So Far, The Comer Committee Is Missing The Point

On Wednesday, the House Oversight Committee released a report on Biden family business dealings.

In total, Biden family members and business associates designed a web of over 20 companies, many of which were formed during Joe Biden’s vice presidency, the committee revealed. In total, the Biden family, business associates, and companies received over $10 million from foreign nationals’ companies, the committee found.

The story doesn't have a whole lot of detail, but from what I can gather, the payments totaling $10 millian trickled in via shell corporations over a period between 2014 and 2017, and they were paid to nine Biden family members who were named in the report, as well as mostly unnamed family associates, who would have included figures like Robinson Walker, Devon Archer, and Eric Schwerin. If we divide $10 million by nine family members plus associates over a period of maybe three years, this comes to an average of well under a million bucks a year for each.

You and I might be more than satisfied with, say, half a million bucks a year, but let's keep in mind that all of these people have extravagant lifestyles, and several of those named, including Hunter; Beau's widow, Hallie; and Joe's niece Caroline; are addicts. Ten million bucks over a period of years simply will not sustain this group. Something's out of whack.

If they're living on payouts, there have to be sources for amounts far in excess of what we're seeing here. Many of them do in fact also have sinecures and no-show jobs with family-allied non-profits and such, but again, even if they're each making a couple hundred thousand a year at those, that won't pay their bills, and it doesn't explain where the money comes from to pay those non-job salaries. There's some sort of financial dark matter here that hasn't yet been explained.

The next problem is that Hunter is so far being portrayed as the kingpin of the family grift -- for example,, from the link above, Hunter managed payments from a Romanian businessman, Gabriel Popoviciu:

Hunter Biden began working for Popoviciu in the spring of 2015. According to Hunter Biden’s calendar, he met with Joe Biden three times from July 2015 to March 2016 about helping Popoviciu with a “conviction stemming from his purchase of a 550-acre parcel of government-owned land for a steep discount,” the New York Post reported.

But let's look at the context here. In May, 2015, just as Hunter started working for Popoviciu, his brother Beau died of brain cancer, which immediately precipitated Hunter's years-long cocaine bender that included his affair with Hallie and her sister, his divorce from Kathleen Buhle, weeks on end of debauchery in Hollywood luxury hotels, expensive cars, and trips to luxury rehab in centers around the country. From July 2015 to March 2016, Hunter would never have been in a position to handle money or manage anything like a business, even a shady one.

Let's recall as well that anything Hunter undertook from his college days at Georgetown onward to Yale Law and his brief stints as an investment banker were due entirely to the fact that he was the son of a US senator. His ex-wife Kathleen recounted in her memoir that he had been in and out of rehab and living far beyond their means even before Joe became vice president; for much of that time, she just wasn't paying attention. Other discussions of Hunter's time from the 2000s onward indicate that his business deals were seldom successful.

So just looking at the overall proportions involved in the family dealings, which appear to have been largely under Hunter's aegis, not enough was coming in to sustain their lifestyles or their drug habits, and of what was coming in, Hunter probably stole the lion's share. Something doesn't fit.

Let's look at another astute analysis, made following Wednesday's report from the Comer committee:

Normally, a sitting vice president might think about running for the top job as the boss hit the two-term limit. But Biden knew he could not oppose Hillary Clinton’s historic campaign to become the first female president.

So Biden — perhaps under some pressure from profligate relatives like Hunter — decided, finally, to cash out. He set up what D.C. insiders call a “government relations” business, profiting from his name and contacts.

In “government relations,” there does not need to be a specific quid pro quo. The clients are paying for the relationship, in the hope that it leads to other introductions and opportunities. It is not necessarily illegal.

. . . The calculus changed once Trump actually defeated Clinton. Suddenly, there was a path back to politics for Biden. That presented a huge windfall for the Biden family’s clients, though it contained new risks of exposure.

So Biden finds himself a victim of calculations he made when he thought his career was over, but even those calculations were out of kilter -- chief among them, he appears to have relied on Hunter to manage his affairs, especially during his last couple of years as vice president. But recall that as late as 2014, Joe had to try to wangle a sinecure for Hunter as a public affairs officer in the Navy, which lasted only until he failed his first drug test. Apparently whatever the Navy would pay Hunter was important, even though Hunter's debts at the time must have been exponential multiples of his Navy salary. This just doesn't fit.

