When are "white people" like a mass killer?

THURSDAY, MAY 19, 2022

Our blue tribe's Pizzagate crowd: Recent years have supplied a punishing anthropology lesson.

The red tribe has painfully taught us this: 

At times of tribal dislocation, there's no claim that makes so little sense that millions won't believe it. You can start with the Pizzagate lunacy, move on to the stolen election.

Our own blue tribe is starting to teach a painful related lesson. Consider the headline which sat atop the featured report at Slate this very morning:

What Everyday White Americans and the Buffalo Shooter Have in Common

That's what the headline on the featured essay said.

Question! Just how much do "everyday people" have in common with an 18-year-old mass killer? We'd be inclined to start with this question:

How many "everyday white Americans" have shot and killed ten people in recent days?

The answer, of course, would be just one—but then again, so what? Letting his love and his wisdom show, Professor Matthew W. Hughey arranges to come up with this right in his second paragraph:

HUGHEY (5/18/22): Over the past several years, a half-dozen white supremacists committed acts of violence under the belief that their country belongs to white people and they must suppress any risk of replacement by force. This delusion led Anders Breivik to kill 77 people in Norway in 2011 and inspired Frazier Glenn Miller Jr. to kill three people outside of a Jewish community center in Kansas in 2014. Elliot Rodger espoused the same notion in 2014 when he killed six people in Santa Barbara, California. So did Dylann Roof before he killed nine parishioners in Charleston, South Carolina, in 2015. Patrick Crusius, who killed 23 people in a Walmart in El Paso in 2019, and Brenton Tarrant, who killed 51 worshippers in Christchurch, New Zealand, in 2019, also composed and shared lengthy white supremacist screeds. 

As he starts, Professor Hughey says that he's talking about the past "several" years. By the time he's done, he's talking about the past twelve years—and, in order to pad his numbers, he has to include an everyday white person from Norway and another everyday white person from New Zealand.

Breaking! If you're from Norway or New Zealand, then you actually aren't an "everyday white American." This means that Professor Hughey has identified four (4) everyday white Americans who behaved in much the same way the Buffalo shooter did, over the course of the past dozen (or more) years.

Needless to say, that's four people too many. But in his screeching, unintelligent rhetoric, Professor Hughey—and whoever decided to publish his essay at Slate—becomes our own tribe's equivalent of the lost souls who believed that Hillary Clinton had a bunch of children locked up in the basement of that pizza restaurant.

The crazy rhetoric emerges from Slate and serves to make everything worse. The crazies in the other tribe see their worst suspicions confirmed. Tucker takes over from there.

Meanwhile, let's take a look at the record:

Setting infants and children aside, there are well over 100 million "everyday white Americans" crawling about on the land. Very few such people ever have, or ever will, engage in conduct anything like the conduct the Buffalo shooter authored.

Don't tell that to Professor Hughey, who is one of Ours. Professor Hughey is one of the people who are increasingly making it clear that, at times of societal breakdown, there's nothing so dumb that it won't be loudly and dumbly screeched, by our tribe if not by theirs.

Who the Harold Hill is Professor Hughey? We began to suspect, some years ago, that our nation might not be able to survive biographies like this from our own tribe's exalted "thought leaders:"

Matthew Windust Hughey is an American sociologist known for his work on race and racism. He is Professor of Sociology at the University of Connecticut, where he is also an adjunct faculty member in the Africana Studies Institute; American Studies Program; Institute for Collaboration on Health, Intervention, & Policy; Sustainable Global Cities Initiative, and; graduate certificate program in Indigeneity, Race, Ethnicity, & Politics. His work has included studying whiteness, race and media, race and politics, racism and racial assumptions within genetic and genomic science, and racism and racial identity in white and black American fraternities and sororities.

He first came to national attention for his book White Bound: Nationalists, Antiracists, and the Shared Meanings of Race, originally published in 2012.

Within Professor Hughey's work, everything looks like a nail.

The other tribe has lost its mind. Increasingly, our tribe is catching up. 

These bands of defectives need each other, and they need publications like Slate.

TIMES AND SCHOOLS: How serious is Gotham's "literary crisis?"

THURSDAY, MAY 19, 2022

And does the New York Times care? When the mayor announced a major new plan, the New York Times couldn't be bothered.

More precisely, the New York Times couldn't be bothered to assign an experienced education specialist to report on the mayor's new plan. 

Instead, the Times assigned a bright young "general assignment reporter" to the project. This isn't the doing or fault of that very bright young reporter, but it does reflect the uncaring culture of the paper by whom she's employed

To what extent does the New York Times care about the (roughly) one million kids who attend Gotham's public schools? We'd say the newspaper tends to favor two approaches to this area of concern:

On the one hand, the newspaper seems to favor a policy of benign neglect, in which the only kids who get discussed are the school system's top few percent. 

This approach is augmented by the paper's widely observed "performative antiracism."  In accord with this approach, the only topic which gets discussed is racial imbalance within the system's various schools, a state of affairs the performative paper describes as "segregation."

The newspaper motors on these twin tracks, weekending out in the Hamptons. We've rarely seen a group of people who seemed to care so little about so many good, decent kids—about the toughly one million good, decent kids within their city's public schools.

It was in this context that the Times assigned Lola Fadulu to report on the new mayor's new plan. Fadulu is good and decent and very bright, but she's also very young—and she isn't an education specialist or an experienced education reporter. 

This last fact seemed to scream out at us at the start of last Friday's report:

FADULU (5/13/22): Mayor Eric Adams announced Thursday the details of a plan to turn around a literacy crisis in New York City and, in particular, to serve thousands of children in public schools who may have dyslexia, an issue deeply personal to the mayor, who has said his own undiagnosed dyslexia hurt his academic career.

School officials plan to screen nearly all students for dyslexia, while 80 elementary schools and 80 middle schools will receive additional support for addressing the needs of children with dyslexia. The city will also open two new dyslexia programs—one at P.S. 125 Ralph Bunche in Harlem and the other at P.S. 161 Juan Ponce de Leon in the South Bronx—with a goal of opening similar programs in each borough by 2023.

Officials also plan to train all teachers, and will create a new dyslexia task force. School leaders are requiring school principals to pivot to a phonics-based literacy curriculum, which literacy experts say is the most effective way to teach reading to most children.

“Dyslexia holds back too many of our children in school but most importantly in life,” Mr. Adams said during a press briefing Thursday morning, adding that it “haunts you forever until you can get the proper treatment that you deserve.”

New York is facing a literacy crisis: Fewer than half of all third to eighth graders and just 36 percent of Black and Latino students were proficient on the state reading exams administered in 2019, the most recent year for which there is data. Research suggests that the coronavirus pandemic has only worsened those outcomes.

That's the way the report began. The framework struck us as odd.

Are the New York City Public Schools "facing a literacy crisis?" That's a somewhat peculiar way to describe a situation which has obtained all through our nation's public schools ever since the mainstream world began keeping track of this matter in the 1960s.

The language employed by this young scribe almost makes it sound like this "literary crisis" is some sort of novel event—is something has just recently appeared on the scene. The notion that the mayor is prepared to "turn the crisis around" speaks to the cheerful ignorance which may perhaps accompany an unavoidable lack of experience.

In fact, the "literary crisis" which the mayor is (said to be) planning to "turn around" has dogged the nation's public schools ever since roughly forever. Over the course of the past sixty years, a wide array of simple solutions to this crisis have been brought forward and ballyhooed, and have then been quietly abandoned.

We don't blame Mayor Adams, in any way, for the Pollyannist tinge to the language which animates this description of his new proposal. Nor do we blame the bright young Fadulu, though we do think her framing is odd. 

(Are there any experienced editors at the New York Times?)

Lola Fadulu is a good young person. It's the upper-class newspaper by whom she's employed which has long been at fault.

As far as we know, the New York Times has never had an education specialist on its editorial board. When it does appoint the occasional journalist to serve as lead urban education writer, it may bring the eternal note of nepotism in, naming another young person whose mother has served as foreign editor and deputy executive editor of the Times, and as senior correspondent on gender issues.

Not that there's anything wrong with it! But that's how this newspaper functions.

Out of this unsalted stew comes the scent of benign neglect. In Times reporting, the message about the city's public school students is clear:

If you're headed for Brown, you can stick around! But if you're just black, get back!

We'd planned today to go beyond Fadulu's brief account of the "literary crisis" the mayor is (said to be) planning to "turn around." We don't blame Fadulu for the brevity of that account. If anything, this passage takes us a bit beyond what we normally read in the Times:

New York is facing a literacy crisis: Fewer than half of all third to eighth graders and just 36 percent of Black and Latino students were proficient on the state reading exams administered in 2019, the most recent year for which there is data. Research suggests that the coronavirus pandemic has only worsened those outcomes.

In that passage, Fadulu offers some data from New York's statewide testing in 2019. Her data are quite limited, but they go beyond what one normally finds in the New York Times.

Having said that, let us also say this:

It's amazingly hard to find the data which emerge from New York City on this statewide testing program. 

Almost surely, Gotham's scores on this testing program are somewhat better than you might have suspected or guessed. It's also true that test scores in reading and math had been improving over the past fifty years, in New York City itself and around the nation, although the lordly Times has rarely bothered itself, or its readers, with information of that encouraging type.

At any rate, the New York City Public Schools seems to show little interest in letting the public see the data from the statewide program. Similarly, the New York Times simply motors along, periodically screeching about "segregation" and talking about nothing else.

What kind of "literary crisis" will the mayor's plan encounter? To the extent that it can be measured, Fadulu's report offered a tiny peek at the size of this crisis in question. 

