Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump held their first debate last night, moderated by Lester Holt. Holt did a fine job; fact-checking when it was needed, otherwise allowing both candidates to state their case for why they should be President.

And when they actually started debating, Hillary obliterated Trump. She blew him off the map.

Early on, on the subject of free trade, Trump did well. Trade deals like NAFTA are bad for American manufacturing; he gets that, and articulates it well. That’s most of his candidacy–‘our economy struggles because trade deals favor Mexico and China.’ That’s bonkers, but it’s simple, easy to memorize, and plays for American nativists. And Hillary Clinton has a tough time there. Her instincts are pro-free trade, and she generally supports trade deals. (And should; they’re ultimately beneficial). But the costs of free trade are obvious; the benefits are subtler, and more difficult to explain. Rather than go through a long, abstruse explanation of the ways NAFTA really was good for America, she could only really pivot to her basic economic message. He drew blood on trade, and it showed; for a moment, Trump seemed to be winning.

That was twenty minutes in. For the rest of the debate, she blew him out of the water. She kept Trump off-balance. She adroitly kept the conversation limited to her issues, not his. (He said nothing about immigration, for example, nothing about that doggone wall). She raised serious questions about his finances, which clearly angered him, and kept the heat on. In the meantime, she also managed to demonstrate her grasp on policy, with solid answers on foreign policy, Iran, Isis, and the economy. He kept interrupting her, she kept smiling, and refused to be derailed.

As I watched, I realized that each of them was trying to articulate a specific narrative for the other one, and that their successes and failures throughout the debate depended on how successfully they managed to sell those narratives.

Here’s Hillary Clinton’s narrative: Trump is woefully unprepared to be President. He’s not a politician; his resume is as a businessman. He’s not a good businessman, though. He’s a businessman who stiffs subcontractors. He has repeatedly filed for bankruptcy. His first job in business involved a scheme to discriminate against minority homeowners. (His answer seemed to be that we should all be applauding him for building a non-discriminating resort. What?) It’s not just that big business and politics are very different arenas. He’s quite specifically the kind of businessman who is unlikely to be a good President. She takes his main qualification for the Presidency, and turns it into a liability.

Here’s Trump’s narrative: Hillary Clinton is a typical politician. She’s all talk, no action. She’s been thinking about these important issues her entire adult life, but to what end? What has she actually accomplished? Our political system is broken anyway, and it’s broken because of politicians like Hillary Clinton. She has these terrible and costly ideas, which cost tons of money and end up not working. Or, her occasional good ideas never seem to get implemented. She had her chance–on trade, in the Middle East–and blew it. She epitomizes how broken American politics has become. She’s not just a politician, she’s specifically the kind of politician unlikely to be a good President. He takes her main qualification for the Presidency, and turns it into a liability.

That’s what they’re both trying to accomplish. And last night, I thought she did a better job of selling her narrative. She got lucky in one sense. I could hardly believe it, but last night, in a debate featuring Hillary Clinton, there was no mention of Benghazi, no mention of Whitewater, no mention of the Clinton Foundation, and only one question about her emails, which she dismisssed briskly. In the biggest missed opportunity of the night, Trump was asked about the threat to American cyber-security posed by hackers, and did not pivot immediately to her email server, as I expected him to. Instead, we got this completely incoherent word salad, all about which police unions have endorsed him, and how the DNC hack might have been done by foreign actors, or by some 400 lb. guy in his bed, and wasn’t it cool to read all those hacked emails anyway?

So Trump wasn’t particularly swift afoot, and Clinton kept the pressure on, and by the end, Trump sounded pathetic, shouting that he did too have the best temperment. Still, there will be three more debates, two involving these two and one more with their Vice-Presidential picks. (That could get interesting: Mike Pence is dumb as a brick). But watch the two narratives. Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton each have a story they’re selling. And the one who sells theirs best will likely become President of the United States.

 

I got pulled over by the police yesterday. I totally deserved it. In Utah, if you’re driving in the furthest right lane, and you see, on the right shoulder, a traffic stop, you are obligated to move over a lane, so as to not endanger a cop or fellow motorist. I didn’t know that was the law, but I had plenty of room to move over, and it’s a sensible thing to do, distance yourself from a potential problem. One of the many factors that make policing dangerous is the hazard posed by traffic. Anyway, my interaction with the officer was cordially non-confrontational. He let me go with a warning, which was nice of him, but if he had cited me, I did break the law, and had no grounds to be obnoxious about it. Patience and courtesy prevailed.

