Coyote Blog

Last week I spent a bit of time looking at the indictment of James Comey (not hard, it's barely a page long).  At first I thought I must be missing some pages.  The indictment is for lying when Comey told Congress that he had not "authorized" an employee to leak the Hillary Clinton investigation to the WSJ.  But everyone agrees, apparently even the prosecutors, that Comey did not even know about the leak or intention to leak before it happened.  It looked to me like the whole case was built on the argument that Comey "authorized" the leak by not opposing it after he found out about it.  Could that really be the case? Seriously, that is flimsier than even some of the NY prosecutions of Trump.  As it turns out, to their credit, a number of prominent Conservatives are rallying to mock the indictment.

I get it that Trump and his supporters have some reasons to be frustrated by events over the past 8 years or so.  The Russian collusion charges that turned out to be complete inventions of the opposition party.  The prosecutions by the NY AG for (at best) borderline victimless crimes for which no one in history had ever been previously prosecuted.  The over-prosecution of rank-and-file January 6 protestor-rioters. The "election denier" prosecutions in multiple states that look a lot like attacks on political speech (particularly when similar statements made by Democrats in 2016 went un-prosecuted).

But there are two possible responses to this frustration:

1. Hold public hearings to publicize the evidence of any wrongdoing.  Fire people in law enforcement who violated the rules or abused their position.  Work hard to change the rules, controls, and accountability mechanisms so it is much harder for such abuses to be duplicated in the future.  And trust the process to work (after all, Trump overcame most all the various legal proceedings against him).
2. Go the opposition one better by doing all the same stuff, just harder

Approach number 1 holds out some hope of de-escalating abusive practices in the system and prevent further degeneration into banana-republic style political retribution after every election.  Approach number 2 is fraught with risks of spiraling out of control and creating precedents that Democrats will gleefully use when inevitably back in power.

Of course, Trump and his FAFO (f*ck around, find out) crowd have chosen #2.  They strongly believe that the far Left is violent and lawless and that Republicans have historically been far too genteel in how they play politics and that only by extreme responses can they get, uh... I don't know what.   Do they expect the Left to back down?  If Trump's supporters are characterizing the Left accurately, by Trump's own assumptions it is unlikely the Left will back down.  Republicans are risking a further devolution of the American polity -- is it for revenge only?  For the feelz of it?  What is the endgame they envision, or do they even have goal here other than watching the other side burn?

Postscript:  All of the above is also true in the realm of speech and cancel culture.  Conservatives have clearly born the brunt of cancel culture and speech limitations over the last 10-20 years (just as the Left bore the brunt in the 1950s and 1960s).  The Kimmel firing was a great example of Trump's ability to score an own-goal when he has the lead.  The initial reaction to Kimmel's reality-defying statement created sympathy for the Conservative cause, at least until Trump's FCC head lawlessly issued threats to ABC's broadcast licenses, threats echoed later by Trump himself.  Suddenly a story that that should have been about Kimmel's absurd statement and falling ratings became about the Trump Administration's lawlessness.  Had this Administration just STFU, the Leftish late night hosts would have continued their downward spiral and been an object lesson to programmers that maybe they do not want to program for just 30% of their audience.

I am sure Republicans want to send a message about cancel culture but Executive threats are just not going to work.  Of the hundreds of media articles on the whole Kimmel mess, I did not see a single one (excepting the explicitly Conservative press) that mentions Roseanne Barr or Gina Carano.  Using retribution to highlight past injustices is not going to work when the media will not acknowledge or mention past injustices -- in the media Republican retribution is portrayed instead as a first strike.

I will leave the last words on this to Ted Cruz, someone I think is very smart but with whom I often disagree.  This is from the WSJ

Mr. Carr “says, ‘We can do this the easy way or we can do this the hard way,’” Mr. Cruz told his listeners, quoting Mr. Carr. “That’s right out of ‘Goodfellas.’ That’s right out of a mafioso coming into a bar going, ‘Nice bar you have here. It’d be a shame if something happened to it.’”

The Senator added that he’s no fan of Mr. Kimmel, but he warned conservatives that government power abused in this way won’t hurt only the left. “What [Mr. Carr] said there is dangerous as hell,” Mr. Cruz continued. “It might feel good right now to threaten Jimmy Kimmel, but when it is used to silence every conservative in America, we will regret it.”

Exactly right.  I am not sure that Trump's supporters understand the damage they may be doing to our political environment (and if you are reading this and saying "the other side started it", then you don't get it either), but they are also damaging their future selves.  Remember Coyote's Law.

