Political violence in the United States declined for nearly two decades after the 1990s and then rose sharply beginning around 2016. For decades prior to that year, politically motivated violence was concentrated overwhelmingly on the far right. Today, violence associated with the right and left is closer to balance, even as it takes very different forms. Right-wing violence has been substantially more frequent and far deadlier than left-wing violence since 2016—aimed at elections, federal institutions, and public officials—while left-wing violence has been more common in mass protest settings, from the 2020 George Floyd unrest to clashes over immigration enforcement, typically involving property destruction and confrontations with police.
…
If you look at the numbers, says Pape, we have 100 million Americans who support political violence, just as we are about to have the midterms. He says that they could be “the most dangerous elections in our lifetime,” not because of what may or may not happen on Election Day, but the way both sides process the outcome.
Rod Dreher, discussing and quoting Robert Pape, University of Chicago political scientist and expert on political violence and terrorism.
Damned if you do …
I don’t need to read one more text message or police report about what happened in the Chi Phi house at Cornell University two years ago. I don’t need any of that because I know this: A member sent out a text to all of the brothers advertising “free” sex in one of the rooms, and there wasn’t a single member of that outfit who was man enough to shut it down. There couldn’t really be a simpler test of manhood: If you got that text, would you go to the house to get your bit of free sex, or would you go to get her out of there?
I do, however, wonder how the campus newspaper, TheCornell Daily Sun, would receive the news of a man busting into that room during the early, consensual part of the event. “Slut-Shaming Chi Phi Tells Sophomore: Enough!” Or, worse, “Chi Phi ‘Rescues’ Sophomore Woman—From Herself.” But the headlines this week have been starkly different, and the eyes of the world are on Ithaca, New York.
If I have any sense in my head, I’ll leave exploration of the Cornell rape situation in the voices of others. It’s a highwire act and my balance is lousy.
Only the vices vary
There was a time when I felt defensive on behalf of Republicans when liberals accused them of furtive (and not so furtive) racial resentment toward America’s first black president.
My days of giving the right the benefit of the doubt about its good intentions are over. Watching a supposedly principled small-government movement like the Tea Party transform overnight into an authoritarian personality cult intoxicated with populist cultural revanchism will do that to a fellow.
David M. Drucker, The Accidental President (hyperlink unavailable because – well, just search “The Accidental President” and you’ll see why I couldn’t identify the source when this resurfaced)
I had repudiated my notional connection to the GOP (Indiana doesn’t register voters by party) a few years before Barack Obama was elected. I didn’t vote for him (loved his speaking, hated his voting record), but I thought his election was a harbinger of racial reconciliation in America. Far from feeling defensive toward the GOP’s reaction, I was red-pilled about the continuing salience of America’s original sin.
But the GOP as “authoritarian personality cult” strikes me as “off” — as discontinuous with the GOP I left over policy, not personality. The GOP of 2016-to-date just isn’t the same GOP I repudiated. Circumstances have shuffled in a lot of MAGA riff-raff, shuffled out many country clubbers.
On the other side of the shuffle, the Democrats aren’t much like the pre-2016 Democrats. Who can take that party seriously as the party of the proverbial working man? It’s neither constituted of working men nor are working men much impressed with its progressive social views.
Inasmuch as the GOP umbrella is now big enough for racism and xenophobia, “The Party of Vote Your Vice” now fits both major parties. Only the vices vary.
Bingo (from an icon of the sober-minded wing of Evangelicalism)
I think it is a drastic mistake to think that the deadly influences of a leader come only through his policies and not also through his person.
Flagrant boastfulness, vulgarity, and factiousness are not only self-incriminating; they are nation-corrupting.
This is true not only because flagrant boastfulness, vulgarity, immorality, and factiousness are self-incriminating, but also because they are nation-corrupting. They move out from centers of influence to infect whole cultures. The last five years bear vivid witness to this infection at almost every level of society.
