Saturday Miscellany

First, I hear tell, from a very reliable source, that the Showtime series, Couples Therapy has, in its first episode of the new season, showcases a book by yours truly. I am humbled and I thank Orna Guralnik for her excellent taste in reading material. I have not yet seen the episode, so I do not know which of my works she showed but I am grateful.

Second, a commentary on lawfare, from someone who fashions himself the Physics Geek. It stands as a response to the Trump administration effort to crack down on certain law firms for their efforts to destroy him:

One year ago, a leftist DA, judge and jury used lawfare to manufacture felonies out of thin air against a former president. The conviction was rightly seen as nonsense by the vast majority of people able to get oxygen to their brains because their heads weren't shoved up their own asses and this energized both his base and wavering independents who were outraged at this judicial chicanery.

Third, how did anyone get the idea that great universities had become cesspools of anti-Semitism. Consider these remarks from the president of MIT’s class of 2025, during the school’s commencement. 

Newsmax reports:

Clad in a red keffiyeh, Megha Vemuri, president of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology's class of 2025, addressed graduates at the school's commencement on Thursday.

"You showed the world that MIT wants a free Palestine," she said.

"It is no secret that at this time, academic institutions across the country are shrouded in a dark cloud of uncertainty," she said. "The question of what will happen next echoes in our minds, and there is a lot of fear in many of our hearts."

In a better world, she would have been sanctioned for promoting anti-Semitism. Alas, when it comes to major American universities, we do not live in a better world.

Of course, she risked devaluing the degrees that were being handed out on the occasion. Would you recruit from a school that identified itself with a terrorist supporter?

Fourth, as though to affirm that this woman is not an exception, we have this from emeritus Harvard Law Professor, Alan Dershowitz, a strong supporter of Trump administration efforts to stifle academic anti-Semitism.

Newsmax has the story:

Dershowitz told "American Agenda" that Harvard's Divinity School and Public Health School are "sewers of antisemitism."

“It has actually encouraged, fomented, and incited antisemitism by some of the courses," he said. "If they dared ever to allow courses of the kind they allow against Jews to be taught against Blacks or gay people, there would be hell to pay.”

"We have too many foreign students today who are unvetted and who are creating real problems on campus," he said, referencing the murder of two Israeli Embassy staffers in Washington. “Look, the two people who were killed in Washington, D.C., there is blood on the hands of universities for those two deaths, because universities not only tolerated antisemitism, not only tolerated shouts of 'Globalize the intifada,' which is an incitement to kill.”

He said the concerns go even further. “But also we're encouraging antisemitism by teaching courses on intersectionality and DEI and critical race theory and you name it.”

Dershowitz said there should be no debate that “the government has the right to restrict foreign students" as the United States is "long past the point in time where people should be allowed to light a fire and get away with it."

Fifth, in the bad news department, David Brooks took to his New York Times column to prove definitively that he does not know how to think. 

Brooks opens his column by informing us that he communes with his phone. It is so embarrassing that it is probably true. Brooks gives special meaning to-- pathetic.

Anyway, he explains that conservative thinkers believe that soldiers do not fight wars to defend a bunch of gauzy ideals, but do so  in order to defend hearth and home, family and country. To which he is going to take serious offense.

Last Monday afternoon, I was communing with my phone when I came across a Memorial Day essay that the Notre Dame political scientist Patrick Deneen wrote back in 2009. In that essay, Deneen argued that soldiers aren’t motivated to risk their lives in combat by their ideals. He wrote, “They die not for abstractions — ideas, ideals, natural right, the American way of life, rights, or even their fellow citizens — so much as they are willing to brave all for the men and women of their unit.”

It sets him off. I am sure you are glad to know what sets him off. He has a problem with Deneen and Vance because they do not think that soldiers are not fighting for an ideal.

Elite snobbery has a tendency to set me off, and here are two guys with advanced degrees telling us that regular soldiers never fight partly out of some sense of moral purpose, some commitment to a larger cause — the men who froze at Valley Forge, the men who stormed the beaches at Normandy and Guadalcanal.

You might not have guessed it, but Brooks is going to denounce Trump for promoting national pride, which he considers to be atavistic and rejecting what he calls the best aspirations of the human spirit.

