At WaPo, Elizabeth Bruenig writes about an ongoing debate in certain circles, whether the problem facing the body politic is our inability to talk to each other, to find sufficient common ground to disagree without being disagreeable.

“You cannot be civil with a political party that wants to destroy what you stand for, what you care about,” Clinton declared in a recent CNN interview. When and if Democrats assume power in Congress, she said, “that’s when civility can start again.” Members of the American left agreed; those on the American right did not. Meanwhile, a study published last week by the think tank More in Common found that 80 percent of Americans believe that “political correctness is a problem.” Conservatives hailed the study as supplying empirical backing to common sense; liberals dismissed it as methodologically flawed and politically motivated.

While Bruenig’s focus is whether there is an American history of political civility, beyond the brief halcyon days following World War II. she suggests we’ve got a long history of being politically uncivil. But there is a collateral question raised in the context of this civility debate. Are civility and political correctness the same? Continue reading →

A young, male public defender got hold of me the other day to ask if he was crazy. It wasn’t a personal question, but raised the views of his colleagues who both fancied themselves fierce defenders of the accused while simultaneously being absolute in their support of #BelieveTheWoman.

I began by pointing out the obvious, that it would seem impossible for someone dedicated to social justice ideology to do the nasty work of defending people accused of terrible crimes, whether a man accused of raping a woman, or beating his spouse, or a white man accused of a “hate crime” against a black man, or worse still, woman.

Can they cross the accuser hard enough to make them cry, to destroy their credibility, to traumatize them if it serves their client’s interest? If they can’t, or won’t, then they aren’t the defender they claim to be. Continue reading →

Activists are decrying the imposition of cash bail as a means of imprisoning people for poverty. They contend that cash bail is merely the way the wealthy buy their freedom while the poor languish in jail, turning bail into another rich person’s privilege. And the unwary are buying this simplistic argument, telling the stories of sad, poor innocent people held for lack of the ability to pay.

This narrative isn’t false, but it isn’t sufficient either. And there is no doubt that being held for the inability to bail out is one of the foremost wedges coercing the innocent to plead guilty. There is much, much, about bail that’s wrong and demands correction. But it is not the simple binary of rich and poor, and to argue otherwise is to argue  falsely, to call for an untenable system and to invite a bludgeon in response.

Many people think that “innocent until proven guilty” implies that everyone should be let loose on their own recognizance before trial. A moment’s thought reveals that this is idiotic. The white supremacist Dylann Roof killed nine people on June 17, 2015 at the Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church. His image was captured on security cameras and he was arrested the next day. Roof’s trial, however, didn’t start until more than a year later, December 7, 2016, and he wasn’t convicted of anything until December 15, 2016. Should Roof have been released before trial because he was “innocent until proven guilty”? Of course not.

I stand second to none in demanding high standards before the state can deprive a person of their liberty but high standards do not demand binary divisions. Tradeoffs are everywhere and when the evidence against the accused is strong and the danger to the public is high, it’s not unreasonable to deprive the legally innocent of some liberty prior to trial. The tradeoffs are ugly, as they always are when trading off two sacred values, but the tradeoffs cannot be avoided.

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None of these were problems in 2008 or 2012, but they sure are now. The electoral college has to go. The First Amendment needs to be changed to prohibit hate speech. The Supreme Court needs term limits or, in the alternative, to be packed with the right sort of justices. And now we need two new states.

The biggest racial preferences in this country have nothing to do with college admissions or job offers. They have to do with political power. And they benefit white Americans, at the expense of black, Asian and Hispanic Americans.

There are many arguments, problems, that could follow this paragraph. Gerrymandering to deny predominantly black areas the ability to elect a representative of their choosing. Voter suppression to reduce the number of minority voters. Felon disenfranchisement, which coordinates with the disproportionate focus on minorities to deny them the right to vote. But that’s not what follows. Continue reading →

In a remarkable piece of investigative reporting, Radley Balko reveals the pointless, baseless, destructive raid that turned Roderick Talley’s life into misery.

