Legal Commentary

Clerisy heresy.

[Fred Siegel] sees [President Trump] as a champion of "bourgeois values," under threat from the "clerisy," Mr. Siegel's word for the dominant elites who "despise" those values. He regards Mr. Biden as a "captive" of this clerisy, and running mate Kamala Harris as the "embodiment of it."...

By 2012... Mr. Siegel had developed an exceedingly low opinion of President Obama, whom he describes as "a faux intellectual with preacher's cadences and an academic veneer." In his opinion, "the worst thing" about Mr. Obama was "his effect on race relations. We couldn't have the cold civil war we have now without Obama, because he, in a very cunning way, exacerbated all of our racial tensions." 

Under Mr. Obama, Mr. Siegel says, "racial grievance" took on a "new legitimacy, and it came from a president talking in asides, and saying things between the lines. He didn't push back against anything, not even against the idea that Michael Brown said 'Hands up, don't shoot' in Ferguson [Mo.], which was just a fabrication."... 

"Ferguson allowed Ivy League grads to assert their 'natural leadership,' in opposition to lowlife cops and guys with pickup trucks -- again, the deplorables." In Mr. Siegel's understanding, wokeism holds that "the important truths are already known, and that the American aristocracy has to impose those truths on the country." These are "given positions" -- irrefutable and sacrosanct. Wokeism, he says, is a "perilous threat" to America and particularly to the First Amendment. "It says we don't need debate. We don't need free speech. We don't need freedom of religion. We need to obey."...

Full post as published by Althouse on October 18, 2020 (boomark / email).