Last Call For The Ol' Perfesser's Lament

Our old friend Glenn "Instapundit" Reynolds was booted from Twitter last night for a rather awful tweet he made about Charlotte protesters:

Glenn Reynolds, a conservative USA Today columnist and University of Tennessee law professor known by the moniker Instapundit, was suspended from Twitter on Wednesday for urging drivers to hit protesters blocking a highway in Charlotte, North Carolina.

Reynolds tweeted a link to a live video stream of demonstrators stopping traffic on I-277 during the chaotic second day of protests over the fatal police shooting of Keith Lamont Scott. His comment read “Run them down.”

Twitter suspended his account shortly after the tweet went up and outraged commenters accused Reynolds, who also runs the Instapundit website, of inciting violence. Several users preserved screenshots of the tweet.

Run them down.

That tweet was bad enough.  Far worse is Reynolds's defense today.

Sorry, blocking the interstate is dangerous, and trapping people in their cars and surrounding them is a threat. Driving on is self-preservation, especially when we’ve had mobs destroying property and injuring and killing people. But if Twitter doesn’t like me, I’m happy to stop providing them with free content. 

ANOTHER UPDATE: Was just on Hugh Hewitt talking about this. Since Twitter won’t let me respond to — or even see — my critics, let me expand here. 

I’ve always been a supporter of free speech and peaceful protest. I fully support people protesting police actions, and I’ve been writing in support of greater accountability for police for years. 

But riots aren’t peaceful protest. And blocking interstates and trapping people in their cars is not peaceful protest — it’s threatening and dangerous, especially against the background of people rioting, cops being injured, civilian-on-civilian shootings, and so on. I wouldn’t actually aim for people blocking the road, but I wouldn’t stop because I’d fear for my safety, as I think any reasonable person would. 

“Run them down” perhaps didn’t capture this fully, but it’s Twitter, where character limits stand in the way of nuance. 

Meanwhile, regarding Twitter: I don’t even know that this is why I was suspended, as I’ve heard nothing from Twitter at all. They tell users and investors that they don’t censor, but they seem awfully quick to suspend people on one side of the debate and, as people over at Twitchy note, awfully tolerant of outright threats on the other. 

Twitter can do without me, as I can certainly do without Twitter.

So he absolutely was advocating for violence, in particular vehicular assault,  against protesters.  The standard is that if you block the road, and he runs you over, it's automatically self-defense no questions asked.

This is a tenured law professor saying this.

Oh but it gets worse: Nick Gillespie shows up and continues the defense at Reason because he's a nice guy and a blogger.

Well, I hope he is reinstated immediately and keeps on giving Twitter "free content." Over the past 15 or 20 years, Reynolds (whom I interviewed for one of my very first stories at Reason, about the potential influence of the Supreme Court case United States v. Lopez) has been one of the most-interesting and thoughtful voices on the broadly defined right. He writes everywhere (I recommend especially his USA Today columns) and books such as An Army of Davids and The Higher Education Bubble are the product of an incredibly sharp and serious person with an eye on the possibilities offered by technological and cultural innovation. Since coming online in 2001 shortly before the 9/11 attacks, the Instapundit site has been nothing short of a godsend, collecting and sharing links on an immense variety of topics from electoral politics to private space exploration to human longevity to flash sales at Amazon (for these and other reasons, Reynolds is sometimes called "the Blogfather"). I don't always agree with the spin the various contributors put on current events, but it's the first or second site I check every day after Reason.com.

Whatever you think of the tastefulness of his suggestion regarding the protesters in Charlotte, the idea that he is seriously inciting any sort of actual or real threat is risible. I can appreciate the various pressures that Twitter is facing from all sorts of perspectives. The service is constantly being asked to take material down for any number of reasons, and the requests aren't simply coming from SJWs with bees in their bonnets (indeed, it seems as if the most numerous requests from copyright holders). Twitter lists the most common reasons for suspending accounts here.

He was reinstated later on Thursday morning, of course.

This is what we're up against.  This is what I mean by there's a different legal, cultural, and social standard for black people exercising anything that looks like a right: a right to gather, a right to protest and air grievances, a right to bear arms, they either apply to black people only with the permission of white people or do not apply to black America at all, and the penalty for violating this goes all the way up to death, guys.