Chairman Comer comes a little bit closer to the point as of this past Friday:

House Oversight Committee Chair James Comer (R-KY) suggested Friday that former President Barack Obama knew of the Biden family’s foreign deals with adversaries of the United States.

. . . “He knew his son [Hunter Biden] was no good, and he knew this was nothing but a political liability not just for our country, not just for the democrat party, but for Obama’s legacy,” Comer added. “Because a lot of this happened during the Obama administration.”

Comer also believes Obama’s knowledge of the family’s business informed his opposition to Joe Biden’s 2020 candidacy.

Heck, I would imagine Obama heard about Hunter's failed drug test before Hunter himself did; indeed, I wouldn't rule out that Obama arranged for it in the first place. But the question isn't the Biden family's business dealings, which were clumsy and often unsuccessful. The real question is the Biden family debts, not the payments. Recall just this one data item:

{Hunter] Biden "has incurred substantial personal loans to which he is indebted and subject to repayment for attorneys’ fees he has incurred," said his attorney. The disclosure of personal loans follows reports this week that the president’s son is considering launching a legal defense fund to raise money to pay his lawyers, a plan that has reportedly sparked ethics concerns at the White House.

To whom does he owe this money? Is it directly, say, to Abbe Lowell, or is someone else paying Abbe Lowell who then holds the paper on the loan? We've also had hints, but little more than hints, that Joe has been paying for Hunter's living expenses for years -- even as far back as 2018, Joe was footing the bill for Huntrer's trips to rehab and his settlement with his ex-wife, as well as his overdue credit card balances. Hunter's living expenses, as well as payments on years of debt, must amount to far more than the $400,000 annual salary Joe earns.

Where is this money coming from? On one hand, people are being allowed to think the family's lifestyles are coming from Romanian or Chinese businessmen, but whatever they've paid now and then, as far as I can see, hasn't been remotely enough to cover the Biden family's lifestyles. What do they owe, and to whom do they owe it? I'll betcha Obama knows quite a bit, and I'm sure others do as well. It's just people like you and me who are in the dark.

I'm Still Reacting To Trump's CNN Town Hall

As I noted yesterday, my gut reaction to the first reports I saw on the Trump CNN town hall was uh-oh. If I could parse it out into sentences, it would be that his opponents had nothing new, Trump was simply bypassing the nothing-new with his charisma, and the audience was loving it. They loved it even more when Kaitlan Collins's head kept exploding and, as one commentator put it, she kept acting like everyone's ex-wife.

What I began to notice Thursday was that Trump's town hall performance simply overwhelmed the rest of the news, even though the rest of the news -- the deep state ignoring congressional subpoenas, the Comer committee releasing details of Biden family money laundering, and the border chaos -- was on balance poison for the Biden administration. Never mind that, everyone wanted to talk about Trump.

Six months ago, I was convinced that Trump had misread Ukraine, he'd proved disastrously weak against Fauci and Birx, his vaccine program was a failure, and DeSantis had displayed greater foresight over COVID and was pursuing more credible current policies over corporate wokery and transsexualism. Nevertheless, since then, DeSantis has failed to gain traction and is unlikely to eclipse Trump as the primary season gets under way.

With Wednesday’s CNN town hall behind him, former President Donald Trump remains both the prohibitive GOP front-runner for the 2024 nomination and a man who was found liable this week in a civil case for sexually abusing and defaming former magazine columnist E. Jean Carroll.

While we cannot yet know what effect that verdict will have on the race for the Republican nomination, Trump built his large polling advantage with this civil trial in the news and after being indicted earlier this spring in a separate criminal case related to hush money payments to Stormy Daniels. (Trump has denied all wrongdoing.)

Trump’s edge in surveys of Republican voters and in endorsements from elected officials at this stage is among the strongest for a nonincumbent in the modern presidential primary era.

