Month: August 2019

Recently retired Philadelphia Daily News/Inquirer columnist Stu Bykofsky is having a hard time adjusting to his new life, in which no one cares about his opinions anymore. After leaving the position he held for nearly 50 years—where he demonized immigrants, proclaimed that America needs another 9/11 for our own good, and notoriously played a too-cute did-he-or-didn’t-he semantics game over the joys of sex tourism in Thailand—Bykofsky promised he’d be back with a blog of his own. It’s unreadable, and I’m not going to link to it.

If Bykofsky’s name rings a bell, and you’re not from Philadelphia, it may be because of his hysterical (in both senses of the word) meltdown after his colleague Inga Saffron ripped him a new one at his retirement party. Since then, he’s struggled to be relevant. Today, he made a blatant and pathetic attempt to get some attention by tweeting a stupid, gratuitous, and sexist comment about country/pop singer Taylor Swift.

Taylor Swift makes half a mil a day. Good thing because no one finds her attractive otherwise. https://t.co/pcV3JhpNX6

— Stu Bykofsky (@StuBykofsky) August 26, 2019

This would be offensive from anyone, to be honest, but coming from a creepy old man who writes glowingly of sex trafficking it’s just… well, it’s disgusting.

As Saffron said at his retirement, Stu is an old school news man, emphasis on the man. In his day… well, women weren’t really in the news business. And that sexist attitude has clearly stuck with him ever since.

Not that this should bear mentioning, but physical attractiveness is subjective, and has nothing to do with artistic skill. I hesitate to even bring any specific performers up, because it’s offensive and crass to remark on people’s looks, and women’s looks in particular. But let’s say that a violinist like Gaelynn Lea looks quite different from whoever’s on the cover of the Sports Illustrated swimsuit issue. Mama Cass probably doesn’t meet muster for today’s beauty standards. And so on and so forth. Is their work somehow less because they don’t look like a Heidi Klum or Giselle Bundchen? (I had to look these names up.)

Not that any of that matters: as they say, “beauty is skin deep.” Children’s author Roald Dahl, in the introduction to his wonderful short novel, The Twits, took it further.

“If a person has ugly thoughts, it begins to show on the face. And when that person has ugly thoughts every day, every week, every year, the face gets uglier and uglier until you can hardly bear to look at it.

A person who has good thoughts cannot ever be ugly. You can have a wonky nose and a crooked mouth and a double chin and stick-out teeth, but if you have good thoughts it will shine out of your face like sunbeams and you will always look lovely.”

He included a funny illustration to make his point too.

But really, it’s not even about what an elderly gadfly whiling away the time waiting to die by shouting at clouds thinks about a given woman’s looks. Bykofsky couldn’t pick Taylor Swift out of a lineup if she was the only one there. It’s even more pathetic: it’s a washed up has-been desperately begging for attention by glomming onto someone who’s at the top of her game, who’s famous around the world, and is clearly successful and happy with what she does.

Meanwhile, Stu Bykofsky just gets uglier by the day. It’s almost sad to watch him flail. Then I remember what a nasty piece of work he is.

Call me stupid, but I thought the better half of the point people had in praising Teddy Kennedy upon his death ten years ago was that he had taken a second chance he probably didn’t deserve after Chappaquiddick and he had not squandered it. That is evidently a different take than the one David Mark wants us to adopt.

For Mr. Mark, we somehow erred in noting that Kennedy was one of “the most effective lawmakers in the history of the Senate” who had a major role in education, health, civil rights, immigration, improving life for the disabled, and many other things besides.  We should have spent the occasion of his death speaking much less about his legislative legacy and much more about his drinking and carousing, and of course the abandonment of Mary Jo Kopechne in a tidal pond for which no subsequent atonement or mitigation is to be permitted.

If someone were to argue that Kennedy never should have had a Senate career after Chappaquiddick, I wouldn’t argue with them. But I would point out that he serves as an example of why we shouldn’t automatically deny people the possibility of redeeming themselves. As for his other loutish behavior, I can forgive some of it as the struggles of a man who dealt with an unhealthy amount of personal tragedy and who spent his life looking over his shoulder waiting for the next assassin’s bullet. But, yes, he would fail any modern #MeToo test, and fail it quite miserably. It’s not unlikely that his political career would have crashed out over his drunken skirt-chasing ways if he were held to the standards of today. I suppose there is nothing wrong with pointing that out, but it’s not the only way of thinking about Teddy Kennedy’s life and legacy.

