This Guy.

Meet Matthew Walther. Note the creepy Reichstag haircut. Note the strangely manicured ‘stache that creates the illusion of a little rectangle of hair in the philtrum, directly under the nose and above the lip. I see that Mr. Walther has ended rants he wrote for The American Conservative e-zine with the line, “Yours in the struggle.” (Look up the meaning of “Kampf” in German.)

But I digress. I’m not seriously calling him a Nazi. I am seriously calling him a douchebag.

The New York Times ran an oped last week by Mr. Walther. It was not badly written, but thuddingly stupid and dishonest in concept. The headline read: “Why I don’t vote — and why maybe you shouldn’t, too.”

Yeah, he was urging people not to vote, and doing it on the Fourth of July, and this was in reference to what is shaping up to be the most consequential election in collective memory. You don’t have to read it, but feel free. I can summarize:: Voting is stupidly pointless; no need to do it because your single ballot will never matter in any election. The term “civic duty” is quaint and fuddyduddy, and is no longer applicable to modern society. He claimed that he himself had not voted in the past several election cycles.

Now, some thoughts about this.

First, The Times eventually amended the story, apparently after some online sleuths discovered Walther Had Indeed voted in at least two recent elections, in 2020 and 2022. So the story was quickly changed, but incompetently and dishonestly and cravenly. In it, he now admits to voting in at least one of those, because it was on a ballot initiative he cared about. Neither he or the Times acknowledged that this admission essentially invalidated his entire point and the entire story, because, you know, your vote on a ballot initiative ALSO won’t carry any electoral heft. So the Times changed “Don’t Vote” to Won’t Vote” — as though that fixed the fatal logical flaw — and eliminated the second sentence altogether, because — you know — it was obnoxious, and people had noticed. Then they removed the story off their home page and hid it inside. But they did not take it down.

Also, not incidentally, Walther once wrote a churlish piece about how he wanted to vote but was prohibited from doing so at the polling place because he wasn’t registered and also because his drivers license had expired, so he had no valid ID. He felt that was a “grotesque violation of my civic rights,” a noisome assertion he than further stank up by specifying that his cruel bureaucratic tormenters at the polling place were “a pair of gray-haired lady librarian Democrats.”

Mr. Walther has some serious far-right baggage, which is curious since conservatives like him are the ones who for some dang reason want to tighten polling-place restrictions. According to capitolhunters, a watchdog group that organizes information about the 1/6 Capitol attack, Walther is also “an extremist Catholic graduate of Hillsdale College, part of the religious-right faction behind Jan 6.” None of this was acknowledged in the Times story.

—

Brief digression: Send your questions and observations here:

-

Back to the issue of whether you should vote.

In October 2004, as the Bush-Kerry election approached, I wrote a magazine cover story about nonvoters — and basically asked the same annoying question Walther did.

The story was titled “None of the Above.” Here is the story , but its long, so I’ll just print the salient part here:

—

From the story:

And this raises a valid, if impertinent question: When it comes to voting or not voting, why should any individual give a damn?

One of the more intriguing books about nonvoting, To Vote or Not to Vote, actually begins by wondering why anyone votes at all. Author Andre Blais tries to answer this question by applying the modern economist's favorite scientific model, the Rational Choice Theory. Rational Choice analyzes human decision-making based on a fairly simple mathematical cost-benefit ratio. Blais, who is a Rational Choice acolyte, winds up basically throwing up his hands. The costs of voting (registering, going to the polls, waiting in line, etc.) so outweigh any palpable benefits (no vote is ever likely to directly influence anything) that the model essentially falls apart.

Can it be that those who don't vote are the most rational among us? If a single vote is without influence, isn't casting one illogical?

Mathematically speaking, sure. Even in Florida, even in 2000, the breathtakingly narrow margin in the official vote tally was hundreds of times larger than one person's vote.

But there is something profoundly unsettling about the idea that voting is, basically, senseless. That may be because mathematical logic is not the only type of rigorous reasoning. Moral and political philosophers have spent centuries mulling civic duties and obligations. Perhaps that's the place to look for guidance, because deciding whether to vote is not so much a question of math as a matter of morals.

