Ferrell said. “It is not for the hourly store team members.' That’s a point the NLRB’s top prosecutor, General Counsel Jennifer Abruzzo, is eager to litigate.... 'I’m not sure that all circuit court judges, or even district court judges for that matter, fully understand all the nuances of labor law,' she says. 'We try to educate them as best we can.'"

From "Washington’s Top Labor Prosecutor Battles Whole Foods Over Black Lives Matter Masks/Jennifer Abruzzo, general counsel at the NLRB, is seeking a ruling that would give US workers something more like free speech" (Bloomberg).

I'm not sure what "would become dangerous." Is it that workers who didn't choose to wear the slogan could be threatened? Is it that customers might go ballistic? Was Ferrell talking about physical danger or some sort of emotional "danger"? Some people might feel hated when they read the slogan "Black Lives Matter" — is that a "danger"? I'm thinking of the vogue concept that words are violence. But stepping back from that puzzling word "danger," I can see that management has to worry that some customers may sense hostility and decide to shop elsewhere. The mask itself already embodies the hostility of the deadly virus. Writing an aggressive — or merely confusing — message on the mask has a synergistic effect. 

Just 4 TikToks tonight. Let me know what you like best.

1. Ohio's new slogan.

2. Confronted by bears, this worked.

3. The hellbender.

4. The self-aware narcissist.

"Much has already been said, tweeted and complained about The Washington Post’s tagline, 'Democracy Dies in Darkness'.... It’s harsh, foreboding and alarming."

"But it’s also true. When people don’t know the facts, a government of the people is impossible. So then why do the Post and many other legacy news publishers leave so many Americans in the dark? See, if you want to read a Post article, including this one about how they came up with the tagline back in 2017, you might be blocked by a paywall.... I often refer to people who don’t pay for news as 'passive' news consumers.... [T]hey’re... consuming the news that comes to them through their daily scrolling of social media feeds, email inboxes and conversations with people they trust.... Passive consumers may have faith that good, accurate news about the world and their own communities will somehow find them. But with few exceptions, they’re wrong about that. Increasingly, the fact-based news that’s necessary for a pro-democracy citizenry is behind a paywall. On social media, passive consumers are more likely to see propaganda that capitalizes on the ways information is distributed there. Biased algorithms reward salacious and emotionally charged content — often favoring right-leaning messaging that is outright false....With a major political party upholding the Big Lie and sowing mistrust in our incredibly secure elections, we have no more time to waste on out-of-touch debates. News organizations must instead seize the opportunity before us to once again serve as the bulwark of our democracy and get factual information to the people...."

Writes Tara McGowan in "Democracy dies behind a paywall/Paywalls bolster news organizations’ bottom lines, but leave Americans in the dark. As a public service, let everyone read election stories for free" (Poynter).

There are more kinds of passivity — and propaganda — than McGowan acknowledges, and she's — ironically — doing propaganda of her own. But, yeah, paywalls are gumming up the works.

In case you're wondering what was in that 2017 WaPo article about its ominous slogan, I crossed the paywall for you:

The statues that were torn down last summer — "Forward" and Hans Christian Heg — were restored to the Wisconsin state capitol square yesterday.

 From the Wisconsin State Journal: 

[O]n June 23, 2020, as protesters battered the “Forward” statue. A deep boom followed as the roughly one-ton bronze piece fell to the ground. Hundreds cheered. Shortly after, protesters tore down the Heg statue....

The night of unrest was prompted by the arrest of a local Black activist earlier that day after he walked into a restaurant carrying a baseball bat and swore at customers through a bullhorn.... 

The “Forward” statue, a replica of the original that is stored in the state archives, suffered abrasion damage from being pulled through the street, and some of the figure’s fingers broke off when the statue initially fell, [bronze fabricator Jay Jurma] said. The replica was also covered in red paint, a challenge to remove. 

The Heg statue was “far more severely damaged,” Jurma said. When protesters pulled it down, one of the legs detached from the rest of the statue, the base became twisted and the whole statue became crooked, as if Heg were leaning forward. At some point the statue’s head came off. What remained of the statue was filled with mud from Lake Monona. 

I did not realize the statues were about to be reinstalled. I'd been seeing the empty plinths, covered in plywood, for so long and felt outraged that the restoration had not yet occurred. Why wasn't it more of a political issue? What an awful sight — that blank plywood. What dismal symbolism.

That said, I do understand the protest. In that video and elsewhere, there are expressions of the idea that the protesters were ill-informed about the meaning of the statues and therefore made a mistake in targeting them. Quite aside from whether it's bad to destroy art and to damage public property, the protesters picked the wrong statues because Hans Christian Heg fought and gave his life for the abolitionist cause and "Forward" symbolizes the state's progressive values.

But the protesters had a theory of systemic racism, so the outward appearance of progressivism is part of the problem. To tear down the statues expresses outrage at the veneer of enlightenment that disguises and therefore facilitates the underlying evil. 

"Rich guys like rockets, I don’t know, they like rocket, boom."

Context, from "Donald Trump Mosinee, WI Rally Speech Transcript September 17":

We will land the first woman on the moon and the United States will be the first nation to land an astronaut on Mars. And, NASA is now the hottest space center anywhere in the world. And, when I took over three and a half years ago, there was grass growing in the runways, you know that it was closed down, it was a mess. We are now the hottest in the world. You see what’s going up. And, we’ve got a lot of rich guys sending them up too. I liked that better. I said, “Let them do it.” Rich guys like rockets, I don’t know, they like rocket, boom. I see dollars going right up, but they need a good place to launch. We have the best places. We have the best places, so it’s been incredible what we’ve done with NASA.

I'd love to hear Trump's uncensored analysis of rich guys and their rockets. I note the hand gesture. Obviously, it's about masculinity... potency... boom.

"California city washes away Black Lives Matter street art after resident asks for ‘MAGA 2020’ painting."

WaPo reports.

Despite granting permission for the temporary street art and even providing the paint for the July 4 project, officials in [Redwood City, California] ordered the painting be cleared from its prime location late last week, KPIX reported....

The request [to paint MAGA 2020] came from local attorney Maria Rutenburg, who [argued] that once the words “Black Lives Matter” were painted on the street, it effectively became “a public forum.” “Everybody has a chance of saying whatever they feel like,” she added. “My speech is just as important as BLM.”

Under First Amendment law, if it's a public forum, then the decisions must be viewpoint neutral. If, on the other hand, you see it as government speech, government can say one thing and not another if it wants. But not everyone wants to litigate.