The Myth Of The "Mostly Peaceful Protests" And Unprovable Counterfactuals

Donald Trump, still pressing the narrative of a stolen election, met with protesters hoping to shut down the formal electoral vote count. These protests later turned into an absurd, theatrical farce, with dozens arrested and four dead. Very quickly, Joe Biden went straight into absurdities of his own, pretending that the kid-gloves treatment afforded the George Floyd protesters of last summer did not happen, and that they were instead somehow manhandled by the police:

Biden: "No one can tell me that if it had been a group of Black Lives Matter protesting yesterday, they wouldn't have been treated very, very differently than the mob of thugs that stormed the Capitol. We all know that's true, and it is unacceptable. Totally unacceptable." pic.twitter.com/TfWa25VzEt

— CBS News (@CBSNews) January 7, 2021

Kamala Harris and Michelle Obama made similar statements:

.@KamalaHarris: "We witnessed two systems of justice when we saw one that let extremists storm the United States Capitol, and another that released tear gas on peaceful protesters last summer...We know this is unacceptable. We know we should be better than this." pic.twitter.com/Uc1FC8aZKg

— CSPAN (@cspan) January 7, 2021

Like all of you, I’ve been feeling so many emotions since yesterday. I tried to put my thoughts down here: pic.twitter.com/9xzRvrpk7y

— Michelle Obama (@MichelleObama) January 7, 2021

This is the purest of self-delusion. In fact, the summer protests are likely to go down as the most expensive in US history, with mayors in, at least, Seattle, Portland (especially), and Minneapolis all taking little effort and/or being slow to suppress the violence. Seattle only finally cracked down on October 3, but Minneapolis continues to have problems, and Portland Mayor Ted Wheeler actually said something mean about violent protesters. Yes, Trump famously (and stupidly) got unmarked federal police (some from the Bureau of Prisons) on the scene in D.C., and also to Seattle, but both dispersed relatively quickly. It's hard to look at this and conclude this is nothing but a narrative in search of its own facts — and that Democrats have no interest whatsoever in an honest accounting of any misdeeds from their side of the aisle.

And Now A Warren-Sexism Corrective From Cathy Young

Some new links therein about more silly postmortems (Ella Nilsen and Li Zhou at Vox, and Connie Schultz), and good reminders about how all personalized criticism and bashing isn't a sign of sexism (Ted Cruz particularly seems to attract this sort of thing). As ever, excellent work from Cathy Young.

Nancy Pelosi Joins The Sexism-Scuttled-Warren Bandwagon

Nancy Pelosi has at times impressed me as one of the less crazy Democrats, particularly in her handling of loose cannon Alexandra Ocasio-Cortez and her "squad". But she has joined the chorus of those baselessly claiming that sexism was to blame for Elizabeth Warren's exit:

“I do think there’s a certain element of misogyny that is there,” Pelosi said. “Some of it isn’t really mean-spirited, it just isn’t their experience.”

“Many of them will tell you they had a strong mom, they have strong sisters, they have strong daughters, but they have their own insecurities,” Pelosi continued.

I increasingly think this will not end but for some crushing defeats; however, even that might not be enough.

The Inevitable, Vacant Charge Of "Sexism" In Elizabeth Warren Postmortems

Katie Herzog (@kittypurrzog on Twitter) has done me the solid of cataloguing at least some of the "Elizabeth Warren didn't win because, sexism" balderdash you just knew would be rolling in following Warren's conceding the race. (Emboldening mine below.)

The feeling is nicely summed up by Jason Stanley, professor of philosophy at Yale and author of How Fascism Works: The Politics of Us and Them. "To repeat the obvious: there is no other explanation except for misogyny for what has happened to Senator Warren this year," Stanley tweeted after Warren suffered across-the-board losses on Super Tuesday. He called this "profoundly depressing."

This feeling was mirrored by feminist writer Jessica Valenti, who wrote in an essay that Warren had been "outright erased and ignored" by both media and voters. "Don't tell me this isn't about sexism," Valenti wrote. "I've been around too long for that." Sure, Warren may have been the most exhaustively covered female candidate since Hillary Clinton, and she may have one of the biggest war chests in the race, and she may have had among the most stage time at the debates, but still! She lost. The only explanation is that she's been systematically ignored and erased.

