Martin Jacques, When China Rules the World

At Amazon, Martin Jacques, When China Rules the World: The End of the Western World and the Birth of a New Global Order.

Why the Past 10 Years of American Life Have Been Uniquely Stupid

I can't block quote this article. There's just too much that's too good. Outstanding. 

Read the whole thing, from Jonathan Haidt, "It's Not Just a Phase." 

Boston School Has Transgender Explain to 4 and 5-Year-Olds That Sometimes Babies Are Assigned the Wrong Sex

At AoSHQ, "David French: Republicans Are 'Against Free Speech' Because They're Instructing Government Employees What They Can Teach Kindergarteners."

Black Flag Defined Punk of the 1980s

A book review, at the Los Angeles Times, "Review: The L.A. man behind the music that defined the 1980s."

I saw them play many times, though I didn't care much for Henry Rollins. 

Black Flag's co-founder and original lead vocalist, Keith Morris (of later Circle Jerks fame), was irreplaceable.

The band played Baces Hall in Los Angeles, October 24, 1980 (set list), and I was there with Gerry Hurtado (a.k.a., Skatemaster Tate), my best friend friend at the time. We got there late. The band was just starting to shred when I heard commotion and saw fans fleeing out the side doors of the club. Thank goodness there were side doors. I sorta didn't realize what was happening. But I saw a row of cops, with billy clubs and riot shields, pushing the crowd toward the front of the hall. 

It was proverbial pandemonium. I look over at Gerry and he was scared shitless. I'd never seen that look on him before, which was complete terror. I said, "Come on!" And we ran out the side, and luckily my car was just across the street. We get in and another car backs up into mine, bashing the front bumper, but we didn't care (I had a 1970 Volkswagen Bug, and their bumpers where pretty hard and durable.) After the little "fender bender" we scrammed. I have a very good recollection of it --- and this was 40 years ago. 

In any case, the books under review are, Glenn Friedman, What I See: The Black Flag Photographs of Glen E. Friedman, and Jim Ruland, Corporate Rock Sucks: The Rise and Fall of SST Records.

From the review:

The June 29, 1980, edition of this paper spoiled Angelenos’ Sunday morning by dropping a dire warning on their doorsteps: The punks had arrived, and they were murderous.

Audiences at punk shows “mug each other,” Patrick Goldstein reported. “Accounts of reckless violence, vandalism and even mutilation at some area rock clubs read like reports from a war zone.”

At the center of this alleged chaos was the band Black Flag, whose shows had become a magnet for police crackdowns since its formation in Hermosa Beach in 1979. They brought some of that scrutiny onto themselves: Founder and guitarist Greg Ginn finagled a slot at a family-friendly festival at Manhattan Beach by saying they were a Fleetwood Mac cover band, then delivered a typically loud, profane set. But the media’s pearl-clutching was disproportionate to the danger. Ginn wasn’t trying to sow anarchy, just locate the spaces that wouldn’t reject punk outright.

In “What I See,” his lively, lavishly assembled collection of Black Flag photos, Glen E. Friedman recalls the violence as wholly on the police side of the ledger. Promoters called in the LAPD, scared by “overwhelming crowds that were showing up that often looked threatening to them.” The band goaded the cops with songs such as “Police Story,” and its fury is palpable throughout the book — even rehearsals look like barnburners. But the response — SWAT teams, billy clubs, helicopters — was absurdly disproportionate. “Corporate Rock Sucks,” Jim Ruland’s well researched history of Ginn and the label he founded, SST Records, puts some context around the absurdity. And it’s a thrilling story in the early going, the tale of a culture being stubbornly constructed from the ground up. In its 1980s heyday, SST released at least a dozen canonical rock albums that were notable for their rejection of convention. Black Flag’s piercing hardcore and Sabbathy sludge shared little with the Minutemen’s springy, spiky punk-jazz fusion, the Meat Puppets’ Dead-like excursions or Hüsker Dü’s blend of pop savvy and stun guitar. But together, they made SST the decade’s preeminent indie label. As Ruland writes: “Ginn was interested in punk rock as a concept — a creative call to arms — not as a specific style of music.”

In that regard, it’s a little disappointing that Ruland — a fiction writer who’s also co-authored two earlier books on Southern California punk — generally sticks to label history and doesn’t make a stronger argument on his subject’s behalf. SST’s accomplishment wasn’t just signing a host of enduring bands; it became the wellspring and prime mover for much of Gen X culture and the indie rock that followed. Black Flag frontman Henry Rollins exemplified a generation’s sour, antiestablishment, heavily ironic posture. The second side of its 1984 album, “My War,” was a grunge touchstone. Hüsker Dü and Sonic Youth gave the ‘90s alt-rock explosion its melodic textbook. Negativland set a template for anticorporate pranking and culture jamming. The touring paths that indie bands across the country took — and still take — were largely developed at SST’s Torrance offices. Its ads and review copies fueled a generation of zines and their writers.