Trumpism can be seen as a giant attempt to amputate the highest aspirations of the human spirit and to reduce us to our most primitive, atavistic tendencies.

And, also:

Deneen’s and Vance’s comments about men in combat are part of a larger project at the core of Trumpism. It is to rebut the notion that America is not only a homeland, though it is that, but it is also an idea and a moral cause — that America stands for a set of universal principles: the principle that all men are created equal, that they are endowed with inalienable rights, that democracy is the form of government that best recognizes human dignity and best honors beings who are made in the image of God.

Brooks takes offense at the notion that America is not the embodiment of universal ideals. 

Trump and Vance have to rebut the idea that America is the embodiment of universal ideals. If America is an idea, then Black and brown people from all over the world can become Americans by coming here and believing that idea. If America is an idea, then Americans have a responsibility to promote democracy. We can’t betray democratic Ukraine in order to kowtow to a dictator like Vladimir Putin. If America is an idea, we have to care about human dignity and human rights. You can’t have a president go to Saudi Arabia, as Trump did this month, and effectively tell them we don’t care how you treat your people. If you want to dismember journalists you don’t like, we’re not going to worry about it.

If America is an ideal, then thinking it, and believing it makes it so. Dare we say that Brooks is encouraging us to think less of people who do not live as we do.

What Deneen and Vance said about men in combat is a manifestation of tribal morality. They take a sentiment that is noble in time of war — we take care of our own — and apply it in general to mean that we don’t have to take care of the starving children in Africa; we can be cruel to those we don’t like. Trumpism is a giant effort to narrow the circle of concern to people just like us.

The problem is, we engage with the world as we find it. If we assume that all nations on the planet will end up believing the same beliefs then we are totalitarian zealots who aspire to control minds.

It will come as news to David Brooks, but human beings are not merely minds. We do not unite the nation on the basis of shared belief. Human beings are social beings. They identify as members of groups, whether of families, or communities or nations. To deprive them of this defining characteristic, the foundation for their moral behavior, is to render them eunuchs. 

What happens to the virtue of loyalty, if we are all just true believers in ideals that Brooks accepts?

Besides, it has not crossed Brooks’ pea brain, but you never really know what anyone really believes. Unless, of course, you can read minds. People are judged by their actions, not their beliefs in gauzy ideals.

Today’s history lesson says that America was founded on a contract, a constitution, that laid down rules that we all respect and follow. Whether you follow the rules is not the same as believing in some Platonic ideal.

The Brooks approach gave us witch hunts and inquisitions looking for heretics. It is well past time that he retires.

Sixth, in a world that Brooks would find congenial you would be investigated and even jailed by the thought police. See, for example, the Great Britain now under Labour Party control.

Danial Greenfield explains the tyranny of Labour in Front Page:

The British economy continues to struggle under PM Keir Starmer, the military is depleted and a pension crisis is on the horizon, but there is one area where the UK is exceeding expectations.

Starmer’s UK has achieved levels of political prisoners not only resembling but occasionally even outdoing those of Communist dictatorships like Cuba, Venezuela and even China.

Freedom House estimated that Cuba has 2,768 political prisoners, Venezuela has 1,953 political prisoners, and thousands more in China. Starmer’s regime and an enthusiastic police force have easily outdone these backward Communist regimes by arresting over 1,000 people a month for social media posts. The full number of political prisoners in the UK remains unknown, but the high number of arrests suggests that Britain may be able to compete with Cuba.

The 12,000 arrests by 37 forces a year are a record high. Speech arrests more than doubled from 5,502 in 2017 to over 12,000 since 2022. increasing by 1,000 or more every year. The internet did not fundamentally change since 2017. The UK authorities however have.

The London Times recently reported that “British police arrest more than 30 people a day for online posts”. London’s Met Police, who have been at the center of some of the worst speech abuses, maintain a secretive operation monitoring social media leading to almost immediate arrests.  The Met Police arrested a staggering 5,332 people in 9 years for speech and 1,700 speech arrests in 2023 alone making London into its own speech gulag.

Finally, I currently have some free consulting hours in my life coaching practice. If you are interested contact me at StuartSchneiderman@gmail.com.