That has been the case every time I have interacted with police. It doesn’t happen often. I’ve gotten maybe 3 tickets in my life, plus been involved in perhaps 3 or 4 minor traffic accidents investigated by cops. I wouldn’t say things ever got confrontational or even adversarial. I’m treated politely–I’ve responded politely. But then, I’m white. I’m a middle-aged white guy. I’m very large, but still–I don’t seem to be ever perceived as any kind of threat.

That’s not true of Black people. In Tulsa Oklahoma, recently, an unarmed 40 year-old African-American motorist named Terence Crutcher was gunned down by a police officer as he stood, with his arms up, next to his car, which had broken down. The next day, in Charlotte, North Carolina, Keith Scott, a 43 year-old African American man, who suffered from a brain injury, was shot and killed by police outside his home. Scott’s family insists that he was sitting in the shade by his car, reading a book, waiting for his son to get home from school. A video shot by his wife has been released. It does not, however, answer the key question in the case. Was he armed? The family insists that he was not. The police have refused to release their video of the incident, which suggests, at least, that it wouldn’t appear exculpatory.

So, twice more. Two more incidents of Black men killed by the police. In the case of Crutcher, he was not armed. (Why, then, did a police helicopter observer declare that Crutcher was “a bad dude?” From the helicopter footage, the only thing you can see about Crutcher is that he was Black. Does that automatically make him “bad” in the eyes of the police). In the case of Scott, it’s uncertain whether he was armed or not.

In both cities, there were demonstrations, and in Charlotte, those demonstrations turned violent. Despite calls for peaceful protests from, among others, Black Lives Matter leaders, some folks responded by rioting. Sixteen police officers have been injured. Those riots seem now to have calmed down.

Still, the whole thing’s dreadful. And, of course, because this is America, it’s all gotten politicized. A young blonde woman named Tomi Lahren, who I literally had never heard of until this morning, has 60 million viewers on Facebook for rants like this one:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nBOGIZLpSlI

What an awful person. Meanwhile, Seattle Mariners’ back-up catcher Steve Clevenger enlightened us with his views on these shootings, posted on Twitter:

Black people beating whites when a thug got shot holding a gun by a black officer ha ha cracks me up. Keep kneeling for the anthem.

(Later) BLM is pathetic once again! Obama, you are pathetic once again! Everyone involved should be locked behind bars like animals.

Clevenger has been suspended by the Mariners organization for the rest of the season, without pay.

Meanwhile, on my personal Facebook page, Black Lives Matter was compared to the Ku Klux Klan, as part of an, uh, lively conversation on these matters. And President Obama was accused of ‘fanning the flames’ of racial unrest and strife.

All right. Let’s begin by trying to understand. The narrative on the Right would begin in an unexceptionable place; we should all respect police officers. We should recognize how dangerous and how essential their jobs are, and we should stand by their efforts to keep public order. I completely agree with all of that.

At the same time, we need to recognize that police make mistakes, like all humans, and when someone dies, there should be a reckoning. What infuriates people about these moments when unarmed people are killed, is that the officers in the case are rarely held accountable. The officer in the Tulsa case has been criminally charged, with manslaughter. That’s good. But far too often, no charges are even filed. And the relationship between police and prosecutors is hardly adversarial. It can feel awfully cozy, the way prosecutors present cases to grand juries, the way police shootings are investigated, the whole comfortable relationship between the various entities in the criminal justice system.

We’re talking about power, and who has it, and who wields it, and to what end. During the civil rights movement in the ’50s and ’60s, police were the bad guys. Übervillain of the entire Birmingham protest was Bull Connor, chief of police. Police exist to preserve public order, but ‘public order’ is defined by the political power structure. Me, I’m very much in favor of public order; what scares me is anarchy. But I’m white. I’m automatically empowered. I’m generally seen as a ‘good guy’. I look like one. White privilege favors me. Even in situations, like yesterday, when I commit a minor traffic violation. Slap on the hand; don’t do it again.

