Society

Why does everyone have it in for Victor Davis Hanson? Professor, Hoover Institution fellow and farmer, Hanson is a consummate scholar of military history and ancient Greece. His literary accomplishments include paeans to American agrarianism and epoch-spanning histories of war, lauded by left and right. Yet the bipartisan goodwill has lately evaporated. The reason for the contempt is easily apprehensible: Hanson’s new book is titled, simply, The Case for Trump.The repercussions have been swift. Isaac Chotiner of the New Yorker accused Hanson of ‘hostility to undocumented Mexican and Central American immigrants.

Does Facebook have a grudge against the right? It’s an accusation that’s been leveled against Mark Zuckerberg before — notably in a Congressional hearing last year — and is rearing its head again, with the suspension of two British right-wing broadcasters, Tommy Robinson and Raheem Kassam. Robinson, the founder of the English Defence League, has been permanently banned from Facebook and Instagram for ‘repeatedly breaching’ their Community Standards by ‘posting material that uses dehumanizing language and calls for violence targeted at Muslims’, according to a Facebook blog post. ‘What they’re saying about me is complete lies,’ Robinson told Cockburn this morning. ‘What they’re saying about “hate” is all lies.

When Trump declared the border situation a national emergency, you couldn’t move for breathless headlines questioning the constitutionality of his order. But has the mainstream media always held this deep commitment to reporting on the limits of power of the nation’s chief executive? Trump is hardly the first president to make use of an executive order in order to circumvent Congress. Back in February, 2011, President Obama began contemplating strikes against Libya’s Muammar Gaddafi. Article I, Section 8, of the US Constitution grants Congress the power to declare war.

News from the #NeverTrump bubble, as Weekly Standard spinoff site The Bulwark have decided to keep tally of every conservative who expresses discomfort or opposition to Trump’s declaration of a national emergency for wall money. It’s an ambitious branching out into listicles for the site, whose preferred format up until that point had been ‘please, someone, anyone, primary Trump’. Their piece, entitled ‘Conservative Critics of Trump’s Non-Emergency Declaration, Listed’, categorizes opponents of the executive cash grab by their area of work.

Mr Theodore McCarrick will spend his last days within the limestone walls of St Fidelis Friary in Victoria, Kansas. He’ll be able to see the stunning St Fidelis Church, ‘the Basilica of the Plains’, from his window. His quarters in the monastery will be simple, clean, and pleasant. He’ll have all the time in the world to pray, read, write, think, or just putter, as old men like to do. His meals, laundry, heating, and other necessities will be taken care of for him. There will always be a tender Franciscan nearby if he needs to talk, or cry, or play checkers. He’ll die surrounded by holy men praying for the repose of his soul.

Media types are getting all sniffy because some goober dealt a BBC cameraman one ‘very hard shove’ at Donald Trump’s El Paso rally on Monday. The BBC released a statement saying the cameraman, Ron Skeans, is ‘fine’ – which most people no doubt assumed he was, because Skeans is a grown man. The ‘incredibly violent attack’ (as Britain’s state broadcaster is choosing to bill it) took place shortly after Trump pointed to the press pen and said: ‘Wow, look at all the press, can you believe that?’ and ‘They’ve gone down a long way since they started hitting us a little bit, right?’ Inflammatory stuff!

I woke up, thanked Allah for not letting the yahud across the street hypnotize me in my sleep, then crawled to the window and peeked over the sill. The black Volvo was gone. He must have got up early this morning, to stuff more money into the mouths of the other members of the Minnesota delegation. I got up, standing strong. My husband gets the kids’ breakfast. He’s like a brother to me. Really. It’s in our faith tradition. His support gives me time to do more for my people. There’s so much to do when I get to my office, I barely have time to wipe my feet on the Israeli-flag doormat that members of my progressive and diverse community gave me when I won my House seat by defeating the yahud Phyllis Kahn and Mohamud Noor, who I now believe to be a yahud.

Enquiring minds want to know what fallout the National Enquirer story about Jeff Bezos, the proprietor of the Washington Post, will have on the Trump presidency. The Post, to the ire of Trump, has relentlessly pursued Trump, focusing on his illicit business activities.