Postscript #2:  I will offer Republicans a piece of advice I often give to other business people: If you are in a dispute with another person or entity, be satisfied if you get what you want.  Do not hold out for sorrow or contrition because you are never, ever going to get them to feel guilt or honestly admit error.

Postscript #3: In thinking about it, the Comey prosecution is similar to some of the Trump prosecutions in that in both cases, I think the prosecutions are effectively acting as proxies for suspected real crimes committed that no one could prove.  Almost everyone discuss this with (depending on if they are Red or Blue team) will say about one or the other that a certain prosecution may be weak but the person is clearly dirty.  Sorry, but this is not how the US legal system is supposed to work.  I grew up in the South when it was still possible that a cop who killed/arrested/prosecuted/jailed a black man for something they did not do could argue that "yeah, but I am sure he was guilty of something."

Postscript #4:  I will remind everyone that both parties equally think the other party is lawless and their own party is too genteel. I have many times seen writers of the Left and Right lament this about their sides in writing on the same day.   I guarantee anyone from the Left reading what I wrote above about Republicans thinking themselves too genteel are saying "Republicans are the violent, lawless ones, not us!"

I have put off dealing with the large drop target assembly, but finally it was time.  It is now cleaned up and in pieces. I hope it goes back together.

For a few halcyon days after the tragic murder of Charlie Kirk, Trump and Republicans were actually getting a bit of sympathy and probably had an opening to reframe some of the political discourse.  But in true Trumpian style, the Administration has gone to 11 in their over-reaction to some Lefties being, let's say, less than sad at Kirk's death.  I get it that Trump and his followers are (probably rightly) grouchy about some of the BS prosecutions of Trump and his supporters over the last 8 years, not to mention the mostly fabricated Russia collusion impeachment.  But Trump seems to have found his moment for vengeance and anyone who calls for him to turn the other cheek on some of this stuff gets labelled a cuck.

Here is what I have catalogued so far:

• AG Pam Bondi fans the flames of public confusion by reinforcing the myth that there is somehow a First Amendment exception for hate speech
• After years of defending cake-bakers who get prosecuted for not making a cake for a gay wedding, Republicans are getting their revenge by threatening prosecution of (and getting fired) an Office Depot employee (also here)  who wouldn't print some Charlie Kirk memorial material
• Sec. of State Marco Rubio announced that they were revoking Visas of immigrants who said bad things about Charlie Kirk
• Under pressure from the FTC (really outright threats), ABC has suspended Jimmy Kimmel for what were admittedly incorrect and inflammatory statements about Kirk's killer.  ABC probably was on a path to axing Kimmel over ratings anyway, but the FTC pressure is absolutely unethical
• Trump is ready to name Antifa a terrorist organization.  I can't stand the Antifa thugs but this is a really slippery slope where it is easy to start naming opposition groups as terrorists.  Besides, is Antifa even an organization, or a label that people adopt?
• Unrelated to Kirk, Trump also launched another large and looney defamation suit.  Note that in my view this was not written to win, but to force a settlement.  Being sued personally by the man who is also your chief regulator is a brutal position to be in, just ask CBS who had to knuckle under previously.
• I am almost sure there was something else, but it is late.  I will update when I remember.

I will say again what I have said before -- Republicans are acting like they will be in power forever -- but they won't.  Remember Coyote's Law.  At some point their political opposition will be in power and all these precedents will come back to bite them.  Particularly in this case because almost every one of these is an authoritarian power that Republicans fought under Democratic administrations.  As mentioned before, Republican's defended cake bakers (and pharmacists and many others) against laws mandating they provide services against their conscience.  Republicans have fought against laws based on making hate speech illegal, laws that are dragging the Brits down the toilet as we speak.  It was Republicans who fought to get rid of equal time in broadcasting and stopped the FTC from bludgeoning Conservative talk radio hosts.  Republicans have fought for years against having their mainstream groups labelled as white supremacist terrorists by the SPLC (I believe the SPLC so designated Charlie Kirk's organization).   Not sure if they have had same issues with Visas, but they sure as hell will as Democrats will find a way to evict Conservative immigrants in retribution (looking at you Elon).

Via Zero Hedge:

President Donald Trump suggested Monday on Truth Social that companies should stop filing quarterly earnings reports and instead move to a semiannual schedule. Trump’s call to replace quarterly earnings reports with semiannual filings revives a debate that also surfaced during his first term.