I’m saying, in part, that ‘public order’ is often defined by the white power structure in ways that harm Black people. I’m saying that police officers have an exceptionally difficult job, and are deserving of our respect, and simultaneously that too many unarmed people seem to be dying. It’s possible to support police, and express concern about how well they’re trained. It’s possible to support the police, and still wonder about the degree to which racism remains part of police culture.

This is why Black Lives Matter is so very very important, and so right. Black people are not generally, routinely, automatically, presumptively thought of as mattering. With very few exceptions, African-Americans are NOT part of the power structure. My Black friends are, without exception, successful. They’re middle-class, educated, employed, good at their jobs. But when they’re pulled over by cops, they experience fear at a level that I can’t comprehend. They are, to at least some degree, Other, in a white society. And I am privileged, and know it. I don’t fear cops. People of color do, and for good reason.

That’s the insidious way in which racism works. And, yes, of course racism still exists, and still, in part, defines Black/White relationships. We’re not talking segregated rest rooms (though, incredibly, throughout much of the nation, we ARE still talking about segregated schools). We’re talking about how Black Americans get pulled over by traffic cops 31% more often than white drivers are. How New York City’s contemptible and unconstitutional ‘stop and frisk’ policing (which Mr. Trump wants to revive and extend), focused almost entirely on people of color. And the shocking fact that a significant number of Black drivers, pulled over by police, aren’t ever told why.

So when a Bill O’Reilly points to black-on-black crime statistics, or suggests that if ‘those people’ lived in more stable families things would be fine, putting the blame on African-Americans themselves, he just comes across as foolish and ignorant. Our country, in dealing with the issue of race, took shortcuts. We went from overt displays of racial prejudice to pretending that everything was swell, and that no one harbored those feelings anymore.  We didn’t evolve, but leapt, from ingrained systemic obvious racism to more subtle and quieter forms of it.

One problem, of course, is our nation’s failed war on drugs, which turns a public health problem into a criminal disaster. Another is educational apartheid, nearly 70 years after Brown v. Board. Another is mass incarceration. President Obama has made some small progress during his eight years in office. Now, with Trump, we’re seeing the backlash. But we have to solve this, especially since we’re increasingly becoming a multi-cultural society.

Our first and most obvious beginning requires that we listen to Black Lives Matter. Because they do.

 

What is it with people and conspiracy theories? I ask, because I spent a frustrating couple of days arguing on-line with people who really do believe that Hillary Clinton is a mass murderer. I know, right? But there are people who believe this, that the Clintons routinely bump off people who are about to expose them. Expose what, you might reasonably ask? Well, all the women Bill raped, for one thing. The Clinton family drug smuggling. And also, duh, all the murders.

Really, I should know better. It’s completely impossible to argue with conspiracy theorists. For one thing, they’re obsessed. The Clinton-haters spend endless amounts of time reading books about the vileness of the Clintons. Which means they know way more about their theory than you’re likely to. They know the names and life histories, for example, of all 67 people the Clintons had murdered. How do you refute that?

So you scramble. It doesn’t take that long. A quick proficiency with Google leads to, yes, fifty articles supporting the conspiracy, but also to solid, factual evidence. But if you cite that evidence, it doesn’t matter. That’s what’s infuriating with conspiracy theorists; nothing fazes them. Disprove one allegation, and they’ve got twenty more lined up. I’m genuinely angry with myself. The number one rule with conspiracy theories has to be: do not engage. It’s impossible to argue with these people. Conspiracy theories are intoxicating. You get to feel superior. Everyone else is a dimwit; you possess the actual truth of things! You’re one of the secret elite; you’re Someone Who Knows.

There’s actually been some research on this subject, including a book-length study by political scientists Joseph Uscinski and Joseph Parent, which was published in 2014. It makes for depressing reading. Liberals and conservatives believe in conspiracy theories pretty equally, though the two sides like different ones. A third of Americans believe in birther theories about Obama; about the same number believe 9/11 is an inside job. In fact, liberals and conservatives are equally likely to think the favorite theories of their opponents are hilariously silly (because of course ‘those people’ believe that sort of ridiculous nonsense), while holding to favorite, equally nonsensical notions of their own.

Education helps, a little. 42% of people without high school diplomas are prone to conspiratorial thinking, while only 23% of people with post-graduate degrees do. Still, that’s depressing. One of five PhDs believe in absolute tommyrot? Because that’s the reality of conspiracy theories. They’re objectively untrue. They’re unsupported by, you know, evidence. Facts.

