According to The New York Times, 10 moderates, 15 conservatives, and eight other Republicans would have voted against the Republican repeal and replace Obamacare bill. So, then, 15 or so conservatives made it impossible to pass the bill favored by nearly every other Republican and by President Donald Trump. If that is the case, what we have here is another conservative example of purism and principle damaging another major opportunity to do good.
The first purist conservative example were the Never-Trumpers, who believed it was better for Hillary Clinton to be elected president and for the Left to have four more years of presidential power than for Donald Trump to win.
There were valid reasons to wonder whether Donald Trump was a conservative, and valid reasons to oppose him in the primaries. There were no valid reasons to oppose him in the general election. I said all these things then, and have thus far been validated beyond my wildest dreams.
In terms of policy, Donald Trump is a conservative dream. From appointing a conservative to the Supreme Court, to approving the Keystone XL pipeline, to weakening the fanatical, hysterical, and tyrannical EPA, to appointing an ambassador to the United Nations who has moral contempt for that immoral institution, to backing Israel, to seeking to reduce economy-choking regulations on business – indeed essentially everything conservatives would wish for in a president – Donald Trump is almost too good to be true.
But he’s still not good enough for those conservatives who remain Never-Trumpers or good enough for the House members of Freedom Caucus, at least with regard to the repeal and replace Obamacare bill that President Trump worked so hard to have passed.
It is quite possible that I and most other conservatives who supported the repeal bill agree with just about every criticism of the bill that House conservatives made.
But, just as in the general election the question wasn’t whether candidate Trump was our ideal, the question now wasn’t whether the bill was our ideal. The question during the election was: What will happen if the Democrats and the Left win the presidency again? And the question now was and remains: What will happen if the Republicans don’t pass a bill favored by all but 25-30 Republican Congressmen and, most important, by President Trump?
But purists don’t ask such questions. They live in a somewhat different world than the rest of us who actually agree with them on everything. Because we don’t ask what is ideologically pure and true to our principles. We ask: What is closest to our ideology and to our principles?
Or, to put it another way, we have one larger principle than even the conservative ones we share with the purists – defeating the left because that is the No. 1 priority of those who cherish Western Civilization and regard America as the last best hope for humanity.
The conservative Never-Trumpers and conservatives who voted for Trump had everything in common except for that overriding principle. Conservatives who voted for Trump believed that defeating the Left is the overriding moral good of our time. We are certain that the Left (not the traditional liberal) is destroying Western Civilization, including, obviously, the United States. The external enemy of Western Civilization are the Islamists (the tens or perhaps hundreds of million of Muslims who wish to see the world governed by Sharia), and the internal enemy of the West is the left. What the left has done to the universities and to Western culture at the universities is a perfect example.
Passing even a tepid first bill to begin the process of dismantling the crushing burden of Obamacare would have been an important first step in weakening the left – not only by beginning to repeal Obamacare but by strengthening the Trump presidency and the president’s ability to go forward with tax-reform and other parts of his conservative agenda. The president is now damaged, and the Republican Party looks ludicrous – what other word can one use to describe the party that passed 60 resolutions in seven years to repeal Obamacare and then can’t pass a bill to repeal or replace Obamacare when it is given the House, the Senate, and the presidency?
Make no mistake, ye of pure heart, this may well be the last time in your lifetimes that Republicans control both Houses of Congress and have a conservative president. And understand that time is not on our side; there are congressional elections in a year and nine months.
Providence or luck made it possible to have a conservative president. Act accordingly.
Posted inAmerica|Comments Off on Purists Kill Whatever They Believe In
Do conservatives — or non-leftists, for that matter — appreciate just how terrific Donald Trump has been as president? And how lucky we are that he won the presidency?
I don’t know the answer.
What I do know is that they ought to be deeply appreciative of him, and deeply grateful for luck or providence, and certainly for Trump himself, that he was elected president. First, it is unlikely that any other Republican would have defeated Hillary Clinton. Second, he has not only surpassed many of our expectations but also thus far governed in a manner more consistent with conservative principles than any president since Ronald Reagan, and arguably Calvin Coolidge.
