If You Lean Right
The Conservatives Who’d Rather Die Than Not Own the Libs (Conor Friedersdorf, The Atlantic, 12 min.)
John Nolte, a longtime writer at the populist-right website Breitbart News, insists that a conspiracy of evil leftist elites are doing everything in their power to “put unvaccinated Trump supporters in an impossible position where they can either NOT get a life-saving vaccine or CAN feel like cucks caving to the ugliest, smuggest bullies in the world.”
This conspiracy theory is rooted in a fundamental misunderstanding of the left. Folks in blue America who fret about the surge of the Delta coronavirus variant want every American to get their shots as soon as possible, because they genuinely fear that unvaccinated adults will infect unvaccinated children, fuel new variants, overwhelm hospitals, burden doctors and nurses, degrade care for those who suffer any other medical emergency, raise the risk of breakthrough cases, and undermine political approval for President Joe Biden’s handling of the pandemic. Those are the reasons, right or wrong, that Biden and many of his supporters favor vaccine mandates. But the populist right has put disdain for the left and the establishment at the center of its identity. And rather than simply telling his readers that refusing a medical miracle in order to defy the left is irrational, Nolte accuses the left of exploiting their psychology.
The populist right is not unique in its self-destructive political behavior. Indeed, its members are quick to point fingers at riots that destroy the rioters’ own neighborhoods or social-justice reckonings that sap progressive institutions’ ability to function.
But rarely has so significant a faction in American politics behaved in a way that so directly claims the life of its own supporters. The approach that Trump voters are taking all but guarantees that more of them will die than other Republicans and Democrats.
Trump Campaign Knew Lawyers’ Voting Machine Claims Were Baseless, Memo Shows (Alan Feuer, The New York Times, 15 min.)
Days before lawyers allied with Donald Trump gave a news conference promoting election conspiracy theories, his campaign had determined that many of those claims were false, court filings reveal.
It was known:
that Dominion did not use voting technology from the software company, Smartmatic, in the 2020 election;
that Dominion had no direct ties to Venezuela or to Mr. Soros;
and that there was no evidence that Dominion’s leadership had connections to left-wing “Antifa” activists, as Ms. Powell and others had claimed.
Trump continues to falsely argue that the election was stolen from him.
A lawyer for Mr. Giuliani said in a court filing last month that at least some of his claims of election fraud were “substantially true.”
A federal judge in Detroit ordered penalties to be levied against Ms. Powell and eight other pro-Trump lawyers who filed a lawsuit that sought to overturn the election results in Michigan using the false claims about Dominion.
“This case was never about fraud,” the judge, Linda V. Parker, wrote in her decision. “It was about undermining the people’s faith in our democracy and debasing the judicial process to do so.”
In June, a New York court suspended Mr. Giuliani’s law license, ruling that he had made “demonstrably false and misleading statements” while fighting the results of last year’s election for Mr. Trump.
If You Lean Left
Ignoring Data
A COVID Serenity Prayer (Lucy McBride, The Atlantic, 12 min.)
Human beings have always coexisted with threats to our health: violence, vehicular crashes, communicable diseases. And many of us have meandered through our perilous existence without thinking much about it. Sure, people may drive more cautiously at nighttime, use condoms with a new partner, and avoid walking through dark alleys alone. But before the pandemic, we didn’t lock down our lives to eliminate all risk. Schools didn’t close during flu season. Doctors didn’t preach abstinence for all in the face of herpes and HIV. We had accepted the inherent riskiness of being human, and we took reasonable precautions where possible.
But for many of us, the pandemic blew apart our complacency—at least when it came to the risk of contracting COVID. People rejiggered their lives with a singular goal in mind: Don’t get infected with the novel coronavirus.
Abstinence from living isn’t sustainable, nor is it healthy. In trying to contain COVID-19, we unleashed other health risks. The collateral damage from pandemic restrictions is manifest in alarming increases in obesity rates among adults and kids (obesity itself being a comorbidity that increases the risk of poor COVID outcomes), and spikes in suicide attempts, drug overdoses, and rates of anxiety-, depression-, and stress-related symptoms.
We have to accept that there is no inoculum for uncertainty—that no human contact is risk-free, that no vaccine is perfect, that we can never guarantee safety in life.