Immanuel Kant, the 18th-century German philosopher, lived in an era of monarchy; his works never directly addressed the issue of voting. But he addressed, at great length, issues of moral responsibility. In his treatise on the Categorical Imperative, Kant concluded that all human actions, if moral, must be taken not to achieve what is best for you, or even to accomplish a particular result you desire. The moral act, he said, is the one which, if universalized, would result in the greatest good. In other words, in a given situation, minor or momentous, the moral person acts the way he would want everyone to act if they were faced with a similar choice.

What would happen if, literally, not a single person voted? Jefferson's Grand Experiment ends in ignominy. Anarchy reigns. Regional warlords rise to power in a return to a feudal state. There are medieval codes of honor, indentured servitude, after-dinner floggings.

Hence, Kant would argue, the only moral choice is to vote.

—

I’m going with Kant over that other great moral philosopher, the pocket pistol of phony facts and tortured logic, Mr. Walther PPK.

—

And finally, I want to discuss another, very brief story that I wrote as a Post op-ed on a Tuesday back in early November, 2004. (It ends with a bang.)

My Father’s Vision.

My father, Philip Weingarten, is 90. He wears hearing aids in both ears. At night, before he goes to bed, he removes them as he stands with his head above an open dresser drawer. That is because he is a practical man. He knows that if he dropped one on the floor, he could never find it. He cannot see the floor.

His right eye sees nothing. The sight that remains in his left eye is so limited that, to read, he must use a machine that magnifies each letter to the size of a baseball. In this manner, he reads The Washington Post every day, all day. The retina in his functioning eye is a rubble of scar tissue, so ravaged from diabetic damage and macular degeneration that his doctor doesn't know how he sees anything at all. Somehow his brain has learned to cobble together into vaguely recognizable images the fractured signals from the few neurons that still fire….

He moves in a determined shuffle, behind an aluminum walker. When he ventures outside, he needs a companion to warn him of the presence of a curb, or a sidewalk anomaly. The ground is a soupy mist to him, swallowing his legs at the thigh. Daylight can play mischief with his eyesight. Sometimes, the empty streets before him are aswarm with pint-sized people, or blocked with poplar trees, or are a landscape of yawning craters. These are the only things he sees in sharp focus, because they bypass his ruined eyes entirely. They are inventions of his brain, a medical syndrome not uncommon in people with profound loss of vision. They are hallucinations, but not delusions. He knows they are unreal. Still, it is an act of faith and no small courage to step forward into an abyss, trembling just a little, just because someone you love tells you it is safe.

It is through this foggy soup and minefield of phantasms that my father will walk this afternoon, with me at his side, into a church in suburban Maryland. There -- as he has done every four years since he chose Roosevelt over Landon -- he will cast a mathematically insignificant vote for president of the United States. Because he knows it is the right thing to do.

So, what are you doing today?

—

I also will take Philip Weingarten over Matthew Walther.

—

I have two reasonable questions remaining here, and theories about what they mean.

One: Why does Walther not want to you vote? Why does he care? A modest suggestion: Because he wants to vote, as he has demonstrated in the past. He plans on voting. He just doesn’t want you to vote onaconna most engaged, thinking readers are libs, and libs are more openminded and less hidebound, and maybe more likely to change their minds in the face of a convincing argument, so these are the people he is talking to, urging them not to vote. See?

And finally, what’s up with The Times? Printing that piece was a serious failure of due diligence and good judgment, compounded by a chicken-hearted, half-measure reaction when they were caught. I have a theory about that, too, and I hate to voice it because I am the guy who almost always defends newspapers when readers cavil at some reasonable choice the media has made, or impute base motives to ordinary journalistic decisions.

However.

The Times has saturated its pages with stories about Biden’s alleged senescence, Democrats’ growing willingness to urge Joe Biden to step down, the unnerved teeth-gnashing mood of the public, etc. It’s vast overkill. A journalist counted: The Times had run 192 stories on the subject in the ten days since the debate, including 50 editorials and 142 news stories.

