The first step toward correcting a problem is admitting you have one. The left isn’t there yet.
Take, for example, Kenneth Roth, the president of the advocacy group Human Rights Watch. On Thursday, he gave the left a headline over which it could not resist salivating: “Human Rights Group Portrays the U.S. as Major Threat, Citing Trump,” the New York Times blared. Dig into the article, however, and the basis upon which Roth has determined the U.S. represents a “threat” to global human rights is entirely speculative.
Citing Trump’s “misogynistic, xenophobic, and racist rhetoric,” Roth sees a grim future. “This is a more fundamental threat to human rights than George W. Bush after 9/11,” he said. “I see Trump treating human rights as a constraint on the will of the majority in a way that Bush never did.”
Roth fancies himself a soothsayer. He pores over the entrails and—omens, auguries, and portents dire—prophesizes dark days ahead. Roth’s prediction must be a bit speculative, of course, because Donald Trump hasn’t taken office yet. Nothing has happened. This minor point cannot get in the way of pique and melodrama. We’ve got a persecution complex to nurse!
HRW’s dire warnings are exposed as entirely hollow partisanship once one takes the time to read the complaint. There, Roth’s group cites the potential repeal of the Affordable Care Act and Trump’s pledge to appoint “pro-life” Supreme Court justices as evidence of the incoming president’s antipathy toward basic human rights. If those are violations of basic human dignity, than it isn’t Trump who represents a threat to human rights in HRW’s estimation but conservatism.
That is not to say that Roth and human-rights advocates have no reason to worry. As HRW noted, Trump made campaign-trail pledges to create a Muslim database and to deport over ten million immigrants in just two years. And his promise to reinstitute practices like waterboarding is arguably disconcerting. We must at some point acknowledge, though, that the left appears to enjoy this discomfited feeling. To maintain it, they must ignore everything that has happened since November 8.
“No, I would not call it mass deportations,” Trump said of his immigration policy as early as June of last year. In a November 13 interview with CBS News, Trump seemed to waver on his pledge to create a “deportation force” to perform the herculean task of ridding the United States of its illegal immigrant population. In a December interview with TIME, Trump appeared to endorse President Barack Obama’s deferred-deportation initiative for the children of illegal immigrants. Members of Congress, including the Republican Speaker of the House, have made assurances that fears of a jackbooted deportation squadron are unwarranted.
Trump and his administration have refused to rule out the reinstitution of a “Muslim database,” but on this front, too, the trademark bravado that characterized the campaign has disappeared. “President-elect Trump has never advocated for any registry or system that tracks individuals based on their religion, and to imply otherwise is completely false,” claimed former Trump transition team spokesperson Jason Miller. “We’re not going to have a registry based on a religion,” incoming White House Chief of Staff Reince Priebus asserted flatly in December. If HRW’s concern is that the U.S. could monitor persons of interest with potential exposure to terrorist elements abroad, their contention is that reasonable counterterrorism practices constitute a threat to human rights.
Finally, the notion that Bush-era extraordinary rendition practices are set to make a comeback also seems to have little basis in reality. By Trump’s own admission, his Defense Secretary-designate James Mattis impressed upon him the uselessness of “torture” tactics. Trump’s nominee to head the Department of Homeland Security, General John Kelly, his Attorney General-designate Jeff Sessions, and likely incoming CIA director Mike Pompeo have all said tactics like waterboarding are not making a comeback. Pompeo went so far as to stress that he would disobey the commander-in-chief’s order to use enhanced interrogation techniques but added that he does not foresee ever receiving that order.
None of this made it into HRW’s overwrought fundraising appeal in the form of a complaint against the United States. Like Harvard University’s Electoral Integrity Project, which laughably determined that North Carolina is today less free and democratic than North Korea, Human Rights Watch has given its critics ample justification to ignore its findings. The temptation to posture for the benefit of chin-stroking liberals has led much of Trump’s opposition to sacrifice their credibility. They may come to regret it.
