Tuesday, December 31, 2019

Roll Over, Johann Paul Friedrich Richter — You May Have Coined Weltschmerz (Disillusioned View Of The World), But The New Yorker's Susan Glasser (Assisted By German Scholar Constanze Stelzenmüller Of The Brookings Insitution) Has Given Us THE Word For Our Mood In 2019 & 2020: Trumpschmerz (LK-Soul-Sickness) & Now You Know Why You've Felt Lousy All This Year (And Probably The Next)

As a New Year's gift for 2019 (and 2020), this blog presents an essay by The New Yorker's Susuan B. Glasser. Read and know why the days of 2019 seemed so dreary and all you had done was watch TV news. That was enough exposure, with even a single daily viewing, of the souce of your malady. You have contracted Trumpschmerz from Patient Zero aka The LK (Lyin' King). The malady was caused by a falsehood equivalent of a McDonald's burger-count — 10,000 and counting with a few days remaining in 2019. The drip-drip-drip of falsehoods is the mental equivalent of Chiinese water-torture morning-noon-and-night. If this is the (fair & balanced) disgnosis of our national pandemic, so be it.

[x The New Yorker]
Our Year Of Trumpschmerz
By Susan B. Glasser


TagCrowd Cloud provides a visual summary of the blog post below

created at TagCrowd.com

So much for the holidays. In the quiet of Christmas and New Year’s, the President of the United States has repeatedly attacked “Crazy Nancy” Pelosi and her family, inveighed against the “bogus Impeachment Scam” and circulated the alleged name of the C.I.A. whistle-blower whose complaint triggered it, retweeted an account that described former President Barack Obama as “Satan’s Muslim Scum,” hosted the accused war criminal he recently pardoned over the objections of military leaders, and promoted a post calling himself “the best President of all time.” He even accused the Prime Minister of Canada, Justin Trudeau, of personally ordering Canadian television to cut a seven-second snippet of the schmaltzy Christmas movie “Home Alone 2” that features Trump, an accusation the President refused to retract, although it was quickly proven that the scene was one of many edited out as a time-saver back in 2014, long before either Trudeau or Trump was anywhere close to power.

Even now, three years into the Trump Presidency, there is no language to fully capture the madness of all this, though many of my journalistic colleagues have gone to great lengths to record and codify just how disturbingly nutty 2019 has been. The Washington Post reports that Trump ended the year having made more than fifteen thousand four hundred false and misleading statements since his inauguration. CNN’s “Inside Politics” produced a four-page, single-spaced list of all the people and institutions Trump has attacked by name this year. There are online trackers for the unprecedented levels of turnover in Trump’s Administration and for the rapidly proliferating array of lawsuits involving Trump’s assertions of sweeping executive authority. By any measure, 2019 will go down as a remarkable year in the annals of the American Presidency: Trump began it by causing the longest-ever federal government shutdown in history, after Congress refused to spend billions on his proposed border wall, and ended it as only the third President in history to be impeached by the House of Representatives.

But, of course, all the metrics can’t really quantify the crazy of a President who acts like this and the relatively stable forty per cent of the public that continues to approve of him, no matter what he says and does. How will we explain to our future selves the sheer bizarreness of an American leader who rants at rallies about the evils of windmills and modern toilets, who brags that he and North Korea’s homicidal dictator “fell in love,” who repeats Russian propaganda from the Oval Office, and who issues major national-security decisions by fiat on Twitter without informing the Pentagon, State Department, or his own staff? All of that happened this year, too, and it’s not even what he was impeached over.

I thought I’d unplug over the holiday week, in anticipation of a frenetic 2020 that will begin with a Senate impeachment trial and end with a Presidential election that may well be the most consequential of my lifetime. I thought I’d take a break from Twitter and from endless, twenty-four-hour-a-day Trump. And I tried—I really did. I knew there was some issue with “Home Alone 2” but didn’t bother to spend a few seconds clicking around to figure out what it was all about until I was writing this column. For a few days, Trump’s Mar-a-Lago tweetstorms were like thunderclaps on a distant horizon; I knew the weather was bad on the Internet, and I happily stayed away. I realize this attitude is increasingly held by the American public, at least that segment of the public which doesn’t follow the news for a living.

It turns out, however, that staying away from the daily distractions of Trump has not been restorative. You can turn off the Trump show, but the nagging, unfortunate reality is that the show goes on, with or without you. The President of the United States is still out there saying crazy, mean, inappropriate things at all hours of the day and night. This remains disturbing, even if one is divorced from the particulars. You can turn off your smartphone, delete the Twitter app, bake endless batches of cookies, and binge-watch Netflix: Trump is still there.

Tuning out also brings other, more consequential anxieties. The less time spent in the hair-trigger news cycle of Twitter, the more time left to contemplate the bigger, more long-lasting consequences that all of this is wreaking on our democratic institutions and our nerve-wracked souls. By choosing not to immerse myself in the details of which conspiracy theorist Trump was retweeting, I had more time to think about the increasingly real possibility of Trump’s reëlection in November. By skipping the mini outrages, I had the mental bandwidth for the macro ones: time, that is, to consider what the Trump Presidency will look like after Democrats have tried and failed to convict and remove him from office, and what the impact will be, over the next several decades, of a federal judiciary remade by a President who is hostile to any interpretation of the Constitution that does not give him essentially unconstrained authority. I had time to think about what a second-term Trump will feel empowered to do and time to consider, once again, whether the President may have been literally, and not just metaphorically, correct when he bragged that his followers would stay loyal to him even if he shot someone in the middle of Fifth Avenue.

There must be one of those long German words for all that soul-sickening worry, right? Some tortured mouthful of consonants that captures the ceaseless anxiety and absurdity of Washington in the age of Trump? I asked my friend, the German scholar and writer Constanze Stelzenmüller, an astute observer of Trumpism at the Brookings Institution and especially of its toxic effect on the troubled transatlantic relationship. She said that, even in Trump-skeptical Berlin, there was no single, widely accepted word that describes this phenomenon but gamely offered up her own stab at it. The word she came up with is “Trumpregierungsschlamasselschmerz.”