The controversy is legitimate. It is a big story, and no one should argue it is not. It is based on observable fact. The apparent defections from an otherwise effective sitting president by members of his own party is alone significant. But no other newspaper has come close to the obsessive hemorrhage the Times has shown.

And now they run this shoddy, shallow, shitty Independence Day piece urging people not to vote.

What’s with The Times? Is there actually an … agenda?

It is well known and has been well reported that the Times’s upper management is pissed off at Biden because he has declined to grant them an exclusive interview, while giving one to lesser venues including, um, Howard Stern’s show. Is their suffocating coverage at least partially driven by a petty tantrum?

Also, the Times was the first paper to editorially call for Biden to step down — the very day after the debate. It was daring and risky, and at least to me, shockingly premature. I actually suspect that on some level the paper’s management is trying to justify and bolster and defend its case. This doesn’t sit right with me. Advocacy journalism is fine. Self-serving advocacy journalism is not.

—

Today’s Gene Pool Gene Poll:

—

Hey, you know who’s great? Jen Psaki. Check out this short clip.

—

I was surprised by the results of The Weekend Gene Pool Gene Poll. I asked you this:

Are you angry with / disappointed by Biden for staying in the race given that the relentless furor over his debate performance is -- fairly or unfairly -- dominating the news and invigorating MAGAS and the Trump campaign, and could even flip the Senate?

A daunting 41 percent said '“yes,” and 30 percent said “a little.” Only 29 percent said “no.” I did not expect that from my audience, a group of mostly older, mostly solidly liberal folk. It has to mean something. The sample was pretty big.

In the second question, I asked who your best replacement for Biden would be, should he withdraw. Harris won, but the. answers were all over the map. Whitmer, Newsom, Buttigieg.

Well, it turns out there might be no choice. It might have to be Harris, for boring, purely logistical reasons. Check out this Twitter string by Dana Houle, who used to run Democratic campaigns. It’s pretty persuasive.

—

Okay, we now enter the real-time segment of the Gene Pool, where you ask questions and I respond to them in real time. So far, many of these involve responses to my challenge this weekend to tell us moments you’ve had where you suddenly realized you were becoming a geezer. Also, reactions to this Times story, about 3 deans fired from Columbia for alleged antisemitism. I had linked to it in Monday’s Emergency Gene Pool.

—

Q: I am a mere 66, but I  believe I can hold my own in fogey-ness with people significantly older, viz.: I am proud to be driving my 2010 Kia Rio with manual door locks and windows, and of course, a CD player.

A: I drive a 2008 Honda Civic with a CD player.  I still have a case of CDs I can use there and nowhere else. After taking many brush-bys, My driver’s side view mirror is frozen in one position, one appropriate for a taller person.  Rather than bother to get it fixed at my age, I sit on a pillow.

—

Q: I collect netsukes.  (pronounced “net-skays” ) They are saccharine little figurines. Many are Japanese antiques made of ivory, others are cheap Chinese ripoffs.  The best ones represent long-ago animal slaughter and are all are ostentatious and overly, preciously cute. I don’t really like them that much, but once I started (I was 30) I couldn’t stop. I have many, many.    I recognize this is marginally senile behavior.  I am now 38 and hold a responsible job.  

A: Good news: My beloved ma, who was born in 1915, collected them, too. Bad news: She was 65 and just a bit barmy when she started.

—

Q: When you have kids, your life is full of fogey moments. I had my twins 22 years ago, when I was 31. Here is a partial list of things that astound them from my childhood.

* They can't understand how typewriters work. Where's the screen? How do you preview what you've written? How do you correct mistakes?

* Wait, to know the exact time you called a phone number?

* Trucks didn't beep when they backed up?

— Marisa

A:  Have you ever seen this video?  It’s spectacular.  

