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MY NEW YORK POST COLUMN: Lindsay Clancy’s lawyer bashed America’s juries — and battered another pillar of justice.

What we witnessed in Portsmouth was a public explosion of the deepest fissure in British society right now. On one side stands a state that has abdicated its prime responsibility, which is to defend Britain’s territory and Britain’s people from external forces. And on the other stand everyday citizens enraged by this managed suicide of British statehood, by the sacrifice of our sovereignty at the altar of a phoney globalist virtue that says borders are bigotry and migration is splendid.

A Home Office whistleblower has said what many of us have suspected for some time: that the vast majority of “asylum seeker” claims are false. In fact, he says, only around one per cent are genuine. For the state to keep foisting strong, fit, aggy men onto communities that don’t want them, while barking “They’re asylum seekers, you racists”, is wicked and preposterous. If the state wants to put a stop to the kind of vigilantism we saw in Portsmouth, then it just needs to do one simple thing: its job.

– Brendan O’Neill

I’ve been recounting the lessons I learned from (unsuccessfully) running for Congress. The first lesson was that politics is a time warp. With a few exceptions, it is dominated by people who started running for office, or started their preparation for running for office, decades ago—and this explains why our political system can be so slow to react to quickly changing events.

I came across a figure that confirms part of this: a calculation that in this year’s primaries (as of late June), the number of congressional incumbents who were running for office and won their primaries dropped dramatically: from 98.2% to, er, 97.1%. That article notes that an unusually large number of incumbents decided not to run for re-election this year. (This is mostly on the Republican side—people who aren’t sufficiently aligned with Trump, or people who realize he’s going to drag them down to defeat in the general election.) But the point still stands. In my case, I didn’t know if my main opponent’s one term in Congress sixteen years ago would confer most of the advantages of incumbency, and yep, it did.

The second big lesson I learned is that this applies to the voters, too—and especially a party’s core voters, the ones who tend to decide the primaries and determine what alternatives you see on your ballot in November. The composition of these voters also tends to reflect the reasons people got involved in politics decades ago, whether they’re local organizers and activists or just the politically engaged rank-and-file—rather than their response to recent events.

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The Laws of Ideologial Inertia

This was driven home to me pretty early on when I met a very nice local Democratic Party organizer in Nelson County (between Charlottesville and Lynchburg) who is a Navy veteran, who has worked on veterans’ issues for years, and who will grill you on those issues at every available opportunity. There’s nothing wrong with that, as far as it goes; every issue needs its single-minded advocates or it will be forgotten in favor of something else. But this set a pattern, and the problem is that the priorities created by these prior political commitments can be a little too unyielding to the requirements of current events.

Here’s an example of what I mean.

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Last week both Google and Apple updated their maps to accommodate Trump changing the United States Geological Survey’s recognized name for Lake Ontario to “Lake America”. Just as with Trump’s fiat renaming of the Gulf of Mexico back in the first days of his 2.0 administration, Google and Apple are showing the same names to the same people, by region. Here are the names you now see for Lake Ontario, based on what region your device is set to:

• United States: “Lake America”
• Canada: “Lake Ontario”
• Everywhere else in the world: “Lake Ontario (Lake America)”

This is exactly the same as their joint solution to the Gulf of Mexico renaming — the U.S. sees “Gulf of America”, Mexico sees “Gulf of Mexico”, and the rest of the world sees “Gulf of Mexico (Gulf of America)”.

Here is the solution I strongly believe Google and Apple should follow:

• United States: “Lake America (Lake Ontario)” and “Gulf of America (Gulf of Mexico)”
• Everywhere else in the world: “Lake Ontario” and “Gulf of Mexico”

There is no reason to show these new Trump-dictated names anywhere outside the U.S., even putting them in parentheses. There is no reason to show only the actual traditional names exclusively for users in Canada (for Lake Ontario) and Mexico (for the Gulf). Treating Canada and Mexico as special cases only makes sense if they’re part of some sort of dispute over the names. They’re not. The names of these two bodies of water are not contentious. There is no long-simmering debate about them, like there is with Denali/Mount McKinley in Alaska. The one and only country on the planet with a crackpot kook-ridden government that claims these bodies of water have new names is the United States; the only country that should see the new names is the United States.¹

So, I disagree with how Google and Apple have chosen to handle these re-namings. But it is correct that users in the United States do see the new names.