The NYT's Partisan Tale about COVID and the Unvaccinated is Rife with Sloppy Data Analysis (Jeremy Beckham, 12 min.)
Why is it especially important that we adjust for age when comparing COVID-19 mortality rates in “red” counties with “blue” counties? Because age is not randomly distributed geographically, nor is it randomly distributed on a partisan basis. Republican voters tend to be older than Democratic voters. And rural counties, where Trump won by the largest margins, have older populations than suburban and urban counties. So this means that age is clearly a significant confounder that could easily exaggerate or distort the measured effect and lead one to spurious conclusions.
Take my home state of Utah, for example. Utah is a very red state. Trump won Utah by more than 20 points in 2020. But Utah also has the youngest population in the country, with a median age of approximately 31 years old. If partisan affiliation were a significant factor that explains deaths from COVID, we would expect Utah to have a greater COVID death rate than the national average, and the younger population helps us minimize the effect of this confounder. But instead, what we find is that Utah ranks 45th in the nation for COVID deaths, with 91 deaths per 100,000 population, far below the national average of 210 deaths per 100,000. This suggests (without proving) that age, not partisan affiliation or ideology, is paramount.
And all of this only accounts for one potential confounder (age). There are other potential confounders that should be addressed. For instance, the disparity in health outcomes between rural and urban populations likely means that people in counties that voted heavily for Trump have other comorbidities that place them at greater risk of death from COVID-19. And people who live in rural areas also experience significant disparities in health care access, with higher rates of uninsured, diminishing available health care facilities, and longer travel times to the nearest hospital. In the past decade, 138 rural inpatient hospitals have closed. This unjust inequity that persists in rural America has previously been a matter of persistent concern for writers at The New York Times, even in the context of reporting on COVID-19 when the pandemic was in its early stages.
Ignoring Performance
Against the Commodification of Blackness (Glenn Loury and Bari Weiss, 12 min.)
The Asians are nonwhites. The Koreans, the Chinese, the Vietnamese, they're not white people. White supremacy, if it means anything, will apply to them just as much as it would apply to anybody else. They're not white adjacent. That's playing with words. They have cultural inheritance and it’s specific. You can look at it.
To call their overrepresentation and the concomitant underrepresentation of black people “segregation” is, of course, a bait and switch. It's a trick. It's a rhetorical move.
People are going to dismiss me. They are going to say I'm a right-wing ideologue. I'm going to say I'm looking at failure. I'm looking at multigenerational failure and the public safety piece of this narrative that the police are out to get black people, this contempt for law, the lawlessness of the George Floyd protests, the celebration of that lawlessness, the silence in the face of it.
If I were somebody who supported Donald Trump and I contrasted how the mainstream organs of public communication treated the “insurrection” of January 6 with what they had to say about the civil disorder attendant to the George Floyd protests, it would cause me to lose faith and trust in basic institutions. I would think that people are lying to me. There's a lot at stake here.
Culture - Not Racism - Explains Asian American Educational Success (Zaid Jilani, 15 min.)
Those who argue that admissions to selective schools and gifted programs should be proportional to racial makeup of a community often argue that the only thing preventing this outcome is racism. Absent racism, every racial group would be proportionally represented in everything.
So then why aren’t educational outcomes proportionate to population?
For us to have roughly proportionate outcomes in education, we’d also have to have roughly the same inputs. Advocates for equity are quick to point out that there is broad socioeconomic inequality in the United States — and they’re right about that.
Yet the reality is that even if you control for socioeconomics, students from various Asian American cultural subgroups tend to outperform everyone else. Many of the students at the elite high schools in New York City and elsewhere are Asian Americans from very poor families. Why is that?
Ignoring Crime
What’s Behind Rising Violent Crime? Progressive Prosecutors’ Non-Enforcement of the Law (Andrew C. McCarthy, The Hill, 8 min.)
It is not the sociopaths committing the violence, the thinking goes. See, when you really consider it, it’s each of us, right? This is the enterprise to “reform” the criminal justice system by pretending that we don’t have criminals — to assign blame for all crime on our systemically racist society.
If today’s prosecutors didn’t rationalize this way, they’d have to wrestle with what and who is responsible for the bloodshed. Progressive prosecutors would have to come to grips with the stubborn fact they and their media cheerleaders strain to avoid: patterns of offending.
