Columnist.
On Sunday, The New York Times ran a piece by Jack Turban, a research fellow at the Yale School of Medicine. Turban says that doctors should begin applying puberty blockers to children who identify as transgender as early as possible. That's because, according to him, "it has become clear that if we support these children in their transgender identities instead of trying to change them, they thrive instead of struggling with anxiety and depression."
This week, the Washington Post published a long form piece about Vice President Mike Pence, which included a little tidbit that said, "In 2002, Mike Pence told the Hill that he never eats alone with a woman other than his wife and that he won't attend events featuring alcohol without her by his side, either."
Let's pretend. It's January 2017, and President Jeb Bush just took office.
Over the past two weeks, Democrats have begun to acknowledge that they have virtually no evidence demonstrating meaningful collusion between the Trump campaign and the Russian government. They proclaim that circumstantial evidence shows ties between Trump staffers and President Vladimir Putin — former Trump campaign manager Paul Manafort and former Trump advisor Roger Stone allegedly had significant contacts with the Russians. But to this point, they've got nothing.
Two weeks ago, political scientist Charles Murray of the American Enterprise Institute went to speak at Middlebury College. There, he was quickly surrounded by protesters chanting: "Racist, sexist, anti-gay. Charles Murray, go away!" On his way out of the venue, a violent throng surrounded him and his security, as well as one of the university professors. She ended up in a neck brace. The same week, supporters of President Trump held a rally in Berkeley, California, and anti-Trump protesters threw smoke bombs and began punching people.
Another week, another "nothing burger" Trump scandal.
President Trump's approval ratings are nothing special. Actually, they're extraordinarily low by historical standards — he's clocking in at 44 percent, according to the latest NBC News/Wall Street Journal poll. His support base is highly polarized, with 85 percent of Republicans behind him and just 9 percent of Democrats. If those rates drop steadily for the next two years — and given the level of polarization, they certainly could — Republicans would be in serious danger of losing the House, since low presidential approval ratings correlate significantly with House elections.
"Nobody panics when things go according to plan, even if the plan is horrifying!" the Joker says in "The Dark Knight." "Introduce a little anarchy. Upset the established order, and everything becomes chaos." Welcome to the Trump administration.
President Trump, we're told by his greatest advocates, will bring much-needed change. Why not merely ignore his rhetorical failings, his unsurpassed egotism, his confident ignorance? There's a good deal that's tempting about this proposal — who wouldn't want to separate the wheat from the chaff? I'm personally on board with perhaps three-quarters of Trump's policy implementation thus far in his presidency, even though I'm deeply concerned by his personal shortcomings. So why not just excise the shortcomings from the roll call?
It's been several decades since American politics has been so contentious. According to a Reuters/Ipsos poll taken after President Trump's election, 32 percent of California residents want the state to secede from America. In the middle of the election cycle, Public Policy Polling found that 40 percent of Texans would have wanted the state to leave the country if Hillary Clinton had won — and that included 61 percent of Trump supporters. Nationally, 22 percent of people now want to see their particular state leave the union.
We're barely a week and a half into President Trump's administration, and the left is in sheer panic mode. We've seen headlines blaring that Trump instituted a Muslim ban (he didn't). We've seen speculation that the Trump White House's failure to clearly inform the Department of Homeland Security how to implement his immigration executive order amounts to an attempted coup (nope). We've seen accusations that Trump will overthrow the judiciary, run roughshod over Congress and generally make a fascist nuisance of himself.
Why are leftists reducing women to their constituent body parts?
Last Saturday, in an attempt to demonstrate outrage at ... at ... well, at *something *, some three million people across the country, mostly women, participated in women's marches. The scattershot platform for the march included public funding for contraception and abortion, equal pay, protections for illegal immigrants, anti-Israel activism and taxpayer-subsidized tampons, among other disparate causes. What united them? Hatred for the reality that Donald Trump was sworn in as president of the United States on Friday.
This week, Rep. John Lewis, D-Ga., accused President-elect Donald Trump of being an illegitimate president. He said: "I think the Russians participated in helping this man get elected. And they helped destroy the candidacy of Hillary Clinton. ... When you see something that is not right, not fair, not just, you have a moral obligation to do something."
On Tuesday, Alibaba CEO Jack Ma, one of the richest men on the planet, met with President-elect Donald Trump at Trump Tower. After emerging from the meeting, he stood alongside Trump and announced: "We specifically talked about ... supporting 1 million small businesses, especially in the Midwest of America. Small businesses on the platform selling products — agriculture products and American services — to China and Asia because we're pretty big in Asia." Trump shook Ma's hand in front of the cameras and announced, "Jack and I are going to do some great things," before shaking hands.
On Tuesday, the U.K.'s Daily Mail reported that 23-year-old Anna Teshu of Staten Island, New York, has gone missing. Teshu's 15 minutes of fame began in 2015 when she was featured on the internet because her boyfriend was walking her around on a leash in public. Her boyfriend said: "The collar is like a ring for most couples. They use rings, we have a collar." Teshu reportedly enjoyed spending time in a puppy cage, as well. She explained, "The first time I put on a collar I thought, 'Now I need to find someone for the other end.'"
President Barack Obama likes to see himself as a moral leader. "The arc of the moral universe is long," Obama likes to say, quoting Martin Luther King Jr, "but it bends toward justice." According to Obama, Obama is a genteel representative of decency and good grace, a man pointing America toward a broader vision, a fellow questing for social justice and contextual consideration.
Last Friday, President Obama gave his last press conference as commander in chief. Undeterred by his would-be successor's devastating loss to Donald Trump in the presidential election, unswayed by Republicans' complete domination of Congress, state legislatures and governor mansions, he maintained his cool and collected self-aggrandizement. Why not? According to Obama, Obama has been a major success.
This week, the Washington Post reported that the CIA now believes that Russian-supported hacks of the Democratic National Committee and Hillary Clinton's campaign chair John Podesta were designed to boost Donald Trump's election prospects. The FBI apparently disagrees; it believes that the Russian intervention was designed to undermine faith in the election system generally. But all intelligence agencies agree that there was Russian support for the hacks themselves.
One of the great lies of the 21st century is that republicanism and freedom are inevitable. Actually, representative government and individual liberty are the exception, not the rule, and individual liberty often dissipates in the name of the collective, along with truly representative government. And yet, it's that feeling of inevitability that allows us to attack the basic values that undergird republicanism and freedom. Because we never think that those institutions are under assault, we're unafraid of chipping away at their foundations in the name of partisan politics.
