The Whole World Was Watching

COMEY ON THE HILL

STEPHEN F. HAYES • MICHAEL WARREN

JUNE 19, 2017 • $5.99

THE WHOLE WORLD WAS WATCHING

CHARLOTTE ALLEN on the appalling protests at Evergreen State

WEEKLYSTANDARD.COM Contents June 19, 2017 • Volume 22, Number 39

2 The Scrapbook The Obamas get the royal treatment, NPR euphemisms, & more 5 Casual Joseph Epstein on jokes that lose their mojo 7 Editorials Comey v. Trump • The Republican Future • Violent Portland Articles

10 A Memo-rable Hearing by Michael Warren Comey unloads

11 Rules of Disorder by Fred Barnes 2 The president leads himself astray

12 One Seat That Should Be Safe by Tony Mecia Pugnacious politics in the Palmetto State

15 All Politics Are National by Chris Deaton Trump might as well be on the Georgia ballot

16 A Separate Place by Alice B. Lloyd Where every young man is a king

18 Macron, Le Terminator by Anne-Elisabeth Moutet Le winner and les losers 7 21 Foundering Fathers by Jay Cost 10 Is there no historical figure good enough for today?

24 Of Tribes and Terrorism by Lee Smith How do you solve a problem like Qatar? Feature

26 The Whole World Was Watching by Charlotte Allen The appalling protests at Evergreen State College Books & Arts

34 Let Them Eat Cake by Sara Lodge Islands at sea unite over tea 21 36 Remember Malmedy by Gabriel Schoenfeld The truth, and untruth, of a German atrocity

38 State of the City by Robert Whitcomb There’s no place quite like Singapore. But for how long?

39 Irresistible Force by Diane Scharper Love in the shadow of Israeli-Palestinian conflict

40 Crosses to Bear by Maureen Mullarkey The limitations in the academic study of faith

43 Comic Critics by John Podhoretz Ideologues drain all the wonder from a popcorn flick 26 44 Parody Post-Paris pollution COVER BY DAVE MALAN THE SCRAPBOOK That’ll Be the Day ven in Texas, where everything’s ner of Texas, where small museums film, and tech industry crowd, the E bigger, the little guys can still win celebrate and highlight that past,” ac- city already dominates the state’s one. In the latest case, the little guys cording to the paper. “There’s Turkey, modern music scene. Who wants to are the nearly 40 private music muse- where the Bob Wills Museum is locat- give Austin even more influence over ums across the Lone Star State. Their ed. And San Benito’s Freddy Fender Texas culture? The opening of a cen- defeated foe? A plan backed by Gov- Museum and the Buddy Holly Center tral museum would have also made it ernor Greg Abbott, Austin politicians, in Lubbock, along with Arlington’s harder for museums of narrower or and the state’s preservation board to Texas Blues Museum and the Light niche focus to remain open. build a taxpayer-funded Texas State Crust Doughboys Hall of Fame and One such museum is the Texas Music Museum. Museum in Hillsboro.” Polka Music Museum in Schulen- As the Houston Chroni- But as plans began burg. Based on its website, there’s cle gleefully reports, two bills for the big state muse- nothing flashy or interactive about to establish the state-run um, these communi- this museum. But it does appear museum died in the legisla- ty museums spotted to be run by its board of directors, ture late last month. That a threat. Austin, an earnest group of polka-loving news pleased those who with its hip indie Texans who are keeping alive the have long been develop- music scene and tradition passed down from their ing their own Museum of German, Polish, and Czech immi- American Music History grant ancestors. The TPMM opened in Houston. But the fail- in 2010 in a historic building in ure to create an official downtown Schulenburg, serving to state music museum also conserve polka history, showcase gave the owners and op- polka bands and DJs, and organize erators of Texas’s numerous an annual polka festival. small, independent music mu- And don’t forget the Tex Rit- seums cause to celebrate. ter Museum at the Texas Country The Chronicle noted the many Music Hall of Fame in Carthage, in musical styles and influences that “Keep Austin Weird” ethos, was seen Panola County. make up Texas’s “rich music his- as encroaching on claims of musical A small-town museum is as tory”—everything from German tradition in other parts of the state. American as apple pie, and it’s why polka to Mexican folk to country to As host city of the annual South By The Scrapbook is dancing a polka blues. “That history was developed in Southwest conference and festivals, on the grave of the Texas State

small towns and cities in every cor- which draw an international music, Music Museum. ♦ BRUNSWICK RECORDS HOLLY, TWS ART;

Not in Her Name soldiers who stopped the rampage. It shouldn’t have come as a sur- urveys consistently rank Scan- prise her name would go on a West S dinavian countries the hap- Bank women’s center—hers is a piest on earth. But now, even go-to moniker for such things. Pal- they are getting ticked off by estinians had already named a pub- the Palestinians. lic square, two girls’ high schools, a The brouhaha began with the computer center, a soccer champi- decision by Norway and the Unit- onship, and two summer camps for ed Nations to help fund a women’s Mughrabi. The New York Times in center in the Palestinian territories. ahem, Palestinian activist. Problem is, 2010 quoted a Palestinian official say- What could go wrong with that? Dalal Mughrabi was a member of the ing, “For us, she is not a terrorist, [but Well, it turns out that after the cen- Palestinian Liberation Organization. rather] a fighter who fought for the ter was constructed, in the West Bank She led a 1978 terrorist attack outside liberation of her own land.” town of Buraq, Palestinian officials Tel Aviv that killed 38 Israeli civil- Norway, though, was shocked at decided to name it the “Martyr Dalal ians, including 13 children. She was the naming and asked last month

Mughrabi Center” after a well-known, killed in a shootout with the Israeli that its association with the center BACKGROUND, MOHAMMAD HIJJAWI TWS ART;

2 / The Weekly Standard June 19, 2017 be erased. In Nordic solidarity, Den- mark pledged to freeze contributions to Palestinian organizations. After some mealymouthed responses, the United Nations also issued an admirably stern statement: “The glorification of terrorism, or the perpetrators of heinous terrorist acts, is unacceptable.” Alas, the U.N.’s check had already been cashed, so the best they could do was to ask “for the logo of UN Women to be removed immediately” from the women’s center wall. That’s all well and good—refreshing, even. But such concerns are perhaps best expressed before forking over money to groups with a history and habit of celebrating terrorism. ♦ BO Brummell arack and Michelle Obama are B setting lifestyle standards most Americans could only dream of, but there’s no shortage of publications urging us to dream. Under the heading “Celebrity Food,” People magazine published an online list of some of the fabulous eat- eries where Barack and Michelle have recently been spotted. The article was titled “The Obamas Still Have Fan- tastic Taste in Restaurants.” And if that weren’t enough praise for their culinary savoir-faire, there was this drooling sub-headline: “The former president and his family continue to dine at the world’s coolest—and most tailoring. The New York Times shows style, as “most Milanese men are too delicious—restaurants.” Good luck us how with an early June article, “In hidebound to be seen wearing open- getting reservations. High Style, Obama Returns to the necked shirts,” but “Mr. Obama seized Not only can one dine like the World Stage.” While in Milan, he wore on an element of European style— Obamas, one can travel like them “a slim dark suit over a white dress sprezzatura, the art of studied careless- as well. Travel+Leisure featured “the shirt with two buttons left open.” Two ness,” to achieve a “fusion style” that luxurious estate where Barack and buttons! Social media went into a fren- the Times describes as “the full-inter- Michelle Obama vacationed” when zy, “so effortlessly and ineffably cool national.” To get the look, don’t forget, recently in Italy. The Tuscan mansion did he appear.” It wasn’t quite Italian it’s two buttons, not one. where they stayed features “a 60- In part, all of this urging to foot pool, tennis and bocce courts, copy the Obamas’ food, drink, and a fully-equipped gym with resort, and clothing choices is sauna and steam room, along with just the commonplace stuff of a basketball court.” In bold type, modern celebrity. But The Scrap- Travel+Leisure raves of the estate: book wonders if there’s not also “You can rent it too, but it will something strangely monarchi- cost you.” cal about it. Mr. Obama is being And while in Italy, don’t for- treated not unlike the prince in get to dutifully emulate Barack’s Regency England—someone

June 19, 2017 The Weekly Standard / 3 with not very much to do, but whose “It shows a group of students con- style of doing nothing-very-much is fronting a biology professor named closely followed and copied. Bret Weinstein because he questions So far, this is being done in an in- certain diversity policies on campus.” formal way. But perhaps it’s time for After rolling the tape of the under- www.weeklystandard.com an official seal of Obama approval, a graduate Jacobins screaming abuse Stephen F. Hayes, Editor in Chief mark that verifies a product or service at Weinstein, Kaste explains again: Richard Starr, Editor has been used by the former president “Now, this professor considers himself Fred Barnes, Robert Messenger, Executive Editors Eric Felten, Managing Editor or his family. It could be America’s a liberal, and he objected only to some Christopher Caldwell, Andrew Ferguson, first royal warrant. ♦ aspects of the diversity policies. But Lee Smith, Senior Editors Peter J. Boyer, National Correspondent the students were still outraged, and Philip Terzian, Literary Editor they wanted him punished or fired.” Kelly Jane Torrance, Deputy Managing Editor Evergreen Evasion Jay Cost, Mark Hemingway, What’s all the fuss about, one might Matt Labash, John McCormack, ive National Public Radio some ask? Weinstein “questions certain Tony Mecia, Michael Warren, Senior Writers Jonathan V. Last, Digital Editor Gcredit: In an All Things Considered diversity policies.” What policies? It Rachael Larimore, Online Managing Editor feature, reporter Martin Kaste actually can’t be that he has committed the Ethan Epstein, Associate Editor Chris Deaton, Jim Swift, Deputy Online Editors interviewed some anti-left- grave apostasy of opposing Hannah Yoest, Assistant Literary Editor Priscilla M. Jensen, Assistant Editor ist protesters and did not affirmative action, because Andrew Egger, Jenna Lifhits, present them as crazy peo- he “objected only to some Alice B. Lloyd, Reporters Grant Wishard, Editorial Assistant ple. Also to NPR’s credit, aspects of the diversity pol- Philip Chalk, Design Director the story, “Trump Support- icies.” What aspects? What Barbara Kyttle, Design Assistant Contributing Editors ers Accuse Liberal Com- are we talking about here? Claudia Anderson, Max Boot, Joseph Bottum, Helpfully, Prof. Wein- Tucker Carlson, Matthew Continetti, Terry Eastland, munities of Hostility To- Noemie Emery, Joseph Epstein, David Frum, ward Free Speech,” didn’t stein has himself described David Gelernter, Reuel Marc Gerecht, Michael Goldfarb, Daniel Halper, neglect ugly evidence of what sparked all the out- Mary Katharine Ham, Brit Hume, Thomas Joscelyn, bullying perpetrated by rage. “I had objected to a Frederick W. Kagan, Charles Krauthammer, Yuval Levin, Tod Lindberg, Micah Mattix, the left on campus: Kaste planned ‘Day of Absence’ Victorino Matus, P. J. O’Rourke, included audio of Ever- in which white people were John Podhoretz, Irwin M. Stelzer green State College stu- asked to leave campus,” the William Kristol, Editor at Large dents menacing Professor professor wrote in the Wall MediaDC Bret Weinstein. But that’s Street Journal. Weinstein Ryan McKibben, Chairman Stephen R. Sparks, President & Chief Operating Officer where the credit for NPR explained that the Day of Jennifer Yingling, Audience Development Officer Kathy Schaffhauser, Chief Financial Officer comes to an abrupt halt, Absence has been a tradi- David Lindsey, Chief Digital Officer as All Things Considered tion in which “students and Alex Rosenwald, Director, Public Relations & Branding Mark Walters, Chief Revenue Officer turned to opaque euphe- faculty of color organized a Nicholas H. B. Swezey, Vice President, Advertising misms to describe just what got every- day on which they met off campus,” to T. Barry Davis, Senior Director, Advertising Jason Roberts, Digital Director, Advertising one all worked up at Evergreen State. express symbolically their “vital and Paul Plawin, National Account Director (See Charlotte Allen’s report on under-appreciated roles.” This year Andrew Kaumeier, Advertising Operations Manager page 26 of this issue for a full account organizers had a different idea: People Brooke McIngvale, Manager, Marketing Services Advertising inquiries: 202-293-4900 of the madness at Evergreen State.) of color would come to campus and Subscriptions: 1-800-274-7293 Here’s how Kaste described the whites would be expected to go else- The Weekly Standard (ISSN 1083-3013), a division of Clarity Media Group, confrontation caught on video (the where. Weinstein made his objection is published weekly (except the first week in January, third week in April, audio of which was played on NPR): to this public in an email to everyone first week in July, and third week in August) at 1152 15th St., NW, Suite 200, Washington, DC 20005. Periodicals postage paid at Washington, at the school. “There is a huge dif- DC, and additional mailing offices. Postmaster: Send address changes to The Weekly Standard, P.O. Box 421203, Palm Coast, FL 32142-1203. ference between a group or coalition For subscription customer service in the United States, call 1-800- deciding to voluntarily absent them- 274-7293. For new subscription orders, please call 1-800-274-7293. The story behind our stories. Subscribers: Please send new subscription orders and changes of address Listen to it each week selves from a shared space,” he wrote, to The Weekly Standard, P.O. Box 421203, Palm Coast, FL 32142-1203. “and a group or coalition encouraging Please include your latest magazine mailing label. Allow 3 to 5 weeks for at weeklystandard.com arrival of first copy and address changes. Canadian/foreign orders require another group to go away.” additional postage and must be paid in full prior to commencement of service. Canadian/foreign subscribers may call 1-386-597-4378 for The fracas got its start when subscription inquiries. American Express, Visa/MasterCard payments accepted. Cover price, $5.99. Back issues, $5.99 (includes postage and Weinstein objected to being told, as handling). Send letters to the editor to The Weekly Standard, 1152 15th he saw it, to leave campus for a day Street, NW, Suite 200, Washington, DC 20005-4617. For a copy of The Weekly Standard Privacy Policy, visit www.weeklystandard.com or write to because he is white. That’s not just Customer Service, The Weekly Standard, 1152 15th St., NW, Suite 200, a matter of questioning “certain di- Washington, DC 20005. Copyright 2017, Clarity Media Group. All rights reserved. No material in The Weekly versity policies,” that’s standing up Standard may be reprinted without permission of the copyright owner. against an act of ugly and institu- The Weekly Standard is a registered trademark of Clarity Media Group. tional racial exclusion. ♦ MIKE, BIGSTOCK TWS ART;

4 / The Weekly Standard June 19, 2017 CASUAL

Apart from the brave staving Fading Humor off of the Nazis at Stalingrad and a few scientific discoveries, the only accomplishment in the 72 years’ existence of the Soviet Union, whose ocial change can be tough on if it ain’t on the menu ve ain’t got it.” leaders were responsible for mil- humor. A few years ago I read a “You vanted the chicken soup, you lions of murders, general suffering, book of stories and sketches by should’ve ordered the mushroom- and a nightmare world of envy and James Thurber, who I remem- barley.” Alas, Jewish waiters, all of fear, was providing the background Sbered as being very funny, and felt as them Eastern European immigrants, for a dozen or so jokes. But 20 or so the comedian Chris Rock remarked no longer exist, and their sons have years from now will there be many, about watching the movie The Last long ago gone off to become perio- or even any, people left who will get Temptation of Christ, “Not many laughs.” dontists and sociologists. Jewish- the joke about the man who buys S. J. Perelman, another writer I once waiter jokes may themselves soon a drab gray car on which he is told thought immensely amusing, has also seem as otherworldly as Martian delivery will take precisely 10 years? over the years lost his magic, at least jokes. “Does everyone on Mars wear After buying the car, he asks if they for me. Time, that relentless monster, rings with diamonds that large?” one would please bring it in the afternoon. seems to have done in both When asked why the afternoon, he writers, each considered a great says that he has the plumber com- humorist in his day. ing that same morning. Time is even harder on jokes. Jokes about shrinks may soon One of Henny Youngman’s be another casualty. Before a characteristic quickie jokes fairly large audience I recently used to go: “A bum came up told the joke whose punchline to me on the street and asked is “Oedipus, Schmoedipus— me for 50 cents for a cup of the main thing is a boy should coffee. When I told him coffee love his mother,” and got a good was only a quarter, he replied, laugh. But now that no one in his ‘Won’t you join me?’ ” Today right mind any longer believes one would have to change the in the Oedipus complex or most egregiously politically incorrect of the other shrinkinese mumbo “bum” to “homeless man,” and jumbo, for how much longer will have the man ask for $6 for a such jokes be viable? cup of coffee. When you tell him cof- such joke asks. “Yes, everyone” the An anthology of classical Greek fee is only $2.75, he replies, “I have a Martian woman answers, “except of jokes called Philogelos (Laughter Lover) hankering for a chocolate croissant to course the goyim.” features jokes about doctors, men go with it.” Then there is the question of chang- with bad breath, eunuchs, barbers, Whole categories of jokes have ing prices. Mickey O’Brien, ascending men with hernias, bald men, cuckolds, been wiped out by losing their his- the stairs of a neighborhood bordello, and shady fortune tellers. Every sub- torical context. A popular genre in my meets his father coming down. “Dad, ject listed, poof!, is gone. (When was adolescence was the traveling-sales- you?” he says. “I figure,” says his the last time you heard a good eunuch man-and-the-farmer’s-daughter joke. father, “for three dollars why disturb joke?) Is there any way to prevent the Slightly off-color—turquoise more your mother?” Three dollars was the jokes of our own era from similarly than blue—these jokes began with entry fee in such establishments in falling into the dustbin of history? the salesman’s car breaking down my youth. I have no notion what it Look for subjects of greater general- and his being given shelter for the might be today, or even if bordellos ity, perhaps? Of less ephemerality? night in the home of a nearby farmer, still exist. The advent of the pill and Of wider interest? But then, it is pre- with mild sex comedy to follow. But the radically altered mores of nice cisely their particularity, their time- today salesmen rarely travel by car, girls long ago put most of them out of liness, their parochialism even, that no farmer would let a stranger in his business. One might have thought the give jokes their piquancy. Jokes, like house, and the farmer’s daughter is prostitutes would have protested their beauty, may be destined to fade. Noth- unlikely to be all that innocent. unemployment. Instead, one might ing for it, but to laugh now, before the Or consider Jewish-waiter jokes. say, they took it lying down—one joke itself disappears. The punchlines alone are magical: might say it, that is, if one has a taste

DAVID CLARK DAVID “You vant to see the sommelier? Lady, for wretched puns. Joseph Epstein

