May 4, 2024

SO IN PROSECUTING TRUMP FOR MISHANDLING CLASSIFIED DOCUMENTS, THE PROSECUTORS MISHANDLED THE CLASSIFIED DOCUMENTS: Prosecutors: Docs in boxes seized from Mar-a-Lago were inadvertently jumbled. “Special counsel Jack Smith’s team acknowledged Friday that some evidence in the prosecution of former President Donald Trump for hoarding classified documents at his Florida home may not be in the same sequence FBI agents found it when they swept into the Mar-a-Lago compound with a search warrant in August 2022. The concession from prosecutors in a court filing Friday afternoon came after attorneys for one of Trump’s co-defendants asked for a delay in the case because the defense lawyers were having trouble determining precisely where particular documents had come from in the 33 boxes the FBI seized almost two years ago. In their filing, prosecutors acknowledged the government had previously — and incorrectly — told U.S. District Judge Aileen Cannon that the boxes remained ‘in their original, intact form as seized,’ other than a decision to replace classified documents with placeholder sheets.”

Posted at 8:22 pm by Glenn Reynolds

RICHARD FERNANDEZ: The Woke God.

The writer James Lindsay said in a talk (here available on YouTube) before the European Parliament that ‘Marx was not an economist. He was a theologian’. Lindsay, described in Wikipedia as a promoter of right-wing conspiracy theories, goes on to describe how 20th-century Marxists, disheartened by the failure of the abolition of economic property to create wealth, expanded their evangelical model to include other types of properties. Race, civilization, and even sexual normalcy were all regarded as oppressive advantages that had to be mocked, abolished, and otherwise scattered for “equity” — the great leveling — to be achieved. This expanded their audience considerably and allowed them to expand beyond the traditional working class.

The James Lindsay talk explains why radical politics and Wokism in particular always involve God, or at least universals, whether Judaism, Islam, or Christianity, or in the negative sense of militant atheism. That is because it deals with the eternal issues, the nature of humanity, the origin of civilization, and the meaning of social relations. Hence Lindsay’s remark that “Marx was not an economist. He was a theologian.”

Indirect proof of this assertion can be seen in the traction of the Woke message in historical, parochial, or ethnic contexts where they were alien. Examples include anti-colonial movements in Ireland, which never had a colony; Black Lives Matter demonstrations in Europe and perhaps this most curious of imitations:

“Palestine wasn’t initially their thing, but now they are doing more than we are, and [we] felt ashamed and that we should do more,” Ali Tayyar, a student organizer at Lebanon’s American University of Beirut, said at a protest Tuesday. “We needed to at least show some support for our friends in the U.S.”

The message is nothing to do with the facts, just the feelings. Will it last? If Marx’s thesis, as Lindsay argues, was fundamentally erroneous in the domain of economics, the mistake cannot be fixed by expanding the flawed analysis to explain race, culture, sexuality and history after its original failure. Mistakes just get bigger by expanding their scope. Wokism as enlarged Marxist economics doesn’t get better, it gets worse.

Also from Lindsay: Marx was “a privileged white European male.”

Flashback: Berkeley students angry that they have to read Marx, not because he was, well, a Marxist, but because he was yet another dead white European male: “The course syllabus employed a standardized canon of theory that began with Plato and Aristotle, then jumped to modern philosophers: Hobbes, Locke, Hegel, Marx, Weber and Foucault, all of whom are white men. The syllabus did not include a single woman or person of color.”

As James Lileks wrote in response, “Marx is in foul order in Berkeley not for his ideas, or the heaps of corpses accumulated in his name, but because he had a prostate. By the way, Foucault died of AIDS, so you can dismiss everything the students wrote. Homophobes and haters. No, kids, don’t bother defending yourselves. As your heroes would no doubt say: If it wasn’t true, we wouldn’t have accused you.”

Related: Karl Marx Calls Mexicans Lazy. Will Social Justice Warriors Demand Noted Racist Karl Marx Be Banned From Study on Campus?

 

Posted at 4:43 pm by Ed Driscoll

QUESTION ASKED: Are You More Annoyed Than You Were Four Years Ago?

What Biden’s government should do, more broadly, is resist the self-sabotaging forces of progressive hyper-activism*. Noah Rothman’s magazine piece last year on “the war on things that work” is a useful reference point, cataloguing the ways activists have been “waging a crusade against convenience.” This includes, especially at the state level, fulminating against gas stoves, fighting the scourge of gas-powered lawn equipment, and banning single-use packaging in grocery stores. On that New Jersey bag measure, Noah wrote that the environmental benefits are unclear given that reusable bags take more energy and resources to make (read this; it’s priceless) — and “the only observable effect of the ban has been to make daily life marginally more expensive and noticeably more annoying.”

