Connexion
A bizarre 24 hours in Brussels for an annual conservative conference showed the possibility—and necessity—of a grand conservative coalition.
National Conservatives saw an unlikely party leap to their defense amidst a buffoonish and unacceptable crackdown in Brussels. None other than their arch-rivals, the “Freedom Conservatives,” stepped up.
The Freedom Conservatives, an umbrella group who are broadly old fusionists in their outlook, opposed the cancellation of NatCons, while reminding them about their appeal to the principles of liberalism, open debate, freedom of speech, and reduced governmental powers.
“Although Freedom Conservatives have many and profound disagreements with National Conservatives, we condemn any attempts by the government to hamper or extinguish the peaceable exercise of anyone’s fundamental rights to free speech, assembly, and association,” their statement noted.
John Hood, a signatory to the statement and the President of the Pope Foundation, reminded me that NatCons also have an obligation towards bridge-building if they seek a genuine movement:
Any political movement broad enough to win elections and govern effectively will encompass individuals and institutions who disagree on some matters of principle or priority. Robust debate about such disagreements can be healthy, as long as it’s substantive and folks still share enough in common to work together. Over the past decade, however, I’ve seen these debates turn increasingly toxic. And what we share can’t just be progressivism as a common foe. That’s not enough.
And that’s precisely why the FreeCons are reaching out in support of the NatCons: “Although FreeCons and NatCons differ on many issues, we ought to be able to agree on freedom of speech and the other foundational principles of a free society,” Hood said.
The European venue this year was in Brussels, capital of the European Union and seat of NATO. What transpired was downright absurd. Two venues were forced to cancel the conference under pressure from mobs, antifa, and the Socialist-party mayor of the precinct, Emir Kir. The third venue witnessed a massive police buildup—ironic in a city known for its inability to ever stop a terror attack or museum vandalism—but when they refused to shut down the conference, the police laid siege, refusing entry of people, food, and water. A British Member of Parliament, Miriam Cates, had to be escorted wearing a head-cover through a backdoor.
That’s just one of the several examples of speech rights violation at the center of the European Union. Ultimately, after it spiraled into an international diplomatic incident, the Belgian supreme court reversed the order for the police siege and the conference was allowed to continue, with the Belgian prime minister tweeting why free speech should never have been violated. But by then, as the Economist noted, the damage to the reputation of the EU was already done.
“It is the sad reality that an emergency legal challenge had to be mounted in order to peacefully assemble in the political center of Europe. How can Brussels claim to be the heart of Europe if its officials only allow one side of the European conversation to be heard?” Paul Coleman, International Executive Director of the Alliance Defending Freedom, told The American Conservative in an email. “What we have seen in Brussels is an overt attempt from authorities to censor and suppress free speech and ideas that they disagree with—tyranny at its finest.”
He cited multiple speech right violations within the EU, including the high-profile cases of the Finnish Christian MP Päivi Räsänen and of Isabel Vaughan-Spruce, a Catholic activist in the UK. “In this instance with NatCon, common sense and justice have prevailed,” he said. “But the battle to protect free speech throughout Europe is far from over.”
But the theoretical contradictions were visible this time, and are becoming increasingly hard to ignore. The left-wing mayor who tried to cancel the NatCon event tried to do so in the name of liberty and authority, and the NatCons appealed with card-carrying liberal principles of free speech.
The National Conservatism movement is predicated on two fundamental pillars: first, that nation-states are the fundamental units of international relations, and they chart their courses independently; and, second, a broad opposition to the fusionist conservatism that has run the Anglo-American right since roughly the late 1960s to the present day. With the increased secularization of society and the lack of an overwhelming external secular-authoritarian threat in the USSR, the bonds of a 50-year period of social cohesion disintegrated. The NatCons therefore believe in a return to a more communitarian economy, a program of social cohesion and assimilation, and a return to more religious overtones in the social contract.
So far, so good. The problem, of course, occasionally arises from the definitions of these terms. As Max Weber wrote in The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, freedom of speech, for example, stems from a broadly Anglo-Protestant theological impulse, which also opposes increased economic communitarianism—increasingly an orthodoxy in the NatCon section of the right.
There are also other philosophical conflicts. NatCons in the last four years have opposed “foreign interventions,” “Covid tyranny” and lockdowns, and state-mandated vaccinations backed by penalties, but they supported school choice and defunding higher ed; at the same time, they rhetorically denigrate libertarians and fusionists.
In foreign policy, that gets even more problematic. The Hungarians and the Poles, for example, are on the opposite side of the Ukrainian question, with the American NatCons falling firmly on the Hungarian side, and the British NatCons closer to the Poles. Outside Europe, Modi’s India, a potential ally and example for NatCons across the world, is comically opposed to the very Anglo foundation of the modern Indian state formed in the aftermath of British withdrawal. No one really knows where the NatCons fall on the question of free speech.
These are not criticisms. Every movement has different subsets within it; part of the job of growing a movement is to seek common ground.
These questions will be increasingly important in an election year, as besieged left-wing forces in the government facing public opposition and hostility turn to the authoritarian use of state power to crush dissent in Europe, America, and potentially in a Labour-governed UK. (Note the Labour front bench cackling at the news of the attempted cancellation of the conference.)
“It is laughable that the Brussels thought police were sent out to shut down a conference of democratically elected politicians representing the views of millions of people. They clearly didn’t want to hear about how we can secure our borders and protect our citizens,” the current Member of Parliament and former British Conservative Home Secretary Suella Braverman told TAC, adding that “the more ridiculous their attempts to shut us down, the more cheered I am that we are winning the arguments.”
But, while Braverman is the last best Tory hope against a second Blairist assault on the UK, and at least somewhat identifies and understands the main cause of all Anglo-American social dysfunction, the Brussels episode highlights that arguments and debates in and of themselves are clearly not enough; political power and willingness to use that power towards democratic ends are also urgent and necessary. And that is perhaps the question that needs a better answer from any future conservative thought summits, whether organized by FreeCons, libertarians, fusionists, or NatCons.
The reality is that Johnny Public doesn’t really care about theories of governance. He sees a practically open border and unlimited foreign aid to secure foreign borders. He also sees his voice being drowned in their local school boards, mind-numbing breakdown of inner cities, crime on the streets due to lax governance and a flawed punitive philosophy, massive inflation and deficit due to a bloated government, a particularly self-loathing and destructive education sector, and a political class that is indifferent to his cultural patrimony at best and antagonistic at worst. He sees increased taxes, but also decreased policing and broken roads and other primary services for which they pay tax.
Ultimately, however, the common enemy of the FreeCons and the NatCons is the same: an unelected political and bureaucratic class, ever-growing and self-sustaining—an edifice, a superstructure, a governance by swarm, as Michael Brendan Dougherty once noted. Democracy, in any form, whether populist, statist, nationalist, or localist, loses all meaning against that, as the swarm has no accountability and no hierarchy.
Perhaps conservatives should stop bickering among themselves and recognize that reality.
The post ‘Freedom Conservatives’ Defend Free Speech—Even for National Conservatives appeared first on The American Conservative.
Compelling speech at universities is the first step toward Canada-style speech codes.
The Biden administration just released its 1500-page revision of the Title IX Rule. This new Rule makes this administration’s primary goal glaringly obvious: to cram Neo-Marxist gender ideology down the throats of every American and punish any resistance. That’s why they are weaponizing Title IX to compel speech.
Despite the fact that expressing and debating views and ideas is fundamental to the American system, my organization, Speech First, has found that many universities prefer to shut down speech, punish students for merely asking questions or stating basic facts, and enforce a dogmatic approach towards all political speech. At the same time, they embed their preferred political speech in all aspects of student life.
Similarly, the Biden administration does not want to wait for the end result of the traditional American way—debate and discourse that seeks truth through reason, and ultimately settles on a conclusion based on core constitutional principles. Instead, the administration is attempting to bend the country to its will by turning Title IX against the Constitution.
Title IX was passed by Congress in 1972 to close gaps in the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which did not provide protections for discrimination on the basis of sex in education. Since then, various lawsuits expanded or reworked definitions of “sex” and “discrimination.” Sexual harassment and sexual assault were eventually included to be forms of sex-discrimination. As the years went on, many presidential administrations sought to further define these terms.
The Obama administration issued a series of “Dear Colleague Letters,” policy directives from the Department of Education to colleges and universities. These circumvented the rule-making process to prioritize political goals over the rights of American citizens. Instead of going through the multi-year slog of hearing what legal experts and citizens of the country might think about a new Title IX Rule, the Obama administration just short-circuited the system.
The Trump administration, on the other hand, went through the formal rule-making process with the intentions of thoroughly auditing Title IX and building in important protections for constitutional rights. Under Trump, a very important speech protection was added to Title IX: the Davis standard.
This speech protection was not written by the administration; it came from a U.S. Supreme Court decision, Davis v. The Monroe County Board of Education. This Supreme Court precedent specifically stated that for speech to be considered harassing conduct, it has to be so severe, pervasive, and objectively offensive that it effectively denies students equal access to education.
What this means is that if a student wanted to report another student or a professor for a Title IX sexual harassment violation, it couldn’t be for a “microaggression,” nor could it be for any of the numerous and often ridiculous speech code limitations that universities have embedded in their own non-Title IX harassment policies.
These days, universities punish students for committing “microaggressions,” not using “preferred pronouns,” using “offensive language,” “stereotyping,” or mean jokes. You may or may not believe these rise to the level of Title IX sexual harassment or sex discrimination, but they are all forms of constitutionally protected speech.
But that didn’t stop universities from attempting to discipline students for their protected speech. In Speech First v. Cartwright, the Eleventh Circuit Court recognized how the University of Central Florida was abusing its discriminatory-harassment policy to target students’ constitutionally protected speech.
The Davis standard is a possible solution for a harassment policy that protects students’ First Amendment speech rights while simultaneously protecting students from actual sex-based discrimination. This would also ensure that Title IX offices don’t get bogged down by frivolous or malicious reports that would inevitably bury and delay action on more serious cases.
When the Biden administration came in, its members sought to take much of what Obama listed in his “Dear Colleague” letters and march it through the formal rule-making process. This includes brazen expansions of the definition of sex. The new Rule broadens the definition of “sex” and states that discrimination on the basis of sex will also include discrimination based on “sex stereotypes, sex characteristics, pregnancy or related conditions, sexual orientation, and gender identity.” In other words, you can no longer express your opinions on transgender ideology, the LGBTQ+ community, or abortion without getting reported for a Title IX violation.
Section 106.2 redefines “sex-based harassment,” throwing out the aforementioned Davis standard that placed a high bar as to what kind of speech can be considered harassing conduct, and replaced it with language that is vague, overbroad, and actually uses the word “subjective” in the definition itself. A law cannot be subjective and applied fairly at the same time.
The Biden Title IX Rule states that sex-based harassment must be “based on the totality of the circumstances, is subjectively and objectively offensive and is so severe or pervasive that it limits or denies a person’s ability to participate in or benefit from the recipient’s education program or activity.”
Here, the Biden administration changes “severe, pervasive, and objectively offensive” to “severe or pervasive.” Along with the inclusion of gender identity as a protected class, this means not using someone’s preferred pronoun is a reportable Title IX offense. This is compelled speech, and it is unconstitutional.
Further, the speech only has to “limit a person’s ability to benefit from….” Unlike the previous Rule’s “effectively denies a person equal access…” phrasing, this means anyone can file a Title IX claim, even when they have equal access to education, if they merely feel they cannot enjoy their class because, for example, a fellow student asked about Title IX compelling the use of gender affirmation language.
Other countries like Canada already have similar laws regarding the use of pronouns. They now send their citizens to jail if they do not use the language the government demands of them. Biden’s Title IX Rule is the first step in that direction—the beginning of the end of free speech in America.
The post Biden’s New Title IX Rule is the Beginning of the End for Free Speech appeared first on The American Conservative.
California’s Gavin Newsom has underlined an interesting question with a shocking series of ads in red states.
Two young women are driving towards the Alabama state line. The driver is seeking an abortion, which is illegal in the state of Alabama. In the passenger seat, her friend encourages her that she will not get caught, since the two are almost out of the state. Less than a mile from the border, however, blue lights flash them over, and a law enforcement officer walks up to the car with a pregnancy test.
This is not a true story: It is a fever dream of an advertisement campaign launched in the state of Alabama this week by California’s Gov. Gavin Newson. In a stunning instance of intrastate political interference, Newsom has launched similar campaigns in Arizona and Tennessee, and is targeting Alabama specifically while state lawmakers weigh a bill that would penalize the act of helping a woman travel out of state to receive an abortion. Newsom might be playing a long game for the Oval Office—and this move would certainly suggest that—but his state also stands to benefit from abortion tourism, especially from neighboring Arizona. All this raises the question of whether there are any limits on the governor of one state influencing the politics of another.
It is hard not to see a bigger picture forming here, one in which leaving abortion decisions to the states to decide sounds increasingly impossible. Just this week, the Biden administration issued a new rule expanding the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) to hide abortion medical records from law enforcement investigations. This is not merely a strategic move for the Biden reelection campaign but also unavoidably hampers pro-life wins at the state level. As the politics of abortion become increasingly contentious, and January feels like a long time to wait for making substantial moves, the political left is seizing power wherever it can be found to take this debate to the national stage, where they are confident the pro-death strongarm will prevail.
The HIPAA expansion means that women who receive abortions in states where abortions are illegal are now effectively immune to that state’s efforts to enforce its own law. While private medical information has been protected under most circumstances since HIPAA was created, it was also always available to law enforcement in special cases, such as in a criminal investigation. Now, by executive declaration, any information about an abortion is exempt from disclosure, even in criminal cases, making it practically impossible to prove an illegal abortion has occurred. Of course, national rules trump local laws, meaning states that do ban abortion are powerless to counteract the Biden administration’s new rule. The only recourse is through the presidency or federal law.
This is one reason why national legislation is inevitable: The left is already making national moves. Thus, the question is not whether abortion will be regulated nationally, but who will do the regulating: Will the right answer these moves? So far, Republican leaders seem to prefer running from the playing field, as Trump did in claiming abortion should be left to the states to decide, for fear of harming Republicans’ chances in November. And fair enough: Most polling on abortion regulation is not in Republicans’ favor. Meanwhile, the left is unafraid to make national abortion legislation a key goal. Some have even gone so far as to say that “any candidate who doesn’t outright promise to protect abortion rights at a federal level with proactive legislation has no regard for ‘the will of the people.’”