June 19, 2017 The Weekly Standard / 5 EDITORIALS

Comey v. Trump

James Comey being sworn in before the Senate Select Intelligence Committee, June 8

t’s not hard to understand why Donald Trump was frus- might lie about the nature of our meeting so I thought it trated with FBI director James Comey. In the weeks really important to document.” I before the inauguration and the weeks that followed, This was a reasonable concern. Trump lies all the time, Comey repeatedly told Trump that he was not under inves- about matters big and small, significant and insignificant. tigation as part of the FBI’s probe into Russian attempts to He lies when he cannot possibly be contradicted, and he lies influence the 2016 election. But when Trump urged Comey when there is irrefutable evidence that he’s lying. Even judged to say so publicly, to help quell a steady stream of media against professional politicians, Trump is a notably prolific reports suggesting otherwise, the director refused. Top and aggressive liar. His victory in November seemed to sug- White House officials took up the cause, lobbying Comey gest that there might be no consequences for his mendacity. and his associates to be more transparent and to spare the But the memos Comey wrote to record the details of his con- new president unfounded accusations. versations with the president—memos that would be admis- To Trump, Comey’s unwillingness to say publicly what sible in a court of law as credible, contemporaneous accounts he would say in private was a profound demonstration of of their interactions, and memos that could play a significant bad faith. It was, he believed, another indication that the role in special counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation—tell law enforcement and intelligence communities were out to us such a conclusion may well have been premature. get him. And it is hard to blame him after the spate of leaks According to Comey, on February 14 at a one-on-one that have characterized the investigation. meeting in the Oval Office, Trump asked him to end the But Trump himself bears responsibility for the events FBI’s probe of Lt. Gen. Michael Flynn, the Trump cam- that led to Comey’s dramatic, high-stakes testimony about paign adviser who had gone on to serve as the administra- these investigations on Capitol Hill last week. The current tion’s first national security adviser. Trump had no idea scandal is a uniquely Trumpian affair, precipitated and what kind of evidence the FBI had on Flynn and seems to exacerbated by the president’s erratic social media habits, have based his request on a benefit-of-the-doubt supposition his eagerness to make threats and propagate conspiracies, about Flynn’s behavior. Trump’s lawyer denies Comey’s and his public dishonesty. claim, but it’s consistent with Trump’s public calls for an Immediately upon leaving his first one-on-one meeting end to the Flynn investigation. with Trump, at Trump Tower on January 6, Comey logged Just days after Trump fired Comey, the president threat- on to a classified computer and memorialized their conver- ened the ex-FBI director in what seems to have been an ill- sation in a memo to file. Comey testified that he hadn’t kept conceived effort to intimidate him. “James Comey better such careful notes during his government service under hope that there are no ‘tapes’ of our conversations before he George W. Bush or Barack Obama. Why did he do it this starts leaking to the press!” Trump tweeted on May 12. time? Well, he answered, the seriousness of the subject This tweet—and the bullying indiscipline behind it— matter was a factor. So, too, was the credibility of his inter- helped lead to the special counsel investigation that will locutor or, as Comey put it, “the nature of the person.” “I preoccupy the Trump administration for months, maybe

DOUG MILLS / GETTY IMAGES was honestly concerned,” Comey told lawmakers, “that he for years. Comey testified that Trump’s tweet led him to go

June 19, 2017 The Weekly Standard / 7 public with one of the memos he’d drafted, in case Trump Now we are not knee-jerk respecters of youth. We give tried to mischaracterize their conversations. no greater weight to the opinions of the young than to those “The president tweeted on Friday after I got fired that of the old. In fact, we’re inclined to give them less, as the I better hope there’s not tapes,” Comey recalled. “I woke young lack experience, and experience is a great teacher. We up in the middle of the night on Monday night because it would even go so far as to say that the overvaluation of the didn’t dawn on me originally that there might be corrob- sentiments of the young may be one of the curses of our age. oration for our conversation. There might be a tape. My On the other hand, one would have to be blind not to judgment was: I need to get that out into the public square. see the political risk for Republicans and conservatives in I asked a friend of mine to share the content of the memo these numbers. First impressions matter. Most people don’t with a reporter—didn’t do it myself for a variety of reasons. change their political views radically from the ones they first I asked him to because I thought that might prompt the hold. For young Americans today, Donald Trump is the face appointment of a special counsel.” of Republicanism and conservatism. While Trump will undoubtedly seek to shift blame in They don’t like that face. And the danger, of course, is order to avoid responsibility for his current ordeal, he lacks that they’ll decide their judgment of Trump should carry the credibility to do so convincingly. It is his own words over to the Republican party that nominated him and the that are haunting him. conservative movement that mostly supports him. If he is —Stephen F. Hayes indeed permitted to embody the party and the movement without challenge, the fortunes of both will be at the mercy of President Trump’s own fortunes. Perhaps the danger is exaggerated. One could argue, after all, that the worst-case scenario for Trump’s first term is Nix- The Republican on’s second. Yet the Republican party and the conservative movement recovered quickly from that, didn’t they? Well, those of us who made the case for Nixon in the fall Future of 1972 on college campuses, who cast our first vote for him that November, who were tempted to rationalize his behavior any Trump critics relished a recent Quinni- for at least a while as Watergate unfolded, and who couldn’t piac poll showing that President Trump’s job help but feel a pang of sorrow as he resigned amid victory M approval had fallen to a new low, at a net -23 per- whoops from his critics in 1974 remember those years all too cent (34 percent approve, 57 percent disapprove). well. They weren’t the easiest of years to be on the right. Commentators friendly to the president sprinkled a But we also remember that the new and exciting con- few grains of salt on the survey. For one thing, they noted, servative columnists in the Washington Post and the New Quinnipiac has always had Trump’s job approval a bit lower York Times, George Will (in his early 30s) and Bill Safire than other pollsters. Gallup, for example, has Trump’s job (in his early 40s), were tough on Nixon. We remember that approval/disapproval at 38 percent, 56 percent, and the Real one of the most prominent conservative Republican sena- Clear Politics average has it at 39 percent, 55 percent. So tors, James Buckley, who had won dramatically as a Con- things aren’t that bad! servative third-party candidate in New York in 1970, did Furthermore, it was observed, Quinnipiac two months not join other Republicans in rallying to Nixon’s defense. ago had Trump at an almost identical 35 percent, 57 percent. We remember that Jim Buckley’s younger brother Bill So the new result was no sign of hemorrhaging support. No made sure National Review was no cheerleader for Nixon. reason to panic! We remember that John Ashbrook, an eloquent and prin- Others added that Bill Clinton’s job approval numbers cipled congressman from Ohio, then 43, launched a quix- were in comparable territory at this point in his first term, otic primary challenge against Nixon in 1972 to ensure that in 1993, and he turned out okay! (Though one might note voters understood Nixon didn’t speak for conservatism. We that the 1994 midterm elections didn’t, and that Clinton had remember Jack Kemp, a Republican congressman turning unusual political talent.) 40, who was shaping a new economic message for the party. Lost in the back and forth—and especially in the efforts We remember neoconservatives of all sorts who had very lit- to be somewhat reassuring—was the most notable finding in tle history with Nixon or the GOP providing fresh thinking the poll. It had to do with age. Donald Trump’s job approval/ and new energy. disapproval was 40 percent, 54 percent among Americans In sum, we remember that young Americans could look 65 and over; it was an almost identical 39 percent, 55 percent at the Republican party and the conservative movement and among 50-64 year olds; it was slightly worse at 35 percent, see fresh faces and other voices than those of Richard Nixon 55 percent among those 35 to 49 years old; and among Amer- and his defenders. icans 18 to 34, Donald Trump’s job approval was 19 percent One might add that dozens of those defenders in Con- approve, 67 percent disapprove, an amazing -48 percent. gress were wiped out in the 1974 midterm elections. One

8 / The Weekly Standard June 19, 2017 could also note that the subsequent GOP comeback was can gather with, history shows us that the most marginal- made easier by the fact that Spiro Agnew had resigned, so ized will be disproportionately censored and punished for that Nixon was succeeded by a vice president who had been unpopular speech.” in office for only a few months and who wasn’t particularly The second reason the rally almost didn’t occur was that identified with him. That incumbent was then challenged the threat of violence was indeed real. It took quite an effort in the 1976 primary by a governor of California who had his by law enforcement to maintain the peace; but this, too, is own political identity distinct from Nixon’s, and who won the city’s fault. The danger came not from alt-right Don- the Republican nomination in 1980. Thus the GOP and the ald Trump fans but the roving packs of left-wing, so-called conservative movement were quickly able to achieve real “black bloc” and “antifa”—short for “anti-fascist”—counter- separation from Nixon. protesters who have been a fixture in downtown Portland at Can they do the same from Donald Trump? It’s urgent least since the riots at the 1999 World Trade Organization that Republicans and conservatives begin to try. The future meeting in Seattle cemented their reputation. of the Republican party and of conservatism depend on their The Portland police Twitter account sent out a series standing for loyalties and principles more fundamental than of pictures cataloging the sheer number of weapons con- the fortunes of Donald Trump. fiscated, including wrenches, knives, batons, chains, and —William Kristol bricks. The left-wing counter-protesters eventually started throwing bricks and glass bottles at the cops; some of their compatriots were found on the roof of an adjacent building, along with a bag of bricks. It’s not an exaggeration to say that raining bricks down from above is nearly as dangerous Violent Portland as firing a gun into a crowd. Fourteen counter-protesters were arrested. n recent decades, Portland, Oregon, has acquired a rep- Despite this, Portland still regards left-wing violence utation as one of America’s most tolerant and liberal cit- as little more than local color and has done little to curb I ies. In practice, this means there are taxpayer-funded it. The protests in Portland following Trump’s election last sex changes for municipal employees and lots of bike lanes, November destroyed cars and shop windows, resulting in but comparatively little tolerant liberalism. The city govern- 26 arrests. A March report by the Department of Home- ment has made it quite clear that if you have views it finds land Security specifically cited those riots as an example of offensive, it does not want you expressing them publicly. On “domestic terrorist violence.” And in April, the city can- June 4, a political rally that was described by turns as pro- celed a parade associated with the Portland Rose Festival, Trump, alt-right, and pro-free-speech was held on federal one of the city’s oldest traditions. The Multnomah County property in downtown Portland. It almost didn’t happen for Republican party was one of dozens of civic groups set to two unsettling reasons. march in the parade. Two antifa protest groups issued a First, the city begged the federal government to pull the threat of violence against them, and the city quickly caved. organizer’s permit. On May 26, two men were stabbed to One of the men killed defending the women on the train death and another was injured on the city’s light rail train was Ricky John Best, an Army veteran and city employee after they came to the aid of two women, one of whom was who once ran for county commissioner in adjacent Clack- Muslim and wearing a hijab, being verbally assaulted. The amas County as, yes, a Republican. Best died serving and killer, Jeremy Joseph Christian, had attended an April defending a city led by cowards unwilling to make far more rally put on by the same organizer. Christian is a known basic sacrifices to protect men like him. Taliesin Myrddin white supremacist; according to his social media accounts, Namkai-Meche, the man who died alongside Best, was his he’s also an ardent fan of Bernie Sanders and Green party cultural opposite—a Reed College hippie. We should take presidential candidate Jill Stein. He was reportedly asked comfort in the fact that America is still a place where hero- to leave that April “March for Free Speech” after he arrived ism and opposition to bigotry are not limited by one’s per- with a baseball bat and shouted obscenities. sonal politics. Portland mayor Ted Wheeler argued that the June The Portland murders and other recent episodes of rac- event, labeled the “Trump Free Speech Rally Portland,” ist violence are disturbing, as are the racist sentiments ema- was a public safety threat. “Our city is in mourning, our nating from the dark corners of the alt-right. But it is better community’s anger is real, and the timing and subject of to defend the right to air these ugly sentiments in public and these events can only exacerbate an already difficult situa- increase awareness than force them underground, where tion,” he said, adding that “hate speech is not protected by the petty oppression will be cited as justification for plotting the First Amendment to the United States Constitution.” ugly acts in private. In fighting one form of illiberalism by In response, Oregon’s ACLU chapter issued a sterling tolerating another, Portland has proven that its reputation as statement of disagreement: “Once we allow the govern- one of America’s most enlightened cities is undeserved. ment to decide what we can say, see, or hear, or who we —Mark Hemingway

June 19, 2017 The Weekly Standard / 9 obstruction of justice. Barring new evidence, it arguably does not. But A Memo-rable if they win majorities in Congress in the 2018 midterm, Democrats eager to oust Trump from office will likely Hearing argue that it does. Comey’s testimony further suggested that there remain numerous questions for members of the admin- Comey unloads. istration to answer. When asked about by Michael Warren the recusal of Attorney General Jeff Sessions from the Russia investiga- hat did we learn from broadest terms, either Comey per- tion, Comey hinted that Sessions had James Comey, the fired jured himself in front of Congress or a “variety of reasons” to do so beyond W FBI director, when he his characterization of those conver- his undisclosed meetings with Rus- testified on June 8 before the Sen- sations is accurate. If it’s the former, a sian ambassador Sergey Kislyak. “We ate Select Intelligence Committee? long-serving law enforcement officer also were aware of facts that I can’t Not enough to prove Donald Trump with a sterling reputation threw all of discuss in an open setting that would committed high crimes and make his continued engage- misdemeanors warranting ment in a Russia-related impeachment, as the presi- investigation problematic,” dent’s most strident oppo- Comey continued. Reports nents were hoping. Neither out of Comey’s closed-session did Comey’s testimony testimony before the com- vindicate Trump of ethical mittee say that there may wrongdoing or inappropriate have been a third undisclosed behavior, as the White House meeting between Sessions had claimed it would. and Kislyak. The truth is more com- We also learned that the plex. In Comey’s telling, the feds are investigating Michael president leaned hard on Flynn’s statements to the FBI his FBI director to rein in about his communications the investigation of Trump’s with Kislyak. Asked whether former national security James Comey testifying before senators, June 8 Flynn lied to or misled the adviser, Michael Flynn. FBI, Comey demurred, saying Comey said he took the president’s that away in a misguided attempt to that question was the “subject of the February 14 words—“I hope you can sink the president who fired him. criminal inquiry.” let this go”—as a direction to do so. If it’s the latter, at the very least it Comey explained why he felt com- He also claimed that Trump asked shows Trump was either unaware of pelled to write detailed memos follow- for Comey’s loyalty during a private or felt unconstrained by the guard- ing his one-on-one meetings with the dinner in January. “I need loyalty, I rails of propriety, the independence of president, a practice he did not main- expect loyalty,” said Trump. federal law enforcement, or even his tain during the three-and-a-half years Trump, through his lawyer Marc own best interests. he worked for Barack Obama. “The Kasowitz, denied these claims. “The During his testimony, Comey subject matter I was talking about, president never, in form or sub- definitively said that no other mem- matters that touch on the FBI’s core stance, directed or suggested that Mr. bers of the Trump administration responsibility, and that relate to the Comey stop investigating anyone, asked him to drop the Flynn inves- president, president-elect personally, including suggesting that Mr. Comey tigation—no one from the White and then the nature of the person,” ‘let Flynn go,’ ” said Kasowitz follow- House staff, the Department of Jus- Comey said. “I was honestly con- ing Comey’s public testimony. “The tice, the National Security Agency, or cerned that he might lie about the president also never told Mr. Comey, the office of the director of national nature of our meeting so I thought it ‘I need loyalty, I expect loyalty’ in intelligence. If there was an order for really important to document. That form or substance.” Comey to stop the investigation, it combination of things I had never This is a simple dispute. In the came from the president alone. experienced before, but had led me What is open to interpretation is to believe I’ve got to write it down Michael Warren is a senior writer whether what Trump said about the and I’ve got to write it down in a very

at The Weekly Standard. Flynn inquiry rises to the level of detailed way.” NEWSCOM

10 / The Weekly Standard June 19, 2017 Perhaps the most revealing part of described its contents to a New York campaign, but it was a preview of dis- Comey’s testimony was his admission Times reporter. The Times published tractions to come. that after he was fired he leaked one the bombshell news of the Comey Trump fights in public with Repub- of these memos to a friend. On Fri- memos on May 16. licans. He criticized Senators John day, May 12, three days after he had In his testimony last week, Comey McCain and Lindsey Graham for ousted Comey, Trump tweeted that was matter-of-fact in his reasoning being “sadly weak on immigration” his former FBI director “better hope” for the leak. “I asked him to because when they took exception to his tem- there were no tapes of their conversa- I thought that might prompt the porary ban on immigration from seven tions. Comey decided to call Trump’s appointment of a special counsel,” he Muslim countries. And weeks after bluff and gave the memo document- said. The day after the Times story ran, praising Rep. Mark Meadows, the head ing his February 14 meeting at the the Justice Department did exactly of the Freedom Caucus in the House, White House to Columbia law pro- that when it tapped Robert Mueller as he tweeted that Meadows and caucus fessor Daniel Richman, who then special counsel. ♦ members “will hurt the entire Repub- lican agenda if they don’t get on the team, and fast.” Their offense was having opposed a health proposal favored by Trump. Rules of Disorder Rather than court critics or Repub- licans who have crossed him, he blasts them. Since he believed he was right The president leads himself astray. on health care, dissenters had to be reprimanded publicly. For Trump, by Fred Barnes politics is a zero-sum game. Either he wins or his detractors do. resident Trump has three rules buttressed the president’s case about There’s some truth in Trump’s rule for operating in the world of the threat posed by “radical Islamic that controversy elevates message. On P government and politics. Time terrorists.” But instead of focusing on immigration, he has feuded with Mex- learned of them from a White House that, he picked a fight with London ico, Hispanics, immigrants, Demo- official and describes them this way: mayor Sadiq Khan. He quoted Khan crats, Hollywood, and anyone else who “When you’re right, you fight. disagrees with him. This has ele- Controversy elevates message. And vated his message that illegal immi- never apologize.” grants are a serious concern. They The rules sound like Trump take jobs from American citizens. and like no other president with Many should be deported, starting the possible exception of Andrew with those with criminal records. Jackson, who’s a Trump role model. Among Republicans and conserva- They touch on Trump’s character tives, Trump’s position on immigra- and are the underpinning of his tion has prevailed and built support combative, relentless style. for rigorous border security. But the rules keep Trump in Now, Trump has benefited from constant trouble. As often as not, softening his position. He appears they bring out the worst in him. likely to give legal status to “dream- It’s not harmful to Trump or his ers,” young people whose parents administration when he infuriates brought them here illegally. Mass Democrats, the left, or adversar- roundups of illegal immigrants have ies like Iran. It’s when he alien- been ruled out by Trump’s Home- ates friends and allies that he and the out of context and accused him of land Security secretary John Kelly. And country suffer. downgrading the terrorist threat. Trump seems less draconian. Let’s start with the rule on fighting It was reminiscent of the week he But many of the controversies cre- when he’s right. The problem is that spent last summer attacking Khizr ated by Trump don’t end well. They Trump always believes he’s right. And Khan, a Pakistani immigrant whose fail to elevate the message he may have this leads to no-win clashes harmful to son, an Army captain, was killed in in mind. A controversy ensued when his credibility and presidency. Iraq in 2004. He also insulted Khan’s he fired FBI director James Comey. The London Bridge attack in May wife. Trump had been provoked by What message did that raise up? It sig- Khan’s sharp criticism of him in a naled that Trump is rash, impulsive, Fred Barnes is an executive editor speech at the Democratic conven- and self-absorbed.