We'd planned to run you through some data today, using performance from the federally-administered National Assessment of Educational Progress as well as from the New York statewide testing program, whose data are more problematic.

That said, we think we'll push that service back to tomorrow. 

The woods are lovely, dark and deep, and the New York City Public Schools are full of good, decent kids. That said, it's depressing to swim in the seas of the New York Times' education reporting. 

That isn't the fault of the young Fadulu. She's a good decent person herself, one of the many kids in our floundering nation who have done everything right.

Tomorrow: A fuller look

From the annals of meaningless pseudo-discussion...

WEDNESDAY, MAY 18, 2022

...Morning Joe debates "who we are:" The Morning Joe program began today with a lengthy, utterly pointless pseudo-discussion of the race for the GOP Senate nomination from the state of Pennsylvania.

As matters stood, the race was an unresolvable dead heat between the two leading candidates. There was absolutely no way to cipher out the basic question of who would eventually win.

Still and all, the topic carried the familiar thrill of an ongoing horse race. So Steve Kornacki stood before "the big board" and wasted astonishing amounts of time, speculating about what additional votes might still come in—or, of course, might not come in—from a wide range of Keystone State counties, large and small counties alike

It was the ultimate waste of time. Or so it might have seemed, until the gang began discussing what President Biden said yesterday—what he said about white supremacy and its role in American life.

The discussion didn't start until roughly 6:55 A.M. Eastern. But when the discussion finally started, it went on roughly forever.

What gave the discussion its high elan? It was the utterly pointless scripted claim, adopted by several members of the gang, that last weekend's murderous rage by one (1) teenager does in fact demonstrate "who we really are as a nation."

The claim could hardly be more pointless. True to form, the pundits loved it.

The later Wittgenstein seemed to think that most of our most highly exalted "philosophy" was really just meaningless pseudo-assertion. We're glad the later Wittgenstein didn't live to see this morning's pseudo-discussion.

If one deranged teenager shoots and kills ten people, can that crazy behavior actually show, in some sense, "who we really are?" If you think a question like that makes some sort of actual sense, you should perhaps be kind enough to abstain from further public discussion. 

We expect to discuss this lengthy conversation in greater detail at some point. We're waiting for MSNBC to post the transcript from Monday evening's 11th Hour program, where a different pundit went on and on, then on and on, in a similar ludicrous vein, with the grossly disappointing Stephanie Ruhle dumbly agreeing and posturing.

(For reasons which strike us as perfectly obvious, MSNBC continues to slow-walk its production of transcripts. Generally speaking, the channel now waits roughly a week before allowing the world to see what its employees have said.)

Over at Mediaite, Tommy Christopher thought today's Morning Joe discussion was worth transcribing and recording. We're very glad that he did.

Thanks to Christopher, you can watch 17 minutes of this utterly pointless pseudo-discussion. You can even see short transcriptions of some of the pundits' comments, though Princeton peacock Eddie Glaude somehow escaped this fate.

(Further note: Eddie Glaude is a good, decent person.)

The woods are lovely, dark and deep. The rhetoric of our self-impressed tribe is routinely well past pathetic.

You should very much stop assuming that our tribal leaders are fundamentally intelligent, insightful or wise. First and foremost, they're reflexive performers of memorized script—and their performative scriptings routinely make societal matters worse. It's mandated Storyline, pretty much all the way down. 

The other tribe has lost its mind. Our own flailing and floundering tribe is stunningly faux and unimpressive on the corporate "cable news" end.

Does a murderous rage by one teenager show "who we really are as a country?" You really can't ask a dumber question than that. 

Our corporate pundit corps loves such games. This is who, and what, they are.

TIMES AND SCHOOLS: The Times described the mayor's plan!

WEDNESDAY, MAY 18, 2022

Did its descriptions make sense? In last Friday's morning's editions, the New York Times described Mayor Adams' plan for Gotham's public schools.

The city "is facing a literacy crisis," Times subscribers were told. Early in her news report, Lola Fadulu described the crisis in the manner shown:

FADULU (3/13/22): New York is facing a literacy crisis: Fewer than half of all third to eighth graders and just 36 percent of Black and Latino students were proficient on the state reading exams administered in 2019, the most recent year for which there is data. Research suggests that the coronavirus pandemic has only worsened those outcomes.

The lack of easily accessible academic support for children with dyslexia has been an issue that has been top of mind for the mayor. He has said his own dyslexia went undiagnosed for years because his mother didn’t have the necessary information to get him screened. He recalled “not wanting to come into school every day because I just couldn’t keep up.”

In grades 3 through 8, just 36 percent of black and Hispanic kids were proficient on the official state reading tests back in 2019. In his desire to address this problem, the mayor has proposed a "plan to screen nearly all students for dyslexia," Fadulu wrote at the start of her news report.

Fadulu is a good, decent person; she's done everything right in her life. Our guess will be that she will go on to have a superb journalistic career.

Having said that, Fadulu is rather young—just five years out of college (Amherst, class of 2016). Also, she's a "general assignment reporter." For whatever reason, the Times didn't bother assigning an education specialist to report on the mayor's new plan.

As we've noted again and again, the Times tends to take this feckless approach when it comes to the problems confronting the mass of New York City's million public school kids. 

The paper will assign its education specialist, such as she is, for front-page reports about the prospects and the treatment of the system's top few percent. When it comes to the masses of good, decent kids in the city's schools, this widely-known upper-class paper tilts quite strongly toward a policy of uncaring benign neglect.

Nothing we say in discussing this matter is intended as a criticism of Fadulu, a very bright young reporter. She didn't assign herself the task of covering this important new plan. Nor is it a criticism of Fadulu herself to say that she isn't an experienced education reporter or an education specialist.

Fadulu has done everything right in her life. When it comes to covering the interests of our good, decent low-income kids, her newspaper often fails. 

It isn't Fadulu's doing or fault, but in the course of reporting the mayor's new plan, we think her inexperience and lack of technical expertise did repeatedly fail. Before we list some salient points, let's return to the role of the mayor.

The mayor is relatively inexperienced too. Also, he isn't an education specialist either!

We praise him again today for the focus he's brought to the needs and the interests of the vast swath of New York City kids. But does his proposal really make sense? Is it a sound proposal?

We have no idea how to answer that question. Meanwhile, the track record of such attempts at intervention is lengthy and fairly poor.

Tomorrow, we'll offer you a more detailed statistical assessment of the "literary crisis" which obtains in Gotham's schools. In some ways, that crisis may not be as bad as you might think.

In some ways, it may be worse.

We salute the mayor for switching our focus to the needs of the many kids, as opposed to the most favored few. Beyond that, we salute him for directing us to the pain associated with struggles at school—struggles he himself knew as a public school student. Here is the fuller passage from the start of Fadulu's report::

FADULU: “Dyslexia holds back too many of our children in school but most importantly in life,” Mr. Adams said during a press briefing Thursday morning, adding that it “haunts you forever until you can get the proper treatment that you deserve.”

New York is facing a literacy crisis: Fewer than half of all third to eighth graders and just 36 percent of Black and Latino students were proficient on the state reading exams administered in 2019, the most recent year for which there is data. Research suggests that the coronavirus pandemic has only worsened those outcomes.

The lack of easily accessible academic support for children with dyslexia has been an issue that has been top of mind for the mayor. He has said his own dyslexia went undiagnosed for years because his mother didn’t have the necessary information to get him screened. He recalled “not wanting to come into school every day because I just couldn’t keep up.”

This mayor says he has been there. He understands that the pain of struggling in school can end up "haunting" good, decent children for life. 

It isn't just that they may emerge from school lacking the academic skills which will help them in the workplace. Along the way, they experience the daily pain of classroom failure—the feeling of  “not wanting to come into school every day because [they] just couldn’t keep up.”

Their reading difficulties rob them of the chance to lose themselves in the types of books which are written for children of their age and grade. They lose the chance to explore the world in the ways that other kids do.

The mayor seems to understand these things from his own childhood experience. But he's no more an education specialist that the young and bright Fadulu.

With that in mind, we pose these question:

Does the mayor's proposal make sense? And how about Fadulu's reporting of the mayor's plan?

It seems to us that Fadulu's inexperience—or the cluelessness of her editors—may have shown in various ways. For starters, riddle us this:

The mayor plan is built around the idea that Gotham's kids need to be screened and treated for dyslexia. Headline included, Fadulu's report starts like this:

Mayor Adams Unveils Program to Address Dyslexia in N.Y.C. Schools

Mayor Eric Adams announced Thursday the details of a plan to turn around a literacy crisis in New York City and, in particular, to serve thousands of children in public schools who may have dyslexia, an issue deeply personal to the mayor, who has said his own undiagnosed dyslexia hurt his academic career.

School officials plan to screen nearly all students for dyslexia, while 80 elementary schools and 80 middle schools will receive additional support for addressing the needs of children with dyslexia. The city will also open two new dyslexia programs—one at P.S. 125 Ralph Bunche in Harlem and the other at P.S. 161 Juan Ponce de Leon in the South Bronx—with a goal of opening similar programs in each borough by 2023.

Officials also plan to train all teachers, and will create a new dyslexia task force. School leaders are requiring school principals to pivot to a phonics-based literacy curriculum, which literacy experts say is the most effective way to teach reading to most children.

Under the mayor's plan, almost every student will be screened for dyslexia. Also, school officials will create a new "dyslexia task force."

According to Fadulu's report, "national figures estimate that one in five children have dyslexia." She says there are no reliable figures for the prevalence of dyslexia among New York City's students.

Fadulu presents specific details of the mayor's screening plan as her report continues. That said, does anyone reading the New York Times actually know what dyslexia actually is?

