The Resurrection of Objective Truth

Among Donald Trump's achievements is one for which he will be especially despised by our postmodern friends. He has, as Glenn Stanton points out at The Federalist, bamboozled those of his critics who scoff at the very notion that there's any objective truth, especially about morality, into tacitly admitting that objective truth does indeed exist after all.

For decades we've been told that truth is subjective and relative, that we live in a post-fact world, that what's true for me isn't necessarily true for you, that the culture in which one lives sets the standard for moral truth and no one can judge anyone else's truth.

But all of that progressive flummery went out the window the day Trump walked down the escalator and announced his candidacy for the presidency. Since then, progressives have touted a standard of truth that a fundamentalist would envy.

Here's Stanton:

Whether he meant to or not, Trump almost single-handedly corrected the left’s false view of the nature of truth. Indeed, if we learned anything from the left and their media partisans these last few years, it is this: Truth is no longer relative.

The notion that each of us has his own equally legitimate take on the truth has been demonstrably demolished by the Age of Trump. Over the last five years, the world was regularly reminded just how illegitimate one particular man’s view of the truth was. And there was to be no debate over that objectively true truth.

The idea, considered axiomatic by the left until Trump strode onto the political stage, that no one can judge anyone else's concept of what's true evaporated like morning mist among journalists obsessed with pointing out Trump's lies.

For all his foibles, Trump couldn’t open his mouth without giving flight to battalions of passionate media elites and Hollywood-types who commissioned themselves the faithful and dogged centurions of this precious new and fragile thing called objective truth. They showed up to work every day to constantly remind us that one particular person’s take on truth was indeed wholly illegitimate.

In a reversal so sudden and sharp that it might've dislocated an observer's cervical vertebrae, the progressive media overnight abandoned their moral relativism and became stout defenders of objective truth. Time magazine, Stanton reminds us, even blamed Trump for the death of truth when in fact Trump was simply a manifestation of the postmodern epistemology that has been regnant in our culture for over fifty years.

Stanton continues:

While both Bill Clinton and Barack Obama were feted as postmodern presidents, Trump represents the post-postmodern president because the idea that all perspectives should be welcome at that table is now categorically dead. Some ideas are indeed evil and must be rooted out and denounced with great fervency.

As “fact-checking” became the secular press’s new religious duty to the world in the Age of Trump, we are all objectivists now — and of a very fundamentalist flavor. Rare were days when we were not “gifted” their services, often in “real-time,” when Trump said or tweeted anything. Did one incorrect statement ever fall from his tongue or fingertips without being dutifully called out? No, even his tiniest falsehoods were catalogued in obsessive detail.

We now know with unquestioned certainty that there are indeed ... certain choices and assertions [which] are forever and always morally and rationally wrong. Our brightest commentators never let us forget how nearly everything Trump ever said or did was fundamentally immoral and unethical.

Of course, our media and academics, being as partisan as they are, shouldn't be expected to apply this newfound knowledge consistently. Doubtless, they'll hold Republicans and conservatives to an objective standard of truth and everyone else will be assessed through a relativistic lens.

Even so, the left has made an important beginning on the road back to moral and logical sanity by recognizing that truth matters.

Stanton concludes with this:

At the very least, Trump served to convince the left that objective truth does indeed exist and it does make unbending claims on all of us. From here on out, whenever someone tries to convince any of us that truth is relative and all perspectives deserve an equal hearing, we only need to ask “Including Trump’s?” to put that silly assertion to rest. For that, we can all be thankful.

Indeed we can.

The next time you hear someone complain about Trump's moral failings ask them whether they believe that moral truth is objective or subjective. They may not answer at all, but if they reply that they believe it's objectively wrong to do the things they criticize Trump for doing, ask them what they believe objective right and wrong are grounded in if not in God. A nontheist will have a difficult time answering this question.

If they respond that they believe that moral truth is subjective or relative to one's own feelings, which are often a function of one's own social setting, class or culture, ask them why they think that anyone else should care about their moral judgments of Trump. Any judgment that's a product of one's own feelings, after all, is simply a matter of taste and can hardly have relevance for anyone other than the person making the judgment.

The irony of the left's embrace of objective moral truth during the Trump presidency is that objective moral truth can only exist if God exists, so when an atheist delivers a moral judgment that he implicitly holds to be objectively true he's tacitly admitting that he's wrong about God's existence.

It must feel very awkward, I'd think.

Raising Wages, Raising Unemployment

Part of President Biden's Covid-19 stimulus plan is a proposed increase of the minimum wage to $15 an hour. It's not clear what this has to do with Covid nor is it clear why the Biden administration is pushing for this increase when the majority of studies over the last thirty years have shown that raising the minimum wage has a deleterious effect on employment, an effect that certainly seems on the face of it to be plain common sense.

Charles Fain Lehman at The Washington Free Beacon cites a study that shows precisely this. Lehman writes:

The analysis, published Monday by the National Bureau of Economic Research, combed through academic literature on the minimum wage and determined that nearly 80 percent of studies conducted since 1992 have found that an increased minimum wage leads to a decrease in the level of employment.

The effect, study authors David Neumark of U.C Irvine and Peter Shirley of the West Virginia state legislature find, is most pronounced for teens and young adults, particularly for the less-educated—meaning that these groups are most likely to be pushed out of the labor market by a hike in the minimum wage.

The new study comes as congressional Democrats reintroduce legislation to raise the federal minimum wage to $15 an hour and as President Joe Biden pushes for the same hike as part of his proposed $1.9 trillion COVID-19 stimulus plan. Neumark and Shirley's findings serve as evidence that these pushes could cost American jobs as the unemployment rate remains elevated thanks to the coronavirus recession.

It's remarkable that supporters of raising the minimum wage would think that such an increase would have an overall benefit. Many businesses operate on very thin profit margins, a circumstance that's obviously been exacerbated by the pandemic. If the minimum wage is raised, several things will likely happen:

1. Those who are paid more than minimum wage will also have to be given raises so that they remain above their entry level colleagues. Thus, a business' entire payroll will have to be increased.

2. Staff will be cut back and fewer people will be hired. Those who remain will be given a heavier workload and perhaps fewer benefits. Even with these measures some businesses will simply not be able to survive and will close their doors putting all their employees out of work.

3. A minimum wage twice what it is now will make many minimum wage jobs look more attractive to more highly qualified workers who will in turn be more attractive to employers. The poorly educated and economically deprived job-seeker will find it even harder to find work since with a higher minimum wage he or she will be squeezed out of the applicant pool by better qualified applicants.

4. Since the Democrats' proposal would apply to the federal government it's very probable that the law would stipulate that any business that the government contracts with to provide goods and services must itself meet the $15 minimum wage standard. This would mean that the goods and services these businesses provide will cost more which means that the American taxpayer will have to pay more than we already do for our government.

Even so, the Democrats are pushing ahead with plans to pass a $15 federal minimum wage into law, notwithstanding the Congressional Budget Office's finding last year that such a move would result in the loss of between 1.5 million and 3.7 million jobs.

It's hard to see the wisdom in that.

What Is Cosmic Fine-Tuning?

Philosopher of science Robin Collins is one of the world's foremost authorities on cosmic fine-tuning, a topic that has popped up on Viewpoint pretty often, largely because it's so fascinating. Back in 1998, an essay by Collins titled The Fine-Tuning Design Argument: A Scientific Argument for the Existence of God, appeared in a collection of papers edited by philosopher Michael Murray titled Reason for the Hope Within.

Collins' essay opens with this:

Suppose we went on a mission to Mars, and found a domed structure in which everything was set up just right for life to exist. The temperature, for example, was set around 70 °F and the humidity was at 50%; moreover, there was an oxygen recycling system, an energy gathering system, and a whole system for the production of food.

Put simply, the domed structure appeared to be a fully functioning biosphere. What conclusion would we draw from finding this structure? Would we draw the conclusion that it just happened to form by chance? Certainly not.

Instead, we would unanimously conclude that it was designed by some intelligent being. Why would we draw this conclusion? Because an intelligent designer appears to be the only plausible explanation for the existence of the structure. That is, the only alternative explanation we can think of–that the structure was formed by some natural process–seems extremely unlikely.

Of course, it is possible that, for example, through some volcanic eruption various metals and other compounds could have formed, and then separated out in just the right way to produce the “biosphere,” but such a scenario strikes us as extraordinarily unlikely, thus making this alternative explanation unbelievable.

The universe is analogous to such a “biosphere,” according to recent findings in physics . . . . Scientists call this extraordinary balancing of the parameters of physics and the initial conditions of the universe the “fine-tuning of the cosmos.”

The eminent Princeton physicist Freeman Dyson notes, "There are many . . . lucky accidents in physics. Without such accidents, water could not exist as liquid, chains of carbon atoms could not form complex organic molecules, and hydrogen atoms could not form breakable bridges between molecules" (p. 251)--in short, life as we know it would be impossible.