In contemplating Kennedy, his sins make me less inclined to think he shouldn’t have served at all than to think that people like Al Franken might do a hell of a job if given an opportunity to serve the public interest again.

That’s why I don’t have a lot of sympathy for this:

In a way, though, we betrayed ourselves. Kennedy violated our values of decency and justice and we celebrated him. In a free society, portraying history accurately is acutely important, as future generations rely on that information to make important decisions.

A more honest appraisal of Kennedy’s life would enhance the moral authority of Trump critics. When congressional Republicans ignore his antics, liberals can say they tried to clean up their own house first.

Again, I don’t think there’s any harm in occasionally reminding people about Chappaquiddick or Kennedy’s unseemly and at times deplorable behavior with alcohol and women. But I don’t really think that’s been covered up. An honest appraisal of Kennedy’s life is that he was a badly flawed man who suffered tremendously, made enormous mistakes that would justly destroy less privileged individuals, and nonetheless did more to promote progress than any other senator of the last half-century.

Maybe he shouldn’t have served at all. But I don’t think we need to trash his legacy in order to keep our house clean.

 

Congressman Who Voted Against Protections for People With Pre-Existing Conditions Will Father Child With Pre-Existing Conditions

Wisconsin Republican Sean Duffy is resigning his seat in Congress due to a legitimate family emergency: the child he is expecting with his wife has been discovered to have a number of complications, including heart problems.

Duffy, who was elected in 2010 during a GOP wave, said he and his wife are expecting a child in late October who will “will need even more love, time, and attention due to complications, including a heart condition.”

“With much prayer, I have decided that this is the right time for me to take a break from public service in order to be the support my wife, baby and family need right now,” Duffy said in a statement posted to his Facebook page. “It is not an easy decision – because I truly love being your Congressman – but it is the right decision for my family, which is my first love and responsibility.”

Congenital heart defects are no joke. My first housemate in Philadelphia, and today one of my dearest friends, was born in the early 1960s with either pentalogy or tetralogy of Fallot (I forget which). Doctors had to fashion a diaphragm for him out of a sliver of his newborn thigh muscle, and he wasn’t expected to live past his early 20s (he’s in his 50s now, so hooray for modern medicine). He has spent his life in and out of the hospital. He’s a hilarious and creative person, but his humor is deeply underlaid by the trauma he’s endured since he was born. Of course he can’t work, so he’s on SSI, which keeps you pretty damned poor. It hasn’t been easy for him.

So I know what Duffy and his family could be looking at, if only secondhand. And of course medicine has come a long way since the 1960s (my friend is apparently the first or second “blue baby” born that survived).

As crass as it may be to point it out, Sean Duffy has spent his entire career in Congress voting to repeal the Affordable Care Act. Here he is in 2011, getting called out for “ignor[ing] the ‘replace’ part of his pledge on health care reform”.

One year ago today Rep. Sean Duffy voted to repeal the Affordable Care Act with no replacement. pic.twitter.com/Y3RtxVgKWg

— Margaret Engebretson (@vetfordemocracy) May 5, 2018

He believes the Prevention and Public Health Fund component of the ACA (described at On the Issues as “a Fund to provide for expanded and sustained national investment in prevention and public health programs to improve health and help restrain the rate of growth in private and public sector health care costs”) is a slush fund, and voted to repeal it. Scientists and doctors disagree with that description.

Here he is in 2017 boasting about sending a bill to the Senate to repeal the ACA. Google gave me 280,000 results in less than a second for “Sean Duffy Affordable Care Act”, a minutely curated record of his votes and statements.

But perhaps the worst of all these votes—and the one he should absolutely be asked to explain—is his NO vote just this past May on HR 986: the Protecting Americans with Preexisting Conditions Act of 2019, which would roll back one of the many assaults on the ACA lobbed by the Trump Administration, in this case a waiver which would make it easier to discriminate against people with pre-existing conditions.

Life comes at you fast sometimes. One minute you’re out there banging the table about how the people with pre-existing conditions should be hung out to dry, the next you’re quitting your seat in Congress to prepare for a newborn with a lot of expensive health problems.

