California Tries To Reboot Indoor Masking, Fails

In the New York Times this past Monday:

Less than a month after instituting a mask mandate for most indoor settings, health officials for Alameda County, the San Francisco Bay Area’s second-most populous county, lifted the order, citing improving conditions in a news release.

Mask requirements were reinstated earlier this month for restaurants, bars and offices and other places, in response to increased hospitalizations and new coronavirus cases across the county, which had exceeded last summer’s Delta variant wave.

The order was lifted Saturday after Alameda County, home to Oakland and 1.6 million people in the eastern Bay Area, moved from high risk to moderate risk for community transmission on Thursday, as defined by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention guidance.

Los Angeles County, which must have been humiliated to be beaten to the punch by Alameda up north, had nevertheless threatened to do the same:

LOS ANGELES (CNS) -- Mandatory indoor mask-wearing could return to Los Angeles County in a matter of weeks, possibly by the end of June, absent a downturn in the rate of new COVID-19 cases and virus-related hospitalizations, the county's public health director said Thursday.

Los Angeles County is currently listed in the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention's "medium" virus-activity category, based on its cumulative seven-day rate of new cases. But the county will move into the "high" category if its average daily rate of new COVID-related hospital admissions rises above 10 per 100,000 residents, or if the percentage of staffed hospital beds occupied by COVID-positive patients tops 10%.

. . . She applauded the step taken by Alameda County in Northern California, where an indoor mask mandate will take effect again on Friday. And she pointed to a pair of recent studies that suggested mask-wearing has a notable impact on reducing spread of the virus.

However, we managed to make it through June without the mandate being reimposed down here. A San Francisco news site, SFGATE, points out:

In early June, during an uptick in COVID-19 cases, Alameda County was the only Bay Area county to bring back an indoor mask mandate.

At the time, county Health Officer Dr. Nicholas Moss said, “Putting our masks back on gives us the best opportunity to limit the impact of a prolonged wave on our communities.”

But regional case data provides no discernible evidence that the rule, which was lifted June 25, succeeded at that goal.

. . . San Francisco and Santa Clara had higher case rates than Alameda County throughout the current surge, including pre-mask mandate. Once the mandate was introduced, the three counties all followed the same trend line, casting doubt on whether the mask mandate did anything to curb transmission at the community level.

It contacted Dr Moss for commeent, who replied,

“We believe the recent mask order contributed to the improvements we are now observing with COVID-19 in Alameda County,” Moss said in a statement. “Conditions are more stable now than at the time the Order was put in place.”

I think this points out that by and large, the world is done with COVID, and attempts to reboot the panic aren't going to work, even in the bluest of blue cities. The red light-green light approach is annoying and disruptive, and it erodes health officials' credibility. But it's indicative of where we are that President Biden is clearly on board with finding a new pandemic:

But we don’t just need more money for vaccines for children, eventually; we need more money to plan for the second pandemic.

There’s going to be another pandemic. We have to think ahead. And that’s not something the last outfit did very well. That’s something we’ve been doing fairly well. That’s why we need the money.

He can't wait.

But What's The End State?

Yesterday, President Biden gave a press conference at the end of the NATO summit in Madrid where he outlined the Western position on the Ukraine war. There was quite a bit of preening and bloviation, but he did announce a few details of where things might be headed:

Secretary Austin just brought together more than 50 countries — more than 50 countries — pledging new commitments, and this is a global effort to support Ukraine: nearly 140,000 anti-tank systems, more than 600 tanks, nearly 500 artillery systems, more than 600,000 rounds of artillery ammunition, as well as advanced multiple launch rocket systems, anti-ship systems, and air defense systems.

And again, the United States is leading the way. We provided Ukraine with nearly $7 billion in security assistance since I took office. In the next few days, we intend to announce more than $800 million more, including a new advanced Western air defense system for Ukraine, more artillery and ammunition, counter-battery radars, additional ammunition for the HIMARS multiple launch rocket system we’ve already given Ukraine and more HIMARS coming from other countries as well.

But in response to a question later in the press conference, there was little concrete:

But my second question is: G7 leaders this week pledged to support Ukraine, quote, “for as long as it takes.” And I’m wondering if you would explain what that means to the American people — “for as long as it takes.” Does it mean indefinite support from the United States for Ukraine? Or will there come a time when you have to say to President Zelenskyy that the United States cannot support his country any longer? Thank you.