at The Weekly Standard. tion. This fight occurred during the The president raised a ruckus by GARY LOCKE

June 19, 2017 The Weekly Standard / 11 downplaying the investigation of possible collusion between his campaign and Russia during last year’s election. One Seat That He has a point. So far as we know, no evidence of collusion has been uncov- ered. But Trump’s interference has Should Be Safe obscured this and made it look like he has something to hide. Newt Gingrich says Trump never apologizes because he thinks it shows Pugnacious politics in the Palmetto State. weakness. Sometimes it might. Yet it by Tony Mecia can also do the opposite: An apology by a confident leader can build loyalty, Rock Hill, S.C. he earned high marks for fiscal dis- respect, and an expectation of being nside his company’s conference cipline but never quite fit into the treated fairly. room, where the walls are lined Republican establishment. Trump not only refuses to accept I with photos of sites his real-estate This year, when President Trump blame for screwups at the White business has developed, Ralph Nor- tapped Rep. Mick Mulvaney as bud- House, he blames others. When he man is talking about how he arrived get director, Norman saw an opening. announced Comey’s dismissal, his at this point. He fought his way through a crowded aides cited a Justice Department memo He’s favored to win a seat in Con- field of seven Republicans and fin- on Comey’s actions in the case of Hil gress later this month. But it has been ished second in the primary, by 135 lary Clinton’s email. Two days later, votes—good enough to force a he indicated to an interviewer that his mid-May runoff. irritation over the Russia investigation His Republican opponent played a major part in the firing. was Tommy Pope, the num- Though Trump had created the ber-two official in the South confusion, he didn’t take responsibil- Carolina statehouse. Pope, a ity. Rather, he suggested his aides were well-known former prosecu- at fault for not keeping up with his fast- tor, had endorsements from moving presidency. He seems unaware legislative leaders. PAC money of this truism: Leaders take responsi- flowed his way. The U.S. bility, losers blame others. Chamber of Commerce spon- Leaders also don’t belittle subordi- sored a pro-Pope ad featuring nates publicly. Yet last week, Trump popular South Carolina con- subjected Attorney General Jeff Ses- gressman Trey Gowdy. sions to a public shaming. He com- Norman, who loaned his plained the Justice Department had campaign more than $300,000, Ralph Norman, appearing with wife Elaine and appealed the wrong immigration family, speaks to supporters in 2006. was backed by Jim DeMint (a order to the Supreme Court. And he former two-term senator for let it be known that by recusing him- a long path for the 63-year-old Rock South Carolina), the Club for Growth, self from the Russia case, Sessions Hill native—and a tougher one than and Sen. Ted Cruz, who helped him showed weakness. you might expect for a well-connected campaign in the district. There are more than a few apolo- conservative businessman in one of On May 16, Norman eked out a gies Trump might make without look- the country’s most solidly Republican 221-vote victory. He hasn’t forgotten ing weak, beginning with Sessions. It states. Politics in South Carolina has who helped him—and who opposed wouldn’t hurt if he apologized to the never lived up to the genteel South- him. Should he win the June 20 elec- entire country of Mexico. A friendly ern stereotype. Norman, despite his tion, he says he will be proud to join nation to the south is beneficial. A soft drawl, has no problem speaking the House Freedom Caucus, the group country that hates the American pres- pointedly, either. of about 30 conservatives that pushes ident isn’t. He ran for the Fifth Congressio- legislation rightward and has been a It’s important for Trump to give his nal District seat once before, 11 years thorn in the side of House leadership. Christian faith some breathing room ago, against a longtime Democratic “They came to my aid when the at the White House. He’d soon real- incumbent. He lost and returned to Chamber attacked me,” Norman says. ize that he’s wrong on occasion, that Columbia as a state legislator, where On paper, a Republican run- controversies can be counterproduc- ning in South Carolina’s Fifth Con- tive, and that an apology or two would Tony Mecia is a senior writer gressional District should have

show strength and self-discipline. ♦ at The Weekly Standard. an easy time. It stretches from the MELISSA CHERRY / THE HERALD AP

12 / The Weekly Standard June 19, 2017 fast-growing northern suburban over here,” Woodard says. “They’re a The voters he talks with, he says, towns just across the border from little bit sharper, more on edge, more are patient. But they expect results. Charlotte, N.C., toward Columbia, able to say things. . . . We did start the “The public is saying, ‘We want the picking up a handful of rural coun- war, you know. And I’m not talking engine to run now. The engine has got ties. Trump and Mulvaney both won about Vietnam or Iraq.” to run,’ ” Norman says. “Is Trump still here in November by 20 points. The In an interview at his office, which popular? Yes. Would he win by 20?” state Republican chairman told Polit- sits alongside a vitamin store and a He pauses to think. “Maybe 15. They ico last month, “I will eat my shoes if dance studio in a brick strip mall his see him trying, and they get that the a Democrat wins.” company developed, Norman sounds press is not supporting him.” In a solidly red state like South polished. He seems most at ease talk- Standing between Norman and Carolina, the Republican label can ing about traditional conservative Washington is Democrat Archie Par- mask deep internal divisions. Repub- issues: cutting spending, balancing nell, 66, a tax lawyer making his first licans hold both of the state’s U.S. the budget, fully funding the mili- run for office. Parnell acknowledges Senate seats, five of six House seats, tary, repealing and replacing Obama that the Fifth District is tough for all elected statewide offices, and com- care, enacting tort reform. He’d like Democrats, but points out that special manding majorities in the state legis- to see Congress make an effort on elections have low turnouts that can lature. Yet some conservatives say the term limits, and he supports entitle- neutralize advantages. Turnout in last state’s policies tilt too far left. month’s Republican runoff was about “The leadership of the Republican 8 percent. party here is very, very liberal,” says Should he win the June 20 Parnell says there’s a lot of enthusi- Tara Servatius, a conservative talk election, Norman says he asm for his candidacy. When he went radio host in nearby Greenville. “As to one county’s Democratic headquar- I often say on the show, they would will be proud to join the ters, staffers had to open up a second fit in better in Rhode Island than House Freedom Caucus, adjoining room to accommodate the here.” She ticks off a long list of con- the group of about 30 overflow crowd. servative disappointments: votes in The voters he talks to, he says, are the statehouse to raise the gas tax, conservatives that pushes concerned: “They think things are just repeated failures to pass an open- legislation rightward and has off the rails, out of whack. A lot of carry gun law, the continued support been a thorn in the side of people are actually afraid of what’s of an open primary election system in House leadership. going on in Washington.” which Democrats can vote in Repub- Parnell describes himself as a mod- lican contests. erate. He says he favors good constitu- Norman, she notes, was one of only ment reform. His campaign website ent service, creating jobs, “protecting three South Carolina legislators to says he favors raising the retirement Social Security and Medicare,” and earn an “A” rating from the S.C. Club age by two months and lowering ben- sticking up for working folks. He for Growth, while 44 Republicans efits for the top 10 percent of earners knocks Norman for repeated votes received an “F.” to keep Social Security solvent. He’s in the state legislature against spend- David Woodard, a Clemson political less talkative, though, about social ing that would have helped farmers science professor, says that compared issues. He considers himself a pro-life and workers. For his part, Norman with Columbia’s establishment fig- Christian—a de facto job requirement describes Parnell as “Bernie Sanders ures, Norman is “more of a traditional for Republicans in these parts—and with a different name.” South Carolina conservative. . . . He’s hands over a mailer his campaign sent Parnell is heartened by a poll in pugnacious. He’ll get in your face.” He out with a big photo of a swaddled late May that showed him losing by says Norman went to the capitol and infant that calls Norman “the proven 10 points. An earlier poll had him los- didn’t play the game of cozying up to pro-life leader we need in Congress.” ing by 17. the power structure. Those seeking stinging rebukes of He says that in debates before the That brawling, rebellious streak Trump, though, will have to look else- primaries, he was the only one of has a long history in South Carolina. where. Trump, Norman points out, three Democratic and seven Republi- The state has produced feisty politi- has put a conservative on the Supreme can candidates to enthuse about work- cal figures from John C. Calhoun and Court and will sign legislation coming ing together, across party lines, to Preston Brooks to Strom Thurmond from a Republican Congress. Last fall, solve the country’s urgent problems. and Lee Atwater. Joe Wilson, the con- he says, the choice was clear. That kumbaya approach of congressman who famously shouted “You “Hillary Clinton, had she won, the sensus-building and bipartisanship lie!” at President Obama during a country would have been pretty well might play well in some parts of the 2009 joint session of Congress, is from destroyed, by my way of thinking,” he country. Whether it’s a winning mes- South Carolina. says. “Now, we have a mandate to move sage in rough-and-tumble South Car- “There’s just something different forward with conservative ideas.” olina will be determined June 20. ♦

14 / The Weekly Standard June 19, 2017 rivals to advance to the June 20 runoff. Ossoff is a political Janus, flirting All Politics with progressives while campaigning like a moderate. He initially pledged to “make Trump furious,” and a Are National fundraising haul unprecedented for a House race followed: $8.3 million in the first quarter with 95 percent of the donors from outside Georgia. Having Trump might as well be on the Georgia ballot. quickly overshadowed the rest of his by Chris Deaton party’s field, Ossoff made the sort of strategic pivot that generally typifies Atlanta This swath of suburbia is no populist presidential contests between the pri- eminders of campaign glory haven, particularly since reappor- mary season and the general election. form a red stripe across the tionment in 2011 concentrated the In January, he was calling Trump “an R white walls of a cramped con- Sixth in territory closer to Atlanta. embarrassment and a threat” to Geor- ference room in a GOP fundraising Lopped off the district was Cherokee gians. By April, he was telling Chris office. There is a poster commemo- County, which favored the president Matthews that he only lacked “great rating “NIXON” in colorful all-caps, over Hillary Clinton by 50 points last personal admiration” for the presi- as well as framed pho- dent. He wouldn’t bite tographs marking the when Matthews goaded victories of George W. him for more. “I’m prag- Bush. Cartoons of former matic,” Ossoff said, “and first ladies stretch from one of the things that corner to corner. Miss- would be refreshing ing was any reference to about representing this Donald J. Trump. Maybe district is that it is a prag- Karen Handel chose to matic, moderate district.” meet here because it’s Ossoff ’s campaign did the only place in Georgia not respond to interview where he isn’t hanging requests for this article. over her head. The progression of Handel, 55 and busi- Ossoff ’s politicking irks nesslike, is the Repub- Handel. “The notion that lican candidate for the he is somehow going to state’s Sixth Congres- Karen Handel and Jon Ossoff speak before debating in Atlanta, June 6. be this pragmatist is just sional District, a Texas- absurd,” she tells me, shaped glob just north of Atlanta. November. Handel could use a few of going on to use words like “mislead- Given the area’s electoral history, the 80,000 votes Trump won there— ing,” “deceiving,” and “deceitful” to any Democratic challenger should she’s polling neck and neck with her describe Ossoff ’s sales pitch, which be irrelevant here. Tom Price, who Democratic opponent, Jon Ossoff, includes eliminating wasteful spend- resigned in January to become who has leveraged anti-Trump energy ing and boosting the district’s tech Trump’s secretary of Health and nationwide into a campaign flush economy. During a May fundraiser Human Services, was reelected here with cash and symbols of “resistance” with House speaker Paul Ryan, she six times without his support dipping to the administration. quipped that her opponent “talks like below 62 percent. Republican senator Ossoff is a documentary film- a Republican.” Johnny Isakson, Price’s predecessor, maker and a former congressional What he talks like is a profes- won the seat three times by large mar- aide. He hadn’t even turned 30 when sional politician, going before the gins. And Isakson’s predecessor was he launched his bid in January, and cameras to proclaim that “both par- House speaker Newt Gingrich, who a super-PAC used footage of him ties in Congress waste a lot of your held the seat for 10 terms. But Trump dressed as Han Solo during college money.” His rhetoric is practiced and carried the district by only a single to remind voters of his youth. Ossoff precise, and his cadence is familiar— point in 2016—where Romney had nearly won the seat outright during so much so that he seemed to speak won it by 23 points four years before. the first vote on April 18, coming with the rhythm and ponderous uhhs just two points short of the necessary of Barack Obama during a televised Chris Deaton is a deputy online editor 50 percent. Handel, a former Geor- debate with Handel on June 6.

at The Weekly Standard. gia secretary of state, bested 10 GOP On the stump, Handel attacks NEWSCOM

June 19, 2017 The Weekly Standard / 15 Ossoff ’s credibility. “Honestly, from what I’ve seen, the Handel campaign is not about Handel at all. It’s about A Separate Place Ossoff,” Georgia State University political science professor and Sixth District resident Jeff Lazarus tells me. Where every young man is a king. “The thrust of the Handel campaign is that Ossoff is unqualified to be a by Alice B. Lloyd member of Congress.” It’s true that Ossoff inflated just a tad his national college preparatory school for their attention to the day’s discussion security credentials from his time as black and Latino boys opened starter: a clip from the 1990s sitcom a legislative aide to Georgia congress- A in Washington, D.C., last year The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air, in which man Hank Johnson. And Handel has to a burst of public interest—and the Will Smith breaks down, from cocky tried to tar Ossoff with Johnson’s lib- inevitable question from the American and resentful to tearful and dejected, eral voting history. Do voters trust Civil Liberties Union of the Nation’s in the arms of his Uncle Phil when his posturing, she asks, or do they see Capital: What have you done for girls Will’s absentee father has disap- “the most liberal of the left who are lately? In the city’s newest public high pointed him again. the power behind his campaign”? school, you’ll see blue blazers, khakis, Adults in the room kicked it off, In a twist, Handel is trying to gold and purple school ties, confident and then a few brave souls among the dodge defending Trump with a pro- handshakes, door holding, and eye school’s 105 students followed their fessed pragmatism of her own. An contact, but the real salvation might lead, one noting Will’s flamboyance Indianapolis Colts fan, she uses a come from the heart-to-hearts and and compensatory good humor: his football metaphor to describe her hard lessons handled with care. It’s a armor. But most of the boys sat qui- approach to legislating. “The teams school culture aimed at teaching teen- etly and listened with observable that win—generally, their whole aged boys how they can right their interest while their teachers talked strategy isn’t a Hail Mary pass. Their own paths, and girls—according to the about what’s underneath the armor strategy is get first downs, move the equal-in-all-things reflex—ought not men wear. A male teacher in his late ball,” she said. Not too long ago, such be left behind. twenties or early thirties talked of an an opinion could’ve earned a sitting The freshman class at Ron Brown “unsettled part of you to explore,” a GOP lawmaker a primary challenger. College Preparatory High School sense of abandonment that stays with She’s mindful of the shift and points in D.C.’s Deanwood neighborhood you until you can’t ignore it—but you, out that Republicans are in charge of was rebounding from back-to-back he addressed the students, the “young both Congress and the White House. snow days when I visited its morn- kings,” you can have these discus- “I don’t know the exact number, ing meeting earlier this year. The sions now. Another opened up about but somewhere close to half of the boys and the faculty took their seats his own sense of abandonment, think- House Republicans currently have around the edges of a rectangular ing as a young man, “I’m pretty great; never served under a Republican pres- meeting room that doubles as the why shouldn’t they want me?” An ident,” she notes. “So these are indi- dining hall. Frederick Douglass, English teacher scanned the student viduals specifically elected to be the Duke Ellington, Malcolm X, Martin body for attentive eyes and invoked vocal opposition. And that’s a differ- Luther King Jr., and Barack Obama their literary readings and essays— ent approach than being in a govern- looked on—their portraits posted on you know these themes, she reminded ing mode.” She points to her time in the wall, exemplars of greatness— her boys. (And from loftier sources the Republican minority on the Ful- while students who came in late qui- than a sitcom, a certain encouraging ton County Board of Commission- etly reported to their teachers. edge in her voice suggested.) ers, where she styled herself a “fixer,” Principal Ben Williams made the At RBHS, students are “monarchs,” not a rabble-rouser. She said she’d do rounds, checking in with a few stu- their mascot the head of a crowned lion the same in Congress, taking Trump’s dents here and there while they set- facing head-on, and the teachers and agenda “one issue at a time.” tled in for the school’s core ritual. staff who counsel and corral them— There’s likely no other path to vic- They might all be a little out of sorts, homeroom advisers in typical public tory for her in what would normally he warned, after missing two days in school parlance—are the “council of be a safe Republican seat. “I don’t mid-March—a first for Ron Brown, elders.” “If we’re going to move these want to completely downplay the role but then so is everything. After a few young men and grow these young of campaigns and campaign messag- boilerplate announcements, the lights men, we have to model what we expect ing,” Judd Thornton, another Georgia went down and everyone turned them to do,” Williams told me. Their State political scientist, tells me, “but work is countercultural, he noted. “It none of this would matter if Trump Alice B. Lloyd is a reporter doesn’t matter race or ethnicity, it’s weren’t so unpopular.” ♦ at The Weekly Standard. uncommon for a 14-year-old young

