Not evil, just awful

Kotkin sums up exactly the way I want to respond every time I hear a Trump supporter/defender say "he's not racist". Okay; walking like a duck is something our intelligent species can do without becoming ducks, but why would we do it? Maybe to get some really gullible ducks to follow us around.

In reality, Trump is not a classic racist, but rather an ugly opportunist willing to use ethnic divides for his own benefit. He’s been compared to Adolph Hitler, a monster whose philosophy revolved around race, but Trump has no real theory that extends beyond self-glorification, resentment, and attracting the fetching female; “The Art of the Deal” is not “Mein Kampf.”

Trump will play the race card as a way to satisfy his narcissistic need for enthusiastic admirers. This does not mean his approach does not echo the racism of the past. His claim of bias by a U.S.-born judge of Mexican descent, as well as his suggestions that Muslim jurists are incapable of ruling independently, recall the worst of the pre-Civil Rights South. His proposals to ban Muslim immigrants in general recall approaches in the late 19th and early 20th centuries which targeted Chinese, Japanese and, ultimately eastern and southern Europeans.

In short, you don't have to be Hitler to be awful, or to have bad intentions, or to be a wrecking ball for your own movement. When people were calling Obama a communist back in 2008 I was cringing because I knew it would be pretty easy to dismiss the charge. After all, what communist would save General Motors? Barack Obama had to have been secretly smiling every time someone tossed that accusation at him or its even stupider twin sister—the charge that he was born in Kenya. Leave the fact that it wouldn't have mattered if he had been (his mother is an American citizen), it just made everyone making it seem like an instant racist to the general populace.

Yes, Virginia—that general populace. The one which elects Presidents. Not the subsection of critical thinkers or people with degrees in the hard sciences.

So when I heard people saying Trump could be the next Hitler I cringed as well knowing that a few black and Jewish friends will effectively dismiss that charge while a host of others would point at the media, shout "See they call us all racist!" and reflexively support Trump even though his rhetoric is incendiary.

I am not the only person who sees it this way. Larry Elder had been more generous to Donald Trump than many of the other Salem Radio hosts, but boy, did he about lose it when the whole thing about the "Mexican" Judge came out. This all happened shortly after Trump had all but secured the GOP nomination. Elder's conclusion is worth noting: "As found as people are of Donald Trump, if you give him a pass on this it means you have no integrity."

I should probably just accept my new status as politically homeless. Get out the cardboard and lets light a barrel fire.

Defamation or Free Speech?

Here's the story so far. Rod Dreher started westfeliciana.blogspot.com, another blog, back in May to discuss local politics in West Feliciana, LA. There was a big controversy about something called the Home Rule Charter (HRC). Some people started discussing aspects of it on a Topix forum post. Topix is a very successful and popular forum for discussing local current news events, debating politics, making announcements, etc.

Rod became upset regarding reports of alleged bullying and he posted his reaction here. In this post he presents two conflicting opinions about the Topix forum post.

There's been some talk, in public meetings and on Facebook, that some people are afraid to speak out about the Home Rule Charter issue because they feel intimidated, and have been "bullied."

I don't want to say that it's never happened, only that it hasn't happened to me. If "bullying" means some anonymous jackass said slanderous things on Topix, then sorry, I don't count that. Those people are cowards, and should be completely discounted.

This is the first opinion, that anonymous Topix forum cowardly jackasses don't count. He doubles down on this opinion later:

But if people are only worried that some idiot on Topix is going to say mean things about them, sorry, but I can't take that seriously. I'm told they trash me all the time on that site. Big deal.

Then he makes this pronouncement:

By the way, you may not know this, but a Texas couple won $14 million last year in a defamation lawsuit against anonymous posters on Topix who libeled them. A Texas judge compelled Topix to release their IPs, which led the plaintiffs directly to those who had libeled them.

I am eager to talk to a lawyer who would be willing to file a libel suit on contingency against these anonymous Topix commentators, the identities of which Topix can be compelled to reveal (or at least their IPs). Sooner or later, the West Feliciana people who have been libeled anonymously on Topix are going to be able to find out the identities of those who have defamed them. And when they do, they are going to own those people, and their nice houses. If you know what I mean.

Do we have a lawyer in town who would be willing to sue Topix to compel them to release the IPs of our local slander trolls? Get in touch with me -- I'd love to be party to that lawsuit. I bet some others would too.

