Donald Trump, Ron DeSantis Jockey for Position Ahead of Potential 2024 Showdown

I hope DeSantis wins the nomination.

At WSJ, "Former president paying close attention to Florida governor’s polling and fundraising; ‘Only Ron matters’":

HOLLYWOOD, Fla.—The current front-runners for the Republican presidential nod are both in Florida. Whether Palm Beach or Tallahassee is more likely to produce the eventual winner might depend on if GOP voters here and around the country want an encore from the party’s most dominant voice or prefer to hand the stage to its fast-climbing star.

Former President Donald Trump is very likely to run again in 2024, aides say, and he has said publicly that he is weighing whether he should announce before or after this November’s midterm elections. Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis has developed his own devout following and is one of the few potential 2024 contenders who hasn’t said he would defer to Mr. Trump, though there are several other high-profile candidates who could end up challenging one or both men.

Once close allies—Mr. Trump’s endorsement helped fuel Mr. DeSantis’s rise, and Mr. DeSantis lavished praise on him in return—the two Republicans have jabbed at each other across the state, particularly over each man’s handling of the Covid-19 pandemic. Mr. DeSantis is capturing the interest of some Trump voters, as well as party officials and donors.

Here in Hollywood, among 1,500 GOP activists at a guitar-shaped resort on Saturday evening, many said Mr. DeSantis should run for president because they like his brand of defiant conservatism.

“I haven’t backed down one inch and we are not going to back down,” Mr. DeSantis said at a political summit he hosted at Seminole Hard Rock Hotel & Casino.

That same night, Mr. Trump gave a speech to young conservatives in Tampa, Fla., and again teased a return, claiming falsely—to wild applause—that he had already won two presidential elections. “And now we may just have to do it again,” he said. The 45th president returns to Washington Tuesday afternoon for a speech before a policy group made up of members of his administration.

Their budding rivalry is top of mind for Florida GOP insiders—and in other key states—many of whom are torn over having to pick sides and would rather not see a clash arrive, though they expect one. Some hope Mr. Trump, 76, won’t run and some want Mr. DeSantis, 43, to wait his turn. Others fantasize about a Trump-DeSantis ticket.

Recent surveys have shown that Mr. Trump retains the backing of most GOP voters. But polling and interviews with voters in many states have shown signs the former president’s support has ebbed, and congressional hearings into the Jan. 6 Capitol riot have reminded Republicans of the controversies around Mr. Trump. A Quinnipiac poll this month found 69% of Republicans wanted Mr. Trump to run again, down from 78% last October, and a recent New Hampshire survey showed Messrs. Trump and DeSantis statistically tied in the state, leaving Mr. Trump fuming, advisers to the former president say.

Mr. DeSantis, who declined an interview request, is favored to win re-election in November, and he hasn’t joined the parade of candidates in other races around the country wooing Mr. Trump for his endorsement. The former president has asked friends about how Democratic Rep. Charlie Crist is performing in his bid to take on Mr. DeSantis in November—implying, according to people familiar with the discussions, he wants his understudy to sweat a little.

In an interview with The Wall Street Journal on Monday, Mr. Trump said he would vote for Mr. DeSantis’s re-election in November but quickly turned to his role in helping Mr. DeSantis four years ago. “If I didn’t endorse him, he wouldn’t have won,” Mr. Trump said. “I get along with Ron very well,” he added, before mentioning “a very good poll this weekend”—an unscientific straw poll of young conservatives at the Tampa conference that showed him beating Mr. DeSantis by a wide margin.

A person close to Mr. Trump said he wasn’t concerned about other would-be 2024 candidates, including former Vice PresidentMike Pence, former Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, former South Carolina Gov. Nikki Haley and several conservative senators.

“Only Ron matters,” the person said.

Another Republican who talks to the former president said, “Trump wants to find something harder to say but really can’t because DeSantis has played it well.”

While President Biden’s advisers see an upside in a rematch with Mr. Trump, some are concerned over the prospect of the nation’s oldest-ever president facing the younger, more-disciplined governor, according to people familiar with the discussions. Messrs. Biden and DeSantis have often criticized each other’s policies in their public remarks.

Mr. DeSantis acknowledges Mr. Trump’s role in his rise, thanks to an endorsement over a better-known Republican in the 2018 governor race, and the two differ more on personality than substance. Mr. DeSantis, then a congressman from near Jacksonville, Fla., caught Mr. Trump’s eye through Fox News appearances attacking the Russia investigation by special counsel Robert Mueller.

After narrowly winning that contest, Mr. DeSantis, a Florida native who played baseball at Yale and has a Harvard law degree, has become one of the state’s most powerful executives ever. He has frequently won turf fights with the GOP-controlled Legislature while building a national profile for eschewing Covid-19 restrictions, battling the social advocacy of Walt Disney Co. and banning the instruction of critical-race theory from schools.

Mr. DeSantis has also won bipartisan support for his environmental record, including money for conservation and Everglades restoration. He has raised teacher pay and given bonuses to first responders. And he has frustrated Democrats by touting projects in the state funded by the Biden administration’s Covid-19 aid and infrastructure bills that he criticized.

In December, Mr. Trump was booed by supporters after saying he received a booster shot. The governor—who publicized his first vaccine shot—had refused to say whether he had received a second shot, prompting Mr. Trump to say politicians who wouldn’t disclose their status were “gutless.”

A few days later, Mr. DeSantis said on a conservative podcast that he wished he had spoken out “much louder” against the Trump administration’s calls for a nationwide shutdown at the start of the pandemic...

 

Conor Dougherty, Golden Gates

At Amazon, Conor Dougherty, Golden Gates: The Housing Crisis and a Reckoning for the American Dream.

Aubrey Again

On Twitter.

And previously here.

January 6th Hearings Succeeded Not Just through Good Intentions but With Teasers, Previews, Recaps, and Diagrams to Turn Congressional Inquest Into Great Television (VIDEO)

Well, I thought Cassidy Hutchinson was great. I couldn't take my eyes off of her.

Here's from this week.

At the New York Times, "The Jan. 6 Hearings Did a Great Service, by Making Great TV":

Investigating a threat to democracy was always going to be important. But this time, it also managed to be buzzworthy.

Every new summer TV series has to fight to get attention. The Jan. 6 hearings had more challenges than most.

There was public exhaustion and media jadedness over a story that’s been in the news for a year and a half. There was the MAGA echo chamber that has primed a huge chunk of America to reject, sight unseen, any accusation against former President Donald J. Trump.

Above all, the hearings, which aired a capstone prime-time session on Thursday night — a midseason finale, if you will — had to compete with our expectations of what constitutes a “successful” TV hearing. Not every congressional inquest can be the Army-McCarthy hearings, in which the lawyer Joseph Welch asked the Red Scare-monger Senator Joseph McCarthy, “Have you no sense of decency, sir, at long last?”

These hearings, in an era of social-media cacophony, cable-news argument and fixed political camps, were never likely to build to a cinematic climax that would unite the public in outrage. Yet by the standards of today, they have achieved some remarkable things.

They drew an audience for public-affairs TV in the dead of summer. They reportedly prompted further witnesses to come forward. Polling suggests they even moved opinion on Mr. Trump and Jan. 6 among Republicans and independents. They created riveting — and dare I say, watchable — water cooler TV that legitimately mattered.

And make no mistake: The hearings, produced by James Goldston, the former president of ABC News, succeeded not just through good intentions but also by being well-made, well-promoted TV. They may have been a most unusual eight-episode summer series (with more promised in September). But they had elements in common with any good drama.

Visual storytelling

When you think of congressional hearings, you think talk, talk, talk. Hours of witnesses leaning into microphones. Countless round-robins of representatives grandstanding. The Jan. 6 hearings, on the other hand, recognized that TV is a visual medium, and that images — like the footage of the assault on the Capitol — can say more than speechifying.

The editing and graphics were more the stuff of a high-gloss streaming documentary than anything we’re used to seeing from the U.S. Congress. Diagrams of the Capitol showed how close we came to catastrophe, metaphorically and physically. Using mostly interview snippets, deftly cut together, the July 12 hearing brought to life a White House meeting in which Trump loyalists floated “unhinged” gambits for seizing the election apparatus — the oral history of a cabal.