I think the answer to the puzzle here is that the public is discounting all the courtroom kabuki over Trump and understands there's nothing new there. Charges that Trump was delusional about the 2020 election are slowly losing credibility as information emerges about efforts by current Secretary of State Blinken and CIA insiders to recruit other deep staters to discredit the Hunter laptop as Russian disinformation.

During the debate on Oct. 22, 2020, in response to Trump's taunts of "it's the laptop from hell, the laptop from hell," Mr. Biden pushed back, "There are 50 former national intelligence folks who said that what this — he's accusing me of is a Russian plan — they have said that this has all the characteristics — four — five former heads of the CIA — both parties, say what he's saying is a bunch of garbage. Nobody believes it except him. . . and his good friend Rudy Giuliani."

The interim report accuses the Biden campaign of taking "active measures to discredit the allegations about Hunter Biden by exploiting the national security credentials of former intelligence officials" and also said the "Biden campaign coordinated dissemination of the statement to members of the media."

There are two strategies operating here. One is the congressional strategy, keep investigating, keep attacking on individual points, like deep state coordination of the Biden electoral strategy, deep state refusal to respond to congressional subpoenas, and the Biden family finances. We might add to this the DeSantis point strategy of attacking specific issues of corporate wokery, porn in school libraries, or drag queen story hour for third graders.

The problem is that these are all small ball and as point strategies are vulnerable to point attacks. DeSantis thinks drag queen story hours are grooming, his opponents say he's a bigot, nothing moves forward. Trump is a different case entirely. Trump has an almost magical ability with body language and facial expression to characterize his accusers as everyman's ex-wife. He sweeps the point strategies, both offense and defense, away with a wave of his hand.

This comes from his ability to read the room, figuratively speaking, which his opponents simply don't have. The remarkable Dylan Mulvaney fiasco in particular is a sign of the current public mood, but Dylan Mulvaney as a symbol represents far more than just individual point issues of drag queen story hour, men in women's sports, or men in ladies' rooms. Trump understands this to the point that he doesn't even need to mention Mulvaney to convince his supporters that he understands the underlying issues.

Allegations of grabbing body parts and January 6 so far are all Trump's opponents have, and the public has already discounted them. The CNN town hall illustrated this plainly, which is what made it something of a revelation. Every indictment from now on will do nothing but feed the beast, which Trump's oppenents so far haven't figured out. But what else can they come up with? Even if they can take him out in one way or another in the next 18 months, another Republican will step up and claim his mantle.

The Dylan Mulvaney Paradigm

The photo at the top is of Kaitlan Collins, the 31 year old CNN former chief White House Correspondent whose disastrous performance at Wednesday's Trump town hall caused rending of garments and gnashing of teeth in elite circles. The photo below her is Dylan Mulvaney, the trans female whose disastrous performance as a Bud Light surrogate six weeks ago has continued to cause rending of garments and gnashing of teeth in elite circles. I'm surprised at how few commentators have pointed out how much they look like each other.

Maybe if that light bulb had gone on over the head of someone like Mr Licht at CNN, the outcome of the town hall would have been different. As it is, Robert F Kennedy Jr, the sort of gadfly the Democrats need right now, characteried Donald Trump as a result of Wednesday night's performance as "the most devastating debater, probably, since Abraham Lincoln".

I didn't watch the CNN town hall Wednesday night; it was only when I saw excerpts on YouTube yesterday morning that I sat up and said uh-oh. My big takeaway was that the consensus strategy against Trump, which has been the same since 2016, isn't working. The Access Hollywood tape about grabbing body parts didn't work then, and the E Jean Carroll verdict didn't work Wednesday. Two successive impeachments on trivial charges didn't work after he was elected, and whatever indictments on trivial charges political hack DAs are able to bring against him won't work now. They'll only feed the beast.

On the heels of the Carroll verdict, the New Hampshire audience greeted Trump's entry with a standing ovation. He turned references to classified documents or January 6 into laugh lines, and the town hall loved it. Clearly both CNN and Ms Collins completely misread the national mood, but the rest of corporate media was taken by surprise as well. Don Surber reviews the universal editorial shock, with the most apoplectic at Vanity Fair:

Vanity Fair’s review began, “CNN’s decision to host a prime-time town hall with Donald Trump already looked like a terrible idea going into Wednesday night, and now it looks like, well, whatever is German for ‘letting an insurrection-inciting sociopath take a [redacted] in your collective mouth on live TV—and get applause for it.’”

