Adam Gopnik on Donald Trump

Just in case you were wondering what you need to believe about Donald Trump to retain your place among New York’s liberal intelligentsia, Adam Gopnik, surely a capable writer, has written a screed to end all screeds explaining the correct belief about Trump. 

It is, Trump is a villain, worthy of constant opprobrium and raw unadulterated hatred.

New York’s liberal intelligentsia is ferociously independent. It rejects all orthodoxy, and yet, it has simply embraced its own orthodoxy, the kind you read in the New Yorker and the kind that is peddled by Adam Gopnik. If you deviate from the party line about Trump you will learn the extent of the ferocity.

As it happens, the word “villain” seems more suited to literary fables than to political philosophy or even cultural analysis. After all, Shakespeare used the word prominently in Hamlet:

O villain, villain, smiling damned villain….

That one may smile and be a villain.

Gopnik is obviously biased. He does not really consider what Trump may or may not have accomplished in his presidency. He considers Kamala Harris to be an everyday workaday politician. 

Anyone who has wiped the glaze from his eyes would have recognized that Harris, a woman of no singular achievements has risen to the top by sleeping with powerful men. 

As Harris herself asserted clearly, in her Fox News interview with Bret Baier, she is not responsible for anything that has happened over the past three and a half years. She cannot even accept that she was part of the administration that brought it all upon us.

Whereas Gopnik rails against Trump for failing to take responsibility, he fails to notice that Kamala Harris cannot accept that she was in charge of, for example, the border. Someone who cannot take responsibility has no character. The suit fits Kamala; Gopnik ignores it.

Our border czar, such as she was supposed to be, had presided over a flood of migrants into the country. Parts of the nation are overwhelmed by migrants and Gopnik thinks that those who are opposed to the invasion are mere xenophobics. As though the rising crime rates and the ruinous introduction of unqualified and incompetent students into public schools is something we should embrace. 

Gopnik rants that Trump might very well negotiate an end to the war in Ukraine, but he fails conspicuously to notice that this Biden foreign policy debacle has cost nearly a million Ukrainian lives. 

Similarly, and quite naturally, Gopnik does not bother to mention the catastrophe that has befallen the Middle East since the Biden team set out to appease the mullahs in Iran. He does not grant Trump any credit for the Abraham Accords, though apparently, he does not blame the Biden administration for the events of October 7.

Speaking of Ukraine, how much better would it have been if the Biden administration, led by Kamala herself at the Munich Security Conference that preceded the invasion, had found a more diplomatic way to solve the problem. After all, Noam Chomsky, of all people, agrees with Donald Trump on this score.

Had Gopnik offered us a balanced approach to the Trump record-- because there is a governance record-- his arguments would have some credibility. As is, his rank bias discredits whatever he has to say, even when he lights on an interesting point.

Apparently, the American right believes that the culture is rigged against them. Surely, Gopnik has a point here. The academy, the educational system, the media and social media-- all tend left. With some recent and conspicuous exceptions-- think Elon Musk-- the culture at large is not balanced. It is biased against the right.

Somehow or other people who do not think like Gopnik believe that the country has been having problems. Surely, they are suffering from misinformation:

We may be standing on the edge of an abyss, and yet nothing is wrong, in the expected way of countries on the brink of apocalypse. The country is not convulsed with riots, hyperinflation, or mass immiseration. What we have is a sort of phony war—a drôle de guerre, a sitzkrieg—with the vehemence of conflict mainly confined to what we might call the cultural space.

The world is suffering wars; Eastern Europe has suffered nearly a million dead; the Middle East is falling apart; the country has been overrun by migrants, most of them here illegally; inflation has eaten up most of the wage gains; the economy is in some serious trouble. One might say that statistically we have never had it so good. If so, how does it happen that so much of the country thinks that we are a nation in decline, headed in the wrong direction.