So much of this sprang from Ginn — or more precisely, from his resentment of authority and institutions. Beyond the police bullying and hyperbolic media attention, Black Flag’s recording career was stalled by an extended legal squabble with MCA Records after an exec dubbed 1981’s “Damaged” an “antiparent record.” (The band made that into a literal badge of honor, slapping stickers with the quote on copies of the LP.) Ruland’s chapter titles are framed as confrontations led by the label — “SST vs. the Media,” “SST vs. Hardcore” — but the battles were often Ginn’s.

Still, Ginn wasn’t anybody’s idea of the leader of a cultural movement. He grew up obsessed with ham radio and other engineering-geek phenomena. (SST was originally a small electronics outfit, short for “solid-state transmitters.”) He spoke little as a musician or label chief — and not at all to Ruland, who was told, “I retired from interviews a long time ago.” In “What I See,” Ginn is usually dressed as if he’d just come off a shift assistant managing a Kroger’s.

What made Ginn, Black Flag and SST so distressing to outsiders was partly a matter of aesthetics. Cover art and show flyers designed by Ginn’s brother, Raymond Pettibon, featured feverish, provocative imagery obsessed with sex and death. It was also a matter of timing. The soporific Reagan era made the music and lyrics SST trafficked in seem an active threat. The infamous 1982 punk-rock episode of “Quincy, M.E.,” plainly inspired by news coverage of Black Flag from The Times and elsewhere, was so determined to depict the scene as violent and nihilistic that Jack Klugman’s no-nonsense Quincy took the remarkable step of defending the ‘60s counterculture to make punk seem all the worse.

SST’s contempt for law-and-order conservatism didn’t exactly make them what we’d consider progressive today. Women and people of color were scarce; Black Flag bassist Kira Roessler curtailed her recovery from a hand injury for fear of being booted from the band, leading to permanent damage. Songs like Black Flag’s “Slip It In” were overtly misogynistic. Cover art and SST letterhead flirted with Nazi rhetoric. Bad Brains frontman H.R. was known for homophobic outbursts. The label came grotesquely close to releasing a Charles Manson album...

I still have a few of the Raymond Pettibon concert flyers, packed away somewhere.

A great moment in rock and roll history. An iconic band for the ages.

Brie Larson Stuns

At Giant Freakin' Robot, "Brie Larson Stuns In Backless Dress In New Post."

And on Instagram.

Brooklyn Subway Shooting: At Least 16 Shot; Explosive Device or Smoke Bomb May Have Been Discharged (VIDEO)

Man on the street interview at CBS News 2 New York, "Witness saw people running from subway, 'not looking back'." Dude thought it was definitely a professional operation; super organized.

At WSJ, "Brooklyn Subway Shooting Live Updates: At Least 16 People Injured in Sunset Park":

At least 16 people were injured in the shooting Tuesday morning at the 36th Street subway station in Sunset Park, according to the New York City Fire Department.

Multiple people have been transported to local hospitals, police officials said. Officers and emergency responders were on the scene providing medical attention in the continuing investigation.

Ten of the 16 injured were wounded by gunfire, according to fire officials. Five are in critical but stable condition.

Images from the incident showed people on the ground, which was spotted in places with blood stains. The air appeared smoky.

New York Police Department officials said an explosive device or smoke bomb may have been discharged in the incident.

*****

And, "Police Search for Suspect in Brooklyn Subway Shooting: Ten people were shot and wounded and six others were treated for shrapnel injuries, smoke inhalation and panic, FDNY officials said":

BROOKLYN, N.Y.—A manhunt is under way for the person who shot and wounded 10 people on a busy New York City subway train and platform Tuesday morning.

A Manhattan bound train was approaching the 36th Street station in the Sunset Park neighborhood of Brooklyn at about 8:30 a.m. ET when the suspect put on a gas mask and took a canister out of his bag and opened it, filling the train car with smoke, said New York City Police Commissioner Keechant Sewell.

“He then opened fire, striking multiple people on the subway and on the platform,” Ms. Sewell said at a news conference Tuesday afternoon.

The suspect shot and injured 10 people, according to the New York City Fire Department. Six others were treated for shrapnel wounds, smoke inhalation and panic, according to the FDNY. Victim ages ranged from teenage to middle age, a department spokesperson said. Five were in critical but stable condition.

Ms. Sewell described the subject as a 5-foot-5-inch Black man who was dressed in a green construction vest and a gray hooded sweatshirt.

No motive has been established for the shooting and the incident isn’t being investigated as an act of terrorism, Ms. Sewell said. The suspect shot people from a variety of ethnic backgrounds, she said.

New York Police Department officials said no active explosive devices have been found at the scene.

The 36th Street stop on the N and R train lines is a busy station in the mornings. The stop connects residents in the Sunset Park neighborhood to the major transit hub at Atlantic Avenue.

The station is one block from Greenwood Cemetery as well as Industry City, a business and shopping center with over 500 companies and 50 shops across 16 campus buildings. The complex is packed with shoppers and families on the weekends, and workers at offices including co-working space Camp David on weekdays.

Schools in the vicinity went into lockdown, New York City Department of Education officials said. Children were permitted to enter school buildings and once inside were required to stay indoors. New York Police Department officials said there were no reports of injuries at schools or reports of criminal activity related to the shooting.