I say this as one who vigorously opposed him during the Republican contest for the nomination. I said from the beginning, in print and on my radio show, that I would support Trump if he became the nominee, but I dreaded his becoming the nominee. His comments about the size of his hands, Sen. John McCain as a prisoner of war and former President George W. Bush lying about weapons of mass destruction in Iraq; his lack of any history as a conservative; and the seeming absence of a filter between his brain and his Twitter app made it difficult for me to imagine him as a serious president of the United States.
Nevertheless, once he was nominated, I just as vigorously supported him on the simple and — I still believe — unanswerable grounds that while no one could be certain how Trump would govern, we were all certain about how Hillary Clinton would govern — as a leftist. And I truly believed that another four years of left-wing rule would mean the end of America as it was founded to be.
That is why I found the arguments of the conservatives who were Never-Trumpers, many of whom I work with, admire and count as friends, not just unpersuasive but incomprehensible. That a conservative could prefer Clinton — which was the only upshot of a Never Trump position — to any Republican could only mean that we have an entirely different understanding of the damage the left has done and would have done to America and the Western world if Clinton had won.
I remember Never-Trumpers calling my radio show and asking me how I could possibly believe that, if elected president, Trump would honor his commitment to nominate to the Supreme Court one of the conservatives on the list of judges from which he promised to choose.
He has honored that promise.
And given the supreme importance of the Supreme Court, isn’t that reason enough for conservatives to celebrate his presidency?
He has repealed many of President Obama’s energy regulations that would have strangled the American economy. He doesn’t believe that carbon-induced warming of the planet will destroy the human race — the greatest of the innumerable hysterias the left manufactures and then believes in.
Isn’t that reason enough for conservatives to celebrate his presidency?
He has appointed a woman who, as a billionaire, could have easily devoted her life to enjoying her wealth but instead has fought for American students and their parents to be able choose their schools just as the wealthy do. And he has taken on the teachers unions, the only group that has ever given American teachers a bad name.
Isn’t that reason enough for conservatives to celebrate his presidency?
He has appointed as ambassador to the United Nations a woman who is calling the U.N. the naked emperor that it is. And now, America is backing, rather than subverting, Israel in that benighted institution.
Isn’t that reason enough for conservatives to celebrate his presidency?
By building a wall along our southern border, he is reasserting the belief that America actually has borders.
Isn’t that reason enough for conservatives to celebrate his presidency?
And then there is tax reduction and simplification so that private citizens can keep more of their money and corporations can be far more productive.
Isn’t that reason enough for conservatives to celebrate his presidency?
And now, he has vowed, after decades of American obsequiousness, to confront the sociopathic North Korean regime.
The American media — most particularly, its elite — no longer even feigns objective reporting. It is solely an arm of the left and the Democratic Party, its task being the delegitimization of the Trump presidency.
If you live among liberals, it is not chic to express support for President Trump. But it is time more of us did. If people abandon you because you support this president, they weren’t serious friends to begin with. And, sorry to say, they aren’t worthy of you. Somehow, you have been able to look beyond their support for the America- and West-destroying left. But they can’t look beyond your support for the first conservative president in a generation — and the gutsiest perhaps ever.
If the president’s approval rating really is in the 30s, this makes overt support for him all the more imperative. Whether you like his tweets or not, his fate is our fate.
Posted inAmerica, Conservatives|Comments Off on It’s Time for Conservatives to Celebrate This President
Ask anyone what the nose does, and the reply will most likely be related to smell. We appreciate our noses because they help us experience flowers and fresh-baked cookies.
In fact, our honkers have another, more important function: They warm and humidify the air we breathe, helping prevent illness and damage in our airways and lungs. Because of this, scientists have long suspected that nose shape evolved partly in response to local climate conditions. In cold, dry climates, natural selection may have favored noses that were better at heating and moisturizing air.
A team led by scientists at Pennsylvania State University has found more evidence of the relationship between the noses we have now and the climates where our ancestors lived.
