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The subhead of the New York Times piece with that headline appearing yesterday is “Why the left can’t win without a new Constitution.” I read it yesterday and planned to post about the thing, but, as has been happening too often lately, life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness intervened. Now I see that other sources are opining on it.

As regular readers here can guess, my initial reaction was “What a waste of time!” Here we are treated to Osita Nwanevu (above), a radical black Leftist (aka. “nascent totalitarian”) pushing his book, “The Right of the People: Democracy and the Case for a New American Founding.” Such a book can only appeal to other radical (and deluded) leftists, and it is also a waste of time. The author believes that a new Constitution is mandatory to save what he calls “democracy.” Even if he were right, Nwanevu might as well advocate mass surgery to graft wings onto all human beings, or the replacement of English in the U.S. with Esperanto. The chances of his “reforms” coming to pass are exactly zero. Not 5%, not 1%, but zero, unless one believes that a violent civil war is in the cards. The Constitution isn’t a perfect document, but no one can claim it hasn’t served the U.S. (and the world) extraordinarily well. The Founders, wisely or luckily, made the process of changing it difficult and burdensome, making radical alterations unlikely to the vanishing point.

To its credit, and you know how I hate to write that about the New York Times, the paper did put one of its token conservative pundits, Ross Douthat, in charge of interviewing the author. Douthat reveals himself as a weenie, however, and never challenges Nwanevu as forcefully as the extremist’s nonsense deserves. Observe this section, for example:

Douthat: All right, let’s do an excursion back in time to the American founding, because one of your arguments is that America was not actually intended to be a democracy.

 

Nwanevu: Right.

 

Douthat: That in fact, we should understand our founding almost in terms of a kind of oligarchic coup.Talk a little bit about your view of the founding.

 

Nwanevu: So when you raise some of the objections that I’ve raised about the nature of our system, conservatives will often say: well, we’re a republic, not a democracy. I think liberals, by habit, say: No, no, no, that’s not true — the founders actually intended democracy, but they messed up in 50 million different ways.

 

I think the conservatives have the better side of the argument when you actually look at the historical record. People should understand that the Constitution is forged in a particular political and economic context.

To all of which the required response is “Ya think?” Everyone literate knows that while the Founders were committed to democratic principles (as articulated by the nation’s mission statement, the Declaration of Independence), they were sufficiently educated, wise and practical to know that pure democracies don’t work, and come to disastrous ends. Nwanevu “thinks” the argument that the nation was founded as a republic is the better one? It was founded as a republic. The Constitution was “forged in a particular political and economic context”? What historical document in world history wasn’t forged in a particular political and economic context?

The real value of the Times feature is this: Nwanevu shows vividly how hostile the current American Left is not only to the Constitution but to the democratic processes created by it, as well as pluralism. His attitudes explain why Democrats think it is acceptable to cheat in order to hold power; his theories reek with the “it isn’t what it is” deception that has become the operating system of the Axis of Unethical Conduct.

He wants to abolish the Senate so the the large, knee-jerk Democratic states can dominate national policy forever. Tough: the Founders respected and protected the pluralistic ideal of individual states with their own unique cultures having the power to avoid tyranny of the majority, and as Baretta would say, “That’s the name of that tune, baby.” He wants the Electoral College to be abolished for the same reason (and because it was why the Obama un-making of America was stopped in its tracks despite the Democrats’ efforts to rig the 2016 election). Packing the Supreme Court would eliminate the Founders’ prescient plan to ensure that the Constitution isn’t shredded every time the same party rules Congress and the White House.

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Here’s how the increasingly despicable Daily Beast introduced the story about Trump’s “summit” with Vladamir Putin:

President Donald Trump has given Russian President Vladimir Putin the red carpet treatment as they arrived for their historic summit, applauding the Russian autocrat before offering him a ride in the presidential limousine known as The Beast.

As the pair landed at Joint Base Elmendorf-Richardson Friday—three years after Russia invaded Ukraine—Trump greeted Putin with a military flyover and a handshake before the pair smiled for the cameras on a makeshift podium.

The extraordinary scene was the first time Putin, who has been largely frozen out by the West, has been on U.S. soil in 10 years.

It was also the first time an American president has given the VIP treatment to a Russian leader who faces an arrest warrant for war crimes issued by the International Criminal Court as well as being sanctioned by the U.S. government.

Is it possible to be more contemptible? This hack news aggregator is using a diplomatic effort in pursuit of a laudable goal—the end of hostilities that have claimed over a million casualties and devastated a region to continue the discredited and debunked Democrat narrative that Trump is somehow in league with Russia against U.S. interests. Would it be possible to write that section in snottier, more biased, less ethical fashion?

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Here’s a smoking gun: Records uncovered in the recently settled lawsuit by police sergeant Charlotte Djossou showed that D.C. police department leadership ordered the staff to file theft and violent crimes as lower-level offenses.

The sergeant accused Metropolitan Police Department leaders of misclassifying offenses to deflate the district’s crime statistics. Police superiors told officers to downgrade theft cases, knife attacks, and violent assaults to lesser offenses, as shown by internal MPD emails, depositions, and phone call transcripts.

Djossou’s suit was filed in 2020, alleging that police leadership punished her for speaking out against the scheme. She accused MPD brass of deliberately to “distort[ing] crime statistics” by “downgrading a number of felonies to misdemeanors, so that there will be ‘fewer’ felonies in the statistics.” She also provided records proving that police leaders instructed their subordinates to under-classify varieties of theft to keep the crime statistics artificially low.