This simply echoes the consternation in corporate circles over the completely unexpected public reaction to the Bud Light Dylan Mulvaney not-a-formal-campaign:

Bud Light’s controversial marketing deal with transgender social media influencer Dylan Mulvaney has ignited speculation that top executives at corporate parent Anheuser-Busch may have been blindsided by the tie-up when it was revealed.

. . . “Some low-level marketing staffer who helps manage the hundreds of influencer engagements they do must have thought it was no big deal,” according to an unnamed source cited by the Daily Wire.

“Obviously it was, and it’s a shame because they have a well-earned reputation for just being America’s beer — not a political company.”

The deal was, of course, the brainchild of a well-regarded marketing VP with degrees from Harvard and the Wharton School who'd already telegraphed her intentions to remake the Bud Light brand on social media. She clearly felt she had at least the tacit endorsement of the higher-ups, and her boss took the fall with her when the Mulvaney deal went south. This was no corporate whoopsie, this was a high-level, high-stakes and disastrous misreading of the US Public.

By the same token, CNN's peers are blaming CNN for a similar misreading of how Trump would handle the town hall. Various commentators have pointed out the contradictions in their format: it was the first event in the 2024 Republican primary season, but it featured only Trump, and the idea was that Trump was there to debate Ms Collins, who was thought to represent all bien pensant opinion, not other Republicans. But it was with an audience that had been selected deliberately to represent Republican or undecided voters. My surmise is that CNN expected the foreordained outcome to be a win for the Nurse Ratched team, who'd then go on to scold the Republican audience as a bunch of Neanderthals.

Instead, Trump played to the audience CNN gave him, which he clearly understood much better than CNN did, and he debated a woman whose public persona actually wasn't too far afield from Dylan Mulvaney -- look at the insipid smirk on her face in the photo above. The nicest characterization of their encounter was that he wiped the floor with her, but Vanity Fair's suggestion that he took a [redacted] in her mouth is closer.

Dylan Mulvaney is becoming a paradigm for the current public mood, and the corporate elites are continuing to misread it.

Trump Is Froggy Gremlin

I was going to post on something else this morning, but the reactions I discovered to Trump's town hall on CNN last night in this morning's news diverted me. Last month I posted about "Trump's role as truth-teller, the Huckleberry Finn, the Holden Caulfield, the Caleb Trask or Jim Stark as played by James Dean", but there I was only close. Trump is something like those, but he's even closer to Froggy Gremlin:

Froggy the Gremlin was a character created by Smilin' Ed McConnell and brought to radio in the 1940s and television in 1950s on the Smilin' Ed's Gang show, and later Andy's Gang TV show, hosted by actor Andy Devine after McConnell's death.

Froggy was a troublemaker. Disrespectful of adult authority figures, Froggy played practical jokes and disrupted the presentations of other guests. If a guest were to demonstrate how to paint a wall, he might say, "And now I'm going to take this can of paint..." Froggy would chime in, "And dump it over my head." And the confused guest would proceed to do so.

The video above has excepts from Froggy's appearances on the Andy's Gang TV show in the 1950s. What strikes me about Froggy is that he's out of control, and this is the problem that our contemporary adult authority figures clearly have with Trump. My post that I linked above quotes William Barr, of all people, who actually resembles a typical Froggy victim quite uncanilly:

In a Sunday interview with Fox News' Shannon Bream, Barr was asked whether Trump would personally defend himself in court if his indictment went to trial.

"I'm not his lawyer, generally I think it's a bad idea to go on the stand," Barr replied. "And I think it's a particularly bad idea for Trump because he lacks all self-control, and it would be very difficult to prepare him and keep him testifying in a prudent fashion."

I went on to comment in that post,

Here I think Barr is seriously missing the point. Trump has a public persona to be sure, and part of it is his irrepressible naughty-boy image. But it's a persona, and it's part of his appeal to a broad swath of the public.