Has Duffy had a change of heart since learning his own child is going to be born with what sounds like a host of pre-existing conditions? Or does Duffy continue to believe, as his votes suggest, that health care is only for those who can afford it? I wonder if he reflects on his previous votes. Does he have any regrets?

Someone should ask him.

PS: If you’re enjoying what we do here at Progress Pond, you can help us keep the lights on with a monthly or yearly subscription. We have several tiers, and we’d love to have you on board.

Our family was on vacation last week and my son started school today, signaling an informal end of summer and a return to routine. I think a lot of the nation followed the same pattern, which perhaps explains why so few new polls get released in the latter half of August. During my absence, there were only three national surveys of the Democratic race.

On Monday, Politico/Morning Consult published their results, which were completely consistent with what we’ve seen before. Biden led the field at 31 percent, followed by Sanders and Warren in the high teens, and then Harris (9 percent) and Buttigieg (5 percent) formed a little tier of their own above a long list of also-rans. The most interesting finding was that the second choice of Bernie Sanders’ supporters is Joe Biden and the second choice of Biden supporters is Sanders. Perhaps showing the influence of gender on people’s choices, Warren and Harris showed the same pattern with their adherents.

The Morning Consult results were basically confirmed by CNN on Tuesday: Biden 29 percent, Sanders 15 percent, Warren 14 percent, Harris 5 percent, Buttigieg 5 percent. Everyone but Buttigieg was slightly lower in this second poll, but the distribution and margins were almost identical. The overall trend of this survey is favorable to Warren, who also led among their oddly phrased second choice question: “Aside from the candidate you support, which candidates do you most want to hear more about?” But the more interesting finding was that, while Democratic voters still strongly prefer a candidate who can win over one that shares their positions on major issues, the margin has narrowed from 61 percent-30 percent in June to 54 percent-39 percent in August. That may be bad news for Joe Biden, as more Democrats are now willing to take perceived risks.

The final national survey from last week, from The Economist/YouGov, was released on Wednesday and it broke the pattern. In their poll, Biden still led, but by a very uncomfortable three point margin (Biden: 22 percent, Sanders 19 percent, Warren 17 percent, Harris 8 percent, Buttigieg 7 percent).

We can still see the same basic contours to the race. What’s different here is really only that Biden is polling much lower and closer to the Sanders/Warren tier. All three polls showed Sanders/Warren in a near-tie for second place in the mid-t0-high teens, and Harris and Buttigieg polling with just a slight pulse above a long list of people who can’t get above three percent.

The most interesting finding in YouGov poll comes from their question about which candidates people would at least consider voting for. This isn’t a great proxy for a second choice question, but it contains some information about the also-rans. While 45 percent of voters would consider voting for Biden, about one in five are open-minded about Cory Booker and Beto O’Rourke. Julian Castro (15 percent) and Andrew Yang (12 percent) also show small signs of life. No one in the rest of the field could even crack double digits on this question.

Most articles on the state of play in the Democratic race are fairly accurate in portraying the overall picture painted by these three recent surveys, but there are some distortions. Most obviously, there is a ton of attention on Elizabeth Warren and very little on Bernie Sanders, despite the fact that they’re essentially tied for second place. A lot of reporting assumes that Warren and Sanders are hurting each other by dividing the progressive anti-Biden vote, but Sanders’ supporters prefer Biden to Warren and Warren’s supporters prefer Harris to Sanders. This indicates that Warren is actually being helped by having Sanders in the race, while Sanders is not being hurt as much as people think by competition from Warren.  An interesting question is what would happen to the race if Harris were to drop out. In that case, it seems Warren might leap out to a clear lead over Sanders and perhaps even overtake Biden if the YouGov numbers are accurate.  Since Biden is much less likely to leave the race before it’s over, Sanders doesn’t have the same hope of getting a boost.

As Edward Isaac-Dovere reports for the Atlantic, Warren received the warmest reception from 150 major Democratic Party donors in San Francisco over the weekend, even getting a standing ovation before she delivered her remarks. This demonstrates that she’s breaking through in ways people didn’t expect as this was not supposed to be an audience well-inclined to her economic populism. She drew an estimated 15,000 people to a rally in Seattle after holding a event nearly as large in Minneapolis last week. Biden spent the weekend talking to small gatherings in New Hampshire and Iowa. This led to a new meme: the rock star versus the rock.

