Battle Not With Monsters: It’s Biden & The Dems Who Might Have the ‘Fascism’ Problem

 

“If there are fascists in America these days, they are apt to be found among the tribes of the left,” writes Lance Morrow, in a WSJ column headlined Biden’s Speech Had It All Backward that upends ideological labelling, political virtue-signaling and self-stroking liberal historical narratives about “hate” and “enemies.” You can argue with the way he equates Trumpist America First with that of Robert Taft, pre Pearl Harbor. But he does capture the moral projection at the center of what Biden called “The Battle For The Soul of the Nation.” As Nietzsche warned: “Be careful when hunting monsters, lest you become one.”  

According to Morrow:

 

The Democrats have the “fascist” business wrong. 

 

Donald Trump isn’t a fascist, or even a semi-fascist, in President Biden’s term. Mr. Trump is an opportunist. His ideology is coextensive with his temperament: In both, he is an anarcho-narcissist. He is Elmer Gantry, or the Music Man, if Harold Hill had been trained in the black arts by Roy Cohn. He is what you might get by crossing the Wizard of Oz with Willie Sutton, who explained that he robbed banks because “that’s where the money is.” 

As for Mr. Trump’s followers, they belong to the Church of American Nostalgia. They are Norman Rockwellians, or Eisenhowerites. They regard themselves, not without reason, as the last sane Americans. You might think of them as American masculinity in exile; like James Fenimore Cooper’s Natty Bumppo, living in the forest has made their manners rough.

If there are fascists in America these days, they are apt to be found among the tribes of the left. They are Mr. Biden and his people (including the lion’s share of the media), whose opinions have, since Jan. 6, 2021, hardened into absolute faith that any party or political belief system except their own is illegitimate—impermissible, inhuman, monstrous and (a nice touch) a threat to democracy. The evolution of their overprivileged emotions—their sentimentality gone fanatic—has led them, in 2022, to embrace Mussolini’s formula: “All within the state, nothing outside the state, nothing against the state.” Or against the party. (People forget, if they ever knew it, that both Hitler and Mussolini began as socialists). The state and the Democratic Party must speak and act as one, suppressing all dissent. America must conform to the orthodoxy—to the Chinese finger-traps of diversity-or-else and open borders—and rejoice in mandatory drag shows and all such theater of “gender.” Meantime, their man in the White House invokes emergency powers to forgive student debt and their thinkers wonder whether the Constitution and the separation of powers are all they’re cracked up to be. 

Mr. Trump and his followers, believe it or not, are essentially antifascists: They want the state to stand aside, to impose the least possible interference and allow market forces and entrepreneurial energies to work. Freedom isn’t fascism. Mr. Biden and his vast tribe are essentially enemies of freedom, although most of them haven’t thought the matter through. Freedom, the essential American value, isn’t on their minds. They desire maximum—that is, total—state or party control of all aspects of American life, including what people say and think. Seventy-four years after George Orwell wrote “1984,” such control (by way of surveillance cameras, social-media companies and the Internal Revenue Service, now to be shockingly augmented by 87,000 new employees) is entirely feasible. The left yearns for power and authoritarian order. It is Faust’s bargain; freedom is forfeit.

Mr. Trump, the canniest showman in the White House since Franklin D. Roosevelt, introduced into 21st-century politics what seemed to be new idioms of hatred, a freestyle candor of the id. Doing so, he provoked his enemies—and finally Mr. Biden—to respond in kind: a big mistake. In the early 1950s, when Sen. Joseph McCarthy was loose in the land, and roughly half the country supported his anticommunist inquisition, President Eisenhower wisely decided, “I will not get into the gutter with this guy.” It took a while for McCarthy to implode. 

When Mr. Biden spoke in Philadelphia the other night, he might have been thinking of FDR’s speech at Madison Square Garden on the night of Oct. 31, 1936, at the end of his presidential campaign against Alf Landon—and, by the way, three months before he tried to pack the Supreme Court. That night, Roosevelt boasted that his enemies (Republicans, plutocrats, et al.) “are unanimous in their hate for me.” With a flourish, he added, “I welcome their hatred!

Americans, lamenting the divisions of 2022 and, some of them, entertaining fantasies of a new civil war, should refresh their historical memories. The country has been bitterly divided against itself any number of times. The hatreds and convulsions of the 1930s (the era of Huey Long and Father Charles Coughlin and the Silver Shirts, of homegrown tribes of Trotskyists and Stalinists) culminated in the ferocious battle between isolationists and internationalists that lasted until the Sunday morning of Pearl Harbor. 

The motif of political hatred returned to America almost as soon as World War II ended. The Alger Hiss case of 1948 warmed up the enmities, and McCarthy blew on the coals and turned half of the country against the other half. Such hatred seems cyclical. The 1960s (assassinations, civil rights battles, urban riots, the Vietnam War) had Americans at one another’s throats again. Those eruptions of political rage occurred in the years when the baby boomers and Joe Biden (who was a few years older) came of age and acquired their idea of what America is all about. 

That night in 1936, Roosevelt, warming to the language of hatred, suggested that his enemies should get out of the country: “Let them emigrate and try their lot under some foreign flag.” Mr. Biden—who, as he spoke in Philadelphia, was bathed in a lurid red light that seemed, as it were, ineptly theological—was content to cast his foes into outer darkness.

Annals Of Bunco: Skeptical Questions About Jeffrey Goldberg's 'Suckers & Losers' Story That 'The Atlantic' Just Can't Seem To Answer

 

To: Anna Bross, Director of Communications, The Atlantic.