We ask that question because the report never attempts to describe or define the condition. This seems like a very basic omission in a lengthy report of this type—though for all we know, Fadulu may have included a helpful passage addressing this point which her editors removed from her piece.

The failure to define dyslexia seems like a basic omission. Moving along, we were repeatedly puzzled by various parts of Fadulu's detailed report.

Start with Fadulu's third paragraph, as presented above. According to Fadulu's report, "literacy experts" say that "a phonics-based literacy curriculum" is "the most effective way to teach reading to most children." 

If that's true, why does it fall to Mayor Adams to introduce this instructional approach to the city's schools? Why hasn't this type of curriculum been in effect all along?

Fadulu skips past this point. In fairness, no news report can address every possible question. But if you think the New York Times will ever double back to explore this obvious question, we'll suggest that you have no idea of the degree of disinterest the New York Times has traditionally brought to such basic points concerning the public schools.

The Times is concerned with the top few percent—with the kids who succeed in Gotham's schools, and especially with their race and ethnicity. The Times has rarely shown any interest in the world of those Other kids.

That said, the mayor's plan seems to be based on the idea that dyslexia—whatever that is—lies at the heart of the city's "literary crisis." For all we know, that assessment may be accurate! But if so, consider the highlighted part of this passage, which starts with Fadulu describing part of the mayor's plan:

FADULU: The Literacy Academy Collective will be piloting second and third grade classrooms at P.S. 161 in the fall, and each class will have 15 to 18 students from that school, said Ruth Genn, one of the co-founders of the nonprofit. The goal is to eventually open a separate school and work with children in kindergarten through eighth grade.

The Lab School for Family Literacy will be running the program at P.S. 125, where two grade levels—either first and second or second and third—will each have a separate class for struggling readers. Teachers of those classes will be trained in the Orton-Gillingham approach in a 10-day intensive program.

Schools Chancellor David C. Banks said the department would look to these schools for lessons learned as it expands dyslexia programming to other boroughs.

“They will be labs of innovation for us,” Mr. Banks said.

The full-day programs won’t be the first in the city. The Bridge Preparatory Charter School, which opened in Staten Island in 2019, is the state’s first and only public school created to help children with dyslexia and other learning disabilities. City officials have worked closely with the school’s officials to learn more about the programming.

The chancellor and other education officials have also spent time studying the methods used at the Windward School, a private school with campuses in both New York City and White Plains that primarily serves children with dyslexia. Ms. Quintana said teachers from the Windward school would be training teachers from other schools in helping children with dyslexia.

Question! If twenty percent of the nation's kids are suffering from dyslexia; if the prevalence of dyslexia explains the literacy crisis found within the New York City schools; then why in the world haven't many pre-existing programs been "created to help children with dyslexia?"

Why in the world is the Bridge Preparatory School the only such public school in the entire state?

If dyslexia is such a widespread condition, it seems a bit odd, at least on its face, to think that no one but the city's new mayor has ever come up with the idea of addressing this problem. Why aren't there numerous programs, around the country and the state, on which the city can draw?

Writing with great competence as a dutiful "general assignment reporter," Fadulu composed a lengthy report about the details of the mayor's proposal. Because we've followed the introduction of many such ballyhooed plans over the course of the past fifty years, we were struck by some of the oddities which Fadulu tended to move past.

Dyslexia is the heart of the problem—but there seem to be virtually no pre-existing programs attempting to address it! Experts agree that phonics-based instruction is best—but it falls to this newly-elected mayor to tell the school system this!

Such peculiarities abound in Fadulu's report. Consider this unexamined note:

FADULU (continuing directly from above): Under the new plan, school officials will require principals, who can choose their curriculums, shift toward a reading program that is based in reading science. Many currently use one developed by Lucy Calkins, an academic at Teachers College, Columbia University, that has repeatedly come under fire.

Officials will require principals to choose from a handful of phonics-based curriculums to include as part of their comprehensive reading programs, such as Fundations, Really Great Reading and Preventing Academic Failure, said Ms. Quintana.

Say what? If Cakins' reading program "has repeatedly come under fire," why have so many principals been using it? Also, riddle us this:

FADULU: Once children are identified as at-risk, they will be recommended for a neuropsychology evaluation. Some schools have partnered with a nonprofit group, Promise Project at Columbia University Medical Center, to help low-income families afford the assessment, which can sometimes cost thousands of dollars.

The students will then receive either additional support at their current schools or enroll at one of the two new programs, which will open this fall.

The additional support includes more intensive instruction steeped in the Orton-Gillingham approach, which teaches reading with more hands-on methods that break down words into smaller, more digestible parts. District-based coordinators will work with all schools to adjust instruction and provide intervention for those students.

We were surprised to see that the city's public school parents will apparently have to pay for the assessments in question. That said:

According to Fadulu, the Orton-Gillingham approach "teaches reading with more hands-on methods that break down words into smaller, more digestible parts."

Does that mean that the method teaches kids to break words down into syllables? (In fairness, we note the inclusion of the term "hands-on.") Also, the Orton-Gillingham approach has been around since the 1930s. If this approach is so successful, why isn't it in widespread use around the country today? Why isn't it already in use in the Gotham schools?

Is Gotham turning to Orton-Gillingham? We know nothing about the approach, but when we turned to the leading authority on the method, we found it telling us this:

An overview of all reported studies of Orton-Gillingham derivative methods, such as Alphabetic Phonics or Project Read, revealed only a dozen studies with inconsistent results and a variety of methodological flaws. Despite these conclusions, the article does provide a detailed overview of the available research, which viewed most favorably would show some evidence of benefit from classroom use of OG methods with first graders, and use in special education or resource room settings with older children with learning disabilities.

According to a review of the literature in 2008, its efficacy is yet to be established.

In July 2010, a US Department of Education agency reported that it could not find any studies meeting its evidence standards to support the efficacy of Orton-Gillingham based strategies.

If you care about Gotham's good, decent kids, that's a gloomy assessment. If you think the Times will ever examine this matter, we have a bridge to M.I.T. you might want to lease, rent or own.

New York City's public schools are full of good, decent kids. When these children struggle in school, they're losing large chunks of their happiness and their sense of worth. The wider world is losing part of its greatest resource.

"We don't have a single person to waste," one successful politician used to tell the public. The same is true of our nation's kids, including the giant numbers of good, decent kids found in Gotham's schools.

Fadulu is young, and she isn't a specialist. Through no fault of her own, she works for a newspaper which rarely seems to give a flying fig about the "lower 98" percent of kids in its city's schools.

Fadulu is young, and she isn't experienced. Older, more experienced people may know and understand this:

Many prophets have stepped forward with ballyhooed plans to turn around our low-income schools. These plans have tended to come and go with the seasons and the winds.

Experienced reporters would understand that. Our blue tribe pretends that black kids matter, but the Times rarely seems to care.

Tomorrow: How serious is that crisis?

The AP surveyed replacement theory!

TUESDAY, MAY 17, 2022

Why did Democrats say what they did? We're so old that we can remember when Samuel Alito's draft opinion on abortion rights was still major news all across the land.

That was some time last week. Now we're involved in a great civil war about so-called "replacement theory."

Last evening, cable stars on our own liberal channels conducted themselves in the standard manner. They took turns topping each other in their recitation of talking points concerning the racist conspiracy theory which is so plainly false.

Meanwhile, the Washington Post has spilled with references to a survey about this general topic from December of last year. Yesterday morning, in a news report on page A13, Marianna Sotomayor described one result as shown:

SOTOMAYOR (5/16/22): An Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research poll from December found that 1 in 3 U.S. adults believed there was “an effort to replace U.S. citizens with immigrants for electoral gains.” More Republicans believed in the likelihood than Democrats, 36 percent to 27 percent. 

Sotomayor seemed to be quoting the language from one of the survey's specific questions. Like several colleagues who have cited this survey, Sotomayor offered no link to the AP/NORC report.

That said:

According to Sotomayor's account, 36 percent of Republican respondents had said they believed that there was “an effort to replace U.S. citizens with immigrants for electoral gains.” 

Surprisingly, 27 percent of Democrats had said they believed the same thing! That doesn't seem like a giant difference. Or at least, so Sotomayor said.

Given current tribal messaging, it's surprising to think that 27 percent of Democrats said they agreed with that statement. Meanwhile, was Sotomayor giving an accurate account of what the survey had actually asked, and what the respondents had actually said?

In this morning's Washington Post, Michelle Norris seems to give the same account of the same AP/NORC survey. In her second paragraph, she links to this earlier account of the survey by the Washington Post's Philip Bump.

With that, the problems start. None of these Post reporters offer an actual link to the actual survey in question. Also, none of these reporters seem to describe the results of the survey in the exact same way.

After a considerable search, we managed to find the original AP/NORC report about the survey in question. Incredibly, the report appears without a date of publication, though it offers a link to this poorly-written AP news report about the actual survey.

Alas! Everyone is citing the survey, but it isn't clear that anyone knows what its respondents said. For better or worse, this is fairly typical work from within our badly failed upper-end journalistic culture.

What questions were respondents actually asked? How did they actually answer? Only Bump, in his Post report, seems to think that he can answer those questions, though he too fails to provide a link to the actual data. 

We still haven't managed to find the original data. But if we put our faith in Bump, we can tell you what the respondents were asked and what the respondents said. 

Warning! If Bump's account is accurate, then Sotomayor's account was wrong. According to Bump, respondents were asked if they agreed with this statement:

"There is a group of people in this country who are trying to replace native-born Americans with immigrants who agree with their political views."

According to Bump's graphic, something like 46 percent of Republicans said they agreed with that statement. So did something like 22 percent of Democrats.