Like Piper, I would oppose Trump, even if I could discern and approve his “policies,” because of his utterly toxic person.
Let’s try those magic words again
Conservatives should attack Barbara [the SCOTUS decision affirming what the constitution says about birthright citizenship] with “the model that dismantled Roe,” the conservative strategist Rachel Bovard wrote in First Things, a right-leaning religious publication. “Trump v. Barbara must act as a litmus test for every future conservative nominee.”
First, Barbara is so fundamentally different than Roe that I don’t think the same model will work for undermining it. Barbara affirmed what the constitution says; Roe just kind of made stuff up (emanations, penumbrae) without constitutional grounding. Roe fell because its foundations were flimsy; Barbara should stand because its foundation is sound.
Second, if MAGA (it’s not real conservatives, said the scribe who’s aware of the No True Scotsman fallacy) is going to attack birthright citizenship by trying court-stacking, the real conservatives must join liberals in interrogating the heck out of MAGA nominees. (I also predict that MAGA will have trouble finding many qualified nominees who agree with them on birthright citizenship.)
First Things has always been slightly “right-leaning” on cultural issues, but it took R.R. Reno a dishearteningly brief time to make it strongly MAGA-leaning after 2016. I’ve dropped it after being, I believe, a charter subscriber.
I am not oblivious to many problems of liberal democracy, but I’m unconvinced that any of the postliberal alternatives would be any improvement.
Live not by lies
The problem is that all too many Christians are in the grips of two sets of lies. We’ll call them the enabling lies and the activating lies. And unless you deal with the enabling lies, the activating lies will constantly pollute the body politic and continue to spawn violent unrest.
What’s the difference between the two kinds of lies? The enabling lie is the lie that makes you fertile ground for the activating lie that actually motivates a person to charge a thin blue line at the Capitol or take a rifle to a pizza parlor. Here’s an enabling lie: America will end if Trump loses. That was the essence of the Flight 93 essay in 2016. That was the core of Eric Metaxas’s argument in our debates this spring and fall.
Here’s another enabling lie: The fate of the church is at stake if Joe Biden wins. And here’s yet another: The left hates you (this sentence sometimes concludes with the phrase “and wants you dead.”)
Joe Gebbia, Chief Design Officer of America, co-founder of Airbnb, has given this country its first proper website. No, not X, and not Brazzers, you freaks. It’s America.gov. And it’s a search bar powered by AI, so you ask it things and it pulls from about 29,000 government websites. It also has helpful suggestions like, “Which military service is best for me?”
I tried to come up with Magic 8 Ball questions I had for America (Where is my closest polling place? R u racist? Will Bryan Johnson live forever? Do you want me here or should I leave?), but my mind went blank. I don’t have any questions for America, more like musings and the occasional yell. Still, it’s very nice-looking. The more we see the government as a consumer product, the more we will demand it work and be cheaper and tax us less. This website says “How can I help you, citizen,” and I like that. The more it looks like Uber Eats, the angrier we will be at what’s missing and damaged or wrong, and how long it took to get here. A country in 2026 is mostly a delivery service. It’s a thing we give money to in exchange for services, like roads or fire engines, and now search engines. Good for Joe Gebbia. And Hello, America!
Of course, in the year of our Lord 2026, much of what the government says is false if not insane, but I’ll admit it’s a decent-looking looking-glass to go through.
Rejuvenation
I fell in love again to convince myself I was young. She became the mirror of my dotage ….
(R.S. Thomas, Repeat, in Collected Later Poems 1988-2000)
Shorts
Obviously most Muslims are not terrorists. But at some point “most Muslims are peaceful” cannot be the end of the conversation either. (@chelsssseeeea)
Few travelled in these days, for, thanks to the advance of science, the earth was exactly alike all over. (E.M. Forster, The Machine Stops)
Your enemies are not demonic, and they are not all-powerful and the right hasn’t always lost and the left hasn’t always won. But if you convince yourself of that, you give yourselves all sorts of permission to do a lot of stupid and terrible things under the rubric of “Do you know what time it is?”
