Summon the Sanhedrin! Convene the College of Cardinals! Alert the Ayatollahs! Bring me your best Talmudic Mishna-machers. We have a newly revealed Text to be limned. The usual oracles are agog. The unusual oracles are agogger. I have some thoughts, but first, the scripture:
A couple of weeks ago, I was watching a video of people fighting on the street in Washington. A group of Trump guys surrounded an Antifa kid and started pounding the living shit out of him. It was three against one, at least. Jumping a guy like that is dishonorable obviously. It’s not how white men fight. Yet suddenly I found myself rooting for the mob against the man, hoping they’d hit him harder, kill him. I really wanted them to hurt the kid. I could taste it. Then somewhere deep in my brain, an alarm went off: this isn’t good for me. I’m becoming something I don’t want to be. The Antifa creep is a human being. Much as I despise what he says and does, much as I’m sure I’d hate him personally if I knew him, I shouldn’t gloat over his suffering. I should be bothered by it. I should remember that somewhere somebody probably loves this kid, and would be crushed if he was killed. If I don’t care about those things, if I reduce people to their politics, how am I better than he is?
Yes, that is the secret Teaching of Tucker Carlson, the one that allegedly got him fired. But, Tucker a complex human being? With a conscience? And yet, still a bigot? Actually, the Text reflects the Tucker I used to know when we were riding campaign buses and planes together, before the dawn of social media and his revolting descent toward parlor fascism. That was one charming young man, always questioning and joking about his own actions and motives—very much like the Secret Scripture Tucker. He was conservative, yes. And smart, with a sense of irony. Indeed, I suspect the now-infamous “white men fight” line above was a bit of country club locker-room brohumor. Tucker surely knows that his hero, Mr. Putin, is a white man who fights excessively dirty. He may even know that Caucasian males industrialized genocide during World War II, in Auschwitz and elsewhere—and even the Caucasian good guys, i.e. us, incinerated whole cities filled with civilians in Germany and Japan and, later, left chemical disgrace in Vietnam. The version of “Tucker Carlson” portrayed on television was certainly guilty of unironic racism, as well as anti-semitism and nativism and a barge-load of conspiracy nonsense. But given the structure of the Text, Secret Tucker is a different guy—the racism seems a straw man for the introspection that follows.
What are we to make of this? The poison fog of dishonesty that wreathed TV Tucker was so convincing. The Text is sort of like discovering Iago had an inner life. I am not ready to grant Carlson even a trial membership in the Sanity Caucus; quite the opposite, he is the embodiment of all that has gone evil in our public space. But this is so weird: it was a private text. What was in it for him? Impossible to say, but Carlson is clearly one of our most talented and clever and therefore dangerous demagogues. Even now, defenestrated, he bears watching.
A finally thought: If this Text indeed was the end of the road for Carlson at Fox, was it the racism or the empathy that got him fired?
The Woking Dead Come for Science
All Hail Pamela Paul, whose New York Times column is a beacon against politically correct excesses in publishing and academia—two demographics very close to the zeitgeist of her publication, which makes her work all the more courageous. Here, she goes after something truly shocking: a left-academic attempt to bowdlerize the scientific method by insisting on a politically correct roster of supporters for an academic chemistry paper:
Is a gay Republican Latino more capable of conducting a physics experiment than a white progressive heterosexual woman? Would they come to different conclusions based on the same data because of their different backgrounds?
For most people, the suggestion isn’t just ludicrous; it’s offensive.
Yet this belief — that science is somehow subjective and should be practiced and judged accordingly — has recently taken hold in academic, governmental and medical settings.
Paul is absolutely right: this is a direct assault on the rigor necessary for truth-telling. The constant questioning and revision of the scientific method makes not only technological progress possible, but it also launched the social inquiry that created the Enlightenment, which midwifed the birth of our democracy. A few years ago, Jonathan Rausch wrote a wonderful book called The Constitution of Knowledge, a fulsome defense of the scientific method as the only way to establish what is true and what is not. It is horrifying, but not surprising, that left-academia has decided to sacrifice truth on the altar of identity.
And for the Oscars, Too…
This is less surprising. The Hollywood dunderheads are placing diversity blinders on their most prestigious awards:
Starting in 2024, a film has to meet certain diversity and inclusion standards in four different categories set out by the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences to be considered for “Best Picture” at the Oscars.
Full credit to Richard Dreyfus for reacting against it. In recent years, diversity has had its fair share on Oscar night. Most of the awards were justified; what was never justified was the constant complaining about “not enough” black or women or left-handed Mongolian nominees. Transcendent Art is not accountable to race or gender. It doesn’t even recognize criminality (Caravaggio was a murderer). Art is art, as Buddy Holly once said, not fade away. In an honest system, there may be years when no black (or white) actors are nominated and it will have absolutely nothing to do with social justice. In fact, with these silly news standards, the door will be opened to speculation that inclusion caused the a worthy performance to be excluded.
Civil Wrongs
Back in the 1990s, I wrote several columns about black inner-city Democrats and white, suburban Republicans in Georgia conspiring to redraw Congressional districts for their mutual advantage. Moderate districts were destroyed; extreme black and white partisanship triumphed. It’s still happening, according to Pro Publica, which unearthed secret negotiations between South Carolina Congressman Jim Clyburn and local Republicans to draw a district that favored his reelection:
This came at a cost: Democrats now have virtually no shot of winning any congressional seat in South Carolina other than Clyburn’s, state political leaders on both sides of the aisle say.
Now, Jim Clyburn has been an estimable and reasonable force in American politics. He was responsible for making South Carolina safe for Joe Biden in 2020—and thereby saved the Republic from a second Trump term. It should also be noted that the legality of drawing districts along racial lines was enshrined in the sainted 1965 Civil Rights Act. But it’s also another example of how making distinctions by race distorts our democracy, empowering extremists of both parties in most cases—Clyburn, the exception—at the expense of more moderate biracial districts. Democrats wail about gerrymandering, but they are curiously silent when it comes to this.
A Few Other Things…
If there is an anti-Trump in the moral universe, it is Ted Lasso.
If there is to be a monarch—and I suspect fealty is a primal feature of the human condition—then let it be someone like King Charles III, whose native impulse toward tradition, from preservation of the planet to architectural classicism, is at the very heart of a principled conservatism.
The utter corruption of Clarence Thomas is mind-boggling. (And I really like the lede of this WaPo piece.)
Finally: As a longtime, I won’t say long-suffering—I enjoyed the pain—Mets fan, I learned to root a certain way: We didn’t have the money the Yankees did to buy fancy players, we had to develop our own, slowly, in the minors. This was a catch-as-catch-can proposition; it didn’t happen often, but it was satisfying when a David Wright or Jacob DeGrom or, better still, someone truly unheralded like Jeff McNeill emerged. Now, we have a very rich owner, who has splashed money around to create what appears to be a very mediocre roster. My favorites, as always, are the young players we’ve developed in the minors—Brandon Nimmo, Pete Alonso, McNeill, Brett Baty and Francisco Alvarez (with a couple more coming soon). They play with passion. They are not hired guns. They are Mets.