That still sounds like a lot of Dems! According to Bump, respondents were also asked if they agree with this statement:

"Native-born Americans are losing economic, political and cultural influence because of the growing population of immigrants."

According to Bump, 36 percent of Republicans agreed with that statement, as did 27 percent of Democrats.

At present, we have no ultimate way to check the accuracy of Bump's account. That said, we'll assume that he has access to the actual data, and that his account is correct.

As President Kennedy used to do, we'll now say this about that:

According to this large survey from last December, 22 percent of Democrats agree with a statement which strongly resembles straight-up "replacement theory." Also, 27 percent of Democrats say that native-born Americans are losing political influence due to our nation's growing number of immigrants.

Compared to what you're currently seeing and hearing on cable TV, that seems like a lot of Democrats who said they agreed with those statements. At this point, we'll author a guess:

No one watching liberal cable saw those numbers reported last night. Instead, we were encouraged to blame the whole thing on The Others. 

In other words, Republicans believe the racist conspiracy theory which is plainly false. Our virtuous tribe does not, or at least so we were told.

Why did so many Democrats answer the way they did? We can't answer that question, but we'll show you some data, in the next few days, which create a wider context for this ongoing discussion.

For ourselves, we'll repeat our position from yesterday. We'd assume that some members of our liberal tribe do view immigration policy as a way to gain future political advantage. 

We'd be amazed if none of our tribe's journalistic or political elites view the matter that way. That doesn't necessarily mean that anyone does, though we may mention Frank Rich tomorrow.

At any rate, roughly a quarter of the AP/NORC's Democratic respondents gave answers to those two questions which tilted in the direction of "replacement theory." 

Last night, cable tribunes screamed long and loud, reciting mandated points. This is the nightmare into which our species descends when we split into warring tribes and it's Storyline all the way down.

Liberal cable was gruesome last night. Fox News almost always is.

Tomorrow: The 22 percent

TIMES AND SCHOOLS: The mayor's new education plan!

TUESDAY, MAY 17, 2022

And the New York Times' new reporter: It was an unusual moment in the recent history of the New York Times.

When it comes to the New York City Public Schools, the paper of record typically concerns itself with the highest achieving students only—with the top few percent. 

Which of these higher-achieving kids, and from which racial and ethnic groups, will get into Stuyvesant High, then possibly move on to Yale? As we've noted again and again and again, the New York Times fills its front pages with anguished reports about those questions. 

The vast majority of students—the good, decent kids who won't be going to Yale—are rarely given the time of day in this Hamptons-based upper-class newspaper.  

Last Friday morning, the New York Times published different type of report. This news report concerned the struggles of the hundreds of thousands of good, decent kids who won't proceed from Gotham's public schools to the hallowed halls of Yale or Harvard or Brown.

Amazingly, New York City's new mayor, Eric Adams, has voiced concern about Gotham's more numerous and more typical kids! He has voiced concern about the way those hundreds of thousands of good, decent kids may struggle in hit city's public schools. 

This new mayor has even produced a proposal addressing the needs of these good, decent kids! In last Friday's New York Times, the news report about his proposal started like this, headline included:

Mayor Adams Unveils Program to Address Dyslexia in N.Y.C. Schools

Mayor Eric Adams announced Thursday the details of a plan to turn around a literacy crisis in New York City and, in particular, to serve thousands of children in public schools who may have dyslexia, an issue deeply personal to the mayor, who has said his own undiagnosed dyslexia   hurt his academic career.

School officials plan to screen nearly all students for dyslexia, while 80 elementary schools and 80 middle schools will receive additional support for addressing the needs of children with dyslexia. The city will also open two new dyslexia programs—one at P.S. 125 Ralph Bunche in Harlem and the other at P.S. 161 Juan Ponce de Leon in the South Bronx—with a goal of opening similar programs in each borough by 2023.

Officials also plan to train all teachers, and will create a new dyslexia task force. School leaders are requiring school principals to pivot to a phonics-based literacy curriculum, which literacy experts say is the most effective way to teach reading to most children.

“Dyslexia holds back too many of our children in school but most importantly in life,” Mr. Adams said during a press briefing Thursday morning, adding that it “haunts you forever until you can get the proper treatment that you deserve.”

According to the news report, the mayor has released a plan designed "to turn around a literacy crisis" in New York City's public schools. His proposal will focus on screening kids for dyslexia, whatever dyslexia is.

For the record, reports about admission to Stuyvesant High tend to appear on the New York Times' front page. This report about the mayor's far-reaching plan was banished to page A21.

That said, we start by tipping our hat to the mayor for caring about the mass of New York City's kids, not just the top few percent. Beyond that, we tip our hat to the mayor for understanding the way his city's kids can be "haunted," damaged, forever harmed if they're unlucky enough to be among the large number of kids who struggle in Gotham's public schools.

We applaud the new mayor for his focus. At this point, "the eternal note of sadness" must also be brought to the fore.

To anyone with an ounce of sense or a bit of experience, that instant reference to "turn[ing] around a literacy crisis" will surely sound perhaps a bit Pollyannish. As she continued, reporter Lola Fadulu offered this capsule account of the size and shape of the problem found in the city's schools:

FADULU (continuing directly from above): New York is facing a literacy crisis: Fewer than half of all third to eighth graders and just 36 percent of Black and Latino students were proficient on the state reading exams administered in 2019, the most recent year for which there is data. Research suggests that the coronavirus pandemic has only worsened those outcomes.

The lack of easily accessible academic support for children with dyslexia has been an issue that has been top of mind for the mayor. He has said his own dyslexia went undiagnosed for years because his mother didn’t have the necessary information to get him screened. He recalled “not wanting to come into school every day because I just couldn’t keep up.”

Developing a universal dyslexia screening program in the city’s schools was one of the few specific policy prescriptions the mayor offered during his campaign. He has devoted $7.4 million in his proposed budget for addressing dyslexia and other literacy issues.

In 2019, in grades 3-8, fewer than half of Gotham's public school kids "were proficient on the state reading exams." The proficiency rate of black and Hispanic kids stood at roughly 36 percent.

Before the week is done, we'll offer you a more detailed statistical look at this state of affairs. 

In some ways, this situation may be better than you think; in some ways, it might be worse. But to the extent that this is "a literary crisis," it's a crisis which has been faced by the public schools of New York City and the nation dating back many long years.

At this site, we tip our hat to Mayor Adams for the shape of his concern. He's concerned about the many kids in his giant city, not just the top few percent!

At the Times, this focus pushed last Friday's report from page A1 back to A21. The best and the brightest get love at the Times. Other children may get left behind.

Our question today is this:

Can Mayor Adams, for all his good intentions, really "turn around" this "literary crisis?" Does his proposal make good sense? Is there reason to think that it will succeed—and if so, to what extent?

What are the prospects for this proposal? As someone who's watched public schools since the 1960s, we're forced to voice a bit of skepticism about the mayor's plan. 

The mayor is very new to this game, and many ballyhooed proposals have preceded his. We admire the mayor for his focus, but we'd want to hear more—much, much more—about the actual shape of his plan.

It's at this point that we turn again to the journalistic culture of the Times. Mayor Adams is new to this task, but so is the very bright Fadulu—a young, relatively inexperienced reporter who isn't an education specialist.

Nothing we say in the course of this week will be intended as a criticism of Fadulu. She didn't assign herself this task of covering this proposal. It isn't her judgment, or her doing, that has a "general assignment reporter" covering this sweeping new plan in this highly technical area.

The decision to assign Fadulu to this task comes from the heart of the Times itself. And at the Times, the pattern holds:

The Times assigns its education specialists (such as they are) to its front-page news reports about the top few percent. Reports about the mass of kids are assigned to less experienced scribes.

Fadulu is young, and she's smart. That said, she isn't experienced in this field, and it seems to us that her report displays this lack of experience at various junctures.

This is the way the New York Times tends to cover the public schools. If you're headed for Brown, you can stick around! Everyone else can get back.

Tomorrow: For starters, what's dyslexia? 

We happened to be watching that night!

MONDAY, MAY 16, 2022

Tucker's replacement theory: Horrifically, mass shootings by deranged teenagers are part of our culture now. 

Some of these shootings involve racial motives. Some of these shootings don't.

We can't meaningfully discuss the types of (extreme) mental illness which play into such impulses and such horrific behavior. Here, as elsewhere, we'll offer this thought:

We'd have a more useful public discourse if (carefully selected) mental health professionals were more commonly involved. 

How might we understand the forces which lead certain teens to engage in such behavior? We'd like to see such questions posed to (carefully selected) medical / psychiatric specialists.

In the current case, the horrific shooting in Buffalo has generated a great deal of discussion of so-called "replacement theory." Tucker Carlson is often mentioned. We have a confession to make:

By happenstance, we were watching Carlson's program in April 2021 when he offered his fullest discussion of this general topic. For today, we can only bring ourselves to tell you this:

We think the transcript and the videotape are actually worth reviewing. To do so, just click here.

In our view, Carlson is basically lost to the world, morally and intellectually. As we noted a few weeks ago, he sometimes starts his show, at 9 P.M. Eastern, with a fairly reasonable premise—but, by 9:02 P.M., his wild embellishments and his ugly, unfounded ascriptions of motive make his braindead pseudo-discussions extremely hard to watch.

(And of course, his gratuitous insults.)

Regarding his discussion that night, we're only going to say today that we thought it was worth watching. In fact, we're going to make an awful confession:

We came away thinking that we'd rarely seen a cable news monologue which contained as much information as his monologue did that night.

