The Wall Street Journal once commanded respect.  It put out an editorial about the speech of Donald Trump for Independence Day.  The convention is that this is not a time for party politics or division.  The editorial called the speech a ‘familiar Fourth of July ode to liberty…..Contrary to the media reporting, the America Trump described is one of genuine racial equality and diversity…’  He described ‘a left-wing cultural revolution against traditional American values of free speech and political tolerance.’  The fault lies with ‘progressives.’

The speech contained the following.

Let us also send our deepest thanks to our wonderful veterans, law enforcement, first responders and the doctors, nurses and scientists working tirelessly to kill the virus…..

I am here as your President to proclaim, before the country and before the world, this monument will never be desecrated…..

Our nation is witnessing a merciless campaign to wipe out our history, defame our heroes, erase our values, and indoctrinate our children…..

Angry mobs are trying to tear down statues of our founders, deface our most sacred memorials, and unleash a wave of violent crime in our cities…..

Many of these people have no idea why they are doing this, but some know exactly what they are doing…..

This attack on our liberty, our magnificent liberty, must be stopped, and it will be stopped very quickly…..

We will expose this dangerous movement, protect our nation’s children, end this radical assault, and preserve our beloved American way of life…..

In our schools, our newsrooms, even our corporate boardrooms, there is a new far left fascism that demands absolute allegiance…..

This left-wing cultural revolution is designed to overthrow the American Revolution…..

The violent mayhem we have seen in the streets and cities that are run by liberal Democrats in every case is the predictable result of years of extreme indoctrination and bias in education, journalism, and other cultural institutions……

All of that is rubbish.  But it is also vicious.  The WSJ shows how far the U S has fallen.  Not only have better people not stood up to Trump – they positively encourage him.  And Donald Trump would not know an ode from an owl.

Quite by chance, I was reading Nicholas Nickleby again and came across this passage:

There are some men who, living with the one object of enriching themselves, no matter by what means, and being perfectly conscious of the baseness and rascality of the means which they will use every day towards this end, affect nevertheless—even to themselves—a high tone of moral rectitude, and shake their heads and sigh over the depravity of the world.  Some of the craftiest scoundrels that ever walked this earth, or rather—for walking implies, at least, an erect position and the bearing of a man—that ever crawled and crept through life by its dirtiest and narrowest ways, will gravely jot down in diaries the events of every day, and keep a regular debtor and creditor account with Heaven, which shall always show a floating balance in their own favour.  Whether this is a gratuitous (the only gratuitous) part of the falsehood and trickery of such men’s lives, or whether they really hope to cheat Heaven itself, and lay up treasure in the next world by the same process which has enabled them to lay up treasure in this—not to question how it is, so it is.

Bloopers

Ember quotes the law professor Kimberlé Crenshaw, the theorist of intersectionality, marveling at the change: ‘You basically have a moment where every corporation worth its salt is saying something about structural racism and anti-blackness, and that stuff is even outdistancing what candidates in the Democratic Party were actually saying.’

New York Times, 24 June, 2020

What says your theory of intersectionality?