Silicon Valley parents are famously strict about their children’s screen time, even as they dish out their ‘crack cocaine’ technology to the rest of the world’s youth. Last week, however, Tucker Carlson upped the ante: he called on Congress to step and ban children from smartphones, as they do with alcohol. Researchers have demonstrated a link between hours spent in front of a screen and depression and anxiety levels in children. But screen usage damage isn’t just in our heads; increasingly, it’s also in our hands.  ‘Children are increasingly finding it hard to hold pens and pencils because of an excessive use of technology, senior pediatric doctors have warned,’ reports the Guardian.

What connects the Ralph Northam story, the Covington story, and the Brett Kavanaugh confirmation story? Is it the dark side of social media? The perils of high-school? Catholicism in America today? It is all that. More than anything, however, it is abortion. Abortion is and arguably always has been the nuclear core of the culture war, yet these days it hides itself. The pitched media scraps between progressives and conservatives are often still about Roe v. Wade, we just pretend that they are not. We act as if the Ralph Northam story is about racism. It isn’t. It’s about what he said about fetuses, and the tasteless whooping for late-term abortions.

Cockburn was flattered to read BuzzFeed News’s claim that what Steve Bannon wants to read is a ‘Catholic Spectator’, but puzzled. The Spectator is a broad church, broad enough to accommodate atheists, Bible-bashers, even that notorious sinner Taki. But on further inspection, Cockburn realized that Bannon is talking about British weekly The Catholic Herald, and its launch in America. What the Herald should do, Bannon says, is cultivate ‘Catholic influencers and millionaires’, and to follow the strategy which has worked so well for BuzzFeed, by running listicles like ‘The 25 most influential Catholics in the US.’ Catholic BuzzFeed, perhaps? The ways of the Lord are more mysterious than Donald Trump’s tax returns.

Jim AcostaChris CillizzaChris CuomoOliver DarcyManu RajuJim SciuttoBrian StelterJake TapperJeffrey ToobinFareed Zakaria.

About a year ago, I found myself at an eclectic dinner party. In our mix were men and women of all ages in all stages of their careers. Conversation turned to the #MeToo movement and the way it had changed the national conversation about sexual harassment and assault. A high-powered lawyer at the table confided in us that several of his male friends and counterparts had come to him after noticing a troubling pattern. These men — who were working for different companies, across a wide array of industries — were committed to mentoring men and women. They were eager to ensure that their colleagues were being treated equally and being afforded equal opportunity, regardless of gender.

A curious incident last night as The Baffler, an esteemed (or once-esteemed) left-wing political and literary journal, suddenly retracted a highly-touted pro-Bernie tract by Amber A’Lee Frost. The piece, entitled ‘It’s Bernie, Bitch,’ made an acerbic and amusing case for why all socialists, leftists, and ‘progressives’ should suck it up, quit the belly-aching, and back Bernie Sanders in 2020 because he’s the only hope for achieving social democracy in the foreseeable future. Whatever you might think of Bernie’s potential candidacy, the piece was interestingly argued and well-written. Presumably why it has since emerged on Jacobin.

Robert Mueller’s office possesses evidence showing that Donald Trump instructed Michael Cohen to lie to Congress! My goodness, what a bombshell. When the BuzzFeed story alleging this was first published Thursday night, the reaction was as painful as it was predictable. Journalists and fellow-traveler Twitter personalities lit up social media with grand, gleeful pronunciations about the imminent downfall of the Trump presidency. You could almost hear the champagne corks being popped. Within what seemed like mere seconds, the report was blared across all the major TV networks, and the reporters who broke the news were touted as once-in-a-generation heroes. Plaques and monuments in their honor entered the early stages of construction.

Has there ever been a more fitting corporate meltdown than that endured by Facebook over the last two years? After perhaps swinging an election or two in 2016, the company has been dragged bawling through the mud more times than an Medieval Estonian peasant caught stealing horses. There have been non-apologies and listening tours, rebrands and reach-outs, Senate committee hearings, slap-downs and back-pedals, faked humility and conspiracy theories, inquests and campaigns and furious denunciations, ponderous op-eds and stock-price massacres, would-be trust-busters on the make, crisis management PR operations and parade ground about-faces.