Two hours after the shooting, dozens of onlookers gathered around the police cordon as several helicopters flew overhead. Some asked those around them if they saw what happened, others asked for details and shared what they have heard.

Sunset Park resident Erik Frankel said he has been on alert in the neighborhood due to an uptick in crime. “It kept me up at night knowing how bad things are, knowing that I live here alone with a 4-year-old,” he said.

Mr. Frankel, a candidate for New York state assembly, called the shooting senseless. “I can’t conceive to understand what thoughts tiptoe through the Everglades of [the shooter’s] mind,” he said.

Shootings in the city are up 8.4% year to date, at 322 incidents, compared with 297 in the same period in 2021, according to the latest NYPD data. Police arrested 4,025 people for major crimes in March compared with 3,140 for the same month last year, officials said last week...

 

Paul Gillingham, Unrevolutionary Mexico

See Paul Gillingham, Unrevolutionary Mexico: The Birth of a Strange Dictatorship.

Abby Leftwich

A lovely young lady, on Instagram.

Also, wonder from Appalachian State University.

Plus, Anna Darling.

Geoffrey Wawro, Son of Freedom

See, Geoffrey Wawro, Sons of Freedom: The Forgotten American Soldiers Who Defeated Germany in World War I.

'Love My Way'

The Psychedelic Furs.

There's an army on the dance floor

It's a fashion with a gun, my love

In a room without a door

A kiss is not enough in
Love my way, it's a new road

I follow where my mind goes
They'd put us on a railroad

They'd dearly make us pay

For laughing in their faces

And making it our way

There's emptiness behind their eyes

There's dust in all their hearts

They just want to steal us all

And take us all apart

But not in

Love my way, it's a new road

I follow where my mind goes
Love my way, it's a new road

I follow where my mind goes
Love my way, it's a new road

I follow where my mind goes

So swallow all your tears, my love

And put on your new face

You can never win or lose

If you don't run the race

Yeah, yeah, Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah

Ah-hoo, Ah-hoo, Ah-hoo, Ahh-ahh-ahh-ahh, ahh-ahh-ahh, ahh
Ahh-ahh-ahh-ahh, ahh-ahh-ahh, ahh...

France's Macron and Far-Right Le Pen Lead in First Round of Presidential Election

It's going to be a nail-biter. Two weeks from today.

At WSJ, "France’s Macron and Far-Right Le Pen Lead in First Round of Presidential Election":

PARIS—President Emmanuel Macron and far-right leader Marine Le Pen led the first round of France’s presidential election, according to exit polls, setting the stage for a closely contested runoff amid fears over high-inflation and immigration.

Mr. Macron won the first round with 28.5% of the vote ahead of Ms. Le Pen with 24.2%, according to polling firm Elabe. The French president now faces an April 24 showdown with Ms. Le Pen that polls say will be much more tightly contested than his landslide victory five years ago.

Today, French politics are more polarized, making it hard for Mr. Macron to rekindle the coalition of disaffected socialists and conservatives rallied behind him in 2017, fueling a 32-point margin of victory. This time, widespread anxiety over the decline of middle- and working-class France—coupled with deep anti-immigrant sentiment in many parts of the country—has brought Ms. Le Pen from the political fringe to the center of national discourse. Polls taken ahead of Sunday’s vote showed Mr. Macron leading Ms. Le Pen in the runoff by just 2 percentage points.

Mr. Macron’s vulnerability reveals the challenges lurking for a European political establishment that has tried to turn the page on populist and nationalist movements, focusing on geopolitical challenges like the Covid-19 pandemic and Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. Ms. Le Pen wants to pull France out of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization’s military command, in which French soldiers currently serve under the alliance’s commanders. She also wants European Union nations to claw back powers they have delegated to EU technocrats in Brussels.

A month ago, Mr. Macron was riding high in the polls with a double-digit lead over Ms. Le Pen. His advisers in the Élysée Palace said he was too busy taking calls with President Biden and his Russian counterpart, Vladimir Putin, about the war in Ukraine to hit the campaign trail in earnest or participate in debates with his rivals. Polls indicated there was no need, with one survey in March showing that 79% of respondents—regardless of who they supported—expected Mr. Macron to win.

“Macron didn’t even bother campaigning,” said Nathalie Dome, a 50-year-old cleaning lady who said she is voting for Ms. Le Pen. “He’s not the only one who can pick up the phone and call Putin.”

Ms. Le Pen, meanwhile, crisscrossed the country, holding rallies in small rural towns. Her highly disciplined campaign focused on the economic sting of rising inflation while casting off much of the fiery rhetoric that has defined the Le Pen brand of politics for decades under her father, who has been convicted for anti-Semitic speech.

“It’s hard to make ends meet,” said 30-year-old Estelle Classen, a gas-station employee. “Prices are increasing so fast, it’s abominable.”

If the focus on pocketbook issues softened Ms. Le Pen’s image, so has the competition she faced from Eric Zemmour, another far-right candidate. A former TV pundit with strident anti-immigrant views, Mr. Zemmour trafficked in conspiracy theories that Ms. Le Pen refused to even utter.