“You don’t know what fear is until you wake up and your own front door is flying at you,” says Roderick Talley.

Talley may not have been a perfect guy, but he was a good guy, and so had no reason to  anticipate the explosion that would awaken him on August 10, 2017.

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When Harvard political scientist, Yascha Mounk, wrote about the results of the study at The Atlantic, I felt a brief moment of hope for the future.

According to the report, 25 percent of Americans are traditional or devoted conservatives, and their views are far outside the American mainstream. Some 8 percent of Americans are progressive activists, and their views are even less typical. By contrast, the two-thirds of Americans who don’t belong to either extreme constitute an “exhausted majority.” Their members “share a sense of fatigue with our polarized national conversation, a willingness to be flexible in their political viewpoints, and a lack of voice in the national conversation.”

Most members of the “exhausted majority,” and then some, dislike political correctness. Among the general population, a full 80 percent believe that “political correctness is a problem in our country.”

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The video is replete with issues, from the accused being a child, a black child, to the “survivor” bizarrely remembering her trauma backwards, where she claimed someone else claimed to be a cop when it came from her mouth. Reactions to the video are as varied as there are IQ scores. But there is one tiny slice of what happened that can’t be distinguished by age or race, the lie of traumatic memory or #BelieveTheWoman.

What happened to her was “sexual assault.” We know because she said so. While #BelieveTheWoman would preclude anyone from doubt that it happened, it also prevents all but the slave to facts from questioning her conclusory claim, that whatever actual conduct occurred, it was “sexual assault.” Not a grope. Not even “copped a feel,” but “sexual assault.” Continue reading →

The argument is that it’s sexist, if not downright misogynistic, to use the “nuts and sluts” argument, that a woman is batshit crazy, to oppress women. All the unduly passionate tell me so, and make it clear that one can never, but never, seize upon the tool employed for centuries to silence women. So what then does one call this?

Thanks for not raping us, all you ‘good men.’ But it’s not enough.

It started with “don’t be bad guys.” Then be good guys. Shed your toxic masculinity. But even that wasn’t good enough for Victoria Bissell Brown, who apparently decided to lose her shit on the pages of the Washington Post. Continue reading →

Why? What possible reason could there be for the Metropolitan Republican Club to have someone like Gavin McInnes speak? It’s not that they don’t have the right to invite him. They do. It’s not that he doesn’t have the right to speak. He does. But of all the people in the world to invite, why someone like Gavin McInnes?

…Gavin McInnes, who spoke at the club Friday evening and who is touted on its web page as the “Godfather of the Hipster Movement” who “has taken on and exposed the Deep State Socialists and stood up for Western Values.”

McInnes, a Canadian, is a co-founder of Vice Media and leads the far-right group “Proud Boys,” whose members have been involved in several physical conflicts with left-wing and anti-fascist protesters. The group, which insists it is not part of the so-called “alt-right,” is designated a hate group by the Southern Poverty Law Center.

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Since everybody is a cartoon character except you, because you are unique and special, it comes as no surprise that the outrage shown by Brett Kavanaugh can be reduced to a bumper sticker for convenient use on Instagram.

Variations on the phrase white male rage were everywhere. Some meant only to suggest that Kavanaugh could get away with shouting and crying in a way that an African American or a woman never could. While anger would be a more accurate word than rage, I have no objections to folks who raised that hypothesis; indeed, I am convinced by the evidence for gender inequities in responses to male and female anger.

Like Conor Friedersdorf, it seems patently obvious that the anger wouldn’t have played well had Kavanaugh not been a white male, although Clarence Thomas managed to pull it off during his confirmation hearing with his “high tech lynching” speech. But on the whole, it’s true that the same show of emotion is perceived differently for different races and genders because we superimpose our prejudice over their display and attribute it to acceptable, or unacceptable, traits and motives. Continue reading →