THE PRESIDENT: We are going to support Ukraine as long as it takes.

I see a big difference between the high-level conduct of the Western powers in the Ukraine conflict and equivalent conferences during and after World War II. Take the 1943 Casablanca Conference, whose major figures appear at the top of this post.

The conference produced a unified statement of purpose, the Casablanca Declaration. It announced to the world that the Allies would accept nothing less than the "unconditional surrender" of the Axis powers. Roosevelt had borrowed the term from US Army General Ulysses S. Grant (known as "Unconditional Surrender" Grant), who had communicated that stance to the Confederate States Army commander during the American Civil War. So Roosevelt stated at the concluding press conference on 24 January that the Allies were demanding "unconditional surrender" from the Germans, the Italians and the Japanese.

In a February 12, 1943 radio address, Roosevelt explained what he meant by unconditional surrender: "we mean no harm to the common people of the Axis nations. But we do mean to impose punishment and retribution upon their guilty, barbaric leaders".

Biden's remarks, on the other hand, say simply that we're going to spend a lot of money for "as long as it takes". As long as it takes for what? Roosevelt articulated a clear war aim that was accomplished by August 1945 and followed by near-immediate demobilization. Subsequent conferences at Yalta and Potsdam articulated a relatively clear end state for the disposition of German territory and spheres of influence in postwar Europe.

Right now we're still lacking a war aim -- cease fire in place? Russian retreat to 2014 borders? The 1991 borders? Some other disposition? It's fairly plain that none of the previous Minsk agreements that tried to establish a stable separation of Ukraine and Belarus from Russia worked, so a war aim that tries to reestablish any of those won't solve the underlying problem. An unspoken war aim for the Allies in World War II was an end state that rendered Germany and Japan militarily innocuous, and this was effectively achieved in Yalta and Potsdam, especially with the partition of Germany.

We're seeing nothing like this so far with Ukraine, even though a realistic solution to the problem will almost certainly require an equivalent partition of Russia according to new spheres of influence that prevents Russia from building alliances of former constituent states big enough to move against others.

One problem is that President Biden is at best bought, with his domestic and foreign policy positions essentially discrete and controlled by separate factions in thrall to separate puppeteers. Thus his social policies are dominated by the transsexual lobby, his energy policies dominated by extreme environmentalists, and his foreign and military policies are dominated by -- whom?

I recently read that one major factor dominating the Russian agenda, such as it is, is a rapidly declining birth rate. A weakening Russia is clearly a destabilizing factor. I'm in favor of any policy that aims for world stability by rendering Russia militarily innocuous, but it has to be done in a way that restores stability, and this will require a level of both transparency and foresight that we saw in figures like Roosevelt and Churchill but have yet to see now. At minimum, someone needs to bring China and potentially Japan into the discussion with incentives to create a stable postwar balance of power.

And that goes for the Republican front runners for 2024, who need to start articulating the sort of coherent policy goals for Ukraine and Russia that we aren't yet hearing from anyone.

Why Is Everyone So Upset?

In the Washington Examiner yesterday:

Also distressing to hear were Hutchinson’s accounts of Trump’s repeated fits of rage, including dining table contents overturned and ketchup dishes thrown violently across the room. The worst by far, though, was that people immediately returning from being with Trump in the presidential vehicle told of the president trying to grab the wheel of the car to force it to be driven to the Capitol and then violently reaching for the neck of Secret Service agent Bobby Engel, who headed the president’s protective detail.

Hutchinson’s testimony confirmed a damning portrayal of Trump as unstable, unmoored, and absolutely heedless of his sworn duty to effectuate a peaceful transition of presidential power. Considering the entirety of her testimony, it is unsurprising that Hutchinson said she heard serious discussions of Cabinet members invoking the 25th Amendment that would have at least temporarily evicted Trump from office.

Trump is a disgrace. Republicans have far better options to lead the party in 2024. No one should think otherwise, much less support him, ever again.

David French -- recall that he mulled running against Trump in the 2016 primaries but wussed out at the last minute -- had this to say about the Hutchinson testimony:

Yes, Trump urged the mob to “fight like hell” and march on the Capitol, but he also said they should “peacefully and patriotically” make their voices heard. That caveat was likely enough to spare him from prosecution.

That was yesterday’s analysis. Today’s is different. Because of a courageous woman named Cassidy Hutchinson, a former aide to Mark Meadows.

