The student in question is an American of South Asian descent who was chosen by the administration, out of a couple of hundred eligible straight A students, to be this year’s valedictorian. I don’t see any indication that she had written her speech yet, so the basis for the cancellation is, putatively, “safety” concerns about somebody who apparently had, according to a group opposing the choice, “a link to a curated media page” as part of her social media bio. On that page are statements calling Zionism a racist settler-colonial ideology, and advocating the abolishment of the state of Israel.

So basically USC’s administration is saying that if the right people complain about having a student whose social media bio includes links to anti-Zionist statements as the valedictorian, that person will be removed — cancelled if you will — because of fabricated concerns about “public safety,” which as Pope Hat points out is the very definition of a heckler’s veto, assuming it’s the genuine reason for the cancellation, which very obviously it’s not.

While it’s true that nobody has a right to give a speech at graduation, cancelling a speech after inviting a student to give it because the student is an Asian-American with apparent sympathies for anti-Zionist views is really really bad. This isn’t in any way like protesting handing a big check to Condi Rice to come and spout pablum while demurely not mentioning any of her own war crimes, and anybody who makes that analogy, given LGM’s official anti-Condi Rice being given big checks to give commencement speeches policy, can step right off.

There’s something about this whole topic that drives otherwise reasonable people completely insane.

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Tom Schaller and Paul Waldman have a new book about the reactionary turn in white rural America that has predictably generated a great deal of criticism that is large on personal attacks and hand-waving and light on substantive response, the latter of which I’ve mean meaning to get to. (In the meantime, the authors respond here.) In the meantime, I wanted to highlight this blog by Tom Scocca, who responding to an attempt by a critic to draw what AFICT is a non-empirical, analytically useless distinction between “rage” and “resentment” points out that Clinton’s “basket of deplorables” speech did exactly what critics of white rural rage thesis insist that Democrats never do:

The key difference, Jacobs wrote, is that unlike rage, resentment “is rational, a reaction based on some sort of negative experience. You may not agree that someone has been treated unfairly, but there is room to empathize.” And liberals’ belief in white rural rage gets in the way of that necessary empathy, he argued, continuing a “reflexive condescension and dismissal of rural voters that escalated during the George W. Bush administration and peaked with Hillary Clinton’s campaign and her dismissal of Trump supporters as a ‘basket of deplorables.’”

What would expressing real concern for rural voters sound like? Jacobs explained that liberals need to find a whole new way of looking at Trump supporters. Trump’s rural voters are

“people who feel the government has let them down, the economy has let them down, nobody cares about them, nobody worries about what happens to their lives and their futures; and they’re just desperate for change. It doesn’t really even matter where it comes from. They don’t buy everything he says, but – he seems to hold out some hope that their lives will be different. They won’t wake up and see their jobs disappear, lose a kid to heroin, feel like they’re in a dead-end. Those are people we have to understand and empathize with as well.“

Just kidding! That wasn’t Jacobs. It was Hillary Clinton, in those same remarks now known as the “Basket of Deplorables” speech. 

The whole point of the Basket of Deplorables speech was that there was more than one basket of Trump supporters. Clinton was telling her audience—the audience at the LGBTQ for Hillary Gala—that despite the visible, undeniable bigotry in the Trump movement, some of it directed specifically at them, not every potential Trump voter was a bigot or irredeemable. She was urging them to understand why ordinary Americans might be hungry enough for change to vote for someone like Trump.

And then the Trump movement responded by declaring that no, there was only one basket, that the racists and homophobes and xenophobes did, in fact, represent them all. The press, in turn, adopted the Trump position that Clinton had insulted everyone who supported Trump, and since her defeat has spent the next eight years, countless words, and who knows how much travel budget recreating exactly the message about understanding and empathy that Clinton had delivered in the first place—insisting, all the while, that no one had ever thought of it before. 

Eight years of asserting that Clinton said the nearly precise inverse of what she actually said has been very successful propaganda, and in the critics of White Rural Rage we see mostly futile attempts to square a familiar circle: i.e. 1)Democrats have made efforts to materially address the stated non-“deplorable” grievances of white rural America; 2)Republicans have not; and yet 3)white rural rage against Democrats and their core constituencies is both rationally justified and could be addressed by [insert vague underpants gnomes theory here] that Democrats stubbornly refuse to do because they regard all Trump supporters as deplorable. I will come back to this but it’s an exhausting cycle.