And this is why.  We're just obstacles to Reynolds.  We're in his way, and if we violate that, our lives are forfeit. Automatically. Not only is he unapologetic, but he doesn't see any possibly reason as to why he should have been made to care in the first place, and the bad guys here are Twitter and liberals for pointing out he's advocating violence against people.

Black Lives Matter, guys.

Racism's Only Been Around For Eight Years Or So, You See

This isn't just gaslighting by Trump supporters, I'm used to them just pretending facts don't exist. Global warming, police brutality, gun safety and an entire economic "plan" are all fiction to these clowns. But this?  It's wholesale alternate reality construction that erases 400 years of history.

Donald Trump’s campaign chair in a prominent Ohio county has claimed there was “no racism” during the 1960s and said black people who have not succeeded over the past half-century only have themselves to blame. 

Kathy Miller, chair of the Republican nominee’s campaign in Mahoning County, who is white, made the remarks during a taped interview with the Guardian’s Anywhere but Washington series of election videos. 

“If you’re black and you haven’t been successful in the last 50 years, it’s your own fault. You’ve had every opportunity, it was given to you,” she said. 

“You’ve had the same schools everybody else went to. You had benefits to go to college that white kids didn’t have. You had all the advantages and didn’t take advantage of it. It’s not our fault, certainly.” 

Miller also called the Black Lives Matter movement“a stupid waste of time” and said lower voter turnout among African Americans could be related to “the way they’re raised”.

Such abject denial is necessary for voting for Trump, after all.  But this is bordering on mass delusion.

Miller also dismissed the racial tensions of the 1960s, when she said she graduated from high school. “Growing up as a kid, there was no racism, believe me. We were just all kids going to school.” 

Asked about segregation and the civil rights movement, she replied: “I never experienced it. I never saw that as anything.” 

Miller added: “I don’t think there was any racism until Obama got elected. We never had problems like this ... Now, with the people with the guns, and shooting up neighborhoods, and not being responsible citizens, that’s a big change, and I think that’s the philosophy that Obama has perpetuated on America.”

Miller dismissed the suggestion that Trump was exploiting racist or prejudiced views among some voters as “the media making stuff up”. Instead, she said of the Republican nominee: “He’s very willing to talk about issues that have never been discussed publicly.” 

When it was pointed out that some people might find her remarks offensive, Miller replied: “I don’t care, it’s the truth.”

This is what we're up against in November, guys.  Now, after this Kathy Miller has resigned her position but take a long, hard look at the very real possibility of a country where sixty million Kathy Millers decide your federal government.

Maybe you want tot do something about it?

Our Dark Orange Future Nightmare

Evan Osnos at The New Yorker honestly considers what a Trump presidency would look like, and it's pretty awful across the board if you're one of those folks who thinks that they can grin and bear it through four years of Trump to reach the promised land of liberal utopia.

When Trump talks about what he will create and what he will eliminate, he doesn’t depart from three core principles: in his view, America is doing too much to try to solve the world’s problems; trade agreements are damaging the country; and immigrants are detrimental to it. He wanders and hedges and doubles back, but he is governed by a strong instinct for self-preservation, and never strays too far from his essential positions. Roger Stone, a long-serving Trump adviser, told me it is a mistake to imagine that Trump does not mean to fulfill his most radical ideas. “Maybe, in the end, the courts don’t allow him to temporarily ban Muslims,” Stone said. “That’s fine—he can ban anybody from Egypt, from Syria, from Libya, from Saudi Arabia. He’s a Reagan-type pragmatist.” 

William Antholis, a political scientist who directs the Miller Center, at the University of Virginia, pointed out that President Trump would have, at his disposal, “the world’s largest company, staffed with 2.8 million civilians and 1.5 million military employees.” Trump would have the opportunity to alter the Supreme Court, with one vacancy to fill immediately and others likely to follow. Three sitting Justices are in their late seventies or early eighties. 

