The Weekly Sift

It’s a rare week when my memories of the University of Chicago have anything to do with the news. In a perverse way, U of C revels in its obscurity, like the cool bar that the posers haven’t found yet. Whenever somebody confuses it with the University of Illinois or places it up the lakefront near Northwestern, a real Chicago grad smiles; we know the inside joke and they don’t.

So it was disconcerting to find Chicago at the center of this week’s big culture-war argument: The Dean of Students sent out a letter to “welcome” the new freshmen by telling them the University wasn’t going to coddle them with trigger warnings and safe spaces and canceling “controversial” speakers. The whole campus is an intellectually unsafe space, so you’d better buck up and get used to it, Bubbles.

Basically, this is the Dean posturing for conservative alumni in hopes of getting more money out of them, and (to use the high academic vocabulary I picked up at Chicago), it’s a load of crap. I’ll explain in this week’s first featured post “Academic Freedom and Institutional Power at My Old School”. Along the way, I’ll reminisce about the only demonstration I participated in at Chicago, when we protested against the University giving a “humanitarian” award to Vietnam War architect Robert McNamara. We protesting students were right, the administration was wrong, and that’s usually how these things go. The biggest corrupting force in a great university is the administration’s lust for contributions and its temptation to cozy up to the powerful, not the over-sensitivity of the student body.

That post just needs some editing and should be out before 9 EDT.

The second featured post is a debunking of the “pay-for-play scandal” at the Clinton Foundation. (Except for the complete absence of either pay or play, the story totally works.) That will be “About the Foundation”, which I think of as a sequel to “About Those Emails“, which I wrote in June. Expect it around 10.

The weekly summary will try (and fail) to make sense of Trump’s new stance on immigration. I’ll be keeping it short because of the length of the featured posts, but I’ll also get around to the 49ers quarterback’s protest, and a few other things. I’ll predict that for noon.

I have a long morning in front of me. There are two featured posts this week, and one still needs a lot of work.

The first is about the even more dangerous and destructive turn the Trump campaign has taken since the polls turned bad for him. When he thought he was winning Trump acted like a bully, targeting politically weak groups like immigrants and Muslims. But now that he’s clearly losing, he’s tearing down trust in American democracy. He’s started claiming that he can only lose by fraud, and hinting at violence as the appropriate response.

I’m not terribly worried that this message will work in a literal, immediate sense. He will still lose (legitimately), and his loss will not touch off a wave of riots and assassinations, much less the “civil war” that some of his more extreme supporters are predicting. But the long-term effect will be destructive. Trump began his campaign by uniting a segment of the electorate that feels — not entirely incorrectly — that they deserve better than what recent trends have given them. If many of them come out of this election feeling that peaceful organizing and voting is pointless, that opens the door for the next demagogue to be even worse. I don’t believe that Trump is Hitler, but it’s possible we may look back on him as Hitler’s warm-up act.

That post — which will include lengthy footnotes explaining why his fraud claim is absurd and his dog-whistle to “Second Amendment people” was not just a joke — is currently called “Democracy Will Survive This, With Damage” and should be out between 8 and 9 EDT.

The other story that deserved more attention than it got this week was the Justice Department’s report on Baltimore’s police. In some sense this was the big-city sequel to the report DoJ did last year on Ferguson. We now have very well documented accounts of how American policing shouldn’t work. Hopefully somebody is working on a model of how it should work. My post on the D0J report is called “It’s Not Just Freddie Gray”. It’s the one that still needs work. Let’s hope it gets out by 11.

The weekly summary will cover the latest attempt at raising a Clinton email scandal and a few other topics, before closing with some classics of literature rewritten in Trump style. Noon? 1? I don’t know.

Another week, another convention. There still aren’t enough polls to establish it convincingly, but the early results are validating my intuition that Hillary’s bounce undoes the one Trump got from his convention and then some. Trump is helping by acting exactly like the person the Democrats described, so we may have seen the last of those Trump-leads headlines — at least until some other major event happens.

The convention offers a lot of possible angles. So many of the headline speakers were tremendous, and then there were unexpected knock-outs like the speech from the parents of the late Captain Khan. But today’s featured post focuses on Bernie Sanders: He didn’t just check the box on his Hillary endorsement, like Marco Rubio did for Trump, and he didn’t even make a lesser-of-two-evils argument. He put his heart into it, assured his supporters that “Hillary Clinton will make an outstanding president,” and went through a list of issues to prove it.

That surprised a lot of people, to the point that conspiracy theories have started about what Hillary could have offered or threatened him with. I will offer a more mundane explanation in “Why Bernie Backed Hillary”. It should be out before 8 EDT.

Last week I brushed off the Trump/Putin story, but it got a lot more solid this week. Then I went back and read exactly what Trump’s been saying about NATO and realized it’s worse than I thought. I’m leaning towards making that a second featured post, but I haven’t decided yet. If I don’t, the new developments will be in the weekly summary.

The rest of the summary will mostly be convention coverage, with links to all the major speeches and a follow-up on Trump’s incredibly dumb decision to go after the Khans. I’m still looking for a closing. I’m aiming to have everything posted by 11.

The Baton Rouge shooting yesterday upended the post I had been writing about police reform. Posting it would be like: “Too bad about your friends and colleagues dying. Here’s how you’ve all been doing your jobs wrong.” So I’m scrambling a little this morning. What exactly is going to come out when is hard to predict.

One short post should be out soon. I did a search of past Sift posts to see where Mike Pence has come up before and what I said about him. I figured that was a way to keep myself honest, rather than just posting a knee-jerk reaction of “Trump picked him, so he must be pond scum.”

The result is “Mike Pence. I’ve heard that name before.” It should be out between 8 and 8:30 EDT.

I have a huge number of short notes for the weekly summary — I picked an eventful week to go on vacation — so I could just stop with the one short featured post. But it feels cowardly to ignore the issue most of us are churning over: police killing and being killed. So I’m going to wing something difficult. I want to step back to the larger perspective, in which both police and young black men are victimized by an unjust society that pits them against each other. The working title is “A Real Pro-Police Agenda is Liberal”. Wish me luck on that; it’s still all in my head and could fall completely apart before the glue sets.

Then there will be the summary: Republican convention, Turkish coup, Nice attack, Bernie endorses Hillary, reactions to Hillary’s non-indictment, Baton Rouge, Chilcot report on Iraq. Your typical two weeks in the 21st century.

The big news this week was Brexit, which I had barely covered in the Sift because I didn’t expect Leave to win. (If Remain had won, the story would have been “OK, never mind.”) So the consequences of Brexit — the worst of it being the strain it puts on the Northern Ireland peace agreement — take up most of the weekly summary, which also discusses whether Brexit should change our views of the likelihood of a Trump presidency. (I come down with a definitive “yes and no”.)

But the featured post is about the odd and (from my point of view) welcome change of tone among the Democrats in Congress. Suddenly senators are giving 15-hour speeches and representatives are holding sit-ins in the well of the House. If nothing else, such actions are breaking the nothing-to-see-here fatalism of a Congress that can barely keep the government open and can’t hope to accomplish anything positive.

But what’s all that about, why now, and where might it go from here? That’s the topic of a featured post that still needs work and doesn’t even have a title yet. So figure that to appear around 10 or 11 EDT.

Beyond Brexit and the congressional sit-in, the weekly summary discusses the end-of-term barrage of Supreme Court decisions, the odd finances of the Trump campaign, and the continuing signs of a thaw on the Bernie/Hillary front. I’m still looking for a closing, so let’s predict that to appear around noon.