Liberal (or Western) Democracy Under Pressure

[Wosbald]

+JMJ+

Source: New Republic
Link: newrepublic DOT com/article/183082/nopes-trump-very-fine-people

Why Is Snopes Helping Trump Clean Up “Very Fine People”

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The generally valuable debunker of right-wing lies made a very odd ruling recently that may have ramifications for the election.

Jun 26, 2024 — Nearly seven years after Donald Trump infamously stated that there were “very fine people on both sides” of the deadly Unite the Right Rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, internet fact-checkers at Snopes-DOT-com have published a piece declaring it “false” that Trump was referring to neo-Nazis and white supremacists.

This conclusion, however, fails to recognize the intricacies of Trump’s rhetoric, which serves as a prime example of doublespeak.

I believe Snopes should have, at minimum, given this a rating of “mixture,” which it uses when a “claim has significant elements of both truth and falsity to it such that it could not fairly be described by any other rating.” I did not receive a response when I contacted the author of the post and Snopes editorial staff via email.

[…]

According to Trump, there were “very fine people” in both of the two groups, which included the people who went to the rally organized by neo-Nazis and people who protested the neo-Nazis. Those were your “sides.” Trump, here, said that within the group of people at the neo-Nazi rally, where “the night before” they were marching with tiki torches and chanting “Jews will not replace us,” there were “very fine people.”

It’s never been a matter of whether every single person who went to that rally self-identified as a neo-Nazi or a white nationalist, but that Trump said there were “very fine people” within each of the two groups. Unite the Right was a neo-Nazi rally. It did not matter whether every attendee called themselves neo-Nazis. If you show up to an event where there are people walking around with swastikas and chanting “Jews will not replace us,” then you’re absolutely not a “very fine” person.

Here’s why this matters today, and why Snopes’s call here helps Trumpworld. At first, most conservatives condemned Trump’s remarks. But by the following year, conservatives, including many who had originally condemned Trump’s response, had come around to the idea that it was actually a “hoax” that Trump had ever said there were “fine people on both sides” of the neo-Nazi rally. Led by the likes of Dilbert creator Scott Adams, the right-wing website The Daily Caller, and PragerU, conservative media outlets began pointing to individuals who attended the rally but didn’t personally identify as neo-Nazis or white nationalists as evidence that Trump wasn’t referring to those groups.

One of Trump’s strategies has always been to stake out every possible position on any given topic. That’s exactly what he did here. He talked himself into a knot. He used doublespeak, and Snopes fell for it.

Did Trump specifically say, “Some neo-Nazis are fine people?” No. Did he say that there were “very fine people on both sides” of a neo-Nazi rally? Yes!

Trump’s presidential campaign is now pointing to Snopes’s erroneous fact check to claim that Joe Biden and Democrats have been lying for years about something we all saw and heard with our own eyes and ears. This is shameful on Snopes’s part.

Snopes, which in fairness has often been a valuable debunker of right-wing disinformation and lies, fell for the semantic dance Trump performed, where implicit validation undercut explicit condemnation. By focusing on his technical disavowal of neo-Nazis, Snopes ignored the broader and more pernicious impact of his rhetoric. His words provided a veneer of legitimacy to those who shared a stage with hate. Trump’s tactic of occupying every possible rhetorical position allows his supporters to cherry-pick the most favorable interpretation, a classic case of doublespeak designed to muddy the waters of public discourse.

Labeling this as “false” without acknowledging the nuance of Trump’s doublespeak misrepresents the reality of his rhetoric. This is not just about parsing words; it’s about understanding the implications of those words in their entirety. Failing to recognize this allows history to be rewritten in a way that sanitizes the dangerous equivocation of those in power.

Snopes, in its eagerness to fact-check, missed the forest for the trees. In doing so, the site inadvertently aided in the revisionist effort to downplay the true nature of Trump’s remarks. We must remain vigilant against such simplifications, ensuring that the full context and impact of public statements are considered to safeguard the truth from being obscured by clever manipulation.