The story doesn’t have to end there, however. Forty Days for Life’s Shawn Carney recently compared the pro-life movement to the gay rights movement, the latter of which forced a mind-boggling pendulum swing from obscene fringe to corporate-backed ascendancy in the span of some 10 years: “After losing referendum after referendum, same-sex marriage advocates didn’t go away; they went for broke. Just three years after winning their first referendum, they achieved total victory on June 26, 2015 when the Supreme Court—wrongly in my opinion—redefined marriage for all 50 states with Obergefell.” In other words, the appearance of an uphill battle does not necessitate a loss, and most definitely does not preclude fighting back harder. Needless to say, this is not how the Republican Party has traditionally operated, but just as painfully obvious are the party’s results, which are further from the target today than ever.
Abortion tourism seems poised to force the question before Republicans are ready to answer. The practice has opened a load of state sovereignty questions which demand a higher authority to resolve. Does a state have a right to ban its residents from leaving? Can another state be permitted to interfere? Normally, a medical practitioner has to seek additional licensing to work in another state, but California is already working to offer reciprocity for Arizona OBGYNs who cross into the Golden State to perform abortions, incentivizing an exodus of doctors from the desert. Can Arizona protect itself, or the federal government protect Arizona, from such predatory behavior by neighboring states? These are questions for constitutional scholars, but they are being answered in real time by real political actors who care little for parchment barriers.
The “New Right” has made waves by claiming the mechanisms of the state may and should be used for the common good. Here is an issue where such power may be used without embarrassment.
The post Abortion Tourism Is the Next Frontier appeared first on The American Conservative.
State of the Union: Today, America can’t even differentiate between its own people, ships, and commerce and that of the rest of the world.
Rogue actors are wreaking havoc on Mediterranean trade.
The year is not 2024 but 1801. The newly inaugurated president, Thomas Jefferson, once negotiated on behalf of the new American regime with Tripolitania to reduce the economic and human toll of piracy on Americans conducting commerce.
Over the years, Jefferson grew tired of the ever-increasing demands of the Barbary states. When Jefferson refused to pay the Barbary states in the form of a consular gift upon assuming the presidency, the Pasha declared war on the United States. Jefferson, however, had already sent an envoy to the Barbary coast in an attempt to keep the peace. Learning of this declaration of war, Jefferson commanded the envoy’s leader, Commodore Richard Dale, to “protect American ships and citizens against potential aggression,” but added, he was “unauthorized by the constitution, without the sanction of Congress, to go beyond the line of defense.”
Certainly, the Barbary pirates were menacing savages. Between the 16th and 19th century, the pirates captured and sold into slavery at least a million Europeans. But this was not the casus belli for Jefferson. The war came when the pirates, under the declaration of war, attacked U.S. owned and operated commercial ships. American gunboats came to their defense.
Now to 2024—rogue actors yet again are disrupting Mediterranean commerce to the southeast.
The Houthi rebels announced late Wednesday it launched attacks against U.S. and Israeli vessels in the Gulf of Aden.
In a video address on Wednesday evening, Yahya Saree, a Houthi spokesperson, said the Houthis successfully targeted and hit the Maersk Yorktown. The U.S. military has since confirmed the attack, claiming the Houthis used an antiship ballistic missile against the vessel. Thankfully, “there were no injuries or damage reported by US, coalition, or commercial ships,” a statement from U.S. Central Command (CENTCOM) read.
One other piece of important information provided by CENTCOM: the ship targeted was a “U.S.-flagged, owned, and operated vessel with 18 U.S. and four Greek crew members.”
The reason this piece of information is so interesting is that up until this point, U.S. strikes against Houthi targets in Yemen have been responses to attacks on commercial ships that are, for the most part, neither owned or operated by the United States.
Wednesday’s strike should not be considered escalatory on the part of the Houthis given that the United States has not made any distinction between U.S. and foreign commercial vessels. That fact is a powerful indictment on America’s current foreign policy apparatus. Long are the days of Thomas Jefferson when American foreign policy first looked out for America’s interests. Today, America can’t even differentiate between its own people, ships, and commerce and that of the rest of the world.
What we saw Wednesday in the Gulf of Aden—which failed to make front page news—is the Nikki Haley-esque logic of “an attack on (fill in the blank country) is an attack on America” put into practice. Jefferson weeps.
The post The Yemen Imbroglio Gets Even Worse for U.S. Interests appeared first on The American Conservative.
If children are the future, then Guatemala greatly undervalued its own.
Until I Find You: Disappeared Children and Coercive Adoptions in Guatemala, by Rachel Nolan, Harvard University Press
International adoption has sharply declined over the last 15 years, but the fraud and corruption that characterized many countries’ adoption systems in its heyday is only now coming to light. One of the worst offenders was Guatemala, where the government used international adoption to cover up domestic problems such as disintegrated families, mass poverty, and genocide. Historian Rachel Nolan tells the sad tale in her new book Until I Find You: Disappeared Children and Coercive Adoptions in Guatemala.
The numbers are astounding. Despite its relatively small population, Guatemala overtook Russia and South Korea in the “sender” nation rankings in the 1990s, meaning more total children were adopted from Guatemala than from those much larger nations. In 2007, the zenith of international adoption in Guatemala, one in 100 native-born children were adopted by parents in the U.S., Canada, Sweden, or other Western countries.
Adult adoptees, equipped with advancements in DNA testing and social media connectivity, are now returning to Guatemala to find their birth parents. Few find the answers they crave. One story that Nolan tells culminates in justice: Via DNA testing, adoptee Dolores Preat finds her birth family and learns that a neighbor kidnapped her as an infant. The neighbor, who pretended to be her birth mother and sold her to a lawyer in Guatemala City, was sentenced to 15 years in prison in 2015.
Perverse incentives plagued the Guatemalan adoption industry. A privatized system enriched lawyers who looked the other way as their underlings bribed and deceived birth mothers. Western nations, including the U.S., were complicit in numerous ways. American evangelical Christians were key in providing relief after a devastating earthquake killed more than 20,000 Guatemalans in 1976, but they also pushed for increased international adoption in Guatemala without understanding that the system was rife with abuse. Birth mothers were often illiterate and spoke Mayan languages instead of Spanish, which was used in adoption proceedings and documents. Nolan questions how many of these mothers truly understood the permanence of an international adoption arrangement.
And, of course, there’s the fact that so many of these mothers were desperately poor. Many felt pressured to relinquish their children after hearing adoption advocates describe the improvements to the children’s “material lives” that were only possible in wealthy countries. A middle-class lifestyle in the U.S. seemed unimaginably privileged to most Guatemalans. But those material advantages came at a cost. Preat, when seeking criminal charges against her kidnapper, cited among the harms she has suffered her loss of “family, identity, and culture.”
In Nolan’s view, U.S. policymakers contributed to immiseration in Guatemala and its neighbors. She cites decades of interference, from the CIA-backed coup in the 1950s to American funding for population control methods that meant giving Guatemalan women IUDs but no subsequent medical care for complications or removals. Nolan also mentions the uptick in Guatemalan men migrating to the U.S. to look for work in the 1980s and how the families they left behind struggled financially, leading many mothers to relinquish children of all ages. U.S. policy has only become more permissive of the constant stream of Central American men illegally crossing the southern border.
Guatemala is an extreme example of what happens when adoption is about finding children for would-be parents instead of the other way around. Nolan reviewed hundreds of adoption files and found examples of adoptive parents making specific requests for the gender, age, and even skin tone of the children they wanted to adopt. Lawyers facilitating the adoptions then dispatched women known as jaladoras, or baby brokers, to find the best matches. Many Guatemalans looked at jaladoras the way New Testament Jews looked at tax collectors like Zaccheus: as traitors. Jaladoras were often willing to do whatever it took to meet their quotas, including, in an extreme case, murder.
Nolan details a sensational quadruple murder orchestrated by an adoption ring to get rid of pesky family members asking about a young boy’s whereabouts after he was trafficked out of the country. In an extra sickening twist, the family was murdered at what was supposed to be a piñata party. But shocking and scandalous crimes aren’t the point of Nolan’s book. Instead, she wants readers to understand that the main factor behind Guatemala’s broken adoption system was mundane: poverty. In such circumstances, a mother’s decision to give up her child was something less than a free choice.
International adoptions closed in Guatemala in 2008, largely as the result of a national panic that foreigners were adopting Guatemalan children to harvest their organs (such rumors and press stories were unfounded). The underlying issues that fueled the Guatemalan adoption industry haven’t disappeared, though, only morphed.
“Dawning awareness of ethical concerns is one reason international adoption is declining around the world,” Nolan writes. “The United States remains the largest receiving country, but the high-water mark was 22,884 children adopted from all over the world in 2004. Since then, numbers of international adoptions are falling fast, even as international surrogacy, which raises parallel ethical issues, is on the rise.”
Nolan, who lists “human rights and social justice” as a specialization on her Boston University bio page, is an unlikely bedfellow for conservatives raising questions about gestational surrogacy, but she is among a cohort of left-leaning academics digging deeper on such issues. Another example is Gretchen Sisson, author of Relinquished: The Politics of Adoption and the Privilege of American Motherhood, published February 2024. On the right, activists like Katy Faust, an adoptive parent and former adoption agency employee, are addressing children’s rights and what a healthy family looks like. Their starting points are different, but they often end up in the same place: giving a voice to society’s voiceless—children.
Unfortunately, Nolan and Sisson’s idea of the voiceless doesn’t include the unborn. Nolan highlights the lack of legal abortion in Guatemala in Until I Find You; Sisson is a co-founder of a group called the Abortion Bridge Collaborative Fund. For Nolan, adoption is coercion, but abortion is a solution. It’s plain to see the logical disconnect: In a society where getting rid of a baby through adoption is the only choice for a single mother, whether she wants to or not, how could abortion be any less coerced?
In most chapters of Until I Find You, the forces separating mothers and children are banal: social stigma, grinding poverty, overreaching social workers. The parts of the book that unmask true evil are the chapters on disappeared children under Efraín Ríos Montt’s short-lived dictatorship in the 1980s. In an attempt to eliminate communist guerrillas and their “seed,” Montt’s forces massacred indigenous villagers and re-educated surviving children. Whether this was accomplished by turning a young child into a gofer for soldiers or sending him to be adopted by a wealthy foreign couple, the regime didn’t care. (Actually, many Guatemalan officials preferred the latter; they stood to make much more money that way.) Adoption files were used as evidence of genocide in the 2013 trial that resulted in Montt’s conviction for crimes against humanity.
Those who control the education and upbringing of children control the future. In Nolan’s estimation, the Guatemalan government seriously undervalued its future by undervaluing its children, turning to international adoption to save money on orphanage costs instead of addressing root causes. International adoption seemed like a salve, but the wound left untreated continued to fester.
The post The Worst-Case Scenario of International Adoption appeared first on The American Conservative.
But that’s no reason for the U.S. to get involved.
Opponents of the military junta ruling Burma (or Myanmar) recently took another small step toward winning the ongoing civil war. The Karen National Liberation Army, an ethnic militia which has long fought for autonomy, captured some 600 government soldiers and seized Myawaddy, a busy border city. Humiliated, the regime had to fly personnel and records out of neighboring Mae Sot in Thailand. Last weekend, fighting continued as insurgents attacked retreating government forces. While the junta recaptured the city Tuesday, its gain remains tenuous. Reinforcements sent two weeks ago from a base three hours away have yet to arrive, blocked by other KNLA units.
The victory seems modest since Myawaddy has limited strategic value. Yet the town was a fixture of military control when in years past I visited the region to cover the KNLA’s fight on behalf of the largely Christian Karen people. The current battle follows a coordinated offensive last October by several other militia groups that seized several border posts in the Shan State to the north, neighboring China. Overall, the opposition controls upwards of 60 percent of the country.
Most important, the Tatmadaw, or military, is weakening. Increasing numbers of soldiers are surrendering; insurgents are cooperating more effectively; opponents are capturing abundant military materiel; fighters are targeting junta leaders. In February the so-called State Administration Council, an anodyne title for the brutal military regime, announced enforcement of universal conscription. Draft avoidance activities burgeoned, from hurried marriages to foreign flight. Potential conscripts also have joined both the ethnic militias and the People’s Defense Force, which is contesting control of the dominant Burman heartland.
The regime retains an advantage in airpower, which it deploys ruthlessly and cruelly against insurgents and civilians alike. However, military morale is cratering. Observed Thomas Kean, a consultant with the International Crisis Group: “They have lost thousands of soldiers, either killed, wounded or taken as prisoners, and lost a huge amount of weapons.” Even before the latest losses “There was already some discontent within the military leadership and the pro-military circles.”
Indeed, there is increasing speculation that the army, whose common soldiers are abused, underfed, isolated, and misused, might break. No longer are troops battling distant ethnic groups. Now they are fighting members of their own villages and even families. Expanding resistance across the country has stretched the Tatmadaw thin. Wives and children patrol bases in the absence of the men. Forcing regime opponents into uniform might spur resistance within the armed forces, with increased desertions, surrenders, sabotage, and attacks on officers, bringing to mind “fragging” by U.S. personnel in Vietnam.
Disagreements are growing even among top commanders, with harsh punishments meted out to those who fail. Additional defeats will only increase tensions. Moreover, the opposition has demonstrated its ability to target military leaders and reach the capital, meaning no one is safe. Observed Terence Lee of the S. Rajaratnam School of International Studies: “The more disillusioned they become, the more likely they are willing to move against [coup leader] Min Aung Hlaing. He promised a bed of roses but that didn’t turn out to be the case as the country now is in civil war and many do not accept the legitimacy of the Tatmadaw.”
The military has misruled the country since 1962. The junta held elections in 1990, which resulted in a landslide victory for Aung San Suu Kyi, the daughter of an independence hero, and the National League for Democracy. The regime voided the election, triggering democracy protests that were swiftly crushed. The nation’s Burman heartland, though hostile to military rule, remained largely quiescent as conflict continued to rage in the ethnic-dominated borderlands.
