Connexion
State of the Union: Both Israel’s strike and Iran’s reaction to it have been much more tempered than many expected.
Israel has carried out a retaliatory strike against Iran.
Unnamed Israeli defense officials, as well as a number of Iranian officials, confirmed there was a strike on Iran in the early morning hours on Friday. Iranian officials claim that Israel used small exploding drones to carry out the attack—drones potentially launched within Iran’s borders. The strike, Israel’s first action against Iran since the Iranian attack last weekend, reportedly hit an Iranian military base in Isfahan, the city where Iran does a large amount of its missile development and production.
After Iran launched a strike against Israel over the weekend in response to a prior Israeli strike on an Iranian diplomatic installation in Damascus, Iranian officials claimed that they viewed the matter as concluded. Nevertheless, Iranian President Ebrahim Raisi promised that “the tiniest act of aggression” against Iran in the future would provoke a response. Yet both Israel’s strike and Iran’s reaction to it have been much more tempered than many expected.
While the Biden administration has admitted Israel tipped off the U.S. moments before the strike, Secretary of State Antony Blinken said America “has not been involved in any offensive operations.”
The post Israel Launches Small Strike on Iran appeared first on The American Conservative.
State of the Union: Harvard’s Emma Dench is correct about the graduate job market.
Harvard Graduate School of Arts and Sciences Dean Emma Dench, niece of Dame Judi, recently said in an interview with the student newspaper the Harvard Crimson that students should “pursue graduate degrees out of passion for their research rather than a desire for professorship.” To seek a higher-education degree with the aim of being a professor is “too narrow a view,” Dench said, adding, somewhat as an afterthought, that one should be “realistic” about post-education job prospects.
“Over GSAS as a whole, about pretty much 50 percent of our graduates are going to not end up in academia,” she said. “And they’re going to do everything else and there’s a whole lot of brilliant options that are available to them.”
The interview is very interesting and is highly recommended. She is, at the time of writing this, being ferociously “dragged” (to use the parlance of our times) all over social media—which is absurd, because this is surely not the batty-est thing she has ever said. (She once declared that she hates the Romans because they were “violent, sexist, racist, arrogant, and not very nice to anybody who got in their way”—but that she also loves to hate the Romans.)
Regardless, turgid though her managerial expression may be, she actually makes a valid point. In fact, what she did not explicitly say is far more notable than what she did. The subtextual is, as always, far more interesting than the overt.
There are hundreds of thousands of words written on the state of the discipline of history in higher ed. Long story short, it is not good. The field became bloated as the job market shrank. Tenure is down; scholarship has become insufferable, dogmatic, unreadable, and unmarketable to Johnny Public; funding is ideological, and research potential is in perpetual decline. Most importantly, the field’s perception has declined: A significant portion of the population does not view history as a neutral field, much less job-worthy, and they do have a point. Just take note of the historical research coming out of academic presses. Looking beyond history, other humanities and social sciences are far worse; they also skew overwhelmingly towards the left, alienating a significant chunk of those who might otherwise prefer to fund and support academic research.
Historically, both humanities and history were domains of the elite purely because they could afford the time and money to pursue their academic and artistic interests without actually worrying about the next time they had to get food on the table. One can also argue that their studies allowed them to have the usual elite detachment from the subject matter, given that independent wealth often guards one from external influences and conditioned thought processes.
But more than that, whether or not to go into higher education is a question of pure mathematics and economics. Talent cannot be mass-produced in some fields; nor, if it could be, would the job market keep up with the supply. It is one thing, for example, to have hundreds of thousands of engineers or mechanics. It is another to have hundreds of thousands of poets and historians. You cannot possibly have thousands of Lords Byron or Herbert Butterfields—and churning out thousands of writers or historians doesn’t automatically mean there will be thousands of jobs. There is a reason that a specific portion of the academy was always hierarchical, and that, from Thucydides to A.J.P. Taylor, the discipline of history itself was always considered a higher calling compared to others.
Unfortunately, our society and current culture does not allow one to speak hard truths, regardless of how common sense they are. Of course Dench, dean at Harvard, scholar from Oxford, knows all the above—but is not allowed to say it out loud. What she meant, but perhaps cannot say, is not that one should do something because they love it, but that some fields are only for those who can afford them. The love is secondary and stems from the fact that it can be pursued without worry, fear, or desperation.
Here are the hard facts: People should not pursue a PhD (especially in history, social sciences, or humanities) unless they are independently wealthy or have an inheritance, a full scholarship for doctoral research in a field which has a steady demand, or have a job lined up somewhere—preferably all three together.
This advice may not sound appealing to generations who grew up with the motto that you can be whatever you want, if only you wish for it. But it might save them from future debt and disappointment.
The post Friends Don’t Let Friends Get PhDs in Humanities appeared first on The American Conservative.
Johnson’s foreign aid will cost the American taxpayer $95 billion. Conservatives are at their breaking point.
House Speaker Mike Johnson has finally unveiled his foreign aid package. His plan to get it across the finish line, however, remains less clear.
There are three main bills in Johnson’s package that will provide aid to Ukraine, Israel, and the Indo-Pacific respectively. Although the supposed urgency for this aid package stems from Iran’s strikes on Israel, the bulk of the package’s funding, just over $60 billion worth, is aimed towards Ukraine. Israel receives quite the chunk of change, however: $26 billion courtesy of the American taxpayer. The Indo-Pacific region gets just over $8 billion. This brings the total price tag of Johnson’s foreign aid bonanza to $95 billion. Sound familiar?
The resounding answer for conservatives in the House is yes. Johnson’s future hangs in the balance, and his conservative wing is nearly out of patience.
“This latest ‘America last’ package is just another failure of leadership,” Rep. Bob Good (R-VA), chairman of the House Freedom Caucus, told The American Conservative in a phone interview. “We’re going to borrow nearly $100 billion that we don’t have to further exacerbate our debt situation to defend Ukraine’s border, along with other countries, to pass this with predominantly Democrat votes.”
The package, Good said, “[does] not to do anything for America, not to do anything to keep us more safe and secure, not to keep our promise to fight for border security.”
The first bill, the Israel Security Supplemental Appropriations Act, provides Israel “$26.38 billion to support Israel in its effort to defend itself against Iran and its proxies,” per a readout from House GOP appropriators. The U.S. will provide $4 billion to replenish the Iron Dome and David’s Sling missile defense systems, $1.2 billion for the Iron Bram defense system, $3.5 billion for procurement of more advanced weapons systems, $1 billion for artillery and munitions production, $2.4 billion for U.S. operations in the region, and $4.4 billion to replace weapons provided to Israel from U.S. stockpiles. Finally, a sweetener for Democrats: $9 billion is directed towards humanitarian relief.
The second is titled the Ukraine Security Supplemental Appropriations Act. GOP appropriators claim that $13.8 billion will be directed towards “the procurement of advanced weapons systems, defense articles, and defense services”; another $26 million will be for oversight of U.S. aid to Ukraine.
Then there is $11.3 billion for current U.S. military operations in the region. But what are those operations? Have the nature of these operations been made clear to members of Congress? If so, why haven’t legislators talked about them? This fraught question might have something to do with it: What kind of U.S. personnel are involved?
The Ukraine supplemental also provides for $23.2 billion to replenish U.S. stockpiles, which is far short of the investment necessary to bring U.S. stockpiles back to pre-war levels. A large amount of the money appropriated for U.S. weapons procurement, however, is transferable to other limited purposes should the executive branch deem fit. To make matters worse, the alleged replenishment of U.S. stockpiles is predicated on providing even more aid to Ukraine. The Ukraine supplemental increases the presidential drawdown authority from $100 million to nearly $8 billion for fiscal year 2024.
Johnson seems eager to give Biden the unilateral authority to continue America’s involvement in two foreign wars. Both Ukraine and Israel supplementals include identical increases to the presidential drawdown authority.
The Ukraine supplemental also provides nearly $500 million for refugee entrance and assistance.
Furthermore, most of these appropriations creep well into 2025, potentially limiting a future Trump administration’s diplomatic options, just as Sen. J.D. Vance warned in this magazine’s pages.
“We ought to not be passing legislation that impacts past early in the year once the Trump administration gets the opportunity to get their team in place and their appointees confirmed and on the job and running,” Good told TAC. “President Trump obviously has a very different view of Ukraine than President Biden or even half of the Republicans in the House.”
Sadly, from Good’s point of view, “apparently Speaker Johnson seems to want Ukraine [aid] as much as Democrats do”—even if that means handcuffing a future Trump administration.
Trump, trying to avoid literal handcuffs in a New York courtroom over the next few weeks, posted on Truth Social,
Why isn’t Europe giving more money to help Ukraine? Why is it that the United States is over $100 Billion Dollars into the Ukraine War more than Europe, and we have an Ocean between us as separation! Why can’t Europe equalize or match the money put in by the United States of America in order to help a Country in desperate need? As everyone agrees, Ukrainian Survival and Strength should be much more important to Europe than to us, but it is also important to us! GET MOVING EUROPE! In addition, I am the only one who speaks for ‘ME’ and, while it is a total mess caused by Crooked Joe Biden and the Incompetent Democrats, if I were President, this War would have never started!
Finally, the Indo-Pacific Security Supplemental Appropriations Act would provide $3.3 billion for submarine infrastructure, $2 billion for Taiwan and other regional partners, $542 million to strengthen U.S. capabilities in the region, and $1.9 billion to replenish U.S. stockpiles.
But that’s not all—there are two other bills the House might take up.
The fourth bill, titled the 21st Century Peace through Strength Act, is a grab-bag of middle-of-the-road GOP foreign policy items. This bill includes REPO provisions for the seizure and use of Russian assets to fund America’s involvement in Ukraine, the TikTok sale or ban, and a litany of sanctions targeting Iranian leaders, Iranian industries, and proxies throughout the region.
The fifth bill is a watered-down version of HR 2, the border security bill passed out of the House earlier this Congress.
At first glance, it might appear that Johnson is attaching real border security to Ukraine aid. While Johnson wishes the GOP base to believe that, the facts are less compelling.
“The fifth bill, that’s the pretend, weakened, border Security, so to speak, but it’s not going to have any leverage attached to it,” Good said. “The Senate will just ignore that fifth bill of course and not take it up. It’s showmanship, it’s theater. I think this further diminishes the speaker before the Republicans across the country.”
Much remains up in the air on Capitol Hill, but Johnson seems to be pursuing a procedural maneuver that leaves border security on the outside looking in, as Good suggests. Johnson’s idea is to pass two rules. One will govern the House’s consideration of the border security bill. The other rule will lump together the first four bills—Ukraine aid, Israel aid, Indo-Pacific aid, and the 21st Century Peace through Strength Act. That rule will govern how the GOP considers these pieces of legislation and will probably result in whichever of these four bills that pass on the House floor getting bundled together and presented as one bill to the Senate, a procedural maneuver known as a MIRV (for “Multiple-Impact Reentry Vehicle,” a type of multi-warhead missile payload—this is what passes for humor among parliamentarians).
“The MIRV process is just completely ridiculous,” Rachel Bovard of the Conservative Partnership Institute told TAC.
That is why House conservatives seem to be trolling the amendment process. Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene has offered an amendment to Israel aid that would fund “space laser technology on the southern border.” Greene is also toying with an amendment that would “conscript in the Ukrainian military” any member of the House who votes for Ukraine aid.
Democrats are having fun, too. Rep. Jared Moskowitz proposed an amendment to name Greene, “Vladimir Putin’s Special Envoy to the United States Congress.”
“[The MIRV] is an interpretive dance, basically, because it allows different coalitions within the House to pass each section. Ukraine can’t get enough votes by itself; Israel, because the Democrats probably can’t get enough votes, doesn’t pass by itself,” Bovard told TAC. “Different components of the legislation pass with different factions. But nobody votes for the final bill.” This Frankensteinian piece of legislation will then be handed over to the Senate.
“This is worse than John Boehner. If you consider John Boehner the peak level of violence against conservatives, Mike Johnson is about to leap that hurdle,” Bovard claimed.
“This is new for me,” Good said of the MIRV. “In my first three years here, I’ve not seen this before. Now I have learned that it’s been used sparingly a few times in recent history over the last 20 years or so. The bills will come under the same rule as separate votes, but then they’re packaged together, the four of them go to the Senate. And so you’ve got Ukraine picking up the lion’s share at $60 billion.”
Border security is unlikely to be attached to one of the foreign aid bills or covered in the MIRV. It looks as if GOP voters’ number one priority will again take a backseat to the border security of a foreign nation.
“It’s the same song, second verse, isn’t it?” Good said, likening Johnson’s foreign aid package to the Senate’s $95 billion package passed in February.
The text of the rule that will govern this process is not publicly available yet. Currently, the House Rules Committee is deadlocked. The conservative contingent of the Rules Committee, Reps. Chip Roy and Thomas Massie, refused Wednesday evening to go along with passing a rule for the border security bill because it would not be attached to the foreign aid package.
The event revealed the true priorities of some GOP House members.
“The three members who refuse to support the Speaker’s agenda should resign from the Rules Committee immediately,” Rep. Mike Lawler tweeted. “If they refuse, they should be removed immediately. They are there on behalf of the conference, not themselves.”
“Sorry, not sorry, for opposing a crappy rule that is a show vote / cover vote for funding Ukraine instead of border security,” Roy replied.
Getting rid of Roy and company on the Rules Committee is easier said than done. “Because the House approves committee assignments, changing them also requires a vote of House,” Bovard told TAC. “Johnson could try. He’s made his alliance with hawks and appropriators, so maybe they help him.”
On the other hand, getting rid of Johnson might prove relatively easy.
Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene has a motion to vacate primed in the hopper. All the Georgia Republican has to do is ask for privilege to trigger the motion, and leadership has a 48 hour window to give Greene’s motion a vote. Greene has courted a key ally in Massie, who previously announced he’d cosponsor the motion after Johnson caved on warrant requirements in FISA reauthorization.
“If [the motion to vacate] is triggered, after everything has just gone on, there’s going to be conservatives who will have a hard time not supporting it if the vote is put in front of them,” Bovard said.
“The battle lines were very clear at the end,” an unnamed GOP lawmaker told the Washington Post. “It was very clear [the motion to vacate] will be brought if the speaker’s plan proceeds.”
Yet Johnson might use the MIRV process to change the rules on the motion to vacate. As it stands now, a single member can file a motion to vacate the speaker, a concession conservatives squeezed out of the ill-fated Kevin McCarthy in the speakership fight at the beginning of the current Congress. Johnson and some of his allies are reportedly considering using the rules that govern the foreign aid package to change the number of members needed to trigger a motion to vacate. Alternatively, Johnson might also consider changes that limit the motion to vacate to members in leadership. Then there’s what Bovard described as “completely nuclear”: “It’s possible that they turn off the privilege [for the motion to vacate] in the rule.”
“Speaker Johnson plans also to kill the motion to vacate procedural device, with Democrat votes, IN THE PENDING RULE,” Rep. Dan Bishop tweeted. “No Republican who is not an avowed double agent will survive politically after voting for that rule.”
Yet Johnson announced on X, formerly Twitter, that he would not be changing the motion to vacate rules. “Since the beginning of the 118th Congress, the House rule allowing a Motion to Vacate from a single member has harmed this office and our House majority,” the speaker’s tweet read. “Recently, many members have encouraged me to endorse a new rule to raise this threshold. While I understand the importance of that idea, any rule change requires a majority of the full House, which we do not have. We will continue to govern under the existing rules.”
If the speaker changes his mind, don’t expect House conservatives to be surprised. They’ve come to regard Johnson as a flip-flopper. “Previously, the speaker was for paying for supplementals. Now he’s against paying for them. He was for using the Ukraine supplemental to leverage border security. Now, he does not want to do that. He was for paying for Israel aid as a standalone. Now, he does not want to do that. So here we are, again, letting down the American people,” Good told TAC. “We said the border was the hill we would die on. Now we’re just dying politically for the Democrat priorities.”
If Johnson does stick to his promise, don’t expect conservatives to thank him either. Johnson will need to do a lot more to assuage their concerns with his leadership.
Where does that leave Johnson, then?
Johnson could decide to side with his own conference to pass the rules and the bills that fall under them. If he does that, he will have to attach border security to Ukraine aid, separate the foreign aid bills out, and be willing to let the legislation die in the Senate (adding border security to Ukraine aid would effectively kill the legislation).
The other option, siding with Democrats, is more likely. It won’t be the speaker’s first time doing so. So far, Johnson has denied courting Democratic support. “I have not asked a single Democrat to get involved in that at all. I do not spend time walking around thinking about the motion,” Johnson said, according to POLITICO.
Siding with Democrats would almost guarantee the motion to vacate would be triggered. “I don’t think that’s a sustainable position,” Good said of Democrats saving the Republican speaker, POLITICO reported. Massie agrees: “They will doom him.… They won’t save him. How is that sustainable?”
“If his speakership depends on Democrats it becomes harder for [Republicans] to vote for him in subsequent motions to vacate,” the Kentucky Republican added.
Despite Johnson’s assurances, Good told TAC he expects Democrats to get this legislation over the line. “I think the Democrats will provide as many votes as are needed to pass the rule. They will overwhelmingly vote for the ultimate supplemental package,” Good said. This process “represents the worst of Washington.”
“It’s one thing for a rule to pass with Democrat support on the House floor. But it’s a different thing to force it out of Rules with minority votes. I don’t think that’s ever happened,” Bovard claimed.
“The Rules Committee is an incredibly partisan committee—the minority always votes against the rule, the majority always supports it,” Bovard explained. “Now, we’re in a situation where the majority doesn’t support it. How Johnson handles this, I don’t know. If he forces a rule out of Rules Committee on the backs of Democrats to fund a war that his conference doesn’t want to fund—”
Bovard paused. “Nobody’s in charge at that point. You don’t have a majority party at that point.”
In Bovard’s estimation, it’s nearing “Joe Cannon levels of tyranny.”
“The Joe Cannon parallels here are creepy,” Bovard explained. “Joe Cannon was the most tyrannical Speaker the House has ever seen. They called him ‘The Czar Speaker.’ In 1910, he basically ran the Rules Committee, ran the house, members had no rights, and the only thing that saved the House from Joe Cannon was a revolt of the members.”
If Johnson doesn’t change course, Bovard told TAC he’s headed for “utter destruction of House practice and tradition.”
The post Johnson Ties His Own Noose With Foreign Aid Package appeared first on The American Conservative.
Michigan is the latest state to legalize womb rental in the guise of family-friendly policy.
Three weeks ago, Michigan became one of the most friendly places in the country for commercial baby-making. It is no surprise, under its current Democratic leadership in the legislature and executive, that Michigan chose to defend the surrogacy industry and LGBT special interest groups over women and children. It is, however, a monumental change for the state, the true ramifications of which may only be visible in years to come. Overriding a 1988 law that made any form of contractual surrogacy arrangement punishable by fine and/or jail time, the new bill permits all forms of commercial surrogacy that align with “best practices,” as defined by an unelected medical and legal establishment.
Money and identity politics are strong medicine, perhaps the two most effective motivators for politicians today. It is no surprise that Michigan went with the flow. The surrogacy industry is projected to be worth $129 billion in the next 10 years, up from $14 billion in 2022. Legalizing it will bring the Wolverine State an influx of taxable dollars. At the same time, the LGBT lobby has moved well past its “just let us marry” phase to decrying anything less than fertile women renting out their wombs as bigotry. Every gay couple, unmarriageable single, or man in drag has a right to play house with real, live human souls; the only possible injustice is how much it costs them to pay for all the parts, or so we are told. A third incentive, no less influential, is that old blackjack of the spirit: peer pressure. In every state in the nation, with the exception of Louisiana and Nebraska, commercial surrogacy contracts are either protected by law or assumed to be legal because no statute explicitly bans them.
Michigan falling to the surrogacy lobby is so consequential because of commercial surrogacy, paying women to rent out their wombs. Though surrogacy advocates say women gestate children for others out of the kindness of their hearts, the industry all but disappears when women are not permitted to be paid for the use of their wombs. Thus, while Louisiana and Nebraska technically permit a few very narrow instances of unpaid surrogacy, the effect is close to a total ban.
Prior to April, only Michigan banned surrogacy outright. The fall of this last symbolic hurdle is a harbinger of what happens when such weighty questions as the power to create children at will—and destroy them, for that matter—are left to the states to decide. As Stephanie Jones, founder of the innocuously named Michigan Fertility Alliance, put it, “We hope Michigan can serve as an example for other states where outdated laws still leave families vulnerable.”
It may be years before we see the full effect. Gestational surrogacy, in which the egg is purchased from a third party or extracted from one of the paying couples, rather than supplied by the gestating surrogate mother, is still very new. As such, those born of such arrangements are mostly too young for long-term effects to be clearly assessed. Women like Jessica Kern, however, born of “traditional” surrogacy, in which the surrogate mother is also biologically related to the child, have already spoken out about the childhood trauma they endured as a result of their confused genetic makeup and upbringing. Predictably, like adopted children, surrogate children often wrestle with feelings of confusion, disillusionment, depression, or anger over their origins.
This hasn’t stopped surrogacy advocates from calling Michigan’s new surrogacy provisions both “family-focused” and “safe.” What is meant by “family-focused” is that anyone may now purchase and rent the materials needed to purchase a baby—no background checks, home checks, or personal references required. What is meant by “safe” is that those who want to become parents in this way are finally allowed to put their names on the birth certificate even when, in some cases, their contribution to the creation of a new human was exclusively financial.
It is easy to see how such logic merges naturally with another fight around reproduction that is happening in countless other states this year, the fight over a right to family destruction. Where in vitro fertilization provides a positive means of control over childbearing, abortion provides the negative. Where surrogacy demands multiple human embryos be created that the fittest might survive, abortion provides a tidy disposal for the extra babies. And, of course, both abortion and surrogacy are hot button issues which politicians at the national level have thus far preferred to leave to local leaders, or direct democracy, to decide.
The powers of creating life and destroying it are far too dangerous to be left to the whims of Big Pharma–backed medical associations and those who stand to benefit from couples using expensive, invasive procedures rather than cheaper, more natural ones.
The post Is Gretchen Whitmer’s Surrogacy Law Too Extreme for Voters? appeared first on The American Conservative.
It is important to not merely accept axiomatically that Putin, like all autocrats, is bent on aggression and expansion.
NATO countries must “help Ukraine push Russia out of its territory and end this unprovoked aggression,” U.S. Ambassador to NATO Julianne Smith said on April 2, “because if they do not succeed, of course, the concern is that Russia will feel compelled to keep going.”
Smith is not the first to warn that Ukraine is the dam that is holding back a Russian conquest of Europe. U.S. President Joe Biden told Congress on December 6 that “If Putin takes Ukraine, he won’t stop there…. He’s going to keep going. He’s made that pretty clear.” Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin warned that “Putin will not stop at Ukraine.” And Secretary of State Antony Blinken explained that Putin has “made clear that he’d like to reconstitute the Soviet empire.” NATO Secretary-General Jens Stoltenberg says that, “if Putin wins in Ukraine, there is real risk that his aggression will not end there.” On March 28, Ukraine’s President, Volodymyr Zelensky, insisted that “this aggression, and Putin’s army, can come to Europe.” He said that “at the moment, it’s us, then Kazakhstan, then Baltic states, then Poland, then Germany. At least half of Germany.”
“If Ukraine loses the war,” he said on April 7, “other countries will be attacked. This is a fact.”
Aside from the value these warnings have in convincing the public—and the U.S. Congress—to continue sending money and weapons to Ukraine, the insistence that Putin’s ambitions are not limited to Ukraine but have their sights on Europe is based on two historical myths.
The first is that autocrats by their nature desire conquest and the expansion of their empires. “We have also seen many times in history,” the U.S. ambassador to NATO said, “where if a dictator is not stopped, or an authoritarian leader, they keep going.”
Inconveniently, this axiom is not borne out by history. Nor does the U.S. apply it to several of its contemporary friends; Washington does not assume that the autocratic rulers of Saudi Arabia or Egypt are bent on conquering the Middle East or Africa.
The historical record shows that, in his over two decades in power, Putin has not “kept going.” When Russian forces have been deployed, they have been limited to specific objectives when they could have easily kept going, as in Georgia in 2008 and Ukraine in 2014, when military conquest could have been accomplished with ease.
The second is that Putin has said as much. Putin is often quoted as saying that “people in Russia say that those who do not regret the collapse of the Soviet Union have no heart.” The second part of his statement is quoted less often: “And those that do regret it have no brain.”
The same selective use of quotations is applied to Putin’s comment that “we should acknowledge that the collapse of the Soviet Union was a major geopolitical disaster.” Though quoted as proof of Putin’s nostalgia for the Soviet Union and his desire to reestablish it, the strategy requires lifting the quotation from a context that makes it clear that the disaster Putin is referring to is not the absence of the Soviet Union but, primarily, the economic hardship that followed in the wake of its break up. He bemoaned that “individual savings were depreciated” and oligarchs “served exclusively their own corporate interests.” He remembered that “mass poverty began to be seen as the norm.”
There are at least three points that need to be factored into Western calculations of Putin’s ambitions that should temper the confidence of the forecast that he is bent on conquering Europe and on war with NATO.
The first is that there is no evidence for it. After her warning that Russia will “keep going,” Smith admitted that “we do not have indicators or warnings right now that a Russian war is imminent on NATO territory, and I really want to be clear about that.”
The Baltic countries complain that their warnings of the expansionist threat posed by Russia have been dismissed by the West. “For years,” Polish foreign minister Radosław Sikorski says, the West was “patronizing us about our attitude: ‘Oh, you know, you over-nervous, over-sensitive Central Europeans are prejudiced against Russia.’” Estonia’s former President Hendrik Ilves complained that the West does “Russia policy without consulting people who know far more about Russia.”
Smith responded, “I don’t want to give our friends in the Baltic states the impression that somehow war is coming to NATO territory overnight. We take it seriously, but we do not see this to be an imminent threat.”
The second point is that the Western statements of Putin’s ambitions are not consistent with the historical record of Putin’s statements of his ambitions.
Putin has said that “the Ukraine crisis is not a territorial conflict, and I want to make that clear…. The issue is much broader and more fundamental and is about the principles underlying the new international order.”
Those fundamental principles have consistently included a guarantee that Ukraine will remain neutral and not join NATO, a guarantee that NATO won’t turn Ukraine into an armed anti-Russian bridgehead on its border, and assurances of protection of the rights of Russophile Ukrainians.
There is nothing on the historical record to suggest that conquering Europe or confronting NATO have ever been among the stated goals of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.
This point has been conceded by Ukraine and by NATO. Davyd Arakhamia, who led the Ukrainian negotiating team at the Istanbul talks, says that Russia was “prepared to end the war if we agreed to, as Finland once did, neutrality, and committed that we would not join NATO.” He says that a guarantee that Ukraine would not join NATO was the “key point” for Russia. Most importantly, Zelensky has said that the promise not to join NATO “was the first fundamental point for the Russian Federation” and that “as far as I remember, they started a war because of this.”
NATO Secretary-General Jens Stoltenberg recently conceded that a “promise [of] no more NATO enlargement…was a precondition for not invading Ukraine.” When NATO refused to discuss such a promise, Putin “went to war to prevent NATO—more NATO—close to his borders.” Stoltenberg concluded that “Putin invaded a European country to prevent more NATO.”
The third point is that the historical record suggests that Putin went to war in Ukraine, not as a step toward war with NATO, but to prevent a war with NATO.
“Listen attentively to what I am saying,” Putin said just three weeks before the invasion. “It is written into Ukraine’s doctrines that it wants to take Crimea back, by force if necessary…. Suppose Ukraine is a NATO member…. Suppose it starts operations in Crimea, not to mention Donbass for now. This is sovereign Russian territory. We consider this matter settled. Imagine that Ukraine is a NATO country and starts these military operations. What are we supposed to do? Fight against the NATO bloc? Has anyone given at least some thought to this? Apparently not.”
Putin’s decision to invade Ukraine “to prevent NATO…close to his borders” may have been motivated by concern that a Ukraine in NATO that attacked Donbas or Crimea would draw Russia into a war with NATO.
Just three days before launching the Russian invasion of Ukraine, Putin said that “the reality we live in” is that if Ukraine is “accepted into…NATO, the threat against our country will increase because of Article 5” since “there is a real threat that they will try to take back the territory they believe is theirs using military force. And they do say this in their documents, obviously. Then the entire North Atlantic Alliance will have to get involved.”
If Putin went to war in Ukraine to prevent a war with NATO, then it makes little sense that he would use the war in Ukraine as a means to start a war with NATO.
Since the claim that, if Russia wins in Ukraine, Putin will keep going and bring war to Europe and NATO, is wielded to justify continuing the fight instead of encouraging a diplomatic solution, it is important to not merely accept axiomatically that Putin, like all autocrats, is bent on aggression and expansion. The frequently made warning rests uncertainly on myths and misreading of the historical record that, when examined, recommend a less confident forecast of Putin’s intentions.
The post Is Putin Bent on Conquering Europe? appeared first on The American Conservative.
The days of free and cheap riding are numbered.
The wailing is getting louder across Europe. Elites in Brussels and national capitals are clutching their pearls as they view American opinion polls. Their U.S. friends, the usual Masters of the Universe who dominate political and economic affairs, are reacting similarly.
Although the presidential election is more than six long months away and much can happen before November 5, they all are sharing nightmares featuring Donald Trump. Such is the consequence of spending the last eight decades treating Europe’s protection as America’s responsibility.
Europeans are only slowly waking up to reality. For instance, the British historian and journalist Max Hastings observed, “Some of us have repeatedly asserted that without America the Ukrainians could become toast. That proposition looks like it is being tested.” He didn’t blame America. Rather, he admitted that “there is also a realization that the United States has tired, probably forever, of leading and largely funding the defense of Europe.”
Then he criticized Europeans for lagging despite their professed fears of Russian aggression. He wrote “The Germans have discovered a €25 billion shortfall in their defense spending plan, overlaid on national economic stagnation. President Macron is shipping 100 howitzers, but these cannot make good his earlier refusal to back Ukraine.” That’s not all; leading states such as Italy and Spain still can’t be bothered.
Hastings was even tougher on his own nation, citing the ugly truth about its disappointing efforts: “Though successive British prime ministers have professed to embrace Ukraine, which is essentially our proxy in facing down Russian aggression, they have done almost nothing to sustain the supply of munitions, once the army’s cupboard was emptied.”
Indeed, he added, “since the end of the Cold War it has been the all-party fashion to treat defense not as a vital element in our polity but as an optional extra to the main business of government.” He targeted the Conservative Party, the home of Winston Churchill and Margaret Thatcher: “Since 2010 the Tories have refused to make the necessary defense spending commitments.”
Also credit Hastings for admitting that the Europeans were warned about Russia’s likely response to NATO expansion: “It was recklessly insouciant to take no steps to prepare ourselves, both morally and militarily, to fight if the Russians responded with force.” He called for Europeans to step up: “Europe must send Kyiv yesterday every gun and shell it can purchase—we cannot manufacture the hardware ourselves in real time.”
Finally, and most important, he acknowledged that the continent’s residents must work hard to protect themselves: “If we wish to avoid having to fight another big war we must create a credible military deterrent in which nuclear weapons are the least relevant, though still necessary, component. Even granted the will, which is problematic, Europe requires a decade of enhanced spending to make itself remotely capable of self-defense, in the absence of the U.S.”
Still, the situation is a bit less dire than Hastings suggests. He overestimates the danger facing Europe. Although Russia’s Vladimir Putin is ruthless, the latter has shown little interest in conquest during his quarter century in power. Indeed, he began his presidency friendly to the U.S. and Europe; he was the first foreign leader to call George W. Bush after 9/11 and gave an accommodating address to the German Bundestag shortly thereafter.
Moreover, Putin’s much-cited remark about the Soviet collapse did not suggest recreating the Russian empire, as commonly claimed. He declared,
Above all, we should acknowledge that the collapse of the Soviet Union was a major geopolitical disaster of the century. As for the Russian nation, it became a genuine drama. Tens of millions of our co-citizens and compatriots found themselves outside Russian territory. Moreover, the epidemic of disintegration infected Russia itself.
Individual savings were depreciated, and old ideals destroyed. Many institutions were disbanded or reformed carelessly. Terrorist intervention and the Khasavyurt capitulation that followed damaged the country’s integrity. Oligarchic groups—possessing absolute control over information channels—served exclusively their own corporate interests. Mass poverty began to be seen as the norm. And all this was happening against the backdrop of a dramatic economic downturn, unstable finances, and the paralysis of the social sphere.
Far from backing the return of the Soviet Communist Party, he contended that “the time that our young democracy…was precisely the period when the significant developments took place in Russia. Our society was generating not only the energy of self-preservation, but also the will for a new and free life.” His discussion of how “to find our own path in order to build a democratic, free and just society and state” looks ironic in retrospect, but nothing in the speech suggested reconstituting the USSR.
Of course, his attitude hardened over time, but for obvious reasons reflected in his famous talk at the 2007 Munich Security Conference. He highlighted what faithless and dishonest allied officials subsequently sought to deny, Moscow’s displeasure over NATO expansion and Washington’s aggressive military policy. U.S. presidents, secretaries of defense, and secretaries of state knew that they were recklessly crossing a red line for Putin and most of Russia’s top political leadership. For instance, in 2008 intelligence officer Fiona Hill, more recently with the Trump NSC, and U.S. Ambassador to Russia William Burns, currently CIA Director, warned the George W. Bush administration that NATO expansion was likely to spark a violent response.
Two years ago, Putin made the decision for war, for which he bears ultimate responsibility. Yet he is no Hitler. Russia has not found Ukraine easy to conquer. It would be difficult for Moscow to swallow its victim whole. Moreover, Putin acted out his explicit threats, not the West’s imagined fears. Never has Putin or the rest of the leadership shown interest in conquering the Baltic States, let alone more of Europe. The question would be, To what end? Putin’s invasion of Ukraine was criminal, but he did so for reasons known in the West for decades. What would he gain from attempting to overrun the rest of Europe? When asked by Tucker Carlson if he might invade Poland, Putin replied, “Only in one case, if Poland attacks Russia. Why? Because we have no interest in Poland, Latvia, or anywhere else. Why would we do that? We simply don’t have any interest.”
Of course, Europeans should not trust Putin with their continent’s peace and stability. However, they—not America—should make their security their priority.
An important issue raised by Hastings is whether Europe should develop a continental nuclear deterrent. The U.S. promised to use nukes to defend Europe during the Cold War and the Soviets never tested American resolve. Whether or not the continent was worth the risk to the U.S. then, it is not now. Observed the Wall Street Journal’s Yaroslav Trofimov: “Would an American president, especially a re-elected Donald Trump, be willing to risk nuclear war for Helsinki, Tallinn or Warsaw? And if not, could Europe’s own two nuclear powers—France and, to a lesser extent, the UK—provide enough deterrence of their own?”
Both Paris and London have nukes, but their forces are national and independent. Germans have begun to debate contributing to a European arsenal or developing their own. Even the Poles might be on board with a Eurobomb. Friendly proliferation has obvious drawbacks but may be the best practicable option. Today Russia relies on nuclear parity to make up for conventional inferiority compared to America. Europe could do the same vis-à-vis Moscow.
Nevertheless, as the Europeans move ahead, they also should seek a future in which they will be safer and more prosperous, which means reaching an understanding with Russia over a new security structure. Although European officials routinely demonize Putin, they share responsibility with him for the war. Fighting Moscow to the last Ukrainian is not the best means to establish long-term stability and peace.
Kiev’s determination to battle on is understandable and, indeed, courageous, but Ukrainians should remember that the allies have consistently played them false. NATO made a commitment in 2008 that no European government and no subsequent US administration was prepared to keep. For 14 years, every alliance member along with the Brussels bureaucracy lied to Kiev, falsely insisting that they looked forward to Ukraine joining the alliance. Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin continued the deception when he visited Kiev in late 2021 in the lead-up to Russia’s invasion. At the same time, the Biden administration refused to negotiate with Moscow when a commitment not to include Ukraine might have kept the peace.
Shortly after Russia’s invasion Washington and London apparently discouraged Kiev from negotiating with Moscow over the same issue, when the conflict might have been ended with relatively modest casualties and destruction. Moreover, NATO members continued to promise alliance membership to Kiev; at last July’s NATO summit Austin said that he had “no doubt” Ukraine would join. Yet the allies steadfastly refuse to enter the war when their support is most needed.
A couple weeks ago Secretary of State Antony Blinken reassured Kiev, “We’re also here at NATO to talk about the summit that’s upcoming in the summer in Washington, celebrating the 75th anniversary of the Alliance. Ukraine will become a member of NATO. Our purpose of the summit is to help build a bridge to that membership and to create a clear pathway for Ukraine moving forward.”
But no one expects a formal commitment this year or next; realistically, Kiev shouldn’t expect one this decade or next. Ultimately Ukrainians will have to make their own deal with Russia. And that will turn out better if done sooner rather than later.
It is Europe’s turn. Observed Hastings: “If Putin or China’s President Xi today demands: ‘How many divisions has Britain?’—or, for that matter, Europe—the truthful answer deserves the scorn it must inspire in both tyrants.” Europeans should act like grownups and take over responsibility for their own defense.
The post Europe is Starting to Wake Up to Needing Defense—Including a Nuclear Deterrent appeared first on The American Conservative.
If you’re going to make an end-run around your own party, shouldn’t you at least give us a reason?
What’s the point of Mike Johnson?
The House GOP decided Kevin McCarthy needed to go. Fine. There were plenty of good arguments for that decision, including the very fundamental point that McCarthy’s mouth wrote checks to the party that Frank Luntz’s body couldn’t cash. That’s no way to run a railroad. Sayonara, Mac.
Who could forget the tragicomedy of the efforts to replace him? The placeholder speaker, Patrick McHenry, a little man in bowties and a really heartrending victim of tailoring malpractice, waving the gavel around like a kid at the carnival high-striker. The parade of proposed replacements: Steve Scalise, sort of the presumptive next in line save for the facts that he’s a moron and has got blood cancer. Doug Emmer. Jim Jordan. Mike Johnson was picked after Jordan lost his third round of votes. He was a perfect unity candidate: He had never said or done anything of note. (To quote some wise men discussing another political tabula rasa: “We have no inkling of his past!” “Correct, and that is an asset. A man’s past can cripple him.”)
Johnson seems like a nice man. (A difference from the visibly cretinous McCarthy.) He seems like one of the handful of national politicos who actually takes something approaching orthodox Christianity seriously, which has earned him plenty of ire (much of it very weird) in the mainstream press. He has borne up gracefully under all that, and, for that, we’re cheering him.
Unfortunately, while the absence of a past can be an asset, the absence of the present and future is not so good. As you might infer from the conditions of his elevation, things are a little contentious in Congress right now. A sizable portion of the Republican caucus has noticed that we’re spending rather a lot of money, and thinks maybe we should spend less, and is (for the first time in quite a while) willing to kick up a ruckus about it. Our southern border has undergone Aufhebung. The Fourth Amendment, which underwent Aufhebung quite some time ago, is up for grabs again with FISA renewal. Through our clients abroad, we are running a couple of wars of decreasing popularity and unclear value.
In the face of crisis, division, and uncertainty, you need a leader of men who can articulate a forceful program—or at least can mollify everyone a little by looking like he knows what he’s doing. Has that been Johnson? Well, not really.
Take his stance on military aid, the item at the top of everyone’s mind this week. Johnson is anxious to get the money out there to our foreign clients. In this, he is hardly alone—but also hardly unopposed. We’re a little leery of rubber-stamping anything touching the fisc, but might excuse it in cases where an expenditure is completely uncontroversial. (So far as we can tell, not much of the country is clamoring to stop funding military salaries or highway maintenance.) As of February, roughly half of his own party’s voters thought the U.S. was sending too much aid to Ukraine in particular.
Are there perhaps deep principles behind Johnson’s position? Does he, statesmanlike, think he’s doing the right thing, and damn the torpedoes? If he is, he’s doing a very good job of keeping it quiet. Johnson took the gavel last October. His congressional office has issued, by my count, 17 press releases since then, including the announcement of his speakership; the speaker’s office has issued 111 press releases. Not a single one has laid out the speaker’s case for sending military aid to other supposedly sovereign nations: not a good argument, not a bad argument, not even a pro forma argument; not for Taiwan, not for Israel, not for Ukraine. (There is, however, a precis of a fact sheet justifying his recent flip-flop on FISA—a real polishing-the-turd exercise for his comms staff, to whom we extend our real sympathies.) Hiding behind the fiction of “loans” is no remedy. In fact, it makes it worse: It shows embarrassment and the attendant desire to pull a quick one. Do you call this leadership?
The point of a party system is to give voters a choice—not necessarily a very large set of choices, but at least the bare binary of “X” versus “Not X.” When a speaker uses opposition support to pass through legislation against half his own party’s wishes—and against his own promises—something has gone badly wrong in the system. When he does it without even articulating his position, well, that’s something worse than badly wrong.
In Britain’s 1972 push to join the European Economic Community, which was in short order transmogrified into the European Union, a sinister compact developed between the leadership of the Conservative government and the Labour opposition to move through the membership vote outside the courses of debate appropriate for such a weighty and controversial decision. (This effort was opposed primarily by two members, the Tories’ Enoch Powell and Labour’s Michael Foot, an unlikely combination on the face of it.) The European Communities Bill affair left a bad taste in the voters’ mouths, and they punished the Tories for it (among other sins). The consequences of that skulduggery have bedeviled British governments for the 50 years since. Johnson is inviting a similar dysfunction into our own public life, and without even making his case to the American people.
Government by men with bad ideas and even bad morals we can endure; government by invertebrates is intolerable. So again we ask: What’s the point of this guy?