Ms. Le Pen has stuck to hard-line positions on the place of Islam in France, calling for a sweeping ban on Muslim headscarves in public spaces. But she has managed to temper that message with humanizing moments, inviting TV cameras into her home to talk about being a cat lover.

“Marine Le Pen has learned from her mistakes. Zemmour is kind of scary,” said 28-year-old social worker Florian Dubois.

Mr. Macron, on the other hand, has kept his distance. Known for his self-proclaimed “Jupiterian” style of governance, the French leader waited until March 3 to officially declare his candidacy. The move initially kept Mr. Macron above the political fray, allowing him to focus on diplomacy and depriving his rivals of the public attention that comes from sparring with an incumbent...

Alyssa Farah on Donald Trump, Jr.'s, Text Messages Trying to Overturn the 2020 Presidential Election Results (VIDEO)

Ms. Alyssa, who was White House Director of Strategic Communications and Assistant to the President during the Trump administration, with Jake Tapper:

Shanghai Crackdown on Omicron Shows Brutality of China's 'Zero Covid' Policy (VIDEO)

CONTENT WARNING!

There's video (HERE) of the massive state crackdown in Shanghai. To say it's troubling would be an extreme understatement. THIS is why the Chinese Communist Party controls all communication and information --- the regime cannot allow the outside world to see the brutal inhumanity of the "Middle Kingdom's" totalitarian system.

At the Financial Times, "Shanghai lockdown tests the limits of Xi Jinping’s zero-Covid policy":

In late March, as Shanghai residents began to worry that rising coronavirus infections would lead the city into its first mass lockdown, authorities turned to social media to calm the situation.

“Please do not believe or spread rumours,” the city government wrote on China’s Weibo platform on March 23, where posts warning that people would imminently be confined to their homes had already spurred panic buying of food.

Just days later, the outline of the rumours — if not the fine details — turned out to be true. In response to thousands of cases, China’s largest city last Sunday unveiled the most significant lockdown measures in the country since the sealing off of Wuhan when Covid-19 first emerged more than two years ago...

Citizens are jumping off high-rise building in mass, and people are hanging themselves in groves of trees.

The police are killing ALL cats and dogs in the city.

 

The Return of the Old American Right

From Matthew Continetti, at WSJ, "The Trump GOP resembles the party of Calvin Coolidge in its commitment to economic protection, restricted immigration and non-intervention abroad":

It’s hard to think of two American presidents with less in common than Calvin Coolidge and Donald Trump. For one thing, Coolidge held a variety of public offices, from Massachusetts governor to vice president, before assuming office on Aug. 2, 1923. Mr. Trump had no government or military experience before his inauguration in 2017.

Coolidge, moreover, was a budget hawk who never met a line item he didn’t want to cut. Mr. Trump presided over record peacetime deficits even before federal spending took a quantum leap during the coronavirus pandemic. Coolidge was also a man of few words. Trump is not.

Yet these personal differences obscure important political similarities. Both Coolidge and Mr. Trump staked their presidencies on voter satisfaction with broadly shared prosperity. Both supported restricting immigration into the United States. Both wanted to protect American industry from foreign competition. Both sought to avoid overseas entanglements.

Mr. Trump’s views now dominate the Republican Party. For anyone who grew up with the GOP of Ronald Reagan, the two Bushes and John McCain, this can be strange and bewildering. But in many respects, it’s a return to the principles of the 1920s, of Coolidge and his predecessor Warren Harding. Their conservatism was delegitimized by the crises of the 20th century. The Great Depression robbed the right of its claim to promoting prosperity. FDR’s New Deal created a federal government that Republicans did not comprehend or control. Then World War II discredited the right’s noninterventionist foreign policy. What emerged from the rubble was a postwar conservative movement that embraced alliances, military intervention, forward defense, free trade and open immigration to defeat communism and fuel economic growth.

This postwar conservative internationalism—known to its critics on the right as “globalism”—may have been an aberration. Today, the GOP is reverting to its pre-World War II identity as the party of low taxes, economic protection, restricted immigration, wariness of foreign intervention and religious piety. This retro-Republicanism could turn out to be a popular mix, but history shows that it is also a combustible one.

By the beginning of the 1920s, the American electorate had soured on its experiences with the Progressive movement and the Great War. The influenza pandemic of 1918-20, the Red-hunting of Wilson administration officials A. Mitchell Palmer and J. Edgar Hoover, and postwar recession all contributed to civil unrest. Change came in the form of a garrulous Republican politician from Ohio named Warren Harding.

“Our supreme task,” President Harding said in his inaugural address, “is the resumption of our onward, normal way.” Harding promised to reduce social tensions. He disavowed foreign intervention and withdrew U.S. occupation forces from postwar Germany. His secretary of state pursued disarmament treaties with the great powers. He opposed Wilson’s League of Nations.

For Harding, “normalcy” meant nation-building at home. He raised tariffs and restricted imports. And he venerated the Constitution. In a speech delivered in 1920, he called the document “the very base of all Americanism, the ‘Ark of the Covenant’ of American liberty, the very temple of equal rights.”

