Democratic Presidential Clown Car Update for September 30, 2019

September 30th, 2019

The Biden clan gets rich, Klobuchar kills a duck, O’Rourke threatens a kitten and calls Journey punk rock, while Yang channels The Dead Kennedys and the Q3 fundraising deadline looms. It’s your Democratic Presidential clown car update!

Polls

Too damn many polls this time around…

  • CNN (Nevada): Biden 22, Sanders 22, Warren 18, Harris 5, Buttigieg 4, Steyer 4, Yang 3, Booker 2, Gabbard 1, Klobuchar 1, Ryan 1, Williamson 1. 4% is as high as we’ve seen Steyer in any poll. Is his airdropping money on his campaign finally moving the needle?
  • CNN (South Carolina): Biden 17, Warren 16, Sanders 11, Buttigieg 4, Harris 3, Steyer 3, Booker 2, O’Rourke 2, Gabbard 1, Klobuchar 1. These numbers are from the RealClearPolitics summary, as they’ve double-linked the Nevada poll on their source link.
  • Harvard/Harris: Biden 28, Warren 17, Sanders 16, Harris 6, O’Rourke 3, Buttigieg 3, Yang 3, Castro 2, Booker 2, Steyer 2, Klobuchar 1, Gabbard 1. be prepared to click the zoom button a lot…
  • Quinnipiac: Warren 27, Biden 25, Sanders 16, Buttigieg 7, Harris 3, O’Rourke 2, Klobuchar 2, Castro 2, Yang 2, Bennet 1.
  • Economist/YouGov (page 185): Warren 25, Biden 25, Sanders 16, Buttigieg 7, Harris 6, O’Rourke 2, Yang 2, Gabbard 1, Castro 1, Klobuchar 1, Delaney 1, Bennet 1, Ryan 1, Bullock 1.
  • LA Times/Berkeley (California): Warren 29, Biden 20, Sanders 19, Harris 8, Buttigieg 6, O’Rourke 3, Yang 2, Klobuchar 2, Booker 1, Castro 1, Gabbard 1, Bennet 1.
  • Landmark Communications (Georgia): Biden 41.4, Warren 17.4, Sanders 8.1, Harris 5.6, Buttigieg 4.9, Booker 2.0, Yang 1.9, O’Rourke 1.4, Klobuchar 1.1, Gabbard 0.8, Bennett(sic) 0.1, Steyer 0.1, Castro 0.0. While I should theoretically appreciate the greater precision, I don’t understand how you get a 0.1 out of a sample of 500. Doesn’t that work out to half a person?
  • Goucher College (Maryland): Biden 33, Warren 21, Sanders 10, Harris 6, Buttigieg 5, Klobuchar 1. Yang 1, Booker 1, O’Rourke 1, Delaney 1.
  • Emerson Biden 26, Warren 23, Sanders 22, Yang 8, Buttigieg 6, Harris 4, Booker 2, Castro 2, O’Rourke 1, Ryan 1, Gabbard 1, Sestak 1, Williamson 1. Small sample size of 462, but 8 is a new high for Yang. A couple more points and he’s in Ron Paul territory…
  • Politico/Morning Consult: Biden 32, Warren 20, Sanders 19, Harris 6, Buttigieg 5, Booker 3, O’Rourke 3, Yang 3, Klobuchar 2, Bennet 1, Bullock 1, Castro 1, Delaney 1, Gabbard 1, Ryan 1, Steyer 1, Williamson 1.
  • Monmouth (New Hampshire): Warren 27, Biden 25, Sanders 12, Buttigieg 10, Harris 3, Booker 2 Gabbard 2, Klobuchar 2, Steyer 2, Yang 2, O’Rourke 1, Williamson 1.
  • USA Today/Suffolk (Nevada): Biden 23.2, Warren 19.4, Sanders 14.2. Harris 3.8, Buttigieg 3.4, Yang 3.0, Steyer 2.8, Booker 2.4, Bullock 1, O’Rourke 1.
  • Real Clear Politics
  • 538 polls
  • Election betting markets
  • Pundits, etc.

    Today is the Q3 fundraising deadline, so expect leading candidates to crow about their respective hauls right after I click Publish.

  • Which candidate is putting the most money into campaign ads? Right now, Steyer…and almost nobody else.

    The other candidates have not yet started seriously spending on TV. To date, most candidates have been committed more resources to Facebook and Google ads than to television ads (Pete Buttigieg, for example, has spent $5.3 million on digital vs. just $302,200 on TV). After Steyer, the active candidate who has spent the most on TV is Joe Biden, who has aired 882 spots for an estimated $384,220, almost all of it in Iowa.

  • Evidently Saturday Night Live is still on, and they had a DNC Town Hall skit Saturday:

  • If you think this section is light this week, you’re right: I think the impeachment nothingburger has sucked a lot of the air out of the room for the 2020 race. One way or another, Trump always manages to do that…
  • Now on to the clown car itself:

  • Colorado Senator Michael Bennet: In. Twitter. Facebook. Says he’s staying in the race until New Hampshire. Gets a Politico interview, says he’s not on the impeachment train. Also says far left candidates hurt Democratic chances of beating Trump. He’s the third richest Democrat running, behind Steyer and Delaney. “Within days of the appointment [to the senate in 2009], Bennet sold off at least $2 million worth of stock, in companies like Philip Morris, Eli Lilly and Chevron, according to federal filings.”
  • Former Vice President Joe Biden: In. Twitter. Facebook. “Wherever Joe Biden went, son Hunter cashed in.”

    Biden has been leading the Democratic field. The central case for his candidacy rests on the supposedly exemplary work he did as a senior member of Team Obama. Well, in 2016, acting as the Obama administration’s point man in Ukraine, the vice president — unlike Trump — openly threatened to withhold $1 billion in American loan guarantees if the embattled nation didn’t fire the country’s top prosecutor, Viktor Shokin.

    As Biden later bragged, “I looked at them and said, ‘I’m leaving in six hours. If the prosecutor is not fired, you’re not getting the money.’ Well, son of a bitch. He got fired.’ ”

    Most of the media assure us that, though by the Democrats’ new standards this kind of ­intimidation constitutes a flagrant abuse of power, Biden’s reasons for threatening Ukraine were chaste.

    But simply repeating this talking point doesn’t make it true. Granted, Shokin was a shady character. Yet at some point he had been investigating Burisma, the largest gas company in Ukraine, which also happened to be paying Hunter Biden a $50,000 monthly salary as a board member.

    By coincidence, Hunter had landed this cushy gig in a foreign country only a few months after the Obama ­administration began dispatching his father, Joe, to the very same foreign country on a regular basis.

    There was, of course, absolutely nothing in Hunter’s résumé to indicate that he would be a valuable addition to foreign energy interest. He didn’t speak the language, and he had no particular expertise in the energy industry. Oh, he did have one thing, though: his last name.

    I suppose, that isn’t entirely fair. Hunter once ran a hedge fund with his dad’s brother, James Biden, and associated with a notorious Ponzi schemer. James would go on to snag a job as executive vice president of a construction company in 2010, despite having virtually no experience in the field. And only a few months into his tenure, the company would win one of its biggest contracts in its history, a $1.5 billion deal to build affordable homes in Iraq.

    By pure happenstance, Joe was also the Obama administration’s point man in Iraq at the time. Funny how these things work out.

    Liberal reporters, who are framing Trump’s conversation with Zelensky as the most perilous threat in the ­republic’s history, have shown little curiosity about Biden’s dealings with the Ukrainian government. Many media personalities, in fact, have rallied to ­Biden’s defense, calling any intimation of wrongdoing a smear.

    NBC’s Chuck Todd dismissed any Biden talk as a mere distraction. CNN called questions into the former vice president’s actions “baseless.” Other liberals now argue that the Biden firing of Shokin actually worked against the interests of Hunter.

    We have no way of knowing if this is true, either. According to The New York Times, Hunter’s work for Burisma had “prompted concerns” among Obama administration State Department officials, because it undermined diplomacy in Ukraine. Was Biden really the only person available to pressure Ukrainian officials while his son was raking in the cash? Does anyone really believe Biden’s claims that he never once spoke to his 49-year-old son about business in the two years they spent working in the same country?

    A comprehensive timeline of Hunter Biden’s business dealings:

    Late Summer 2006: Hunter Biden and his uncle, James Biden, purchase the hedge fund Paradigm Global Advisors. According to an unnamed executive quoted in Politico in August, James Biden declared to employees on his first day, “Don’t worry about investors. We’ve got people all around the world who want to invest in Joe Biden.” At this time, Joe Biden is months away from becoming chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee and launching his second bid for president.

    The unnamed executive who spoke to Politico charged that the purchase of the fund was designed to work around campaign-finance laws:

    According to the executive, James Biden made it clear that he viewed the fund as a way to take money from rich foreigners who could not legally give money to his older brother or his campaign account. “We’ve got investors lined up in a line of 747s filled with cash ready to invest in this company,” the executive remembers James Biden saying.

    It’s not just Hunter:

    Joe Biden’s brother told executives at a healthcare firm that the former vice president’s cancer initiative would promote their business, according to a participant in the conversation, who said the promise came as part of a pitch on behalf of potential investors in the firm.

    The allegation is the latest of many times Biden’s relatives have invoked the former vice president and his political clout to further their private business dealings. It is the first that involves the Biden Cancer Initiative, a project Joe Biden made the centerpiece of his post-White House life following the death of his son Beau.

    Biden’s brother, James, made the promise to executives at Florida-based Integrate Oral Care during a phone call on or around November 8, 2018, according to Michael Frey, CEO of Diverse Medical Management, a health-care firm that is suing James Biden. At the time, James Biden’s business partners were pursuing a potential investment in Integrate, according to Frey and court records. Frey, who had a business relationship with James Biden and his associates, had introduced the group to Integrate.

    James Biden told the Integrate executives that he would get the Biden Cancer Initiative to promote an oral rinse made by the firm and used by cancer patients, Frey, who said he participated in the call, told POLITICO. He added that James Biden directly invoked the former vice president on the call. “He said his brother would be very excited about this product,” Frey said.

    “Is Impeaching Trump Really About Kneecapping Joe Biden?”

    Make no mistake: This is a risky game the Democrats are playing. On the one hand, their most energetic voters practically demand Trump’s immediate removal. On the other hand, most voters are apathetic at best to the idea of impeachment, and will probably turn against it quite sharply if yet another investigation fails to reveal enough dirt on Trump. But as I wrote at Instapundit earlier today, maybe the only thing worse to the Democrats’ kamikaze wing than not going ahead with an impeachment inquiry would be an unsuccessful one.

    But for some Democrats, that might be a risk worth taking. So let’s go back to our earlier thought, courtesy of GMU law prof David Bernstein.

    The payoff here for “some very powerful Democrats” — and it wouldn’t be prudent to point fingers at anyone in particular — might be well worth the risk. Weaken Trump and force Biden out of the race, probably before Iowa? You can picture a particular presidential candidate or three saying “Deeeeeeliiiiiicious” in their best Dr. Evil voice.

    How bad is the scandal hurting Biden? “Biden Campaign Demands TV News Execs Stop Booking Giuliani.” Long 538 piece on Biden’s popularity among black voters, and how he could lose it.

    In order to win the nomination in a crowded race, Biden needs to cultivate support across demographic groups, to at least feint at his ability to win back the Obama coalition in the general election. His bedrock of support is black voters. Black voters made up around one-quarter of the 2016 Democratic primary electorate and are a crucial demographic group for any candidate. According to Gallup, 63 percent of non-Hispanic black Democratic voters self-identify as moderate or conservative. This, even as the Democratic Party overall has gotten more liberal — 2018 was the first year that over half of Democrats (51 percent) identified as liberal (in 1994, that number was only 25 percent.)

    But while black voters have remained more moderate or conservative, white voters have become increasingly likely to identify as liberal — 65 percent of non-Hispanic white Democrats called themselves liberal and have become rapidly more liberal on issues of race over the past 10 years. With white liberals comprising a key demographic not just in the first two primary states, Iowa and New Hampshire, but also in the media, it’s no wonder that Biden’s campaign has felt the pile-on of Twitter chatter.

    Caveat: Includes analysis from Al Sharpton.