Now we originally laughed at this post, and it's still pretty funny on its own. It seemed like a serious overreaction, probably a Rod-got-up-on-wrong-side-of-bed kind of thing or Rod-ate-too-much-and-drank-to-much-last-night kind of thing. Here's why. The link about the Texas couple explains the nature of the actions of the defendants in the defamation suit.

Mark and Rhonda Lesher of Clarksville, Texas, filed a suit against anonymous commenters who accused them of being sexual deviants, molesters, and drug dealers on Topix, once self-described as "the country's largest local forum site."

"This vindicates us. This is vindication for all the scurrilous, vile, defamatory statements that caused us to be indicted, to be tried, that caused us to move out of town and my wife to lose her business," Mark Lesher said, the Texarkana Gazette reported. "You can't post anonymous lies on the Internet without suffering the consequences."

Furthermore, and this is what really blew me away:

Since reports of the rape allegations began to surface in 2008, more than 25,000 comments, on about 70 threads related to the trial, were posted on Topix message boards for anyone with a search engine to see.

I started this in 2007 and have posted — along with Pikkumatti and Kathleen — a total of 2,180 posts on this blog. Twenty-five thousand is a big number. I can't imagine going into the confessional and saying "Father, I bore false witness against my neighbor 25 thousand times since my last confession." There's no way the derogatory comments about Dreher amounted to anything close to this. There's no big payout here, chumps; keep playing the Louisiana Lottery.

As far as I could see after reading all the comments on the aforementioned Topix site, there is nothing accusing Rod Dreher or Ellen Kennon or Becky Hilliard or any of their friends in this whole political argument of felonious behavior, of raping and molesting people, of dealing drugs, grand theft, racketeering, eating at chain restaurants, shopping at Wal-mart — nothing like that. The strongest accusations I saw pretty much stated that Dreher didn't know what he was talking about and that he was stirring up racial tensions. That's just criticism, not libel or defamation. I seriously couldn't believe that he made the comparison of criticisms against him to people who had lost their business over false accusations of serious criminality. What makes it even harder to buy is that Dreher doesn't disclose the details of the supposed defamation; he doesn't even provide a hint. Was it a comment — possibly deleted — about dealing drugs or child molestation? Or was it something of the Justin Bieber eats poop variety? We don't know; he doesn't say.

"I'm told they trash me all the time on that site. Big deal." That attitude seems to change by the end of the post, and it most certainly changed a week later on July 16 when he put up a post about defamation charges filed by himself and Ellen Kennon titled Defamation.

Ellen Kennon and I met with detectives from the Sheriff's office this afternoon to discuss the possibility of pressing criminal defamation charges against anonymous Topix commenters. Filing charges would be the first step in unmasking them and holding them accountable for the defamatory things they've said in public under the cloak of anonymity.

In my case, there are lots of items trashing me, but given my job, I have the status of a "public person" in terms of libel law. People can say things about me that they couldn't get away saying about someone who was a "private person" in the eyes of the law. Still, I identified two or three specific posts involving me that, in my view, constitute criminal defamation, especially insofar as they make reputation-damaging assertions that are provably false, as well as malicious, and that hurt my professional and personal reputation. See the Louisiana statute below.

It is possible that the investigation will not find that there are sufficient grounds to determining criminal defamation (which is a misdemeanor), and either the DA will choose not to press charges, or the judge will not find sufficient grounds to subpoena Topix's records -- in which case our only recourse will be in civil court. We'll see where this goes. I can report, though, that there is a criminal investigation underway. I know there are lots of people in this parish who have been slandered on Topix, but who felt that they couldn't do anything about it. Well, maybe you can, if the anonymous trolls cross certain legal lines. Like I said, we'll see.

Rod Dreher has lamented his status as a "public person" before. But he has benefited from being a public person, so I don't see why he shouldn't suffer the slings and arrows of his outrageous fortune. My aunt died really young and my dad didn't even get a lousy t-shirt out of the tragedy, let alone a $1 million book advance. I'm not entirely sure his statement "People can say things about me that they couldn't get away saying about someone who was a 'private person'" is true. Over the years I've pointed out what I believe are inaccuracies, inconsistencies and absurdities in Dreher's viewpoints, especially in his anti-Catholic knee-jerks. None of this amounts to libel or any kind of defamation, and I don't see why it would if I accused my next door neighbor of the same thing. My neighbor does not publish a blog or do any writing so it would probably be considered bad form to criticize opinions he expressed to me in private ("I can't believe my neighbor, Jim ______, thinks Chevys are better than Fords; what planet is he from?"), but the idea that I couldn't get away with saying it because he is a "private person" is simply not true.