The post Mike Johnson Should Grow a Spine or Leave appeared first on The American Conservative.
In January, Curt Mills took over as executive director of The American Conservative. This is the first print issue commissioned and edited entirely under his leadership.
In January, Curt Mills took over as executive director of The American Conservative. This is the first print issue commissioned and edited entirely under his leadership. There is no better way to launch his tenure than with a blockbuster cover article written by the boss himself, “How Ohio Became the Center of the Republican Universe.”
If you think of Ohio politicians, the first name that comes to mind is probably J.D. Vance. He’s certainly the most exciting figure on the right today, but he’s not the only one from that part of the country. Ohio is also home to names like Vivek Ramaswamy, Jim Jordan, and Warren Davidson, as well as newly minted Senate nominee Bernie Moreno.
The surprising thing about all this new energy is that, not long ago, Ohio was dominated by establishment figures. Rob Portman and John Kasich were the face of the Ohio GOP. Needless to say they did nothing to give voice to the concerns of their Rust Belt constituents on issues like trade.
So the emergence of so many fresh-thinking populists in Ohio is a puzzle. The cover essay offers an answer—and serves as an introduction to the brilliant writer now helming this organization.
Staff reporter Bradley Devlin visited Kentucky, just across the river, for his reported feature in this issue, but he didn’t meet any politicians. Just hillbillies. Bradley has been doing mission trips to Appalachia for a decade. The first time, he went as a high-school student. This time he returned as a chaperone.
Appalachia has seen some changes in the last ten years. The drugs are cut with fentanyl now. On the plus side, a national politician finally gave voice to their suffering and tried to do something about it. Leslie County is Trump country. What do they think of him these days? Bradley found out that and much more.
South Korea is a fascinating country. Its right-wing party, in particular, always seems to echo Western trends in the most unlikely ways, as in the 2022 race that Western pundits dubbed the “incel election” for candidate Yoon Suk Yeol’s excoriations of feminism.
During its Asian Tiger era, the South Korean right rehabilitated the reputation of Park Chung-hee, the assassinated dictator whom many remember fondly for the economic development he promoted, from which modern Koreans hoped to draw inspiration.
Now there are stirrings of a similar rehabilitation of South Korea’s founding president, Syngman Rhee, also a dictator with some positive qualities. What is it about Rhee that matches the current moment, the way Park Chung-hee matched the 1990s? Rob York, an expert on Rhee, explains. We hope the documentary he discusses, which has apparently created a stir in South Korea, will be made available to American audiences.
The post A New Era at TAC appeared first on The American Conservative.
Tabling the DHS secretary’s impeachment is an insult to the American people.
The House managers have officially delivered the letters of impeachment for Department of Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas to the Senate. For weeks, I have been calling for the Senate to conduct a full and fair trial. Now is the time for every Senator to go on the record.
Do you think Mayorkas has done a good job at the border? Has Mayorkas fulfilled the oath he swore before this body to protect and defend our country against all threats, foreign and domestic? Is our border secure?
The answer is simple. Mayorkas has intentionally failed to do his job. Now, Senator Schumer and the globalist Democrats have the opportunity to conduct a trial before the entire Senate and the public.
Unfortunately, that’s not how this is going to play out. Democrats are going to try to table—or dismiss—the articles of impeachment, which has never been done in the history of the Senate. They’re going to attempt to sweep the border crisis that President Biden has created under the rug. Every single House Democrat voted to save Mayorkas’ job. They endorsed our wide-open borders that have allowed terrorists, drug traffickers, and murderers into our country.
Democrats are lying to themselves and risking the lives of every American. Senator Schumer and the Democrats can’t say they want to fix our border while voting to save Mayorkas’ job. Mayorkas has been derelict in his duty to secure the border in the three years he has been in the job.
Our border is the least secure it has ever been; in fact, it’s almost nonexistent. Our Border Patrol agents are so overwhelmed, and receive such little support from the Biden administration to enforce our laws, that they have been forced to release millions of illegal immigrants into the U.S. To make matters worse, those who are released on parole are given work permits. The Biden administration is more concerned with taking care of illegal aliens than it is about protecting American citizens. We might as well start mailing every criminal, drug trafficker, and terrorist an open invitation to cross our borders.
I have spoken numerous times on the Senate floor to highlight stories of Americans who have died at the hands of illegal aliens. Their tragic deaths are a direct result of Secretary Mayorkas’ inaction. Mayorkas and Joe Biden have blood on their hands. The most important responsibility of any sovereign nation is the safety of its citizens.
Yet the Department of Homeland Security just announced they plan on sending another $300 million dollars to communities receiving illegal aliens from this border crisis. The top priority of this administration is to let as many people in as quickly as possible, regardless of how many American lives are lost in the process.
The number of people crossing into the U.S. who are on the terrorist watchlist is unprecedented. Just last week, it was reported that an Afghan on the FBI terror watchlist has been in the U.S. for almost a year. He is a member of a U.S. designated terrorist group responsible for the deaths of at least nine American soldiers and civilians in Afghanistan. ICE arrested him in San Antonio just this past February. Unfortunately, this known terrorist has been released on bond and is now roaming our neighborhoods.
It isn’t just terrorists we have to worry about. Fentanyl flows freely across our borders, and it has killed hundreds of thousands of Americans. Law enforcement officers in Alabama tell me time and again how their officers must wear heavy equipment and carry Narcan spray to protect themselves from the fentanyl that is pouring into our communities.
Despite the critical need to secure our borders and discourage illegal immigration, Mayorkas has been traveling the world, lecturing other countries about their national security, while his refusal to enforce U.S. laws has exposed his own country to invasion. It’s embarrassing.
In February, he traveled to Austria to speak with Chinese officials about counter-narcotic efforts. Did he discuss with them the flood of Chinese illegal immigrants coming to the U.S. through the southwest border? 22,000 Chinese nationals have been arrested by border patrol agents at the southwestern border since October of last year.
Most of these individuals are single adult males of military age. Yet the media tries to act as if all these people crossing the border are innocent women and children. Some of them are, but most are not. This invasion is more than a border crisis. It’s a national security crisis. And yet, I seriously doubt Mayorkas even brought that up in his meeting with Chinese officials.
In February, he was in Germany for the Munich Security Conference. The Munich Security Conference is the largest international security meeting in the world. Mayorkas was there, giving speeches on strengthening global security and partnerships. Meanwhile, the border he is responsible for is wide open.
The secretary’s priority should be here—securing our borders and protecting our citizens. President Biden has made the U.S. a joke on the world stage. Under this administration, nearly 10 million people have illegally invaded our country. Every state is now a border state.
This is not a gray area. Secretary Mayorkas has intentionally failed to do his job. It is high time that the Senate take action.
To my Democratic colleagues: Have you read the heartbreaking stories of innocent Americans who have been murdered by illegal aliens? Are you concerned about the safety of your spouses, children, nieces or nephews? Does it worry you that hundreds of terrorists are flooding into our country? Do you know someone who has died of fentanyl, which was trafficked into our country by cartels?
This isn’t about politics. Our national security and our country’s future is at stake here. Americans deserve to know the truth about how Secretary Mayorkas has intentionally failed to secure the border.
I will be voting to hold Mayorkas accountable.
This text is adapted from a floor speech delivered by the senator.
The post Mayorkas Must Be Held Accountable at His Senate Trial appeared first on The American Conservative.
The former president’s fight extends beyond the courtroom.
The weakest legal case against former President Donald Trump may now be the most important one. It is the first case against Trump to go to trial. It is the first to offer near-daily shots of the presumptive Republican nominee inside a courtroom. It offers the best chance of appending “convicted felon” to Trump’s name, if not putting him in a jail cell, before the election.
Trump’s hush-money trial begins as President Joe Biden appears to have begun to close the gap in their rematch. The latest New York Times/Siena College poll has them virtually tied, with Trump clinging to a 1-point lead. The former president is just 0.2 points ahead of the incumbent in the national RealClearPolitics polling average.
The American people have seen courtroom dramas on this scale before. O.J. Simpson’s death this month reminded the public of a divisive trial that was daytime viewing for millions for months. More recently, there was the legal battle between actors Johnny Depp and Amber Heard.
Voters are at this point no strangers to Trump trials specifically. No civil judgment against Trump or his businesses has dented his poll numbers. Among Republicans, the numerous indictments across multiple jurisdictions improved those numbers to the point where he went from the odds-on favorite to win the GOP nomination for the third time to holding an insurmountable lead.
Perhaps more surprisingly, Trump has remained competitive in the general election throughout all the indictments and suits. He has led Biden more often, both nationally and in the top seven battleground states, than at any point in 2020. Overall, Trump’s numbers are better than they have been since he first began running for president nearly nine years ago.
Despite Jan. 6, two impeachments, the 2020 election, the Russia investigation, and the various criminal cases, Trump has at least as good of a chance of returning to the White House as he does of becoming a convicted felon.
One big question is whether it is possible for him to do both. The public polling and some of the primary exit polls suggest there are voters who currently support Trump who will not vote for a convicted felon. These numbers may not only be sufficient to cost Trump the election; they may transform the current competitive race into a more lopsided affair in the Democrats’ favor.
If that is true, then all it takes is for a single Democratic prosecutor in a Democratic jurisdiction with a Democratic-leaning jury pool to find Trump guilty of something—say, one count out of dozens—and it’s game over. For this reason, some of us argued Trump would be an extraordinarily risky general election nominee for the GOP.
It’s a risk Republicans nevertheless decided they wanted to take.
This is in no small part because the legal pile-on against Trump looks manifestly unfair to so many voters who already back him or are still open to doing so.
The George Soros–connected Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg ran on going after Trump. He stretched the law to get around the statute of limitations and to turn misdemeanors into felonies. He stacked charges to get 34 felony counts out of a single incident. And he is basing much of his case on the word of Michael Cohen, the former Trump legal fixer whose words and deeds have already landed him in prison.
It is therefore possible that many people who tell pollsters they wouldn’t vote for a convicted felon would not actually be dissuaded from pulling the lever for Trump if the ex-president’s prosecution was viewed as a partisan charade.
Not everyone sees it this way, of course. There are many people who think Trump has played it fast and loose with his businesses, women, and his election claims for long enough that he deserves some consequences even if many of the legal cases against him are dubious in some particulars.
It’s a question of justice delayed versus justice denied.
Yet how many of these hold-Trump-accountable voters are not already in Biden’s camp? And how many find Biden’s record so wanting that they might once again look past a seedy payment to a porn star? Will that payment be seen as a bigger example of “election interference” than Bragg’s prosecution of a leading presidential candidate during an election year?
The answers to these questions will likely decide who wins in November.
The post Trump Begins the High-Wire Act appeared first on The American Conservative.
Americans should read more about the Naxalite movement. There are echoes of the past in current American left-wing activism.
A man accused of firebombing an anti-abortion lobby group office last year in Madison, Wisconsin pleaded guilty to the crime and was sentenced to seven and a half years in prison. A PhD biochemist by profession and researcher at U-Madison, Hridindu Sankar Roychowdhury apparently started the pro-abortion group “Jane’s Revenge” and used his connections and grant money to gather incendiary chemicals to create the device he used to firebomb the office. He has also, according to reports, been uncooperative with the federal agents, and has been speaking to Antifa and “Stop Cop City” comrades in prison. He was indicted for RICO violations, terrorism, and money-laundering charges. Before the bombing, he threatened that “if abortions aren’t safe then you aren’t either.” He was identified from a half eaten burrito at the terror scene, and was nabbed while trying to flee the country for Latin America.
It is an interesting case with several layers. Even a man who has a PhD in biochemistry apparently isn’t wise enough to not throw a half-eaten saliva-covered burrito at the crime scene. Being intelligent isn’t the same as being wise or prudent; a data point in the case-study against the “cult of expertise” that runs in this country. Universities also should be far more strict about whom they let in. The job of academia is not to allow just about everyone to aim for the upper echelons of society, but to promote merit towards the betterment of the nation. One can make the case of more, not less gate-keeping in higher-education.
But the arrest of this man also provides a historical lens to look at a very strange form of insurgency that is now haunting America. The American understanding of left-wing radicalism is steeped in its formative years in the 1930s, the labor unions, and the Cold War against the USSR. Leninism is what most Americans think of when they imagine left-wing radicalism. Only in recent years have intellectuals and scholars started to talk more about Antonio Gramsci and “the long march through the institutions.”
But there is a precedent in what we are seeing in America now. The early 1970s Naxalite movement in India was fundamentally decentralized; compared to other grassroots peasant or worker led communist movements across Europe and Asia, it was dominated by upper-middle class college students. The core of the movement was Calcutta University, one of the oldest and most prestigious Indian schools, but the movement had different rhetoric and local policies depending on where it was operating. Similar to the modern iteration of Antifa, it wasn’t centralized; it was based in different states; it never had a consolidated information center or coordinated action plan, it combined different splintered groups; it had medical, assault, and scouting groups; and it organized via hand-to-hand communications across state lines.
Most importantly, it was heavily upper-middle class, with students often using their parents or sympathetic university professors for bail money, sometimes aided by lenient local attorneys and laws. Although the movement had broad shared ideological commitments about “class enemies,” it never had a party line, and therefore most terrorist actions were against local businesses, mom-and-pop stores, small landlords, and the hapless homeguards and beat cops walking the roads at night.
But it showed what impotent and repressed middle-class bloodlust against both upper and lower class of society is, and how deadly it can be. The Naxalites never truly threatened the existence of the republic of India, nor did they much harm the rich in the 1970s India, who could afford private security and militias. But it made the life of those commoners who pay tax expecting to be protected by the state an absolute hell.
The moment it appeared that Beijing was even rhetorically sympathetic to a Maoist insurgency within India, the state cracked down with a ferocity that became a byword of counterinsurgency studies. Hundreds of diehard students simply disappeared without a trace. But most of the normies, mellowed out after a thorough beating (and after their parents were bankrupted paying bail funds). The public opinion shifted rapidly against the needless violence of the Naxalite groups against individuals they considered to be “class enemies.” As often is the lesson of history, most pretend revolutionaries don’t survive a dedicated reaction. Violence goes both ways.
The most haunting paragraph from one of the greatest series of novels written about that era, the Bengali polymath and author Samaresh Majumdar’s “Animesh Quartet,” shows a police officer lamenting to another that the items found during the raid in a commune were some revolutionary literature and a whole bunch of unused condoms. The Naxalites were a weird mix of wasted upper-middle-class students who fancied themselves Che Guevaras in a movement that was itself a weird mix of the Parisian 1968ers and the Maoist Red Guards.
For the uninitiated, Roychowdhury is an Indian and Bengali surname denoting “landlord,” an acquired title that originates from the Mughal era and was continued by the British. Somewhere in the past, this chap’s forefathers formed the backbones of two empires. Like most modern descendants of older elites, this man, born with perhaps above average intelligence, decided to ruin his above average life for momentary nihilism in the cause of a rudderless movement dedicated to a heady mix of hedonism, impotent rage, and violence. As a philosopher of our time once noted, “Many such cases. Sad!”
The post An Indian Precedent for American Upper Middle Class Radicalism appeared first on The American Conservative.
State of the Union: Marjorie Taylor Greene is no longer alone—she gained a crucial ally on Tuesday in her campaign to oust Johnson. The Speaker may not last the week.
Rep. Thomas Massie has announced he will be cosponsoring Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene’s motion to vacate House Speaker Mike Johnson.
“I just told Mike Johnson in conference that I’m cosponsoring the Motion to Vacate that was introduced by @RepMTG,” Massie posted on Twitter. “He should pre-announce his resignation (as Boehner did), so we can pick a new Speaker without ever being without a GOP Speaker.”
Just prior to Massie’s Twitter announcement, Jake Sherman of Punchbowl News scooped Massie’s support of the motion to vacate. According to Sherman, “[Massie] told Johnson in front of the entire House Republican Conference that he should clean the barn and resign or else he’ll be vacated.”
NEW — TOM MASSIE said in a closed House Republican meeting that he’s going to cosponsor the motion to vacate, per several sources in the room.
— Jake Sherman (@JakeSherman) April 16, 2024
Previously, after Johnson jammed through a $1.2 trillion, 1,000-page minibus that funded the government through fiscal year 2024, Greene filed a motion to vacate. While that motion has so far remained in the hopper, Massie’s endorsement of Greene’s motion means she could trigger the motion by asking for privilege on the House floor at a moment’s notice.
Meanwhile, Johnson is planning to pass four different foreign aid supplemental spending bills under a single rule, a procedural maneuver called a MIRV. If Johnson goes with a MIRV, the House will vote on the rule, then vote on the four different packages. Then the packages that pass will be bundled together in a single bill presented to the Senate.
Meanwhile, Johnson has (for now) told House GOP members there will be an amendment process. Conservatives are going to test just how open that process will be, however. Last night, Rep. Matt Gaetz said he’d like to offer HR 2 as an amendment, which would effectively kill the legislation in both chambers—Johnson, once again, is relying on Democratic votes to get legislation out of the House. Without such an amendment, the aid package will not address border security—the number one issue thus far in the 2024 campaign cycle.
For now, Capitol Hill is playing the waiting game: What exactly will each one of these bills include? Text is expected to be circulated today. What amendments will Johnson allow? Members of Congress simply don’t know.
Meanwhile, Speaker Johnson maintains that he will not be stepping down:
JOHNSON JUST NOW: "I am not resigning."
— Jake Sherman (@JakeSherman) April 16, 2024
It’s fitting that Massie invoked the name of former speaker John Boehner. Boehner’s slow downfall started with a MIRV on trade legislation. Johnson’s swift downfall could end with one.
The post Massie Kicks Effort to Oust Speaker Johnson Into High Gear appeared first on The American Conservative.
Conservatives are apparently no longer welcome in Europe. What’s next?
Chaos erupted at the National Conservatism conference (“NatCon”) in Brussels today when police ordered the event to be shut down for causing a “public disturbance.”
Hundreds of attendees gathered in the EU capital to hear speeches by Hungary’s Prime Minister Viktor Orban, the Brexit Party founder Nigel Farage, the UK’s former Home Secretary Suella Braverman, and more right-wing figures and politicians.
Back on April 13, the organizers of NatCon shared that the conference would be moving to a different location after their host caved to political pressure from politicians such as Brussels’s Mayor Phillipe Close.
Even after finding a last minute replacement venue, NatCon shared that they were still facing pressure to cancel the event altogether, just hours leading up to its start.
As the conference opened, Yoram Hazony, chairman of the Edmund Burke Foundation, which hosts NatCon, said to the crowd, “This is now the third event space where we have attempted to host a National Conservative Conference in Brussels. This is an age in which we can’t expect basic decency or grace from those who are our political opponents.”
The conference proceeded over the next few hours, with a slew of speakers having their chance to address the audience. When Nigel Farage took to the stage, he and his audience did not know what was about to happen. His words were ironically foreshadowing: “If anyone said to me that Brexit wasn’t the right thing to do—leaving this place, recognizing you can’t be a democratic, sovereign nation state and be a member of this monstrous union—they would now tell me: WE WERE RIGHT TO LEAVE!”
However, just minutes into his speech, the Brussels police arrived at the scene, citing “public disturbance” as the reason for shutting the event down.
Police blockaded the venue, telling attendees that if they left, they would not be allowed back in. According to NatCon, “Delegates have limited access to food and water, which are being prevented from delivery. Is this what city mayor Emir Kir is aiming for?”
Saurabh Sharma, president of American Moment and executive director of the Edmund Burke Foundation, who had chaired a panel discussion at the event, shared an image of the chaos on X:
Brussels Police are holding NatCon Brussels 2 hostage. They know that it would be a circus to frog-march us out of here—so they just won’t let people come in.
— Saurabh Sharma 🇺🇸 (@ssharmaUS) April 16, 2024
The conference will continue—either here or elsewhere. pic.twitter.com/L0gq5s9sxS
Gladden Pappin, President of the Hungarian Institute of International Affairs, told The American Conservative,
Brussels has been hounding Hungary for supposed rule of law violations for years. But today in the heart of the European Union, the mayor of Brussels forced the National Conservatism conference out of two venues and is trying to expel it from a third, against the will of the owner. Brussels police have barricaded the doors of the conference location, citing the mayor’s criticism of the ideas being discussed and claiming that the conference is under antifa threat. Conference attendees can leave but not return. This is the reality of liberalism: while draping itself in “norms” and the “rule of law,” it has become an aggressive ideology bent on excluding conservative viewpoints. Unfortunately for them, the truth can’t be excluded.
Hazony also spoke to TAC, saying, “We decided to hold NatCon Brussels 2 because Europe is facing a choice between preserving independent nations or descending into totalitarian liberal tyranny. This ridiculous suppression of political speech only underlines this truth. Make no mistake, this is the entrenched political cartel in Brussels doing everything in and out of their power to stop any challenge to their rule.”
Rod Dreher, resident of Hungary, speaker at NatCon, and TAC contributing editor, told TAC via email, “The Islamo-left municipal government, collaborating with Antifa, are showing the world the kind of Europe they will impose if they aren’t stopped. I never imagined I would live to see something like this in the free and democratic West. Yet here we are. Nothing anybody will have said from the NatCon stage will speak as powerfully about the dark realities of the moment as what the Brussels authorities have done.”
While stuck inside the venue, the speakers are carrying on with the event. The question remains: Is free speech still a reality in the European Union? And when will this dark force of suppression make its way across the Atlantic?
The post Inside the Attempt to Cancel NatCon Brussels appeared first on The American Conservative.
The U.S. risks being caught off-guard if it expects the ’90s to last forever.
On December 30, 2021, Joe Biden informed Vladimir Putin in a phone call that the White House stood ready to cripple the Russian economy if the Kremlin proceeds with plans to invade Ukraine. Biden reiterated this message in a call with Putin just weeks before the February 2022 invasion. “President Biden was clear that, if Russia undertakes a further invasion of Ukraine, the United States together with our Allies and partners will respond decisively and impose swift and severe costs on Russia,” said the White House in a readout. As Russian forces poured into Ukraine later that month, the Biden administration wasted no time corralling U.S. allies behind the largest and most ambitious sanctions regime in history.
The Russian ruble, Biden triumphantly declared in March 2022, was “almost immediately reduced to rubble,” and the “Russian economy [was] on track to be cut in half.” It is widely acknowledged today that these, to put it mildly, optimistic forecasts turned out to be catastrophically wrong. Not only did the Russian economy shrink by an insubstantial amount in 2022 despite the West’s unprecedented sanctions onslaught, but its precipitous growth in 2023 has experts speculating that it is actually on the verge of “overheating.”
How did Russia, which, as often observed in Western commentary, has a smaller GDP than several individual EU states as well as both Texas and California, manage to defeat an economic blockade imposed by a coalition accounting for over one-third of the global economy? This phenomenon has been well-charted as a policy question. It is, in large part, a story of sophisticated Russian sanctions evasion and mitigation measures, including a wide array of parallel import schemes, a vast network of commercial proxies and cut-outs, alternative energy export pathways, and Russia’s success in offsetting Western pressure through deeper commercial ties with China, India, and other major players in the global south.
In some cases, Moscow has demonstrated a capacity for honing and adapting these methods faster than the U.S. and EU can come up with countermeasures against them. In others, there simply are no reasonable countermeasures. For instance, targeted sanctions against specific Turkish or Chinese entities are far too insignificant in scale to make a dent in Russia’s war effort. Meanwhile, the White House cannot impose large-scale, sweeping secondary sanctions on Beijing, New Delhi, and others for continuing to do business with Russia without inviting an avalanche of negative short and long-term diplomatic, political, and economic consequences that would leave many asking if the cure is worse than the disease.
The sanctions regime’s failures have been laid bare in ways that are increasingly difficult to ignore. Yet this moment’s deeper significance lies not in what it says about Russian economic resilience, but, rather, in its indictment of a tired, hollow foreign policy orthodoxy that has captured Washington since 1991.
To be sure, America has a long history of wielding economic restrictions as a policy tool. Such measures are, in a way, ingrained into the mythology behind this country’s founding: North American colonists pursued a fairly effective boycott of British goods as a form of protest against the Crown’s revenue collection laws in the run-up to the War for Independence.
The basic policy rationale behind sanctions is perfectly sensible, even attractive. It goes something like this: Imposing economic punishments on misbehaving states is a low-risk, low-cost way of pressuring those states to bring their policies into closer alignment with U.S. interests. The U.S. has enjoyed an unparalleled degree of international economic clout since the end of the Second World War and is thus one of the few countries in world history with the ability to project its influence in that way—according to this line of reasoning, it would be a wasted opportunity not to.
Even in relatively propitious circumstances, however, sanctions have always been a deeply flawed tool for advancing national interests. Their basic feedback loop—getting states to change their behavior through varied economic restrictions—is only credible if the target both believes that the restrictions can realistically be lifted and has a strong enough underlying incentive to do what Washington wants.
Neither condition has applied to Russia since at least 2014: that is, the Kremlin has long been working from the assumption that the bulk of the Western sanctions regime is here to stay no matter what Russia does, and Moscow is fundamentally unwilling to accede to any Western demands—like returning Crimea to Ukraine—that would so much as offer even as modicum of hope that Congress would consider easing, let alone lifting, its share in a sprawling international regime of what is now over 16,000 sanctions on Russia. This incentive problem is present to varying degrees in other sanctions regimes, including the ones on North Korea and Iran, but is especially acute in Russia’s case because it is amplified by a stark and growing divergence between Western means and ends. Simply put, the Russian state has proven too large, its resources too vast and its international influence too entrenched, to be effectively isolated. This marks not just a grievous policy failure, though it is that too, but a repudiation of the basic assumptions driving U.S. foreign policy.
There was an abundance of circumstantial evidence to suggest that the Western sanctions regime would fail in its task of mortally wounding the Russian economy; perhaps the most glaring indicator was that nearly the entire non-western world refused to take part in the Western blockade, rendering any attempts to economically isolate Russia null and void from the start. Why, in the face of these realities, was the administration so sure that it could bring Russia to heel? The answer lies in a deeper and more chronic dysfunction. The 1990s’ unipolar moment, or the brief span of time following the Soviet collapse in which the U.S. got to act nearly unchallenged on the global age, gave rise to a stubbornly maximalist, rigidly dogmatic, and quasi-religious view of America’s place in the world that brooks no limits on what the U.S. can and should achieve.
This arrogance of power is alarmingly detached from the realities of an emerging multipolar world where Washington cannot bend others to its will simply by embargoing them and shutting them out of western-dominated financial institutions. Sanctions were of dubious effectiveness even when imposed against states much smaller than Russia and in geopolitical contexts more favorable to the U.S, let alone in a configuration that gave Russia lucrative, ready-made pathways to pivot its energy transactions away from western markets.
Decades of global American financial dominance have cultivated a voracious policy appetite for sanctions as a catch-all solution for punishing friends and adversaries alike, but these tools are steadily undermining the unprecedented prosperity that made them possible. An insistence on walling off access to Western markets, even as the West’s share of global wealth steadily declines relative to the non-Western great powers, amounts to a kind of economic self-castration for which future generations will bear steep costs. The dollar and other key Western financial products, while not at risk of being conclusively displaced by competitors of comparable clout, are slowly declining as non-Western states seek to insure themselves against Western economic pressure by diversifying their finances. “We won’t have to talk about sanctions in five years, because there will be so many countries transacting in currencies other than the dollar that we won’t have the ability to sanction them,” warned Sen. Marco Rubio last year.
The disastrous failure of Russia sanctions offers a glimpse of a future for which U.S. policy, stuck in a staid 1990s mentality even as the world quickly passes it by, is not prepared. Washington must finally wean itself off its worsening sanctions addiction and pursue a more nuanced, pragmatic framework for dealing with the rest of the world while it can still do so on its own terms.
The post What Russia Sanctions Failure Says About the Future appeared first on The American Conservative.
A proposed development in Harbor Springs, Michigan could be the next episode in the uglification of America.
It’s no secret that America is confronting a crushing housing shortage; pundits on the left and right point out that high housing prices exacerbate the birth crisis, keeping Millennials and Gen Z from forming families and flourishing. But policies ostensibly designed to create more housing come in many forms, not all of them good. Top-down attempts to fundamentally re-engineer communities in the name of “housing justice” are particularly dangerous. Devolution and localism are important principles in housing policy; a neighborhood in the Bronx might look different from one in Palm Springs, and communities ought to build homes in ways that honor the best of their character and history.
Harbor Springs, a vacation town in northern Michigan, is discovering this lesson first-hand. The town has ties to important moments in American history. Its Catholic church, Holy Childhood of Jesus, was established as part of the larger Jesuit missionary movement in the 1800s, serving Native American families and logging communities. Its train station is where Ernest Hemingway’s family would arrive from Chicago for their annual summer vacations in the surrounding area. Its forests and pines, home to foxes and bald eagles, are prized to this day for their haunting tranquility. And, its views of sparkling Lake Michigan are refreshing and clarifying. It is understandable that residents are protective of Harbor Springs, having seen the destruction of other beautiful, historic communities at the hands of “central planning.”
It is questionable whether Harbor Springs even needs more housing, given that the current homeowner vacancy rate, according to census bureau data, is 9.7 percent, meaning one in ten dwellings is available. But one proposal for building new housing in Harbor Springs, backed by the city government, involves Michigan’s Redevelopment Ready Communities, a program of the quasi-governmental Michigan Economic Development Corporation. The agency was originally established as a job-creation engine for troubled regions and to help diversify the economy where it was too heavily dependent on the auto industry.
Immediately one wonders what relevance any of this has to flourishing and affluent Harbor Springs; this is not Flint or Detroit, but a town with an income per capita of $38,000 (versus $27,500 statewide) and 2.6 percent unemployment (versus 5.2 percent statewide). Relatively small and largely residential, Harbor Springs is also hardly the first place—or the 10th—that comes to mind for drawing new residents in the name of economic opportunity. If the state is serious about spending its finite money on cities that can actually be mobilized into economic success stories, rather than just looking to enact a power grab or punish a town it may perceive as being exclusionary or snobby, would not the funds be better spent in places like Grand Rapids and Kalamazoo?
A city overview published in March 2024 anticipates such questions. It asserts that the RRC program is not just for troubled communities but instead allows any community “to be proactive instead of reactive” with regard to economic downturns and perceived need for new development, to increase the transparency and fairness of government processes, and “to receive technical and/or financial assistance”—presumably from the state. This last function is perhaps what the Harbor Springs city government has primarily in mind here, as it is at pains to assert elsewhere in the overview that the proposed rezoning it seeks to pass has been devised independently of RRC. But how much can we expect the rezoning to diverge from RRC “best practices” when it is presented as part of certification for the program? And, more troublingly, how long can local independence in city planning be guaranteed if state funding is at stake?
There is good reason to fear that state involvement in local planning is likely to turn into ideologically motivated strong-arming to the eventual detriment of Harbor Springs. Federal government programs have sought to push suburbs to build more apartment buildings and other multi-family dwellings, sometimes under pain of loss of necessary funding (road maintenance, for instance); many on the Left have come to view single-family zoning as “racist” simply because many members of ethnic minorities are unable to afford homeownership. For such people, increasing density in a wealthy community becomes part of a moral crusade, whether or not it benefits those who already live there or even the disadvantaged they are trying to help.
It is worth noting that Cabrini-Green, until its demolition one of the most notoriously crime-ridden housing projects in Chicago, was located not in the virtual war zones of that city’s West or South Sides but on the desirable North Side, mere blocks from some of the richest neighborhoods in the city. True, the North Side did not suffer for the proximity, but nor did the projects benefit at all for it in quality of life.
Another example of government planning, driven by ideological concerns and theoretical constructs in diagnosing and addressing economic problems, is even closer to home for Wolverine State residents. In his book The Poor Side of Town, Howard Husock documents in harrowing detail how public housing projects helped ruin Detroit’s Black Bottom by displacing the neighborhood’s many black-owned business, residential properties, and self-help institutions in the name of “slum clearance.”
It is against the backdrop of America’s many Cabrini-Greens and Black Bottoms that we should consider top-down initiatives spearheaded by unelected city planners and bureaucrats, imported from left-leaning policy programs, with questionable ties to the communities for which they make decisions that may have decades of effects.
There is reason to be skeptical when city officials in a small town insist that, whatever local homeowners or business-owners say, zoning laws be changed to favor greater density and a wider range of businesses. What does it mean, for instance, when officials suggest that certain zoning laws are “out of date”? Could this refer to sex shops and residential treatment centers, both of which are permitted by default in certain districts under the proposed rezoning? Or the cannabis shops that are now ubiquitous in blue districts?
No doubt there are points upon which the zoning code could be legitimately clarified or improved, but if so, it should not be an excuse for squeezing in more contentious policies as a response to completely undefined future threats—policies that could very well draw developers with no connection or commitment to the area to undermine the very character that drew residents to Harbor Springs in the first place. Even where many parties have good intentions, extreme changes in density often bring a great risk of social unrest for the simple reason of clashing social customs or the introduction of problems a small community is not poised to handle.
Part of Harbor Spring’s appeal, its quaint architecture, is a reflection of what has happened to the architecture industry over the last century. New developments, especially of higher density, are often, shall we say, aesthetically deficient. Historical preservation movements may not be the sign of a dynamic community, but they may be the only way to preserve something beautiful—and thus human-friendly—in a public life that is often grimly utilitarian.
One hopes that this sad state of affairs comes to an end soon. But until it does, we must not let a poorly thought-out “luxury belief” impulse backed by state power further encroach on the surviving signs of a better way of living.
City officials insist that the current zoning proposal preserves current regulations pertaining to architectural style and does not call for sale or development of city-owned land. The question is how far such assurances will go if the RRC connection leads to greater involvement or pressure from Lansing—and whether the city government’s interest in RRC is really motivated only by a desire for greater resilience and administrative efficiency.
Undoubtedly, America does need some share of higher-density construction in order to combat its housing crisis and increase economic opportunity for those who would take advantage of it. High-density housing need not be ugly or create a low quality of life. (Who would turn up his nose at a townhome in Tuscany?) Nor, for that matter, is it necessary for state governments to assess and influence local zoning policy as a matter of course, as RRC effectively does through its best practices. In New York, for instance, the “Housing Compact” proposed in 2023 by Governor Kathy Hochul would have generally set housing growth rates for local communities while leaving it to them how to achieve these, only forcing rezoning in the vicinity of certain commuter rail stations.
But even so, we should remember that many Americans aspire to a quieter and more remote life in a beautiful setting, and if we cannot be proactive in preserving the communities that offer such a life, who will be left to benefit? Perhaps the state of Michigan should seek to make other communities more like Harbor Springs, at least in beauty and hometown pride, than vice versa—if it really wishes to offer a better life to those who need it.
The post Central Planning Comes for Vacation Towns appeared first on The American Conservative.
The White House has rejected an Israel standalone bill. Will the Speaker send one out anyway?
The House, under the leadership of Speaker Mike Johnson, could vote in the coming days on an aid package to Israel. But will Ukraine aid be attached?
If the White House has its way, the answer is yes. “We are opposed to a stand-alone bill that would just work on Israel,” White House National Security Communications Advisor John Kirby told members of the media Monday. Johnson, however, reportedly told House Republicans at a conference meeting Monday evening that Ukraine and Israel aid should be separated. Is Biden willing to use the veto to get his way, and if he is, will that force Johnson to reconsider?
“House Republicans and the Republican Party understand the necessity of standing with Israel,” Johnson told Fox News on Sunday. Previously, the House had advanced two aid bills for Israel—in fact, Johnson’s first legislative act as Speaker was passing a stand-alone aid bill for Israel.
“We’re going to try again this week, and the details of that package are being put together. Right now, we’re looking at the options and all these supplemental issues,” the speaker continued, signaling an openness to keeping aid to Ukraine and Israel bundled.
Over the weekend, Iran launched a strike with more than 300 missiles and drones in response to an Israeli strike on an Iranian consulate in Damascus that killed 13, including senior military officials. Very few of the Iranian missiles and drones ended up hitting their targets; Israel, with assistance from the U.S., Britain, and France, shot down most. The Jordanians, critics of Israel’s campaign in Gaza, also shot down drones and missiles that entered its airspace. Iran gave ample prior warning of its retaliatory attack and used slow-moving drones, suggesting its actions were meant to be non-escalatory in nature. Despite the apparent scale, Iran expected most of its projectiles would be shot down.
After the Senate failed to strike a deal that would provide supplemental aid to Ukraine, Israel, and the Indo-Pacific in exchange for border security, the Senate passed a $95 billion aid package without border security provisions in February. Johnson has refused to take up the legislation, but has repeatedly stated he wants to create an aid package for Ukraine and Israel that won’t cost him the speaker’s gavel.
On Sunday, in the wake of the Iranian attack, Johnson spoke with President Joe Biden, Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer, Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, and House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries. The group urged Johnson to bring the $95 billion supplemental, nearly two-thirds of which is funding for Ukraine, to the floor.
But Johnson would most likely have to bring the $95 billion package to the floor under suspension of the rules, and it’s unclear whether two-thirds of the House would be willing to sign on. While the weekend’s attack has added urgency, Johnson faces a House GOP growing increasingly skeptical about America’s involvement in Ukraine and a House Democratic conference that increasingly questions U.S. support for Israel. Threading the needle, and doing so while keeping his job, is going to be difficult for Johnson.
For its part, the Senate has refused to consider House-passed aid packages too. The first Israel aid bill Johnson passed out of the House offset the costs via spending cuts, most of which from Biden’s IRS expansion.
In the past few weeks, Johnson has been flirting with various ways to offset future expenditures on the war in Ukraine for his future aid package, such as providing Ukraine aid in the form of a loan or using the REPO Act to seize Russian assets.
“I think these are ideas that I think can get consensus, and that’s what we’ve been working through,” Johnson said in the wake of a Friday meeting with former President Donald Trump, who is more comfortable with the idea of Ukraine aid as a loan. “We’ll send our package. We’ll put something together and send it to the Senate and get these obligations completed.”
While Johnson’s decision to separate Israel and Ukraine aid is aimed primarily at shoring up support from the more conservative wing of the conference, some House Republicans, such as House Foreign Affairs Committee Chair Michael McCaul, believe the conflicts are intertwined. “What happened in Israel last night happens in Ukraine every night,” McCaul said on CBS’s “Face The Nation.”
What happens with the impending aid package remains to be seen. That doesn’t mean Johnson’s House will be idle, however. Johnson is preparing a legislative barrage against Iran in the coming week. The speaker is putting 17 bills about Iran and Israel on the floor—11 of which will proceed under suspension of the rules.
The post Will Ukraine Actually Be a Part of Mike Johnson’s Aid Package? appeared first on The American Conservative.
And will the U.S. be dragged along for the ride?
In August 1961, during a period when tensions between Washington and Moscow were at a high point, Admiral Konstantin I. Derevyanko penned a letter to Premier Krushchev. His purpose was to alert Krushchev to what the Admiral called the “nuclear romanticism” of the Soviet General Staff. The Admiral’s words still carry the force of logic and common sense and are still worthy of our attention today:
Which planet do these people [the Soviet General Staff] intend to live on in the future, and to which Earth do they plan to send their troops to conquer territories?… By this indiscriminately massive use of nuclear weapons on a small and narrow area like Western Europe, we would not only be accepting millions of radioactively contaminated civilians, but, because of the prevailing westerly winds, would also be radioactively contaminating millions of our own people for decades—our armed forces and the populations of the socialist countries, including our own country as far as the Urals.
According to an unnamed official of the U.S. Government, President Joe Biden has told Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu that the United States will not participate in a counterstrike against Iran. This is gratifying news.
Israel does not contemplate operations against Iran or any other state that challenges Israel’s bid for strategic dominance in exclusively conventional military terms. In other words, for Israel’s national leadership, the use of a nuclear weapon is always on the table. Israel’s fundamental deterrence is still asymmetric nuclear capability.
Until now, Washington’s unconditional support for any action Netanyahu wants to take has made Washington an accomplice in Israel’s deliberate slaughter and starvation of Gaza’s Arab population and in the Israeli attack on the Iranian consulate in Syria, a violation of international law. This collaborative support erodes the power and authority of the American People.
It’s time to ask whether American national interest and common sense are finally intruding in the formulation and conduct of U.S. foreign policy. No one in the United States, Europe, or Asia benefits economically, politically, or financially from a regional war in the Middle East that closes the Straits of Hormuz and potentially invites direct Russian military intervention on Iran’s side. Is it also possible that Biden might object to the destruction of life in Gaza?
In this connection, the revelation that Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin allegedly asked Minister Yoav Gallant, his Israeli counterpart, to inform the United States in advance of any possible counterattack by Israel is small comfort. Americans should not forget that Netanyahu wields considerable influence on the Hill, and in the mainstream media. Already legislators are falling all over themselves to send additional billions to Israel while U.S. borders remain open, Americans die of fentanyl poisoning, criminality rises, and children are being trafficked.
It may be too soon to answer the question of whether U.S. foreign policy is changing. Why? Because Israeli Media reports that there were intense debates during the last two meetings of the Israeli war Cabinet on whether to launch a large-scale strike against Iran. Such an attack would likely target Iranian command-and-control, potential long-range missile sites, airbases, naval bases, and oil infrastructure. On the other hand, there was reportedly a discussion about an Israeli response that might be more “measured” to prevent a wider regional conflict.
What Americans know is that Iran targeted Israeli military installations, not Israel’s population. And Iran used a small fraction of its arsenal and very few of their newest weapons. Hezbollah effectively sat out the event. Though it is speculated that two Israeli airfields and possibly an intelligence station on the Golan Heights sustained some damage, the entire Iranian operation had a theatrical air about it.
No one was surprised. Certainly not the Israeli air forces or their colleagues in the U.S. and British air forces. As noted above, with few exceptions, most of the 300-plus drones and missiles were intercepted and shot down.