Democrats, do you ever look at Trump’s Truth Social feed and feel like Jon Lovitz? Maybe stuff like this is why.

Speaking of: The administration’s persistent efforts to wipe away (transfer to taxpayers) college-student debt, especially while struggling to process present-day financial-aid applications, are yet another way to alienate voters. If the policy wasn’t invidious enough, one has to suspect more than a few (million) people saw the images this week of college students camping out, vandalizing property, occupying school facilities, and getting justifiably arrested and thought, perhaps while making their monthly car payment: So let me get this straight . . .

Reagan once asked, “Are you better off than you were four years ago?” The 2024 version might be: Are you more or less annoyed?

Google are doing their best to shield voters from the issues that frustrate them, and yet they all of all people should know about how the Streisand Effect works: Google Removes Trump PAC Ad Targeting Black Men and it is Very Suspicious.

* Well, “self-sabotaging forces of progressive hyper-activism” is a pretty good definition of the Luddite left these days: QED: Hillary Clinton group wired $500,000 to climate activists behind disruptive protests. “‘Anyone who cares about public safety and preventing vandalism should be deeply concerned that money connected to Hillary Clinton is propping up these radicalized eco activists,’ said Daniel Turner, founder and executive director of the Power the Future energy advocacy group.”

Posted at 2:45 pm by Ed Driscoll

HE COULD DO A LOT WORSE, AND PROBABLY WILL: Is Winsome Sears on Trump’s Short List for a Running Mate? “She’s a rising star in Republican politics. Like Trump, she is known for delivering unfiltered opinions on controversial topics. At a time when college campuses are being disrupted by pro-Hamas demonstrations, the Trump campaign may be thinking about a strong show of support for law and order to contrast with Biden’s cowardice in addressing the problem. And, she is a black woman. Sears would provide a sharp contrast to Kamala Harris on a debate stage.” Well, yes, she can speak in coherent sentences and everything. Plus she has actual experience and substantive knowledge.

The born in Jamaica thing is an issue, though. You can’t be VP if you’re ineligible to be President. But the story just says her father is Jamaican. I don’t know if her mother is a U.S. citizen but if so she’s good no matter where she was born.

Posted at 2:16 pm by Glenn Reynolds

JACK DUNPHY: On the Violent Left, Eternal Recurrence.

Have we learned nothing from the past? It’s not as though we need to explore antiquity for lessons in how to confront today’s issues. While such an exploration would no doubt be helpful, any effort in that direction is beyond – far, far beyond – the stunted intellectual capacities of our current crop of ruling elites, certainly to include our degreed betters running our so-called institutions of higher learning.

But is 2020 so shrouded in the mists of history as to be inaccessible to the people who hold themselves out as arbiters of all that is good and just? Apparently so. Consider: it was a mere four years ago that every major city in America was convulsed in the paroxysms of violence that followed the death of George Floyd. We must, said these lettered sophisticates, allow the oppressed to vent their outrage at the death of one of their own at the hands of state oppressors. To deter them in any way would only deepen their pain. And never mind that our hero of the moment had lived a life of depredation and was found to have consumed a fatal dose of fentanyl. Such trivial details need not dim the luster of the man’s memory.

A result of the ensuing anti-police hysteria, one that was easily foreseeable in nature if not necessarily in its horrifying scale, was that the number of homicides in the U.S. rose by nearly 5,000 from 2019 to 2020, and that nearly 3,400 of these added victims, 68 percent, were black. But there must be martyrs to the cause, after all, and who is to say how many of those 5,000 people wouldn’t willingly have sacrificed themselves in the name of a more just society? Eggs and omelets, right, comrades?

Still, one prays for more wisdom in those we’ve entrusted with authority. For the most part, we pray in vain. Witness the  chaos this week on display on college campuses across the country, where we find that the protesters who brought so much death and disorder in 2020 have swapped their BLM T-shirts for kaffiyehs and adopted the Gazans as their Cause of the Season. Same clowns, different circus.

Not surprisingly, the AP isn’t willing to connect the dots:

Or as Jon Gabriel recently noted: Welcome to protest season, where the cause changes but the tactics stay the same.

Because, “The issue is never the issue. The issue is always the revolution.”

Posted at 2:14 pm by Ed Driscoll

DON’T GET COCKY:

Posted at 1:44 pm by Ed Driscoll