So when he speaks of the "lots of items trashing me", do any of these rise to the level of libelous or defamatory? I didn't see any on that post. And he admits that it's likely that there will not be "sufficient grounds to determining criminal defamation". So the announcement that there's a criminal investigation underway has one primary purpose as I see it: to put a chilling effect on free speech. Does this work? I think it might in some cases. People start to worry, thinking "Uh-oh, did I tick him off with my remarks? Will he make trouble for me? Will they release my IP address in the court case?" This is probably because they don't know what constitutes libel nor how difficult it is to prove.

But there is an off chance that people might be dragged into court over this matter. Maybe Angela Corey will be disbarred in Florida and become the DA of Baton Rouge, I don't know. That is why I have started the First Amendment Defense Fund (FADF). It's basically a PayPal account. This fund has the specific purpose of defending people who comment on Topix and are named in this frivolous lawsuit filed by Rod Dreher and Ellen Kennon. Hopefully we won't need to pay anything out, so if that's the case after 6 months or so I'll return all the contributions. I started out by contributing $25 to the fund.

I don't think I have anything more to say about this right now, except that I think Rod's anger mainly stems from the fact that he cannot delete comments on Topix like he can on his own blog. Here's one last comment on the HRC thread from commenter Billfr:

The biggest winners, though, will be all those other local SF-WFP residents who will be filing criminal complaints with the sheriff against the people they think wronged them here on Topix and launching criminal investigations through the sheriff's office too. Not only will they be able to smack around people they might have disliked for some time and even sue them for some money, with all the national stories being spun out of this, I wouldn't be surprised if a few other locals also got their 15 minutes of media fame, just like that Zimmerman witness Rachel Jeantel. I think that guy Pauli in Cleveland is already blogging about this, I don't doubt others have already picked it up too at least in BR [Baton Rouge], and Rod himself would be foolish not to tip off his colleagues everywhere he has them. There's no such thing as bad publicity, at least not for Rod.

Lol. Well, again, criticism does not equal defamation, and any smart person knows this.

Correction

The other day I said that the George Zimmerman trial had become a yawn fest. That was an error in judgement on my part. Maybe I had forgotten for an instant that we are in the age of Obama when crises must not be let go to waste. Whether a particular "crisis" has been manufactured, as this one has, is beside the point.

Now I am following the Zimmerman verdict's aftermath much more attentively. There is a lot of interesting material being churned out and it's almost all supportive of the verdict and the right way of seeing the events. Trying to turn Rachel Jeantel into Anita Hill would be downright funny if she were attractive or intelligent — or even if she possessed the proverbial nice personality — just one of the above would make Rachel Jeantel jokes at least mildly acceptable. But I'll stop there.

Far more interesting is the fact that black people benefit disproportionately from stand your ground laws, the new "boogieman" of Eric Holder & Co.

African Americans benefit from Florida’s “Stand Your Ground” self-defense law at a rate far out of proportion to their presence in the state’s population, despite an assertion by Attorney General Eric Holder that repealing “Stand Your Ground” would help African Americans.

Black Floridians have made about a third of the state’s total “Stand Your Ground” claims in homicide cases, a rate nearly double the black percentage of Florida’s population. The majority of those claims have been successful, a success rate that exceeds that for Florida whites.

Nonetheless, prominent African Americans including Holder and “Ebony and Ivory” singer Stevie Wonder, who has vowed not to perform in the Sunshine State until the law is revoked, have made “Stand Your Ground” a central part of the Trayvon Martin controversy.

So we get to sit back and watch the left demonize yet another thing like they do with school choice, gun rights and pro-growth business policies which help law-abiding blacks. Of course Ann Coulter wrote a book about this so she contributed an article about a parallel story about an undercover cop named Lee Van Houten who was forced to shoot a black mugger back in 1985. This was in the "dark days" before the internet when false media narratives and hype could not be as easily exposed as such.

The case most like George Zimmerman’s is the Edmund Perry case. In 1985, Perry, a black teenager from Harlem who had just graduated from Phillips Exeter Academy, mugged a guy who turned out to be an undercover cop. He got shot and a few hours later was dead.

Instead of waiting for the facts, the media rushed out with a story about Officer Lee Van Houten being a trigger-happy, racist cop. When that turned out to be false, the New York Times looked at its shoes. It was the kind of story the elites wanted to be true. It should be true. We had such high hopes for that one. Damn!