My German is nonexistent, but a quick Internet search suggests that Constanze nailed it. In thirty-three letters, she managed to capture the whole damn mess. Her word has pretty much everything that has come to characterize this uniquely dysfunctional moment in America’s troubled capital: Trump and his Administration (“regierung” means government); the slow-motion car crash of constant controversies (“schlamassel”); and the continuous pain or ache of the soul that results from excessive contemplation of it all (“schmerz”). Sure, it’s a mouthful, but that’s the point: there should be one word that sums up the Trumpian disruption we are experiencing, not merely a jumble of different ones. It’s the tweets and the other stuff, too: the endless attacks on enemies, real and imagined; the torrent of lies; the eroding of the basic functions of government; and the formerly unimaginable assault on our institutions. It’s impeachment and the Mueller Report and migrant children in cages, the bullying of allies, and the lavish praise of adversaries. It’s the uncertainty and worry that comes with all of the above.

On the brink of a new year, Trumpregierungsschlamasselschmerz has come to dominate our collective psyche. There is no taking a vacation from it. I confess that I have not yet figured out how to pronounce this unwieldy linguistic invention that so deftly captures our national Trump-soul-sickness. Luckily, I received a follow-up e-mail from Constanze, in which she proposed a shortened version that gets right to the angsty, anxious point: If “Trumpregierungsschlamasselschmerz” is too much, she said, you can just use “Trumpschmerz.” Either way, in German or in English, it’s my nominee for the word of the year in 2019. I suspect it will be in 2020 as well. ###

[Susan B. Glasser is a contributing writer for newyorker.com, where she writes a twice-monthly column on life in Trump’s Washington. She is Politico’s chief international-affairs columnist and the host of its weekly podcast, “The Global Politico.” Glasser has served as the top editor of several Washington publications; most recently, she founded the award-winning Politico magazine and went on to become the editor of Politico throughout the 2016 election cycle. She previously served as the editor-in-chief of Foreign Policy, which won three National Magazine Awards, among other honors, during her tenure. Before that, she worked for a decade at the Washington Post, where she was the editor of "Outlook" and national news. She also oversaw coverage of the impeachment of Bill Clinton, served as a reporter covering the intersection of money and politics, spent four years as the Post’s Moscow co-bureau chief, and covered the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. She is the author of Kremlin Rising: Vladimir Putin and the End of Revolution (2005), which she co-wrote with her husband, Peter Baker. Glasser received a BA cum laude (government) from Harvard University (MA).]

Copyright © 2019 Condé Nast Digital



Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License..

Copyright © 2019 Sapper's (Fair & Balanced) Rants & Raves

Monday, December 30, 2019

The Nightmare Continues In Both Real Life & The Virtual Reality Of Today's "This Modern World"

Within the e-mail bearing today's TMW 'toon, Tom/Dan also wrote:

Aaaaand Happy New Year! I wrote this one a few months ago, but it kept getting bumped by Trump craziness, and then impeachment. Early holiday deadlines have finally given me a chance to run it.

Dan/Tom

With impeccable timint, today's TMW 'toon is prescient in light of the recent church shooting in White Settlement, a suburb of Fort Worth, TX. During the church service at the West Freeway Church of Christ yesterday (12/29/2019) morning, a man arose from his seat in a pew and opened fire with a shotgun. Two male members of the 240 persons in the church at that time fell dead. Within seconds, the shooter was shot to death by two congregants who fired back. The two defenders were members of the church's volunteer security force. In the aftermath, the senior ministerBritt of the church, Britt Farmer, speaking at a press conference in the aftermath of the violence, gave thanks to the government that "allowed us the opportunity to protect ourselves." Of course, that same government has enabled gun violence throughout the United States thanks to the influence of the National Rifle Association and its opposition to gun controls. Here is an image captured from the church video recording system of the shooting scene in progress:

If this is a (fair & balanced) national tragedy, so be it.

[x TMW]
The Unfairness Of It All
By Tom Tomorrow (Dan Perkins)


[Dan Perkins is an editorial cartoonist better known by the pen name "Tom Tomorrow." His weekly comic strip, "This Modern World," which comments on current events from a strong liberal perspective, appears regularly in approximately 150 papers across the U.S., as well as on Daily Kos. The strip debuted in 1990 in SF Weekly. Perkins received the Robert F. Kennedy Award for Excellence in Journalism in both 1998 and 2002. When he is not working on projects related to his comic strip, Perkins writes a daily political blog, also entitled "This Modern World," which he began in December 2001. More recently, Dan Perkins, pen name Tom Tomorrow, was named the winner of the 2013 Herblock Prize for editorial cartooning. Even more recently, Dan Perkins was a runner-up for the 2015 Pulitzer Prize for Editorial Cartooning.]

Copyright © 2019 This Modern World/Tom Tomorrow (Dan Perkins)



Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License..

Copyright © 2019 Sapper's (Fair & Balanced) Rants & Raves

Sunday, December 29, 2019

Birds Of A Feather Flock Together (In Lynchburg, VA) — The LK (Lyin' King), Jerry Falwell Jr., And Coach Hugh Freeze

Liberty University, founded by Jerry Falwell Sr., is seeking to bcome the equivalent of Notre Dame to Roman Catholics, Brigham Young University (BYU) to the faithful of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints or Mormons; Liberty University to Evangelical Protestants. It is not a lovely story. If this is a (fair & balanced) tale of hypocrisy, so be it.

[x The Ringer]
Ready, Set, Trump: Big-Money Faith, Football, And Forgiveness At Jerry Falwell Jr.’s Liberty University
By Jordan Ritter Conn


TagCrowd Cloud provides a visual summary of the blog post below

created at TagCrowd.com

“I’ll tell you a funny story,” Jerry Falwell Jr. says.

It’s about his school, Liberty University, and about its football team, the Flames, and about his friend, the most powerful man in the world. “My wife and I attend a lot of Friday-night dinners with recruits,” says Falwell, the president of Liberty, the conservative Southern Baptist university that ascended in 2018 from FCS to FBS football and will play in its first-ever bowl game this Saturday. We’re talking last August, a few days before Liberty’s first FBS game.

“We’re sitting around a table like this one,” Falwell continues, gesturing to our table in a conference room high above Liberty’s Lynchburg, Virginia, campus. “It’s me and my wife, and it’s the recruit’s father and his son, who’s a running back.”

He leans forward. He has a gray beard, blue eyes, and a charmed bluster. He smiles. The story is just getting good. “And then my phone rings,” he says. “It’s an unknown number. And I answered it.” His eyes brighten.

