“…My pile of leftist insanity that has emerged in the Age of George Floyd is now getting quite deep, but I want to concentrate on just a single story today.

You may recall my item here on “Rioters for Trump” on June 1, in which I passed along the scholarly work by Princeton’s Omar Wasow (a standard issue academic liberal or leftist as near as I can tell), in which Wasow crunched the data and concluded that rioting helps Republicans and hurts Democrats, so much so that he thinks the rioting in 1968 pushed Richard Nixon over the top. Wasow’s complex regression model is susceptible to the usual criticisms, but it is a serious piece of work and deserves to be treated as such. But that’s not what has happened.

New York magazine’s liberal columnist Jonathan Chait (the person who famously wrote an article entitled “I Hate Bush” in The New Republic back around 2004 or so) reports on the story of David Shor, a former Obama campaign analyst who, until last week, was working for Civis Analytics, a Democratic-leaning campaign consulting group. Shor had posted a Tweet summarizing the Wasow article as follows:

Well, as the clickbait heads say on the Interwebs, you’ll never guess what happened next! Of course you can guess: a firestorm from the cancel culture left. Among the threads attacking Shor, this may be my favorite:

Shut up, he explained.

Chait takes it from here:

It is easy to see why a specialist in public opinion whose professional mission is to help elect Democrats while moving the party leftward would take an interest in this research. But in certain quarters of the left — though not among Democratic elected officials — criticizing violent protest tactics is considered improper on the grounds that it distracts from deeper underlying injustice, and shifts the blame from police and other malefactors onto their victims. . .

At least some employees and clients on Civis Analytics complained that Shor’s tweet threatened their safety. The next day, Shor apologized for tweeting Omar’s paper:

This straightforward groveling was not enough to save Shor. Chait continues:

Civis Analytics undertook a review of the episode. A few days later, Shor was fired. Shor told me he has a nondisclosure agreement preventing him from discussing the episode. A spokesperson for Civis Analytics told me over email, “Out of respect for our employees and alumni, Civis does not publicly discuss personnel matters, and we don’t plan to comment further.”

From here Chait engages in an extended hand-wringing about the ill-liberalism of the “progressive” left, all while affirming that the greatest threat to the liberal idea comes from the right, as if this boilerplate will protect Chait from the mob when it comes for him. Who has allowed the progressive left to become a rampaging mob, getting their way at just about every turn? I wonder if Chait owns a mirror.

Reminder:

Original

June 14, 2020

The Party of Chaos and Falsehood

Jim Kunstler:

“…Which raises the question: how much of the response to the public killing of one George Floyd has been an engineered operation by the Democratic Party and its allies in the propaganda industry? I’d say, an awful lot, considering the presentation of events in The New York Times and other organs of the perpetual Resistance that have been luxuriating in existential woe surrounding the indecencies of whiteness, culminating in the fake abject ritual of contrition put on by Ms. Pelosi and Chuck Schumer taking-a-knee in their Kente cloth prayer shawls. Within a few more days, at least four cops around the country were ambushed and shot in the head, but there were no public displays of mourning for them…

…The Democratic Party Resistance apparently believes that all this mayhem, and the false sanctimony excusing it, works to their advantage in the coming national election. They may be disappointed about how that works out, as they’ve been disappointed in three years of previous gambits to overthrow the government and seize power by any means necessary. The picture of them is resolving into the party of bad faith, foul play, coercion, and tyranny. Even the corona virus scare carries a taint of Resistance manipulation. One moment the populace is hustled into an economically devastating lockdown; and then suddenly, on a fine spring day, they’re incited to mix in moiling mobs of street protests with the predictable result of a fresh spike in virus contagion and the possibility of a second lockdown. Like many activities in our national life lately, it’s another hostage racket, and, guess what, you’re the hostage.

Their most transparent artifice is the utterly false elevation of Joe Biden as their candidate for president. Everybody knows he’s incapable of performing the job, and probably even of functioning through a campaign. His inchoate utterances on events and policy make Donald Trump sound like Ralph Waldo Emerson. He’s left behind himself an evidence trail of financial crimes running to at least nine digits of grift. And, of course, if you believe all women, he’s a sexual molester. Everything about his public presentation is false, including his hair, teeth, and soul.

This past week, his handlers posed him as Grief Counselor-in-Chief (via video from his basement) at the state funeral for George Floyd, accompanied by an inspirational music soundtrack to shore up the sham sentimentality. (Click here for video.) Never have so many hollow platitudes been woven into such a garment of alternative reality for public consumption. Most pathetically of all, the audience of mourners, mere props, as black America has long been employed by the cynical party, went along with the charade that George Floyd was a model citizen and father, now soaring on golden wings to the place on high where you don’t need methedrine and fentanyl to feel happy. A couple of days later, Democratic Party bigwig and Clinton henchperson Terry McAuliffe told a meeting of the faithful that Joe Biden should remain confined to his basement. In a matter of weeks, you may be sure, we’ll learn that the party is compelled to draft Hillary Clinton as poor Joe’s replacement. It can’t be helped. Her turn will not be denied, even if she has to destroy the country to take it…”

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