The reaction of the adult authority figures to Trump's performance at the CNN town hall was predictable. There was no AOC in the mid-1950s to go on Andy's Gang against Froggy, but we had an inkling of what it might have been like in her reaction:

CNN should be ashamed of themselves.

They have lost total control of this “town hall” to again be manipulated into platforming election disinformation, defenses of Jan 6th, and a public attack on a sexual abuse victim.

The audience is cheering him on and laughing at the host.

— Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (@AOC) May 11, 2023

Someonme posted in reply, "They've lost total control of the narrative... not this town hall."

Several things are going on here. The narrative of the adult authority figures has been that Trump is beyond the pale, and their agenda has been to put him or his supporters in courtroom after courtroom to prove he's seditious, irresponsible with classified documents, a serial groper, a defamer of women, blah blah blah, and all it does is keep him in the news and give him material for his own standup:

Former President Donald Trump said the judge in E. Jean Carroll’s civil lawsuit against him refused to allow his attorneys to submit evidence that Carroll’s cat was named “Vagina,” among other things, during his first reaction to the jury’s verdict against him.

Trump was seemingly unfazed by the jury verdict, telling CNN’s Kaitlan Collins that after the verdict, his “poll numbers went up” during a CNN Town Hall at New Hampshire’s Saint Anselm College on Wednesday evening.

The Hill called the town hall "a disaster":

The discussion, moderated poorly by CNN’s Kaitlan Collins, was simultaneously a triggering flashback to the bad old days of Trump’s presidency, a frustrating preview of what we can likely expect over the next 18 months, and a conclusive repudiation of CNN CEO Chris Licht’s doomed plan to restore the network’s fortunes by tacking to the imagined middle.

. . . Live television is Trump’s bailiwick. His charisma shines through in unscripted, unedited settings, especially in a friendly room, as does his skill at running out the clock. Over the course of the hour, Trump consistently deflected Collins’ dogged albeit ineffective attempts to pin him down on his many disqualifying factors; lied openly and consistently about the 2020 election results and dozens of other things; made Tuesday’s $5 million verdict in the E. Jean Carroll case into a joke at the victim’s expense; and showed absolutely no remorse for anything he had ever said or done in his entire life.

Hiya, kids, hiya, hiya. The adults in authority are losing control.

Reparations, Bud Light, Tucker, And The 2020 End Of The World

Recall that after the 2020 election, I compared the Democrat situation to the problem of apocalyptic cultists who believed the world was about to end on a date certain. I said that if I knew the world was going to end, my reaction would be to run up my credit cards in the final month so that I could buy everything I wanted and enjoy it before the big asteroid hit the planet, but since the world would end on that date, I'd never have to pay anything back.

As I saw it then, the problem for the Democrats was that they'd won a narrow electoral victory in November, but they'd have to set the results in stone before another election took place in 2022 -- or in oher words, they were running up the credit cards with promises to pay the bills and assuming the world would end before they came due. The difficulty was the world didn't end, as it has always tended not to, and the 2022 election happened anyhow.

The Democrats lost in 2022 by less than some optimistic predictions, but they lost by enough that the bills still went out. One of the first 2020 charges that's had to be paid has been Gavin Newsom's promise of reparations for slavery in California, where there was never slavery. The California Reparations Task Force

The California Reparations Task Force is a non-regulatory state agency in California established by California Assembly Bill 3121 in 2020 to study and develop reparation proposals for African Americans, especially those who are descendants of persons enslaved in the United States. It was created to deal with systemic racism against African Americans resulting from slavery's enduring legacy.

This was done in the wake of the George Floyd riots that summer in order to appease the rioters on one hand, but on the other and more importantly to salve the consciences of the wealthy California one percent and the allied gentry in their affluent enclaves. Their problem was less to stop the riots, which went on notwithstanding, but more to assuage their own consciences, since riots in the ghettos and working class areas would never reach Marin County or the Hollywood Hills.