Nevertheless, Iran understood what was required to overwhelm Israeli and allied air defenses. We may infer that there was also a desire in Tehran to avoid escalating the conflict. Consider what would happen if Iran launched 1500 drones and 800 ballistic missiles over several hours, or even days. Iran made its point. It’s simple: Iran can destroy Israel. Tehran created new conditions of deterrence that favor Iran.
Iran announced through their UN mission that they consider the issue of the Israeli strikes on their consular offices in Syria closed. But nothing is solved. Little has changed. A million are starving in Gaza, and Americans should expect the Israeli campaign of murder and expulsion in Gaza to resume shortly.
As a result, Netanyahu will demand the subjugation or destruction of Iran or any Muslim entity that challenges Israeli strategic dominance. For Netanyahu it’s a matter of existential importance to Israel. Yet the U.S. did not commit to attacking Iran. This is unacceptable to Netanyahu, and he will work to alter Washington’s position.
Under the circumstances, Washington should expect Israel to employ whatever military power is at its disposal, including nuclear weapons, to destroy Iran’s strategic power. Destroying Iran’s underground nuclear facilities has been a goal for a very long time.
Moscow, however, will not tolerate a devastating attack on Iran. The question is whether Biden will tolerate such an attack and continue to indulge Israeli operations in Gaza. Perhaps Biden should pause to read Admiral Derevyanko’s 1961 advice to Krushchev before he answers.
The post Will Israel Go Nuclear Against Iran? appeared first on The American Conservative.
There is no magic button. Trump would have to go further than even allies assume.
The American civil bureaucracy accomplished enormous successes from the time the Constitution was adopted through the Civil War and the early years of Reconstruction. The country incorporated more than half the land mass that comprises the contiguous United States today, including through the Louisiana Purchase. The U.S. undertook and accomplished enormous public works projects, constructing the Erie Canal and the National Road, the nationwide telegram system, and the transcontinental railroad. Americans were victorious in battle, successfully repelling the British invasion in the War of 1812 and winning the Mexican-American War. These were sensational and advanced accomplishments, unrivaled among the rest of the contemporaneous world.
Today, the civil bureaucracy of that era is derided as the Jacksonian “spoils system,” which its numerous critics describe as a web of political patronage that allowed individuals to purchase positions in the federal bureaucracy with their political donations. A system as crass as that should be rightfully criticized, but the dominant “spoils system” narrative does not accurately portray the historical reality and instead merely parrots the talking points of Jackson’s political opponents to caricature a movement that actually promoted democratic accountability.
In truth, Jackson did not “gut” the federal government, as his critics allege, but replaced approximately 9 percent of its workforce with loyalists who wanted to advance the policies he had been elected to enact. This was not an affront to democracy but rather the embodiment of it, and it was not without precedent. In proportion to the size of the federal government at the time, President Jefferson gutted a larger percentage of the federal workforce when he took office, and other early presidents supported the president’s power to remove any member of the executive branch. Such removal, even at a larger scale, was not anti-democratic but a core feature of the political accountability of the executive branch.
Today, the civil bureaucracy is not creative, accomplished, or even responsive to the president; it is stagnant and a drag on the country, and it is no wonder. Rather than being staffed with regular Americans chosen for their ideas or leadership capability by a duly enacted president, the bureaucracy of today is composed of credentialed box-checkers insulated from political accountability by undemocratic civil service protections. Of the roughly 2.2 million federal bureaucrats and 10 million federal contractors, only about 4,000 roles are political appointees accountable to the president. What is worse, this unaccountable bureaucracy is an active arm of the Left, and not any reflection of the diversity of political thought among the American people or their elected leaders.
One can judge the bureaucracy by its controversies. IRS bureaucrats targeted “patriot” organizations for their conservative identity; the national security agencies wielded anti-terrorism authorities to investigate a rival presidential campaign and unmask its senior-level political advisors; bureaucrats across numerous agencies applied pressure to social media companies to repress conservative political speech with which they disagreed; and even the Department of Justice, supposedly the paragon of neutrality and the arbiter of the rule of law, has embarrassed itself over its irreconcilable enforcement choices. It executed a pre-dawn raid of Roger Stone, while allowing the statute of limitations to run on most of Hunter Biden’s crimes. It prosecuted Peter Navarro for refusing to answer a congressional subpoena, but when Eric Holder did the same, DOJ declined to bring charges. It raided, arrested, and prosecuted a pro-life protestor who was ultimately acquitted on all charges, while Antifa and BLM rioters were never charged.
Unsurprisingly, a leftist bureaucracy willing to wage war on its political opponents is also unwilling to help them achieve their policy priorities. Today, the key challenge facing a Republican president, in the words of political scientist Clinton Rossiter, is “not to persuade Congress to support a policy dear to his political heart, but to persuade the pertinent bureau or agency—even when headed by men of his own choosing—to follow his direction faithfully and transform the shadow of the policy into the substance of the program.” The reason? Federal civil service laws that protect and insulate the bureaucracy from the president’s control, contrary to the Constitution’s demands.
Reforming those laws must be a top priority of the next Trump administration, and the centerpiece of that reform cannot be the Schedule F proposal put forward in the first Trump presidency. That idea, which would at most designate a small proportion of the bureaucracy for greater presidential removal authority and control, cannot begin to stand up against the threat of the administrative state writ large. Nor is there any reason for conservatives to be satisfied with such an incremental, technocratic, work-inside-the-system proposal. The facts are apparent to the American people that the weaponization of government has never been on fuller display. There will not be a more convincing record on which to campaign to dismantle the administrative state, nor will there be a second chance to try. If the administrative state survives unscathed and unreformed after the last ten years of abuses, the already bold bureaucrats will grow bolder and and reform will be out of reach.
Today the Left defends the civil service protections of the federal bureaucracy as if they were handed down on stone tablets, but the reality is that they are an amalgamation of entrenched policies reflecting a progressive worldview, essentially a one-way ratchet that has grown more powerful with every Democrat administration and rarely if ever knocked back when Republicans ascend to power.
The first major attempt at establishing protected status for the civil service was the adoption of the Pendleton Act in 1883. In the years before its passage, the concept of civil service reform was hotly contested and a source of division in electoral politics. Public opinion for the reform coalesced in the aftermath of President James Garfield’s assassination. Garfield was shot and killed by a man named Charles Guiteau, whose professed motivation was having been passed over for a diplomatic position to which he believed he was entitled based on his support for Garfield’s campaign. In reality, Guiteau was mentally ill. He had a history of fraud and dishonest dealings as a lawyer, including pocketing money his clients won in litigation. He was a plagiarist, narcissist, thief, domestic abuser, and a self-professed prophet of God. The idea that Guiteau had any claim to a diplomatic role in the Garfield administration was merely a symptom of his insanity.
Civil service reformers relied on the emotional pull of the Guiteau story to rally support for their cause. The National Civil Service Reform League circulated nationwide a letter relying on “the recent murderous attack” to promote reform legislation. Senator George Pendleton of Ohio was even more explicit when promoting the reform bill that bore his name: Guiteau’s “desire for office—the belief that he had earned it…made this crime possible…made it possible for the assassin to assert that he thought he was doing his party and his country a service.” In fact, what made Guiteau’s crime possible was his insanity, which was surely no basis on which to enact political reform. But rhetoric like this worked, and the Pendleton Civil Service Act was enacted in 1883.
Despite the swelling support for reform based on the despicable acts of a madman, the Pendleton Act’s actual effect was modest. It charged the Civil Service Commission to institute “open, competitive examinations for testing the fitness of applicants for the public service,” examinations that would “relate to those matters which will fairly test the relative capacity and fitness of the persons examined to discharge the[ir] duties.” Jobs were to be available only to the highest-scoring applicants and also apportioned among the states and territories based on the latest census. New appointees were to be given a period of probation at the outset of their employment.
Perhaps most importantly, this new opportunity for open, merit-based civil-service selection was limited to roughly 10 percent of the federal bureaucracy at the time, essentially customs officials (“clerks and persons employed by the collector, naval officer, surveyor, and appraisers”) and some postal employees. Both categories encompassed positions of trust where political accountability was of little importance. It was important that the individuals inspecting citizens’ goods, assessing customs dues, and handling official mail be competitively selected in open, merit-based hiring, not based on political connections.
Over time, the Pendleton Act’s modest reforms have metastasized across the federal government, transforming it beyond what even its proponents would recognize.
First, the act’s coverage expanded until, roughly a century after the Pendleton Act took effect, 90 percent of the federal bureaucracy fell under the purview of the Civil Service Commission. This meant that civil service reforms that were once limited to select trust positions far removed from policymaking are today so expansive that they encompass legions of supposedly non-political civil service employees who actually perform policymaking and policy-advocating work.
The greater reach of these reforms is compounded by the enormously expanded reach of the federal government over the same period of time, a longstanding trend but one that grew exponentially out of the New Deal. Because of the ever-expanding federal government, more civil servants doing policy-related work are protected by civil service rules and the policy work they do reaches further into citizens’ lives than ever before. Protected bureaucrats can designate a neighborhood parcel as a protected wetland, eliminate incandescent lightbulbs in homes, and demand that half of cars sold be electric vehicles, infrastructure inadequacies be damned.
Second, the Carter administration scrapped merit-based examinations, which had been a key feature of civil service hiring beginning with the Pendleton Act. At the start of the Carter administration, the Professional and Administrative Career Examination (PACE) served as a gateway for college graduates seeking top agency positions in the executive branch. The test was a general intelligence exam aimed at assessing and predicting skills in verbal comprehension, judgment, and deductive, inductive, and quantitative reasoning. Studies showed that success on the test was an excellent predictor of success on the job. In the late 1970s, however, other studies emerged that indicated black test-takers performed disproportionately worse on PACE. The data was imperfect, and the Office of Personnel Management believed that the disparate test results had no “bottom line” adverse impact on minorities in PACE occupations because of other equalizing means for entering those jobs, including internal promotion. OPM data showed that 17 percent of the employees in the most populous PACE occupations were minorities, which was higher than the relevant labor market statistics at the time. But activists sued the Carter Administration over the disparate impact of PACE, and in the twilight of his presidency, Carter’s Department of Justice (perhaps without directly consulting the president or his advisors) settled the case with a consent decree that scrapped the test just as the plaintiffs sought and set in place a racial quota system instead: minority applicants must be selected for jobs at a rate proportional to the number who apply.
Various other aspects of the Pendleton Act’s reforms have been abandoned, too. There are no geographic requirements for apportioning civil service roles. Instead, the bureaucracy is primarily staffed by individuals who spend their careers in and around the District of Columbia. Far from requiring probation periods for new employees to demonstrate their fitness for their roles, in today’s civil service misbehavior is extremely difficult to address and firing nearly impossible. Unable to address misbehavior, the civil service now incentivizes performance with pay bonuses. This has not solved the problem. Even the bureaucracy’s worst performers (for example, the Veterans Administration executives who encouraged false reporting about waiting lists for hospital admissions) receive “outstanding” ratings and qualify for these incentives. The Government Accountability Office has acknowledged that the bureaucracy has no way to stratify employees based on the existing performance evaluation system, under which more than 99 percent of federal employees rate as “successful” or above. The result is that pay raises have become automatic and so-called “incentive pay” serves as “free money” to recipients, untethered from exemplary, metric-tested accomplishments.
Other reforms have also contributed to changing the character of the federal bureaucracy. John F. Kennedy gave federal employees the right to unionize and collectively bargain in 1962, and Lyndon B. Johnson expanded the right to include binding arbitration of certain disputes beginning in 1969. Every subsequent Democratic president took executive action to further expand the rights of public employee unions. President Carter enjoyed congressional support for additional pro-public-union reforms that were rolled into the Civil Service Reform Act of 1978. Among other things, that law expressed Congress’s view that public-employee unions “safeguard the public interest” because they promote “the highest standards of employee performance and the continued … implementation of modern and progressive work practices to … improve employee performance and the efficient accomplishment of the operations of the Government.” Nothing could be further from the truth today, when public-employee unions insulate low-performing or outright misbehaving federal employees from termination. Federal public employee unions impose greater costs on taxpayers and interpose quintessentially private interests (the preferences of public employees) between the citizenry and their government.
Not content merely with bargaining rights, Democrats also enacted employment protections for the civil service in the same 1978 Act. These reforms imposed for-cause limitations on subjecting covered employees to adverse employment actions and also guaranteed civil service bureaucrats extensive procedural protections before an adverse action is taken. Adverse actions include not only suspension and termination but also a reduction in grade or pay. The procedural protections include advanced notice of any adverse action, an opportunity to respond, the right to be represented, and an appeal, to be heard by the new Merit Service Protection Board, which the 1978 Act also created. These are exactly the kinds of procedural protections that a private sector union might be expected to bargain for; public employees of the federal government, however, enjoy these protections by statute, outside of any collective bargaining.
The net result of these changes is that our federal bureaucracy reflects neither the ideals of the Founders nor the principles that supposedly justified the growth of the administrative state and accompanying civil service “reform” over the past 150 years.
The Founders believed in accountable government and rejected proposals that would have insulated executive branch officers, even minor officers, from the president’s sole control. In 1789, the early Congress debated a bill to create a foreign affairs department, including what removal authority should govern it: removal by the President, or authority based in Congress, or blended between the branches? In debating the bill, Madison spoke about the Constitution’s intentions for accountability at all levels of the executive branch and the best protections against maladministration:
The danger to liberty, the danger of mal-administration has not yet been found to lay so much in the facility of introducing improper persons into office, as in the difficulty of displacing those who are unworthy of the public trust. If it is said that an officer once appointed shall not be displaced without the formality required by impeachment, I shall be glad to know what security we have for the faithful administration of the government. Every individual in the long chain which extends from the highest to the lowest link of the executive magistracy, would find a security in his situation which would relax his fidelity and promptitude in the discharge of his duty.
And he minced no words about where the chain of executive authority should terminate:
If the president should possess alone the power of removal from office, those who are employed in the execution of the law will be in their proper situation, and the chain of dependence be preserved; the lowest officers, the middle grade, and the highest, will depend, as they ought, on the president, and the president on the community. The chain of dependence therefore terminates in the supreme body, namely, in the people, who will possess besides, in aid of their original power, the decisive engine of impeachment.
In his speech, Madison explains that this structure of executive accountability flows from the Constitution itself, its structure and its guarantee of republican government.
Proponents of the burgeoning and protected civil service bureaucracy claim that the structure of the administrative state today serves other goals, goals the Founders could not have envisioned based on the size of the nation and the complexity of today’s economy. They say the demands of modern governance require rule by experts, best achieved through meritocratic bureaucracy. I have previously written about a key originator of these ideas, James Landis, an intellectual whose idea of a three-branches-in-one administrative state provided the theoretical architecture supporting FDR’s radical reconstructions and expansion of the federal government.
The drive to produce a federal bureaucracy of merited experts has been shared by both parties, such that even efforts to “reform” the administrative state have been undertaken with the goal of encouraging merit and expertise. But if the goal of the federal bureaucracy is merit, we do not have a system designed to produce it. Objective criteria, like civil service examinations, have been jettisoned. Employee performance evaluations are inflated and meaningless. Procedural protections insulate federal employees from consequences for poor performance or misbehavior.
Far from producing a meritocratic bureaucracy, the civil service system produces a bloated and lethargic class of unaccountable “experts,” who have been captured by the political Left. In the 2020 election, of those federal employees who donated to a candidate for president, most donated to Biden. In some agencies, the numbers were overwhelming: 91 percent of total dollars donated by Labor Department bureaucrats went to Biden, 85 percent at the Justice Department, and 84 percent at both the Education Department and State Department. It is no surprise, then, that when federal bureaucrats do muster themselves to get something done, it will be a priority of the Left: requiring religious organizations to provide health insurance for abortions and abortifacient drugs; imposing and enforcing vaccine mandates; enacting rules to allow retirement plans to invest based on environmental and social governance; or investigating the tax status of conservative organizations and churches.
It is impossible to understand the Trump presidency, what it accomplished and what it failed to accomplish, without understanding these attributes of the federal bureaucracy. The President no longer controls the executive branch. He can hire and fire Cabinet heads and some senior positions in each agency, but actually advancing substantive policies requires the participation of bureaucrats who may be happy to act when a Democrat president proposes a reform they support but who are equally happy to sabotage conservative policies through apathy, delay, or open opposition.
In my own experience, executive policy priorities originating from the White House and directed by the president were thwarted by bureaucrats across the federal government who simply refused to provide requested data (“Yes, we keep that data, but no, you can’t see it.”), or threw up flimsy procedural roadblocks (“If you want that information, you’ll have to ask someone else first.”), or dragged their feet for so long that the clock ran out (“Yes, we know we’ve already received two extensions, but we really do need more time”). And that does not account for the ways in which the bureaucracy itself stands as a gatekeeper to policy-making ideas.
In our leviathan federal government, it is impossible to monitor what the government is currently doing without a guide through the system. The only people who know, though, are bureaucrats themselves, little motivated to give an accurate accounting of their operations, thereby making it difficult or impossible to understand what problems exist and devise policies to solve them. The Trump presidency exposed these problems more than any previous administration had because the bureaucracy had never hated a president as much as it hated him.
After battling administrative state intransigence and sometimes outright revolt for nearly four years, President Trump was well aware that something had to give. In October 2020, he issued an executive order often referred to now as simply “Schedule F.” Schedule F required agencies to designate which of their employees were “in positions of a confidential, policy-determining, policy-making, or policy-advocating character.” These employees would then be placed on Schedule F (Schedules A through E already existed), and because the order’s language mirrored the 1978 Act exemption for some federal jobs, Schedule F employees would lose procedural protections against adverse employment actions that originated in the 1978 Act.
The idea was smart and its objective good. But Schedule F will not solve the problems embedded in the modern administrative state, and it cannot be the “centerpiece” of a Republican presidential administration’s deep state reforms. It would be like making the cranberry salad the star of Thanksgiving Dinner; even if it’s good, it’s not the main event.
First, Schedule F looks good on paper but is virtually impossible to actuate because it asks the agencies to determine which employees should be added to it. Agency leaders do not want this reform because they do not want to lose the procedural protections that they and their colleagues enjoy. This was on display in the immediate response to Schedule F. Although only a short time remained in the Trump administration (more on that in a moment), no agency placed positions into Schedule F before President Biden revoked it. Only the Office of Management and Budget and the U.S. International Boundary and Water Commission took the preliminary steps necessary to designate positions and would have placed 415 and 5 employees, respectively, on Schedule F. Just 13 other agencies bothered to respond at all, seven to say they needed more time to finalize their analysis, and six to say that they would not be adding any positions to Schedule F.
This exposes some of the problems I’ve already described: If your reform of the federal bureaucracy must be carried out by the federal bureaucracy, then you can be sure that the reform will fail. This is especially true of Schedule F because the determination it asks employees to make (essentially, does a given position make or advocate policy or not) is itself a political question that depends on one’s views of bureaucratic expertise. When officials at the Center for Disease Control recommended COVID responses like lockdowns and masking, were they merely stating expert views on the issues or were they making policy? When Anthony Fauci helped hand out funding for gain-of-function research in the Wuhan Labs, was he making policy or merely stating expert views on meritorious research projects? The answers to these questions likely depend on one’s political views on a variety of topics, including the proper role of government and the fallibility of experts. The Left will say that these bureaucrats are simply charged with “following the Science.”
Second, even if it were possible to fill Schedule F with a meaningfully honest list of policymaking and policy-advocating employees across all agencies, the reform would only address one part of one problem with the administrative state, the inability to take an adverse action against Schedule F employees. It would not recommit the federal government to merit-based hiring through civil service examinations; it would not shrink the bureaucracy or its reach; it would not place the bureaucracy under the president’s direct control or restore the Constitution’s balance of powers. Even the modest reform it does offer—the ability to take adverse action against the small number of newly-designated Schedule F employees more easily, up to and including termination—would be difficult to do in large numbers if an administration were so inclined. For example, the Trump administration never filled all of the political positions it was entitled to fill without the advice and consent of the Senate, sometimes leaving nearly 2,000 such positions open at once.
Third, Schedule F is not durable. Being created by executive order generally means it can be undone by executive order, and a Democrat president would surely do so (as Biden did). So if a future Trump administration spent years coercing agencies to finally designate Schedule F positions, the effort could be wasted just two years later. Plus, by announcing the reform in what turned out to be the waning days of the Trump administration, Republicans laid their cards on the table, and Democrats memorized them. A future administration should expect legal challenges to Schedule F reforms. Even if unsuccessful, such challenges would mire Schedule F in litigation for years, making it difficult to realize the reforms it promises within the span of a four-year term.
Fourth, it is also worth asking what the reform is that Schedule F actually promises. Schedule F has often been justified by its leading proponents as a way to ensure that deadbeat, no-show federal employees can finally be fired, a type of house-cleaning that even federal bureaucrats will acknowledge is necessary. If Schedule F is just cleaning up these dumpster fires, it is good but very modest indeed. If instead, the purpose is to inventory the vast network of policymaking bureaucrats operating free of chief executive control and then delete those positions en masse, the measure could go some way toward shrinking the bureaucracy and could be harder for Democrats to undo. But an action of such consequence would not be likely to succeed without my next point.
Fifth, Schedule F is a technocratic proposal. Solving for the problems of the administrative state requires more than tinkering within the system. The administrative state presents a crisis of self-governance, an attack on the Constitution itself because it betrays some of our nation’s founding principles (separation of powers, checks and balances, a republican form of government). A problem of this magnitude cannot be solved without congressional action, which cannot happen without the buy-in of the American people who must want it. And to want it, they must understand it. Otherwise, the stories will write themselves: TRUMP PUTS EMPLOYEES ON LIST JUST TO FIRE THEM; THEIR CHILDREN STARVE.
If Schedule F is an executive-only sneak attack on the administrative state, then it will be too sneaky to succeed. Big reforms require laying the groundwork that allows the public to follow along. Americans will support big reforms if they know why big reforms are needed, but they will not know if no one tells them.
Some Republicans are doing this, to their credit, and with so much fodder provided by the bureaucracy in recent memory they have plenty of rhetorical ammunition. J.D. Vance and Vivek Ramaswamy have spoken often about the administrative state as the “deep state.” Due in no small part to their influence, a generation of young Republicans are coming to see administrative state reform as the central issue of the time. Vance has said, “We have a major problem here with administrators and bureaucrats in the government who don’t respond to the elected branches. If those people aren’t following the rules, then, of course, you’ve got to fire them, and, of course, the president has to be able to run the government as he thinks he should.” Ramaswamy has described his “dream,” “that the people who we elect to run the government ought to be the ones who actually run the government. Not the managerial bureaucracy in three letter government agencies.” Yes and yes.
I understand and applaud the originators of Schedule F who thought of a way to use the president’s existing power to try to make a dent in the administrative state. The idea is creative, and I wish it had not been debuted at such an inopportune time, when its potential could not be realized and the element of surprise was lost. I am skeptical whether it can be resuscitated for a second attempt.
More importantly, I know that Schedule F is not and cannot be the silver bullet reform that Republicans advance in a second Trump administration. Schedule F is not a solution to the administrative state, and it stands a strong likelihood of becoming a major distraction to achieving more meaningful reforms. Setting Republican sights on Schedule F is like going to the Grand Canyon to see the view from the parking lot. If Republicans focus on Schedule F, Americans will miss the bigger picture, and will also miss their one, best shot at groundswell support for meaningfully diminishing the administrative state.
Now is not the time to tinker with a technical change, moving employees around on lists that are supposed to carry bureaucratic significance. Now is the time to dismantle the administrative state. Shutter an agency (or many); eliminate public employee unions; repeal civil service protections that insulate bureaucrats from presidential control.
And just downsize. In his recent piece for Tablet magazine titled “Twilight of the Wonks,” Walter Russell Mead describes how “bureaucracy is, from an information point of view, a primitive, costly, and slow method of applying algorithms (rules and regulations) to large masses of data.” With improvements in artificial intelligence and machine learning, Mead predicts that “drastic reductions in the size of both public and private sector bureaucracies will be coming.” If, as the Left says, bureaucrats are opinionless automatons just pushing paper, administering benefit formulas, or keeping planes in the sky, then every effort should be made to replace them with computers and technology that will do the job faster and cheaper.
The administrative state presents the single greatest crisis facing our county, a crisis of constitutional magnitude. The Left agrees that a crisis exists but believes the problem is the proposal to reform at all. The Left’s reaction to a change as modest as Schedule F is pearl-clutching and “destroying democracy” talk, because even a minor change threatens their citadel of power within the executive branch. That’s not a reason to pull back, it is a reason to push harder.
The idea that 2.2 million unaccountable, unelected bureaucrats should decide for themselves how best to execute the laws is an affront to our Constitutional order and to the millions of Americans who are subjected to their anti-democratic bureaucratic tyranny. This is a moment for bigger changes. If not now, when? If not Trump, then who?
The post Schedule F Won’t Tame the Deep State appeared first on The American Conservative.
Do you think they really believe this stuff?
Take a dip in the murky waters of recent Trump Apocalypse journalism—it says there’s gonna be a civil war and dictatorship. But don’t worry, not really—it’s just the politics of fear.
In a scary article subtitled “Donald Trump is warning that 2024 could be America’s last election,” New Republic alerts us that, if Trump wins, America is pretty much done being a democracy. “If we don’t win on November 5, I think our country is going to cease to exist. It could be the last election we ever have. I actually mean that,” Trump said out loud at a recent rally, so it couldn’t possibly be hyperbole, busting the chops of the mass media like a smart-aleck guy from Queens might do, or throwing red meat to his unwashed supporters like a wily candidate might do.
After that, you get the standard list of bad things Trump has said: “He has claimed that he wants to be a dictator, but only on ‘day one,’ and plans to install his legal allies at all levels of government. And his Cabinet? It’s sure to be full of ideologues, immigration hard-liners, and outright fascists. Even conservative judges claim he’ll shred the legal system… It might not be a stretch to suggest that Trump could plan another January 6–type event if he loses. After all, only months prior to the Capitol insurrection, he urged the Proud Boys to ‘stand back and stand by’ on a debate stage.”
In another recent article at the New Republic, one writer imagined possible election outcomes, concluding, “The election cycle either ends in chaos and violence, balkanization, or a descent into a modern theocratic fascist dystopia.”
And what politics of fear round-up of Trump Terror Titillation would be complete without this out-of-context quote: “Now if I don’t get elected, it’s gonna be a bloodbath for the whole—that’s gonna be the least of it. It’s going to be a bloodbath for the country.” Somewhere after that inevitably comes a mention of how our system of bypassing the popular vote in favor of the Electoral College (in place some 230 years) is undemocratic even if it has resulted in a democracy each and every time it has been used.
Then there are the Christian nationalists, who are supposedly increasingly calling for “dual sovereignty” and implementation of “a Scripture-based system of government whereby Christ-ordained ‘civil magistrates’ exercise authority over the American public” according to a manifesto made public. The result is a United States that is one country in name only. “Christian Nationalism” is supposedly a priority for a second Trump term.
This all is quite an ambitious goal for Trump, given that the only lasting social policy he is remembered for (Dobbs) came from the Supreme Court acting in its standard constitutional way, not by any Trump-sponsored legislation or diktat.
Speaking of democracy being used to destroy democracy, Trump-Apocalyptic writers do love less-well-known Constitutional passages like the Twelfth Amendment. This starts with the Speaker of the House refusing to certify election results which show a Biden victory. Then the Twelfth Amendment kicks in to decide the election. This lets the House of Representatives—the one elected in November, which might be majority or even overwhelmingly Republican—determine the outcome, with each state getting one vote. If things don’t work out for Trump this way, then J6 times 100, yadda yadda.
And they do love invoking the Insurrection Act, something Trump actually never did in his four years. “If this results in fatalities and mass detentions,” says the first New Republic article, “it will exacerbate the situation, leading to many people on both the left and right concluding violence is the only viable option for change, resistance, or as a response to resistance.” New Republic further believes that “right-wing elements have long been itching to use violence to put ‘those people’ in their place,” so watch out when you take the dog out for a walk.
And most of that is horror tales if Trump loses, or gerrymanders a win. What if he actually wins outright and overwhelmingly (aka “the will of the people,” but, oh, never mind)?
The New Republic leads again, stating,
Trump will absolutely let his team attempt to implement Christian nationalism across the U.S. and use every means available to achieve its vision of an America with no immigrants, no trans people, no Muslims, no abortion, no birth control, Russian-style ‘Don’t Say Gay’ laws, license to discriminate based on religion, and all government education funding going to religious schools. Blue states will try to resist this and invoke the same states’ rights and ‘dual sovereignty’ arguments, but it’s unlikely they will succeed due to conservative bias on the Supreme Court and the Trump administration’s willingness to blow off court rulings it doesn’t like. If Trump goes straight to a massacre via the Insurrection Act, civil war is on the table. If Trump manages to bring blue states to heel via legal means, and resistance is insufficient to compel blue state governors to refuse to comply, then we end up with fascist, theocratic, hereditary dictatorship.
In short, says the Washington Post, “A Trump dictatorship is increasingly inevitable. We should stop pretending.”
Whew. Once you step across the line into writing about Trump dictatorships and Christian nationalism as living, breathing threats, things get pretty crazy pretty fast. Why is this?
Occam’s Razor says this is all hullabaloo, pure malarkey, with tabloid-jealous writers doing it for the most clicks and dopamine hits, trying to outdo one another trying to whip up fear of Trump. It is good for business, and very easy to do. Freed from the old-school journalism restraints of having to muster facts to support opinions, anything—including imagining a civil war—is possible.
A second possibility is the journalists who write articles such as these are an extreme edge of a broader Democratic strategy of scaring people into not voting for Trump. Scare votes have long been a popular strategy, from the racist propaganda in post-bellum South, to the famous Lyndon Johnson “daisy girl” commercial dubbing his opponent a nuclear monster ready to start WWIII, to Willie Horton, and, of course, to 2016’s “Trump is a Russian spy.”
The current spate of articles have all the hallmarks of traditional fear politics, with a particularly heavy dose of “Framing the Opposition.” Political ads often frame opponents as dangerous or unfit for office, playing on fears of what might happen if they were to gain power. This can be seen as a desperate move, given how they contribute to a climate of distrust and polarization within society.
To be fair, it is of course possible that the writers actually believe what they are writing, that we are steps away from the collapse of democracy. But you don’t believe that, do you?
The post Trump Apocalypse Hysteria Is Spiraling Into Madness appeared first on The American Conservative.
Climate scientists have been hounding dissenters for years. In a D.C. courtroom, they scored a crowning victory for censorship.
In July 2012, I came within a hair’s breadth of ruining my life. I escaped, but the very talented Canadian writer Mark Steyn did not. My mention of his name will rightly signal to many readers that this is a story about the infamous verdict in a D.C. Superior Court earlier this year. It will signal to others who care about such things that this is also a story about the hollowness of much of what passes as “climate science.” But let me tell the story in my own convoluted way.
For those for whom the words “infamous verdict” and “Mark Steyn” fail to ring a bell, here is a short course. Steyn was sued by the climate “scientist” Michael Mann, who had taken umbrage twelve years ago when Steyn likened him to convicted child molester Jerry Sandusky. On February 8, a Washington, D.C., jury agreed with Mann and found Steyn and co-defendant Rand Simberg guilty of defaming Michael Mann. It was an extraordinarily odd verdict. The jury assessed “compensatory damages” of one dollar each from Steyn and Simberg—which is to say they found no real harm to Mann in his ability to make money. But the jury didn’t stop there. It added a fine of $1,000 for Simberg and a cool $1 million for Steyn for “punitive damages.” This was retribution for their supposedly making statements with “maliciousness, spite, ill will, vengeance or deliberate intent to harm.”
It took a dozen years for Mann’s defamation suit to reach a trial court. What the case was really about was Mann’s reputation as a liar and a hack who had nonetheless gained wide influence in the political world for his promotion of the idea of runaway man-made global warming.
Mann had risen to international fame beginning in 1999 by propounding his “hockey stick graph,” which purported to show that global temperatures had risen very little until 1900, then began to rise rapidly. In 2001, the International Panel on Climate Change put Mann’s hockey stick chart in the prominent summary of its Third Assessment Report. This conferred on Mann the science (or pseudo-science) equivalent of rock star status. After that, Mann would throw a tantrum when skeptics—of whom there were many—criticized his work. Rather oddly, he refused to divulge the data out of which his famous graph was constructed.
Steyn was only one of the many who mocked Mann and his pretensions to scientific rigor. The Jerry Sandusky jibe was just colorful rhetoric, i.e. Sandusky molested children; Mann molested data.
The court case was closely watched and nearly all observers thought that Mann was thoroughly defeated. He was shown indeed to have made numerous false claims and to have suffered no material damage at all from Steyn’s satire. Mann had instead prospered in the years that followed.
But in the closing minutes of the trial, Mann’s lawyer, John Williams, turned the case into a referendum on Donald Trump, who of course had no part in what Steyn had said in 2012 and as far as anyone knows had no opinion at the time on Michael Mann’s career. Williams urged the jury to award punitive damages to send a message to others who might engage in “climate denialism,” which he likened to Trump’s “election denialism.”
“Denialism” appears to be Williams’ term for disagreeing with the left’s established views. Such denialism has to be obliterated like the dangerously invasive lantern fly wherever it is encountered. And the D.C. jury did what Williams asked. It came back with a crushing punitive judgment against Steyn.
This happened in early February. Since then, we have had several lessons on how juries in unfriendly cities can be relied on to impose preposterous fines on Trump and to use “lawfare” to destroy the lives of innocent people who have some connection to Trump. Even those like Steyn who are not connected to Trump can be targets of this legal maliciousness.
Let’s go back to the beginning. In July 2012, former FBI director Louis Freeh released a 250-page examination of how Penn State University had handled child molester and former assistant football coach Jerry Sandusky. What had university officials known? What had they done or failed to do? Freeh had been commissioned in November 2011 by the university’s board of trustees to lead this study, immediately after they fired President Graham Spanier. Freeh’s report blamed Spanier and Penn State’s revered football coach Joe Paterno for concealing what they knew about Sandusky from “the Board of Trustees, the University community and authorities.” Freeh blamed them as well for allowing Sandusky to continue to molest children. Spanier disputed the findings and to this day continues his attempts to claw back his reputation, but it is a stiff climb. In 2017, he was convicted in state court of endangering the welfare of children and spent two months in jail.
I wasn’t especially interested in the Sandusky scandal, but I had had my eye on Graham Spanier since 2010 when he had orchestrated the Penn State branch of the coverup of the “Climategate” affair of 2009. Professor Mann had been caught red-handed in the suppression of scientific findings that ran counter to his own. Penn State had quickly rallied to Mann’s defense, but public doubt remained intense, and to put it to rest Spanier established a committee to look into the matter. The committee in short order determined that “Dr. Michael E. Mann did not engage in, nor did he participate in, directly or indirectly, any actions that seriously deviated from accepted practices within the academic community.”
By 2009, I had begun to follow closely stories that dealt with “climate science” and its overlap with higher education. My interest grew out of finding that the dean of residence life at the University of Delaware had imposed a Stasi-like regime on students in the name of “social justice.” The planning documents for this Delaware dorm-based indoctrination called it a “sustainability program.” As I peeled back the layers, I found that “sustainability” took its intellectual warrant from the supposed crisis of global warming. At the bottom of all this, “climate science” and climate scientists were promoting a vision of impending catastrophe caused by humans recklessly burning fossil fuels. I initiated a project called “How Many Delawares?” aimed at documenting how far this effort by university administrators had penetrated American higher education.
Global warming hysteria was truly launched way back in 1988, but it was not one of those movements that first poked up on college campuses. It was, rather, a combination of government bureaucrats and grant-hungry scientists who invented it and politicians who marketed it. The International Panel on Climate Change was formed in November 1988. The Rio Summit (“The United Nations Conference on Environment and Development”) was held in 1992. It would take almost two decades before climate hysteria became epidemic in American higher ed.
In time, I caught up with this history, and later I co-wrote a book about it with Rachelle Peterson, Sustainability: Higher Education’s New Fundamentalism (2015). Global warming hysteria finally caught on with students when college presidents, rallied by John Kerry, took up the cause, attracted by the potential for vast amounts of new federal funding to support “climate research.” President Spanier was one of the early adopters; Michael Mann joined his faculty in 2005, after leaving the University of Virginia.
Mann’s sojourn in Virginia bears telling as well. It was there that he developed his “hockey stick.” In the wake of Climategate, in 2010, Virginia attorney general Ken Cuccinelli attempted to force the University of Virginia to divulge records of Mann’s research on the grounds that Mann may have committed fraud against the state’s taxpayers. The university refused to cooperate and the press smeared the investigation as a violation of academic freedom. The case had various twists and turns but eventually landed before Virginia’s Supreme Court, which ruled that Cuccinelli had no right to see the records.
To this day, the actual data that Mann supposedly used to construct the hockey stick remains hidden away. This hasn’t gone unnoticed. Mark Steyn, for one, compiled a 300-page book in 2015, A Disgrace to the Profession, which consists entirely of statements by “The World’s Scientists in Their Own Words on Michael Mann, His Hockey Stick, and Their Damage to Science.” It was an audacious conceit on Steyn’s part to gather so much salt to rub into the wounds in Professor Mann’s sensitive ego. It was possibly not the gentle balm with which to convince the partisan public that he meant no harm to Mann’s career.
Any sensible person who cares about the integrity of science and good public policy should want to cure the problems presented by Mann’s odd ways of conducting “science.” There is no lack of earnest efforts by well-informed writers to do just that. A. W. Montford’s The Hockey-Stick Illusion: Climategate and the Corruption of Science (2010) is a classic of the genre, but there has been a steady stream of expert deconstruction of Mann-ian science in the last decade. My favorite among recent ventures is Stephen Einhorn’s Climate Change: What They Rarely Teach in College (2023). These are not polemics. They are efforts to synthesize the scientific data that bears on the questions of what has happened and what is happening to the Earth’s temperature. And it just so happens that Michael Mann’s testimony on these matters does not come off well.
Many climate researchers have not been shy in devising more and more terrifying forecasts. Global warming circa 2010 (not yet rebranded “climate change”) was supposedly taking off like a sky rocket or, ahem, a hockey stick.
Back in 2009, when I was new to the subject, I expected the news of “Climategate” would desolate the field. Here were esteemed researchers emailing one another about ways to bury the findings of other researchers who had discovered deep discrepancies in the warmist narrative. Here were researchers discussing a “trick” they could use to make the existence of warm medieval temperatures disappear. (It was awkward that the Earth had warmed before the invention of the internal combustion engine or indeed the Industrial Revolution.) And at the center of the Climategate scandal stood one redoubtable figure: Michael Mann.
The scandal, however, failed to dethrone him, thanks in considerable part to Penn State’s determination to prop him up. Mere months after Climategate broke, President Spanier appointed the committee to look into it and early in 2010 the committee came back with its finding that Mann was clean, honest, and reliable—or something like that.
So when Penn State convened another special committee in 2011 in the Sandusky matter, I had trepidations. Was another cover-up in progress? It turned out not, but when the Freeh report was issued I saw an opportunity to remind readers of my weekly columns in The Chronicle of Higher Education that Spanier’s decision to cover up Sandusky’s lewdness and Paterno’s indifference was nothing new. I possessed no first-hand knowledge of either the Sandusky case or the Mann matter, but from a distance the evidence of a look-the-other-way attitude among Penn State administrators with Sandusky and a protect-our-asset attitude towards Mann seemed awfully convincing.
How close could I dare draw the parallel? In my article, “A Culture of Evasion,” I decided to tread lightly:
Then there was the Michael Mann case, the well-known advocate of the theory of man-made global warming, accused in the wake of the Climategate memos in 2009 of scientific misconduct. Penn State appointed a university panel, headed by the vice president for research, Henry Foley, to investigate Mann. According to ABC News Foley’s committee asked:
whether Mann had 1) suppressed or falsified data; 2) tried to conceal or destroy e-mails or other information; 3) misused confidential information; or 4) did anything that “seriously deviated from accepted practices” in scholarly research.
The committee exonerated Mann on the first three and punted on the fourth. Make of this what you will, but a review by the university’s vice president for research, who oversees grant-funded projects, does not have exactly the same standing as an investigation carried out by the former director of the FBI. Penn State has a history of treading softly with its star players. Paterno wasn’t the only beneficiary.
Even this bland summary raised the ire of the famously thin-skinned Professor Mann. He strikes me as the sort of person who drags a heavy load of guilt through life. The evidence is indirect: He viciously attacks anyone who impugns his intellectual integrity but utterly refuses to divulge the data and other details that would go far to clear his name. The points that have prompted others to express their doubts about his honesty are matters of fact that simple candor could settle once and for all.
When I published that passage in 2012, I already knew about and had grazed Michael Mann’s litigious wrath. In August 2011, I published an article, “Climate Thuggery,” in which I cataloged some of Mann’s “nuisance lawsuits,” including one against a Canadian geographer, Tim Ball, who had joked that Mann “should be in the state pen, not Penn State.” Mann had also threatened a Minnesota group for a satiric video, and he had won the allegiance of a handful of admirers who were making it their business to harass his critics. One of these was a fellow named John Mashey who was praised in the pages of Science for “trying to take the offense” against global warming skeptics. Mann praised Mashey for “exploring the underbelly of climate denial.”
Mashey came after me, and I was told by my editor at the Chronicle that Mann himself did as well, but nothing much came of it. The Chronicle soon dropped its experiment in having a handful of conservative columnists, but I had already been sternly warned off writing about climate change.
As it happened, I wasn’t the only writer who conjured a connection between the Sandusky and Mann cases. Mann sued Rand Simberg and the Competitive Enterprise Institute for publishing Simberg’s comment that Mann had “molested and tortured data” and sued Mark Steyn and National Review for referencing and expanding upon Simberg’s statement.