“It was the president.”

Donald J. Trump, calling Falwell right in the middle of a recruiting dinner. He grins, remembering the moment. “Hey, Jerry,” he remembers Trump saying, “I just wanted to tell you that you did a great job on CNN the other night.” Falwell often appears on cable news to defend Trump’s decisions and to bolster his connection with evangelical Christians.

“We talk politics for a minute,” he says, “and he asks about Becki”—Falwell’s wife—“and he says he’s glad she and Melania are becoming friends.” And then, Falwell remembers, after a few minutes of small talk, Trump had a question:

“So, how’s the football team looking?”

I went to Liberty to write about football. I went twice, once last year, for the program’s very first FBS game, and again this July, to talk with the school’s new head coach, Hugh Freeze. But thinking about Liberty’s football team is impossible without also thinking about the university at large, and any consideration of the university is colored by the legacy of its founder, Jerry Falwell Sr., and the public impact of its president, Falwell Jr., both giant figures in the history and present of politicized American evangelicalism; and all of this leads, inevitably, from thinking about football to thinking about God.

“The difference between Liberty and other schools,” says Turner Gill, Liberty’s coach until he resigned last winter to care for his wife as she deals with a heart condition, “is that at Liberty, everywhere you go, you pray. Professors pray with you. Staff prays with you. If you’re talking about something serious with someone, they’ll say, ‘Hey, let’s pray about this.’” Liberty is the largest nonprofit Christian university in the country, a place where students and faculty enter most every conversation with an expectation that they’re talking to someone who shares their Christian faith. Prayer opens many classes and meetings. Casual conversation, even among strangers, is often peppered with evangelical slang. “I was really on fire for the Lord,” senior Ivory Edosomwan says of first arriving on campus as a first-year student, “and I’d never been surrounded by 15,000 Christians before. I was amazed.”

Walk around Liberty’s campus, and it can feel at first glance like any other university, with gleaming facilities and cranes for new construction and students shuffling between classes, some in sweats and sandals, a few in Yeezys and Supreme. I graduated from another evangelical university, and the first layer of Liberty’s culture felt familiar: aggressively and startlingly nice. “People are so happy and excited to talk with you,” says Jake Page, the former student government association president, who graduated this spring. “Whether you’re passing in the hall or just walking outside, they’ll welcome you, give you directions. There’s a spirit in Liberty students that’s contagious. There’s a genuine joy.”

Just underneath that first layer, though, the campus’s culture reflects an assumed ideological sameness. “Just like Harvard is known as a liberal institution, but you don’t have to be a liberal to go there,” says Falwell, “you don’t have to be a Christian here. But we attract Christians for the most part, and we attract conservative students for the most part, because everyone knows what Liberty stands for.” Liberal students have to go searching for like minds. Students describe the English and religion departments as home to more liberal professors, and say social-justice-oriented ministry organizations are more liable to attract liberal students. Online, private Facebook groups serve as havens for LGBTQ students. “For students who are a little more on the woke side—quote unquote—finding a community can be a struggle,” says Hannah Hartsook, a student who helped start a group called LU for #MeToo. “I’ve definitely found that community, but it’s small.”

Each student arrives on Liberty’s campus for their own personal reasons. Hartsook faced pressure from her parents. Edosomwan chose LU because it had a mechanical engineering program and the distinction of the world’s largest Christian university (though it has since been passed in enrollment by Arizona’s Grand Canyon University). A number of football players say they chose the school for the same reason recruits choose any other school: They wanted playing time.

All arrive with their own personal mission, their own ambitions and desires. In 2019, though, it’s difficult to understand exactly what the university’s mission is. Though his father founded the Moral Majority, the Reagan-era movement that solidified the alliance between evangelicals and the Republican Party, Falwell Jr. is a lawyer, not a minister. His public comments focus far more on a Trumpian brand of conservative politics than on any expressions of faith. He has built the once-modest university into a national brand, using revenue from online education to fund a building boom on campus. It is a university founded on evangelical Christian theology, led by a president spreading nativist politics, expanding with the money of online students, most of whom live many miles away.

Liberty’s football players compete for themselves and their teammates. “It’s a family-like atmosphere,” says Juwan Wells, who played defensive line for the Flames from 2015 to 2018. Like in any college football program, though, their play also serves to draw attention to their school. This Saturday, Liberty will play in the Cure Bowl, perhaps the biggest game in the program’s history. All around the country, college football fans starved for games will flip to the CBS Sports Network and watch the Flames play Georgia Southern. Some might be learning about Liberty’s existence for the very first time.

In 2019, Liberty continues growing in size and stature, Falwell in influence and notoriety. The reputation of the university and that of the man who runs it are bound up together, intertwined. And lately Falwell’s personal conduct has drawn more scrutiny than ever before. In September, Politico published an investigative piece by Liberty alumnus Brandon Ambrosino, outlining a university culture that one administrator called a “dictatorship.” The piece also detailed university financial dealings that appeared to enrich people close to Falwell, including his son Trey, and anecdotes about Falwell’s loud and enthusiastic descriptions of his own sex life to subordinates on campus.

Students staged a protest against Falwell in September, a few holding signs that said “We Want Change” and calling for an independent investigation into Falwell’s leadership and conduct. (As of December, no investigation has been announced.) Falwell has threatened to sue Ambrosino and has called for the FBI to investigate an alleged “criminal conspiracy” by former board members who may have participated in the story. On campus, some students feel a certain tension. They love their classmates and many professors, but feel uneasy about what their university and its leader now represent. Says Hartsook: “Jerry kinda sucks, but the school itself does not. They’re pretty good people here.”

Falwell’s father, Jerry Falwell Sr., founded the university in 1971, its football program two years later. He spoke then about building Liberty football into a national power, a program to compete with the likes of Alabama and USC. The idea, then as now, was that Liberty could represent for evangelicals what Notre Dame does for Catholics and Brigham Young University for members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints—a cultural unifier, a team and an institution in which members of the faith could feel a sense of investment, whether or not they attended the school. “My dad’s goal,” says Falwell Jr., “was to create for evangelical young people a university that had all the facilities, the NCAA Division I sports, and the academics that any major secular university would have. That was the goal.” It took decades for the university to build the resources necessary to compete anywhere near that level. Now, though, Falwell Jr. says the move to FBS “is sort of the realization of that.”