And this would work until the world didn't end and the bills came due, and the statements began to arrive in the mail this past weekend when, as I noted the other day, the Reparations Task Force issued its report and intimated without quite spelling things out that the total amount due would fall in the neighborhood of $800 billion in order to pay up to over $1 million to each eligible resident. Gov Newsom, whose idea was to run up the credit cards in the first place, has been quick to respond:

California Gov. Gavin Newsom declined to endorse the cash payments – which could reach as high as $1.2 million for a single recipient – recommended by his reparations task force, telling Fox News Digital that dealing with the legacy of slavery "is about much more than cash payments."

"The Reparations Task Force’s independent findings and recommendations are a milestone in our bipartisan effort to advance justice and promote healing. This has been an important process, and we should continue to work as a nation to reconcile our original sin of slavery and understand how that history has shaped our country," Newsom said in a statement to Fox News Digital.

In other words, even though we promised African-Americans reparations, we didn't mean it that way. We just meant we'd keep saying the same empty words, but nothing's really going to change. OK?

This goes back to what I've been saying all along, that the current political alignment is primarily an alliance between the Ivy League wealthy, the magagerial, academic, media, and bureaucratic gentry, and Marx's Lumpenproletariat, the petty criminal class, which has expanded somewhat to include the homeless and radical sexual deviants like transsexuals (whose interests are not the same as the traditionally same-sex attracted).

The problem for the wealthy and the gentry is that the Lumpenproletariat, as Marx understood, are not reliable allies, while the traditional New Deal alliance has lost groups like the working class and Catholics, who are politically reliable, or at least had been until the wealthy and the gentry reneged on their part of the deal. Meanwhile, the one percent and the gentry never intended to follow through more than they have with the lumpenproles, who for the moment have received leniency on petty crime, homelessness, and drug addiction, but will not receive any new money to subsidize them.

The Bud Light problem, as I see things, is simply another manifestation of the same dilemma for the wealthy and the allied gentry. The Bud Light marketing VP, Alissa Heinerscheid, a member of the Ivy League wealthy essentially masqueading as managerial gentry, implemented a policy of appeasing the extended Lumpenproletariat by handsomely paying and privileging Dylan Mulvaney, a member of the media gentry masquerading as a transsexual lumpenprole.

This patently phony srrangement collapsed just about instantly, beyond even the false dialectic behind it -- Mulvaney was doubly phony, since he was neither an actual woman nor, as commentators have begun to point out, an authentic transsexual. He was and is a professional actor, an entitled member of the media gentry who, seeing his age catch up with him in traditional roles, hoped to jumpstart his acting career as a transsexual, but his surgery will never go beyond his face.

This hasn't sold with anyone; the collapse of his career, Heinerscheid's, the Bud Light brand, and possibly Anheuser's corporate image, have all led to universal schadenfreude.

The same thing is taking place with Tucker Carlson. Again, I think it's a symptom of how the upper class and gentry, the Murdochs and the Fox executive suite, ran up charges expecting the world to end before they came due. On one hand, they created a monster in Tucker Carlson, who was able to supplant the aging and more corporate-correct anchors Bill O'Reilly and Sean Hannity with a younger look slightly more aligned with a new-generation working and middle class audience who, however, never quite trusted Fox.

Carlson is currently alleging through his attorneys that Fox berayed an implicit understanding that it would not terminate him as part of any Dominion settlement.

Carlson lawyer, Bryan Freedman, wrote to Fox News executives Viet Dinh and Irena Briganti that Fox News employees, including “Rupert Murdoch himself,” broke promises to Carlson “intentionally and with reckless disregard for the truth,” according to Axios.

. . . The letter also reportedly alleges the network broke promises not to settle with Dominion Voting Systems “in a way which would indicate wrongdoing” on the part of Carlson and not to take any actions in a settlement that would harm his reputation.

Two sources told Axios that Carlson was told by a member of the Fox News board that he was taken off the air as part of a Dominion settlement.

This is simply another example of the wealthy class -- the Murdochs -- and their allied gentry -- the Fox executive suite -- making credit card charges expecting the world to end before the bills arrive, though even here, things aren't what they seem. Carlson is also a member of a wealthy family who can afford a five-star lifestyle even without a job in the media gentry, while his hairpiece, for-the-camera cosmetics, and plastic surgery give a misleading impression of fresh-faced youth.