I certainly do not want to be sued by Michael Mann or get The American Conservative drawn into such bother. So I will continue to mind my words. It is my personal opinion that Michael Mann’s research, especially on reconstructions of global temperature, is profoundly flawed. It is also my opinion that the theory of catastrophic anthropogenic global warming is a compound of leftist ideology, mass delusion, biased, self-confirming pseudo-science, and over-interpretation of fragmentary and ambiguous data. What relative proportions of these four factors go into the mix depends on the individual and the situation. Millions of people go along with so-called climate science because they don’t know any better. A fair number of scientists are so psychologically invested in the theory that they are literally unable to question it. Others have doubts but make their peace with it because it has become their livelihood. Still others are straight-on radicals intent on “decarbonization” as the shortest route to their anti-capitalist revolution.
Put all this together, and we have the figure of Michael Mann alongside a few others such as Greta Thunberg, Al Gore, and Bill McKibben as our latter-day Jeremiahs pronouncing world-ending doom as punishment for modern prosperity. They enjoy the backing of most of the world’s governments and a huge number of foundations.
For all that, they have failed to create the crisis mentality on a mass scale that they hope for. Last year, Pew Research Center reported that only 27 percent of Americans say fighting climate change “should be a top priority for the president and Congress.” Another 34 percent say such a fight is important but not a priority. Among Republicans only 13 percent say it is a “top priority.” That makes it by definition a political issue, which in turn means that the apocalyptos have not prevailed. If a world-ending catastrophe were in the offing and people really believed that, these numbers would look very different.
Where then does Mark Steyn stand? He is a hero to many who, like me, count ourselves among the climate skeptics. There are others, especially many scientists who have risked their reputations and careers by coming out as climate skeptics. There are organizations such as the Heartland Institute and the CO2 Coalition that put real intellectual muscle into gathering and analyzing facts that belie the prevailing climate-change narrative.
All of us need a Mark Steyn who with cussed determination and quick wit has stood up against climate thuggery and its most self-important champion. Steyn will appeal the absurd verdict and the outlandish penalty. May he win. In the meantime, I recommend the excellent day-by-day recreation of the trial by the Irish documentarians Ann McElhinney and Phelim McAleer. Their podcast, “Climate Change on Trial,” presents the whole debacle.
The post The Long Road to the Steyn Verdict appeared first on The American Conservative.
I’ve been going back to eastern Kentucky for over a decade. Since 2016, something there has changed.
Kevin Rogers has five rules: love God, love others, don’t do dumb things, don’t die, and “Get ye, therefore, over thyself.”
“Roger’s Rules” govern the work of Big Creek Missions, an inter-denominational Christian ministry center in eastern Kentucky, the heart of Appalachia. Every year, Big Creek Missions hosts hundreds who come to serve the Lord through service projects to communities in Leslie and the surrounding counties, Clay, Harlan, and Perry.
I was 16 the first time I visited Big Creek, on a trip with my high school, Orange Lutheran. As a kid who had only ever known the Southern California beaches and suburbs, I found an entirely different side of America waiting for me in eastern Kentucky, an America rife with poverty, riddled with drugs, and wrung out of opportunity. It was an America no one—especially in Washington or the other power centers of the nation—seemed to want to talk about. Why was that? How did America forget Appalachia and its people? Why was it left behind in the first place?
The trip triggered a fascination with Appalachia, its history, its people, its culture. It caused me to rethink and, over time, fundamentally change my view of politics. What kind of politics can seek the good for the people I met in the hills of eastern Kentucky? It’s not an easy question. My efforts at answering it myself have been downright embarrassing at points, and I still don’t have all the answers. I likely never will.
Between my first trip junior year and my return as a senior, a presidential candidate emerged who talked as if he hadn’t forgotten the people of the American heartland. In a bizarre twist, that candidate was a billionaire—a real estate mogul and a reality TV star from Queens.
Candidate Trump preached protectionism and derided so-called free trade deals that had hollowed out America’s manufacturing base. Immigration both legal and illegal, Trump said, was undermining the ability of working-class Americans to get good jobs and fundamentally changing the nation’s character. He vowed to unleash American industry and extolled the virtues of energy independence. He aimed to end the forever wars in the Middle East that cost America trillions of dollars and thousands of its sons and daughters’ lives. These issues, and the way Trump pilloried the establishment’s approach to them with ruthless delight, became the foundation of Trump’s political movement.
More importantly, Trump declared what Appalachians had already intuited: “The American dream is dead,” especially for people like them. What Trump was saying on the stump was what Appalachians have been saying around the dinner table for decades. By no means were Appalachians condemning their country by saying these things—Appalachians are the most patriotic breed of Americans you’ll ever encounter—they were simply observing reality and had the courage to say it aloud.
Nearly a decade on, a lot has changed. I’m engaged to be married. Trump’s first term has come and gone. A redux could be in the making. The right has coalesced around Trump’s platform and vision. What, if anything, has changed for the forgotten people of Appalachia?
In November, I returned to Big Creek with my sister, now a freshman at Orange Lutheran, to chaperone her first trip to the hills of eastern Kentucky.
Founded in 1878 from portions of Harlan, Clay, and Perry counties, Leslie County’s history reads more like folklore than fact. Records explain how the area’s creeks and streams received their curious names. Cutshin Creek received its name after an unnamed pioneer slipped and cut his shin on one of the sharp rocks while crossing. “Hell Fer Sartin” creek was named by two prospectors. Upon finding the creek, one prospector turned to the other and said, “This is hell.” The other, in the region’s throaty, rhotic Appalachian dialect, croaked, “Yes, hell fer sartin.”
Leslie is named after Preston M. Leslie, the governor of Kentucky from 1871 to 1875. Though he started out as a Confederate-sympathetic Whig and moved to the Democratic Party, Preslie became renowned in the region for driving out the KKK presence and the roving bands that were wreaking havoc in the backcountry in the aftermath of the civil war. Clay, Perry, and Harlan were pockets of some of the strongest Union support in the nation. More men enlisted in the Union Army relative to population in these and the surrounding counties than anywhere else in the nation.
Leslie has never voted for a Democratic presidential candidate since its creation in 1878. From 1896 to 1928, no democratic presidential candidate managed to capture more than 10 percent of the vote. The closest a Democrat has ever come to winning Leslie was in 1964 when President Johnson captured 47 percent of the Leslie County vote against Barry Goldwater.
In both 2016 and 2020, Trump received 90 percent of Leslie County’s vote. This was an improvement on the internationalist Republican candidates of the 90s and 2000s—Bob Dole, George W. Bush, and John McCain—who each lost at least 25 percent of the vote in Leslie County in their respective bids.
Trump’s message echoed through the hollers of eastern Kentucky. So, too, did the scorn of the former president’s political enemies. One Appalachian I met told me, “I feel like they hate Trump so much because he stands up for us and says what a lot of us think.” They’re out to get Trump, but “they want to go after us, too.” Another chimed in with a chuckle, “They already are.”
In my travels to eastern Kentucky, nearly every person I talked to also told me some iteration of, “Here, we have to look out for one another because no one else will.” The Jacksonian strain of American thought is alive and well in the hills of eastern Kentucky, befitting for a place which started as a backcountry settled by yeoman farmers.
While Appalachia has been the target of substantial government aid on paper, you won’t hear many Appalachians suggest they are much better off than they once were. You also won’t hear many Appalachians credit the government or the NGOs for the improvements that have been made. They credit other members of their community, such as Kevin Rogers of Big Creek Missions, who have started local nonprofits to provide for the oscillating needs of these holler communities.
“I grew up in a house that struggled financially,” Rogers told Orange Lutheran students gathered in the Big Creek gymnasium. The financial constraints Rogers faced at home extended to his church community, where economic insecurity and social instability led to a revolving door of church leaders. “In my church, we didn’t have a lot of money. We had four or five youth pastors in four years.” When he graduated high school, Rogers took over as the church’s youth pastor, “because I got sick and tired of the church running them off,” he explained. “I wanted something deeper for my friends and for my students.”
Shortly after taking the job, Rogers found out that “you can do disaster relief mission trips for really cheap.” In the next three to four years, Rogers and his high schoolers took 17 mission trips to disaster areas. “Because they were looking out for the needs of others, our youth group was growing spiritually. Their hearts were being changed.”
Some time later, the pastor of Roger’s small church approached him and said, “Kevin, my home church is looking for a youth pastor, and I think you should do it, get out of your home church, go do something else.” The pastor’s former church was in a whole other league compared to Kevin’s home church.
“I’m like, ‘Man, I don’t want to do it. Not me—I’m happy here,’” Rogers recounted.
Three months later, Rogers was settling into his new role at the larger church. The youth group Rogers was tasked with leading was four times larger than that of his home church. The students Rogers initially found there seemed to think youth ministry was for their entertainment, not for accomplishing the mission God had given them.
“Their idea of a mission trip was much more elaborate,” Rogers explained. Luxury charter buses would take students and their families to nice hotels. Recreation got in the way of the mission. “From the outside looking in, it appeared that their trips were more of a vacation than a mission trip,” said Rogers. He would do things differently.
The church also held a toy drive around Christmas time. Rogers, joined by members of his youth group and the media team, were tasked with taking the busload of toys northward to a small school in eastern Kentucky called Big Creek Elementary.
“We set up this big production, we had lights, we had a stage, we had sound, all this fancy stuff to share the story of Jesus with these kids,” Rogers recalled. The production was not a classic retelling of the Redeemer’s humble origins. After the show, the church group distributed the toys to the children, but the way they gave the toys out left some of the elementary schoolers in tears.
“We go back to the church and all the students get up there and say how amazing it was, how everybody was changed in Appalachia, and how we changed all these kids’ lives—blah, blah, blah, blah,” Rogers said. “And I’m like, ‘did you not see the kids crying?’”
The time came to plan the church’s summer mission trip. “The student threw ideas at me: ‘Let’s go to Chicago! Let’s go to New York! Let’s go to Virginia Beach! Let’s go back to Orlando!” But Rogers had already made up his mind. “I asked my youth leaders, ‘Y’all love those kids and Big Creek School? Because y’all told me that you love those kids.’ ‘Oh, yeah. We love those kids.’ ‘Are you committed to those kids?’ ‘Oh, yeah. We’re committed to those kids.’ I said, ‘Cool. Because this summer, we’re going on our first mission trip to Big Creek Elementary School.’”
Big Creek was not the vacation destination students in the youth ministry had envisioned. There’s no Six Flags or white sand beaches in the backwoods of eastern Kentucky. “I ticked them all off,” Rogers admitted. Just 30 students and adults made the first trek to Big Creek.
For those who went, the trip was transformational. Students told stories about things they’d never seen before—homes with empty pantries where children had no toys to play with while mom and dad were strung out on meth in the bedroom.
The trip lit a fire in the bellies of Rogers’ students to serve Big Creek and the surrounding community. Word of the small but deeply spiritual trip to Big Creek made its way to the leadership of the association of churches. He was asked to lead an association-wide trip to Appalachia. The next summer, 100 students made the trek up to Leslie County. In the span of four years, the trip grew from 30 to 750 stretched across four weeks at Big Creek.
In 2007, Rogers’ pastor sat him down for a serious conversation. “‘Kevin, it’s time,” Rogers remembers the pastor telling him. “All you talk about is Big Creek missions. You need to ask the Lord if you need to be here, or you need to be there.’”
Rogers replied, “I love my students, and the youth group has grown so much spiritually and numerically.” The pastor told him to pray about it. “God said yes. I kept saying no,” Rogers said. That same year, Rogers received a call from the superintendent that oversaw Big Creek Elementary. “‘Kevin, we’re shutting down Big Creek Elementary, these kids are going to be going down to Mountain View Elementary in Hyden.’” Rogers recounted.
Rogers’ heart broke when he initially heard the news. But the superintendent had another proposal—for Rogers to buy Big Creek Elementary and turn it into a full-time mission. Again, Rogers prayed. Again, God said yes and Rogers said no. A few months later, “through a series of amazing things that happened, and a series of challenging things that happened, I knew it’s time to go and do this Big Creek thing.” Since, Rogers said, “we continue to do simple things. We serve people in need, we look in the community, find the greatest needs, and we go and serve.”
Orange Lutheran High School was one of the first major groups to start visiting Big Creek Missions after Rogers took over the school. The first trip Orange Lutheran took to Big Creek was on extremely short notice—Orange Lutheran had to cancel their plans to serve in Mexico over safety concerns. It found Big Creek Missions and gave Rogers a call. A few weeks later, 40 students and a handful of chaperones were on their way to Leslie County. Now, more than a decade on, Orange Lutheran brings about 170 individuals to Big Creek every fall.
Rogers and his small team of staff and volunteers have converted the old classrooms into dorm rooms, each lined with seven to eight handbuilt triple bunk beds. The old gymnasium is now a place for worship and assemblies. The kitchen and cafeteria are mostly left unchanged; the industrial-sized refrigerators and freezers hold meals for anyone in the community in need. The detached warehouse holds all the tools needed to maintain the campus and for Big Creek’s multitude of construction projects within a fifty-mile radius. In the parking lot, school buses have been replaced with Big Creek branded shuttles, flatbeds, and vans.
With a group of Orange Lutheran’s size, Rogers can dispatch teams of six to ten to work on nearly 20 different service projects, most of which fall into three buckets: construction, community, and caretaking.
The group of six students I chaperoned with one other adult were sent around 20 miles east to assist another area nonprofit, Hope in the Hills.
Jack is a short but sturdy man. His full, white head of hair and the hitch in his gait suggest he’s in his sixties. Arriving on site, where we’d be helping Jack repair and remodel the Hope in the Hills warehouse, Jack stuck out a thick, stubby hand. His handshake was firm and friendly, though his hands felt like sandpaper.
As we became acquainted, Jack explained that Hope in the Hills started as a small service group that would collect donations from his local church. Soon enough, Hope in the Hills was collecting more donations than the church could reasonably store. The group had to set out on their own, and Hope in the Hills was born.
Jack said things ran on a shoestring budget—everything, the donations and the man hours, “came from the good of people’s hearts.” Their regular giveaways, several times a month at local parks or other public meeting places, attracted beneficiaries from Leslie, Clay, Harlan, Perry, and beyond. Hope in the Hills’ donors also came from farther and farther away. Jack said they had to get a bigger truck to collect larger donations from the south and west. Hope in the Hills workers scour public marketplaces to haul back free furniture and other goods to give away, too.
Jack is partially retired now, but four decades or so ago, he started out working in the timber industry, which came to Appalachia’s virgin forests starting in the 1880s. The increased demand for timber and technological innovations for the industry made logging more profitable in places it wasn’t before, though loggers would have to use mule teams, rivers, or even splash dams to get logs out of the hollers.
The timber industry Jack started working in was nothing like the Appalachian timber industry of a hundred years prior. Working conditions, while still perilous, were safer and corporate interests had been beaten back relative to the near-feudal conditions that prevailed before.
By the time Jack found employment, the logging industry in Appalachia was dying. Advancements in sustainable practices for the industry meant once-depleted forests in other states were returning. An explosion of trade deals was making lumber easier and cheaper to import than previously. While the U.S. remains the largest producer of timber in the world, it’s the third largest timber importer in the world. Everyone has heard of Chinese steel’s effect on economic opportunity for working-class men; fewer know about Canadian timber’s impact on workers in Hazard, Kentucky.
Eventually, Jack changed career paths. He began working as a trucker, hauling products once made in the United States but now shipped in from overseas. Trucking was one of the few industries that did not necessarily create displacement. A trucker could still live in Leslie County, Kentucky, rather than move north to work in a factory, though he’d spend most of his time on the road and away from family. Compared to the alternatives in the area, trucking paid well and provided good benefits. There was also a fairly low barrier to entry. A commercial driver’s license takes about seven weeks of training to obtain. Trucking remains one of the top jobs in the United States, especially for working-class white men without college degrees.
Working as a truck driver has allowed Jack to enjoy his partial retirement in the hills of eastern Kentucky without ever having to relocate his family as millions of Appalachians have done since World War II. Beyond his work with Hope in the Hills, Jack tends to a small herd of cattle. He lives in a nice, small prefabricated home overlooking the local school and a creek. A detached warehouse, mostly made of reclaimed tin, is where Hope in the Hills keeps most of its donations.
Our task for the week was to repair and remodel the warehouse. The seasons slowly eat away at the wood and metal of Appalachian homes. Sometimes, they’re swallowed whole. A massive flood in July 2022 swept through 14 counties in eastern Kentucky. It claimed the lives of 45 and displaced thousands.
One of the underappreciated reasons Democratic Kentucky governor Andy Beshear was reelected in 2023 was his handling of the flood. Even those I met in deep red Kentucky admitted the governor did a pretty good job in the aftermath. The electoral map bears this out. In deep-red southeastern Kentucky, Beshear greatly overperformed, managing to capture about a third of the vote.
That said, the devastation is still easy to spot. On the drive to Jack’s place, we passed upside-down mobile homes that had been completely washed away. Others were simply twisted piles of metal. The land isn’t the only thing to carry the flood’s scars. Many of the families in Leslie still do, too. Thankfully, Jack’s property was spared, and the goods stored there have been used to help dozens of families in the community get back on their feet in the aftermath.
Nevertheless, some of the roof’s tin sheets had rusted out and the support beams rotted. New siding was also in order. Inside the warehouse, we were tasked with laying down a fresh coat of paint, building shelves, and reorganizing.
Despite his height, Jack was a confident and commanding figure. He was quick to show friendship and respect when extended to him. We became fast friends when I told him my occupation. “Now, I’ll be completely honest, I’m a Republican,” Jack said as we ventured into politics. For the next three days, our political chat was off and on. “I’ll tell you one thing, Bradley,” he said as we stood at the base of a ladder, “there wasn’t any of these terrible school shootin’s when they taught the Bible in schools.”
Jack had a general vision of what he wanted the finished product to look like, but he didn’t go into much detail. Only towards the end of our talk would Jack say, “If you need anything or any guidance, just ask my daughter Heather—she’s the brains of this whole operation.” Jack, even in retirement, had a boss.
Heather’s father wasn’t her only underling, either. As Hope in the Hills survived on donated time from volunteers, Jack had called in backup. These men were the most eclectic and wonderful group of hillbillies in all of Appalachia.
“Have you ever met a French hillbilly?” A voice like a rebel yell called out from the warehouse as I repaired the siding. I was certainly intrigued. I stopped what I was doing to meet this curiosity. As I entered, a man who seemed in his sixties looked upon a group of students, all frozen in position from their various tasks inside the warehouse. “The name is Bur-zhay,” he told the students in a faux French accent through his Appalachian drawl. As I circled around to this mysterious character’s front, I saw he sported a Ford motor company windbreaker over a neon yellow hoodie. Embroidery on the jacket atop the right side of his chest read, “Burgie.”
Over the three days we spent helping the folks at Hope in the Hills, I’m not sure Burgie handled a tool, lifted a paint brush, or shelved a can of soup. But Burgie is retired—he’s earned that right. What Burgie did was make a long day’s work fly by. With the radio out, Burgie’s stories became a neverending variety podcast with zero breaks or advertisements.
Burgie spent most of his career working at a Ford factory manufacturing parts, mostly transmissions. He got the nickname “Bur-zhay” while on a trip to France with Ford. “When I got there, all these French folk were telling me that I had been pronouncin’ my name wrong my whole life!” He laughed.
Burgie was one of the millions of Appalachians who participated in one of the largest internal migrations in American history. The road north became known as the Hillbilly Highway as job opportunities dried up in the coal mines and forests and Appalachians sought work in the industrial Midwest. In the three decades between 1940 and 1970, 3 million Appalachians took to the Hillbilly Highway. Dwight Yoakam’s 1985 tune “Readin’, Writin’, and Route 23” memorialized the migration in song.
The migration transformed Appalachia. The era of the yeoman farmer, which tapped into the region’s precolonial roots, was over. In the 1950s, forty counties in eastern Kentucky and West Virginia lost about 70 percent of their farm population. Harlan County lost 82 percent, Leslie County a mind-boggling 98 percent. Only 20 fulltime farming operations remained in Leslie by the end of the decade.
A bevy of factors led to the decline of manufacturing in Appalachia. Environmental struggles, increased regulatory burdens, mechanization, and some companies’ difficulties paying retirement benefits all played their part. But it all took place against the backdrop of an increasingly globalized market economy, governed by a ballooning number of “free” trade agreements that spanned thousands of pages, which made foreign goods, and more importantly foreign labor, more attractive than Appalachia. Between 1970 and 2001 in Appalachia, the number of apparel workers declined by 66 percent and textile workers by 30 percent. For those who remained, living off the government dole became a way to make ends meet.
The North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), signed in 1993 by President Bill Clinton, was the nail in the coffin for manufacturing and other Appalachian industries. Six years later, Clinton would deliver remarks from Tyner, Kentucky, to bring public attention to Appalchian poverty. “I’m here to make a simple point,” Clinton told the nation. “This is the time to bring more jobs and investment to parts of the country that have not participated in this time of prosperity. Any work that can be done by anybody in America can be done in Appalachia.” The problem for Clinton was that those jobs were no longer being done in America.
Burgie spent decades working in that Ford plant far from the hills of Appalachia he called home. He became involved in the plant’s United Auto Workers (UAW) chapter and eventually ascended to a number of leadership positions. As the years passed, Burgie became increasingly disenchanted with his involvement in the UAW. “I don’t want to get into detail about it,” Burgie told me, as we sat on a bench sipping Diet Cokes. “But the point is it stopped being about the workers and more about the politics, and I just didn’t like that so much.”
I asked him what he thought the future of union work might be. “The unions are wondering why people don’t want to be a part of ’em anymore,” Burgie said. “I’d tell ’em the same thing I tried to tell ’em when I was there: just focus on the workers. Folks have a hard time finding good jobs that can provide for a good retirement without the unions, and I think that’s still true. But there won’t be any unions to help people get these jobs, and no jobs to begin with, if they keep going down this path.”
Burgie admired what certain Republicans, Trump among them, were doing to reach out to union workers. Trump, Burgie told me, was the first politician in a long time to name and shame the macro forces making it hard for working class people to get good jobs—immigration and globalization. “Whatever you think of him,” Burgie added, “it was the right thing to say. That takes some guts. I respect that.”
Joe was also in his sixties but much more prepared to do construction work than Burgie. He wore flannel, a vest, and an old rope cap. Thick, wire-rimmed glasses covered a good portion of his short face and rested heavily on the broad bridge of his nose. Myself, Joe, and Matt, one of the other chaperones, and Johnny, another member of our curious band, spent most of the first day working on the roof and siding. Joe had spent his working years in the timber industry, though he was afraid of heights, as our work on the roof quickly made clear.
As Matt and I huddled to figure out how to remove a particularly stubborn piece of rusted tin, Joe made his way to the spot with a chainsaw, slowly inching his way across the gable roof—none of the rotted beams had been replaced yet. This plan definitely violated rule three and potentially four of Rogers’ Rules, but it was already in motion.
As Joe approached, you could clearly see him shaking. “I think it’ll work.” Johnny said. “Be careful,” he yelled at Joe. “He’s afraid of heights,” Johnny said, turning to Matt and I. As I looked back at Joe, he had made his way over the peak of the gable and was heading down the slope to the corner of the roof. Once there, according to Johnny’s plan, he would fire up the chainsaw and punch down through the metal roof. A few steps onto the downward sloping side, Joe surmised this plan wasn’t as good as it initially sounded. With chainsaw in hand, Joe gingerly made his way down the 14-foot drop to the ground.
New plan: We’d use a smaller, cordless metal saw and approach from the bottom. Two men would be on ladders—one sawman, one scrap collector—and the other two supporting the base of the ladders. Joe, who we now knew was afraid of heights, would remain with me on the ground.
“Was being afraid of heights difficult when you were logging?” I asked Joe. “No,” he said, his voice a whispering gruff. “Climbing trees is no problem when they’re on the ground.”
Matt and Johnny were hard at work near the roof while Joe and I got to know each other on the ground. I could tell Joe wasn’t much of a talker. He kept his eyes fixed on Johnny, who teetered at the top of the ladder to reach where he needed to cut. Joe answered my questions about the area and his work experience with a sentence or less.
After about 30 minutes, Joe warmed up. It really got rolling when I asked about the present problems Appalachians face. Joe, with his coughing drawl, spoke about the difficulties young people face in communities like Leslie County. By the government’s metrics, Appalachia is much less impoverished than it was when he was a young man. In 1965, 219 of the 420 counties that make up Appalachia were considered impoverished. Today, that number is 82.
While less of the region faces poverty, things seem much worse by Joe’s telling. Good-paying jobs are few and far between not just here but in the places Appalachians once fled to. It might be a Detroiter’s first time facing the reality of massive job displacement; for many Appalachians, it’s their second. Meanwhile, price increases for the most essential goods—housing, health care, education, groceries—have outpaced inflation at best and skyrocketed at worst.
To add insult to injury, the health care that workers in the area have received has mostly been in the form of prescription opiates. “The drugs have really done a number on this place,” Joe told me. “It’s devastated whole families.”
The opioid epidemic ravaged the American heartland. It almost appears to have been designed to do just that. Companies lied about the nature of the wonder drugs they created. Some extremely bad actors moved in to take advantage of the profits the drugs offered. Even good doctors wrote prescriptions that ruined lives. The influx of fentanyl from the southern border brought another wave of drug abuse. The pandemic ushered in a deadly round of relapses.
Opioids have sapped Appalachia, particularly Appalachian men, of their vitality when their distressed communities needed it most. When opioid addiction takes a life, that’s sad enough. Here, it crushes whole families, even whole communities. Hopelessness begets more hopelessness.
Eventually, our conversation got sidetracked when Joe asked, “Why do you speak with your lips so much?” I wasn’t sure what he meant at first, then I realized that the rhotic Appalachian drawl comes from the back of your throat. My southern California speech patterns are very tip of the tongue. “I’m not quite sure, but I guess you’re right, Joe,” I replied.
An old blue truck kicked dust up on the gravel road leading up to Jack’s property. A man dressed quite similarly to Joe got out and approached. “What’s going on, Joe,” he asked. Joe explained to the man, whose name was Ronnie, that Johnny and Matt were entering their second hour of wrestling with a rusted out tin roof. Johnny and Matt climbed down to greet Ronnie, and Johnny told Ronnie of the original plan for Joe to use a chainsaw. Ronnie, seeming to know Joe was afraid of heights, stared at Joe with a shocked expression on his face. He was a soft-spoken man, but suffice it to say Ronnie didn’t need to say anything to make clear his disapproval of the original plan.
“Ronnie worked in the mines,” Joe told me. Mining had been one of the topics we covered in our conversation at the base of the ladders. I asked Ronnie what that was like. “Dark,” Ronnie chuckled. Ronnie explained that his office was a crawl space hundreds of feet below ground. Ronnie gestured a rounded box around his chest to his thigh to show the size—a few feet by a few feet. Ronnie, also a retiree, was the most slender of the hillbillies assembled but also the tallest, which I assume must have been a disadvantage underground.
Appalachia once produced two-thirds of the nation’s coal. Coal fields cover 63,000 square miles in the region. In eastern Kentucky alone, there are 80 major seams. Most of the region’s mining is done how Ronnie once mined, deep underground, and a third is surface mining, a more controversial form because of its impact on the environment.
Even in the glory days of mining in Appalachia, it was a cycle of boom and bust. World War I brought a major spike in coal production, only to give way to the Great Depression. During World War II, the Office of War Mobilization encouraged coal production as a patriotic duty. Thousands of workers and small-scale operations took advantage of the government’s demand, but that revival was short-lived.
Mechanization arrived after the war as coal operators sought to cut down on labor costs. Inventions like the continuous miner, which integrated drilling, blasting, and loading into one process, “made it possible for ten men to produce three times the tonnage mined by eighty-six miners loading coal by hand,” Ronald Eller writes in Uneven Ground: Appalachia Since 1945. “By 1960 fewer than half of the 475,000 miners in the region at the end of World War II still found work in the deep mines” Eller continues, “and by 1970 the number had declined to 107,000.” Today, coal mining employs just 2 percent of the Appalachian workforce.
Johnny Muncy is Leslie County royalty. He’s not one of the barons who made their fortunes from King Coal nor one of the titans that built holiday homes in the Appalachian hills like the Vanderbilts. He’s not wealthy by any means. But the Muncy name has been associated with the area that is now Leslie County since before its creation.
One of his ancestors, also John Muncy, came to the hills from Burke’s Garden, Virginia. When the Civil War began, John Muncy was too young to fight but convinced commanding officers to let him join the 47th Regiment of the Kentucky Volunteer Infantry. There, Muncy would be among the 77,000 troops that won the pivotal battle of Vicksburg, which secured Union control of the Mississippi river. He’d go on to become a corporal in Company C and serve in New Orleans and Baton Rouge.
John Muncy had eleven children from two marriages. One of his sons, John M. Muncy, born 1868, would go on to establish Hyden’s first and only newspaper, named the Thousandsticks, and serve as a county judge and school superintendent. For the final five years of his life, before he passed in 1937, J.M. Muncy was chairman of the Leslie County Republican Party.
As we joked about Burgie’s frenchified nickname, Johnny Muncy said the best hillbilly nickname he’d ever heard belonged to his grandfather. “His name was William Muncy, but everybody always called him Powder Bill.”
William “Powder Bill” Muncy was a logger around the turn of the century. When a logflow jammed in the river, his grandfather was the only one crazy enough to head down to the jam with a stick of dynamite and clear it. “Whenever they had a jam, they always called for Powder Bill, and he always made sure the logs started flowin’ again. Nothin’ bad ever happened to him, though.”
I never tired of talking to any of my new hillbilly friends, but especially Johnny Muncy. Like Jack, Johnny became a trucker. For three decades, he crisscrossed the country hauling whatever needed transporting. “I spent a lot of time away from home, away from my family,” Johnny said. “Those years on the road take a toll. You miss a lot. I needed to be home.”
Later, Johnny and I got to talking politics. He wanted to know if I had any dirt on powerful people in D.C. I told him that, if I did, I would have already written it.
I asked Johnny what issues people here cared about. He didn’t hesitate: “The drugs.” All over the community, you can find people strung out, sons, daughters, mothers, fathers, even grandparents. Babies live covered in their own excrement, their parents too high to care or too busy looking for the next score. Johnny and Jack knew of at least two drug-related deaths nearby in the last week. In many cases, addiction here starts with prescription pills—from surgery, a disability, or a relative’s medicine cabinet—then moves on to the hard stuff, much of which is now laced with fentanyl.
The epidemic has touched Johnny’s family: One of his sons has struggled with drug addiction. Though his methods were unconventional, Johnny made sure to get his son clean. “It came to a point where I had to physically lock him in a room to get the drugs out of his system,” Johnny said. “I had a six shooter and said, if you come out of there, I’m goin’ to shoot you, because if you keep goin’ down this path, you’re as good as dead anyways.”
“It was a rough few days,” Johnny said, “but he’s strong, and he pulled through.”
Before Johnny issued that ultimatum, he thought he had done all he could to keep his son on the straight and narrow. He bought him a rifle so they could go hunting together. Johnny’s son sold the rifle for drugs. Then Johnny bought him a new hunting bow. That, too, got sold for drugs. Johnny even bought his son a truck to get to and from work. “He stripped everything he could out of that truck. The radio, everything, even the seats, he stripped out of that car to sell for drugs.”
“Young people used to go to church, now their gods are sex and drugs,” Johnny said. “This rotten culture has corrupted their souls.” These days, on Sunday mornings, you can find Johnny’s son in a church pew. “Now he’s given that up, he’s going back to church,” Johnny said.
The right has only begun to grapple with the lives of men like Jack, Burgie, Joe, Ronnie, and Johnny. How to bring manufacturing jobs back, how to end the opioid crisis—these are topics of roundtable discussions across institutional Washington. There’s little agreement on an agenda, but we had to start somewhere.
The men I met in Appalachia have intuited that a realignment is happening. They’ve been waiting for it for a long time. If the right succeeds in bringing a revival to Appalachia, don’t expect these men to direct their thanks to the Republican Party. Their thanks will go to the men and women like Kevin Rogers who have done the Lord’s work and kept hope alive in the hills.
But don’t expect Rogers to take credit. “God gets the glory for what he has done through somebody as messed up as me,” he says. “I cannot stand up here and say, ‘Well, look at what I’ve done.’ Because I kept saying, no, no, no, no, no, no, no to God.”
“I don’t know why people keep coming back to Big Creek, but they do. God brings them here. He gets the glory for it from the beginning to the end. Wherever you are, give Him the glory,” Rogers told students in closing. “Thank you all for being a part of Mr. Rogers’ neighborhood.”
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The rules of democracy require abortion opponents to embrace, for now, moderation like Trump’s.
Donald Trump has done more for the pro-life cause than any other president. As promised, he appointed the Supreme Court Justices who overturned Roe v. Wade. Yet abortion opponents are unhappy with the former president, who recently declined to endorse a federal abortion ban. Mike Pence, who served as Trump’s vice-president, called the remarks a “slap in the face.” Lila Rose, the leader of anti-abortion group Live Action, concluded that “President Trump is not a pro-life candidate.”
This conflict reflects a longer-running tension between abortion opponents and the former president. Styling himself as a consummate deal-maker, Trump has a pragmatic way of talking about issues that other politicians discuss in more principled terms. He has repeatedly bragged that he “put the pro-life movement in a strong negotiating position” by appointing the justices who reversed Roe. As one abortion opponent put it, Trump’s message to pro-life Americans is, “I’ve given you leverage now to make a better deal.”
Grateful as pro-lifers are for Trump’s appointments, they find this way of speaking about abortion unsatisfying: A right to life shouldn’t be subject to negotiation. But Trump’s approach accords with what once would have been called democratic habits of mind. When a political debate is framed in terms of rights, the compromises that are natural to democratic life will appear illegitimate.
Trump’s raw rhetoric and deviation from the bipartisan consensus on trade, immigration, and foreign policy have led some to view him as an “extremist.” His refusal to concede defeat in the 2020 election, culminating in the events of Jan. 6, was taken by many to confirm recurring claims that he was a threat to democracy.
Such criticisms obscure the fact that Trump’s policy views on immigration and social issues resemble those of Clinton-era Democrats. His opposition to free trade and nation-building foreign policy, meanwhile, may be closer to the views of the median voter than are the views he rejects.
Even after his remarks on abortion, liberal journalists and anti-Trump Republicans remain reluctant to acknowledge him moderation. Some continued to paint him as an extremist—or at least the leader of an extremist coalition. “Trump and his allies will do everything in their power to ban abortion nationwide, with or without a Republican majority in Congress,” Jamelle Bouie wrote in The New York Times.
A more inventive response came from Bill Kristol, who cited Trump’s abortion moderation as proof that Trump is, yes, a fascist. “This is classic authoritarianism. (See Eco on Ur-Fascism).” Umberto Eco describes fascism as “a fuzzy totalitarianism, a collage of different philosophical and political ideas, a beehive of contradictions.” So Trump’s very moderation, his refusal to endorse federal restrictions on abortion, is a sign that he is advancing a nefarious ideology.
When it comes to contradictory political stances, Kristol knows whereof he speaks. The enthusiastic promoter of Sarah Palin and unrelenting critic of Donald Trump, the high-toned opponent of public recognition of homosexuality turned unapologetic advocate for LGBT rights, Kristol himself might be described as a beehive of contradictions.
If Trump’s abortion statement left his critics on the left casting about for a line of criticism, not always convincingly, it raised more serious questions for the right. When Roe v. Wade was in force, abortion opponents eagerly framed their cause in democratic terms. They decried “the judicial usurpation of politics,” as a famous symposium in First Things put it, and hoped that their preferred policies would one day be enacted by a “moral majority.”
This democratic vision of pro-life politics has been weakened by a number of developments. Declining religiosity and rising social liberalism have led many on the right to recognize that they constitute a moral minority—certainly one of the nation’s most important political blocs, one almost completely unrepresented in most elite institutions, but a minority nonetheless.
Meanwhile, the nation’s rapid embrace of gay rights seemed to teach some conservatives a non-democratic lesson in social change. Democratically enacted referenda were knocked down by courts, changing not only the law but—in conjunction with political leaders, business executives, and media properties—public attitudes. “The law is a teacher” became a refrain on certain parts of the right.
The reversal of Roe v. Wade would seem to be an opportunity for this non-democratic idea of social change. But as Darel Paul pointed out in Compact, counter-majoritarian political strategies will be difficult to pursue when the wealthiest and most educated classes—those best positioned to wield legal, economic, and cultural power on behalf of an unpopular view—are opposed.
In this context, Trump’s moderation may be the best the opponents of abortion can hope for. Ryan Williams, president of the Claremont Institute, defended Trump’s statement, saying, “The pro-life movement needs to take its bearings from Lincoln, not William Lloyd Garrison.” It is a wise remark. Lincoln’s statesmanship, not Garrison’s radicalism, led to the triumph of the anti-slavery cause. Lord Charnwood, Lincoln’s great biographer, observed that Lincoln’s approach to slavery involved “watching and waiting while blood flows, suspending judgment, temporizing, making trial of this expedient and of that.” Lincoln’s attitude toward slavery was less radical than Garrison’s; he succeeded by implementing “a policy of deadly moderation towards it.” A little deadly moderation may be just what the pro-life movement needs.
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A reflection on Norman Lear, Archie Bunker, and All in the Family.
The recent death at the age of 101 of Norman Lear, creator of All in the Family and its improbable folk hero, Archie Bunker, set me to musing (always a dangerous thing) over Archie’s voting history and the dirty tricks that politics plays on us all.
I doubt if anyone under the age of 60 grasps the impact of All in the Family when it debuted on CBS in 1971. This wasn’t Punky Brewster or Manimal. Archie Bunker was a malaprop-tripping, outer-borough (Queens), blue-collar union-man paterfamilias given to bigoted asides and (thanks to actor Carroll O’Connor) perfectly timed double-takes. Whatever Lear’s satiric intentions, Archie became a beloved character during the show’s heyday, before it descended into stupid laugh-track moralizing.
Norman Lear was a thoughtful pro-free speech liberal Democrat, a species rarer than goldfish-swallowers on today’s campuses. Even as a left-sympathizing kid I scorned Archie’s liberal son-in-law and sparring partner, played by Rob Reiner, as a self-righteous ingrate, and my guess is that Lear wanted it that way.
Yet Lear cheated, too. The wistful line in the All in the Family theme song—“Mister, we could use a man like Herbert Hoover again”—warbled off-key by Archie and his long-suffering wife Edith, is dishonest even by sitcom standards. The archetypal Archie would have been a pedigreed FDR Democrat. His supposed Protestantism was also ridiculous: Archie—with a different forename—would’ve been Catholic.
Surely he cast his first votes for FDR in 1944 and Truman in 1948 over the prig (and Kitty Carlisle’s boytoy) Thomas E. Dewey, the little man on the wedding cake. Archie (without the Hollywood makeover) liked Ike but voted rotely for egghead Adlai Stevenson in ’52 and ’56. He was JFK all the way in 1960 before facing his first ballot-box temptation: jumping the fence for anti-Civil Rights Act Republican Barry Goldwater in 1964. But…Social Security. Archie was no entitlement-reform wonk, so he pulled the lever, with misgivings, for LBJ.
In 1968 Archie could’ve gone any of three ways. (And here let me recommend Luke Nichter’s perceptive account of that race, The Year that Broke Politics.) George Wallace’s denunciation of “pointy-headed intellectuals” who can’t park their bicycles straight was the summit of Bunker’s hill, but his defense of segregation was its nadir. In any event, Wallace’s Southernness would’ve been too strange.
Hubert Humphrey’s full-throated endorsement of civil rights would’ve irritated Archie, but the Hump was for whatever the big unions were for—including the manufacture if not necessarily use of weapons of mass destruction—so after a moment’s hesitation in the voting booth Archie chose HHH against Nixon. The Minnesota motormouth would be his last Democrat.
(Thinking on this sent me back to Hunter S. Thompson’s Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail ’72, a formative reading experience for the teenaged me. The Aspen assassin wrote, “Any political party that can’t cough up anything better than a treacherous brain-damaged old vulture like Hubert Humphrey deserves every beating it gets. They don’t hardly make ‘em like Hubert any more—but just to be on the safe side, he should be castrated anyway.” It’d be pretty easy to update that passage for 2024.)
In 1972 Archie Bunker, over the Hump, flipped to the GOP for good, turned off by George McGovern—or, rather, the caricatured misrepresentation (abetted by the Democratic candidate’s obnoxious celebrity supporters) of the true patriot McGovern as an acid-dropping, welfare-dispensing commie.
Carroll O’Connor was no more Archie Bunker than Charlton Heston was Moses. In a 1972 Democratic primary race containing two genuine if mottled populists—Oklahoma senator Fred Harris on the “left” and George Wallace on the “right”—the actor stumped for the silk-stocking Republican turned Democrat John Lindsay, whose limousine liberalism would’ve reduced Archie to paroxysmal sputtering.
Long after the laughter has died, the last joke is on Archie—the real one, not the Hoover-voting Protestant. The Bunkeresque tough-talking white Democratic mayors of the 1950s and ‘60s collaborated in the destruction of their cities and the neighborhoods that gave them life via urban renewal and the Interstate Highway System. At the national level, the Trumans and Johnsons that Archie supported shipped working-class boys into the abattoirs of Korea and Vietnam while militarizing the economy.
Archie turned coat just as the Republicans were taking up the mantle of world policeman from Vietnam-spooked Democrats and as the GOP’s stolid but solid Main Street faction was being bulldozed by Wall Street.
