![[Is that Trump or Biden out there on the wing?]](/ps/media/MV5BNmM0Y2Q0OGEtYmUzZi00NzBhLTgwYmEtNzFhNzcwZG.jpg)
Peter Berkowitz notes a metaphor he doesn't like: 'Flight 93 Election' Anti-Trumpers Imperil the Rule of Law.
On Sept. 5, 2016, The Claremont Review of Books’ website published “The Flight 93 Election” under the pseudonym Publius Decius Mus. The high-brow polemic went viral a few days later when Rush Limbaugh read it aloud on his radio show. Author Michael Anton – who served on President Trump’s National Security Council and is now a fellow at Hillsdale College and the Claremont Institute – analogized the choice between Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump to the one faced by passengers on the last of the four doomed commercial aircraft that had been hijacked by Al Qaeda terrorists on Sept. 11, 2001. If Flight 93 passengers did nothing, they faced certain death. If they charged the cockpit, they might still die, but they gave themselves a fighting chance to seize control of the plane.
A Clinton presidency, argued Anton, would plunge the nation into an authoritarian progressive dystopia, a secession crisis, or internal collapse. Meanwhile, despite his vulgar and erratic character and lack of government experience, “Trump articulated, if incompletely and inconsistently, the right stances on the right issues – immigration, trade, and war – right from the beginning.” Notwithstanding the manifest risks, maintained Anton, the real-estate mogul and reality-TV star gave hope of preserving America’s constitutional order.
Desperate times, Anton counseled, necessitated desperate measures. He did not call for lawlessness. But by maintaining that Clinton’s election would produce unmitigated catastrophe, he encouraged the notion that all bets were off if she prevailed at the ballot box.
Today’s anti-Trumpers go Anton one better. Whereas he warned of the danger of progressive dictatorship a mere two months before the 2016 election, anti-Trumpers have been sounding the alarm continuously against Trumpian tyranny since 2016 and have picked up the pace this cycle. This gives Democrats time to grasp the grave threat and take suitable precautions. But what precautions are suitable to thwart the authoritarian conquest of America?
Rhetoric gets escalated. I winced at a recent article by Ray Cardello at Granite Grok: It Is Time To Take Back This Country. And it's no less of a storm-the-cockpit call from the first paragraphs:
It is time to take off the gloves and get the knuckles bloody. It is time to stop playing softball and throw the heat high and inside, right under the chin. It is time to stop playing by their rules and take back this country.
It is time to nail Biden with a fastball that will make him double over in pain and not even know where first base is. It is time to take this country back by whatever means are necessary. The Democrats are destroying this country, and most Republicans are willing to be casual spectators. This dynamic must change, or we will someday see America replaced by a new Socialist experiment and wonder how that happened.
"Whatever means are necessary."
And in this morning's local paper, I note an LTE from one J. Michael Atherton of Dover. Who goes right to the Godwin's Law demo:
Trump insists he has not read Mein Kampf . This may be true but, perhaps, not the point. Scholars justifiably read it to study the mind of a sociopath. It helps them see warning signs before someone becomes a dictator with power to enforce his demented view of the world. That is, before it’s too late.
Non-scholarly people with anger issues and sociopathic tendencies read Mein Kampf as a how-to book. They read it to have their master, Hitler, show them the way. But that 'way' ended poorly for everyone. At the end of the war, for example, deep in the bowels of the Berlin bunker, Hitler’s right-hand man, Goebbels, killed his own six children, his wife, and then himself. Because of Hitler, Europe lay in ruins with millions of people dead, injured, or misplaced. Hitler caused the world’s economic structure to crumble. All this happened when gullible people followed the ideas of Mein Kampf even if they never read it.
No link, sorry, it's well-paywalled. But trust me, J. Michael goes on in the same vein for awhile.
This Flight 93ism from both sides can't be good. I can't help but think people are going to start shooting.
(I assume most everyone gets the headline reference, but just in case, here's the relevant Wikipedia page.)
