As They Do

The ongoing fallout of the Dobbs decision, and the way it's made manifest the GOP's extreme and retrogressive anti-abortion priorities, has caused no small amount of soul-searching amongst Republican politicians. We saw, for example, a slew of Arizona Republicans race to disavow their own hand-packed-picked supreme court's decision to resurrect a pre-statehood near-total ban on abortion. Donald Trump also came out and said he opposed a national abortion ban. What should voters make of this about-face?

Nothing. Absolutely nothing. Why not? Because Republicans are, to be blunt, lying. No matter what they say, no matter what press releases they write, no matter what interviews they give, when push comes to shove, they will absolutely either endorse or acquiesce to the most draconian possible limitations on female reproductive autonomy. That's the full truth.

The list of supporting evidence on this is essentially endless, but I'll just give two examples:

Exhibit A: Arizona, where the GOP-controlled legislature -- fresh off their oh-so-pained public squirming over the aforementioned state supreme court ruling -- has continued to block legislative efforts to actually, you know, repeal the offending law.

Exhibit B: Florida, where Senator Rick Scott rapidly backtracked from his own heresies calling for greater moderation on abortion after that state's supreme court reversed decades-long precedent clear the way for abortion bans by clarifying that of course he'd support even a six-week ban if given the opportunity.

These are two among many.

I suspect that over the next few months, we will continue to see more Republican rhetoric that gestures at some sort of "moderate" or "compromise" position on abortion, occurring right alongside more extreme tangible implementations of the right's extremist anti-choice agenda (what's going to happen when the Supreme Court permanently allows states to murder pregnant women in defiance of federal law). Even as rhetoric, it's hollow -- the "exceptions" they promise are nugatory or impossible to implement, the "deals" on offer are to impose unwanted bans on blue states while letting red states be as extreme as they desire -- but more than that they're lies. No matter what they say, no matter what they earnestly promise, no matter what soul-searching they might promise, where Republicans are in charge what they will do is push for and defend the most draconian abortion bans they can possibly get away with.

There's no lever that will get Republicans to behave differently; no weird trick that can change their minds. Where they have power and hold office, this is what they will do. Our only option is to deprive them of that power. No matter what they say, no matter what they believe, anyone who is taking any steps right now to assist Republicans taking or keeping office is tacitly endorsing extreme abortion bans. There's no way around it.

DeSantis' "Asylum" Offer to Jewish College Students

Florida Governor Ron DeSantis has issued an emergency order waiving various requirements for prospective transfer students into Florida public universities "who are seeking to transfer to a Florida university because of a well-founded fear of antisemitic or other religious discrimination, harassment, intimidation, or violence" at their current colleges.*

The "well-founded fear" language is borrowed from asylum law, so if I were a Jewish student considering this offer I'd have to be concerned that DeSantis' next step would be to traffic me right back out of the state via a one-way to a New England island.

In all seriousness, I have to give DeSantis a very faint tip of the cap here, if only because a few months ago I had a similar thought about whether colleges in blue states should offer a form of "asylum" running in the opposite direction -- assisting admissions or transfers of students leaving Florida public universities in the wake of DeSantis' assault on academic freedom and the rights of sexual minorities. I've certainly noticed an at least anecdotal uptick in "red state refugees" on the faculty side of academia, and it wouldn't surprise me to learn there's similar pressure on the student side. And on the other side of things, I actually wondered back in 2022 if DeSantis might seek to expressly differentiate himself from Trump on the subject of antisemitism. He hasn't really done so -- the seemingly obvious need of a GOP challenger to challenge Trump continuing to founder on the absolute inability of any Republican of substance to say a bad word about the Supreme Leader -- but he has tried to make "antisemitism" a relatively large part of his presidential narrative.

And so as DeSantis' presidential campaign continues to flounder in the most pathetic fashion, this reads like a theatrical attempt to capture some of the Stefanik-magic from last month. Of course, DeSantis isn't alone here. For whatever reason, Republicans have learned that fake performative concern about antisemitism is the easiest route for craven gutless mediocrities to become media starlets, at least for a few days. That it keeps on filling this role is maybe something that the Jewish community needs to ponder -- while on the one hand I'm not convinced it's actually Jews who are most impressed by these stunts, there does seem to be a repeated gullibility on this front that deserves closer interrogation. How has the GOP become so convinced that this play, in particular, is a winning strategy for them? 

* Nominally, "other religious discrimination" encompasses Muslim students as well -- an interesting prospect as various Muslim and pro-Palestinian groups have begun adopting the broad understandings of "antisemitism" vis-a-vis discourse about Israel and Zionism promoted by some Jewish groups and trying to cross-apply them to similar broad understandings of Islamophobia vis-a-vis how university actors talk about Palestine and anti-Zionism. In practice, it's hard to imagine that will amount to much -- in part because of the vagueness surrounding "well-founded fear" of persecution, and in part because the sort of person who is concerned about that sort of Islamophobia is perhaps unlikely to find Florida an attractive destination to flee to.

The Conservative Experiment at New College is Failing on Easy Mode

I'll admit: when Ron DeSantis and Christopher Rufo announced their intention to convert the New College of Florida into a conservative indoctrination camp, I thought they might succeed. Not just in the enshrining conservative orthodoxy part, but in doing so while maintaining or increasing New College's numbers along traditional metrics of academic excellence.

Simply put, the New College is a small place (fewer than 700 students). And so my logic was straight-forward: are there 700 young conservatives with reasonably good test scores who are eager to devote their college experience to a crusade in owning the libs? Probably! Especially given the largesse that undoubtedly would be funneled to them by the DeSantis administration in support! And given the high profile of DeSantis' and Rufo's machinations, it would be easy to attract that sort of young right-wing zealot to the New College campus. Any right-wing culture warrior who would find this sort of endeavor appealing no doubt would have heard of the New College and what's being done there, and would quickly put it at the top of their application list.

The problem, I thought, was always going to be one of scalability. Sure there may be 700 such students who could make the New College experiment into a "success". But are there 10,000? 100,000? The factors which would make the New College experiment work could not be replicated across the education sector as a whole. Try this at the University of Florida and you'd just have the academic wrecking ball of mass faculty departures and an enraged student body, and nothing to show for it. So my prediction would be that some of the "cream of the crop" currently going to Liberty or Patrick Henry might redirect themselves to the New College, thus giving a false impression that there was untapped demand for the product Rufo was selling, and then we'd have to explain that redistributing the small set of baby conservative crusaders is not actually evidence of a plan that can work at scale.

But it turns out I was still giving Rufo and DeSantis too much credit. Because the early returns are in, and while they've certainly done a number in terms of destroying the New College's academic reputation and standing (over a third of the faculty have departed, alongside dozens of transferring students), the new crop of students coming in are actually less impressive than those the college attracted before the takeover.

Rufo speaks a lot about academic excellence and the virtues of a classical liberal education. But as Steven Walker of The Sarasota Herald-Tribune reported in a damning July story, the incoming class recruited by the new administration has lower average grades, SAT scores and ACT scores than last year’s class. “Much of the drop in average scores can be attributed to incoming student-athletes who, despite scoring worse on average, have earned a disproportionate number of the school’s $10,000-per-year merit-based scholarships,” wrote Walker.

With all the publicity, and all the conservative cheerleading, and all the momentum of the right's latest culture war, the New College couldn't even attract a few hundred talented right-wing youth to create the impression of a successful reform? Hilarious.

And it gets better. Rufo defends the recruitment of underperforming athletes on the grounds that -- wait for it -- there are too many ladies at the New College.

Rather than reviving some traditional model of academic excellence, then, it looks as though New College leaders are simply trying to replace a culture they find politically hostile with one meant to be more congenial. The end of gender studies and the special treatment given to incoming athletes are part of the same project, masculinizing a place that had been heavily feminist, artsy and queer. When I spoke to Rufo last weekend, he offered several explanations for New College’s new emphasis on sports, including the classical idea that a healthy body sustains a healthy mind. But an important part of the investment in athletics, he said, is that it is a way to make New College more male and, by extension, less left wing.