Thursday, in a meta device befitting a president who was made and swayed by TV, the committee showed onscreen what the president saw in real time in the over two and a half hours he spent watching Fox News and letting the violence play out. A graphic dropped us into the executive dining room, from the point of view of the president in his customary spot facing the tube.

Later, we saw outtakes of a sullen Mr. Trump the day after the attack, shooting a cleanup video meant to deplore the violence. He rejected the line “The election is over,” stumbled over words, smacked the lectern in frustration. For decades, Mr. Trump thrived through media appearances and flattering editing on “The Apprentice.” Now the TV president was exposed by his own blooper reel.

High stakes Every TV series needs to tell viewers why they should care. The Jan. 6 committee had a ready answer: Americans should care about our free, democratic elections. And they should care when the losing party tries to toss out the outcome in an extra-constitutional bonus round.

But the hearings also repeatedly made clear that this was not about an abstract principle or a bad thing that happened in the past. This was an active threat. The conservative legal scholar J. Michael Luttig warned in a June hearing that Mr. Trump or a like-minded successor could “attempt to overturn the 2024 election in the same way.”

And the vice chairwoman, Liz Cheney, Republican of Wyoming, used her remarks to underscore the immediacy. When she reported at end of the July 12 hearing that Mr. Trump had recently tried to contact a potential witness, her remarks were a warning to the former president, but they also had the feel of a cliffhanger: The target was still at large and still at work.

Story structure

Beginning the first hearing with footage of the mayhem at the Capitol was an unusual choice by congressional standards. But it was familiar to anyone who watches TV mini-series — the in medias res opening, dropping you at the scene of the crime and then doubling back to trace, step by step, episode by episode, the actions that brought us to this pass.

Each hearing, like the installments of a streaming thriller, focused on a discrete aspect of the attack on the election — the pressure on state governments, the incitement of the mob, the involvement of right-wing hate groups — each building on the last and drawing connections. Thursday night, the narrative came full circle, returning us to the climactic day, this time from the heart of the White House.

Like the graphics, the hearings’ structure gave viewers a map, making sure they knew where they were, where they’d been and where they were going...

Keep reading.

 

Olivier Guez, The Disappearance of Josef Mengele

At Amazon, Olivier Guez, The Disappearance of Josef Mengele: A Novel.

Miranda

So physically fit.

On Twitter.

And watch the video.

He Built a Home to Survive a Civil War. Tragedy Found Him Anyway

Mind-boggling and depressingly sad. 

At NYT, "C. Wesley Morgan once believed that the place he built, which included a 2,000-square-foot bunker, was the safest house in Kentucky":

RICHMOND, Ky. — The doorbell rang in the night, waking C. Wesley Morgan. He rolled out of bed and walked into the foyer, looking through the arched glass entryway into the dark. Nobody. These phantom rings had been happening lately; most likely there was a short somewhere in the system. The rain didn’t help. He went back to bed.

Minutes later, he awoke to the sound of a crash, then the rattle of gunfire. It was coming from upstairs, where his daughter Jordan was sleeping. Mr. Morgan rushed to the French doors leading out of his bedroom, opening them to see a man in a mask and carrying an AR-15 walking down the stairway.

The man looked blankly at Mr. Morgan, who had time to shout one word: “Why?”

What could drive a man to try to kill a family he had never met? The explanation Mr. Morgan had been given for the attack on that early February morning — mental illness — he found almost insultingly weak. He was certain that it had to have been a deliberate part of some larger plot. For more than a decade, he had been vigilant about such dangers, convinced that the country was hurtling toward civil war. He put millions of dollars behind his fears, building a fortress in the countryside. He knew that some thought he was paranoid.

A dozen years later, a sense of impending breakdown has spread beyond the fringes, taking hold across a country that can at times feel dangerously unhinged. Pandemic, lockdowns, fire and flood, ubiquitous rage and shocking violence: A deadly rampage can suddenly break out in the big-city suburbs or in a remote little town, at work, at the grocery store, at school or even at home. Mr. Morgan thought he had prepared for whatever catastrophes might come, diligently constructing a place that could guarantee his family’s safety. Now he wonders if he had invited the catastrophe that followed.

On a warm evening at a public campground in central Kentucky, Mr. Morgan, 71, sat in a folding chair, watching his wife, Lindsey, and 14-year-old daughter, Sydney, take a walk among the campers and R.V.s. He was spending his nights in agony over Jordan’s death, he said. She had been shot at least 11 times in her bed. Just thinking about it, he said, was like being strangled.

His days were spent overseeing repairs to his bullet-riddled house and talking to potential buyers.

He had built the house in the Obama years, when he was convinced society was on the verge of collapse. Here his family could live in secluded comfort, and if the social fabric truly tore apart, as he expected it would, they could wait out the chaos in an abundantly stocked underground bunker. Now he couldn’t wait to be rid of it.

A $6.5 million estate was a far cry from Mr. Morgan’s childhood. He grew up in the mountains of eastern Kentucky, where his father drove a small-town taxi and where, he said, he spent his early years without indoor plumbing.

He left the state as a young man to work as a federal investigator, uncovering illicit gun markets and underground gambling rings. But his father pressed him to come back home and put down roots.

So in 1982, he took out a loan to buy a liquor store in Richmond, a small city about a half-hour southeast of Lexington. Southern Kentucky in the 1980s and 1990s was still a desert of dry counties, and Richmond was the closest oasis for miles. Mr. Morgan eventually opened Liquor World, a giant alcohol emporium in Richmond, where, he said, “we were doing over a million a month.” He married and had a daughter, Jordan. He divorced, married again, and Sydney was born. He went to Ireland to watch horse races, took the family to Paris, bought a boat. And in 2009, he got to work on the house.

“My vision was that I was building a place I was going to die in,” he said. “The finest everything. I spared no expense.”

On 200 acres of Kentucky meadow just outside of Richmond, his vision became a 14,300-square-foot reality. Nine bedrooms, three kitchens, a six-car garage, a steam room, a saltwater pool — the front entryway alone cost $75,000.

“My feelings were that we were going to have civil unrest because there was so much going on with Obama,” Mr. Morgan said. He believed that people were going to rise up against the attempts to overhaul health care and restrict guns, and that societal collapse would soon follow. He envisioned “roving bands of gangs” hunting for food and necessities in the aftermath. He bought riot gear, bulletproof vests and a small arsenal of firearms, so that “if you had to engage a band of marauders, you would have a chance to save your family.”

The keystone of his survival plan was what lay underneath: a shelter 26 feet underground, beneath a 39-inch solid ceiling. It contains 2,000 square feet of bedrooms and common space along with a stocked food pantry, an air filtration system and two escape tunnels, one of them 100 feet long. The company that installed the shelter suggested that Mr. Morgan keep quiet about it, because “if anything ever happened, there’d be people that try to take the bunker.”

But even as he built his fortified sanctuary, politics in Kentucky were shifting, becoming more favorable for those with the kind of hard-right convictions that Mr. Morgan held. Jordan, who had become an ambitious and outspoken conservative herself, landed a job out of law school in the new gubernatorial administration of Matt Bevin, the firebrand Republican. Mr. Morgan decided to run for the Kentucky House of Representatives and in 2016 became the first Republican in decades to win his district.

Within days of taking office, he had become a lightning rod for criticism and derision. Good government groups expressed shock when Mr. Morgan proposed a slew of bills that would help the retail liquor business. Democratic lawmakers lambasted his measures allowing teachers to carry guns and granting immunity to motorists who unintentionally hit protesters blocking traffic.

But Mr. Morgan’s bitterest ire from his time in politics was reserved for his fellow Republicans. He blamed them for his negative press coverage, complained that the party did little to support his legislative proposals and publicly blasted Republican leaders who were implicated in scandal. When Mr. Morgan ran for re-election, another Republican challenged him in the primary, and won.