Fr: William McGowan, Coloring The News blog

Re: Jeffrey Goldberg’s Suckers & Losers Story 9/20 

Date: March 23, 2022

 

Hi Anna: 

As I’ve explained several times over the last year, I’m working on a book—my fourth—about intellectual dishonesty and repression in the time of Trump and Woke. (Working title at the moment is The Captive Mind as per Czeslaw Milosz or maybe Battle Not With Monsters from Nietzsche.) Part of the book is about “Resistance Journalism” and the collapse of norms and standards in the media during campaign 2020. As you may have noticed, we are still digging our way out of that wreckage. Case in point, the NYT’s admission last week that the emails on Hunter Biden’s laptop were authentic, not anything close to Russian disinformation. Likewise revelations about Kamala Harris’ experience and competence as well as Biden’s mental fitness. 

But many in the media resist accountability, still unready to acknowledge how far off the rails the press went in order to drive Trump from the White House.  

 

Along these lines, I’m looking pretty closely at Atlantic editor Jeffrey Goldberg’s Suckers and Losers piece from early September, 2020, and would really like answers to the questions I have been posing to you at regular intervals for more than a year now, but which you and others at the Atlantic I’ve reached out to---Don Peck, David Frum, Jim Fallows and Nicholas Thompson--- have refused to engage. Again: For more than a year now.  

The follow up reporting that Goldberg said would be forthcoming over 18 months ago has not materialized. I’m getting the feeling that Goldberg’s piece is not nearly as sturdy as he insisted when it first dropped. In fact, after much triangulated reading and re-reporting, I can’t dismiss that the piece may in fact be a “Deep State” dirty trick that Goldberg got suckered by, or that it might be a fabrication---a good-old, whole-cloth hoax. As the hacks on Fleet street used to say back in the day, “Make it early. Make it short. And if you have to make it up.”  

 

So once again I’d ask you have a look my inquiries and come back with some kind of response. My questions are:

1/ A few days after the piece dropped, Goldberg said he would have more reporting in the coming days to bolster the story; CNN characterized him as saying what we’d seen so far was just “the tip of the iceberg.” Addressing his reliance on four anonymous sources to make the claims he did about Trump’s reluctance to go to a World War I American military cemetery while in France, Goldberg told Jim Sciutto that he would be “continuing to make the effort to move this material directly on to the record.” 

So, what happened to that reportorial effort to expose the rest of the iceberg by getting the unnamed sources to forgo their anonymity? (In fact, instead of an iceberg, there has been even less than a warm bucket of spit.) Why didn’t Goldberg have any luck in moving his sources onto the record as he assured us they would? And why was he so confident those anonymous sources were going to come forward; had they agreed to do so before and then pulled out after the piece came out, perhaps dismayed by the way the Atlantic seemed to have coordinated the publication of the piece with post-Labor Day Biden campaign schedule? Did Goldberg get out too far over his skis on this point, panicked maybe by the pressure that skeptics of the piece put on him? (I’m pretty sure I saw flop-sweat when Goldberg was on CNN’s Reliable Sources w Brian Stelter.)  

2/ Goldberg’s piece maintained that Trump didn’t go to the military cemetery in France because he had contempt for the dead soldiers there and that the excuse he gave that the weather was too inclement to fly in a helicopter to the cemetery was a cover for not wanting to drive the 1.5+ hours each way it would take there, which might get his high-maintenance hairdo wet. On one cable interview, Goldberg added that Marine pilots were actually miffed at Trump blaming the weather, taking it as a slight to their flying skills. 

Within days it was learned that the Navy had in fact determined that bad weather had made it too risky to fly and that documentation of that determination was sought and received in a 2018 FOIA request by Buzzfeed’s Jason Leopold, which Leopold had posted on Leopold’s Twitter account, which was not referenced in Goldberg’s story. This documentation would seem to have splintered a major plank of Goldberg’s story. And also raised more doubts about his heavy reliance on anonymous sources when more objective documentary evidence was not too hard to find. 

So why was there never a correction to the story, or at least an editorial clarification noting what the Navy said about the weather in France at the time and the decision to forego flying that day? Why did your fact checkers decide to go with what the anonymous sources said about the decision not to fly over what the Navy told Jason Leopold in 2018, presuming the fact checkers were aware of that FOIA request? What’s with this concealment? (Apologies for the trope.) 

3/ The piece says that Goldberg’s relied on “four people with firsthand knowledge of the discussion that day.” It distinctly does not say these people were actually on the line for these discussions and accurately heard what was being discussed first hand, perhaps by themselves or by others in the chain of command. This suggests to me that the sources of information about that phone call might have been from the national security personnel who routinely monitor presidential phone calls, either when the president is speaking with foreign leaders in the Oval office or when the president is travelling overseas. It also suggests that the “first-hand knowledge” of the substance of the discussions might have been distorted in the re-telling, as in a game of phone tag, either innocently or intentionally. 

Could what Goldberg’s sources said was “first-hand knowledge” of the discussion actually have been something other than “first-hand?” Did the Atlantic make any effort to determine whether what Goldberg heard was actually “from the horse’s’ mouth?” 