Valenti, one of the most predictable hacks out there, was hardly the only individual to make this spurious and risible cause the basis for Warren's failure to catch fire. In addition to those mentioned above, a few more:

• Warren herself:
  

  "Gender in this race, you know, that is the trap question for every woman. If you say, 'yeah, there was sexism in this race,' everyone says 'whiner,'" she said. "And if you say, 'no, there was no sexism,' about a bazillion women think, 'what planet do you live on?''"

• Emily Stewart in Vox:
  

  There’s no clear answer as to why she didn’t succeed and why her campaign, while resonating with millions of voters, didn’t quite get there. Misogyny is almost certainly an element — many Americans still question whether a woman can win the White House, and thus far, a woman hasn’t. And Warren’s campaign in some ways exemplified the challenges women face in so many aspects of life: They often have to work harder and gather more credentials to even attempt to reach the same heights as men, and even then, there’s no guarantee of success.

• Hanh Nguyen in Salon:

  "We had all that this time, right?" said Yang. "And it looks like America is not going to elect her, which really comes down to me, to a recognition that whatever we want to claim, gender is at the core of this. It may not be deliberate. It may not be that people outright say they cannot imagine supporting a woman or having a woman president. But when the going gets tough, when there's concern about electability, when there is a push-comes-to-shove around priority, things still seem to line up the same way. And that soft bigotry, that soft filtering, that consistently I think serves as the toughest of glass ceilings for women to raise."
  
  [Actress Sara] Gorsky also holds this belief. "I think that she faced an enormous amount of sexism and misogyny that's inherent in the system and in everyday voters still in America, which is hugely disappointing to me," she said. "I think the media painted a picture of a candidate who 'couldn't do it' and couldn't be elected. It breaks my heart that the media sent that message and that Americans seemed to receive it."

• Megan Garber in The Atlantic:

  Kate Manne, a philosopher at Cornell University, describes misogyny as an ideology that serves, ultimately, to reinforce a patriarchal status quo. “Misogyny is the law-enforcement branch of patriarchy,” Manne argues. It rewards those who uphold the existing order of things; it punishes those who fight against it. It is perhaps the mechanism at play when a woman puts herself forward as a presidential candidate and finds her attributes—her intelligence, her experience, her compassion—understood as threats. It is perhaps that mechanism at play when a woman says, “I believe in us,” and is accused of being “self-righteous.”

You really could do this all day, although I note with some interest that Jezebel has surprisingly failed to level this charge in their coverage, to their credit. The simple, obvious rejoinder to this idiocy is that Hillary Clinton won the Democratic primaries as their standard-bearer in 2016, and why are Democrats such sexists now? It says a great deal about the state of the Democratic polity that this is such a go-to answer for any and all of Warren's failings. As Herzog put it, "Warren's followers are both primed to see sexism everywhere and so enamored with their candidate—so sure of her (and their own) righteousness—that they are unable to see any of the flaws that are so apparent to anyone outside their bubble."

Update: It occurred to me that we have seen this exact, data-free approach before, with two other female candidates in the 2020 presidential race:

•  Kamala Harris herself in an HBO interview after she suspended her campaign:

  Harris: Essentially is America ready for a woman, and a woman of color, to be president of the United States?
  Margaret Talev: America was ready for a black man to be president of the United States.
  Harris: And this conversation happened for him. There is a lack of ability, or a difficult — a difficulty in imagining that someone who we have never seen can do a job that has been done forty-five times by someone who is not that person.

• Kirsten Gillibrand: "Gillibrand’s exit is particularly significant – and betrays a worrying anti-feminist undercurrent within the Democratic Party."

Yet it's truly hard to find similar charges leveled at the voters for rejecting Amy Klobuchar, Marianne Williamson, or Tulsi Gabbard. (I did manage to pick up a piece complaining about differential media treatment of Klobuchar in Politico, but it has yet to be raised as a justification for her campaign's dissolution.) The idea that the press coverage is aimed at the audience has never been more apt.