And, of course, rather than worry about the gross incompetence of Biden and Harris, Gopnik resorts to defamation and slander. He calls Trump a cancer, a vile human being, a “spectacularly malignant political actor.” You will imagine that it would have sufficed to call Trump malignant. Gopnik had to make it into a spectacle.

As though that is not enough, he adds that “Trump’s madness rose to a peak of raging lunacy.”

Gopnik has become a model of rhetorical incontinence. Surely, such vile drool encourages certain deranged individuals to try to assassinate the former president. If that is true, how could they not. 

If he had had a tad more imagination, he would have recognized a point that I made some time ago. For certain true believers on the left, Trump is the Antichrist, the sum of all evils. Once they destroy him they will see the Heavenly City descend on the planet.

You might imagine that Trump incited a violent insurrection on January 6. The point is debatable. But, Gopnik ignores the violent insurrection that was mounted by Trump’s enemies during the Spring and Summer of 2020. It was encouraged by one Kamala Harris.

The notion that Trump is going to expel countless helpless immigrants is yet another absurdity. People who do not belong here, people who broke the law to come here, have no real business being here. Gopnik’s empathy is largely misplaced:

Marrying the American paranoid style to the more recent cult of the image, Trump can draw on the manner of the tabloid star and show that his is a game, a show, not to be taken quite seriously while still being serious in actually inciting violent insurrections and planning to expel millions of helpless immigrants.

But, then, Gopnik wants to save Ukraine from Trump’s wish to “abandon” it to Putin. Now that the bodies of dead Ukrainians pile up in Eastern Europe, the only real concern is that perhaps Trump would prefer to make a deal, to stop the carnage:

Trump will certainly abandon Ukraine to Vladimir Putin and realign this country with dictatorships and against NATO and the democratic alliance of Europe. 

An administration whose manifest weakness has produced chaos and war around the world is pretending to be tough. It is a pathetic charade.

What really hurts Gopnik’s feelings is this. When he tries to give Trump the benefit of the doubt-- why would you bother to give an evil villain the benefit of the doubt?-- the Donald tells another whopper, another lie:

Trump is a villain. He would be a cartoon villain, if only this were a cartoon. Every time you try to give him a break—to grasp his charisma, historicize his ascent, sympathize with his admirers—the sinister truth asserts itself and can’t be squashed down. He will tell another lie so preposterous, or malign another shared decency so absolutely, or threaten violence so plausibly, or just engage in behavior so unhinged and hate-filled that you’ll recoil and rebound to your original terror at his return to power. 

As it happens, if Kamala obfuscates her views and if she pretends no longer to believe what she has always said she believes, Gopnik considers that she is just a normal politician.

Republicans never receive such grace. Recall that George W. Bush was called a lying liar over and over again. And that Trump, even if he merely misspeaks is denounced as a perfidious prevaricator. 

Again, as though it needs repeating, the Gopnik indictment of Trump the Antichrist is not merely an exercise in political eschatology. It is designed to create a narrative, one you can believe in, one that you must believe in, if you want to break bread with the likes of Adam Gopnik.

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Donating Sunday

We no longer tithe, so we humbly request donations.  

Obviously, it takes time and effort to write these posts. I have been posting on this blog every day for over sixteen years. It is not self-evident. I could not have done it without the financial support of you, my readers.

If you would like to show appreciation and to encourage me to continue, a good way would be by making a financial contribution.

I try to make my writing sound effortless, but, as the old saying goes, it takes a lot of work to make anything seem effortless. From where I sit, it deserves some compensation. 

The internet is awash in blogs. I am grateful to those who have chosen to spend a small part of their days reading mine. I have tried to be worthy of their confidence, by presenting reflections and analysis that are unlikely to be found elsewhere. 

If you would like to express your gratitude by donating please make use of the Paypal button on this page. If you prefer, you can mail a check to 310 East 46th St. 24H. New York, NY 10017.

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Saturday Miscellany

First, as Hamas chieftain Yahya Sinwar settles into his new home in the nth circle of the Inferno, the usual suspects have weighed in on the matter.