In 2010 the Tatmadaw created a hybrid system, sharing power with an elected civilian government. The Burmese military, like that in Thailand, expected to maintain control by rigging the electoral system and manipulating the government structure. Suu Kyi and the NLD, however, won overwhelmingly despite the generals’ hope to fracture the opposition. Fearing that it was losing authority, Hlaing, described as “power-hungry, slithery and wolflike,” staged a coup in February 2022. The Tatmadaw took over government agencies, abolished democratic institutions, proscribed demonstrations, arrested Suu Kyi, NLD leaders, and other military critics, and staged Stalinesque show trials of its opponents, including Suu Kyi.
Hlaing called for “unity between the military and the people,” but the latter are the junta’s primary victims. The regime soon crushed non-violent protests and mass civil disobedience, killing and imprisoning thousands.
The Tatmadaw miscalculated. The Burmese people, especially the younger generation, had come to expect more freedom and opportunities. No longer was there peaceful acceptance of military rule. Multiple ethnic militias reignited rural insurgencies that had ebbed a decade ago and trained an influx of urban volunteers. More dramatically, opposition throughout majority Bamar or Burman territory turned violent with formation of the PDF units. An incredible 315 of 330 townships are aflame. The regime is almost alone in waging war on its population as the opposition formed the National Unity Government.
The coup and resulting conflict have left the country in shambles. Nikkei Asia reported, “The economy and currency have tumbled perilously, the peace process with insurgent ethnic minorities has foundered, the medical system has buckled after defiant doctors and nurses quit public hospitals or were arrested, and hundreds of thousands of internally displaced people cower along remote borders.”
As resistance has stiffened, the military has grown more murderous and destructive, killing civilians, destroying villages, and displacing residents. So far, tens of thousands of civilians have been killed and almost three million people have been driven from their homes. Some analysts fear that another million might be displaced this year by the regime’s “campaign of brutality.”
What to do? There are no easy answers.
Washington should eschew military involvement. On my first trip to the region a quarter century ago, Bo Mya, the legendary Karen leader, asked me why Washington did not do for the Karen what it had done for the Kosovars, whom the U.S. protected from the Serb military. My cynical response was that their land held no oil. More seriously, the U.S. has no important security interests in Burma that warrant going to war. So distant is this battle that, amazingly, none of Washington’s predictable war hawks have advocated intervention. Adding another conflict would be especially foolish when the allies are engaged in a dangerous proxy war with Russia, North Korea is building ICBMs capable of hitting America, Israel’s war on Gaza has inflamed the Mideast, and American officials are threatening China if it attacks Taiwan.
There simply is no justification for risking the lives of Americans, including military personnel, in Burma. Overthrowing the regime would be costly and transfer responsibility for Burma’s future to America, creating an unpredictable, probably violent long-term commitment. Supporting an insurgency is tempting but could go bad. The U.S. would become responsible for the outcome—and war is rarely a good humanitarian tool.
The best strategy is working with friendly states to weaken the regime. The U.S. has sanctioned Naypyidaw, but most countries in the region, including India, Japan, and the Southeast Asian states, have proved reluctant to follow suit. Resistance to targeting general commerce, most notably energy sales, which would further impoverish the general population, is understandable. Nevertheless, the regime deserves the same treatment as Russia when it comes to cutting state revenue and restricting military purchases, especially of jet fuel for the air force, as well as defunding businesses run by military elites and their cronies.
Although it is premature to recognize NUG, as the junta’s hold on power weakens Burma’s neighbors might become more willing to expand ties with it. Naypyidaw’s defeat in Myawaddy caused the Thai prime minister to suggest pushing the junta to engage the opposition. Along with official ties could come as much as a billion dollars in regime funds frozen after the coup.
Naypyidaw’s most important supporters are Russia and China. The former is unlikely to abandon the junta so long as it is under attack by the allies over Ukraine. Which is another good reason to try to end, rather than prolong, the Ukraine war.
Beijing might be more willing to cooperate on Burma. The former’s relationship with the Tatmadaw was undermined by the former’s suspicion, even hostility. In contrast, China established good relations with the Suu Kyi government. Beijing has shown no great affection for the junta. Indeed, tired of the regime’s toleration of organized criminal activity along its border, China apparently acquiesced in last October’s insurgent operations in Shan State. Washington should disclaim any intent to push China aside in a new democratic Burma and encourage the Xi government to take a more balanced stance between regime and insurgency. Beijing might prefer a stable, prosperous though democratic neighbor which leaned its way rather than the status quo.
Finally, governments friendly with Burma’s democrats should encourage cooperation between the largely Bamar PDF and the ethnic movements. To forge a unified opposition against the junta, anti-regime elements need to build trust, especially by guaranteeing greater autonomy for ethnic minorities. Promises of financial aid from the region’s democracies, starting with Japan and India, might help encourage greater comity.
For more than six decades the Burmese people have suffered from political oppression and economic deprivation due to military rule. A decade ago, they had reason to expect a brighter future. The Tatmadaw is delivering the opposite. The road ahead remains long and hard, but recent gains by the opposition revive hope of creating a new Burma, one in which the Burmese people finally rule.
The post Burma’s Military Junta Totters Toward the Brink appeared first on The American Conservative.
State of the Union: President Biden takes a victory lap after coaxing Speaker Johnson into passing more support for the war in Ukraine.
President Joe Biden’s administration is taking a victory lap as the president prepares to sign a $95 billion foreign aid package that includes $61 billion for Ukraine.
Specifically, Biden and company are boasting about how they worked over House Speaker Mike Johnson in the six months since the Louisianan started his tenure. “For months, President Joe Biden and his team pressed the case for additional aid both publicly and privately, leaning into courting Johnson,” CNN, one of the administration’s favored outlets, reported. The effort mostly took place, “behind the scenes through White House meetings, phone calls and detailed briefings on the battlefield impacts, administration officials said.”
The courtship started with “a Situation Room briefing one day after Johnson became speaker,” per the CNN report. Johnson was worked over by National Security Adviser Jake Sullivan and Office of Management and Budget Director Shalanda Young—even Biden himself stopped by the meeting. From then on, Biden administration officials were in regular contact with the Speaker. The aids Steve Ricchetti and Shuwanza Goff ran point together for the administration’s courtship of Johnson and his staff. Sullivan gave Johnson the occasional ring; Biden gave Johnson the occasional invite to 1600 Pennsylvania Ave.
CNN’s story and others like it should embarrass Republicans. They should embarrass Republican voters, who have put their trust in their elected officials to represent them. They should embarrass Republican lawmakers, who have lost on every major issue this Congress. But most of all, they should embarrass Mike Johnson.
The post How Biden Courted Johnson for Ukraine Aid appeared first on The American Conservative.
The furore around the case underlines how vague the concept of “election interference” is.
The former President Donald Trump says Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg’s hush money case against him is election interference. Prosecutors say the same about the hush money payments themselves.
The question then becomes: What is election interference?
“This case is about a criminal conspiracy,” said Bragg deputy Matthew Colangelo. “Trump orchestrated a criminal scheme to corrupt the 2016 presidential election.”
“The prosecution detailed allegations of a sensational tabloid scheme to ‘catch and kill’ stories that could prove damaging to Trump, a plan, the DA’s office said, that was elicited with Trump’s blessing and that he was directly implicated in,” writes NBC News’ Katherine Doyle.
One of the legacies of the Trump-Russia affair is the persistence of imprecisely defined “election interference.” In that case, the phrase was used to describe unmistakable crimes like hacking and stealing emails, but also generally hamfisted Russian attempts to swing American public opinion.
Many Democrats believe, or at least told pollsters they believed, that Russia altered the vote totals to get Trump elected. This was not backed by any evidence, but it is a perfectly reasonable way to interpret the term “election interference.”
Much of what was described as interference had to do with the publication of unflattering information about Hillary Clinton through WikiLeaks dumps of her emails. (Forever memorialized in the segments of the press that attribute her 2016 loss to a trivial matter of “her emails!”)
“The Russians—in my opinion and based on the intel and the counterintel people I’ve talked to—could not have known how best to weaponize that information unless they had been guided,” Clinton later said when she laid out her own theory of Trump-Russia collusion. “Guided by Americans and guided by people who had polling and data information.”
Special counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation never found any evidence of such collusion or coordination, just indications that the Trump camp liked the anti-Clinton info getting out there.
The most damaging revelation might have been the Democratic National Committee’s attempts to tip the scales in favor of Clinton during the primaries. This news led to some Bernie Sanders supporters staying home, voting for third-party candidates like the Green Party’s Jill Stein, or even pulling the lever for Trump. This in turn helped Trump penetrate the “blue wall” in the Rust Belt.
You could argue that the information was overblown. Clinton would have likely won the nomination without the DNC’s favoritism—Richard Nixon would have still won a 49-state landslide in 1972 without Watergate—and that these were mild interventions by an entity that is primarily tasked with electing Democrats. Bernie had never really run for anything as a Democrat before those primaries, even though he caucuses with them in the Senate, and was sincerely viewed by most party professionals as a weaker general election candidate.
But the information was also true and of public interest. All the talk of Russian interference never really grappled with how to reconcile the public’s need to know pertinent if politically inconvenient facts with the understandable desire to not have our elections influenced by hostile—or even friendly—foreign powers.
Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY) just recently suggested Israeli voters should replace Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. Voters here replacing the Squad would undoubtedly be welcomed in Israel.
Allegations of interference in the Iranian hostage crisis bedeviled Ronald Reagan’s campaign, with the New Republic declaring the science settled on the matter last year. Nixon has similarly been painted with the collusion brush for interference in Lyndon Johnson’s Vietnam peace talks, a story given legs in Trumpian fashion by LBJ-ordered surveillance.
But in the hush-money case there is no foreign government involved. The placement of favorable stories and the attempted killing of negative ones is pretty central to how modern political campaigns do business. Partisans have been trading accusations of “dirty tricks” for virtually all of the country’s history.
If we’re going to begin to criminally prosecute people for the seedier side of politics, we are probably going to have to develop a better working definition of election interference than “attempting to swing public opinion in a way that will benefit a candidate I don’t like.”
It’s probably too much to ask that the election-year Bragg case against a leading presidential candidate get us there, but hope springs eternal.
The post The Bragg ‘Interference’ Allegations Are Business as Usual appeared first on The American Conservative.
A new book examines weaknesses in China’s meritocratic system—and in our own.
The Rise and Fall of the EAST: How Exams, Autocracy, Stability, and Technology Brought China Success, and Why They Might Lead to Its Decline, Yasheng Huang, Yale University Press, 440 pages
Whether you are a globalist or a supporter of economic nationalism, a China hawk or dove, you must consider a number of critical questions. What is the basis for the stability of CCP—how has the party managed to survive so many upheavals and not lose legitimacy? Does Xi Jinping’s rule signify a further strengthening of the Chinese Communist Party’s power, or will it lead to a weakening of its foundations? And finally, is China’s system capable of surpassing the West technologically, and therefore militarily and economically? Yasheng Huang’s latest book, The Rise and Fall of the EAST: How Exams, Autocracy, Stability, and Technology Brought China Success, and Why They Might Lead to Its Decline, offers a careful analysis of these questions that distinguishes it from the biased and predictable speculations of many commentators.
According to Huang, the sources of political stability can be found in the institution of keju, the civil service examination, that molded Chinese mentality and institutions. The tradition of examinations dates back to several centuries before Christ, but it was during the Sui Dynasty in the 6th century AD that the keju system was established. This system remained in effect until the fall of the empire in the 20th century.
Thanks to the keju, emperors were able to create a uniform class of educated bureaucrats. The exam enforced an intellectual monoculture; to pass, one had to master Neo-Confucian philosophy. It advocated absolute submission to the ruler’s will and strictly prohibited questioning his decisions. As Huang points out, the examinations focused on the inculcation of complex doctrines to the extent that “there was no time or energy to do much of anything else, whether that was exploring new ideas and natural phenomena, delving into mathematics, organizing a political opposition, or developing a crucial trait in the development of liberalism and science—skepticism. The human capacity was already taxed to its very limit.” This stifling intellectual environment meant that a culture of democratic discussion never emerged.
The keju also curtailed the influence of aristocracy and its regional power; the emperor no longer had to rely on nobility, having a new class of bureaucrats to carry out his orders. Further, this system monopolized human capital. An intelligentsia like that of Czarist Russia—a country with a lower literacy rate than the Middle Kingdom—never developed in imperial China. The class of civil servants absorbed all intellectuals, instilling in them a Neo-Confucian loyalism. For the same reasons, a bourgeois class never emerged. Emperors viewed trade as a disruptive element, and in the hierarchy of Confucian values, market activities were regarded with contempt.
Thus, the paths to social mobility were narrowed to one: the civil service. The enduring effects of the keju system help to explain CCP’s stability.
The longevity of the CCP is astounding, particularly in view of the shocks the party has weathered. These include surviving not only the disastrous Great Leap Forward and the Cultural Revolution but also the Tiananmen protests of 1989, the Asian Financial Crisis of 1998, the Global Financial Crisis of 2008, the SARS epidemic of 2003, and Covid-19. The Party has implemented draconian reforms, such as the One Child Policy and the mass layoffs from state-owned enterprises in the 1990s, during which between 30 and 50 million people lost their jobs. It has withstood internal power struggles, globalization, the growth of the private sector, and the expansion of the middle class.
Some suggest that the resilience of the CCP should be attributed to “performance legitimacy.” Yet a closer examination of the Chinese Communists’ governance reveals that its stability cannot solely be explained in this manner, especially considering its history of explosive growth alongside political catastrophes.
Huang proposes an alternative explanation for the CCP’s longevity: “axiomatic legitimacy.” According to this perspective, the state’s legitimacy is seen as unconditional; it has been deeply ingrained in the Chinese mentality through the keju, which emphasized obedience to the ruler and created a natural inclination towards statism. Given more than a thousand years of autocracy and intellectual homogenization, such a form of governance does not appear abnormal to the populace.
But can the legacy of imperial meritocracy explain why the PRC did not end up like Soviet Russia? Huang suggests that China’s political history can be understood through the prism of a pursuit of balance between heterogeneity—embracing diversity and autonomy—and the homogenization necessary for governing such a massive country. This delicate equilibrium between what Huang refers to as “scale and scope” has been achieved only a few times throughout the history of the Middle Kingdom, most recently by the CCP reformers.