I presume Trump wants to be a deregulator and free marketeer here, but he is going at it exactly wrong.  The best free market approach to capital markets is to make sure investors have information to make quality decisions about their investments.   Then, you can clear out all of the other underbrush of regulation and quasi-parental oversight of markets and leave decisions to individual responsibility.  The first, lightest touch regulation is for corporate financial transparency.  Its not the first regulation you would eliminate, its the last one you hang on to.

In addition, six month waits for corporate numbers is way too long.  It can take as much as 60 days after the reporting period is over for results to be released, so that problems that start occurring in January would not come out of the closet until August or even September.  Enron finally blew up when the chickens finally came home to roost in its third quarter 10-Q.  Were they allowed to put this off for 3 more months the damage could only have been worse.

Of course, if the government changes this rule it does not mean that exchanges such as the NYSE and NASDAQ will change their rule to match.  It is still very possible that absent a federal 10-Q requirement the exchanges would still require such reporting.

Some follow-up thoughts on this post about the murder of Charlie Kirk.

• Pam Bondi has proven herself unqualified to be America's lead attorney.  First she talks about a hate speech exception to the First Amendments which does not exist.  Then she threatens to prosecute service providers who refuse service to someone she disagrees with.  I understand that there is an enormous gulf between laymen's understanding of the First Amendment and settled law (and her boss is one of the worst offenders, at least in his understanding of libel law), but there is no excuse for the US Attorney General to be reinforcing public myths and misunderstandings on this critical topic.  It is particularly incredible to see a Republican AG take these positions, as Republicans have for years fought Progressive attempts to make hate speech illegal and have defended any number of service providers (eg bakers who won't make a cake for gay weddings) who have refused service over matters of conscience.  I will give her credit though for rallying even Progressive MSNBC to attack the notion of a hate speech exemption.
• I have been critical of Republicans for going overboard on cancellation demands (eg so-and-so should be fired) over reactions to the Charlie Kirk shooting.  But I have to give them kudos for almost as one coming down on their own party and hammering Pam Bondi's ignorance.  I had thought that Republicans seemed ready to eat whatever dog food the Trump Administration served, but it is good to know there is something they will send back to the kitchen.
• For all the over-the-top invective I have seen this week, most people (whether they admit it or not) assume there will be no rioting this weekend as Republicans tend not to riot, loot stores, and burn buildings when they are upset.  To some extent I think January 6 was notable because it was such an exception to this.  I live in Phoenix where the Charlie Kirk funeral is this weekend and -- unlike in some past national explosions on the Left -- no one is boarding up the stores in Scottsdale this week (after the 2020 riots caused millions of dollars of damage in Scottsdale Fashion Square, we had prophylactic boarding up several other times after, including around the 2020 election when store owners feared a violent response on the Left if Trump were to win).  It should go without saying, but violence is not speech and is not First Amendment protected.  Maybe we can get Pam Bondi to say that violence is protected by the First Ammendment to get Progressives to finally accept that it is not.
• With all the words spilled this week over this terrible event, I still think what the Utah governor said was the best:  "We need to learn to disagree better."  Which actually is an initiative he has been pursuing for several years.  I have not looked at his program, but I always have some skepticism on such efforts.  Like tax harmonization which always turns out to have all taxes set to match the highest one, calls for cooperation across political divides often boil down to giving more power to the state on the issues the Right wants and giving more power to the state on issues the Left wants.
• The last time there was some violence against Conservative speakers on campus, many universities responded by instituting onerous security rules and fees on Conservative groups trying to bring their speakers to campus.  I hope universities don't go down this road, but it would be typical of them.  Universities have trained their students and faculty for decades that Conservatives are beyond the pale and thus should not be engaged as doing so would legitimize them.  It's like a 19th century English Duke being encouraged to sit down and share a meal with his long-time butler -- it just is not going to happen.
• My wife really likes the Left-Right-Center podcast / radio show.  I confess I have not listened to it as I don't listen to radio and have mostly eschewed non-history podcasts.  I feel like the information rate in audio is too low for my patience level (I listen to audio books at least at 1.5x and don't even get me started on how much I hate voicemail).  But I do think given how on-point the show's concept is to what I think we need more of, I will have to give a listen.  I have always loved Bryan Caplan's Ideological Turning Test concept and try to force myself through the exercise when I get overly angry about some issue.

I would describe myself as an intellectual and a pacifist.  Not a pacifist in the sense that I would accept any outrage to avoid violence, but a pacifist in the sense that violence is way down my list of solution approaches to any problem.  My first, second, and third options are always to try to have a reasoned discussion.