Scientists call this extraordinary balancing of the parameters of physics and the initial conditions of the universe the "fine-tuning of the cosmos." It has been extensively discussed by philosophers, theologians, and scientists, especially since the early 1970s, with hundreds of articles and dozens of books written on the topic.

Today, it is widely regarded as offering by far the most persuasive current argument for the existence of God.

For example, theoretical physicist and popular science writer Paul Davies--whose early writings were not particularly sympathetic to theism--claims that with regard to the basic structure of the universe, "the impression of design is overwhelming" (Davies, 1988, p. 203).

Similarly, in response to the life-permitting fine-tuning of the nuclear resonances responsible for the oxygen and carbon synthesis in stars, the famous astrophysicist Sir Fred Hoyle declared that:

I do not believe that any scientists who examined the evidence would fail to draw the inference that the laws of nuclear physics have been deliberately designed with regard to the consequences they produce inside stars. If this is so, then my apparently random quirks have become part of a deep-laid scheme.

If not then we are back again at a monstrous sequence of accidents. [Fred Hoyle, in Religion and the Scientists, 1959; quoted in Barrow and Tipler, p. 22]

Collins goes on in his essay to give five examples of cosmic fine-tuning. In each case, had a particular parameter, such as the initial expansion rate of the universe or the strength of gravity, varied by incomprehensibly minute amounts - one part in 10^120, for example - the universe would never have formed.

If the universe is designed by an intelligent agent it's all absolutely breath-taking, but it's literally incredible, at least for me, to be told that it's all just a "lucky accident."

What Is the Filibuster and Why Is it Important?

During the recent presidential campaign a number of prominent Democrats indicated that they're in favor of ending the Senate's filibuster rule. The filibuster (from the Spanish filibustero meaning "pirate") is a process in the Senate by which one or more senators can block a vote on a bill by extending debate on the measure indefinitely.

Originally, senators did this by talking as long as they wished on any topic they wished (see the Jimmy Stewart movie Mr. Smith Goes to Washington) until cloture (closure of debate) is called. Cloture, however, requires the votes of three fifths of the senators. In today's Senate 60 senators would have to vote to end the filibuster.

Moreover, filibusters today are not carried out by interminable speeches but are simply declared, and until one party can muster 60 votes for cloture the measure being filibustered is essentially dead.

Not everything the Senate does is subject to the filibuster, but legislation often is so those bills essentially require a 60 vote majority in order to be enacted into law.

Since this is merely a rule of the Senate and not required by the Constitution - even though it's been around in one form or another since the early 1800s - it could be changed by a simple majority, and that's what many Democrats want to do in order to prevent the Republicans from using the filibuster to block their agenda.

The Democrats have a slender majority even though the Senate is split 50/50 between Democrats and Republicans because the vice-president can break a tie. Presently, absent a filibuster, any tie would be broken by Kamala Harris in favor of the Democrats.

Rachel Bovard at The Federalist explains why the filibuster is important:

While the filibuster is often decried for slowing down, hamstringing, or blocking the legislative process, it was actually designed as a way to facilitate it. Generally speaking, passing legislation in the Senate requires the participation of more than just the majority.

Ending a filibuster — that is, getting to 60 votes in the Senate — requires consensus. It forces the parties to work together, to engage in negotiation, and to perform the give-and-take of legislating. This deliberation is what distinguishes the Senate from the House, where the majority has the full authority to crush the minority, and frequently does.

Furthermore, the filibuster performs an additional important function: it gives individual senators — and the causes that lack support of the majority — a voice they otherwise wouldn’t have. Because overcoming a filibuster requires a large consensus, causes can’t simply be steamrolled.

The concerns of individual senators, or groups of senators, must be given both credence and credibility. Voices and causes that would otherwise be ignored in a majoritarian body like the House receive consideration in the Senate — but only because the filibuster, or threat thereof, makes them matter.

The filibuster, in other words, amplifies otherwise voiceless causes and makes certain that they are taken seriously. For conservatives, as well as the far left of the Democratic Party, who are generally always in the minority even when their party is in the majority, the filibuster is a powerful tool.

Since it would take fifty senators plus Vice-president Harris to approve of doing away with the filibuster, if all the Republicans wanted to keep it it appears right now that it would survive since at least two Democrats, Kyrsten Sinema of Arizona and Joe Manchin of West Virginia, have said they don't support its abolition.

Potpourri

Jason Whitlock, a black journalist, compares Black Lives Matter to the KKK:

It's my belief that the KKK and BLM share the same intent. They use race, intimidation, violence, and property destruction to achieve political goals on behalf of the Democratic Party.

The Ku Klux Klan was founded on Christmas Eve 1865 by Confederate soldiers dedicated to undermining the racial progress sparked by the Civil War and Emancipation Proclamation. "The KKK engaged in terrorist raids against African Americans and white Republicans at night, employing intimidation, destruction of property, assault, and murder to achieve its aims and influence upcoming elections," according to History.com.

Here's a link to a summation of the KKK's history.

Black Lives Matter and Antifa protests have primarily terrorized and destroyed property in black communities at night. BLM and Antifa have attempted to intimidate white Republicans. BLM protests have been violent and caused the assassination of law enforcement officers and other citizens. BLM is a cleverly marketed slogan that provides cover for extremists to undermine racial progress and bully American citizens to support Democrat politicians. It's not a coincidence that BLM riots pick up during an election cycle and disappear after the votes have been counted.

BLM, founded by self-described trained Marxists, has a stated goal of disrupting Western Civilization traditions and values.... Despite the sweet-sounding name, BLM acts as a racial divider — no different from the KKK.

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I was reading a book on the 19th century Indian wars in the American west and couldn't help sympathize with the Native Americans who saw their land being flooded by white immigrants who drained their resources and forever altered their culture. Had I been one of them I would've felt the same way they did.

But then I wondered why folks on the left would think that what the white man did by colonizing the Indian territories was a terrible crime. After all, these are the same folks, many of them, who favor open borders, unlimited immigration and government benefits for illegal immigrants. Why think open borders and mass immigration were deplorable when the white man imposed them on Native Americans and be all in favor of it when others do it today? What am I missing?

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Most Christians believe that we have a moral duty to prioritize the weak and the powerless, that we should take strong measures to aid and protect those among us who cannot defend themselves, and that we should speak on behalf of those who have no voice in our politics.

So why did so many Christians vote in the last election to put a man and a party in power who support the killing of unborn babies right up to the time of birth, and, even, in some cases, after the baby has actually been delivered?

No one is weaker, less powerful and more vulnerable than an unborn baby, yet we kill over a million of them each year. We may think that there's not much that we as individuals can do about it, but we certainly don't have to vote for those who, so far from condemning this national tragedy, consider it something to be subsidized and promoted.

That so many Christians nevertheless voted in November to perpetuate this state of affairs is something of a head-scratcher.

Stumbling at the Starting Line

It's not fair to judge a presidency by its first few days in office, of course, but the inception of the Biden tenure has not been distinguished for either its wisdom, its transparency nor it's consistency.

As for its failure of wisdom, Abigail Shrier predicts in the Wall Street Journal that Joe Biden's first day in office will be seen as the beginning of the end of girls' sports. She writes that the president's Executive Order on Preventing and Combating Discrimination on the Basis of Gender Identity or Sexual Orientation means that,

Any school that receives federal funding — including nearly every public high school — must either allow biological boys who self-identify as girls onto girls’ sports teams or face administrative action from the Education Department. If this policy were to be broadly adopted in anticipation of the regulations that are no doubt on the way, what would this mean for girls’ and women’s sports?

“Finished. Done,” Olympic track-and-field coach Linda Blade told me. “The leadership skills, all the benefits society gets from letting girls have their protected category so that competition can be fair, all the advances of women’s rights —that’s going to be diminished.” Ms. Blade noted that parents of teen girls are generally uninterested in watching their daughters demoralized by the blatant unfairness of a rigged competition.

I say rigged because in contests of strength and speed, the athletic chasm between the sexes, which opens at puberty, is both permanent and unbridgeable. Once male puberty is complete, testosterone suppression doesn’t undo the biological advantages men possess: larger hearts, lungs and bones, greater bone density, more-oxygenated blood, more fast-twitch muscle fiber and vastly greater muscle mass.

It should be no surprise, then, that the two trans-identified biological males permitted to compete in Connecticut state track finals against girls—neither of whom was a top sprinter as a boy—consistently claimed top spots competing as girls. They eliminated girls from advancement to regional championships, scouting and scholarship opportunities and trophies, and they set records no girl may ever equal.

How big is this performance gap? To take one example cited by the Connecticut female runners in their complaint against the Connecticut Interscholastic Athletic Conference, the fastest female sprinter in the world is American runner Allyson Felix, a woman with more gold medals than Usain Bolt. Her lifetime best for the 400-meter run is 49.26 seconds. Based on 2018 data, nearly 300 high-school boys in the U.S. alone could beat it.