When Harding died in office in 1923, Calvin Coolidge did not depart from this constitutionalist path. To Coolidge, the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution offered the last words in a centuries-long argument over popular sovereignty. “If all men are created equal, that is final,” he said. “If they are endowed with inalienable rights, that is final. If governments derive their just powers from the consent of the governed, that is final. No advance, no progress can be made beyond these propositions.”

Coolidge argued that success in self-government was related to religious faith. Political freedom depended on traditional morality and self-control. He called on Americans to preserve the inheritance of the Founders, to follow “the spiritual and moral leadership which they showed.”

Coolidge opposed immigration. He and Harding signed into law two restriction acts that shut off entry to the U.S. for the next 40 years. As he closed the door to mass migration, however, Coolidge also celebrated the contributions of earlier waves of immigrants. “Whether one traces his Americanism back three centuries to the Mayflower, or three years [to] steerage,” he told the American Legion in 1925, “is not half so important as whether his Americanism of today is real and genuine. No matter by what various crafts we came here, we are all now in the same boat.” But there was no room for additional passengers.

Coolidge was out of office for less than a year when the stock market crash of 1929 and the onset of the Great Depression upended the established order. His Republican successor as president, former secretary of commerce Herbert Hoover, struggled to contain the economic fallout and social disorder. “This election is not a mere shift from the ins to the outs,” Hoover said in the run-up to the 1932 election. “It means deciding the direction our Nation will take over a century to come.”

The nation opted for New York governor Franklin D. Roosevelt, whose New Deal created a bureaucratic structure of government, centralized in the nation’s capital, which quickly won the enmity of conservatives. The upheaval of the 1930s drove the partisans of strict constitutionalism and nonintervention in economics and foreign affairs from positions of power and influence.

The GOP was a leaderless rump until the election of 1938, when it found a new spokesman in Ohio senator Robert A. Taft. As the son of President William Howard Taft, he had been raised to uphold the constitutionalist, free-market, noninterventionist traditions of his party. The reach of state power under FDR and its concentration in the executive branch reminded him of the new authoritarian governments in Europe. The New Deal, he said, was “absolutely contrary to the whole American theory on which this country was founded.”

Taft’s philosophy contained all the principles of his father, Harding and Coolidge. As he put it in 1938, “The regulation of wages, hours, and prices and practices in every industry is something which is, in effect, socialism; which is government regulation of the worst sort; which means a totalitarian state.”

For Taft, Roosevelt’s preparations for war against Germany were the foreign-policy equivalent of the New Deal. He had worked for Herbert Hoover at the American Relief Administration during the final years of the Wilson presidency, and what he saw amid the rubble of the Great War confirmed his loathing of great-power competition. Europe was a charnel house of nationalism, dynastic politics and class struggle. Taft wanted the U.S. to avoid it and warned against mobilizing American armed forces too quickly. “Our armament program should be based on defending the United States and not defending democracy throughout the world,” he said in response to Roosevelt’s 1939 State of the Union address, in which the president warned of the rise of Nazism and called for increased defense spending

The GOP was a leaderless rump until the election of 1938, when it found a new spokesman in Ohio senator Robert A. Taft. As the son of President William Howard Taft, he had been raised to uphold the constitutionalist, free-market, noninterventionist traditions of his party. The reach of state power under FDR and its concentration in the executive branch reminded him of the new authoritarian governments in Europe. The New Deal, he said, was “absolutely contrary to the whole American theory on which this country was founded.”

Taft’s philosophy contained all the principles of his father, Harding and Coolidge. As he put it in 1938, “The regulation of wages, hours, and prices and practices in every industry is something which is, in effect, socialism; which is government regulation of the worst sort; which means a totalitarian state.”

For Taft, Roosevelt’s preparations for war against Germany were the foreign-policy equivalent of the New Deal. He had worked for Herbert Hoover at the American Relief Administration during the final years of the Wilson presidency, and what he saw amid the rubble of the Great War confirmed his loathing of great-power competition. Europe was a charnel house of nationalism, dynastic politics and class struggle. Taft wanted the U.S. to avoid it and warned against mobilizing American armed forces too quickly. “Our armament program should be based on defending the United States and not defending democracy throughout the world,” he said in response to Roosevelt’s 1939 State of the Union address, in which the president warned of the rise of Nazism and called for increased defense spending.

In the view of Taft and other noninterventionist conservatives, war would expand government, lead to rationing, and invest FDR with a dangerous amount of authority. The U.S. should defend the mainland and the Caribbean basin, Taft said, but otherwise it should leave the conflagration in Europe to burn itself out. His priority was the home front. “There is a good deal more danger of the infiltration of totalitarian ideas from the New Deal circle in Washington,” he told a St. Louis audience on May 20, 1940, “than there will ever be from any activities of the communists or the Nazi bund.”

Taft neither joined nor spoke for the antiwar America First Committee, but he welcomed its appearance on the national stage. The organization was established in 1940 in Chicago. Its founders included graduates of some of the nation’s elite educational institutions, and it drew support from Republicans, Democrats, Progressives, conservatives and even figures within the Roosevelt administration....