In a study published in PLOS Genetics on Thursday, the researchers found that nostril width differed significantly between populations from different regions around the world. Moreover, the higher the temperature and absolute humidity of the region, the wider the nostril, the researchers found, suggesting that climate very well may have played a part in shaping our sniffers.
Physical traits that are in direct contact with the environment often undergo natural selection and evolve faster, said Arslan Zaidi, a postdoctoral scholar in genetics at Penn State and an author of the paper. “This is one of the reasons why we looked at nose shape.”
…Between the groups in this study, only nostril width and skin pigmentation showed greater differences than would be expected because of chance accumulations of genetic mutations.
Over all, people whose parents and ancestors came from warm, humid climates tended to have wider nostrils, whereas those from cold, dry climates tended to have narrower ones. Correlations between nostril width and climate were strongest for Northern Europeans, the researchers found, suggesting that cold, dry climates in particular may have favored people with narrower nostrils…
Studying how certain traits evolved as environmental adaptations that may no longer be relevant could also help us understand disease risk today, Dr. Zaidi said.
“We know there are variable risks of respiratory diseases across different populations in the U.S.,” he said. “Can we find an explanation for that in morphology?”
Posted inEvolution|Comments Off on NYT: ‘Ancestral Climates May Have Shaped Your Nose’
I enjoyed this movie. “Acclaimed writer and historian Deborah E. Lipstadt must battle for historical truth to prove the Holocaust actually occurred when David Irving, a renowned denier, sues her for libel.”
Deborah Lipstadt is portrayed by a beautiful actress (Rachel Weisz) while David Irving is portrayed by a creepy-looking actor (Timothy Spall). The real life David Irving looks similar to actor Tom Wilkinson who is in the movie but curiously given the role of the barrister attacking Irving.
Rachel Weisz, Deborah Lipstadt
Deborah Lipstadt
David Irving
Tom Wilkinson
NEW YORK, NY – JANUARY 06: Actor Timothy Spall attends the 2014 National Board of Review Gala at Cipriani 42nd Street on January 6, 2015 in New York City. (Photo by Gilbert Carrasquillo/FilmMagic)
The film makes clear that Lipstadt had unlimited funds and legal help at her disposal while Irving represented himself. Lipstadt’s team poured through Irving’s diaries to find a few passages to discredit him. Who has written an honest diary who would not be embarrassed to have parts of it read aloud in court?
Wikipedia: “Lipstadt hired the British solicitor Anthony Julius to present her case, while Penguin Books hired Kevin Bays and Mark Bateman, libel specialist from media firm Davenport Lyons. They briefed the libel barrister Richard Rampton QC and Penguin also briefed junior barrister Heather Rogers. The defendants (with Penguin’s insurers paying the fee) also retained Professor Richard J. Evans, historian and Professor of Modern History at Cambridge University, as an expert witness. Also working as expert witnesses were the American Holocaust historian Christopher Browning, the German historian Peter Longerich and the Dutch architectural expert Robert Jan van Pelt. The latter wrote a report attesting to the fact that the death camps were designed, built and used for the purpose of mass murder, while Browning testified for the reality of the Holocaust.”
Deborah Lipstadt is more moderate than others when she describes Allied policy as merely “bordering on complicity” in the Final Solution. What prevented Auschwitz from being bombed, says Lipstadt, was the “deep antipathy” toward “contemptible” Jews held by key figures in Washington and London. David Wyman, perhaps the most cited member of the prosecution team, is at one with Lipstadt in seeing anti-Semitism at the core of the “abandonment.”
The role of memory, and its fraught relationship to fact and truth, is threaded through Lipstadt’s legal battle with Irving, and so through “Denial,” the new film dramatizing that epic British courtroom struggle. The film debuted at the Toronto Film Festival and will open in select cities in the United States on September 30. Starring Rachel Weisz as Lipstadt, it’s based on Lipstadt’s book recounting her ordeal, “History on Trial: My Day in Court With a Holocaust Denier.”