[Del]

+JMJ+

Source: New Republic
Link: newrepublic DOT com/article/183082/nopes-trump-very-fine-people

Why Is Snopes Helping Trump Clean Up “Very Fine People”

Because Snopes is tired of lying for Democrats. Lies undermine our Democracy and encourage political violence.

All of the violence comes from the Left, where the lies are spread with encouragement.

But Snopes is not being altruistic. They still want to help Democrats. All they know is that Americans see through the lies, we are sick and fed up with the lies, and only the truth might save the Democrats from an electoral bloodbath.
==============================

Why does anybody lie during an act of persuasion? Because they know that the listener won't buy what they're selling if he knows the truth.

Now that much of America is awakened, Democrats won't win until they come up with better, more persuasive ideas.... and back them with solid truths. They can't just "control the narrative" to victory anymore.

[Wosbald]

+JMJ+

Source: National Catholic Reporter / MSW
Link: ncronline DOT org/opinion/ncr-voices/why-are-we-fighting-about-10-commandments

Why are we fighting about the 10 Commandments? [Analysis, Opinion]

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Jul 3, 2024 — The state of Louisiana has decided that the Ten Commandments should be posted in every classroom in the state. Wouldn't you know, and in response to the decision, all hell broke loose.

At The Hill, Southern Methodist University professor of religious studies Mark Chancey denounced the decision as "alarming." He recalled the incident in 1859 when 11-year-old Thomas Wall, a young Catholic student, refused to recite the Protestant version of the Ten Commandments and had his hands beaten. Surely, such an incident can and should be included in whatever curriculum is devised to explain the historical significance of the Commandments.

[…]

But while it is not true to call America a "Christian nation," for most of its history it was a nation of Christians, and they certainly were motivated in their understanding of law in part by the tablets Moses brought down from Sinai.

Everybody needs to take a deep breath and relax.

When you enter the U.S. House of Representatives chamber in the Capitol building, you will find 23 relief portraits over the gallery doors, each one representing some of the great lawgivers in Western civilization. Blackstone, Hammurabi, Justinian, Napoleon are all there. So is Moses. And the country hasn't fallen apart. The Congress has not authorized an Inquisition.

One of the things that is happening in our legal system is that decisions made by previous courts regarding many issues are being reevaluated. You can like that or not like it, but one thing is certain: The church–state jurisprudence of the Vinson, Warren and Burger courts did not come down from Sinai.

In its 1980 decision in Stone v. Graham, the U.S. Supreme Court barred the Commonwealth of Kentucky from posting the Ten Commandments in its schoolrooms. The court stated: "If the posted copies of the Ten Commandments are to have any effect at all, it will be to induce the schoolchildren to read, meditate upon, perhaps to venerate and obey, the Commandments. However desirable this might be as a matter of private devotion, it is not a permissible state objective under the Establishment Clause."

One is tempted to commend anything that might induce a young person to meditation in this noisy, social-media-driven world, but that is not the point that is most salient. And the Supreme Court had previously discarded the Lemon test [which] the court used to decide Stone v. Graham. The point is that there was an underlying assumption that stalked church–state jurisprudence in the past many decades: that secularity equals neutrality. That assumption is deeply flawed.

One of the fundamental dynamics that James Davison Hunter explains in his recent book, Democracy and Solidarity: On the Cultural Roots of America's Political Crisis (which I recently reviewed), is the breakdown of what was once a shared understanding of the national mythos, a breakdown into two rival worldviews with fundamentally different objectives. One measures national success by its ability to maximize individual autonomy and the other continues to insist on the need for a transcendent anchor to which individuals and society should align themselves.

At the level of public intellectuals, this was a foundational difference between John Dewey and Reinhold Niebuhr, and later between Richard Rorty and Richard John Neuhaus. At the popular level, these differences were and are more blurry. In between the people and the philosophers, special interest groups increasingly see the differences not as something to be negotiated but as a conflict to be won, a zero-sum game, a battle for the soul of America.