In the past, about two-thirds of New College’s students were women. “This is a wildly out-of-balance student population, and it caused all sorts of cultural problems,” said Rufo. Having so many more women than men, he said, turned New College into “what many have called a social justice ghetto.” The new leadership, he said, is “rebalancing the ratio of students” in the hopes of ultimately achieving gender parity.

But gender parity is not necessarily compatible with a pure academic meritocracy, which Rufo claims to prize. Women are outpacing men in education in many parts of the world, including Saudi Arabia and Iran. In Hungary, nearly 55 percent of university students are women, leading the government to warn about the “feminization” of higher education. Selective American colleges tend to have more female than male applicants; to maintain something approaching a gender balance, some have adopted lower standards for men. In other words, it often takes deliberate intervention — one might call it affirmative action — to create a student body in which women don’t predominate. New College isn’t jettisoning gender ideology. It’s just adopting a different one.

Oh buddy, I hope upon hope someone sues the New College for sex discrimination based on these passages. 

It's entirely appropriate to call Rufo's endeavors an affirmative action program for men. And while the SFFA opinion is about race-based affirmative action, even before that case conservative lower courts had been reflexively applying their affirmative action skepticism to sex-based programs (for example, in Vitolo v. Guzman, the 6th Circuit struck down preferences for women in COVID relief programs using essentially identical analysis to why it struck down race-based preferences). The logic of SFFA should, if fairly applied (I know, I know: that's one hell of a caveat), cover a case like this as well.

But even absent SFFA, the sex discrimination here is worse than a standard affirmative action case. Not only does the quoted language from Rufo suggest that the New College's decisions were taken "because of, not in spite of", the effect they'd have on women, they also demonstrate that explicit hostility to women -- a belief that too many women leads to "a social justice ghetto" and creates "cultural problems" -- was a motivating factor in the decision. This is far more powerful evidence of discriminatory intent than one would find in, say, the Thomas Jefferson High School for Science & Technology case (where race-neutral changes to admissions policies were alleged to be motivated by discriminatory animus against Asians). Even defenders of affirmative action have never agreed that an affirmative action program could be justified by disdain for the overrepresented class. And one would struggle to find a more overt admission of misogynistic motivations than what one has here -- all in the service of further degrading the New College's academic quality in service of an ideological indoctrination effort.

There's still time for Rufo to, er, "right ship". If you dump enough money and resources into the New College, it will attract students no matter how bad its academic reputation gets. A lavishly funded subsidy program for right-wing kids really should be able to find an audience even if it's being run by incompetents.

But for now, this is just delightfully embarrassing. What a joke.

UPDATE: I believe it's paywalled, but this article has a lot more detail on the utter chaos that's overtaken the New College as it prepares for the next academic year.

White Republicans To Black Republicans: Stop Whining About Slavery

The fallout from Ron DeSantis' new "slavery: it wasn't all bad" educational standards continues, as most elected Black Republicans have now spoken out to condemn the framework and urge it be revised. Faced with this criticism from Black members of his own parties -- people who time and again have shown their commitment to conservative causes but nonetheless believe that here the state of Florida made a grave historical error -- DeSantis has responded exactly how you'd expect a White Republican to respond to challenges from Black people (whether in his party or not):

Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, who appointed the board members responsible for the standards, did not take the measured disapproval well. On the contrary, the governor and his political operation seemed to go after [Florida GOP Rep. Byron] Donalds with a vengeance, accusing the GOP lawmaker of aligning himself with Vice President Kamala Harris and referring to Donalds — a member of the right-wing House Freedom Caucus — as “a supposedly conservative congressman.”

[....]

Speaking with reporters in Albia, Iowa, on Friday, DeSantis responded to [South Carolina GOP Sen. Tim] Scott’s comments by criticizing “D.C. Republicans” for promoting a similar argument as Harris. “I think part of the reason our country has struggled is because D.C. Republicans all too often accept false narratives, accept lies that are perpetrated by the left and accept the lie that Kamala Harris has been perpetrating, even when that has been debunked,” he said. 

DeSantis was joined by, among others, Ben Shapiro ("Tim Scott ... promptly sided with Kamala Harris and he sided with the Congressional Black Caucus.... that's Scott being disingenuous") and Matt Walsh ("You are dead to us.... [B]ecome a Democrat. That's what you are."). The general response to Black Republicans expressing offense over a GOP politician soft-pedaling the wrong of slavery was not to think "huh, maybe there is something here," but to fulminate about how they're traitors to the cause.

I talked about these dynamics in "The Distinctive Political Status of Dissident Minorities". Dissident minorities such as Black Republicans are often "tokenized" -- held out as a means of discharging an obligation to consider the views of diverse communities but not valued beyond that transactional function. Hence, where Black Republicans cease, even temporarily, to offer this "value" to the broader GOP community (because in a specific case they do not agree with the particular goals or interests of the conservative movement), it won't be taken as a valid critique from insiders but rather proof that the Black Republicans are actually a fifth column reverting to their leftist roots.

Indeed, in that paper I actually specifically referenced a different instance where Senator Scott tried to diverge from his GOP colleagues on the matter of racism as a core illustration of the phenomenon. It is striking how everything I wrote there applies here as well with barely any need for revision:

[E]ven though tokenization might in some circumstances result in dissident minorities attaining political successes, the relationship forged through tokenization likely is not sufficiently robust so as to persevere in cases where the dissident minority does publicly diverge from the opinions of their majority allies. To the contrary, when they are tokenized, dissident minorities may find that their opinions are only valued transactionally—useful to the extent that they advance the goals of their non-group-member patrons and no further. Where the perspective isn’t what’s valued, dissident minorities will typically find that their “enhanced standing” falls apart the moment they express a view that diverges from their nominal allies.

Dissident minorities might contest this point. Specifically, they might suggest that their enhanced standing is not purely instrumental but rather reflects genuine respect by majority-group members regarding their substantive contributions—respect that will carry over to cases where they do find themselves forced to challenge the dominant group. By showing themselves to be “independent” or “exceptional,” the argument goes, dissident minorities earn credit with the majority that they then can redeem in cases where they do find it necessary to contest majority viewpoints....

Unfortunately, in a great many cases the cynical prediction wins out, and the dissident minority finds that the chips they thought they had amassed are unable to be cashed.... 

[....] 

The “enhanced standing” Scott normally enjoyed by aligning with the Republican Party was a product of him being (per Arendt) an “exceptional” member of his minority group. But once he adopted (even temporarily) a critical posture towards his conservative allies, he ceased to be exceptional, and reverted to being just a regular member of the Black community. If the “earned credit” hypothesis held true, that shouldn’t have mattered—he should have been able to draw upon the well of credibility to attain a favorable reception upon raising a challenge. Yet this is not what happened: once Scott stopped being exceptional, he was treated the same as any other minority group member, and the way the GOP treats minority group members who challenge them is to dismiss them. While Scott’s patrons in the Republican Party had been happy to hold him up as proof that the GOP had Black supporters, they did not actually have any particular commitment to engaging with the Black community—even nominal “allies” in those communities—in any circumstance where it might generate challenge or change.

If Tim Scott keeps on wanting to hand me examples for my published work, who am I to argue? But this goes to show just how steady this practice of tokenization is. I'm not going to say that Tim Scott should "become a Democrat" (anymore than I think every person should!) -- his politics are his business. But surely he must realize that this will be the reality of his treatment as a Republican in perpetuity -- if he challenges the GOP on race, he will be slapped down and hard.

The Holocaust Was Not Summer School; Slavery Was Not Trade School.

Someone -- I can't find who -- once said, in relation to claims that Jews had "failed to the learn the lessons of Auschwitz", that "the Holocaust was not summer school."

The retort there was in relation to claims that Jews had not imbibed the correct moral sentiments following our genocide. But I was reminded of it upon hearing the recent defenses of Florida's "anti-woke" efforts to whitewash slavery by lauding the "skills" slaves allegedly acquired -- apologias which, unsurprisingly, have spilled over to Holocaust minimization as well.