4/ Alex Marlow, editor of Breitbart and author of the NYT best-seller Breaking The News: Exposing the Media’s Hidden Deals and Secret Corruption. (Threshold Editions, May 2021)  says the strongest reason for doubting the Goldberg story is the numerous for-the-record  denials from various Trump aides who were on the trip and would have been in direct position to know because they were in the room when discussions were being conducted between the President’s entourage in France and the Secret Service in Washington. (pp 43-48) Why were these sources not contacted for the original piece? And why were their subsequent denials to other publications not noted in any follow up reporting once those denials were noted? Not all of the deniers were still working for Trump or even in his good graces at the point Goldberg published his piece, it should be noted. John Bolton, for example, had left the White House in a highly agitated, irritable state and had published a very negative book about Trump and his experience as National Security Director. Bolton said he never spoke to anyone from the Atlantic and certainly did not hear anything that Goldberg reports. Did you reach out to these Trump aides and officials and were rebuffed? Or did you not reach out?   

5/ I noticed that Goldberg interviewed Lt. Col. Alexander Vindman shortly after the Suckers and Losers piece, posting that interview on September 14th. Can’t help but ask: Was Vindman a source or did he help Goldberg locate a source, courtesy of the network of national security aides Vindman was part of before the Ukraine/Impeachment imbroglio and his subsequent retirement earlier this year? Was there any involvement from Eric Ciaramella, the CIA analyst who was te actual whistleblower on the Trump’s Ukraine impeachment phone call with whom Vindman colluded? Did Goldberg have any role in securing Vindman a visiting fellowship at the University of Pennsylvania’s Perry World House this last year for his PhD? 

6/ Did Goldberg’s much-derided and debunked New Yorker piece about Saddam’s fictitious WMD program and Saddam’s equally fictitious ties to Al Qaeda (The Great Terror, March 25, 2002) cast a shadow over the fact checking process for the Suckers and Losers piece? Many of Goldberg’s sources on that effort---anonymous sources as well as sources who allowed themselves to be named---quite obviously lied to Goldberg, and inputs from intelligence sources--- American, German and Israeli---were unreliable. Were there a lot of “on author” notations on the Atlantic manuscript as a New Yorker fact checker told me there was on that 2002 WMD piece, meaning that the magazine had no documentation and had to rely on Goldberg’s word and that word alone? Are any of those fact checkers still working at the Atlantic?  

7/ Could you comment on the account of Suckers and Losers in Battle for the Soul: Inside the Democrats’ Campaigns to Defeat Trump, a book that was published in May of last year(2021) by former Atlantic writer Edward-Isaac Dovere who is now at CNN? (see pp 415-416)  If you’ll recall, a day or so after the Suckers and Losers piece dropped, Dovere put a question to Biden at a press conference about it---the lead question in fact. What did Biden think about the story and what it said about Trump’s “soul,” Dovere wanted to know. So at that point in time, at the very beginning of the campaign’s final, post-Labor Day leg, I think it’s safe to assume that Dovere had no problem with the credibility of the piece.

But the way that Dovere’s book is worded in relation to the Goldberg piece leaves the impression that the author lost a bit of confidence in it since the time Goldberg’s piece dropped and the time the book went to the printer. (Note, again, that Dovere left the Atlantic and is now at CNN) It’s as if he’s trying to distance himself from it, that he developed the sense that it is tainted. Dovere doesn’t even mention the Goldberg piece by its title, instead referring to it as “an article in the Atlantic.”  And his description of the text lacks detail, as if a fact-checker or a lawyer went through it and took out anything that could not be corroborated or verified independently. Anybody at the Atlantic notice this? Anyone from outside the magazine reviewing Dovere’s book or writing about it for publicity call in about this?

8/ I have not done any kind of rigorous analysis of the frequency of Goldberg’s television appearances since Suckers & Losers but you as the magazine’s publicist probably have that information at the ready. Has the publicly-aired doubts about this article’s credibility and veracity led any TV bookers to bar or cancel Goldberg in places where he might have  otherwise been invited? 

9/ Goldberg’s story implies that Trump was less than patriotic---and that on that trip to France at least, he put his complicated hairdo first instead of valorizing honorably dead American soldiers.

 

But is Goldberg the appropriate person to cast aspersions here about patriotism given his own complicated relationship to American patriotism? Many saw Goldberg’s erroneous WMD story as an example of “Israel First” journalism practiced by many neocons in the run-up to the Iraq Invasion: Which makes him an ironic defender of the honor of American troops, almost 5000 of whom perished in Iraq.  

 

Could you help me understand why Goldberg was never held to account for that 2002 WMD story---neither by the New Yorker or by the Atlantic--- despite the WMD story representing one of the most salient journalistic blunders of all time? 

 

Also, why Goldberg himself has never explained his reportorial failures here, and why he has been abusive and mean whenever he’s been pressed about it, most notably by the German war correspondent Carolin Emcke, author of Echoes of Violence? It might be relevant here to know whether Goldberg still a dual US-Israeli citizen or has he given up the Israeli passport as he told Paul Starobin of the Washingtonian he was about to do in 2013? And how did one of the most important magazines in America come to have someone as its editor-in-chief who has served in Israel’s military but not that of the United States?   

10/ From April 6 to April 8^th the University of Chicago’s Institute of Politics and The Atlantic will jointly host a conference called “Disinformation and the Erosion of Democracy.” The gathering is being described as “a groundbreaking three-day event exploring the organized spread of disinformation and strategies to respond to it.” The conference will bring together “a top-tier group of experts, policymakers, journalists and politicians to analyze this important phenomenon.” Among the participants are former President Barack Obama ( who will be interviewed by Goldberg), David Axelrod (who heads the Institute of Politics at the University of Chicago) and Joan Donovan (of Harvard’s Shorenstein Center on Media, Politics and Policy). Joining them will be New York Times tech columnist Kara Swisher, former Times media critic Ben Smith, The Atlantic’s Anne Applebaum and Chris Krebs, former DHS cyber security director for elections. 