16 / The Weekly Standard June 19, 2017 man to be able to express themselves time together to build each other up racial proscription. (WSG, which does and especially to be able to feel safe and learn from older girls. The all-girl not cite race in its mission, has had enough to do that in a school environ- offerings include a citywide confer- perhaps one Latina graduate in its ment amongst their peers.” They’re ence for young women of color on the 20 years, per one administrator’s rec- talking about their feelings in front first Saturday in June, a new grant pro- ollection.) And both aim for spiritual of their friends a mere seven months gram, and a series of workshops in the intervention. RBHS, while as secular as into the life of this brand-new school. coming school year—no boys allowed. can be (a needless disclaimer, but let’s “That’s a tremendous shift for many At the first conference, held earlier not trouble the ACLU any further), of our young men, especially consider- this month, chancellor of schools Ant- scoops up souls statistically predisposed ing the communities they come from,” wan Wilson told me the eventual out- to stray—or students demographically Williams said. His office walls are come of these efforts might still be a likeliest to drop out. Both begin with covered in easel paper scrawled with public girls’ school. a fairly simple formula for sanctuary: data and ideas; students tend to come For now, Ron Brown’s closest Ron Brown has discussion circles and to RBHS trailing academically. “Our complement in D.C. sits due south, daily meetings, Washington School for young people, because of where they also east of the Anacostia, though the Girls morning prayer. are, are not generally going WSG began as an after- to be able to meet what other school program in the mid- people might expect,” he said, nineties. Head of school Mary “but if we can grow them two Bourdon, a sister since her or three grade levels to help college years, belongs to the them get on par with the peers order Religious of Jesus and that are at that level, then Mary, who dedicate their lives we’ve done a good job.” The to educating the poor. Serv- underlying goal, more fun- ing her calling through social damental than test scores, is work and in-school counsel- cultural uplift, teaching boys ing, Sister Mary saw the need to ask for help—having girls for a girls’ school. She and around necessarily under- her sisters brought together mines this mission—and to a founding circle of women understand what it means from the National Council of to be men. Negro Women and the Soci- RBHS grew out of a com- ety of the Holy Child Jesus; mitment from Mayor Muriel Ninth-graders learn to shake hands on Ron Brown they decided the preteen Bowser and former chancellor High School’s opening day, August 22, 2016. years were the most impor- of schools Kaya Henderson— tant time to step in. and a $20 million pool of public and Washington School for Girls is not a “We thought that’s the place at private funds—to address the high public school but an all-scholarship which young girls are deciding their rate at which young black men fall Catholic pre-secondary institution future consciously and unconsciously,” behind and drop out of high school in that has grown since starting in 1997 Sister Mary told me. “We wanted to D.C., where the four-year graduation to include two campuses and 140 stu- have the freedom to have faith explo- rate is 91 percent for whites, 69 percent dents in grades three through eight. ration and to have faith expression in for Latinos, and 68 percent for African Today its middle school fills half the the school. We start every day with a Americans; it’s 76 percent for girls and upper level of an arts center boasting prayer. It grounds the students.” The 63 percent for boys. In 2015, Bowser ballet studios and a theater the stu- girl who read that day’s gospel, the gave 100 boys Obama’s The Audacity of dent body could fill twice with room story of Jesus healing at the pool of Hope for vacation reading and learned to spare, while girls in grades three Bethesda, was so expressive her friends from their reaction that they most through five have gone to a second seemed torn between genuine admira- wanted mentorship. When officials get campus, Our Lady of Perpetual Help tion and wanting to tease her for over- the question “What about the girls?” Catholic Church, not 10 minutes away. acting—admiration won. “It’s another they point out the undeniable differ- Like the new Ron Brown, the Wash- example of girls being free,” Sister ences between boys’ and girls’ needs. ington School for Girls was built from Mary said. Still, in response to that repeated ques- the ground up and works to reroute Kimberly Hopwood, the director tion, the school system hosted listen- young lives. Neither especially bears of student life and graduate support, ing sessions with 100 young women the influence of any hot-trending edu- sends eighth-grade graduates to high of color this spring, fourth graders cation reform movement; both serve school and often sees them off to col- to high school seniors. Rather than almost exclusively African-American lege four years later. Keeping up with

MARVIN JOSEPH / WASHINGTON POST / GETTY MARVIN JOSEPH / WASHINGTON a school of their own, they wanted students, by virtue of need rather than alumnae from the summer before

June 19, 2017 The Weekly Standard / 17 their freshman year at high school minds” (and the school district’s, too). less-discussed cycle of matriarchy. until they’re college bound—holding “We kind of already have our stuff in “Often in black households, the moth- them close while handing them off— order,” Somerville said, explaining ers, the women are normally the back- makes for a delicate balance. “Making why girls wouldn’t ask for their own bone,” Somerville said, and Hopwood sure kids go where they need to go school while “boys need to start get- agreed. “If nothing else, our girls get and do what they need to do—that’s ting it together.” that sense of freedom which a lot of pretty much it. We cannot be their The school-to-prison pipeline and women really don’t have,” Sister Mary parents, we can only encourage,” and generational poverty are familiar con- told me. Middle school is the time to they encourage academic exploration cepts even to those most protected inspire it, she believes: That’s when a and self-knowledge, and are quick to from their sting; they’re mainstays girl learns what interests her and won- check in if word gets back a gradu- of political discourse and must-read ders who she’ll be. Before she knows ate is falling behind in high school. think pieces. Dependency on wom- who she is, she might find the rest of “We’re the backup.” an’s powerful character sustains a her life spoken for. ♦ Sister Mary told me about an eighth-grade student who’d returned triumphant from a shadow day at a top-shelf Catholic high school. They showered her with praise and offered Macron, a spot almost immediately, but she couldn’t be swayed from surveying all her options. As it should be. “If noth- Le Terminator ing else, our girls get that sense of freedom which a lot of women really don’t have,” she said, and she had in mind bigger decisions than the choice Le winner and les losers. of high school. There are decisions a by Anne-Elisabeth Moutet young woman must make with a hypo- thetical future family in mind. “It’s a Paris (hitherto forbidden), and took to little weakness to try to please some- hen Emmanuel Macron addressing colleagues and voters in one else in what you do, even if it’s declared he would run management-speak, en anglais s’il vous for the rest of your life,” Sister Mary W for president of France plaît. He talked of “la task force,” “les said. “That should be the one decision in late 2016, the consensus was that losers” (ISIS terrorists), et “le win- based on what do I want.” he was a cat’s-paw of François Hol- win.” These were baby steps in the Black women defer to the demon- lande. Macron had been deputy chief right direction, sorely needed even if strable urgency for intervention in of staff at the Elysée Palace to the somewhat cosmetic. Revolutionary it young black men’s lives, Hopwood Socialist Hollande, the most unpopu- was not. offered as a partial explanation for the lar president in the history of modern Observing Macron’s army of nomi- increased attention paid to boys-only France, or indeed of political polling. nally socialist octogenarian supporters, schools. Publicity—including a forth- Hollande then named him economy all storied throwbacks to the presi- coming documentary to chronicle minister, a dazzling promotion for a dency of François Mitterrand (for- the first year, I’m told—has swirled 36-year-old civil servant who’d never mer Elysée adviser and all-purpose around RBHS since they opened last run for elective office. pop thinker Jacques Attali, Yves Saint summer. Jaztina Somerville, WSG Tasked with modernizing the Laurent supremo Pierre Bergé, for- class of 2006 and now an assistant in French economy, Macron took a few mer Mitterrand culture minister and the school’s graduate support office, bites at the country’s rigid employ- hip-hop champion Jack Lang), pun- concurred. “I think it’s because there’s ment law (clocking in at well over dits recalled that Hollande himself more of a need for that kind of envi- 3,500 pages, it beats Obamacare in had been a far more junior adviser to ronment for boys,” said Somerville, complexity). He let Uber into Paris the same Mitterrand. The president, who went to Cesar Chavez, a charter against the violent protests of the taxi they felt, having no chance of winning, high school, and Frostburg State Uni- drivers, allowed Sunday openings for had groomed a transparent successor versity. She talked about her brother, more categories of shops, broke the to keep his own people in place. The who felt compelled to fit in, no matter rail monopoly on regional transpor- upstart was dubbed “Hollande 2.” what it took. “As black men living in tation by allowing intercity bus lines Now President Macron may be said the city,” she went on, “they face peer to be following in Hollande’s foot- pressure in a way that we can’t really Anne-Elisabeth Moutet is a Paris-based steps—but with the aim of doing the fathom.” So the need for a boys’ school columnist for the London Telegraph and a precise opposite of what his hapless seems greater, “at least in the parents’ commentator for the BBC. predecessor did. Triumphantly elected

18 / The Weekly Standard June 19, 2017 on May 7, at the head of a new party Marion, one of the Front’s only two at European and foreign affairs and that did not exist two years ago—En members of parliament, who’d care- Gérard Collomb, the Lyon mayor and Marche!—Macron is turning into Le fully expressed disagreements with her regional satrap who supported him Terminator, poised not only to win aunt’s too-statist choices, resigned to from the start, as minister of the inte- the legislative elections to the Assem- “take care of [her] daughter”—though rior. Collomb’s Socialist party machine blée Nationale (the final round will be really to distance herself from the gen- is expected to deliver the Lyonnais on June 18), but to win in a landslide. eral stench of Marine’s losing anti- regional vote to Macron’s party. With strategic brilliance and ruthless- euro campaign. Marine’s Karl Rove, François Hollande’s Socialists, the ness, he has systematically destroyed the former left-wing Socialist Florian venerable party of Jean Jaurès and the right, the left, and Marine Le Pen’s Philippot, the architect of her popu- Léon Blum, are dead in the water. At National Front (FN), although in the list platform, threatened to resign, 125,000 registered members, they only last instance she helped him. too. The man hitherto described, with number half Macron’s En Marche! Macron has split the Républicains, some accuracy, as “Marine’s brain” official followers. They scored a little the conservative party reshaped by was then dismayed to see her luke- over 6 percent in the presidential elec- Nicolas Sarkozy in recent years, by warm reaction to this empty threat. tion, and even though that will get taking as his prime minister a young Only three weeks ago, the National them more seats than the FN in the unknown from their ranks, Le Havre Front giddily expected to end up legislative elections, they have been mayor Édouard Philippe. He consoli- with 50 to 60 members of parliament. effectively ripped to pieces by the com- dated with Bruno Le Maire, bination of Macron and the a onetime acolyte to the surprisingly strong Jean- anti-George W. Bush former Luc Mélenchon, a man of foreign minister Dominique the far left whose support for de Villepin, as minister for Chavista Venezuela and Cas- the economy. Finally, in a troist Cuba didn’t hamper move of balletic malevo- him from grabbing a fifth of lence, Macron snatched the the presidential vote. 34-year-old Gérald Darma- Mélenchon himself, off nin, Sarkozy’s latest discov- the presidential campaign ery and bright new hope, as trail where he shone beatifi- the junior minister for pub- cally, all red flags strictly lic accounts. banned from his rallies, has This, in effect, left the since shown his true colors Républicains with a rump of by high-handedly pre-empt- bitter older men who’ve been President Macron, right, and Prime Minister Philippe in Paris, May 23 ing a Socialist-held constitu- around too long and now ency in Marseille that he only hope they won’t lose too badly. They’re now wondering if they’ll man- is sure to win. The Communists had The FN, having come close to com- age 15, the minimum needed to create supported Mélenchon for president; plete victory, is now in complete dis- a parliamentary group. Like Trump, they now will field candidates against array. Having believed, for a heady Marine appealed to disappointed blue- his. He will try to make up the votes by 12 hours, that she really had won collar and lower-middle-class voters attracting a chunk of the working-class her presidential debate with Macron from both the right and the left. FN voters. It will not be enough to last month, Marine Le Pen realized But the Front is a clan more than help him win the large bloc he dreams the following morning that she had a party. Its campaign has been farmed of in the Assemblée Nationale. And not only lost, but botched it. While out to dubious experts, unprofessional this infighting between far-left and far- Macron cake-walked to victory, she and disorganized. Worse, local FN ther-left will only benefit Macron. wasn’t seen in public for over a week, cadres have such a bad reputation for It is all an unholy mess, watched hunched up at home with her cats nepotism, corruption, and plain inepti- with an Olympian eye by Macron, who and digesting her humiliation. Mean- tude that about 40 percent of Front self-describes his role as president as while, feedback from Le Pen’s base regional officials (councilors, alder- “Jupiterian” (he had the benefit of a streamed in, confirming that her Pal- men, etc.) elected in 2015 have already classical education in his Jesuit lycée inesque performance in the debate had left the party. in Amiens). Following the lead of exposed her as undignified, flaky, and, In his shopping spree to strip Barack Obama, the new president has in the words of many FN voters on the traditional parties of some of sharply curtailed the access of the press Twitter, “non-presidential material.” their more compatible personalities, who loved him so much these past two What followed in her party smacked Macron has taken on four Socialists, years. The Elysée will pick and choose of a mini-night of the long(ish) knives. including two big beasts, Jean-Yves Le exactly which journalists they’ll deign

Marine’s popular 27-year-old niece Drian (Hollande’s defense minister) to allow in His Presence. / AFP GETTYETIENNE LAURENT

20 / The Weekly Standard June 19, 2017 It doesn’t matter: Like Obama parliamentary assistant job. Rich- One could argue that anybody who in the early days of his presidency, ard Ferrand, Macron’s consigliere wore cotton garments at any point Macron can do no wrong in the and minister for parliamentary prior to the Civil War is guilty in eye of the voters. Some of his early affairs, allegedly caused his former some respect. By the same token, the appointees are fingered by the media employers to buy a choice piece of system of slavery was largely accept- for the same kinds of abuses that cost real estate for the benefit of his girl- able to most quarters of the nation François Fillon, the Républicain friend. Macron refuses to fire them. for most of American history prior candidate, the election. Bruno Le The voters do not seem to care. They to the Civil War. If James Madison Maire, like Fillon, allegedly paid his elected the new boy, and they want is to be excluded from the annals of wife with public funds in a fictitious him in charge. ♦ honor, why not Alexander Hamilton? He was personally opposed to slavery, but he did not try to have it outlawed by the Constitution at the convention in Philadelphia. Foundering Fathers And why should we limit our denunciations to those who owned slaves? Why not anybody who com- Is there no historical figure good enough for today? mitted what we judge to be public or private misdeeds? Franklin Roosevelt by Jay Cost interned Japanese Americans during World War II. Should his name trange news from Wiscon- be stricken from all public memori- sin. A student at James Madi- als? John F. Kennedy, while angling S son Memorial High School in for the presidency during the 1950s, Verona has petitioned to have the tended to vote against civil rights name of her school changed, argu- measures while in Congress. Ditto ing, “The significance of this name in Lyndon Johnson. Should their names association with my school has a neg- be removed as well? Teddy Roosevelt ative effect on memorials [sic] black signed restrictive laws on immigra- students. The lack of representation I tion during his presidency and told feel in this school makes me feel more Congress, “Any man who says he is than unsafe.” To date, the petition has an American, but something else also, received more than 1,500 signatures. isn’t an American at all.” Surely that This is a small action, but it is moti- must make some immigrants feel vated by a principle that is becom- unsafe. Should we therefore blast his ing more and more popular: Public Madison visage from Mount Rushmore? Abra- in 1821 memorials to historical figures need ham Lincoln won the Republican to be evaluated not just on the fig- nomination in 1860 in part because ures’ contributions to civil society, Before we the people initiate such he was more moderate on the slavery but their other beliefs and actions, a heady project, it is fair to inquire issue than William Seward. Should especially regarding the matter of whether this notion can withstand he be wiped from history for this? slavery. If this view were adopted, it scrutiny. Must we relegate historical Assuming that we can identify would have sweeping consequences. If figures with a connection to slavery to any such standard, it does not follow the name of James Madison must be the dustbin of history? that those who fall on the wrong side struck from public buildings, schools, To begin, whatever cut-off point we of it must be refused public recogni- and towns because he owned slaves, identify delineating acceptable and tion. Honor is not the same as wor- what about George Washington? unacceptable historical personages ship. To honor somebody is to hold What about Thomas Jefferson? James would have to be arbitrary—unless of him in esteem, to respect him. It does Monroe? John Marshall? Henry course we get rid of nearly every pub- not require us to excuse or justify Clay? Andrew Jackson? The list of lic testament. Slavery, after all, was everything he did. Look again at the names that would have to be removed essential to the American economy names of slaveholders from America’s from public places goes on and on; it for centuries. The Southern planta- past—Washington, Jefferson, Madi- would mean thousands of new names tion gentry had slaves to grow their son, Clay, Marshall, Jackson. Are they required all across the country. cotton, but it was shipped in Yankee worthy of honor? Of course they are! boats to England, or to Northern tex- They laid the foundations for the sta- Jay Cost is a senior writer tile mills to be spun into cloth. Who ble, prosperous, and free republic that at The Weekly Standard. was culpable for this state of affairs? we all enjoy today.

June 19, 2017 The Weekly Standard / 21 We owe them a debt of gratitude for their endeavors, notwithstand- ing the misdeeds they committed. If I Of Tribes contract somebody to paint my house, and I find out later that he is an adul- terer, does that excuse me from pay- and Terrorism ing what I owe? Of course not. By the same token, my debt for the painting does not oblige me to act as though he did not wrong his spouse. So it goes How do you solve a problem like Qatar? with the Founders who owned slaves: by Lee Smith We should appreciate them for their endeavors, for our lives are manifestly ast week, several Arab states, conflict goes back further still: “2014 better because of their struggles, but including Bahrain, Egypt, was just a culmination of problems honoring them does not require us to L Saudi Arabia, and the United that were brewing for 20 years,” says ignore or excuse their errors. Madi- Arab Emirates, put Qatar on notice. Mohammed al-Yahya, a Saudi analyst son’s home Montpelier, for example, They removed their diplomats from close to the government in Riyadh just opened an exhibition, “The Mere Doha, closed airspace and ports to and a fellow at the Atlantic Council. Distinction of Colour,” exploring Qatari vessels, expelled Qatari nation- “Hamad bin Khalifa al Thani [who slavery at the plantation. als, and prohibited their own nation- ruled Qatar until 2013; his son rules Wiping the Founders from the als from visiting the country. Among now] overthrew his father in a coup public memory, moreover, endan- other key demands, Qatar’s Arab in 1995. The Saudis disapproved. It’s gers the perpetuation of our republic. opponents want the emirate to stop not part of the culture of the GCC They were no doubt flawed men, but backing Islamic extremists, Sunni and states to overthrow monarchs in they were flawed men who invented Shia, and shut down hostile press out- coups like this. And Sheikh Hamad this system of government. If we lets, including Doha’s jewel, Al Jazeera. had a lot of animosity toward Saudi wish to make the most of our govern- Reports suggest the breaking point Arabia, Qatari posture shifted 180 ment, we have to understand how it was Doha’s decision to send nearly degrees after the coup.” functions. That requires us to under- $1 billion to rescue a hunting party Indeed, that was the central purpose stand what these men thought and held captive in Iraq—a ransom paid to of Al Jazeera—to serve as an instru- did. The decisions they made, and the Iran and to Sunni extremists, both of ment with which Hamad attacked assumptions behind them, reverber- whom the Arab states consider threats his larger and richer Gulf neighbor. ate through the generations, into to their national security. The ransom Internationally, the satellite network is the present day. Public memorials may be the proximate cause of the cri- known for its anti-American posture. are a way to keep us mindful of their sis, but tension has been brewing for After 9/11, it was virtually Osama bin continued influence, so that as we some time. Laden’s bulletin board, posting videos endeavor to understand civil society, The key players are the Emiratis the al Qaeda leader sent to the network we remember to look to them. and Saudis, the two major powers in through couriers. During the U.S.-led While planning the University of the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC), coalition’s invasion of Iraq, Al Jazeera Virginia, Thomas Jefferson wrote that of which Qatar is also a member. Bah- openly sided with the remnants of Sad- it would be a school whose students rain is effectively a Saudi province dam Hussein’s forces as they targeted and faculty would not be “afraid to fol- and Egypt, while contemptuous of American troops and allies. low truth wherever it may lead, nor to Qatar, is incapable of projecting much From Doha’s vantage point, though, tolerate any error so long as reason is power without the financial support of beating up on the Americans was just left free to combat it.” It is an impor- its Emirati patrons. In 2014, Bahrain, another way to target Washington’s tant motto to remember in this age of Saudi Arabia, and the UAE removed local client, Saudi Arabia. The Qataris “safe spaces,” anxieties about “micro- their diplomats to protest Qatar’s have no real problem with the United aggressions,” and the like. Nobody interference in their internal affairs. States—they host Al Udeid, the biggest should feel afraid of the figures from That crisis was partly precipitated American military base in the Middle our history, nor compelled to redact when Qatar backed Egypt’s Muslim East and CENTCOM’s headquarters them from the public memory. Brotherhood government while the in the region. But that’s the Qatar way, Instead, we should honor statesmen others supported General Abdel Fattah play both sides—making nice with the from our past for the good things they el-Sisi’s coup. Americans and the people who want to did and not hesitate to rebuke them Regional experts explain that the kill Americans, Sunnis as well as Shi- for the bad. In this way, we properly ites, is just another day at the office pay the debt we owe them, and we also Lee Smith is a senior editor in Doha. Similarly, Qatar shares with learn to be better citizens. ♦ at The Weekly Standard. Iran the world’s largest natural gas