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Earlier this month, Arizona state Sen. Eva Burch (D) learned eight weeks into her pregnancy that her embryo wasn't developing, and her choices were between an abortion or waiting for another miscarriage.  “I don’t think people should have to justify their abortions," Burch said in remarks on the Senate floor on March 20. "But I’m choosing to talk about why I made this decision because I want us to be able to have meaningful conversations about the reality of how the work that we do in this body impacts people in the real world.” Despite Burch knowing what was best for her and the right course of action for her nonviable pregnancy, the state of Arizona did not make the decision easy for her. In an interview with Jezebel Burch, a mother of two, said she chose to share her deeply personal experience, putting herself at risk of anti-abortion harassment, to shine a light on an everyday experience even in a state that doesn’t have a total abortion ban. On the Senate floor, Burch recounted her history of fertility struggles including numerous miscarriages and an abortion for a nonviable pregnancy two weeks before the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade in 2022. She told her colleagues she didn't want to go through another miscarriage. “I don’t know how many of you have been unfortunate enough to experience a miscarriage before, but I am not interested in going through it unnecessarily. Right now, the safest and most appropriate treatment for me—and the treatment that I choose—is abortion,” Burch said. “But the laws this legislature has passed have interfered with my ability to do that.”  But state law in Arizona, where abortion is legal through about 15 weeks of pregnancy, requires people seeking abortion care to receive state-directed counseling from their abortion provider. Abortion providers are required to tell them (among other things) that they have the option to parent or to put their child up for adoption. Of course, Burch did not have those options: Her pregnancy wasn’t viable. But she still had to sit through this politically charged, state-mandated guidance anyway. “From where I sat, the only reason I had to hear those things was a cruel and really uninformed attempt by outside forces to shame and coerce and frighten me into making a different decision other than the one that I knew was right for me,” Burch said in her speech. “There’s no one-size-fits-all script for people seeking abortion care, and the legislature doesn’t have any right to assign one.” https://twitter.com/A_DLCC/status/1769838751432270039 Burch and other Arizona Democrats have been trying to repeal this mandatory counseling abortion law for years now but are unable to advance their bills out of committee thanks to the Republicans’ majority. Burch introduced SB 1531 earlier this year to repeal the waiting period and other onerous restrictions. Speaking to Jezebel on Monday, Burch called the mandatory counseling she received “misguided and factually inaccurate at best,” but “in my case, hurtful, because I was mourning the loss of my pregnancy in that moment.” Burch emphasized that the counseling that abortion providers are required to offer isn’t written by medical experts but by anti-abortion “extremists” with a political agenda to stigmatize the health service and pressure someone out of making a personal medical decision. “They are also required to talk about the probable fetal anatomical properties at the time of the abortion procedure, which again, in my case was inaccurate since my embryo was dying and was not subject to the properties of a healthy, developing pregnancy,” Burch explained. Pregnancy and pregnancy loss are personal and emotionally charged…

Where the law is determinate, judges will ignore it only when they have very strong policy preferences and the arrogance to believe they trump everything. In the mifepristone case, it looks like only Alito and perhaps Thomas will fall into this category:

Mary Ziegler, a law professor at the University of California at Davis who specializes in abortion, said she expects the Supreme Court to rule on standing and preserve access to mifepristone.

“Pretty clearly it seems a majority don’t think these people have standing,” she said, noting that Justice Samuel A. Alito Jr. appeared to be the only one persuaded by the Alliance Defending Freedom’s arguments about standing.

The other big takeaway, she said, was the emphasis that Justices Clarence Thomas and Alito placed on the Comstock laws, long dormant laws from the 1800s that prohibit the mailing of “obscene” materials, including materials used for abortions.

Ziegler predicted that Alito and Thomas would write dissenting opinions arguing that Comstock “is very much alive — and that it bars the mailing of at least abortion pills and maybe much more.”

Interpreting the Comstock Act as banning abortion nationwide — another legally nonsensical claim — it the holy grail of the American anti-abortion movement, and looks like they have 3 votes to go.

Alito’s argument about why doctors who are not affected in any way by mifepristone being available have standing to challenge the FDA is…less than persuasive:

Sam Alito: "I have great respect for Article 3" pic.twitter.com/0LFxb2MSyQ

— Leah Litman (@LeahLitman) March 26, 2024

If your argument that an approved drug is so dangerous that the judiciary should usurp the FDA and revoke the approval cannot find a single person adversely affected by the drug to bring the suit, I believe the term for this is “self-refutation.”

This is even more farcical if you know that Alito has written multiple lengthy opinions asserting that abortion clinics do not have standing to challenge abortion statutes that would cause them to close down. I am once again remembering the affable Republican lawyer who went on at some length to me in 2006 about how liberals should be thrilled to get Sam Alito rather than some out-of-control reactionary.

Anyway, a bad day for Washington’s fash power couple is a good day for the United States.

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