Just ask the coach. “Here we are, getting to walk in that vision,” says Freeze. “Pretty neat.”

Freeze is talking to me this July, sitting in a press box in Liberty’s stadium, a few weeks before his first season kicks off. “I love a challenge,” he says. “If we can take this program to a bowl game in the first two, three, even four years, that would be pretty neat.” Five months later, he’s done it in year one. “I’m just overjoyed,” he said after the Flames’ bowl matchup was announced. “To stand here today knowing it’s a reality and that we are achieving something that’s never been done before … is really, really special.”

Freeze has led his program to new heights and brought national attention, sometimes for reasons that have little to do with its play on the field. Early this season, he coped with a health scare in ways that became one of the strangest story lines in college football. In August, weeks after I interviewed Freeze, he underwent surgery for a debilitating staph infection. As he recovered, Freeze coached from a hospital bed and Skyped into a postgame press conference.

The images of Freeze coaching from a bed seemed to perfectly capture the beautiful ridiculousness of college football. Here was a man so committed to coaching—or perhaps to giving the appearance of coaching—that he would lie prone on a mattress, shouting calls into a headset from beginning to end of a blowout loss.

This is Liberty’s coach. Offensive whiz, talented recruiter, man willing to coach from any surface, prone or upright, that his body allows. Freeze has also long been one of the sport’s most outspoken evangelical Christians. When we meet, Freeze looks healthy. He sounds confident. He talks about the opportunity before him. Freeze says he was drawn to Liberty by the school’s faith-based mission, but admits, “I wouldn’t say that’s the biggest thing.”

The primary draw? “It was the one school,” he says, “that offered me the opportunity to step back in as head coach.”

The light was soft and warm, the stage massive and spare. Freeze stood before 13,000 students one morning in January 2018, his wife and his hometown pastor seated behind him, and started talking about sin. Freeze had been invited to speak at Liberty’s convocation, the thrice-weekly services held in the Vines Convocation Center, to tell the story of how he had lost his job.

Well, kind of. Freeze spent much of his time telling stories of others who’ve come back from failures, before eventually offering vague references to his own personal shortcomings. “Can you have a genuine faith,” he asked, “and have a season in your life when you struggle with a sin?”

Six months earlier, Freeze had resigned as head coach at the University of Mississippi, amid an NCAA investigation and reports of personal misconduct. Ole Miss faced 17 allegations of NCAA rules violations during Freeze’s tenure, most regarding impermissible benefits in the form of cash, merchandise, or food for recruits. Also in 2017, university phone records emerged showing multiple calls placed from Freeze’s university phone to numbers held by escort services. When Freeze resigned, the university’s statement said that he admitted to the administration “a pattern of personal misconduct.”

On stage, Freeze made no mention of specific ways he’d failed. He kept things vague. “I didn’t honor my wife totally,” he said. Freeze did, however, explain that he’d been privately dealing with the consequences of his failures long before anything became public. He said, “What I thought was a private sin I had struggled with, confessed to my wife. … It became public. My world crumbled.”

Liberty’s convocation felt like a fitting setting for a public apology. “Liberty is a place where people come to get forgiveness from the public,” says Edosomwan. Michael Vick has spoken there. So has Ray Rice. Forgiveness is, after all, baked into the core of evangelical Christian theology, which teaches that Jesus’s crucifixion served as atonement for all of humanity’s sins, and that anyone who asks God for forgiveness is saved from punishment for those sins.

During his talk, Freeze said to the crowd, “I am sorry. Please forgive me.” In a matter of seconds, someone called back, “We forgive you!” The students cheered.

In our interview, Freeze again declined to give details on his misconduct, but he said of his family, “They know exactly what I did.” He spoke about initial anger at the coverage of his resignation. “I used to really get frustrated with that,” he said. “But I finally came to the conclusion, ‘Look, if I had never done anything wrong, they couldn’t write anything or get their own assumptions.’”

Once, a coach with Freeze’s résumé would have been well out of Liberty’s league. For years, the university barely remained afloat. “I remember times when my father and I spent weekends talking to donors and lenders about loaning us money to cover the paychecks that had gone out the Friday before,” Falwell Jr. says. “We were that close to the edge for so long.” The school turned around its finances by investing in online and distance learning, becoming a nonprofit competitor with institutions such as the University of Phoenix.

Liberty now has more than 100,000 students, about 85 percent of whom attend online. As the university found solid financial footing and the quality of its facilities rose, Liberty began exploring the possibility of finally making the jump to FBS earlier this decade. NCAA rules require a team to move up into a conference, rather than as an independent, but Liberty couldn’t come to an agreement after conversations with the Sun Belt and Conference USA. (Falwell said the Sun Belt rejected Liberty because of its politics. The Sun Belt disagreed.) In 2017, the NCAA granted the school an exception, allowing it to move up with no conference.

The move has been overseen by athletic director Ian McCaw. Like Freeze, McCaw once worked in the highest levels of college sports, as AD at Baylor. And like Freeze, he resigned amid scandal. McCaw stepped down in 2016, after the university released the findings of an external investigation, in which the law firm Pepper Hamilton found “specific failings within both the football program and the Athletics Department leadership, including a failure to identify and respond to a pattern of sexual violence by a football player, to take action in response to reports of a sexual assault by multiple football players, and to take action in response to a report of dating violence.” The report also expressed “significant concerns about the tone and culture within Baylor’s football program as it relates to accountability for all forms of athlete misconduct.”

Several students I interviewed did not even know who McCaw was, much less what had happened under his watch at Baylor. Joel Schmieg, the former sports editor of Liberty’s student newspaper, The Liberty Champion, followed his hire closely. “I was really upset,” he says. “To me, that was the biggest step in Liberty putting sports above everything, just like any other school.” Schmieg had followed Liberty sports obsessively since the moment he arrived on campus, traveling to road games as a fan, covering playoff runs as a student reporter. “It was like, ‘What do I do now? How do I root for this? It’s my own school, and I don’t even want to root for them anymore.’”

Falwell bristles when asked about McCaw’s handling of sexual assault reports at Baylor. “We did a lot of due diligence,” he says, “and I believe in him. We looked into it and couldn’t find where he had done anything wrong. And everybody we talked to on the board down there said, ‘He will never embarrass you. He’s golden.’”