If the Israelis had followed the pusillanimous lead of the Biden administration, Sinwar would doubtless still be alive.

Recall that notable nitwit Kamala Harris sternly advised Israel against moving into Rafah, because she had studied the maps. How stupid can you get? 

For his part Joe Biden has called, yet again, for a cease fire. Aside from the word “don’t,” that seems to be the only notion that has entered into Biden’s empty head.

The Biden administration has done its darndest to save Hamas and even to save Hezbollah. It has also done its best, along with the Tommy Friedman, to blame it all on the Israeli prime minister.

For the record, Friedman has suggested that the death of Sinwar, death which would not have happened if the Israelis had followed the advice of the Biden administration, paves the way for a two state solution. The truth remains that the Palestinian peoples do not want a two state solution. The other truth remains, that the war is not yet over.

In Friedman’s case, the point of it all is to show that he was right all along. Like a good leftist, he never admits to being wrong.

Second, you may be worried about Donald Trump’s threat to democracy. You might not. Now political prognosticator Mark Halperin gives us something else to worry about. A Trump victory, he opines, will produce a nationwide nervous breakdown in half the population, a mental health crisis like we have never seen before.

Roger Simon reports on an interview between Halperin and Tucker Carlson:

Tucker asked political prognosticator Halperin what it would be like if Kamala loses.  He said millions of Democrats would suffer from a psychological collapse that would create the “greatest mental health crisis in the history of the country”.  The ramifications of this, including violence, will be all over society for a long time.  This is no normal election.

I don’t have the expertise and certainly not the contacts of Halperin, but that has also been my observation.  The time between the election and inauguration could well be fraught beyond anything we have seen this century and quite a while before.  And it’s not likely to stop at the inauguration. Trump Derangement Syndrome, so manifested by Ms. Harris during the interview, is a profound mental illness not likely to go away with the snap of the finger or anybody’s vote. And with the psychotherapy community so predominantly leftist they are likely to exacerbate the situation more often then help improve it.

You might find this to be a good reason for voting for Trump. You might find it a good reason to vote for Harris. 

I report; you decide.

Third, if you want to see minority children succeed academically, put them all in charter schools, like New York’s Success Academies.

If you want to see them fail and grow up to be chronic complainers, teach them anti-racism training.

Those who recall yesterday’s report on a New York Times essay about the serial failures of DEI at the University of Michigan will not be surprised to read that the same anti-racism training is infesting public schools, with the financial support of some of America’s wealthiest families. Are they contributing to the cause or are they paying protection?

The Daily Mail has the story:

A radical activist who believes black students should only be taught by same-race teachers has received $20million from billionaires such as Jeff Bezos and Bill Gates.

Sharif El-Mekki has lobbied for a focus on anti-racism education in public schools through his prominent nonprofit and time as an adviser to Pennsylvania governor Josh Shapiro, as reported by The Free Press.

A former middle and high school teacher, El-Mekki lobbies through his nonprofit, the Center for Black Educator Development, CBED, which describes its mission as a 'world where... all black students are taught by high-quality, same-race teachers' and where 'all teachers demonstrate high levels of expertise in anti-racist mindsets.'

Now you know where the graduates of the Michigan DEI indoctrination are ending up. 

How does it happen that billionaires get sucked into this con?

Fourth, was it good public relations or did she really mean it. The ongoing saga at CBS News has a new voice. The boss, that is, Shari Redstone has found the network’s coverage of Israel to be inadequate and biased. While the pearl clutchers who run CBS News were outraged by the Tony Doukoupil interview with Ta-Nehisi Coates, Redstone was happy with him.

The New York Post reports:

Media heiress Shari Redstone, the controlling stakeholder in CBS News parent Paramount Global, reportedly fumed to network executives over its left-leaning lurch in its coverage of Israel and lobbied for them to hire more conservative voices.

Redstone sent clips from other outlets to CBS higher-ups as examples of what she felt was more balanced coverage of Israel’s battle against Hamas terrorists, according to current and former network executives cited by Wall Street Journal.