The whole experience convinced Mr. Morgan that he was the target of a corrupt power structure. Lauding the “patriots” of QAnon in Facebook posts, he mounted a quixotic primary campaign against Senator Mitch McConnell, whom he condemned as a “deep-state traitor.” When the primary was over, Mr. Morgan was done with Kentucky.

He listed his house on Zillow — “perfect for grand scale entertaining and family living,” the listing read, with “the highlight of the property” being “a $3 Million, 2,000 sq. ft. Nuclear/Biological/Chemical Fallout Shelter.” He assumed the listing would be seen only by buyers interested in a $6.5 million property. But it went viral.

“A cult compound,” one commenter wrote online; “getting mole people vibes,” added another. Strangers drove out to the house to gawk, and articles were written about it on real estate websites and in the state papers.

Jordan, 32, told her father she had come to feel unsafe at the house. In February of this year, she was hired by a law firm in Lexington and planned to move as soon as possible to an apartment in the city. “She must have sensed that she was being watched,” he said.

Someone had been watching, marking the house’s entry points and taking detailed notes on the family’s movements. Early on the morning of Feb. 22, prosecutors say, the watcher, Shannon V. Gilday, a 23-year-old former soldier who lived in the Cincinnati suburbs, climbed up to a second-floor balcony and began his attack.

“He stood and looked at me without any emotions, like he was programmed,” Mr. Morgan said of the moment he first encountered Mr. Gilday in the foyer. At that point, Jordan was dead.

Now Mr. Morgan was the target.

Bleeding from his arms, Mr. Morgan crawled across the bedroom carpet, dragging himself around to the other side of his bed. His wife was gone, having rushed into Sydney’s bedroom next door. Mr. Morgan took a loaded pistol out the drawer of his nightstand. When the French doors opened, he emptied the gun.

“I shot 12 times,” he said. “I was out of bullets. But that did something to him. He turned and shot twice through Sydney’s door, and then he went into the bathroom.”

Mr. Morgan quickly considered his other guns — another pistol in the drawer, the 12-gauge shotgun in the closet, the AR-15 in the guest bedroom — but saw his cellphone on the nightstand. He grabbed it and called the police. “See, that’s another thing I hate myself for,” he said. If he had just gotten another gun, he could have killed the intruder there and then.

Instead the attacker hurried out into the night. The authorities arrived soon after and Mr. Morgan found himself in an ambulance unaware of what had happened to Jordan, Sydney, Lindsey or the man who had tried to kill them all...

Keep reading.

 

Emily Bazelon, Charged

At Amazon, Emily Bazelon, Charged: The New Movement to Transform American Prosecution and End Mass Incarceration.

Members of Pence's Secret Service Detail Feared for Their Lives

For realz.

At NYT, "Five takeaways from the eighth hearing of the Jan. 6 committee":

Testimony from a White House security official, who had access to what Secret Service agents in the Capitol protecting Vice President Mike Pence were saying to each other over their radios, showed how agents feared for their lives as protesters drew near. The committee declined to identify the official and masked the official’s voice.

“There was a lot of yelling,” the official told the committee. “A lot of very personal calls over the radio, so it was disturbing. I don’t like talking about it, but there were calls to say goodbye to family members, so on and so forth. It was getting — for whatever the reason was on the ground the V.P. detail thought that this was about to get very ugly.”

The official said Secret Service agents were “running out of options and they’re getting nervous” and that is sounded like “we came very close to either Service having to use lethal options or worse.”

 

Immie

Lovely.

On Instagram.

Robert Samuels and Toluse Olorunnipa, His Name Is George Floyd

At Amazon, Robert Samuels and Toluse Olorunnipa, His Name Is George Floyd: One Man's Life and the Struggle for Racial Justice. 

Aubrey

 A lovely Only Fans star, on Twitter.

Democrats' Far-Left Climate Agenda Costing Americans More and More (VIDEO)

Here's Sean Hannity from earlier tonight:

The DeSantis Dilemma

From Andrew Sullivan, at the Weekly Dish, "Is he the only politician who can save us from a second Trump term?":

“I would say my big decision will be whether I go before or after. You understand what that means?” Donald Trump told New York Magazine’s Olivia Nuzzi this week. He likes to tease. But we know what’s coming. The deranged, delusional liar who tried to stop the peaceful transfer of power is going to again. He still commands a huge lead in the GOP primary polls; he shows few signs of flagging energy; and the president who succeeded him is imploding in front of our eyes.

The preeminent question in politics right now is therefore, to my mind, a simple one: how to stop Trump — and the spiraling violent, civil conflict and constitutional chaos a second term would bring. To re-elect a man who attempted a coup is to embrace the definitive end of the American idea.

The Democrats, meanwhile, appear to have run out of fake “moderate” candidates, are doubling down on every woke mantra, presiding over levels of inflation that are devastating real incomes, launching a protracted war that may tip us into stagflation, and opening the borders to millions more illegal immigrants. They are hemorrhaging Latino support, and intensifying their identity as upper-class white woke scolds. And a Biden campaign in 2024 would be, let’s be honest, “Weekend At Bernie’s II.”

So get real: If you really believe that Trump remains a unique threat to constitutional democracy in America, you need to consider the possibility that, at this point, a Republican is probably your best bet.

One stands out, and it’s Ron DeSantis, the popular governor of Florida. And yet so many Never Trumpers, right and left, have instantly become Never DeSanters, calling him a terrifyingly competent clone of the thug with the bad hair. He’s “Trump 2.0” but even “more dangerous than Trump,” says Dean Obeidallah. “He’s dangerous because he is equally repressive, but doesn’t have the baggage of Trump,” argues a fascism scholar.

“DeSantis has decided to try to outflank Trump, to out-Trump Trump,” worries Michael Tomasky. He’s a clone of Viktor Orbán, says Vox, and on some issues, “DeSantis has actually outstripped Orbán.” Then there’s Max Boot: “Just because DeSantis is smarter than Trump doesn’t mean that he is any less dangerous. In fact, he might be an even bigger threat for that very reason.”

Jon Chait frames the case: “Just imagine what a Trumpified party no longer led by an erratic, deeply unpopular cable-news binge-watcher would be capable of.” Chait’s critique focuses at first on the fact that DeSantis is an anti-redistributionist conservative, and believes that pure democracy is something the Founders wanted to curtail. Sorry — but, whatever your view on that, it’s light years away from Trump’s belief in one-man rule.

On this, in fact, Chait acknowledges that DeSantis once wrote that the Founders “worried about the emergence of popular leaders who utilized demagoguery to obtain public support in service of their personal ambitions.” He meant Obama — not Trump. Unfair to Obama, of course. But the same worldview as Trump’s? Nah.

Chait then argues that DeSantis is an anti-vaxxer, or has at least toyed with anti-vaxxers, and out-Trumped Trump on Covid denialism. But like many criticisms of DeSantis, this is overblown. Dexter Filkins reports that DeSantis, after his lockdowns during the panic of April 2020, studied the science himself, became a skeptic of lingering lockdowns and mask mandates, and, for a while, risked looking like a crazy outlier.

But from the vantage point of today, not so much: Florida’s kids have not been shut out of schools for two whole years; the state’s economy beat out the other big ones except Texas; Covid infection and death rates were not much higher than the national average; and compared with California, which instituted a draconian approach, it’s a viral wash.

As David Frum put it in a typically perceptive piece:

The DeSantis message for 2024: I kept adults at work and kids at school without the catastrophic effects predicted by my critics. Because I didn’t panic, Florida emerged from the pandemic in stronger economic shape than many other states — and a generation of Florida schoolchildren continued their education because of me. Pretty powerful, no?

Very powerful in retrospect. And again: not Trump.

And this is a pattern: DeSantis says or does something that arouses the Trumpian erogenous zones, is assailed by the media/left, and then the details turn out to be underwhelming. His voter suppression law provoked howls; but in reality, as Ramesh Ponnuru notes,

the law includes new restrictions, such as requiring that county employees oversee ballot drop-boxes. But it’s also true that the law leaves Floridians with greater ballot access, in key respects, than a lot of states run by Democrats. Florida has no-excuse absentee voting, unlike Delaware and New York.