The initial news accounts stressed not only that Perry was a graduate of Exeter on his way to Stanford, but that he was unarmed. (In all white-on-black shootings, the media expect the white to have RoboCop-like superpowers to detect any weapons on the perp as well as his resume.)

The real must read so-far is yesterday's NR piece called Angela Corey's Checkered Past. The title might be a little inaccurate, unless it's a checkerboard with all dark squares.

Corey knows about personal vendettas. They seem to be her specialty. When Ron Littlepage, a journalist for the Florida Times-Union, wrote a column criticizing her handling of the Christian Fernandez case — in which Corey chose to prosecute a twelve-year-old boy for first-degree murder, who wound up locked in solitary confinement in an adult jail prior to his court date — she “fired off a two-page, single-spaced letter on official state-attorney letterhead hinting at lawsuits for libel.”

Ooooh! Libel suits for criticism! Always so charming.

And that was moderate. When Corey was appointed to handle the Zimmerman case, Talbot “Sandy” D’Alemberte, a former president of both the American Bar Association and Florida State University, criticized the decision: “I cannot imagine a worse choice for a prosecutor to serve in the Sanford case. There is nothing in Angela Corey’s background that suits her for the task, and she cannot command the respect of people who care about justice.” Corey responded by making a public-records request of the university for all e-mails, text messages, and phone messages in which D’Alemberte had mentioned Fernandez. Like Littlepage, D’Alemberte had earlier criticized Corey’s handling of the Fernandez case.

More of the same. But there's more than bullying that she's guilty of.

But what these instances point to is something much more alarming than Corey’s less-than-warm relations with her peers.

In June 2012, Alan Dershowitz, a well-known defense attorney who has been a professor at Harvard Law School for nearly half a century, criticized Corey for her affidavit in the Zimmerman case. Making use of a quirk of Florida law that gives prosecutors, for any case except first-degree murder, the option of filing an affidavit with the judge instead of going to a grand jury, Corey filed an affidavit that, according to Dershowitz, “willfully and deliberately omitted” crucial exculpatory evidence: namely, that Trayvon Martin was beating George Zimmerman bloody at the time of the fatal gunshot. So Corey avoided a grand jury, where her case likely would not have held water, and then withheld evidence in her affidavit to the judge. “It was a perjurious affidavit,” Dershowitz tells me, and that comes with serious consequences: “Submitting a false affidavit is grounds for disbarment.”

Shortly after Dershowitz’s criticisms, Harvard Law School’s dean’s office received a phone call. When the dean refused to pick up, Angela Corey spent a half hour demanding of an office-of-communications employee that Dershowitz be fired. According to Dershowitz, Corey threatened to sue Harvard, to try to get him disbarred, and also to sue him for slander and libel. Corey also told the communications employee that she had assigned a state investigator — an employee of the State of Florida, that is — to investigate Dershowitz. “That’s an abuse of office right there,” Dershowitz says.

This is corruption mixed with pure Alinsky tactics. And here's the really bad news, although I hope National Review is wrong about this.

But will Corey ever be disciplined for prosecutorial abuses? It’s unlikely. State attorneys cannot be brought before the bar while they remain in office. Complaints can be filed against Corey, but they will be deferred until she is no longer state attorney. The governor can remove her from office, but otherwise her position — and her license — are safe.

She is a thug worthy of the Age of Obama. We can only hope that the continued overreaching continues to backfire and at least some bad people end up going down for it. And that not too many innocent people get hurt along the way.

Drag (inter) net

Top Ten Ruthies according to Google

Maybe this will change when Rod's book comes out, but currently these are the top ten suggestions when you Google the name Ruthie:

1. Ruthie Henshall - There are reasons she's at the top, IMHO.
2. Ruthie Davis - Like, shoes and sutff.
3. Ruthie Foster - Blues singer.
4. Ruthie from 7th Heaven - Cute actress Mackenzie Rosman.
5. Ruthie Camden - Same as #4.
6. Ruthie Alcaide - Alcoholic tattoo chick from real world.
7. Ruthie Real World - Same as 6.
8. Ruthie Knox - Soft-core hack.
9. Ruthie and Moe's Diner - Wow, it's in Cleveland. I'll have to check it out sometime.
10. Ruthie Sommers - Upscale interior decorator.

Check out Ruthie Sommers's pictures on that last link. She's a pretty good designer. Well, I suppose her upscale business isn't going to be affected too much by a new Ruthie on the block. Everyone knows her last name, unlike Ruthie from 7th Heaven and Ruthie Real World.

We'll check back in May '13 and see the new Ruthie list, who's in, who's out.