Anyway, the Clintons. The false narrative, in this case, argues that Bill and Hillary Clinton have murdered (or ordered murdered) 67 people over their time in the public eye. See, there’ve been all these mysterious deaths! Of people who were just about to testify against the Clintons about something nefarious they’d done! (Except, turns out, they weren’t). And they can name names: Ron Brown, Seth Rich, John Ashe, Victor Thorn, Shawn Lucas. Vince Foster (of course!) So many deaths! Has to be murder!

I grew up in Bloomington Indiana. I am a middle-class, unremarkable, politically insignificant man around 60. But I can certainly think of 67 people who I knew and who knew me, who died. In my neighborhood growing up, the kid who lived to our north died of AIDS. Another kid, a little further north, died in an auto wreck. The kid across the street committed suicide. One of my best friends, in high school, killed himself–I spoke at his funeral. Over fifty-some years, there have been lots of mishaps and illnesses and tragedies. My life isn’t anything special, but if some nasty-minded person wanted to stitch all those unrelated incidents together and create a false narrative about Eric the Lethal, I can imagine what it would look like.

And that’s what’s going on here. Not that it matters, but Ron Brown (Bill Clinton’s Secretary of Commerce) died in a plane wreck. The conspiracy theory is that they found a bullet hole in his skull–he was shot before the plane went down! Except that isn’t true; there was no exit wound, no bullet fragments in his skull. He died of blunt force trauma, because, you know, his plane crashed. Seth Rich died in a botched robbery. John Ashe died of a heart attack, Victor Thorn killed himself, Shawn Lucas died in an accident. And Vince Foster actually, really, did kill himself. Seven separate investigations proved it.

It’s all that silly. People sometimes die. All of us know people who have died. There’s nothing remotely suspicious about either the number of deaths of people the Clintons knew, or the circumstances in which those deaths took place.

Most of this garbage came from a recent book, Roger Stone and Robert Morrow’s The Clintons’ War on Women. Roger Stone is a professional Clinton hater, a guy who has spent his life digging for anti-Clinton dirt. Robert Morrow, meanwhile, spends his free time writing in a genre I had not previously known exists–Hillary porn. Researching this, I found some, read maybe half a paragraph of the most unspeakable vileness. (Now you don’t have to: you’re welcome). Their book is published by something called Skyhorse Publishing, which specializes in all sorts of conspiracy theory books, with titles like American Nuremberg (a truther book about 9/11), American Conspiracy, Spooks, and The Secret Coalition. Thar’s gold in them thar hills.

Of course, as is always the case with these things, the conspiracy requires the active collusion and participation of way too many people. There’s no way; someone would have blabbed. It’s like the Kennedy assassination theories; if, say, LBJ conspired to kill Kennedy, it would have required the cooperation of dozens of organizations and hundreds of individuals. Or the ‘moon landing was faked,’ literally hundreds of scientists and engineers with NASA, and that’s just for starters.

So let’s get real. Hillary Clinton absolutely doesn’t go around bumping people off. She’s been investigated more than any politician in the country, and there’s absolutely no evidence of criminal wrong-doing. And if you run into a conspiracy theorist, there’s a perfect way to handle them. Don’t engage. Don’t argue. Just change the subject, politely and firmly. Exactly the way Chelsea Clinton did, when confronted with Robert Morrow.

 

I am an unapologetic, card-carrying liberal, and have been for most of my adult life. But I also try to be as open-minded as possible. I think of myself as a reasonable person, and I try to listen carefully to opposing points of view. On any political issue, if facts are presented that lead me to change my views, I am unafraid to make that change. There are issues that are very important to many liberals that aren’t important to me, and many issues that liberals favor and conservatives oppose where I believe conservatives are right. When that happens, I say so. I could give some specific examples, if you like. One is free trade, which I favor. I think it reduces poverty world-wide. Another is the Keystone pipeline, which I likewise favor.