Though in the end victorious, Lipstadt faced a legal saga that was filled with uncertainty and marked by intense loneliness. In the United Kingdom, the burden of proof in a libel case is on the accused, so it was up to Lipstadt and her British legal team to prove that Irving was wrong; that the Holocaust had, indeed, occurred, and that Jews were its intended victims. Lipstadt, then and today still a professor at Emory University, had put everything on the line to defend herself against the claims of a man who was driven by prejudice and anti-Semitism but also knew how to construct a cunning and cynical argument.
“History on Trial” was published in 2005, and it eerily resonates today. The rise of anti-Semitism in Europe and the surge of derogatory Holocaust-related tropes on social media perpetrated by extremists in this country raise a similar quandary: How do you deal with those who deny history, who disregard factual evidence, who seem to care little for the truth? And can this one film — a solid, interesting, at times gripping film, but one not destined for blockbuster status — help counter an ugly narrative?
The contemporary echoes were one reason that Weisz, whose parents fled from the Nazis, wanted the part. “Obviously, the Holocaust being on trial is just a very outlandish notion to me,” the British-born actress said during an interview in a Manhattan hotel. “But the idea that there are objective truths, and there is a difference between opinion and fact — in the current climate of relativism, people just spout opinions as if they are facts! There doesn’t seem to be much respect for the difference of the two things. So I thought it was fascinating to put something on trial and prove it was irrefutably a fact and that someone’s opinion didn’t stand up.”
David Irving is a complicated chap. There’s an excellent five-part British miniseries “Selling Hitler” about the Hitler Diaries. Apparently, Irving lead the way in denouncing the diaries as fraudulent after first calling them genuine.
In 1983, Stern, a weekly German news magazine, purchased for 9 million marks the Hitler Diaries of 61 volumes and published excerpts from them. Irving played the major role in uncovering the Hitler Diaries as a hoax. In October 1982 Irving purchased, from the same source as Stern’s 1983 purchase, 800 pages of documents relating to Hitler, only to discover that many of the documents were forgeries.[52] Irving was amongst the first to identify the diaries as forgeries, and to draw media attention. He went so far as to crash the press conference held by Hugh Trevor-Roper at the Hamburg offices of Stern magazine on 25 April 1983 to denounce the diaries as a forgery and Trevor-Roper for endorsing the diaries as genuine.[53] Irving’s performance at the Stern press conference where he violently harangued Trevor-Roper until ejected by security led him to be featured prominently on the news; the next day, Irving appeared on the Today television show as a featured guest.[54] Irving had concluded that the alleged Hitler diaries were a forgery because they had come from the same dealer in Nazi memorabilia from whom Irving had purchased his collection in 1982.[52] At the press conference in Hamburg, Irving announced, “I know the collection from which these diaries come. It is an old collection, full of forgeries. I have some here”.[52] Irving was proud to have detected and announced the hoax material and of the “trail of chaos” he had created at the Hamburg press conference and the attendant publicity it had brought him, and took pride in his humiliation of Trevor-Roper, whom Irving strongly disliked for his sloppy work (not detecting the hoax) and criticism of Irving’s methods and conclusions.[55] Irving also noted internal inconsistencies in the supposed Hitler diaries, such as a diary entry for 20 July 1944, which would have been unlikely given that Hitler’s right hand had been badly burned by the bomb planted in his headquarters by Colonel Claus von Stauffenberg earlier that day.[56]
A week later on 2 May, Irving asserted that many of the diary documents appear to be genuine; at the same press conference, Irving took the opportunity to promote his translation of the memoirs of Hitler’s physician Dr. Theodor Morell.[55] Robert Harris, in his book Selling Hitler, suggested that an additional reason for Irving’s change of mind over the authenticity of the alleged Hitler diaries was that the fake diaries contain no reference to the Holocaust, thereby buttressing Irving’s claim in Hitler’s War that Hitler had no knowledge of it.[57] Subsequently Irving conformed when the diaries were declared as a forgery by consensus. At a press conference held to withdraw his endorsement of the diaries, Irving proudly claimed that he was the first to call them a forgery, to which a reporter replied that he was also the last to call them genuine.
David Duke of course came to his views on race through the KKK. It is easy to think of David Duke as a clown, but his views on Jews largely parallel Kevin MacDonald’s.