McCaw denies responsibility for the culture of his department at Baylor. “It was a university-wide, systemic problem,” he says, sitting in his office in 2018. He points to a deposition, which he gave last year as part of an ongoing lawsuit, in which he discussed the dynamics at Baylor in greater depth. In the deposition, McCaw referred to the Pepper Hamilton report and other moves by the university as an “elaborate plan that essentially scapegoated the black football players and the football program for being responsible for what was a decades-long, university-wide sexual assault scandal.”

I relayed all of this to Brenda Tracy, the woman who has become the most prominent activist voice regarding issues related to sexual violence in college football. “Of course there was a campus-wide problem,” says Tracy, who spoke to Baylor’s football team several months after McCaw’s resignation. “But to say that athletics wasn’t centered in all of this—that is wrong for them to say that.”

Like Schmieg, Hartsook says that McCaw’s hiring mostly went unnoticed by students, but among those paying attention, she says, “It was politicized.” In Hartsook’s conversations with other students about McCaw’s hiring, she says, “Most people took a really defensive stance on it. They either said he did nothing wrong, or they said, ‘We’re supposed to be Christians and forgive.’” This emphasis can feel, at times, like weaponized theology. Grace becomes the enemy of justice. “As a Christian university,” Hartsook says, “we should be holding leadership to a higher standard. But it feels like we’re not.”

Liberty wants to compete. This means recruiting the best players it can find, regardless of how closely they hew to the university’s professed beliefs. “I don’t treat it any differently from any other schools I’ve been,” says Freeze. “I don’t know if I should or I shouldn’t. I don’t know what the answer is. … I still look for the same kind of kid I looked for at Arkansas State or Ole Miss. Number one, does he fit with our program? Is he a gym rat? Does he love to compete? I don’t ask, ‘Well, is he an angel?’”

Freeze says he doesn’t bring up the university’s faith-based mission early in the recruitment process, but that he discusses it openly when asked. “I’m happy to tell them, ‘This is a difference between this university and others. How you view that difference is ultimately going to be up to you.’” He tells them it’s a Christian school, that they will hear and see Christian teaching most every day they’re on campus. “I hope it attracts you at some point,” he says he tells them, “but that doesn’t go into me deciding whether we offer you a scholarship.”

Liberty’s last two recruiting classes have ranked near the bottom of FBS, as expected of a program new to this level. (The current class looks to be an improvement, ranked no. 92 in the country.) When I ask players what drew them to Liberty, most say their decision was about football first. “The coaches made it clear,” says Wells, who chose Liberty over offers from Old Dominion and Troy, “you can have the chance to compete for a starting job from the moment you get on campus. If you have the talent, you’re going to get a shot.” Says senior quarterback Stephen Calvert, a former three-star recruit who had offers from FIU and USF: “The facilities are amazing. These are way better than at any of the other programs that were recruiting me.” Bejour Wilson says that on his visit he could sense that the team felt like family, and Ceneca Espinoza Jr. explains that he felt a loyalty to the Flames for offering him a scholarship before anyone else.

But Espinoza also felt drawn to the school’s religious affiliation. “At home I believed in God, but I wasn’t really a strong believer,” said Espinoza. “I felt like here I could really develop myself.” Others liked what the school’s culture can help to limit: “I wanted no distractions,” said Antonio Gandy-Golden, seeming to refer to the lack of a party atmosphere on campus. “Just focus on football and school and nothing else. I love that aspect of it.”

While neither Freeze nor Gill told me their players needed to be Christians, Gill emphasized the fact that once his players arrive on campus, they’d be fed a steady diet of Scripture and Christian teachings—in their classes and in convocation, at the very least. “This university is evangelical,” he said. “That means you’re trying to find the lost and bring them to Christ.”

Christianity s built around a man who taught peace and nonviolence; football is among the world’s most brutal sports. I tell Falwell a story about someone I know, a high-level administrator at a Christian university, who has resisted developing a football program because of worries that the sport’s culture clashes with its mission. “It’s a challenge,” Falwell says, “but the positives outweigh the negatives. It brings attention to your school. That shines a light on your Christian mission.”

I mention this to Schmieg. “The idea of using sports to broadcast the message of Jesus is awesome,” he says. “But here, I think most of the time it comes off as broadcasting Liberty instead of the message of Jesus.”

And these days, drawing attention to Liberty means drawing attention to Falwell. The university’s president has carved out a public identity as a Trump-promoting talking head, appearing regularly on camera to defend the president on everything ranging from charges of stoking anti-Semitism to criticisms of his personal morality after the release of an Access Hollywood tape in which Trump bragging about “grabbing” women “by the pussy.”

Falwell insists, time and again, that these are only his personal views, that he’s not representing the university. But after the release of the Access Hollywood tape, Falwell spiked a student newspaper column by Schmieg in which Schmieg criticized Trump’s defense of his words as “locker-room talk.” Schmieg says he felt compelled by his own faith to speak out against Trump’s words and actions. After the administration killed his column, he resigned from the student paper. “I wasn’t fired, but if I had stayed it would have felt like I had to fall in line, or else,” he says. “I wasn’t interested in that.” By giving up his role at the paper, Schmieg says, he was giving up the scholarship money that came with it too. “It sucked,” he says. “I loved my job. I loved being a part of that newspaper.” (Falwell said that he spiked the column because the paper was already running a pro–Hillary Clinton letter to the editor, and that running both would be “redundant.”)

Falwell used the same defense of Trump then that he has used so many times since, the same defense that seems to follow so many around campus. “We’re all sinners,” he says. “People say, ‘How can you support a sinner like Donald Trump?’ We’re all sinners. Come on now. Nobody’s better than anybody else.” Here, again, is the tension between the Christian compulsion toward forgiveness and the Christian compulsion toward just doing the right thing. Says Hartsook: “Forgiveness is used as a manipulative tool. It’s like, ‘Forgive me because the Bible says so, even if I never have to take responsibility for anything I did wrong.’”

Falwell uses Jesus’s words as justification for his support of Trump. Yet the core of what Jesus taught centered on embracing the stranger, caring for the poor and the sick. (On Thursday, Christianity Today’s editor-in-chief wrote an editorial using a theological justification to advocate for Trump’s removal from office.) How does Falwell reconcile his faith with his support of a president who has consistently spoken ill of racial and religious minorities in this country, who has drawn the support of white supremacists, who has built much of his political identity around policies of keeping those less fortunate strangers from entering our country?

