Tribesmen unhidden

Fortune.com recently reported on a "Hidden Tribes" study that More In Common had conducted. Mislead by the photo Fortune used on Facebook to promote its story, I concluded headline claim "The Far Right Represents Only 6% of Citizens, Study Says" referred exclusively to the two-legged detritus depicted:

(Fortune.com photo)

So misdirected, I reposted the Fortune article link with the following message:

"6% is still too much, of course. But it's a far piece from the 'under every bed' ubiquitousness political propagandists would have us believe.

"For some, continued power and paychecks hinge on unsubstantiated hysteria. Were they sincere in their claimed beliefs, they would celebrate hate groups' nearly complete disappearance from the landscape.

"Instead, they pretend such ragged and execrable assemblages still pose significant dangers."

It was only when I personally took the Hidden Tribes online quiz that I realized I'd been had, and that a mainstream media organ had again artfully contorted definition into something convenient to its bias. My answers put me in that 6% "Devoted Conservatives" category.
The Hidden Tribes study page characterized the 6% thusly:

"The Devoted Conservatives are the counterpart to the Progressive Activists, but at the other end of the spectrum. They are one of the highest-income groups, and they feel happier and more secure than most other Americans. They are highly engaged in social and political issues and think that religious liberty, abortion, and terrorism are especially critical issues. They value patriotism and loyalty to the flag. They feel that traditional values are under assault and that Americans are being forced to accept liberal beliefs about issues such as immigration, racial inequality, Islam, and the role of women. They believe that American values are being eroded rapidly, and they see themselves as defenders of those values."

The Values described by the study's authors are hardly standard among the few-in-number hooded hate-wretches in the Fb photo. Foolish and terrible articles of faith for marchers in that regrettable number include unscientific notions of racial superiority, and that violence and terrorism are legitimate tools for an imagined worldwide conflict.

Such are flatly incongruent with any reasonable characterization of traditional, patriotic Americanism. Equality, liberty, individualism, and national sovereignty are its genuine hallmarks -- not the foul, ignorant, false, vicious, and oppressive passions advocated by hate thugs like those shown in the Fortune.com photo.
A look at More In Common's "Our team" page turns up rich evidence of an organization hardly disposed toward principles like nationalism and state autonomy. Many members hail from EU nations, and count liberal groups like Change.org, Greenpeace, Global Zero, Google, and the French Socialist Party on their resumes.
Small wonder they would rank traditional values and patriotism as negatives. Their sort has never supported liberty.

Patriotism and respect for the flag, and opposition to the horrors of abortion and political violence, are traditionally cherished beliefs among Americans. They are not and never were extreme negatives common to Nazism and Tiki Torch-carrying bottom-feeders.
Consider the outrageous reality that visible media, show business, and academic figures routinely smear as immoral American principles that have produced tremendous advancements in politics, medicine, science, education, and the arts. These momentous strides not only bettered our own land and culture, but served to inspire countless millions the world over.
The Hidden Tribes study was not legitimate political inquiry -- in which popular attitudes are chronicled objectively and without prejudice -- but merely another example of irresponsible academics seeking to move definitional goalposts, that laudatory, long-defended American values can be slurred as conflicting with the larger interest.

Fox host Chris Wallace joins Fake News 'dogpile on the president'

During an 11/18 interview with President Trump, Fox News Sunday host Chris Wallace repeated a falsehood popular in the anti-Trump press: 

"No president liked his coverage," Wallace said. "Nobody called it the enemy of the American people."

Wallace surely knew President Trump has always taken pains to employ the crucial modifier "fake' in his news media criticisms. I noted that in my 2017 That a Man Can Again Stand Up: American Spirit vs, sedition during the incipient Trump Revolution.

"Despite Trump's specifying 'fake' reporting, commentators typically mischaracterized his remarks as referencing the entire journalistic enterprise.