Earlier this afternoon she gave the most extraordinary congressional testimony I’ve ever seen. She testified that the president was so committed to walking to the Capitol with his own supporters that he allegedly tried to grab the wheel of his Secret Service vehicle. She painted the picture of a president utterly out of control, a man so committed to preserving his own power that he approved of the riot and believed that Mike Pence deserved to face mob justice.

The big thing that strikes me here is that, as I've been saying, we're in the morning after phase of the 2020 moral panic. The problem is that David French and the Washington Examiner are still in 2016. Trump is out of office and 2022 is two years away, but the never Trumpers are relitigating the guy's fitness for office as though his actual term in the White House never took place -- and their problem is that so far, the polls suggest he's a contender in the next presidential election.

In fact, the consensus in the wake of the Dobbs decision is that, by nominating three justices who didn't prove to be squishes, Trump was the guy who solved Roe. So days later, the never Trumpers have decided he's unfit for office? Didn't he just accomplish what even the never Trumpers themselves thought might never be done? I've got to think the context here is important.

In fact, the anger from the sidelines tells me something about the nervousness among the gentry class ever since 2016. Across the spectrum, the respectable "conservative" commentariat, from George Will and David Brooks to John Podheretz and David French, sensed the rising power of the uncredentialed plebs who voted Trump into office despite their best efforts and now threaten to do it again.

I think it was the foreshocks of Dobbs that drove the great uncertainties that led to the 2020 media-driven dual panic over COVID and BLM, even though Dobbs will have little actual impact on who opts for abortion, especially in the blue states where complaints about the decision are strongest.

Another symptom in the news is the accelerating speculation about who'll run for president in 2024. So far, just in the past several days, we have Gavin Newsom taking out ads against Ron DeSantis in Florida, even though he's on the ballot in California, as best anyone can tell in order to raise his visibility for 2024. In the Washington Post, Youngkin meets with megadonors amid hints he’s mulling White House bid, while in the National Review, Kamala Harris Backtracks after Guaranteeing Biden Will Run in 2024.

Doesn't this simply acknowledge the continuing undercurrent of dissatisfaction with the 2020 election, that everyone should be jockeying for position so quickly in an atmosphere where almost nobody thinks the president we have is quite up to the job? That in itself, of course, simply reinforces Trump's continued standing and stokes the rage of the people who never liked him in the first place.

As I've been saying, moral panics are thought to reflect widespread uncertainty about social change. That change has been more visible this year -- for instance, the visible decline of Russia and its role in a world balance of power, as well as the collapse of the Nixon-era social compromises that included Roe v Wade, decided in 1973. Here's a pertinent comment at Slate:

Internal critics of the Democratic Party often say that its current leaders—who are for the most part in their 80s—believe too strongly in the value of political comity and the potential for bipartisan consensus. Tactically, strategically, and emotionally, this argument goes, Democrats have failed to realize that appeals to shared values and common purpose are no longer the most effective way to achieve tangible legislative results in the United States’ political system.

The old Nixon-era cliches that supported Earth Day (1970) and programs like affirmative action (Nixon executive order in 1969) were meant to paper over the issues that led to student protests and race riots in the 1960s. They've lost their effectiveness, though this raises the question of how effective they ever actually were.

At minimum, we can't go back to those days. As even Slate recognizes, the chief advocates and beneficiaries of doing that are in a fading generation. Trump was in many ways an opportunist who simply read the public mood, and the public mood isn't going to change.

Amber Heard Redux

I mentioned Raymond Chandler in yesterday's post. and for whatever reason, I kept thinking about him all day. Then, late in the afternoon, the news broke that at minimum, it was physically impossible for Trump to have grabbed the steering wheel of the SUV (or whatever it was) in which he was riding on January 6, and by this morning, the headlines emerged that the Secret Service was prepared to testify under oath that Trump never assaulted the driver or the other agent as former aide Cassidy Hutchinson testified before the January 6 Committee.

Then I realized that a stock figure in Hollywood noir from The Maltese Falcon to Chinatown is the pretty woman who tells lies. This is part of the secret deliciousness of the genre; women are portrayed as dishonest schemers, and it takes a disreputable but world-weary detective to penetrate the conventional wisdom and winkle out the truth, though the woman's attractiveness remains. Look at Sam Spade's final confrontation with Brigid O'Shaughnessy at the end of Dashiell Hammett's The Maltese Falcon:

"But--but, Sam, you can't! Not after what we've been to each other. You can't--"

"Like hell I can't."