DeSantis wins both ways: he gets cred from the base by riling up the media, but isn’t so extreme as to alienate normie voters.

Ditto his allegedly anti-gay bigotry. Vox’s Beauchamp says DeSantis is another Orbán. But Orbán’s policies are a ban on all teaching about gays in high schools, a ban on anything on television before 10 pm that could positively show gay or trans people, and a constitutional ban on marriage rights. DeSantis’ policy is to stop instruction in critical gender and queer theory in public schools for kids under 8, and keep it neutral and age-appropriate thereafter. In other words: what we used to have ten minutes ago before the woke takeover.

And who but a few fanatics and TQIA++ nutters really oppose this? I know plenty of gay people who agree with DeSantis — and a majority of Floridians support the law as it is written. The fact that his opponents had to lie about it — with the “Don’t Say Gay” gimmick — and then resorted to emotional blackmail — “This will kill kids” — tells you how unpopular their actual position is.

Some more contrasts: Trump famously wanted to torture captured prisoners, steal the oil in occupied Iraq, and desecrate Islam to break down Muslim detainees. DeSantis, on the other hand,

was responsible for helping ensure that the missions of Navy SEALs and Army Green Berets [in parts of Iraq] … were planned according to the rule of law and that captured detainees were humanely treated. “He did a phenomenal job,” Navy Capt. Dane Thorleifson, 55, said of DeSantis … [describing him] as “one of my very close counsels that as we developed a mission concept of operations, he made sure it was legal. I respected him a lot as a JAG. He was super smart, articulate, resourceful and a positive part of the staff.”

Imagine Trump taking care to make sure anything is legal!

Trump ripped children from illegal immigrant parents. DeSantis opposed the policy. Trump launched his real estate empire with a “small loan of a million dollars” from his mega-wealthy dad. DeSantis grew up in a working-class neighborhood, scored in the 99th percentile on his SAT, and worked several jobs to help pay his tuition at Yale.

Trump is a teetotaler, and while in office “his administration made a number of hostile anti-marijuana actions — rescinding Obama-era guidance on cannabis prosecutions to implementing policies making immigrants ineligible for citizenship if they consume marijuana.” DeSantis ensured that Florida’s overwhelming vote in favor of legal medical marijuana was passed into law, and he even suggested that the drug be decriminalized — despite his distaste for the smell of weed in public.

Trump wings everything, and almost never delivers. He couldn’t even build a fraction of his wall. DeSantis is disciplined, studies issues closely, and follows through. On a good day, Trump is fun. DeSantis, to be kind, isn’t. He has a Nixonian edge.

Trump believes climate change is a Chinese hoax, and, given the chance, would cover our national parks with condos and oil rigs. DeSantis is a governor in a state where rising sea levels and floods are real, so Trumpian insanity is a non-starter. “I will fulfill promises from the campaign trail,” DeSantis said shortly after taking office:

“That means prioritizing environmental issues, like water quality and cleaning the environmental mess that has resulted in toxic blue-green algae and exacerbated red tide around the state. We will put Everglades restoration into high gear and make it the reality that Floridians have been promised for three decades.”

This year he followed through — with more than $400 million in funds for containing rising sea levels. And last year, Filkins noted,

DeSantis signed into law a remarkable piece of environmental legislation that could become a model for the rest of the country. The project will establish the Florida Wildlife Corridor, a blueprint for the state to connect all of its large national and state parks with tracts of open land.

The corridor, once complete, would create an unbroken swath of preserved land from the Alabama state line all the way to the Florida Keys, nearly eight hundred miles away. It would insure that a population of wildlife — whether it be black bears or panthers or gopher tortoises — would not be cut off from other groups of its species, which is one of the main drivers of extinction.

So far, DeSantis is not that far from the “Teddy Roosevelt conservationist” he claimed to be. Yes, he’s mainly focused on responding to, rather than preventing, climate change — “Resilient Florida” is the slogan. And he’s allergic to green uplift or catastrophism. But another Trump? Nope.

His authoritarianism? He certainly gives off vibes. He picked a fight with Disney, for example, over their belated opposition to his parental rights bill — and punished them even after the law had passed. Using executive power to target companies for their free expression is not conservatism. (It’s worth noting, however, that in this case, the “punishment” was ending very special state treatment for the company.)

There is also disturbingly vague wording and vigilante enforcement in his parental rights bill — which is why I opposed it. He has tried to curtail free speech in colleges in ways that will almost certainly be struck down by the courts. Three state university professors were prevented from testifying against state policies (DeSantis denies any involvement). His comments on tenure are chilling. He said something dangerous about the role of child protective services in punishing parents for taking their kids to raunchy drag shows. Parental rights for conservatives, but not for liberals?

His spokesperson, Christina Pushaw, is Trumpian in her provocations, reviving the ugly trope that gays are pedophilic “groomers” until proven otherwise. DeSantis wages the power of government in the culture war — and with alacrity. There’s a pugilism to his style that comes off as bullying at times, so he can, quite clearly, be a charm-free prick. He’s been a coward over January 6 and Trump’s Big Lie. And as Tim Miller notes, he hasn’t exactly declared he would not be another Trump in his contempt for constitutional democracy (although such a stance now would effectively sink his bid to replace Trump). He’s said nary a word on abortion; and has ducked real questions about guns in the wake of Uvalde. Who knows what his position on Ukraine is?

I’m deeply uncomfortable with much of this...

 

Murder Charges Dropped Against Bodega Owner Jose Alba

Following up from the other day, "Social Justice Warriors Turn Victims Into Killers."

From Dana Loesch, "A good development to this story — but the charges should never have existed in the first place."

Yes, Things Are Really As Bad As You've Heard [In Public Education]

Another outstanding inside look at the continuing eradication of standards in the schools, with emphasis here on how so-called "progressive" policies end up hurting most those kids who were targeted for affirmative compensatory policy change in the first place. 

There is a backlash afoot, with the San Francisco school board recall being the prime example. But getting things back to where they were just a decade or so ago (when it was bad enough already) is going to be extremely difficult. Leftists are like venomous poisonous species that will kill regardless of what and how fast medical intervention takes place.

See, "A Leftist Schoolteacher Struggles To Say Aloud the Things He Regularly Witnesses That Are So Outlandish They Sound Made Up By Right-Wing Provocateurs."

Dave Rubin, Don't Burn This Country

At Amazon, Dave Rubin, Don't Burn This Country: Surviving and Thriving in Our Woke Dystopia.

Anna's Glow

 She's glowing and proud of it, on Twitter.

Jonathan Martin and Alexander Burns, This Will Not Pass

See, Jonathan Martin and Alexander Burns, This Will Not Pass: Trump, Biden, and the Battle for America's Future.

Inflation's Still Screaming

This White House is so clueless on this issue. Even as gas prices are easing a bit, the Consumer Price Index topped 9 percent for last month, another record. This will be the defining issue in November. Upscale women will be pissed about abortion, and they may have an effect on some close congressional races, perhaps denying Republicans a pick up. But everybody else is going to be mad as hell on the economy. I expect a massive tsunami, especially on the House side, and don't believe anyone else who tells you otherwise. 

At WSJ, "U.S. Inflation Hits New Four-Decade High of 9.1%":

U.S. consumer inflation accelerated to 9.1% in June, a pace not seen in more than four decades, adding pressure on the Federal Reserve to act more aggressively to slow rapid price increases throughout the economy.

The consumer-price index’s advance for the 12 months ended in June was the fastest pace since November 1981, the Labor Department said on Wednesday. A big jump in gasoline prices—up 11.2% from the previous month and nearly 60% from a year earlier—drove much of the increase, while shelter and food prices were also major contributors.

The June inflation reading exceeded May’s 8.6% rate, prompting investors and analysts to debate whether the Fed would consider a one-percentage-point rate increase, rather than a 0.75-point rise, later this month. Slowing demand is key to the Fed’s goal of restoring price stability in an economy that is still struggling with supply issues, but raising interest rates also elevates the risk of a recession.