If only the Archie Bunkers had voted for Herbert Hoover—who once said that what America needs is a great poem—and George McGovern, who requested, sensibly and sincerely, that America come home in the spirit of peace and community. I’ll bet Norman Lear would’ve loved that country.
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Taking the bus can be a harrowing experience.
Americosis: A Nation’s Dysfunction Observed from Public Transit by Sam Forster (2024, Sutherland House), 129 pages.
Public transit has always asked its patrons to assume undefined risks. In exchange for a few dollars, the transit authority offers that you can get from the general area of your origin to the general area of your destination along with others who have the same goal.
There’s the rub. Marketing materials for public transit rarely feature their patrons, and for good reason. The promoters tend to favor a driver standing with a sense of authority at the step of a bus or a train conductor glancing through his window. The patrons offer something less predictable: a mix of those who are in a hurry and those who are decidedly not in a hurry, a reserved majority and an extroverted minority, a quiet consensus to give peace a chance interrupted by someone who’s still thinking that one over.
The experience generally works out as a net positive on the individual level. Though the risk is a small price, some are unwilling to pay it. Sam Forster was willing, and he has compiled his observations in a helpful little book called Americosis. A blend of cultural analysis, data collection, and bright journalistic color, Forster offers a delicate treatment of coarse content.
The author, a Canadian, travels south to get a sense of the environment surrounding the Dallas Area Rapid Transit (DART) system. The situation he describes is nothing short of disorder. As drug use and mental instability pervade, normal customers are relegated to a position of inferiority. Loud ramblings overcome the otherwise universal hope for quiet, a standard to which most riders have resigned themselves.
To illustrate the point, Forster recalls a bus ride during which the passenger behind him warned, “DIS MUH’FUCKA GON’ GET IT…dis muh’fucka really gon’ get it!” For the veteran rider, these pronouncements have become unsurprising; the regular exposure has worn down his capacity for fear.
But for the uninitiated, such a threat could portend a serious problem. Despite an elevated heart rate, sweaty palms, and a heightened sensitivity to all that’s around him, the amateur tries to get a sense of the accuser’s intentions and does all he can to distinguish himself from the accused.
The man, Forster says, smelled of weed and liquor; in one hand “was a revolver that was being casually twirled around his index finger like a set of car keys.” For the better part of half an hour, Forster says he watched the man in the reflection of his phone until the bus reached the next stop.
Though half an hour is on the long end for the average distance between stops, Forster’s experience points to the center of public-transit angst: you can only get off at the next stop. When the door closes, your presence is required until it opens back up. What happens in between is anybody’s guess, but that’s for you to find out.
Lest riders think these concerns are imaginary, DART confirms they are real. Forster identifies the advertising on DART buses and trains as an historical marker for what would otherwise be a psychological bother. “Assaulting a DART employee is a felony,” one sign advises. “Violators will be prosecuted to the full extent of the law.” For the normal rider, this informal legal counsel reminds them that, presumably, one of DART’s drivers or conductors has been assaulted in the past and that the only thing stopping a criminal from doing the same to themselves is the threat of a criminal charge.
The author’s observations indicate a culture of poverty and desperation on Dallas’s public transit system, then turn to a critique of personal automobiles as the norm for transportation. His frustration with the current state of public transit is couched in a greater appreciation for the idea of public transit. In theory, this idea of public transit should elevate social life; it’s one remaining cultural structure that involves strangers taking part in a goal that’s common yet distinguishable among individuals.
Car culture, Forster laments, will remain so long as public transit retains its reputation as being unsafe and the car retains its reputation as a representation of success; women have a greater interest in the former and men in the latter, he says, though both groups have an interest in both factors in their own ways. Though his critiques of the car as the norm for transportation are compelling, they are unlikely to be received well by an American audience. The car is too ingrained in our culture.
Despite his romantic description of the park outside of his Montreal apartment and his prescription, one of the few in the book, for universal basic income as a cure for what he calls “the great economic absurdity of America: the fetishization of employment and the demonization of unemployment,” Forster offers a clear picture of a dim reality. Americosis should not be read as a blueprint for revived urban policy or a formula for enjoying public transit as it was meant to be, but as good journalism from a dejected transit system. Some of it sounded familiar; I read most of it on the train.
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Florida gets all the attention. The GOP power center of the future is closer to D.C.
The Ohio River tears westward through the Pittsburgh suburbs, whisks into West Virginia, cuts on through Ohio, capstones Kentucky, indexes Indiana, and terminates in Southern Illinois. In the end, it marries the mighty Mississippi. The Ohio River once marked the frontier—a land of second chances and poseur aristocrats.
Now they just call it Trump country.
By twofold, Louisville, Kentucky, is the most populous city on the river. Bourbon country’s finest is followed by Pittsburgh, and then ever so closely by Cincinnati. Hunter S. Thompson, a native, declared Louisville “a Southern city, with Northern problems.” A Cincinnatian in the know told me his hometown is the inverse.
You see it when you’re there. Moving east and south across Ohio, Cincinnati is no Toledo. There is no quick-and-easy explanation of a glass industry gone away, no Detroit-style misery in miniature. Cincinnati is not comparable to Cleveland-Akron, Ohio’s Dallas-Fort Worth. Cincy has never suffered such a collapse in prestige. One hundred years ago, Cleveland was the fifth largest city in the United States—more fearsome than American-ancient Boston or nouveau Los Angeles.
Cincinnati is also not Columbus. First, Cincinnati is more likely to keep its name. (Roman generals are grandfathered in; explorers of the last six hundred years are not.) Second, unlike Columbus, Cincinnati is not anchored to a benign cult: the Ohio State University.
John Jeremiah Sullivan wrote that Ohio “has its very blandness and averageness, faintly comical, to cling to.” But these places are not so satirical. After all, there are hipster bars that could have been ripped from Hollywood (or anywhere these days). And there are early 20th-century homes (though often on German-named streets) refurbished by under-40s that could double as S.F. Victorians in a pinch.
More than anywhere else in the state, Ohio’s capital Columbus (and its more transient population) often seems intent on breaking its Midwest mold in such a fashion. Though such maneuvers all feel very self-aware—which is perhaps even more Midwestern.
Columbus is the fastest-growing city of significance in the state, though such materialist markers of success haven’t stopped many Ohioans from spouting complaints that could be heard in Northern Virginia, the Atlanta suburbs, and scores of towns across Texas, Florida, and anywhere in 21st century America that’s actually growing.
Last, and not least, and barely in the state, is Cincinnati and the overlooked Ohio River.
It still bears emphasizing: Eight presidents of the United States have hailed from Ohio. And seven were born in the state—including the seven that occupied the Oval Office from Reconstruction to the Roaring Twenties. Seven in half a century.
In contrast to the general understanding of American oligarchy, Ohio has been more important on the level of presidents than Harvard. Ohio politics in the Gilded Age was plausibly more important than the Democratic Party’s. And Ohio backrooms were nearly interchangeable with the GOP’s.
The last representative of this Ohio old guard was Senator Robert Taft, who in the early 1950s substituted “sane analysis for expediency” (his words), argued China not Russia was enemy number one, and exhorted Europe to be vaguely self-reliant.
Taft was defeated in his bid for the Republican presidential nomination in 1952 by the most plausible heir to George Washington to date: Dwight Eisenhower. Taft’s ideas seemed, for a lifetime, to be settled business, as defeated as the druids.
Robert Taft’s father had been president of the United States and chief justice of the Supreme Court. Kids from even Southern Appalachia (a land of confusion and confused loyalty), like this writer’s grandfather, were named for the old man. For more than seventy years, to use a 21st century phrase, Robert Taft has been treated like the geopolitical version of a failson.
Even his father William Howard Taft, that stout figure who served between Theodore Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson, was seemingly abandoned by history.
Yet along the Ohio River, up a road in Cincinnati named for the 27th president, there is a man some now think will be the 48th, and possibly the youngest ever.
In 10 years, Ohio has swapped places with Virginia on the political map. Now it is Ohio that is a soft red state a stone’s throw from Washington.
Sure, Akron is not Arlington-close, but there are portions of Virginia that are further west of Detroit. It’s not Arizona or Wyoming. And Ohio has the arsenal of would-be commanders-in-chief to match this new prestige that comes with being important, safe for the GOP, and an hour flight from power.
Before this shift, but after Taft, Ohio had a generation of usually Democratic grandees that seems strange and supine now.
There was Democratic Senator John Glenn, the first American to orbit the Earth and not the last to run a weird and blighted campaign for president. There was Republican Governor and before that Congressman John Kasich, reportedly brilliant and temperamental, but brilliant and temperamental about balanced budgets (fair) and Ukraine aid (much less so). It was a different time; it was certainly a different GOP.
There was Speaker John Boehner, beloved by the Washington press corps and the maître d’ at the Met Club. His tenure now is set to be lost in the noise of the Newt Gingrich revolution, the Dennis Hastert catastrophe, the Nancy Pelosi stints, the Paul Ryan story, and what could still be the GOP’s Year of Five Speakers.
There were more. Ted Strickland, Democratic governor in the Noughties and an ordained minister, was on Barack Obama’s vice-presidential search list when the Democratic Party felt the need to strike a middle ground in the culture war.
Notably absent from the Ohio national profile in these pre-Trump years was anything in the way of an effective punch on the issue of deindustrialization. It all went down, after all.
At the commanding heights, it was a process. As Charles Bukowski wrote in 1986: “Now in industry, there are vast layoffs (steel mills dead, technical changes in other factors of the work place). They are [laid] off by the hundreds of thousands and their faces are stunned: ‘I put in 35 years…’ ‘It ain’t right…’ ‘I don’t know what to do…’”
Especially after the collapse of communism, most statewide Republicans were tacitly for international laissez-faire. Both Democratic Senators at the time (including Glenn) and 11 of 19 congressmen voted against the North American Free Trade Agreement’s ignoble ratification. Among the Republicans voting in favor were Kasich and Rob Portman, the latter a Bushie U.S. Trade Representative and later U.S. senator.
In the meantime, many Democrats were content to rally support on these issues at the polls while often eliding immigration. They, too, seemingly achieved little.
By the late 1990s, dissent on these subjects was marginalized to such voices as James Traficant (the “oracle from Youngstown” to some, a convicted racketeer to others) and Dennis Kucinich (more on him a little later). In Britain, these figures would have been written off as “the loony left.”
This line of thought is certain to resurface this year as Democratic Senator Sherrod Brown seeks another term in office. He’s considered a state great, having been in elected office since the Seventies.
To his most cynical Republican critics, who have possibly been feeding lines to his opponent Bernie Moreno, Sherrod Brown is great like Elizabeth II was great. Like the late monarch, Brown is impossibly long in tenure and has been an overseer of precipitous decline.
For now, the old statewide consensus—what MAGA populists would now call “the uniparty”—is preserved in amber in the form of current Ohio Governor Mike DeWine. Presently, he is probably best described as an anti-anti-Trump Republican. Like the current president, DeWine’s been running for office since the ’70s. This is his last gig.
For the establishment, at least: après moi, le déluge.
West of Columbus and Northeast of Dayton, there is Jim Jordan, the congressman who in many ways was first on board with the new tendency. An unremitting presence on cable news, in office since 2001, Jordan’s tradecraft has left him open to the critique that he is agnostic on governing.
In recent years, Jordan has sought—or been compelled by circumstance—to correct this impression.
The current chair of the influential House Judiciary Committee, Jordan attempted a bid for speaker in the mad scrum last autumn. If Speaker Mike Johnson’s tenure collapses before the November general election, Jordan may well be the odds-on favorite to succeed him.
Southwest in the Eighth District is below-the-radar player Warren Davidson. A West Pointer and former Army Ranger, the congressman’s “your word is your bond” personal style may be better suited for whatever comes after the Trump restoration—or the attempt at it that may soon end.
It is not unimaginable that Davidson could wind up a senior national security official under a President Trump next year. The former president has gone out of his way to show he means business this time, to the delight of both the right and the liberal press who have papers to sell.
On foreign policy, especially, the ex-president is short on allies and frankly running out of neocons he hasn’t fired. If a Senate vacancy opens up next year, Davidson could run for the upper chamber (he looked but passed on a run this year).
In the meantime, Davidson could take down a speaker of the House. Like a realist Georges Danton, no single member of Congress has communicated so proudly the imperative to end the old ways. That starts with bringing the war in the east to a close, or at least American sponsorship of it.
Dashing back to Columbus now is Cincy native and overnight Republican rock star Vivek Ramaswamy. The entrepreneur-turned-politician relocated back to Ohio in recent years. His wife is a physician at OSU. Ramaswamy passed on the 2022 Senate race only to dive headfirst into the 2024 presidential contest.
Ramaswamy has been compared derisively to Pete Buttigieg, another millennial Ivy League “gunner.” Past the mistiest similarities, it is an inaccurate comparison.
Buttigieg’s support was often bolstered by voters older than him. Ramaswamy, by contrast, seemed to rattle many establishment Baby Boomer conservative sensibilities while he built a youth fanbase online.
Buttigieg is taciturn. Ramaswamy is saber-rattling. Buttigieg is the bête noire of the Bernie Sanders wing. Ramaswamy is all in on Trump and Trumpism.
The Senate nominee this year, Moreno, is perhaps the biggest unknown.
A Hispanic-American and a career car dealer, Moreno’s background is plainly that of the kind of striver his party both seeks to attract and increasingly has come to represent. In his primary night victory speech, Moreno castigated the U.S. trade deficit with China.
Moreno has the staunch backing of much of the most populist and nationalist infrastructure in Washington, DC. But he does not have much in the way of an independent brand—it is one he will swiftly have to develop.
After all, a five-alarm fire, with way more than a whiff of the political dark arts, erupted at the eleventh hour in Moreno’s primary race. A 16-year-old alleged gay dating profile on an adult website. Was it Moreno’s?
“I reviewed all the available information and it showed that the account had only a single visit, no activity, no profile photo, consistent with a prank or someone just checking out the site. That’s it,” said AdultFriendFinder founder Andrew Cornu, denouncing the story. “It’s important to recognize that even temporary access to an email account is sufficient to create a fake dating profile in someone else’s name.”
For a party and a country seemingly debating abortion and gay rights this year with a fury not seen in decades, the impression of hypocrisy or even pathology could mean Senate control.
Even if one concedes the Republican talking point that Sherrod Brown is not all that he seems, the fact remains he has seemed just fine to voters. They have only once rejected him, in an Ohio secretary of state’s race over thirty years ago.
Coincidentally, Moreno is also the new father-in-law of Republican Congressman Max Miller. Both are from the Cleveland area. Miller, a 35-year-old freshman representative, is a Trump White House alum, a stalwart ally of Mar-A-Lago, but not generally associated with the party’s reformist wing.
Indeed, during the battle over Kevin McCarthy’s speakership, Miller broke with Florida Congressman Matt Gaetz, the anti-McCarthy ringleader, in furious terms. His critics see him as a grandiose foreign policy hawk. He said shortly after the October 7 Hamas atrocity that Israel should be bound by “no rules of engagement.”
Miller is running for reelection this year—against Kucinich (!), last seen running Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s presidential campaign. Kucinich left the RFK team in mid-October, as the candidate left the Democratic race to run as an independent.
Some near the Kennedy orbit have commented privately that Kucinich’s exodus lines up with RFK’s foreign policy post–October 7. Remarkably, on the Gaza war, Kennedy is arguably now the most hawkish of the three leading presidential candidates.
As Trump has urged Jerusalem to “finish up” and Biden has increasingly ceded ground to his progressive left, Kennedy has overtly rejected ceasefires and truces. This has won him plaudits from such arch-hawks as the Wall Street Journal editorial board and the Foundation for the Defense of Democracies.
“I don’t even know what that means right now,” Kennedy said in March of a potential stoppage in fighting. Each such cessation “has been used by Hamas to rearm, to rebuild and then launch another surprise attack. So what would be different this time?”
Surely these issues will soon come up on the campaign trail between Miller and Kucinich.
All these tensions, open disagreements and questions of authenticity and how they are settled—or not—will determine how much the Republican Party has really, truly changed.
No discussion of Ohio, of the Republican Party, or American politics is complete any longer without addressing Senator J.D. Vance.
For the subject at hand, he’s the 800-pound gorilla. Except what a poor analogy that is: the senator looks to be down about thirty pounds. The question of the hour is if he is, indeed, “central casting” to be Donald Trump’s second running mate.
At first, Vance might not make all that intuitive sense for the role. Shouldn’t Trump select a woman or a minority?
That is easier said than done, actually, as President Joe Biden found out in 2020. First Biden committed himself to the selection of a woman—it was a killing stroke to win the primary against Bernie Sanders in the waning normal days of 2020 (mid-March). By summer, the death of Minneapolis man George Floyd compelled Biden to select an African-American, ruling out white Minnesota politicians and former prosecutors such as Amy Klobuchar.
Trump has shrewdly not hemmed himself in so tightly, but another Biden-style precedent looms. Major party presidential nominees usually don’t select non-politicians or even backbench congressmen for a reason. Statewide politicians—elected senators and governors—are more heavily vetted, and are demonstrated survivors. Yet even selecting a governor of a less populous frontier state is fraught with risk, as John McCain learned with Sarah Palin.
Under this rubric, and ruling out clear apostates such as former U.N. Ambassador Nikki Haley, the list is winnowed considerably: Vance; South Dakota Governor Kristi Noem; Florida Senator Marco Rubio; North Dakota Governor Doug Burgum.
With Rubio, the main problem is logistical. Both he and Trump are residents of the same state. Would Trump move his legal residence? Amidst a sprawling dragnet of criminal indictments related to his business and political practices? Would Rubio resign his Senate seat and move to another state for a race he might well lose?
Noem is bedeviled by a whisper campaign about marital infidelity. More significantly, Noem is in a double bind politically on social issues, cutting into her appeal as a feminine complement to Trump.
On the one hand, social conservatives view Noem as not hardline on the transsexual issue. In 2021, Noem declined to sign a transgender sports ban in college athletics, purposefully avoiding a fight with the NCAA. She cited her small state’s tourism concerns and her duty to her constituents. Conservatives such as Tucker Carlson disagreed, and the matter culminated in a Fox News showdown.
On the other hand, Noem signed into law an abortion ban that wiped away exceptions for rape and incest.
Noem gave a striking, inspired answer to Carlson a year later on the subject of Ukraine:
The primary external threat to the United States in Communist China. Our opposition to Russia has heightened this threat… The American people didn’t get us into this war. Joe Biden did. Biden has this fantasy that he can do the same kind of thing to Russia that Ronald Reagan did to the Soviet Union. … We’ve already overextended ourselves in our largesse to Ukraine.
But it’s likely, though not certain, that she’s staked out ground that has bled too many would-be allies.
Burgum is a dark horse in Vance’s way. It’s difficult to see what Burgum—Midwestern, tall, business experience, brains—brings that Vance doesn’t also while legitimately exciting people. Trump is said to fear anointing a successor. But picking the little-known if probably safe Burgum risks jumping the shark. Trump once also thought highly of Rex Tillerson.
The other question for Vance: Should he want the number 2 slot?
It is not a secret The American Conservative is a longtime confederate of the junior senator from Ohio. The upside is clear: No politician in America is as staked out as clearly on the stalwart issues of foreign policy realism, trade realism, and immigration restriction. No one. If Vance becomes vice president, he will be the runaway favorite to succeed a reelected Trump.
There is also the potential extraordinary circumstance that Trump wins but is forced from office by legal or financial issues or poor health (with a presumably corresponding set of pardons solving some of these issues). Vance, who turns forty in August, would become the youngest president in American history.
Yet, if Trump loses, or if he loses badly, not only does Trump go down but the most credible populist in the country is badly tarnished by a rout. Only one losing vice presidential nominee in over a century has later become president: Franklin Roosevelt. And it took FDR 12 years and the crisis of the Great Depression to recover politically from his loss on the 1920 ticket.
For Vance, then, this is a vabanque political moment less than two years into his Senate career.
It is especially so attached to a personality like Trump’s. The former president is the consummate gambler. Untold numbers of individuals have flamed out of his orbit.
Is this the move?
The personal fealty between Vance and the Trumps seems genuine. Vance is clearly tight with Trump’s eldest son Donald Trump Jr. Few have been able to strike the delicate balance between Trump’s personal affairs and Trump’s political prerogatives. Has Vance found it? It would be a major asset in office.
Much has been made of Vance’s highly bespoke political call in 2016: enthused and sympathetic about the issues Trump was raising, opposed to his becoming president.
Five years later, in autumn 2021, Vance (before he was a senator) told me Donald Trump would be reelected and inaugurated in January 2025. Back then, I ferociously disagreed. A major horseshoe political miss that Vance has recovered from could soon be capstoned by powerful prescience very few had.
It could make Vance the second most powerful person in the country.
Back when I started in journalism, I worked with the longtime columnist Michael Barone. In vivid contrast with most others I met, those who warned what a tough business media was, Barone reported the industry’s upsides. Barone had predicted Mitt Romney would win 315 electoral votes in the previous election with nary a professional consequence.
But Barone is hardly out to lunch, even if he joined organized conservatism’s strange sanguinity about the electoral appeal of Mitt Romney. He quickly followed up.
In his 2013 work Shaping Our Nation: How Surges of Migration Transformed America and Its Politics, Barone put forward the case (which would have huge relevance in 2016) that the Midwest is the most dovish region of the United States. The Midwest was notably settled by immigrants fleeing the wars of Europe. The Germans and even the Irish-Americans in the region were less likely to support any foreign policy perceived as too pro-British, which was increasingly a hallmark of U.S. foreign policy after the Civil War.
“Southernization” has defined U.S. demography and its politics for nearly a century and especially much of the last fifty years. Americans continued (and continue) moving south and west. Between 1976 to 2004, it became conventional wisdom that any Democratic ticket that had a prayer would have to feature a Southerner, probably at the top (Carter, Clinton).
From 1980 onwards, Republicans always featured a Southerner (and a Bush) except for 1996, an election in which the party was totally swarmed. The 1992 presidential race featured two Texas millionaires against the governor of neighboring Arkansas. The winning Democratic ticket of the 1990s was united by the Hernando de Soto Bridge in Memphis that links Tennessee and the Razorback State.
And then, all at once, the South disappeared from the big game.
In 2008, McCain-Palin vs. Obama-Biden skipped the region (unless you’re catching the current president on the occasional day he feels inclined to remind you that Delaware was a slave state). In 2012, Romney and Ryan were two Yankees. Parts of Indiana are arguably the South, but Mike Pence is not from that part.
And no Southerner is in the top tier of Trump vice presidential aspirants (Miami is not the South). Three Midwesterners (Vance, Noem, Burgum) are.
Given both the obscene housing crunch now hitting Florida and even Texas and the clear problems of the West Coast, the continued U.S. national move south and west may be no fait accompli. Much like Russia, the Midwest hopes to be a moonshot beneficiary of climate change.
Demographics could match political reality in the coming decade. For now, political reality is already here.
Midwest political influence—and Ohio Republican power, particularly—is back on the scene.
The post How Ohio Became the Center of the Republican World appeared first on The American Conservative.
The women who opposed their own enfranchisement in the Victorian era have little in common with the “Repeal the 19th” fringe of today.
Not long ago, a high-profile conservative woman of my acquaintance was cornered at the National Conservatism conference by a pimply young man who put to her that women should not vote. And, he declared furthermore, women should take no part in public life at all. What did she think?
She relayed this story to me with some amusement, but we both recognize that this young man’s views are not unique on the fringe Right. In the United States, this proposal propagates as “Repeal the 19th” and tends to base itself in arguments from physiological differences, which reportedly render women unfit for the vote, or else in perverse incentives. Examples are legion. Novelist Michael Walsh, for instance, explains that the typical female mind is characterized not by “calm thinking and reasoned judgment” but “inflamed emotions absent any rational thought.” Such views are not confined to men. The internet personality Pearl Davis argues that granting women the vote has resulted in a state welfare system that replaces husbands, “paying women to be single mothers.”
One of the frustrating aspects of such debates is how weak a grasp these people typically have of the history of the women’s movement. This is, to some extent, the fault of the winning suffragist side, whose narrative on feminism often situates Year Zero at the campaign for women’s suffrage. One casualty of this self-aggrandizing move is popular recollections of the 19th-century women’s movement.
We can sketch the outlines of this missing movement in the person of one of its most prominent anti-suffragists: the prolific and wildly successful novelist Mary Augusta Ward (1851–1920), better known by her married name, Mrs. Humphry Ward. A brief study of her life challenges both feminist and anti-feminist narratives. First, it reveals that much of the pre-suffrage women’s movement viewed the vote as a marginal issue. Secondly, it challenges my friend’s NatCon interlocutor with the fact that even high-profile opponents of woman suffrage were strongly in favor of women’s education and participation in public life. Lastly, it reveals the larger-scale social forces that eventually scotched opposition to woman suffrage, along with the ways these have subsequently changed again. The nature of this evolution suggests that those who seek to disenfranchise women today would, if they succeeded, find their victory a hollow one.
Born in Tasmania into a prominent literary family in 1851, Mary Augusta Arnold married the Oxford fellow Humphry Ward when she was 20. As an Oxford wife, she helped widen access to the university for women, including playing a central role in the foundation of Somerville Hall, Oxford University’s first women’s college, in 1879. She was also an active social reformer, setting up an adult education center in east London that is still in operation today. She involved herself vigorously in local and national politics and wrote prolifically, producing 26 novels, along with lectures, articles, and nonfiction books.
By the outbreak of the First World War, she was the best-known Englishwoman in America. She was also the founding president of the Women’s Anti-Suffrage League in 1908.
Why would such a public and political figure oppose women’s enfranchisement? From a contemporary perspective, this seems quixotic in the extreme. But Mrs. Ward baffles today only because our world differs so sharply in its moral assumptions. From a modern perspective characterized by dogmatic egalitarianism, it has come to be seen as illegitimate by definition to map asymmetries of power, agency, or status onto givens such as sex or social class. Seeking to entrench such differences, meanwhile, is viewed today as deeply immoral. Whether or not we support this premise, it is not possible to understand Victorian England without grasping that there, the inverse generally obtained.
The Anglican hymn All Things Bright And Beautiful, written in 1848, is still popular today. The extent of the moral sea-change we have undergone in between is illustrated by how rare it is to find modern churches singing the second verse:
The rich man in his castle,
The poor man at his gate,
He made them, high or lowly,
And ordered their estate.
By contrast, the established social world Mrs. Ward bestrode so influentially viewed political access and agency as necessarily unegalitarian, because power was contextual and relationship-bound—not just for women, but for everyone. One’s social station was as given as one’s sex. The power relations implied by such a worldview are compellingly described in Mrs. Ward’s many novels. The Marriage of William Ashe (1905) depicts a glittering prewar politics whose terrain is not, or not only, Parliament, but also wider networks of association across great families, gilded Mayfair parties, and grand country houses. It is a world of parliamentary candidates chosen among friends and cousins, of landed-interest power bases, and deferential farmhands and servants. In this world, elite women exert all the influence they could desire, just obliquely: The plot of William Ashe turns on the hero’s disastrous marriage to a woman too emotionally erratic to play her allotted part as a charming political wife. Conversely, in the book, the notion that non-elite individuals of either sex should have much say in the country’s government is scarcely considered. In Delia Blanchflower (1913), meanwhile, the figure that most closely articulates Mrs. Ward’s own view of the issue muses at one point that feminists “attributed a wildly exaggerated importance to the vote, which, as it seemed to him, went a very short way in the case of men.”
In the view of influential antis such as Mrs. Ward, being denied the vote was no impediment to women making full use of their abilities. By her time, the women’s movement was in fact very well-developed. Industrialization disrupted families and settled social norms. As men and women grappled with how to live together in a world transformed, the result was a vigorous, culture-wide debate on sex roles and relations. A consensus gradually emerged from this on “true womanhood”; in its wake came an increasingly organized women’s movement that was both maternalist and often strongly religious.
If this movement is largely illegible from the liberal feminist vantage-point, this is because its core assumptions leaned into the very “sexist” distinctions that liberal feminism seeks to dismantle. Its vision was of women’s role as flowing from motherly values of kindness, selflessness, nurture, and moral uplift. Ideas spread via reading circles and public lectures. At scale, this coalesced into networks dedicated to public service and moral improvement. Organizations such as the Girls’ Friendly Society and the Mothers’ Union worked to propagate sexual “purity,” frugal living, and strong marriage across society, especially among the lower classes. Women linked domestic and public maternalism and drew parallels between all forms of caring work: The National Union of Women’s Workers, formed in 1895, explicitly framed all women’s domestic, voluntary and professional activities as “work,” whether paid or not, emphasizing the common element of public service.
In an age with very little state welfare, the maternalist women’s movement played a transformative role in areas such as poor relief, social work, education, and health care. After the 1869 electoral reform extended the local government franchise to rate-paying women, this extended to voting for and standing in local government and school board elections. But, by and large, this movement did not view suffrage as anything like a main priority. Instead, as Julia Bush shows in her book Women Against the Vote, within such organizations suffragists and antis often worked side-by-side. The NUWW leadership, in particular, fought to preserve the institution’s neutrality on the suffrage question, hoping to preserve a space where women could continue collaborating on the many common projects to which the franchise was a side issue.
This movement was the distaff side of Britain’s industrial and imperial ascendancy, and members often framed their labors explicitly in the context of this larger patriotic project. Though later decried as the tyrannically moralistic “Mrs. Grundy,” their philanthropic and reformist efforts helped soften the disruptive social costs of industrial urbanization. And anti-suffragists such as Mrs. Ward based their arguments against women’s enfranchisement on the fact—obvious to them, from the labors of Mrs. Grundy—that women were already involved in public life. Their domain was just distinct from those of men.
This reasoning is set out in an 1889 open letter against female suffrage, co-authored and organized by Mrs. Ward. It argues that women should be active in every area where they have equal skin in the game. They should pursue higher education, lead in “the State of social effort and social mechanism,” and aspire to “that higher State which rests on thought, conscience and moral influence.” As the government began to take on more of the social functions first innovated by reformist women, Mrs. Ward and other antis argued for a representative delegation of women to advise Parliament on policy in domains where women were prominent. But, they argued, it was not physiologically possible for women to play an equal part across the board, especially in areas of public life predicated on the capacity to exert physical force, such as heavy industry, shipping, imperial governance, and the military. There, women’s influence was already proportionate to their contribution.
What, if anything, can we learn from Mrs. Ward about the contemporary right-wing suffrage debate? Today, far fewer of her objections to woman suffrage apply. The Britain I live in is no longer the industrial, imperial, naval one of the 19th century. Industrial modernity prompted debate on the “woman question,” and its depredations also ended the settlement dubbed “true womanhood”: slowly, through the 19th century, then, with the World Wars, all at once. Ironically, one of Mrs. Ward’s last major works approvingly documented its end. England’s Effort: Letters To An American Friend (1915) was commissioned by England’s Propaganda Bureau with the aim of tilting American public opinion toward the English side of the war. In it, Mrs. Ward outlined England’s total wartime mobilization, an effort that mingled social classes, drew women into manufacturing, drove industrial innovations that weakened the bargaining power of labor, and legitimized the hitherto unimaginable intrusions of an emerging managerial state into previously private domains of English life.
She applauded all these initiatives in the name of the war effort. But they proved to be the final nail in the anti-suffrage coffin. Wartime social changes shattered the stiffly hierarchical prewar social order upon which Mrs. Ward’s view of womanly public service was premised. It lent moral force to the working-class claim to political participation and normalized the presence of women in the workplace. In its aftermath, the franchise was granted at least in part in recognition of the fact that working-class goodwill was now in the national interest. England needed its industrial workers, and those workers therefore had leverage with which to demand political access. This went for women, too. Their direct participation in national economic life had, by this point, been so impressed upon the public that withholding the franchise seemed perverse and cruel. Mrs. Ward lost her battle, two years before her death, in the 1918 Representation of the People Act.
In light of all this, a better question than “Should women be denied the franchise in 2024?” might be “Who, in 2024, actually has it?” Since deindustrialization, the franchise may be nominally universal but the electoral goodwill of the lower orders is not, as it was in 1918, needed. It should therefore surprise no one that, as Peter Turchin has noted, where popular opinion today diverges from the elite on a policy issue, it is never decided in favor of popular opinion. Politically speaking, the masses are now once again as peripheral to the business of decision-making as they were in Mrs. Ward’s day: a force not to be wholly disregarded but without any kind of decisive power.
The real counter to right-wing calls for the disenfranchisement of women is not outrage but: What difference would that make? Within this increasingly pseudo-democratic order, and especially across its mechanisms of consensus-formation and moral conditioning, something not dissimilar to the 19th-century “women’s movement” is once again in the ascendant. In the 19th century, reformist women dominated education, health, philanthropy, and moral reform; the same is true today, across education, the charity sector, and the guardians of contemporary moral conformity known as HR. The chief difference is that, whereas in Mrs. Ward’s time such institutions were run on a voluntaristic basis by women of independent means, motivated by Christian piety and noblesse oblige as well as the usual human quest for status, today these are run on a salaried basis by elite women with household bills to pay and ordered to a more post-Christian moral framework.
For those agitating to disenfranchise women, this invites a further question: Disenfranchise how? Which forms of political agency would the repealers remove? I defy anyone to compare the literary output of Mrs. Humphry Ward with (say) that of Michael Walsh and conclude that men are always and everywhere the intellectual superiors of women. Given this, we can reasonably assume that, whether directly enfranchised or not, clever women will continue to wield the influence they have always possessed. In the softer, less accountable, and now palpably post-democratic political order we inhabit, where at least as much of the Overton window is shaped by today’s equivalent of Mrs. Grundy, this influence would if anything be increased.
Even supposing a consensus could somehow be mustered for withdrawing the vote from women, I submit that male advocates of this policy would be surprised to find themselves as politically henpecked as ever. Whatever we choose to call our formal political settlements, the reality today is—as it was in Mrs. Ward’s time—that men and women must, once again, grapple with how best we can live together.
The post When Feminism Was ‘Sexist’—and Anti-Suffrage appeared first on The American Conservative.
Members of Congress should nominate new officers for the U.S. Foreign Service, just as they nominate candidates for the military service academies.
The State Department is failing to recruit a Foreign Service that fully represents the American people, as required by the Foreign Service Act of 1980. One of State’s most glaring recruitment shortcomings is its inability to hire new Foreign Service officers (FSOs) who come from all geographic regions of America. This ongoing failure helps to perpetuate the mindset of the current Foreign Service and shape its policy attitudes.
Fielding a U.S. diplomatic and consular corps that truly reflects the geographic diversity and values of the American people, and not just elite foreign-policy opinion, will require Congress to end the State Department’s hiring monopoly.
Congress should change the law so that FSOs are recruited and qualified in a process similar to congressional appointments to the U.S. service academies. Empowering senators and congressmen to appoint qualified FSO candidates, recruited in their states and districts, would ensure a Foreign Service that is genuinely “representative of the American people,” as required by the law.
An invigorated, congressionally-led nomination process could easily meet State’s quotas for new FSOs who can pass the entrance exam and meet high standards of knowledge, professionalism, and integrity. Ending State’s hiring monopoly and transferring that selection authority to senators and congressmen, supported by their state and district offices, would initiate new interest in the career and potentially bring hundreds of Americans, currently overlooked in “fly-over” regions, into the Foreign Service.
Historically, the congressional appointment process to West Point, Annapolis, and the other academies has served to counter elitist tendencies. It was crucial to democratizing and interweaving all aspects of American society into the U.S. military officer corps, and it would do the same for the Foreign Service. FSOs from diverse geographic backgrounds will bring the mosaic of American values, different political points of view, and genuine racial and ethnic diversity that the Foreign Service so desperately needs.
Consider the data. An analysis of the 2,013 FSO appointments made over the past seven years reveals the alarming geographic imbalance in current State Department recruiting. Four states plus the District of Columbia, with a combined population of about 19 million, produced a staggering 691 new FSOs, more than a third of the total.
By contrast, five of the most underrepresented states (Indiana, Arkansas, Rhode Island, Louisiana and Mississippi), also with a combined population near 19 million, produced only 16 FSOs. While one in six thousand residents in D.C. became a diplomat, the odds were worse than one in a million for applicants from some states. Considering their state’s population, five North Dakotans should have been hired during this period, yet in seven years, State failed to recruit even one resident as an FSO.
It is no surprise that 2023 public records indicate no senior State Department recruiters even went to ten states: Arkansas, Idaho, Nebraska, North Dakota, Montana, South Dakota, Utah, Vermont, West Virginia, and Wyoming.
Monopoly and privilege fiercely resist change. State’s current hiring system also serves to perpetuate the department’s political biases, wherein senior diplomats recruit new officers who are cut from the same cloth. Of the same group of 2,013 FSOs hired over the past seven years, 608 joined the service from DC, Virginia, and Maryland, reflecting that about 30 percent of all newcomers were probably young careerists already in the Washington foreign-policy world of think tanks, NGOs, and federal government jobs.
At the same time, these same Metro Washington–area recruits, as well as the lion’s share of those who come from outside the Beltway, are almost all products of university graduate schools that overwhelmingly inculcate the left-liberal political values of those institutions. Most graduate school foreign-affairs professors, who direct many students to Foreign Service careers, are committed disciples of the Obama-Biden internationalist view of America’s role in the world.
Thus, all these new officers are already pre-programmed to take their place in Washington’s foreign-policy establishment. No matter what new administration the American people might elect, these careerists are all schooled in the same “interagency process” (to use the vernacular) of shaping U.S. foreign policy in a manner that often protects government’s institutional interests, not the country’s. To change Washington’s default tendency, for example, that all international crises must be met with U.S. resources, engagement and leadership—no matter the national interest—requires injecting new values and new thinking into our diplomatic corps.
Most damning, consider the 2016 presidential voting outcome, which revealed an American public basically evenly divided between Republicans and Democrats. To no one’s surprise, the record of financial contributions to the two candidates made by employees at Foggy Bottom was monumentally one-sided. State Department employees provided the Trump campaign a total of 39 contributions, while they gave Hillary Clinton 2,518 donations.
Meanwhile, the situation at Foggy Bottom becomes worse with each new FSO A-100 entering class and with ongoing civil service hiring. Not only is the Obama-Biden internationalist perspective the default position of new State hires, the status quo has been further hijacked by the ongoing imposition of a radical vision of “diversity, equity, inclusion, and accessibility (DEIA).”
This DEIA agenda is all about imposing quotas and identity politics on the department, and it has nothing to do with hiring new officers with a diversity of policy views or who fairly reflect the geographic distribution of the American people. Those core elements are very much not part of the DEIA agenda.
Embracing the Biden administration’s DEIA tenets has become mandatory for entering—and maintaining—employment at Foggy Bottom. Per Executive Order 14035, DEIA Kommissars are well-established in State—indeed, across the federal workforce—and embracing the Biden version of “social justice” inside the bureaucracy has become one of the core building blocks of federal employment.
The State Department is among the worst offenders as DEIA ideology commands all the career staff, how they view their colleagues, and the performance of their duties. In one recent instance, an event “intended only for women of color” was promoted through official department channels. How many lawsuits would (rightfully) be filed if the genders and racial identities had been reversed? Just as bad, aspects of this divisive ideology have also been shoehorned into regular U.S. diplomacy with foreign partners.
The department’s recent deployment of artificial intelligence to screen applicants for the Foreign Service, labeled innocuously as the “computer-QEP,” raises significant questions of political bias. Particularly concerning, this AI was added to the screening processes during a major overhaul primarily intended to increase the number of DEIA-aligned applicants who make the final cut. Protecting its monopoly to hire, State has refused to grant anyone with oversight authority, even union officials, access to the underlying code in order to ensure fairness in selection.
By controlling the intake of new FSOs, as well as using extreme DEIA ideology in making promotions and career-enhancing assignments, Secretary Blinken and his department leadership are continuing to resist the authentically diverse mandate spelled out in the Foreign Service Act of 1980. The objective of that statute was to build a professional diplomatic corps that represented the American people and “operated on the basis of merit principles.”
While it is true that the 1980 Act acknowledged that “affirmative action” could be a tool, it did not open the door to today’s DEIA extremism. In the face of what Blinken is doing, Congress has no alternative but to end State’s hiring monopoly and re-make its promotion authority. Both are ignoring merit principles the law requires:
The objective of this Act is to strengthen and improve the Foreign Service of the United States by assuring, in accordance with merit principles admission through impartial [emphasis added] and rigorous examination, acquisition of career status only by those who have demonstrated their fitness through successful completion of probationary assignments, effective career development, advancement and retention of the ablest, and separation of those who do not meet the requisite standards of performance (Sec. 101(b)(1)).
DEIA is just the latest expression of diplomatic elitism that often corrupts State and runs counter to the best interests of the country. Too many at State believe their mission is not about representing U.S. values in international affairs, but about instructing out-of-step Americans to change their outdated attitudes.
Thus, the DEIA phenomenon is part of a larger more deep-seated problem of elitism at State. Henry Kissinger, writing in his memoirs decades ago, reflected that State careerists often had a “supercilious attitude” that would lead them to put aside the national interest as the lodestar of U.S. foreign policy.
In an honest assessment of the Foreign Service, Kissinger pointed to a weakness that continues to this day: the tendency of State officials to remake instructions from their political leadership instead of implement them. Kissinger wrote:
The Foreign Service has the best personnel among American public officials—dedicated, well informed, and, if led decisively, highly disciplined. But they start from the conviction that their elected or appointed chiefs could probably not have passed the Foreign Service examination. Hence, they consider it their duty to persuade the Secretary and the President to their point of view and, failing that, to maneuver bureaucratically and with the media in such a way that their superior knowledge prevails by indirection. Their convictions are conventionally Wilsonian [emphasis added]; diplomacy and power are often treated as discrete realms—and diplomacy as separate from any other enmeshed in the area of national policies.