Huang adopts the concept of M-Form and U-Form organizations from managerial theory to explain this. In U-Form organizations, decisions are made through a tight vertical hierarchy by general offices; for example, the sales department is responsible for sales across all regions. In contrast, in M-Form organizations, each regional branch operates its own sales department. This approach mitigates informational overload and conflicts of interest within individual offices. The Soviet economy worked according to the U-Form model, whereas the Chinese economy has adopted the M-Form structure since the late 1970s.
In Communist China, provinces were endowed with a significant degree of autonomy, creating a set of incentives distinct from those in Russia. Unlike USSR, where regions received funding from the central government, Chinese provinces lived off collected taxes from companies operating within their boundaries, encouraging a more pro-business attitude.
The goal to maximize GDP has spurred innovation within the Chinese system. Successful experiments could be, and often were, replicated across other parts of the country. In contrast, Russia dictated all changes from the center, which lacked the feedback from local levels. Huang observes that regional autonomy prevented Beijing from enforcing central planning. The shift towards a market economy occurred not because the central authorities decided to make this transition, but because they lost the capacity to execute central planning effectively.
GDP served as the meritocratic element within this decentralized structure. Regional leaders were primarily evaluated based on this metric, which, in turn, granted them room for maneuver—the focus was on growth, regardless of how it was achieved. When GDP becomes the primary objective, concepts like class struggle or mass campaigns fade into the background, resulting in a more rational and stable system.
The Gaokao, China’s college entrance exam, and CCP schools represent the communist version of the keju meritocracy. Just as in imperial China, human capital today is channeled through the civil service examination system. The route to the top of the party passes through provincial governance, where GDP serves as the most important metric for assessment.
This system may be witnessing a transformation; Xi is eroding its meritocratic character and restricting its autonomy.
According to Huang, Xi’s leadership represents a profound shock to the reformist system established by Deng Xiaoping and his successors. Xi has steered China away from the political moderation that characterized the party’s approach since the 1990s.
Although Xi’s predecessors also engaged in anti-corruption crackdowns, their efforts were surgical and, in contrast to the current campaigns, did not involve millions of people. Another instance of Xi’s new rigidity is the curbing of fintech and gaming industries, private educational services, and the real estate sector. The equilibrium between autonomy and control, or scope and scale, that has been so rarely achieved in China’s history has been unsettled by Xi’s actions, affecting not only the economy but also the very essence of the CCP system. The meritocratic emphasis on GDP has been overshadowed by vague criteria such as “political integrity,” paving the way for arbitrary political decisions. While the author acknowledges that the focus on GDP has led to issues like the fabrication of statistics or a disregard for environmental concerns, it is crucial to recognize that the alternative, that is political criteria, could prove to be far more detrimental.
As for the downfall of the USSR and the survival of the PRC, Xi has his own interpretation. According to him, the culprit is the so-called “historical nihilism”: the regime was destined to collapse as Marxist faith waned. Huang argues, however, that Xi overlooks the strengths of the reformist system built by previous CCP generations. As a result, the scope for political, intellectual, and economic autonomy has further narrowed: University curricula increasingly focus on Marxism and the Xi Jinping Thought, and private companies are required to introduce Party cells into their organizations. Contrary to viewing the private sector as the “crown jewels” of the economy, he believes China’s development stems from the design of party officials.
This is where Huang’s thesis may show an excessive emphasis on market mechanisms. Undoubtedly, Chinese companies have demonstrated remarkable vitality, yet this vitality might not have been stimulated without the subsidies, preferential loans, or tax breaks provided by the state. The term “industrial policy” is scarcely mentioned in Huang’s book, which is regrettable. A more careful consideration of CCP’s neomercantilism could have lent more nuance to his argument.
Nevertheless, this observation does not diminish the strength of the thesis that under Xi, the issue of succession in the CCP has gained unprecedented importance. In the Chinese empire, succession was determined by heredity; in the PRC, its outcome is shaped by political maneuvering and factional struggles. Huang notes that in modern autocracies, 68 percent of power transitions occur through coups d’état. By contrast, in imperial China, violence accounted for only 38 percent of succession cases. While tensions over succession have frequently sparked crises within the CCP, they have not led to systemic collapse.
On the other hand, under Xi, the author expresses concern that China may be drifting toward the pattern seen in modern autocracies. The elimination of internal opposition, the removal of term limits, and the cult of personality mark a clear departure from the “gentle politics” framework established by Deng Xiaoping, within which the PRC has functioned for the past several decades.
To China’s leadership, technology represents the paramount advantage in securing national power. Take for instance this study from a think tank affiliated with the Ministry of Security, which argues that in the realm of great power competition, technology is the critical determinant of success—a perspective repeatedly endorsed by Xi.
In addressing the so-called Needham question—that is, why China, despite once having a significant technological advantage over the West, has lost its edge—Huang offers an original answer: the keju system. He argues that the intellectual homogenization and monopolization of human capital undermined the conditions necessary for innovation. The delicate balance between autonomy and control, crucial for the generation of new ideas and innovations, was reestablished only by the Communist reformers and lasted until the Xi era. Two critical factors contributed to the construction of this balance: Hong Kong and scientific cooperation with foreign countries.
Globalization has facilitated the development of international collaborations with research centers around the world, enabling Chinese universities to bypass the need for liberalization. Huang notes that “international collaborations provide access to foreign talent, capabilities, and ideas, as well as to the ‘think-different’ attitude that has been lacking and repressed domestically.”
Hong Kong has played an equally pivotal role in providing Mainland companies with access to venture capital, enabling them to circumvent the constraints imposed on the private sector. Without access to Hong Kong’s financial markets, companies like ByteDance or Lenovo, along with thousands of small and medium-sized enterprises, would have faced capital shortages and would never grow in such a rapid way.
Geopolitical tensions have resulted in a reduced scope and frequency of foreign cooperation. The clampdown on Hong Kong has transformed it from a bastion of free market principles and the rule of law into just another Chinese city (some claim that, to the contrary, a tighter integration would be beneficial for economic dynamism). According to Huang, these actions will ultimately harm the PRC, undermining the very foundation necessary for technological competitiveness.
If this book were read by someone with a hawkish view on China, they might draw two conclusions that could be unsettling for liberal minds. First: Further integration of Hong Kong into the PRC is a good thing, precisely because it will be a self-inflicted wound. Second: There is an argument for tighter restrictions on scientific cooperation (making, for instance, the admission of Chinese scientists contingent upon their agreement to work exclusively in the West).
The Rise and Fall of the EAST is a book about the crisis of China’s authoritarian meritocracy, so naturally it provokes reflection on the state of meritocracy in the West, where the idea that ability should determine success has become controversial in recent years.
While meritocracy once received strong support from the left, viewed as a pathway for social mobility for the working class, today’s attitude towards this ideal has shifted dramatically. Criticism of the SATs, justified by claims that these tests are saturated with bias against racial minorities, increased the importance of factors unrelated to ability like ethnic identification.
Populist critiques of meritocracy highlight two primary failures. First, the elites produced by this system have demonstrated a poor track record: From the Vietnam War through the occupations of Iraq and Afghanistan to the financial crisis of 2008, the “best and brightest” have often fallen dramatically short of expectations. Higher education, rather than enhancing their abilities, often inflates their self-confidence to delusional levels. The second accusation targets universities: they have shifted from recognizing the most deserving individuals to perpetuating privilege.
As Adrian Wooldridge notes in The Aristocracy of Talent, meritocracy is the worst system—except for all the others. The principle that an individual’s place in society should be determined by ability and effort arguably represents the most universal ideal uniting the West today. Far from inherently favoring elites, this ideal originally emerged in opposition to the undeserved usurpation of positions within the social, political, and economic hierarchy.
In America, its heyday came at the beginning of the Cold War. The launch of Sputnik raised fears in Washington that the Soviets might win the brain race, and thus the geopolitical competition. It was during the early stages of confrontation with the USSR that standardized tests gained prominence, as tapping into the largest possible talent pool—effectively democratizing education—became imperative for national security. As Julius Krein explains: “Driven in large part by great power competition, university education went from a narrow, elitist pursuit—led by the Ivy League and ‘Saint Grottlesex’ feeder schools, along with regional replications—to a national and meritocratic endeavor.”
With the Cold War’s end, both the role of universities and the nature of American meritocracy underwent significant changes. Neoliberal policies, embraced by both the left and the right, led to the abandonment of capital-intensive sectors and spurred deindustrialization. As factories closed, elites promulgated the mantra that education would provide those affected by offshoring with access to “jobs of the future.” These promises failed to materialize. Universities did not usher in a bright future where everyone became knowledge workers; instead, they turned into a form of job insurance for the offspring of privileged families.
Krein suggests that the Claudine Gay scandal may herald a return to reason, as more colleges started to reinstate SAT requirements. The harsh realities of great power competition may dispel previous illusions. Nevertheless, there remains much work to be done. Alongside Krein’s proposal to eliminate diploma prerequisites for many jobs, another idea worth considering (similar to a practice in Singapore) involves financing the education of the most talented students in exchange for their commitment to work in state institutions for a certain period of time.
The drive towards economic nationalism highlights the importance of achieving a degree of self-sufficiency in domains such as semiconductors. The economist Alex Tabarrok points out that this sector—and many others that are technologically challenging—requires workers with exceptionally high IQs. This raises the important questions of how to select these individuals, and how to prevent their talents from being misallocated in fields like finance or law.
Another issue concerns political meritocracy. The projects that policy-makers aim to implement today are so complex and multifaceted that asking questions about the cognitive capabilities of those making these decisions should be inevitable, yet is often overlooked, as this study demonstrates.
Finally, if America wants to take in immigrants, which ones? Research suggests that their potential to thrive and contribute to the modern economy is influenced by their cultural heritage, with notable effects persisting into the second generation. The effort of rebuilding the American system requires not only inventing a new kind of mercantilism, but a new form of meritocracy as well.
The post Meritocracy and the Great Power Competition appeared first on The American Conservative.
There are problems money can’t fix.
On April 20, the U.S. House of Representatives passed the long-delayed $61 billion aid package for Ukraine. The package quickly passed Tuesday night through the Senate on its way to President Joe Biden’s desk, where it will quickly be signed.
House Speaker Mike Johnson reportedly reversed course and led the aid package through the House in part because, during intelligence briefings, he came to “believe the intel” that without the “lethal aid,” “Vladimir Putin would continue to march through Europe if he were allowed. I think he might go to the Baltics next. I think he might have a showdown with Poland or one of our NATO allies.”
That Ukraine is a stepping stone in Russia’s march through Europe has long been a key argument in justifying continued aid for Ukraine. Johnson should not have so readily believed it. Aside from the not unimportant question of whether Russia even has the ability to invade Europe and engage in a war with all of NATO, there is no evidence that this is Putin’s intent. U.S. Ambassador to NATO Julianne Smith said on April 2 that she “really want[s] to be clear” that “we do not have indicators or warnings right now that a Russian war is imminent on NATO territory.”
Nor does the historical record suggest waging war on NATO and conquering Europe has ever been Putin’s intent. Putin’s claim that the decision to go to war was motivated by the security necessity of keeping Ukraine out of NATO has been verified by NATO and Ukrainian officials. Davyd Arakhamia, who led the Ukrainian negotiating team at the Istanbul talks, says that Russia was “prepared to end the war if we…committed that we would not join NATO.” Ukrainian Volodymyr Zelensky called the promise not to join NATO “the first fundamental point for the Russian Federation” and said 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.”
If Ukraine was a member state of NATO and tried to take back Crimea militarily, then Russia and NATO could find themselves at war. If Putin went to war to prevent this scenario and avoid a war with NATO, as he has stated a number of times, then it would seemingly make little sense that he would launch a war against Ukraine as a stepping stone to war on NATO.
But aside from the question of whether Johnson should have been convinced of the need to aid Ukraine, there is the question of whether the $61 billion will provide the aid it is intended to give.
There are five things the aid package will not do for Ukraine. It will not provide enough money. It will not provide the badly needed weapons, nor deliver them on time. It will not provide the even more badly needed troops. And it will not provide victory.
Though $61 billion is a massive amount of money, it is not massive enough to defeat Russia. Ukraine accomplished little but the loss of life and the most advanced weapons during its centerpiece counteroffensive when it was receiving even more.
“$61 billion will not change the outcome of this war,” Nicolai Petro, Professor of Political Science at the University of Rhodes and the author of The Tragedy of Ukraine, told The American Conservative. “In order to change the outcome, much, much more money is needed. Just how much more? We know, because just talking about it is one of the things that got the head of the Ukrainian armed forces, Valery Zaluzhny, fired in February. In an interview in December 2023, Zaluzhny pointed out that a mere 61 billion USD would not suffice to liberate all of Ukraine. That, he said, would require five to seven times that amount, or $350-400 billion.” There is the additional danger that future aid packages might all be smaller.
Even if the money was sufficient, it would not provide Ukraine with the weapons it needs because the weapons are not available for purchase. Retired U.S. Army Colonel Daniel Davis, Senior Fellow at Defense Priorities, agrees that the $61 billion “is fairly small in terms of the overall need.” But Davis adds that “even if you get the money, you’re not going to have the number of artillery shells, interceptor missiles for air defense. You can’t make the artillery shells any faster than we are right now. It’s a matter of physical capacity: we can’t do it.”
And even if the West could produce the weapons, there is the question of whether they could deliver them to Ukraine on time. Retired U.S. Air Force Colonel Bruce Slawter, who served as attaché at the American Embassy in Moscow and spent 25 years working on government assignments in Russia and Ukraine, agrees that there is an “inability to produce weapons that have already been used up in the war” but adds that “any additional funding for Ukraine will take many months, if not a year or more, to have any effect on the battlefield.” And that may be too late if Russia launches a summer offensive as some expect.
Even if the West could provide Ukraine with the weapons on time, the “big problem for Ukraine,” Davis says, is not the provision of weapons, but the “manpower issue.” Ukraine’s losses on the battlefield, to death and injury, have left Ukraine with a bigger manpower problem than artillery problem. A close aide to President Zelensky told TIME magazine in an interview published in November 2023 that, even if the U.S. gave Ukraine all the weapons it needed, they “don’t have the men to use them.”