Core prices, which exclude volatile food and energy components, increased by 5.9% in June from a year earlier, slightly less than May’s 6.0% gain, the Labor Department said.

On a month-to-month basis, core prices rose 0.7% in June, a bit more than their 0.6% increase in May—a sign of inflationary pressures throughout the economy.

“Inflation makes everything difficult,” said Lara Rhame, chief U.S. economist for FS Investments. “It erodes your savings, your wages, your profits. It’s punishing everybody.”

Stocks declined on Wednesday after wavering for much of the day, with the S&P 500 index falling by 0.5%. Bond yields jumped following the inflation report, but yields on longer-term Treasurys quickly gave up those gains.

Despite June’s inflation reading, economists point to recent developments that could subdue price pressures in the coming months.

Investor expectations of slowing economic growth world-wide have led to a decline in commodity prices in recent weeks, including for oil, copper, wheat and corn, after those prices rose sharply following the Russian invasion of Ukraine. Retailers have warned of the need to discount goods, especially apparel and home goods, that are out of sync with customer preferences as spending shifts to services and away from goods, and consumers spend down elevated savings.

“There’s a pretty serious recession fear affecting a broad range of asset prices,” said Laura Rosner-Warburton, senior economist at MacroPolicy Perspectives.

Retailers’ ability to shed unwanted inventory could test whether pricing is returning to prepandemic patterns, Ms. Rosner-Warburton said. Some retailers, such as Target, have already said they are planning big discounts. Others with robust warehouse capacity, such as Walmart Inc., could be more likely to hold on to their excess inventory, analysts say.

“It would be really important if we do see discounting return, because it would show that we weren’t that far away from the pre-Covid environment in terms of pricing behavior,” Ms. Rosner-Warburton said.

Discounts haven’t shown up prominently in inflation figures so far: Prices for apparel and home goods both rose last month. New and used car price increases, a significant source of upward pressure on inflation, both eased on a month-to-month basis in June.

The Fed last month raised its interest-rate target by 0.75 percentage point, the largest increase since 1994. Besides tempering demand, the central bank is trying to prevent consumer expectations of higher inflation from becoming entrenched, as such expectations can be self-fulfilling. Fed Chairman Jerome Powell has said the central bank wants to see clear evidence that price pressures are diminishing before slowing or suspending rate increases...

Noah Rothman, The Rise of the New Puritans

At Amazon, Noah Rothman, The Rise of the New Puritans: Fighting Back Against Progressives' War on Fun.

Amid Hunter's Scandals, President Biden's Going Soft on China

It's Miranda Devine, at the New York Post, "It took a certain bloodless chutzpah for the president to place his scandal-ridden son front and center at a White House function last week."

She literally wrote the book on this. See, Laptop from Hell: Hunter Biden, Big Tech, and the Dirty Secrets the President Tried to Hide.

Social Justice Warriors Turn Victims Into Killers

It's Batya Ungar-Sargon, at London's Daily Mail, "Social justice warriors turn victims into killers and criminals into saints as progressive NYC charges a 61-year-old bodega worker with murder for the crime of fighting for his life."

This is the Jose Alba story, the man who was charged with murder after defending himself against "a 35-year-old career criminal named Austin Simon."

Neo-Neocon posted on this earlier, here and here.

Lisa Boothe on July 4th

She's so fine.

On Twitter.

The '#Shes10' Abortion Story the Media Ran With Without Checking Is a Hoax and an Obvious One

At AoSHQ, "Megan Fox has been on the hoax from the beginning, and now Ohio AG Dave Yost completely obliterates the false story."

'I Made A Huge Mistake Voting For Biden'

Ms. Zoe Nicholson from St. Louis:

Zoe, a Missouri resident: “I made a huge mistake voting for Biden.”

“I regret voting for him. I mean, it really was a terrible choice. " pic.twitter.com/EMki781Gu7

— RNC Research (@RNCResearch) July 11, 2022

'Shine'

From Collective Soul:

If Held Today, President Trump Would Win the #GOP Primaries

He's got a huge plurality of supporters in this this new poll out from the New York Times.

See, "Half of G.O.P. Voters Ready to Leave Trump Behind, Poll Finds":

Far from consolidating his support, the former president appears weakened in his party, especially with younger and college-educated Republicans. Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida is the most popular alternative.

As Donald J. Trump weighs whether to open an unusually early White House campaign, a New York Times/Siena College poll shows that his post-presidential quest to consolidate his support within the Republican Party has instead left him weakened, with nearly half the party’s primary voters seeking someone different for president in 2024 and a significant number vowing to abandon him if he wins the nomination.

By focusing on political payback inside his party instead of tending to wounds opened by his alarming attempts to cling to power after his 2020 defeat, Mr. Trump appears to have only deepened fault lines among Republicans during his yearlong revenge tour. A clear majority of primary voters under 35 years old, 64 percent, as well as 65 percent of those with at least a college degree — a leading indicator of political preferences inside the donor class — told pollsters they would vote against Mr. Trump in a presidential primary.

Mr. Trump’s conduct on Jan. 6, 2021, appears to have contributed to the decline in his standing, including among a small but important segment of Republicans who could form the base of his opposition in a potential primary contest. While 75 percent of primary voters said Mr. Trump was “just exercising his right to contest the election,” nearly one in five said he “went so far that he threatened American democracy.”

Overall, Mr. Trump maintains his primacy in the party: In a hypothetical matchup against five other potential Republican presidential rivals, 49 percent of primary voters said they would support him for a third nomination.

The greatest threat to usurp Mr. Trump within the party is Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida, who was the second choice with 25 percent and the only other contender with double-digit support. Among primary voters, Mr. DeSantis was the top choice of younger Republicans, those with a college degree and those who said they voted for President Biden in 2020.

While about one-fourth of Republicans said they didn’t know enough to have an opinion about Mr. DeSantis, he was well-liked by those who did. Among those who voted for Mr. Trump in 2020, 44 percent said they had a very favorable opinion of Mr. DeSantis — similar to the 46 percent who said the same about Mr. Trump.

Should Mr. DeSantis and Mr. Trump face off in a primary, the poll suggested that support from Fox News could prove crucial: Mr. Trump held a 62 percent to 26 percent advantage over Mr. DeSantis among Fox News viewers, while the gap between the two Floridians was 16 points closer among Republicans who mainly receive their news from another source.

The survey suggests that Mr. Trump would not necessarily enter a primary with an insurmountable advantage over rivals like Mr. DeSantis. His share of the Republican primary electorate is less than Hillary Clinton’s among Democrats was at the outset of the 2016 race, when she was viewed as the inevitable front-runner, but ultimately found herself embroiled in a protracted primary against Senator Bernie Sanders of Vermont...

Still more.

And Bill Schneider suggested the other day that Trump might announce his 2024 run before the November midterms. We'll see. That's not unprecedented. Howard Dean formally announced his bid for the 2004 Democratic nomination June 23, 2003, but he was campaigning way before then, in the second half of 2002.

If Trump's able to raise a massive war chest --- to the tune of say $2 billion or so --- then he'd certainly scare off much of the competition. But let's see how much DeSantis is able to raise in 2023, should he throw his hat into the ring. He's the one on fire right now. I like him. I hope he's the nominee. He'll crush any Democrat in the 2024 general election.

Ms. Kate Reads

CNN's Kate Bolduan.

She's reading an advanced copy of Daniel Silva's, Portrait of an Unknown Woman. The book hits stores on the 19th.

A good lady.

On Twitter.

The Strategy Behind DeSantis' Culture War

From Christopher F. Rufo, ,"The New Yorker reveals some of the governor's most effective tactics":

The New Yorker just published a report highlighting my work supporting Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis’ policies on critical race theory and gender ideology. If you can set aside the obligatory editorializing—the disposition of the New Yorker is obviously left-wing—there is some valuable insight into the political strategy that DeSantis has adopted.