As for the Trump Organization, by law Trump could retain as much control or ownership as he wants, because Presidents are not bound by the same conflict-of-interest statute that restricts Cabinet officers and White House staff. Presidential decisions, especially on foreign policy, could strengthen or weaken his family’s business, which includes controversial deals in Turkey, South Korea, Azerbaijan, and elsewhere. Trump would likely face pressure to adopt an arrangement akin to that of Michael Bloomberg, who, when he became mayor of New York City, withdrew from most management decisions for his company. Trump has said only that he plans to turn over the Trump Organization’s day-to-day control to three of his adult children: Donald, Jr., Ivanka, and Eric. 

As President, Trump would have the power to name some four thousand appointees, but he would face a unique problem: more than a hundred veteran Republican officials have vowed never to support him, and that has forced younger officials to decide whether they, too, will stay away or, instead, enter his Administration and try to moderate him. By September, the campaign was vetting four hundred people, and some had been invited to join the transition team. An analogy was making the rounds: Was Trump a manageable petty tyrant, in the mold of Silvio Berlusconi? Or was he something closer to Mussolini? And, if so, was he Mussolini in 1933 or in 1941? 

Michael Chertoff served both Bush Presidents—as a U.S. Attorney in Bush, Sr.,’s Administration, and then as Secretary of Homeland Security under George W. Bush. He was one of fifty senior Republican national-security officials who recently signed a letter declaring that Trump “would be the most reckless President in American history.” Chertoff told me that he has been approached for advice by younger Republicans who ask if joining Trump, after he has already been elected, would be regarded as patriotic, rather than political. “I think anybody contemplating going in will have to have a very serious look in their own conscience, and make sure they’re not kidding themselves,” Chertoff said. 

Trump’s Presidential plans are not shaped by ideology. He changed parties five times between 1999 and 2012, and, early on the campaign trail, he praised parts of Planned Parenthood (while opposing abortion), vowed to protect Social Security, and supported gay rights (while opposing same-sex marriage). He is governed, above all, by his faith in the ultimate power of transaction—an encompassing perversion of realism that is less a preference for putting interests ahead of values than a belief that interests have no place for values. 

Trump has relied heavily on the ideas of seasoned combatants. Newt Gingrich, who, as House Speaker in the nineties, pioneered many of the tactics that have come to define partisan warfare, is now a Trump adviser. Gingrich told me that he is urging Trump to give priority to an obscure but contentious conservative issue—ending lifetime tenure for federal employees. This would also galvanize Republicans and help mend rifts in the Party after a bitter election.

“Getting permission to fire corrupt, incompetent, and dishonest workers—that’s the absolute showdown,” Gingrich said. He assumes that federal employees’ unions would resist, thus producing, in his words, an “ongoing war” similar to the conflict that engulfed Madison, Wisconsin, in 2011, when Governor Scott Walker moved to limit public-sector employees’ collective-bargaining rights. After five months of protests, and a failed effort to recall the Governor and members of the state senate, Walker largely prevailed. Gingrich predicts that that chaotic dynamic can be brought to Washington. “You have to end the civil-service permanent employment,” he said. “You start changing that and the public-employee unions will just come unglued.”

That was always the goal: to dismantle the US civil service for good. The damage would be catastrophic in the courts and in the executive branch, as well as in foreign policy.

If you can't see that you should be doing everything you can to stop Trump, and that means voting for Hillary, then I don't know what else to tell you at this point.  There is nothing that Hillary Clinton could do that would be worse than this man at the helm of the United States Armed Forces, making Supreme Court nominations, and making and breaking foreign treaties.

Put your pride and ego aside and realize there are exactly two choices in this election, and make the right choice.  Period.

StupidiNews!

• A second night of protests in Charlotte have prompted NC GOP Gov. Pat McCrory to declare a state of emergency and ready the NC National Guard to deal with further protests.
• The US Senate has easily turned back efforts by KY Sen. Rand Paul and CT Sen. Chris Murphy to stop $1.15 billion in arms sales to Saudi Arabia.
• Federal Reserve Chair Janet Yellen left interest rates unchanged this week but hinted strongly that an interest rate hike is probable before the end of 2016.
• Several Trump campaign aides could be called as witnesses in the "Bridgegate" trial in New Jersey that started this week, including Gov. Chris Christie and Trump's son-in-law, Jared Kushner.
• Nashville's city council gave final approval to Google Fiber bringing internet service to the city but as with Louisville, AT&T plans to immediately sue the city to stop Google Fiber access to utility poles.