Explaining the basis for the conference, Axelrod said that disinformation and conspiracy theories “have become weapons with which to foment mistrust in our institutions, sow division and even political violence.” According to Goldberg: “Disinformation causes a great deal of stress on otherwise functioning democracies, and The Atlantic’s preoccupation, for 165 years, has been the state of American democracy, and the state of the democratic idea worldwide,” said Goldberg.  

Th Atlantic has been an keen-eyed sentry on the disinformation watch all through the Trump years. But it has also been a victim of disinformation, its susceptibilities to it on display in the overzealous way its own "top-tier" scribes have gone about reporting on  it. It dismissed the Hunter Biden laptop story, gave credence to the Russia Collusion hoax, was credulous about the Christopher Steele dossier at that hoax’s core and advanced Franklin Foer's completely bullshit Alpha Bank story which was planted by attorneys & operatives for Hillary Clinton's campaign-----including the hiring of Foer--- after the bogus story ran. It also pretended not to notice when its stories on these subjects came a cropper ---and that that Special Prosecutor John Durham is putting together a pretty good case against the Democratic National committee and its lawyers for lying to the FBI and to the CIA in order to get the government to surveil the Trump campaign in 2016. 

Will there be a panel on the Atlantic’s own dysfunctional experience with disinformation,  the Deep State dirty tricks it has been a part of and the erosion of its own journalistic credibility this has caused? If so, might you think about calling that panel “Suckers & Losers?”  

 

 

 

 

 

'A Problem From Hell:' US AID Director Samantha Power's Whiney Self-Pardoning January 6 Cliches

From Breitbart News: USAID Chief Samantha Power: My Job Is ‘Harder Today than It Was Before’ January 6

U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) administrator Samantha Power claimed her agency’s work is “harder today than it was before” the January 6 Capitol riots on the anniversary of the event.

Power characterized the Capitol riots as an attack on democracy and claimed that the lesson of the event was that “democracy must be defended,” according to a letter obtained by Breitbart News.

“A violent mob, consumed by lies and incited by peddlers of conspiracy theories, breached our nation’s Capitol in an attempt to overturn the will of the people and prevent a transfer of power that is a hallmark of our democracy,” Power wrote.

Power said those involved in the riots did “grievous harm” to “confidence in the strength of American democracy.” She further claimed the event caused damage to the country’s global standing among other nations and the “importance of nonviolent political transitions.”

She emphasized the impact January 6 had on America’s global standing once more, claiming, “We have since seen autocrats wield the events of January 6 to diminish America’s leadership and delegitimize our efforts to support global democracy.”

As head of USAID, Power is one of America’s representatives on the world stage. Her duties include monitoring the United States’ response to “conflict and humanitarian crises; and democratic backsliding.”

Power is a longtime diplomat who previously represented America internationally while serving as U.S. Permanent Representative to the United Nations during the Obama-Biden administration.

Powers’ views on January 6 mirror her former boss, former President Barack Obama. Obama claimed, “our democracy is at greater risk today than it was back then,” on the event’s anniversary.

Power similarly alleged that the events of January 6 made her job at USAID more challenging than it would otherwise be.

“There is no question that our work at USAID to promote democratic processes and ideals is harder today than it was before the insurrection,” she wrote.

Power described democracy as an “ongoing journey,” then posited that the United States’ “divisions and setbacks” are good reasons for the country to address alleged domestic threats to democracy.

Our own nation’s divisions and setbacks should encourage us to both confront the urgent threats to democracy at home and to approach others on the journey with humility. But we should never doubt the virtue of our pursuit.

She commended Congress for certifying the 2020 election results following the breach of the Capitol. Power concluded her letter by claiming the lesson January 6 teaches us is “that democracy must be defended.”

On A Silent Retreat Along The Hudson, A Skeptic Quietly Looks For 'The Present Possibility of God'

 

Here’s a Christmas story for the quietly faithful. From the WSJ, December, 1998: Quiet, Please.

"An acre of woods or seashore is not necessary to meet God." So notes the Jesuit writer William Barry, pointing out that it was in the cosmopolitan tumult of 16th-century Paris, and not in some pastoral setting, that St. Ignatius of Loyola gave spiritual instruction to the men who helped him found the Society of Jesus. 

But standing on the grounds of the Linwood Spiritual Center in Rhinebeck, N.Y., I can't help thinking that, for the average spiritually challenged person, a little solitary contact with nature might be a good thing. Located 90 miles north of New York City, the center sits on a promontory at one of the Hudson River's most majestic points. By day, the river sparkles with late autumn sunlight. At night the landscape is wrapped in absolute darkness. 

Apparently mine isn't the only soul that finds such a setting propitious. Around the country, men and women who hope to feel "the present possibility of God," as the theologians put it, are seeking out places like Linwood, drawn as much by the relief from urban stress as by the regimens of silence that are often imposed. "Sanctuaries: A Guide to Lodgings in Monasteries, Abbeys and Retreats" lists more than 1,200 retreat centers in the U.S. 

Although most religious traditions value contemplation, it is generally the Roman Catholic religious orders that run such retreats. Linwood -- once a home of Jacob Rupert Schalk, a brewery magnate -- became the property of the Sisters of Ursula in 1963. Founded in France in 1606, the Sisters of Ursula, like their Jesuit brethren, try to fuse contemplative withdrawal with worldly engagement. 

The nuns at Linwood have not taken lifelong vows of silence, but they do follow the precepts of Ignatian Spirituality, which commend periods of silence as a means of achieving the mystical recognition that God is in all things. Some of the nuns function as "spiritual directors" to visitors. In the course of a year, more than a 1,000 retreaters from all walks of life come to stay at Linwood, many spending their vacation time there. 