But for now, unlike Ms Heinerscheid, Gov Newsom, Bud Light, Anheuser, the Murdochs, and Fox, he's smart enough to be on the winning side of a battle of appearances -- in other words, appearing to be a reliable ally of the reliable alliance, the working and middle classes, who are currently quite upset with the range of betrayals they see from the wealthy and the gentry, who've foolishly aligned themselves with the least reliable factions anywhere, the Lumpenproletariat. This can't last.

Dershowitz On The Jordan Neely Chokehold

Alan Dershowitz has an interesting commentary on the Jordan Neely episode, wherein a mentally unstable homeless man who was behaving bizarrely and apparently threatening New York subway riders was killed after a former Marine, assisted by other passengers, placed him in a chokehold with the intent of holding him for police. The question he asks, "Should ex marine be charged for killing subway screamer?" he answers, somewhat predictably, with, "it depends."

But he makes several other remarks that I think reflect his current wider views on society. At about 7:00, he says

Imagine if the shoe were on the other foot, if the [ex-Marine] had been black and the homless person had been white, would AOC be saying anything? Of course not! Well, maybe she would be saying something, but not what she said about this case. This is all about race, the fact that the victim in this case was African-American and that the alleged perpetrator is white changes everything. That's why there are demonstrations in the street . . . We have become in this country, I hate to use this term, we are now a systematically, systemically racist country.

We were a systemically racist country in the 20s, 30s, 40s, 50s, until Brown v Board of Education. We were systemically anti-black. We were systemically antisemitic. We were systemically anti-Catholic. We were systemically anti-gay. . . . Then from, say, '54 to the beginning of this centuiry, we became not a systemically racist country, we became a country with pockets of racism, but the systems were not systemically focused on race to the advangtage of minorities. But now in the last 20 years, maybe the last ten years, certainly since the death of Goerge Floyd, we have once again become a systemically racist country, everything is seen through the eyes of race.

I find myself agreeing with Dershowitz about 80% of the time, and he's up front about his opinions, which align with the center-left of the early to mid 1960s. This is the case here. But contra Dershowitz, here were cases equivalent to George Floyd in the 1990s, for instance the 1992 Rodney King riots or the somewhat converse case of OJ Simpson's acquittal for murder in 1995 by a predominantly African-American jury. Los Angeles was never Mayberry, and it's misleading to suggest it, or the rest of the country, ever was.

As well, "gay" is not a racial issue. Morally, it's a matter of conduct, which people of any race can engage in. In addition, communities are entitled to regulate that conduct if, for instance, it takes place in public or if it affects the public's ability to enjoy public facilities like parks or rest rooms. The question of how communities can regulate other aspects of same-sex attraction, like drag shows in schools or drag queen story hours, remains open and legitimate, and it's also separate from the question of transgenderism, to which significant factions of the same-sex attracted object. None of this is strictly speaking racist.

Dershowitz touches breifly on another issue, the fact that so far, protests over the Jordan Neely death have been more limited than those over the George Floyd killing, and this illustrates a point Dershowitz seems to miss: Neely and Floyd were both African-American, but the issue is less clear than that. Both also had lengthy criminal records, and both died in the process of behavior that, if not directly criminal, was nevertheless associated with a petty criminal lifestyle.

In other words, they were members of Marx's Lumpenproletariat, the petty criminal underclass. The social attitudes that led to widespread protests over the Rodney King and George Floyd episodes were based on a tendency to conflate race with the Lumpenproletariat and to insist that enforcement of laws against petty crime is racist simply because some, though certainly not all, members of the petty criminal underclass are black. It's possible that especially since Neely was said to be acting in a way that threatened other people and the ex-Marine was not a police officer, it's been harder to whip the public into a frenzy over the case, which strikes me as a good sign.

Nor is Dershowitz especially clear on just what sort of racism we're dealing with post-George Floyd: it's specifically anti-white. For instance,

A Denver councilwoman has sparked fierce debate after suggesting that white-owned businesses pay additional tax, which would be given in reparations to the owners of minority-owned businesses.

Candi CdeBaca, a 37-year-old Democratic Socialist, told a business forum in Denver on Thursday that more needed to be done to provide reparations.