By the metric of percentage composition of the overall population, young Black males account for a disproportionate amount of the incarcerated population because, as a demographic class, they commit a disproportionate amount of the crime. They account for an overwhelming number of the gang arrests in cities such as Chicago because they are shooting at each other; that means they also account for more of the victims. And shooting each other is something they are certain to do more of if progressive prosecutors keep coming up with “creative” ways to resist charging them.
If arrests and prosecutions are explained by racism rather than criminal behavior, why rely on the statistics breaking down the races of prison inmates? Why not just say that police departments — even though many are run and heavily staffed by minority officers — are systematically racist, and therefore, must be blinded by bias in making arrests?
Little Outcry Over Antifa's Equal-Opportunity Beatdowns of Journalists Left and Right (Mark Hemingway, RealClearInvestigations, 25 min.)
The U.S. Press Freedom Tracker documented an alarming rise in attacks on journalists during 2020, a year marked by nationwide George Floyd unrest -- 400 last year, out of 517 since 2017.
The few journalists willing to cover Antifa typically do so on social media and have found themselves frequent targets of violence by the loosely organized movement, which denounces free speech.
Maranie Staab, a social justice-focused freelance photographer, had her phone smashed, was thrown to the pavement and maced after refusing demands by Antifa members to stop filming their activities.
Andy Ngo, a conservative freelance reporter, has sustained four physical attacks from Antifa, one of which left him with a brain hemorrhage. These attacks and death threats forced him to move out of his hometown of Portland.
Nancy Rommelmann, a self-described liberal journalist, has been attacked in the streets and threatened online in response to her reporting on Antifa.
While major media downplayed left-wing protest violence at hundreds of Black Lives Matter protests, progressive outlets have denigrated “right-wing” journalists trying to cover the unrest.
Ignoring Contradiction
Top Trans Doctors Blow the Whistle on ‘Sloppy’ Care (Abigail Shrier, 25 min.)
Dr. Marci Bowers, a world-renowned vaginoplasty specialist who operated on reality-television star Jazz Jennings, and Erica Anderson, a clinical psychologist at the University of California San Francisco’s Child and Adolescent Gender Clinic, are two of the most prominent providers in the field of transgender medicine.
In the course of their careers, both have seen thousands of patients. Both are board members of the World Professional Association for Transgender Health (WPATH), the organization that sets the standards worldwide for transgender medical care. And both are transgender women.
Earlier this month, Anderson told me she submitted a co-authored op-ed to The New York Times warning that many transgender healthcare providers were treating kids recklessly. The Times passed, explaining it was “outside our coverage priorities right now.”
For nearly a decade, the vanguard of the transgender-rights movement — doctors, activists, celebrities and transgender influencers — has said it was perfectly safe to give children as young as nine puberty blockers and insisted that the effects of those blockers were “fully reversible.” They said that it was the job of medical professionals to help minors to transition. They said it was not their job to question the wisdom of transitioning, and that anyone who did — including parents — was probably transphobic. They said that any worries about a social contagion among teen girls was nonsense. And they never said anything about the distinct possibility that blocking puberty, coupled with cross-sex hormones, could inhibit a normal sex life.
The problem for kids whose puberty has been blocked early isn’t just a lack of tissue but of sexual development. Puberty not only stimulates growth of sex organs. It also endows them with erotic potential. This problem cannot be corrected surgically. Bowers can build a labia, a vaginal canal and a clitoris, and the results look impressive. But, she said, if the kids are “orgasmically naive” because of puberty blockade, “the clitoris down there might as well be a fingertip and brings them no particular joy and, therefore, they’re not able to be responsive as a lover. And so how does that affect their long-term happiness?”
Few, if any, other doctors acknowledge as much. The Mayo Clinic, for instance, does not note that permanent sexual dysfunction may be among puberty blockers’ risks. St. Louis Children’s Hospital doesn’t mention it, either. Oregon Health & Science University Children’s Hospital and University of California at San Francisco don’t. Nor was there any mention of sexual dysfunction in a recent New York Times story, “What Are Puberty Blockers?”
What’s Missing From the Conversation About Systemic Racism (John McWhorter, The New York Times, 12 min.)