David Remnick: The Politics of Fear; or: Orange Man Hate

eyeroll

First, two things I'll say in favor of this screed:

[i] The stuff about Trump being a bully at military school (and before) does matter to me--epistemically, I mean. I think that does tell us something about his character. Needless to say, the copious counterevidence is unmentioned by Remnick--this isn't inquiry, this is politics. Nevertheless: this is some relevant evidence about Trump's character.

[ii] Well, come to think of it, it's just that one thing.

   Of course "hate" and "fear" are two of the neo-PC left's favorite emotions. Everyone they don't like is a hater, and any politically incorrect word, thought, or action is "hate." And their pathetic, pusillanimous, pantywaist trump (lower case) card is fear. "I'm afraid" is supposed to be a move in a game of Victim! that wins every time. Slave morality (as the Mystic likes to emphasize). Repulsive. 

   I think I've got a fairly balanced view of Trump: by far the lesser evil in November, in part because of his commitment to rolling back psychotic postpostmodern progressive soft totalitarianism. Trump's basically chemotherapy against the cancer of prope-Marxist lunacy that had taken over the nation. But man, this is a dicey game. This is a treatment that might just kill us itself. Nobody wants Trump...just for shits and giggles or whatever. He's a weapon for fighting a left that is out of control.

   Anyway, the real tell, I think, is that Remnick tries to spin Trump's comments about the "Central Park 5" as evidence of his malevolent nature. What Trump said, of the teenagers who assisted in the gang rape and attempted murder of the Central Park jogger, is:

Mayor Koch has stated that hate and rancor should be removed from our hearts. I do not think so. I want to hate these muggers and murderers. They should be forced to suffer and, when they kill, they should be executed for their crimes. . . . I recently watched a newscast trying to explain the “anger in these young men.” I no longer want to understand their anger. I want them to understand our anger. I want them to be afraid.

Two points:

[1] Trump was right, and the "Central Park Five" did, in fact, at least hold down the Central Park jogger--an actual person, you should remember. Her name is Trisha Meili. First, here's Wikipedia's account of her gang rape and attempted murder. (And, of course: Wikipedia is a solidly leftist site):

Patricia "Trisha" Ellen Meili,[15] a 28-year-old,[16][17] was going for a regular run in Central Park shortly before 9:00 p.m.[13][18] While jogging, she was knocked down, dragged nearly 300 feet (91 m) off the roadway,[13]: ¶ 26  and violently physically and sexually assaulted.[12][19] About four hours later at 1:30 am, she was found naked, gagged, tied, and covered in mud and blood in a shallow ravine about 300 feet north of the 102nd Street Crossing, a wooded area of the park.[12][20][19] The first policeman who saw her said: "She was beaten as badly as anybody I've ever seen beaten. She looked like she was tortured."[16] Meili was so badly injured that she was in a coma for 12 days, not awakening until May 1, according to a May 3 interview with her doctor.[21]
She had severe hypothermia, severe brain damage, severe hemorrhagic shock, loss of 75–80 percent of her blood, and internal bleeding.[17][22][23][24] Her skull had been fractured so badly that her left eye was dislodged from its socket, which in turn was fractured in 21 places.[17][22]
Meili was not identified for about 24 hours, and it took days for the police to retrace her movements of that night. By the time of the trial of the first three suspects in June 1990, The New York Times characterized the attack on the jogger as "one of the most widely publicized crimes of the 1980's"

If you don't hate the animals who did this, and don't want a world in which fear of retribution protects innocent women from such monsters...well...you may be some kind of monster yourself...

  The "Central Park Five" did this. They are guilty--and guilty of rape. Here is Coulter's account.

  The perpetrators' crimes were whitewashed in the blacks-can-never-be-guilty madness of BLM hysteria. They are guilty. Trump was right about them. The inhuman position is the leftist one: boundless, grotesque sympathy for the perpetrators, none for the victim. Ms. Meili was only useful to the left to cast aspersions on white men as the putative locus of "rape culture." The actual rapists were inconveniently black.

[2] Even the Central Park Five had not participated in the assault, Trump didn't know that at the time of the ad. At that time he was justified in thinking that they had (remember: they had). So he was speaking of the perpetrators, and assuming (correctly) that they were the Central Park Five. That's what matters when drawing conclusions about Trump's character from this.

   Anyway. Trump's the human here. The defenders of the perpetrators--like the perpetrators themselves--have basically left the realm of the human and spun off into the insane parallel universe inhabited by the left--the world in which the West is the source of all evil, the USA is its point man, whites are racist oppressors by definition, blacks cannot be racist no matter what they think or do, women have penises, men have babies, babies have no determinate sex at birth, but fetuses have an innate "gender identity" from conception, cow farts are incinerating the world, COVID had nothing to do with the leaky lab down the street studying COVID, Trump is a Russian agent, Israel is committing genocide by Hamas is just dandy...and on and on and on.

   So, the main evidence that Trump is evil is: [a] he was a mean kid and [b] he hates murderers (and those who attempt to murder, but are too incompetent to pull it off) and rapists, and wants them to fear the law so that they will not rape and murder the innocent. IOW: Trump is an ordinary, rational human person.

   The poor innocent behbah angels (as Actual Justice Warrior would put it) of "the Central Park Five" gang raped a woman, beat her until they thought she was close enough to death--among other things dislodging her eye from its socket--and threw her in a ditch to die.

   If you don't hate the people who did that, and you don't want people like that to fear the law, there's something wrong with you, dude.