According to the Christian mystical tradition, silence is not just a pause between words but a medium that allows one to feel God "principally stirring and working," as the great Jesuit scholar William Johnston has written. There is a common misconception that silence is the means through which the contemplative achieves a oneness with God. In fact, the point of silence is to allow one to recognize that the oneness already exists, and that feelings of loneliness and despair are unfounded. 

As I made my own plans for Linwood, I thought that -- at the simplest level -- four or five days in retreat would be a break from the stress of a turbulent period in my life. But I also hoped for the kind of transformative experience that would reassure me that there was in fact A Plan and that God had included me in it. Abstractly, I believed in God, but it had been a long time since I could say I had felt his Presence. 

On the train I fretted over whether I'd find the experience of silence liberating or oppressive. I had read stories about people who had sought out the quiet of a monastic retreat only to flee, unnerved by the intensity of the introspection. 

Once I settled into the routine, however -- hours of solitary walking, reading and exercising punctuated by basic meals and an hour a day in conference with my spiritual director -- silence seemed like the most natural thing in the world. Although there were plenty of people around, I found myself not really interested in conversation, except (once) to find out who won the D'Amato-Schumer Senate race. Hardly a hair shirt, the verbal deprivation and solitude seemed almost luxurious. 

Sitting alone in the library one night, I seemed to sense the point "where something in the silence takes over and becomes active on its own," to borrow a phrase from the cleric Morton Kelsey. Touched by a feeling of surpassing contentment, I came about as close to a "still point" as I have ever come. The silence made the air lighter, more oxygenated -- clearer, even as it had become more richly textured. Silence really wasn't the absence of media, I began to sense. It was a medium unto itself, flooded with messages of subtle power. 

Not that the regime of silence was all sweetness and light. The bliss of night-time library visits competed with alternating states of anger and frustration on my daily walks. Anger, in part, at living in a media culture that so readily marginalized anything to do with the sacred, a culture ready to drown authentic spiritual striving in an ocean of irony. (I could just hear my friends groaning as I talked to them about this piece.) Frustration over the fact that, no matter how hard I tried to convert the feeling of contentment into a transfiguring spiritual dividend, I couldn't. Listening to the honkings of the geese in the bogs below, I began to wonder whether I was being mocked. 

Gradually, though, a new insight took hold, arriving from where I do not know. Although the Bible often presents spiritual transformation in dramatic terms -- the burning bush, the blinding light -- in fact for most people it does not come in blows. Spiritual apprehension is rather a subtle and incremental thing, in which an awareness of God develops slowly and deepens over time. 

I had entered the retreat with the hope of being bowled over. It was only after I realized how unrealistic this expectation was that I began to feel the nonepiphany epiphany that made the trip worthwhile. Although the "present possibility of God" remained for me only that -- a possibility -- there was nevertheless a fortifying certainty of heart. No blinding light but a foundation to build on. 

After five days, breaking the silence was a bit of a let-down, although it did offer me a chance to explore another kind of mystery. On my first night at Linwood, one of the groundskeepers had urged me to try to get a look at an albino deer that they had started seeing a few months before, around the time that Sister Rosemary McNamara, an albino herself, had arrived from North Carolina. I thought the story was just a hazing ritual, but this didn't stop me from patrolling the grounds after dinner, squinting into the dark, looking for the unicorn, so to speak. 

Ending my silence, I couldn't help asking Sister Rosemary about the deer. "That would be my cousin, Belva," she said, smiling. "The name is Russian -- for white." As elating as it was to confirm the existence of this creature, the words that followed left a deeper impression. 

I confided to her that I was worried that everything I had sensed that week was going to fade as soon as I left. She sat across the lunch table, the afternoon sun turning her into a pillar of blazing light. "You can either let this experience change your life, or you can say it was all a delusion," she said quite directly. "It's up to you." 

The Captive Mind: Is Alice Still In 'Wonderland' Or Is She In The White House?

 

Joe Biden campaigned on restoring the Soul of America, borrowing the title of a book by his friend & presidential historian Jon Meacham. The slogan, dripping in virtue and moral righteousness, implicitly promised he and his administration would be guided by the transparency and honesty that Donald Trump, often referred to as the nation’s “Liar in Chief,” so egregiously lacked. 

 

But as we have seen all too vividly recently, the president and his enablers are spectacular liars. They attempted to spin the debacle in Afghanizatan into “an extradordinary success,” to declare that the southern border with Mexico is “closed” even though 2 million migrants have poured over it this year and snipped that the supply chain crisis merely means that the well-to-do will have to be a little more patient about when their Stairmasters will arrive. In this administration White House press spokeswoman Jen Psaki is the penultimate gaslighter; she raises falsehood, obfuscation and concealment to an art form that is practically occult. 

As WSJ columnist Dan Henninger noted two weeks back we may have reached a tipping point in the way Americans conceive reality, citing the ways in which Team Biden has propelled us to this pass. “Ms. Psaki's skill at reordering reality for Mr. Biden is mesmerizing," Henninger wrote, "and I say without irony that she will be seen as an important figure in the transformation from believing what is real to believing what we're told is real .” 