“Jesus never told Caesar how to run Rome,” he said. “He told us as his followers, as believers—he told us that it’s our job to help those in need, to help the least of these. He never said to Caesar to take money from the rich and give it to the poor.” This is a common refrain among some conservative Christians regarding social welfare policies. Caring for the poor is the job of the church, not of the government. “It’s very clear,” he continues. “And people get confused by that. They think, ‘Oh, Jesus said to help the poor. Doesn’t that mean the United States should let in anybody that wants to come?’ Well, the United States is not a theocracy. It’s not meant to be run according to the teachings of Jesus. I’m sorry, but it’s not.”

Falwell is one of the bulwarks of the religious right, an heir to his father’s Moral Majority. His family has built its legacy on the intertwinement of faith and politics, fighting for prayer in schools and against gay marriage. Yet Falwell seems to be suggesting that his political activity is no longer guided by his Christian beliefs. So I ask how much his faith informs his political views.

“Not at all,” he says.

Without pausing, he rushes into an explanation. “I mean, I believe what I do politically because I believe it’s what’s best for the country. And I take to heart what Jesus said. Render unto Caesar the things that are Caesar’s and unto God the things that are God’s. They’re two different things.” In years past, many within the religious right have seemed to equate Christian belief with conservative politics—particularly on issues such as abortion and same-sex marriage. Falwell, though, justifies his support for Trump by suggesting that faith and politics need not be intertwined. “I think you can be a liberal, a conservative, or a libertarian, and still be a good Christian.”

I refer back to what Falwell said earlier, that he sees Trump as a “Christ-centered” man.

“Well,” Falwell says, “I’ve never talked to him about that in particular. But I think he’s a good man. I do think he’s a Christian.” To be clear, Jerry Falwell Jr., one of Trump’s first and loudest supporters from the religious right, a man who talks to the president often, who began our conversation by bragging about getting a phone call from him during a recruiting dinner, and who has developed his own platform through his presidency of the nation’s best-known evangelical university, said that he doesn’t talk to the president about faith.

Hartsook says that after both the Politico piece and a Reuters piece that quoted emails in which Falwell called a student “retarded,” support for Falwell’s leadership has waned, even among more politically and religiously conservative students. “The rules we have to follow, he breaks them all the time,” says Hartsook. According to the school’s code of conduct, “The Liberty Way,” students can be fined for using “obscene, profane, or abusive language.” Says Hartsook: “It’s not enforced with him.”

When he ran the program, Gill seemed unbothered by Falwell’s political outspokenness. “It has never been an issue for our football team,” he said. “He’s speaking on behalf of himself, not on behalf of the university, and people can agree or disagree, and that’s OK.”

Administrators see the football program as a way to unite Liberty’s increasingly diverse student body, connecting students and alumni from across the country and even the world. They tell stories of students who never set foot on campus until arriving in Lynchburg to walk across the stage at graduation. “They’re just as much of a part of this school as the on-campus students,” says McCaw. “Athletics can give them a great way to connect to the university.”

In his campaign for student government association president, Page ran on a platform of building school spirit among the student body. “We’re such a young school,” he says, “that we don’t have the traditions that so many other schools do. … I felt like by building those, we can build a deeper sense of pride among the student body.” He worked to centralize tailgating before football games, to design and offer class rings available to students near graduation.

How much that translates into a fan base invested in the football program’s success remains to be seen. Players and coaches have spoken at length about the energy they feel around campus, the excitement that has accompanied the program’s ascension to the highest level. Schmieg says he’s seen the administration go all in on promoting the program, but he adds, “From a student perspective, though, I don’t think most people care.”

In 2018, Liberty had an average attendance of 17,047, which ranked 110th out of 130 FBS programs. (The school’s stadium capacity is 25,000.) This year, attendance improved to 18,272, though it’s unclear where that ranks among FBS programs. The product on the field is improving. The energy around the program is growing, if slowly. Liberty remains far from Falwell Sr.’s dream of truly competing with the likes of Alabama or Notre Dame, but Liberty football matters more now than it ever has.

Back in his office, Falwell Jr. isn’t quite done with his story. The one about the recruiting dinner, about the phone call from Trump, about the time the president told Falwell he did a great job on CNN. Sitting around the table, he holds his smile and continues. After Trump asked about the football program, he says. “I handed the phone to Turner.”

“I used to watch you play at Nebraska,” Falwell says, imitating Trump’s conversation with Gill, still Liberty’s coach at the time. “You were the best quarterback they ever had!”

Soon enough, Gill handed the phone back to Falwell, and Falwell traded banter with Trump for a few moments more. Finally, Falwell says, he hung up and returned his attention to the dinner, as well as to the football recruit and his family who were sitting at his table. “The boy’s dad was just sitting over there,” Falwell says, “and he’s just like, ‘Oh, my God.’”

He shrugs. “Anyway,” he says, “that was our last recruit.” Falwell leans back and he smiles, pleased with his team and his school, his president and himself.

“We got him.” ###

[[Jordan Ritter Conn writes longform feature stories for The Ringer. Previously, he wrote for The New York Times, Sports Illustrated, and ESPN: magazine. His book The Road From Raqqa is forthcoming in July 2020). Conn received a BA (communication studies) from Lee University (TN) and an MJ from the Graduate School of Journalism of the University of California at Berkeley.]

Copyright © 2019 The Ringer



Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License..

Copyright © 2019 Sapper's (Fair & Balanced) Rants & Raves

Saturday, December 28, 2019

Roll Over, Jeanne Antoinette Poisson (Madame de Pompadour) — Après 2020, Le Déluge?

German-born Yascha Mounk provides an internationalist perspective in comparisons of authoritarian tendencies in the current governments of India, Poland, Venezuela, and the United States.His study of the authoritarian governments that came to power after 2000 illustated a pattern of more or less normal behavior in the first term, but uppon reelection, the hammer of authoritarianism dropped on minorities and immigrants. In the case of the United States, the inauguration of The LK (Lyin; King) was followed by massive demonstrations by women that were — in total — larger than the crowd for the inauguration ceremony on January 20, 1917. After a few days of demonstrations and rallies, the mass protests dwindled into silence. However, in the authoritarian nations, the previous fears became real in the second term of the goverments. In other words, we ain't seen nothin' yet in the United States in terms of extreme authoritarianism. If this is a (fair & balanced) equivalent of Thomas Jefferson's "fire bell in the night," so be it.