"That only underscored his point. By refusing to acknowledge the pivotal distinction, journalists essentially threw arms about Fake News's shoulders, claimed it as a legitimate component of a free press, and declared that to call out the improper former is to necessarily threaten the proper latter.

"There was, too, a fundamental flaw in arguments that by castigating shoddy journalism, Trump evinced hostility to the public interest. Who, after all, is truly an enemy of the public: a mainstream press that dissembles, or the man who points that out?"

Wallace also showed he had evidently learned a bad lesson from Sen. Kamala Harris. Are you aware, he asked the president, that you are viewed as a "beacon of repression" around the world?

In a hearing convened just days previous, Harris had challenged acting Immigration and Customs Enforcement director Ronald Vitiello whether he understood the "perception of many" that ICE is comparable to the Ku Klux Klan.

Both she and Wallace waved supposed, unsubstantiated popular perceptions like rhetorical banners deserving of serious attention simply because they might exist, somewhere, to some degree. 

Neither claimed to share the cited perceptions, much less allege them to be with merit. They just threw them out in the hopes that their mention would cause injury.

FAKE NEWS AND A FALSE MATCH
The Hill's Nathaniel Weixel admires the Emperor's new clothes; Caitlin Oprysko of Politico trips over own false rendition; Des Moines Register's Jason Clayworth exploits racial wrongs

Fake news and clumsily troweled propaganda pollute daily, their shifty mongers not at all shy about flaunting their biases. Here are three fresh illustrations.

"Physicians push back on Trump plan to redefine gender" was the rigged title of an illogical 11/13 Nathaniel Weixel article in The Hill.

Weixel's piece was premised on the falsehood that belief in a 'spectrum of genders' was traditionally accepted, and that 2018 embrace of an exclusively binary definition of gender would be novel.

The writer noted the American Medical Association's opposition to President Trump's proposed DHS acknowledgement of biological reality, as if that group's authority were necessarily sound. He did not examine any reasoning the AMA might have offered, but simply asserted its opinion.

Trump's DHS would, according to Weixel, define sex as "a person's status as male or female based on immutable biological traits identifiable by or before birth."

That would not be a "redefinition," but instead, a restoration. Such was the way men and women have been defined throughout human history, medically, culturally, and in religious faiths the world over. Societies and laws both criminal and civil recognize that definition and are built on it.

DNA impacts physical development and biological abilities, regardless of this season's bumper-sticker slogans.

It was the effort in very recent years to impose a new and unscientific meaning that was the attempted redefinition. Weixel is pretending it was the original definition, when of course it was not.

Biology has its claim and cannot be wished away. An old man can't be young merely by identifying as such. A diseased person cannot be healthy through subjective identification. Nor can anyone's sex be changed in that manner. (Surgical mutilation and apparel are only cosmetic.)

Restoring governmental definition of sex to conform with biological science and immutable characteristics is only right.

The Hill's Weixel may have hoped to slip his fraud past the audience. He did not succeed.

In her 11/13 Politico article, "Trump goes on the attack against Macron," Caitlin Oprysko was so assured her readers' would accept bias she made no attempt at obfuscation.

"Emmanuel Macron suggests building its own army to protect Europe against the U.S., China and Russia,” Oprysko wrote that Trump had, in part, tweeted.

Just two paragraphs on, she pronounced the president's recounting a "mischaracterization." Her slur was transparently false, especially as she herself went on to quote the French president saying precisely what Trump had described:

“I believe in the project of a sovereign Europe," Macron had said, according to Oprysko.“...We should protect ourselves when it comes to China, Russia and even the United States of America..." 

But the problem is not just calculatingly dishonest reporters, but readers so caught up in partisan devotion that they wink and chuckle tolerantly at counterfeit renditions that indulge their perspectives.

"Should Iowa restore voting rights to 52, 000 felons? Advisory board says yes," was the name above Jason Clayworth's 11/14 Des Moines Register article.

"Multiple civil rights and voter groups, including the League of Women Voters of Iowa, have compared the voter prohibitions to Jim Crow laws enacted by white-dominated legislatures to enforce racial segregation in the 19th and early 20th centuries," Clayworth wrote.