In his speech to the British Parliament in 2010, Pope Benedict XVI said: "This is why I would suggest that the world of reason and the world of faith — the world of secular rationality and the world of religious belief — need one another and should not be afraid to enter into a profound and ongoing dialogue, for the good of our civilization."

Those are wise words with which people who care about the future of American democracy should wrestle. They were expressed in greater depth in the fascinating public discussion then-Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger had with Jurgen Habermas and published under the title The Dialectics of Secularization: On Reason and Religion.

Pope Francis also spoke to the need to reflect more deeply on the relationship of the sacred and the secular when he addressed the U.S. Congress in 2015.

"Yours is a work which makes me reflect in two ways on the figure of Moses," Francis said to the assembled members of Congress. "On the one hand, the patriarch and lawgiver of the people of Israel symbolizes the need of peoples to keep alive their sense of unity by means of just legislation. On the other, the figure of Moses leads us directly to God and thus to the transcendent dignity of the human being. Moses provides us with a good synthesis of your work: You are asked to protect, by means of the law, the image and likeness fashioned by God on every human face."

The walls of the U.S. Capitol did not come crashing down when Francis invoked the memory of Moses. The republic can withstand, and might even benefit, from calling more attention to the role the Ten Commandments played in the development of Western civilization generally and American self-identity in particular.

I am not sure I trust these delicate issues to the rough-and-tumble of Louisiana politics, but I am quite certain that fighting a new culture war battle over the placement of the Ten Commandments on the walls of schools is a fool's errand.

We need to stop fighting the culture wars and, instead, set ourselves to the hard work of forging a culture capacious enough to embrace both religion and reason, the transcendent and the secular, Americans who believe and those who don't.

[Del]

+JMJ+

Source: National Catholic Reporter / MSW
Link: ncronline DOT org/opinion/ncr-voices/why-are-we-fighting-about-10-commandments

Why are we fighting about the 10 Commandments? [Analysis, Opinion]

This is a pretty long, winding, and boring way for NCR to say that the Ten Commandments are vital to our culture but they shouldn't be taught in our schools.

Chesterton says that any writer of an essay should first do a simple exercise: State your point concisely, in words of one syllable. "It's a waste of time to post the Ten Laws in schools by law."

I'm not sure why a nominally Catholic newsrag would oppose the effort. Especially when the author praises the fundamental important of the Decalogue in the foundation of our culture.

[Wosbald]

+JMJ+

Source: National Catholic Reporter / MSW
Link: ncronline DOT org/opinion/ncr-voices/biden-drops-out-state-race-muddled-and-frightening

As Biden drops out, the state of the race is muddled and frightening [Analysis, Opinion]

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Jul 22, 2024 — With President Joe Biden dropping out of the race and the GOP convention concluded, stories of Secret Service incompetence that keep the failed assassination attempt on the front pages, and inflation finally ticking downward but not enough to get the Fed to cut interest rates yet, you would think that the Democrats' chances of holding the White House and the Senate, still less seizing control of the U.S. House, would be vanishing fast.

Then 538 came out with an Electoral College simulator that had Biden winning in 53 out of 100 scenarios. What is going on? What is the state of the race?

There is no easy answer to those questions.

The GOP's coronation, I mean, convention solidified Trump's effort to unify the Republican Party around his agenda and person. The failed assassination attempt days before the convention began made criticism of the dear leader impossible. Worse, it cemented Trump's image as a strongman.

As Carlos Lozada wrote in The New York Times, Trump pumping his fist in the air and mouthing the words "Fight! Fight! Fight!" are the stuff of political iconography:

With that terse, defiant refrain, Trump accomplished many things at once. He offered reassurance that he remained both safe and himself; he issued a directive for how supporters should react to those who attack him; and he captured the emotional state of a nation that was on edge well before the horror of an attempted assassination. Trump's social-media posts and interviews since the shooting have stressed the need for national unity, but unity was not his first impulse.