[x The Atlantic]
Why Trump’s Second Term Will Be Worse
By Yascha Mounk


TagCrowd Cloud provides a visual summary of the blog post below

created at TagCrowd.com

When I spent a month on a research trip to India in December 2014, half a year after Narendra Modi swept to power, the writers, academics, and intellectuals I met were engrossed in a debate that may now feel oddly familiar to Americans. They all disliked Modi, an ardent Hindu nationalist, because of his disdain for India’s secular constitution. But they were divided on the impact that his rule was likely to have on the basic freedoms they enjoyed.

Some people feared that Modi would quickly move to quash dissent; one even worried that he might soon land in prison for criticizing the government. Others waved such fears away as hyperbolic.

In his first five years in office, Modi did considerable damage, both to the freedoms his critics enjoyed and to the security of the country’s religious minorities. Social-media mobs intimidated anybody who dared to criticize his government. Media outlets allied with Modi stoked fears about Muslim men waging “love jihad” by marrying Hindu women. Mainstream newspapers that were once highly critical of Modi started to praise him with surprising regularity, and to criticize him with notable rarity. And in episodes of what Indians euphemistically call “communal violence,” Muslims were lynched by angry mobs.

The worst, however, was yet to come. After Modi won reelection with an even larger majority in the spring of this year, his government began to take radical action to unwind the secularism of India’s constitution, arguably doing more damage in the first months of its second term than it had in the previous five years. Some of the concerns about Modi that seemed exaggerated at the conclusion of his first term in office are now starting to look prescient.

During his reelection campaign, Modi vowed to introduce a national register of citizens, which would allow the government to keep better records and to expel unauthorized immigrants. This plan raised fears both among Hindu immigrants who came to the country decades ago after being expelled from neighboring countries such as Bangladesh and among Muslims who lack the necessary documentation to prove that they are in fact citizens. Once reelected, Modi proposed to help the former group by granting unauthorized immigrants from Muslim-majority countries—including Bangladesh, Pakistan, and Afghanistan—an express path to naturalization if they belonged to a persecuted religious minority in their country of origin. In other words, Hindus who have no legal right to be in India would likely be able to stay, while many Muslims who have been in India for generations would face the threat of deportation—bringing India one step closer to the Hindu nation that Modi desires.

Over the past weeks, a large protest movement has formed to oppose these radical changes. In cities and universities across the country, citizens of every faith have rallied to defend the country’s secular constitution. The government’s response has been brutal: In some states, it has invoked colonial-era statutes to ban the assembly of more than five people. In other states, it has shut down the internet. Harrowing videos that quickly went viral show policemen roughing up Muslim students whom they suspect of having protested the government.

As Pratap Bhanu Mehta, the country’s preeminent political scientist, told me, in his first term, Modi focused on economic initiatives without ever distancing himself from Hindu nationalism. “In the second term, he has taken a more aggressive stand to enshrine Hindu majoritarianism in law and polarize public discourse,” Mehta said. “Even more worryingly, the use of the state apparatus to quell dissent and protest has increased markedly. In states like Uttar Pradesh, the police is cracking down on protesters from the minority community with unprecedented ferocity.”

Many observers of India have been surprised that Modi has grown so much more extreme in his second term in office. But a comparison of populist governments around the world suggests that India is following a predictable pattern of what would-be authoritarians do when they win reelection.

As we’ve seen in countries including Hungary, Turkey, and Venezuela, populist leaders are at first hamstrung in their ability to concentrate power in their own hands. Many key institutions, including courts and electoral commissions, are still dominated by independent-minded professionals who do not owe their appointment to the new regime. Media outlets are still able and willing to report on scandals, forcing the government to tread somewhat carefully.

Once these governments win reelection, these constraints begin to fall away. As the independent-minded judges and civil servants depart, populist leaders feel emboldened to pursue their illiberal dreams.

Poland’s populist government, which won reelection this fall, is a particularly scary example of this tendency. In his party’s first term in office, Jarosław Kaczyński started to undermine the independence of the judiciary, to turn the state broadcaster into a powerful propaganda outlet, and to erode the rights of various minority groups. But conscious of the need to win reelection, he also compromised on some of his most extreme reforms: When millions of women marched in the streets of Poland’s major cities to protest a law that would have banned abortion even in cases of rape, his party—Law and Justice—withdrew the proposed reform to the country’s already strict laws. And when a report by by the European Union admonished Law and Justice for its blatant attacks on judicial independence, the government refrained from bringing the supreme court under its direct control.

Now Kaczyński is tending to his unfinished business. A new law states that judges may be fired for a number of vaguely defined offenses, including expressing their political opinions. In effect, it would allow the government to demote any judge whose decisions it dislikes. As the members of the Polish Supreme Court said in a statement, the reform amounts to “a continuation of the lawlessness of the 1980s,” when the country was ruled by martial law.

In his first term in office, Donald Trump has done plenty of damage to the rule of law. His firm control of the Republican Party has made it virtually impossible for Congress to act as a check on the executive. He has exercised enormous influence over institutions ranging from the FBI to the State Department. And it is now evident that he has abused the powers of his office to damage the electoral prospects of his most likely opponent in the 2020 election.

Even so, some of the most extreme predictions about Trump’s tenure in office have, so far, proved unfounded. Madeleine Albright’s warning about impending fascism in the United States, for example, seems a bit much: For all the tremendous damage Trump has inflicted on the institutions of the American republic, there are no stormtroopers in sight.

Perhaps that’s why the fear and anger that propelled such big protests in the first months of 2017 seem to have dissipated. Neither the spectacle of Trump’s impeachment trial nor the children still held in cages at America’s southern border have inspired anything resembling the levels of mobilization that marked his first months in office. Many may assume that Trump’s reelection will bring nothing worse than four more years of the same—terrible, to be sure, but by now imaginably terrible.

Current events in India and Poland should shock Americans out of this complacency. Trump’s first term is at best an imperfect guide to the horrors that would await us if he manages to win a second one. When they are reelected, populists nearly always become more radical and more dangerous. ###

[Yascha Mounk is a contributing writer at The Atlantic, an associate professor at the Johns Hopkins University's School of Advanced Studies (DC), and a senior fellow at the German Marshall Fund. He is the author of The People vs. Democracy: Why Our Freedom Is in Danger and How to Save It (2018). See other books by Yascha Mounk here, Mounk received a BA (history) from the Trinity College of Cambridge University (UK) and a PhD (government) from Harvard University (MA).]