  • New Jersey Senator Cory Booker: In. Twitter. Facebook. Announced he met the donor threshold for the November debates. Can he raise enough money to stay in?
  • Montana Governor Steve Bullock: In. Twitter. Facebook. Unveiled a public lands proposal.
  • South Bend, Indiana Mayor Pete Buttigieg: In. Twitter. Facebook. Plans to take on Sanders and Warren on socialized medicine. He campaigned in Reno. At a campaign stop in Sparks, he was literally left in the dark during a power outage.
  • Former San Antonio Mayor and Obama HUD Secretary Julian Castro: In. Twitter. Facebook. Swears he’s not going to run for the senate even if he drops the presidential run. Which is understandable, since (like O’Rourke) he would lose either. “Julián Castro’s campaign manager says fundraising email not ‘a threat to quit.'” Like I said last week about Booker, it’s the standard campaign solicitation shuck.
  • Former Maryland Representative John Delaney: In. Twitter. Facebook. His Iowa State Director Monica Biddix left the campaign to “pursue other opportunities,” which is hardly reassuring for Delaney’s longshot hopes. “His campaign announced later Friday that it had named Brent Roske the new Iowa state director. Roske earlier served as Democratic presidential candidate Marianne Williamson’s Iowa state director.” I’m guessing this is a step up in neither prestige nor likelihood of success, but probably a much stronger chance of receiving additional paychecks until the caucuses. BEEEEEFCAAAAKE!
  • Hawaii Representative Tulsi Gabbard: In. Twitter. Facebook. Qualifies for October debate. Caves on impeachment. Every day a little more of her “not quite as insane as the rest” credibility slips down the drain.
  • California Senator Kamala Harris: In. Twitter. Facebook. Declining popularity in her home state. “The highs and lows of Kamala Harris’ roller coaster summer.” You know, the sort of roller coaster that climbs one big hill near the beginning, and then it’s all downhill…
  • Minnesota Senator Amy Klobuchar: In. Twitter. Facebook. She killed a duck while golfing. The fact this is the big news of the week for her should give you an inkling of her chances…
  • Miramar, Florida Mayor Wayne Messam: In. Twitter. Facebook. No Messam news this week. Trust me, I looked.
  • Former Texas Representative and failed Senatorial candidate Robert Francis “Beto” O’Rourke: In. Twitter. Facebook. He’s reached the “don’t give a shit” phase of his campaign, or at least he’s come up with a brand new form of phoniness. Also commits the unpardonable sin of calling Journey “punk rock.” “Give me money or I’ll kill this kitten!”
  • Ohio Representative Tim Ryan: In. Twitter. Facebook. Says he’s not dropping out.
  • Vermont Socialist Senator Bernie Sanders: In. Twitter. Facebook. Plans to step up the campaign in Iowa and New Hampshire. He wants national rent control, because he’s obviously not satsified with it just screwing up New York and California. Wants to register but not ban AR-15s.
  • Former Pennsylvania Congressman Joe Sestak: In. Twitter. Facebook. Appeared at something called the Harry Hopkins Democratic Dinner in Sioux City, Iowa.
  • Billionaire Tom Steyer: In. Twitter. Facebook. Gets interviewed by the Council on Foreign Relations. Naturally he’s crowing about leading the impeachment charge.
  • Massachusetts Senator Elizabeth Warren: In. Twitter. Facebook. It’s not just the Biden Family profiting from the insider sleaze. “Elizabeth Warren’s daughter, Amelia Warren Tyagi, is reportedly chairwoman [of] Demos, a liberal think tank, which gave the Working Families Party $45,000 in 2017-2018. This is significant because the Working Families Party just issued a surprise endorsement of Elizabeth Warren for president.” What do you know, some people are taking that unconstitutional wealth tax proposal personally: “Wall Street Democratic donors warn the party: We’ll sit out, or back Trump, if you nominate Elizabeth Warren.”

    Some big bank executives and hedge fund managers have been stunned by Warren’s ascent, and they are primed to resist her.

    “They will not support her. It would be like shutting down their industry,” an executive at one of the nation’s largest banks told CNBC, also speaking on condition of anonymity. This person said Warren’s policies could be worse for Wall Street than those of President Barack Obama, who signed the Dodd-Frank bank regulation bill in the wake of the 2008 financial meltdown.

    She’s all about leading the charge…except when it comes to fulfilling her actual senate voting duties:

  • Author and spiritual advisor Marianne Williamson: In. Twitter. Facebook. Gets a New York magazine profile. “How Spiritual Snobs Became the New One Percent. Enlightenment is the new status symbol for the elite, and Jack Dorsey, Gwyneth Paltrow, and Marianne Williamson the undisputed gods of the wellness aristocracy.” Eh, it’s a sort of irritating, scattershot attack on a real issue. Oh, and in that SNL skit, Williamson appeared via astral projection…
  • Venture capitalist Andrew Yang: In. Twitter. Facebook. While Beto was calling Journey punk rock, Yang was declaring his devotion to the real thing:

    $5 for anyone who can find a video of him doing a karaoke cover of “Holiday in Cambodia.” Gets a BBC profile. He proposed a VAT, which a New York Times writer says will raise more money than Warren’s wealth tax. In truth, both will earn exactly the same amount: zero, since neither has a hope in hell of passing.

  • Out of the Running

    These are people who were formerly in the roundup who have announced they’re not running, for which I’ve seen no recent signs they’re running, or who declared then dropped out:

  • Creepy Porn Lawyer Michael Avenatti
  • Losing Georgia gubernatorial candidate Stacey Abrams
  • Actor Alec Baldwin.
  • Former New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg
  • Former California Governor Jerry Brown
  • Ohio Senator Sherrod Brown
  • Former one-term President Jimmy Carter
  • Pennsylvania Senator Bob Casey, Jr.
  • Former First Lady, New York Senator, Secretary of State and losing 2016 presidential candidate Hillary Clinton
  • New York Governor Andrew Cuomo
  • New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio (Dropped out September 20, 2019)
  • Los Angeles Mayor Eric Garcetti
  • New York Senator Kirsten Gillibrand (Dropped out August 29, 2019)
  • Former Tallahassee Mayor and failed Florida Senate candidate Andrew Gillum
  • Former Vice President Al Gore
  • Former Alaska Senator Mike Gravel (Dropped out August 2, 2019)
  • Former Colorado Governor John Hickenlooper (Dropped out August 15, 2019; running for Senate instead)
  • Former Attorney General Eric Holder
  • Washington Governor Jay Inslee: Dropped Out (Dropped out August 21, 2019; running for a third gubernatorial term)
  • Virginia Senator and Hillary Clinton’s 2016 Vice Presidential running mate Tim Kaine
  • Former Obama Secretary of State and Massachusetts Senator John Kerry
  • New Orleans Mayor Mitch Landrieu
  • Former Virginia Governor Terry McAuliffe
  • Oregon senator Jeff Merkley
  • Massachusetts Representative Seth Moulton (dropped out August 23, 2019)
  • Former First Lady Michelle Obama
  • Former West Virginia State Senator Richard Ojeda (Dropped out January 29, 2019)
  • New York Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (constitutionally ineligible)
  • Former Massachusetts Governor Deval Patrick
  • California Representative Eric Swalwell (Dropped out July 8, 2019)
  • Talk show host Oprah Winfrey
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    Bill Maher Slams White Guilt

    September 29th, 2019

    Ignore the usual “white privilege” throat clearing, as Bill Maher takes aim at the risible nature of white liberal guilt:

    “Hating all whites is just tedious virtue signaling.”

    (Hat tip: Jack Posobiec on Twitter.)

    Will Hurd Running For President? That’s Not Happening

    September 28th, 2019

    At a Texas Tribune forum, retiring Texas Republican Rep. Will Hurd floated the idea of running for President in 2024.

    As for the running part, well, who knows? Lots no-hope candidates delude themselves into running for President every year, people with names like “Wayne Messam” and “Tom Steyer” and “Bill Weld” and “Joe Walsh” and “Kirstin Gillibrand” and “Even McMullin” and…

    You get the idea.

    As for the idea of Will Hurd securing the Republican nomination for President, well, that’s not happening.

    In many ways Hurd was a perfect fit for TX-23, the only true swing district in Texas until 2018. A moderate Republican and squish on border enforcement, he probably did reflect the rough consensus of his majority Hispanic San Antonio-to-just-short-of-El Paso district. But the moderate views that were such a virtue in getting elected (and re-elected) would be a non-starter in the Republican primary. There are at least two other Texas Republican office holders (Rep. Dan Crenshaw and Sen. Ted Cruz) who would be much stronger first-tier contenders for a 2024 Presidential run, and several others who could do better than Hurd as well were they to run (and Rep. Mike McCaul could probably self-finance his run at least as well as John Delaney…er, never mind).

    That said, I could see Hurd as a dark horse VP pick for a non-Texas nominee (pesky Twelfth Amendment). Which puts his overall chances of ever being President better than Beto O’Rourke’s…

    LinkSwarm for September 27, 2019

    September 27th, 2019

    Welcome to fall, or, as we call it in Texas, still freaking summer. It might get as low as 70° next week…at three in the morning.

  • “Democrats were first to enlist Ukraine in US elections“:

    Earlier this month, during a bipartisan meeting in Kiev, Sen. Chris Murphy (D-Conn.) delivered a pointed message to Ukraine’s new president, Volodymyr Zelensky.

    While choosing his words carefully, Murphy made clear — by his own account — that Ukraine currently enjoyed bipartisan support for its U.S. aid but that could be jeopardized if the new president acquiesced to requests by President Trump’s lawyer Rudy Giuliani to investigate past corruption allegations involving Americans, including former Vice President Joe Biden’s family.

    Murphy boasted after the meeting that he told the new Ukrainian leader that U.S. aid was his country’s “most important asset” and it would be viewed as election meddling and “disastrous for long-term U.S.-Ukraine relations” to bend to the wishes of Trump and Giuliani.

    (Hat tip: Stephen Green at Instapundit.)

  • Did California Representative Adam Schiff actually set up the nothingburger?
  • Why Democrats have gone insane:

    What’s really going on here? Why have the Democrats, to put it bluntly, gone berserk? Why are they risking a backlash of cosmic proportions (other than appeasing their psychotically-inflamed base, of course)?

    One, distraction. They live in absolute fear of the coming revelations about the Russia probe, from Inspector General Horowitz but even more from the DOJ’s John Durham, who can actually put people in jail. The Dems know — if they have a brain (and a few do) — these revelations are likely to point up the line at the leaders of the Democratic Party all the way to President Obama. They were all involved to one degree or another with illegally spying on or undermining Trump and his administration and supporters before and after the election. The extent of this we are only beginning to understand.

    To put it mildly, not good. Whether you call this treason is up to you, but you can be sure Middle America (i. e. those elusive independent voters) will not appreciate it.

    But there’s something worse — and Pelosi’s knows it. The only hope for Democrats to defeat Trump is, remote and quixotic as it may be, impeachment. In the midst of the current brouhaha, Joe Biden — their great (alas white male) hope — is being exposed as not just a senile plagiarist, but a senile, corrupt plagiarist with a freaky family out of a Southern gothic novel with tentacles reaching into China and Ukraine. Again, not good.

    Unfortunately, the rest of the Dems have tacked so far to the left that they wouldn’t be able to win an election in Shenyang. Sanders, speaking of senility, is almost risible. He wants to restrict population for reasons of “climate change” when every one of the myriad social programs he so vehemently urges depends on strong continued population growth for economic survival, irrespective of taxes. (Is he that stupid? I don’t think so. He’s just a liar.)

    As for his somewhat subtle clone, Ms. Warren, her proposals are if anything more extreme because she fails to acknowledge (though Colbert did his best to encourage her) that they are going to cost a ton of taxpayer money that approaches national bankruptcy. Even taxing the rich at one hundred percent won’t come near supporting her ideas. Wait until Trump gets ahold of that.

    (Hat tip: Director Blue.)

  • What’s the magic word that made Democrats go extra apeshit over the Ukraine meeting? Crowdstrike:

    To understand how important this is, we must remember the foundation for the entire Russian election interference narrative, ‘Muh Russia – writ large, is built on the claim Russians hacked the servers of the Democrat National Committee (DNC), and subsequently released damaging emails that showed the DNC worked to help Hillary Clinton and eliminate Bernie Sanders.

    Despite the Russian ‘hacking’ claim the DOJ and FBI previously admitted the DNC would not let FBI investigators review the DNC server or cloud-based network. Instead the original claim was that the DNC provided the FBI with analysis of a technical review done through a cyber-security contract with Crowdstrike.

    According to the original FBI statements made by James Comey: Crowdstrike did the captured imaging of the DNC network (servers/cloud), then conducted analysis, then provided a report to the DNC with their findings; and that report was given to the FBI. At least that was the original 2017 claim. However, during court filings in the case against Roger Stone, the DOJ/FBI later admitted they never even saw the Crowstrike final report.