For all these reasons, the $61 billion aid package will not provide the promised victory. The one thing it will do is prolong the war and continue the loss of Ukrainian life and land.
“The $61 billion will not change the outcome of this war, which is now decisively turning in Russia’s favor,” Petro told TAC. The best the aid package can do, Anatol Lieven, Director of the Eurasia Program at the Quincy Institute, told TAC is “help Ukraine to defend its existing lines – though not ensure that it will be able to do so successfully. What it will not do is to enable Ukraine to break through Russian lines and recover the territory that Ukraine has lost. Given the strength of Russian defenses and the imbalance of numbers and ammunition favouring Russia, that looks militarily impossible for the Ukrainians.”
Though the aid package “is extremely unlikely to have any meaningful impact on the eventual outcome of the war,” Alexander Hill, professor of military history at the University of Calgary, told TAC, it “will certainly prolong the bloodshed.” Geoffrey Roberts, professor emeritus of history at University College Cork, agrees that the aid will just “prolong Ukraine’s agony.” He told TAC that “Ukraine will lose more people, more territory and its viability as an independent state.”
“This decision will only prolong the agony of Ukraine and Europe,” Richard Sakwa, Professor of Russian and European Politics at the University of Kent, told TAC. But, he added, “It also raises the stakes, and pushes the world one step further towards a cataclysm the likes of which we have never seen. Now is the time to start de-escalating, and to outline what it would take to start a diplomatic process of some sort.”
Hill said that if the U.S. wants to help Ukraine “it would be pushing for meaningful negotiations that would include not only territory, but also the future nature of the Ukraine-NATO relationship, with the aim being to facilitate a lasting peace.” Roberts agreed and added that the $60 billion would be better spent on “aiding Ukraine’s postwar recovery, not its further unnecessary destruction in pursuit of the West’s proxy war with Russia.”
In trying to help Ukraine, the aid package will in fact prolong its tragedy.
The post What $61 Billion for Ukraine Won’t Do appeared first on The American Conservative.
The American brand will suffer so long as Washington pretends its capacities are limitless.
It is an axiom of warfare that it is always desirable to have friendly territory beyond one’s own borders or the capacity to prevent the buildup of significant military power in neutral territory for an attack against one’s own territory. When it lacked the military strength to do much, the United States promulgated the Monroe Doctrine with a similar purpose in mind.
When Moscow sent Russian forces into eastern Ukraine in February 2022, it did so without any plan of conquest or intention to permanently control Ukrainian territory. As Western military observers pointed out at the time, the Russian force that intervened was far too small and incapable for any mission beyond limited intervention for a brief period. In fact, Western observers predicted Russian forces would soon run out of ammunition, equipment, and soldiers.
The rationale for Moscow’s limited military commitment was obvious. Moscow originally sought neutrality for Ukraine as a solution to Ukraine’s hostility toward Russia and its cooperation with NATO, not territorial subjugation or conquest. Moscow believed, not unreasonably, that a neutral Ukrainian nation-state could be a cordon sanitaire that would shield Russia from NATO and, at the same time, provide NATO with insulation from Russia.
Nearly three years of Washington’s practically limitless funding for modern weapons and support in the form of spaced-based surveillance, intelligence, and reconnaissance for a proxy war designed to destroy Russia makes this approach laughable. Chancellor Merkel’s admission that the Western sponsored Minsk Accords were really designed to buy time for Ukraine to build up its military power is enough for Moscow to reject Western promises to ever respect, let alone enforce, Ukrainian neutrality.
When questioned on January 19 about the potential for negotiations with Washington and NATO, Russia’s Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov said, “We are ready [for negotiations]. But unlike the Istanbul story, we will not have a pause in hostilities during the negotiations. The process must continue. Secondly, of course, the realities on the ground have become different, significantly different.” What do Lavrov’s words mean?
In 1982, Marshal Nikolai Ogarkov, Chief of the Soviet General Staff, argued that control of the Rhine River would determine the outcome of any future war with NATO in Central Europe. There is little doubt that Russia’s senior military leaders have already concluded that Russian control of the Dnieper River is essential to Russian national security.
In addition to annexing historically Russian cities like Odessa and Kharkiv, Moscow will almost certainly insist on a modern demilitarized zone from the Dnieper River to NATO’s eastern border to prevent the reemergence of a hostile military force in Western Ukraine. Whether the Poles, Hungarians, or Belarusians decide to engage Moscow in discussions regarding Ukrainian territory with historic connections to their countries is unknown, but the imminent collapse of the Ukrainian state and armed forces will no doubt inform such discussions.
Washington’s strategy toward Moscow, if it can be called a strategy, consisted of organizing coercive measures across the Atlantic Alliance—economic, diplomatic, and military—to harm Russia fatally and destabilize its government. Washington’s unrealistic approach failed, and NATO, the framework for its implementation, is now fatally weakened, not Russia.
As a result, Washington’s brand has been grievously diminished, even enfeebled. Washington’s belief that with the combined might of NATO’s scientific-industrial power it could achieve a strategic victory over Russia by arming Ukrainians to do the fighting for them backfired badly. Like FDR in 1939, who expected the Germans to end up in a stalemate with the Anglo-French Armies on the model of the First World War, Washington did not consider the possibility that Ukraine would lose the fight.
During the 1930s, FDR became trapped in a debt spiral of “special interest” spending. In defiance of logic and affordability, FDR opted for more Federal spending until he realized that it was not working. With the onset of war in Europe, FDR saw the opportunity to extricate American society from the Depression by steering the United States into war. FDR’s scheme worked. The Second World War reinvigorated the American economy and ended America’s chronic unemployment. At the same time, America’s physical insularity kept American infrastructure and the American People beyond the reach of its enemies.
President Biden and Congress are on a similar course with profound consequences, but today, horrifically destructive modern weapons make the war option suicidal. Put another way, 21st-century problems cannot be solved with the use of 20th-century plans and policies. Instead of framing another false narrative to justify funding for a corrupt Ukrainian state that is collapsing, Washington and its allies should question the rationale for a new, costly cold war directed against Moscow, Beijing, Tehran, and a host of countries with world views that diverge sharply from our own.
Business schools teach their students that good brands have the power to sway decision-making and create communities of like-minded people. It isn’t just companies that need brands; countries need them, too. When asked about Washington’s ability to cope with wars in Ukraine and the Middle East, President Biden said, “We are the most powerful nation in the world, in the history of the world. We can take care of both of these [wars].” Biden was and is wrong. America’s resources are not limitless. Our power is constrained.
In Europe, Asia, the Middle East, Africa, and Latin America, the American brand has been damaged. Americans need (and should demand) a sober-minded analysis of the facts from the men who want to be president. They should be compelled to identify the United States’ true national interests; a process that should also identify the political and cultural realities that are not Washington’s to change.
The post Is It Game, Set, Match to Moscow? appeared first on The American Conservative.
The U.S. government is making itself felt in Orthodox internal politics.
Everyone knows that the Moscow Patriarchate is in bed with the Kremlin. Few realize that the Ecumenical Patriarchate of Constantinople is deeply beholden to the United States government.
This ignorance is surprising, given that many Greek Orthodox leaders are quite proud of the fact. In 1942, Athenagoras Spyrou—the Archbishop of America for the Greek Orthodox Church—wrote to an agent of the Office of Strategic Services. “I have three Bishops, three hundred priests, and a large and far-flung organization,” Athenagoras wrote. “Every one under my order is under yours. You may command them for any service you require. There will be no questions asked and your directions will be executed faithfully.”
In 1947, the OSS was rechristened as the Central Intelligence Agency, or CIA. One year later, Athenagoras was elected Ecumenical Patriarch of Constantinople, the spiritual leader of Eastern Orthodoxy.
One might point out that, when Athenagoras reached out to the OSS, his native Greece was under Nazi occupation. It is understandable that a Greek bishop in America would support the American war effort. But it was more than that. Athenagoras was a strong supporter of American exceptionalism and encouraged Washington’s militarist foreign policy. The U.S. Consul in Istanbul recounted a conversation with Athenagoras in 1951: “As usual, he talked at some length of his belief that the United States must remain in the Near East for several centuries to fulfill the mission which had been given it by God to give freedom, prosperity and happiness to all people.”
(These quotes, by the way, are pulled from a talk given by an Orthodox historian called Matthew Namee at Holy Cross Hellenic College, the Greek seminary in Boston. These are not malicious forgeries peddled by Russian propagandists—the Greek Orthodox are quite proud of their association with the American deep state.)
Athenagoras was not merely an Americanist. He was also known as a renovationist, as liberal Orthodox are known. In 1964, he met with Pope Paul VI in Jerusalem; together, they officially lift the mutual excommunications placed by their predecessors in 1054. This gesture sparked outrage across Orthodox world. Athenagoras was accused of compromising the Orthodox Faith for the sake of a paper union with Rome.
The current Ecumenical Patriarch, Bartholomew, is cut from the same cloth as Athenagoras. He is very close to Pope Francis; the two share a passion for mass immigration and environmental activism. Also like Athenagoras, Bartholomew shares a close relationship with the U.S. government—a partnership that has proven mutually beneficial.
The Ecumenical Patriarch is the spiritual leader of Orthodoxy. However, he only has direct jurisdiction over a few thousand Orthodox Christians in Turkey. The rest of the Greek Orthodox world are autocephalous, or self-governing. This includes the Church of Greece, the Church of Cyprus, and the American metropolises (or dioceses). Many look to Bartholomew for leadership, but they are not directly under his authority. It is also worth noting that a large majority of Orthodox Christians around the world belong to the Russian Orthodox tradition. These churches do not look to Bartholomew for leadership in any meaningful way. Some, like the Patriarchate of Moscow, are in schism with Constantinople.
Bartholomew is not the “pope” of Orthodoxy—although he would like to be. Over the last few decades, the ecumenical patriarch has also worked to consolidate hard power over the various Greek Orthodox churches. This effort has proven most fruitful in the United States.
In 2014, Elpidophoros Lambriniadis, the current Archbishop of America and Bartholomew’s heir apparent, published a short essay called “First Without Equals.” Its name was a play on the phrase primus inter pares, or first among equals. This title originally referred to the Pope of Rome, but was transferred to Patriarch of Constantinople by the Orthodox following the Great Schism of 1054. Of course, the Schism itself was caused in no small part by a sense that the Roman Pontiffs failed to respect the rights and privileges of their fellow bishops, especially in the Christian East. Clearly, the Archbishop was signaling his desire to cultivate a more authoritarian, centralist ecclesiology within the Orthodox Church, a philosophy which has been dubbed Greek papism.
In 2022, during an interview with the Greek newspaper Ta Nea, Elpidophoros was asked if he expected to become the next Ecumenical Patriarch. Elpidophoros demurred, claiming that “the succession will be decided by God.” This, too, is a radical departure from Orthodox tradition. In fact, it goes beyond Greek papism. Even the Roman Catholic Church explicitly denies that the Pope is chosen by God.
Nevertheless, the United States government officially supports the doctrine of Greek papism, as will be shown. Strengthening the Ecumenical Patriarchate’s position within global Orthodoxy serves two purposes. First, it necessarily subtracts from the influence of Constantinople’s rival, the Moscow Patriarchate. Washington regards Russian Orthodoxy as a tool for Kremlin propaganda and, therefore, a legitimate target for counterintelligence operations. Secondly, the renovationist Ecumenical Patriarchs are willing partners in Washington’s campaign to spread liberal, democratic values across the globe.
Consider, for example, the schism in the Ukrainian Church. In 1990, the Patriarchate of Moscow granted self-governing status to the Ukrainian Orthodox Church (UOC). It was not, however, given full autocephaly. However, a group of Ukrainian nationalists led by then-president Minister Petro Poroshenko organized an “independent” Orthodox Church of Ukraine (OCU). With the support of Western media, these nationalists successfully branded the canonical UOC as the “Russian Church.”
In 2018, when asked about the Orthodox Church of Ukraine’s bid for autocephaly, Kurt Volker—then Special Representative of the United States Department of State for Ukraine—appeared to wave the question off. He insisted that the U.S. government does not take a position on such matters and would respect the decision of Bartholomew and his synod.
Make no mistake: By declaring that the decision belongs to the Ecumenical Patriarchate, the U.S. government is taking a position. First of all, autocephaly cannot be granted unilaterally by any patriarch or bishop. Second, if the decision belonged to anyone, it would be the Patriarch of Moscow, the spiritual leader of Slavic Orthodoxy. Even the great Kallistos Ware denounced the Ecumenical Patriarchate for meddling in the Ukrainian Church:
Though I am a metropolitan of the Ecumenical Patriarchate, I am not at all happy about the position taken by Patriarch Bartholomew. With all due respect to my Patriarch, I am bound to say that I agree with the view expressed by the Patriarchate of Moscow that Ukraine belongs to the Russian Church. After all, the Metropolia of Kiev by an agreement of 1676 was transferred from the omophorion of the Ecumenical Patriarchate to that of the Patriarchate of Moscow. So, for 330 years Ukraine has been part of the Russian Church.
Third, just days before Volker gave his interview, Joe Biden—then only the former vice president—flew to Ukraine to express his support for the OCU. As soon as Bartholomew ruled in favor of the OCU church, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo expressed the Trump administration’s firm support for his decision. Since Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, our government has implicitly supported Ukrainian president Vladimir Zelensky’s policy of seizing property (including church buildings) from the UOC and transferring them to the OCU. In one particularly egregious episode, a nationalist mob attacked a UOC church in the middle of a funeral, dispersed the worshippers and beat the celebrant-priest so badly he had to be hospitalized. The kicker? It was a funeral for a Ukrainian soldier who died fighting against Russia.
This one detail cannot be emphasized enough: Whatever the media claims, the canonical UOC is not an arm of Russian influence. Its members are not “pro-Russia”; much less are they Russian collaborators. They, too, are giving their lives to defend their homeland against Russian aggression. But that doesn’t matter to Washington or Constantinople. By supporting the separatists, Bartholomew is undermining Moscow’s influence within global Orthodoxy. And that’s good for the Russophobes in our foreign-policy establishment.
In 2019, the State Department gave $100,000 to the Orthodox Times, a news site strongly aligned with the Ecumenical Patriarchate. The purpose? “To counter entities spreading fake news and misguiding believers in Orthodox communities”—in other words, Russian disinformation.