The Non-Invisibility Of Elizabeth Warren

I have previously written about the cesspit that is The Root, particularly its perceived profitability versus sister G/O Media outlet, Jezebel. Unless you like stale intersectional dogma delivered with a heaping helping of snark, there’s little inside that dank cave for anyone searching for fresh insights on racial matters.

Recently, a new essay by Michael Harriot on the subject of the Democratic primary generally and Elizabeth Warren hove into view, "Elizabeth Warren Exists". This one is so bad that it may have actually lowered my already basement-level opinion of Harriot as a journalist.

At this point, we need to take a brief detour into Harriot's recent coverage, and one story in particular. Harriot, you may recall, was late to writing about the Sarah Braasch "napping-while-black" non-incident; The Root's first installment came from Anne Branigin, a story that mostly pulls from the Yale Daily News piece. Harriot's first piece on July 20, 2018, "Woman Who Called Police on 2 Black Yale Students Says She's 'Done Absolutely Nothing Wrong' in Whitest Tweets Ever", manages to be both snarky and uncharitable to Braasch. (By contrast, Cathy Young's report covering the incident and fallout in The Bulwark gets the details that Harriot missed or refused to learn: that Braasch called campus police on a black non-resident in the dorm, Lolade Siyonbola, napping in a common room that was off-limits to outsiders. Siyonbola had a reason to extract revenge on Braasch for earlier calling police to break up a loud party on her dorm level. It was not, as Harriot and much of the outside press insisted, simply a matter of Braasch calling the police on a black person in the wrong place.) For reasons only he knows, he later called Braasch a "swamptwat", which is of a piece with former Gawker Media properties: if you can't be good, be snarky.

This is a pattern with Harriot, who fancies himself a connoisseur of what he labels "wypipo" (white people); he once made a defense of this racist expression of contempt which boils down to, only power plus prejudice can equal racism. As the Twitter account @neontaster once put it, "If you can't be racist against white people, then why are you trying so hard?" The answer to this question is that there's coin to be made, albeit not as much as women trying to plump their victimhood scores, which latter is over half again more profitable. Writing about matters racial with snark and verve doesn't have to be an exercise in unalloyed hate, something Gustavo Arellano showed us with his syndicated "¡Ask A Mexican!" column; he gave back as good as he got from racist idiots, but the genuinely curious (and polite) received thoughtful replies in Spanish-infused English. It is a model Harriot plainly rejects in favor of intersectional pugilism.

So, back to Warren. Warren, we learn, is invisible in the media, by which I presume Harriot means the TV punditry. A recent New York Times story expanded on this, mentioning her absence in a NBC News/Wall Street Journal poll as well: the poll asked about head-to-heads with other leading candidates versus Donald Trump — but not Warren. To some degree, Warren has only herself to blame for this state of affairs. Despite being fourth in overall fundraising among Democratic candidates (and second if you omit self-funders Tom Steyer and Michael Bloomberg), Warren badly trails both Steyer and Bloomberg in ad spending — but also trails Bernie. What is she doing with her war chest? Saving it for Super Tuesday? Running a sham campaign so she can guarantee her reelection as senator from Massachusetts?

But of course the main reason why Warren might prove invisible is her showing thus far, winning a grand total of eight delegates. Of course, this is after only two states have rendered results, so it's hardly a representative sample. Warren hasn't drawn the same level of interest as Bernie, either, at least if you count Google searches:

Looking at news results, Google News shows 72,600,000 for "Elizabeth Warren" versus 107,000,000 for "Bernie Sanders", which is maybe more encouraging, but also broadly tracks the Google search results as well. What accounts for this state of affairs? I don't know, but I would speculate it's a number of things:

• She has Hillary Clinton's technocratic iciness, although I do think Warren's a better politician. Both had or have very long and detailed policy lists that can be off-putting.
• Warren hasn't had to win a state outside cobalt blue Massachusetts, so her success elsewhere is open to question. (But then, so is Bernie's.)
• Warren's virtue-signaling. This is an absolute guess, but her bid to give a veto to the Secretary of Education to a transgender kid smacks of political grandstanding she has no intention of implementing in office. Likewise her wealth tax that Peter Suderman called "probably unconstitutional" and a "stunt policy" that Sweden and most other countries adopting it eventually repealed when it failed to produce the promised revenues. She would also pursue a flatly unconstitutional program threatening social media companies for permitting protected speech on their websites.