    Lawyers representing Roger Stone requested the full Crowdstrike report on the DNC hack. When the DOJ responded to the Stone motion they made a rather significant admission. Not only did the FBI not review the DNC server or cloud data, the FBI/DOJ never even saw the final Crowdstrike report.

    The narrative around the DNC hack claim was always sketchy; many people believe the DNC email data was downloaded onto a flash drive and leaked. Crowdstrike was a private contractor holding a strong conflict of interest over Clinton and DNC interests. With this FBI court admission the scale of sketchy increased exponentially.

    There was, and still is, absolutely no evidence the DNC was “hacked” (WikiLeaks claims the information was an inside job of “leaking”), and even John Podesta admitted himself he was a victim of an ordinary “phishing” password change scam.

    This admission meant the FBI and DOJ, and all of the downstream claims by the intelligence apparatus; including the December 2016 Joint Analysis Report and January 2017 Intelligence Community Assessment, all the way to the Weissmann/Mueller report and the continued claims therein; were based on the official intelligence agencies of the U.S. government and the U.S. Department of Justice taking the word of a hired contractor for the Democrat party….. despite their inability to examine the server and/or actually see an unredacted technical forensic report from the investigating contractor.

  • “Pelosi’s impeachment theater is boob bait for her rabid radicals.”

    If politics were regulated the way that consumer goods are, Nancy Pelosi might be charged by the FTC with deceptive packaging for her ridiculous announcement yesterday that an “official” impeachment inquiry is underway. It is pure theater, designed to appease the radicals like Rep. Ocasio-Cortez, who two days ago denounced the failure to impeach as worse than Trump’s “crimes.” With radical primary challengers and a San Francisco constituency given to backing lunatic schemes and politicians, she fears for her political career.

    The only way that impeachment begins is with a floor vote of the House, after which time subpoenas can be issued and the facts assembled for Articles of Impeachment to be presented to the House, and, if voted by a majority, submitted to the Senate for trial, which requires a two-thirds majority for conviction. What Pelosi offered was deceptively packaged oversight hearings by six committees. All she is doing is adding five more committees to the hearings already underway by Rep. Jerrold Nadler’s Judiciary Committee.

    (Hat tip: Director Blue.)

  • Why Democrats lie to blacks:

    The obvious is that they are fishing for votes. Warren has a putative weakness with African American voters. Tom Steyer is unknown to them (as he is to a lot of people). Harris is sinking fast and needs to shore up her rep and Julián Castro’s campaign has barely been registering enough to keep him on the debate stage.

    But beneath this are more disturbing beliefs, one of which is on the edge of disgusting and actually racist: that African Americans prefer to be lied to than told the truth. The corollary to this is that they are easily lied to if you stir them up. The level of disrespect in this is off the charts.

    Also at play here, as it is everywhere in Democratic precincts, is Fear of Trump. African Americans are doing better under Trump than they ever have been in this country with unemployment at record lows and salaries up.

    Further, Trump really did something never done before — spearheaded and signed criminal justice reform legislation. Better not remind black people of that. Distract them or lie to them instead. Call Trump a racist, though why would a racist do such a thing?

    (Hat tip: Ed Driscoll at instapundit.)

  • How ObamaCare screwed up health care, in one chart.
  • Man starts a program to help other men get off heroin. The Southern Poverty Law Center called him a white supremacist. Now he’s suing their ass for $4.8 million, and a district judge just gave the green light to start discovery.
  • Hey kids, Scott Adams wants you to know that climate change is not an existential crisis and that nuclear power will help solve the problem.
  • “‘No Climate Emergency‘: MIT Climate Expert, 500 Prominent Global Experts Write In Letter To UN.”
  • Former Admiral McRaven sounds the warning about China’s military buildup.
  • “What’s Wrong With Chinese GDP Data?” “Since 2013, GDP figures look suspiciously smooth.”
  • If proven, this deserves serious prison time: “California Sheriff Under Investigation For ‘Pay To Play’ Concealed Carry Permits.” Namely to campaign donors. (Hat tip: Say Uncle.)
  • “Some 600,000 vacationers were stranded when Thomas Cook, a travel company that has been in business for 178 years, collapsed on Sunday.”
  • Dumbass Texas teen sentenced to 20 years in prison for attempting to join Pakistan Islamic terrorist group Lashkar-e-Taiba.
  • Captain Alfred Haynes, RIP. He’s the reason anyone walked away from the Sioux City crash landing following the loss of all hydraulic control systems.
  • Austria’s oldest Holocaust survivor dies at 106. Marko Feingold lived through four camps, including Auschwitz. Suck it, Hitler.
  • The Air Force sets PHASERS to kill (drones).
  • Friend of the blog Karl Rehn joins some pretty illustrious company.
  • Every now and then I stumble across Crazy Possum Lady’s YouTube channel. Here’s a nice sampler:

  • New Pulitzer Prize to honor destroying people’s lives.
  • The Nothingburger of Nothingburgerton

    September 26th, 2019

    Shortly after House Democrats launched an unofficial official impeachment inquiry for the now-laughable “whistleblower” scandal, President Donald Trump released the transcript of the conversation at the heart of the non-scandal showing there was no talk of freezing Ukraine aid or of any “quid pro quo.”

    You can read the transcript itself to see what a nothingburger it is.

    But partisan and radical is their business model! (Well, that and all the graft.)

    This didn’t keep some of the media’s worst outlets from continuing to hype the non-story:

    The irony is that Democrats actually did what they laughable accused President Trump of doing:

    WIll this cause Democrats to close their impeachment proceedings and apologize? Of course not. They’ll keep it humming along until their extensions in the media can gin up another fake scandal for them to hype until that nothingburger explodes in their face as well. Repeat until November 2020.

    It’s nothingburgers all the way down, forever and ever amen.

    Democrats Get Ready To Throw Br’er Trump In The Brier Patch

    September 25th, 2019

    Can Democrats let President Donald Trump’s constant Twitter jabs at them lure them into throwing him into the brier patch?

    On Tuesday, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) admitted her plans to put a resolution on the House floor Wednesday to investigate President Donald Trump’s Ukraine scandal, a process that will likely grow into an impeachment inquiry as Democrat demands for impeachment grow ever more insistent.

    “Confirmed: House Speaker Nancy Pelosi planning to put a resolution on the House floor tomorrow to address the Ukraine issue as there are increasing calls by Democrats to start the impeachment process for President Trump,” PBS White House Correspondent Yamiche Alcindor tweeted.

    In an interview with CNN Monday night, Pelosi declined to say whether or not she would fully endorse an impeachment inquiry, but she suggested a move toward impeachment proceedings was certain. “We will have no choice,” she said.

    The renewed push for impeachment gained steam following reports that President Trump pressured Ukraine President Volodymyr Zelensky to investigate Joe Biden’s son Hunter in cooperation with the president’s personal lawyer, Rudy Giuliani. On Tuesday, Trump announced he would release the full transcript of the call, during which he reportedly pressured Zelensky to investigate Hunter Biden no fewer than eight times.

    Hunter Biden was a board member of Ukrainian firm Burisma Group when Joe Biden served as secretary of State. During his tenure, Joe Biden pressured Ukraine to fire a prosecutor who was investigating Burisma.

    Yes, a scandal where a sitting Democratic Vice President withheld aid from a foreign country unless they stopped investigating his crooked son’s crooked deals is somehow Trump’s fault. (Hat tip: Stephen Green at Instapundit.)

    The whole thing is transparently yet another “get Trump at any cost” ploy by Democrats.

    It’s ironic that this so-called whistleblower scandal is going to be the thing that kicks off an actual impeachment inquiry, since it looks like just another nothingburger in a long line of nothingburgers:

    The democrats in the House of Representatives are at it again. Is this their third or fourth call for impeachment of the president? Each week it seems media bring us a new sensational story of theft and intrigue, that then very quietly falls by the wayside once the facts emerge.

    This time the controversy centers around business dealings that former Vice President Biden’s son had in the Ukraine. Allegedly, Biden’s son was on the board of a company that bribed Ukrainian officials to end a corruption investigation into it. Democrats now allege that the President threatened to withhold military aid to Ukraine should it not reopen the investigation into Biden’s son. The President denies this claim, and intends to release the transcript of the phone call in question. Currently Speaker Pelosi and her cohorts are planning impeachment, before any real evidence of misconduct has come to light.

    (Hat tip: Instapundit.)

    The way the House is going about sounds less like an impeachment proceeding than a clown show:

    Outside the hard left, the public is not wild about the idea, with 61% of all registered voters opposed:

    Perhaps because it’s obvious that the entire thing is politically motivated by Democrats’ irrational hatred of President Trump:

    Democrats seem not to have noticed that Trump thrives in environments of opposition and chaos. There are a lot of people (not just among Republicans) who believe that actual impeachment is several bridges too far, that Br’er Trump is going to thrive in the impeachment brier patch, and that instead of derailing President Trump’s reelection, it’s going to ensure it.

    Kat Timpf expounds on why this is a bad idea:

    Team Trump sure seems ready for it:

    But it’s also possible that this is just a mime show for the hard left rubes, that Pelosi has no intention of allowing an actual a vote on impeachment:

    Remember that the House tabled an impeachment motion against Trump three months ago. 137 Democrats voted to table the motion then. Does Trump look any weaker today?

    Buckle up…

    The Twitter Primary Revisited for September 2019

    September 24th, 2019

    As I did in previous months, here’s an update on the number of Twitter followers of the Democratic presidential candidates, updated since last month’s update.

    Last month I started using a tool that gives me precise Twitter follower counts.

    I do this Twitter Primary update the last Tuesday of each month, following Monday’s Clown Car Update. Today’s falls on the 24th, while last month’s fell on the 27th, so feel free to adjust accordingly for the three day difference.

    The following are all the declared Democratic Presidential candidates ranked in order of Twitter followers:

    1. Bernie Sanders: 9,695,041 (up 101,797)
    2. Cory Booker: 4,357,161 (up 14,798)
    3. Joe Biden: 3,747,843 (up 52,558)
    4. Elizabeth Warren: 3,187,498 (up 124,085)
    5. Kamala Harris: 3,129,357 (up 49,935)
    6. Marianne Williamson: 2,763,349 (up 4,148)
    7. Beto O’Rourke: 1,611,598 (up 55,055)
    8. Pete Buttigieg: 1,442,981 (up 53,657)
    9. Andrew Yang: 878,076 (up 147,817)
    10. Amy Klobuchar: 767,019 (up 14,092)
    11. Tulsi Gabbard: 573,937 (up 34,068)
    12. Julian Castro: 389,362 (up 13,251)
    13. Tom Steyer: 245,075 (up 276)
    14. Steve Bullock: 185,762 (up 847)
    15. Michael Bennet: 39,477 (up 945)
    16. Tim Ryan: 37,374 (up 374)
    17. John Delaney: 36,270 (up 516)
    18. Joe Sestak: 12,938 (up 499)
    19. Wayne Messam: 8,599 (up 509)

    Removed from the last update: Kirsten Gillibrand, Bill de Blasio

    For reference, President Donald Trump’s personal account has 64,699,182 followers, up 1,133,230 since the last roundup, so once again Trump has gained more Twitter followers this month than all the Democratic presidential contenders combined. The official presidential @POTUS account has 26,750,341, which I’m sure includes a great deal of overlap with Trump’s personal followers.

    A few notes:

  • Twitter counts change all the time, so the numbers might be slightly different when you look at them. And if you’re not looking at the counts with a tool like Social Blade, Twitter does significant (and weird) rounding.
  • Andrew Yang gained the most of all the contenders, up almost 150,000 followers, passing Amy Klobuchar for ninth place. At that pace he’ll break the million follower mark next month.
  • Cory Booker gaining less than 15,000 followers since last month, despite starting with over 4 million, is a strong indication his campaign is dead in the water.
  • Marianne Williamson’s mere 4,000+ gain is even more pathetic. Clearly her magic ride is over.
  • Most pathetic of all is Tom Steyer, who has reportedly been throwing fistfuls of money into social media advertising…and gained 276 followers. That’s less than last-place Wayne Messam gained. Steyer could have gained more by posting cute puppy memes.
  • As predicted, Elizabeth Warren zoomed past Kamala Harris into third place, but her momentum has slowed, as she gained roughly half the followers in September she gained in August.
  • In fact all candidates seemed to slow the rate at which they acquired new followers. Maybe younger people stopped paying as much attention to politics after returning to school after summer vacation.
  • Democratic Presidential Clown Car Update for September 23, 2019

    September 23rd, 2019

    De Blasio quits, Warren rises, Sanders falls, Harris freefalls, Booker’s going broke, Klobuchar shows signs of life, Messam registers, and everyone is all-in on Iowa. It’s your Democratic Presidential clown car update!

