Best of the American columnists NEWS 15
28 May 2022 THE WEEKState-by-state
abortion laws
are no solution
Ronald J. Granieri
Los Angeles Times
There’s a “certain soothing quality” to the argument that abortion policy is best left to individual
states, says Ronald J. Granieri. Let each decide how restrictive it wants to be, and we can all move
on. If only it were that simple. In practice, “let’s leave it up to the states” quickly morphs into “we
expect other states to comply with our laws and will demand federal action to guarantee it”. Look
at the history, such as the Fugitive Slave Acts of 1793 and 1850, to see how vexed the issue could
become. Those laws sought to manage relations between slave and free states by requiring even
those states that didn’t allow slavery to facilitate the forcible return of runaways to states that did. It
led to all sorts of legal disputes and inter-state rancour. It will be the same with abortion. States that
ban it won’t be happy about women shipping in abortion pills or seeking virtual consultations with
practitioners in permissive states. With issues that people feel very strongly about, there are few good
options for resolving conflicts between state laws. Constitutional amendments require time and a lot
of consensus. Passing national legislation is also tricky. “If neither happens the issue lands at the
supreme court. That was the reality that led to Roe v. Wade in the first place.”Slowly, slowly
Trump is
getting dumped
Peggy Noonan
The Wall Street Journal
“Something new is being built” inside the Republican party, says Peggy Noonan. The most
heartening feature of the recent primary elections is that the party is acquiring more diverse
candidates, who have strong support. In Pennsylvania, for instance, a clear majority of GOP primary
voters supported either a Muslim (Mehmet Oz, who got 31% of the vote) or a black woman (Kathy
Barnette, 25%). “Democrats had best take note.” Another encouraging sign is strong turnout. In
the ten states that had held primary contests, GOP turnout was up a massive 32% from the last
comparable election year; Democrat turnout, by contrast, was down 3%. Another bit of good news
is that Donald Trump’s endorsements yielded only “mixed success”. He still exerts “real influence”
and some of the candidates he backed won. But some Trumpian candidates, in Nebraska, Idaho and
North Carolina, lost. Increasingly, he seems to be trying to second-guess where the base is going and
get there first, rather than leading it. Among Trump supporters one senses affection, but also a “new
distance” and a lack of enthusiasm for another Trump run. “It’s a kind of psychological moving
forward that is not quite a break, not an abandonment, but an acknowledgement of a new era.”Congress held a hearing on UFOs last week, says Dana Milbank – the first in more than half a
century. The House Intelligence subcommittee did its best “to keep things rational”. They spoke not
of “UFOs” but of “UAPs” (unidentified aerial phenomena), and stressed that while plenty of these
have been reliably recorded over the years, there’s still no evidence of anything of non-terrestrial
origin. But despite the best efforts of the panel’s bipartisan leaders, things inevitably took a
conspiracist turn. The Republican congressman Mike Gallagher raised the issue of alien abductions,
and pressed Pentagon officials to account for a dubious claim that, in 1967, a “glowing red orb” in
the sky shut down nuclear weapons in Montana. His colleague Tim Burchett said that he, for one,
still believed in UFOs: “If you look at hieroglyphics, if you look in caves all over the world, there’s
something going on.” There’s “something in our airspace” that would “turn a human into a ketchup
package”, he added, before denouncing the hearing as a “cover-up”. We shouldn’t be surprised. “At
a time when a large chunk of the population won’t believe easily proved things – election fraud is
rare, vaccines are safe – doubters aren’t about to believe US government claims about UFOs.”Is there
intelligent life
in Congress?
Dana Milbank
The Washington Post
“Thesis statements for mass murder
rarely come clearer” than the one that
Payton Gendron posted online, just
before shooting dead ten African
Americans in Buffalo, New York, said
Justin Peters on Slate. “The White race
is dying out,” the 18-year-old stated,
explaining that his forthcoming attack
was, “anti-immigration, anti-ethnic
replacement and anti-cultural
replacement”. He was alluding to the
“great replacement” theory – which
holds that an elitist cabal is deliberately
flooding the West with immigrants to
disempower the white population.
Gendron developed his ideology on
internet forums, but you don’t need to delve into the recesses
of the web to find such ideas these days. They have become a
staple of the right-wing media. The prominent Fox News pundit
Tucker Carlson has referenced the theory more than 400 times
since 2016, according to a New York Times analysis.Gendron was deeply mentally ill, said Rod Dreher in
The American Conservative. He tortured and killed animals, a
“MASSIVE warning sign”. He threatened a mass shooting at his
school. Tucker Carlson and his ilk are not to blame for what he
did, whatever the liberal pundits say. Gendron did not mentionCarlson once in his “180-page
screed”. Carlson has talked about
how immigration and demographic
change will dilute the white vote. So
have many liberals, often approving it
because it will advance the progressive
cause. Apparently that’s fine. But if
you don’t welcome it, it seems you’re
“a white supremacist who encourages
loonies to commit mass murder”.Conservatives seek to dress up
their arguments as concern about
uncontrolled immigration, said Adam
Serwer in The Atlantic, but it doesn’t
wash. Right-wing Republicans are
selling a “sanitised version of the great replacement”. They
“conceive of America as fundamentally white and Christian”,
implying a “racial hierarchy that must be maintained if
America’s true nature is to endure”. This is reminiscent of the
line taken 100 years ago by the eugenicist Madison Grant, who
saw the arrival of southern Europeans as a threat to America’s
traditional “Anglo-Saxon” population. Ever since European
arrivals expelled Native Americans, the population has been
in flux, said Bret Stephens in The New York Times. “The
phenomenon of replacement, writ large, is America. What the
far-right calls ‘replacement’ is better described as renewal.”Families mourn the ten victims of the Buffalo shooterThe “great replacement”: a warrant for mass murder?
© KENT NISHIMURA