Overall, things are not looking up for Warren. Recent polling shows her with less than half of Sanders' totals (24% to 6% in South Carolina, and 30% vs. 12% in Nevada) in the next two primary states. Even a Sanders/Warren unity ticket would not work, as national polls together show they don't make up even 50% of Democrats. It's a long road to November, and there's a strong chance Warren won't even complete the run of primaries. Harriot, incurious, fails to ask why black voters pulled the lever in greater numbers for Trump in 2016 than for Romney in 2012. Absent a historic candidate, it seems likely an enervated black electorate (and the presence of someone like Mayor Stop-And-Frisk) might possibly not change matters much.

Andrew Yang Forgets Korematsu

Andrew Yang is, I take it, a smart person, according to various reports, but this is something like ethnic suicide:

We came up with the SAT during World War II to determine who to keep from the frontlines. Now every year is wartime. We should deemphasize standardized tests and evaluate kids more holistically.

— Andrew Yang🧢 (@AndrewYang) October 9, 2019

 Absent SATs, how do we determine who gets seats in UC and Cal State schools? Oh, right, that would be a project for the intersectionalists, who would insist upon equal proportionality based on overall population. Asians are over-represented in higher education, something that was not lost on them when in 2014, the California legislature threatened to reinstate affirmative action; the biggest losers would be (wait for it) Asians, who were instrumental in killing that bill. The whole point of standardized tests is to emphasize merit over skin color, sex, or any other arbitrary measure. Yang's universal basic income is a stupid, virtue-signaling effort at vote-buying; this attacks what should be a group of core supporters, only he's too dumb to see it.

Sunday Linkies

• The ACLU has come out in favor of M2F participation in biological women's sporting events, an announcement that was immediately panned by Martina Navratilova:

  I love you ACLU, but you are wrong on this. Unless you want to completely remake what Women’s Sports means, there can be no blanket inclusion rule. There is nothing stereotypical about this- it’s about fairness and it’s about science. Thank you.

  — Martina Navratilova (@Martina) March 13, 2019

  The ACLU's source for this claim is a data-free essay from ... Everyday Feminism.
• Reason ran a fine essay on sex differences in athletics that probably won't do much to change the current situation, larded as it is with loud advocates resting on spectral evidence that doesn't really address the differences between M2F transgender athletes and biological women. 
• A terrific thread from @FondOfBeetles showing how adolescent boys routinely break records set by the best women in track. Opening shot:

  In 2004, I was privileged to watch Kelly Holmes win the female Olympic 800m gold, in a run that kept everyone on tenterhooks until that final glorious sprint finish. Her finishing time was 1:56.38. 1/ pic.twitter.com/6EkVF5ZFxe

  — Dr FondOfBeetles (@FondOfBeetles) March 11, 2019

• A useful article from T Nation on the subject of transgender athletes:
  

  Most experts say that the average testosterone production for biological females ranges between 0.52 to 2.8 nmol/L. The Mayo Clinic put that range even lower (2). And while experts may vary in what they consider average among females, the consensus is almost always below 3 nanomoles/L.
  
  But remember, federations like the IOC require a male-born person to suppress and maintain testosterone production at 10 nanomoles/L.
  
  So even if a woman was genetically blessed with testosterone levels that reached 3 nmol/L, that would still be less than half of what a trans woman would be allowed to have during the competition. To look at it another way, her male-born competitor would have just over three times as much testosterone, even with hormone-altering drugs.

• Sex differences in the human brain show up before birth. The last refuge of the blank slate-ist is gone.
• Kirsten Gillibrand has zero endorsements. 
• Finland's government has collapsed following failed efforts to reform the country's healthcare delivery system.  This is interesting for a lot of reasons, not least because Finland has better per-capita spending on healthcare than France, which is often used as a model for US single-payer/M4A advocates (the light blue line below is Finland):