The same is true of political candidates. I generally support Democratic candidates and oppose Republicans. But I have voted for Republicans in the past, and will probably will do so in the future. What I reject is the notion that Republicans, or any political opponents, are dreadful people. I thought the last two Republican candidates for President, John McCain and Mitt Romney, were decent, honorable and intelligent men. I thought they were both proven patriots. In both cases, I voted for Barack Obama, because generally I agreed with him on important matters of policy, and because I disagreed with Senator McCain and Mitt Romney on matters of policy. But that’s all. We just disagreed, and if they had won, they may well have turned out to be good Presidents. Just not as good as Obama.

George W. Bush was, I thought, a particularly poor President. But it’s not difficult for me to find important issues where he was right, and where I agreed with him, and thought he did well. He did a tremendous amount of good, for example, in combatting AIDS in Africa. PEPFAR, the President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief, was a spectacular success, saving millions of lives. I think that Bush’s legacy is generally a weak one, that his tax cuts were ruinous and the war in Iraq grievously ill-considered. On balance, he wasn’t a very good President. But he also did genuine good in the world during his time in the White House.

Political campaigns are ugly things, with ferocious rhetoric on both sides. Partisans delight in making terrible personal attacks on their political foes. I deplore that. I wish we could all, liberals and conservatives, agree on this point: that both candidates are patriots, who just happen to disagree on matters of policy.

This is what I have believed and this is what I have written. This year is the exception. This year is genuinely different. For the first time in my lifetime, I am genuinely frightened for the future of my country. For the first time in my lifetime, we have a candidate for President who, if elected, seems to me to be genuinely dangerous. I consider myself a reasonable man. One candidate, however, defies reason, and requires an unreasonable response.

Donald Trump is the most dangerous candidate for President in American history. He cannot, and must not be elected. I do not say that, if he is elected, it will mean the end of the United States, that he is a danger to democracy. I don’t know that. But I do believe that he might pose precisely such a threat. And I don’t think that’s a chance we should take.

He has allied himself with dangerous forces of ethnic nationalism. I don’t particularly care if Alt-Right is meant to be tongue-in-cheek. Their rhetoric, and his rhetoric, is dangerously extreme, and profoundly anti-democratic. On crucial matters of race and ethnicity, Trump represents the most atavistic, nativist, and extremist strains in American history and current American society.

His economic plans, as outlined in his speeches and on-line, would impoverish our nation, increase our international indebtedness, and would, in all likelihood, lead to trade wars with many, if not most, of our leading trade partners–China, Mexico, the EU, South Korea.

His immigration plans are vicious, uncompassionate, and completely unworkable. The mass deportations he describes would badly damage our economy, while destroying the lives of millions of people, and ruining their family relationships. And let’s be clear, there’s not going to be, and shouldn’t be, a wall. (I have friends who point out that there have been times in the past when Hillary Clinton has supported building a similar wall. That’s true. She was wrong too.)

His foreign policies, such as they are, are built on a foundation of utter ignorance and foolishness. He has no appreciation for the complexities of foreign diplomacy, and no understanding of the challenges faced by our allies and friends. Worst of all, he expresses and fosters the most extreme contempt for a peaceful major world religion, Islam.

Worst of all, though, is Trump’s embrace of authoritarianism, for his rejection of fundamental democratic processes. In his acceptance speech at the Republican National Convention, Trump repeatedly insisted that he and only he could solve intractable national problems, that he and only he could Make America Great Again. For a student of history, that’s a frightening notion.

And his personality is incompatible with political leadership. This campaign has been so topsy-turvy, it beggars the imagination. But there is one event that I absolutely cannot imagine happening. I cannot imagine Donald Trump graciously conceding defeat. That’s something every losing candidate has done in the history of our great nation. And it’s the one thing of which I believe Trump to be incapable.

Though, of course, I would love to be proven wrong.

For this candidate, and only for this candidate, I do not say ‘he’s a patriot with whom I disagree.’ I say that this candidate, and only this candidate may represent a threat to the idea of America, to American melting pot multiculturalism, to American republican democracy, to the values that find such perfect expression in the Declaration of Independence, the Preamble to the Constitution, and to the Bill of Rights.

In a recent speech, Trump said to African-American voters, ‘what do you have to lose?’ I would answer that there is a great deal that we stand to lose. We cannot, cannot take that chance. Donald Trump cannot become President of the United States. Whatever we can do, consistent with our democratic traditions, we must do. I’m writing a check to the Clinton campaign today. I hope you will join me.