Kissinger is right on the mark when he labels most FSOs as committed foreign-policy Wilsonians. That Wilsonian perspective, of course, more often than not, gives FSOs vast common ground with internationalist Democrats. Some FSOs may be Wilsonians of the right, even comfortable with aggressive neocon perspectives, but most are Wilsonians of the left, and both groups have little patience for those who see America’s role in the world in restrained, non-Wilsonian terms. It is past time for congressional planners to take up the cause of re-legislating the Foreign Service Act of 1980 to end State’s hiring monopoly. Involving Congress in selecting and qualifying new FSO candidates will bring the State Department authentic diversity in thought and values. Senators and congressmen selecting officer candidates will guarantee geographic distribution in commissioning new FSOs; it will bring authentic racial and ethnic diversity, not the phony quotas that Blinken’s Kommissars are imposing.
It may be the only way to ensure that Foreign Service officers, like their military officer counterparts, truly reflect the values of modern America.
The post A Plan to Infuse American Values into State Department Hiring appeared first on The American Conservative.
On his 75th birthday, an acquaintance remembers the inimitable Hitch.
Impossible as it is to believe, Christopher Hitchens, the enfant terrible of Anglo-American politics and letters, would have turned 75 today, almost 13 years since his premature death from esophageal cancer in December 2011.
Yet in many ways Hitchens seems more alive than ever. His name routinely crops up in contemporary debates, notwithstanding how different the political landscape looks in the Age of Donald and Elon. In the years since his passing, he has acquired a new generation of fans in the millions. His coinages (“Islamofascism”) have entered the contemporary cultural lexicon. His debating ripostes are so widely cited that they have acquired names in their own right. (For example: “That which can be asserted without evidence, can be dismissed without evidence.” Known as “Hitchens’s Razor,” it serves as a handy rhetorical implement for dismissing—“shaving off”—opponents’ empty arguments from Authority.)
“Hope you are thriving,” he used to sign off his messages to me and other correspondents.
The ghost of Christopher is thriving.
Composing His Thoughts: The Mozartian Method
I came to know Christopher—it was never “Chris,” an Americanism (so he claimed) that he loathed—during the last dozen years of his life. I first met him briefly in December 1999. We later met at conferences, at his Washington apartment, and at his Palo Alto residence near the campus of Stanford University (where his father-in-law, Edwin Blue, a retired physicist, lived next door). Between our occasional meetings, we emailed (“Hope you are thriving!”), and spoke every few months on the telephone. My first lengthy one-on-one encounter with Christopher was in Washington in April 2002, when he was well known but had not yet emerged as the leading controversialist of the day. We spent most of the day together, starting with a long lunch before a late-afternoon taping for an hour-long PBS special on George Orwell (“The Orwell Century”) in the runup to the Orwell centennial of 2003. Like me, Hitchens was finishing a book (Why Orwell Matters, 2003) about Orwell’s legacy.
Not long thereafter, I visited him in California. Christopher took me on a long, leisurely stroll through his Palo Alto neighborhood. Waving to neighbors, stopping to visit his father-in-law Edwin, and pausing to point out “Condi’s house” (Condoleezza Rice, then-Secretary of State and Stanford’s provost during the 1990s), Christopher was in an ebullient mood.
I steered the conversation to a remark of an editor for whom we had both written. I asked Christopher if his retentive memory was “photographic.”
“I’ve heard you have a ‘Mozartian’ method of composition,” I rattled on, telling him that a magazine editor of ours had recounted to me that “you don’t write down your work.” Hitchens, he had said, “composed” a lengthy essay in his head with no apparent need to write it down. (Mozart wrote his scores for the benefit of others; his tragic early death, claimed his wife, meant that several of what might have been his very greatest works died on his deathbed with him. Contra Amadeus, nobody had the presence of mind—or perhaps the coldness of heart? —to insist in businesslike fashion that he dictate them with his dying breaths.)
“Well, yes, I suppose that’s a fair analogy,” answered Christopher. “Since I was often abroad and on tight deadlines—this is long before the smart-phone era—I developed the habit of phoning up and dictating my essays or dispatches to a sub-editor who would take them down.”
Christopher went on, “If I had someone on the phone, then I knew the story would be filed with the magazine. Faxes and computers are unavailable or unreliable in a lot of remote places.”
“No notes either?” I said. “You’re kidding. You just…dictated it? Straight through? Off the cuff?”
“Don’t misunderstand. I turned over most serious articles for hours, even days before ringing up the office. I always worked hard. But I didn’t need to write it down. It was as if I was reading it on a screen inside my head. It was all quite clear.”
“You just read it off? I heard that you even knew the length as you went along.”
“That’s right. I’d be relaying a 5,000 word-piece to the office, and I’d get to a place and just check in with the sub-editor on the word count. ‘That’s about 4850, right?’ I’d say. He’d answer, ‘4873, to be exact.’ I’d say, ‘All right, let’s wrap up, here’s the last 120 or so.’ And I’d come in at right around the 5,000-word mark.”
The Symposiast as Showman
A visit to Palo Alto in May 2006 stands out in memory. On my arrival, Christopher apologized that he and his wife Carol Blue had just been invited to a small dinner party.
“Hope you won’t mind seeing Bob and Lindy and a few friends tonight. He asked about you.”
The dinner was at the home of the poet-historian Robert Conquest, whom I had also met a few years before. Author of path-breaking books on Stalinism and the Gulag, most notably The Great Terror (1968), he had been a close comrade since the 1960s of “the Hitch” (a term of endearment granted to the inner circle). Recently turned 90, Conquest too—like their mutual friends and mates in mischief, Philip Larkin and Kingsley Amis—was an ardent admirer of Orwell. (Christopher dedicated Why Orwell Matters to Conquest.)
It was my first experience of seeing Hitchens in a relaxed setting among friends. With no effort and no pretense, throughout an eight-hour supper that stretched until 3 a.m., he held court. That evening’s symposium outdid Plato’s banquet. Hitchens delivered all of the speeches ex tempore, punctuated merely by occasional interjections and exclamations and impromptu grace notes from the eight others of us around the table. I can only report, echoing the Athenian statesman-orator Alcibiades on hearing Socrates’ contribution, that Christopher seemed that night “unrivalled by any man, past or present.”
Unrivalled that night he was.
And unrivalled, I believe, he will remain.
A gift of that order occurs once in a generation—and Christopher Hitchens possessed it.
Yes, it was a command performance, from a self-summons that Christopher issued to himself to rise to an occasion for Bob and his friends. Though of course it all seemed to arise casually, spontaneously, indeed serendipitously—as if we had just glided into it.
Which indeed we had—especially so in my case. By some misty alchemy of midsummer romance, a Palo Alto dining room had become a theater in the round, whereupon our places at the table had materialized into front-row seats. Although Bob, sitting at its head, nominally functioned in that capacity and did serve as a gracious host throughout the evening, nobody could mistake the fact that he had delegated Christopher to assume head-of-table duties—or that Bob beamed with a father’s pride at the theatrics of his intellectual son. Not for a single moment did Bob feel “upstaged” that night. The very notion would have struck him—and the rest of us too—as preposterous. His Gulf Stream of constant chuckles and repeated, happy, old-boyish nods of agreement made clear his warm approval of the show—and of the showmanship of the showman. After all, Bob had invited Christopher—and he and Lindy certainly knew what they were getting. And delighted to get it, too: Christopher Hitchens, singing—or rather, soliloquizing—for his supper.
If you merely watch some short YouTube clips, or even if you listen to a series of hour-long presentations during one of Christopher’s countless debates on the Iraq War or religious faith, you cannot appreciate the magic and majesty of that marathon evening. And remember: YouTube had just come out a few months earlier and Facebook was still in its infancy; this was long before the era of viral videos and ubiquitous iPhones—and before Twitter and X, before Pinterest and Snapchat, fully a decade before Instagram and TikTok. None of us knew it, but that evening we were already in the last flickering twilight moments of intellectual vaudeville. No matter how high the tightrope, Christopher kept his balance as if it were a stroll in the park—and interspersed the walkabout with assorted magical stunts, ventriloquism acts, and other assorted forms of verbal acrobatics.
The discourse that night ranged from Churchill and Thatcher to Nixon and Reagan to Putin and John Paul II, from sectarian squabbles about the revisionist critiques of Old Bolshevik leaders such as Nikolai Bukharin to the current historiography on World War I and the Vietnam War, from the revelations about Nobel Prize winner Günter Grass’s SS background to the comparative merits between Atonement on film and the original novel by “Ian” (McEwan, another shared inner circle friend of Christopher and Bob). Through it all, Hitchens expounded and extemporized with sovereign grace and authority.
As cogent analyses of the above subjects proceeded—to which the rest of us periodically chipped in a token contribution—reason would give way to rhyme as Christopher suddenly took flight. Somehow it was understood that we had arrived at an appropriate juncture for another soliloquy.
The table would fall silent.
Spontaneously and with perfect relevance to the topic, Christopher would reel off a couple of stanzas of Milton’s Paradise Lost; two dozen lines from Pope’s Rape of the Lock, Wilfred Owen’s “Dulce et decorum est,” a Shakespearean sonnet immediately followed by a Petrarchan counterpart, an Ogden Nash limerick along with a bawdy one by Bob himself, and more. It was lovely to see a guest or two—chiefly Bob and the Oxford historian Timothy Garton Ash—call out a title, identifying with delighted recognition the quoted work—and hesitantly chant a few lines summoned from memory. (I was grateful.)
Occasionally, Carol would gently rap hubby on the knuckles.
“Christopher! That’s enough now! Stop showing off!”
To which the rest of us, like a mournful Greek chorus, would protest with guffaws:
“No, Carol! No! Let him show off!!”
As the evening concluded, Danuta Garton Ash—Tim’s Polish-born wife—threw her arms around Christopher and sobbed on his shoulder. Not tears of sadness, but of joy—and wonder. The Polish accent was strong and utterly charming.
“Christopher, Christopher! How? How? How?”
A dazed Hitchens said nothing, as her clasp tightened.
“How did you learn all this?! How does your head hold all these things?! How do you know so much?”
For once, Christopher was speechless. Released from her headlock, and dazed by both the late hour and the happy hours, he smiled and swayed and waved off her effusive display.
Danuta had spoken for us all. Her husband Tim nodded in agreement. He had already had several encounters with Hitchens before. No slouch himself—Tim is Britain’s leading scholar of modern European history, whose exciting dispatches from Eastern Europe before and after the fall of the Berlin Wall in November 1989 captivated the West—he averred that the evening was amazing, yes, yet no great surprise to him.
The friends departed; I stood with Christopher as we looked up at the clear night sky. There was a twinkle in his eyes.
Home With the (and Without a) Hitch
It remains to mention how the wondrous symposium of that long evening’s journey into night concluded. As Christopher and I stood in the parking lot, after the Garton Ashes had driven off, I casually remarked that we should fetch Carol, who must still be inside the house. (I had also made a mental note to remonstrate with—or perhaps just reassure—her: Her husband was a matchless showman, yes, but he was no mere showoff.)
Not necessary to summon Carol, he assured me. A friend of hers came by an hour ago and she had slipped out.
Trying not to look too startled, because Christopher was quite under the weather, I offered to drive.
“No need at all,” he replied, ensconcing himself in the driver’s seat. “I can drive this route in my sleep.”
Although I had been repeatedly impressed with how fluent and coherent he had appeared after several drinks both this night and on previous occasions—including two interviews that I conducted with him (one on film, for an educational documentary on Orwell)—this was different. I was not about to get into a car with an inebriated Hitch at the wheel at 4 a.m.
Or so I had thought.
“Don’t make a scene,” he chastised me, as I stood outside and asked for the keys. “It’s only a couple of miles.”
Finally, exhausted, I relented.
Miraculously, we rode slowly through the night, without incident, without even a single headlight coming at us. The car rolled gently up his driveway, clicking to a neat halt just inches from his garage door. Christopher switched off the ignition, opened his door, and swung himself leftward to step out of the car.
He promptly tumbled onto his driveway, and I rushed to the driver’s side and helped him stagger to the front door.
Had we been protected by a medallion of St. Christopher—traditionally the patron saint of travelers (including Irish Catholic motorists, who used to keep “Christopher statues” on the dashboard)—squirreled away in the glove compartment?
I will never know.
No matter. Christopher, as you turn 75, I raise a glass to you!
Hope you are thriving!
The post The Symposiast: Remembering Christopher Hitchens appeared first on The American Conservative.
The Texan governor is again challenging liberal complacency.
When Texas’s Governor Greg Abbott decided to bus illegal immigrants crossing the Southern Border across the country to various sanctuary cities, many were skeptical, including conservatives. Some argued that bussing a few hundred migrants each week would do nothing to reverse the millions crossing each year. Others ridiculed it as a grotesque stunt, using vulnerable human beings as political props. Most leftists insisted this was illegal somehow.
By now, many have come around and see Abbott’s brilliant gambit for what it was. He turned an issue that once concerned only certain Americans—usually the ones in border states—and made it a critical issue for everyone, even the pompous elites over in Martha’s Vineyard. Now, these people can put away their meaningless abstractions, progressive platitudes, and memorized verses of Emma Lazarus’s “The New Colossus” and instead consider the concrete realities of illegal immigration—the strain on public resources, the proliferation of slums and shantytowns, and the rise in crime and disorder.
One would imagine that the whole busing episode would cause Abbott’s critics to give him the benefit of the doubt in other controversial decisions, like his recent executive order to punish antisemitic rhetoric on college campuses. But this hasn’t happened. Just like before, a large number of doubters have come together to denounce the order as misguided and counterproductive.
Conservatives mainly accuse him of curtailing free speech rights, conforming to the leftist insistence on “safe spaces,” and implementing something that is legally dubious. Rather than impose speech codes like a typical Democrat, he should dismantle all existing speech codes and promote a more open forum that encourages respectful dialogue and debate. The cure of hate speech is more speech. Punishments inevitably drive those with hateful, irrational arguments underground to spread unchallenged. Moreover, this gives legitimacy to those on the left who impose their own speech codes and thereby tightens the deadly chokehold on public discourse.
As a person who teaches rhetoric, I have recited these arguments constantly. I can also attest that they have mostly become stale and do little to shake the indifference of younger generations who have grown up with the internet. A decade ago, such arguments might have more merit, but today, they are incomprehensible to the majority of people. They only prolong a debate over an issue that for most of them has already been settled. Indeed, it’s very much like arguing about the problems with illegal immigration with Americans who have no experience of its effects and assume everything is fine.
At the moment, a significant portion of Americans, particularly college students, do not actually care about free speech. And the ones who do mainly want to eliminate it and effectively criminalize dissent. Not only do they want to prohibit hate speech, but they also want to ban misinformation (accidentally saying something wrong), disinformation (purposefully saying something wrong), and malinformation (saying something true, but in the wrong context). Even if this amounts to viewpoint suppression and a totalitarian culture held captive by endless propaganda, they are fine with it because they assume it’s the other side who suffers, not them—“safe spaces for me and not for thee!”
Unlike his detractors, Abbott acknowledges this inconvenient truth and acts accordingly. Just as it was too late to plead with leftists to help close the border and care about illegal immigration, it’s again too late to tell these same people to stop silencing conservative voices and start caring about free speech. Now would be the time to have them reap the consequences of their own stupidity. Seen in this light, it’s apparent that Abbott’s executive order is not so much about changing leftists’ minds (though it might), but challenging their complacency.
As was shown last year in the hearings with college presidents Claudine Gay, Liz Magill, and Sally Kornbluth, antisemitism is definitely the left’s Achilles heel when it comes to the issue of free speech. For a variety of reasons, opposing the state of Israel and excusing Palestinian terrorism has become a central pillar for leftism all over the world. They can’t let it go, no matter how irrational and abhorrent this view becomes.
And if they’re forced to choose between allowing an open forum with a protected right to free speech and letting go of their visceral hatred of Israel, they will pick the former. Sure, they’d prefer to control the conversation and humiliate conservatives at every turn, but they will sacrifice this control if it means preserving their right to scream at Jews and call for more humanitarian funding for Palestine. In terms of power, speech is just one weapon among many; supporting Hamas and accusing Israel of genocide, however, is essential to the leftist identity.
In all likelihood, Abbott understands this, which is why he’s forcing the issue. Either leftists on college campuses will react by challenging the executive order in court and arguing that it violates their free speech and academic freedom, or they will actually abide by the order and stop defending Hamas and condemning Israel. In the first case, they would have to defend hate speech and explain why their arguments should be protected while those of their opponents are routinely suppressed. In the second case, they would have backed off from antisemitic rhetoric. It’s almost certain they’ll pick the first option for the same reason they would rather let the country be invaded than close the border for any reason: It’s core to their being.
From Abbott’s perspective, it’s a win-win proposition. The only real objection to issuing an executive order against antisemitic speech is being called a hypocrite—a criticism any governor from Texas hears at least a dozen times a day. Once conservatives and free speech absolutists see how this works out, they will change their tune and pretend they were supportive all along. They’ll realize that Abbott isn’t playing into the left’s hands. He’s simply playing their game, and he’s going to win it.
The post Is Abbott’s Speech Order a Tactical Masterstroke? appeared first on The American Conservative.
State of the Union: The House has passed a FISA reauthorization bill, but the legislation isn’t on its way to the Senate just yet.
The House has passed a FISA reauthorization bill, but the legislation isn’t on its way to the Senate just yet.
On Friday, the House voted 273-147 to reauthorize Section 702 of FISA for two years, with 126 Republicans joining 147 Democrats to pass the bill. Fifty nine Democrats and 88 Republicans opposed the bill.
The most dramatic vote in the House chamber on Friday, however, was the vote on an amendment to FISA reauthorization that would have added warrant requirements when U.S. persons are in question. The amendment, brought by Rep. Andy Biggs, failed in a 212-212 tie. Conservatives in Congress are blaming House Speaker Mike Johnson, claiming he was the tie breaking vote. In total, 86 Republicans voted against the warrant requirement. Once the vote was taken, the chair quickly gaveled the amendment dead, ensuring no vote flips or latecomers that could have changed the outcome.
“To me that was the whole ball of wax…that warrant requirement,” Rep. Jim Jordan said after the FISA reauthorization vote.
NEW: 86 Republicans just voted against @RepAndyBiggsAZ’s amendment to require a warrant to spy on Americans under FISA causing it to fail.
— Greg Price (@greg_price11) April 12, 2024
Here are the names: pic.twitter.com/6mAoJfnlac
Johnson was able to secure a majority of the GOP’s support on the final legislation, but it’s hard to consider that a win when Democrats signed off in higher numbers. Furthermore, Rep. Anna Paulina Luna has filed a motion to reconsider the legislation, which will delay moving the bill to the Senate until early next week. If the House wants to avoid reconsideration of the bill, they’ll have to motion to table Luna’s procedural maneuver. Johnson clearly has the votes to overcome Luna’s challenge, and it’s unlikely conservatives will score any wins.
Unless former President Donald Trump has something to say about it. Johnson now heads to Mar-a-Lago for an election integrity event where the pair will have a joint news conference. But it appears that Trump has been appeased by the idea that he could preside over FISA reauthorization come 2026. For now, Mar-a-Lago is backing Johnson, hoping to avoid any further chaos in the House before the election, so it seems FISA reformers will have to wait.
The post Where Does the FISA Fight Go From Here? appeared first on The American Conservative.
Mike Johnson is mired in a political minefield. What is most likely to cause the House GOP to implode?
“Mike Johnson, he’s literally turned into Mitch McConnell’s twin and worse. He’s a Democrat…. There’s not even any daylight between him and Nancy Pelosi at this point.” Harsh words from Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene for House Speaker Mike Johnson.
Currently, Greene has a motion to vacate Johnson’s speakership in the hopper. Greene filed her motion to vacate on March 22 when the house was forced to vote on (and passed) a 1,012-page minibus with a price tag of $1.2 trillion. House members had less than 36 hours to read the bill or be blamed with a partial government shutdown. Just 101 Republicans, far short of the majority of the conference, voted for the minibus.
“Remember, last Congress we were all complaining: ‘We can’t even read these thousands of pages before we have to vote on them.’ We’re now back to the House of hypocrites, and I’m so sick and tired of it,” Greene said before filing her motion to vacate. “Why throw out a speaker for supposedly breaking the rules, and now we have a new speaker that is really breaking all the rules. So like, what changed?”
Certainly, a lot could change in the next few weeks if Greene decides to force a vote on the motion to vacate. Between FISA Section 702 reauthorization and Ukraine aid, Johnson finds himself in a political minefield—one false step, and Greene could blow up his speakership.
But where are the mines, exactly? They’re difficult to sniff out, but Greene provided a window into her thinking on a potential motion to vacate in a Dear Colleague letter circulated to Republican House members on Tuesday. “I will not tolerate our elected Republican Speaker Mike Johnson serving the Democrats and the Biden administration and helping them achieve their policies that are destroying our country,” Greene wrote. “He is throwing our own razor-thin majority into chaos by not serving his own GOP conference that elected him.”
“I will not tolerate this type of Republican ‘leadership,’” Greene continued. Making reference to the fights over FISA and Ukraine aid, Green claimed, “This has been a complete and total surrender to, if not complete and total lockstep with, the Democrats’ agenda that has angered our Republican base so much and given them very little reason to vote for a Republican House majority.”
“And no, electing a new Republican Speaker will not give the majority to the Democrats,” Greene wrote, preempting rebukes if she does decide to go forward with the motion to vacate. “That only happens if more Republicans retire early, or Republicans actually vote for Hakeem Jeffries.”
Neither the FISA or Ukraine aid fight seem to be trending in Johnson’s direction. On Wednesday, 19 Republican lawmakers went against Johnson in a procedural vote to move forward on FISA reauthorization legislation.
The vote against FISA came in the wake of a Wednesday post on Truth Social from former President Donald Trump: “KILL FISA, IT WAS ILLEGALLY USED AGAINST ME, AND MANY OTHERS. THEY SPIED ON MY CAMPAIGN!!!” on his Truth Social account. Though Trump’s campaign was spied upon using a different FISA authority (not 702) and some members of the corporate media are claiming that the 19 Republicans who stood against the vote to proceed are blindly doing so at Trump’s behest, the battle lines were clearly drawn much earlier in the week. Surely, Trump brought further attention to the issue and put Republicans in the pocket of the intelligence agencies on the back foot by forcing them to answer hard questions from the grassroots, but by no means was Trump’s weighing in on the topic the deciding factor. (Side note: see how the intelligence agencies, corporate media, and establishment work together?)
Johnson has been working for months to reconcile the divide over 702 in the GOP conference, embodied by the House Intelligence and House Judiciary Committees. The House Judiciary Committee wants reforms to increase transparency and accountability in the FISA process, as well as provisions that would require FISA warrants for agencies to sift through information of U.S. citizens caught up in foreign surveillance and ban the government from buying U.S. persons data from private companies.
Johnson tried to split the baby by taking a FISA reauthorization bill from the Judiciary Committee’s Laurel Lee, a representative from Florida, with some but not all of the reforms. First, Johnson prevented, and would prevent any future amendment, on banning data sales from private companies to the U.S. government—a red line for the Intelligence Committee headed by Rep. Mike Turner. FISA warrant provisions, arguably the biggest priority of the Judiciary Committee, were also made part of the amendment process and not included in the bill’s text.
Johnson, before he was speaker, was in favor of FISA reforms, like warrant provisions, that the House Judiciary Committee proposed. As now-Speaker Johnson devised this plan, he seemed ambivalent at first, but has increasingly soured on warrant provisions. Eventually, Johnson came out fully against warrant provisions, claiming classified briefings given to him as speaker by the intelligence agencies gave him a “different perspective.”
Speaker Mike Johnson elaborates on his FISA flip flop from when he was a rank and file member of the House, explaining that after receiving classified briefings he has a “different perspective.” pic.twitter.com/mrLj9ouEji
— Haley Talbot (@haleytalbotcnn) April 10, 2024
No warrant provisions guaranteed, no deal, House conservatives suggest. Leaving the warrant provisions up to the amendment process with an adversarial speaker is too big of a risk. Now, its leg-fare against Johnson’s FISA proposal. House conservatives are trying to force open the amendment process to loosen Johnson’s grip on the process.
“The Speaker of the House put his finger on the scale, against the amendment. And that pretty much is the story,” Rep. Chip Roy of Texas told POLITICO.
Johnson is running out of time to find a deal before Section 702 expires on April 19. Without a deal, Johnson will likely bring a clean reauthorization, which will find broad uniparty support, to the floor. Another vote that potentially courts more Democratic support and less than a majority of the GOP conference could imperil Johnson’s speakership.
But it seems there has been a provisional agreement between the pro- and anti-FISA factions. Johnson has negotiated with conservatives a FISA reauthorization that would expire in two years. They’re betting on Trump becoming president in November. The next FISA renewal will need his signature.
Greene was not among those who voted no on the procedural vote, but she has hinted her support for the final FISA reauthorization is contingent on warrant provisions.
“We do not believe in warrantless spying on the American people, especially when this bill carves out the ability for Congress to be notified when a member of Congress is going to be looked at through the FISA court,” Greene told members of the media. “That’s completely unfair. The same thing should apply for the American people. But Mike Johnson doesn’t have the trust of the conference. That’s become very clear.”
Johnson’s new two-year FISA reauthorization plan does not include warrant provisions.
Greene met Johnson on Wednesday afternoon—the first time the pair met since she filed her motion to vacate. “I got a lot of excuses,” Greene told members of the media after leaving the meeting. “We didn’t walk out with a deal.”
What’s more likely to cause Greene to trigger her motion to vacate Johnson, however, is if Johnson decides to go forward with Ukraine aid.
If Johnson moves forward with Ukraine aid, it would be one of “the most egregious things he could do,” Greene said. Currently, Johnson is working on an Ukraine aid package expected to be worth $60 billion—the same level of funding for Ukraine provided by the Senate’s previously passed supplemental. Johnson, to maximize Democrat votes, is toying with decoupling Ukraine aid from aid to Israel. But to keep some Republican votes so that a majority of the GOP conference supports the package, Johnson is exploring making some of the aid a loan or using the REPO Act to seize Russian assets to fund further U.S. aid to Ukraine.
Chances are any Ukraine funding Johnson hopes to bring to the floor will also be under suspension of the rules. In this case, it’s a guarantee that Johnson fails to secure a majority of the House GOP’s support and a majority of the support for the package comes from Democrats.
“Let me tell you, when he forces that vote, again, under suspension with no amendments, and funds Ukraine and people find out how angry their constituents are about it, that’s going to move the needle even more,” towards a motion to vacate, Green said. “I’m not saying I have a red line or a trigger, and I’m not saying I don’t have a red line or trigger. And I think that’s just where I’m at right now. But I’m going to tell you right now: Funding Ukraine is probably one of the most egregious things that he can do.”
Johnson might have an unexpected savior, however: Donald Trump. On Friday, Johnson and Trump are expected to give a joint news conference during an election integrity event hosted at Mar-a-Lago. Trump is reportedly displeased at Greene’s maneuvering against Johnson. One MAGA world insider even went so far as to say Greene’s motion to vacate is “100 percent distraction. Unwanted. And just stupid.”
“We’re not going to get trapped into this cycle of bullshit that comes out of members of the House,” the Trump insider claimed.
“It’s fair to say we don’t think she’s being constructive,” another person close to Trump told POLITICO. “It’s no way to run a party; it’s no way to run a House. You can’t work in that environment.”
The bottom line: “The internal fighting is not appreciated by [Trump].”
So, Johnson is heading to Mar-a-Lago to not only beat the war drums for Trump’s reelection effort. The two are expected to talk FISA and Ukraine, and potentially do some horse trading on these issues to protect Johnson’s speakership. Over the course of his 2024 campaign, Trump has balked at being labeled “conservative,” opting instead for “common sense.” The former president has always been a pragmatist and dealmaker at heart—his pragmatic streak has been on full display when it comes to the issue of abortion as of late. But is he willing to make a deal to protect Johnson when two of the former president’s key issues—war in Ukraine and the weaponization of the federal government—are on the line and the biggest—border security—goes unaddressed?
Even then, will it be enough to save Johnson. Greene says maybe not; she’s “not backing off at all.”
This story has been updated with information about the prospective two-year reauthorization deal.
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Turkish conservatives must adapt in the face of voter dissatisfaction.
In 1977, Israel witnessed what was termed the “mahapach,” a Hebrew word for upheaval or revolution, as the right-liberal Likud party ended 28 years of left-center governance. A similar seismic shift seems to be unfolding in Turkey, echoing through the corridors of power in Ankara to the streets of Istanbul and beyond. The 2024 local elections in Turkey have emerged as a watershed moment for the nation’s conservative and nationalist factions, indicating a tectonic shift in the political landscape that may have profound implications for the country’s future.
On March 31, 2024, Turkey’s local elections set a different tone from past polls. The People’s Alliance, a coalition composed of the ruling Justice and Development Party (AKP) and the Nationalist Movement Party (MHP), experienced a notable setback, losing control over several key municipalities. This marked a departure from the fervor that characterized the May 2023 General Elections, with the repercussions of this electoral outcome poised to significantly influence the role of political actors in Turkish society.
The Republican People’s Party (CHP) emerged as the primary victor, relegating the AKP to second place—a development viewed as a severe blow by Turkish conservatives and right-wingers. Various factions within these groups have speculated on the reasons behind their defeat; a prevalent theory suggests that the electorate aimed to send a stern message to the ruling elite due to the country’s economic downturn. This perspective finds resonance within the context of Turkish right-wing politics, where the relationship between conservative social groups and their political representatives is not based on mutual exchange.
A deep-rooted trust in strong leadership, coupled with an unwavering belief in the leader’s infallibility, fosters an organic bond between the leader and his party, rendering internal reforms challenging. Additionally, the mystical reverence for the state held by Turkish conservatives discourages public dissent. In this vein, the local elections presented an unprecedented opportunity for Turkish conservatives to voice their political discontent in a dramatic fashion, relegating the ruling party to the opposition benches at a local level.
Moreover, the 2024 local elections signify a setback for the Turkish right at large, with the exception of the New Welfare Party (YRP), led by Fatih Erbakan, which seemed to defy the trend by embracing the political legacy and rhetoric of his father, Necmettin Erbakan. The YRP’s platform, focusing on anti-vaccination, nationalist-Islamist themes, and a number of other distinct policy propositions, unexpectedly attracted up to 7 percent of the vote. Disenchanted AKP supporters found refuge in the YRP, buoyed by the belief that such a shift would not undermine the AKP’s standing. Post-election analyses, however, indicate that the People’s Alliance’s vote share hovered around 49 percent, with the anti-Erdogan coalition slightly leading at 50.2 percent. Despite the contraction of mainstream right-wing parties, this does not necessarily denote a paradigm shift among the right-wing electorate.
The relegation of AKP to second place has ignited fervent debate among Turkey’s right-wing circles. While some attribute this decline to economic malaise and poor candidate selection, a broader analysis reveals macro-scale factors at play. The genesis of AKP can be traced back to societal divisions between the periphery and the center, propelled by the capitalist transformation of the Turkish economy and the centralization of state bureaucracy. As the political voice of the marginalized, AKP initially rose to prominence. Over time, however, the party’s pivot towards conservative and nationalist rhetoric led to the alienation of its pragmatic and liberal elements, culminating in the creation of a new “other.”
The “iron law of oligarchy,” by which decisions by a select party elite began facing rejection at the grassroots level, and an identity crisis within conservatism underscore a complex milieu. The conservatives’ prolonged tenure in power, coupled with an increasingly intimate relationship with the state apparatus, has engendered a new political orthodoxy, sidelining dissenters as security threats. Moreover, the inability of the conservative ideology to adapt to changing circumstances, gravitating towards a geopolitical revisionist stance, has surfaced as a salient challenge.
The central dilemma for advancing a conservative agenda in Turkey revolves around the political and geopolitical ramifications of Islam. AKP’s challenge in crafting a comprehensive conservative doctrine is compounded by transnational religious affiliations, notably the concept of the ummah. This global Islamic solidarity occasionally hampers the full realization of a national identity, as demonstrated in debates over Turkey’s trade relations with Israel. AKP’s foreign policy rhetoric since the Arab Spring, aimed at addressing the ummah’s issues under Turkey’s stewardship, has witnessed a recalibration post-2020, yet its societal echoes persist.
Looking ahead, the ramifications of the 2024 elections for Turkey are poised to be far-reaching, particularly in shaping Turkey’s engagement with global powers like the U.S. ahead of the 2028 elections. Turkey’s economic reliance on external financing underscores the necessity of strengthening partnerships with the EU and the U.S. A potential alignment between Erdogan and a Trump-led U.S. could foster cooperation on regional and global fronts, sharing a mutual understanding. This could, consequently, bolster Erdogan’s influence within the realm of domestic politics.
Nevertheless, a glaring deficiency within Turkish conservatism is the lack of engagement with conservative factions beyond its borders, contributing to the stagnation of its domestic agenda. Fostering ties with American conservatism could serve as a pivotal step in rejuvenating Turkey’s conservative movement.
While the local election results in Turkey spell a significant setback for the conservative-nationalist bloc, it is imperative not to overlook the nearly 49 percent vote share secured by the right. This percentage embodies the most significant political capital for the right wing as it gears up for the 2028 elections, signaling that the conservative base, although shaken, remains a formidable force in Turkish politics.
The post The 2024 Turkish Elections Were a Warning for the Global Right appeared first on The American Conservative.
The Old Line State calls itself “America in Miniature”—and perhaps this will prove true in more ways than one.
Let Hercules himself do what he may, the cat will mew and every dog will have his day—even when the dog in question is the generally hapless Maryland GOP.
The Old Line State’s federal legislators have a tendency to stick around for quite a while—Steny Hoyer, the former House Majority Leader, has been in the lower chamber since 1981—but from time to time one of these old crocodiles will shuffle off the scene, leaving a spot for a (relatively) younger, more energetic crocodile. Ben Cardin, who serves as one half of Maryland’s Senate complement, announced in May 2023 that he will not be seeking reelection.
This would not ordinarily be a cause for breaking out the champagne among the state Republicans, who haven’t fielded a senator since 1977. Further, the party is coming off an embarrassing 2022 cycle, in which they continued to be a non-factor in the state legislature—the Dems added three seats to their existing supermajority in the House of Delegates—and picked up no new Congressional seats. Worst, perhaps, the America First gubernatorial candidate Dan Cox was roundly punished at the ballot box, 64.5–32.1. Cox had won a primary battle with Kelly Schulz, the anointed successor of Larry Hogan, the popular two-term governor. Schulz was all wet, and her heart didn’t seem to be in the race—she didn’t seem interested in winning over the right wing of the state party, for example declining to answer the Maryland Right to Life’s abortion policy questionnaire.
Maryland is in some respects electorally similar to Massachusetts—a handful of dense blue counties, along with Baltimore City, ensure that the state legislature generally remains Democratic; yet there are enough rural voters and enough disgruntled high-net-worth taxpayers in the blue districts that the GOP has been able convincingly to contend for the governor’s mansion in the past decade and a half. (Before Rob Ehrlich’s 2003 election, the last Republican governor had been Spiro Agnew.) This is the sort of state party that has been ill served by the America First realignment; the overall share of the vote has not grown, but the core of the party has grown more hardline in its positions. In Maryland, the mythical Republican swing voter actually exists, and he’s none too excited by Cox’s hawkish efforts on behalf of Donald Trump’s anti–election fraud crusade.
But it’s a moment of weakness for the blue team, too. David Trone, the popular District 6 representative who had been the presumptive replacement for Cardin, is embroiled in a scandal. He uttered a word during a congressional hearing that I have never heard and frankly sounds made up, but is apparently a fairly full-bodied anti-black slur. If you are a Maryland Democrat, you can’t do that—at least not anymore. (Long gone are the days when the state party threw in for George Wallace.) His main challenger, Angela Alsobrooks, is looking to make the long-shot jump from Prince George’s County Executive to the national legislature’s upper chamber. If Gov. Wes Moore and other high-ranking state Democrats formally come out against Trone, a sufficient number of strictly party men may make cause with Alsobrooks’s black core constituency to elevate her.
Alsobrooks is a weak candidate—suffice it to say that Prince George’s County is not synonymous with good government in the state. (In 2010, the county executive, Jack Johnson, went to prison on good old-fashioned graft charges. Ladies and gentlemen, the Democrats!) She will be even weaker coming out of a hotly contested primary in which the moderate, bog-standard Maryland machine creature is publicly beaten with an identity-politics-inflected stick.
In the face of this disarray, the Republicans are set to get it together to nominate that beloved former governor—Larry Hogan. Hogan won his 2014 election soundly, 51–47.3; his second term was a mandate 55.4–43.5, won even in the face of anti-Trumpian headwinds in the suburbs. The state ran a surplus under his supervision, and he successfully thwarted many of the zanier efforts from the liberal state legislature. In 2022, he had an approval rating of 70 percent. These are the marks of a winner.
The right wing of the state party came to dislike him for Covid lockdowns, but, for better or worse, the national bad feelings around the Emergency of 2020 have faded. His public break with Trump is harder to get around, but the fundamental question remains, Whom would you rather have? They’re not going to be voting for Alsobrooks in Garrett County. Despite the beef between Hogan and Trump, the Marylander has shown himself loyal to the party, apparently shrugging the dreams of the erstwhile No Labels project without much second thought. It should be easy enough for the men to bury the tomahawk, especially as Trump tacks toward the center for the general election. And polling already shows Hogan winning against Trone.
Whom would you rather have? This is the question that may sweep Trump back into the White House. Despite the gloomy conventional wisdom about the GOP’s chances in the legislature, it is also a cause for hope down ticket—even in the land of the crab and the rockfish.
The post Maryland: Is This the Senate Seat Most Likely to Flip Republican? appeared first on The American Conservative.
The word games around “content moderation” recall the days of “enhanced interrogation.”
During last month’s Supreme Court hearing on a landmark case on federal censorship, Associate Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson declared, “My biggest concern is…the First Amendment hamstringing the government in significant ways.” Her comment was mystifying because that is the whole point of the First Amendment: to prevent government from nullifying freedom of speech and press.
Jackson’s assertion exposed the parallels between the current case on federal censorship of social media and the torture controversies from the George W. Bush era. Two decades ago, Bush administration lawyers secretly rewrote federal policies to assure that CIA interrogators were not “hamstrung” when they sought to flog the truth of detainees.
When the government heaves the law and Constitution overboard, euphemisms become the coin of the realm. During the Bush era, it wasn’t torture—it was merely “enhanced interrogation.” Nowadays, the issue is not “censorship”—but merely “content moderation.” And “moderation” is such a virtue that it happened millions of times a year thanks to the feds arm-twisting social media companies, according to federal court decisions.
In the Bush era, torture was justified in response to “ticking time bombs. “ But the Senate Intelligence Committee concluded in 2014 that harsh CIA interrogations never led to “imminent threat” intelligence. That failure was irrelevant as long as a snappy phrase exonerated tearing out toenails, waterboarding (mock drownings), rape-like rectal feeding, and pummeling people to stay awake for seven days and nights straight.
Instead of the “ticking time bomb,” Jackson last month touted mass suicide as the latest pretext for censorship in the Murthy v. Missouri case. Justice Jackson luridly warned of kids “seriously injuring or even killing themselves” by “jumping out of windows at increasing elevations” thanks to a social media “teen challenge” that the government would need to suppress. And you don’t want all the teenagers to die, right? Washingtonians presume the First Amendment is archaic because Americans have become village idiots who must be constantly rescued by federal officials.
For both torture and censorship, Washington policymakers were presumed to be the smartest people in the room—if not the world. Yet the CIA regime was largely designed by two preening psychologists who had little or no experience conducting interrogations. The CIA ignored its own 1989 report conclusion that “inhumane physical or psychological techniques are counterproductive because they do not produce intelligence and will probably result in false answers.”
Similarly, the lead federal agency for online censorship—the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA)—presumed that any opinion or statement that differed from federal policies and proclamations was misinformation. CISA simply asked government officials and “apparently always assumed the government official was a reliable source,” federal judge Terry Doughty noted in his decision last July. Any assertion by officialdom was close enough to a Delphic oracle to use to “debunk postings” by private citizens.
For both torture and censorship, there was almost zero curiosity inside the Beltway regarding what the government actually did. When the Bush administration railroaded a bill through Congress in 2006 to retroactively legalize some of its harshest interrogation methods, the Boston Globe noted that thanks to restrictions on classified information, “very few of the people engaged in the debate… know what they’re talking about.” Sen. Jeff Sessions of Alabama, Trump’s first Attorney General, epitomized legislative absolution through absolute ignorance: “I don’t know what the CIA has been doing, nor should I know.” (The American Conservative was one of the few political magazines that did not sweep the scandal under the rug. I wrote TAC articles on torture outrages here, here, here, here, and here.)
Similarly, when the Supreme Court heard the censorship case on March 18, the federal iron fist practically vanished. Most justices sounded clueless about the machinations exposed in earlier court decisions used to decimate the First Amendment.. In his July 4, 2023 ruling, federal Judge Terry Doughty delivered 155 pages of details of federal browbeating, jawboning and coercion of social-media companies, potentially “the most massive attack against free speech in United States history.” A federal appeals court followed up by issuing an injunction prohibiting federal officials from acting “to coerce or significantly encourage social-media companies to remove, delete, suppress, or reduce” content.
In the Bush era, people who were brutalized were vilified as terrorists, extremists, or enemy combatants. That blanket condemnation rested on a presumption of infallibility, as if federal agencies could never torture an innocent person. The 2014 Senate report provided a deluge of examples of hapless victims horribly abused.