She took a long trembling breath. "You've been playing with me? Only pretending you cared--to trap me like this? You didn't--care at all? You didn't--don't--l-love me?"

"I think I do," Spade said. "What of it?" The muscles holding his smile in place stood out like wales. "I'm not Thursby. I'm not Jacobi. I won't play the sap for you."

. . . "Wait till I'm through and then you can talk. Fourth, no matter what I wanted to do now it would be absolutely impossible for me to let you go without having myself dragged to the gallows with the others. Next, I've no reason in God's world to think I can trust you and if I did this and got away with it you'd have something on me that you could use whenever you happened to want to. That's five of them. The sixth would be that, since I've also got something on you, I couldn't be sure you wouldn't decide to shoot a hole in me some day. Seventh, I don't even like the idea of thinking that there might be one chance in a hundred that you'd played me for a sucker. And eighth--but that's enough. All those on one side. Maybe some of them are unimportant. I won't argue about that. But look at the number of them. Now on the other side we've got what? All we've got is the fact that maybe you love me and maybe I love you."

"You know," she whispered, "whether you do or not."

"I don't. It's easy enough to be nuts about you." He looked hungrily from her hair to her feet and up to her eyes again. "But I don't know what that amounts to. Does anybody ever? But suppose I do? What of it? Maybe next month I won't. I've been through it before--when it lasted that long. Then what? Then I'll think I played the sap. And if I did it and got sent over then I'd be sure I was the sap. Well, if I send you over I'll be sorry as hell--I'll have some rotten nights--but that'll pass. Listen." He took her by the shoulders and bent her back, leaning over her. "If that doesn't mean anything to you forget it and we'll make it this: I won't because all of me wants to--wants to say to hell with the consequences and do it--and because--God damn you--you've counted on that with me the same as you counted on that with the others." He took his hands from her shoulders and let them fall to his sides.

Isn't this something like the subtext of the Jonny Depp-Amber Heard trial? Pretty woman makes the disreputable but somehow authentic guy play the sap -- but in the end, she gets her comeuppance? Something in that story reverberates deeply within the American character. Now we have something oddly similar, pretty woman tries to make disreputable but somehow authentic ex-president play the sap, but she gets her comeuppance.

I think the conservative YouTube commentator Mark Dice has the best take:

At 4:10, he says, ". . . and it turns out that just two days ago, she got a brand new lawyer, which helps explain this 'surprise' testimony, but I think the real story here is that he's most likely negotiating a million-dollar book deal for her and needed this publicity to help lock it in." The lesson of the Depp-Heard trial is that the jury system relies on ordinary citizens with common sense to come to their own conclusion about the credibility of witnesses. I think the same eventually plays out in manufactured public scandals like the January 6 boondoggle -- enough ordinary citizens can have enough common sense to bring about just outcomes.

Nevertheless, the never Trumpers are still trying to rehabilitate Hutchinson. Take John Podhoretz:

[Trump] also wanted to drive to the Capitol in the lead and physically tussled with the Secret Service in his SUV when they weren’t going to do so because they could not guarantee his safety. She testified that Cippolone told her if Trump marched to the Capitol, “We’re going to get charged with every crime imaginable.” And she reported Meadows saying of the chant to hang Vice President Mike Pence that Trump “doesn’t want to do anything,” and that “he thinks Mike deserves it. He doesn’t think they’re doing anything wrong.”

You’re going to hear people call this “hearsay.” It is not hearsay. It is direct testimony of contemporaneous things said in Hutchinson’s earshot about events that were taking place while she was listening.

. . . He has so far been protected by Meadows and Cippolone because they have refused to testify to the committee under claims of executive privilege. . . . But they can testify if they choose. If they do not, they will, in essence, be allowing Hutchinson’s testimony to stand. If they do, and they do not say everything she said was a lie, her testimony will stand and be bolstered by them. And if they testify and say their recollections of the days were different, they will have to report in what way they were different—and will not be able to refuse to answer questions they find uncomfortable.

But it isn't just hearsay; important parts of it are now in dispute by parties who were present, and that inevitably affects Hutchinson's overall credibilty. What puzzles me is that the political circumstances that will surrround the 2024 election are far distant and at this stage impossible to predict. Why is everyone so excited about this pretty 25-year-old who's quickly proven herself a bad liar?

