2020 watch: Trump’s Stronger Than the Media Admit
Much of the media is breathlessly touting recent polls that suggest President Trump has no chance in 2020, but “the real-world situation” is that “Trump is a favorite to be re-elected,” says The Federalist’s Mollie Hemingway. For starters, recall that the polls in 2015 and 2016 “showed Trump having little to no chance of winning the presidency.” And now, notably, in a poll of Wall Street insiders, “more than 70 percent expect Trump to win re-election.” Resistance types are in denial, even as “the Trump agenda is turning out to be surprisingly successful.”
Conservative: A Well-Deserved Thumping for PC Mobs
A recent Ohio court verdict “offers a glimmer of hope that we have reached a tipping point in the culture wars on campus,” predicts Commentary’s Christine Rosen. The suit arose from a 2016 incident involving a black Oberlin College student, Jonathan Aladin, who was caught shoplifting from nearby Gibson’s Bakery. The owner of the bakery gave chase, only to be “attacked further by Aladin and two female friends,” Rosen notes. Student activists responded with “a protest and boycott” against the store. Worse, an Oberlin dean “attended the protests and passed out leaflets” that read “This is a RACIST establishment” — though there was zero evidence of that. The bakery sued the college for slander and other civil torts, and a jury last week awarded the business $11 million in damages. Rosen draws the lesson: “People unfairly victimized and libeled by campus activists are done acquiescing to the mob’s demands.”
Libertarian: Britain’s Creepy New Wealth Law
Shady foreigners have long flocked to London to turn their ill-gotten gains into “clean” luxury assets. But a British law attempting to tackle the problem goes too far, Walter Olson argues in The Washington Examiner. So-called unexplained-wealth orders allow the UK government to seize your assets until it’s proved “that your possessions (whether a house, fancy car or jewelry) have been obtained honestly.” The scary part: “The burden of proof falls on you, not the government.” So far, the law has only been applied to the wife of an Azerbaijani oligarch, not exactly a simpatico figure, “but advocates want this to be the start of hundreds of seizure actions against other rich foreigners,” including in the United States, warns Olson. The “reversal of the presumption of innocence” should trouble everyone.
From the left: Is Sanders a Sandinista?
In his recent speech describing his democratic-socialist vision, Sen. Bernie Sanders paid lip service to democracy and the Bill of Rights. But that isn’t enough, notes Yascha Mounk in The Atlantic: “Virtually all socialist movements have claimed to embrace democracy.” What has set such movements apart — the dividing line between Nicaragua’s Sandinistas and France’s Socialist Party, for example — “was in good part their attitude toward markets.” The Sandinistas and the like “nationalized large parts of the economy,” “severely restricted the functioning of the market” and “crushed freedom.” Whereas Europe’s welfarist parties gave much wider berth to market actors and individual freedom. That history “makes it all the more important for Sanders to be clear on the kind of role that he envisages for the market,” Mounk concludes, yet “after sitting through his 40-minute speech, I was none the wiser about this basic question.”
From the right: Leave Jack Phillips Alone
Jack Phillips — the Colorado baker who fended off two attempts to force him to bake LGBT-themed cakes against his beliefs — finds himself in liberal crosshairs again. National Review’s editors wonder: “What is it with the pissant totalitarians in Colorado?” Last year, the Supreme Court held that by targeting Phillips for censure for refusing to bake a gay-wedding cake, Colorado had acted with “religious hostility,” as the justices put it; a second lawsuit against Phillips, this time by a transgender woman, was dropped after he countersued. Now, the second complainant is pursuing a third action against Phillips. This repeated legal harassment, NR’s editors argue, proves “American liberals have almost entirely abandoned liberalism, with its tenets of generosity and tolerance, and now insist on conformity and homogeneity — to be enforced at the point of a government bayonet.”
— Compiled by Sohrab Ahmari & Ashley Allen