Along the bucolic shores of Loon Lake in New Hampshire after a Biden speech Friday, former state House candidate John Streeter summed up the contrast between the two candidates.

“Warren is a rock star,” Streeter said.

And Biden?

“Joe Biden is a rock,” Streeter said. “We know him.”

Rightly or wrongly, the perception is being created by campaign reporters that this is developing into a two-way race between Biden and Warren. Warren has all the momentum, the energy, and the crowds, but Biden remains stubbornly ahead due to the risk-aversion of the Democratic electorate. It’s not a terrible take, but it’s unjustifiably dismissive of Sanders. Nothing in last week’s surveys can justify erasing him from the conversation. In fact, Sanders actually leads Warren by a narrow margin in every one of those polls.

Of course, national surveys aren’t the best tool for prognosticating the race. It’s far better to look at the state-by-state polls of early contests. The problem here is first that the polling is too sparse to catch movement in the campaign. Secondly, the data we do have doesn’t clarify the situation. Warren is doing better than Sanders in Iowa but the reverse is the case in New Hampshire. The most recent polls out of South Carolina show Warren and Sanders essentially tied in a distant fight for second place that might not even give either of them any delegates at all, and the two most recent polls out of Nevada disagree about which if them is doing better. However you look at it, the polls suggest that Sanders is doing about as well as Warren, although she has a better argument for being on a positive trajectory.

From what I can see, the only people who should remain in the race beyond the top five are Booker, O’Rourke, and Castro. Enough voters seem to be interested in them to justify them doing more campaigning and participating in more debates. The rest of the field appears to be wasting their time. Fairly soon, I expect either O-Rourke or Castro to drop out and announce a Senate run against John Cornyn. At that point, we may have whittled this contest down to seven candidates.

In the end, while I do expect some surprises still to come, I think it will eventually become a two-way race between Biden and Warren. I just can’t find areas of growth for Sanders and I doubt he can grow his support as easily as Warren can. She stands to gain more when other candidates drop out and she’s doing better than expected with both the press and the Democratic establishment, both of which are often pooh-poohed as factors but have always been crippling weaknesses for Sanders.

So, as we approach Labor Day and the real beginning of the primary and caucuses campaign, I think the national take on the race is pretty close to accurate but if I were backing Sanders I’d have plenty of complaints about the coverage.

Pardon the dizzying image, but that is exactly the way my brain feels when I watch Nikki Haley spout garbage about the horrors of Canadian style health care and publicly funded higher education.

Socialism. Free healthcare. Free college for everyone. Think you want it? Be careful what you ask for. 🇺🇸 https://t.co/TsYVJUUIKf

— Nikki Haley (@NikkiHaley) August 23, 2019

I’ll leave the sophisticated arguments about how she’s conflating a socialist dictatorship to social democracies to others smarter than me, only adding that it’s preposterous to compare Venezuela to Canada, Sweden, Norway, or Germany. And I’ll spare you the old chestnut about the many socialist programs and amenities we have here in the US and enjoy every day, other than to say perhaps our public schools might do a better job of civics education moving forward to prevent future political disasters like people voting for Donald Trump.

But I would like to say, just for the record, that I don’t know what I’d do if I wasn’t hauling around an unpayable student loan that just keeps growing and growing no matter how long I pay. It’s become like a friend to me, a little reminder every day that I’ll always be in debt to the US government, til the day I die. Why, I’ll bet I’d miss the thrill of waking up at 3:00 AM to panicked thoughts that I’m going to spend my old age having my meager Social(ist) Security benefits garnished for loan payments, forcing me to purchase a cheaper brand of cat food as I squat down for dinner in my cardboard chateau under the interstate.

And I don’t know what I’d do if I could just walk into a doctor’s office or urgent care center and have them look at my leg for little or no cost. Nope, the ongoing muscle and nerve pain is invigorating, like a swift kick in the shins or a boot in the ass. I’m grateful for it, and I know I’d miss it if a doctor was able to treat it at no personal expense to me.

Whatever would I fucking do if there was free healthcare and free education? Whatever would I fucking do?