Copyright © 2019 The Atlantic Monthly Group



Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License..

Copyright © 2019 Sapper's (Fair & Balanced) Rants & Raves

Friday, December 27, 2019

The NY Fishwrap's Bret Stephens (A Never-Trumper) Has A Virtual Solution For The 2020 Election — Virtually Wash The Stained Fabric Of This Country With The Political Equivalent Of Soap-And-Water

On December 24, 2019, this blogger posted an essay by four co-authors (Never Trumpers All) who were campaign coordinators or managers in the Pre-LK (Lyin' King) Party of Lincoln. Mark the author of the essay posted below (Bret Stephens) as a fellow-traveler in the movement to prevent a second term of office for The LK in 2020. If this is a (fair & balanced) demonstration of genuine patriotism, so be it.

[x NY Fishwrap]
What Will It Take To Beat Donald Trump?
By Bret Stephens


TagCrowd Cloud provides a visual summary of the blog post below

created at TagCrowd.com

Bill Clinton and Barack Obama both campaigned for, and won, the White House on the watchword “hope.” What watchword will it take for a Democrat to win this time?

My suggestion: soap.

Nearly three years into Donald Trump’s presidency, America needs a hard scrub and a deep cleanse. It needs to wash out the grime and grease of an administration that every day does something to make the country feel soiled.

Soiled by a president who, Castro-like, delivered a two-hour rant at a rally in Michigan the night he was impeached. Who described his shakedown of Ukraine as “perfect.” Who extolled the world’s cruelest tyrant as someone who “wrote me beautiful letters.... We fell in love.” Who abandoned vulnerable allies in Syria, then opted to maintain troops in the country “only for oil.” Who, barely a year before the El Paso massacre, demonized illegal immigrants who “pour into and infest our Country.”

The list goes on, and most everyone feels it. In June, the Pew Research Center published a survey on how the country sees the state of public discourse. The most striking finding: “A 59 percent majority of Republicans and Republican leaners say they often or sometimes feel concerned by what Trump says. About half also say they are at least sometimes embarrassed (53 percent) and confused (47 percent) by Trump’s statements.”

What’s true of Republicans is far more so of the rest of the United States. Pew found that overwhelming majorities of Americans were “concerned” (76 percent), “confused” (70 percent), “embarrassed” (69 percent), “angry” (65 percent), “insulted” (62 percent) and “frightened” (56 percent) by the things Trump says.

These numbers should devastate Trump’s chances of re-election. They don’t, for three reasons.

First, 76 percent of Americans rate economic conditions positively, up from 48 percent at the time of Trump’s election. Second, the progressive left’s values seem increasingly hostile to mainstream ones, as suggested by the titanic row over J.K. Rowling’s recent tweet defending a woman who was fired over her outspoken views on transgenderism. Third, the more the left rages about Trump and predicts nothing but catastrophe and conspiracy from him, the more out of touch it seems when the catastrophes don’t happen and the conspiracy theories come up short.

No wonder Trump’s average approval ratings have steadily ticked up since the end of October. In the view of middle-of-the-road America, the president may be bad, but he’s nowhere near as bad as his critics say.

In that same view, while Trump’s critics might be partly right about him, they’re a lot less right than they believe. In a contest between the unapologetic jerk in the White House and the self-styled saints seeking to unseat him, the jerk might just win.

How to avoid that outcome?

The most obvious point is not to promise a wrenching overhaul of the economy when it shows no signs of needing such an overhaul. There are plenty of serious long-term risks to our prosperity, including a declining birthrate,national debt north of $23 trillion, the erosion of the global free-trade consensus, threats to the political independence of the Federal Reserve, and the popularization of preposterous economic notions such as Modern Monetary Theory [courtesy of the Koch brothers].

But anyone who thinks blowout government spending, partly financed by an unconstitutional and ineffective wealth tax, is going to be an electoral winner should look at the fate of Britain’s hapless Jeremy Corbyn.

What would work? Smart infrastructure spending. New taxes on carbon offset by tax cuts on income and saving. Modest increases in taxes on the wealthy matched to the promise of a balanced budget.

What these proposals lack in progressive ambition, they make up in political plausibility and the inherent appeal of modesty. They also defeat Trump’s most potent re-election argument, which is that, no matter who opposes him, he’s running against the crazy left.

Hence the second point. Too much of today’s left is too busy pointing out the ugliness of the Trumpian right to notice its own ugliness: its censoriousness, nastiness and complacent self-righteousness. But millions of ordinary Americans see it, and they won’t vote for a candidate who emboldens and empowers woke culture. The Democrat who breaks with that culture, as Clinton did in 1992 over Sister Souljah and Obama did in October [10/27/2019] over “cancel culture,” is the one likeliest to beat Trump.

Finally, the winning Democrat will need to make Trump’s presidency seem insignificant rather than monumental — an unsightly pimple on our long republican experiment, not a fatal cancer within it. Mike Bloomberg has the financial wherewithal to make Trump’s wealth seem nearly trivial. Joe Biden has the life experience to make Trump’s attacks seem petty. Pete Buttigieg and Amy Klobuchar have the rhetorical skills to turn Trump’s taunts against him.

As with most bullies, the key to beating Trump is to treat him as the nonentity he fundamentally is. Wouldn’t it be something if his political opponents and obsessed media critics resolved, for 2020, to talk about him a little less and past him a lot more?

When your goal is to wash your hands of something bad, you don’t need a sword. Soap will do. ###

[Bret L. Stephens joined The New York Times as an Op-Ed columnist in April 2017, joining The Times after a long career with The Wall Street Journal, where he was most recently deputy editorial-page editor and, for 11 years, foreign affairs columnist. He is the author of America in Retreat: The New Isolationism and the Coming Global Disorder (2014). See his other books here. Stephens received a BA (political philosophy) from the University of Chicago (IL) as well as an MS (comparative politics) from the London School of Economics (UK).]

Copyright © 2019 The New York Times Company



Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License..

Copyright © 2019 Sapper's (Fair & Balanced) Rants & Raves