Trump's acceptance speech aimed at a spirit of unity but the only unity Trump wants is one in which his will is unquestioned. And one that allows him to go off-script and revisit his vast and varied grudges and lies, meandering through the forest of grievances and conspiracy theories that constitute identity.

No one puts the id back into identity as forcefully and comprehensively as Trump does.

The cravenness to which the GOP has been reduced still manages to shock. Two years ago, at a rally in Ohio, Trump said that J.D. Vance was "kissing my ass" because he needed the former president's endorsement. Trump acknowledged that Vance had said disparaging things about him in the past but that was before the author-turned-Senate-candidate fell "in love." Trump compared Vance's trajectory in this regard to that of North Korean dictator Kim Jong Un.

The whole thing was cringe on steroids, both for Vance personally and for what it said about the Republican Party. Last week's convention was more of the same.

Today's GOP is an entirely different party from its pre-Trump iteration. Did you notice who was not on stage in Milwaukee? Or even in the hall? Former President George W. Bush, former Vice Presidents Dan Quayle, Dick Cheney and Mike Pence, former GOP nominee and current U.S. Sen. Mitt Romney — none of them were seen at the Fiserv Forum where the convention was held.

[…]

So, the Republican Party has problems, but at least their situation is straightforward. Their internal struggles have been set aside and the Never Trumpers have left the party. Their "America First" campaign mantra echoes the slogan adopted by Charles Lindbergh for his fascistic isolationism in the 1930s, which is bad enough. The real worry is what that mantra presages.

The Democrats' situation has been murkier all year, and Biden's decision to drop out raises as many questions as it answers. The Democrats face problems both internally and externally. The internal divisions were mostly covered up in 2020 by the manifest necessity of defeating Trump and by widespread affection for Biden.

[…]

The worry for those of us who are more socially conservative and economically progressive, a voting bloc I have called "Pope Francis voters," is that Biden may have been the last Democrat capable of keeping the radical, cultural politics of the faculty lounge at arm's length and the political interests of those on the factory floor front and center.

Even though there are many more voters in the socially conservative/economically progressive bloc than in its opposite, Democrats tend to highlight their moderation by abandoning populist economic policies and clinging to more radical cultural politics. It is a recipe for a Trump victory.

Doubts about Vice President Kamala Harris' ability to win the support of voters who backed the Democrats in 2020 are unanswerable. The vice president has not demonstrated the kind of political skills that inspire confidence, yet it is inconceivable that the Democrats could push her aside for anyone else. In 2024, asking a Black woman to step aside is not going to fly.

The GOP will do everything they can to make her appear responsible for all California's real and perceived problems — high taxes, homelessness, population decreases, extreme political correctness, all of it.

That is the state of the race: It's a mess. One candidate decided he was not physically fit and will be replaced by someone who may not be politically fit. The other is not morally fit.

Anyone who tells you they know how this will play out is deluded. We are in uncharted waters, we can see danger all around, and the boat that is the republic is taking on water. "Other than that, Mrs. Lincoln, how was the theater?"

[Del]

+JMJ+

Source: National Catholic Reporter / MSW
Link: ncronline DOT org/opinion/ncr-voices/biden-drops-out-state-race-muddled-and-frightening

As Biden drops out, the state of the race is muddled and frightening [Analysis, Opinion]

Michael Sean Winters is a political hack and a Trump-Deranged idiot. I'm not sure that he knows this, but everyone else does. That's why he can't get a job at a real news provider.

Catholics are voting for Trump because Democrats displayed a tyranny of religious oppression. From local states locking churches during covid (while leaving bars and dispensaries open as "vital community services") to the Biden Admin's prosecution and SWAT Team arrests of peaceful pro-lifers.... Trump has both promised and demonstrated his willingness to protect our freedom of religion.

Not to mention Trump's support for our Catholic schools and his historic efforts to protect unborn children.