She was particularly upset with a “Face the Nation” broadcast last spring in which the show was critical of Israel after seven aid workers were killed during a strike on Gaza, the Journal reported.

Her reported fury comes after she called out CBS News President Wendy McMahon last week over her sanctioned dressing down of morning show anchor Tony Dokoupil for grilling author Ta-Nehisi Coates about his strong criticism of Israel in his latest book.

Redstone — the 70-year-old daughter of late media mogul Sumner Redstone — called Dokoupil to praise him for the tough interview and had dinner with the anchor earlier this week, the Journal reported.

Now, we will see whether this was damage control or a sign of a meaningful course correction. Time will tell.

Fifth,  fancy this. Andrew Sullivan is about to change his mind. He had supported Kamala Harris in her bid for the presidency, until he discovered that the Biden-Harris administration has been militating for mutilating children. The responsible party is one Richard, aka Rachel, Levine. 

But the discovery from a lawsuit against the State of Alabama over its ban on the medical sex reassignment of children has left me reeling. It shows a staggering level of bad faith from the transqueer lobby, and, also, from Rachel Levine — the Assistant Secretary for Health at HHS.

What does Levine want?

So they removed the age limits! For these procedures, among others: removal of both ovaries; double mastectomy; turning a girl’s clitoris into a micro-penis; surgically removing a boy’s penis; surgical and chemical castration of boys; and permanent removal of the capacity for orgasm for both boys and girls. I repeat: permanent removal of the capacity for orgasm for both boys and girls.

"A doctor who privately doubts if her child patients can give meaningful consent and operates on them anyway is not a doctor, but a sociopath. "

Sullivan is enraged. Strange that it took him this long to figure out that the Biden administration was supporting child mutilation:

It is despicable to take a child who has never gone through puberty and remove from them any possibility of orgasm for life — before they can possibly know what an orgasm feels like. Evil. 

Bowers admits it’s no different than FGM [female genital mutilation] in its effect. With FGM, much of the pressure to mutilate a child comes from the parents’ religion. The difference between Iran — where they trans young gays and lesbians en masse — and America, is that in one, the parents’ religion is fundamentalist Islam, and in America, it’s wokeness.

The new religion targets gays. 

And that wokeness overwhelmingly targets gay kids. In Britain they became the vast majority of the children sent for sex reassignment, before it was banned outside a clinical trial. And we know that these “doctors” have no way of objectively knowing whether a child is actually trans or gay or depressed or autistic — and yet they also oppose any broad mental health assessment of a child, if that child has simply declared himself or herself the opposite sex.

None of this should be news. We have rehearsed similar points here and elsewhere. As have many others.

Is it a reason to pull your support from Kamala? I report, you decide.

Sixth, for those of you who wish counseling or coaching, contact me at StuartSchneiderman@gmail.com.

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The Tyranny of DEI

One has had occasion to criticize the New York Times. One is not alone in this. But, that places one under an ethical obligation to make especial note of the New York Times when it produces excellent journalism.

Now, in the latest issue of the Times magazine, we find an article by Nicholas Confessore on DEI in the University of Michigan. The article is fair and balanced. It is comprehensive. It shows that DEI programs became the problem they were designed to solve. 

Hats off to the New York Times.

Rather than reduce racial discrimination and other forms of bigotry, DEI programs forced everyone to participate in a grievance culture, complaining about everything, accomplishing nothing. They made the campus more race conscious, and eventually more conscious of gender and ethnicity.

The programs, conducted by an army of administrators, tended to divide students and faculty. They made free and open discussion impossible, and undermined the university’s mission of educating people and advancing knowledge.

The Times does not ask the question, but we can ask what function the graduates of such DEI programs will be able to fulfill in the outside world, the world of work.

Given that affirmative action admissions programs have been declared by the Supreme Court to be discriminatory, the university has proposed that more diversity will not merely make up for past discrimination-- the go-to explanation for minority underachievement-- but would produce a culture where people would be more likely to get along.