A few days later the National Review’s Charlie Cooke satirized the Psaki style in exactly the right literary idiom, placing her “in dialogue,” as the post modernists would have it, with the hallucinogenic fiction created by Lewis Carroll. “Rumor has it that Alice (from Through the Looking Glass and Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland) is preparing to apply for a job in the White House press office,” Cooke noted. “If I had a world of my own,” Cooke quotes Alice as saying, perhaps lifting a line from the job interview notes she had prepared, “everything would be nonsense. Nothing would be what it is because everything would be what it isn’t. And contrariwise, what it is, it wouldn’t be, and what it wouldn’t be, it would. You see?” 

Cooke explained that Alice was certainly in the right place at the right time to apply for the “For having ­offered himself up as the savior of the American way, President Biden now finds himself in something of a pickle.” 

The jobs reports are lackluster. The border is a mess. Gas prices are sky high. Our supply chains are broken. Inflation, which was supposed to be “transitory,” looks more persistent by the day. Americans remain stranded in Afghanistan. China’s testing space nukes. COVID is not only still with us; it’s making its way into the Good States. And, despite its having been given a jolly, catchy name — the “Build Back Better agenda” — all the public seems to know about the president’s gargantuan spending plan is that it will cost trillions upon trillions of dollars. 

Down the rabbit hole, though, everything is still peachy. 

Indeed, insofar as America has any problems to speak of, they’re held to be either nonexistent, inconsequential, or somehow your fault. You may think you watched in horror a few months ago as a generational debacle unfolded in Kabul, but what you actually saw was “the largest US airlift in history.” Hurrah! 

You may believe that the southern border has been in a perpetual state of crisis from the moment Biden took office, but this is merely the sort of quotidian “circumstance” that could have happened under any president and is only happening now due to the inexplicable vagaries of climate change. How unfair! 

On first glance, you might think it more than a little startling that the Chinese Communist Party has managed to contrive a cache of hypersonic nuclear weapons that, if deployed correctly, would zip right past our defenses, but what you’re for some reason missing is that when it comes to the prospect of a nuclear apocalypse, “stiff competition” between nations is “welcome.” Natch. 

That inflation you’re worried about? It’s not going to happen, says the president. Or, at least, if it does happen, it’ll be because the government wasn’t permitted to spend enough of your cash. And anyhow, when you really think about it, inflation is a pretty “high-class problem” to have, isn’t it? In that sense, it’s a little like ­supply-chain disruptions, which you might well believe have the potential to seriously inconvenience you, but which, Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg confirms, are ­really just the positive byproducts of Biden’s having “successfully guided this economy out of the teeth of a terrifying recession.” 

Asked today about the potential impact that this successful economic guidance might have on the delivery of consumer products going forward, White House press secretary Jen Psaki explained that we don’t really need a functioning market anyhow. No one, she sniffed, should shed any tears at “the tragedy of the treadmill that’s delayed.” 

Bothered by this approach? There’s no need to be. Instead, relax into what the Washington Post’s Micheline Maynard submits should be your “new, more realistic expectations” for the future. “American consumers,” Maynard points out, have been “pampered and catered to for decades,” to such an extent that their first reaction to deteriorating economic conditions may well be to engage in an unacceptable and “spoiled” “whine” rather than to simply “make adjustments” so that the president’s feelings might be spared. 

Oh, and while you’re at it, you might take a moment to appreciate the sheer ingenuity of the alchemy by which this administration has managed to transmute $3.5 trillion into $0 through good intentions alone. Previous generations — the ones that sat around worrying about treadmills delayed in transit, no doubt — had to face hard questions, such as how best to raise the money they wanted to spend on public services. Our generation, by a striking piece of luck, can just insist those choices away with incantations. What a trick! 

It’s so devilishly clever, in fact — and so terribly simple to boot — that one can’t help but wonder why it hadn’t been thought of until now. 

All one must do to achieve the effect is respond to any criticisms whatsoever with an emphatic, “No, you absolute rotter, that isn’t happening at all; and if it is happening, it’s not too bad, ­really; and if it is bad, it won’t be bad for long; and if it is bad for long, well, that’ll be your fault.” 

Then, having handily dispatched one’s enemies, one can simply move on to the next objection, which, yes, might be based on things that people are actually seeing, but which is equally ill-founded, for reasons that will be decided upon by Twitter within the next few days. 

Alice, she says, is able to believe “six impossible things before breakfast.” Looks as if she’ll get the job. 

First It Was Christmas. Then It Was Free Speech. Now the Grinch Wants To Steal Halloween!

From Breitbart News: ADL Warns: Avoid Culturally Insensitive, Gender-conforming Halloween Costumes  

The increasingly partisan Anti-Defamation League (ADL) interjected itself into the annual Halloween debate this week when the organization advised parents to avoid Halloween costumes that are culturally insensitive and perpetuate gender norms. 

“Halloween is a week away and you and your family might be brainstorming costume ideas,” the ADL tweeted on Sunday. “Check out our resource for reminders about how and why to avoid cultural appropriation, cultural stereotypes, and costumes that perpetuate gender norms.” 

According to the ADL, parents should not let their children indulge in their desired costume if it appropriates from any culture, most especially Native American. If the child asks to dress up as Pocahontas, the ADL advised that parents use it as a teaching opportunity to enlighten their child’s mind to the rich cultural heritage of Native Americans. 

Before Halloween, be proactive by addressing these issues in advance and use it as an educational opportunity to discuss stereotypes, bias and cultural appropriation. Many children and families don’t realize that their costume choices are potentially hurtful or offensive. For example, a child who may be interested in Native American stories and history wants to dress up as a Native American person. Consider it an opportunity to talk with them about how Native American dress is not a costume. Instead, it is an essential part of identity, unique to each different tribe with their own customs and ways of dress. 