Faithful Catholics have a strong affinity for faithful Jews and Israel, for example. Democrats do not.

Talk about schools... Catholic families are very concerned about what the Teachers Unions have done to our public schools. We care about what government can do to help with school choice and supporting homeschooling. Democrats are an obstacle to progress.

Hispanic voters share all of these Catholic concerns, plus special concerns over border security. They are turning to Trump enough to flip Arizona and Nevada.

.... Need I go on? It's a long list. Catholics will not be persuaded by Democrat hacks like MSW and NCR.

Then 538 came out with an Electoral College simulator that had Biden winning in 53 out of 100 scenarios. What is going on? What is the state of the race?

Everyone paying attention to polls, on the right and the left and the center, is scratching his head at this analysis from FiveThirtyEight.com. No one can make sense of their algorithms.

And now that Biden is out of the race, even this nonsense is nonsense.

So... what does MSW get right? This much:

Today's GOP is an entirely different party from its pre-Trump iteration. Did you notice who was not on stage in Milwaukee? Or even in the hall? Former President George W. Bush, former Vice Presidents Dan Quayle, Dick Cheney and Mike Pence, former GOP nominee and current U.S. Sen. Mitt Romney — none of them were seen at the Fiserv Forum where the convention was held.

We identify with the Gold Star parents who lost beloved and forgotten heroes in the Afghanistan Withdrawal Debacle.

No Catholic is excited to remember the Neo-Cons of the past, with their pointless wars lip-service to protecting life. They did not unify the Nation; they worked with Obama to divide it. The Bush/Obama Era is not a happy time to remember. Trump represents a return to the Reagan/Clinton Era, of happy memory.

[Del]

Meanwhile.... More attempted murder and malicious vandalism perpetrated by leftists tempted to fascist violence by the media that calls Trump "fascist."

This time, in Michigan:

Elderly Trump Supporter In Critical Condition After ‘Politically Motivated’ Attack, Police Say

An elderly man in Hancock, Michigan, is in critical condition after what police are calling a “politically motivated” attack on Sunday.

The man, who has not been identified, was putting up a yard sign supporting President Donald Trump around 5:45 p.m., when a suspect driving a Honda ATV drove onto the man’s yard and ran him over with the vehicle, the Hancock Police Department said in a press release. The driver reportedly began to pull out the yard signs, and when the victim tried to put them back in the ground, the driver ran him over.

The victim was taken to the hospital with serious injuries, including a brain bleed, and is reportedly still in critical condition.

We need to keep history in mind.

Actual fascism starts with politically motivated terrorism and mob violence. Mussolini's Black Shirts, Hitler's Brown Shirts, Lenin's Bolsheviks, Democrat's Antifa.... all are the start of fascism.

A small force of Trump-deranged true believers is all that it takes to start a persecution of peaceful MAGA Republicans.

Will Kamala and Democrats condemn this violence? -- No. She likes it. It helps to further her cause. She'll say it's Trump's fault.

Fascism ends with their transition to power and imposing a police state, in which political opponents -- and innocent citizens who catch the eyes of state actors -- are run through lawfare/mock trials and disappeared.

[Del]

Update on the political violence in Michigan:

The 22-year-old suspect, whose name has not been released to the media, was found dead Tuesday in a home in Quincy Township with a self-inflicted gunshot wound to the head.

Police received a message on Monday from an individual at the home who said they wanted to confess to a crime involving an ATV driver within the last 24 hours, and asked for authorities to “send someone to pick me up.”

When law enforcement arrived at the home, they found the man dead from an apparent self-inflicted gunshot wound, the Hancock Police Department said in a press release released Tuesday afternoon. Police obtained a search warrant for the home and recovered electronic devices that will be searched by forensic specialists as well as the ATV used in the crime and the clothing the suspect had been wearing.

Tinfoiler's are going to have a holiday with this one. "FBI incited him to violence, then cleaned up. Nothing will be found on his phone. Media will claim this is Trump's fault, due to his divisive rhetoric."