Hunter's Dad Is The First Enabler

I've been building a detailed history file on the First Crackhead now that reporters like Andrew Kerr have been able to dig deeper into previously password-protected files on his abandoned laptop. But even before Kerr's revelations, I find that I missed this story in the New York Post from last April:

Hunter Biden — who’s admitted battling addictions to booze and crack cocaine for much of his life — is living across the street from a swank rehab center where Lindsay Lohan once spent a summer drying out, The Post has learned.

The scandal-scarred first son’s $20,000-a-month rental home in Southern California is located just steps from the Cliffside Malibu, one of four “residential homes” run by its namesake parent company.

The price for “luxury,” in-patient treatment there isn’t advertised, but reportedly ran $68,000 for a 30-day stay nearly a decade ago.

The map at the top of this post comes from that story (click on the image for a larger view). I first mentioned his Malibu rental in this post back in March, which linked to another story in the New York Post from July 27, 2021 that first refers to this Malibu rental:

Hunter Biden has a new Malibu rental with an art studio, according to reports.

. . . The rental was listed for $20,000 a month in April, and the listing was removed on May 10, two months ago, signaling that a rental agreement had been reached (though TMZ reported that the rental began four months ago when the property was first listed).

. . . Hunter recently left a $5.4 million Venice Beach house — which was guarded by the Secret Service — that cost an estimated $25,000 per month and which he found after living in Hollywood Hills, The Post reported. The new rental is also guarded by the Secret Service, TMZ has reported.

Only later has it emerged that the Secret Service rents an adjoining luxury home that serves as a detail headquarters for $30,000 per month. It subsequently came out that the $20,000 monthly rental and other unspecified expenses have been paid by a Hollywood attorney, Kevin Morris.

But now we have the news that this rental coincidentally adjoins a self-described luxury rehab facility. That program says to its prospective clients:

We understand that you have utilized your valuable resources to hire us to do a job for you, and also understand that you have hired us because it is a job that you now understand that you cannot do for yourself and as such, have agreed to let us do the work you have entrusted us to do.

When you enter the recovery program at Rise in Malibu you can expect your individualized treatment programming to include the following therapeutic work and associated therapies. . .

As best I can infer, this means that patients are submitting to a program that includes involuntary confinement, no matter how luxurious the surroundings may be. It's hard not to think that the rentals across the street, the one for Hunter and the adjoining one for his Secret Service minders, are effectively part of a more holistic treatment plan that basically keeps this guy under very, very close control, with lots of therapy to go with. And I assume there's a fee to be paid, and Kevin Morris is at least the front for it.

What does the tab amount to here? It's hard to avoid thinking Hunter is in some sort of adjunct program at Cliffside Malibu, presumably individualized for his oh-so-unique needs and closely coordinated with the Secret Service next door. Ten years ago, your run-of-the-mill addicted wastrel cost $68,000 to stay there for a month. At minimum, we must be talking a high five-figure monthly payment that's so far lasted more than a year and presumably will continue through January 2025, if not longer. I've got to assume Kevin Morris is picking this up as well. Again, who's he fronting for?

For a certain amount of context, let's look at a new Andrew Kerr investigative piece that came out just yesterday:

Hunter Biden spent over $30,000 on escorts, many of whom were linked to ".ru" Russian email addresses and worked with an “exclusive model agency" called UberGFE during a 3 1/2 month period between November 2018 and March 2019.

He managed to do so thanks in part to Joe Biden committing to wiring him a total of $100,000 to help pay his bills from December 2018 through January 2019.

In one instance, Joe Biden wired his son $5,000 while he was actively engaged with an UberGFE escort. In another, texts indicated Hunter Biden convinced his father to wire him $20,000 to finance his stay at a New York City drug rehabilitation program that he never checked into.

The most we can say for now is that Hunter's extended binge through much of 2018 and into 2019 was costing Joe tens of thousands each month, as well as representing both a security risk and a potential major scandal at a time when Joe was putting the wheels in motion to run for president in 2020. Indeed, in March of 2020, Hunter finally settled with the ex-stripper mother of his child born out of wedlock for an undisclosed amount, taking that issue off the radar. I wouldn't look too far to find Kevin Morris in this picture.

Something had to be done. In fact, I would guess that about the time of the settlement with the stripper, a plan had been formulated to keep Hunter out of the news, but it didn't come to full fruition until the whole Malibu program was set up about a year later. My guess is we won't learn a whole lot more until after the November election, but there's got to be an awful lot of money being spent here.