—

TIMELY TIP: If you’re reading this on an email: JUST CLICK ON THE HEADLINE IN THE EMAIL AND IT WILL DELIVER YOU TO THE FULL COLUMN ONLINE. Keep refreshing the screen to see the new questions and answers that appear as I regularly update the post.

Please remember to Observe and Question:

Also, you can upgrade your subscription to “paid” here, but only if you oppose ignorant, malevolent autocracy:

 Q: Here are two-idiot moments-in-one from almost 20 years ago when I was in my late forties, so it's more of an ADHD moment, which are pretty much indistinguishable from fogey moments except that you suffer from them your whole life: I was going to meet my husband at his workplace for lunch, and he called me from his office phone to ask me to bring his cell phone from home, which he'd forgotten. When I pulled up at his workplace, 1) I tried to call him on his cell phone to tell him I'd arrived, and 2) not only was I annoyed when he didn't answer, but I got annoyed at his ringing phone in the front seat of the car, muttering, "And now here's someone trying to call him and I don't know whether to answer it or not."

-- Francesca Kelly

A: This is excellent. 

—

Q: I am 32. I do needlepoint. Nuff said.

A: Indeed. Do you do “home sweet home?” Do you darn socks? Do you tat, whatever that is?

—

This is Gene.  I’m going to print my  views on the Columbia mess before I start publishing yours, which will dominate the rest of the chat, because I think my points might provide fodder for further discussion. They will infuriate many of you, and delight others.   Your responses so far have been deeply thought out, impressively expressed, and wildly disparate.

I would have voted “overreaction.”  It’s a complex issue but to me, but it boils down to several things. 

1.  Despite the school’s pompous, self-righteous, unexplained and unelaborated-on assertion that this was antisemitic hate speech  – many in the public seem willing to just accept this judgment –  I don’t see it.  This is a key point; if that falls apart, the punishment becomes a pretext.  I see it as three administrators snarking privately to one another, as many of us do, with friends.  There is no sign and no allegation that they were discriminatory in their official acts, or in how they treat students of different backgrounds.  They were not, as I see it, criticizing entire cultures or ethnicities, but the individuals whose speeches they were watching at the moment.  But most important: 

2. None of this was intended to be public.  They were being careless — that’s fair to say — but they were not trying to persuade anyone of anything or disseminate their views.    And so, logically, the school was punishing private

   thought.  This was a furtively stolen private correspondence.  

3. This seems part of a trend I despise: College presidents being stampeded into overreaction at the threat of losing their jobs, due to agitation from the radical, self-righteous right wing, over so-called “wokeness.”

The best argument on the other side is not without merit: that these were administrators, with a higher duty, and that some of them were in charge of helping students directly, which requires a purity not just of actions, but of  thought.  Also, that their speech – whether or not intended to be private – occurred at a highly charged event where antisemitism was the key issue, so what they did was foolish to the point of undermining confidence in their ability to lead.  

 I see the point and don’t dismiss it.   It would be very clear if they were sharing these thoughts publicly, but that was not their intent.  I probably would have been fired a long time ago – and I am guessing many of you, too – if my private snarky emails were hacked.   And if you read the texts again, I think you will agree they were intemperate and highly opinionated about individual speakers, and express political opinions – but not hate speech against cultures, which to me is all that matters.  If you disapprove of Netanyahu’s policies,  that doesn’t mean you hate the Jewish people.  If you support Palestinians it doesn’t mean you approve of Hamas.

What if I had been watching a presentation by Jeff Bezos and texted to Tom Shroder that Bezos was sounding like an idiot?  And someone hacked it, and gave it to Bezos?  And I was fired.  Wouldn’t that seem like an awful violation not just of free speech but also the right to think in private? Wouldn’t it represent a petty abuse of power by Bezos?  I can see being called on the carpet, reeducated in proper communications and good judgment, but not fired.  There are ways of doing this short of ending a career.  