David Irving is a different case. He was a respected amateur historian and popular author about military matters. He is educated guy and a really talented writer. Because he speaks and reads German fluently, he has used original source material for his works. He is more responsible than anyone, other than Kurt Vonnegut, for publicizing British firebomb raid on Dresden (for fans of Pynchon’s Gravity’s Rainbow, it plays a significant part in that book as well). What happened with Irving is that in all of his original research, he was unable to come up with anything linking Hitler with direct orders to exterminate the Jews. He also minimized the number of Jews who were deliberately killed. (The numbers, even from established historians of the Holocaust, are all over the map. Arno Mayer, who wrote, Why did the Heavens not darken, in that book said that more Jews died of disease and other causes than were put to death in gas chambers in Auschwitz.)
Deborah Lipstadt wrote a book in which she called Irving a Holocaust Denier, lumping him with people who were explicit Holocaust deniers. Irving sued her in England for libel and lost. In the process Irving’s historical research was shredded by Richard Evans, another British historian of WWII and the Nazis, because Evans said that Irving had deliberately shaped his books and opinions by ignoring some facts and stressing others to reach a desired result.
This result of the trial pretty much ruined Irving’s reputation among serious historians. However, there are a number of points that really have to be made in Irving’s defense: Irving foolishly represented himself at trial whereas Libstadt’s team consisted of the best barristers in England paid millions of pounds by wealthy Jews including Spielberg. Evans was paid hundreds of thousands of pounds to testify as an expert witness, and in subsequent events, has been criticized by neutral sources as someone who has made serious errors in his own works. Irving made all of his source materials available to the defense and Lipstadt refused to turn over much of what she had that she based her claim in the book on.
Irving is probably the English speaking historian who knows the most about the Nazi leadership having read and translated Goebbels diaries, written a book on Goebels and on Himmler as well as on other aspects. Irving has also changed his views on the extent of the Holocaust. He still doesn’t think it can be attributed to Hitler, but does think that others in the leadership were involved, and he now concedes that there were extermination camps and that at least hundreds of thousands of Jews were killed.
Christopher Hitchens strongly supported Irving’s right to his opinions and his books. The question is always one of whether histories should be refuted by calling its author a racist or an anti-Semite or refuted with facts. Irving was not some crank pounding out tracts. He may have had an agenda as Evans testified, but if that is the case, identify the agenda as Evans did and show how Irving distorted the facts. However, that may be true for some of the parts of Irving’s works, its certainly not true for most of them.
Haaretz: ‘Hitler’s American Model,’ by James Q. Whitman, contends that America’s racist legislation served as a model for at least portions of Nazi Germany’s Nuremberg Laws.
“Hitler’s American Model: The United States and the Making of Nazi Race Law,” by James Q. Whitman, Princeton University Press, 208 pp., $24.95
It’s not widely realized that Adolf Hitler wrote a sequel to “Mein Kampf.” Published only in 1961, “Hitler’s Second Book,” as it was titled, rehashed many of the themes from his earlier work but also included some significant additional material, including some fascinating praise of America’s immigration system in the 1920s.
“The American nation appears as a young, racially select people,” Hitler wrote. “By making an immigrant’s ability to set foot on American soil dependent on specific racial requirements on the one hand as well as a certain level of physical health of the individual himself, the bleeding of Europe of its best people has become regulated in a manner that is almost bound by law.”
Yale law professor James Q. Whitman, in his intriguing new book, “Hitler’s American Model,” contends that the Nazi leader’s praise of America was not merely some propaganda rant but reflected the Nazis’ genuine admiration for the laws governing race relations in America in those years.
More than that: Whitman contends that Nazi legal theorists not only extolled America’s racist legislation, but actually used it as a model for at least portions of the Nuremberg Laws. The centerpiece of Whitman’s case is a June 1934 gathering of senior Nazi attorneys and Justice Ministry officials to draft sweeping new legislation that would define the status of German Jews and their relations to non-Jewish Germans.