I mean, other than have a healthier life with less personal debt?

[UPDATE. Here’s a vision of Nikki Haley’s free market utopia: “Income sharing agreements could mean interest rates for students above 18%”.]

I’m happy to see anyone challenge Donald Trump for the Republican nomination, but former Illinois congressman Joe Walsh is far from an ideal choice. Walsh is probably best known for being a deadbeat Dad who had to be compelled to provide child support to his children. He rode the Tea Party wave into Congress in 2011, but lasted only one term largely because his personal life was a mess and his rhetoric was unhinged.

Unsurprisingly, he found a second political life as a conservative radio host and major presence of Twitter. He has recently become one of the more vocal and acerbic critics of President Trump, often echoing liberal criticisms of his policies and behavior.  These criticisms are, of course, welcome in the same way that Republicans once enjoyed saying “even the liberal New Republic says…”

We won’t have much money, but he’s media savvy and he believes he can effectively troll the president precisely because Trump is media-obsessed.  He made his announcement on George Stephanopoulos Sunday morning “This Week,” program on the ABC Network.

Mr. Walsh’s decision to announce his candidacy on television, aides said, is a preview of a television-centric strategy designed to rattle a television-focused president with a rare challenge from within the party…

…For Mr. Walsh, it’s a question of what defines success. He has been trying to recruit high profile Trump-hating Republicans like George T. Conway III, the husband of a top Trump aide, Kellyanne Conway, in what is seen as an effort to troll Mr. Trump into engagement with him. And he is hoping that as a former supporter turned critic, he will encourage other Trump voters to split with the president and weaken his base.

In a two-minute video posted on his website, Mr. Walsh makes a direct-to-camera appeal, telling voters that “we’re tired of a president waking up every morning and tweeting ugly insults at ordinary Americans.” He adds, “We’re tired of a president who is tweeting this country into a recession.”

He may be successful in getting under Trump’s skin, and that may have a value all of its own. But he’s not a viable alternative to Trump and he would not be much of an improvement as president. A healthy party would rally around someone with a different profile, as the GOP did in recruiting Dwight Eisenhower in 1952. But no one of Ike’s stature currently exists in our military, and currently former Massachusetts governor William Weld is the only “respectable” challenger for the nomination.

Walsh is trying to recant for some of his prior behavior, but I don’t think he should be easily forgiven:

Stephanopoulos called out Walsh for making outlandish statements of his own, including calling former President Barack Obama a Muslim and an enemy. Walsh said Trump “made me reflect on some of the things I’ve said in the past,” acknowledging that at times he “went beyond the policies and idea” and “said some ugly things about President Obama that I regret.”

When asked if he truly believes what he said about Obama, Walsh responded, “God no, and I have apologized for that.”

He should be easily dispatched by Trump, but it’s at least possible that he’ll make a small contribution to his defeat. He’s hopeful that he’ll blaze a trail out of the wilderness for some other lost souls.

[Walsh] is hoping that as a former supporter turned critic, he will encourage other Trump voters to split with the president and weaken his base.

I guess what I like best about what Walsh is doing is that he seems clear-eyed about his goal. He wants to weaken Trump’s base. That’s something he might actually be able to accomplish, as opposed to having any hope of actually winning the nomination or becoming the president. I like my protest candidates to be realistic and stick to protesting. The ones that suffer from illusions of grandeur irritate me greatly.

I’m quite fond of actress and activist Alyssa Milano, who is generally on the right side of things when it comes to politics. She walks her talk, and doesn’t strike me as a Susan Sarandon wack-a-doo. I follow her on Twitter, and 99% of the time I’m like “right on!”

But that said, Milano sure dropped a steaming pile of hot take on Twitter this weekend, and got the ratio she deserved.

Celebrating a man’s death while fighting to abolish the death penalty is a bad look for democrats/humans.

— Alyssa Milano (@Alyssa_Milano) August 23, 2019

This is so head-smackingly awful, I’m not sure where to begin. Perhaps the Times can help elucidate.

David H. Koch, an industrialist who amassed a multibillion-dollar fortune with his brother Charles and then joined him in pouring their riches into a powerful right-wing libertarian movement that helped reshape American politics, died on Friday at his home in Southampton, N.Y. He was 79.