Shrier's whole op-ed is interesting. She explains how the harmful effects on girls that can be expected to result from President Biden's foolish executive order go well beyond sports.

As for transparency, Mr. Biden promised that there'd be “at least 100 million Covid vaccine shots into the arms of the American people in the first 100 days.” His spokesperson, Jen Psaki, declared that this would double what was accomplished during the last forty days under the previous administration since during that span the average number of shots per day was 500,000.

I can't say whether Ms. Psaki intended to be disingenuous or whether she's just not good with numbers, but her statement is very misleading. The reason why the average number of daily vaccinations during the last forty days of the Trump administration was at 500,000 was, presumably, because in the early days after the vaccines were approved there were very few doses administered. It took time to get the shots out to the general public (they're still not available in my part of Pennsylvania). By the end of the forty days, however, the average number of daily inoculations stood at 939,973 doses, so what Mr. Biden is actually promising is a relatively small improvement of 60,000 doses a day.

Biden called the current rate of vaccine distribution a "dismal failure," but boasts about a rather paltry 6% increase. Even this is probably not an actual increase over what would've been available under Trump as the vaccine rollout continued to ramp up through January and February and reached more facilities where it could be dispensed.

When a reporter asked Mr. Biden to explain why we should get excited by a vaccine availability that's essentially what it was under his predecessor, Mr. Biden grew testy and replied, "When I announced it, you all said, ‘It’s not possible.’ Come on, give me a break, man." It's odd, though, that anyone would've said that Mr. Biden's goal of a million shots per day was impossible since that's almost the number that was being administered even as he spoke.

Anyway, Mr. Biden delivered himself of a knockdown solution to the Covid problem in his inaugural address by promising to mandate that everyone on federal property wear a mask at all times. The president assured us in his speech that wearing masks was "patriotic" and is the "single best thing we can do" at this time to save lives. But then, inexplicably, he and his family subsequently appeared maskless at a public event at the Lincoln Memorial, which is, of course, federal property.

When Ms. Psaki was asked by a reporter about this seeming inconsistency the press secretary bobbed and weaved and finally concluded by proclaiming that, "I think we have bigger issues to worry about at this moment in time." So, the centerpiece of Mr. Biden's response to the pandemic - wearing a mask for 100 days - really isn't all that important, after all? Or is it a mandate just for the little people that the elites need not bother themselves about?

To compound the confusion Mr. Biden has also stated that "There's nothing we can do to change the trajectory of the virus in the next several months." What?

Isn't this the same Joe Biden who promised during the campaign that he wasn't going to shut down the country, he wasn't going to shut down the economy, he was going to shut down the virus? Wasn't he almost daily berating Trump for not doing more to contain the plague? And now he's telling us there's nothing he can do?

If the next few months are anything like the first few days how long will it be before the beleaguered Ms. Psaki breathes a deep sigh of relief and hands the press secretary baton off to someone else?

In Love with Gov

The Biden administration promises to bring us a heavy dose of government control over every aspect of our economic lives and some aspects of our lives that have little to do with economics.

The prospect before us reminds me of a short video, actually a series of short videos, which satirize the progressive idea that more government and less freedom is good for us. The series is slightly dated, having been produced six years ago, but the message is still timely, especially with the arrival in Washington this week of an administration zealously committed to the big government philosophy.

In the first video a young woman named Alexis falls in love with a smooth-talking guy named Govinsky who turns out to be an overbearing, controlling lout who, despite his assurances of wanting only what's best for Alexis, gradually smothers her freedom.

Her friend Libby (Liberty) tries to warn her that "Gov" isn't what he appears to be, but Alexis allows herself, over a series of five episodes, to become more and more deeply dependent, and more deeply in debt, until finally she has an epiphany and realizes that her dependence on Gov has wrecked her life.

Each of the videos in the series is an amusing parable for our times. Government purports to care about us, to care about protecting us from all the hazards of life, but it often creates, as it did with Alexis, a dysfunctional relationship. Here's the first video:

Biology and Psychology

Shortly before Joe Biden was sworn in as our 46th president a federal court ruled that doctors had a constitutional right to refuse to perform gender reassignment surgery, a right they had been denied under an Obamacare mandate.

This is significant for several reasons one of which is that President Biden has vowed to promote transgender rights and on his first day in office signed an executive order that would permit transgenders to serve in the military without having to conceal their sexual identity.

According to The Blaze.com. Biden's campaign website claimed that Mr. Biden is also intent on restoring "transgender students' access to sports, bathrooms, and locker rooms in accordance with their gender identity. He will direct his Department of Education to vigorously enforce and investigate violations of transgender students' civil rights."

Under the guidance, all schools receiving federal funds are required to comply or risk having their funding withdrawn.

How this is just and how it unifies the country remains to be explained. Justice for the Biden administration apparently flows only in one direction, toward vocal minorities.

Why, for instance, does a biological female's right to be considered a male override someone else's right to consider that person a female? Why is one's psychology allowed to trump their biology, and why must everyone else be compelled to go along, even if they're convinced that biology, not psychology, determines gender?

If a surgeon believes that he's actually harming someone by performing gender reassignment surgery, if he believes that what he's doing is immoral, how is it just to compel him to do it? And if one's gender identity were solely, or at least mostly, a matter of one's psychology why do so many transgenders believe it's necessary to surgically change their anatomy anyway?

Under the Biden administration, biological men are evidently going to be given access to women's locker rooms and compete against women in athletics, and if one believes this to be wrong then she's just revealing her bigotry. Were a transgender man who still possesses all the male accoutrements to walk about nude in front of a group of teenage girls in a public locker room we're told by the gender radicals in the Biden administration that those girls would be bigoted to react differently than if a woman did the same thing. But why would they be?

If a transgender male competed against your daughter in a sport in which your daughter excelled against other females but consistently lost to the biological male would you consider it fair and accept the outcome with equanimity? Why should you?

If a biological male who identifies as female is convicted of a crime should he/she be placed in a women's prison? Is it fair to the female prisoners to place a biological male in their midst?

If a man is convinced he's a fifteen year-old in a thirty year-old body and he sexually assaults a thirteen year old, must we accept his fantasy and find him innocent of statutory rape?

Are feminists like Germaine Greer wrong to be outraged by biological men who consider themselves women even though they have no ovaries nor uterus, they don't menstruate, conceive and get pregnant, they don't give birth, they don't lactate, they don't possess a double X chromosome, nor do they have the developmental history of living in a female body that a woman has?

Is someone a woman just because he or she thinks she is? If someone is convinced that he's Julius Caesar reincarnated we don't acquiesce to his judgment of himself. Rather we judge him to be mentally disturbed. This is not meant to disparage people who firmly believe they're "a woman trapped in a man's body." Rather, it's to make the point that a belief about oneself isn't made true simply because one is convinced that it's true.

Furthermore, consider the confusion that our contemporary embrace of transgenderism sometimes entails. This is an actual real-life scenario taken from the publication Our Bodies, Ourselves: Two lesbians had a deep relationship with each other for over a decade, but one of them decided to transition to being a man. The two remained in their relationship, so were the partners still lesbians? They were both in a relationship with the same person as before, but was it not now a straight heterosexual relationship? If the female, now strongly committed to a man, still thinks of herself as a lesbian, is she? To continue to affirm her identity as a lesbian she has to either deny the identity of her partner as a male or affirm her partner's male identity and deny her own identity as a lesbian.

This must all be very awkward, to say the least.

In a culture in which personal identity is fluid and few sexual boundaries remain, what rationale exists for maintaining bans on group marriage (polyamory) or pedophilia? With regard to the former there no longer is any logically consistent rationale for prohibiting it. Marriage is whatever people want it to be, and neither the sex nor the number of people involved matters.

With regard to pedophilia it might be replied that this should remain illegal because children are incapable of giving consent to sexual contact, but so what? Why does a child's consent matter? Children don't consent to a lot of things we make them do, like eat their spinach, go to bed early, get vaccinated, and go to school.

Indeed, there are children whose parents are pushing them to transition hormonally and surgically to the opposite gender with the evident approval of a large number of progressive Democrats, so a child's inability to give informed consent doesn't seem to matter much to these folks anyway.

And why insist that a child's inability to give consent for sexual conduct is significant when so many men identify as pedophiles and have a deep psychological need to satisfy their desire for children? Why think that sharing sex with a child is any more heinous than sharing a meal with the child? The reason, of course, is that sex is much more than just a recreational activity and the pedophile's psychological need is a completely irrelevant justification for his behavior.

But pointing out absurdities with our current attitudes toward gender and sex no longer has purchase in a culture which has made sex into an idol and personal satisfaction and fulfilment into an absolute. It doesn't matter what the consequences are for everyone else, it doesn't matter whether the policies are reasonable and just, the transgender's personal happiness is paramount and the rest of society must bow to it.