The device of exploiting past racial injustice to ease the progress into law of unrelated phenomena like felons voting, and cow into silence opponents, is despicable. A logical appraisal of Clayworth's assertion reveals its flawed nature. 

Jim Crow laws were used to suppress an entire, innocent group because of a shared immutable characteristic. Barring felons from voting is a component of punishment for specific crimes for which they've been duly tried and convicted.

Comparing the two is logically unsupportable and a contemptible smear of the historically marginalized.

MSNBC's Chris Matthews seeks to erase God from American history

During a Thursday, 11/8 interview with Rep. Jackie Speier (CA), MSNBC host Chris Matthews managed to squeeze into a single sentence his contempt for Americans' Constitutional rights, disdain for religious faith, and something larger and more sinister.

"It's about this almost neo-religious notion of the Second Amendment, as if it's God created."

Matthews is surely aware that the Declaration of Independence, in its beginning, observes that men "are endowed by their creator with certain unalienable rights."

But his ignoring that reality comports with a sentiment held in some distasteful quarters: that founding documents like the Declaration and later Constitution are obsolete and to be disregarded, their principles not representative of popular good.

Witness not only ongoing assaults on gun and free speech rights, but also on due process and the "innocent until proven guilty" standard. 

Indeed, much commentary during the Kavenaugh hearings was premised on the notion that due process is not a prerequisite of justice, but somehow contrary to its realization.  

President Donald Trump urges "Make America Great Again." A return to respect for Constitutional principles and their Divine origin is doubtless one way we can fulfill that awesome task.

Sedition by the yard
49ers 'unknown cheerleader' latest to spit on America

This morning, the BBC reported that an as-yet unidentified cheerleader for the San Francisco 49ers kneeled as the National Anthem was played, prior to a game against the Oakland Raiders. 

49ers’ management would be within their rights to take punitive action against the cheerleader. If they do not, well, draw your own conclusions. 

Earlier this year, in Ideas Afoot (Bromley Street Books) I addressed this faddish foulness and explained why free speech considerations are not relevant: 

A person once challenged my defending white supremacists' free speech rights, noting that I also criticize NFL players' National Anthem kneeling. The revolting and untrue implication was that I somehow sympathized with the content of supremacist speech.

Rather than marshalling exonerative evidence, I'll borrow a line from Christopher Hitchens: 'That which has been asserted without evidence can be dismissed without evidence.'

The difference between one's own time and that of one's employer is important, here. Street demonstrators, pamphleteers, and online agitators are at liberty to spend personal time in pursuits of their choosing and to utter views, whether fine or foul.

But during an on-the-clock event, professional athletes [and cheerleaders] are bound by employers' standards. This hardly applies exclusively to football players; an office supply store clerk, for example, cannot reasonably claim First Amendment protection for work-stoppage and spontaneous cash register-situation renderings of Gilbert and Sullivan operas.

An employer can tell workers when to arrive for work, what apparel is appropriate in the workplace, what duties to perform, how to conduct themselves while on the job, and when their shift ends. Employees accept those temporary restrictions on some rights as a condition of desired employment. 

If legitimate work specifications are not to the liking of prospective hires, they can proceed elsewhere.

Anyone who's read American history knows our country has always had voices that rail against the patriotic, cultural, and nationalistic faiths that have for over 200 years united us as a people. 

Questioning can be productive. It's healthy to periodically reexamine assumptions and democratically agree on such timely adaptations as may be deemed necessary. But such must be done within the framework of unvarying Constitutional language and principles, and not grabbed at willy-nilly much as tykes might grab at a merry-go-round's shiny brass ring.

Kneeling during the National Anthem is not legitimate argument, any more than is poking your finger in an opponent's eye. Doing so constitutes ugly repudiation of American unity, law enforcement, and the countless men and women who've fought and died to ensure our safety and liberty.