Fox News star Greg Gutfeld, whose latest book debuted on Tuesday, is currently under fire over his recent observation that Jewish people “had to be useful” in order to survive concentration camps, prompting the Auschwitz Museum to rebuke his comments as an “oversimplification” of the Holocaust. 

[....] 

During Monday’s broadcast of Fox News’ The Five, which both Watters and Gutfeld co-host, the panel raged against Vice President Kamala Harris’ condemnation of the Florida curriculum as racist. Watters, for instance, blasted the veep for not wanting “African-Americans and white Americans to know that Black Americans did learn skills despite being enslaved.”

The heated discussion, however, took an uncomfortable turn when lone liberal panelist Jessica Tarlov drew a parallel between slavery and the Holocaust, wondering if Florida schools would also teach that Jewish people received some benefits from the Nazis systematically murdering them in death camps.

Gutfeld, referencing a famous book by Holocaust survivor Viktor Frankl, took Tarlov’s challenge and ran with it.

“Did you ever read Man’s Search for Meaning?” Gutfeld wondered. “Vik Frankl talks about how you had to survive in a concentration camp by having skills. You had to be useful. Utility! Utility kept you alive!”

The slide from "anti-CRT" to Holocaust trivialization is nothing new, of course. And here in particular we have one of those moments where an ounce of truth helps generate a ton of falsehood. It is true that, comparatively speaking, a Jewish inmate who had skills that happened to be useful for the Nazi war effort (or otherwise coveted by the local commander) was more likely to survive. Likewise, it's true that having enough wealth to pay for bribes actuarially increased one's life span compared to the destitute. It is not true that "utility kept you alive" (a phrase that is eerily adaptive of arbeit macht frei). Plenty of people with "utility" were murdered by the Nazis. It is not true that having money insulated Jews from the Nazis. Plenty of Jews with means were nonetheless rounded up and slaughtered. The relationship of "utility" to the Jewish experience in the camps was not one of moxie and grit overcoming incredible odds; anymore than the relationship of wealth was one of frugality and financial stewardship steering one to safety. There is no favor done to the oppressed that they can sometimes leverage opportunities to resist.

But again, this is the inevitable byproduct of the anti-woke panic. The obsession with never speaking forthrightly and honestly about oppression and discrimination -- always viewing it as a "both sides" initiative -- means one has to find ways to render Nazism, if not benign, then at least filed down. Others have written about the gentile obsession with telling feel-good Holocaust stories where plucky protagonists show their wiles and skills to secure a happy ending. This is a myth that non-Jews need to tell themselves to evade reckoning with the Holocaust in its full horror; the Holocaust did not come with happy endings.

And the same is true of slavery. Slavery was not a somewhat-unsavorily-run trade school. It was a form of White supremacist oppression. Trying to find the "happy endings" is an attempt to avoid reckoning with its horrors. And the thing is, if we actually took seriously the "nobody should be made to feel guilty based on the color of their skin" pablum, there'd be no quarrel with teaching the history in its full terrible glory. Learning of the horrors of slavery doesn't and shouldn't make White people feel guilty. The guilt comes from learning those facts and then wanting to carry on as before -- no change in affect, no change in politics, as if it never happened. The dissonance between the historical knowledge and the desire to pretend as if the history didn't happen or didn't matter -- that's what creates the guilt. But that's guilt based on one's own choices, and history class needn't and shouldn't have an interest in absolving you of that.

Making the Grade Roundup

It's grading season at Lewis & Clark. I have the entire 1L day class this semester across two sections of Con Law I, so it's a bit of a bear. But I'm almost halfway done!

You get a roundup.

* * *

As a professor, I cannot fathom the hubris it takes to see one of your papers rejected from a journal -- the most normal possible experience for an academic -- and decide to parlay it into an entire New York Times column decrying "wokeness".

Florida is set to legalize kidnapping trans children from their families. But don't worry -- they'll only do it if the families love their kids and provide them with healthcare. Family courts in other states better start boning up on asylum law, because the phrase "well-founded fear of persecution" is going to become increasingly germane in cases where there's a possibility of the child being sent to Florida.

Local elections in the UK are seeing the Tories getting absolutely stomped. Over a thousand seats lost by the party, most of which are going to Labour and a healthy chunk of which are going to the LibDems and Greens. It's amazing what Labour can do when it isn't being led by a wildly unpopular antisemitic extremist!

Princeton under fire for hiring prominent BDS activist to a fellowship position. The twist? The activist is a member of the Israeli far-right. But the BDS thing is real -- he supported a divestment campaign against Ben Gurion University in retaliation for its allegedly "anti-Zionist" tilt.

The UAW has new leadership (I had half an eyeball on this, since I technically was a UAW member in my capacity as a UC-Berkeley graduate student instructor), and they're playing hardball against the Biden administration demanding compensation for how new electric vehicles may reduce the number of autoworker jobs.

Guns as Escalators, Guns as Deescalators

Professor McGonagall's face was pinched and angry. "You are not to use the Time-Turner in that fashion, Mr. Potter! Is the concept of secrecy not something that you understand?"

"They don't know how I did it! They just think I can do really weird things by snapping my fingers! I've done other weird stuff that can't be done with Time-Turners even, and I'll do more stuff like that, and this case won't even stand out! I had to do it, Professor!"

"You did not have to do it!" snapped Professor McGonagall. "All you needed to do was get this anonymous Slytherin back on the ground and the wands put away! You could have challenged him to a game of Exploding Snap but no, you had to use the Time-Turner in a flagrant and unnecessary manner!"

"It was all I could think of! I don't even know what Exploding Snap is, they wouldn't have accepted a game of chess and if I'd picked arm-wresting I would have lost!"

"Then you should have picked wrestling! "

Harry blinked. "But then I'd have lost -"

Harry stopped.

Professor McGonagall was looking very angry.

"I'm sorry, Professor McGonagall," Harry said in a small voice. "I honestly didn't think of that, and you're right, I should have, it would have been brilliant if I had, but I just didn't think of that at all..."

-- Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality, Chapter 17

"Mr. Potter, you have taken to using the Time-Turner as your solution to everything, often very foolishly so. You used it to get back a Remembrall. You vanished from a closet in a fashion apparent to other students, instead of going back after you were out and getting me or someone else to come and open the door."

From the look on Harry's face he hadn't thought of that.

"And more importantly," she said, "you should have simply sat in Professor Snape's class. And watched. And left at the end of class. As you would have done if you had not possessed a Time-Turner. There are some students who cannot be entrusted with Time-Turners, Mr. Potter. You are one of them. I am sorry."

"But I need it!" Harry blurted. "What if there are Slytherins threatening me and I have to escape? It keeps me safe -"

"Every other student in this castle runs the same risk, and I assure you that they survive. No student has died in this castle for fifty years. Mr. Potter, you will hand over your Time-Turner and do so now."

-- HPMOR, Chapter 18

"Harry Potter," Professor Quirrell said.

"Yes," Harry said, his voice hoarse.

"What precisely did you do wrong today, Mr. Potter?"

Harry felt like he was going to throw up. "I lost my temper."

"That is not precise," said Professor Quirrell. "I will describe it more exactly. There are many animals which have what are called dominance contests. They rush at each other with horns - trying to knock each other down, not gore each other. They fight with their paws - with claws sheathed. But why with their claws sheathed? Surely, if they used their claws, they would stand a better chance of winning? But then their enemy might unsheathe their claws as well, and instead of resolving the dominance contest with a winner and a loser, both of them might be severely hurt."

Professor Quirrell gaze seemed to come straight out at Harry from the repeater screen. "What you demonstrated today, Mr. Potter, is that - unlike those animals who keep their claws sheathed and accept the results - you do not know how to lose a dominance contest. When a Hogwarts professor challenged you, you did not back down. When it looked like you might lose, you unsheathed your claws, heedless of the danger. You escalated, and then you escalated again. It started with a slap at you from Professor Snape, who was obviously dominant over you. Instead of losing, you slapped back and lost ten points from Ravenclaw. Soon you were talking about leaving Hogwarts. The fact that you escalated even further in some unknown direction, and somehow won at the end, does not change the fact that you are an idiot."