Stating the obvious, changes in the demographics of a jurisdiction can produce changes in that jurisdiction's politics. Carlson sketched several examples that night. Some of his examples involved matters of ethnicity and / or race. At least one of his examples did not.

We happened to be watching Carlson's program that night. Concerning the idea that Democratic motives are always pure and non-political, we can only borrow this question from Michael Corleone:

Who's being naive now, Kay?

As our nation's tribal warfare unfolds, we live in a badly fallen world. Leaders our own blue tribe may sometimes be compromised, or at least so we sometimes are prepared to imagine here.

Idiotic comments to the side, we found Carlson's monologue intriguing that night. Provisionally, we'll offer this as this new discussion unfolds:

Who's (possibly) being (perhaps a bit) naive now? 

STARTING TOMORROW: The Times and the schools!

MONDAY, MAY 16, 2022

Journalism versus illusion: "Time is an illusion," Kant is sometimes rather crudely said to have possibly said.

Did he really say such a thing—and if so, what could he have meant? The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy offers this overview of the matter:

Perhaps the central and most controversial thesis of the Critique of Pure Reason is that human beings experience only appearances, not things in themselves; and that space and time are only subjective forms of human intuition that would not subsist in themselves if one were to abstract from all subjective conditions of human intuition. Kant calls this thesis transcendental idealism.

According to that account, time would not "subsist in itself" (whatever that means) "if one were to abstract from all subjective conditions of human intuition." 

Speaking truth to alleged erudition, we don't have the slightest idea what such formulations might mean. (It's always possible that someone else might be able to explain it.)

That said:

By the middle of the last century, the later Wittgenstein had piped up with an unpleasant suggestion. He suggested that discussions of that type were illusory in a certain way—were imitations of life, were disguised imitations of discourse.

Such discussions were built on piles of conceptual confusion, Wittgenstein suggested and sometimes said. Down through the annals of time, college freshmen, such as they were, had always suspected as much!

An any rate, how about it? Is time really some sort of "illusion?" Or does illusion enter the scene when philosophers start to discuss it? 

We'll set such questions aside for the rest of the week. We'll turn instead to basic questions about our nation's modern journalism at its alleged highest end.

For our text, we'll examine a full-length news report in last Friday's New York Times. The report was written by Lola Fadulu. The news report's headline said this:

Mayor Adams Unveils Program to Address Dyslexia in N.Y.C. Schools

According to Fadulu, the mayor has released "the details of a [major] plan to turn around a literacy crisis in New York City." It almost sounds like that could be an important topic, worthy of careful discussion. 

In theory, a million public school students in New York City could be affected by the mayor's proposal. The question we'll be posing all this week is this:

Is there any chance—any chance at all—that the New York Times will be able to produce a coherent discussion of this new mayor's proposal? A million kids are tangled up in this proposal. Is the Times equipped to discuss it?

For today, we'll restrict ourselves to one intriguing point. Fadulu, who's five years out of college, isn't an education specialist or an experienced education reporter. 

Nothing we say in the course of this week will be offered as a criticism of Fadulu. Presumably, this very bright young reporter didn't assign herself to the current task.

We do regard it as strange, though perhaps also as revealing, when the New York Times puts a relatively young "general assignment reporter" in charge of this important and technical topic. For the record, this supports observations we've made in the past concerning the depth of concern at the New York Times about struggling public school kids.

That full-length report in Friday's Times appeared to be a standard journalistic account of an important new policy effort. But does that report present a real discussion of the mayor's proposal, or does it merely present the illusion of same? 

The woods are lovely, dark and deep, but it isn't clear that our flawed blue tribe possesses the ability to create such journalistic discussions. Beyond that, it isn't clear that we have the ability to notice our journalistic failures when it turns out that we've failed.

Is time an illusion in some way? We're not even sure what the question means! But even at its highest end, our journalism has trafficked in illusions for a very long time, and in this, and in so many other cases, our well-intentioned blue tribe is routinely unable to see this.

Tomorrow: As described, the mayor's plan

SATURDAY: Is "our democracy" in peril?

SATURDAY, MAY 14, 2022

It has been for a long time:  With apologies, we didn't do a very good job explaining our argument yesterday. 

We were discussing the perils involved in the possibility of charging Donald J. Trump (and an array of lesser GOP figures) with a series of crimes. 

Should Donald J. Trump be charged with a crime? We can't answer that question.

For starters, we don't know if he has actually committed a crime. Also, we don't know if he has committed a type of crime which can be described to the wider public in a way the wider public will understand.

Some types of crime are quite clearcut. You can't steal someone's wallet or purse. You can't shoot someone on Fifth Avenue. 

Other crimes (and constitutional rulings) involve layers of complexification which are very hard to explain—and which may not even make sense. It may be especially hard to explain such matters to the general public when deeply felt policy views, or deeply held political loyalties, are involved.

Criminal charges of that type would generate major backlash. Perhaps such charges should be brought, but this is a tricky and dangerous time.

On Deadline: White House, Nicolle Wallace's "favorite reporters and friends" have been walking the "criminalization" road all through these Trump and post-Trump years. They've been trying to address a serious political problem—How can we persuade people to vote against Donald J. Trump?—by means of criminalization.

For years, they've been asking this question: How we can get Trump locked up? More recently, they've even been asking this related question:

How can we get the candidates we don't like removed from the ballot?

Yesterday, Wallace joined Max Boot in worrying about the fate of "our democracy." In fact, our democracy has been on life support for decades, dating back—let's recall one of the most ridiculous episodes—to the time when the mainstream press corps had a collective nervous breakdown over the fact that a certain candidate for president was wearing three-button suits.

That was an undisguised lunacy of the mainstream press. The mainstream press is a major part of "our democracy"—and we've been detailing such lunacies for the past twenty-four years. 

In many respects, "our democracy" has been a tightly-scripted clown show dating at least to 1992. People like Wallace and Boot are never going to tell you that. Neither will the other stars of our own tribe's "corporate cable."

For now, just consider the functioning of "our democracy" and those three-button suits:

In the fall of 1999, two experienced Democratic candidates—Senator Bradley and Vice President Gore—conducted a debate which focused on American health care. It was the first Democratic debate of the 2000 campaign. 

At the conservative National Review, the late Kate O'Beirne praised the candidates for their breadth of  knowledge. At the Washington Post, Pulitzer winner Mary McGrory started her column as shown:

MCGRORY (10/31/99): Vice President Albert Gore came to his fateful encounter with newly menacing challenger Bill Bradley carrying heavy baggage. He was wearing an outfit that added to his problems when he stepped onstage at Dartmouth College: a brown suit, a gunmetal blue shirt, a red tie—and black boots.

Was it part of his reinvention strategy? Perhaps it was meant to be a ground-leveling statement—"I am not a well-dressed man." It is hard to imagine that he thought to ingratiate himself with the nation's earliest primary voters by trying to look like someone seeking employment at a country music radio station. 

McGrory barely mentioned what the candidates had said about health care. Instead, she lambasted Gore's deeply troubling wardrobe, in this and in her next column.

Everyone treated this lunacy as normal. Within "our democracy," things spiraled downward from there, with major mainstream journalists conducting lunatic discussions of every conceivable aspect of Gore's deeply troubling wardrobe.

That included the fact that some of his deeply troubling suit jackets had three buttons, not two. Eventually, one major national figure even sewed a fourth button on!

No, we aren't making that up—and the lunacy came to be even more lunatic than whatever you may be imagining. That was the state of "our democracy" as of the fall of 1999, and all the people our tribe admires knew that they had two choices:

They could play along with this jihad if they chose. But they mustn't notice or mention the lunacy, and they certainly mustn't complain.

Wallace herself has long been part of the threat to "our democracy," dating back to 2004, when she was pimping state ballot measures on same-sex marriage to enhance voter turnout for Bush. That said, "our democracy" has been a joke for decades—but you will never be told such things as corporate cable sells product.

We hope to do better again at this site starting on Monday. According to a string of experts, it won't make a lick of difference. But we'll be trying to find ways to get our time and our focus back.

Should Donald J. Trump be charged with a crime? On the merits, we have no idea. On the politics, it strikes us a very risky maneuver.

That said, people like Wallace are busy earning millions of dollars selling "cable news" product. You should never trust their judgment or their factual statements or the pleasing product they sell.

First three buttons, then four: Within the realm of the fourth estate, "our democracy" was a manifest joke as of the fall of 1999.

The conduct of the mainstream press was crazier than you think. "Our democracy" has been a form of lunacy for decades, and that isn't likely to change. 

To consider the troubling number of buttons on that one candidate's suits, you can just click here. This was the state of "our democracy" as of 1999—and you can trust us on this point:

What you find, if you click that link, will be crazier than you think. None of our blue tribe's exalted leaders said even a word in real time. 

FRIDAY: Ignoring the need to win elections?

FRIDAY, MAY 13, 2022

A preference for "locking them up:" From 2009 through 2015, Eric Holder was President Obama's attorney general.

Holder is intelligent, sensible, smart. He doesn't seem to be crazy at all. We'd call him transparently sane. 

Also, Holder has recently changed his mind—or has started to think about changing his mind—concerning a difficult question:

Would it be a good idea to indict former president Trump—to charge him with a crime? 

On Monday evening, Holder appeared on The Last Word. At the start of the program, Lawrence O'Donnell quoted Holder's account of a recent change in his thinking:

O`DONNELL (5/9/22): Our first guest tonight is an institutionalist—the 82nd attorney general of the United States of America, Eric Holder.

The current attorney general, Merrick Garland, is an institutionalist. If you asked either of those Justice Department institutionalists say, ten years ago, if they believe that newly appointed attorney generals, serving a newly elected president, should spend time investigating the previous president of another party, or the actions of the Justice Department itself serving that previous president, they both would have said no.