Similarly nowadays, censorship is fine with many zealots as long as the targets are widely reviled groups such as anti-vaccination activists. Many pundits viewed Covid policy critics like southern sheriffs viewed civil rights protestors in the 1960s: They forfeited all their rights because they were up to no good. Federal officials presumed that any assertions that disagreed with federal proclamations (such as the false promise that vaccines would prevent Covid infections) were automatically “misinformation” and could be suppressed. Federal censorship extended far beyond Covid policy, suppressing disfavored comments on the 2020 election, mail-in voting, Ukraine, and the Afghanistan withdrawal.
Will the Supreme Court drop an Iron Curtain to shroud federal censorship like it did torture atrocities? Two years ago, the Court entitled the CIA to continue to deny its outrages despite worldwide exposes of its crimes. The Supreme Court ludicrously declared that “sometimes information that has entered the public domain may nonetheless fall within the scope of the state secrets privilege.” Associate Justice Neil Gorsuch dissented, warning that “utmost deference” to the CIA would “invite more claims of secrecy in more doubtful circumstances—and facilitate the loss of liberty and due process history shows very often follows.” Gorsuch noted that the Supreme Court was granting the same type of “crown prerogatives” to federal agencies that the Declaration of Independence describes as evil.
In the Bush era, it was necessary to argue that torture was odious (alas, no one told President Donald Trump)—despite that being a self-evident truth throughout American history. In the Biden era, is it now necessary to argue that censorship is a bad thing? How in Hades did our national values go off the rails?
The Biden administration wants the Supreme Court to dismiss the censorship case because censorship victims “lack standing”—i.e., they allegedly cannot specifically prove that federal conniving directly suppressed their comments and posts. Back in 2013, the Court disgraced itself when it used that same pretext to dismiss lawsuits on federal surveillance because the victims could not prove they were spied on. (Secrecy is convenient for shrouding government crimes.) Justice Samuel Alito, writing for the majority, scoffed at the Supreme Court passing judgment on a case that relied on “theories that require guesswork” and “no specific facts” and fears of “hypothetical future harm.” The Court insisted that the feds already offered plenty of safeguards to protect Americans’ rights and privacy – including the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court. A few months later, whistleblower Edward Snowden revealed that the “safeguards” totally failed to prevent a vast federal illegal surveillance regime. The FISA Court has been a laughingstock for over a decade, except among its diehard devotees on Capitol Hill.
One stark difference between federal torture and censorship policies is that the latter could determine the winner of the 2024 presidential election. Murthy v. Missouri could determine the winner of the 2024 presidential election. In the 2020 election, federal agencies suppressed millions of comments by Americans doubting the trustworthiness of mail-in ballots and other election procedures; “virtually all of the free speech suppressed was ‘conservative’ free speech,” Judge Doughty noted. Both the federal district court and the appeals court imposed injunctions on federal agencies to prohibit them from again massively suppressing Americans’ online comments on the election. The Supreme Court temporarily suspended that injunction when it took the current case (over the fierce dissent of Associate Justice Alito). Unless the Supreme Court revives that injunction or otherwise prohibits federal agencies from subverting free speech, another censorship tsunami could taint another national election.
How many federal crimes can the Supreme Court absolve or expunge without radically changing the relationship of Washington to the American people? Is it time to rename the Supreme Court the “Chief Tribunal for Petty Federal Crimes”?
The post Is Censorship the Biden Era’s Torture Issue? appeared first on The American Conservative.
As NATO celebrates its 75th anniversary, the U.S. should tell Europe it is on its own if it provokes a war with Russia.
NATO is celebrating its 75th year as its members fight a brutal proxy war with Russia over Ukraine. The alliance marked its anniversary in Brussels last week and will hold a formal summit in July in Washington.
That session could be contentious. Fears of a Ukrainian collapse are increasing, and an increasing number of policymakers on both sides of the Atlantic believe the alliance should go all in for Kiev, assuming away the risks of a broader conventional and potential nuclear war.
France’s President Emmanuel Macron played the Napoleon card, suggesting that allies deploy troops to Ukraine. While meeting with his European counterparts, he opined, “There’s no consensus today to send in an official, endorsed manner troops on the ground. But in terms of dynamics, nothing can be ruled out.” When criticized, he doubled down: “For us to decide today to be weak, to decide today that we would not respond, is being defeated already.”
Macron imagines that putting allied troops in Ukrainian cities would immunize the latter from attack, deterring Moscow without war. He drew support from officials in Estonia, Lithuania, and Poland. More serious governments, including the Biden administration, rejected the idea. After all, Americans would bear the principal burden and pay the greatest cost of a broader war.
Nevertheless, as Warsaw pointed out, some members already have deployed troops to Ukraine. Others are threatening to act on their own. Reported the Wall Street Journal: “Slovakian Prime Minister Robert Fico told a televised briefing that preparatory materials he had received for the summit sent shivers down his spine. The documents, he said, suggested that a number of NATO and EU countries were considering sending troops to Ukraine. Fico added: ‘I cannot say for what purpose and what they should be doing there’.” The author Edward Luttwak helpfully offered detailed military missions for the transatlantic alliance:
NATO countries will soon have to send soldiers to Ukraine, or else accept catastrophic defeat. The British and French, along with the Nordic countries, are already quietly preparing to send troops—both small elite units and logistics and support personnel—who can remain far from the front. The latter could play an essential role by releasing their Ukrainians counterparts for retraining in combat roles. NATO units could also relieve Ukrainians currently tied up in the recovery and repair of damaged equipment, and could take over the technical parts of existing training programs for new recruits. These NATO soldiers might never see combat—but they don’t have to in order to help Ukraine make the most of its own scarce manpower.
Whether or not such personnel went mano-a-mano with Moscow’s troops, they would be actively involved in the war and thus valid targets. Given Russia’s extensive missile and drone attacks, allied casualties would be inevitable. In that event, Macron said, neither the U.S. nor NATO need be involved, but that is easier said now than done then, with bodies being shipped back to European nations and possibly America. An expanded conventional and possible nuclear war could scarcely be avoided.
Others freely advocate direct intervention in combat, though for nominally defensive purposes. For instance, retired Col. Alexander Crowther suggested sending personnel to run anti-missile batteries: “You’d have to be really clear to Putin [and] say, ‘We’re sending people to Ukraine, they’re not going to be doing offensive combat against you’.” Alas, Moscow isn’t likely to respect that distinction. Allied troops would be actively engaging Russian forces and could scarcely be ignored by Moscow. In that case, Crowther would be inviting massive retaliation.
Yet some European and American officials would go even further. They have urged deploying aerial and naval armadas to sweep the skies and seas of Russian forces, intervening more broadly “to decisively turn the military tide,” and even employing nuclear weapons against what they appear to perceive as the Mongols reborn. These would risk World War III, putting thousands and perhaps millions of lives in the balance. Proponents of such measures appear more than a little deranged.
Indeed, what ties such proposals together is that only Washington has sufficient power to overcome Moscow. NATO members which barely pretend to field a military are currently plotting how to effectively borrow U.S. forces. The very structure of the transatlantic alliance, treating all members as equals, encourages dangerous flights of fancy by ivory tower warriors across the continent. Consider the complaints of Eastern Europeans that they deserve to fill NATO’s top spot, the secretary generalship, for which the Netherlands’ former Prime Minister Mark Rutte is the strong favorite to replace retiring Jens Stoltenberg. Both Estonia’s prime minister and Romania’s president considered running. The former asked, “Are we equals or are we not equals? So these questions still remain.” Artis Pabriks, former defense minister of Latvia, complained that “we feel that we were not consulted enough.”
Estonia may be a lovely tourist destination, but with only 7,100 men and women under arms it is but a rounding error in any conflict with Russia. Tallinn shouldn’t oversee anything military in NATO, except maybe providing an honor guard for visiting dignitaries in Brussels. Latvia has even less credibility with just 6,600 people under arms. At least Romania, which fields a military of 69,900, is more serious.
In fact, few governments in Europe look good. The former Estonian President Toomas Hendrik Ilves asked of Rutte, “What moral credibility does this guy have?” Rotterdam has chronically failed to hit NATO’s two percent of GDP target. Moreover, the Netherlands fields fewer than half as many soldiers as Romania. Italy and Spain have sizable economies but risible militaries. Germany’s long-term commitment is uncertain at best.
Even the United Kingdom, with Europe’s best military, is not ready for war with Russia. London is shrinking its army as it trims plans to increase military outlays. Sky News’ Deborah Haynes observed that “the armed forces would run out of ammunition ‘in a few days’ if called upon to fight”; “the UK lacks the ability to defend its skies against the level of missile and drone strikes that Ukraine is enduring”; and “it would take five to 10 years for the army to be able to field a war-fighting division of some 25,000 to 30,000 troops backed by tanks, artillery and helicopters.”
Only slightly less reckless than entering the war are proposals to bring Ukraine into NATO—which most members have continued to reject despite the 2008 Bucharest declaration endorsing the inclusion of Kiev and Tbilisi. Indeed no one in NATO wanted to defend either country, so members lied for the next 14 years about their willingness to invite the two governments to join. Alas, having previously been misled about NATO expansion, Moscow took the prospect seriously, which ultimately animated Vladimir Putin’s invasion decision. Even then the alliance wasn’t prepared for nuclear war over Ukraine and stayed out. Nor are most members prepared for such a conflict today, despite the increasing attempt by Eastern Europeans to drag America into the war.
Yet Secretary of State Antony Blinken continues to encourage Ukraine while refusing to act, declaring: “Ukraine will become a member of NATO. Our purpose at the summit is to help build a bridge to that membership.” But if Kiev isn’t worth risking mass casualties and destruction today, it won’t be worth doing so tomorrow. With some Europeans nevertheless pushing to deploy troops to Ukraine and risk war with Russia, Washington should tell Europe to put up or shut up.
Vladimir Putin’s government is responsible for invading Ukraine. For that Moscow bears responsibility for mass death and destruction. Nevertheless, the U.S. and European states did much to encourage the conflict and share blame for the resulting horror.
That makes it even more important for the allies to step back from the abyss. Washington long ago recognized that Ukraine matters little for America’s defense. Kiev spent most of US history as part of the Russian empire in one form or another. Washington never considered going to war over who ruled Kiev. It should not do so now.
The Biden administration should make very clear that if European meddling in Ukraine leads to war, America’s allies are on their own, NATO notwithstanding. There is no alliance obligation to rescue those joining someone else’s fight. Washington also should forthrightly reject Kiev’s NATO aspirations. No one has a right to join. Alliances are supposed to increase security. Accepting a country at war with Russia would yield conflict not peace.
Instead of prolonging the Russo-Ukraine war, Washington and its allies should work to bring hostilities to a close. Doing so won’t be easy, but the ongoing proxy war risks expansion and escalation. Ukraine is not worth that risk. To properly celebrate NATO’s 75th anniversary, the Biden administration should end today’s proxy war.
The post If Europe Pushes Putin, America Should Tap Out appeared first on The American Conservative.
The dictum: Hug the middle, avoid being tagged as an extremist.
Down deep, in keeping with his background in business and marketing, Donald Trump is a popularist. That being the term, uh, popularized by Democratic political analyst David Shor. It can be summed up easily enough: hug the middle, avoid being tagged as an extremist.
In fact, on a host of issues—he’s in favor of tax cuts, Social Security, and infrastructure, and against illegal immigration, crime, and most trade with China—Trump holds positions that rate as majoritarian. By contrast, many of Joe Biden’s positions—open borders, electric-vehicle mandates, energy export pauses, transgenderism—count as minoritarian.
(Yes, one could dispute every one of these assertions, but electoral politics is about themes and, okay, about optics. For instance, there might be a good reason—or no good reason at all—why the Bidenites chose to celebrate Transgender Day of Visibility on Easter, but they did it, and Trump has made them own it.)
The goal of the pragmatic politico is to play popularist while framing his opponent as an extremist. We might think of it as the electoral equivalent of the children’s game of “pin the tail on the donkey.” Only now, it’s pin the extremist tail on the partisan donkey, the Democrats. Or, of course, pin it on the elephant, the Republicans.
Just last month here at The American Conservative, this author wrote of Trump, “For all his personal vehemence, he is something of a popularist.” I specifically cited the abortion issue, which Trump has long tried to downplay, as part of a middle-muddle strategy.
Now Trump’s April 8 campaign video eliminates all doubt: He’s a center-hugging popularist. In the wake of the Supreme Court’s 2022 Dobbs decision—which overturned Roe v. Wade, reverting the abortion issue to the states—Trump actually wants to vindicate that position. In that video, he reminded viewers that his three Supreme Court picks all voted for Dobbs. But Dobbs, of course, didn’t ban anything but federal overreach. In the wake of Dobbs, each state must decide; Trump knows pro-life states will restrict and ban abortion, while pro-choice states will not. The result will be a muddle red-blue checkerboard on the map; for instance, Iowa and Indiana pro-life, Illinois, in between, pro-choice.
Is such a piebald outcome satisfactory to either of the respective hard cores on abortion? Of course not. But the problem for the voter-minded pol is that both polarities of the debate, Planned Parenthood (PP), and the Right to Lifers (RTL), can be dubbed, fairly or unfairly, as extremist.
PP’s extremism is well known: In keeping with its tacit reality as a front for abortion doctors (anti-natalist zealots and profit-maximizers, both) it supports abortion up to nine months—and it doesn’t even hide it. Such ne plus ultra, which a former Democratic senator compared to infanticide, would be an anti-popularist loser were it not for one thing: It’s mirrored, even masked, by the perceived extremism of the RTL side, which emerged in the wake of Dobbs.
Put simply, the general RTL goal of a six-week limit on abortion is too much for most Americans. In the meantime, various Republican proposals for the death penalty for abortion, however marginal to the main RTL effort, are duly played up by the MSM and made to look like they’re coming from the GOP establishment.
This author counts himself as pro-life, but it’s been sobering to see the pro-life position getting pummeled these last two years, even in right-of-center states such as Kansas and Ohio. Indeed, the Republican fizzle in the 2022 midterms was attributable, in no small part, to the backlash against the Dobbs decision.
Or, more precisely, the backlash against the way some GOPers acted in the wake of that decision, seeking to nationalize what could have been, post-Dobbs, a state-by-state issue. In September 2022, Sen. Lindsey Graham of South Carolina, the top Republican on the Judiciary Committee, put the issue of a federal ban at 15 weeks on the national agenda; that legislation had no chance of passing, and yet it caused a tremor, signaling to pro-choicers that the pro-lifers were coming for them, even in their pro-abortion bastions.
In fact, the unpopularity of this non-popularism has been pronounced. Hence this Fox News headline from March 27: “Fox News Poll: Record number say abortion should be legal.”
So now comes Trump, seeking a middle path, aiming to let some of the steam out of this pressure cooker—and of course, seeking to aid his own re-election campaign.
Indeed, as this author has argued here at TAC in the past, the divisions in America, red and blue, RTL and PP, are so strong as to defy any consensus; the best answer is legal devolution, such that red RTL and blue PP are both safe in their respective domains. That’s an outcome not satisfactory to any purist, but the possible alternative, civil war, is a good deal worse.
In the meantime, RTL isn’t happy with Trump. “We are deeply disappointed,” said Marjorie Dannenfelser, president of Susan B. Anthony Pro-Life America. Yet as POLITICO noted, “The group reiterated its commitment to ‘defeat President Biden’ and congressional Democrats.” After all, if Biden is re-elected, his judicial nominees—including, potentially, for SCOTUS—will be PP true believers; if they could, they would reimpose Roe—and more.
Still, the same Lindsey Graham “respectfully” opposed Trump on the abortion issue. Whereupon the 45th president responded, citing “the 10th Amendment and State’s rights.” With those principles in mind, he continued, RTLers in and out of Congress should “proudly get on with helping Republicans to WIN ELECTIONS, rather than making it impossible for them to do so.” Hard to be more popularist than that.
Trump-type popularists can say: Republicans have a moderate position on abortion, letting the states sort it out So what of Democrats? Do they wish to be extremist? Out in public with their anytime pro-abort bloodiness while Republicans are moderate in their Constitution-minded goals? Bring it on.
The post Abortion Shows Us Donald Trump’s Popularist Essence appeared first on The American Conservative.
Social liberalism completed its march toward the unfathomable through increments. There is no reason conservatives can’t win back terrain with the same playbook.
Former Indiana Gov. Mitch Daniels got laughed out of the 2012 Republican presidential primaries for proposing a “truce” on social issues.
More than a dozen years later, Daniels’s better dead than red (at least when it comes to ink) pitch looks even more out of step with a GOP that is today less focused on the national debt or size of the federal government than the culture war. Its ascendant intellectuals and new voters are more socially than economically conservative, perhaps for the first time since Richard Nixon was in office.
Except former President Donald Trump did bring about a truce of sorts on social issues, at least within his own coalition if not the country as a whole. His strongest supporters have ranged from transgendered tax-cutters to integralists.
Whatever Trump’s libertine personal values, his arrival on the scene unleashed committed culture warriors who make the Religious Right of the 1990s look like country-club Republicans by comparison.
It’s therefore fitting that Trump has delivered more for the pro-life cause than Republicans with clearer anti-abortion bona fides while also being the first GOP nominee to defy most pro-life activists since Gerald Ford in 1976, before the parties sorted on abortion.
That doesn’t make it any less true that there has been a realignment of sorts on the right in which social conservatives are vying to be a bigger part of the furniture than one third of a three-legged stool.
These conservatives cannot help but notice that some of their fellow Republicans would stick out of principle to many positions that poll as badly as a ban on first-trimester abortions, ranging from opposing minimum-wage increases to cutting entitlement programs to fighting foreign wars after the public has turned against them, while heading for the tall grass on the life issue at the first opportunity.
Republicans campaigned for decades on overturning Roe v. Wade. They now seem to wish those promises had gone the way of repealing and replacing Obamacare.
At the same time, social conservatives need more than political courage to be successful (though courage certainly helps). They have to think of how to effectively pursue their policy objectives and build political coalitions that can sustain their wins.
From the conservative perspective, it often seems as if social liberals are able to make the impossible inevitable overnight. It is true that social liberalism occupies the commanding heights of opinion-shaping, from the news media to Hollywood to academia to now even the corporate boardroom and certainly HR departments.
But social liberals often proceed gradually, introducing concepts that most people agree on in the march toward making the impossible inevitable. Consider the advances of gay rights in the 1990s: Social liberals appealed to inclusion in the family, the military, the Boy Scouts, in basic middle-class values. If they had proceeded all the way to Dylan Mulvaney’s forebears in 1996, Bill Clinton would have dropped them more quickly than Bud Light did—just as he did on the issue of gay marriage that very year.
If you go back four years before that, when Clinton was first elected, gay marriage was not a public policy issue at all outside the margins. At the same time, Republicans were being counseled to get over their hang-ups about abortion, which Clinton pledged to keep “safe, legal, and rare.”
“November 1992 marks the end of the 20-year abortion wars,” the more-or-less conservative columnist Charles Krauthammer wrote at the time. “The principle has been settled, though some details remain. Never again will abortion be criminalized, though the question remains as to how far society may go to discourage abortion by creating such inconveniences as parental notification and 24-hour waiting periods.”
Krauthammer was referring to Casey v. Planned Parenthood, a Supreme Court case that year that was a major disappointment to conservatives and pro-lifers. Justices mainly appointed by pro-life Republican presidents failed to overturn Roe. But they did open the door to additional abortion restrictions, and for many years afterward there were incremental pro-life gains.
Thirty years later, the country had both gay marriage and a reversal of Roe. It can be difficult to predict the future, even as confident commentators proclaim we are already living in it.
More important to pro-lifers than any election result this year is ensuring that Dobbs v. Women’s Health Organization is not the pyrrhic victory that Casey ultimately was for our political opponents.
That’s going to require prudence as well as principle and courage.
The post Trump’s Abortion Approach is Prudent appeared first on The American Conservative.
Nobody liked what happened in a field in New Hampshire.
On Monday, the wife and I piled our kids into the Subaru and drove three hours to northern New Hampshire to see the eclipse at 100 percent totality. Aside from all the unwelcome visitors from Massachusetts and Rhode Island, it was a very pleasant trip. Passing beneath the White Mountains brought tears to my eyes, as it always does. Growing up in farm country, all I knew were fields and forests. Mountains I only knew from books—in particular my favorite book, Lost Horizon. I tried to imagine what they would look like (“hills, only four hundred stories tall”). Still, I knew that once I saw a real mountain all my fantasies would be put to shame. And so they were.
We’d planned on camping out somewhere in the town of Lancaster, which was directly in the eclipse’s pathway. But even before we met the highway, we saw that hundreds of our fellow looky-loos were simply pulling over on the highway and camping out there. Friends of ours had made reservations to stay in Lancaster the night before; they texted to warn us that traffic was gridlocked when they drove up on Sunday afternoon, a good twenty-four hours before the eclipse even began. A little patch of gravel next to the highway was probably the best we could hope for. So, we snagged the first spot we saw. This was about half an hour before the eclipse began.
We hiked up the road a bit and found a field where folks were setting up folding chairs, flying drones, and fidgeting with their ultra-stylish eclipse glasses. The mood was ebullient. There was a rumor that the Town of Lancaster would be setting off fireworks. Folks were playing music and toying around with drones. Children were playing tag in the field. It was like the tailgate at a Patriots game. Everyone was brought together in that field by a common purpose, and that gave us a sense of camaraderie.
Then, about twenty minutes before 100 percent totality, it became noticeably darker—and colder. I had expected both, but it was a bit like the mountains: Nothing in my imagination prepared me for the real thing.
For those who don’t know, the darkness of an eclipse is nothing like the darkness of nightfall. Partially it’s because it becomes so dark so quickly. But I think it’s also because the sun isn’t setting in the West. The shadows don’t lengthen. It doesn’t give off a few last warm, golden rays before dropping behind the horizon. It just… turns off.
What little light remained was gray, almost sickly. My wife said, “It’s like when you edit a photo and turn ‘saturation’ all the way down.” That’s exactly right. The rational part of my brain knew I wasn’t going blind, but I couldn’t quite drive away that fear. And it quickly became clear that the same fear was creeping over our 3-year-old, Beatrice. She started looking around and rubbing her eyes. A look came over her face, half-sad, half-panicked. She looked at me, silently pleading for me to comfort her, clearly hoping that if she didn’t say that she was scared, it would all go away quickly.
It didn’t—not for her, not for me, and not for anyone else. As the darkness grew, everyone in the field slowly went silent. Hundreds of strangers were gradually overcome by fear and awe. A group of girls to our right started talking about the Rapture. A man to our right whispered to his wife, “It’s the end of the world.”
Some folks had driven three or four hours to witness a 30-second event—and yet, as soon as it began, it was clear that everyone wanted it to be over. Nobody was having fun. All the children stood riveted to the earth in fright or burst into tears. The grown-ups looked around nervously. Obviously, we all half-expected something else to happen. What that something is (the Rapture or the Apocalypse or what) was almost beside the point. It felt like a portent, like it was pointing to something else.
Imagine you’re at a crowded beach reading in the sun or splashing in the waves, and suddenly you hear the blast of a huge trumpet come from somewhere across the sea. Everyone on the beach might have a different theory about what the trumpet means, but everyone would agree that it means something. The trumpet doesn’t want your attention: it wants you to be still and silent, attentive to whatever comes next. This horrible mood of anticipation was thick in the air on Monday at 3:30 p.m. in Lancaster, New Hampshire.
When the eclipse ended and the light returned, I found myself holding my prayer rope and whispering, “Lord Jesus Christ, have mercy on me.” There was a palpable sense of relief, bewilderment, and shame in our field. Everyone packed up, quietly and quickly, and hit the road. There were a few tear-stained cheeks and quite a lot of nervous smiles. Some folks tried to make small talk. I said to my wife, “No one liked it.”
Let me state for the record that I had no particular interest in the eclipse. For me, it was an excuse to take the day off and spend time with my family; I certainly wasn’t expecting article-fodder. My wife was quite excited, as was everyone else gathering on the side of the highway. And I really don’t think a single one of us left that field without a deep, nameless dread in our hearts. But how many of us would tell the local reporter hunting for a human-interest story? How many would post about it on Facebook or Instagram? How many would tell our families? How many would admit it to ourselves?
By the way, I don’t say that in judgment. I spend a lot of time thinking about religion and the “supernatural.” I’ve seen demons; I’ve witnessed miracles. But what I felt watching the eclipse was something else. It was as if Reality itself had cracked open, and we all saw something on the other side.
I’m a proud and Orthodox Christian; I could give my particular theory about the nature of that something. We all had our expectations, and we were all wrong. The question is, what do we do now? Do we bury that feeling and rewrite the memory to seem more cheerful? Or do we go looking for that something whose darkness outshone the sun?
This is one of those moments in life where the mundane world peels away like old wallpaper. We realize that our existence doesn’t work the way we thought it did. The first time you hold your firstborn is one example. The first time you watch someone die is another. I believe we’ll be judged on how we respond to such moments. It’s not so much about finding the right answers. It’s about having the courage to ask the right questions—the ones that are (literally) staring us in the face. Those who seek will find, but how many of us seek?
The post The Eclipse Was a Moment of Holy Dread appeared first on The American Conservative.
Automatic license plate readers give local police departments powers once available only to the world’s totalitarian regimes.
If you travel any meaningful distance within Illinois via the state’s highways or expressways, a detailed, time-stamped record of your route and approximate destination will be logged by multiple law enforcement agencies.
In part this is due to the state’s massive automatic license plate reader (ALPR) program, which recently expanded to cover approximately 6,600 miles of roadway. The rapid adoption of the technology by local law enforcement agencies has left them with surveillance programs that five years ago most would have thought were the domain of dystopian novels and major cities like London, New York, and Chicago.
In the state of Illinois, as is true for much of the rest of the country, the use of automated license plate readers, commonly referred to as ALPRs, remains largely unregulated; Illinois’s limited restrictions primarily pertain to sharing information that could be used against those seeking abortions or who are in the United States illegally.
Typically placed at intersections or along the side of the road, sometimes attached to police cars, ALPRs log the license plates and other identifying information of passing vehicles. If a passing vehicle is being sought by law enforcement and on a hot list, a notification may be sent out to officers in the area. Otherwise, a vehicle’s data are generally stored in a searchable database for later reference.
“We are seeing them used at all levels of government,” stated Edwin Yohnka, the director of communications and public policy at ACLU Illinois in an early 2023 phone interview with The American Conservative. “The state police have begun a very aggressive campaign of using them on highways and specifically on the expressways in and around Chicago, ostensibly in that instance because they are concerned about…the shootings that have taken place on the expressways over the last couple of years.”
“We’re seeing them used in some instances at the county level where law enforcement officials are using them…as part of regional task forces,” he continued.
In those instances, said Yohnka, the claim is that they are being used to address violent crime in larger communities or in efforts to recover stolen vehicles.
“And finally, at the municipal level,” he said, “there has been over the last twelve to eighteen months a significant push to use the camera systems in communities, you know, whether as large as Chicago or…some suburbs that by comparison are fairly small.”
In such comparatively small communities, Yohnka said, “the cameras are often marketed as a crime-fighting device.”
In the absence of much regulation at the state or national level, policies regarding their use and what if any privacy protections are in place vary considerably by agency and municipality.
“What we’re seeing then,” stated Yohnka, “is an incredible breadth in terms of, for example, how much or how long the data is stored—whether it’s stored for sixty days or ninety days.”
According to Yohnka, when the ACLU-IL did an in-depth analysis of ALPR policies in Illinois several years earlier, some places maintained the data indefinitely.
Given the strict regulations on comparable devices in Illinois such as stingrays, a device that surreptitiously collects data from people’s cell phones, there would seem to be an obvious question of why there is not greater regulation in place regarding the use of ALPRs in Illinois.
In an early 2023 phone interview with TAC, Khadine Bennett, ACLU-IL’s director of advocacy and intergovernmental affairs, explained her organization actually attempted to push for such regulation around the time the stingray legislation was passed but noted the atmosphere for the regulation in that instance was different. Not many jurisdictions at the time were using stingrays, she noted, making it easier to get bipartisan support for regulation.
“When it came time to regulate ALPRs, I think at that point there were probably maybe at least forty localities we knew of based on who responded to a FOIA who were using them,” she said.
When the ACLU-IL attempted to push for the regulation of ALPRs at the state level, Bennett said, ACLU-IL’s starting point in negotiations was a retention period of twenty-four hours for information for vehicles not actively being sought by law enforcement. This, she said, would at least prevent the proliferation of data over time. Law enforcement, however, she said, “started from a place of wanting it forever.”
Subsequently, Bennett said, the ACLU-IL went back and forth with law enforcement over the course of negotiations which came to an end when law enforcement settled on three years and refused to budge. Most localities in Illinois at the time, Bennett said, already had a retention period of 30 days; some had a retention period of only 15 days.
“So at that point,” she said, “our assessment was instead of having this really long retention period of three years…both sides essentially decided not to pursue [it].”
“Also, like there were more law enforcement entities using that kind of technology, so I think once you start using it, there’s a desire to keep using it,” she added.
Yet, even if a retention period of 30 days affords citizens more privacy than a retention period of three years, 30 days can still give law enforcement a considerable window into the private lives of ordinary citizens.
In a recent article published by the Brownstone Institute, Jay Stanley, a senior policy analyst with the ACLU Speech, Privacy, and Technology Project, commented, “There’s no question that if you get enough license plate readers and you got one on every block, that put together…can create a GPS-tracker-like-record of my movement and even if there’s, you know, only one every ten miles and [I’m] driving around the country, I’m driving from Texas to California or what have you, that can be very revealing as well.”
Bennett, when asked whether people are generally aware of the use of ALPRs in their community, said, “I think it’s mixed in terms of them knowing about it. I think there are maybe some municipalities where folks had no idea, especially if they’re not following what’s happening at the local city council meetings.”
According to Yohnka, two or three years ago it was not uncommon for communities first to become aware of ALPRs in their neighborhood upon seeing them installed well after they were approved. More recently, however, he said, there has been more discussion and debate in at least some local governments in Illinois leading to a little more community awareness.
“When they are proposed, what we’re seeing is a real drive among community members to do, you know, to really kind of do some opposition or ask [for] more information about the privacy policy before they’re adopted,” he stated.
“I think there have been some instances where maybe some ALPRs have been delayed,” said Bennett. “I think we’ve seen cases where community folks have been able to…give input in terms of what the policy is for law enforcement in terms of having some level of transparency and accountability measures in place.”
In most cases, this is all opponents can usually get. Once local law enforcement is sold on the utility of ALPRs, whether as an investigative tool or as a deterrent for criminal activity, the most opponents can often hope for moving forward is a retention period around thirty days and perhaps some agreement to keep records on how the ALPRs are used and assess their effectiveness at a later date.
In the rare instance community members are able to thwart efforts to utilize the devices in their towns, proponents in law enforcement and the media continue the push for ALPRs, sometimes depicting local law enforcement’s inability to use the devices as a hindrance to their ability to fight crime even when evidence demonstrating this is lacking.
Christopher Evans, a city council member from Urbana, Illinois, made this point in a series of email comments in 2023 and 2024.
Through the correspondence he highlighted how Urbana city officials tried to bring ALPRs to Urbana in 2021 to address the uptick in gun violence the city experienced in 2020 and 2021.
This led to considerable debate at city council meetings and within the community. Ultimately, though the city council rejected the implementation of the devices in a four to three vote.
Additionally, as Evans noted, gun violence in Urban began to come down in 2022 and a report from the University of Illinois suggested a neighboring city’s ALPR program seldom facilitated arrests for likely gun felonies.
Nevertheless, Evans pointed out, representatives from local law enforcement have since made misleading statements to the press to garner support for bringing ALPRs to Urbana.
In one example Evans provided, an Urbana police lieutenant downplayed his department’s ability to apprehend a suspect in a case without ALPRs a few days before a suspect was apprehended. In another, the same lieutenant put out a press release in which he credited another town’s ALPRs as having helped apprehend suspects in a well-publicized local robbery even though the devices played absolutely no role.
The post The Dystopian Surveillance Programs Right In America’s Heartland appeared first on The American Conservative.
TAC Contributing Editor Carmel Richardson wrote: “[Richard] Dawkins is right to recognize that it is better to belong to a Christian nation than to any other sort of nation. Indeed, much of his own worldview, whether or not he knows it, is borrowed from Christendom. It is not just cultural edifices like hymns and parishes, but the very systems of science Dawkins employs that were built by Christians, not to mention our legal and judicial heritage.”
She’s far too kind. Dawkins isn’t so reflective to understand his follies, nor are his New Atheist buddies that profound. The damage they have done to civilization is incalculable and we will suffer for centuries for that. Dawkins’s rants are risible, a horrified realization of a failed old man who suddenly realized that he has been sawing off the tree limb where he was thus far safely perched, someone who destroyed the roots of the old society and is now horrified with the aftereffects as he realizes what is coming.
The idea that you can have “cultural Christianity” with either secular or neopagan society is so absurd that only a “scientist” can think of that. There’s a reason in every Victorian sci-fi novel, the villain is a mad scientist with no religious morals. “When you give up Christian faith, you pull the rug out from under your right to Christian morality,” as Nietzsche once wrote. Morals do not exist in a vacuum. You cannot have Michelangelo’s Pieta without the faith behind it.
The peak reactionary, romantic 19th century gave us Flaubert and Shelley, Aivazovsky and Chopin, Dostoyevsky, and Millais. Peak secularism and New Atheism gave us euthanasia, Pinker’s ahistoricism about Enlightenment, Sam Harris, the Iraq War, and failed social engineering in the Middle East. May they live to suffer the world they wrought, before a new generation of young reactionaries can find meaning again in natural beauty, authority, divine glory, and repressed stoicism.
The post ‘New Atheism,’ Twenty Years On appeared first on The American Conservative.
On June 2, Mexico will elect a new president.
The era of Mexican President Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador (AMLO) is coming to an end. Most Americans, particularly those following the disastrous events at the southern border, are likely to say good riddance to the cantankerous AMLO, who is completing a six-year term and legally prohibited from running again.
The Mexican leader has been the hemisphere’s loudest voice in promoting a universal “right to migrate,” sometimes colluding with President Joe Biden to help migrants illegally enter the United States, and sometimes masterfully manipulating him.
Although he will leave office by October 1, AMLO will almost assuredly be succeeded by Claudia Sheinbaum, his protégé candidate who is fully expected to continue his administration’s policies.
For months, Sheinbaum has held a commanding lead in Mexico’s national polling, and most experts predict she will easily win the June voting. She is campaigning cautiously, confident that AMLO’s endorsement and popularity—he has almost 60 percent approval levels—will carry her to victory.
Sheinbaum is an experienced politician, who proved her leadership mettle, and won AMLO’s support, by previously serving as mayor (governor in function) of the greater Mexico City capital region (population 22 million).
Sheinbaum’s personality is cut from a different cloth than AMLO’s. She has an academic background, holding a hard-science Ph.D., and tends toward a less combative approach than the outspoken AMLO. However, she very much shares his leftist vision: critical of so-called “neoliberal” economics, while advocating the radical-chic woke agenda that is everywhere in leftist politics. Predictably, she ordered a statue of Christopher Columbus to be taken down in the capital.
If Sheinbaum is elected, the identity-politics-driven international media story will headline her status as Mexico’s first Jewish-heritage woman president. The gushing reporting about her identity will help sweep AMLO off Mexico’s national stage, but Sheinbaum’s expected electoral victory, unfortunately, will certainly further entrench his political agenda.
Sheinbaum has embraced AMLO’s views on immigration: borders should be porous and the priority is addressing “root causes.” When it comes to handling Washington, Sheinbaum is more analytical, but her first instinct is an AMLO-like defense of Mexican sovereignty. She may have some differences on environmental policies with the Mexican president; AMLO is fine burning fossil fuels, while Sheinbaum, the green physicist, is deeper into climate change orthodoxy.
While there are several candidates running, Scheinbaum’s main opponent is Xóchitl Gálvez, a tech-industry businesswoman and former senator who heads a coalition put together by Mexico’s two main opposition political parties, the PRI (Partido Revolucionario Institucional) and the PAN (Partido Acción Nacional). Gálvez is seeking to restore something of the pre-AMLO dynamic in Mexican politics; although she brings a new twist as an indigenous-heritage woman, that era is not likely coming back.
For decades, the PRI and PAN dominated Mexican politics in an establishment manner similar to our own Democrats and Republicans. It was in 2018 that AMLO finally overturned their dominance when his insurgent party, known as Morena (Movimiento de Regeneración Nacional), took him to the presidency in a landslide victory.
AMLO discredited both the PRI (the old statist, establishment left) and the PAN (conservative and business-oriented) as Mexico’s corrupt ruling class. The fact that the two previously dominant parties, once bitter rivals, have come together, somewhat desperately, to nominate Gálvez says volumes about how much AMLO has remade Mexican politics.
One key element of the AMLO realignment was his large expansion of federal welfare and pension plans. In modern Dickensian Mexico, some 20 million workers are in the informal economy that creates 30 percent of national income. AMLO has brought this significant and neglected segment of society into the welfare state for the first time, an effort that doubtless undergirds his popularity.
The left praises AMLO’s welfare policies for “institutionalizing” Mexican support programs, like FDR’s in the 1930s. The country’s conservatives and the old establishment liberal-left, on the other hand, condemn his policies as populist vote-buying, a disreputable political tactic nevertheless regularly used to win Mexican elections.
All of this contributes to why Gálvez has a hard path to victory. She has already gone to Washington to suggest that the Organization of American States (OAS) send election observers to Mexico.
Gálvez would be marginally preferable to Sheinbaum when it comes to U.S.-Mexican security cooperation. Gálvez does talk about collaboration on the common frontier, and she might, at least rhetorically, open up to a better law-enforcement partnership. But her security vision has little in common with securing the border in an American sense.
While Gálvez denounces the unprecedented human trafficking that is taking place in both countries, her immigration “solution” is more visas and legal work opportunities for foreigners, particularly Mexicans, in the United States. This is not surprising, since Mexicans living in el Norte can still vote in Mexico’s elections.
Mexico’s endemic corruption is another major campaign issue that directly impacts the U.S. national interest, because our large southern neighbor is both our greatest commercial trading partner and source of migrants. Both candidates, of course, denounce corruption, but neither proposes viable solutions because everybody is out of ideas.
Sheinbaum is almost philosophical, rejecting the notion that Mexican corruption is a “matter of culture”; she improbably calls for “peace dialogues” among governors, judges, and police to address “impunity.” Sheinbaum claims, dubiously, that fundamental change is already under way as AMLO’s administration is not only setting a new tone, but has begun to historically remake the country—AMLO pompously calls it the “Fourth Transformation”—by overturning corrupt privileges deeply embedded in Mexican society.
Gálvez of course rejects Sheinbaum’s positive spin and has made credible charges that AMLO is no different than past presidents, specifically accusing his adult sons of illicitly profiting from the government-led, massive construction effort of the Maya train line in southern Mexico. This train line is AMLO’s signature infrastructure project, and its costs have ballooned from about $8 to $28 billion as contractors wheel and deal.
Gálvez’s criticism is certainly more valid than Sheinbaum’s optimism. Mexican society, by measures like Transparency International’s annual rating, is still hopelessly sunk in widespread corrupt practices. These continue despite Mexico’s success in attracting significant new foreign investment and trade, which comes to the country mainly because of its nearness to the U.S. market. Outsiders who seek to do business with Mexico—and increasingly Chinese businessmen are first in line—simply navigate around corrupt practices or participate in them.
Where AMLO has succeeded on the corruption issue, however, is in fiercely defending his own, highly valuable, personal reputation as being incorruptible. For millions of Mexicans, accustomed to watching their politicians become vastly wealthy (sadly, not unlike in the U.S.), AMLO’s clean record, if it is indeed true, is something remarkable. It certainly helps Sheinbaum’s campaign as she, too, is substantially free from charges of illicitly using politics to become wealthy.
In this context, AMLO has been a grandmaster of symbolic acts that his grassroots supporters never forget. For example, he canceled Mexico City’s massively over-budget new airport project (thought to benefit the corrupt rich); he refused to use and sold off the president’s luxury jet, a Boeing 787 “Dreamliner”; and he never took occupation of the chief executive’s elaborate living quarters known as “Los Pinos.”
While this was brilliant political theater, no president’s policies can remake a country as vast and complex as Mexico, particularly on corruption, in a handful of years. There is a case to be made, perhaps, that the long road of reversing Mexico’s ingrained corruption must start by examples from the top. Certainly, nothing else is working. Sadly, however, when it comes to daily governance issues, such as overhauling the country’s dysfunctional criminal court system, AMLO’s gameplan is as empty as those of Mexico’s previous presidents.
Perhaps there is no higher U.S. national interest than curbing transnational organized crime from using Mexico to strike into our country. Mexican politicians, of course, approach their widespread criminality crisis differently, but they acknowledge that “insecurity” is the main concern this election cycle, which includes campaigning for Congress, state, and local offices, too.
Mexico’s 2024 election kickoff was accompanied by the murders of two local candidates, tragically symbolizing how violence infects all aspects of Mexican national life. Understandably appalled and frightened, most Mexicans are resigned to their fate that, no matter who is elected president, the country is likely to continue to just muddle through in dealing with a gigantic national crisis.
Both candidates have called for a larger National Guard, since Mexican state and local police are unreliable or even part of organized crime. Gálvez is recommending doubling the number to 300,000 guardsmen, but the record of the National Guard, first created by AMLO to replace the corrupted Federal Police, has been unimpressive. AMLO basically backed away from his own National Guard strategy, gradually moving towards putting more and more authority in the Mexican military to deal with crime (and many other issues).