Here’s Andy Ihnatko, at his eponymous website:

We all have every right to be upset. Google’s receiving plenty of flak over this move (as is Apple; Apple Maps now shows “Lake America,” reportedly after being pressured directly by Trump). I dislike Google’s and Apple’s choices, but I can’t personally fault them.

That said, Trump’s move is clearly meant to antagonize Canada during a volatile period in our relations. He’s throwing gasoline on a tariff fight that’s already creating uncertainty and suffering among vulnerable businesses and consumers on both sides of what was once an impeccably peaceful border. Google and Apple didn’t need to move so damned quickly. I wish they’d deferred the name change long enough for things to cool down a little. Doing so would have avoided creating the perception of handing one side a swift, validating victory.

I doubt a cooling-off period would help. Wounds don’t feel better when they’re reopened after healing. It’s best to get it over with. Applying the change to Google and Apple Maps while the GNIS database ink is still wet at least serves to remind who made this change and why. And whose change it rightfully is to make.

This is a bitter pill for some to swallow. What a lot of people want is for Google and Apple to just ignore the U.S. government’s official new names. E.g., to pick just one high-profile pundit, here’s Kara Swisher regarding Google (“quislings”) and Apple (“craven”, “pathetic”). But I suspect, quite strongly, that the people who profess to be the most angry at Apple and Google for going along with this change are the same people who would argue most strongly that Goliath tech companies and mega-billionaires wield too much anti-democratic power and influence.

It’s not coherent to argue that Google and Apple should decide which names to put on their maps only when you want them to ignore the names from the official government database. Neither Google nor Apple are going to sell their maps apps, but it’s not outlandish to think that in some alternative universe, one or more of the leading maps app might be owned by, say, Elon Musk or Larry Ellison. Would the people who want Apple and Google to ignore the official names from the GNIS support the same stance if the two leading maps apps were owned by SpaceX and Oracle instead? Obviously they would not.

What we want is a system where geographic names are determined democratically, by voting. And that is the system we in fact have. Trump won. The Department of the Interior has the power to change these names. If you’re angry that their official names in the United States are now Lake America and Gulf of America, stay angry that Trump won the 2024 election. Stay angry that our president continues to debase his office and embarrass our nation. Directing your anger at Google and Apple for reflecting that change is shooting the messengers.

But this is why I find it embarrassing that both Google and Apple are foisting these absurd names on the rest of the world, even if only between parentheses. These names are nonsense, and they are Americans’ nonsense to deal with.

China is another country with ridiculous geographic dogma. China demands that Taiwan, which is an independent free nation, be falsely labelled as a province of China. Apple Maps reflects that policy — within China. It doesn’t label Taiwan as “(Province of China)” on maps outside China. Bullshit inside parentheses is still bullshit. Less seriously but more preposterously, the Chinese government also insists that the obscure Diaoyu Islands, subject of a long-running territorial dispute with Japan, be drawn larger than they actually are on maps. Apple Maps dutifully renders those inflated false island sizes to users in China. It doesn’t show them to users anywhere else in the world — not even as dotted outlines. Chinese users see Chinese government dogmatic nonsense; no one else does.

So too it should be for U.S. government dogmatic nonsense. Spreading the nonsense to the rest of the world only makes it more embarrassing.

Neither Google nor Apple claim to be cartographic editorial authorities. I do not think we should want them to be. Other non-governmental institutions do claim to be independent authorities. The Associated Press has stuck to their guns even in the face of losing its White House press pool seat over their refusal to adopt the “Gulf of America” name. And then there’s Wikipedia, whose reputation, integrity, popularity, and independence haunt the right wing. From Politico, last week:

Other platforms will soon follow, a senior administration official told Politico on Tuesday. “We got Lake America changed on Google Maps, and many other maps are changing in a couple days. And Wikipedia is going to change as well,” said the official, who was granted anonymity to speak frankly.

As of Wednesday, Wikipedia was still using the original names of both the Gulf of Mexico and Lake Ontario, while noting that Trump had signed orders to rename them.

Regarding this, Molly White noted:

A Wikipedia editor put it well: “You almost want to pat them on the head and say ‘Yes, of course it will’ in the same way you’d tell a small child that Santa Claus will be delivering their presents.”