Help children understand that Halloween costumes are only fun or funny when they don’t hurt or make fun of other people or spread stereotypes. 

Beyond mere costumes that incorporate sombreros, hachimakis, or dashikis, the ADL also cautioned against costumes that offend people of lower economic status, such as “hobos,” “bums” or “rednecks.” 

Of course, none of those offenses compare to the horrific social crime of perpetuating “restrictive social norms around gender and sexual orientation.” 

While costumes targeted to boys place heavy emphasis on superheroes and action figures, choices like these convey the message that boys should be scary and gruesome. Many children are attracted to traditional gendered costumes, think girls who love princesses or boys who are obsessed with action heroes. When that is the case, it is best not to reinforce that these are the only appropriate options available. Engage in conversations with young people about gender stereotypes and discuss messages that companies send through marketing and advertising. 

Many Halloween costumes perpetuate gender stereotypes and exclude those who don’t conform to traditional gender norms, especially those who are transgender, non-binary or gender non-conforming. Be mindful that you may have students who feel excluded and marginalized by the overly gendered way Halloween costumes are marketed. 

Addressing teachers whose gender non-conforming students might feel ashamed in the presence of such gender-specific costumes, the ADL suggested schools tell the students that “there aren’t boy’s and girl’s costumes.”  

 

Day One In The Long War: Twenty Years After, 9/11 Feels Like Long Ago---And Only Yesterday

 

From Newsweek, As Citizen & Reporter: A 9/11 Memoir 

Tens of thousands of stunned, dust-covered office workers surged over the Brooklyn Bridge toward me, the devastated skyline at their backs. It was midmorning, September 11, 2001. The second World Trade Center tower had collapsed 20 minutes before; New York’s two tallest buildings reduced to rubble. I had heard on the radio that as many as six other planes had been hijacked. This later proved untrue. But at that moment, no one knew what might come next.

The impact of the second plane had rattled the windows of my Brooklyn Heights apartment so violently I had thought they might break. I’d rushed to my roof to see the towers first burn, then fall. The falling steel and shards of glass glinted in the glorious late-summer sun as a low volcanic roar swept across the water.

“You’re going the wrong way,” someone shouted. I kept walking, unable to say why. On the bridge were people of every race, ethnicity and social class, but they all wore the same look of terror. A wailing torrent of emergency vehicles set off dust swirls racing to the scene. The closer I got to Manhattan, the darker and smokier it became. As I walked closer, I had to pull my T shirt up over my mouth to breathe. I kept on going, as if the burning hole in the skyline was sucking me into itself.

Part of what was driving me was what Sebastian Junger has called an “amoral sense of awe” in the face of destruction, although after a few years as a young war correspondent in South Asia, I’d thought I’d gotten over this necessary journalistic evil. But as I passed police headquarters just over the bridge, I realized there was something else at work. New York is a big city, but for me, part of a family that has had four generations of New York City cops, it was a town, in distress as never before, and I was a townie. And so, for that day at least, “the ways of my people” eclipsed my reportorial instincts. I became a first responder, looking for some way, any way, to help.

At 10:45 that morning, City Hall Park was dusted with four inches of ash. Clouds of smoke and dust choked the streets off lower Broadway. A couple of loud “BA-BOOMS” shook the air—exploding ordnance in the arsenal that the U.S. Secret Service kept in its World Trade Center bunker, I learned later. As I stood dumbstruck across from the Woolworth Building on Broadway, a maniacal, motley-clad man in his 30s came out of the clouds. Pushing a cart loaded with bottles of drinking water, he looked like an extra from the film “Mad Max.” He had pulled a red T shirt over his face, completely obscuring it, and was wearing a pair of outsized aviator glasses. I asked him where the Red Cross was and where volunteers should report. “Just pick up some water and give it out,” he shouted, handing me some water bottles and a paper facemask. “God bless you, sir,” he said over his shoulder as he disappeared into the smoke. “God bless you.”

Then another man, this one in late middle age, staggered out of the clouds, wheezing badly. Wearing a smudged brown suit, he was carrying a preposterous, bulging brown leather briefcase. Grabbing him beneath the arms, I walked him two blocks up Broadway to an oxygen station. The man said he was a senior manager for FEMA. “I dove behind a truck,” he gasped. “That’s the only reason I’m alive. There were people behind me, but I don’t think they made it. There was seven feet of debris on the street.” Nearby, regrouping cops were so covered in dust you could hardly tell their uniforms were blue. Along with battered helmets, they were wearing the proverbial “thousand-yard stare.” They had been among the first at the scene, hit hard by cascading concrete and steel. One, who couldn’t have been more than 22, had been blinded by the debris.

I joined up with several nurses and doctors, some in scrubs, and headed over to a triage center at the Staten Island Ferry Terminal. The side streets there were even darker, the air even more noxious. As we double-timed it, a Fire Department paramedic supervisor walking with us took a quick survey. “What skills do we have? Who can do what?” he asked our group. “Who’s a doctor? Nurse? RN? NP? Paramedic? EMT?” First Aid and CPR, I volunteered, sheepishly, skills learned long before as a Central Park ranger.

We passed the Federal Reserve Bank, home to a few billion dollars in U.S. gold reserves. There, the acrid fog was so thick we literally bumped into a phalanx of guards with assault weapons at the ready. The adrenaline level was very high all around.

The chief of the New York Fire Department’s Emergency Medical Services briefed us at the terminal. Ours would be a standard triage with three zones: green for minor injuries, yellow for the next level and red for really serious cases. “There will be no freelancing,” the EMS commander ordered. “If you don’t know something, ask.” As we raced to assemble blood-pressure cuffs and blood-plasma trolleys, a couple of thirsty firemen used their emergency crowbars to try to open a couple of soda machines standing against a wall. They dented the machines but could not open them. Someone just brought down two of the world’s biggest buildings and somehow these soda machines were impregnable.