So I was particularly horrified by the news of the murder of Charlie Kirk.  While I frequently disagreed with his positions, and do not share his religious zeal, he was doing exactly what I would have liked to do and what I wish everyone else did – engage in reasoned debate with those who disagree.  He was a model for non-violent engagement with one’s opponents and to be killed while engaging in such debate is a terrible irony.

I can’t find the post but a while back I wrote about what I would do as a college president to combat cancel culture and the toxic intellectual environment on many campuses.  My lead recommendation was to ban the heckler's veto but require that every campus speaker make themselves available for at least an hour of open discussion and debate after any presentation.

As to the motives of the killer in this case, I am not sure I really give a sh*t.  It is an exceedingly popular but absurd game to try to count coup on one’s political opponents based on the actions of a single fringe participant in some of their beliefs.  In my lifetime pretty much every major public assassination of this type has been by someone who turned out to be mentally unbalanced or a total loony.  I am not sure how much value there is to parsing the motivations of the mentally ill – I remember all the attempts to pin the actions of the nut who shot Gabby Giffords on Sarah Palin, which turned out to be 100% a political points-scoring exercise and 0% useful in understanding anything useful.

What has worried me more than the confused politics of mentally ill kills has been watching the public reaction to Luigi Mangioni's cold-blooded murder of Brian Thompson.  Instead of treating him like Charles Manson, we instead see young progressive women treating him like a Teen Beat cover boy.  People have contributed over $1 million to his defense fund and the “Luigi Mangione Access to Healthcare Act" is a real ballot initiative gathering signatures in California at this moment – presumably the Initiative’s promoters felt Mangione’s name had positive marketing power in the California progressive community.

Equally, anyone should be horrified by folks going online to celebrate Charlie Kirk's murder.  Many examples of such social media celebrations have been dredged up and archived by Conservative commentators.  They are all awful, though it is hard to determine just how representative they are of general feelings on the Left.

There is a funny dynamic in which both team Red and team Blue believe their side to be well-behaved while the other side is steeped in violent rhetoric.  There is a reason for this, as alluded to earlier:  Opinion-makers from both teams love to explore the other team's fringe supporters to look for craziness, and inevitably find it.  They amplify those crazy opposing fringe views to their own supporters, building the impression among their supporters that the other side is violent and dangerous.  But since most folks don't read across the red-blue line, they don't see such accusations of their own side.  In fact they are confused if you mention to them that their side has violent rhetoric, because they honestly may never have seen it in the mainstream sources they read.

I once had a feature on this blog where I would take advantage of being one of the few to read both sides of the aisle to post interesting juxtapositions from Left and Right.  One of the most common I saw (and still see) is the statement "our side loses too much because we are too genteel, we need to start being more bare-knuckled like the other guys."  I once saw this on the same day at Conservative Powerline and from Progressive Kevin Drum.

A typical formulation of this you will see a lot is "we need to start playing by their rules"  or "they made the new rules so they are going to have to live with them now" or even to an extent the "FAFO" mantra used by Trump supporters nowadays. At this moment the Left is blaming Charlie Kirk's death on the Right's violent rhetoric and is saying the Right needs to have a timeout while the Right responds to his death by urging its supporters that it is perhaps time to stop being so genteel and passive.  Both see Charlie Kirk's death through a lens where their side is well-behaved and the other is toxic and violent.

All of this is a (typically) long-winded intro to what I actually was going to write about, which is the people getting fired for posts on social media celebrating Charlie Kirk's death.  In particular, a lot of these seem to be public school teachers and public university professors.  And I can understand the concern one would have if their kid had a teacher who in their private hours was celebrating violence on social media.

But here is the "but" from the post title.  If this stuff is actually happening in the classroom, then these terminations may stick.  But otherwise, if they were terminated for private speech in their free time, it is very likely administrative or legal appeals will result in these teachers being back at work very soon.  Public school teachers are public employees, no different than clerks in the DMV.  And it is highly unlikely that they can be terminated over their private protected speech.  Celebrating a death is protected speech.  Even saying "such and such public figure should die next" is protected under many circumstances.  Of course this is going to drive the Right crazy when "liberal judges" send these folks back to work, but it is going to happen.**

As ugly as this stuff is, it is also depressing to see the Right engage in cancel culture after so many years of being its victim.  Yes, I know folks like Amy Wax and other educators with libertarian or conservative opinions have had to fight suspensions and terminations over their speech.  And some of these statements are really awful, but a gay parent or student might argue that anti-gay statements by a teacher are equally awful.  The acceptability of speech is often in the eye of the beholder and thus the very reason why its legality needs to be absolute.