I don’t do any of the major social media, but I have two sub-domains of the domain you’re currently reading: (a) You can read most of my reflexive stuff, especially political here. (b) I also post some things on my favorite no-algorithm social medium.
Purdue University recently was found liable for retaliation against a co-ed for her 2017 complaint that a fraternity member had sex with her without her consent because she was too intoxicated to give real consent. The two female administrators involved remain in their offices with Purdue’s backing (Purdue thinks the jury blew it), and, of course, protests ensued.
Here’s what Purdue had to say about it:
We appreciate our students and their passion on this truly important issue. But we believe, because of the evidence presented, that this is not the correct case to use in advocating for it. This was a very rare case of discipline for making false statements in a sexual assault report. The undisputed facts overwhelmingly established that Roe chose the sexual encounter she later labeled a sexual assault. …
The jury, which in part exonerated university administrators, ruled on the narrow issue of whether Purdue, having conducted a thorough investigation, appropriately disciplined Roe based on its finding of false charges.
Purdue’s position in these matters has long been clear: we will not tolerate sexual harassment in any form, including and especially sexual violence. But neither will we tolerate lying or making false accusations that can have lifelong consequences.
As for our two outstanding administrators, Dr. Katie Sermersheim and Alysa Rollock, we absolutely stand behind them, and any suggestion that they resign is out of the question.
“When you listen to campus tour guides walk by, what do you hear parents ask: ‘Is this campus safe? Can my daughter walk home at night?’” Grace Gochnauer, a Purdue junior, said. “If I was the tour guide, my answer would be no.”
Purdue isn’t Mayberry RFD, but it has no particular problem with stranger rape of co-eds walking home at night. You know what you don’t hear parents ask? “Can my daughter get willingly get blackout drunk at a party, have sex with her apparently enthusiastic consent, and then get a pound of flesh when she regrets it later?”
I once stayed in a girl’s dormitory when on campus for a summer recording session. When I turned out the lights at bedtime, I saw a glowing message on the wall, painted cunningly so it only showed up in the dark: “Drink ‘till he’s cute.” Read between those lines. A frat boy’s equivalent could be “Drink ‘till you’re irresistible.”
I wish Purdue hadn’t found it necessary to ignore the elephant in the room. Call me santimonious, but if campuses could stop binge-drinking, they’d stop maybe 95% of problematic sexual intercourse. Justice Brett Kavanaugh’s unrepentant history of binge-drinking, even when under legal age, was a big reason that I thought the first allegation against him might be true — and why I remain agnostic about it still.
David French never said that!
Jake Meador, one of the good guys, writes about Alternatives to Culture War, but credulously alludes to a slander leveled against David French by tribalist culture warriors.
The slander, widelyspread (and here and heread infinitum), is that French thinks Drag Queen Story Hours are a “blessing of liberty.” Here’s Meador:
It was easier to be anti-culture war when our country still knew what marriage was and what men and women are. But as the SOGI landscape has shifted, culture war has started to look like a viable strategy, especially if the alternative is talking about drag queen story hour as a “blessing of liberty.”
The slander is so prevalent that searching “David French drag queen blessing of liberty” returned, for me at least, six or eight of the lies before it gave one link to the truth. What David French called a blessing of liberty was the absence of viewpoint discrimination in public spaces:
My position was simple — I don’t like drag queen reading hours, but I also want to preserve for all Americans the First Amendment-protected right of viewpoint-neutral access to public facilities when those facilities are opened up for public use. I don’t want the government dispensing access on the basis of its preferred messages or its preferred speakers. Handle bad speech with better speech. Counter bad speakers in the marketplace of ideas, not through the heavy hand of government censorship.