Yesterday, former Attorney General Eric Holder said:

"I am an institutionalist. My initial thought was not to indict the former president out of concern of what how divisive it would be. But given what we have learned, I think that he probably has to be held accountable." 

Holder has come to believe that Trump "has to be held accountable"—or at least that he probably should be.  

O'Donnell was quoting Holder's Sunday appearance on Face the Nation. Should Donald J. Trump be charged with a crime? Here's the fuller exchange between Holder and Margaret Brennan of CBS:

HOLDER (5/8/22): At some point, people at the Justice Department, perhaps that prosecutor in Atlanta, are going to have to make a determination about whether or not they want to indict Donald Trump. The air is going to be—

BRENNAN: Would you do it?

HOLDER: Well, I think there's going to be sufficient factual information. And I think that there's going to be sufficient proof of intent.

And then the question becomes, What's the impact of such an indictment? 

I'm an institutionalist. My initial thought was not to indict the former president out of concern of what—how divisive it would be. But given what we have learned, I think that he probably has to be held accountable.

BRENNAN: We'll leave it on that incredible note.

Eric Holder still isn't totally certain.

Holder knows how divisive an indictment of Trump would be. But he says that, based upon what he now knows, it looks to him like Donald J. Trump probably should be held accountable—probably should be charged with a crime.

On Monday evening, Holder discussed this assessment with O'Donnell. You can peruse MSNBC's error-riddled transcript. To do so, just click here.

Speaking with O'Donnell, Holder discussed the reasons behind his ongoing reluctance. We've never indicted a former president, this former attorney general said. It's the sort of thing they do in other countries, he said. It's something we've never done here.

For what it's worth, we tend to be even more concerned about this idea than Holder now seems to be.  In the end, we don't know what Merrick Garland should decide concerning Trump's disordered behavior—but we think an indictment of Donald J. Trump would be profoundly divisive, at a time when our badly floundering nation is already breaking apart.

Having said all that, let us also say this—within our flailing, embattled blue tribe, there are major cadres who basically live for the chance to see Trump (and his allies) locked up. 

These people appear, day after day, on Nicolle Wallace's two-hour MSNBC show, Deadline White House. Yesterday, we watched for two solid hours as Wallace and her endless array of upscale guests dreamed of the day when Donald J. Trump would be indicted, with criminal charges against various others thrown in.

On Wallace's popular show, it has been time to "lock them up" for several years now. The program focuses on such delicious possibilities—and on little else.

Holder's concern about where this might lead is rarely mentioned on this show. And of course, the daily issues which bother everyday American citizens also go unmentioned.

Those everyday American citizens are also American voters. For many of them, the dream of locking Trumpists up falls quite low on their current wish list.

That said, the Wallace show brings a daily two-hour focus to the dreams and desires of a highly exercised blue tribe elite. 

Life seems to be good for her wealthy guests. To our ear, they seem to spend little time thinking about the topics which take us beyond their private war with corresponding red tribe elites.

The woods are lovely, dark and deep, but our nation's systems have long been falling apart for some time.

On balance, the bugs in those systems make it harder for Democrats to win election—to the House, to Senate, to the White House. They even make it possible to imagine Donald J. Trump ending up in the White House again.

We admire Holder for his obvious sanity. We aren't fans of the tunnel vision displayed by Wallace and her endless array of upper-end guests.

For decades now, our own blue tribe has shown little interest in hearing about the interests, concerns and beliefs of The Others—of the people who keep defeating us in elections, helped along by the Electoral College and by so-called "Senate math."

We spent two hours yesterday watching Wallace act out her dreams. Our general view?

Every time she leads a discussion, Trump voters are getting their wings.

Wallace and her stable of guests keep dreaming of locking them up. This emphasis strikes us as unwise.  Holder sees this as a potentially dangerous move. We agree with his reluctance, and raise him some.

Our tribe isn't always real skilled at dealing with Others. With apologies:

As our own focus slowly returns, we expect to offer more cogent thoughts on this topic next week. Our nation has entered a dangerous time. We need to think very clearly.

The best letter we've read in a while!

THURSDAY, MAY 12, 2022

From yesterday's New York Times:  We should have posted the letter yesterday. It came from that day's New York Times.

It's the best letter we've read in a while. Heading included, it went exactly like this:

The Day I Skipped School

To the Editor:

Re “Your Kids Can Handle Dangerous Ideas,” by Matt Gross (Opinion guest essay, April 30), which opens with an anecdote about skipping school:

In 1943, on a warm spring afternoon, my mother was swayed by my pleas to skip school the rest of the day. I was surprised but delighted. The next day I brought the teacher my excuse note, written in my mother’s best hand, which said I had suffered an attack of spring fever.

At 90, I still remember lying on the lawn, watching drifting clouds.

Margaret Mary K— C— / Cleveland Heights, Ohio

In our view, the writer's mother seems to have gotten it right.

Fuller disclosure: On one or two occasions, our own sainted mother let us stay home from grade school to watch the seventh game of the World Series.

Such games were played in the daytime then. They involved the Milwaukee Braves, not long removed from our own native Boston.

Casey Stengel had once managed the team, when they were called the Boston Bees. Based upon an anecdote, our sainted mother, as a young woman, had dated one of Casey's players way back and long ago then.

If you're lucky enough to be able to do so, remember to drift with the clouds!

THURSDAY: Senate Democrats lose again!

THURSDAY, MAY 12, 2022

What the vice president said:  We continue to apologize for our lack of focus in the past few weeks. Medical issues involving our entire staff have dragged our attention away.

 (We hope to be back on track soon.)

Even as we apologize, the anthropology lessons continue in the wider discourse. Rather, those lessons emerge from the general absence—the general lack—of a functioning national discourse. 

The impending reversal of Roe v. Wade will involve a major upheaval in American life. Will we, the American people (such as we are) be able to conduct a serious discourse and negotiation as this episode unfolds? 

Will members of our embattled red and blue tribes be able to speak to each other?

The evidence suggests that the answer those questions is no. Indeed, experts say that our attempts at conducting a national discourse broke down long ago.

At this site, we favor abortion rights. We also favor respect for Others. This brings us to the most striking piece of videotape we saw on cable last night.

Democrats had just engineered a 49-51 loss in the Senate. The proposal which was voted down would have written a version of Roe into federal law.

Vice President Harris had presided over that Senate vote. When she emerged, she took one question from the press. 

Early in last evening's Last Word, Lawrence O'Donnell played the full videotape of what the vice president said. To see the official White House transcript, you can just click here:

QUESTION (5/11/22): Madam Vice President, what does this vote mean? And what is your message to women and childbearing people in America about what’s next?

VICE PRESIDENT HARRIS: Yeah, so, I just presided over the Women’s Health Protective Act vote. And sadly, the Senate failed to stand in defense of a woman’s right to make decisions about her own body.

And let’s be clear, the majority of the American people believe in defending a woman’s right, her choice to decide what happens to her own body. And this vote clearly suggests that the Senate is not where the majority of Americans are on this issue.

It also makes clear that a priority for all who care about this issue—a priority should be to elect pro-choice leaders at the local, the state, and the federal level, because what we are seeing around this country are extremist Republican leaders who are seeking to criminalize and punish women for making decisions about their own body.

That presentation is hardly unique to Vice President Harris. The messaging involved in that statement isn't something Harris dreamed up.

That said, we were struck by the unyielding tribal repetition involved in the vice president's statement. At the beginning, middle and end of her statement, she repeated the verbal framework with which our blue tribe addresses this matter:

Within the framework of our tribe, we want to give each woman the right to "decide what happens to her own body."  That's the way we frame this matter—and we leave the matter right there.

In the course of speaking that way, we disappear the fundamental beliefs of the Others—of the rival red tribe. For better or worse, The Others believe that another body and another life are involved in this matter—the life of an "unborn child."

That isn't our own fundamental view, but it's the view of the Others. And the Others have the same ownership stake in the society that we do.

That doesn't mean that the Others are right—but it's hard to prove that the Others are "wrong." Routinely, though, our tribe proceeds as Harris did, acting as if the Others, and their views, aren't even there.

Citizens, can we talk?

As a general matter, very few people would want to interfere with a woman's "right to decide what happens to her own body." When our tribe frames the matter that way, we make it sound like we are supporting the most obvious right in the world.

Elsewhere, though, in the other tribe, a different view of the matter prevails. Our neighbors and friends in the other tribe believe that a second body and life are involved—and as the Alito draft opinion has shown, the Others haven't abandoned that belief in the course of the past forty-nine years.

Here's what the experts have told us:

At times of tribal war, we human beings divide into membership / identity groups. We begin to otherize those in the rival tribe.

We come to believe that our views, and only our views, are worth considering or mentioning. We may even start to act as if the Others are less than human. 

They may start to seem like cockroaches. Their views aren't worthy of mention.

Our American nation, such as it is, has been dividing into tribal groups for a great many years at this point. A great deal of The Crazy is now involved—and just for the record, a great deal of that Crazy, down through the years, has come from the people our tribe admires in the mainstream press.

"Now we're involved in a great civil war," as President Lincoln once said. The way our own blue tribe discusses this matter tends to leave no way out.

As the Court prepares to overturn Roe, we're facing a very difficult challenge. At present, The Crazy is widespread in the red tribe. If we want to be honest for once, our blue tribe, such as it is, isn't necessarily a whole lot better.

That said, we the people have fundamentally different ways of understanding the topic at hand. "We must not be enemies," Lincoln once advised. "We are not enemies, but friends."