It’s ironic that Trump’s State Department pursued this pro-Constantinople agenda given that the Ecumenical Patriarchate is openly and proudly aligned with the Democratic Party. The Greek Orthodox Archdiocese of America boasts:
President Truman often emphasized the pro-American convictions of Patriarch Athenagoras and the importance and influence of the Ecumenical Patriarchate, along with the Greek Orthodox community in the U.S., as vital to American foreign policy objectives. Indeed, Truman saw the Patriarchate and Athenagoras as crucial to bolstering the pro-Western resolve of both Greece and Turkey, as well as to promoting stability in the Middle East.
In 2020, Patriarch Bartholomew wrote to congratulate his old friend Biden for defeating Donald Trump in the presidential election. “You can only imagine my great joy and pride for your successful election as the 46th president of your distinguished nation, the United States of America.” Archbishop Elpidophoros, in that same interview with Ta Nea, also offered a thinly-veiled endorsement of Joe Biden:
In America, the issue of abortion has been completely politicized…. It is as if the only qualification for being a good Christian or a good politician depends on one’s stance on the issue of abortion. All other principles and doctrines of Christianity do not matter; you can be a crook, a liar, a swindler, a warmonger, violent, or a misogynist, but if you are against abortion, then you are a politician suitable enough for “pious people” to support.
As Rod Dreher pointed out, this little-noticed interview contains quite a few shocking revelations. For instance, Elpidophoros is not simply concerned that abortion has been “politicized”: he is openly pro-choice. “Women bear the full burden in giving birth and raising their children, while men, otherwise directly involved in the pregnancy, do not bear the same burden,” he told Ta Nea. “Therefore, we must support women’s right to make reproductive decisions of their own free will.” Elpidophoros also discusses how proud he was to support the protests which erupted after the death of George Floyd, as well as the infamous “gay baptism.”
For those who aren’t up on their Orthodox church politics: In 2022, Elpidophoros baptized the sons of two wealthy Greek-Americans, Evangelo Bousis and Peter Dundas. (The children were conceived through surrogacy.) The baptism was performed in Vouliagmeni, a suburb of Athens. This set off a firestorm in world Orthodoxy for two reasons. Firstly, it is wrong to baptize a child if there is little to no chance of their being raised according to the Church’s teachings. The parents are making a commitment to their child to the Christian faith without giving them the tools to fulfill that commitment. Second, visiting clergy (including bishops) must receive permission from the local metropolitan before publicly celebrating the sacraments within their jurisdiction. In this case, the local metropolitan was Antonios of Glyfada. Elpidophoros requested and was granted permission to baptize the children of an American couple, but did not inform Antonios that the parents were a same-sex couple.
Elpidophoros was condemned by the Holy Synod of the Church of Greece as well as the monks of Mount Athos, but he didn’t care. The Archbishop was simply giving the Orthodox world a taste of how he’ll do things once he becomes Ecumenical Patriarch.
There’s more. In 2019, Elpidophoros appointed Father Alexander Karloutsos as vicar-general for the Archdiocese of America. Father Alexander is, for all practical purposes, the Biden family’s pastor. He sits on the board of the Beau Biden Foundation and serves as a spiritual advisor to the President. In 2015, Father Alexander attended a (now infamous) dinner hosted by Hunter Biden at the Café Milano in Georgetown. The dinner was a private reception for several Eastern European oligarchs, including Yury Luzhkov, the profoundly corrupt former Mayor of Moscow. This was the night that Hunter introduced his father to Vadym Pozharskyi, an executive at Burisma, allegedly fulfilling the deal for which Baturina had paid Hunter $3.5 million the year before.
More troublingly, Father Alexander is also close to John Poulos, the Greek-Canadian founder of Dominion Voting Systems. Father Alexander has been credibly accused of serving as a go-between for Poulos and the Bidens during the 2020 election scandal. It is said that the priest relayed information between the two parties, but cannot be subpoenaed due to New York’s clergy privilege laws. Though all parties admit that Father Alexander was in frequent communication with both parties during that time, they also insist that he was simply offering them spiritual counsel. Undoubtedly both Poulos and Biden spent those difficult months in prayer and fasting.
As it happens, in 2018, Father Alexander also found himself at the center of an $80 million financial scandal, which was probed by the U.S. government. The federal government’s investigation to the matter was dropped shortly after it began, despite the fact that no explanation was ever unearthed. When President Biden awarded Father Alexander the Presidential Medal of Freedom last year, he jokingly warned, “I’m going to ruin your reputation by talking.”
Unfortunately, such allegations of corruption are fairly widespread in the Archdiocese of America. The Greek Orthodox Church is by far the wealthiest denomination in this country relative to its size. (A Roman Catholic priest can expect to make no more than $45,000 per year; a Greek Orthodox priest can earn upwards of $130,000.) There are many well-established second-generation families who still feel a deep loyalty to the Church even if they tend not to practice very faithfully.
In other words, the Archdiocese of America is in roughly the same position that the Catholic Church was under Kennedy. It is rich in capital and assets but largely beholden to secular, liberal donors. Hence why the Hellenic College Holy Cross, the Greek Orthodox seminary, refers to former congressman Michael Huffington as a “faithful Orthodox Christian” despite the fact that he’s a practicing homosexual who publicly dissents from the Church’s teaching on sexuality.
Happily, most Greek Orthodox jurisdictions are not renovationist; neither are they in the pocket of the American government or beholden to liberal, secular donors. In fact, when the Greek parliament voted to ratify same-sex marriage, the Church of Greece called the decision “demonic” and excommunicated several of the “immoral lawmakers” who voted for the bill.
But whatever our government may claim, it will promote Bartholomew and his successor, Elpidophoros, as “Greek Popes” in order to liberalize Greek Orthodoxy and counter Russian Orthodoxy. This is the policy of the U.S. government. There are State Department personnel (and taxpayer dollars) dedicated to achieving this exact goal. It is discussed—openly; gleefully—in the major institutions of the Ecumenical Patriarchate and the Archdiocese of America. And yet anyone who suggests that this is a gross betrayal of both the American people and the Orthodox faithful is immediately accused of being a “Russian asset.” Go figure.
The post The CIA’s Man in Constantinople appeared first on The American Conservative.
State of the Union: Could the hush-money case against former President Trump be over before it has even begun?
Today, the hush-money prosecution of former President Donald Trump started in earnest. But could this case be over before it has even begun?
In the prosecution’s opening statement, Matthew Colangelo, on behalf of the Manhattan district attorney’s office, told the jury that Trump orchestrated “a criminal conspiracy and a coverup,” to win the 2016 presidential election. Predictably, in his own opening statement, Trump’s leading lawyer Todd Blanche told the jury that the former president is “innocent” and “did not commit any crimes.”
The statements were directed towards the jury composed of 12 members and six alternates. Finding members to serve with impartiality has unsurprisingly proved difficult. When court proceedings began on Monday, one of the twelve jurors met with Justice Merchan and both sides’ attorneys because they were concerned for their safety. Before the jurors were chosen from the 96 prospects, they were among the scores to fill out a 42-question form.
One question, the results of which have been reported by the New York Times, asked about the media appetites of prospective jurors.
Where the Trump jurors say they get their news.
— Joshua Benton (@jbenton) April 19, 2024
Amazing marker of how far the NYC tabloids have fallen: Only 1 of the 18 read the @nypost, and zero read the @NYDailyNews.https://t.co/9AaEo7M9Hq pic.twitter.com/0dhK1hs8XT
The most frequent response from jurors on the list: the New York Times. The Gray Lady has been deeply involved in the deep state’s effort to delegitimize President Trump’s election in 2016. Even disgraced FBI agent Peter Strzok admitted in 2017 that the Times’ reporting was full of errors. Nevertheless, the Times reporters who worked on this Russian collusion story received Pulitzers.
Only one juror watches Fox News, and only one other reads the New York Post (the outlet that originally broke the Hunter Biden laptop story). One other juror says they receive their news from X (formerly Twitter) and Truth Social—which has caused some users on social media to suggest this juror will prevent a Trump conviction.
Maybe so, but to pretend that the jury members’ media appetites suggest anything other than a difficult road ahead for the former president is disingenuous. In fact, that’s the entire point of the operation: get a conviction against Trump before the election by trying him in the most hostile territory imaginable.
The post Trump Could Be in Serious Trouble appeared first on The American Conservative.
Will the Supreme Court draw a line between the contradictions of presidential immunity?
With the Supreme Court set to begin arguments on Donald Trump’s immunity claims this Thursday and the landmark decision likely to be handed down no later than the end of June, the Deep State weighed in. That itself is a scary thing, but even more frightening is this: What if they are right this time?
Fourteen retired four-star generals, admirals, and other military leaders (including the former NSA head Michael Hayden, who certainly knows a thing or two about illegal orders) filed an amici brief with the Supreme Court, arguing against former President Trump’s claims of immunity in his criminal cases, particularly those dealing with J6.
Trump argues the charges against him related to J6 should be thrown out because he was acting as president at the time. Prosecutors denounced the idea, with the generals taking a side with their brief. Amicus curiae is a Latin term translating to “friend of the court.” It refers to a person or organization that is not a party to a case but offers information or expertise to assist the court in making a decision, although they do not have the same legal standing as briefs submitted by the parties directly involved in the case. They can be, as in this case, an argument by a third party for deciding the case one way or another. The generals et al. are decidedly against Trump having immunity, as any good Deep Stater would be.
They argue Trump should not be granted immunity by the Court for three reasons: The claimed immunity would undermine the national commitment to civilian control of the military; Trump’s immunity would undermine the military’s adherence to the rule of law, its orderly functioning, and public trust; and Trump’s claimed immunity, by implicating the peaceful transition of power in particular, threatens national security.
The arguments for the first point are largely what you’d expect them to be, spraying out everything from George Washington’s address to Youngstown Sheet and Tube, centering on the idea that a president, immune from prosecution for anything he does while in office whether related to his official duties or not, could indeed order the military to do anything.
One argument you can expect to hear more of is that the president could order the armed forces to murder a political opponent live on TV. The president would be untouchable, and the soldiers who faced such an order would be flummoxed as the Constitution subjects the armed forces of the United States to both civilian control and the rule of law. (In the United States, murder is still illegal—for now.) “Such a President would be able to break faith with the members of the armed forces by placing himself above the very law they are both sworn to uphold,” the brief says. It would allow “the Commander-in-Chief to weaponize the powers of the U.S. military to criminal ends.”
It is important to step back and understand the president is already considered immune from criminal prosecution while in office, and that he serves under the ultimate check and balance of impeachment. He currently can be prosecuted for acts done while president after he leaves office, the current situation with the two ongoing J6 prosecutions, the as yet unstarted Jack Smith case in Washington and the Fani Willis case in Georgia, which is lurching into motion soon.
Trump argues that he is immune from prosecution for the things he said on the morning of January 6, 2021, words that in the eyes of the law could add up to inciting the mob to attack the Capitol. (Note, however, that Trump is not charged with incitement, a specific legal term. It can get confusing.)
Nonetheless, there is little confusion in the generals’ brief. They argue that, if the
President is absolutely immune from criminal prosecution [this] has the potential to severely undermine the Commander-in-Chief’s legal and moral authority to lead the military forces, as it would signal that they but not he must obey the rule of law. Under this theory, the President could…direct members of the military to execute plainly unlawful orders, placing those in the chain of command in an untenable position and irreparably harming the trust fundamental to civil-military relations.
The generals’ second argument is compelling. Service members have a long-standing duty to disobey unlawful orders. This requires service members, who are required to obey all lawful orders, to disregard patently unlawful orders from their superiors and prohibits service members from using such orders as a defense to criminal prosecution. Immunizing the Commander-in-Chief from criminal prosecution would put service members in the impossible position of having to choose between following their Commander-in-Chief or obeying the laws enacted by Congress. Again, see the example of the president ordering the murder of a political opponent, the argumentum ad absurdum of this case.
The generals cite something almost as clear, the My Lai massacre in Vietnam where the officer in charge on the ground was not successful in using “but I was only following orders” as a defense. Interestingly, Trump’s Supreme Court filing also cites My Lai, drawing a different lesson: The My Lai massacre serves as evidence the military would resist carrying out the President’s hypothetical order to murder a political rival because someone blew the whistle, albeit after the killings.
That is wrong, say the generals’ in their brief:
[T]he very fact that officer in charge on the ground felt emboldened to kill civilians on the basis of ‘superior orders’—in that case, from a captain—demonstrates that our system remains vulnerable to the risk that servicemen or women may commit crimes when ordered to do so. That risk is all the graver if the person giving the orders is the president, particularly one protected by absolute immunity.
The generals make their argument conclusively, stating,
Receiving an unlawful order thus places service members—already pushed to extremes by virtue of their vocation—in a nearly impossible position. On the one hand, disobeying a lawful order is punishable by court-martial and contrary to everything service members have been trained to do. On the other hand, the duty to disobey imposes on them the obligation not to rationalize obedience of an unlawful order simply out of deference to one’s superiors—including the Commander-in-Chief.
The third argument in the brief is not as compelling—basically a variation of “Orange Man Bad/Dictator,” in that the cases at hand, dealing with J6, concern specifically the peaceful transition of power at the White House. The generals argue that it is a bad case to set any kind of precedent, and our adversaries will be taking note of what they consider a breakdown of democracy. Constitutional crises are bad for the defense business when the bad guys are watching.
The case puts a lot on the line. In Washington alone, Trump is facing four J6 felony counts accusing him of defrauding the United States. Prosecutors allege he stood at the center of a conspiracy to block the certification of votes for Joe Biden. Granting Trump sweeping immunity would not only end this prosecution and the one in Georgia; it would set a precedent for all future presidents.
Besides, Trump already has a decent defense in saying his remarks on the morning of J6 were covered by the First Amendment, with or without immunity. Of course, in the end, none of this may matter. The real purpose of the request for immunity may prove to be simply delaying Trump’s trial until after the November election, in which case he wins no matter what the Court says.
The post The Generals’ Trump Brief Actually Makes a Compelling Case appeared first on The American Conservative.