[...]

"The next time, Mr. Potter, that you choose to escalate a contest rather than lose, you may lose all the stakes you place on the table. I cannot guess what they were today. I can guess that they were far, far too high for the loss of ten House points." 

-- HPMOR, Chapter 19

Yesterday, the New York Post ran a story about an incident in Florida where two drivers got into a rolling gunfight with one another, exchanging fire that injured both drivers' daughters (a 14-year old and 5-year old girl). While both drivers were initially charged with attempted murder, one driver -- the one who opened fire first -- had the charges dropped after prosecutors decided he had a valid self-defense claim since the other driver was the initial aggressor (allegedly trying to "run him off the road" and hurling a water bottle at his truck).

Hale tried to run Allison [the driver who had the charges dropped] — who was driving a Nissan Murano with two passengers — off Highway 1 near Calahan with his Dodge Ram pickup truck, which had four passengers, police said.

At one point, Hale drove alongside the Murano, rolled down his window and began shouting at Allison to pull over as Hale’s wife made an obscene gesture.

Allison rolled down his window to shout back when a plastic water bottle was thrown from the truck into the SUV, according to the Nassau County Sheriff’s Office in Florida.

[...] 

[Then, Allison] fired a semiautomatic handgun at [Hale], hitting Hale’s daughter, who was sitting in the back seat, and then sped off, police said.

When Hale realized the girl was hit, he sped closer to the SUV and began firing several rounds from his semiautomatic — one of which struck the 14-year-old girl. 

I was thinking about this incident, and to a lesser extent the recent case in Texas where a man was convicted of killing a protester who allegedly brandished an assault rifle at his car after the shooter reportedly drove his car into the crowd (this is the case where the Governor has promised to pardon the killer), and thinking "what would happen if none of the parties had guns?"

In the Florida incident, I do not think -- even accepting that Allison was "acting in self-defense" -- "thank goodness Allison had a gun -- who knows what would have happened if he wasn't armed!" My strong intuition -- albeit not one that can be proven -- is that if Allison was not armed, this incident would have resolved as a "normal" case of road rage, and in particular, we would not have seen two young girls be shot in their parents' cars. To be clear: Allison seems to have been the victim of terrible, threatening behavior by Hale. But the presence of guns (and it was Allison who fired the first shot) escalated the situation. It did not keep anybody involved safe; it made a bad situation far, far worse.

If Allison had no gun, the most likely result is that he would have just had to endure Hale's predatory road rage (at least until a filing a police report later). There is something disconcerting, I imagine, to saying, in effect, that this would have been the right choice. It entails, to be very colloquial about it, agreeing to "lose" to a predator. Allison firing at Hale represents an (escalatory) effort to fight back; to continue to resist; to win. Should Allison have "picked wrestling", even though it allowed Hale's predations to prevail (at least in the immediate moment)?

I think the answer is yes. At the very least, it's the choice that doesn't result in two children being shot. More to the point, it's the choice that millions of Americans who don't have guns would have had to have made in that same situation. Millions of Americans go through life without guns. When we encounter a road rage scenario like the one in Florida, we can't use a gun "in self-defense" because we don't have one. But as much as it might be humiliating or scary or infuriating to feel impotent in that scenario, it seems clearly better than what happened here when guns did enter the picture.

Proponents of gun rights as a means of self-defense imagine a template case as a scenario where a person is threatened and, had they not had the gun, they would be subjected to severe bodily injury or death. The availability of the gun "deescalates" (that's not quite the right word, but I don't have a better one) the situation insofar as, instead of the innocent victim being severely injured and/or killed, it is the wrongful perpetrator that suffers that fate.

But there are no doubt some number of circumstances -- and I don't know how one could measure it, but I suspect it's a greater number -- where the availability of a gun, even under the "self-defense" rubric, does not deescalate but escalates a situation. A scenario that would have resolved as a lower-level indignity or violation becomes one where someone is shot or killed.

Sometimes, we might say that for some sorts of criminal activity, a violent response is justified and socially beneficial even if it is in some sense escalatory (e.g., many argue this for a homeowner shooting a burglar, notwithstanding the fact that robbery is a "lesser" violation than shooting someone). Nonetheless, when I think back to the occasions where I've been a victim of violent crime, I do not think "if only I had a gun." To the contrary, whether or not on those occasions I would have been legally permitted to "stand my ground", I think it is absolutely for the best that I did not blow away either the homeless man or the drunk college students who assaulted me. It is clear to me that in those circumstances, I should have done what I actually did do, which is pick myself up and walk away. I should have "lost".

Not everyone agrees with me -- a law school classmate told me that if he was shoved to the ground as I would, he would "legitimately fear for his life" and would be justified in responding with lethal force. Perhaps if he had been in my shoes and armed, four people who we know did not need to die would be dead. I lacked the means (or desire) to respond with lethal force, and the result was the people who we know did not need to die, didn't die. Where the presence of guns converts more scenarios like that -- ones where we could just walk away -- into ones where someone or multiple someones are shot or killed, that is I think a clear net loss for society.

Again, I don't know how to measure this. But it seems clear that, just as there are some circumstances where having and using a gun averts the more tragic outcome; there are other circumstances where having and using a gun causes the more tragic outcome -- and (this is important) even under cases which fall under the rubric of self-defense.

The opening excerpts from Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality (which I highly recommend) are about instances where Harry is, in a brute moral sense, right to resist. Professor Snape and other Slytherins are wronging him, abusing him, in a manner that in a just world he should not have to tolerate. And yet, the moral of these passages is that reckless escalation even in response to injustice or wrongdoing has immense risks; it puts even more stakes on the table that aren't always justified or commiserate to the underlying, initial abuse. Hale seems to have badly abused Allison. But Allison could not just let it lie; he escalated dramatically by firing a gun from a moving vehicle into another car. The danger that posed -- to Allison's own family, to Hale's, to other travelers or passers-by -- is almost incalculable, and hardly seems proportionate to the (very real) wrong and abuse Allison endured. If Allison lacked a gun, he would not have been able to initiate that escalation. And at least two children would not have been shot.

America Sees Florida Man, Is Creeped Out

It looks like the Ron DeSantis bubble might have already burst. After a brief period where he looked like a viable GOP challenger to Supreme Overlord Donald Trump, his poll numbers even amongst Republicans are cratering.

There's something about this which is just tickling, and it's not only that it couldn't happen to a more deserving autocrat. The media enthusiasm for DeSantis was based on his big reelection win in Florida -- if he can win by that margin in a "swing" state, surely he's a force to be reckoned with on a national level! That logic was always a bit faulty, and instead of DeSantis' Florida-appeal translating nationwide, what  actually happened was that America saw what apparently appeals to Florida voters and was reminded again that Floridians have weird, creepy tastes and can't be trusted. 

Turns out a regime based on government-period monitoring, assaulting Mickey Mouse, banning books on Roberto Clemente, outlawing Black history, and censoring Michelangelo isn't a recipe for national success! Who knew?

Conservatives need to get out of the gulf-coastal-elite bubble and recognize that what plays in Tallahassee doesn't appeal to the rest of America.

— David Schraub @schraubd@mastodon.lawprofs.org (@schraubd) November 9, 2022

Nobody Is More Gullible Than Alt-Center "Free Speech" Advocates

When Florida announced it was banning the AP African-American history course, 90% of Ron DeSantis' supporters know exactly what he's doing -- legally banning wrongthink on race to the greatest extent possible -- and support it on that basis. They know that's what he's doing because he's been crystal clear about his agenda from day one and entirely consistent in applying it.

But you still can easily find alt-center "free speech!" advocates who tie themselves in knots to plead that it's actually about "opposing indoctrination" or "ensuring that multiple perspectives are taught" or something that just has to be different from "rank censorship". Meanwhile, the Florida government just states outright that if the college board wants its class taught in the Sunshine State, "we expect the removal of content on Critical Race Theory, Black Queer Studies, Intersectionality and other topics that violate our laws." They're not even bothering to hide it, but the alt-center sorts are perfectly happy to pull the wool over their own eyes in order to maintain harmony on their Scales of Broder.