    Polls

    Lots of Iowa polls this time around:

  • Des Moines Register/CNN/Mediacom (Iowa): Warren 22, Biden 20, Sanders 11, Buttigieg 9, Harris 6, Klobucher 3, Booker 3, Gabbard 2, Yang 2, Steyer 2, O’Rourke 2, Bullock 1, Castro 1, Delaney 1.
  • Fox News: Biden 29, Sanders 18, Warren 16, Harris 7, Buttigieg 5, O’Rourke 4, Booker 3, Klobuchar 2, Yang 2, Bennet 1, Delaney 1, Steyer 1.
  • Monmouth (New Jersey): Biden 26, Warren 20, Sanders 18, Booker 9, Buttigieg 6, Harris 6, Gabbard 2, de Blasio 1, Klobuchar 1, Yang 1. Booker’s best showing, but it’s for his home state, and if he got that percentage in the actual primary, it would be below the 15% threshold he needs to pick up delegates.
  • Economist/YouGov (page 126): Biden 25, Warren 19, Sanders 15, Buttigieg 8, Harris 5, O’Rourke 3, Yang 3, Booker 2, Gabbard 2, Klobuchar 1, Castro 1, Bennet 1, Williamson 1, Bullock 1, Delaney 1.
  • SurveyUSA: Biden 33, Warren 19, Sanders 17, Harris 6, O’Rourke 4, Booker 4, Yang 3.
  • Iowa State University: Warren 24, Biden 16, Sanders 16, Buttigieg 13, Harris 5, Gabbard 4, Klobuchar 3, Yang 3, Steyer 2, Booker 2, O’Rourke 2, Williamson 1, Ryan 1. High as I’ve seen Buttigieg anywhere, much less Iowa. Sample size of 572.
  • Florida Atlantic University (Florida): Biden 24, Warren 24, Sanders 14, Buttigieg 5, Harris 4, Messam 3, Yang 2, O’Rourke 3, Bennet 1, Ryan 1, Bullock 1, Gabbard 1, de Blasio 1, Booker 1. Messam’s 3% in his home state is not only his highest anywhere, it may be the first time he’s actually registered as a choice.
  • NBC: Biden 31, Warren 25, Sanders 14, Buttigieg 7, Harris 5, Yang 4, Klobuchar 2, Booker 2, O’Rourke 1, Gabbard 1, Delaney 1, Steyer 1, de Blasio 1, Castro 1.
  • Focus on Rural America (Iowa): Biden 25, Warren 23, Buttigieg 12, Sanders 9, Klobuchar 8, Harris 5, Steyer 3, Booker 2, yang 2, Bullock 1, Castro 1, Delaney 1. Gabbard 1, O’Rourke 1, Messam <1. Sample size of 500. Highest I've seen Klobuchar since she announced. Of all the longer-shot candidates, I'd give her the best chance of an "all in on Iowa" strategy getting results.
  • Real Clear Politics
  • 538 polls
  • Election betting markets
  • Pundits, etc.

  • It seems like everyone is now all in on Iowa:

    Former Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr.’s campaign said it would have 110 staff members in the state by the end of this month. Senator Kamala Harris has promised to visit every week in October. Mayor Pete Buttigieg on Sunday kicked off a John McCain-like, everything-on-the-record bus tour and is advertising on local television and radio. Senator Amy Klobuchar is 49 counties into her tour of all 99 in the state. And on Monday, Senator Bernie Sanders will begin a “Bernie Beats Trump’’ tour of eastern Iowa to highlight what he says is his strength as a general election candidate.

    As a new poll suggested a significant shift in the primary race’s top tier — with Senator Elizabeth Warren overtaking Mr. Biden for first place — candidates at the annual Polk County Steak Fry in Des Moines on Saturday tried to cut through the furor surrounding President Trump, Ukraine and Mr. Biden to deliver their message to voters still sifting through their preferences from one of the largest fields in history.

    The candidates’ renewed sense of urgency has set the stage for a four-month sprint to a night of caucuses that remains the single biggest prize in American politics.

    “We know that Iowa is where we can turn heads,’’ Mr. Buttigieg, of South Bend, Ind., said aboard his campaign bus on Sunday. “Even the other early states will be looking at what Iowa did.”

    The increasing focus on Iowa, where voters must attend an hourslong midwinter evening gathering to participate in choosing their party’s nominee, has come at the expense of New Hampshire, where the nation’s first primary election comes eight days later.

    None of the Democratic presidential candidates are betting their entire campaigns on a strong performance in New Hampshire, meaning it may be the first time since 1984 that there is not a candidate focused solely on the Granite State in a contested presidential race.

  • Naturally, this turn of events has supposedly given New Hampshire Democrats a case of the sads:

    Overall, an analysis by The Hill shows that this cycle’s presidential candidates are actually visiting New Hampshire more frequently than 2016’s field of candidates.

    Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D), who is from the neighboring state of Massachusetts, held 34 campaign stops between January and July of 2019, according to the NBC Boston candidate tracker.

    Former Rep. John Delaney (D-Md.) held 79 campaign events in the same time frame, the most of any 2016 or 2020 candidate.

    Former presidential candidate Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand (D-N.Y.) also held more campaign stops than any 2016 presidential candidate, with 53 campaign stops before the end of July. She dropped out of the race at the end of August.

    Fat lot of good it did her.

    “Even though there are dozens and dozens of candidate visits, they’re not as visible as they used to be,” said Andrew Cline, the president of the Josiah Bartlett Center for Public Policy.

    In an interview with The Hill, Cline, who follows New Hampshire politics closely, said the sense the state is being overlooked by candidates is widely shared.

    “It definitely feels like there isn’t much going on in New Hampshire week to week,” he said.

    New Hampshire people can sound a bit miffed about the whole thing.

    “Yes, it’s annoying,” Cline said about the feeling of an overshadowed first-in-the-nation primary.

    The sentiment has been felt in the state throughout the summer.

    For example, the famed Amherst, N.H., Fourth of July parade usually serves as a hotbed for presidential hopefuls, but none of the top-tier candidates showed up this year.

    Most of the top-tier no-shows had supporters marching in their absence but were met with lukewarm enthusiasm compared to the low-polling candidates, such as Delaney and Rep. Tulsi Gabbard (D-Hawaii), who marched in the hot sun and shook hands with dozens of locals.

  • After most called for reducing meat consumption, and some for banning cheeseburgers, Democrats descended on Iowa to grill 10,000 steaks.
  • Are Harris, Buttigieg and Booker playing for second place? If so Harris is failing at that. Booker may well be running for veep. I get the impression that Buttigieg is the insider big money backup choice if Biden’s brain goes completely kablooey.
  • Lots of candidates aren’t even winning their home states. “The fact that so many Democratic candidates aren’t winning in their home states is not a good sign. These are the voters who know you best and should be the most behind you.”
  • Now on to the clown car itself:

  • Colorado Senator Michael Bennet: In. Twitter. Facebook. Natters about climate change and Citizens United, having learned nothing from the Inslee campaign. Starts an ad campaign in Iowa.
  • Former Vice President Joe Biden: In. Twitter. Facebook. All that Hunter Biden/Ukraine dirt is finally getting dragged into the open. “Joe Biden, now the Democratic presidential frontrunner for 2020, faced scrutiny for months over accusations that he pressured Ukraine to fire its top prosecutor, who at that time was leading a corruption investigation into a natural gas company that had ties to Biden’s son.” Let’s go to the tape:

    Inside the mind of a Biden voter.

    Those so-called experts on TV keep saying that Biden is old. Well, you’re not as young as you used to be, either, but you’re not ready to be shuffled off into the retirement home or the grave just yet. When they say Biden’s past his prime and no good anymore, those smug young punks are saying you’re past your prime and no good anymore. You hope to live long enough to see those guys deal with a bad back and arthritis and diabetes.

    Then there are the kids are complaining about what Biden said and did in the ’70s. C’mon now, it was the ’70s. Everybody was listening to disco and wearing bell bottoms and taking drugs and growing their sideburns longer than your middle finger. Nobody’s the same now as they were in the ’70s. That nice-looking kid mayor who’s running was, what, in preschool then? You want to judge him based on what he was doing back then?

    He gets dissed by Ilhan Omar, which will probably only help him with his base of mostly non-insane Democrats.

  • New Jersey Senator Cory Booker: In. Twitter. Facebook. Does Booker only have ten days left to fund his campaign?

    The next 10 days will be critical for Sen. Cory Booker, who warned his presidential run may come to an end if he isn’t able to raise nearly $2 million by the end of the month. “We have reached a critical moment, and time is running out,” campaign manager Addisu Demissie warned in a memo to staff and supporters. “It’s now or never: The next 10 days will determine whether Cory Booker can stay in this race and compete to win the nomination.”

    Booker confirmed that was the case in a series of tweets, acknowledging it was unusual “for a campaign like ours to be this transparent” but he insisted that “there can be no courage without vulnerability.” Booker specified that his campaign doesn’t “see a legitimate long-term path forward” unless the campaign can raise $1.7 million by the end of September. The New Jersey senator insisted that “this isn’t an end-of-quarter stunt” but rather “a real, unvarnished look under the hood of our campaign.”

    Possibly true, possibly just another version of the direct mail “Dear DONOR, we need $X amount of money for CANDIDATE campaign in Y days or we can’t go on! Could you give $Z to keep us going?” solicitation that everyone who’s ever donated to a political campaign gets. Were Booker and Harris in on the Jussie Smollett hate crime hoax? The Senator from Innsmouth.

  • Montana Governor Steve Bullock: In. Twitter. Facebook. “Why Steve Bullock Refuses to Drop Out. Members of the Clinton diaspora are pleading with the Montana governor to stay in the race, even if the rest of the country doesn’t know who he is.” Because if there’s anyone who has their pulse on the finger of America it’s Clinton cronies.

    The Democratic Party, and America as a whole, have changed so much over the past 30 years that comparing candidates from different eras can seem moot. But there’s a distinctly Bill Clinton–esque sensibility to many Democratic Party veterans urging Bullock to stick with his presidential campaign, despite his failing to make the September debate stage and remaining, at best, in the margin of error of most polls. They see another popular, moderate governor of a small, conservative-leaning state who started his campaign late and is being written off, and they don’t just feel nostalgic—they feel a little déjà vu. They insist they are not being delusional.

    Paul Begala, the former Clinton strategist and current CNN pundit, earlier this week went on Twitter to encourage people to donate to Bullock’s campaign. Minyon Moore, one of the top political aides in the Clinton White House and now one of the most respected African American female operatives in the party, told me she didn’t know Bullock before they recently had dinner, but she was impressed by both his understanding of public policy and his campaign’s outreach, and encouraged him to stay with it. “They’ve been doing a lot of quiet meetings,” Moore said. “Unfortunately, time is not waiting for anybody, but I think he has an important voice that probably hasn’t been heard as much as it should be heard.” Mickey Kantor, the former Clinton Commerce secretary, told me this week that Bullock is “a terrific talent,” with “a résumé we would have prayed for in a Democratic candidate for president.”

  • South Bend, Indiana Mayor Pete Buttigieg: In. Twitter. Facebook. “Buttigieg: ‘I can’t even read the LGBT media anymore.'” So the gay candidate isn’t gay enough for the gay mafia. (Hat tip: Ann Althouse.) Dings Warren on how she’ll pay for her socialized medicine scheme.
  • Former San Antonio Mayor and Obama HUD Secretary Julian Castro: In. Twitter. Facebook. He pandered to the impeach Trump crowd.
  • Update: New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio: Dropped Out September 20. It took a long time, but he finally got the hint.

    Just 10 candidates met the polling and donor thresholds to participate in last week’s Democratic debate in Houston. And de Blasio was not among them, nor did it seem possible for him to qualify for the next debate, in Ohio in October. As of July, only 6,700 people had donated to his campaign (debaters need 130,000), and he has only hit 2 percent support in a handful of polls all year long (none of which are counted by the Democratic National Committee for debate qualification). In short, it’s no mystery why de Blasio called it quits.