"We must not be enemies," Lincoln said. Disconsolate experts, trailing tears, describe that as a type of  response for which we aren't hard-wired.

We recommend respect for Others. We'd favor a "pro-choice" codification, but the Others are our fellow citizens. By the basic rules of the game, their views will have to be considered too.

Yesterday afternoon, our tribe achieved its latest win, by a 49-51 count. We're skilled at producing such victories, less impressive at everything else.

What President Lincoln said: Lincoln closed his first inaugural address in the manner shown:

LINCOLN (3/4/61): I am loath to close. We are not enemies, but friends. We must not be enemies. Though passion may have strained, it must not break our bonds of affection. The mystic chords of memory, stretching from every battle-field, and patriot grave, to every living heart and hearthstone, all over this broad land, will yet swell the chorus of the Union, when again touched, as surely they will be, by the better angels of our nature.

It didn't turn out the way he hoped. Our bonds of affection, such as they are, are under a great strain again.

WEDNESDAY: What Collins said, so long ago!

WEDNESDAY, MAY 11, 2022

Our "anthropology moment:" As we've noted many times, this has been our "anthropology moment."

This has been an anthropology moment for our nation; for our tribe; for each of us as individuals. That said, it can only be our anthropology moment if we're willing and able to see it as such.

When did this "anthropology moment" actually get its start? Decades ago, we'd allege. That said, Lawrence O'Donnell featured a recent anthropology moment on last evening's Last Word.

This anthropology moment was drawn from the May 2 Georgia gubernatorial debate. Last night, O'Donnell played videotape of the moment in question. 

The moment was provided by Kandiss Taylor, one of the GOP candidates. In a recent column, Charles Blow described the moment in the manner shown:

BLOW (5/6/22): As a white woman, and mother of three, Taylor is in the demographic that Republicans are trying to attract. But she is also a near-perfect encapsulation of the party’s fringe.

During the debate, she chastised Kemp for not contesting the 2020 results in Georgia, saying: “Donald Trump won. He won. We have a fraudulent pedophile in the White House because Governor Kemp failed.”

Last evening, O'Donnell excoriated Kemp for failing to challenge Taylor's statement in real time, during the debate. But we'd have to say that, in our estimation, it was Taylor who provided us with our latest anthropology moment.

In truth, we've been having an extended "anthropology moment" over the past many years. During this extended moment, we have learned, again and again and again and again, about the actual mental and intellectual functioning of our famously self-impressed species.

Are we really "the rational animal," as we've endlessly claimed? Candidate Taylor's remarkable moment helps us see what we've seen again and again:

On the whole, no! In truth, we actually aren't!

What have we learned in recent years, during our extended moment? For those of us who are willing to see, we've been allowed to see this:

At times of heightened tribal division, there is no claim, however absurd, extreme, or unfounded, that we human beings may not be inclined to accept. This principle was on display again in the course of Taylor's comments.

Last evening, O'Donnell played a slightly longer version of Taylor's claim from the May 2 debate. In the videotape O'Donnell played, Taylor was shown saying this:

TAYLOR (5/2/22): Yes, 2020? Totally, one hundred percent! Donald Trump won. He won. We have a fraudulent pedophile in the White House because Governor Kemp failed.

So spoke Candidate Taylor, creating our latest moment.

Citizens, can we talk? As of May 2, almost eighteen months had passed since the November 2020 election.

During that time, Donald Trump had made no attempt to present anything resembling actual evidence in support of the claim that he actually won the 2020 election—in support of the claim that he had been deprived of victory due to fraudulent conduct.

Donald J. Trump has had plenty of time to lay out his case, but he has never attempted to do so. Nor is there any evidence that President Biden is a pedophile, whatever this gubernatorial candidate may have meant by that remarkable claim.

Are we humans "the rational animal," as we have long proclaimed? In recent years, we have seen, again and again, the weakness of that historic self-definition.

Starting perhaps with the claim that Barack Obama was actually born in Kenya, we've seen vast numbers of voters express belief in the most improbable claims. Those are voters from the red tribe—but then again, we've often behaved in similar ways over here in the blue.

In yesterday's post, we referred to the most recent weekly "conversation" at the New York Times between Gail Collins and Bret Stephens. (Stephens speaks from the center right, Collins from the center left.)

It's easy for us in the blue tribe to see the remarkable intellectual failures of those who reside in the red. But our own tribe's remarkable failures date back at least into the early 1990s—and we'd have to say that Collins played a role in our tribe's striking breakdowns from that earlier era, if only through her silence.

We've been at this site for more than 24 years. Way back in 2005, we became a Columbia Journalism Review cover boy. We even appeared on Crossfire at one point!

In the end, we have one major discovery to share. That discovery goes like this—and yes, it's anthropological:

Simply put, we humans are not "the rational animal" in any essential way. Instead, we humans are the tribal animal—or so major experts have said.

According to these disconsolate anthropologists, we humans are the animals which divides into tribes, then start creating tribal narratives. At such times, our rational or intellectual capacities are strongly inclined to breakdown.

We accept tribal lore with very few questions asked. It's Storyline all the way down.

The woods are lovely, dark and deep, but our blue tribe behaves this way too. This is the remarkable lesson we have to offer after 24 years at this task.

Candidate Taylor provided an anthropology moment—but so did columnist Collins, long ago. 

We expect to be more in control of our time in the weeks ahead. As we return to fuller services, we plan to remind you of the remarkable "anthropology moments" our own blue tribe has relentlessly provided.

Our tribe has provided a long string of these moments too! In the end, this is the major finding we have to present. 

This finding runs all the way to the academy and to Gödel's theorems too. And dearest readers, make no mistake:

It's an anthropological finding. The finding we're left with is anthropological. It's anthro all the way down.

Tomorrow: Gail and Bret—and Lawrence

Fuller disclosure: No transcript is available from last evening's Last Word. The network continues to slow-walk its transcript production, for reasons at which we must guess.

TUESDAY: Concerning that "decent respect...!"

TUESDAY, MAY 10, 2022

Gail and Bret meet Roe v. Wade:  It has been our view for quite some time that our nation's creaky political systems were breaking down—were ceasing to function in a minimal way, were essentially falling apart.

With that in mind, we first cited the classicist Norman O. Brown at least as far back as July 2009. Brown got very hot in the mid to late 1960s, especially among those of us on the left. 

During that street-fighting era, Brown published several inscrutable though widely-read books. At one point, he described the way societies die in a Phi Beta Kappa address:

BROWN (1966): I sometimes think I see that societies originate in the discovery of some secret, some mystery; and end in exhaustion when there is no longer any secret, when the mystery has been divulged, that is to say profaned...And so there comes a time—I believe we are in such a time—when civilization has to be renewed by the discovery of some new mysteries, by the undemocratic but sovereign power of the imagination, by the undemocratic power which makes poets the unacknowledged legislators of all mankind, the power which makes all things new.

We don’t have the slightest idea what Brown meant by that. But that statement began to rise in our brain as far back as 2009, as we saw our nation's population dividing into warring tribes, as we saw our various constitutional systems starting to fall apart.

Now we're engaged in a great civil war—a war in which our two warring tribes, Balkans style, can't even agree on the language with which to discuss the matter at issue. 

For the blue tribe to which we belong, this incipient civil war concerns "a woman's right to control her own body." For those who reside in the other (red) tribe, this incipient civil war concerns the killing of an "unborn child." 

The tribes huddle around those competing formulations, and rarely the twain shall meet. It's very hard to settle disputes in such circumstances.

This leads us to a question:

At this point, can our civilization, such as it has been, possibly "be renewed by the discovery of some new mysteries?" Can it be renewed "by the undemocratic but sovereign power of the imagination?" Is there some way we can find the power "to make all things new?"

Whatever that question actually means, the answer doesn't seem obvious. At present, two name-calling tribes stand in stark opposition. Under arrangements forged in the past thirty years, each possesses an array of powerful media companies which urge this tribal division on.

Each tribe is inclined to see things in its own way, and in no other way. Deeply destructive wars tend to flow from such circumstances. In the current circumstance, the following must be said:

In the current circumstance, an array of creaking institutions tend to favor the political interests of the red, "conservative" tribe. 

In the current circumstance, it's easier for the red tribe to win control of the Senate. It's easier for their presidential candidates to win the electoral college. 

Concentration of liberal voters in large urban areas tend to make it easier for the red tribe to control the House. Members of our own blue tribe might want to keep such facts in mind as we stumble into an uncertain future, but there's no reason to assume that we will.

What should the liberal world do in the face of these circumstances? In response to that question, we offer this advice

Do not assume that our tribe's political and journalistic leaders will exercise sound judgment. 

At times like these, we humans are inclined to follow our tribal leaders. That said, over here in the blue tribe, our tribal leaders have routinely exercised extremely limited judgment dating back at least to the early 1990s.

As such, you can't assume that your favorite journalists are exercising sound judgment. You can't assume that your political leaders are doing so either.

If the Supreme Court overturns Roe v. Wade, how should our blue tribe respond? It seems to us that the latest conversation between Gail Collins and Bret Stephens helps us examine a host of related questions.

The conversation appears in today's New York Times. We'll start to peruse it tomorrow.

Stephens opines from the center right, Collins from the center left. In our view, Collins has been exercising limited judgment dating back to her role in the disastrous press coverage of Campaign 2000. 

That, of course, was the campaign which sent George W. Bush to the White House—and Samuel Alito to the Supreme Court. Collins is a good, decent person, but it seems to us that she has been offering imperfect intellectual leadership dating back that far. In short:

At this deeply perilous time, we shouldn't be trusting our leaders.