It is incredible, looking back, to remember that approximately 9 month period where conservatives went on a high horse about protecting "free speech" and "uncomfortable learning" in the educational space as against various real and imagined left-wing bugaboos. The rapidity to which they shifted without even breaking a sweat into "enact legal bans on left-wing ideas whenever and wherever we can", and the degree to which their "free speech" hangers-on just followed along without seeming to notice or care that they suddenly were becoming foot soldiers of legally-mandated censorship, is a development I still can't fully wrap my head around. At most, you get some "both sides" grousing about how while they aren't exactly fans of throwing librarians in jail if they stock books that deviate from state-imposed orthodoxy, they can't focus on that too extensively because it might distract them from finishing their 67-tweet thread on an overzealous student protest at Swarthmore, followed by a portentous statement expressing outrage that anyone would even think of withdrawing any honors or accolades from state-censor-in-chief Ron DeSantis.

But seriously -- has any movement more quickly demonstrated itself to be populated entirely by useful idiots than this one?

Where the Sun Does Shine

Arguably the most prolific antisemitic organization operating in America today, Goyim TV, is decamping from its Bay Area base and moving to Florida. Notorious for distributing flyers and dropping banners blaming Jews for everything from COVID restrictions to the Ukraine war, Goyim TV's leader, Jon Minadeo, has indicated that he is tired of his negative treatment in California and thinks Florida will be more hospitable to him and his message:

Despite his close family ties and following in Northern California, Minadeo had increasingly felt besieged by negative press and by criticism of his behavior by authorities. Minadeo’s family owns the historic Valley Ford restaurant Dinucci’s Italian Dinners, a popular road stop en route to the Sonoma Coast, and a source close to Minadeo said the 39-year-old once worked as a waiter at the restaurant, one of his last real jobs.

Yet he had developed a dismal reputation in the North Bay after a flood of media attention on his provocative antisemitic propaganda operation in J., the San Francisco Chronicle, the Santa Rosa Press Democrat and other outlets.

[...]

Minadeo hopes Florida will be more hospitable to him and his worldview, and he may have reason to believe that to be true. A recent report from the ADL described an upward trend of extremist and antisemitic activity in the Sunshine State, driven in part by new white supremacist groups including White Lives Matter, Sunshine State Nationalists, NatSoc Florida and Florida Nationalists. 

It is, of course, notable that one of America's most vicious antisemites looked across the country for more hospitable terrain and said "Florida -- that's the ticket". There is absolutely a straight line between the "anti-woke" neo-fascism promoted by Gov. DeSantis and the belief by the likes of Minadeo that Florida will be a welcoming home for his brand of hate. In fairness, Minadeo released a video targeting Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis for signing a bill targeting antisemitism and for visiting Israel; it's not that Minadeo views DeSantis as directly an ally. But the ideological consanguinity is real, to the point that I'm genuinely curious what would happen if an enterprising journalist asked the following question of some DeSantis press flack:

Jon Minadeo, proprietor of the prominent "Goyim TV" outlet, has announced he's moving his base of operations from California to Florida due to the former's ideological inhospitality and overall "woke" atmosphere. Do you credit Gov. DeSantis' policies for facilitating this sort of move, and do expect similar organizations to likewise flee states like California for Florida going forward?

I bet at least half of the press team on DeSantis' crew would give an answer praising the move and bragging about it. It'll be followed up by a clarifying disavowal, of course, but still, it'd be A+ trolling and I want someone to try it.

The Judeo-Christian's Junior Partner

It's hardly a revelation at this point to observe how the "anti-CRT" style bills have quickly become tools to censor Jewish and Holocaust education. A recent story out of Florida, where a school district cited Florida's "don't say gay" bill to block a parent from giving an educational (but non-theological) presentation to teach students what Channukah is, wouldn't even be especially noteworthy (the district did eventually reverse itself). But there were some details in the story that I thought were illustrative about the location Jews are perceived to occupy in religious pluralism discourse versus the position we actually occupy.

The first thing to note about this district is that it is not some sentinel of secularism. The schools reportedly are replete with "holiday" decorations that are very much tied to Christmas. Nonetheless, when the parent tried to schedule her yearly Channukah presentation, the district demurred on the grounds that if the school allowed such an event, "“they would have to teach Kwanza and Diwali."

To which the Jewish parent replied: "I think that would be awesome!"

What we see here is how "Judeo-Christian" renders Judaism the (very, very) junior partner. Christians won't actually give Jews equal standing with Christians in terms of holiday exposure; as the "junior" they're not entitled to such largesse. But Christians assume nonetheless that Jews remain partners in the desire to maintain "Judeo-Christian" hegemony against upstart interlopers like Hindus or African-Americans. The idea that Jews would not be horrified by, but would in fact welcome, greater inclusion for other minority faiths and creeds -- that Jews actually identify more with other minority faiths and creeds than they do with hegemonic Christianity -- is incomprehensible.

The reality is that this unequal partnership is a creature of the Christian, not Jewish, imagination. Even if "Judeo-Christian" ever actually were a relationship of equals -- and I can scarcely imagine it -- the fact is Jews do not see ourselves as part of this "Judeo-Christian" collective with a shared interest in standing against other minorities. That religious outsiders might be included is for us a feature, not a bug.

Why Is Ron DeSantis Such a Marco Rubio?

Following his apparent 59/40 romp to reelection over Charlie Crist, Eugene Volokh wants descriptive answers to the question of why Ron DeSantis did so well, particularly in contrast to his razor-thin 2018 victory (where he won by less than half a point). What's the secret of his political success?

I'm not going to fully venture an answer to that question. But there's an important data point that I want to flag which is I think easily overlooked in the coming DeSantis mania, namely: that Marco Rubio had almost the exact same result as did DeSantis. He prevailed in his Senate race over Val Demings 57/41. This also represents a significant improvement over Rubio's margin in his last race (which was in 2016, not 2018, so not apples-to-apples, but still pertinent)

I mention this because it suggests that a consilient explanation for DeSantis' strong performance probably should be one that also explains Rubio's near-identical performance. The similarity in results is especially notable given that Rubio and DeSantis don't seem like especially similar political figures or cut similar profiles beyond both being conservative Republicans -- it'd be hard to come up with personal attributes that both share that represent plausible explanations for explaining their respective performance. That DeSantis and Rubio seem quite different (we're talking about DeSantis, not Rubio, as a potential 2024 contender) makes it all the more noteworthy that they basically had identical margins this election. That suggests that the factors driving the results had less to do with DeSantis' personal political genius (unless that genius is something he somehow shares with Rubio), and more on broader structural considerations that have little to do with DeSantis-qua-DeSantis.

So, to move towards an answer to Volokh's question of why DeSantis did so much better in 2022 than 2018, some plausible factors (none of which naturally demonstrate particular "political brilliance" by DeSantis) include:

• The general "reddening" of Florida.
• 2018 being a worse year for Republicans than 2022.*
• Incumbency advantage.

Now, of course, all of these could be unpacked further, and potentially in a fashion that gives more individualized credit to DeSantis. For example, maybe Florida is "reddening" in part because of DeSantis' policies or personal popularity (though the trend seems to predate him -- there hasn't been a Democratic Governor in Florida since 2000, hasn't been a Democratic Senator since 2018, and by 2018 Democrats were already down to a single statewide elected official). Or maybe Rubio's performance this time around is attributable to good coattails from running with DeSantis.

But to a large extent, I think we're overstating DeSantis' political acumen based on this election. I understand the first-blush appeal -- he did far better than many of his Republican colleagues in the 2022 cycle. But he didn't do materially better than his other Florida Republican colleagues, which suggests that the explanation for his success might be Florida-specific, but probably isn't DeSantis-specific. Contrast that to, say, Marcy Kaptur in Ohio, who seemed to dramatically outperform other Ohio Democrats -- that suggests that she might have some personally unique mojo worth looking into. Ditto Chris Sununu in New Hampshire, who easily won reelection in a swing state where Democrats won three tightly contested Senate and House races. Compared to Kaptur and Sununu, DeSantis looks pretty well ordinary -- no more impressive than Marco Rubio.