Truth be told, this has been studied. I have reported on it in the past. Famed Harvard sociologist Robert Putnam wrote a paper entitled, “E Pluribus Unum” where he showed that when you artificially produce diverse communities their members do not interact and socialize. They hunker down. They avoid each other. 

Given the current cultural environment in the University of Michigan, it is too risky to interact with people who have special grievances. 

Following Putnam, we can see that the DEI initiatives were never going to work out. Seeing them fail, universities and other people who ignore sociology, have decided to double and triple down on diversity initiatives. An astonishing conclusion, worthy of totalitarian governance.

As for the details of how DIE compromised the mission of the university, making it into little more than an indoctrination mill filled with grievance mongers, I leave it to those who want to read the entirety of the Times article.

Making every course in every school an exercise in DIE produces courses that ignore knowledge in favor of ideological conformity. You cannot possibly graduate from such courses without being more stupid than you were when you began. 

Michigan’s largest division trains professors in “antiracist pedagogy” and dispenses handouts on “Identifying and Addressing Characteristics of White Supremacy Culture,” like “worship of the written word.” The engineering school promises a “pervasive education around issues of race, ethnicity, unconscious bias and inclusion.”

And also,

At the art museum, captions for an exhibit of American and European art attest to histories of oppression “even in works that may not appear to have any direct relation to these histories.” The English department has adopted a 245-word land acknowledgment, describing its core subject as “a language brought by colonizers to North America.” Even Michigan’s business school, according to its D.E.I. web page, is committed to fighting “all forms of oppression.”

The student body, the Times reports, greets this indoctrination with a “wary disdain.” To say the least.

The student attitude was clear:

On campus, I met students with a wide range of backgrounds and perspectives. Not one expressed any particular enthusiasm for Michigan’s D.E.I. initiative. Where some found it shallow, others found it stifling. They rolled their eyes at the profusion of course offerings that revolve around identity and oppression, the D.E.I.-themed emails they frequently received but rarely read.

Constantly beating the gospel of diversity into students' heads divides students into racial and ethnic groupings, into cult-like groups. As was to be expected, it undermines the primary purpose, the need to make people get along, not to mention learning something useful.

In a survey released in late 2022, students and faculty members reported a less positive campus climate than at the program’s start and less of a sense of belonging. Students were less likely to interact with people of a different race or religion or with different politics — the exact kind of engagement D.E.I. programs, in theory, are meant to foster.

DIE initiatives undermine the ability to speak openly and honestly.

For other critics, D.E.I. has come to subvert the spirit of intellectual pluralism envisioned in Bakke a half-century ago. Many faculty members I spoke to worried that Michigan’s press to ingrain D.E.I. into their scholarship — the diversity statements, the special fellowships, the clamor for research into contemporary social-justice issues — had narrowed its departments rather than broadening them. Disciplines and historical eras that couldn’t be jammed into an equity framework were being left to wither; even academics from minority backgrounds felt they had to present themselves as scholars of equity in order to advance.

If you create an oppressive atmosphere, people shut up and shut down. Expressing opinions becomes too dangerous.

One recent analysis by the political scientist Kevin Wallsten found that the larger the D.E.I. bureaucracy at a university, the more discomfort students felt expressing their views on social media and in informal conversations with other students.

Like I said, the program has been a bust. Inserting diversity training and ideology into all aspects of university life kills university life. It makes it more and more difficult to garner an education. It produces a set of bad habits that will be useless in the real world.

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The New Green Self-Sabotage

In the great civilizational clash between the West and the East, the West is apparently winning. But, not so fast. If we are to believe Joel Kotkin, and I have no reason not to, the West has been digging its own grave with its green Puritanism and environmentalist catastrophism.

We have been told that our goal in life should be to save the planet, even to save the environment. And we should do so by switching, as soon as possible, to green renewable energy, which means solar panels and windmills. No more fossil fuels; no more coal burning plants; no more combustion engines; no more nuclear reactors. No, we are going to replace it all with battery-driven cars and homes.