… Our present regime that broadly protects viewpoint neutrality in access to public facilities is the hard-won result of decades of litigation from free speech and religious liberty advocates, and it represents both a public good in its own right and a practical blessing for millions of American Christians. As our government continues to grow — including by creating an immense number of public facilities — it is quite simply just that taxpayers are able to have equal access to the facilities they paid to create.
Anyone who won’t pause their Jihad long enough to notice the difference between “Drag Queen Story Hour is a blessing of liberty” and “viewpoint-neutral access to public facilities” is a blessing of liberty should stay home and shut up.
And if that’s culture war, so be it.
I’ve certainly flirted with the idea that liberalism has failed, and it’s therefore (almost by definition) time for some kind of post-liberalism. But I’ve yet to find any strange post-liberal devil I prefer to the liberal devils I already know. For that reason, I’m particularly keen to defend right-liberal David French from tendentious slanders by any and all far-right liars.
Conservatisms
If these populist, corporatist, nationalist, ultramontane, oh-so-European ideas succeed in replacing conservatism as we once knew it, they will be called conservatism. But as Friedrich Hayek argued, this conservatism will be “Old World conservatism,” because the conservative in America is necessarily a defender of the liberal tradition of the founding.
[T]he Heritage Foundation is, by any sane reckoning, an elite institution and it admits as much to donors. Second, this us-vs.-them framing implies that the “everyday people” of Italy have more in common with the “everyday people” of America, which is 31 flavors of nonsense for all sorts of reasons, not least that Italians aren’t Americans. Conservatives used to understand that the old Marxist idea that members of the working class were united against the ruling class regardless of nationality—“Workers of the world unite!”—was folly. But now, “Everyday people of the world unite!” is the rallying cry of a leading conservative think tank?
Now, I can’t put “conservative” in scare quotes the way I’d like to, because I think Heritage can still claim to be conservative. But let’s have no illusions: It’s not the same kind of conservative it used to be. Heritage used to champion American exceptionalism with gusto. As Heritage co-founder and longtime president Ed Feulner put it, “And while, in the heat of political battle, we naturally focus on the differences between liberals and conservatives, and their contrasting visions of our country’s future, it is important to remember that regardless of party or political philosophy, we are Americans, we love our country — and we are patriots.” In 2019, Heritage even founded the Feulner Institute for American Exceptionalism, which seems to have had as much impact as the Goldberg Institute for Healthy Living—neither organization even has a website.
[P]erhaps the most revealing aspect of the book, to be published next week, is that Trump gave Maggie [Haberman], a Times reporter since 2015, three interviews for it. This is the same Trump who vilified her on Twitter, called her names and cast her as the personification of “fake news.” Maggie just pressed on, asking the right questions, getting the right people to answer them and seemingly trusting on some level that Trump would never wholly cut her off. She can recognize a performance when she sees one. And she can hear in a narcissist’s self-regarding soliloquies the aching need to babble on.
… Maggie (a friend of mine) and the other journalists whom he publicly insulted but privately indulged were, to him, reserves of precious attention, their discerning gazes trained on him, their busy thoughts dedicated to the puzzle of him, their notepads and audio recordings and television cameras a conduit to ever greater fame. There was danger in letting them in, peril in having them around, but the alternative was worse. They might give prime real estate on the evening’s newscast to some other circus act. They might write books about a lesser clown.
[T]he classic critique from the Right about [news] bias and the new critique from the Left about false equivalency often strike me as frivolous. They can often make sense on some particular item — Ouch, gotta admit, that’s a pretty good point — but cumulatively seem to miss the important point.
That point, in my view, is that the power of journalism does not principally flow from word choice. (Don’t call it a “misstatement” when it’s really a “lie.”) It does not flow from tonal presentation. (More than a half-century ago Richard Nixon’s vice president, Spiro Agnew, said network commentators revealed their bias “by the expressions on their faces, the tone of their questions, the sarcasm of their responses.”) The point is that the power of journalism comes from the primacy of reporting — from telling their audiences things that people in power would prefer they not know.