In its protectionism, resistance to immigration, religiosity, and antipathy to foreign entanglements, Donald Trump’s Make America Great Again movement resembles the conservatism of the 1920s—with one significant difference. In the 1920s, the right was in charge. It was self-confident and prosperous. It saw itself as defending core American institutions.

A century later, in the early 2020s, the right has been driven from power at the federal level. It has been locked out of the commanding heights of American culture: technology, media, entertainment, the academy. Its rhetoric has often veered into apocalypticism and conspiracy theory...

 

'Fractured' France Heads to the Polls

France votes tomorrow, which is actually right now, after 4:00am there.

I'll be back tomorrow with the results, of course. 

For now, here's the New York Times, "With Macron and Le Pen Leading Election Field, a Fractured France Decides":

In Dijon, magnificence and malaise sit side by side, in the image of a country divided before the presidential vote on Sunday.

DIJON, France — At Le Carillon, a convivial place for a coq au vin as France prepares to vote in a critical election, the heated political debates that always characterized past campaigns have fallen silent, as if the country were anesthetized.

In other election seasons, the restaurant would buzz for months with arguments over candidates and issues. This time, said the owner, Martine Worner-Bablon, “Nobody talks politics. I don’t know, people’s heads are elsewhere. No confidence in politicians. If anything, they talk about the war.”

In this strange atmosphere, overshadowed by the Russian invasion of Ukraine, President Emmanuel Macron, a centrist, holds a slight lead over Marine Le Pen, a hard-right nationalist, according to the latest polls. But his comfortable advantage of more than 10 percentage points has evaporated over the past month as his dismissal of debate and failure to engage have irked voters.

“What astonishes me is that the president of the French Republic does not think first about the French,” Ms. Le Pen, whose newfound mild manner masks a harsh anti-immigrant program, said last month. It was a remark that hit home as Mr. Macron spent most of his time pondering how to end a European war.

With the vote spread over two rounds starting on Sunday, many people still undecided and an expected abstention rate of up to 30 percent, the election’s outcome is deeply uncertain. During her last campaign, in 2017, Ms. Le Pen chose to appear at the Kremlin with President Vladimir V. Putin, who said with a smirk that he did not wish “to influence events in any way,” as she vowed to lift sanctions against Russia “quite quickly” if elected.

The possibility of France lurching toward an anti-NATO, pro-Russia, xenophobic and nationalistic position in the event of a Le Pen victory constitutes a potential shock as great as the 2016 British vote for Brexit or the election the same year of Donald J. Trump in the United States.

At what President Biden has repeatedly called an “inflection point” in the global confrontation between autocracy and democracy, a France under Ms. Le Pen would push the needle in the very direction the United States opposes.

All seems tranquil in Dijon, for now. Quiet and immaculate, its center a succession of churches and palaces, the capital of the Burgundy region is as good a symbol as any of “la douce France,” the sweet land of gastronomic delights that finds its way into many people’s hearts. But Dijon, a town of 155,000 inhabitants, has its turbulent underside, in the image of a country where beauty and belligerence and magnificence and malaise are often uneasy bedfellows.

Among regulars at Le Carillon, inquiries as to the whereabouts of nuclear bomb shelters are on the rise. Emmanuel Bichot, a center-right city councilor, does not like the country’s mood. “There’s a lot of frustration, of aggression, of tension,” he said. “People get angry very quickly. This has not been an election about programs. I don’t hear anyone debating them.”

He paused to contemplate this puzzle. “It’s come down to Macron’s Machiavellian manipulations against Le Pen’s resilience.” This is the third time that Ms. Le Pen, the leader of the National Rally, formerly the National Front, has run for president. The two leaders in the first round of voting go through to a runoff on April 24.

One fundamental development contributed to the fractured, incoherent nature of the election. Mr. Macron’s agile occupation of the political center, destroying first the center-left Socialist Party and then the center-right Republicans, effectively wiped out two pillars of postwar French democracy.

What was left was the president against the extremes, whether to the right in the form of Ms. Le Pen or to the left in the form of Jean-Luc Mélenchon. Between them, Ms. Le Pen, the far-right upstart Éric Zemmour and Mr. Mélenchon are set to garner some 50 percent of the vote, the latest poll from the Ifop-Fiducial group showed...

 

Kayla Erin

On Twitter.

Another Erin, "No paywalls, hardcore content."

Plus, Louise Hannah.

Jeremy Scahill, Blackwater

At Amazon, Blackwater: The Rise of the World's Most Powerful Mercenary Army.

Russians Who Support the War in Ukraine Are Turning in Other Russians Who Don't

Just like the good old times with Uncle Joe or back to the future?

At the New York Times, "Spurred by Putin, Russians Turn on One Another Over the War":

Citizens are denouncing one another, illustrating how the war is feeding paranoia and polarization in Russian society.

Marina Dubrova, an English teacher on the Russian island of Sakhalin in the Pacific, showed an uplifting YouTube video to her eighth-grade class last month in which children, in Russian and Ukrainian, sing about a “world without war.”

After she played it, a group of girls stayed behind during recess and quizzed her on her views.

“Ukraine is a separate country, a separate one,” Ms. Dubrova, 57, told them.