24 / The Weekly Standard June 19, 2017 field, South Pars, the source of nearly inserted himself in the middle of it. partner against all the destabilizing all its revenue, so it’s cozy with Tehran Trump’s visit to Riyadh was a suc- stuff in the region, whether that’s Iran even as its GCC allies see Iran as threat. cess, it was the aftermath that was a or Sunni extremism.” The hope, says al-Yahya, “was that problem. While there, he enlisted the What the Saudis don’t need is an things would be different under the support of Arab and Muslim leaders argument over who funds terror, says new emir, Tamim bin Hamad al Thani, in the fight against terrorism. From Lebanese political analyst Elie Fawaz. whom Hamad appointed after he abdi- the perspective of the Saudis and oth- “Once they open that can of worms, cated in 2013. But to Riyadh, these ers, Trump’s promise to forswear they’ll get dragged into it. The pro- hopes turned out to be misplaced.” interference in their societies marked Iranian camp attacked them for back- Indeed, many assume that the father a welcome change from the last two ing terrorism to win support from the is still running the show. “Tamim is so administrations—and was likely read Obama administration, and now the weak,” said another Saudi analyst who by them as a green light to sort out Qataris will get into it.” requested anonymity. The same source local affairs, starting with Qatar. His The reality is that there are plenty of explained that Qatar’s former prime tweet two weeks after his visit con- problematic actors in the GCC, includ- minister, Hamad Bin Jassim al-Thani, firmed that. “During my recent trip to ing the Emiratis, who do business spent last week on Capitol Hill to lobby the Middle East I stated that there can with Iran and have sheltered figures Congress after President Don- ald Trump identified Qatar as a source of terrorism in yet another ill-advised tweet. The Qataris have a powerful ally in the Pentagon—Al Udeid Air Base is a key installation from which the United States runs operations in Afghani- stan, Iraq, and other regional hotspots. No one wants the Americans to leave Al Udeid—except the Emiratis. There was a joking refer- Donald Trump and pals during his visit to Riyadh, May 21 ence about moving the base in an email leaked last week from the no longer be funding of Radical Ideol- from the Syrian regime that the Sau- Emirati ambassador to Washington, ogy. Leaders pointed to Qatar—look!” dis and Qataris oppose. “The Arabs are Yousef al-Otaiba. It merely reinforced “Obama protected Doha,” the Saudi divided,” says Fawaz, “but there isn’t the message the Emiratis have been analyst explained. “He used them to much wisdom in opening up another pushing in Washington for some time: keep the Saudis off balance, but now front in a destabilized region.” move Al Udeid and show us the love, that he’s gone the Qataris lost their Mohamed al-Yahya, the analyst not the Qataris. defender.” The point is not that Trump close to the Saudi government, agrees. It’s perhaps useful to see the cur- should likewise shield an adventur- “The Saudis want a unified GCC. The rent crisis in a wider aperture, since it ist Doha but that it’s probably not point is not to bring Qatar to its knees, goes back way beyond the last 20 years. prudent to widen the natural rift in but to get it back on track to join in Many of the Gulf ’s ruling families are the GCC, an institution designed to pushing a unified GCC agenda. No one from the same region on the Arabian project American power in the Per- wants this to continue.” Peninsula and have been bickering sian Gulf. Further, when you have Trump later walked back his tweet with or actively fighting each other for a problems with an ally, scream at them and in a phone call with the Qatari very long time. Rival clans that became in private, rather than chide them in emir offered to mediate the crisis, energy-rich monarchies are playing front of the world. even if it takes a White House meet- out their feuds on a very large stage If the Emiratis had a specific goal in ing. What’s most important, however, now for several reasons. First, with mind, hosting a major U.S. base, the is that the administration doesn’t let the region embroiled in conflict from Saudis aimed to show the Americans local players, whether that’s Qatar or Libya to Syria to Yemen, the stakes are that they can be helpful. “The Saudis the UAE or Saudi Arabia, set Ameri- high. Second, both Qatar and the UAE wanted to get the GCC in line to take can priorities. Intra-Arab conflict exercise a considerable amount of influ- on Iran,” says Tony Badran, research should not distract the administra- ence in Washington, largely but not fellow at the Foundation for Defense of tion from keeping regional partners exclusively through the money they Democracies. “They wanted to show focused on the two key issues on the donate to think tanks. But most cru- the Trump administration that they U.S. agenda— stopping Iran and

BANDAR ALGALOUD / SAUDI ROYAL COUNCIL HANDOUT / ANADOLU AGENCY / GETTY COUNCIL HANDOUT / ANADOLU ROYAL / SAUDI BANDAR ALGALOUD cially, the president of the United States are part of the solution, an American crushing ISIS. ♦

June 19, 2017 The Weekly Standard / 25 The Whole World Was Watching The appalling protests at Evergreen State College

By Charlotte Allen characterized as Weinstein’s racism. He had objected to a college-sponsored Day of Absence on April 10, when white t Evergreen State College, the revolution students, faculty, and staff had been encouraged to make will be televised. And it already has been, themselves scarce on campus. This video was excised from thanks to the smartphone. YouTube for violating the site’s “harassment and bullying” Since May 23, the 4,089-student public policy after protesters complained it had been selectively liberal arts college in Olympia, Washing- edited to make them look like harassers and bullies. For- ton,A has been embroiled in what the media euphemistically tunately for the curious, the much-copied video is available call “student protests” over perceived racial grievances. At in whole elsewhere on the Internet (the website Heterodox Evergreen State that has actually meant: invading a pro- Academy claims to offer a 12-minute “unedited” version) fessor’s class to taunt him with charges of racism; occu- and in snippets on YouTube of a 6-minute interview that pying the library and the college president’s office while Weinstein gave to Fox News’s Tucker Carlson on May 25. the campus police, ordered to stand down, barricade them- The 12-minute video shows the husky, bearded Wein- selves in their headquarters; delivering F-bombs, derision, stein, clad in an outdoorsy-biology-prof black T-shirt, try- and assorted demands—firing the police chief, confiscat- ing patiently to engage the students who have shut down ing the guns of the rest of the police, setting up manda- his classroom in a “dialectic,” as he called it. Weinstein tory race-oriented “cultural competency” training for the later described himself to Carlson as a “deeply progressive faculty, excusing the protesters from their end-of-term person” who had supported socialist-leaning Bernie Sand- assignments, and providing free gumbo for a radical pot- ers in the 2016 presidential primaries. But the Evergreen luck—to the cornered president, George Bridges; and cre- students captured in the May 23 video were having noth- ating such a threatening atmosphere for the professor in ing to do with Weinstein’s attempts to lift the conversation question, evolutionary biologist Bret Weinstein (another to a high-minded, fancy-word “dialectic” plane: target of the firing demands), that he had to hold his class “This is not a discussion—you lost that one! You said on May 25 in a public park in downtown Olympia. If a racist s—! Now apologize!” photo posted on Instagram is to be taken at face value, it Weinstein responded: “I did not!” has also meant wielding baseball bats and posing omi- “Stop telling people of color they’re f— useless! nously on the balconies of student apartments. You’re useless!” The videos, made on the phones of Evergreen State “Yeah, resign!” screamed another student. students, were ubiquitous as the activities of the 200 or so “Resign!” screamed yet another. protesters culminated in a literal shutdown of the college “I’m not resigning.” (Evergreen State suspended operations from the afternoon “Hey hey! Ho ho! Bret Weinstein has got to go!” of June 1 to the afternoon of June 5, even though it had been The video followed the students yelling the chant in scheduled to hold the last of its spring-term classes on those unison as they tried to block the campus police (probably days, after someone made a 911 call threatening to shoot called in by one of Weinstein’s biology students) shielding up the campus with a .44 Magnum). The first of the videos Weinstein as he exited the building. featured the May 23 invasion of Weinstein’s classroom at The funniest—and also the saddest—of the vid- 9:30 a.m. by about 50 angry students provoked by what they eos might be called the Homework Video, or perhaps the Gumbo Video. Viewed more than 86,000 times on YouTube, Charlotte Allen is a frequent contributor it recorded the events of a May 24 meeting with Bridges to The Weekly Standard. in his office, which the protesters had invaded and taken

26 / The Weekly Standard June 19, 2017 over, blocking the exits while some of them checked their The Evergreen State protesters at the May 24 meet- phones and helped themselves to what appeared to be uni- ing, munching their pizza slices while a jacketless, white- versity-supplied pizza as they sat at the college president’s shirted Bridges stood abjectly before them holding a conference table. The 66-year-old Bridges, balding, pudgy, multipage list of their written demands, clearly regarded bespectacled, and given to sporting bow ties on dressy occa- such solicitude for their sensibilities as so much contempt- sions, had the misfortune of visually calling to mind Bobby ible weakness. The meeting opened with this exchange Trippe, the adipose city slicker raped by hillbillies in John between a female protester and Bridges: Boorman’s 1972 backwoods horror flickDeliverance . Sub- “All of us are students and have homework and projects consciously—or perhaps archetypally, since none was alive and things due. Have you sent an email out to your faculty when Deliverance was ringing up the cash registers during letting them know? What’s been done about that?” the early 1970s—the Evergreen protesters similarly seemed “It’s the first thing I’ll do. I have not done it yet, I will to smell blood with the eager-to-please and ultimately hap- do it right now.” less Bridges. He had already had an encounter with them the “So they need to be told that these assignments won’t be day before, when they stormed his office at 4:30 in the after- done on time, and we don’t need to be penalized for that.” noon not long after their successful disruption of Weinstein’s Jeers and general derision followed, as Bridges tried to biology class. Their greet- shush them with his free hand ing, also captured in a video, and make himself heard. had been: “F— you, George, “Y’all can’t keep doing we don’t want to hear a God- these pointing fingers,” a damned thing you have to say.” female student reprimanded One protester had demanded him, after he had apologized that Bridges “disavow white and meekly placed the offend- supremacy.” Bridges had ing hand in his pants pocket. meekly agreed: “I will disavow A few minutes later white supremacy.” Bridges pleaded over the din to let him please adjourn the ridges assumed the Bret Weinstein, left, attempts to speak to activists at meeting so he could read presidency of Ever- Evergreen State College in May before being shouted down. the list of demands: “You B green State only in the have to give me some pri- fall of 2015, after serving for 10 years as president of Whit- vacy, folks. . . . I have claustrophobia.” man College, a small, well-regarded liberal-arts institution That psychological condition might have resonated serving 1,500 students in Walla Walla, Washington. A soci- with the high achievers at Whitman. It went over at Ever- ologist by training, he specialized academically in studying green State like an IED in Mosul. A T-shirted student stood racial disparities in the sentencing of criminal defendants, up holding a plastic-cup drink and waved her hand sarcasti- thus burnishing his liberal credentials. Those credentials cally: “People of color have to work in threatening environ- received another touch of polish with his marriage to for- ments every day! Welcome! Welcome! Get to work!” mer congressional aide Kari Tupper, who had helped end The meeting ended with the Gumbo Potluck Demand. the long-running political career of Sen. Brock Adams, A male student standing behind Bridges informed him maintaining that the Washington Democrat had sexually that if he didn’t respond to the occupying students’ list by assaulted her in 1987. (Adams, who died in 2004, was never 5 p.m. that Friday, May 26, “you need to pay for a potluck.” criminally charged but in 1992 abruptly declined to seek Bridges was amenable to that order, too: “We’ll be pay- reelection after eight other women accused him of sexual ing for a potluck anyway,” he replied. misconduct.) Tupper for several years taught women’s stud- “We want gumbo!” another student shouted. ies at the University of Washington in Seattle, where her A knot of students on the other side of the table turned husband had been a professor and dean. In August 2016 that into a chant: “We want gumbo!” Bridges wrote an op-ed for the Seattle Times responding to a “Made by my mama!” shouted the young man standing tough-love letter by University of Chicago dean of students behind Bridges. John Ellison that had warned incoming freshman that “trigger warnings” and “safe spaces” for the easily psychically vergreen State, founded in 1967 in the state capital, bruised wouldn’t be forthcoming at Chicago. Bridges coun- Olympia, a waterfront city of about 50,000 at the tered that the University of Chicago was simply “tone deaf to E bottom of Puget Sound, 60 miles south of Seattle, VIA YOUTUBE the academic and developmental needs of many students.” was part of a 1960s wave of brand-new college campuses,

June 19, 2017 The Weekly Standard / 27 many of them publicly funded, that aimed to serve an when the hiring market can be dicey, or perhaps because expanding baby boom population and also to experiment they decide that they were never college material in the first with nontraditional models of post-secondary educa- place (in-state tuition is relatively cheap at $6,500 per year, tion. (The best-known of these colleges is the University but it’s not free). Enrollment at Evergreen has been steadily of California, Santa Cruz, founded in 1965.) Many of the dropping since a record 4,891 students in 2009. The college nontraditional colleges, including Evergreen, quickly website sounds a note of desperation as it tries to persuade became known as “hippie colleges” because they tended, applicants that better-paying job titles than barista might as they still do, to attract a distinctly nontraditional stu- await them: “Graduates of The Evergreen State College do dent body. Evergreen, for example, proudly bills itself as well in graduate schools all over the country and in all sorts “progressive” on its website. There are no letter grades of careers. You can find our alumni everywhere!” (professors submit narrative evaluations of their students’ Oddly enough, despite its blue-chip progressive cre- proficiency), and there are no courses—or majors—as the dentials, Evergreen State has been marked by quite a bit words are generally understood. Evergreen undergradu- of racial tension. Perhaps because it’s mostly relatively ates, who make up the vast majority of its students, instead affluent white people who have the financial wherewithal sign up for year-long, multi-credit, interdisciplinary to identify as hippies, the undergraduate student popula- programs that typically include a range of hard-science, tion at Evergreen (according to its own figures, using the social-science, and humanities fields. Department of Education’s ethnic categories) is 67 percent Evergreen’s likely most famous graduate is Matt Groe- non-Hispanic white. About 29 percent of Evergreen stu- ning (class of 1977), creator of The Simpsons. The college’s dents describe themselves as “students of color.” And of likely most famous nongraduate was Rachel Corrie, acci- that group, about 5 percent categorize themselves as non- dentally bulldozed to death in 2003 in an Israeli military Hispanic black or African-American. Still, before Bridges operation in Gaza during the Second Intifada. (Corrie had arrived on the Evergreen campus, a highly popular Afri- been in Gaza as part of a senior-year independent study can American, Thomas. L. Purce, had held the presidency project and had joined a protest group that positioned its from 2000 until his retirement in 2015, embarking on an members in front of bulldozers destroying houses that the ambitious building program and other capital improve- Israelis said were used as cover to shoot at their troops and ments to the campus, whose 1960s infrastructure (judging smuggle arms.) Evergreen’s commencement speaker in from photos) hasn’t aged particularly well. 1999 was Mumia Abu-Jamal, convicted in 1982 of murder- Nonetheless, the demographic statistics at Evergreen ing a Philadelphia police officer. Mumia, on death row at have been just divergent enough from those of the U.S. the time (prosecutors have since agreed to let him serve a population as a whole—63 percent white, 13 percent black, life term without parole), delivered his 13-minute speech and 17 percent Hispanic (only 10 percent of Evergreen’s from behind bars. students are Hispanics of all races, according to Education The school’s motto is—no joke—Omnia Extares: Let Department criteria)—to trigger the formation of a cam- it all hang out. Some students have clearly thrived in the pus faculty-staff group that titled itself the “Equity and campus’s do-your-own-thing atmosphere, on its thousand- Inclusion Council.” The council aimed not just at match- acre waterfront campus that combines towering eponymous ing the percentages more exactly but at ensuring the reten- fir trees with concrete-overloaded Brutalist architecture. tion of minority students, who seemed to be dropping out A curriculum that mixes empirical and deductive-reason- of Evergreen at a higher rate than their white classmates. It ing fields such as math and science with the humanities hardly mattered that the Pacific Northwest is overwhelm- can be exhilarating, even if the “humanities” these days ingly Nordic, thanks to massive Scandinavian immigration largely mean excursions into arcane ideologized “theory.” around the turn of the 20th century, and that a slight over- Evergreen gets high marks from U.S. News for its teaching representation of white students on a state-school campus (small classes, high engagement), and its marine-biology might therefore be expected. The word “equity” is a new- offerings are considered first-rate. But as Evergreen stu- ish term of art in the lexicon of race-based activism. One dents have complained online, too many of their loosely website defines it as “the condition that would be achieved supervised classmates simply coast along majoring in drugs if one’s racial identity no longer predicted, in a statistical and tattoos. Evergreen has a 98 percent acceptance rate of sense, how one fares. . . . This includes elimination of poli- applicants (in contrast to the 45 percent acceptance rate at cies, practices, attitudes and cultural messages that reinforce the state’s flagship University of Washington), and 20 to differential outcomes by race or fail to eliminate them.” In 30 percent of its freshmen either drop out or transfer after other words, “equity” is all about ensuring not just equal- the first year—perhaps because they seek a more focused ity of opportunity for ethnic minorities but equality of aca- curriculum in these tight-economy, post-2008 crash days demic outcome: a one-to-one correlation between their