What is the result for those places where the policy proposals have been enacted? Kotkin explains the case of Germany. Prices for gas and electricity skyrocket. As though that did not suffice, the high cost of energy caused manufacturing to move offshore, to countries where energy was more plentiful and more economical.

In Europe, most obviously Germany, as well as California , the shift to “renewable energy” has led, as it usually does, to high prices that already are driving German industry off the continent. Although not nearly as well-endowed with energy as North America, the climate lobby in Europe makes sure to throttle anything, such as offshore oil in the UK — in pursuit of green puritanism.

And yet, despite the efforts to promote renewables, the truth remains that fossil fuels still reign supreme.

Yet, in the real world, despite billions in subsidies for “green power,” fossil fuels still represent roughly four fifths of global energy generation, just as it did twenty years ago. This is after expenditures of over one trillion were spent on solar and wind. 

The West has been reducing per capita emissions for years, but this is utterly subsumed by growth in developing countries, notably China, which not only buys huge amounts of natural gas but continues to open new coal-fired plants at a rapid rate.

For those who spend their waking hours worrying about the threat posed by our leading international competitor, China, Kotkin has a sobering thought. While we are reducing energy consumption and emissions, the Chinese are barreling ahead, building coal plants and nuclear reactors. That nation has no intention of running out of energy.

North Americans be forewarned that in imposing burdens on themselves, but not competitors, green governments are essentially guaranteeing their own decline. Already in the EU, nearly a million industrial jobs have been lost over the past few years, with investment shifting to countries like China and India, which freely use coal and fossil fuels to keep costs down.

Consider the case of Great Britain. It has chosen, often with the direction of a conservative government, to lead the world in green Puritanism. It is paying the price.

Britain’s path may give the starkest preview of the future Biden and Trudeau have in mind for us. Since 1990 the manufacturing sector’s share of GDP has dropped roughly 50 per cent along with several million jobs. This parallels a two thirds drop in UK energy production, while consumption has fallen by only one third. Three decades ago, a net energy exporter, the UK now increasingly depends on imports from the Middle East and other unstable regions.

And now, the rise of China. The winner in this madness is the Middle Kingdom. While it builds up its own coal and nuclear, it is perfectly happy to manufacture all the solar panels and electric vehicles the world wants. 

China has placed itself in the catbird’s seat on renewable energy, including utter domination of solar panels and electric vehicles. China already produces twice as many EVs as the US and the EU combined, and seeks to leverage its total domination of the solar-panel industry — its battery capacity is now roughly four times ours . China also exercises effective control of the requisite rare earth minerals and the technologies used to process them.

Of course, Kotkin recognizes that the tech oligarchs among us will fulfill their needs for energy by recommissioning nuclear power plants. The rest of us will be guilt tripped about our gas stoves and plastic straws.

Ultimately, the oligarchs will likely get their juice from sources like decommissioned nuclear energy, while the average family will take the economic hit in order to fulfill the agenda pushed by the likes of Steve Jobs’ widow, Lauren, Michael Bloomberg, the Rockefellers, Jeff Bezos and venture capitalist John Doerr. These, and other oligarchic allies, are waging a sophisticated and well-financed  media and institutional campaign to catastrophize the climate issue as a way to ban gas stoves, stop new LNG facilities, and crack down on plastics.

In the last analysis, green mandates are driving industry to China and India, among other countries. Dare we say that developing countries are not very willing to listen to lectures designed to produce policies that will maintain their status as underdeveloped.

The new green mandates, if adopted, presage yet another force to further reduce the industrial prowess of western countries, while driving more industries to China, India, and other countries who produce their goods with dirtier fuels and develop resources with less environmental care. At the same time, third world countries, for the most part, are not embracing “net zero,” as it is totally infeasible for them and will likely resist western lectures on climate policy.

So, we, enlightened Westerners that we are, have discovered a new way to undermine our efficiency and to sabotage our future. Way to go, team.

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