The article begins with some behind-the-scenes details:

In April, the conservative activist Christopher Rufo flew from his home, near Seattle, to Miami, to meet with Florida’s Governor, Ron DeSantis, and to take part in the public signing of the Stop Woke Act. A former documentary filmmaker and a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute, Rufo was the lead protagonist of last year’s furor over the teaching of “critical race theory” in public schools and helped advise the Governor on the Florida law, which aimed to limit discussion of racial history and identity in schools and workplaces. Rufo was especially taken with how personally invested DeSantis seemed in the policy. “He shows up to the tarmac at 6:30 a.m. with a Red Bull energy drink, ready to roll through the policy papers,” Rufo said. The bill had not come from the Governor’s advisers or the grass roots: “It’s driven by him.”

From there, the writer, Benjamin Wallace-Wells, recounts the story of DeSantis’ fight against Walt Disney after the company publicly announced its opposition to the Parental Rights in Education law, which prohibits public schools from promoting gender and sexual ideologies in kindergarten through third grade. DeSantis mobilized the public against Disney and quickly signed legislation to strip the company of its special tax and governing status—an aggressive move that most political observers did not anticipate.

As Wallace-Wells writes:

DeSantis made a second significant move during the debate over the bill, one that Rufo in particular emphasized: the Governor escalated. The C.E.O. of the Walt Disney Company, Bob Chapek, told shareholders during an annual meeting early in March that he opposed the bill and had called DeSantis to say so; DeSantis retaliated with a new bill that stripped Disney (Central Florida’s largest taxpayer) of certain special legislative benefits that it had enjoyed since its establishment, a half century ago. “At the time, I remember some conversation, ‘Oh, DeSantis will never be able to vanquish Disney, Disney’s too powerful, too beloved,’ and at the time Disney had a seventy-seven per cent favorability rating with the public,” Rufo told me. He credited the Florida Governor with two insights: “A, that the bill is popular, and B, that though Disney is an economic and cultural power, it is really a novice political power, and, as many people are saying lean out of it, he leans into the fight, I think, brilliantly”....

The Left is starting to understand DeSantis as a major threat—and for good reason. In my view, DeSantis is the most courageous and effective politician in the United States today. He understands how to frame the issues, never buckles under controversy, and has demonstrated a deep knowledge of public policy. He can play the media game, but he can also play the legislative game, moving significant policies through the Florida state legislature with remarkable speed.

DeSantis is the man to watch. He is making the necessary transition from “culture war as performance” to “culture war as public policy.” He is writing the new playbook for conservative politics and his enemies are starting to take note.

 

J. David McSwane, Pandemic, Inc.

At Amazon, J. David McSwane, Pandemic, Inc.: Chasing the Capitalists and Thieves Who Got Rich While We Got Sick.

The Democrat Party Pox

This t-shirt pretty much nails it. 

Harsha Walia, Border and Rule

At Amazon, Harsha Walia, Border and Rule: Global Migration, Capitalism, and the Rise of Racist Nationalism.

Patriotic Devbender

She's a good lady.

On Instagram.

Tobias S. Harris, The Iconoclast

At Amazon, Tobias S. Harris, The Iconoclast: Shinzo Abe and the New Japan.

McLaren Speedtail: A $3 Million Zoom With a View (VIDEO)

Well, one can dream.

At the Wall Street Journal, "With a top speed of 250 mph, the Speedtail is the fastest McLaren ever built, but Dan Neil is most impressed by the sightlines from the center driver’s seat":

Go ahead, yank. Give a squeeze. Imagine yourself strapped into this belt-high, $3-million hybrid hypercar, looking down the middle of that steep hood at your immediate and onrushing destiny. It’s a weathery June day in the south of England, with veils of rain and patchy sun along the M3 from the company’s headquarters in Woking, Surrey, to your lunch stop, near Portsmouth.

Fluffy sheep and fluffier clouds, green hills, stone walls. While you’re at it, imagine you weigh what you did in high school. The Speedtail’s steeply bolstered driver’s couch fits like ’70s-era Calvin Kleins.

This go-kart of the gods is officially the fastest McLaren yet (top speed 250 mph), and the most powerful (1,055 hp), hosting an AI-enhanced, twin-turbo 4.0-liter V8 mated to a hybrid KERS system, seven-speed dual-clutch transmission and a torque-vectoring rear axle. The factory, usually conservative in these matters, says the Speedtail can accelerate from naught to 124 mph in 6.6 seconds and to 186 mph in 13 seconds—about the time it takes to read this sentence aloud.

Can you feel that?

Yet this is a case where the absurdity of performance—on what planet will anyone be driving at 250 mph?—takes itself out of critical consideration. Besides, if you go shopping among elite car builders, you (or your goony intermediaries) can acquire all sorts of instantly collectible, money-laundering hypercars with unbearable performance, including the Mercedes-AMG Project One, Aston Martin Valkyrie and Bugatti Chiron. But no other car can compete with this view.

The Speedtail completes a generational quartet of limited-edition, science-on-a-rampage hybrid hypercars from McLaren—the Ultimate Series—including the Senna, the Elva, and the P1. For enthusiasts, these cars represent the proverbial best of times. Each has its inimitable and historic bits for which collectors will pay handsomely in years to come.

The Speedtail’s immortal flex begins with the cockpit layout: the driver’s couch is in the center, flanked by two smaller seats, molded into the carbon-fiber/aluminum monocoque. The three-seat layout is a homage to the essential McLaren F1 sports racer of the 1990s. A way more comfortable homage, I might add.

As with the F1, the company limited Speedtail production to 106 examples—all built and delivered in 2020 and 2021. I’m sorry I’m only getting around to it now.

The center-seat experience is singular—solipsistic, even. In this car the driver’s perceptions sit in the middle of a spherical transparency, around which reality warps like the backgrounds of a first-person videogame. Fanning kinescopes of passing forests, hectic kaleidoscopes of council-owned agriculture, all lens around your POV in perfect symmetry.

The center-seat driver experience is singular—solipsistic, even

That. Is. Awesome! Having spent my driving life slightly askew, it seems, this sudden alignment of my somatic graviception and momentum vector-space was practically euphoric. This is the saddled symmetry of riding horseback, or on a motorcycle, or piloting a single-seat race car or fighter jet. Oh Maverick! Take me to the hangar!

Then there’s the way it looks. I’ve studied the matter closely: The Speedtail is the most beautiful of a generation of very, very fast cars built in the hyper-hybrid era, the sweetest and most lyrical derivation of Navier-Stokes since perhaps the 1930s—”beauty” here being aesthetic satisfaction uncompromised by extreme speed.

Generally, the faster a car is, the uglier. That collects the much-adored Aston Martin Valkyrie and Bugatti Chiron, among others. If not ugly then more cluttered with edges, blades, scoops and splitters, necessary to ensure stability at speeds where the angels fear to tread. And to look cool.

The Speedtail’s form is like a glass javelin, long and balanced and piercing at both ends. Much of the downforce is generated by the unseen underbody and (pressure) diffuser. Instead of a rear wing waggling on pneumatic pylons, movable aero elements are integrated into flexible sections of trailing-edge body work that bend up and down, reacting to control-loop calls for downforce and braking.

The flexi-bendy ailerons were not easy, said Andy Palmer, Vehicle Line Director, Ultimate Series. But to do otherwise would have been like spoiling the line of a good suit.

The plan was to race Mr. Palmer to lunch near Southampton—he in the second validation prototype (XP2) of the Speedtail and I in the XP5. If that wasn’t the plan, nobody told him. Soon the XP2’s exquisite, filamentary taillights disappeared in a towering gray rooster tail, boiling up from the car’s mighty underbody diffuser. Crikey, he’s leaving me.

But put your foot down and the Speedtail represents. Totes. In the time it took to zing the turbos three times—bu-bah-tweee, bu-bahhh-tweeee, bu-bahhhh-tweeeee—the Speedtail had closed in on the XP2 and I was flirting with extradition. It all happened so fast, officer. And so swimmingly.

Why aren’t there more such delightful cars, ask the rest of us? According to the feds, the Speedtail isn’t even road legal, on account of its center controls, camera-based wing mirrors and, I’m sure, other homologation issues. About one-third of Speedtails produced have been imported to the U.S. under what’s known as the show or display rule, which restricts annual odometer-registered mileage to 2,500 miles...