Yet isn't it reasonable and just to say that if people want to consider their gender to be other than their biological sex they should be legally free to do so, to the extent it doesn't infringe upon the rights of others, and if others wish to consider the transgendered person to be whatever their biological sex indicates they should be legally free to do that as well?

Isn't it also reasonable and just to tell those (adults) who wish to receive gender reassignment surgery that they're free to get it from a surgeon willing to perform it, but to also assure physicians that they'll not be compelled to violate their conscience by performing surgeries they believe to be morally wrong and harmful to the patient?

But what's reasonable and just is unfortunately irrelevant in our postmodern politics. There are barriers still to be transgressed and taboos still to be smashed, and the Biden administration seems determined to prove itself equal to the task, reason and justice notwithstanding. For more see this piece at The Daily Caller.

Political Predictions

On August 3rd I made the following predictions about what a Democratic party with power to enact its agenda would likely try to achieve (I'm not claiming that they'd be successful) if they were to win the White House and the Senate in November. Well, they did, the new administration has now been inaugurated, and it'll be interesting to see how accurate these predictions turn out to have been.

I hope they're wildly off the mark, but I fear they're not. We'll see:

Lowering the voting age to 16.

Opposition to measures like voter ID and extending the voter franchise to non-citizens.

Adding additional Justices to the Supreme Court to ensure that SCOTUS decisions go the way the left wants them to go.

Appointment of judges and Supreme Court Justices who believe their role is to make law rather than objectively interpret the law and/or the Constitution.

Abolition of the electoral college.

Allowing felons to vote.

Granting statehood to Washington, D.C. and Puerto Rico thus effectively giving Democrats four more senators.

Allowing biological men to use girls' restrooms and locker rooms and compete against girls in scholastic athletics.

Making it a hate crime to speak out against the LGBTQ+ agenda, even from the pulpit.

Effective repeal of the First Amendment guaranteeing freedom of speech and freedom of religion.

Effective repeal of the Second Amendment guaranteeing the right to keep and bear arms.

Protecting and promoting abortion on demand and infanticide.

Higher taxes and more government regulations on business and industry, stifling job growth and increasing unemployment among the poor.

Making fossil fuel industries like coal, oil and fracking economically unsustainable.

Abolition or deep curtailment of air and car travel.

Exorbitant social spending and a shift away from a capitalist to a socialist economy.

Providing subsidies for those who choose not to work.

Open borders.

Sanctuary cities and states for illegal immigrants.

Free health care and welfare for illegal aliens.

Racial preferences and "reparations."

A return to forced busing.

Weakening the military.

Abolition or weakening of police forces.

Effectively permitting rioters to burn businesses, churches and public buildings and threaten citizens with physical harm.

Obliteration of our historical heritage.

Keeping schools and businesses closed until there's a vaccine for Covid-19.

Making it more difficult for private schools to operate and for poor people to send their children to the schools of their choice.

Hostility, or at least antipathy, toward Jews and Christians.

Destroying the reputation and/or livelihood of anyone merely accused of sexual impropriety (except Joe Biden).

Destroying the reputation and/or livelihood of anyone who holds views on race relations and/or sexuality at variance with those on the left.

Some of these, like keeping schools and businesses closed until there's a covid vacccine, are a little dated now that we have a vaccine, but others are still strong possibilities.

In conclusion I added this:

It may seem that some of these are unfair misrepresentations or exaggerations, but every one of them has been promoted, encouraged, tolerated or implemented by leaders in the Democratic party - presidential candidates, governors, senators, congresspersons, and/or influential members of the media.

Keep the list and see how many of them come to pass over the next four years if the Democrats win the White House and the Senate in November.

Believing in Anything

There's an odd phenomenon apparently unfolding among millenials. As belief in God declines, belief in the efficacy of astrology is growing.

In other words, there's evidently a longing among young adults for transcendence, for something more than what materialism can offer them, but unwilling to return to the religious beliefs of their forefathers, they've been casting about among the occult for something else to serve as a substitute.

Denyse O'Leary wrote about this phenomenon some time ago at Mercatornet.

She noted that polls reveal belief in astrology at about 25% of the population in North America and Britain and that superstitious beliefs in general, e.g. belief in ghosts and witches, are increasing especially among liberal-minded young adults. Indeed, top liberal websites like Buzzfeed, Bustle and Cosmo feature much more superstitious content than do conservative sites.

Moreover, an education in science is no proof against an inclination toward superstition:

[I]nterestingly, “sciencey” types who lack scepticism about Darwin are often superstitious, despite the longstanding dismissal of occult beliefs from science.

The 2003 study, done at a British science fair, found that twenty-five percent of the people who claimed a background in science also reported that they were very or somewhat superstitious.

She closes with these observations:

Superstition feeds on itself. Like a drug habit, it at once satisfies and creates an appetite for more -- in this case, an appetite for occult knowledge, as opposed to transparent knowledge. That appetite can affect a person's perception of everyday reality.

It’s not science that holds superstition in check in Western society. It’s traditional Western religion, which insists on transparent truths (truths that all may know) and forbids attempts at occult, secret truths.

It's puzzling that people who scoff at the possibility of miracles and the existence of a supernatural God are nevertheless open to the possibility of an occult world of ghosts and demons, etc. Why is the latter any more plausible than the former?

The early twentieth century British writer G.K. Chesterton once said that, "When people cease to believe in God they don't believe in nothing, they believe in anything." Perhaps we're seeing evidence of the truth of Chesterton's claim in the early twenty first century.

The Conflict Between Naturalism and Human Reason

Over the seventeen years that VP has been in existence I've frequently written on the inadequacy of the naturalistic worldview, i.e. the view that holds that natural processes and forces are all that exist, that there are no supernatural, immaterial beings.

Throughout the years I've argued that naturalism gives us no basis for believing in many of the things naturalists themselves hold dear. If nature is all there is there are no grounds for believing in human rights and dignity, ultimate meaning and purpose, objective moral truth and obligation, free will, the self, the immaterial mind, and much else.

I've also argued that naturalism lacks the resources to explain human consciousness and the origin of life and has a very difficult time explaining other biological phenomena such as sexual reproduction, insect metamorphosis, animal embryology, irreducible complexity and much else.

In addition, another problem has come under scrutiny on VP, a problem that some philosophers believe is, all by itself, fatal to naturalism. It's a problem raised by C.S. Lewis and given philosophical shape and depth by subsequent thinkers, most notably Alvin Plantinga.

Alvin Plantinga

This is the problem the naturalist encounters when trying to reconcile his beliefs in naturalism, evolution and the reliability of human reason. It seems that the three of these are incompatible with each other in the sense that if one believes in any two of the three he can't logically have confidence in the truth of the third.

Of course, if naturalism is true then theism is false, but theism is compatible with both evolution (though not naturalistic evolution) and the reliability of human reason. Thus, if theism is true the incompatibility problem disappears. It's just another example of why theism does a better job of explaining the world than does naturalism.

Philosopher William Lane Craig provides a brief but helpful discussion of this problem in the following video. For a fuller but more technical treatment of the problem read Alvin Plantinga's book Where the Conflict Really Lies:

Embracing MLK, Rejecting BLM

Today we celebrate the life of Martin Luther King, a man whose vision of racial comity has unfortunately been betrayed by the progressive left as Robert Woodson and Joshua Mitchell argue in a Wall Street Journal op-ed.

Woodson is a veteran of the civil rights movement and author of several books. Mitchell is a professor of political theory at Georgetown University and author most recently of American Awakening: Identity Politics and Other Afflictions of Our Time. They write:

King’s words and actions glorified America by transfiguring its racial wound and revealing its redemptive promise. Yet today many black leaders have lost sight of King altogether and are aiding and abetting the crucifixion of their own people. Rather than hope, they see despair; rather than the Easter Sunday of true liberation, they offer the bleak Good Friday of never-ending misery.

Black Americans, the authors assert, have historically followed three paths in coping with slavery and the subsequent period of Jim Crow. There were blacks who called for their fellow blacks to leave the U.S. altogether (Exit), there were those who called for resistance, either armed or vocal (Voice), or both, and there were those who called for loyalty to the principles upon which the country was founded (Loyalty).

They state that King offered an inspiring combination of the strategies of loyalty and voice, and that it cost him dearly:

King paid a heavy personal price for his hope that America was redeemable. Twice his home was bombed; once, his wife and daughter were nearly killed. Surrounded by hundreds of angry, armed black men after that bombing, he discouraged retaliatory violence. He was assaulted several times, and jailed as well, but he remained steadfast in his commitment to nonviolence.

He united black Americans behind the proposition that racism is evil in itself, not simply because white people visited it upon blacks, and that all must unite to combat evil. He warned us about the self-destructive path of violence, not only for blacks but for the whole nation.