This is just another version of the much more ambitious proposal to pay reparations for slavery in California, under the assumption that even if whites in the state never owned slaves, they were nevertheless responsible for widespread discrimination against blacks.

Dershowitz is also insufficiently specific on the recent manifestations of antisemitism and anti-Catholicism: Observant Catholics and Jews both needed to bring suits against a number of government agencies for imposing discriminatory regulations on houses of worship during the COVID panic. The FBI has more recently been accused of conducting infiltration ooperations against conservative Catholics.

My own view is that ongoing political developments give cause for optimism, but these are largely connected with the resurgent MAGA movement, over which Dershowitz is at best ambivalent. Well, there was a lot to like about the center left of the early 1960s, but it's important to recognize that it also did a lot to put us where we are now. I'm not sure if Dershowitz fully recognizes that.

California Proposal For Slavery Reparations

This has been a background newes item for some time, but a California panel has been studying the issue of reparations for slavery:

In October 2020, Gov. Gavin Newsom (D) signed Bill AB 3121 into law — creating the nation’s first ever task force to study and recommend reparations for slavery.

This past Saturday, it issued a predictable set of recommendations:

California's reparations task force voted Saturday to approve recommendations on how the state may compensate and apologize to Black residents for generations of harm caused by discriminatory policies.

The nine-member committee, which first convened nearly two years ago, gave final approval at a meeting in Oakland to a hefty list of proposals that now go to state lawmakers to consider for reparations legislation.

. . . Some estimates from economists have projected that the state could owe upwards of $800 billion, or more than 2.5 times its annual budget, in reparations to Black people.

California entered the Union in 1850 as a free state, so slavery was never legal here throughout its history as a US state. However, the panel determined that various other forms of discrimination made African-Americans eligible for reparations according to complicated formulas.

The panel's recommendation breaks payments down by types of historical discrimination. For instance, Black residents affected by redlining by banks would receive $3,366 for each year they lived in California from the early 1930s to the late 1970s, amounting to up to $148,099.

Similarly, Black residents could receive roughly $2,352 in compensation for over-policing and mass incarceration for each year they lived in California between 1970 and 2020. Those payments could amount to $115,260.

In total, from these and other payments included in the plan, a Black Californian who is 71 years old and has lived in California his entire life could receive up to $1.2 million, according to analysis from the New York Times.

For now, I want to leave questions of whether such reparations are moral or constitutional completely aside and consider the single issue of how the reparations would be financed. I've got to assume there would need to be some type of tax levy on California residents to pay for this, whatever the cost, even if as some claim the $800 billion estimate is too high, and it might be done for less.

One question would be who would have to pay whatever tax was imposed to pay reparations to African-Americans. Normally if the legislature imposes a tax, every taxpayer must pay it according to income. But if the tax is imposed as a reparation for injustices against African-Americans, why should African-Americans have to pay the tax? Isn't that unfair?

That means there would need to be a set of criteria that would entitle certain people identifiable as African-Americans not only to receive reparation payments, but also to exempt them from being taxed to pay for the reparations.

But then we have a whole separate question of what this could do to those who must pay the tax, which would be not just white people, but Asians and Latins. Wouldn't this be an enormous incentive to drive non-African-Americas out of the state? Such a tax would place a non-trivial burden on possibly 85% or more of the state's residents, which they could escape by simply moving away.

I have no idea where this is headed, but it's hard to avoid thinking the state's political establishment, including a Democrat supermajority in the legislature, is edging toward a proposal that would involve race-based payments, financed by a race-based tax on perhaps 85% of the state's residents. As far as I casn see, this would make the popular indignation against the Bud Light-Dylan Mulvaney partnership look nugatory.

Beyond that, advocates of such reparations are beginning to advocate "down payments" on such reparations even before ultimate means of financing them are determined. As a practical matter, this can be about the only serious way such a proposal could be implemented, since any concrete reparations proposal detailing the actual cost and tax impact would be impossible to sell, much less get through the courts. It would either drive a mass migration of population and businesses out of California, or it would cause a near-immediate upending of the current political arrangements in the state.

But so far, nobody seems to be paying much attention.