I am not a Conservative but I am an opponent of much of the Progressive / woke / Marxist dogma and thus make common cause with Conservatives on some issues.  But I find myself drifting apart from Conservatives of late on tactics, even on issues where we agree.  It is impossible to call a trend after just a few days, but a LOT of Conservatives are responding to the Charlie Kirk murder by saying its time to stop being so genteel and to play by what they perceive as the Left's rules,  Folks like myself who respond to escalation by trying to de-escalate are treated as losers, rubes, patsies, etc.

Well, I hate the totalitarian Marxist woke culture on the Progressive Left.  And I am coming to hate the Conservative FAFO response (where they have adopted a term from drunken bar fights).  I am determined to find a reasoned way out.  Which, by the way, is exactly what I think Charlie Kirk was trying to do.  Perhaps instead of FAFO, Conservatives organized an initiative where many of them went to campus and propped up Charlie's "prove me wrong" sign.

I would find it horrible if we were to further escalate the most toxic elements of the current political culture as the primary memorial to a man who tried as hard as anyone to de-escalate them.  De-escalating does not mean one is giving up advocating for you are passionate about, it means trying to get there in a reasoned, collegial manner.

In this way, I'm with Charlie Kirk.

** Postscript:  Don't like having crazy progressive idiots for teachers of your children?  Instead of working to get them fired -- there are too many! -- advocate for school choice.  I don't think there is a bigger problem in this country than the state of the K-12 education system.  It is the meta-problem from which many, many others flow.  We have got to stop giving the same people who run the DMV and the Post Office a virtual monopoly on our kid's education.  I have had the resources to send my kids to private school -- and I have seen how much better it can be.  My kids in K-5, for example, went to a private school with very high standards that taught math and reading at a high level and cost less per year than the Phoenix public school system pays per pupil of the same age.

Earlier this year I wrote in the context of a post about racism:

I do think the system goes wrong for blacks but it is not in any arena controlled by the proud boys.  And I  have a strong opinion on where that system failure lies:  K through 12 education, and probably even more specifically K-5 education.  We have affirmative action in the workplace for blacks.  Why?  Because there do not seem to be enough prepared candidates so we give less-prepared candidates a leg up.  Before that we have affirmative action in college for blacks.  Why?  Because there do not seem to be enough prepared candidates so we give less-prepared candidates a leg up.  We keep changing the SAT test.  Why?  Because blacks historically struggle to score as well as whites and other races on the test.  We keep changing (lowering) high school graduation requirements.  Why?  Because to many black children fail to graduate with the higher standards.

All of this stuff are after-the-fact attempted work-arounds that avoid fixing the real problem:  K-12 education is totally failing black kids.  Any root cause failure analysis would get to this conclusion.  You want to say that systemic racism exists?  Well here is the place where the system is totally failing one race.  If I were more of an expert, I could probably tell you which grade it is where things go off the rails but my guess is that it is an early grade where reading and basic math are not getting taught.  And it has little to do with money -- school districts like East St Louis have some of the highest per-student spending numbers in the country but their kids graduate completely unprepared for modern life.

If I were the biggest racist in history and wanted to come up with a Dr Evil scheme to destroy blacks in America, I could not come up with a better plan than the K-12 education system, particularly in many large cities.

Dear Republicans,

I am sorry I have not had time to write sooner, and I only have time for a short missive.  But I want you to know that you are NOT going to like living with the precedents that Trump is setting right now for Presidential power.

I know you have convinced yourselves that you will be in power forever.  Believe me, I know -- the Democrats thought the same thing after 2020 and even more so after the 2022 election.  And I know some of the court challenges at the margin have been nutty -- the injunction against Congress legislatively cutting funding to certain organizations was completely baseless, for example.  These crazy court challenges at the bleeding edge have allowed you to convince yourselves -- wrongly -- that all of Trump's actions are perfectly normal and legal and all the legal actions are unjustified.   You will not like future administrations firing Republican commissioners from typically bipartisan organizations.  You will not like Presidents setting tariff rates (or by extension other tax rates) at will.  You will not like a Federal Reserve that is a lapdog to the current administration (perhaps the only thing that can make the Fed worse than it is already).  You will not like Presidential powers that trump state and local governments on even the smallest details.

You all need to relearn Coyote's Law -- never give the government (or particularly the President) powers you do not want your worst enemy to wield, because sure as hell your worst enemy will be in charge some day.  Yes, I know previous administrations pushed the envelope on Presidential power.  Unfortunately, when faced with an opposition party in the prior administration that took a bad precedent from level 4 to an 8, both parties will likely NOT respond by de-escalating but by pushing the 8 up to 11.