And, of course, he was ultimately murdered on April 4th, 1968. Woodson and Mitchell cite the belief of many pro-slavery whites that "blacks were morally inferior and thus incapable of self-government," and point to the irony that many blacks today acquiesce to this argument when made tacitly by both black and white leftists:

Today many black leaders defer to angry white progressives who make the same arguments about blacks’ lack of moral agency, reject the country’s founding principles, and seek to undermine its institutions. For months, the radical left has been exploiting the country’s genuine concern for fairness to keep blacks in a constant state of agitation, anger and grievance, urging them toward behavior that lives down to the slanderous stereotypes of white supremacists.

The leaders of these movements insist that every inequity suffered by blacks is caused by institutional and structural racism, that they have no power to liberate themselves, and that they will remain oppressed until white people change. Even to raise the issue of what role self-determination plays for blacks earns you the label of “racist.”

In other words, blacks are implicitly taught that whatever progress they might make depends not on their own effort but on the noblesse oblige of whites. Woodson and Mitchell go on to level particular scorn at Black Lives Matter for their advocacy of counterproductive policies and measures:

For every unarmed black American killed by the police, hundreds are killed in neighborhood homicides....Those who call for the defunding of police departments, such as leaders of the official Black Lives Matter organization, are silent about this inconvenient truth. They have a narrative and cannot let the facts get in the way. Their story is that the whole of American history is stained and the whole of America must be overthrown.

When citizens declare that they support Black Lives Matter, do they share its opposition to the nuclear family, its objective of abolishing the police, and its view that the Christian cross is a symbol of white supremacy? These positions of the organization — language that has largely been scrubbed from its website — in no way improve the lives of black Americans.

Black Americans have only one way forward that has any chance of long-term success:

Like all Americans, blacks have triumphed over their circumstances only when they have adopted bourgeois virtues such as hard work, respect for learning, self-discipline, faith and personal responsibility.... There would have been no civil-rights movement without this. But radical progressives now insist that such virtues are the legacy of white supremacy, colonialist values that reflect the continuing bondage of blacks to oppressive Western culture.

The only “authentic” expression of blackness in America, they claim, is the opposite of bourgeois self-restraint and discipline — indulging in the passions of the moment, whether anarchic rioting, insulting teachers or other unsalutary forms of expression.

The radical left — disdaining exhortations toward work, family and faith as “respectability politics”—argues that blacks should feel free to indulge their “true” nature, echoing the age-old white-supremacist notion that said nature is violent, lascivious and incapable of self-restraint.

The left masquerades as the messiah to blacks, but its policy nostrums are perhaps even more toxic for blacks than they've been for people everywhere else in the world they've been implemented. The left's call for the abolition of the family and religion and the obscuring of our nation's history (except for the troublesome parts), combined with the economic socialism they advocate and the constant hectoring of white America for its alleged racial sins, is a recipe for cultural and social disaster.

Progressives are either ardent for that disaster or they deny that it'd be the inevitable result of their policies, but it's hard to see how it could be avoided or how blacks wouldn't suffer worse from it than anyone else.

After all, the poor, whether black or white, are still very much reliant upon a prosperous America. To the extent they depend upon tax revenues and charitable donations for their health care, transportation, housing, food, schools, police, and so on they need America to be prosperous.

The left's desire to make everyone "equal" is, in effect, an attempt to make almost everyone (except themselves) poorer which would be a calamity for those dependent on a relatively wealthy and generous middle class for the resources that help make their lives less painful and which help them rise out of poverty if they're motivated to do so.

Woodson and Mitchell finish with these words:

We must turn away from the present course, which preaches despair rather than hope. Black achievement must be glorified. The crucifixion of black America by the radical left must halt. There is a grander, more fruitful future for us all.

There is, but it will only be achieved by embracing King's dream of a colorblind society rather than by wallowing in the rhetoric of those obsessed with exacerbating our social frictions and keeping us divided along racial lines.

A Few Thoughts

I'm glad to see that our Democrat friends have finally recognized that riots are bad, the police and the national guard are good, and fences work. What they couldn't see, or wouldn't admit, during last summer's riots is evidently as plain as day to them now. All it took was for them to get "mugged by reality" last week and suddenly the scales fell from their eyes.

Now they're demanding that illegal entry into the nation's Capitol be prosecuted, they've stopped demanding that the police be defunded, they're wondering why the national guard wasn't called in and they're approving the erection of barriers around every capitol building in the nation.

Perhaps they'll even see the dissonance between their newfound views on illegal entry, the importance of law enforcement and the need for barriers to keep people out and their views on illegal immigration, but I shouldn't hope for too much.

Here's a pet peeve of mine: Why do politicians insist on calling people who commit horrific crimes "cowards" when the word is completely inapt? A coward is one who lacks the courage to do or to endure something. In the wake of 9/11 the terrorists who perpetrated that atrocity were often called cowards, but whatever they were, they were not cowardly. Anyone willing to sacrifice one's life for a cause one believes in is hardly a coward.

Likewise, the rioters who stormed the Capitol on the 6th have been called cowards by some of our political leaders, including Mike Pence, but I fail to see how the word applies to what they did. Their behavior certainly doesn't deserve to be called brave, but how was it cowardly? It seems the more appropriate word would be "evil," or "malignant," or, if we really wish to be anachronistic, "wicked."

Unfortunately, a society which can't bring itself to use language any stronger than "not okay," "unacceptable" or "inappropriate" to describe acts that are morally heinous like burning down shops and destroying peoples' livelihoods will shrink from incurring the opprobrium of progressive social media mobs for being judgmental and using more robust descriptors like "evil" or "wicked."

Now that's cowardice.

Trump and the Nonjudgmentalism Problem

The Democrat majority in the House of Representatives has once again chosen to impeach President Donald Trump, this time, in the eyes of many erstwhile Trump supporters, with much more justification than the disgracefully political previous attempt.

Set aside for now the merits of the present case and consider that it's based not only on an explicit judgment of illegality but also on an implicit judgment of moral turpitude. The legal claim is pretty thin since it'll be extremely difficult to prove in the Senate that the president deliberately incited a riot on January 6th, but the moral judgment that his actions were so reckless, irresponsible and morally reprehensible that he cannot be allowed to finish out the last week of his tenure and must be prevented from ever serving in public office again packs a more compelling punch.

There's an interesting irony here, though. Frank Furedi, Professor Emeritus at Kings College, has an article in the January issue of First Things (paywall) in which he traces how Americans have developed an aversion to making moral judgments, associating them with "judgmentalism" and authoritarian personality types.

Furedi explains the genesis of our current "nonjudgmentalism":

Since the early 1920s, Western culture in general and American society in particular have become increasingly hostile to the conscious act of judgment. It was at this point in time that the term nonjudgmentalism was invented, used by progressive educators, social workers, and therapeutic professionals as a core axiom of their work.

By the late 1930s and especially the 1940s, judgmentalism was linked to authoritarian behaviors and deemed the cause of totalitarianism. Judgment, that is, was at the root of conflict and war. Moral truths firmly stated and the acceptance of moral authority were depicted by progressive pedagogues and social scientists as symptoms of a sick personality.

No one wished to be regarded as a "sick personality," of course, so a reluctance grew on the part of everyone in authority - parents, teachers, clergy, politicians - to make judgments about right and wrong. Today only those judgments which conform to accepted political fashion can safely be voiced, and yet here we are passing a moral judgment on the President's behavior:

This devaluation of judgment contributed to the steady unravelling of moral authority in the cultural imagination of the West in the mid-twentieth century. From the interwar period onwards, but especially since the 1940s, moral authority shifted from a necessity many regarded in a positive light to something increasingly ominous.

As one might expect this unravelling of moral authority has had calamitous social consequences:

Without an authoritative moral source, judgment loses cultural currency. Not surprisingly, when confronted with the claim that moral judgments are merely an expression of the personal opinion of a closed-minded individual, many citizens in the mid-twentieth-century West decided to keep their views of what is right and wrong to themselves.

With so many experts challenging the value of moral absolutes, the very idea of obedience to normative authorities became suspect. Social scientists adduced powerful historical reasons for warning against (presumed) moral authorities: The willingness of civilian populations to obey totalitarian leaders leading up to World War II proved to many that obedience was inconsistent with a democratic form of public life.

The desire to avoid appearing judgmental or authoritarian had ludicrous consequences as well:

For young adults, nonjudgmentalism is likewise a worldview, a paradoxical one of absolute relativism. An important study from 2011, Lost in Transition: The Dark Side of Emerging Adulthood, demonstrated this widespread prevalence of moral indifference among young people.

The majority of subjects interviewed believed that since morality is a matter of individual choice, it was inappropriate to judge others. Those who insisted on doing so were perceived as legitimate targets of condemnation. The prevailing sentiment among these young interviewees was that judging was associated with “condemning, castigating, disparaging, or executing.” One young adult thought people who sought to impose their moral beliefs on others were “sick.”