* This is obviously true, though it's a bit obscured because Democrats probably overperformed expectations more in 2022 compared to 2018. But the actual results of the 2018 midterm were far better for the Democrats than was the case in 2022.

The 2022 Almost-Post Mortem

I was a bit hesitant to write my post-mortem recap today, since some very important races remain uncalled. Incredibly, both the House and Senate remain uncalled, though the GOP is favored in the former and Democrats have the slight advantage in the latter. It would be truly delightful if Catherine Cortez Masto can squeak out a win in Nevada and so make the upcoming Georgia run-off, if not moot, then slightly less high stakes. But again, things are up in the air that ought make a big difference in the overall "narrative" of the day.

Nonetheless, I think some conclusions can be fairly drawn at this point. In no particular order:

• There was no red wave. It was, at best, a red trickle. And given both the underlying fundamentals  on things like inflation and the historic overperformance of the outparty in midterm elections, this is just a truly underwhelming performance for the GOP. No sugarcoating that for them.

• If Trafalgar polling had any shame, they'd be shame-faced right now, but they have no shame, so they'll be fine.

• In my 2018 liveblog, I wrote that "Some tough early results (and the true disappointment in Florida) has masked a pretty solid night for Democrats." This year, too, a dreadful showing in Florida set an early downer tone that wasn't reflected in the overall course of the evening. Maybe it's time we just give up the notion that Florida is a swing state?

• That said, Republicans need to get out of their gulf-coastal-elite bubble and realize that what plays in Tallahassee doesn't play in the rest of the country. 

• That's snark, but also serious -- for all the talk about how "Democrats are out-of-touch", it seems that the GOP also has a problem in not understanding that outside of their fever-swamp base most normal people maybe don't like the obsession with pronouns and "kitty litter" and "anti-CRT". Their ideological bubble is at this point far more impermeable, and far more greatly removed from the mainstream, than anything comparable among Democrats.

• Abortion is maybe the biggest example of this, as anti-choice measures keep failing in even deep red states like Kentucky, while pro-choice enactments sail to victory in purple states like Michigan (to say nothing of blue bastions like California). Democratic organizers should make a habit of just putting abortion on the ballot in every state, and ride those coattails.

• It's going to fade away almost immediately, but I cannot get over the cynical bad faith of what happened regarding baseless GOP insinuations that any votes counted after election day were inherently suspicious. On November 7, this was all one heard from GOP officials across the country, even though delays in counting are largely the product of GOP-written laws. But on November 8, when they found themselves behind on election night returns, all of the sudden folks like Kari Lake are relying on late-counted votes to save them while raising new conspiracies about stolen elections. Sickening.

• Given the still powerful force of such conspiracy mongering, Democrats holding the executive branch in key swing states like Wisconsin and Michigan is a huge deal. Great job, guys.

• For the most part, however, most losing MAGA candidates are conceding. Congratulations on clearing literally the lowest possible bar to set.

• The GOP still should be favored to take over the House, albeit with a razor-thin majority. And that majority, in turn, seems almost wholly attributable to gerrymandering -- both Democrats unilateral disarmament in places like New York, but also truly brutal GOP gerrymanders in places like Florida. This goes beyond Rucho, though that case deserves its place in the hall of shame. The degree to which the courts bent over backwards to enable even the most nakedly unlawful districting decisions -- the absurd lawlessness of Ohio stands out, but the Supreme Court's own decision to effectively pause enforcement of the Voting Rights Act because too many Black people entering Congress qualifies as an "emergency" on the shadow docket can't be overlooked either -- is one of the great legal disgraces of my lifetime in a year full of them.

• Of course, I have literally no idea how the Kevin McCarthy will corral his caucus with a tiny majority. Yes, it gives crazies like Greene and Boebert (well, maybe not Boebert ...) more power, but that's because it gives everyone in the caucus more power, which is just a recipe for chaos. Somewhere John Boehner is curling up in a comfy chair with a glass of brandy and getting ready to have a wonderful day.

• My new proposal for gerrymandering in Democratic states: "trigger" laws which tie anti-gerrymandering rules to the existence of a national ban. If they're banned nationwide, the law immediately goes into effect. Until they are, legislatures have free reign. That way one creates momentum for a national gerrymandering ban while not unilaterally disarming like we saw in New York. Could it work? Hard to know -- but worth a shot.

• Let's celebrate some great candidates who will be entering higher office! Among the many -- and this is obviously non-exhaustive -- include incoming Maryland Governor Wes Moore, incoming Pennsylvania Governor Josh Shapiro, incoming Pennsylvania Senator John Fetterman. Also kudos to some wonderful veterans who held their seats in tough environs, including Michigan Governor Gretchen Whitmer, Virginia congresswoman Abigail Spanberger, New Jersey congressman Andy Kim, Maine Governor Janet Mills, and New Hampshire Senator Maggie Hassan.

• Special shoutout to Tina Kotek, who overcame considerable headwinds (and the worst Carleton alum) to apparently hold the Governor's mansion in my home state of Oregon. Hopeful that Jaime McLeod-Skinner can eke out a victory in my congressional district too, though it looks like that might come down to the wire.

• I also think it's important to give credit even to losing candidates who fought hard races. Tim Ryan stands out here -- not only did he force the GOP to spend badly needed resources in a state they should've had no trouble keeping, but his coattails might have pushed Democrats across the finish line in at least two House seats Republicans were favored to hold. (I hate to say it, but Lee Zeldin may have played a similar role for the GOP in New York).

• I'm inclined to agree that, if Biden doesn't run in 2024, some of the emergent stars from this cycle (like Whitmer or Shapiro) are stronger picks for a presidential run than the also-rans from 2020. But I also think that Biden likely will get an approval bump off this performance -- people like being associated with winners!

• On the GOP side, the best outcome (from my vantage) is Trump romping to a primary victory and humiliating DeSantis -- I think voters are sick of him. The second best outcome might be DeSantis winning narrowly over Trump and provoking a tantrum for the ages that might rip the GOP apart. DeSantis himself, as a presidential candidate, is an uncertainty -- I'm not convinced he plays well outside of Florida, but I am convinced that if he prevails over Trump the media will fall over itself to congratulate the GOP on "repudiating" Trumpism even though DeSantis is materially indistinguishable from Trump along every axis save that he's not abjectly incompetent (which, in this context, is not a plus).

• The hardest thing to do is to recognize when even candidates you really like are, for whatever reason, just not going to get over the hump. This fits Charlie Crist, Beto O'Rourke, and (I'm sorry) Stacey Abrams. It's no knock on them -- seriously, it isn't -- but they're tainted goods at this point. Fortunately, Democrats have a deep bench of excellent young candidates who we can turn to next time around.

• And regarding the youth -- I'm not someone who's a big fan of the perennial Democratic sport of Pelosi/Schumer sniping. I think they've both done a very good job under difficult circumstances, and deserve real credit for the successes we saw tonight and across the Biden admin more broadly. However, we do need to find room for some representatives from the younger generation to assume leadership roles. Younger voters turned out hard for the Democratic Party and deserve their seat at the table. It says something that Hakeem Jeffries, age 52, is the immediate current leadership figure springing to mind as a "young" voice -- that (and again, there's no disrespect to Jeffries here) is not good enough.

New York Primary Predictions

It's primary day in New York (and Florida), and there are quite a few interesting races on tap. I'm not going to predict all of them, but I figure I'd lay a marker down on a few Democratic races.

NY-10: This is a complete free-for-all with at least six candidates still in at least plausible contention, none of whom have broken beyond the high teens or low twenties in polling. That said, Dan Goldman, a relative moderate, does seem to be very slightly pulling ahead, and he might be benefiting from the inability of the field to unite behind a single alternative. Carlina Rivera might have been the mild front-runner at one point, but seems to be fading down the stretch. Yuh-Line Niou is the progressive darling in the race who strikes me as having a very Bernie-like high floor/low ceiling profile, but that could actually work to her advantage in a highly fragmented field. Rep. Mondaire Jones is probably my favorite candidate, but he doesn't seem to quite be able to get out of traffic.