“No longer,” one of the girls shot back.

A few days later, the police came to her school in the port town of Korsakov. In court, she heard a recording of that conversation, apparently made by one of the students. The judge handed down a $400 fine for “publicly discrediting” Russia’s Armed Forces. The school fired her, she said, for “amoral behavior.”

“It’s as though they’ve all plunged into some kind of madness,” Ms. Dubrova said in a phone interview, reflecting on the pro-war mood around her.

With President Vladimir V. Putin’s direct encouragement, Russians who support the war against Ukraine are starting to turn on the enemy within.

The episodes are not yet a mass phenomenon, but they illustrate the building paranoia and polarization in Russian society. Citizens are denouncing one another in an eerie echo of Stalin’s terror, spurred on by vicious official rhetoric from the state and enabled by far-reaching new laws that criminalize dissent.

There are reports of students turning in teachers and people telling on their neighbors and even the diners at the next table. In a mall in western Moscow, it was the “no to war” text displayed in a computer repair store and reported by a passer-by that got the store’s owner, Marat Grachev, detained by the police. In St. Petersburg, a local news outlet documented the furor over suspected pro-Western sympathies at the public library; it erupted after a library official mistook the image of a Soviet scholar on a poster for that of Mark Twain.

In the western region of Kaliningrad, the authorities sent residents text messages urging them to provide phone numbers and email addresses of “provocateurs” in connection with the “special operation” in Ukraine, Russian newspapers reported; they can do so conveniently through a specialized account in the Telegram messaging app. A nationalist political party launched a website urging Russians to report “pests” in the elite.

“I am absolutely sure that a cleansing will begin,” Dmitri Kuznetsov, the member of Parliament behind the website, said in an interview, predicting that the process would accelerate after the “active phase” of the war ended. He then clarified: “We don’t want anyone to be shot, and we don’t even want people to go to prison.”

But it is the history of mass execution and political imprisonment in the Soviet era, and the denunciation of fellow citizens encouraged by the state, that now looms over Russia’s deepening climate of repression. Mr. Putin set the tone in a speech on March 16, declaring that Russian society needed a “self-purification” in which people would “distinguish true patriots from scum and traitors and simply spit them out like a fly that accidentally flew into their mouths.”

In the Soviet logic, those who choose not to report their fellow citizens could be viewed as being suspect themselves.

“In these conditions, fear is settling into people again,” said Nikita Petrov, a leading scholar of the Soviet secret police. “And that fear dictates that you report.”

In March, Mr. Putin signed a law that punishes public statements contradicting the government line on what the Kremlin terms its “special military operation” in Ukraine with as much as 15 years in prison. It was a harsh but necessary measure, the Kremlin said, given the West’s “information war” against Russia.

Prosecutors have already used the law against more than 400 people, according to the OVD-Info rights group, including a man who held up a piece of paper with eight asterisks on it. “No to war” in Russian has eight letters.

“This is some kind of enormous joke that we, to our misfortune, are living in,” Aleksandra Bayeva, the head of OVD-Info’s legal department, said of the absurdity of some of the war-related prosecutions. She said she had seen a sharp rise in the frequency of people reporting on their fellow citizens.

“This is some kind of enormous joke that we, to our misfortune, are living in,” Aleksandra Bayeva, the head of OVD-Info’s legal department, said of the absurdity of some of the war-related prosecutions. She said she had seen a sharp rise in the frequency of people reporting on their fellow citizens.

A recording of that exchange appeared on a popular account on Telegram that often posts inside information about criminal cases. The Federal Security Service, a successor agency to the K.G.B., called her in and warned her that her words blaming Russia for the bombing of a maternity hospital in Mariupol, Ukraine, last month were “100 percent a criminal case.”

She is now being investigated for causing “grave consequences” under last month’s censorship law, punishable by 10 to 15 years in prison.

Ms. Gen, 45, said she found little support among her students or from her school, and quit her job this month. When she talked in class about her opposition to the war, she said she felt “hatred” toward her radiating from some of her students.

“My point of view did not resonate in the hearts and minds of basically anyone,” she said in an interview...

Still more.

 

Who Is Looking Out For Gay Kids?

From Andrew Sullivan,on Substack, "The risks of imposing critical gender theory on young children":

It seems to me that any books that teach kids to be compassionate and accepting [children’s books and curricula that used in many schools and recommended by groups like the Human Rights Campaign, etc.], and aware of different ways of being human, are a positive thing. I don’t doubt the good intentions behind them. Having some materials for a genuinely trans child is a good thing. But teaching all public school kids under the age of eight that their body has no reference to their sex is a huge development — and news to most American parents. And encouraging toddlers to pick pronouns like “ze” and “tree” is not exactly what parents send their kids to public school for.

These teaching materials aim to be inclusive of the tiny minority of trans children — but they do this by essentially universalizing the very rare experience of being transgender, and suggesting that everyone’s gender is completely independent of biological sex, and trumps it in any conflict. The only way to help trans kids feel better about themselves, this argument goes, is to tell the lie that their experience is everybody’s experience. We are all varieties of trans people now, choosing our sex and performing our gender.