By the mid-1990s, the doctrine was being used to sue an employer who printed a Bible verse on paychecks (which a court found to be religious harassment of non-Christians). A university forced a graduate student to remove a photo of his bikini-clad wife from his desk, because someone filed a harassment complaint. A library worker was forced to remove a New Yorker cartoon from his work area after coworkers said it harassed them. The town of Murfreesboro, Tennessee, removed a painting from a public exhibit in City Hall after a city employee filed a hostile-environment complaint about it. Those incidents and others like them should have been seen as flashing red lights, but weren’t.
[A]s we have already seen, normal science ultimately leads only to the recognition of anomalies and to crises. And these are terminated, not by deliberation and interpretation, but by a relatively sudden and unstructured event like the gestalt switch.
I highly recommend this Outliers, Revisited episode of Malcolm Gladwell’s Revisionist History podcast. I won’t ruin it for you except that it involves a 40-30-20-10 “rule” that holds true in way too many fields.
Election Prep
Now might be a good time to refresh your memory on whether your congressperson, on January 6, 2021, voted for the United States of America or voted for the “Oathkeepers” and other insurrectionists. My congressman, normally a cipher, voted with the insurrectionists.
Gathering flowers
Bloggers and writers
I’m a blogger. Bloggers have different talents than writers.
We value writers for their prose and their insight. We value bloggers for their speed, their efficiency at curating news, and their ability to formulate strong political opinions—“takes,” we might more aptly call them—about literally anything that might turn up on the Drudge Report or in the average news junkie’s Twitter timeline.
If there were no age-specific and obligatory learning institution, “childhood” would go out of production. The youth of rich nations would be liberated from its destructiveness, and poor nations would cease attempting to rival the childishness of the rich.
You can read most of my more impromptu stuff here (cathartic venting) and here (the only social medium I frequent, because people there are quirky, pleasant and real). Both should work in your RSS aggregator, like Feedly or Reeder, should you want to make a habit of it.
A fine Saturday WSJ profile of Heather MacDonald, who was only halfway onto my radar previously. She has some very plausible explanations of phenomena that swim against both progressive and conservative streams on snowflakes, Title IX Due Process, patriarchy and more.
Emphasis added.
1
Heather Mac Donald may be best known for braving angry collegiate mobs, determined to prevent her from speaking last year in defense of law enforcement. But she finds herself oddly in agreement with her would-be suppressors: “To be honest,” she tells me, “I would not even invite me to a college campus.”
No, she doesn’t yearn for a safe space from her own triggering views. “My ideal of the university is a pure ivory tower,” she says. “I think that these are four precious years to encounter human creations that you’re otherwise—unless you’re very diligent and insightful—really never going to encounter again. There is time enough for things of the moment once you graduate.”
2
Her views are heterodox. She would seem a natural ally of Jonathan Haidt and Greg Lukianoff, authors of “The Coddling of the American Mind: How Good Intentions and Bad Ideas Are Setting Up a Generation for Failure.” They argue that college “snowflakes” are the products of overprotective childrearing, which creates oversensitive young adults.
Ms. Mac Donald doesn’t buy it. Minority students disproportionately come from single-parent homes, so “it’s not clear to me that those students are being helicopter-parented.” To the contrary, “they are not getting, arguably, as much parenting as they need.” If anyone is coddled, it’s upper-middle- class whites, but “I don’t know yet of a movement to create safe spaces for white males.”
The snowflake argument, Ms. Mac Donald says, “misses the ideological component of this.” The dominant victim narrative teaches students that “to be female, black, Hispanic, trans, gay on a college campus is to be the target of unrelenting bigotry.” Students increasingly believe that studying the Western canon puts “their health, mental safety, and security at risk” and can be “a source of—literally—life threat.”