Ultimately, I think Goldman probably will win a very, very divided vote (I'm guessing Niou will poll second). I'm not super confident in that prediction. But I'm far more confident that if Goldman does win, he will not lose to Niou in a hypothetical general election rematch where the latter runs on the Working Families Party ticket -- some extremely wishful thinking from lefty commentators notwithstanding.

NY-12: A slugfest between two thirty-year veterans in Reps. Jerry Nadler and Carolyn Maloney, with newcomer Suraj Patel trying to sneak in between the two. Though Maloney represents more turf, she's been notably vulnerable in recent primaries (Patel held her to a tight race last cycle), and Nadler seems to be pulling away. I don't see Patel able to pull the upset, and I do think Nadler is going to end up prevailing.

NY-16: Rep. Jamaal Bowman has shown a bit of vulnerability in late polling, but he may benefit from a split in the anti-incumbent vote as both Vedat Gashi and Catherine Parker are waging credible campaigns. Gashi has gotten far more attention, but the only poll I've seen has Parker in the lead. For my part, I think Bowman will end up surviving, albeit with less than 50%.

NY-17: Rep. Sean Patrick Maloney pushed Rep. Mondaire Jones out of his seat, but then encountered an energetic primary challenge from State Sen. Alessandra Biaggi. Biaggi took down one of the IDC schmucks a few years back, so I have residual goodwill for that. But I also don't think she has the firepower or local base to take out the well-resourced Maloney. She also made what I consider to be a truly boneheaded decision to embrace the view that women past "childbearing age" won't care about reproductive rights, which seems outright suicidal in a contested primary.

As to the Florida race, I won't venture predictions on any of them, but I do want to keep an eye on the Republican contest in the FL-11, where incumbent Rep. Daniel Webster is facing a challenge from certified crank and absolute shonda Laura Loomer. It would be a tremendous embarrassment if Loomer wins (and if she wins, she's absolutely entering Congress in this strongly GOP district). But what is the GOP today, if not embarrassment persevering?

The (Non-)Prevalence Problem of CRT

Years ago, I remember reading a famous paradox concerning how Americans viewed the subject of foreign aid. If you asked them "should the US spend more or less on foreign aid," most Americans would answer "less" -- they thought we spent way too much money on the issue. But when you asked them to estimate how much the United States spent on foreign aid each year, they gave an answer that was an order of magnitude higher than what we actually spent. And worst of all, if you asked them how much they thought we should spend on foreign aid, their answer was still far higher than what we actually did spend -- and remember, this is from people who thought their position was that we needed to cut foreign aid!

At one level, this confluence mostly just shows that most people are innumerate. But taking it somewhat at face value, there is a nettlesome political puzzle here. What does one do if people say they want to adopt position X, but actually advocate for moving away from X, because they are under the misapprehension that the status quo is on the far side of X and thus believe that moving away from X actually means moving towards it?

This is a problem with some folks who've joined up on the "anti-Critical Race Theory" crusade. Of course, there are plenty of people who make no bones about their position -- they think CRT is a Globalist Marxist Socialist Communist Soros Triple Parenthesis plot, and they want to destroy it. But others at least purport to believe that Critical Race Theory should be taught, it just shouldn't be the only thing that is taught. For instance, David Bernstein of the "Jewish Institute for Liberal Values", a prominent anti-CRT voice in the Jewish community, took the position that any school which teaches a "traditional" narrative about civil rights should also teach a CRT perspective.

I absolutely believe any school that teaches a traditional narrative should teach a CRT based approach as well. I don’t know if there are more schools in the traditional category.

— David Bernstein (@DavidLBernstein) January 30, 2022

Now here's the thing. If your opinion is that every school should teach both a "traditional" and "CRT" style approach to civil rights, you are advocating for a position that is way to the left of the status quo. The vast majority of primary and secondary schools in the United States do not teach "CRT" at all. In some small number, you might get a CRT-influenced approach in conjunction with more traditional accounts. The number of students who are only being exposed to CRT, and no other perspective, is absolutely negligible. Objectively speaking, if your view is "students should hear both traditional and CRT views", you should be pushing for far more inclusion of CRT into public school curricula than is present in the status quo.

In other words, the entirety of the barrier to getting to the world Bernstein claims he wants to see comes from folks like the Speaker of the Wisconsin Assembly, who's trying to get the University of Wisconsin to rescind its hiring of respected scholar Jennifer Mnookin as Dean because Mnookin (this is a direct quote) "supports critical race theory being taught on campus". It's Texas passing laws limiting what can be taught in the classroom with the express goal of seeking to "abolish" CRT. It's Florida with a veritable cavalcade of legislation seeking to target and suppress "woke" ideologies.

Yet Bernstein, like the ill-informed respondent on foreign aid, has adopted a politics that sprints off in the exact opposite direction from where he claims he wants to go, because he has a wildly off-base assessment of how common Critical Race Theory is. He thinks CRT is everywhere, so getting to a position of even-handedness means pushing back against CRT's hegemony, even if it means making common cause with some unsavory actors. The reality is that CRT is still relatively obscure for most Americans, and so getting to evenhandedness would mean a more aggressive deployment of CRT into the American educational curriculum than would be dreamed by even the philosophy's most fervent supporters. 

Is he actually that ignorant about the true (non-)prevalence of CRT in the American educational system? I think he probably isn't; but there is something to be said for a certain type of elite who forgets the world exists more than 10 miles beyond Brooklyn and so confuses what is commonplace in a Williamsburg coffeeshop with the national status quo. A little of column B, a little (a lot) of column B, I'd wager. 

Omari Hardy is the Future of BDS in the Democratic Party

In the sprawling field vying to replace deceased Democratic Rep. Alcee Hastings, there were no less than five current elected officials running in the Democratic primary that occurred this week. One of these five was State Rep. Omari Hardy.

Initially, all of these candidates avowed positions on Israel that fell roughly in the mainstream of contemporary Democratic politics. About a month before election day, however, Hardy abruptly changed his position on Israel -- announcing his support for the BDS movement (he had only several weeks earlier claimed to be opposed) as well as opposition to the U.S. funding Israel's Iron Dome missile defense system. Upon announcing this change, I suddenly started seeing him a lot more on my Twitter feed, loudly proclaiming about how he wouldn't be intimidated into changing his position and basking in the adoration of a certain wing of commentators who lauded his rare courage and bold commitment to principle, and who presented him as a harbinger of change in Democratic politics. This was not something Hardy did quietly -- his switch to becoming overtly anti-Israel and pro-BDS was a critical part of his closing argument to try and win the race and become the next Democratic Representative from Florida.

On election day, in a sprawling field that contained five current elected officials, Omari Hardy ended up placing sixth. He received less than 6% of the vote -- behind all of his fellow politicos, as well as a wealthy self-funding businesswoman named Sheila Cherfilus-McCormick (the ultimate winner has not yet been called; Cherfilus-McCormick and Broward County Commissioner Dale Holness are currently separated by a whopping twelve votes).

Sixth place finishing, 6% winning Omari Hardy is the future of BDS in the Democratic Party.

If that sounds a bit snarky, I don't -- well, okay, I do mean it to be a little snarky. But believe it or not, the snark is not actually my main thesis.

Omari Hardy was competing in a sprawling, wide open field for an open congressional seat. If you're going to stand out from the pack, you need to do something that clearly marks you as different from the pack. Adopting a generic pro-Israel position in the same vein as all the other candidates wouldn't give anyone a reason to vote for him. Or against him, to be sure. But in politics, the saying "second place is first loser" is especially apt. Announcing support for BDS and pivoting towards intense pronounced hostility to Israel was a calculated risk; it at least offered him a chance to win, even if the more likely result was that he'd just lose by a wider margin (before he announced his pro-BDS turn, Hardy was polling at 10%, so if anything he slipped in performance).