When we read today's conversation, we thought of a phrase from one of the nation's best-known founding documents. As the founders, such as they were, declared independence from a European king, they stated the need to extend "decent respect to the opinions of [hu]mankind."

At times of angry tribal war, human groups rarely display a "decent respect" for the opinions of Others. It seems to us that our disadvantaged blue tribe might want to rethink that potent human impulse. 

Our time is limited again today. We'll start at this point tomorrow.

Should we learn to respect the opinions of Others? Especially under prevailing circumstances, we're suggesting the answer is yes.

Brown's books: Norman O. Brown got very hot in the 1960s. The two books to which we refer were Life Against Death: The Psychoanalytical Meaning of History (1959), and Love's Body (1966).

By the time of his death in 2002, the New York Times regarded him as "an erudite and spectacularly playful philosopher." Whatever he meant by the statement we've quoted, he was quite hot in real time.

MONDAY: Our liberal tribe gears up for a fight...

MONDAY, MAY 9, 2022

...but our skills are extremely limited:  Will the Supreme Court overturn the Roe decision at the end of its current term?

We can't answer that question. That said, it's very possible that they will—and with that daunting prospect in sight, our highly self-impressed liberal tribe is gearing up for a fight.

The Washington Post's E. J. Dionne has long been one of our tribe's sanest journalistic observers. In his new column, he describes the state of play in the wake of the release of the Justice Alito's draft opinion:

DIONNE (5/9/22): The backlash against Alito’s approach is certainly a case of democracy in action. One of the unintended consequences of a ruling along the lines he proposes would be the mobilization of pro-choice voters outraged by a sudden shift in the legal status of abortion.

If the Court reverses Roe, will that result in "the mobilization of pro-choice voters outraged by a sudden shift in the legal status of abortion?" 

To some unknown extent, it almost surely will. Indeed, in this news report from this morning's Post, one liberal leader describes what may be coming:

Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand (N.Y.), who has been among the many Democrats to call for the filibuster to be eliminated to pass abortion rights legislation with only 50 votes, called it “the biggest fight of a generation.”

A very big fight may be on the way. With regret, we pose this question:

Is our highly self-impressed liberal tribe smart enough to win that fight? Do we have the requisite skills to produce a decent outcome?

At this point, we make a confession. We see no sign that our liberal tribe possesses the requisite skills. 

Alas! Everywhere President Roosevelt looked, he saw "one-third of a nation ill-housed, ill-clad, ill-nourished." (The year was 1937.) Everywhere we look today, we see a tribal leadership which is deeply lacking in political wisdom, smarts and skill. 

This remarkable lack of wisdom and political smarts is one of the ways we got ourselves into this mess in the first place. How did our tribe get into this mess? In part, through the way our journalistic leaders conducted themselves during past White House campaigns.

In Campaign 2000, a lingering anger at President Clinton turned into a routinely ridiculous twenty-month journalistic war directed at Candidate Gore. 

In Campaign 2016, that generational war extended itself in the way liberal organs covered Candidate Hillary Clinton—for example, in the upper-end press corps' gigantic over-emphasis on the nothingburger known as Emailgate.

(As we noted in real time, our favorite stars on corporate cable refused to push back against this.)

As a result of those journalistic campaigns, George W. Bush and Donald J. Trump managed to squeeze their way into the White House. Once there, they named four of the five Supreme Court Justices whose opinions we now deplore.

In those beginnings was this end—and the beginning involved the nomination of Justice Alito by George W. Bush. 

In this morning's Washington Post, Margaret Sullivan rails against the way the current Supreme Court is behaving—but in her previous role at the Buffalo News, Sullivan played a key role in the unfortunate outcome of Campaign 2000. 

In that beginning was this end! In our view, Sullivan was deeply unwise back then, remains unwise today.

Our liberal tribe has always prided itself on being the smarter, better, wiser, more moral, more honest tribal group. We've long been given to praising ourselves, and to loathing The Others.

This self-flattery has always been a deception. It threatens to doom us now.

We know that these are gloomy thoughts—but we think these thoughts are accurate. The woods are lovely, dark and deep, but we're an unimpressive aggregation with deeply unimpressive tribal leadership groups.

Everyone can see this but us. For better or worse, we will be exploring these themes throughout the course of the week.

Our liberal tribe must proceed with wisdom and skill. Will we know how to do that?

The history of the past thirty years says that we quite likely won't.

A note on time: Our energy level is better, but we still don't have full control of our time. For thar reason, we expect to do fairly short postings this week.

That said, we envy President Roosevelt! What he saw in 1937 was (largely) fixable. It isn't clear that this is true of our flailing blue tribe's hubris, which helped get us into this mess.

SATURDAY: Many cultures, many views!

SATURDAY, MAY 7, 2022

Our blue tribe's fellow citizens:  How did Samuel Alito get on the Supreme Court in the first place?

We mean that as a basic historical question, not as a denigration of Alito. In one major respect, the answer to that question is perfectly clear.

Samuel Alito got on the Court after he was nominated by President George W. Bush. In January 2006, the nomination was confirmed by the Senate in a 58-42 vote, with four Democrats voting for confirmation.

(The four Democrats were Robert Byrd, West Virginia; Ben Nelson, Nebraska; Kent Conrad, North Dakota; Tim Johnson, South Dakota. By now, it's virtually impossible for Democrats to win Senat seats in those states, Joe Manchin notwithstanding.)

In short, Alito got on the Court because George W. Bush reached the White House. In the end, the behaviors which put Bush in the White House are the behaviors which explain why Alito is on the  Court.

In that sense, Lawrence O'Donnell's twenty-month silence—his twenty-month lack of rage—put Alito where he is. We especially recall his Hardball appearance of May 5, 2000, when he described the way the mainstream press—but especially the New York Times—had adjusted its behavior in the course of waging its war against Candidate Gore.

This past Thursday night, O'Donnell said he was "enraged" by Alito's draft opinion. Back in May 2000, he showed no sign of being enraged as he told Chris Matthews about the way the mainstream press, and the Times in particular, had begun to adjust its coverage of Candidate Gore.

The things he said to Matthews that night were unusually accurate and unusually revealing. But he showed no sign of being "enraged" by the journalistic conduct he was describing. He showed no sign of being disturbed by such absurd press behavior at all.

Alas! For twenty months during Campaign 2000, what happened in the mainstream press corps stayed in the mainstream press corps! One mainstream journalist after another professed bewilderment at the hostile coverage being directed at Gore, but no one seemed to be able to explain it.

In the instance under review, Gore was challenging Candidate Bush's new proposal to privatize part of Social Security. Astonishingly, Gore was instantly assailed, by cable pundits and by the New York Times itself, for daring to adopt such a nasty "scare tactic."

The criticisms of Gore made exactly zero sense. But they came hard and fast from the mainstream press, not from the right-wing machine.

Along came O'Donnell, a man of many subsequent enragements. As he spoke with Matthews that night, he showed no sign of being deeply concerned by the press corps' behavior at all.

It's hard to recreate the context of this remarkable press corps episode. For one account of O'Donnell's Hardball appearance, you can click here. For a real-time citation of O'Donnell's appearance, you can just click this.

(For a fuller account of the Times' reporting and the ancillary punditry, click here. O'Donnell described the start of this strange behavior, but he was moved to none of his trademark rage, not by that and not by all the rest of the ludicrous coverage of that fateful campaign.)

The mainstream press—and especially the New York Times—was waging a war against Gore. To this day, people like O'Donnell have never discussed this relentless press corps behavior, but Lawrence is eager to show his rage at the draft opinion from the Justice whose elevation to the Court he himself helped to create.

In that beginning was this end! It's easy to scream about Alito in the current context. But as we're directed to scream about the Alitos, the years of behavior by the O'Donnells remain undescribed and undiscussed, right to this very day—and their behavior during Campaign 2000 explains Alito's presence on the Court.

Time and energy willing, we may discuss this matter in more detail next week. Simply put, Alito sits on the Court today because of the raft of "liberal" pundits who refused to bark about the way Campaign 2000 was reported by the upper-end mainstream press corps.

In that beginning was this end. This does explain how we've reached this place—and your favorite TV stars are never going to tell you.

Many cultures, many views: We're a very large, continental nation—one which encompasses many different cultures and many different cultural views.

In this morning's New York Times, three reporters describe the views of Hispanic voters in Texas, and especially in South Texas, concerning abortion rights. We recommend the entire report, but we direct your attention to this passage:

DOBBINS ET AL (5/7/22): ...2018 data from the Public Religion Research Institute found that Hispanics in Texas are less likely than other Americans to say they believe abortion should be legal in all cases, with 53 percent saying it should be illegal in most or all cases. Gallup’s Values and Beliefs poll last year found that low-income voters are also more likely to identify themselves as “pro life,” a trend that has held steady for several years and could be a factor in Mr. Cuellar’s largely working-class district. But in a poll from the Texas Politics Project at the University of Texas at Austin released last June, 54 percent of Hispanics said they were opposed to a ban on abortion if Roe v. Wade was overturned.

Uh-oh! In that poll from the Texas Politics Project, 34 percent of Hispanic respondents said they would favor a ban on abortion if Roe was overturned! Simply put, not everyone who adopts this view is the snarling, "angry white male" our tribe's pundits love to focus their own anger on.

Those "pro life" Hispanic voters are our fellow citizens too. Their cultural views may differ from yours on the question of abortion rights. 

Under present arrangements, we're encouraged to loathe such people. Is there a way to approach the world without indulging such ancient instincts?

(For extra credit only: Whatever happened to such soothing rhetoric as "safe, legal and rare?" Compare and contrast. Discuss. What is a winning strategy?)