In preparation for the conference, the attendees examined legal systems around the world, in search of precedents for government-imposed legal restrictions based on race. They were not looking for ammunition to publicly justify the laws they were creating; in fact, there was no public aspect at that point, since the 1934 meeting was held entirely behind closed doors. Rather, Whitman shows, they were trying to determine how best to turn Nazi racial ideology into German federal law.
“This pivotal meeting on the road to the Nuremberg Laws involved repeated and detailed discussion of the American example,” Whitman writes. The Germans were not interested so much in U.S. segregation laws; their goals were to disqualify Jews from citizenship and to criminalize marriage and sexual relations between Jews and non-Jews, in order to “protect German blood and honor.”
For this, they looked to a number of American legal innovations. One was the way in which the U.S. immigration quotas, adopted by Congress in 1921 and tightened in 1924, were structured to heavily favor what were considered “racially desirable” people in northern and western Europe, and severely reduce the number admitted from eastern and southern Europe (primarily Jews and Catholics) and from Asia. Although the U.S. was by no means the only country to decide immigration based on racist ideas, Whitman notes, it had become “the leader in developing explicitly racist policies of nationality and immigration.”
The Nazi jurists were also keenly interested in America’s development of a type of second-class citizenship for residents of Puerto Rico and the Philippines, the territories that the U.S. captured and occupied in the Spanish-American War of 1898. The Supreme Court upheld the conquered peoples’ status as “non-citizen nationals.” German legal scholars created an extensive body of literature on the subject, which the Nazis utilized. “America, in the eyes of this German literature, was a laboratory for experimentation in diminished citizenship rights,” Whitman notes.
Finally, the Nazis looked closely at the laws in 30 states prohibiting marriage between whites and blacks, the last of which (Virginia) was abolished only in 1967. In defining who could marry and who could not, these American precedents included helpful (to the Nazis) ways for deciding the status of persons of mixed-race. The issue of “mongrelization,” which entered the American legal system originally because of relations between white masters and black slaves, was important to the Nazis in addressing the question of Germans who were of partly Jewish descent.
As an example of the prominence of sentiment in America against race-mixing, Whitman quotes U.S. Senator Theodore Bilbo (Democrat of Mississippi) railing, in 1938, about how “mongrelization” could “destroy white civilization.” Bilbo worried that “even one drop of Negro blood placed in the veins of the purest Caucasian destroys the inventive genius of his mind and palsies his creative faculty.”
Many states—primarily, but not exclusively, in the south—defined a Negro as someone who had any Negro ancestors; hence the term “one drop.” Ironically, the Nazis considered the one-drop rule too harsh, and instead adopted the one-grandparent rule to define Jewishness.
Whitman should have mentioned that such views were held not only by crude southern demagogues, but by the president of the United States himself. In a document from 1939 (first published by this author more than 10 years ago), President Franklin D. Roosevelt was reliably quoted by a friendly senator as boasting, “We know that we do not have any Jewish blood in our veins.” Prof. Greg Robinson’s study of FDR’s writings in the 1920s uncovered statements warning that “the mingling of white with oriental blood on an extensive scale is harmful to our future citizenship.” And there can be no doubt (since it was a matter of public controversy) that the president approved his administration’s policy of segregating Negro blood donations during World War II.
Did America’s racist legislation directly influence any aspects of Nazi racial laws? Whitman concludes that although the Nazi statute criminalizing mixed marriage “was not directly copied” from the U.S. legal code, the German jurists’ thinking clearly was “influenced” by the American example, as demonstrated by their frequent reference to U.S. law during that crucial 1934 conference, and the inclusion of extensive American material in major Nazi law texts. While “it is perfectly possible” that the Nazis “would have succeeded in criminalizing mixed marriages even if they had not had an American example to cite,” Whitman writes, there is “no justification for ignoring the evidence of Nazi engagement with American models that litters the sources.”
Posted inAdolf Hitler, America|Comments Off on Was Hitler Inspired by Racist American Laws?
"This guy knows all the gossip, the ins and outs, the lashon hara of the Orthodox world. He’s an [expert] in... all the inner workings of the Orthodox world." (Rabbi Aaron Rakeffet-Rothkoff)