Didn't Raymond Chandler write about rich Hollywood types in secret luxury rehab? Where is Humphrey Bogart when we really need him? Heck, where's Jack Nicholson? There's a Hollywood classic waiting to be made here.

Trump And The Fallout From Dobbs

As the impact of the US Supreme Court's Dobbs decision bgegins to sink in, after a few days, people are starting to recognize that for good or ill, this was Donald Trump's doing. For instance,

To the Never Trump people: Elections matter.

. . . Because Donald J. Trump was president and because he had the courage to stick with solidly conservative jurists and because he, unlike Never Trumpers, knows how to hold the line, abortion now goes back to the people to decide.

. . . And to those who sought a perfect vessel for perfect policy, remember, politics is about wielding power and creating policy to wield that power. Sitting on a perch waiting for the perfect politician to achieve policies is a fool’s errand. All politicians are flawed, some more than others, and yet, a flawed politician can achieve good outcomes with courage.

Breitbart News provided a partial transcript of Trump's remarks at an Illinois rally on Saturday:

We have very big news. Maybe the biggest, right from the United States Supreme Court. Yesterday the Court handed down a victory for the Constitution, a victory for the rule of law, and above all, a victory for life. This breakthrough is the answer to the prayers of millions and millions of people. And these prayers have gone on for decades and decades. They’ve been praying, and now those prayers have been answered.

. . . I promised to nominate judges and justices who would stand up for the original meaning of the Constitution and who would honestly and faithfully interpret the law as written. We got almost 300 federal judges, and three great Supreme Court justices confirmed to do exactly that.

It's worth noting that although, as Trump himself points out, this was the result of a 50-year campaign by generations of people, it was Trump's instinctive willingness to go for broke in 2016 that made the final difference. But Rolling Stone, of all sources, raises questions about Trump's private views:

Republicans spent Friday celebrating the end of Roe v. Wade and praising Donald Trump for making it happen. Trump himself, multiple sources tell Rolling Stone, is far less excited.

Publicly, the former president took credit for abrogating the rights of millions of American women, putting out a statement saying Roe’s repeal was “only made possible because I delivered everything as promised, including nominating and getting three highly respected and strong Constitutionalists confirmed to the United States Supreme Court.”

The rest of the story is behnd a paywall, but this site gives a summary:

However, the report quotes an associate of the former president who said he has been "sh*tting" on the decision since an early draft was leaked weeks ago.

. . . [P]rivately, the former president is anxious about what the end of Roe, and the flood of extreme Republican state-level anti-abortion laws it will unleash, will mean for the GOP’s electoral prospects — and for his own.

On that note, the Trump insider admitted, "He keeps sh*tting all over his greatest accomplishment. When you speak to him, it’s the response of someone fearing the backlash and fearing the politics of what happens when conservatives actually get what they want [on abortion]," before adding, "I do not think he’s enjoying the moment as much as many of his supporters are, to be honest with you.”

I think Trump's problem for his 2024 prospects is that new issues have come up, most importantly the economy, but also Ukraine, and now the question of what next on abortion. He's had little to say on Ukraine, except that it wouldn't have taken place if he'd been president. He needs to be more specific, and he needs to provide a realisic plan forward, especially how to deal with Russia's seriously reduced capabilities with or without Putin.

Now he also needs to provide a consistent stance on how to proceed with the abortion issue left to the states -- after all, wasn't that going to be the predictable outcome of any decision by his court overturning Roe all along? Some states were inevitably going to be stricter than others. How can that be making him anxious?

Rolling Stone, of course, has a history of fake stories, and its "insider" here is anonymous. But if Trump doesn't begin to articulate a fuller path forward in the runup to 2024, he's going to lose out.

Intersectionality Goes Only So Far

So far, opinon against the US Supreme Court's Dobbs decision overturning Roe v Wade has been fairly predictable, centering on how Dobbs will impact poor women of color in states that limit their ability to get an abortion, since it will cost them money to travel to a state with more liberal policies. This, of course, inadvertently reveals the original purpose of Planned Parenthood, which was eugenic, aimed at increasing the rate of abortion among non-whites.