Twitter Says It's Going to Sue Elon Musk for Trying to Back Out of Takeover Deal

Folks see Musk as a free-speech savior, so it'd be a bummer if the deal doesn't go through. That said, frankly, Twitter's valuation was below $44 billion when Musk first made the bid. It's dropped precipitously since then, not to mention the market value of Musk's Tesla electric car company, whose stock was being used to leverage the deal. 

We'll see, in any case. It's still awful bad on that hellsite. 

At the Verger, "Twitter says it’s going to sue Elon Musk for trying to back out of the deal."

Shinzo Abe's Influence Was Still Evident Long After He Left Office

Following-up, "Shinzo Abe Assassinated: Former Prime Minister Was Leader For a New, Stronger Japan (VIDEO)."

At the New York Times, "Japan’s longest-serving prime minister became perhaps the most transformational politician in the country’s post-World War II history":

WASHINGTON — In his record-breaking run as prime minister, Shinzo Abe never achieved his goal of revising Japan’s Constitution to transform his country into what the Japanese call a “normal nation,” able to employ its military to back up its national interests like any other.

Nor did he restore Japan’s technological edge and economic prowess to the fearsome levels of the late 1980s and early 1990s, when Japan was regarded as China is today — as the world’s No. 2 economy that, with organization and cunning and central planning, could soon be No. 1.

But his assassination in the city of Nara on Friday was a reminder that he managed, nonetheless, to become perhaps the most transformational politician in Japan’s post-World War II history, even as he spoke in the maddeningly bland terms that Japanese politicians regard as a survival skill.

After failing to resolve longstanding disputes with Russia and China, he edged the country closer to the United States and most of its Pacific allies (except South Korea, where old animosities ruled).

He created Japan’s first national security council and reinterpreted — almost by fiat — the constitutional restrictions he could not rewrite, so that for the first time Japan was committed to the “collective defense” of its allies. He spent more on defense than most Japanese politicians thought wise.

“We didn’t know what we were going to get when Abe came to office with this hard nationalist reputation,” said Richard Samuels, the director of the Center for International Studies at M.I.T. and the author of books on Japan’s military and intelligence capabilities. “What we got was a pragmatic realist who understood the limits of Japan’s power, and who knew it wasn’t going to be able to balance China’s rise on its own. So he designed a new system.”

Mr. Abe was out of office by the time Russia invaded Ukraine this year. But his influence was still evident as Japan, after 10 weeks of hesitation, declared it would phase out Russian coal and oil imports. Mr. Abe pushed further, suggesting that it was time for Japan to establish some kind of nuclear sharing agreement with the United States — breaking his country’s longtime taboo on even discussing the wisdom of possessing an arsenal of its own.

His efforts to loosen the restraints on Japan that date back to its postwar, American-written Constitution reflected a recognition that Japan needed its allies more than ever. But alliances meant that defense commitments went both ways. China loomed larger, North Korea kept lobbing missiles across the Sea of Japan and Mr. Abe believed that he needed to preserve his country’s relationship with Washington, even if that meant delivering a gold-plated golf club to Donald J. Trump at Trump Tower days after he was elected president.

Mr. Abe was not killed for his hard-line views, which at moments triggered street protests and peace rallies in Japan, at least according to initial assessments. Nor was his killing a return to the era of “Government by Assassination,” the title that Hugh Byas, the New York Times bureau chief in Tokyo in the 1930s, gave his memoir of an era of turmoil.

Mr. Byas recounted the last killing of a current or former Japanese prime minister: Tsuyoshi Inukai was killed in 1932 as part of a plot by Imperial Japanese Navy officers that seemed intended to provoke a war with the United States nine years before Pearl Harbor.

In the postwar era, political assassinations have been rare in Japan: a Socialist leader was murdered in 1960 with a sword, and the mayor of Nagasaki was shot dead in 2007, though that appeared to be over a personal dispute. And the American ambassador to Japan in the 1960s, Edwin O. Reischauer, was stabbed in the thigh by a 19-year-old Japanese man; Mr. Reischauer survived and returned to his post as Harvard’s leading scholar of Japanese politics.

Mr. Abe’s death will now set off a race to be the next leader of one of the most powerful factions of the Liberal Democratic Party. And the shock of it, President Biden said on Friday during a visit to the C.I.A., will have “a profound impact on the psyche of the Japanese people.”

But it will hardly create a political earthquake. Mr. Abe left office, partly because of poor health, two years ago. And in the pantheon of current world leaders, he could not match the powers of Presidents Xi Jinping of China or Vladimir V. Putin of Russia; Japan’s humbling recession in the 1990s damaged its ranking as a superpower.

But his influence, scholars say, will be lasting. “What Abe did was transform the national security state in Japan,” said Michael J. Green, a former senior official in the George W. Bush administration who dealt with Mr. Abe often. Mr. Green’s book “Line of Advantage: Japan’s Grand Strategy in the Era of Abe Shinzo” argues that it was Mr. Abe who helped push the West to counter China’s increasingly aggressive actions in Asia...

Keep reading.

 

Shinzo Abe Assassinated: Former Prime Minister Was Leader For a New, Stronger Japan (VIDEO)

Japan is largely a gun-free society, which makes Abe's assassination all the more confounding. I haven't seen anything yet, but it's unimaginable to me that a gunman could basically walk right up an murder a former prime minister.

The moment of the assassination is here, on YouTube, "Shinzo Abe shot: TV cameras capture attack on former PM and suspect's arrest."

At the Los Angeles Times, "Shinzo Abe, former prime minister of Japan, assassinated at campaign event":

NARA, Japan — Former Prime Minister Shinzo Abe was assassinated Friday on a street in western Japan by a gunman who opened fire on him from behind as he delivered a campaign speech — an attack that stunned a nation with some of the world’s strictest gun-control laws.

The 67-year-old Abe, who was Japan’s longest-serving leader when he resigned in 2020, collapsed bleeding and was airlifted to a nearby hospital in Nara, although he was not breathing and his heart had stopped. He was later pronounced dead after receiving massive blood transfusions, officials said.

Nara Medical University emergency department chief Hidetada Fukushima said Abe suffered major damage to his heart, along with two neck wounds that damaged an artery. He never regained his vital signs, Fukushima said.

Prefectural police in Nara arrested the suspect at the scene of the attack and identified him as Tetsuya Yamagami, 41, a former member of Japan’s navy. Public broadcaster NHK reported that he said he wanted to kill Abe because he had complaints about him unrelated to politics.

Dramatic video from NHK showed Abe standing and giving a speech outside a train station in Nara ahead of Sunday’s parliamentary election. As he raised his fist to make a point, two gunshots rang out, and he collapsed holding his chest, his shirt smeared with blood as security guards ran toward him.

Guards leapt onto the suspect, who was face down on the pavement. A double-barreled device that appeared to be a handmade gun was seen on the ground.

Prime Minister Fumio Kishida and his Cabinet ministers hastily returned to Tokyo from campaign events around the country after the shooting, which he called “dastardly and barbaric.” He pledged that the election, which chooses members for Japan’s less-powerful upper house of parliament, would go on as planned.

“I use the harshest words to condemn” the shooting, Kishida said, struggling to control his emotions. He said the government planned to review the security situation but added that Abe had the highest protection.

Even though he was out of office, Abe was still highly influential in the governing Liberal Democratic Party and headed its largest faction, Seiwakai.

Opposition leaders condemned the shooting as an attack on Japan’s democracy. In Tokyo, people stopped on the street to grab extra editions of the Yomiuri Shimbun newspaper or watch TV coverage of the shooting.

When he resigned as prime minister, Abe said he had a recurrence of the ulcerative colitis he’d had since he was a teenager. He told reporters at the time that it was “gut-wrenching” to leave many of his goals unfinished. He spoke of his failure to resolve the issue of Japanese abducted years ago by North Korea, a territorial dispute with Russia and a revision of Japan’s war-renouncing constitution.