    De Blasio was always an extreme long shot. He entered the race quite late, on May 16 — after more than 20 other major candidates had declared and the field was already drawing headlines for being historically saturated. In fact, only one successful presidential nominee since 1976 (Bill Clinton) kicked off his campaign later than de Blasio did. And although de Blasio was arguably one of the most progressive candidates in the field — having brought universal pre-K and other liberal reforms to the five boroughs — he was crowded out of the primary’s left lane by the likes of Sens. Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren, who combined for 56 percent support among “very liberal” voters in the most recent Quinnipiac poll (de Blasio had less than 1 percent).

    But probably de Blasio’s biggest problem was simply that Democratic voters did not like him,2 which is quite an unusual place to be among voters of one’s own party. In an average of national polls of 2020 candidates’ favorability from May, de Blasio was the only candidate at the time whom more voters viewed unfavorably than favorably (his net favorability rating — favorable rating minus unfavorable rating — was -1). That’s especially bad because de Blasio wasn’t some little-known candidate; 46 percent of Democrats were able to form an opinion of him. All other candidates who were at least as well-known had net favorability ratings of +21 or better!

    That’s one way to put it. “Almost universally loathed” is another.

    The Post probably had the best postmortem:

  • Former Maryland Representative John Delaney: In. Twitter. Facebook. His daughter is getting married. Congrats! So now Delaney has at least one good thing that happened in his life this year…
  • Hawaii Representative Tulsi Gabbard: In. Twitter. Facebook. She flacked for the Iran nuclear deal and ending sanctions. So this was one of Gabbard’s “Bad Idea Weeks.”
  • California Senator Kamala Harris: In. Twitter. Facebook. Harris is now polling fifth…in California. “Kamala Harris bets it all on Iowa to break freefall.” If that sounds like desperation, it’s only because it is.

    Kamala Harris is putting her stumbling campaign on the line with a new Iowa-or-bust strategy: She’s shifting away from the closed-door fundraisers that dominated her summer calendar to focus on retail politicking in the crucial kickoff state.

    Harris huddled with top campaign officials Tuesday in Baltimore to discuss the next steps as a series of polls show her plummeting into the mid-single digits. She’s not expected to significantly alter her message. Instead, Harris is planning to make weekly visits to the state and nearly double the size of her 65-person ground operation, sources familiar with the discussions told POLITICO.

    The re-engagement in Iowa — where the California senator held a 17-stop bus tour in August but hasn’t returned since — is part of a broader acknowledgment inside the campaign that she hasn’t been in the early states enough. It’s designed to refocus her campaign and clarify her narrowing path to the nomination.

    Harris has been backsliding since her summer confrontation with Joe Biden, dropping so far in recent surveys that her once-promising campaign appears in danger of becoming an afterthought.

    An Iowa poll out Wednesday, conducted by her own pollster for another client, showed Harris well out of range of the frontrunners, Joe Biden and Elizabeth Warren, and behind Bernie Sanders, Pete Buttigieg and Amy Klobuchar.

    More on the same subject:

    By confiding (a little too loudly) to Senator Mazie Hirono of Hawaii that she’s “fucking moving to Iowa,” Harris inadvertently disclosed that her strategy now depends on getting a good result there. Another option would be to suggest to the nation that it’s not an optimal state for her, and thereby lower expectations. She could tell everyone that she’s putting her chips on New Hampshire. In truth, though, neither state is ideal for her.

    Iowa and New Hampshire are among the least racially diverse states in the nation. At least in Iowa, Harris does not have to contend with two of the three frontrunners (Bernie Sanders of Vermont and Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts) representing bordering states.

    Harris’s decision looks logical even if it’s a bit forced. The third contest is the Nevada caucuses, but they have historically not had influence in the perceptions game. Harris’s best early state is likely South Carolina, where there is a huge African-American population that has tremendous influence in the Democratic primary. But Joe Biden is dominating in the polls there and that’s unlikely to change (or benefit Harris if it does) if she does poorly in the first three contests.

    She needs a win before South Carolina, or at least a much-better-than-expected result that gives people a reason to see her as a real option. Iowa is probably her best bet for accomplishing that.

    Which is a problem, since Iowa doesn’t like her. She stumbled her way through a Jimmy Fallon interview.

  • Minnesota Senator Amy Klobuchar: In. Twitter. Facebook. “Harris campaign craters while Klobuchar climbs in Iowa.”

    According to an Iowa poll by Harris’ chief pollster, David Binder, released by Focus on Rural America, Klobuchar has jumped ahead of Harris in the Hawkeye State, in fifth place behind Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders after the third presidential debate in Houston.

    Since the end of 2018, Klobuchar and Harris have jumped back and forth with one another in this particular poll. Harris had 10% support in September, while Klobuchar did not chart. By December, Klobuchar had 10% support and Harris dropped to 7%.

    Harris jumped ahead of Klobuchar again in March by 3 points and following the California Democrat’s strong debate performance in Miami, after excoriating former Vice President Joe Biden, she received 18% support from Iowans in the poll, leap frogging into third place.

    Klobuchar, on the other hand, spiraled downward at the time to the low single digits before rebounding to her current 8%.

    Harris is an unlikable phony. Klobuchar, on the other hand, is just genuinely unlikable.

  • Miramar, Florida Mayor Wayne Messam: In. Twitter. Facebook. He broke 3% in Florida, but he’s still getting stories that he’s not paying his staff.
  • Former Texas Representative and failed Senatorial candidate Robert Francis “Beto” O’Rourke: In. Twitter. Facebook. O’Rourke’s gun-gabbing comments have made him the Republican MVP:

    We’re swiftly marching into 2020, and as of right now, the Democrat party is in crisis with its 2020 candidates doing everything they can to appease the radical trend that has taken it over as Democrat leadership attempts to keep the party as centered as it possibly can.

    It’s a war that is going to keep the left busy as the right continues to sail right through the election period with little to no difficulty. The great thing about O’Rourke’s comments is that, as Coons suggested, it will haunt Democrats going forward, specifically into 2020. O’Rourke essentially gave Democrats another problem to deal with, and so long as he’s is in the race, he’ll continue to make more problems for Democrats to deal with when it comes to gun control.

    What’s more, it’s putting Democrat leadership in the position to tell demonstrable lies, and lies that will get other Democrats who do support that measure of gun control to turn on Democrat leadership.

    So long as O’Rourke is around, the Democrats will continue to be forced to fight one another, and continue to give Republicans more momentum. It’s a house divided that will fall in 2020.

    If I didn’t know any better, I’d say O’Rourke is a Republican plant.

    The NRA dubbed him AR-15 salesman of the month.

  • Ohio Representative Tim Ryan: In. Twitter. Facebook. Gets a Washington Examiner profile. It’s not enough that he wants to fund abortion in America, he wants America involved in family planning worldwide.
  • Vermont Socialist Senator Bernie Sanders: In. Twitter. Facebook. Warren is seriously eating into Sanders’ base.

    Warren has begun to eclipse Sanders’s once-dominant standing among the Democratic Party’s most liberal voters and surpass him in some polls in the first two states in the nominating process: Iowa and New Hampshire.

    They both support what would be a massive economic restructuring with ideas such as Medicare-for-all, but Sanders, 78, has carved out his brand as a democratic socialist while Warren, 70, has described herself as a capitalist who has operated more as part of the Democratic mainstream. While Sanders drew notice in 2016 for his avid fans and big crowds, it is Warren this time who is gaining traction that way.

    These challenges have been compounded by volatility inside Sanders’s operations in Iowa and New Hampshire. The campaign quietly fired its Iowa political director in the late summer and has yet to name a replacement — a key vacancy as the race enters a crucial phase, with less than five months to go before the February caucuses.

    Sanders’s difficulties in Iowa have come into sharper focus over the weekend. The most respected pollster in the state released a survey late Saturday showing Warren surging to 22 percent, two points ahead of former vice president Joe Biden, with Sanders at 11 percent. That places him third in the state where he fought Hillary Clinton to a near draw in 2016, launching an electrifying national movement.

    “Why many Muslims treat Bernie Sanders like a rock star“:

    Other Democratic presidentialcandidates have visited mosques on the campaign trail this year or spoken to Muslim groups. But Sanders has done it first and done it bigger, building on relationships with Muslim communities that took off during his previous presidential campaign, said Youssef Chouhoud, a political science professor at Christopher Newport University who studies the role of Muslims in politics.

    “Historically, engaging with Muslims when you’re seeking federal office has been seen as politically dangerous,” Chouhoud said. “Bernie Sanders seems to be doing something different.”

    Since February, Sanders has named a Muslim to be his campaign manager, tapped a prominent Muslim Palestinian American activist as a surrogate and visited a Los Angeles mosque to commemorate the victims of a New Zealand terrorist massacre at two Islamic houses of worship.

    Last month, he headlined the Islamic Society of North America convention in Houston, where he got a standing ovation for his promise to overturn President Trump’s travel ban blocking most visitors from five predominantly Muslim countries from entering the U.S. It was the first time a presidential candidate addressed the largest and most prominent Muslim gathering in the country, and more than 7,000 people packed in to hear him.

    Former Housing and Urban Development Secretary Julian Castro, the only other presidential candidate to speak at the event, followed Sanders, but many in the crowd left after hearing the senator.

    Sanders’ campaign representatives said they hope Muslims will help him repeat his 2016 Michigan primary win and capture other states. The campaign credited outreach to Michigan’s large Arab American and Muslim communities — including Arabic campaign ads — as a factor in his win there.

    Muslims and Islamic organizations, meanwhile, have sought out Sanders, inviting him to talk to their communities, praising his policy positions and offering endorsements. Many have taken to social media to show their support, using the hashtags #Muslims4Bernie and #InshallahBernie.

    Over the summer, Latif, the Bay Area supporter, launched the website “Iftars with Bernie.” The name refers to the meals at sundown that end the daily fast during Ramadan, when extended families and friends take turns eating and praying together in each others’ homes. The website encourages Muslims to share literature about the senator at the dinners.

    “Muslims appreciate how he is giving them opportunities to be part of his movement,” said Cynthia Ubaldo, a physical therapist in Columbus, Ohio, who hosted a similar event for Eid, a holiday at the end of Ramadan. She passed out homemade “Muslims for Bernie 2020” pins decorated with stars and crescent moons to her 30 guests.

    Snip.

    Linda Sarsour, a Palestinian American activist, is flying to Islamic conferences and mosques around the country to speak on Sanders’ behalf as a campaign surrogate. The co-founder of the Women’s March was among the leaders who left the group recently after infighting and accusations of anti-Semitism, which she has denied.

    Sarsour says Sanders has attracted followers because of his response to Trump’s statements on Muslims and the conflict in Israel and the Palestinian territories.

  • Former Pennsylvania Congressman Joe Sestak: In. Twitter. Facebook. WWMT profile. That’s your Sestak morsel this week…
  • Billionaire Tom Steyer: In. Twitter. Facebook. “Can Tom Steyer Disrupt the Democratic Primary?” Gonna go with “no,” but I bet he can waste a ton of his money trying.

    Part of the challenge for Steyer, at this stage, is that his ideology does not especially distinguish him from many of his competitors. Were he a moderate, his late entry in the race might seem clearer—to rope the Party back toward centrist pragmatism. Instead, Steyer has cast himself as an outsider capable of realizing even the most progressive campaign promises. “My basic thesis is that we have a broken government,” he told me, adding that the top three candidates in the polls have served in Congress or the Senate for about seventy years. “We have to stop the corporations’ stranglehold on this government. So, if that is the issue, the question is who’s going to be credible in terms of making that happen.”

    In his early visits to Iowa, though, his bid has felt somewhat abstract. When, at the diner, he roved from table to table, asking Iowans to name their top policy concerns, the impression was of a cheery executive crowdsourcing his own priorities. During another stump speech on his swing, Steyer outlined the five priorities central to his political identity—voting-rights protections, a clean environment, a complete education, a living wage, and good health—and pointed out that none of the candidates at the previous night’s debate had brought up the climate crisis. He later told me that the first debates, which he found uninspiring, had contributed to his decision to run. “I felt they weren’t really getting down to the nub of what’s going on in the United States,” he said, of the other candidates. “I am categorically, qualitatively different, and, in my opinion, what I am saying is much more realistic and much more significant than anything they’re saying. As far as I’m concerned, I have a very simple task—not an easy task, but simple—to try and see if I have something important to say to the American people.”

    On Friday, a few dozen people, mostly seniors, convened in Maquoketa for a town hall hosted by Bob Osterhaus, a pharmacist who served in the Iowa state legislature until 2004. Osterhaus has seen a number of politicians pass through his home, including Bill Bradley, Chris Dodd, and John Dean, who told Osterhaus’s wife that her cinnamon rolls were the best he’d ever had. “It’s always interesting when a rich man decides to get in and try to act like a commoner,” Osterhaus said of Steyer before the event.