3
She similarly thinks conservatives miss the point when they focus on the due-process infirmities of campus sexual- misconduct tribunals. She doesn’t believe there’s a campus “rape epidemic,” only a lot of messy, regrettable and mutually degrading hookups. “To say the solution to all of this is simply more lawyering up is ridiculous because this is really, fundamentally, about sexual norms.”
Society once assumed “no” was women’s default response to sexual propositions. “That put power in the hands of females,” …
Young women … are learning “to redefine their experience as a result of the patriarchy, whereas, in fact, it’s a result of sexual liberation.”
4
What about the idea of actively enforcing viewpoint diversity? “I’m reluctant to have affirmative action for conservatives, just because it always ends up stigmatizing its beneficiaries,” Ms. Mac Donald says. Still, she’s concerned that as campuses grow increasingly hostile to conservatives, some of the best candidates may decide, as she did, that there’s no space left for them.
5
What worries Ms. Mac Donald more than the mob is the destructive power of its animating ideas. If the university continues its decline, how will knowledge be passed on to the next generation, or new knowledge created? Ms. Mac Donald also warns of a rising white identity politics—“an absolutely logical next step in the metastasizing of identity politics.”
6
I turn now to Andrew Sullivan, as I often do on Friday or Saturday.
The Republican senators likely to be elected this fall will, if anything, be even more pro-Trump than their predecessors. Corker, Flake, McCain: all gone. The House GOP will have been transformed more thoroughly into Trump’s own personal party, as the primary campaigns revealed only too brutally. And if by some twist of fate, a constitutional battle between Congress and president breaks out over impeachment proceedings, Justice Kavanaugh will be there to make sure the president gets his way.
(Emphasis added)
That ipse dixit about Brett Kavanaugh defending Trump from impeachment is vile, far beneath Sully’s usual level and, I’d wager, wrong. Moreover, it undermines the judiciary and, thus, the rule of law as surely as Democrats do when they talk as if Kavanaugh is some kind of Manchurian Associate Justice.
And — set me straight if I’m missing something — I think it’s stupid. The House impeaches; the Senate tries the impeachment. An Associate Justice of the Supreme Court has nothing to do with this process which, as we’ve been reminded much of late, is political despite the allusion to “high crimes and misdemeanors.”
* * * * *
Follow me on Micro.blog, too, where I blog tweet-like shorter items and … well, it’s evolving. Or, if you prefer, those micro.blog items also appear now at microblog.intellectualoid.com.
In July, Leonard Leo, executive vice president of the “constitutional originalist Federalist Society,” as RealClearPolitics phrased it, told Fox News:
“Any Supreme Court confirmation is transformative. This is a court that is often equally divided. At the end of the day, I think what’s really important to remember is that there’s been a movement on the court toward being more originalist and textualist. In other words, the idea that law means something, it has determinate meaning. And that’s the trend that I think this president wants to continue.”
But, when I think of originalism, I think this: Many of the founders owned slaves; in the Constitution they viewed black people as less than fully human; they didn’t want women or poor white men to vote. The founders, a bunch of rich, powerful white men, didn’t want true democracy in this country, and in fact were dreadfully afraid of it.
Now, a bunch of rich, powerful white men want to return us to this sensibility, wrapped in a populist “follow the Constitution” rallying cry and disguised as the ultimate form of patriotism.
Would it be entirely unfair to satirize this as “because the founders tended to own slaves, and because of the 3/5 clause (since abolished), we can ignore what they wrote and just make up whatever progressive shit we feel like?”
If it would be entirely unfair, I won’t do it. Nope. Never.
I don’t believe it, and the story doesn’t support it. I would be just as skeptical if they said the confirmation laid the issue to rest.
The Wall Street Journal make it fairly clear what’s really at stake: both parties intend to milk this episode for all it’s worth in next month’s election. And both sides are saying the other overplayed its hand and face an electoral bloodbath.
Time will tell us whether and which.