In other words, judging others is sick, but judging others for the sin of judging others is righteous. Furedi adds this:

Nonjudgmentalism leaves a vacuum in the consciences of human beings, a moral indifference that provides no satisfaction other than the fleeting virtue of showing one’s liberal forbearance, but that was enough for them. They would never think that their enlightened tolerance is a species of moral cowardice.

It's a shame Furedi's article is free only to subscribers because he says much of importance that I can't include here. Instead I'll append a few thoughts:

A moral judgment has to be based on some moral standard, but in a secular society with its adamantine determination to scrub public discourse of all reference to objective moral authorities, i.e. God, either no such standard exists or no such standard is deemed relevant. Yet that doesn't prevent many individuals from being "judgmental" by reproaching the president's actions.

In fact, secular folk, who have no grounds for criticizing the president's behavior beyond an expression of their own subjective disapprobation, make moral judgments all the time. If judgmentalism consists in making groundless moral evaluations of other peoples' conduct then our secular friends are among the most judgmental people in our society for they haven't been shy about expressing their contempt for the president's moral faults over the last four years or more.

Even so, notwithstanding that people do it all the time, denying any transcendent, objective basis for moral judgment while nevertheless voicing moral judgments can only be described as irrational behavior.

Whether Trump should be impeached or not, censured or not, the matter can only be argued on tenuous legal grounds by our secular friends. Having purged our public square of any transcendent moral authority, secularists have left themselves no resources with which to make a moral argument for impeachment, or for anything else, for that matter. Moral arguments depend on judgments of right and wrong, and not only does the secular citizen have nothing upon which to base such judgments other than their own tastes and preferences, but by their own lights declaring someone to be morally corrupt exposes them to the charge of "judgmentalism" and being "sick."

Of course, few of them realize the logically untenable position they put themselves in by pronouncing their moral deprecations of Trump, and so, thinking they're putting their virtue on display for all to see, they actually make themselves appear intellectually shallow and foolish.

Our Divided Land

In the course of an email conversation about all that's happened in our nation in recent months a friend mentioned to me that he's in a quandary as to how we "can ever bring unity to our exceedingly divided land." I wish that by way of response I could've offered a more hopeful way forward, but I fear that the fissures which separate us are going to be with us for a long time. They took generations to develop and will not be reversed by the election of any one man or party.

The way I see it the left has for over a century sought to undermine every institution, cherished belief and custom they could - the family, education, religion, the free market system, our history and the first two amendments in the Bill of Rights to name just a few of the most important. The result has been a rent in our social fabric that appears irreparable.

In the past, our political and social disagreements were conducted within the bounds of a shared set of assumptions, a shared worldview, but for millions of Americans today that common ground no longer exists. Rather than standing on opposite sides of a room across which we could walk toward each other, we find ourselves standing on disparate islands separated by a sea of philosophical differences so deep as to be impassable.

When we try to communicate at all we're like radio operators transmitting and receiving on different frequencies and just talking past each other. Too often our only communication is one side simply shouting slogans and insults at the other. Not sharing any common philosophical ground we find ourselves speaking different socio-cultural languages and have often given up even trying to understand the other.

What I mean by shared philosophical ground can be illustrated by an example that I've discussed many times on Viewpoint. In order to be able to communicate with others at any but a superficial level we have to have a shared view of truth, but we don't. Some of us believe that there is objective truth which we can discover through the use of our reason. Others believe there's no such thing. Truth for them is simply whatever one feels strongly about, it's constructed by the individual or the group to which the individual belongs based on subjective desires, experiences and prejudices.

One way this plays out in our culture can be seen in the transgender phenomenon. Some people believe that an individual's biological sex is an objective determinant of their gender whereas others hold that the individual's gender is whatever they strongly feel themselves to be. For the former group, there's an objective truth about gender fixed in their biology and independent of the psychological inclinations the individual may possess. For the latter group one's gender is subjectively determined. It could be said that for them their psychology trumps their biology.

Differences in one's view of truth actually derive from an even more foundational belief, a belief from which all other worldview conflicts derive. This is the belief about God. Those who believe that truth is objective generally hold to a theistic worldview. They believe that truth exists independently of what we feel or perceive because a transcendent God has established it.

Those who reject the notion of objective truth generally hold to a naturalistic worldview. There is no God, they maintain, therefore there's no telos for mankind, no essence, no fixed human nature, no purpose, no meaning, no free will, no such thing as human dignity or an objective standard of right and wrong. Man is whatever he or his environment make him to be.

Everything ultimately rests, then, on the question of the existence and nature of God. It's the most important, most basic question in life. If there is no God then there's no objective moral truth, there can be no agreement on what justice is or upon what makes any act right or wrong to do, and if there's no objective standard of truth, then every disagreement can only be settled by means of a power struggle, each group striving to impose their will on others through the exercise of raw judicial or political coercion.

The gulf between the two worldviews, between theism and naturalism and the ramifications and implications of each, is as wide as an ocean, and that, in my opinion, is why coming together won't happen any time soon.

Impeachable Offenses

Jim Geraghty at National Review Online recounts a conversation between radio host Hugh Hewitt and Republican Senator Ben Sasse concerning the events of last Wednesday:

Sasse: He wanted there to be chaos, and I’m sure you’ve also had conversations with other senior White House officials, as I have.
Hewitt: I have.
Sasse: As this was unfolding on television, Donald Trump was walking around the White House confused about why other people on his team weren’t as excited as he was as you had rioters pushing against Capitol Police trying to get into the building.
Hewitt: That said . . .
Sasse: That was happening. He was delighted.

Geraghty then goes on to quote from a Washington Post article in which an unnamed advisor reveals that the President,

...was hard to reach, and you know why? Because it was live TV. If it’s TiVo, he just hits pause and takes the calls. If it’s live TV, he watches it, and he was just watching it all unfold.

The WaPo article continues:

. . . But the president himself was busy enjoying the spectacle. Trump watched with interest, buoyed to see that his supporters were fighting so hard on his behalf, one close adviser said.

. . . Meanwhile, in the West Wing, a small group of aides — including Ivanka Trump, White House press secretary Kayleigh McEnany and Meadows — was imploring Trump to speak out against the violence. Meadows’s staff had prompted him to go see the president, with one aide telling the chief of staff before he entered the Oval Office, “They are going to kill people.”

Shortly after 2:30 p.m., the group finally persuaded Trump to send a tweet: “Please support our Capitol Police and Law Enforcement,” he wrote. “They are truly on the side of our Country. Stay peaceful!”

But the Twitter missive was insufficient, and the president had not wanted to include the final instruction to “stay peaceful,” according to one person familiar with the discussions.

The WaPo is hardly a Trump-friendly paper so maybe we should take their reporting with a touch of skepticism, but if they are accurately recounting what happened it presents a very damaging picture of the president's behavior. Geraghty adds this:

The article paints an appalling portrait of the president’s refusal to act as the crisis worsened. But once again, we’re dependent upon sources in the White House who won’t give their names.

The consequences of these statements are gargantuan; they’re describing a president refusing to protect Congress or his own vice president. If there was ever a time to go on the record, this is it.

Maybe the White House staffers closest to the Oval Office on Wednesday would be clearer and more specific if they were testifying under oath.

If all that Geraghty says here is true, it's hard to see how Mr. Trump avoids impeachment, but whether it's true or not will only be ascertained, as Geraghty says, by putting these aides under oath.

Earlier in the same column Geraghty quoted NRO contributor Andrew McCarthy as saying that if the Democrats really want to impeach Trump they're going about it all wrong by charging him with inciting insurrection.

If what the Democrats truly want is bipartisan consensus in the service of national security, rather than political combat, the articles of impeachment they plan to file should charge the president with (a) subversion of the Constitution’s electoral process, particularly the Twelfth Amendment counting of the sovereign states’ electoral votes; (b) recklessly encouraging a raucous political demonstration that foreseeably devolved into a violent storming of the seat of our government; and (c) depraved indifference to the welfare of the vice president, Congress, security personnel, and other Americans who were in and around the Capitol on January 6.

That would be an accurate description of impeachable offenses. It would not disintegrate into legal wrangling over incitement, insurrection, and causation.

I'm not sure the Democrats believe that it's all that urgent to get Trump out of office. Rep. Jim Clyburn said they might hold off until after Biden's been in office for three months before sending articles of impeachment to the Senate. If Trump really is a clear and present danger to the nation, as numerous Democrats and some Republicans have claimed, why would they delay the business of removing him?

Slandering the Capitol Police

There's a theme developing among the progressive left that the police treated the rioters at the Capitol last Wednesday more gently than they would've treated them had they been black. There's absolutely no evidence that this is so, but it's being asserted apodictically as if there could not possibly be any doubt.

David Brooks makes this claim in a New York Times op-ed:

The rampage reminded us that if Black people had done this, the hallways would be red with their blood.

President-elect Joe Biden said much the same:

If it had been a group of Black Lives Matter protesting they would have been treated very, very differently than the mob of thugs that stormed the Capitol.