The New York Times, Washington Post, and Politico all used data from the Metropolitan Police Department to argue that the District is as crime-free as Oz and that Trump’s takeover is really just an early stage of his dictator aspirations. Did their coverage mention Djossou’ s suit? Naw. Did they disclose that a D.C. police commander is currently on leave after the city’s police union accused him of manipulating crime stats? Of course not. Can the public trust the mainstream media to fairly report on any initiative by the Trump Administration? Can the public trust any politicized institution to tell the truth about their effectiveness?

There are more details here.

If we can’t trust the statistics to be honest and true, then all the indignant claims about crime rates dropping are unreliable. That alone is justification for a federal takeover of the D.C. law enforcement operation.

Typical of the “If Trump does it, it’s bad” mania has been the attacks on his choices for the Kennedy Center Honors program this year. The list includes the band Kiss, “Phantom of the Opera” star Michael Crawford, country music legend George Strait, actor Sylvester Stallone and disco legend Gloria Gaynor. I have had insider intelligence regarding these choices in the past (it’s sausage-making), and I’ve also reviewed the history of the honors. The only major departure from tradition this time is that there are no “high culture” awardees on the list, no classical composers, opera singers, ballet dancers or serious novelists. But past honorees have included such legends as “The Flying Nun” star Sally Field, Neil Diamond and Big Bird: if the list had come from the typical progressive cabal that has run the Kennedy Center since its inception, nobody would have blinked. It’s a little like baseball Hall of Fame choices: it is easy to find past honorees who were equally or less deserving.

Is Trump deliberately poking progressive culture in the eye with his takeover of Kennedy Honors? Sure he is, and I’m glad. The honorees and the previous regime insulted him and his office by cutting Trump and Melania out of the gala in his very first year of his Presidency. I condemned this at the time, writing that the threatened boycott of the ceremony by some of the awardees in 2017 should have been responded to by a curt “Fine, we’ll give the honor to someone else, then. Good luck in your future endeavors.”

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Once again, we have the conservative news media hammering at what it believes is a damning story while the mainstream media hasn’t reported on it at all.

Recently declassified documents have raised legitimate questions about whether the Trump-Russia collusion “Get Trump!” project was a deliberate, Barack Obama-approved plot in coordination with Clinton’s 2016 campaign and engineered by the “Deep State” intelligence community. This is being investigated, and it will be interesting to see if the Axis of Unethical Conduct can protect its heroes from the legal accountability they deserve. I thought it was pretty clear that this was what transpired long before Kash Patel and Tulsi Gabbard got involved, but of course, this makes me vulnerable to confirmation bias.

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Invoking section 740 of the District of Columbia Home Rule Act, President Trump has deployed National Guard troops to D.C. and is taking over the Metropolitan Police Department (MPD) to “help reestablish law, order and public safety” in the city. The President has the power to do this for 30 days; anyone calling it a frightening use of autocratic power is in the revolting camp of those who believe that any legitimate exercise Presidential power is fascistic and dangerous if this President is the one exercising it.

Naturally, Trump being Trump, he has been exaggerating the extent of D.C.’s problem. PBS, which, to its enduring shame, used phony factchecking site PolitiFact to challenge Trump’s hyperboles, noted that Trump’s stats were from 2023 and that “at least 49 other cities in the world had higher homicide rates” in that year. Oh! Then what’s all the fuss about? Here’s one: none of those cities is the capital of the United States of America. D.C.’s crime and murder rate are above the national average. The nation’s capital should be a model of safety, public civility and fealty to the law, not a city that’s “not as bad as it used to be and you can find others that are even worse.”

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This is excellent.

The letter is hard to read, but a quick summary would be this: The Trump Administration is threatening to seize Harvard’s patents for discoveries and inventions developed with federal funds because Harvard failed to disclose them as required by law, commercialized them abroad before doing so in the U.S., or in other cases failed to convert them into practical use. The university, which has metastasized into an weapon of Leftist indoctrination and pursued the corruption and politicization of higher education for decades while using its aura of virtue and superiority as a shield against accountability, has been relying on the Axis of Unethical Conduct, notably the news media and its manipulation of public opinion, to insulate it from the Administration’s long-overdue intervention.

It chose…poorly.

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This post sparked several excellent comments, but the exchange between Holly A. and Cees Van Barnevelt was particularly outstanding. Holly’s comment was more political analysis than ethics (not that there’s anything wrong with that) but CVB’s response touched on two ethics issue that get short shrift today: 1) the fact that Donald Trump is indeed a patriot, is addressing matters as he promised to address them, 2) his popularity and power is mostly due to that, and not some kind of mindless cult of personality. (That was Obama.)

Here is Holly’s Comment of the Day on the post “Why Do So Many Democrats and Progressives Think Punishing Americans For Their Opinions and Beliefs Is Ethical Conduct?,” followed by CVB’s retort:

***

CVB: “My first question is what you mean about the Republicans unraveling today? I see the Trump administration getting quite a lot of work done, and fulfilling the promises made during the election. Are you referring to Congress?”

ME: Good question. I see the Democrats as unraveling externally, the Republicans as unraveling internally. Hence the disintegration of the former is easily observable, while the latter still looks quite sound. Congress has managed to pass legislation in record time and with a slim majority, which is a considerable feat! And yes, the Trump administration has also been busily at work with some clear accomplishments in line with campaign promises. What I see as the structural unraveling at the core of the GOP is the transformation of what used to be a party with a reasonably coherent set of values (as articulated by JM) into a personality/strongman cult in which loyalty/submission to the leader trumps adherence to values and attention to the priorities of their constituents. While they are in power, this looks like unity and strength. But what will things look like in the post-Trump era? Succession issues are one of the ways empires fall apart and companies fail. However, whether this supposition is correct will await the next chapter.

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