  • Massachusetts Senator Elizabeth Warren: In. Twitter. Facebook. Just how “electable” is Warren?

    In her first Senate race in Massachusetts, in 2012, Warren won by just 7.4 percent, while Barack Obama was carrying the top of the ticket by more than 23 percent. (Warren might have been facing the unique obstacle of being seen as a carpetbagger, but it’s worth noting that Obama was running against a former Massachusetts governor.) Six years later, Warren won reelection against a barely known opponent in a Democratic wave election. She won by a more commanding 24.1 percent, but still fell short of the 27.2 percent margin Hillary Clinton had amassed in that state in the much-less-favorable 2016 election year.

    Election results are indicative, but not dispositive. No two races are alike, and it’s possible Warren’s traits translate better to a presidential election than to the Senate (or to a campaign against Donald Trump in 2020 than to the Republicans she faced in 2012 and 2018). A somewhat more subjective measure of her political appeal is the degree to which Warren’s platform tracks with popular opinion.

    When she began positioning her candidacy last year, Warren seemed to consciously aim for the broad mainstream of her own party. While she formally had endorsed the Bernie Sanders health-care plan, she was promising more limited measures, which seemed to insulate her from its unpopular aspects like higher middle-class taxes and forcing everybody off employer-based insurance. She was also distancing herself from Sanders by labeling herself “capitalist to my bones,” and even pitching her most radical proposal, the “Accountable Capitalism Act,” as good for business in the long run in a Wall Street Journal op-ed.

    And Warren seemed also to understand the political appeal of policies that imposed their costs on corporations — both through taxes and through regulation — than on the public through general taxation. Her focus on corruption and corporate governance was substantively ambitious, but also presented a narrow target for attack — most voters are happy to stick costs on corporate America if they don’t worry about paying for new programs themselves. A year ago, I thought Warren had found the perfect sweet spot.

    It didn’t work out that way. Despite an exhaustive Boston Globe report that her self-identification as Native American had never benefited her career, early media coverage fixated on the issue, and she drew scorn from left and right alike. To Democratic voters, she looked like another victim of Donald Trump’s bullying.

    Months of dismal polling forced Warren to attract more attention from progressive activists and compete with Sanders for the energized left. She has thrust herself back into the conversation by releasing a blizzard of policy proposals, including a full-on embrace of Berniecare. Many of them poll quite well, though the totality of the programs — free college and debt forgiveness ($1.25 trillion over a decade), green energy investment ($2 trillion), universal child care ($700 billion), new housing subsidies ($500 billion), and Medicare for All (roughly $30 trillion) — would be impossible to fund entirely from the rich. Circa 2018, Warren had a strong case to make that she could avoid higher taxes on the middle class, but 2019 Warren couldn’t credibly make a promise like that without giving up most of her plans.

    On top of all that, Warren has joined most of the field in embracing broadly unpopular stances that play well with progressive activists, like decriminalizing immigration enforcement, abolishing the death penalty, and providing health coverage to undocumented immigrants. Trump’s campaign clearly grasps that his only chance of success is to present the opposition as unacceptably radical, and the Democratic primary is giving him plenty of ammunition to make this case. (Trump has also stopped, for the moment, injecting his “Pocahontas” slur into the political news cycle, but that will return if she clinches the nomination.)

    Ann Althouse has spotted the most embarrassing example of WaPo Warren sycophancy yet: “Frederick Douglass photos smashed stereotypes. Could Elizabeth Warren selfies do the same?” Sweet bleeding Jesus, do you have any idea how cringingly pathetic that makes you look? “Martin Luther King helped lift black Americans up to freedom. Could Wheaties do the same?” Matt drudge thinks it’s Warren’s nomination to lose. She and Biden joined UAW picket lines.

  • Author and spiritual advisor Marianne Williamson: In. Twitter. Facebook. Her “spiritual but not religious” brand isn’t selling to Democrats:

    The more voters learned more about her, the less they seemed to like her. According to an analysis by my colleague Nathaniel Rakich, Williamson’s name recognition is up, but her net favorability ratings are down. She now actually has negative net favorability, a dubious honor she shares only with mayor of New York Bill de Blasio and former Rep. Joe Sestak. And her failure to resonate with an audience that might have been receptive to her message — “spiritual but not religious” Americans — also reflects the difficulty of reaching a group that’s defined largely by what it’s not.

    According to the Pew Research Center, about one-third of Democrats identify as “spiritual but not religious” — an amorphous identity that has a lot in common with Williamson’s nondenominational spiritual practice. She identifies as Jewish and still attends High Holiday services, but she also practices transcendental meditation. She rose to prominence as a commentator and teacher of “A Course In Miracles,” a mystical book published in 1976 whose author claimed to be dictating revelations from Jesus.

    “She’s really the definition of spiritual but not religious,” said Laura Olson, a political science professor at Clemson University, about Williamson. “In that sense, she represents — and you’d think might be able to reach — a very sizeable group of Americans.”

    Depending on how you measure it, between one-fifth and one-third of Americans identify as “spiritual but not religious.” It’s a group whose numbers have grown in recent years, as more and more people draw away from institutional religion. And like Williamson, most of the “spiritual but not religious” maintain some kind of link to an organized faith tradition. In fact, according to Pew, they’re about as likely to identify as Protestant as they are to say they’re religiously unaffiliated. But perhaps unsurprisingly, the vast majority are not churchgoers, nor do they necessarily have a strong sense of communal identity or group cohesion. And here we run into the hurdle that makes outreach to the less-religious and the non-religious perennially tricky for Democrats: It’s hard to marshal a group that doesn’t think of itself as a group.

    Williamson’s followers seem to be people who want meaning in their lives, and who reject the materialist vision of finite human life as a briefly flickering candle in a howling void of meaningless existential nothingness, but also don’t want to believe in something as unfashionable as Christianity. She wants mandatory national service to combat climate changes. Way to draw in that youth vote! Evidently she “didn’t challenge” a 9/11 truther in a 2012 interview. Meh, that’s a pretty limp gotcha.

  • Venture capitalist Andrew Yang: In. Twitter. Facebook. “I Was Andrew Yang’s First ‘Freedom Dividend’ Recipient – When He Fired Me.” Accounts from disgruntled ex-employees should always be taken with a grain of salt. This week in stupid commentary: Vox attacks Yang for “reinforcing toxic Asian stereotypes. Because the Social Justice Patrol never sleeps…
  • Out of the Running

    These are people who were formerly in the roundup who have announced they’re not running, for which I’ve seen no recent signs they’re running, or who declared then dropped out:

  • Creepy Porn Lawyer Michael Avenatti
  • Losing Georgia gubernatorial candidate Stacey Abrams
  • Actor Alec Baldwin.
  • Former New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg
  • Former California Governor Jerry Brown
  • Ohio Senator Sherrod Brown
  • Former one-term President Jimmy Carter
  • Pennsylvania Senator Bob Casey, Jr.
  • Former First Lady, New York Senator, Secretary of State and losing 2016 presidential candidate Hillary Clinton
  • New York Governor Andrew Cuomo
  • Los Angeles Mayor Eric Garcetti
  • New York Senator Kirsten Gillibrand (Dropped out August 29, 2019)
  • Former Tallahassee Mayor and failed Florida Senate candidate Andrew Gillum
  • Former Vice President Al Gore
  • Former Alaska Senator Mike Gravel (Dropped out August 2, 2019)
  • Former Colorado Governor John Hickenlooper (Dropped out August 15, 2019; running for Senate instead) Things that make you go “Hmmm“: “John Hickenlooper’s exit from the presidential race came on the same day he would have had to file his financial disclosure forms with the Office of Government Ethics.”
  • Former Attorney General Eric Holder
  • Washington Governor Jay Inslee: Dropped Out (Dropped out August 21, 2019; running for a third gubernatorial term)
  • Virginia Senator and Hillary Clinton’s 2016 Vice Presidential running mate Tim Kaine
  • Former Obama Secretary of State and Massachusetts Senator John Kerry
  • New Orleans Mayor Mitch Landrieu
  • Former Virginia Governor Terry McAuliffe
  • Oregon senator Jeff Merkley
  • Massachusetts Representative Seth Moulton (dropped out August 23, 2019)
  • Former First Lady Michelle Obama
  • Former West Virginia State Senator Richard Ojeda (Dropped out January 29, 2019)
  • New York Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (constitutionally ineligible)
  • Former Massachusetts Governor Deval Patrick
  • California Representative Eric Swalwell (Dropped out July 8, 2019)
  • Talk show host Oprah Winfrey
  • Like the Clown Car update? Consider hitting the tip jar:





    The Decline and Fall of Yale

    September 22nd, 2019

    This is long, detailed, and interesting piece on the rapid surrender of intellectual freedom at Yale to social justice warrior radicals. It’s a sad, scathing indictment not only of how elite higher education can no longer defend itself or Western civilization, but of how social justice warrior ideology makes our elites feel less responsibility for leading the nation properly than ever before.

    How would a university with vision act when such cultural institutions come under attack? In Yale’s case, several students began to agitate that the term “Master” had problematic racial connotations. In other words, “Master” was also what African-American slaves called their owners. In the case of authentic individual tensions—if a student had a difficult background where they had been forced to use the term—perhaps the university would find a reasonable resolution to make the student comfortable. But in the case of broader misunderstanding, perhaps it would be better to educate the students about their academic heritage. The administration could have explained that this term has nothing to do with slavery in America and actually derives from a rich history that makes Yale unique.

    What actually happened? After some debate, the title was quickly changed to “head of college.” The suspicion is that this was done to appease the student body as a compromise for not changing the name of a dormitory. In the end, the compromise was rejected, a large number of students took to the streets, and both were changed.

    But the appearance of bottom-up protest politics is always a bit of a false narrative. It would be one thing if the students were polled and a majority said they wanted the name changed, or some other process was used. At least the university could say that it was making decisions based on some objective democratic process, and wasn’t just being pushed around. But this is not what happened. No polls were taken. There was no authoritative process. The school said no for a few months, then caved. If the school were actually confident in its position to resist, it could have easily pushed back on the protests. Instead, it folded on demands from a small number of students willing to make noise. Either the university administrators are spectacularly spineless, or the protests just provided a convenient impetus and excuse to do something they already wanted. We can look at several more incidents and notice a similar trend.

    The Halloween Costumes incident also made national headlines. It was another test for Yale. The Intercultural Affairs Council wrote an authoritative email to the entire student body before Halloween, instructing students to be mindful about offensive costumes. A few students approached Erika Christakis, a professor, child psychologist, and wife of Yale Master Nicholas Christakis, and told her that they found it strange that the Council could just email the entire student body and tell it what to do. Erika took note and wrote her own email, proposing that Halloween costumes should be policed not from the top down with institutions instructing people on their behavior, but from the bottom up, with students having conversations with each other.

    What happened next? If this were 2005, nothing would have happened. Erika’s letter was benign and non-confrontational, centering on her experience and research with children, and invoking notions of self-regulation and free expression. But this was 2015, so all hell broke loose. Students called for her to be fired. When her husband stood by her, he became a target, too. Both professors, with ambivalent and ambiguous support from the university, stopped teaching. It did not matter that Erika’s classes were so desirable that she had despairingly long waitlists.

    In the Calhoun incident, people took to the streets because the name of a dormitory was offensive to them. The reason? It was named after Vice President John C. Calhoun, who, even for his era, was vocally pro-slavery. After months of student protest, it was changed to Grace Hopper.

    Then there were the Yelp reviews. The student newspaper parsed hundreds of Dean June Chu’s Yelp reviews, found all of the worst ones, collated them into a PDF, and published it in the student newspaper. What would a university president with vision have done? What should he have done when national newspapers reprinted the piece? Maybe the student newspaper would be placed on suspension, or receive a guidance order. Maybe he would add a faculty advisor. The point is that collating the ‘worst’ of a dean’s activity online and publishing it as a single document—unless there is something criminal or truly heinous—has less in common with journalism than with a revenge plot.

    How did leadership respond in real life? Chu was supported at first, but then, when it was found out that there were seven offensive reviews and not just two as she initially claimed, she was let go, and no student was punished. This case made national headlines, but the actual administrative proceedings that determined her leave are still a black box. Perhaps she was already in hot water, and this was the last straw. Perhaps she was paid off to leave and keep quiet. Nobody knows. The public story is that her leaving was solely because of the Yelp reviews.

