FAST TAKES
From the left: The Online Sewer Where Hate Festers
Soon after Saturday’s massacre at a Walmart in El Paso, Texas, Internet researchers found the alleged perpetrator’s white-nationalist manifesto posted to the online forum 8chan. “The involvement of 8chan is becoming a familiar detail in cases of white-supremacist violence,” worries April Glaser at Slate. The alleged El Paso killer said he was inspired by the Christchurch, New Zealand, perp, “another young white man” who “posted a sprawling essay on 8chan.” The site is “an anonymous, meme-filled Internet backwater,” where white supremacists “indoctrinate others — mostly young white men — into bigoted ideologies.” And no wonder why: The Philippines-based 8chan boasts one of the least-moderated and least-regulated spaces on the Internet, where users “routinely blur the lines between actually believing in Nazism and laughing about it.”
Conservative: The Right Kind of Nationalism
“Nationalism has a bad name,” admits The Washington Examiner’s Michael Barone. “For many Americans, mention of the word summons up visions of Hitler and Nazism.” But that linkages misses the distinction between virulent, imperialistic forms of nationalism and the idea properly understood, which “first emerged in the northwest corner of Europe, in Tudor England and in the Dutch republic rebelling against the overlordship of the king of Spain,” as the Israeli theorist Yoram Hazony, organizer of last month’s national-conservatism conference, has noted. Such states could “provide peaceful havens for those of differing cultural views and economic interests who share a common citizenship.” Plus, it’s worth remembering that the World War II Allies against National Socialism “were all led by nationalists” — of the healthy kind. Pompeo: Good Riddance to the INF Treaty
Interviewing Secretary of State Mike Pompeo in Bangkok, at the annual gathering of Southeast Asian states, National Review’s Rich Lowry reports that the United States is now formally out of the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty, following years of Russian noncompliance. “Six months ago now,” Pompeo tells Lowry, “after years of discussion with the Russians about their noncompliance, we put them on notice that if they didn’t come back into compliance that we would” pull out of the 1980s treaty, which prohibits the superpowers from deploying such missiles in Europe. Says Pompeo: “Not only the United States, but the European countries . . . have all done our level best to convince the Russians that it was in their best interests to come back into compliance with the INF Treaty, and they have done literally nothing — literally nothing.” Yes, the Trump administration will continue to pursue dialogue with the Kremlin in the hope of avoiding an expensive arms race. But “a two-party treaty with one party in compliance isn’t worth a hell of a lot.”
Theologian: The New Liberal Act of Contrition
Last week, activists and the liberal Twitterati assailed celeb Mario Lopez for expressing mild doubts about gender-transitioning children as early as possible. “What once counted as common sense now breaks all the rules of wokeness and incurs the wrath of the cancel culture,” sighs Chad Pecknold at The Catholic Herald. “So naturally, LGBT activist groups such as GLAAD and PFLAG were stoking the progressive fires to get Lopez fired.” And as if following a script, Lopez soon caved, vowing that “moving forward I will be more informed and thoughtful.” Observes Pecknold: “This very public act of contrition sounds structurally familiar” to the Christian version (“I firmly resolve to confess my sins”). “The religious poignancy of Lopez’s apology is uncanny and almost automatic now — rote. It is, in fact, a sort of parody of Christianity.”
Albany watch: State Comptroller AWOL on MTA Labor Costs
State Comptroller Thomas DiNapoli hasn’t been shy about auditing the Metropolitan Transportation Authority. But Erica Scalise at City & State New York wonders if he’s been “too fixated on small-scale issues while failing to fully examine the main driver of the agency’s extraordinarily high costs: labor.” Systematic labor costs “make up a whopping 60 percent of the MTA’s operating expenses,” yet DiNapoli has never touched them. Perhaps the comptroller’s 2018 challenger, Jonathan Trichter, has a point when he says DiNapoli “never found and never has audited the fact that labor costs are driving up the costs of public-works projects.”