So did his Vice-president elect Kamala Harris:

We witnessed two systems of justice when we saw one that let extremists storm the United States Capitol, and another that released tear gas on peaceful protesters last summer.

The claim that the Capitol police were much more passive than they would've been had the protestors been black not only lacks any substantiation, it accomplishes nothing but boost racial discord and drive the wedge between the races even deeper.

Even more, it's an awful slander on the men and women who serve at the Capitol because it imputes to them a racism that's wholly undemonstrated.

A National Review Online article by Tobias Hoonhout is critical of a Washington Post article for pounding that theme.

Hoonhout writes that,

Multiple Washington Post articles published in the days following the pro-Trump riot on Capitol Hill ignored key details in an effort to cast the day’s events as the inevitable consequence of racially disparate policing.

One such article — titled “Kid glove treatment of pro-Trump mob contrasts with strong-arm police tactics against Black Lives Matter, activists say” — was published Wednesday evening, just hours after the chaos subsided. It quotes a number of Black Lives Matter activists who misrepresent the day’s events to suggest that the police went easy on the pro-Trump rioters because they were predominantly white.

The four reporters whose bylines are listed on the article didn’t bother to fact-check any of the false claims.

The implication in the WaPo article as well as the Biden, Harris and Brooks statements, of course, is that the Capitol police are a bunch of racists.

As Hoonhout points out, though, the WaPo article fails to mention that a white female Trump supporter was shot in the neck and died and that the reason the National Guard was not in evidence was because D.C.'s mayor Muriel Bowser, a black woman, had requested only a small contingent of guardsmen, primarily to control traffic and monitor metro stations.

The WaPo article declares that the vandalism and violence of the rioters had no obvious consequence, but there was one dead woman and at least 82 arrests by Thursday night, facts which belie the WaPo's reporting, as does the fact that, in addition to deadly force, the police also used tear gas and flash bang grenades in an attempt to defend the Capitol from the mob.

It should also be pointed out that the Capitol police are not trained in riot control and were not wearing riot gear.

Hoonhout quotes a BLM spokesperson who's not going to let a few measly facts get in the way of his narrative:

DeRay Mckesson, described in the Post as “a leading voice of the Black Lives Matter movement” told the paper that “Black and Brown people have been shot and arrested for far less.”

“Black people would not have even gotten into the building. They would have started shooting at them the minute they started to rush at the police,” he said.

How Mckesson, Biden, Harris or Brooks know any of this none of them tell us, but their lack of any warrant for their inflammatory claims doesn't diminish their certainty. They just know it's true because they know that the Capitol police, many of whom are black themselves, are eager for the chance to shoot black rioters.

It's as incredible as it is disgusting that Biden, et al. would so shamelessly slander the men and women of the Capitol police force while the corpses of their fellow officers were yet warm simply to score political points.

The left, it seems, has no desire to promote racial harmony. Rather they have a deep ideological and political interest in generating as much friction between blacks and whites as they can.

The actor Morgan Freeman was once interviewed by Mike Wallace and gave what I think to be the best advice on how we should handle race in this country. Wallace asked Freeman, "How are we going to get rid of it (racism)?" To which Freeman responded, "Stop talking about it, I'm going to stop calling you a white man, and you're going to stop calling me a black man. I'll know you as Mike Wallace, and you will know me as Morgan Freeman."

Such simple advice. Why don't more people heed it?

The Darkness Closes In

Ben Domenech offers a number of pertinent remarks about last Wednesday's ruckus on Capitol Hill in a fine essay at The Federalist.

Some of his most interesting comments, perhaps, are in his concluding paragraphs where he notes that those who control our news and social media will use the riot as an excuse to amp up their condemnation of conservatives, at least those who themselves don't condemn Trump, and to accelerate the process of suppressing, or even eliminating, the free exchange of ideas in this country.

Here's Domenech:

What will happen next is obvious: A total crushing, anti-free speech effort that treats Trump-supporting groups like Branch Davidians. An effort to restore the fundamentally unserious neocons as the voice of reason in the room. A hardening of the bounds of the People’s House to keep people away from politicians. A use of any levers of government power — including audits, regulation, and lawfare — to harass conservatives now categorized as seditionists and terrorists by the incoming president who falsely claims to want to unite the country. And above all, a doubling down on all the policies and efforts put in place to crush exactly the type of people who showed up at the Capitol yesterday in a foolish, desperate attempt to make themselves heard.

The crushing of free speech is absolutely necessary for the left because they're aware, if only subliminally, that conservative ideas have a powerful appeal to rational folks. Progressives sense that their own ideas can only compete on an emotional level and simply couldn't withstand the criticism they'd be subjected to in a free and open public square.

This is one reason for the postmodern disparagement of Reason itself and for the ascendence of fact-free emotivism in our public discourse. It's one reason why so many conservative speakers, people like Jordan Peterson, for example, are disinvited from speaking on college campuses or shouted down and threatened with physical harm if they do show up. The progressive leadership at these schools fears that the audience would find these speakers too persuasive if they were permitted to expose students to their ideas.

Likewise, Facebook and Twitter will continue to deplatform conservatives. Many newspapers and tv newsrooms will continue in their role as propagandists for the left. Apple may follow though on its threat to drop Parler from its app store, applicants for teaching positions will be asked their opinions of sundry social issues and quietly passed over for the job if their answers don't pass progressive litmus tests.

It's ironic that progressives who see themselves as the champions of justice for the oppressed are themselves busily engaged in creating another unjustly oppressed class and happily serving as the oppressors. The people who see themselves as children of light are actually ushering in the darkness.

Domenech adds this:

The rioters failed in their effort and ensured their marginalization. But marginalization doesn’t mean evaporation. They’re still here. They’re still Americans. And they’re not going away.

They may not be going away, but every effort will be made to make them seem irrelevant, insignificant and malign and to suppress their voices lest people who hear them begin to think that they make a lot of sense.

Protein Shapes

There are hundreds, if not thousands, of metabolic processes occurring in each of the trillions of cells in your body at this very moment. Each of those processes requires the work of a team of specialized proteins, and each of those proteins must have a particular shape in order to perform its assigned task.


Examples of Protein Shapes

 If a particular protein fails to achieve the proper shape when it's formed the fitness of the cell will suffer, and thereby hangs an interesting problem. Given that the universe of possible configurations that a protein could adopt is vastly greater than the number of seconds since the earth formed, how is it that natural selection was able to "discover" all of the highly specific shapes of each of the myriad proteins necessary for even the simplest cell to function?

Biologists tell us that the shape of a protein is a function of the sequence of amino acids that make up the protein, much like beads make up a necklace, but how, out of all the possible sequences there are, did just the right sequence arise, not just once but hundreds of times in the first cell?

Cornelius Hunter offers an interesting discussion on the problem at Darwin's God. He writes:

But [the protein] works just fine only because a very special amino acid sequence was specified. That amino acid sequence is just as astronomically rare as the three dimensional structure that the unfolded protein was able to find. So from where did this amino acid sequence come?

The string of amino acids that make up a protein comes from the cell’s translating machine called the ribosome. The ribosome takes as input a string of nucleotides and produces as output a string of amino acids. The translation is done according to the genetic code.

And from where did the string of nucleotides come? It came from the DNA. A massive protein copying machine slides along an opened section of DNA and copies a gene.

And from where did the DNA gene come? According to evolution it evolved, but it is here that we find another entropy barrier. Just as the folding protein is confronted with an astronomical number of possible structures, so too the DNA gene is confronted with its own nightmare of choices.

This is one of the main reasons why explaining the origin of life is such an intractable problem. DNA is a code. It's information. Where did this information come from. Could it have been produced by chance and blind forces, or did it require intention and intelligence?

We've never experienced information such as a code being produced apart from a mind, and yet despite the complete lack of empirical warrant the naturalist takes an enormous leap of faith and chooses to believe, without any evidence, that not only is it possible to have produced a code by chance, but that it actually happened in the origin of living things.

Then the naturalist, having committed himself to the belief that unthinking nature is capable of such miracles - the equivalent of believing that a computer program could be produced by a random symbol generator - criticizes those who are skeptical of such wonders as being superstitious and unscientific for thinking that the existence of information points to the existence of an intelligent mind.

It's actually rather amusing.

Reaping What We Sow

Wednesday's riots at the Capitol were tragic, disgraceful and worthy of all the condemnation and criticism they've received from Republicans, both those who support and those who are critics of Mr. Trump.

I say Republicans because among our political class it's only Republicans who have the moral standing to condemn what happened on Wednesday. This may sound absurd to some, but almost all Republicans who have been outspoken in their criticism of the mob that vandalized the Capitol building were also outspoken in their criticism of the mobs which vandalized and looted our cities and injured and, in some cases, murdered people last summer.

During that long stretch of chaos and turmoil, however, most Democrats were either silent or even excused the violence.