Whatever one might think of Mr. Koch—and I reserve the right to use a few choice words like “piece of shit who did more to ruin the world I’m leaving for my child than just about anyone else on the fucking planet’—it is ludicrous to compare dying in comfort at one’s palatial estate in the Hamptons to being strapped in a gurney and injected with poison, or being cuffed into an electric chair and having your brain fried with 2,000 volts of electricity. The only entity that decided Koch’s date and time of departure was Death itself. It was not a judge in a courtroom.

Another difference Milano neglects is that—in theory at least, and certainly from the state’s point of view—the person strapped to the gurney or chair is getting what they deserve. Has David Koch ever paid any kind of price, other than angry missives on social media and in the papers, for using his billions to support climate change denial? For despoiling the environment? For helping to rip apart our national political discourse, such as it is? No, he has not.

In fact, the harm Koch did will far outlast his memory, and will far outlast the impact of even the worst individual crime a death row inmate could have done.

David Koch worked tirelessly, over decades, to jettison from office any moderate Republicans who proposed to regulate greenhouse gases…

Mike Pence, who was then a congressman in Indiana, and others soon signed a “carbon pledge” circulated by Americans for Prosperity, which effectively prohibited the government from putting a price on carbon emissions. Those efforts and others effectively derailed the effort to pass a cap and trade plan for greenhouse gas emissions in 2009 and 2010. In 2009, the level of atmospheric carbon concentration hovered around 387 parts per million. In the decade since, levels have surpassed 400 parts per million, the highest level recorded in human existence.

Since the 2016 election, and in the face of more urgent scientific warnings about climate change and a growing popular movement for action, the Koch network has tried to build a Republican Party in its image: one that not only refuses to consider action on climate change but continues to deny that the problem is real.

A mass murder may kill dozens of people. Thanks to Koch, the world—literally billions of people—will be coping with the effects of climate change that he not only helped unleash, but made sure would get worse. It is not going to far to say that David Koch has made my child’s future well-being less sure.

It does not take a lot of cognitive dissonance—none, actually—to be glad that a bad person is dead (of natural causes, no less) while at the same time believing the state shouldn’t be in the business of killing convicted criminals. In fact, I can make a whole list of such people. It’s a long list.

Is it in bad taste to disco dance on the grave of people we don’t like? No doubt. But it is not antithetical to supporting an end to the death penalty.

Under the powers invested in me by the Emergency Economic Powers Act of 1977, you are hereby ordered to eat Indian food. Or Thai. Mexican would be alright. But in no event are you to get Chinese take-out.

For all of the Fake News Reporters that don’t have a clue as to what the law is relative to Presidential powers, China, etc., try looking at the Emergency Economic Powers Act of 1977. Case closed!

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) August 24, 2019

Every time I go on vacation, the president ramps up his bad behavior. I was chilling in the Grand Tetons when I learned about his “very fine people on both sides” comment respecting the violence in Charlottesville, Virginia. This week, as I mostly left the grid on Cape Cod in preparation for the long-haul presidential race, Trump has offered more of a smorgasbord of bigotry, delusion, and insanity. I guess it began with his remarks about Jewish American supporters of the Democratic Party, moved on to his excellent adventure with Greenland, and got more outrageous from there.

I’ll be back in full swing on Monday, although some oral surgery is going to probably take a few beats out of my gait beginning on Tuesday. It’s going to be a bumpy ride, and I hope I’ve decompressed enough to survive it.

Hello again painting fans.

This week I will be continuing with the painting of FDR’s house. The photo that I’m using is seen directly below.

I’ll be using my usual acrylic paints on a 5×7 inch canvas.

When last seen the painting appeared as it does in the photo seen directly below.

Since last time I have continued to work on the painting.

I have continued to refine the house. The siding, windows and large shadow out in fromt have now been darkened a bit. Also revised is the formerly white trim. I intend to maintain the highlights of the original photo, especially those above the front door.

The current state of the painting is seen in the photo directly below.

I’ll have more progress to show you next week. See you then.