It does bring to mind the ancient JournoList semi-scandal, where a so-called private chat room populated by journalists who had pretty strident liberal tendencies was exposed by a saboteur journalist, and heads rolled.   I think that Ezra Klein, who was the creator or JournoList,  would probably agree in retrospect that  it was unwise – but the situation was different.  The group’s messages were not remotely private.  The thoughts were being publicly shared with an audience of more than 250 people.   Any expectation of privacy was so naive as to be fatuous.  

I don’t think that the person who secretly took the photos did anything wrong.  It was a public area; you are allowed to do that.   I think she had the right to give it to a website, if she was nasty enough to do it.   I don’t think The Times or any other news outlet that published the  story did anything wrong. It was an ongoing controversy of current interest.   I do think the Columbia management responded in a craven  way.  To protect their own jobs, they fired others. 

By the way, I don’t deny that Columbia had the right to demote these people, or even fire them.   They work for a private institution, which is allowed to freely control who works there, based on their standards.  The First Amendment doesn’t fully apply. 

You can now have at me.

—

Q: Hey, Biden said he was the first black woman president.  You actually think he’s entirely okay?

A: I didn’t say I think he’s entirely okay.  But even at half speed, I think he is an exponentially  better choice than his opponent. The same complaints arose over him in 2020, and he was vague and fumble-lipped then, too, and then became a fine president.  Compare  him with Trump.  For whom should the thinking person vote? 

Besides, he didn’t really say, or mean to say, he was the first black woman vice president. 

Here is the audioclip.

As a speaker, Biden is a fumfurer.  He elides and conflates and confuses things.   

This is what he said: “By the way, I'm proud to be, as I said, the first vice president, first Black woman, to serve with a Black president.”

This is what he meant to say, I am sure, edited by me:   “By the way, I'm proud to be, as I said, [in the party with] the first vice president, first Black woman, [and ] to serve with a Black president.”

I don’t think I’m being protective here.  I think it’s obvious.  Biden is a bad speaker, and always has been. He’s inarticulate, and not as oratorically sharp as he once was, but he’s not crazy.

—

Q: The entire point of this or any panel discussion was to listen to the speakers (or offer to speak yourself - or ask a question).  These deans acted disrespectfully when they spent the entire time on their phones as if they were live blogging the Oscars. That behavior was distracting and drew the attention of attendees. No invasion of privacy occurs when you draw attention to yourself by your own public misbehavior. Trust me, at a recent alumni panel at my Seven Sister Alma mater no one spent the entire time on their phone, certainly not the deans and college administrators.  Second, this was a college event and they were there in their official capacity.  They had no right to have a personal call or text during the event. Both of those alone could get your fired in most corporate environments. You can’t listen if you are also speaking. Third, if you don’t want to be accused of being an antisemite don’t act like one.  There was nothing vague or subtle about mocking the students, the campus Rabbi, or parents of Jewish students. I am not Jewish, but as the parent of a Columbia graduate I am beyond disgusted by those who texted antisemitic tropes and open vitriol at this event. – Lynne Larkin

A:  “Mocking the students, the campus Rabbi, or parents of Jewish students.” Not even in private, to one’s colleagues, in a discussion you never intended to be public, and had every reason to be believe it would remain private?  

Lynne, have you never snarked things to trusted friends that you would have been mortified had they gone public?  If so, you are a saint, and I applaud you.

Q: Here's a what-if exercise.  What if one of the deans included in the conversation did not text any response.  Would that dean be responsible for reporting the conversation?  Would that dean be culpable for not reporting the conversation?  

Follow-up question.  Were the deans punished because they exchanged thoughts or because Columbia was embarrassed by publication of those thoughts?

Another follow-up.  New York is a one-party state when it comes to the legality of recording a conversation.  However, the law is generally interpreted to mean that any party involved in a conversation may record it.  However, in this case, the person who took pictures of the text messages was not a party involved in the conversation.  Would those involved in the text message conversation have a reasonable expectation of privacy if they were using their personal cell phones?  Or does the fact that they are in a public setting negate any expectation of privacy?

– John Kupiec

A:  These are good questions.

