Notes on the Way
Election deniers, defund follies, antisemitism update, Putin's genocide, embracing extinction
Self-defeating election denialism is alive and well in the ranks of the Arizona Republican Party. In the Grand Canyon State’s Cochise County, the two Republicans on the three-member Board of Supervisors, which oversees elections in the county, have refused to certify the 2022 election results—this at the instigation of three Trumpian election truthers who have repeatedly and unsuccessfully sued to get the state’s 2020 election outcome overturned. Arizona Secretary of State and Governor-Elect Democrat Katie Hobbs is suing Cochise County over this delay, arguing that it risks disenfranchising the county’s voters. Arizona law provides that if county election results are not certified by December 5, they cannot be included in the statewide results. If this were to happen, it would flip a seat in the US House of Representatives from the GOP to the Democrats—just one more example of the toxic and destructive influence that Donald Trump wields over a faction within the Republican Party.
Hey, let’s double down on a bad idea! It seems that having an IQ lower than your height in inches is no barrier to membership in the United States Senate. That’s the takeaway from Senator Chris Murphy’s call for Congress to defund state and local law enforcement agencies that refuse to enforce gun control laws. The Connecticut Democrat floated this trial balloon last Sunday on CNN’s “State of the Union.” It’s an idea that’s excruciatingly stupid on three levels. First, given the complexities of law enforcement, it would be practically impossible to determine whether decisions by police and prosecutors constituted “refusal” to enforce laws or were merely the balancing of priorities. Second, Senator Murphy’s pious regard for the sanctity of the rule of law conveniently overlooks the refusal of progressive prosecutors across the nation to enforce laws they don’t like—including some concerned with gun crime. It also overlooks the refusal by numerous “sanctuary cities” to cooperate with the federal government in the enforcement of immigration law. And third, it’s political malpractice. Defunding the police is a loser issue for Democrats—but here’s Senator Murphy, thumping the tub for it on national TV. Duh…
Antisemitism rising, Trump edition: Traditionally, America has not been troubled by the systemic Jew hatred that blots the copybooks of most countries in Europe, to say nothing of the Muslim world. While it’s true that Jews have faced discrimination in America, it was always, so to speak, sounded in a minor key. But there are disquieting signs that things are changing here. The progressive jihad against Israel has supercharged campus antisemitism, while the Democratic Party seems quite comfortable with the presence in its ranks of antisemites like Ilhan Omar. Aantisemitism is one charge, though, that seemed unapplicable to the otherwise odious Donald Trump. When he was president, US policy toward Israel was markedly friendly—this despite Trump’s characteristic lack of tact in dealing with then-Prime Minister Bibi Netanyahu. So what was Trump thinking when he had dinner with two notorious antisemites, Kanye West aka Ye, and Nick Fuentes, a loathsome racist and Holocaust denier? After the story of the dinner broke, Trump’s staff put it about that he really had no idea who Fuentes was—a claim impossible to believe. Whatever the explanation, this scandalous incident shows that Trump is thoroughly unfit for the presidency or any other public office.
Meanwhile, in Ukraine the war rages on. With his army in disarray after a string of costly and humiliating defeats, Russian despot V. Putin has resorted to missile and drone attacks on Ukrainian civilians and infrastructure: an updated variant of “morale bombing” as conducted against urban Germany by the British Royal Air Force in World War II. (The US Army Air Force was committed, at least nominally, to a policy of precision bombing.) The argument then was that German civilians, whose labors supported the German war effort, were legitimate military targets. This was and remains a controversial policy, even though the Allied cause was as just as any cause in war can be. The same cannot be said for Putin’s war, and his attempt to destroy Ukraine as a functioning nation is looking more and more like genocide. Whether the United States and its NATO partners are willing to do what is necessary to defeat this campaign of terror remains an open question as of this writing.
Some ideas are so outlandish that only an intellectual could accept them. That was George Orwell’s judgement on the deep thinkers of his era, and it stirs an echo down to this day. In the January/February edition of The Atlantic, an article profiling “The People Cheering for Humanity’s End” well deserves to be read, if only for the pathos of its idiocy. “If the choice that confronts us is between a world without nature and a world without humanity, today’s most radical anti-humanist thinkers don’t hesitate to choose the latter,” the reader learns. This sentence should be read aloud, four or five times, so as to savor the fullness of that idiocy. “Today’s most radical anti-humanist thinkers” clearly have never done anything like that, and indeed I suspect that they've lost the capacity to overhear themselves—if they’ve ever possessed it. It just goes to show that G.K. Chesterton was correct when he said that people who give up their belief in God don’t become unbelievers—on the contrary, they’ll believe anything.