    Some conflicts were public explosions, and some were completely private. The change from “Freshman” to “First-year” happened when an administrator requested that all instances of “Freshman” be changed to “First-year” in all of the materials and pamphlets for the 2018–2019 school year. But women were not asked if they were actually offended by the word. Students were not asked what they thought. This was a change that came completely from the top.

    What do all of these events have in common? Some had student support. Some did not. Some started as public outrage taken to the street. Some were completely internal. What they had in common was an administration and student body coordinated around an ideology that continually mutated to ensure moral entrepreneurship and a continued supply of purges, as new forms of human behavior or commonplace descriptors became off-limits. Some of this energy was genuine, some cynical.

    These were not kids protesting the Vietnam war, or graduate students mobilizing for better pay and medical care. Nobody would have had a gun shoved into their arms and sent across the world if Yale had not fired the professors. Nobody would have lost money if they did not change “Master.” In fact—Yale lost money on these changes in the form of alumni donations and administrative time. Meetings, committees, redone paperwork, and brand new “head of college” plaques. These changes were neither meant to save lives, nor to save money.

    But what was the point of it all?

    What’s Really Behind The Campus Wars

    The news stories portrayed the Halloween Costumes debacle as either an obvious issue of professors’ rights, or an obvious issue of minority rights. But they missed all the messy emotions on the ground.

    You must understand—a woman—one professor—wrote an email, and the entire campus went insane. For an entire year, nobody knew what was going to happen. Will the professors really be fired? Can you be fired over an email like that? A cloud of tension drenched the campus. Those opposed to the “politically correct” view whispered among themselves about if, and how, they should mobilize. Those who wanted the firings waited anxiously for the administrative response. On the national scale, this was a minor news story updated every few months, but on the campus these were not minor debates. They changed the entire dynamic. These issues were debated in dining halls. They split apart friends. They formed a mist over everything else—for an entire year. The people who wanted the professors to stay? Either because they disagreed with the scandal, or they liked their classes? They were not just wrong—they must also be cruel.

    Thousands of hours of human effort and labor. And for what? What was it for?

    If you ask supporters, they will tell you the cost does not matter so much, because this is about creating an ideal world. Of course the professor should be fired—how dare she stand against the minority student organizations? Of course it’s okay that the Yelp reviews were published—she should never have written them. Of course names should be changed if they hint at or honor the wrong ideology. What does preserving history matter if history is racist? The university is handling things according to its proper ideals of empathy and inclusion.

    In short, their point was that this was all to help poor people. Immigrants. People whose parents are from distant, impoverished lands. People of color. Changing “Master,” firing the dean, and firing professors was all for this.

    Except this did so little to actually help any of these people that this could not possibly have been the main motivation.

    None of this was actually to their benefit, except for the few activists willing to invest time and energy into the game. It is not easy to stay up-to-date with the new, ever-more-complex rules about what you are allowed to say to qualify as the bare minimum of sociable and sane. It is cognitively and socially demanding. I had to not just study psychology and computer science, but I had to stay up-to-date with the latest PhD-level critical theory just to have conversations.

    I had to debate with people why it is not racist that my Russian parents actually liked the word “Master.” That they liked that Yale was drawing from a rich, centuries-long tradition. “Master” connotes mastery of a subject. It connotes responsibilities and a cultural aesthetic far beyond what “head of college” connotes.

    If words like “Master” are deemed offensive based on questionable linguistic or historical standards, then this means other words and phrases can become offensive at a moment’s notice. Under these rules, only people in the upper ranks who receive constant updates can learn what is acceptable. Everybody else will be left behind.

    The people best positioned for this are professors at elite universities. They are ingrained in the culture that makes up these social rules. They get weekly or even daily updates, but even they cannot keep up.

    Erika and Nicholas Christakis were on-the-record liberals who had fought for minority issues at Harvard. That didn’t matter; they didn’t get with the program, so they had to go. June Chu had penned an article saying that deans need to be mindful of their students’ backgrounds and diverse challenges. If even competent, qualified, liberal, well-meaning, tenured professors at Ivy League universities are in danger of losing their livelihood for arbitrary reasons just because they said something subtly wrong to the wrong student organization, then what hope do the rest of us have?

    Nicholas Christakis was ousted as if he were a bad guy. His on-campus family was bullied. His entire life was cast aside over one email, as if the email were the one standard by which he should be judged. Jonathan Holloway, the African-American then-Dean of Yale College, was shouted at by students for not doing enough for black students. Whether June Chu was a good dean or not—and maybe she wasn’t—does not matter. What mattered was what she wrote on Yelp.

    A cynical observer might conclude that this is all just revolution as usual—a small clique of agitators seizing more and more power, and purging their enemies by virtue of their superior internal solidarity, a bold and demanding ideology, lukewarm popular moral support, and no real organized opposition. In some ways, that is what’s going on. They have the bold ideology, the ambient support, and no real opposition.

    But importantly, they don’t have internal coordination by any means other than adherence to the ideology itself. Even members of the clique are never really safe. Anyone who contradicts the latest consensus version of the constantly mutating ideology, even if they have worked to its benefit or are otherwise obviously on side, gets purged. If you don’t keep up, you get purged.

    It doesn’t matter that the ideology is abusive to its own constituents and allies, or that it doesn’t really even serve its formal beneficiaries. All that matters is this: for everyone who gets purged for a slight infraction, there are dozens who learn from this example never to stand up to the ideology, dozens who learn that they can attack with impunity if they use the ideology to do it, and dozens who are vaguely convinced by its rhetoric to be supportive of the next purge. So, on it goes.

    This is the nature of coordination via ideology. If you’re organizing out of some common interest, you can have lively debates about what to do, how things work, who’s right and wrong, and even core aspects of your intellectual paradigm. But if your only standard for membership in your power coalition is detailed adherence to your ideology, as is increasingly true for membership in elite circles, then it becomes very hard to correct mistakes, or switch to a different paradigm.

    And this helps explain much of the quagmire American elites are stuck in: being unable to speak outside of the current ideology, the only choice is to double down on a failing paradigm. These failures lead to lower elite morale, resulting in the class identity crisis which afflicts so many at Yale. Ironically, the result is an expression of that ideology which is increasingly rigid on ever more minute points of belief and conduct.

    Snip.

    What is the point of this new ideology? This ideology is filled with inconsistencies and contradictions, because it is not really about ideological rigor. Among other things, it is an elaborate containment system for the theoretical and practical discontent generated by the failures of the system, an absolution from guilt, and a new form of class signaling. Before, to signal you were in the fashionable and powerful crowd, you would show off your country-club membership, refined manners, or Gucci handbags. Now, you show how woke you are. To reinforce their new form of structural power, people dismiss the idea that they even have the older, more legible forms of status. They find any reverse-privilege points they can, and if they are cis-white-men, they pose as allies. On an institutional level, the old ways of legitimizing power are gone, and the new motto is this: diversity is legitimacy.

    There is a deep comedy to this sort of signaling. Only around 2% of the student body was in the bottom 20% of American society, and yet extremely wealthy Singaporean students who had spent just a few years in America marched in the street and referred to themselves as “people of color.” People’s experiences were ignored when they volunteered information that countered the main narrative, because the surface-level debate wasn’t the point. The point was to signal that you were with the program. Only a select and secret group of student “leaders”—who were already savvy enough to engage comfortably with hierarchy—were invited in to chat with administrators.

    Snip.

    These are the people who call themselves idealists and say they want to save the world. They feel the weight of responsibility from their social status—but they don’t know how to process and integrate this responsibility into their lives properly. Traditionally, structurally well-organized elite institutions would absorb and direct this benevolent impulse to useful purpose. But our traditional institutions have decayed and lost their credibility, so these idealists start looking for alternatives, and start signaling dissociation from those now-disreputable class markers.

    The capacity to really think through what an alternative should look like, and create one, is so rare as to be effectively nonexistent. Instead, idealists are forced to take the easy way of just going along with dominant ideological narratives of what it means to do good. They feel guilty about their wealth and privileges, and feel that they won’t be doing their part unless they do something very altruistic, and the idealistic ideologies reinforce these feelings. So they go overboard, and rush headlong into whatever they are supposed to do. They purport to speak for and be allied with underprivileged groups. They get their professors fired for minor infractions. They frantically tear down whatever vestiges of the old institutions and hierarchies that they can, and conspicuously feel guilty about the rest.

    These are the people who buy clothes from Salvation Army and decline your Sunday brunch invitation because it’s too expensive, sometimes with the implication that they are saving their money to donate to more effective causes, if they aren’t pretending not to have it. They are the people who might attack or cut off their friends for ideological reasons. They discharge their personal responsibility by sacrificing everything outside of their distant mission, including friendships and social fabric.

    Snip.

    Who is winning? This question is an important one. Yale administrators had lofty goals. In an attempt to placate their own biases, the administrators and faculty forgot that they are the ones who are supposed to be teaching. Instead of expelling or suspending the small number of people actively undermining the student body and university as a whole, the university does nothing, or actively accelerates the process. The professors are the ones who leave. The radical clique feels emboldened.

    Now we can begin to understand the real problem at Yale. It is not free speech—and it is not non-inclusivity. The standards of reality, and the standards of morality not based solely on being woke, are ousted. That’s because the conventional standards of elite morality, based on responsible use of power—actually responsible, not just a convenient feeling of doing good—are much harder, and based on the very self-consciousness that everyone is trying to avoid.

    The faculty get pushed around by a small number of students, and administrators actively fire up conflict on their behalf. If an administrator wins favor among them, that administrator gains power. If administrators come to understand that they can gain power via this vector, it makes sense why they would chip away at existing holders of power: the people on the board, the donors, the alumni, and the traditions of the institution itself.

    In effect, a large fraction of the administrators form a revolutionary class within the rest of the university structure. They use both their existing power and new ideological mandates to expand their own domain at the expense of other players. The purpose of the administrators is to shape, tear down, and rebuild the university on the institutional level, which lets them act on ideological goals in a way students and faculty generally cannot. The people filling these expanded roles often come from the student body itself, having served in student government or activist student organizations before transitioning into their bureaucratic roles after graduation. This is the human institutional structure behind the ideological phenomenon.

    Snip.

    What’s happening at Yale reflects a crisis in America’s broader governing class. Unable to effectively respond to the challenges facing them, they instead try to bail out of their own class. The result is an ideology which acts as an escape raft, allowing some of the most privileged young people in the country to present themselves as devoid of power. Institutions like Yale, once meant to direct people in how to use their position for the greater good, are systematically undermined—a vicious cycle which ultimately erodes the country as a whole.

    Read the whole thing.

    (Hat tip: The American Conservative.)

    In Which The New York Times Straight Up Lies About Ed Buck

    September 21st, 2019

    As an extension of the Democratic Media Complex, it’s never a surprise when theNew York Times lies to help the Democratic Party out. This time it’s calling wealthy gay Democratic Party donor and accused serial killer Ed Buck “a small-time Democratic donor.”

    Does this look like a “small time” donor to you?