That last goal made him a divisive figure. His ultra-nationalism riled the Koreas and China, and his push to normalize Japan’s defense posture angered many Japanese. Abe failed to achieve his cherished goal of formally rewriting the U.S.-drafted pacifist constitution because of poor public support.

Loyalists said his legacy was a stronger U.S.-Japan relationship that was meant to bolster Japan’s defense capability. But Abe made enemies by forcing his defense goals and other contentious issues through parliament, despite strong public opposition.

Abe — who studied at USC for three semesters — was a political blue blood who was groomed to follow in the footsteps of his grandfather, former Prime Minister Nobusuke Kishi. His political rhetoric often focused on making Japan a “normal” and “beautiful” nation with a stronger military and bigger role in international affairs.

Many foreign officials expressed shock over the shooting — especially because of Japan’s strict gun laws.

With a population of 125 million, the country had only 10 gun-related criminal cases last year, which resulted in one death and four injuries, according to police. Eight of those cases were gang-related. Tokyo had no gun incidents, injuries or deaths in the same year, although 61 guns were seized...

Still more.

 

Mark Bowden, Hue 1968

At Amazon, Mark Bowden, Hue 1968: A Turning Point of the American War in Vietnam.

Kristin Cavallari

She just a doll.

At People, "Kristin Cavallari Says She Is 'Really Proud' of Her Fitness Journey After Weight Gain ."

And, "Kristin Cavallari and Tyler Cameron Get Married and Share Steamy Kisses in New Uncommon James Ad."

'Build Me Up Buttercup'

The Foundations:

War of Attrition

At WSJ, "Russia’s Tactical Shift in Ukraine Raises Prospect of Protracted War":

Kyiv says it needs more Western weapons and help training new soldiers to turn the tide.

KYIV, Ukraine—Russia’s steady advances in eastern Ukraine, relying on superior firepower and larger numbers of troops, are grinding down Ukraine’s military and setting the stage for a protracted war of attrition in which Kyiv needs more Western weapons and help training new soldiers to turn the tide.

After early missteps, Russia has found tactics that are working. In the invasion’s opening phase, Moscow’s armies tried to make daring thrusts deep into Ukrainian territory. They largely failed and lost elite units in the process. Now, Russian forces are advancing by increments under the cover of artillery.

Russia is massing “a very heavy concentration of artillery and armor in every square kilometer that we are unable to cope with,” Oleksiy Danilov, secretary of Ukraine’s National Security and Defense Council, told The Wall Street Journal. “This is giving them the advantage.”

Ukrainian forces are seeking to slow the Russian advance, wearing them down and preparing to counterattack when they can bring more Western weapons to bear.

Ukraine has landed some counter-blows in the past few days with long-range rocket launchers from the U.S. and other Western allies. But Russia’s tactical shift raises questions for Ukraine’s backers, who must now confront the possibility of a long, drawn-out conflict.

Russia seized the city of Lysychansk at the weekend, completing the takeover of the Luhansk region, and is now bombarding Ukraine’s remaining strongholds in neighboring Donetsk.

Despite narrowing its immediate objectives to taking Ukraine’s east, Russia’s strategic goal of controlling Ukraine remains unchanged. The secretary of the Russian Security Council, Nikolai Patrushev, said Tuesday that Russia is aiming to demilitarize Ukraine and force it to adopt neutral status, according to Russian state news agency RIA.

Such statements suggest “that the Kremlin is preparing for a protracted war with the intention of taking much larger portions of Ukraine,” the Washington-based Institute for the Study of War said in an analysis Tuesday.

Moscow’s success in the east recalls some of Russia’s previous wars. As in Chechnya in the 1990s, Russia is offsetting the shortcomings of its ground forces by using massed firepower.

Ukraine is trying to impose high costs on the advancing Russians with fierce resistance, while also preserving troop strength by slowly falling back to more defensible positions as it awaits flows of heavy weapons from the West. It took Russia two months to take the city of Severodonetsk.

Some Western leaders say they fear Ukraine won’t be able to win, despite its fierce determination, as the conflict further erodes the country’s economy and its military struggles against Russia’s advantage in sheer numbers.

While the West has extended military aid to Ukraine, Kyiv says it needs more and warns that it will take time to train soldiers to use the multiple new weapons systems being delivered by the U.S. and its allies.

In a report this week, the U.K.’s Royal United Services Institute think tank said Ukraine needs long-range artillery systems and electronic warfare equipment to counter Russia’s own advanced systems.

The report said that Ukraine’s allies are capable of making up the shortfalls. But, in a nod to the complications of operating too many different weapons systems, the report said success “cannot be achieved through the piecemeal delivery of a large number of different fleets of equipment, each with separate training, maintenance and logistical needs.”

Mr. Danilov said that the Ukraine army has used so many of its Soviet-era armaments and ammunition that it is gradually becoming a force that will have to rely on NATO weaponry.

He said the arrival of U.S. High Mobility Artillery Rocket Systems, or Himars, last month has enabled Ukraine to strike precisely at Russian targets beyond the front lines that were previously beyond the reach of Ukrainian guns.

Mr. Danilov said nine mobile Himars and similar rocket-launch systems donated by the U.S. and its allies are now operating inside Ukraine with deadly effect. The Russians “are defenseless against them,” he said. “They are very worried.”

A Himars strike devastated a command post in the east Ukrainian town of Izyum last week, and on Monday a top Ukrainian official confirmed that Himars were used to bombard Snake Island, a small but significant outpost in the Black Sea that Russia abandoned last week.

But Mr. Danilov said Ukraine would need dozens more Himars launchers to shift the fighting in eastern Ukraine. For now, he said, Ukraine must fight a defensive war.

The Royal United Services Institute report noted that Ukraine’s paucity of skilled infantry and armored-vehicle operators limit its abilities to launch serious counteroffensives. Russia’s artillery is also successfully targeting the Ukrainian military so that it is unable to mount attacks, the report said.

Mr. Danilov said Russia’s own arsenal is showing signs of running low four months after launching its invasion, saying that it no longer has the strength to launch attacks on more than one front.

Moscow has also increasingly been sending lower-precision Soviet-era missiles deep into Ukrainian territory, with less regard for whether they hit civilian targets, he said. Last week, one missile landed in a neighborhood in the southern Ukrainian city of Odessa, where Ukrainian officials said at least 21 civilians were killed.

Mr. Danilov said the missile campaign was intended to blunt support for the war among the Ukrainian public, an overwhelming share of whom still say it would be unacceptable to reach a peace deal with Moscow by ceding territory lost to Russian forces.

Mr. Danilov said that the high level of support for some kind of Ukrainian counterattack may be a rubbing point with some of Ukraine’s allies, who have pledged to support Ukraine until it wins, without specifying what victory means...

More:

The Ukrainian PM dropped the number in a presentation yesterday.

Ukraine's entire GDP is $150 billion.

One of the biggest shakedowns in world history, only second to COVID Mania.https://t.co/mVaZtPvToM

— Jordan Schachtel @ dossier.substack.com (@JordanSchachtel) July 6, 2022

 

The Price of an Unpopular Argument

It's Glenn Loury's introduction to the video below:

Thousands of hours of new race-related content pop up every day on cable news, talk radio, podcasts, newsletters, and YouTube. If you’re tired of hearing partisan left-right talking head punditry, the digital democratization of the media has made pretty much any point of view on race in America—from the benign to the malignant—available to you, if you do a little digging.

On The Glenn Show, I often say things that I nevertheless categorize as “unsayable.” But I haven’t been booted off Twitter (at least not yet). I haven’t been fired or jailed for anything I’ve said. People have gotten mad and said disparaging things about me in public, but that’s their right. So why does it feel like there are certain things “one can’t say” about race?

Violating the progressive line on race can have less easily definable social and professional costs than a Twitter ban or the FBI knocking on your door. As John McWhorter points out in the following excerpt from our recent live event at the Comedy Store, simply stating the facts about crime and racial disparities can lead people to look askance at you or cut you off entirely, to regard you as politically untrustworthy or disreputable. To insist, as I do below, that the out-of-wedlock birthrate among black Americans is a scandal can invite the same response.

There is every reason in the world to ignore an unpopular argument...