Meanwhile, I’m sorry to report that there really are some conservatives I have heretofore respected who are converting from Never Trump to Trumpista just because he didn’t withdraw Kavanaugh (they mercifully haven’t praised him for trash-talking Dr. Ford). I’m not going to name names because some of them are not exactly public figures (e.g., a sharp law professor at a second-tier school who I happen to know, Tweeting his Trump re-assessment), but I initially thought such reports were a kind of semi-libel, a total straw man. Then I saw it with my own eyes, in my own Twitter feed (filtered to feature the more reliable sorts). #Sad #RepentanceLikelyInDueCourse
A putative conservative at the New York Times cautions against GOP gloating in a column I endorse (though I’m unfamiliar with the author, David Marcus):
Whatever one believes about the allegations leveled against Mr. Kavanaugh, it is clear that millions of Americans are in real pain. The widespread feeling that the voices of women are being ignored — once again — is leading to a rage that many on the left are increasingly embracing as the necessary counter to Trump-era conservatism.
The anger on both sides has already shut down communication and compromise among our politicians. Now it threatens the ability of average Americans to talk to each other.
The task for conservatives in the wake of these ugly two weeks is not to point and laugh, but to show care and compassion that may build trust in Mr. Kavanaugh and the court among those who so bitterly and sincerely opposed him. There is plenty of blame for the tribalism in our country to go around. Ending it, however, is a task best undertaken by the side that is winning.
I find both stories “interesting,” but the Times really busted its butt on its major investigative journalism piece fleshing out what I already suspected.
American political discourse gets worse by the day, a lesson we’ve seen first-hand again this weekend. The Twitter mob on the political left is claiming that our Saturday editorial headline, “Susan Collins Consents,” was intended as a sly “rape joke.”
The editorial praised Maine Senator Collins for her thoughtful speech on Friday explaining her support for Brett Kavanaugh’s Supreme Court nomination. We said her thorough consideration was an exemplary case of fulfilling the Senate’s “advice and consent” duty under the Constitution. Senators are supposed to offer their advice and then offer or withhold their consent for a presidential nominee. The editorial mentioned advice and consent no fewer than six times.
Yet for some on the political left the editorial wasn’t about the Senate’s constitutional duty or praising Sen. Collins. They said we were making fun of rape ….
“We don’t work as Democrats or Republicans, and I think it’s a very unfortunate perception that the public might get from the confirmation process,” Chief Justice Roberts said at a New England Law-Boston event in 2016. The near party-line split on recent confirmations “increases the danger that whoever comes out if it will be viewed in those terms,” he said.
JUSTICE KAGAN: Starting with Justice O’Connor and continuing with Justice Kennedy, there has been a person who, er, found the center, who people couldn’t predict in that sort of way. … It’s not so clear that, you know, I think going forward, that sort of middle position — you know, it’s not so clear whether we’ll have it.
… [I]t’s rather revealing in this clip that Kagan never considers herself for the role of the unpredictable jurist — or Sonia Sotomayor, who’s sitting next to her and never bothers to interject either. Kagan’s argument is that it should always be conservative jurists who go towards Kagan’s wing of the court, and not the other direction. Why should that be the case? Why shouldn’t Kagan take her own advice?
It’s also amusing that Kagan almost explicitly assigns herself and the other three liberal justices to the roles of predictable jurist in this statement. It’s undeniably true, but one would expect a Supreme Court justice to at least argue that she’s independent. Give Kagan one cheer for honesty, I guess, and a half-cheer to Sotomayor for not objecting to it.
Women Serving on Ships Face Higher Sex-Assault Risks
Women who serve on board U.S. Navy ships and young service members at large training bases were at the greatest risk of becoming victims of sexual assault, according to a study commissioned by the Pentagon.
Follow me on Micro.blog, too, where I blog tweet-like shorter items and … well, it’s evolving. Or, if you prefer, those micro.blog items also appear now at microblog.intellectualoid.com.