The assumption, or at least the hope, of the anti-Dobbs faction is that non-whites will recognize that reducing access to abortion in even this limited way is against their interests, when African-Americans in particular have come to understand that by limiting their birthrate through state-encouraged abortion, the ruling class also limits their numbers at the ballot box.

Another difficulty is that as a practical matter, the general population covered by the designation LGBTQ+ is much less affected by access to abortion, since pregnancies result exclusively from the male-female reproductive act, leaving aside IVF or artificial insemination, although even these in fact are intended to induce a pregnancy that is by implication desired. Thus even if drag queens, say, demonstrate against Dobbs, they're one step removed from the actual issue at hand.

And this leaves aside the subtext of a drag queen performance, which carries with it a certain cluster of feelings about women that include resentment and hatred, with an exaggerated male-oriented portrayal of female vanity and histrionics. I did a web search on "drag queen abortion" just for the heck of it, expecting to find nothing, but instead I found a sequence of images. The least disturbing is the one at the top of this post. Others, like those on the right, are more gruesome. They're anything but a sympathetic portrayal of a woman's right to choose. On the other hand, they're probably much closer to the actual intent of the whole drag queen performance, illustrating a fundamental distrust of women, particularly involving what's portrayed here as a deep suspicion of motherhood.

The elites fetishize drag queens at their peril. I've already noted here that Speaker Pelosi, vain, flamboyant, and histrionic, is just one step removed from a drag queen herself, and that's not good for women. I'm not at all sure if having drag queens in an anti-Dobbs parade would be a good idea.

But there's another issue. I've not been a Rod Dreher fan here, since I don't think his adoption of Orthodoxy or even before that Roman Catholicism was ever authentic, but he does get one thing right in this recent piece:

There is an obvious Luciferian connection between the twin sacred rites of abortion and sex change. Both assert human will over life and the generative order. Both refuse the givenness of Creation. Both insist that the autonomous choosing individual has ultimate power over life and death, male and female. Both rites are necessary to upholding the Sexual Revolution, which is the event that gives meaning to the lives of the American ruling class.

We are now seeing how much that ruling class hates those it rules.

A reader writes that he doesn’t expect mass violence over Dobbs — not an abortion-related repeat of the George Floyd riots. Those riots were carried out by black people and white antifa. The kind of demographic most upset over the fall of Roe — educated middle class women — will never risk their professional status to commit acts of criminal violence, he predicts.

There are other practical problems with protesting Dobbs. My wife notes that the biggest riots so far have been in places like California, which will always have permissive laws on abortion. Thus for women in such states, some other form of civil disobedience will be needed to make their point. The most obvious would be to get preganant, travel to a state with restrictive abortion laws like North Dakota, get a back alley abortion there, and die from it. After all, isn't that the equivalent of a sit-in?

The cartoon at left represents a return to a major pre-Roe argument for legalized abortion, that if it's not legal, it won't be safe, and women will be forced to use coat hangers to peform the procedure on themselves. Well, I was in college and graduate school pre-Roe, and friends and classmates from time to time found the need to find someone who'd do it. Being middle class or better, none needed a coat hanger, and none died, although their children of course always did.

The coat hanger argument was never sincere, it was always a way to hold someone else hostage, when the prosperous educated classes would always have an alternative, legal or not. Everyone drank underage back then, after all, and many smoked pot. The issue simply doesn't affect the educated classes no matter what law is passed in what state, but the other side of the coin is that the argument from the educated classes that the non-white poor need it is also racist: the assumption is that the non-white poor are too stupid and too promiscuous by nature to conduct their sexual activities prudently. This goes back to Margaret Sanger's eugenic purpose behind Planned Parenthood.

There's another problem with the intersectionality fallacy behind protesting Dobbs: it arises from the current movement for synthetic sexual identity. If men can have periods and get pregnant, men also can need abortions. I note that woke companies like Disney have announced they'll fund travel for women employees to get abortions in states that will permit it. But what if I'm a man who works for Disney in, say, Florida? Won't Disney say since I'm a man and can get pregnant, they'll pay for me to go to California for an abortion?

You might well answer sure, just show Disney your doctor's note or your pregnancy test. But not so fast -- the HIPAA Privacy Rule makes all medical records fully confidential. It's illegal for an employer to ask for any medical record, especially one that involves an abortion. I would have a cause of action against Disney if they refused to pay for my trip to California for an abortion on the basis that I'm a man and can't prove I'm pregnant.

This will work its way through, but it's going to take some time. But then it took time to override Roe.