It is a myth that the only route to political power is to take broadly popular positions, even within your own party. That's probably necessary if you want to become the national leader -- as Bernie Sanders found out, if you want to become the Democratic nominee for President, you have to be supported by most Democrats. But becoming the leader is not what everyone wants. You can amass a great deal of power by becoming the standard-bearer for a smaller but intensely passionate faction of the party. And the nice thing about these smaller factions is that they are smaller, and so it's easier to become their "the guy" than it is to become the national "the guy". In particular, in a sprawling primary that's wide open and conducted under first past the post rules, consolidating the small but intense faction is an at least plausible path to victory. It's no accident that Sanders performed best against a divided Democratic field -- a high floor, low ceiling candidate is well-positioned in wide-open, sharply fractured races.

Omari Hardy represents the future of BDS not (just) because he shows that BDS remains whatever the opposite of a selling point is for most Democrats. That is certainly an important lesson to learn. But just as importantly, he's the future because he perceived -- and I think not incorrectly -- that endorsing BDS is a way of standing out from other Democrats and potentially consolidating the backing of a small but intense wing of the progressive movement, some of whom border on being single-issue (anti-)Israel voters (the seething hatred many on the left have for Ritchie Torres, who is on the left edge of the party on virtually every issue but Israel, is one manifestation of this. The comical attempt by some lefty activists to expel Jamaal Bowman from the Democratic Socialist of America because he didn't vote against Iron Dome is another). 

A sprawling primary where a small cadre of passionate supporters can plausibly carry a candidate to victory is a good place to try and leverage becoming the consensus choice of a small wing of Democrats who feel very intensely about one issue. An even better place to run this play may be after one has already won the primary to hold a safe seat and one can feel confident in one's ability to hold onto it indefinitely (Ilhan Omar, too, flipped on BDS only after she had secured a victory in a Democratic primary), when a politician's eye can drift away from local challengers and towards the national spotlight. To be clear, this path is not the route to become President, it's not even the route to become leader of the Democratic congressional caucus (neither one of these is in Ilhan Omar's future). But it is a route to securing a not-insubstantial amount of power. And that's going to be very tempting to a certain type of ambitious politico.

I'm not accusing Hardy of being purely opportunistic in his sudden embrace of BDS. I don't think he's lying; I believe he believes BDS is a reasonable and non-pernicious campaign. But I also don't think it's wrong to look a little archly at his rapid about-face, just a month before election day -- one that was loudly trumpeted and promoted by his campaign, one that he quickly tried to make a centerpiece of his campaign and his boundless courage -- and think that political calculations were playing a rather sizeable role here. Most likely, I suspect that Hardy didn't really care that much about BDS or Israel at the start of this race, and doesn't care too much about it now. He took the anti-BDS position at the start of the race not because he had strong feelings against it but because it was the easiest, default option and didn't seem patently offensive, and he swapped positions at the end of the race not because he developed strong feelings for it but because it was a plausible Hail Mary play that also didn't patently offend him. And if this sounds very cynical, I suspect this is how most politicians deal with most issues that are not especially central to their identity -- it's not that they don't believe what they're saying, but for the 90% of issues that aren't "their" issues, there's plenty of room for beliefs to accommodate a more bloodless calculation of political interest. Hardy is no different from any other politico save for the particular lane his bloodless calculation of political interest ended up placing him in.

And so, despite the fact that the result for Hardy was finishing in sixth place with less than 6% of the vote, plays like Hardy's are something I think we'll be seeing a lot more of. Most Democrats will continue to oppose BDS, and oppose extreme anti-Israel policies (while -- hopefully -- become more open to practical and sorely needed policy shifts designed to actually promote Palestinian rights, such as backing the Two State Solution Act). But more and more frequently, we'll see cases like Omari Hardy: candidates who are laboring at the back of a crowded field and are looking to stand out and get a burst of cash and volunteers, or safe seat backbenchers yearning to garner a national profile and internet likes, will view BDS as a promising avenue for rising for obscurity. It won't win them national or competitive races; it often won't even succeed in fragmented contests amongst Democrats. But if you're going to lose the race anyway, it's a cost-free gamble. And if you don't care that much about the issue to begin with, plenty of people will be happy to roll those dice.

"Can We Survive Four More Years?"

If you'd asked me a month ago where Democrats were better positioned, Florida or North Carolina, I'd have taken the unconventional bet and said North Carolina. The Tarheel State is growing in exactly the way that Democrats are poised to exploit in the new south -- suburban, well-educated -- and Democrats did well there in 2018. By contrast, Florida still is anchored by its aging retiree population -- Trump's prime demographic -- and it was the state which most resisted the blue tide in the last midterm.

Today, a new poll dropped in each state, putting Biden up six in Florida and Trump up three in North Carolina. It's easy to cherry-pick polls, but it's also the case that the coronavirus response may be seriously eroding Trump's support among seniors. The conventional wisdom is that Democrats win by goosing youth and young professional turnout, and there's a lot to be said for that strategy. But if Democrats can crack the senior vote, especially given their high turnout figures? It might be game over for Trump. It's hard to see much of a electoral college route for him without Florida.

The frankly death-cultist response of Trump and the GOP response to the coronavirus provides a huge opening. Obviously, Democrats are already running ads on this. But I think they've got ammo they're not using. Of course there's the clip of Trump calling the virus a "hoax" -- use that, and plenty of other Trump quotes to go along with it. Place alongside the "sacrifice the weak" poster. Place it alongside Texas Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick urging seniors to "take a chance on your survival." Place it alongside Ben Shapiro saying, hey, 80 years old is pretty good life lived already, right? Build a crushing, suffocating narrative that's nothing more than the truth: Donald Trump and the Republican Party are willing to let seniors die.

The ammo is there to make that the story. And with it, the key question that should frame the 2020 election -- for all of us, but especially America's seniors must be asking -- is straightforward: "Can we survive four more years?"

Jewish Republican Calls Jewish Constituent Judenrat

We need to have a conversation about conservative Jews using Nazi terminology to attack liberal Jews.

I'm of the general view that doing this is always antisemitic. Yes, always. That includes calling Stephen Miller a "Kapo". That includes the de rigueur Israel-Nazi comparisons. Always.

It's not just that it almost always is a form of Holocaust minimization -- the crimes the target is accused of committing, however heinous, are not that of mass industrial extermination. It's also that comparing Jews to Nazis, or using Nazi terminology to refer to Jews, is a form of leveraging antisemitic oppression -- in its most vicious form -- against us. That, to me, is what makes it unacceptable (and it is what distinguishes using Nazis analogies generally -- which I often find distasteful, but is not necessarily wrong -- and using them against Jews, which absent truly extraordinary circumstances I consider to be per se antisemitic).

But it also is becoming increasingly acceptable on the Jewish right. David Friedman, of course, represents a high profile case --  comparing J Street students to "kapos" before being appointed Ambassador to Israel. The organizational Jewish community was unforgivably silent on that, refusing to stand up for young Jewish students in a moment of great vulnerability. The ADL's Jonathan Greenblatt expressly declined to challenge Friedman on this, limply calling the comments "hardly diplomatic" before saying that he wouldn't engage in "partisan politics" by condemning them.

The other day, Florida State Rep. Randy Fine (R-FL) went even further than that -- he called a Jewish constituent "Judenrat" (a member of the Nazi-organized council of Jews who kept order in the Ghettos, though in English the false cognate where it sounds like "Jew rat" is probably not unwelcome).

Once again, one expects to see little consequence for Fine or those of his ilk in making comments like this. We've come to accept that this form of antisemitism emanating from within our community is permissible and acceptable. We don't take the hard line on it that we would if it came out of the left. That double-standard remains as operative as ever.

The bonus irony is that Fine was the lead sponsor of a bill, recently passed in the Florida House, expanding the protections against antisemitism in Florida schools. One of the actions deemed antisemitic in the legislation text? Israel-Nazi comparisons. Apparently, though, those comparisons are totally fine when applied to Jewish constituents you dislike.