But, of course, we’re not all varieties of trans; the overwhelming majority of humans, including gay humans, experience sex and gender as completely compatible — when they think about them at all. And our species is sexually dimorphic. When pushed to defend the idea that humans are not a binary sexual species, critical theorists lean on the “univariate fallacy.” That argues that any single exception to a rule completely demolishes the rule. If there are any exceptions to every human being male or female, even if they are a tiny percentage of the whole, then there is no sex binary.

But that’s bizarre. That a small percentage of people are attracted to the same sex, for example, does not invalidate the rule that humans are overwhelmingly heterosexual — and if this were not the case, humans wouldn’t exist at all. Gay people are the exception that proves the heterosexual rule. The much smaller number of trans people, likewise, does not disprove that the overwhelming majority of people are completely at ease with their biological sex. It actually proves it, by showing the terrible psychic cost of being otherwise. (Trans kids and adults deal with huge mental health challenges, and commit suicide at staggering rates.) Intersex and DSD people are not a separate species, or some kind of third sex, no more than people with Down Syndrome are anything but fully human. They are a variation in the sex binary.

For most kids, of course, this stuff will probably be taken in stride. They’ll play with pronouns, feel at home in their bodies, and go on to express their sex as humans always have. Life itself will disprove these weird theories. And if some of this new gender gobbledegook encourages them to be more accepting of others unlike them, of boys who wear dresses or girls who love football, it may well do a lot of good.

But for troubled kids with gender dysphoria — or at least some discomfort with being a boy or girl because they don’t seem to fit in very well with their straight peers — there’s a much greater risk. I’m worried about kids with autism, kids from very dysfunctional families, kids with every sort of mental health issue that needs to be unpacked before judgment is made. I’m worried that gay kids could absorb the idea that what is different about them is not that they are attracted to their same sex, but that they may, in fact, be the other sex “inside.” Most kids with gender dysphoria turn out to be gay in adulthood, as the discomfort disappears with puberty. (That’s certainly my own experience.) But these young gay kids are being subtly taught, at a deeply impressionable age, that they may be in the wrong body.

Among the most important things a gay boy needs to know is that he is no less a boy because he is attracted to his own sex. The proof of this is his own body. Removing the body from any conception of sex takes this away from him. And if he were ever to act out the idea of being a girl, the current treatment is immediate affirmation, puberty blockers, then female hormones and sterilization. Letting him be, or supporting him in his male body, or allowing him to fully experience puberty and grow up gay, is less and less where the emphasis lies.

We have accumulating evidence that lesbian girls in particular are susceptible to this suggestion — as we see transition rates soar beyond anything previously known in teen years, and as the number of detransitioning women grows in number. This unavoidable tension between messages that are good for trans kids and those that are good for gay kids is absent from the debate — in part because the woke conflate both experiences into the entirely ideological construct of being LGBTQIA++. But no one is LGBTQIA++. It’s literally impossible. And the difference between the gay and trans experience is vast, especially when it comes to biological sex.

Here’s where that difference counts. Gay people have had to struggle to own their own sex and their own bodies; while trans people have had to struggle to disown theirs. On this core question, our interests are, in fact, diametrically opposed.

Activist trans groups like HRC or the ACLU may thereby be unwittingly putting gay children at risk, misleading them about their sex and their bodies, putting ideas in their head that in the current heated atmosphere could easily lead to irreversible life-long decisions before puberty. And none of this is necessary. It is perfectly possible to look out for the very few genuinely trans children, without revolutionizing everything we know about the human body and biology. It’s possible to be welcoming to gay kids without insinuating that their real problem could be being “in the wrong body.”

And one of the core elements of gay male culture — the celebration of the male body, its unique qualities, and its sexual power — is effectively diminished. It’s diminished because we are told that being a man is now a feeling inside your head rather than a fact about your body, from the first wave of testosterone in the womb onwards. All that gay male physical sensuality — the interaction of male bodies with one another, the passion for biological maleness — is reduced to an arid, gnostic, inside “feeling” unrelated to the body at all.

At some point, gay men need to face down those who deny the biological differences in the human body that make homosexuality possible. If there is no sex binary, there is no homosexuality. We are not some third sex; we are one of two sexes: men. Our sex is not just in our head; it was not merely assigned at birth. It is in our bodies and minds shaped by testosterone since the womb, bodies that seek sex and intimacy with other male bodies shaped by testosterone in the womb. That the former gay rights movement would now seek to deny this is just one sign of its collapse into woke degeneracy. That some gay rights leaders are now telling gay men they should force themselves to be attracted to vaginas, or that we have to have a pronoun sticker on our jacket to remind people we’re men, is an outrage.

I have a feeling that some in the forefront of this revolution know there is a large body of silent opinion among gay men and many lesbians that deeply believes in sex differences, cherishes and celebrates the male and female bodies, and does not see gayness as connected to transgender experience (which is not to say that transgender experience is any less valid). Gay happiness depends on our owning our own sex, not denying it. And biology is our friend. There’s no reason gay kids should not also understand this. And be spared the mandatory indoctrination into a postmodern homophobic lie.

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