Nottingham is a weird old town, radical and reactionary at the same time. It was the place where King Charles I raised his standard against the Parliament, starting the English Civil War. It is overgrown with Robin Hood statues all over the city center. It is a Labour party stronghold, although it is surrounded by working-class deep Englanders who voted for Brexit in nearby Mansfield and Chesterfield. Almost next door, in Lincolnshire, Margaret Thatcher was born—and is reviled to this day. It is where I completed my PhD, at the University of Nottingham, a Russell Group University. It is near where Lord Byron lived in Newstead Abbey.
George Gordon, the sixth Baron Byron, died 200 years ago on April 19 in Greece, fighting for Greek independence against the Ottoman Empire, back when hereditary elites had the conviction to go to war personally for causes they believed in, instead of tweeting and sending their hapless fellow working-class citizens to die in lands far away for no reasons at all.
Byron hated conservative-realists. He was fascinated by Bonapartism. He despised Castlereagh and Metternich for what we would now call their illiberalism. In his maiden speech at the House of Lords, he did, however, defend the Luddites against the onslaught of science and the technological revolution that ultimately changed the globe.
In the museum at Newstead Abbey, alongside Byron’s books and harp are incredible little items, such as his betrothal ring with the inscription Crede Byron, a coin damaged by a shot, duelling pistols, cutlasses and sabres, and a cuirassier helmet that he used in Greece during a cavalry charge.
Byron was infamously handsome, and even more notoriously a womanizer, once termed “mad, bad, and dangerous to know” by one of his many mistresses.
He remains the greatest Romantic of the era that birthed the term, and perhaps the greatest poetic virtuoso of the English language.
My most favorite work of his, however, is his dedication in the epitaph to his dog, words that were written with no other emotions than true grief and loneliness.
Oh man! thou feeble tenant of an hour,
Debas’d by slavery, or corrupt by power,
Who knows thee well, must quit thee with disgust,
Degraded mass of animated dust!
Thy love is lust, thy friendship all a cheat,
Thy tongue hypocrisy, thy heart deceit!
By nature vile, ennobled but by name,
Each kindred brute might bid thee blush for shame.
Ye! who behold perchance this simple urn,
Pass on, it honours none you wish to mourn.
To mark a friend’s remains these stones arise;
I never knew but one—and here he lies.
The post The Bicentenary of Lord Byron’s Demise appeared first on The American Conservative.
There is no more notable precedent in recent years for an underdog cause toughing it out.
Same-sex marriage advocates lost 32 times in a row before November 2012, when several states then voted in their favor. Yet at no point during that extensive losing streak did they settle for a “compromise,” like civil unions or domestic unions, as their ultimate goal. Neither should we, pro-life Americans, settle for a compromise—in this case, a 15-week abortion ban that (in the words of a prominent presidential candidate) “everybody can live with.”
After all, who is “everybody”? Progressives advocating for abortion at 40-weeks and denying healthcare to babies who survive an abortion? Conservatives who are simultaneously grateful to SCOTUS for effectively nullifying the bad science of 1973 but who still know that life begins at conception? Especially with Roe gone, a 15-week abortion ban that prevents only 3 percent of all abortions and essentially leaves us more pro-abortion than most of Europe is not winning. Winning is going all the way.
After losing referendum after referendum, same-sex marriage advocates didn’t go away; they went for broke. Just three years after winning their first referendum, they achieved total victory on June 26, 2015 when the Supreme Court redefined marriage for all 50 states with Obergefell. And, less than a decade later, there is no meaningful political opposition to same-sex marriage. We must learn an essential lesson from our opposition’s success: a series of defeats at the ballot box does not mean ultimate triumph is impossible.
Fortunately, the winds are in our favor. People are waking up and rejecting the pseudo-science that has been shoved down our throats by an unholy alliance between radical activists and Big Pharma. Recently, the UK, Sweden, Norway, France, and other European nations pumped the brakes on drugging and mutilating children. Similarly, medical research reveals with increasing detail what we’ve already known to be true: Life begins at conception. Improved prenatal imaging and technology allow us to watch it with our own eyes.
No number of weeks picked out of thin air is going to satisfy our adversaries. The anti-life left just wants us to believe that our righteous cause is politically pointless. But we will not go away. According to the latest polling, abortion is the top voting issue for between 5 and 12 percent of voters. There is no doubt this can impact an election in a closely divided America. But there is no way to know for sure if these voters are pro-choice or pro-life, or if, in the end, they’ll vote on another issue come November.
What we know for sure is that killing babies is evil. Due to that conviction, Republican candidates who flounder and fail to act courageously could lose support among pro-life voters. Donald Trump wouldn’t have won in 2016 without SCOTUS taking center stage following the passing of Justice Antonin Scalia. He needs that base to retake the White House, and that base, which resides well outside the Beltway, is nowhere near accepting 15 weeks in a post-Roe America.
President Trump, like many Republicans, disappointed many pro-lifers after Dobbs. But he rightly corrected course by bailing on a 15-week ban. There should not be no such ban, federal or otherwise. Not because such a ban is too pro-life, but because it is not pro-life at all. Let’s trust the truth and go to work.
The post Does the Gay Rights Movement Hold Lessons for Pro-Lifers? appeared first on The American Conservative.
The Library of America gives Jimmy Breslin the treatment.
Jimmy Breslin: Essential Writings, ed. Dan Barry, Library of America
Every publication—every good publication, anyway—is a bit like a baseball team. You’ve got your writers of various sorts, editorialists, book reviewers, and so on. These are your players. Foremost are the reporters, invariably badly dressed, usually gregarious, usually late on deadlines, rarely your great literary stylists but they shake out the interesting details of things. You’ve got your editors, usually better (or at least more formally) dressed, retiring or disagreeable, prone to drinking, the real type-A guys who don’t take crap. These are your managers, the guys who put together a line and guide the ship of state and answer for whatever boneheaded stuff the reporters do, of which there’s usually plenty. You’ve got your business guys, the ones who sit in the dark and sweat you about your reimbursements and know who is working for which senator and that sort of thing—the front office, which is the same kind of guy in baseball and I suppose every other kind of industry.
There in the mix on the writing side you’ve got columnists. “Columnist,” when you pry off the decades of accumulated connotations, pretty much just means “space-filler.” The columnist is there to fill a column of text. He is to do this on some regular schedule. You hope (I speak as an editor here) that he’s going to be insightful or moving or funny; at any rate, you hope he’s going to be correct and non-libelous. But the bare, base-model minimum is this, that he be on time and to length. You’ve got to fill your inches, and you’ve got to fill them on time.
Columnists tend to produce a mix of color and reporting—the tighter the deadline and the longer the column, the more color there tends to be. In this respect, they are more, irrespective of their publication’s format, akin to newsmagazine writers. What Otto Friedrich wrote about the newsmagazines among which he spent so many fruitful years tends to hold for the newspaper columnist as well: “The news, what happened that week, may be told in the beginning, the middle, or the end; for the purpose is not to throw information at the reader but to seduce him into reading the whole story, and into accepting the dramatic (and often political) point being made.”
Like many other party tricks—gurning, smoke rings, telling a decent joke—this sounds like an easy order to fill but proves harder in execution. Not everyone is cut out for columnizing, at least not indefinitely. Whittaker Chambers, unprompted, quit his column at National Review after two years; he gave William F. Buckley no explanation, but it seems he just felt he had nothing more to say on that schedule. A lot of columnists work for a couple years that way and move on to better things.
Yet there are those who thrive in the genre—can’t get enough of it. H.L. Mencken was a weekly columnist for most of his adult life, and a daily columnist for much of it; the now sadly neglected Ring Lardner likewise. On the other side of the pond, G.K. Chesterton wrote a daily column for the Illustrated London News for years. These examples underline a point: Your warhorse columnist of the first rank tends to become best known as a stylist. There are only so many worthwhile insights the human intelligence can produce in a month, let alone a week; you need something to carry you through the between times. Here is danger: It is a short slide from a characteristic style to self-parody, to being a hack. To return to baseball, you don’t want to repeat the same pitches too often, or they’ll stop working. You see this tendency in the late career of Baltimore’s own divine, who has a tendency to repeat the hyperboles a little too close together for the context of a book. In a column, where they might have been separated by a week or two, such repetitions would not have rankled.
Lardner illustrates a quirk of the American columnist tradition, namely that our leading column men tend to be sportswriters. Sports lend themselves to columns for the same reason that columns become exercises in style: You never have to worry about what bare facts you’re going to write about. Somebody beat somebody somewhere by some runs or points. The sportswriter, let alone the sports columnist, has sadly declined; nobody needs to read the paper for results anymore. Now, sportswriting means summarizing a tweet from Adam Schefter summarizing something some lickspittle agent’s assistant summarized for him from a private meeting summarizing contract negotiations between teams and athletes.
Of the latter-day practitioners of the column, the late Jimmy Breslin stands out. From 1960 until his death in 2017, Breslin wrote columns for multiple outlets, particularly the Long Island Newsday and the New York Daily News. He wrote sports, but he also wrote a lot of other stuff. The son of a working mother from Jamaica, Queens, he was the voice for the white ethnic millets of New York—canny, wry, tough, but also sentimental, even self-righteous. He looked the part: tubby, black Irish, a face that looked like it was laughing even when it wasn’t, the living mascot of a million beat cops, bus drivers, and sandhogs. He embodied the New York political sensibility—broadly liberal, distrustful of the Interests, a politics built around “the little man.” One of Breslin’s first big breaks was interviewing the gravedigger for JFK. But he was not what you would call woke. In the ’90s, when a Korean-American Newsday reporter accused him of sexism, he called her a “slant-eyed” “yellow cur” and took to The Howard Stern Show to expand on his thoughts and feelings about Koreans. Newsday suspended him until an apology was extracted.
Breslin was a fixture. My grandparents (Brooklynese) would have called him a character (“He’s a real charehctah”). He ran for city council in conjunction with Norman Mailer’s mayoral bid; their slogan was “Vote the Rascals In.” Yet Breslin was unlike Mailer personally. He remained married to his first wife until her death, and then his second, a New York councilwoman, until his own. This, also, is very Irish-from-Queens. Progressive politics has nothing to do with the right and wrong in your own life. Michael Moore, although a Michigander, has a little of this working-class moral austerity, which is becoming rarer and rarer, particularly in Democratic circles.
He wrote the whole time. A new Library of America collection, Essential Writings, gathers the highlights of a career, including two books—How the Good Guys Finally Won, about the Nixon impeachment, and The Short Sweet Dream of Eduardo Guttierez, about the death of an illegal immigrant construction worker—and many, many columns.
There are two ways of writing American: chewing your cigar and holding your cigar. (Can you guess how the editorial We are oriented as we type these words?) Breslin is at his best when he’s chewing his cigar. From a column on the reporting about Mickey Mantle’s death: “The nurse resented every word of what she had read about the death of Mickey Mantle. These cheap sobbing uninformed Pekinese of the Press had hurt her patients.” On the 1962 Mets: “Basically, the trouble with the Mets is the way they play baseball.”
From a column on sexual abuse in the Catholic Church (which perfectly summarizes every American Catholic’s feelings back in the early ’00s): “I don’t want to be a bishop anymore because the bishops of America have given the title such a bad name.” Later: “I cannot understand why, today, right now, Mansion Murphy of Rockville Centre dares to remain on church grounds after all he has done to place children in jeopardy. Nor can I fathom the reason why Bishop Thomas Daily was still in his residence in Brooklyn this morning. Both bishops belong in the city dump.”
It’s when he puts the cigar down that the self-righteous, almost puritanical tone tends to come through; here you can see the beginnings of the heavy-duty whining of the “personal essay” of the ’00s and ’10s. In a review of a Lardner story collection, Breslin decides to make it all about Watergate and the Nixon impeachment (Lardner’s son was one of the Hollywood Ten and went to jail for refusing to testify to the House Un-American Activities Committee): “Ring Lardner went out into a place which proclaimed itself as America, but in 1901 it was a place for men on their way to making billions. The land was being stolen or scarred, the people manipulated and discarded and the Rockefellers, Goulds, Astors sawed and chewed their way through all the rules of life. Their dishonesty set a tone for the nation, spread a stain on its people, which maybe we haven’t been able to change yet.”
Yet at Breslin’s best there’s the liberal ability to see both sides, the complications of human persons—such as his profile of Big Mama Nunziata, the Gallo crime family’s matriarch, or his comments on a 1964 race riot:
The colored people, all of them, even the leaders, acted like small children yesterday. They have a deep, serious, legitimate, immediate case for themselves. A 15-year-old boy who weighed only 100 pounds was shot to death by an off-duty police lieutenant last Thursday. The case is being investigated. It has inflamed Harlem. The young kids, semi-illiterate most of them, who follow Malcolm X and other dangerous rabble rousers, used this to start a riot. They did not, these people milling from 125th to 133d Sts., last night, represent all of Harlem. They represented the part of Harlem that couldn’t wait for trouble with the white police. But they stood on street corners and hoped for trouble and when it came and the police hit them, the leaders promptly screamed “Police brutality.”
Police brutality? Sure, there was brutality last night. Terrible, sickening brutality. But this was a mess, an absolute, incredible mess, and if you were on the street with the bottles coming down and who the hell knows what was going to come from the rooftops, there was only one thing to do. Go after these crazy bums on the street corners and knock their heads open and send them home with blood pouring all over them. The crowd was uncontrollable. They laughed when Bayard Rustin took a microphone and pleaded with them to go. They jeered and spit at policemen. They wanted everything they got last night.
Breslin wrote and wrote and wrote. A lot of it was pretty good. He was dubbed a “deadline artist,” which is not a bad title. Perhaps he’s best regarded as an obituarist—for a type of liberal who is gone, and for a New York that is gone.
In a 1963 boxing profile, he writes about a bar in the Bronx:
Once, in the Irish neighborhoods, you had one of these places every couple of doorways. But now there are only faint traces of Irish neighborhoods left and this kind of a bar is rare. It is, Bimstein was saying over his beer, a shame.
It is, isn’t it?
The post The Columnist appeared first on The American Conservative.
Democrats could save Speaker Mike Johnson, but they once again find themselves in a can’t-lose situation.
The House has passed House Speaker Mike Johnson’s $95 billion foreign aid package.
The House took several votes on the foreign aid package. As The American Conservative has explained, Johnson chose a procedural maneuver called a MIRV to consider the foreign aid package, which meant the House passed one rule to govern the process over each part of the four-part foreign aid package. As Johnson had to rely on Democratic support on the Rules Committee to advance the package to the House floor, Johnson once again found himself relying on Democratic support.