Tristan Justice at The Federalist lists 28 examples of Democrat politicians or progressives in the media excusing or even applauding last summer's riots in which thirty people died and untold millions of dollars worth of property was destroyed.

Justice writes:

Not one prominent conservative pundit or politician with any significant platform was reported to have tried endorsing the mob of Trump supporters infiltrating the U.S. Capitol. To the contrary, conservatives spent months vilifying Democratic leaders for not doing enough in their own states and cities to crack down on the militant mobs of leftists taking streets under siege, normalizing the kind of political violence on track to appear routine in the nightmare 2020 decade.

He goes on to list his examples which I've condensed here. I urge readers to go to the original, though, because Justice provides video and tweets which document each of the examples he cites:

Vice-President elect Kamala Harris urged her followers to donate toward paying Minneapolis rioters’ bail. Justice doesn't mention this quote from Ms Harris but he might have:

They’re [last summer's riots] not going to stop. They’re not going to stop. This is a movement, I’m telling you. They’re not gonna stop. And everyone beware because they’re not gonna stop. They’re not gonna stop before Election Day and they’re not going to stop after Election Day. And everyone should take note of that. They’re not gonna let up and they should not.

That's our new Vice-President.

CNN's Chris Cuomo justified the violence in our cities' streets by demanding to be shown "where it says protesters are supposed to be polite and peaceful.”

Multiple reporters, including MSNBC's Ali Velshi, excused last summer's violence by assuring us that the protests were "mostly peaceful." The same could be said, of course, about the protest march in D.C. on Wednesday, but that doesn't excuse or diminish the violence that did occur.

Democrats went through their entire online convention without condemning any of the violence that staggered the nation in the months preceding their event.

During a CBS interview Nikole Hannah-Jones, the author of the New York Times' 1619 Project, explicitly rejected the idea that destroying property fits the definition of “violence.” The interviewer agreed that she was making "a great point."

CNN news anchor Don Lemon celebrated the George Floyd riots as a 21st-century version of the Boston Tea Party. “And let’s not forget if anyone is judging this, I’m not judging this,” Lemon said as CNN cameras rolled with footage of riots in Washington D.C. and Los Angeles. “This is how this country was started.”

CNN’s Chris Cillizza complained that Trump was wrong to describe the looting, burning and beatings in our cities last summer as "Riots."

Huffington Post released a video instructing viewers as to "How Riots Built America." The video drew parallels between the 2020 riots against police with periods of unrest throughout American history.

NBC News evidently instructed staff last summer to avoid the term "Riot."

When anarchists were taking control of downtown Seattle, Mayor Jenny Durkin advised people not to be "afraid of Democracy."

When a mob tore down a statue of Christopher Columbus in Baltimore last June House Speaker Nancy Pelosi merely shrugged and replied, "People will do what they do." Perhaps she repeated that profundity when she saw pics of Trump supporters lolling about her office with their feet up on her desk.

Rolling Stone magazine re-published an article in May urging readers to "Rethink Property Destruction." The article promoted the idea that the devastation and property destruction caused by riots as "frequently effective."

Other publications offered similar justifications for rioting:

GQ Magazine averred that "Violent Protests Work." Slate argued that riots are a "Proportionate Response." Mother Jones declared in June that "Riots Aren't Irrational." Time magazine insisted that using the term "Riot" was "Loaded." Vox said last summer that riots are "scary but productive" and yesterday wrote that the Capitol riots were "devastating.' Jacobin magazine opined that looting is justified only to promote social justice.

Democrat Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez informed us early last December that the whole point of protesting "is to make people uncomfortable." She also claimed that marginalized people have no choice but to riot. She was talking about poor people, but her assertion would apply, I suppose, to any form of perceived marginalization, including the belief one is being marginalized by an unfair electoral process.

Writer Vicky Osterweil published a book late last summer titled, “In Defense Of Looting,” and earned a feature on National Public Radio (NPR) for the work.

Temple University Professor Marc Lamont Hill went on NPR complaining that dismissing protestors as rioters “dehumanizes” them and impedes political progress.

As I said, you really should go to the OP and watch the videos and read the tweets, but meanwhile, given their silence or support, both tacit and explicit, when people with whom they sympathized committed crimes even worse than were committed by Trump supporters on Wednesday, they have no moral credibility, at least with me, when they criticize and condemn the mob that overran the Capitol building.

If political rioting is unjustified and criminal when Trump supporters do it, and it is, then it's equally unjustified and criminal when BLM and Antifa do it. Yet, mayors in some of our cities have refused to prosecute those who destroyed peoples' property and livelihoods and no one in the liberal media or in positions of Democratic party leadership has expressed outrage over this.

Indeed, the fact that so many rioters were released without charges last summer doubtless fueled some of the frustration of those who showed up in Washington, D.C. to demonstrate and quite plausibly led some of them to believe they could yield to the temptation to vandalize and assault police without fear of prosecution. The lack of censure of Antifa and BLM from the left has no doubt also led some to ape the left's behavior, believing that if they want to compete with and defeat the left they must play by the left's rules.

This is tragic for the nation, but we reap what we sow. What we excused and rationalized yesterday will come back to plague us today. It's almost a law of human nature.

A Shakespearean Ending

For almost four years President Trump accomplished more good for the country and the world, in my opinion, than any other president in my lifetime. Few other human beings could've withstood the withering criticism from the media, the constant vitriol from the left, the years of allegations of phony scandals, congressional investigations and impeachment and still managed to amass the achievements he did.

Despite unprecedented adversity, he gave us a robust economy, record employment among minorities, peace in the Middle East, a record number of exceptional judges and Supreme Court justices, development of a Covid vaccine at what has been near-miraculous speed, and much more, but he seems almost determined in these last few weeks to undo what could have been an outstanding legacy of accomplishment.

I was open to the argument that the election was stolen and was willing to wait for the evidence to be made public. Whatever testimony there was to that effect, however, (for example, that of the truck driver who claimed to have transported thousands of ballots from New York to Pennsylvania on election night) as well as every promise of imminent revelations of Democrat chicanery, seemed to vanish like morning mist.

If there was anything substantive to such allegations it certainly hasn't been widely publicized and demonstrated. Instead, those who promised them, Sidney Powell, Rudy Giuliani and Lin Wood, for three examples, ended up looking foolish, dishonest or insane.

Neither the president nor his spokespersons have gone beyond mere assertions of wrong-doing and actually laid out the case for malfeasance. Perhaps insiders know more, but those of us looking on from outside are asking why we're not being given the overwhelming proof we've been promised.

To paraphrase Dylan Thomas, President Trump refuses to go gently into that dark night, but has chosen to rage, rage at the dying of the light. He claims he's been cheated and has sought redress in the courts as is his right, but none of the almost sixty lawsuits filed on his behalf, many heard by conservative judges, have resulted in a win for the president. Perhaps some of the judges are corrupt political hacks, but can they all be corrupt hacks?

The confusing message sent to voters in Georgia, first suggesting they shouldn't vote in the senate runoff and then saying they should, and his completely unnecessary squabble with the state's Republican governor and attorney general on the eve of a crucially important election, may well have contributed to the Democrats' winning control of the Senate and implementing the most radical agenda this country has ever seen.

Nor did it help that just prior to the runoff Mr. Trump drove a wedge into the Republican caucus by proposing a $2000 payout to every American. Such largesse was seen by many Republicans as irresponsible, and it forced the Georgia senatorial candidates into a dilemma. Either support it and be seen as recklessly pandering for votes, or defy the president, forfeit his support and alienate many Georgia voters.

Now with the Democrats in control of both the White House and both houses of Congress, much that Mr. Trump has accomplished will be undone and his legacy diminished. The burden of responsibility for this lamentable state of affairs will fall to some extent on his own shoulders, though he's not likely to accept that burden.

The attempt by some in Congress yesterday to forestall the inevitable by refusing to certify the verdict of the states seemed like a call for Congress to usurp the authority of the states to control their own electoral process, and it would've set a very dangerous precedent. It doesn't seem like a tactic that Constitutional conservatives should be adopting, and it's only going to make a deeply fractured Republican party more likely.

At the same time, thousands of apparent Trump supporters stormed the Capitol, and some of their number resorted to vandalism and violence, bringing disgrace upon the movement they say they embrace and besmirching further the president's last days in office.

It's been alleged that the violent perpetrators were really leftist antifa infiltrators wanting to make Trump supporters look bad. Perhaps. Here's a suggestion: Arrest them all, charge them with whatever they can be charged with and then sort out who's who, just like they should've done in Portland, Seattle and a dozen other cities last summer. Indeed, had the mayors and governors in the cities and states beset with last summer's mayhem taken a strong stand against it yesterday's hooligans would've been less likely to think they could riot with impunity.

It's a shame that the Trump presidency is ending this way. It's a denouement that Shakespeare might've written, full of chaos, confusion and death. I imagine that a lot of people who were hoping the president would run again in 2024 are now having second thoughts.