Also of note:
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Is your blood pressure too low? Let me point you to a doctor-approved remedy. Specifically: Dr. Paul Releases 2023 ‘Festivus’ Report on Government Waste.
Some of the highlights include the National Institutes of Health spending a portion of a $2.7 million grant to study Russian cats walking on a treadmill and Barbies used as proof of ID for receiving COVID Paycheck Protection Program funds. The Department of Defense ruined over $169 million worth of military equipment by leaving it outside, the United States Agency for International Development spent $6 million to promote tourism in Egypt, and the Small Business Administration gave ‘struggling’ music artists like Post Malone, Chris Brown, and Lil Wayne over $200 million.
And nothing for Southside Johnny and the Asbury Jukes. Sigh.
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The science is settled. Also censored. Via Jerry Coyne: Anna Krylov (USC Chemistry prof) and Jay Tanzman (freelance statistician) shine their spotlight on scientific censorship.
Censorship—the suppression of facts and ideas—is as old as history itself. Censorship has been invoked to protect people's minds from corruption by bad ideas, to shield religious truths from heresy, to protect the feelings of the faithful from blasphemy, and to ensure the safety of the state in time of war.
Suppression of facts and ideas is antithetical to the production of knowledge; yet, from its inception, science has been a target of censorship. Despite the key role science plays in reducing human suffering, providing solutions to pressing problems of humankind, and improving the lives of people worldwide, censorship in science is endemic in even the most advanced democratic societies.
Recently, science journals and publishers have opened a new and disturbing chapter in the history of scientific censorship: the censorship of scientific articles that are alleged to be “harmful” to a particular group or population, a practice that violates the guidelines of the Committee on Publication Ethics (COPE). The practice began with scientific journals retracting articles in response to the demands of online mobs, but has since been codified into policy by various editorial boards and scientific publishers.
Your confirmation bias is a lot easier to maintain if there's no possibility disconfirming evidence will make it to your eyeballs.
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A worthy effort continues. The WSJ editorialists have some good news about The DEI Rollback of 2023.
The diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) bureaucracy on campus has proliferated in recent years, but there are signs it’s finally meeting resistance. The latest good news is from Wisconsin, where public universities will pare back some DEI programs and freeze them going forward.
Under a deal shaped by Wisconsin Assembly Speaker Robin Vos, the state approved $800 million in pay raises for university staff and for plans to build a new engineering building at the University of Wisconsin campus in Madison. In exchange, the university will freeze all DEI hiring, eliminate a third of DEI positions on campus, and create an endowed chair to teach “conservative political thought, classical economic theory or classical liberalism” at UW Madison. At least now there will be one conservative.
Come on, New Hampshire. What are we waiting for?
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If you answered "very", you were correct. John Hinderaker asks a mostly-rhetorical question: How Left-Wing Is the Press?.
That the “mainstream” press is overwhelmingly liberal is obvious to everyone, and I think is now admitted by most liberals. Still, it is interesting to see quantification of what we all know to be true.
The Economist attempted such an objective measurement, using an interesting criterion:
The first step in our analysis was compiling a partisan “dictionary”. We took all speeches in Congress in 2009-22 and broke them up into two-word phrases. We then filtered this list to terms used by large shares of one party’s lawmakers, but rarely by the other’s. The result was a collection of 428 phrases that reliably distinguish Democratic and Republican speeches, such as “unborn baby” versus “reproductive care” or “illegal alien” versus “undocumented immigrant”.
Next, we collected 242,000 articles from news websites in 2016-22, and transcripts of 397,000 prime-time tv segments from 2009-22. We calculated an ideological score for each one by comparing the frequencies of terms on our list. For example, a story in which 0.1% of distinct phrases are Republican and 0.05% are Democratic has a conservative slant of 0.05 percentage points, or five per 10,000 phrases.
The result was what you would expect.
There are pretty pictures (but as Hinderaker notes, no surprises) at the links.
![[The Blogger and His Dog]](/ps/images/me_with_barney.jpg)