28 / The Weekly Standard June 19, 2017 demographic representation in the population as a whole to the pervasive influence of Critical Race Theory—the and their representation on the evaluation sheets that Ever- notion that most social structures are instruments of white green professors prepare for their students. supremacy—on the nonscience fields of study at Evergreen. It was not the first time that Weinstein had publicly n November 11, 2016, slightly more than a year taken a lone-wolf ideological stance in a racially tinged into Bridges’ presidency at Evergreen, the Equity campus dispute. In 1987, while a freshman at the Univer- O and Inclusion Council released a 39-page report. sity of Pennsylvania, he had written a sarcastic op-ed for By this time, the report indicated, the ranks of the ethnic- the student newspaper, the Daily Pennsylvanian, deploring minority students had been supplemented with students a campus fraternity’s having hired two strippers in order to identifying as “LGBTQQ” and students with “reported attract potential pledges to a rush party (school rules for- disabilities.” An appendix suggested that the committee’s bade the serving of alcohol). The strippers were black, and efforts had the blessing of Bridges. The report outlined the white fraternity brothers had treated them in a “disgust- an elaborate—and if the council got its way, manda- ing and degrading” fashion that involved smearing them tory—step-by step plan for the 2016-2017 academic year with ketchup and penetrating them with cucumbers. In a and beyond. The goal was to shift Evergreen from a “diversity agenda”—the standard-issue multicul- turalism and affirmative action promoted on most college campuses—to an “equity agenda,” in which equality of student outcomes would be the top pri- ority. All campus activities would be subsumed into this quest, which would include some version of “mandatory anti-oppression training for the faculty” (a condition that Evergreen professors, progressive though they might be, rejected by majority vote); the creation of a new administrative position for a “VP for Equity and Inclusion,” who would be independently budgeted and operate autonomously; “equity”-based curriculum planning and assess- ment of student learning; and a requirement that all future faculty hires be subjected to an “equity jus- Evergreen president George Bridges in a colloquy with unhappy students tification.” In a particularly Maoist-sounding rhe- torical fillip, the report referred numerous times to the May 30 interview with political commentator Dave Rubin, “Six Expectations” for closing a perceived “equity gap” Weinstein said that although the fraternity was suspended between the currently “underserved” minority student over the incident, he received so much harassment, includ- population at Evergreen and their presumed fully served ing death threats, from fraternity members that he briefly white, heterosexual, and nondisabled classmates. dropped out of Penn. Insanely totalitarian as the November 11 report might Although the Evergreen faculty never adopted or took strike anyone who hasn’t spent time on a college cam- any other action on the Equity and Inclusion Council’s pus recently, there were apparently few objections from report, some of the council’s members, impatient at the the Evergreen faculty, possibly because few had actually professors’ inaction, seemed to be quietly incorporating its read the report, and possibly because the professors feared recommendations into campus life at Evergreen—while being branded racists. One professor who did object was Bridges began a search for what seemed to be exactly the Bret Weinstein, who, according to reports (Weinstein did plenipotentiary “Vice President/Vice Provost for Equity not respond to requests for an interview), used the faculty and Inclusion” that the council had recommended. email listserv at Evergreen to wage a war of words with council members, accusing them of authoritarianism (the report ne member of the council was Rashida called for a high level of staff intrusion into the contents of Love, director of Evergreen’s First Peoples professors’ courses) and intimidation. He argued that the O Multicultural Advising Services office, which equality of outcomes that the council was pushing was a offers support to minority students. In March 2017, Love “discredited concept, failing on both logical and historical announced at an Evergreen faculty meeting that there grounds,” as he put it in a May 30 op-ed for the Wall Street were going to be drastic changes to the annual Day of

VIA YOUTUBE Journal. Weinstein linked the council’s obsession with equity Absence (scheduled for April 12), an Evergreen tradition

June 19, 2017 The Weekly Standard / 29 dating to the 1970s, when ethnic-minority professors, stu- worded email to Love in which he pointed out that dents, and employees remained off-campus for a day in although she and the First Peoples office had used the order to remind the white majority how crucial their pres- language of “choices” in setting the new Day of Absence ence was to the college’s operation. The Day of Absence policy, “encouraging” whites to stay away—in contrast to the past practice in which minorities had voluntarily absented themselves—amounted to a “show of force, an act of oppression in and of itself.” He added: “You may take this letter as a formal protest of this year’s structure, and you may assume that I will be on campus on the Day of Absence. . . . On a college campus, one’s right to speak— or to be—must never be based on skin color.” Meanwhile there had been a series of low-level student disruptions at Evergreen from the very beginning of the 2016-2017 academic year. Those protests apparently stemmed from minority students’ long-simmering dissatisfaction with the way they believed Evergreen was treating them—dissatisfaction that stretched back even to the African-American Purce’s presidency. The faculty’s refusal to undergo mandatory equity training rankled in particular. One Evergreen student told Olympian columnist Mark Driscoll: “There has been meeting after meeting with the administration. For years students of color, trans and queer students and other minorities have been asking, then demanding, for mandatory equity training for staff and faculty. . . . What you are seeing is months and years of being ignored.” Alleged biased treatment by the campus police seemed to be another sore point. At Evergreen’s opening convocation on September 21, 2016, two students seized the stage carrying a sign that said, “Evergreen cashes diversity checks but doesn’t care about blacks.” On January 11, 2017, the same two students plus several others armed with noisemakers interrupted A tweet by Bret Weinstein showing an Instagram photo the swearing-in of new campus police chief Stacy Brown, attributed to Evergreen campus activists seized the microphone from another campus official, and had been inspired by a 1965 play of that name by Douglas began chanting, “F— cops!” The two students were inves- Turner Ward in which blacks absented themselves from tigated and possibly disciplined. a town whose whites subsequently discovered how much But what seems to have triggered the most recent fracas they depended on the blacks’ services. A Day of Presence was a May 10 post on Evergreen’s Class of 2020 Facebook (scheduled for April 14 this year) typically followed the page by a black student at Evergreen who goes only by the Day of Absence, marked by workshops and other events name Jamil. Jamil’s post called for “PoC” (people of color) focused on race relations. to sign up for a year-long class program titled “Mediaworks: This year, however, Love informed the professors, it Re/Presenting Power and Difference” so as to make the pro- would be whites who would be “encouraged” (as it was gram “majority Black/Brown.” Another student, Kaí-Avé reported) to stay off campus on the Day of Absence while Douvia, who called himself a “person of color” but who is “people of color” held their own “community-building” not black, accused Jamil of reverse racism and put up his workshops at various campus venues (there would be no own post substituting the word “white” for “PoC” and classes that day). Whites were free to attend an off-campus “black/brown.” Several days of vociferous student debate day-long consciousness-raising event of their own, with and back-and-forth charges of racism ensued, culminating this ironic touch: They had to bring their own “potluck” on the night of May 14 in a confrontation between Douvia lunches to the function, while the people of color on cam- and Jamil, who was accompanied by another black student, pus received a lunch provided by the college. Timeko Williams Jr. Douvia called the campus police after-

On March 15 Weinstein shot off a polite but strongly wards to say that he felt “unsafe,” and the police detained VIA TWITTER

30 / The Weekly Standard June 19, 2017 Jamil and Williams for questioning for several hours before (emails to Bridges and Evergreen spokesman Zach Pow- releasing the two early on the morning of May 15. ers went unanswered). A video posted on YouTube and This led a group of students to call for the firing of elsewhere that seems to have been made at 3:40 p.m. on Brown, the police chief, and to send a news release to the May 23—hours after Weinstein’s class had been invaded— Olympian complaining that “black trans disabled students” shows an enraged Naima Lowe, a black professor of film were being harassed by campus police. They also broke into studies and a member of the Equity and Inclusion Coun- an interview with a candidate for the newly formed equity cil, hurling F-bombs, defending the protesters, and telling and diversity position to voice their opinions about rac- some puzzled-looking white faculty members huddling ism at Evergreen. On May 18, Wendy Endress, Evergreen’s outside the library that the campus unrest was their own vice president of student affairs, issued an email inviting fault for ignoring the council’s recommendations. “This is students to a “conversation” about the recent events to be about THEIR needs!” Lowe yells. “And that Equity Coun- hosted on May 19 by George Bridges. The protesters organ cil handed you—handed you—a way to do this EASILY!” ized a boycott of the meeting, sending out a press release Bret Weinstein’s brother Eric, a Harvard-Ph.D. mathe- stating: “We have already voiced our experiences over this matician who is managing director of Thiel Capital, posted year and Wendy and George have made it obvious they on his Twitter account a Facebook post purportedly from don’t care about how recent events are affecting the student Lowe asking: “Could some white women at Evergreen come body. They are making an effort to diminish our voices and and collect [Bret Weinstein’s wife and Evergreen anthropol- take control of a situation they refused to acknowledge until ogy professor] Heather Heying’s racist a—.” it began to tarnish their reputation.” By the time 5 p.m., Friday, May 26, rolled around— the deadline the angry students had given to President ow Weinstein, whose email objecting to the Day Bridges—the protesters had broadened their chant to “Hey of Absence was already more than two months hey! Ho ho! These racist teachers have got to go!” and put H into the past, became the chief target of the stu- together an additional list of candidates for firing by Ever- dents four days later can be only a matter of conjecture green. A meeting took place in the campus’s Longhouse,

Meet Small Business Owners Who Depend on Trade

THOMAS J. DONOHUE ability to trade and sell products to support a robust trade agenda so we PRESIDENT AND CEO overseas markets, the company would can continue to grow,” Cooper says. U.S. CHAMBER OF COMMERCE not have grown or survived.” The debate over what that For many small and midsize agenda should look like is ramping As the debate over trade continues companies, import tariffs imposed up. After a monthslong wait, the to unfold, many small businesses by foreign countries top the list of Trump administration’s U.S. Trade around the country are watching with trade concerns. For example, ice Representative, Robert Lighthizer, keen interest—their success depends cream maker Dippin’ Dots has faced has finally been confirmed by the on the outcome. Too often trade tariffs ranging from 15% all the way Senate. The administration has is thought of as an issue for large up to 65% in some countries. “We notified Congress of its intent to multinational companies, but, have missed out on many markets modernize NAFTA, kicking off a in reality, 98% of U.S. exporters are internationally because we are not 90-day consultation period before small and medium-size businesses. able to afford to do business with negotiations officially begin. As we To help tell their stories, the U.S. countries if their import duties are work with our leaders on NAFTA and Chamber of Commerce recently over 30%,” says Stan Jones, vice other trade priorities, the Chamber launched a new multimedia campaign president of operations. is making sure we hear from Cooper called Faces of Trade. Another example is DeFeet, a and others in the business community. The campaign tells the stories small North Carolina sock maker The Chamber’s Faces of Trade of businesses like Auburn Leather that exports to 43 nations around campaign, launched last week, began Company, based in Auburn, Kentucky. the world. “Ever since we took our by profiling 12 small and medium-size As a leader in the production of business international, we have grown businesses and will continue to feature leather shoelaces, Auburn Leather exponentially and our sales continue new companies on an ongoing basis. sells its products all over the world. It to grow every day,” says founder To read the stories and watch the employs 77 people, and about 90% of Shane Cooper. But these benefits videos, visit TradeWorksforUS.com. those jobs depend on exports. Ida are being slowed by high barriers to Elliott, vice president of business entry in some of the countries DeFeet Learn more at development, says, “Without our exports to. “We need Washington to uschamber.com/abovethefold.

June 19, 2017 The Weekly Standard / 31 a handsome wooden “cultural center” surrounded by for- armed campus intruder that closed down Evergreen from est and bedecked with indigenous art that is Evergreen’s June 1-5. Some students started patrolling the campus nod to the days when cis-het white men—and any other with baseball bats, hunting for white supremacists and white people—were unknown in the Puget Sound region. frightening other students fearful of reprisals because The opening sentence of Bridges’s statement in response to they hadn’t gone along with the earlier protests. Sharon the students’ demands set the tone and the tenor for every- Goodman, Evergreen’s director of residential and dining thing that followed: services, felt obliged to send around a memo on June 4 “I’m George Bridges, I use he/him pronouns.” reminding the bat brigade that “the use of bats or similar What followed was Evergreen-predictable. Apologies instruments is not productive.” to the Native Americans whose “land was stolen and on But this was a revolution that was televised, and hun- which the college stands”? Check. That “mandatory sensi- dreds of thousands of people have viewed those videos. Even tivity and cultural competency training” for faculty? Check perennial ultra-liberals such as New York Times columnist and check. “We commit to annual mandatory training for Frank Bruni and Huffington Post contributor Matt Teitel- all faculty beginning in fall 2017,” Bridges said. And there baum have been shocked at the spectacle of a professor held was more: the creation of an “equity center.” A “Trans & prisoner by students at his own college and taunted for rac- Queer Center coordinator.” A “position that will support ism for disagreeing with faculty colleagues. Evergreen State undocumented students.” And more free food, after the is already having trouble attracting students—and it might meeting adjourned at 6 p.m. take a lesson from the University of Missouri, which is shut- The students didn’t get everything they asked for. ting down dorms and laying off staff in the wake of a 23 per- Bridges declined a demand for “the immediate disarm- cent freshman enrollment decline after widely publicized ing of police services and no expansion of police facilities student-protest belligerence in 2015. Rep. Matt Manweller, or services at any point in the future”—although he did a Republican state legislator from rural eastern Washing- promise to implement “training” for the campus cops that ton, has already introduced a bill that would ratchet down would include “addressing anti-black racism, de-escalation, taxpayer funding for Evergreen, essentially requiring it to minimizing use of force, serving trans and queer students,” privatize. The bill has little chance of passing in the Demo- and so forth. Nor did Bridges accede to this: “We demand cratic-controlled state, but it’s an ominous sign. Bret Weinstein be suspended immediately without pay but The best perspective on Evergreen State might come all students receive full credit” (the “full credit” was a nice from Jason Brennan, a philosophy professor at George- touch). Bridges’s refusal to fire him (or any other Evergreen town University’s business school who previously taught at employees targeted on the student list) may be cold com- Brown, the “hippie school” of the Ivy League. In an email fort to Weinstein, however, because Bridges also declared Brennan observed that “administrators have a financial there would be a “full investigation” of “any complaint of incentive to impose ideological requirements and the like discrimination”—and such complaints look highly likely in on faculty. Consider: Faculty and administrators have to the future. Dozens of Weinstein’s fellow faculty members compete with one another for power, prestige, status, and at Evergreen have already signed an open letter asking the money. $20 million spent on faculty is $20 million not college to pursue a “disciplinary investigation against Bret spent on administrators. Administrators can help win the Weinstein” simply for publicizing his predicament: “Wein battle for money and power by A) inviting external regu- stein has endangered faculty, staff, and students, making lation and accreditation of faculty, B) imposing strict and them targets of white supremacist backlash by promulgat- overly broad speech, harassment, and ideological codes, ing misinformation in public emails, on national television, and C) requiring faculty syllabi to fit administrators’ com- in news outlets, and on social media.” mitments. Thanks to these sorts of things, what we’re see- The Evergreen protesters ought to have walked away ing now is an inversion. In the past, administrators were grinning from ear to ear—although in fact some of them, there to serve the faculty and students. But now adminis- obviously regarding Bridges as a prize pushover, were trators have far more power, and more and more faculty are already agitating for more concessions, as well as nee- there to serve the administration.” dling him for failing to confiscate the cops’ guns as they Still, Brennan wrote: “In the late ’90s, we saw a wave of had demanded. A few days later, according to a report behavior like this: hyper-vigilant language policing, shout- from a faculty member, Evergreen administrators sent out ing down speakers, and the like. Remember the movie PCU email notices warning students and others about the like- making fun of it all? But there was a big public backlash, lihood of violent off-campus white supremacists fired up including from the liberal left, and it died down for a by the Weinstein controversy coming to campus. It was decade. Now there’s a resurgence, and there seems to be a warning that segued directly into the 911 call about an a backlash again.” ♦

32 / The Weekly Standard June 19, 2017 Books&Arts

Award-winning scones from ‘The Great British Bake Off’ appear on ‘This Morning’ (2017). Let Them Eat Cake

Islands at sea unite over tea. by Sara Lodge

ake is having a moment. physalis and crystallized rosebuds encouraging groups where each mem- In fact, it has been a long higher than the hairstyle of Madame ber bakes a cake then joins the oth- moment, a golden hour in de Pompadour. Friends bet on the out- ers at a “secret location” to eat them, the slow oven of history. come and gather for the final to hurl boasts over 8,000 members, with chap- CWith an audience of 14 million—more scones at the screen if their favorite ters in Riyadh and Okinawa. than half the Brits watching TV at falls at the final curdle. What is going on? Cake used to be the time—The Great British Bake Off, Cake shops are expanding like the a home affair, something beloved but launched in 2010, is the most popu- national waistline; you can tour Lon- no more inherently exciting than the lar television program of recent years. don on a vintage red 1960s Routemas- family sofa: springy, comforting, solid. Indeed, it has become Britain’s equiva- ter “Afternoon Tea” bus while eating Now, it seems, it is a platform on which lent of the Super Bowl: a mixing bowl Victoria sponge. Icing has never been all manner of national and personal in which competitors vie to whip up so hot: The Surrey School of Sugar- dramas can play out. Ever willing to chocolate, orange, and cardamom craft, which began offering classes undertake risky missions to apprise ganache, or mounds of gold-painted in 2002, has moved from someone’s Weekly Standard readers of current dining room to shiny new premises trends, I hardened my arteries and set Sara Lodge, a senior lecturer in English where it teaches students how to fash- out to fork through the layers of ancient at the University of St Andrews, ion everything from fondant fuchsias and recent history that lie beneath the is the author of Thomas Hood and to candy cobwebs. And the Clandes- British obsession with cake. Nineteenth-Century Poetry: tine Cake Club, founded by a York- My first stop was a meeting of the

Work, Play, and Politics. shirewoman in 2010 with the idea of Clandestine Cake Club in Cambridge, / AP REX FEATURES