    Money to PACs BUCK, ED
    WEST HOLLYWOOD, CA 90046 RETIRED 06-10-2008 $500.00 United for A Strong America (D)
    Money to Candidates BUCK, ED
    WEST HOLLYWOOD, CA 90046 RETIRED 09-02-2010 $1,000.00 Portantino, Anthony (D)
    Money to Parties BUCK, ED
    WEST HOLLYWOOD, CA 90046 RETIRED 12-09-2009 $500.00 Democratic Congressional Campaign Cmte (D)
    Money to Parties BUCK, ED
    LOS ANGELES, CA 90046 RETIRED 08-23-2012 $2,000.00 Los Angeles County Dem Central Cmte (D)
    Money to Candidates BUCK, ED
    LOS ANGELES, CA 90046 RETIRED 03-15-2012 $1,000.00 Israel, Steve (D)
    Money to Candidates BUCK, ED
    WEST HOLLYWOOD, CA 90046 RETIRED 10-03-2012 $1,000.00 McNerney, Jerry (D)
    Money to Candidates BUCK, ED
    WEST HOLLYWOOD, CA 90046 RETIRED 01-27-2015 $5,200.00 Sinema, Kyrsten (D)
    Money to Candidates BUCK, ED
    WEST HOLLYWOOD, CA 90046 NOT EMPLOYED 10-10-2016 $1,000.00 Bonoff, Terri (D)
    Money to Candidates BUCK, ED
    WEST HOLLYWOOD, CA 90046 RETIRED 10-10-2016 $1,000.00 Bera, Ami (D)
    Money to Candidates BUCK, ED
    WEST HOLLYWOOD, CA 90046 RETIRED 04-24-2015 $2,700.00 Clinton, Hillary (D)
    Money to Candidates BUCK, ED
    WEST HOLLYWOOD, CA 90046 RETIRED 06-25-2013 $2,600.00 Sinema, Kyrsten (D)
    Money to Candidates BUCK, ED
    WEST HOLLYWOOD, CA 90046 RETIRED 06-25-2013 $2,700.00 Sinema, Kyrsten (D)
    Money to Candidates BUCK, ED
    LOS ANGELES, CA 90046 RETIRED 02-11-2014 $2,600.00 Lieu, Ted (D)
    Money to Candidates BUCK, ED
    LOS ANGELES, CA 90046 RETIRED 02-11-2014 $2,600.00 Lieu, Ted (D)
    Money to Parties BUCK, ED
    W HOLLYWOOD, CA 90056 RETIRED 10-28-2014 $2,500.00 Democratic State Central Cmte/California (D)
    Money to Candidates BUCK, ED
    WEST HOLLYWOOD, CA 90046 NOT EMPLOYED 05-25-2008 $1,000.00 Obama, Barack (D)
    Money to Candidates BUCK, ED
    WEST HOLLYWOOD, CA 90046 NOT EMPLOYED 04-24-2008 $250.00 Obama, Barack (D)
    Money to Candidates BUCK, ED
    WEST HOLLYWOOD, CA 90046 NOT EMPLOYED 08-29-2008 $300.00 Obama, Barack (D)
    Money to Candidates BUCK, ED
    WEST HOLLYWOOD, CA 90046 RETIRED 06-11-2012 $500.00 McNerney, Jerry (D)
    Money to Candidates BUCK, ED
    WEST HOLLYWOOD, CA 90046 RETIRED 02-02-2011 $500.00 McNerney, Jerry (D)
    Money to PACs BUCK, ED
    LOS ANGELES, CA 90046 RETIRED 03-31-2010 $600.00 Stonewall Democratic Club (D)
    Money to Candidates BUCK, ED
    WEST HOLLYWOOD, CA 90046 RETIRED 05-27-2011 $500.00 Portantino, Anthony (D)
    Money to Candidates BUCK, ED
    WEST HOLLYWOOD, CA 90046 RETIRED 08-02-2012 $500.00 Sinema, Kyrsten (D)
    Money to Candidates BUCK, ED
    WEST HOLLYWOOD, CA 90046 RETIRED 08-02-2012 $500.00 Sinema, Kyrsten (D)
    Money to Candidates BUCK, ED
    WEST HOLLYWOOD, CA 90046 RETIRED 02-28-2017 $5,400.00 Sinema, Kyrsten (D)
    Money to Candidates BUCK, ED
    WEST HOLLYWOOD, CA 90046 RETIRED 05-06-2016 $250.00 Clinton, Hillary (D)
    Money to Candidates BUCK, ED
    WEST HOLLYWOOD, CA 90046 UNEMPLOYED 07-19-2017 $1,000.00 Gomez, Jimmy (D)
    Money to Candidates BUCK, ED
    WEST HOLLYWOOD, CA 90046 RETIRED 10-10-2016 $1,000.00 Caforio, Bryan (D)
    Money to Candidates BUCK, ED
    LOS ANGELES, CA 90046 RETIRED 03-20-2017 $2,700.00 Lieu, Ted (D)
    Money to Candidates BUCK, ED
    WEST HOLLYWOOD, CA 90046 RETIRED 01-27-2015 -$2,500.00 Sinema, Kyrsten (D)
    Money to Candidates BUCK, ED
    WEST HOLLYWOOD, CA 90046 RETIRED 01-27-2015 $2,500.00 Sinema, Kyrsten (D)
    Money to SuperPAC/Outside Group BUCK, ED
    WEST HOLLYWOOD, CA 90046 RETIRED 10-06-2014 $5,000.00 House Majority PAC
    Money to Candidates BUCK, ED
    WEST HOLLYWOOD, CA 90046 RETIRED 11-08-2012 $1,000.00 Sinema, Kyrsten (D)
    Money to PACs BUCK, ED
    LOS ANGELES, CA 90046 RETIRED 08-23-2010 $500.00 Stonewall Young Democrats
    Money to Candidates BUCK, ED
    WEST HOLLYWOOD, CA 90046 RETIRED 03-30-2011 $1,000.00 Frank, Barney (D)
    Money to Candidates BUCK, ED
    LOS ANGELES, CA 90046 RETIRED 03-29-2008 $2,200.00 Warner, Russell (D)
    Money to Candidates BUCK, ED
    WEST HOLLYWOOD, CA 90046 NOT EMPLOYED 05-31-2017 $1,000.00 Donnelly, Joe (D)
    Money to Candidates BUCK, ED
    WEST HOLLYWOOD, CA 90046 UNEMPLOYED 02-27-2017 $1,000.00 Gomez, Jimmy (D)
    Money to Candidates BUCK, ED
    LOS ANGELES, CA 90046 RETIRED 03-20-2017 $2,700.00 Lieu, Ted (D)
    Money to Candidates BUCK, ED
    WEST HOLLYWOOD, CA 90046 RETIRED 02-28-2017 $2,700.00 Sinema, Kyrsten (D)
    Money to Candidates BUCK, ED
    WEST HOLLYWOOD, CA 90046 NOT EMPLOYED 10-10-2016 $1,000.00 Gallego, Pete (D)
    Money to Candidates BUCK, ED
    WEST HOLLYWOOD, CA 90046 RETIRED 06-25-2013 -$2,600.00 Sinema, Kyrsten (D)
    Money to Candidates BUCK, ED
    LOS ANGELES, CA 90046 NONE 05-04-2016 $1,000.00 Vince, Lou (D)
    Money to Candidates BUCK, ED
    LOS ANGELES, CA 90046 RETIRED 08-19-2015 $2,700.00 Lieu, Ted (D)
    Money to Candidates BUCK, ED
    LOS ANGELES, CA 90046 RETIRED 03-29-2007 $500.00 Warner, Russell (D)
    Money to Candidates BUCK, ED
    LOS ANGELES, CA 90046 RETIRED 06-20-2007 $1,800.00 Warner, Russell (D)
    Money to Parties BUCK, ED
    LOS ANGELES, CA 90046 RETIRED 11-08-2009 $350.00 Democratic Party of San Fernando Valley (D)
    Money to Candidates BUCK, ED
    WEST HOLLYWOOD, CA 90046 RETIRED 09-02-2010 $1,000.00 McNerney, Jerry (D)
    Money to Candidates BUCK, ED
    WEST HOLLYWOOD, CA 90046 RETIRED 04-22-2010 $1,000.00 Frank, Barney (D)
    Money to Candidates BUCK, ED
    WEST HOLLYWOOD, CA 90046 RETIRED 11-03-2009 $1,000.00 Roybal-Allard, Lucille (D)
    Money to Candidates BUCK, ED
    WEST HOLLYWOOD, CA 90046 RETIRED 05-01-2011 $1,000.00 Portantino, Anthony (D)
    Money to Candidates BUCK, ED
    WEST HOLLYWOOD, CA 90046 RETIRED 10-26-2012 $1,000.00 Sinema, Kyrsten (D)
    Money to PACs BUCK, ED
    LOS ANGELES, CA 90046 N/A/RETIRED 04-15-2011 $500.00 Stonewall Democratic Club
    Money to Candidates BUCK, ED
    WEST HOLLYWOOD, CA 90046 RETIRED 09-30-2011 $250.00 McNerney, Jerry (D)
    Money to Candidates BUCK, ED
    WEST HOLLYWOOD, CA 90046 RETIRED 06-21-2017 $1,000.00 Krishnamoorthi, Raja (D)
    Money to PACs BUCK, ED
    WEST HOLLYWOOD, CA 90046 RETIRED 03-15-2016 $5,000.00 Getting Stuff Done PAC (D)
    Money to PACs BUCK, ED
    WEST HOLLYWOOD, CA 90046 RETIRED 02-24-2015 $5,000.00 Getting Stuff Done PAC (D)
    Money to Candidates BUCK, ED
    WEST HOLLYWOOD, CA 90046 RETIRED 10-25-2016 $1,700.00 Caforio, Bryan (D)
    Money to Candidates BUCK, ED
    WEST HOLLYWOOD, CA 90046 RETIRED 12-07-2015 $1,000.00 Lee, Susie (D)
    Money to Candidates BUCK, ED
    WEST HOLLYWOOD, CA 90046 RETIRED 10-10-2016 $1,000.00 Rosen, Jacky (D)
    Money to Candidates BUCK, ED
    WEST HOLLYWOOD, CA 90046 RETIRED 10-01-2014 $1,000.00 McNerney, Jerry (D)
    Money to Candidates BUCK, ED
    LOS ANGELES, CA 90046 RETIRED 05-01-2014 $2,600.00 Honda, Mike (D)
    Money to Candidates BUCK, ED
    WEST HOLLYWOOD, CA 90046 Not employed 12-13-2014 $1,000.00 Barber, Ron (D)
    Money to Candidates BUCK, ED
    WEST HOLLYWOOD, CA 90046 RETIRED 05-12-2008 $500.00 McNerney, Jerry (D)
    Money to Candidates BUCK, ED
    WEST HOLLYWOOD, CA 90046 RETIRED 04-22-2010 $1,000.00 McNerney, Jerry (D)
    Money to Candidates BUCK, ED
    WEST HOLLYWOOD, CA 90046 RETIRED 09-18-2009 $1,000.00 McNerney, Jerry (D)
    Money to Candidates BUCK, ED
    WEST HOLLYWOOD, CA 90046 RETIRED 06-29-2011 $1,000.00 Portantino, Anthony (D)
    Money to Candidates BUCK, ED
    WEST HOLLYWOOD, CA 90046 UNEMPLOYED 05-03-2017 $1,000.00 Gomez, Jimmy (D)
    Money to PACs BUCK, ED
    WEST HOLLYWOOD, CA 90046 Retired 02-24-2017 $10,400.00 Getting Stuff Done PAC (D)
    Money to Candidates BUCK, ED
    WEST HOLLYWOOD, CA 90046 RETIRED 02-28-2017 -$2,700.00 Sinema, Kyrsten (D)
    Money to PACs BUCK, ED
    WEST HOLLYWOOD, CA 90046 RETIRED 03-17-2015 $1,000.00 Ready PAC
    Money to Candidates BUCK, ED
    LOS ANGELES, CA 90046 RETIRED 08-19-2015 $2,700.00 Lieu, Ted (D)
    Money to Candidates BUCK, ED
    LOS ANGELES, CA 90046 RETIRED 04-28-2016 $2,700.00 Schiff, Adam (D)
    Money to Candidates BUCK, ED
    WEST HOLLYWOOD, CA 90046 RETIRED 01-04-2013 $2,500.00 Sinema, Kyrsten (D)
    Money to PACs BUCK, ED
    WEST HOLLYWOOD, CA 90046 RETIRED 04-07-2014 $1,000.00 Stonewall Young Democrats
    Money to PACs BUCK, ED
    WEST HOLLYWOOD, CA 90046 RETIRED 12-31-2014 $1,000.00 Ready for Hillary
    Money to Candidates BUCK, ED D
    WEST HOLLYWOOD, CA 90046 RETIRED 06-15-2017 $1,000.00 Aguilar, Pete (D)

    Forgive the cut-and-paste wonkiness. This assumes that all Ed Buck donations from 90046 are the same Ed Buck, even though some list Los Angeles as the city and others West Hollywood, which seems a safe assumption. That’s 77 line items (including three refunds from the Sinema campaign) over two pages of donations, most of $1,000 or more. He gave maximum donations to candidates across the country (Barney Frank in Massachusetts, Pete Gallego in Texas, etc.), and where you see two $2,600 or $2,700 donations to the same candidate in the same year, like he did with California Democratic Representative Ted Lieu in 2014, it indicates he gave the maximum for both the primary and the general election.

    I’m pretty sure Lieu didn’t think Buck was a “small-time donor” at the time.

    According to Excel, minus the returns, that’s a total of $114,900 accused serial murderer Ed Buck doled out to Democrats. I don’t think that fits most ordinary Americans’ idea of a “small time donor.”

    Just before I posted this, I asked three of the four by-lined writers (Arit John, Laura M. Holson, and Mihir Zaveri; the fourth, Emily S. Rueb, does not appear to be on Twitter) why they described Buck as a “small-time donor,” and who made the decision to refer to him that way. I’ll let you know if I get a reply.