I was assigned to keep patients hydrated, to help wash out eyes and to keep track of names. “Got any Scotch?” asked one shaken elderly man when I handed him a cup of water. Almost everyone we treated spoke of ducking or diving into doorways to avoid debris and choking dust. Few had serious injuries; people either got away from the towers or they got killed. But the screams of the few in the red zone were chilling. Around 12:30 p.m., I heard two EMTs whispering to each other, not realizing I was in earshot. “We lost a lot of guys,” one said out of the side of his mouth. “They set up the command center right at the base of the South Tower and a lot of our guys got hit when the second plane went in.”

“How many we talking about?” his colleague asked, blank-faced. “How many unaccounted for?”

“Don’t know,” the first one said, grimacing. “But we’re talking whole companies, whole squads. Rescue One. Ladder Three. Ladder Four. A whole bunch of chiefs. Some companies, they can’t find anyone.”

In a corner, talking to a minister, a Russian woman in her early 20s was hysterical. Her younger sister, a very recent immigrant who had been working in the South Tower was missing. “I just feel like going there and digging, digging, digging with my bare hands to find her,” the woman sobbed, clawing the air.

Hardly anyone came in after 2:30. I decided to walk to another triage center, where I would make inquiries about the Russian woman’s younger sister. It was actually quite easy to get around. With a face mask and blue surgical gloves, no one stopped me.

Soon I was moving up the bottom of Broadway, passing Arturo Di Modica’s charging bull sculpture, which looked odd in the ashen desolation. Overhead, a few skyscrapers were on fire, burning debris sailing downward. Street-level was equally apocalyptic. Ambulances, fire trucks and police cars were scattered around, many crushed, without glass. A few of the fire trucks had their noses stuck in the debris with their backsides raised in the air. Some overturned cars were still burning, flames licking out of windshields and passenger windows. The sirens on some of the police and fire cars were still squealing, though in that weird sonic environment, the smoke muffled everything, as if it all was happening underwater.

Without the towers as markers, I was feeling lost. As it turned out, I was on the corner of Liberty Street and West Street: right at Ground Zero itself. There was only about 100 feet visibility. Occasionally the wind would shift. Then, eerily, like an iceberg breaking through the mist, the towers’ jagged facade would emerge. The break in the smoke would also allow a glimpse of rescuers on rubble, which was still burning in some spots. There was no sense of the scale of the devastation, which would only become apparent in coming days. Then the wind would shift again and the whiteout would resume.

Firemen were sitting on piles of wreckage, legs spread apart like uncomprehending 5-year-olds. Others had taken refuge in a darkened grocery store, sitting dazed and hollow-eyed in the dark. Rescue vehicles churned up muck as if it were snow in a blizzard. Huge padlocks had been placed on expensive, now evacuated, co-op buildings to secure them from looters. Around the marina at the World Financial Center, exhausted firemen sat in chairs usually reserved for cocktail-sipping bankers and brokers checking out the boats.

Finding it difficult to get to the other triage center, I made my way back to Ground Zero. More of the jagged facade of the collapsed towers was visible from this new angle, as was the burning hulk of 7 World Trade Center, flames roaring sideways out of that 50-story building before curling toward the blackened sky. The fire here now officially out of control, and fire supervisors were trying to clear the area before the now-inevitable collapse. “Get out of here! Go now!” one ordered.

Drifting over to a staging area along the West Side Highway, I found myself in a sea of firemen and rescue cops. Some were readying to go in, keeping the anxiety and stress at bay with jokes and verbal jabs, the air thick with New York accents. Others who had been there all day were cooling off, their overalls rolled down.

In the past seeing these kind of guys had prompted an awkward self-consciousness, my townie side being something that I often found difficult to acknowledge, especially in Manhattan’s snootier social and professional circles. But that day I felt nothing but pride both to be among them and to be one of them. I thought about the workings of fate: what if I had become a cop? By now I might be a captain or an inspector. I might be standing there formulating orders. Or I might be buried somewhere down the street, along with the first responders under my command.

On the far lip of the restricted zone, a young cop stood looking into the chaos. “I’m not supposed to be down here,” he explained, admitting he had left his assigned post further uptown. His dusty face was creased with sweat, and he stabbed his cell phone for what must have been the thousandth time that day. “But my brother’s a firemen and my mother just called me and said he might still be in there.”

In a bar on my way home, people were cringing and yelping as a TV news anchor announced that 7 World Trade Center, burning all day, was about to come down. Outside the street was on the edge of anarchy, as the building collapsed and its roaring cloud of smoke and dust chased panicking onlookers further uptown. “Everything will be back to normal in a couple of days, don’t worry,” a doorman at the Tribeca Grand Hotel reassured tourists, convincing no one.

With the Brooklyn Bridge now closed, and no trains running, I had to limp, sore-footed, across the Manhattan Bridge. The sunset sky was a beautiful aquamarine, streaked with red and purple. But the familiar skyline was now gouged, in a way that was almost human. It was as if somebody had had his nose ripped from his face or his teeth smashed from his mouth. A blood-orange sun sank into a black cloud of soot. Later that night, I looked into the mirror and saw a guy standing there with the same thousand-yard stare I’d seen all day long on the cops and firemen and medics I’d been with. I would wear that expression for more than a week.

* All photographs by William McGowan