Q: Hello!  University (not Columbia) lawyer here, speaking anonymously for obvious reasons.  My response to your Monday poll was "about right" based on my lived experience that "on administrative leave and not expected to return to their positions" is university-speak for "will be terminated from their at-will positions once we've had a chance to work through processes."  In other words, the three on leave will be fired.  I'd guess the remaining dean is hanging by a thread but higher-ups like him, so he isn't on leave yet and may be deemed a bystander within the text group and survive.  But if he doesn't, it will be a self-inflicted wound for participating in the group text at all.  

This situation falls generically into the category of "you had one job, and...."  University administrators have a lot of jobs, but behaving in your official role (including communications with colleagues) with respect toward all segments of the university community is the Prime Directive.  You can disagree with what this or that group says about nearly anything but you must must must not drip sarcasm on them when you do it.  It almost doesn't matter that the subject of their derisive text exchange is the subject du jour and one that is both fraught and nuanced and under extraordinary scrutiny.  The merits of their statements are also irrelevant.  They could have been making far more substantively defensible statements on a far less controversial topic, and they'd still be violating the First Law of University Administration if they did it in writing using vomit emojis directed at their colleagues or students.  The fact that they did it about this topic under those circumstances shows that in addition to having a poor understanding of their university roles, they are either really arrogant, woefully ignorant of how texting works despite approximately a gajillion recent examples of college administrators losing their jobs over electronic communications, or both.  Good riddance. 

A: Also, very good observations.   So essentially they were fired. 

—

Q: The punishment would be about right IF these deans had openly shared their comments in a public university forum. However, whatever we might think of these sentiments, they were being made among 3 people in a private conversation that should and would have remained private if not for some busybody who felt it OK/righteous to take - and share! - screen shots. 

Now 3 lives are ruined and the perpetrator presumably gets to smugly think what he/she did was justified.

I am intrigued enough to ask my Jewish writing groups when next I see them this Friday.

A: Report back, please. 

Q: Come on these are professors and campus administrators at a high class university. They should know better than to engage in snarky behavior. Best punishment is loss of their admin positions and a note, to last 5 years, in their personnel files.

A: Again, is it snarky behavior to exchange caustic opinions with your friends?

Q: I don’t see any evidence of antisemitism in the photos shared by that conservative newspaper, even with the spin that the writer put on it. This firing reminds me of character assassination. 

A: Noted. 

—

Q: I knew I was getting old when, from a sitting position, I could not stand up without making an 'old man' noise, kind of a ergah thing, from deep in the throat; with age (I'm now 76) it's only gotten worse.  – Roger Dalrymple

A: Haha.  I am no longer entirely comfortable going up or down stairs that have no stair rail.

–

Q: I have for some decades been uncomfortable with the use of the term "anti-Semitism" to describe what are specifically anti-Jewish beliefs, statements, etc.  The Palestinians and other Arabs are at least as Semitic as I am (and probably more so, given that my ancestors and I, though Jewish, have not used a Semitic language in everyday speech for many generations).  

If something is anti-Jewish, say so.  

Ken Gallant

–

A: It’s an odd point, and a bit tangential, but interesting!

—

 Q: Well, geez, Gene. You seem to me to miss an important point. What Netanyahu and his - for lack of a better word -- Minions are doing is nothing less than genocide. Palestinians are not Hamas. I have Palestinian friends. Israeli settlers have been methodically stealing their land and oppressing them in many ways for many decades. In Palestine, the Israeli experience is referred to as Nakba - the Catastrophe. Not very far from the word "Holocaust" and for similar reasons. And far from being antisemitic, I am, and always have been, a Jew.

A: I’m not seeing your point.  Israeli settlers are a pretty small segment of the Israeli population, no?  And a goodly proportion of Israelis oppose the settlements. AND Netanyahu.

—

This is Gene. I am calling us down. There are dozen more smart and clever points that have been made, and are being made. I will publish and answer them on Thursday, when the Invitational presents the excellent results of our contest to produce rhyming couplets about historical events.

Please keep sending in questions and observations here:

And if you are of a mind to, consider upgrading your subscription to “paid.'“