I’m generally wary of restricting what college professors can talk about or punishing unpopular opinions that they express. I actually want them to “trigger” the hell of of their students, and if they don’t make them uncomfortable, they probably aren’t very good at their jobs. But, there are some obvious exceptions to that guideline. Expressing clearly idiotic opinions or ideas that are totally unsupported by scientific evidence is not the job of a college professor. There should still be some leeway for that if it occurs outside of a classroom or academic setting, or if it is unrelated to their areas of instruction, but it’s generally a sign that they aren’t mentally fit for a life of the mind.

An Ivy League law professor who believes not only in the supremacy of Anglo-Protestant culture but also that this should inform our immigration policies is definitely testing my laissez-faire disposition toward controversial opinions.

Amy Wax, a professor at the University of Pennsylvania Law School, is the academic who perhaps best represents the ideology of the Trump Administration’s immigration restrictionists. Wax, who began her professional life as a neurologist, and who served in the Solicitor General’s office in the late eighties and early nineties, has become known in recent years for her belief in the superiority of “Anglo-Protestant culture.” In 2017, Wax said, in an interview, “I don’t think I’ve ever seen a black student graduate in the top quarter of the class, and rarely, rarely, in the top half.” The dean of Penn Law School, Theodore Ruger, said that Wax had spoken “disparagingly and inaccurately” and had been barred from teaching core-curriculum classes.

I confess that I don’t agree with the punishment involved here. I guess the idea is that no student should be compelled to take one of Professor Wax’s classes, so she can’t teach anything that is required for a law degree. However, she’s acceptable for anyone who elects to take her classes. That’s a half-ass solution, and I think Penn should take a stand on one side or the other of this debate rather than trying to straddle the middle.

Now, her recent statements have earned a rebuke as well as administrative action:

Last month, in a speech at the National Conservatism Conference, in Washington, D.C., Wax promoted the idea of “cultural-distance nationalism,” or the belief that “we are better off if our country is dominated numerically, demographically, politically, at least in fact if not formally, by people from the first world, from the West, than by people from countries that had failed to advance.” She went on, “Let us be candid. Europe and the first world, to which the United States belongs, remain mostly white, for now; and the third world, although mixed, contains a lot of non-white people. Embracing cultural distance, cultural-distance nationalism, means, in effect, taking the position that our country will be better off with more whites and fewer non-whites.” In response to her remarks, Ruger issued a statement, saying that Wax’s views “are repugnant to the core values and institutional practices” of both the law school and the university.

What’s hard to understand is why Penn would continue to employ someone whose ideas are “repugnant to the core values” of the institution. If they want to maintain a wide berth for professors to express unconventional and controversial opinions (which I generally support) then they should defend their position and allow her to teach the same courses she has been teaching. If, on the other hand, they think she’s gone too far then they should explain that she’s not an acceptable instructor and terminate her.

When journalist Isaac Chotiner interviewed her, he found her opinions somewhat less than scientific.

During our conversation, which has been edited for length and clarity, Wax expounded on her beliefs that people of Western origin are more scrupulous, empirical, and orderly than people of non-Western origin, and that women are less intellectual than men. She described these views as the outcome of rigorous and realistic thinking, while offering evidence that ranged from two studies by a eugenicist to personal anecdotes, several of which concerned her conviction that white people litter less than people of color.

The politically incorrect aspect of her position is probably what will cause her the most difficulty, and possibly her job. But it’s the lack of empirical scruples that is most disqualifying for her as a professor. This is not the kind of intellectual rigor expected of an academic, Ivy League or otherwise.  For that reason alone, I wouldn’t retain her for non-core curriculum courses.

White supremacy is a particularly unattractive strain of thought with an extraordinarily violent history.  Violence inspired by the movement is on the rise in our country as we speak. But it’s not unusual for people to think that their religion or culture is correct or superior to others. Studying and debating the strengths and weaknesses of various belief systems can be a proper academic exercise if it is done with care and also with the awareness that you must always ask for whom something is good or superior. Anglo-Protestant culture has made some striking contributions to mankind, but has also had some truly disastrous consequences for the people and cultures it has subsumed.

Our immigration policies should not be based on race or country of origin or religion, but that doesn’t mean we can’t have a debate about what the parameters of immigration and citizenship should be going forward. To do that, we need people to make their arguments on something other than their opinion of who litters the most. Hopefully, Penn will ultimately agree that Professor Wax doesn’t merit a seat at the table, in the national debate or in their classrooms.