34 / The Weekly Standard June 19, 2017 a picturesque university town usually Off and programs like The X Factor: ground; icing spread with a bundle of associated with punting on the river People on the Bake Off are nice.” feathers. The lady of the manor would and cycling with a stripy scarf dangling They emphasized that although it is be justly proud of this skill set. While across the handlebars. I knew nothing a competition, the Bake Off isn’t cruel. French aristocrats preferred to employ about my fellow bakers. Our precise Quirky entrants are encouraged: One pastry cooks—who, after the revolu- meeting place was emailed to us a cou- woman built a gingerbread Tudor pub tion, became restaurateurs—Britain ple of days before the event. As the day complete with lime-gelatin pool table; retained the habit of admiring cake- approached, I felt oddly like someone an aerospace engineer designed a piece making as a domestic art appropriate going to a Tupperware party that was of clockwork with pies shaped as cogs. to a high-born lady. The French still also a blind date. If you are kooky, then say it with cake. buy their cakes. The British still make The undercover location turned out The Bake Off is more than a little them at home. to be a function room in a pub in the kitchen kitsch. Saucy puns abound: However, there is also a long British town center. As secret trysts go, this was The worst dismissal for the pastry tradition of cake being created chiefly right up there with the thrill of meet- round—“you’ve got a soggy bottom”— for display. The tierful race to the top for ing in Starbucks. But the company was has become a national catchphrase. British brides was begun by Queen intriguing: There were 11 of us, and we However, Ros and Ruth insisted, Victoria’s daughter, the Princess Royal, were all women, varying widely in age. authenticity blooms in this hothouse in 1858. Her wedding cake was nearly Amongst us were a hospital doctor spe- of artifice: “British people often aren’t seven feet high. Only the bottom layer cializing in palliative care, a lecturer very good at cooking, but nobody buys was actually cake. The rest was sugar in 16th-century literature, a business packet mixes here. People really make work: “domes and crowns, plinths and owner who makes cakes for a living, cake. It comes from the heart.” niches, statues and plaques.” Ordi- and a couple of seniors. nary people had no access to the kind My own cake had suffered in transit ertainly cake broke the ice(ing) of sugar-sculptor capable of chiseling and resembled a mudslide following C with this group of women, who this rococo cascade. So they resorted Hurricane Mocha. But more practiced would otherwise not have met. By the to the now-familiar stack of cakes. Pro- club members had produced towering end of the evening, we were falling fessor Humble notes that many of the achievements: a Guinness cake with an about with laughter at a story of some- most famous cakes in British literature Irish four-leaf clover dusted in cocoa body’s mother-in-law who had acciden- remain uneaten. They often represent on the top; a blueberry and amaretto tally gave her 3-year-old son a reindeer social climbing, or what cannot be had. cake; a piña colada cake stacked like a costume intended to be worn by a dog. To assess the latest pipedreams in highball with pineapple and cocktail I reflected that the CCC may be a new sugarcraft, I visited Cake International, umbrellas; a strawberry and Pimms way to do a very old thing: host a kaf- an event held at Alexandra Palace in cake, and—inventively—a Lapsang feeklatsch where anyone is welcome. London: a vast, shabby, glass-domed Loaf, a tea bread where the dried fruit Women and cake have always been Victorian exhibition space in which had previously been soaked in Lapsang closely associated. Nicki Humble in the faded palm trees look small. Souchong, imparting a strange but Cake: A Global History notes that the Although there are specialist stalls sell- compelling smoky incense flavor, like roundness of cake is linked to annual ing everything from gold sugar gravel bacon eaten in a Chinese temple. cycles. For over a thousand years, the to cookie cutters shaped as trombones I chatted with Ros, the doctor, and Chinese have eaten moon cakes as part and stilettos, Cake International is Ruth, the lecturer. They were both of an autumn festival. The pagan Rus- chiefly a showcase for hundreds of very slim and attractive: You would sians baked flat “sun cakes” to honor the cake decorators who compete to pro- not suspect either of having a serious returning sun in springtime. In every duce works that are more jaw-dropping cake habit. But they confessed that in culture, women—with their own cycles than mouth-watering. Many of the addition to the CCC, they ran a private of fertility—tend to be ritually linked to creations looked more likely to take a baking circle where friends gathered the making and distributing of cake. bite out of me than I was to take a bite to make and consume themed cakes. Modern cakebaking began in the out of them. There were cacti cupcakes They were also passionate viewers of 16th century, when smaller private that really did look as if they had come The Great British Bake Off. homes began to have walls sturdy from a desert rather than a dessert. I asked if men ever came to the CCC. enough to incorporate an oven without There was a severed-head cake drip- “Yes, occasionally,” they said. Anyone posing a fire risk, and when the raising ping sugar gore, and a horribly realistic is welcome, but women predominate. power of beaten egg began to be widely set of intestines, vertebrae, and pulled I wondered aloud why cake was so understood. Making a “great cake” teeth. There was a raccoon, a unicorn, central right now to British social life. was still, however, an exhausting and a fishmonger’s slab with salmon and a Surely it hadn’t always been like this? expensive project: Eggs would be sepa- lobster on it, a life-sized ballet dancer “It’s about kindness,” they ruminated, rated and hand-beaten for half an hour (Anna Pavlova?)—all cake. “and celebrating British eccentricity. or more; sugar chipped from a large Most visitors were just wandering That’s the difference between the Bake cone and crushed into granules; spices around gawping. “Can you believe

June 19, 2017 The Weekly Standard / 35 that?” a woman next to me breathed hood. Cake is to bread what cham- rarely been so visible as during the first when she saw a cake depicting a pagne is to wine: Its buoyancy cel- decades of this millennium. bronze statue of a drunk on a bench ebrates rising years and raised spirits. If cake is an emblem of the United surrounded by pigeons. Weirdly, there It counters the pinch of austerity with Kingdom, it makes sense that it is now was no cake available to eat, just pizza the promise of abundance. so hotly contested. The symbolic stakes or salad. I felt hungry and frustrated. John Tenniel illustrated Lewis Car- are high. The final of 2016’s Great Brit- Then I reflected that in order to win roll’s Alice Through the Looking Glass ish Bake Off ordered lavish royal pic- next year, I had only to invent a method (1872) with a thinly disguised political nics to be baked in a tent strung with of making sugar rhinestones and con- cartoon featuring cake. In it a decrepit Union Jacks, where strawberries, blue- struct a life-sized Liberace cake with Lion (William Gladstone, the Liberal berries, and whipped cream echoed a grand piano covered in mirror tiles prime minister) and a pompous Uni- the national colors. Outside, pastoral reflecting a Venetian sunset. Easy. corn (Benjamin Disraeli, the Conser- scenes of waving wildflowers and safely Christine Flinn, a Master Royal vative leader) are fighting over a plum grazing sheep promoted an idyll to Icer with an exhibition at the event, cake, which represents Great Britain. match the inner world of 1950s-style explained to me that icing had peaks It is a striking, if absurd, image of a sausage rolls, meringue crowns, and and troughs, and we were entering a nation whose union is always threat- smoothly cohesive layer-cakes. trough. This was for the best because ened with the possibility of crumbling. Will the sponge always rise for the icing was, ultimately, not for the shallow. Back then, it was Ireland that was British Empire? Probably, yes. At a It was an architectural art. Flinn’s own intent on leaving; more recently it has time of uncertainty and division, cake creations bear out this assertion: She can been Scotland. Disagreement about for tea is the one thing on which we construct a sugar gazebo or a hammock the future of the United Kingdom has all agree. ♦ out of strands of icing no thicker than the filament of a toothbrush. (“I can float things,” she confided.) On the Christmas cake of my child- B&A hood, thick white royal icing set so hard that it resembled enamel: Den- tures were routinely lost in it. Flinn Remember Malmedy assured me that this is not what royal icing is supposed to be like: “Firm but The truth, and untruth, of a German atrocity. yielding,” she said emphatically, “with by Gabriel Schoenfeld a pleasant bite.” I looked into her face and felt the admiration of a child for a strict but caring nanny. n a horrific war in which millions Seeing so much incredible but perished, the massacre at Mal The Malmedy Massacre inedible cake left me determined to medy does not figure large. In the The War Crimes Trial Controversy start baking when I got home. I tried history of fake news, however, it by Steven P. Remy an 18th-century recipe for pepper cake Iis a landmark deserving of recognition. Harvard, 352 pp., $29.95 made by William Wordsworth’s family On December 17, 1944, as Hitler and reprinted in the National Trust’s made his last stab in the Battle of the Cakes, Bakes and Biscuits (2016). It Bulge, 84 American soldiers were cap- The basic facts of the massacre are contained ground black pepper, cloves, tured and slaughtered. The perpetra- not in question. The aftermath, how- ginger, candied peel, and treacle along- tors were members of the 1st SS Panzer ever, has been the source of intense side the usual raisins, currants, flour, Division, a combat unit belonging to the dispute, set out in close detail by the butter, and eggs. The result was dense: Waffen SS, an especially vicious force historian Steven P. Remy. something to keep you going through integral to the Nazi campaign of geno- In the months after Germany’s sur- a long ride on the roof of a bumpy cide. Some 43 Americans crawled away render, American occupation forces stagecoach over Westmorland hills in from the carnage, made it back to Amer- managed to apprehend approximately the rain. ican lines, and told their horrific story of a thousand soldiers and officers But the smell in the kitchen while machine-gun spray followed by German belonging to the responsible SS unit. it was baking was sublime. It brought soldiers shooting their wounded com- They were incarcerated in a facility back memories of my mother, who rades point-blank in a field in Belgium near Stuttgart and subjected to inter- died last year, and also my grandmoth- near the village of Malmedy. rogation. The interrogators came from er’s kitchen: warm and fragrant. One Camp Ritchie in Maryland, where, doesn’t have to be Proust to have cake- Gabriel Schoenfeld, a columnist for USA beginning in 1942, combat intelligence memories that run deep. Most of us Today, is the author of, among other books, officers had been trained. Given the can recall a birthday cake from child- The Return of Anti-Semitism. demand for fluent German speakers,

36 / The Weekly Standard June 19, 2017 it was natural that many of them were know Jews suffered much under Hitler,” ett for revealing abuses that “read like a Jewish refugees from Germany. Magee wrote in an analysis prepared record of Nazi atrocities.” In the House, It was these interrogators who, by for Pope Pius XII. “We also know,” Rep. John Rankin (D-Miss.) declared May 1946, had assembled enough evi- he continued, that “a racial minority” was hanging dence for prosecutors to put 74 SS men not only German soldiers but also “try- on trial before an American military that Christian tenets of “humility, ing to hang German businessmen, in the and charity which, together with tribunal standing in Dachau. The the Church, have their source in the name of the United States.” In the Sen- Army appointed a certain Col. Willis Heart of Christ” have no real place ate, Joseph McCarthy, then a freshman, Everett as chief defense counsel. In in the hearts of many Jews. . . . With explained that the American interroga- civilian life an attorney from Atlanta, persecuted Jews in the background tors from Fort Ritchie “did intensely with no previous trial experience, directing the proceedings, the trials hate the German people as a race.” They cannot be maintained in an objectiv- Everett reluctantly set out to do his ity aloof from vindictiveness, per- were, he said, “men whose wives were best. As he interviewed the defend sonal grievances, and racial desires in concentration camps,” operating as a ants, he began to hear stories of phys- for revenge. “vengeance team.” ical abuse at the hands of American The problem with all of this is that interrogators. Everett attempted to the allegations of abuse were false. employ the stories in the proceeding Remy meticulously pursues the origins to discredit confessions, maintaining of the torture reports to a coordinated that they had been coerced. The effort campaign devised by the SS defendants failed: All the SS men were convicted, themselves while awaiting trial. He also with 22 getting life imprisonment reviews the numerous official inquiries and 43 sentenced to death. prompted by Everett’s insistent accusa- But that was not the end of the mat- tions, all of which turned up nothing ter. Almost immediately, a campaign resembling torture or any other form to overturn the verdict began to take of illicit coercion. Colonel Everett’s shape in both Germany and the United claim that the defendants “were given States. The constituency in postwar severe and frequent beatings and other Germany was obvious enough: Innu- corporal punishments” was based upon merable unpunished mid-level Nazis no evidence other than the statements and Nazi sympathizers were roaming Malmedy, December 17, 1944 of the SS men themselves. There had free, including various Christian cler- been no physical abuse. It was all a tis- ics who lent their prestige to the cause. As Everett and like-minded person- sue of lies, tinged with anti-Semitism. The story in the United States was ages floated their accounts of German Those accusing the Jews of operating more complicated, and Willis Everett prisoners subjected to physical abuse, on the basis of racial hatred were them- was a central player. Drawing on per- stories began to appear in various quar- selves driven by that base force. sonal correspondence, Remy shows ters of the American press. On the Truth always prevails, goes the say- that Everett had come to regard the left, the Christian Century reported that ing. It did not prevail in this case; Allied occupation of Germany as American interrogators had employed instead, the fake news won. One of “corrupt and misguided.” Worse, his “torture, both physical and mental,” Remy’s contributions is to demon- sympathies “lay not with the victims so cruel “as even the Nazi sadists never strate that more than a few reputable of Nazi Germany but with Germans— surpassed.” The Progressive regaled its historians of World War II have failed including former Nazis—victimized, liberal readers with tales of “American to do their spadework and accepted a in his mind, by ignominious defeat Atrocities in Germany,” as one of its pernicious myth as fact. He does not and a vengeance-filled occupation.” articles was titled. On the right, Reg shrink from naming names and citing Everett’s fervor was fueled by a prej- nery published Freda Utley’s The High chapter and verse. udice not uncommon at the time, Cost of Vengeance: How Our German Far more important, justice was not believing that American military Policy Is Leading Us to Bankruptcy and done. By 1957, all the SS murderers justice had been “subverted by ven- War (1949). One of the book’s thrusts behind the Malmedy massacre were set geance-seeking Jews,” i.e., the inter- was to liken the depredations of Ameri- free. None of the death sentences was rogators from Fort Ritchie. can interrogators—those, in particular, carried out. The only retribution for In his anti-Semitism, as Remy shows, with Jewish surnames like Kirschbaum the murder of American servicemen Everett was swimming in a broader and Metzger—to the crimes of Hein- came decades later in less-than-perfect current. Warren Magee, the American rich Himmler, Martin Bormann, “and form: Joachim Peiper, the ranking SS defense counsel for the last seven Nazi other Nazi bullies.” officer responsible for the atrocity, war criminals condemned to death at It did not take long for the story to was assassinated in 1976 by unknown Nuremberg, regarded the Allied war- seep into the mainstream media and assailants believed to be former mem-

ASSOCIATED PRESS ASSOCIATED crime trials as “Mosaic” justice. “We all central institutions. Time hailed Ever- bers of the French Resistance. ♦

June 19, 2017 The Weekly Standard / 37 Singapore into an international sys- B A tem that swiftly made it into a major & entrepôt and gave the rapidly growing city stable, competent, and fair govern- State of the City ment that promoted prosperity: Thanks to . . . its strategic location There’s no place quite like Singapore. between India and China, and a commitment to free flows of goods But for how long? by Robert Whitcomb and people, the settlement . . . proved an instant success as a gateway and place of exchange.

Singapore was very profitably linked to two powerful networks: “Regional in the case of the Chinese, global in the case of the British. . . . Trade linked the small world of Anglo-Chi- nese Singapore to the globe. . . . How pleased [Raffles] would have been to see contemporary Singapore’s embrace of much of British tradition,” Perry writes. But Chinese entrepreneurial- ism, which has always included large doses of risk-taking leavened with self-discipline, including the willing- ness to delay gratification in order to save and invest, was also crucial: “Brit- ish dominion over the seas provided the foundation,” Perry explains. “But In mourning for Lee Kuan Yew (2015) upon this foundation stood the sturdy Chinese middleman, with Straits-born entral to the rise of the Babas [so-called Straits Chinese] lead- island of Singapore as one ing the way with their knowledge of Singapore of the world’s most impor- Unlikely Power English and their ability to connect tant cities are its location by John Curtis Perry with other Asians.” Con one of the planet’s most important Oxford, 360 pp., $29.95 A lot of Singapore’s revenue was waterways and crossroads and its potent once derived from opium, although the mix of the behavioral values of two cul- place has been rigorously, sometimes tures—British and overseas Chinese. But then, Singapore has always even frighteningly, anti-drug since There’s no other place quite like been a site of grand reinventions, some independence. While once having the Singapore, which goes back hundreds gradual and some fast. And John Cur- reputation among Westerners as a den of years to a once-prosperous city tis Perry, emeritus professor of history of iniquity, Singapore has long since called Temasek that essentially disap- at the Fletcher School of Law and been notoriously puritanical about cer- peared. Singapore’s long colonial status Diplomacy at Tufts, provides a (usu- tain behavior, perhaps most famously started in 1819—when it was founded ally) engaging history of this compli- expressed in its ban on chewing gun by Sir Stamford Raffles as a Brit- cated place. Most important for us, he and its use of caning to punish crimes ish trading post—and ended in 1963, explains cogently why Singapore has such as vandalism. when Singapore briefly merged with become so successful. And he works in The helmsman of its progress from Malaya, only to anxiously turn into an some glamour and romance, too, about poverty to wealth was Lee Kuan Yew independent city-state in 1965 when a place that people of a certain age still (1923-2015), the most important per- it became clear that a Malay marriage see as “exotic,’’ like something from a son in Singapore from before inde- with a city dominated by overseas Chi- Somerset Maugham story. pendence, through the city’s unhappy nese was doomed. Being part of the British Empire, marriage with Malaya, and then in its which was held together by the Royal gutsy decision to try to survive and Robert Whitcomb is a partner in Navy and British commerce (based on prosper as a maritime-based city-state, a health-care-sector consultancy and editor free trade), was essential to Singapore’s recalling Venice and Genoa. Perry pro-

of NewEnglandDiary.com. 19th-century development. It wove vides an engrossing analysis of what / GETTY IMAGES / BLOOMBERG LOH NICKY

38 / The Weekly Standard June 19, 2017 drove this intensely ambitious, bril- “anxious to build a sense of identity, this new endeavor can flourish in an liant, ascetic, and authoritarian ruler seized upon a notion of shared values, authoritarian state, especially one no as he and his colleagues made Singa- articulating and organizing them into longer led by Lee Kuan Yew. pore into a major world city, first as a collective ethos, formally approved Sir Stamford Raffles would have a port/supply center, then as a manu- by Parliament.’’ The ethos says that approved of Perry’s remark that a mar- facturing hub, now as a technological citizens “must defer to the needs of riage of convenience between “shrewd dynamo as well. As he led his crowded the community . . . with consensus Chinese entrepreneurship and stable jurisdiction as prime minister (1965- taking precedence over contention . . . British colonial governance spawned 90), and then continuing as Singa- and individualism . . . disparaged as Singapore’s vitality [and] continues pore’s dominant figure until his death, selfishness. . . . The prescribed ethic to nourish it today.’’ I would add that Lee kept driving his people to work lauds hard work, frugality, and social this city-state provides strong lessons hard, be clean, be honest, restrain their discipline, with emphasis on the prac- to other governments on how to maxi- desires, and plan for decades ahead. tical and the specific. . . . Discipline is mize the welfare of their citizens—as Don’t get soft in this dangerous world, equated with being civilized.’’ long as you don’t care much about real he warned: Be anxious! The people of Singapore have democracy. Which raises the question (I know quite a few people who mostly accepted its rigorous and hon- of whether Singapore’s future leaders, worked in Singapore, and a couple of est autocracy/technocracy because it assuming that they’ll also be autocratic, them wrote for me when I was finance created such widely shared prosperity. will be as honest, competent, and pub- editor of the International Herald Tri- And as Perry writes, the Singaporean lic-spirited as Lee Kuan Yew—or his bune, which had a bureau and printed government “is not tyrannous. Instead son Lee Hsien Loong, prime minister in Singapore, and was sometimes cen- it is clearly dedicated to the ideal of since 2004. If not, Singaporeans may sored. They either loved its cleanliness popular welfare.’’ Still, Singapore’s finally demand major political change, and order or hated the Big Brother- recent move into the knowledge indus- and things may get messy in this ism that promoted those qualities. A try raises questions about how long hyper-orderly place. ♦ cousin of mine, a merchant banker, couldn’t wait to move out of “boring, stifling’’ Singapore and move to the B A messy, manic, raucous, and sometimes & seamy life in Hong Kong, its big rival in the 1980s.) Singapore’s leaders worry a lot. Irresistible Force They fear that the island could lose much business if, as has long been Love in the shadow of Israeli-Palestinian conflict. proposed, a canal is built across nar- by Diane Scharper row southern Thailand, diverting much ship traffic from the Straits of Malacca. They worry that an oil pipe- orit Rabinyan’s latest line might be laid across the Malay novel chronicles nine All the Rivers Peninsula, undermining Singapore’s months in the lives of by Dorit Rabinyan status as a huge petro port and refining Liat, an Israeli woman, translated by Jessica Cohen center, and that new technologies will Dand Hilmi, a Palestinian man. The two Random House, 288 pp., $27 leave them behind. And as officials of young adults come separately to New an implausibly tiny, very vulnerable York to study and to make their for- state, they’re especially alert to politi- tunes. When they meet in the autumn ily comes from the upper-middle-class cal, social, and economic conditions in of 2002, they fall immediately in love. and has always lived in a good Hebron their often-unstable neighbors Malay- But it isn’t long before problems neighborhood. But then she finds out sia (on which they depend for much of between them arise. Ironically, it’s the that in 1967, at the end of the Six Day their fresh water) and Indonesia. Perry problems that drive the story line and War, they moved to a poorer section quotes the historian Ian Buruma on keep the narrative from becoming just of Ramallah. No, he tells her, they did Singapore’s existential tenseness: “It another romance novel. not move; they were forced out of their corresponds to a deep primordial fear Growing up as an upper-middle- homes and sent to refugee camps. Only of being swallowed up by the jungle, a class Israeli, Liat knows little about later did they come to Ramallah, where, fate that can only be avoided by being the life of an average Palestinian like even now, they struggle to survive. ever more perfect, ever more disci- Hilmi. She naïvely thinks Hilmi’s fam- Liat’s own family is Jewish and had plined, always the best.’’ lived for centuries in Persia. They came More accurate, perhaps, is Perry’s Diane Scharper teaches English to Israel just before World War II. Liat point that leaders of the new nation, at Towson University. was born in Israel, the country that