The national armed forces should not be in the forefront in the fight against organized criminals, but Mexico’s disastrous law-enforcement performance—corrupted police forces, dysfunctional courts—reflects a vicious societal struggle that more resembles guerrilla war than a crime wave. No state security institutions except the army and marines seem capable of keeping things from getting even worse. It is certain that la Presidenta Sheinbaum will have nothing behind the curtain to deal with this national catastrophe.
When Mexico’s voting is over, and elected candidates take office, there will be little hope, unfortunately, that U.S.–Mexican bilateral relations will get a meaningful new start. More than a new president in Mexico, what is needed is a new chief executive in the White House. We need an American president who will reverse the Biden administration’s calamitous open-borderism and use forceful U.S. diplomatic leverage to focus Mexico’s political leadership, whoever it is, on our mutual security problems.
The post Mexico’s Presidential Election Will Not End the Nation’s Crisis appeared first on The American Conservative.
In the wake of terror, it is worth noting that Putin has long courted his country’s Muslim minority—with mixed results.
Vladimir Putin said on Thursday that Russia “cannot be the target of terrorist attacks by Islamic fundamentalists. We are a country that demonstrates a unique example of interfaith harmony and unity, of interreligious and interethnic unity.” He offered this observation by way of explaining why he believes Ukraine and its American sponsors, not an Islamic State affiliate, were behind last month’s deadly terrorist attack at Crocus City Hall in Moscow, which left over 140 people dead.
How credible is Putin’s claim, attribution of the attack aside? Does Russia enjoy good relations with its Muslim minority?
About 10 percent of the Russian population is Muslim, which makes them a minority comparable in size to African-Americans in the United States. Putin has made a deliberate effort to court the faith from his earliest days in office. Contrary to the impression some Western observers have tried to create of Putin as a fanatical Russian nationalist, Putin has always emphasized Russia’s “multiethnic and multifaith history,” as he put it in a 2005 speech in Kazan, which, to the crowd’s amazement, he delivered in the Tatar language.
Some of this outreach is politically motivated. When Putin lobbied the Organization of Islamic Cooperation to admit Russia as an observer state—a request that was granted in 2005—it was partly in order to persuade Saudi Arabia and other OIC nations to stop aiding Muslim separatists in the Russian province of Chechnya. Putin has played up Russia’s large Muslim population in his courtship of Turkey’s Recep Tayyip Erdogan as a geopolitical ally.
Putin’s interfaith solicitude, whether sincere or cynical, has filtered down to the Russian man on the street. The British scholar Dominic Rubin tells the following anecdote from a Muslim professor living in Moscow: Around 2010, there was a boxing match between a Ukrainian and a Dagestani, and to the professor’s surprise his Moscow friends were all rooting for the latter. “Ten years ago, people would have rooted for the Slav, regardless of nationality,” he said. But now they supported the Muslim fighter: “He’s Dagestani, a Caucasian, yes—but he’s Russian. People finally get it!”
Rubin’s book, Russia’s Muslim Heartlands: Islam in the Putin Era (2018), is based on extensive fieldwork. He seems to have interviewed every Muslim leader of note in Russia as well as dozens of ordinary believers from across the country, from Moscow to Makhachkala. He quickly discovers the biggest challenge the Kremlin faces in its outreach: the changing composition of Russia’s Muslim population.
Millions of guest workers have migrated to Russia in recent years from Central Asian countries such as Uzbekistan and Tajikistan. The tactics that served Putin well with Tatar intellectuals or Chechen nationalists were less useful with this new population. The four gunmen who have been arrested as perpetrators of the Crocus City Hall attack are all Tajiks.
“I have worked as a builder throughout Russia,” says Haireddin Abdolla, a Tajik living in Moscow interviewed by Rubin, “and I have been to nearly every provincial mosque in Russia. And that’s why I can tell you from personal experience on trust that extremism is a bigger problem in Russia than even the most worried people think. Speaking about Tajiks, I can tell you that a huge number of my fellow countrymen support ISIS either actively or passively.”
“Let me be more precise: I would say 30 per cent of Tajiks are devoted Wahhabis,” he continues. “And 40 per cent don’t consider themselves Wahhabis, but by their beliefs and actions, you can see that this is what they believe.”
Putin has tried to adapt to these new challenges. A youth minister at a mosque in Dagestan, a province from which many young men traveled to Syria to fight for ISIS, tells Rubin of his efforts to combat radicalism, including a personal appearance by Putin himself:
I invited all the parents of boys who had gone off to Syria to the town hall. I wanted to talk to them, to find out their worries, and also what is driving their children to do this. Usually, you know, they go off because they have been promised a car, a house, money—it’s a way to get rich for them. A lot of them also have this idea that, you know, “we can’t live in the Russian Federation, it’s dar al-harb.” So we got Qaradaghi [a Kurdish scholar] down here to explain to them about dar al-silm. We had a conference with muftis from Moscow and Tatarstan. Putin also came. He said: “Allah has deprived Erdogan of reason.” He used the word Allah! Muslims were amazed!
But simply saying “Allah” is not enough to win over all of Russia’s tens of millions of Muslims, as last month’s terrorist attack proved. Muslim gangs have also been gaining strength in Russia’s prisons, to the point that jamaats have taken control of entire prisons, defeating not only the guards but also Russia’s traditional prison mafias. Many Muslim prison gang leaders are veterans of the Caucasian and Syrian wars.
Putin gave a speech in 2023 in which he said, literally, that diversity is Russia’s strength. In many ways, this is true. Russia would not be Russia without its Buryats and Yakuts, its Balts and Armenians. But as the recent deportation of thousands of Tajik migrant workers shows, Putin’s commitment to diversity only goes so far.
The post How Putin’s Relationship With Islam Works appeared first on The American Conservative.
State of the Union: Trump and the RNC announced this week that they had brought in $65.6 million in March.
Amid a historic reversal in political fortune, there has been one source of major concern in Donald Trump’s quest for re-election: money.
Trump’s campaign apparatus has spent millions on defending the former president from Democratic lawfare while Biden has raked in the moolah. The Republican National Committee has been pressed for cash too, and is undergoing a top-to-bottom overhaul while the DNC is flush with with the stuff.
But if Donald Trump has demonstrated anything throughout his career in politics thus far, it’s this: Don’t underestimate his ability to mount comebacks.
In a reversal of fortune, the early spring has brought news of a financial bloom. Trump and the RNC announced that they raised in $65.6 million last month. The former president’s effort now has $93.1 million cash on hand entering April, twice the figure announced in March. And Trump’s fundraising in March outpaced his March 2020 fundraising from last cycle when team Trump brought in $63 million.
For the man who would again like to be president, however, there is still a lot of work to be done to erase the deficit.
Biden and the Democrats had amassed a war chest of $155 million by the end of February. Their fundraising numbers for March are expected to be impressive as well. In the 24 hours after the State of the Union address, Biden raised over $10 million. A fundraiser last week in New York that featured former Presidents Barack Obama and Bill Clinton brought in another $25 million.
Nevertheless, this is a marked improvement from where Trump and the GOP were a month ago, and party operators are likely hopeful they’ll be able to close the gap more quickly than anticipated. And this Republican money coup mirrors the rabbit out of a hat that Trump pulled in his personal finances.
The post Trump and Republicans Get Needed Financial Reprieve appeared first on The American Conservative.
Secretary of State Anthony Blinken, reiterated that Ukraine will one day join NATO. It is a meaningless, almost theological gesture—practically pagan hymn-chanting at this point. Blinken knows his promise to be untrue. European allies know it to be untrue. The majority of Americans either don’t care about Ukraine or are actively opposed to further engagement in Europe. The Republicans are a changed party, as evident from thunderous responses from Republican senators. Ohio’s Senator J.D. Vance tweeted, “This is completely irresponsible. Ukraine should not join NATO, and to invite them during a war is to invite our nation into war. Do you want American ground troops in Ukraine? If not, we must push back against the idea that Ukraine should join NATO.” Senator Lee echoed the sentiment, tweeting (with a link to an op-ed published in these pages), “NATO can have Ukraine. Or the U.S. But not both.”
It is, of course, deeply cynical to dangle the NATO carrot in front of Ukraine especially, when NATO did not let them join after the Bucharest summit and will not in future. The argument goes that NATO members will welcome Ukraine only once they have solved their existing security issue, i.e. join a defensive alliance when the need for defense is over. To any sane person, that sounds absurd—that would mean the security issue will not be solved in this lifetime, and it will continue to be a frozen conflict. Russia has no incentive to end the simmering conflict in Ukraine unless Ukrainian neutrality is legally guaranteed, and will continue to bleed Ukraine dry until there are no men left to fight.
To argue against unlimited expansion of NATO and the EU goes against liberal theology and the current raison d’etre for both the organizations. To say openly that there will be no expansion and the club will remain closed, because (despite weakness) Russia is a major power and Russian tacit veto in her backyard matters, will be tantamount to admitting that norms are nonsense, the world is anarchical, realism is still the best path to equilibrium and great power peace, history hasn’t ended, and only great powers matter in foreign policy—which is to say, all is as it has always been.
To admit that publicly is verboten, regardless of how true it is. Hence all this incoherence from an administration that argues that the U.S. will not send troops to Ukraine and start a third world war, while arguing that the U.S. will be treaty bound to defend Ukraine someday and risk a third world war. It makes no sense, but such is the current grand strategy of the preeminent great power of the world.
Naturally, this nonsense is purely for domestic consumption. Yet the result is a continuation of false hope for Ukraine and Georgia, one that may lead to their extinction as states. There will not be any NATO cavalry over the hills (although not for lack of trying by some). The best we can do is seek a compromise making Ukraine and Georgia neutral buffers, similar to Austria during the Cold War. But for that, Washington needs bolder leadership to admit some hard truths and render some strategic coherence.
The post Antony Blinken Plays Politics with Ukraine’s NATO Membership appeared first on The American Conservative.
Is this end for yet another Republican speaker?
Members of Congress better have made the most of their two week Easter vacation because April is shaping up to be a doozy.
March seemed busy enough. Congress barely avoided two partial government shutdowns on March 8 and March 22. To avert the partial shutdown on March 22, the last day Congress was in session in March, Congress passed a $1.2 trillion appropriations package. The 1,012-page bill was dropped in the dead of night, around 3 a.m. on March 21. A mere 36 hours later, members of Congress were forced to vote on the package. Under suspension of the rules, the House passed the $1.2 trillion spending package by a vote of 286 to 134. Although the House is in Republican hands, just 101 Republicans—less than half of the House GOP conference—voted in favor of the bill.
After several rounds of continuing resolutions culminating in an appropriations package that did little to secure the southern border and was passed in violation of House rules negotiated with former House Speaker Kevin McCarthy, frustration with House Speaker Mike Johnson was reaching a boiling point. Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene filed a motion to vacate the Speaker, but did not ask for privilege on the resolution before Congress left for vacation. The motion remains primed in the hopper.
Johnson reached out to Greene over the Easter break to try and smooth things over, according to Greene, but the effort doesn’t seem to have been very successful. “He reached out to me Thursday night before Good Friday and left me a strange voicemail about how he’s traveling all over and he’s exhausted. And no matter how tired he was, he wanted to try to get on the phone with me,” Greene told POLITICO. “I’m like, ‘Why do I want to talk to someone that’s so exhausted?’” Greene added. “That’s not good.”
Johnson, according to Greene, then texted the Georgia representative on Tuesday proposing a time to chat Wednesday, but Greene counterproposed a Friday talk. Whether the conversation will come to fruition remains unclear.
However that may be, Greene’s motion to vacate poses a major threat to Johnson’s speakership. If Johnson cannot convince Greene to back down, Greene will trigger a vote on her resolution by seeking privilege. If she does, Johnson has 48 legislative hours to handle the resolution.
Nevertheless, Johnson might be able to convince Greene to back down by properly handling an issue set to return to center stage in April: Ukraine aid.
While the Senate has passed a sans–border security $95 billion supplemental aid package for Ukraine, Israel, the Indo Pacific, and various humanitarian causes, Johnson has thus far refused to bring the package to the floor. Increasing Ukraine skepticism among the GOP conference and clear red lines drawn by members to Johnson’s right have made it clear that capitulation to President Biden and the Schumer-controlled Senate on Ukraine aid would mark the end of Johnson’s tenure.
Over the past few months, Johnson has hinted there might be ways to get Ukraine aid through the House without nuking his speakership.
Johnson’s plan, it seems, is to offer Kiev an aid package in the form of a loan, as European countries and institutions have done previously. Johnson would also like to attach REPO Act provisions to future Ukraine aid, which would enable the Biden administration to sell off confiscated Russian assets to provide funding for Ukraine. In the U.S., that funding total amounts to $6 or $7 billion, POLITICO reported. In Belgium, however, $225 billion of Russian assets have been frozen since the war broke out. In addition to REPO provisions, Johnson might try to slip in provisions ending Biden’s ban on new liquid natural gas export applications, which the administration has suggested is a non-starter.
For Johnson, the logic is as follows: Including a plan to offset the cost of Ukraine aid in the long run—no matter how doubtful—is the best chance he has to secure the support of a majority of the GOP conference in a vote on Ukraine aid, given that some Ukraine skeptics have cited runaway spending and the $35 trillion in U.S. debt as reasons for voting against Ukraine aid.
Nevertheless, if Johnson wants to pass Ukraine aid with a simple majority, the bill will have to go through the Rules Committee, where conservative members are represented by the trio of Reps. Ralph Norman, Chip Roy, and Thomas Massie—all Ukraine skeptics. If Johnson wants to bypass the Rules Committee, the Speaker will once again have to opt for passing the package under suspension. Bypassing the Rules Committee, and all House conservatives by extension, would likely lead to another vote where a major piece of legislation passes on primarily Democratic support. Johnson would be toast.
Greene made that abundantly clear to CNN’s Manu Raju. Greene called Johnson’s Ukraine loan proposal a “heaping, steaming pile of bullsh*t” that is “insulting to the American people.” Forcing such a package through under suspension would in turn force her hand, Greene told Raju.
If Johnson wants to placate Greene and other conservatives, and avoid getting the boot, Johnson should pass Ukraine aid attached to the House’s strong border-security bill, HR 2, which previously united the GOP conference. If Ukraine is as big of a priority as Biden and the Democrats suggest, they’ll have to come to the table. If they don’t, then Ukraine wasn’t the world-ending conflict it has been made out to be.
Ukraine aid isn’t the only major issue Congress will have to take on in the coming weeks, either. FISA Section 702 is set to expire on April 19. Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, enacted on 2008, permits the National Security Agency to surveil targets in foreign nations. In doing so, however, the NSA collects vast amounts of information and data in dragnets that it then allows the FBI to sift through. The system is rife with abuse. For example, a 2023 court order found that the FBI improperly searched for information in foreign intelligence stores nearly 300,000 times in 2020 and early 2021, including for information on Americans who were at the Capitol on January 6 or participated in George Floyd protests.
Rather than a partisan battle, however, FISA renewal’s current issue is a Committee turf war between the House Judiciary Committee and the House Intelligence Committee.
The source of the disagreement is whether or not the FBI and national security agencies must go to court to obtain search warrants in order to surveil a U.S. citizen. Judiciary, led by Chairman Jim Jordan and Ranking Member Jerry Nadler, wants to add this requirement to FISA, whereas Intelligence, led by Chairman Michael Turner and Ranking Member Jim Himes, wants to leave it out. To no surprise, the Intelligence Committee position has the backing of the intel agencies.
The divide has forced Johnson to pull FISA bills twice already, once in December and once in February. Even when Johnson forced Jordan and Turner to the negotiating table, neither was willing to come to an agreement. Where Johnson goes from here remains unknown, but the advantage seems to be on the side of the Intelligence Committee’s view, given its deep state backing.
Then, of course, there’s impeachment—of the president, members of his cabinet, and maybe more. Last week, the National Archives and Records Administration provided the House Oversight Committee 211 emails with 6,000 pages of records in response to requests made by Chairman James Comer. The House will also be sending its articles of impeachment against Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas to the Senate in short order. With a two-thirds majority vote in the Senate needed to convict, both impeachments are doomed to fail. But that’s not the point of the exercise. House Republicans are hoping to air as much of the Biden administration’s dirty laundry as possible before the election.
It’s turning into a maximum pressure campaign. Republican House Committee chairs levied nearly 50 oversight requests to a bevy of agencies over the month of March. One GOP aide told POLITICO that the House GOP does not view these inquiries, which will start to take more shape over the next few weeks, as a replacement for impeachment.
Attorney General Merrick Garland could be the House GOP’s next big target. Oversight and Judiciary are threatening to hold the attorney general in contempt if he fails to respond to a subpoena for the audio recording of Special Counsel Robert Hur’s interview with president Biden in the coming days.
Other oversight efforts by the House GOP included in the slew of requests cover the Biden administration’s management of the Strategic Petroleum Reserve, the origins of Covid-19, and two DOJ tax attorneys that worked on Hunter Biden’s case.
The appropriations process for fiscal year ’25 should begin this month as well, at least according to statute—but who pays attention to those these days?
One misstep along the way, and Greene could take to the podium to request privilege on her motion to vacate Johnson. If she waits until after April 19, when Rep. Mike Gallagher abandons his post, just one GOP vote could decide whether Johnson keeps the Speaker’s gavel.
The post Mike Johnson Faces a Cruel April appeared first on The American Conservative.
There is no such thing as cultural Christianity without Christians.
The famed atheist Richard Dawkins is now calling himself a “cultural Christian.” That he would like to claim the culture of Christianity for himself while rejecting its theological tenets is not surprising. What is surprising is his honesty.
In an interview with the British network LBC on Easter Sunday, the New Atheist and author of The God Delusion announced, “I find that I like to live in a culturally Christian country, even though I do not believe a single word of the Christian faith.” Calling himself a cultural Christian means he can appreciate Christmas carols and cathedrals without worshiping Christ, the evolutionary biologist said. While Dawkins is still “happy” to see the number of Christians in the West declining, he spoke concernedly about losing Christian parishes to the thousands of new Islamic mosques being built across Great Britain. He reasoned that this is because Christianity is a “fundamentally decent religion,” unlike that alternative; indeed, Dawkins called the substitution of any alternative religion for Christianity “truly dreadful.”
What Dawkins is describing is what American liberalism has been attempting to actualize for decades: beautiful churches and traditions, absent the beatific vision of Christ made known to man. Standing apart from all this striving is the very important question whether such a thing—religion without religious adherents, church without God—can even exist, or would make any sense if it did. The mosques taking over Europe indicate the answer: When Christ is marched out of the church, the cathedrals may remain standing, but other religions will march in.
The idea of a neutered Christianity is tantalizing to an ideology that makes equality its cornerstone. The liberal worldview cannot allow for Christianity as it is, claiming superiority over all other religions and worldly regimes, but if perhaps that troublesome part could be cut out, and the consequences of sin forgotten, the remains could be something beautiful and harmless, or so the thought experiment goes. This is more than mere idea: The mainline Protestant denominations in America have gone to great lengths to liberalize the American church, and quite successfully so. In most major cities, the grand historic parishes belonging to the Episcopalian, Methodist, Presbyterian (PCUSA), and Unitarian denominations fly the rainbow flag to signal that “all are welcome,” even people their churches once excommunicated for living in unrepentant sin.
The doctrines of Christianity have been purged to fit the new sexual mores of our day. The PCUSA has been ordaining female pastors for nearly 70 years, in direct contradiction of the holy scriptures it claims to represent, for the sake of obedience to the god of gender equality. But it is the National Cathedral in Washington, D.C., Episcopalian in denomination, that demonstrates the greatest zeal. The church lists among its core values a commitment to “God’s gift of self-determination and democratic ideals.”
Strange: Neutered Christianity does not look much like Christianity at all. In fact, its shape is much more like some new religion, with acolytes stumbling over themselves to demonstrate their commitment to the solemn new doctrines ranging from sexual libertinism to that wonderful catch-all, “democratic ideals.” The high holy days of the old church have been smothered over by those of the new church: If Eastertide and Transgender Day of Visibility fall on the same day, the Christian holiday must submit to the sexual. The only possible consequence of taking Christ out of the church is that new gods will come to fill the void. Humans are by their nature religious.
Dawkins is right to recognize that it is better to belong to a Christian nation than to any other sort of nation. Indeed, much of his own worldview, whether or not he knows it, is borrowed from Christendom. It is not just cultural edifices like hymns and parishes, but the very systems of science Dawkins employs that were built by Christians, not to mention our legal and judicial heritage. These are not doctrines of the church, but they are the fruits of a people that once sought to live in accordance with nature and nature’s God. Where Dawkins goes wrong is in imagining he can remove Christ and still have the effects of Christianity. The faithful have left the mainline denominations already, and their buildings have been blasphemously desecrated; as they continue to be chased from the public square (Christianity is now apparently synonymous with white ethno-nationalism, the worst of all bogeymen), so too will Christian virtue. More violent crime, theft, drug use, suicide, broken families, and other social ills are downstream of this change, as Dawkins himself seems to be subconsciously aware.
The UK, like America, was once a Christian nation, but it will not remain so without Christians. Beauty, it turns out, cannot be found apart from holiness. The dampness in our eyes at “Ah, Holy Jesus” is not caused by meditating on suffering in the abstract, but on the very particular suffering of a very particular man. Absent that man, the whole thing is meaningless.
Dawkins himself has long rejected any claims to religious neutrality, frequently mocking Christians. In The God Delusion, he argued against all forms of religion as dangerous, divisive, and just plain illogical. At a 2012 rally of some 20,000 atheists and agnostics in Washington, DC, Dawkins derided Christians who believe in Christ’s real presence at the communion table. “Religion makes specific claims about the universe which need to be substantiated, and need to be challenged—and if necessary, need to be ridiculed with contempt,” he told a cheering crowd on the National Mall. Moments later he added, “Mock them! Ridicule them! In public!”
Having actively persecuted the church, Dawkins finds he is sad to see it go. We cannot pretend this is anyone’s fault but his own, and that of his compatriots who have crusaded against religion as the root of all social ills. Nevertheless, some of the church’s greatest apologists have come from its worst former persecutors. May the same be true of Dawkins.
The post Richard Dawkins’s ‘Cultural Christianity’ Is Thin Gruel appeared first on The American Conservative.
While normal people were celebrating Easter this past Sunday, House Speaker Mike Johnson was on Fox News to tout the upcoming push for Ukraine aid in the lower chamber. The particulars are still vague, but no less disturbing for that.
The point I’d like to fix on here is that Johnson seems to think structuring the aid as a loan is a live option. I guess it’s manuring season in Louisiana. As we’ve written before, a zero-interest waivable loan is just a grant by another name—a name that, lawmakers hope, will bamboozle the American people into thinking they’re not really handing out more money to Ukraine.
“Once Ukraine gets back on its feet, they will be an economic powerhouse because of their access to mass deposits of critical minerals, oil and gas,” claimed Sen. Lindsey Graham in support of the idea.
If any poor booby in Congress thinks this will be a bona fide loan, I advise that he exert the supreme effort to use his noggin. If Ukraine is such a prospective powerhouse because of its natural resources and human capital, why wasn’t it a massive European success story before the outbreak of the war? If the good senator from South Carolina proves to be wrong, the loans will be a significant drag on Ukraine’s fisc—as every war loan and indemnity in history has been, from the settlement of the Haitian revolution up until now. Forcing Ukraine to continue payments will keep it weaker and less able to defend itself without American help, the Ukraine boosters, now hard-headed realists, will argue. Why not give them a fighting chance with the forgiving stroke of a pen?
This is, frankly, goofy. It’s also insulting. As I wrote when the proposal was first floated, I think further Ukraine aid is not a good idea; I think it is out of step with the priorities of the American people; I also recognize that sometimes, in a representative democracy, your position loses. Fine. But trying to get around the “representative democracy” part by pulling a fast one instead of making the case for the policy you really want—that should be punished.
If Republican leadership allows this to go through, there should be consequences—ultimately from the voters, but also from any legislators who have something approaching a principle. The House motion to vacate rule is still there. Why not give it a spin again, for old times’ sake?
The post Ukraine ‘Loans’ Are Still a Rip-Off Job appeared first on The American Conservative.
What we like is democracy, and what we don’t like is autocracy—or worse!
Is every democracy the same, or are they all different?
This is the question that confronts us when we look at the results of Sunday’s local elections in Turkey. The ruling coalition’s senior party, Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s Justice and Development Party (AKP), was dealt significant setbacks, particularly in the large cities where their support has been slipping for some years—Erdogan’s home city of Istanbul, Ankara, and Izmir. The Republican People’s Party (CHP), the leading opposition party, strengthened its hand; in particular, the young, popular mayor of Istanbul, Ekrem Imamoglu, roundly defeated the AKP challenger, 51 percent to 40 percent. The opposition’s performance, combined with anemic turnout, looks like a rebuke of Erdogan’s unsuccessful efforts to control Turkey’s worst economic crisis in a generation.
This all has been greeted with cheers by the Americans who have been anxious to dub Erdogan an autocrat and project upon him our own domestic team sports. But the results undercut one of the central ideas about the “autocrat”—namely, that he has been a serious threat to Turkish democracy.
Erdogan is a moderate Islamist whose cultural and social policies would be out of place in Paris—Paris, France or Paris, Texas. At the same time, those views, for which Erdogan spent time in jail in the ’90s, are agreeable to many Turks, especially among the rural working class. The Turkish census reports that 99.8 percent of Turks are Muslim—wouldn’t you expect French-style laicism to be kicking against the pricks at least a little? Not even the French are 100-percent on board with French-style laicism, and, until recently, “Christian democracy” (on which Erdogan modeled AKP) was a live movement in much of Europe.
Even as he pursued conservative cultural policies, Erdogan implemented a robust economic program that encouraged foreign investment in Turkey. He is the only Turkish head of government who has never missed an IMF grant disbursement for regulatory noncompliance. He aggressively pursued closer integration with the European economy, up to and including EU membership. In his Westward-facing early career, he also worked at length to lay to rest Turkey’s two longstanding PR issues: the Kurdish question and the Armenian genocide. (The failure to resolve each of these is complicated and would require two more separate, full-length columns.) This all is to say that Erdogan, his party, and his program have been, in the eyes of the Turkish people, forward-facing and consequently popular with voters.
It is true that Erdogan has engaged in some anti-democratic behavior in the past few electoral cycles; there are reports this week of AKP chicanery in the southeast, particularly in the city of Van, where the Kurdish nationalist party HDP won the municipal election prima facie. In the 2017 constitutional referendum, there was suspect behavior in the vote-counting (more on this below). But the preponderance of Erdogan’s changes—to the judiciary, to the constitution, to the military—have been carried through because he has in fact been massively popular for long periods of his political career. The democratic element of the system has asserted itself against the undemocratic elements; what we see now is, in large part, the use of power that he acquired electorally and then consolidated electorally.
When Western liberals condemn Erdogan as anti-democratic, especially to score points against a certain Republican presidential candidate, it isn’t just wrong; it begins to resonate uncomfortably with certain elements of their domestic propaganda. Two of the strains in Turkish politics are Kemalist secularism, which is predominantly urban and elite, and Islamism, which is predominantly rural and popular. Western audiences have always preferred the first, which is comfortably European, but it has been enforced by largely undemocratic, certainly not Western democratic, means: the derin devlet, the “deep state”—yes, that’s where the term came from. When Turkey’s politics have run too hot or too unsecular, elite institutions have stepped in to keep things from getting out of hand—including, thrice, by military coup against the government. The Western liberal preference in fact runs against Turkish democracy. The Crisis of Parliamentary Democracy, people—read it!
(As a kicker: Erdogan’s 2017 constitutional referendum, which converted Turkey into a presidential system under a united head of state and head of government, did just squeak through under suspicious circumstances—namely, the certification of a large number of irregularly processed ballots. Since when do American liberals think irregularly processed ballots in a tightly contested election are undemocratic?)
It doesn’t make for rousing partisan journalism—Americans especially like a movie with white hats and black hats—but most world leaders are a mixed bag, and most of them hold power by some amount of popular assent. We may find distasteful Erdogan’s Islamism, or his constitutional changes, or his harassment and suppression of the opposition press. (I have a friend who worked for the English version of Zaman and had to make a speedy exit from Ankara after its closure.) But, especially as Turkey has shown itself capable of delivering an electoral black eye to the ruling party for its failures, it is difficult to say that there is exactly a crisis of democracy afoot. If we insist on doing so, and then relating it back to events at home, we may not like the parallels that emerge.
The world is very large and very old, and its various peoples have come up with many different ways of living. This is a difficult lesson for Americans, who have a penchant for projecting the ideologies of our peculiar conservative-revolutionary, Enlightenment-era merchant republic onto the canvas of the world. Jefferson backing the French Revolution, Wilson knocking the crowns off the royal heads of Europe, nation-building in the Middle East—we have a long history of assuming that everyone is an American on the inside. This is a dangerous assumption. Turkish politics will always look different from American politics, just as Marylander politics will always look different from Iowan politics. But for the American liberal, the more dangerous equation is liberal values with democracy—a brittle fiction that will tend to be outed.
The post Turkey’s Wild Elections Confound the ‘Autocracy’ Narrative appeared first on The American Conservative.
The only way to ensure permanent peace is to convince all major groups that their success requires mutual respect and cooperation. It is a lesson that Americans could ponder.
A quarter century has passed since Kosovo broke away from Serbia after a brief but bitter civil war. NATO abandoned its defensive mission and intervened “out-of-area” to oust the Serbian military and later force Kosovo’s independence. The new nation is very different than the once disputed and battered territory.
Nevertheless, the scars of war were evident on my recent visit. Kosovo’s losses, though less than in some other conflicts, such as Ukraine, were still painful. Some 13,000 people died and more than a million people were displaced. Kosovars must address the ethnic and religious divisions which remain and continue to hamper their advance. Helping light the way is the group Hardwired Global, which works around the world to break down barriers between communities and peoples.
Although the war is long over, Pristina and Belgrade remain at odds politically. The latter refuses to recognize Kosovo’s secession. Nearly half of the world’s governments, including five members of the European Union, also reject Kosovo’s statehood. Most consequential is Russia’s refusal to allow Pristina to join the United Nations. This gives Moscow continuing influence in Serbia, unsettling the European Union as war rages in Ukraine.
Moreover, deep divisions remain within Kosovo. Belgrade’s defeat led to violence against the once dominant ethnic Serb population and flight of many to Serbia. The remaining ethnic Serbs are concentrated in Kosovo’s north, adjoining Serbia, and they continue to resist Pristina’s authority. This has led to violence between ethnic Serbs and Albanians, and military posturing by both Belgrade and NATO, which retains an occupation force in Kosovo. While no one expects hostilities to erupt, the specter of further violence has increased regional tensions.
Kosovo cannot escape its history. Memorials to dead heroes abound. Politics long was dominated by former insurgents. Even today the country is rated as only “partly free” by Freedom House. Some of the victors participated in criminal networks, causing Europeans to call Kosovo a “black hole.” Although this problem has eased, the economy remains weak despite substantial outside aid and investment.
Children have no direct memory of the war but live with the war’s reality. I visited a school named after a graduate who died fighting as a member of the Kosovo Liberation Army. His bust stood outside and several paintings of him were hung inside. There are few moderating counterpoints to promote reconciliation among former enemies.
Kosovo was historically home to moderate Islam, but Kosovars with whom I talked worry about growing fundamentalism. One complained that “Islamic radicalism is growing among the young and was promoted from outside.” Another called the situation “very dangerous.” He cited the malign role of Turkey, which he believed had superseded Saudi Arabia in promoting extremism. Both governments have constructed mosques and supported imams.
A third Kosovar believed his country had made “space available for Islamic radicalism,” and that “Kosovo gets into trouble when it flirts with Islamists.” According to Kosovo Online: “An increasing number of Albanians in Kosovo believe that political Islam is the only solution to the accumulated world problems. Data from recent research indicate that in the past 25 years, dozens of young Albanians from Kosovo have been educated in religious schools in the Middle East. Many of these schools promote radical Islam, and some of their followers have been convicted in Kosovo for promoting terrorism.”
Indeed, Kosovo may be Europe’s most worrisome flashpoint outside of the continent’s borders with Russia. The lack of normalization of relations between Pristina and Belgrade makes it difficult to bring either into the European Union. Efforts to fully integrate the Balkans into the larger continental order remain stalled.
Into this world has stepped Tina Ramirez, founder of Hardwired International. A former congressional staffer and political candidate, she has spent years fighting against religious persecution in other nations. I have traveled with her to South Sudan, Kurdistan, and most recently Kosovo. There are many good organizations which stand up for the oppressed, some of which I have also accompanied overseas. Hardwired, however, is unique with its focus on education to combat intolerance, hatred, and all manner of “isms.”
Hardwired noted that Kosovo’s history has left “a fractured society with limited prospects for social and economic development.” One common strategy is to isolate communities, which often lessens current tensions but fails to mitigate long-term hostilities. Alternatively, in Kosovo, warned Hardwired, “imposed secularism has only increased tensions, particularly among conservative religious communities.” Such efforts inadvertently reinforce the message of extremists.
In contrast, Hardwired confronts contending beliefs head-on, offering respect while encouraging not just toleration, but understanding and cooperation. The focus is the classroom, and the process begins with teachers. I watched adults of varying beliefs and from diverse communities discovering, first, the possibility, and second, the necessity of working together despite diverse beliefs.
The process usually begins with religious minorities recognizing the importance of supporting one another. Members of religious majorities also come to realize the moral worth of those who believe differently, and the importance of treating them as equals. It is impossible to reach everyone, of course, but I was struck on my visit to Kosovo with the number of teachers and trainers who talked about how Hardwired’s curriculum helped transform their personal thinking.
One told me that she changed her mind and came to understand “why I should respect” other believers. “Now I am open to learn about them.” Indeed, she added, “we need to cooperate with one another. Religion doesn’t matter.” Another teacher spoke of his students, who learned to be “respectful of people of other religions, races, and other things.”
Such stories were oft-repeated. Most impressive were the admittedly skeptical who came to embrace the Hardwired training program. The organization does not try to convert people to Christianity. The program is effective because it respects the beliefs of all and focuses on creating a safe environment for everyone. In such a world Christians and others are freer to talk about their faith. Hardwired does not attempt to suppress belief but instead seeks to increase communication and understanding among faiths. Its objective is to thereby ease religious and political conflict.
Kosovo is steadily increasing the number of teachers equipped to lead their students in lessons on the importance of respecting the lives and dignity as well as freedom of conscience of all. This in turn helps ease the mistrust and fear still evident among many children as well as adults. Teachers and students then hold events for their families and larger communities. In this way Hardwired seeks to transform the nation.
Obviously, there are few shortcuts to overcoming years of conflict and hatred. Students sometimes were skeptical, even hostile, at the start. Yet most eventually were moved by the training. The most powerful remedy to the divisions evident in Kosovo and elsewhere is to bring people together to confront their fears and hostilities. One of the teachers spoke of flashbacks from the war. He lost a cousin and his family was forced to move: “We suffered a lot. So the training affected us personally.” Another spoke of how the lessons forced him to decide “how I will implement diversity and pluralism in my own life.”
Of course, it isn’t enough to have a good message. People must listen to it. In this case students generally respond well. One teacher noted how “kids ask if they can do it again.” Other teachers noted how the program caused participants to break out of their cliques and work together and in groups. She asked Hardwired to do more: “We desire that the students have another challenge so they can expand themselves.” She saw a “mind change” in those who participated in the program.
Today, Hardwired operates mostly in ethnic Albanian areas, since it has established a cooperative relationship with local educational officials. Ramirez hopes to expand into ethnic Serbian areas. Students there also need to learn how to engage “the other.” Such training may be the best hope for eventual willingness of both communities to live together in not only peace, but also harmony.
Hardwired’s work obviously doesn’t negate the need for a political modus vivendi between Kosovo and Serbia looking toward the future rather than the past. Nevertheless, Hardwired’s training is helping to construct a foundation for political reconciliation. The only way to ensure permanent peace is to convince all major groups that their success requires mutual respect and cooperation. It is a lesson that Americans need to take to heart as well.
The post Why Care About Kosovo? appeared first on The American Conservative.
Over three decades after the end of the Cold War, the alliance encourages perverse and dangerous behaviors in its member states.
Seventy-five years ago, on April 4, 1949, the foreign ministers of 12 European and North American countries convened in Washington and signed the North Atlantic Treaty establishing NATO.
With war raging in Eastern Europe and calls from a number of NATO allies to escalate that war, unpopular yet critical questions need to be addressed with regard to the alliance’s history, its continuation, and its expansion, as well as its ramifications for U.S. national security. Indeed, several articles of faith with regard to NATO’s successes and indispensability turn out to be, upon even cursory examination, highly questionable—if not entirely mistaken.
While criticism of the alliance is effectively verboten in today’s Washington, at the time of its founding, some eminent American foreign policy thinkers such as Walter Lippmann warned that “a great power like the United States gains no advantages and it loses prestige by offering, indeed, peddling, its alliances to all and sundry. An alliance should be hard diplomatic currency, valuable and hard to get.”
An argument could be made that by the end of its first decade, NATO was already obsolete. The great Hungarian-American historian John Lukacs has argued that, by the mid-1950s, the Soviets (post-Stalin, post-Beria) were beating a retreat from the center of Europe. In 1954–55, they agreed to, in Lukacs’s words, a “reciprocal withdrawal” in Austria, paving that way for that country’s Cold War neutrality. Within a year the Soviets relinquished their naval base in Finland (which henceforth was to also pursue neutral status—that is, until last year) and mended ties with Tito’s Yugoslavia. By Lukacs’s accounting, 1956 “was the turning point of the cold war. Perhaps even the end of it, if by ‘cold war’ means the direct prospect of an actual war between American and Russian armed forces in Europe.”
In the absence of the competing alliance systems, the Cold War might have come to a denouement decades earlier. Certainly Turkey’s incorporation into the alliance in 1952 and the subsequent decision to place nuclear-armed Jupiter missiles there did little to further peace and stability between East and West. Indeed, it did help set the stage for the nuclear missile crisis of October 1962.
Nevertheless, the decision to carry on and indeed expand the alliance was made within a mere 24 months of the dissolution of the Soviet Union. For Clinton, the impetus to expand came from domestic politics rather than the requirements of US national security.
As Ambassador Jack Matlock has recently noted,
The real reason that Clinton went for it [NATO expansion] was domestic politics. I testified in Congress against NATO expansion, saying that it would be a great “mistake”; when I came out of that testimony, a couple of people who were observing said, “Jack, why are you fighting against this?”And I said, “Because I think it’s a bad idea.” They said, “Look, Clinton wants to get reelected. He needs Pennsylvania, Michigan, Illinois….”
As many at the time knew, the project was fraught with risk. But in the Washington, DC of thirty years ago, one could have an actual debate on the merits of one or another foreign policies without being labeled a foreign “dupe” or a Russian “apologist.” In those years, scores of members of the Washington establishment, not least Senators Daniel Patrick Moynihan and John Warner, made their objections to the expansionist project known.
One group of objectors was led by the granddaughter of President Dwight Eisenhower. In 1997, the estimable Susan Eisenhower published an open letter in an effort to persuade Clinton to reconsider his chosen course. Calling NATO expansion a “policy error of historic proportions,” the letter’s 50 signatories, including longtime hawks Paul Nitze and Richard Pipes, the prominent Democratic Senators Bill Bradley and Sam Nunn, and intellectuals like David Calleo and Owen Harries, warned that,
In Russia, NATO expansion, which continues to be opposed across the entire political spectrum, will strengthen the nondemocratic opposition, undercut those who favor reform and cooperation with the West, bring the Russians to question the entire post-Cold War settlement.
At around the same time, an article by the World Policy Institute’s Sherle Schwenninger noted,
NATO expansion threatens to create tensions and conflicts in the heart of Central and Eastern Europe that would otherwise not exist…The Clinton Administration justifies NATO enlargement in part as an effort to avoid a new security vacuum in Central Europe, but even as it removes some countries from East-West competition it only increases the potential intensity of the rivalry over others, like the Baltic states and Ukraine.
As those of us who were lucky enough to know and work with him knew, Sherle had a special prescience, and his warnings then were no exception.
Today, NATO’s defenders will no doubt ask: Surely after the Russian invasion of Ukraine, NATO is needed more than ever to keep Europe safe from the Russian bear?
Not really.
First, as the distinguished political scientist John Mearsheimer and others have tirelessly pointed out, there is scant evidence that Putin wants all of Ukraine, much less more real estate in Eastern Europe. Do we really suppose Russia wants to take on the burden of supporting three-quarters of a million Polish pensioners? Or waste more blood and treasure in what most certainly would be fierce guerrilla resistance in Galicia? The fact is that Russia lacks both the means and the will to establish political, economic, and territorial hegemony on the continent. Arguments to the contrary are, to be polite about it, based on a misunderstanding of Russian national security aims. The French political philosopher Emmanuel Todd (less polite) believes that the idea that Russia has Europe in its sights is the stuff of “fantasy and propaganda.”
“The truth is that Russia,” as Todd writes in his new book La Dafaite de la Occident (The Defeat of the West), “with a shrinking population and a territory of 17 million square kilometers, far from wanting to conquer new territories, wonders above all how she will continue to occupy those she already possesses.”
So, let’s call NATO what it is: an unnecessary alliance which poses a danger to the true national security interest of the United States. NATO encourages free-riding on the part of our partners; it encourages recklessness on the part of strategically insignificant though wildly bellicose client states; it encourages incredibly self-defeating behavior on the part of those nations that want to join it; it encourages and helps enable the U.S. to meddle in the Middle Eastern and North Africa where we have virtually no business being.
The show has been on the road for far too long. Surely, 75 years of NATO is enough—and eight decades after the end of the Second World War, it is a long past time for Europe to stand on its own.
The post At 75, Has NATO Outlived Its Use? appeared first on The American Conservative.
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