June 19, 2017 The Weekly Standard / 39 occupies the land belonging to Hil- suspense; she avoids sentimentality owner admires his work and commis- mi’s people. He learns that she served by moving everything at a fast clip. sions 40 paintings, but Hilmi completes in the Israeli Defense Forces and asks Through Hilmi, Rabinyan makes fewer than 10 by story’s end. At first, whether she was one of the soldiers points about our common humanity. Liat’s and Hilmi’s conflicts are solved brutalizing Palestinian old people and Hilmi is obsessed by art: At one point in kiss-and-make-up fashion; but as All children. No, she tells him: Everyone he declares that in his relationship to the Rivers progresses, and the intensity in Israel must serve in the army. She art and life, “reality is imitating my of their passion fades, their problems says she harmed no one and was a mere imagination.” He loves Liat but loves become darker and, as foreshadowing secretary working in an office far away painting more. Early on, a gallery suggests, the darkness wins. ♦ from any military action. She learns that he was put in jail— and immediately thinks he commit- A ted a major crime and wonders if he’s B& dangerous, perhaps a terrorist. No, he tells her: He was just a kid and had spray-painted Arab words on an Israeli Crosses to Bear building. How could they put him in jail just for that, she wonders? The limitations in the academic study of faith. She hopes for a two-state solution by Maureen Mullarkey to the Arab-Israeli conflict; he says that the land is too small to be divided and, therefore, wants assimilation. But rom its inception, Christianity Liat, despite her hopes for reconcilia- has been known as the religion The Cross tion, fears that Israel will be subsumed of the cross. Among Chris- History, Art, and Controversy by Arabs. And so it goes in this novel. tians, the cross is a symbol of by Robin M. Jensen Everything about All the Rivers is politi- FChrist’s passion and its part in the econ- Harvard, 280 pp., $35 cal. Dorit Rabinyan is herself an Israeli omy of salvation. To non-Christians, and the character of Liat is based on it is what St. Paul termed it: a scandal her own experience. She dedicates the and a folly. How did a token of degrada- of citations point Jensen’s way through book to Hassan Hourani (1974-2003), tion inflicted largely on slaves, violent her own excursion on the place of the a Palestinian writer and artist she met criminals, and insurgents evolve into the cross in Western culture and the life of in New York. The character of Hilmi is purest symbol of Christian faith? What faith. The Cross is an accessible variant based on Hourani. transformed an emblem of vile death of a distinguished theologian’s refined When All the Rivers came out in and suffering into an exalted object and reprise of his own work. Israel (as Borderlife) in 2014, it won the a prompt to great monuments of West- Let me explain. Bernstein Prize and became a bestseller ern art? That metamorphosis, enacted Theology does not rank on best- among left-wing Israelis. It became in theology and the arts, is interwoven seller lists. However much lip service even more popular when, last year, with the history of Western civilization. is paid, the subject remains a specialty education minister Naftali Bennett Accordingly, the saga of this symbol, of among academics intent on making a banned it from the high-school curric- its uses and reactions to it, from patris- vocation of it. Career channels broad- ulum because, he believed, its subject tic times to the present, is essential. The ened after the Swiss Catholic theolo- matter could promote assimilation and telling of it requires rigor and breadth. A gian Hans Urs von Balthasar published intermarriage between Jews and Arabs. theologically complex subject with wide his influential seven-volumeThe Glory Teenagers could buy the book or bor- historical reach does not reduce easily to of the Lord: A Theological Aesthetic in the row it from the library, but he didn’t a pocket reference. 1960s. Eight more volumes followed want it included in the syllabus. Nevertheless, The Cross offers itself over the next 20 years. Since then, Bennett has a point—and besides, as one. Without intending to, Robin theological aesthetics has grown into a the subject of Israeli-Arab relations M. Jensen concedes the difficulty of her cottage industry within the larger dis- is covered in other works more suit- task by relying conspicuously on the cipline. Younger theologians compete able for young readers. But Rabin- work of Richard Viladesau, a system- to advance the field and grant pride of yan does a fine job telling her story. atic theologian recognized in the ris- place to its particular perspective: that She shifts tenses from present to past, ing field of theological aesthetics. His an encounter with beauty is analogous and shifts point of view, giving the themes, narrative structure, and wealth to an encounter with God. novel a memoir-like quality. She also Viladesau’s Theological Aesthetics: adds a sense of credibility by enmesh- Maureen Mullarkey is a senior contributor God in Imagination, Beauty, & Art (1999) ing her narrative in history and poli- to the Federalist and keeps the weblog was addressed to the guild. To make tics: Details propel the plot and add Studio Matters. the abundance of his subject available

40 / The Weekly Standard June 19, 2017 to a general audience, he streamlined of Christ and of his adoration as sen’s summary conforms to the half- that earlier work into The Beauty of divine. In a city so full of the trium- knowledge of popular culture and the Cross: The Passion of Christ in The- phant monuments of Christianity, academic fashion. The indiscriminate there is something strangely mov- ology and the Arts from the Catacombs to ing in finding this first visual testi- slaughter and historic suffering of the Eve of the Renaissance (2005). A few mony to the Christian faith amidst Christians—and Jews—under Islam years later he published a sequel, The the fragments of daily life of pagan is off the table. The book offers no Triumph of the Cross, which carried the Rome; and even more so in find- challenge to the reigning tropes that theme through the Reformation and ing it in this rude sketch, probably identify the totality of the Crusades drawn by a palace page with cruel the Counter-Reformation. schoolboy humor to mock the faith with their excesses (as they appear in Jensen follows Viladesau’s sources, of a fellow slave. retrospect) in an age of siege warfare. adds others, and mirrors his align- ment of theological motifs with cor- responding expressions in visual and literary arts. It is a valid path, one that her predecessor anticipated and wel- comed, even suggesting “further lines of thought” to lay readers and fellow scholars alike. But there is a problem: Viladesau enjoys remarkable command of the pertinent literature—philosophi- cal as well as theological—plus a keen and supple intimacy with the range of arts that support his arguments. He is the equal of his sources; Jensen, less so. The result is a drive-thru history of the cross from Golgotha to the Ku Klux Klan. The itinerary spins through art history, church history, archeol- ogy, anthropology, art appreciation, the Koran, literature, hymnology, devo- Matthias Grünewald’s ‘Isenheim Altarpiece’ (1512-16) tional practices, pre-Columbian designs, Wikipedia entries, and contemporary By contrast, Jensen’s description The movement’s defining features iconography with feminist, ethnic, and comes in the tones of a service manual: were penitential and defensive. Yet The social justice memes. It decelerates in Cross accepts the popular view of them This graffito has traditionally been front of Andres Serrano’s 1987 provoca- interpreted as a pagan caricature as inherently anti-Semitic. Thus, the tion Piss Christ and reference to crosses intended to mock the Christian cross has become “a symbol for mili- made of cigarettes or chocolate, with no worship of a crucified deity. It also tary conquest abroad and persecution attempt to weigh the stuff against the corresponds to evidence that Jews of Jews and other non-Christians at claims of art. Or of faith. and Christians were accused of wor- home.” It is “an emblem of oppression shipping the head of an ass or a Jensen opens where Viladesau does, donkey god. and violence.” Jensen’s Crusades-in- with a glance at the purpose and grim a-nutshell crumple into an example of perfections of these calculated cruci- That tonal indifference carries “the long history of Christian anti-Jew- fixions common in the ancient world. throughout. Jensen’s predecessor crafts ish actions.” She seizes the same 2nd-century graf- an argument for engaging Christian tra- The Cross turns upside-down cen- fito from the Palatine Museum to dition in terms of the art it generated; turies of Islamic efforts to colonize illustrate Roman disdain for this new Jensen plucks allusions from scholarly the West. Jensen allows that Muslims religio crucis. Called the Alexamenos monographs to fit the handbook topic. “may” view the cross as a symbol of graffito, it shows a crudely drawn Two theologians in possession of the Christian aggression. She is tentative crucified man with the head of an same material could not be more con- about affirming without ambivalence ass accompanied by the inscription trary in their capacity to quicken the that, whatever else they were, the “Alexamenos worships his god.” responses of thoughtful readers. uniquely medieval Crusades were pro- Viladesau breathes life into the Attractively illustrated, The Cross tective in purpose. ancient cartoon to revive the spirit of looks better than it reads. As his- Most significantly, the Crusades its making: tory, it miscarries: Its approach to were unsuccessful. Consequently, the Crusades, one of the most mis- they were irrelevant to Muslims until It is the earliest known pictorial understood movements in history, is the collapse of the Ottoman Empire. representation of the crucifixion a mortal defect. The timbre of Jen- Thomas Madden was in sync with

June 19, 2017 The Weekly Standard / 41 other recent historians when he of the Church of Notre-Dame wrote that “the Crusades were de Toute Grâce at Assy. It is rea- virtually unknown in the Muslim sonable to expect mention of it, world even a century ago. . . . In given its prominence within the the grand sweep of Islamic his- scope of Jensen’s subject. Yet it tory the Crusades simply did not is missing. matter.” They did not matter, The church of Assy was a that is, until they became use- renowned mid-century experi- ful to 20th-century nationalists ment by the Dominican-led and Islamists, who used them to Sacred Art Movement, based in bludgeon Israel and the West. France, to reconcile religious Contests between the bare imagination with modern art. cross and the crucifix (with its Richier’s crucifix, a hallucina- corpus) cut to the bone of theolog- tory scream of pain, prompted ical dispute during the Reforma- Pope Pius XII’s 1950 exhortation tion, the convulsion that marked Menti nostrae, which took aim the end of medieval Christendom. at “works which astonishingly Idolatry and iconoclasm, the deform art and yet pretend to veneration of saints and relics, be Christian.” The Dominicans were—literally—burning issues. were pressured to remove the Jensen’s précis of the conflicts crucifix from the altar. Calls were makes an efficient companion to made for an Index of modern her sources, as does her outline art. Journalists around the world of the transfer of the power of covered the disputes. images from the Roman Catho- At stake in the contention lic emphasis on the visual to the Memorial to Sewanee dead of World War I, was modernity’s capacity to Protestant preference for hym- University of the South (1940) enlarge Christian iconography. nody. Still, handbook concision The church’s capacity to enkin- works against the scale and heat of the Some viewers regarded Serrano’s dle a renewal of sacred art was also in most theologically and liturgically con- work as a powerful—even sacra- play. So were questions about the role sequential era in Christian history. mental—allusion to the life-giving of faith in the creation of religious art. and death-dealing aspects of human All truly sacred art implies a col- bodily fluids, especially at the height (Richier was an atheist.) lective sensibility. Richard Viladesau of the AIDS crisis in the United Richier’s Crucifix created a tempest held open a door to religious kitsch for States. Others, including Senator from which the cross as a work of art the single reason that it could express Jesse Helms . . . called it abhorrent has not yet recovered, whether created a shared cultural language. He had in and sickening, and used the storm for liturgical use or not. The paintings of indignation to challenge taxpayer mind such things as those sentimen- support for artists. of Stanley Spencer (Crucifixion, 1921) tal products of Saint-Sulpicien piety and Max Beckmann (Crucifixion, 1909); cherished by Thérèse of Lisieux in her A retrospective shot at Jesse Helms Graham Sutherland’s series of crucifix- day. He was not referring to our con- is safer than risking a purposeful opinions from the mid-1940s; the bas reliefs temporary sequence of nihilisms that ion on the nature of sacred art or an of Giacomo Manzù—these and others bend the cross to the service of puerile aesthetic appraisal of the wasteland merit attention in any serious overview provocation or identity politics. Jensen under foot. Jensen’s uncommitted of the cross in the modern era. But fumbles the distinction. glance is carefully divorced from any feminist angst over patriarchal values The Cross reads best where the author standpoint beyond a tepid dodge: and the cross’s possible contribution sticks close to her points of supply. But to abuse of women fit more readily into with no guide to the contemporary land- The cross will continue to project Jensen’s reach for contemporary rel- scape, Jensen founders. Here was an significant valence, both positive evance. She erases from memory 20th- and negative depending on where opportunity to determine distinctions or when it turns up, how it is used, century expressions of a crucifixion between crosses made for liturgical uses what it looks like, and who sees it. that might stir modern souls. and those baited for profane, primarily In the end, much comes down to political, ends. Instead, several ethnic The most significant 20th-century sensibility no less than remembrance. and feminist cruciform statements earn controversy over a cross, however, In all academic work, there is a differ- mention while divorced from any stance was not local clamor over Piss Christ. ence between scholars who love their on vulgarity or gratuitous profanity. Of It was the virulent polemics, reaching sources and those who simply collect Andres Serrano’s attention-grabbing to the Vatican, over Germaine Richi- them. In Augustine’s lovely phrasing,

crucifix in urine there is this: er’s bronze Crucifix, cast for the altar only the lover sings. ♦ / THE LIFE PICTURE COLLECTION GETTY IMAGES ALFRED EISENSTAEDT

42 / The Weekly Standard June 19, 2017 an extravagantly staged and costumed 1918, driven by an uninteresting B&A plot about the Kaiser and chemical weapons; the film renders invisible— erases—the fights women waged a cen- Comic Critics tury ago for representation, contracep- tion, and equality.” Ideologues drain all the wonder from a popcorn flick. Lepore must be fun at parties. by John Podhoretz Not to be outdone in the hot-take department by liberals, conservatives have taken up the cudgels as well—one onder Woman is a super- even going so far as to discern a pro-life hero movie about a Wonder Woman message in the fact that Gal Gadot, the very attractive person Directed by Patty Jenkins star of Wonder Woman, was pregnant at who was fashioned the time the movie was being filmed outW of clay. She resides on an island and didn’t have an abortion. I’d quote on which only women live. It is in the it but it wasn’t by a Harvard professor. Mediterranean Sea but hidden behind a be judged on how it fares in the trans- There’s an Adam Sandler movie gigantic magical cloud. She leaves it and mission of an appropriate message. called Billy Madison in which the emerges into World War I-era Europe so Some speak of it as though it is the title character is an aggressively that she can get into a big climactic fight present-day pop-cultural equivalent uneducated man-boy forced to answer with Ares, the Greek god of war. of the 19th Amendment, a break- history questions in a game-show In bygone days, such a plot would through in the never-ending quest for format. After one particularly bone- not be the cause of extended analysis gender egalitarianism. headed response, his poker-faced and study, and the movie that contains Others are expressing their pro- teacher (played by the great comedy it would be treated as it deserves to found disappointment with the film’s writer James Downey) responds with be treated—as a very watchable piece lack of ideological purpose. a terrible calm born of the utmost of junk. Wonder Woman is well-paced, Perhaps the most representative despair: “What you just said is one well-done, and well-acted by its two article to greet the film’s release came of the most insanely idiotic things I ultraglam movie-star leads Gal Gadot from Jill Lepore, a garlanded Har- have ever heard. At no point in your and Chris Pine. Like all good super- vard professor who wrote a book a rambling, incoherent response were hero movies, Wonder Woman is best few years ago about Wonder Woman you even close to anything that could when it is funny and it’s worst when because that is what Harvard profes- be considered a rational thought. two supernatural beings are hurl- sors do now: “A lot of viewers will Everyone in this room is now dumber ing Jeeps at each other’s indestruct come to this film, as I did, after the for having listened to it. . . . May God ible magical bodies because they’ve most ordinary of days,” she wrote, have mercy on your soul.” evidently forgotten you can’t kill an “punch-card-punching, office-meeting, Wonder Woman is a $150 million immortal with a car. kid-raising, news-watching days, days of production whose purpose is not to But you see, we live in a time when seeing women being silenced, ignored, convey messages about feminism or our chattering classes have collectively dismissed, threatened, undermined, abortion or the horrors of war. Its pur- decided it is their sacred duty to suck underpaid, and underestimated, and, pose is to earn a billion dollars and set the life and fun and joy and diversion somehow, taking it.” up the next billion-dollar comic-book out of just about everything in the Wow. I had no idea that life as the movie in its “universe” (that being Jus- name of a greater ideological purpose. David Woods Kemper ’41 Professor tice League, in which Wonder Woman This lowbrow ideological didacticism of American History at Harvard Uni- will team up with Batman and Aqua- is scarier than The Blair Witch Proj- versity and contributing writer to the man to fight alongside Juice-Cleanse ect, more stomach-churning than The New Yorker could be so dreadful! The Boy and Self-Righteous Harvard Pro- Human Centipede, and more dispiriting horror of Lepore’s day was brightened, fessor Woman). than Crash. And it pervades. in a somewhat shame-faced manner, by And that in turn will produce In this case, because Wonder the film: “I am not proud that I found another dozen politicized takes, and Woman is about a woman, it must be comfort in watching a woman in a those takes will render the people treated not as a diverting entertain- golden tiara and thigh-high boots clob- who write them, the people who read ment but rather a treatise on the place ber hordes of terrible men. But I did.” them, the people who argue over them, and role and status of women—and Mazel tov! and the people who tweet about them Alas for Lepore, she wanted more less enlightened, less thoughtful, and John Podhoretz, editor of Commentary, from this film than the beatings: considerably more stupid than they is The Weekly Standard’s movie critic. “The new ‘Wonder Woman’ is set in were before. ♦

June 19, 2017 The Weekly Standard / 43 “In truth, the agreement does not require any country to do anything; after the failure of the 1997 Kyoto Accord, the United Nations, which PARODY oversees climate change negotiations, decided that it simply did not have the authority to force a legally binding agreement.” —New York Times, June 1, 2017

June 19, 2017