The House passed Ukraine aid 311 to 112, with 210 Democrats and 101 Republicans supporting the legislation. One hundred twelve Republicans voted against. As for Israel aid, 173 Democrats joined 193 Republicans in voting for the legislation. The final tally was 366 to 58. Indo-Pacific aid, mostly directed towards Taiwan, was the least contentious of the bills considered, and passed 385 to 34. The final part of the legislation, the 21st Century Peace through Strength Act, passed 360 to 58.
While Democrats saved Johnson’s foreign aid package—not out of the goodness of their hearts but because it favored their priorities—it remains to be seen whether Democrats will save Johnson’s speakership. Yesterday, Rep. Paul Gosar came out in favor of Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene’s motion to vacate. Between Green, Gosar, and Massie, Johnson’s critics could have the votes at a moment’s notice to invoke privilege and oust Johnson. Massie told the press that he does not expect the anti-Johnson operation to be taken today, but the clock is ticking as the House enters a week-long recess.
It’s a can’t-lose for Democrats.
Allowing Johnson to be ousted, once again throws the GOP into chaos, well beyond the House. Former President Donald Trump has claimed he supports Johnson and some within Trump’s orbit have reportedly said Mar-a-Lago is unhappy with the divisiveness in the House. Ousting Johnson throws Trump into conflict with some of his biggest supporters in the House. The GOP controlled House will once again seem incapable of governing, this time even closer to an election. The risk, however, is that there are enough Republicans in the conference angry enough at Johnson’s handling of appropriations, FISA, and foreign aid that they’ll replace Johnson with a more conservative speaker with a reputation for being a fighter—someone like Rep. Jim Jordan. Nevertheless, it feels unlikely; if Johnson is ousted, someone cut from the same cloth will probably replace him.
But Democrats could also save Johnson by voting against the motion to vacate at large enough margins to overcome Johnson’s conservative objectors. This also makes sense. Johnson has given Democrats almost everything they’ve asked for and House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries doesn’t have a chance at becoming speaker, so why rock the boat? The question becomes: Has Johnson run out of things to give Democrats to incentivize keeping him in the House’s top spot? If so, then the last thing Johnson can give Democrats in his brief tenure is to create another crisis in Republican ranks on the way out.
The post What’s Next After the Ukraine Mistake? appeared first on The American Conservative.
The October 2020 Hunter Biden laptop letter was a classic operation, both in technique and personnel.
As of a few weeks ago, when the New York Times, 91 percent of whose core readers are Democrats, ran an op-ed video titled “It turns out the ‘deep state’ is actually kind of awesome,” both sides of our political divide acknowledged the deep state’s existence. But they differ sharply about what it actually is. For Republicans, it’s arbitrary bureaucrats enacting policies that limit people’s freedom. For Democrats, it’s the real-life model for the series Parks and Recreation or Space Force, where decent administrators use the government to serve Americans.
This second model might be more convincing were it not for the fact that, at its upper echelons, the deep state has created a group of Washington-based operators very different from the Parks and Recreation cohort: powerful people working behind-the-scenes to affect policy through connections to debt-funded defense and domestic administrative agencies and their corporate, university, nonprofit, and media outgrowths. These operators’ moves are subtle and hard to trace, predicated not on overt “power plays” but on more modern techniques for control: the manipulation of language and the dissemination of narratives.
The last time these operators tipped their hand to the public was October 2020, after the New York Post released a report about Hunter Biden’s business activities: an “October Surprise” that could have cost Joe Biden the presidency. The operators’ response to this report has been memorialized by critics with the shorthand “spies who lie,” and there is widespread agreement that it diminished President Trump’s re-election chances. Yet the strategies behind it have yet to be fully examined and linked to a 50-year run of tactics, which, this election year, these operators might use again.
The chronology of the “October Surprise,” and the ensuing response, is extensively chronicled and deceptively straightforward.
On October 14, 2020, twenty days before the election, the New York Post released a report “reveal[ing] that it had obtained emails from Hunter Biden’s laptop, which a Delaware repair-shop owner said he had abandoned.” These emails contained suggestive facts about Biden Jr.’s possible influence-peddling in Ukraine and (as revealed in an October 15 follow-up story) in China, and included connections to his father.
Five days later, on October 19, 51 former intelligence officials signed a public letter released via POLITICO’s Natasha Bertrand, who disclosed that the letter had been provided to her by Nick Shapiro, a former aide to one of its signers, John Brennan—George W. Bush’s deputy CIA director, Barack Obama’s CIA Director, and a vocal opponent of President Trump. The headline of Bertrand’s story describing the letter read “Hunter Biden story is Russian disinfo, dozens of former intel officials say.” Though Bertrand acknowledged that “there has been no immediate indication of Russian involvement in the release of emails the Post obtained,” she also wrote that “its general thrust mirrors a narrative that U.S. intelligence agencies have described as part of an active Russian disinformation effort aimed at denigrating Biden’s candidacy.”
On October 19 and 20, both the signers and the story circulated. One signer, Jeremy Bash, a former CIA and Department of Defense chief of staff during President Obama’s administration, appeared on MSNBC, arguing that “this looks like Russian intelligence. This walks like Russian intelligence. This talks like Russian intelligence.” CNN analyst John Avlon claimed that the letter “parallels something I heard in an interview with a former national counterterrorism expert, saying it has all the hallmarks of a Russian disinformation campaign.”
On October 22, the letter provided Vice President Biden ammunition in the second and final presidential debate, which was watched by 63 million people, and which viewers (by a 14 percent margin) thought Biden won. “Look,” Biden said, when the subject of the laptop was raised, “there are 50 former national intelligence folks who said that [the laptop] is a Russian plan… a bunch of garbage. Nobody believes it except [Trump]….”
This was a blatant misrepresentation of the letter that went uncorrected by any of its signers. The letter did not call the laptop’s content “disinformation,” which in the intelligence community is understood to mean “false or intentionally misleading information that aims to achieve an economic or political goal.” Instead the letter posited an “information operation,” which, among intelligence professionals, means “the collection of tactical information about an adversary as well as the dissemination of propaganda in pursuit of a competitive advantage over an opponent.” This information can be true or false.
In other words, what the letter actually said was that the Hunter Biden information could be true, and that it could be part of a Russian operation to help elect Trump president—a very different message than reporters or signers emphasized at the time, and a message that was not cogently stated in the letter.
What the letter also should have said, in the interest of transparency, was that some of its signers thought that the laptop’s information was true. Indeed, several later went on record stating that they believed this to be the case, and that they believed or assumed their fellow signers thought so as well. One, Douglas Wise, said that “all of us figured that a significant portion of that content had to be real to make any Russian disinformation credible,” and three other signers told the Washington Post that they agreed with this view. (Emphasis added.) Thomas Fingar, a signer who had served as the top intelligence official at the State Department, said that “pure fiction is less likely to fool target audiences. I suspect but do not know that other signers have drawn the same lessons.” Another signer told the Post that “‘a Russia information operation’…would make sense only if a significant amount of the material was true.” This meant that, in the eyes of some signers, it was likely that the Democratic nominee for President had indirect ties to the Ukrainian and Chinese governments.
Making these and other comments two years later, when the content of the laptop had been verified by multiple news outlets and House Republicans had called them in for interviews, some of the letter signers also cited the “information operation” language as proof of their sincerity, and blamed journalists for the confusion. “There was message distortion,” James Clapper, Under-Secretary of Defense under Bush, and Director of National Intelligence under Obama, said—even as he repeated the distorted message. “All we were doing was raising a yellow flag that this could be Russian disinformation…”
Thomas Fingar was more withering: “No one who has spent time in Washington should be surprised that journalists…misconstrue oral or written statements…the statement…was carefully written to minimize the likelihood that what was said would be misconstrued…”
This explanation provided helpful cover, but was disingenuous. Why would people so versed in Washington misinterpretations fail in their letter to define a key term, “information operation,” and then fail to correct reporters’ misinterpretations, if the meaning of the letter was really intended to be clear?
Evidence that the letter was probably not intended to be clear surfaced when the investigating House Committees released excerpts of their questioning of some of the letter’s signers. According to the testimony, the main mover behind the letter, its co-drafter and seemingly its organizer, was Michael Morell, the Deputy and Acting Director of the CIA under Obama. Morell’s impetus for the letter was a conversation with Antony Blinken, a Biden campaign aide who had also served from 2009 to 2013 as Vice President Biden’s National Security Adviser and had longstanding ties to Hunter Biden.
According to CNN, “Morell testified before the committees that he had a phone call with Blinken about the Hunter Biden laptop story in the New York Post, and they discussed possible Russian involvement in the spreading of information related to Hunter Biden.” According to the New York Post, “Blinken’s October 2020 outreach…was credited by Morell with inspiring the letter, though Morell says Blinken…didn’t specifically ask him to write it.”
Morell testified that his goals in initiating the letter were to “share [the] concern with the American people that the Russians were playing on this issue; and…to help Vice President Biden…because I wanted him to win the election.” In an email between Morell and Brennan, later obtained by Just the News, Morrell noted that he was “trying to give the campaign, particularly during the debate on Thursday, a talking point to push back on Trump on this issue.”
As much of this information became public, the implicated players and their allies, again, responded by parsing language. According to Blinken, “With regard to that letter, I didn’t—wasn’t my idea. didn’t ask for it, didn’t solicit it. And I think the testimony that…Mike Morell, put forward confirms that.” House Democrats took the same line.
So did establishment journalists in Washington. Aaron Blake at the Washington Post cited his colleague Glenn Kessler, whose February 2023 column on the letter had been the first to distinguish between “information operation” and “disinformation,” to argue that “the [letter’s] statement was more nuanced than it was initially described…” Blake ended his piece with a quote from Mark Zaid, the lawyer representing a number of letter signers, that “What [the] GOP is doing is far greater politicization than what they allege of Dems”—shifting the story back to a safely partisan arena.
What these parsings and hedgings and re-directions suggest would be par for the course in an episode of Law and Order: the effort to obscure coordinated wrongdoing by people who committed the wrong in the first place in order to keep unwarranted gains. In the case of the letter, its signatories lived at the heart of the “swamp” that Trump was increasingly targeting. Of the 19 signers listed first (by prominence rather than alphabetically), 14 had links to defense contractors or to security firms which leverage their principals’ defense and intelligence connections in Washington. Seven of these 19 had links to the international schools and think tanks which help feed personnel to defense and intelligence agencies, and seven of these 19 appeared regularly on networks staffed by journalists who report on defense and intelligence policy from insider leaks.
In some cases, the interconnections between these players are glaring. One of these is Morell, who in March 2020 was described as a contributing columnist for the Washington Post and on Nov. 12, 2020 was reported to be one of President-elect Biden’s top two contenders for CIA director before progressives stalled his nomination. Another is Brennan, whose aide leaked the letter to POLITICO, and who in 2022 became a principal at WestExec Advisors, the contracting firm founded in 2017 by Blinken. A third is Avlon, who spoke on October 20, 2020, with such certainty of Russian “disinformation” and is now running as a “centrist” Democrat in New York’s first Congressional district, working “to build the broadest possible coalition to defeat Donald Trump, defend our democracy, and win back Congress from his MAGA minions.”
Sometimes they’re quieter, as with signer Michael Vickers: a career CIA-and-Defense official famous enough inside Washington to have been written into a movie by Aaron Sorkin, the court poet of the governing elite. Vickers now serves on the board of the American subsidiary of the world’s seventh largest defense contractor. Often, these quieter connections span education and social life. Jeremy Bash, the signer who on October 19 appeared on MSNBC arguing that the laptop “looks,” “walks,” and “talks like Russian intelligence,” comes from a prominent, Washington-centric background and was educated at elite universities; he was married to and remains “very good friends” with Dana Bash, who comes from a prominent, Acela-corridor background and is CNN’s chief political correspondent. Michael Vickers is the ex-husband of the CEO of the fifth largest defense contractor in the United States.
Washington institutions are the long-time lubricators of these links, and not just the CIA and the Defense Department. Booz Allen Hamilton, a major player linked to covert CIA missions since the 1950s, is on the resume of one prominent signer. The School of Advanced International Studies (SAIS) at Johns Hopkins, a seed-ground of Cold War strategy and later of the Iraq War, is on the resume of two others, including Michael Vickers. The New York Times’ Washington bureau and the Washington Post, helmed by a revolving door of insiders, have shaped coverage in directions helpful to these movers since the 1950s; POLITICO, for its part, is a de-facto spin-off of the Washington Post. The Atlantic, a magazine of the establishment elite which has run several pieces papering over, equivocating about, or strategically re-directing questions regarding press coverage of the October 2020 letter, is run by the grandson and biographer of the founder of SAIS.
Decade by decade, these movers and those like them have shown themselves willing to enact October 2020–style plays to protect or expand their power bases. Their methods are always the same: language manipulation and narrative distortion, followed by dissemination via pliant journalists of the distortions, followed by parsing of the language to escape blame.
The examples proliferate, and they’re discouraging reading for those committed to representative government, reportorial diligence, or even effective policymaking.
In the 1970s, Richard Nixon, trying to bring intelligence agencies under direct White House control after a quarter-century of foreign misadventures from Iran and Guatemala to Cuba and Vietnam, was deposed off leaks to the Washington Post from anonymous sources inside these agencies. But the story that got told by the press was about intrepid reporters defying Washington power centers and bringing down a president. Wondering how on earth this distortion might have happened, Renata Adler, the New Yorker reporter who had worked with the House Committee investigating Richard Nixon, wrote that reporters relying on intelligence sources had corrupted their own material. They had obscured obvious points thanks to the fact that “a whole lexicon of euphemisms, metaphors, and misnomers has slipped into investigative reporting from… in just such a euphemism…the ‘intelligence’ agencies of government” that “actually blur what the subject of investigation is.” What Adler saw then is just what “disinformation” and “information operation” represent today.
But what Adler observed repeated itself long before today, as early as the late 1980s, when elements of the Reagan administration, linked to burgeoning think tanks and supported by a congressional minority led by Congressman Dick Cheney, colluded to unconstitutionally fund the Nicaraguan contras against congressional legislation prohibiting it. Structurally, this was a story about what Theodore Draper, in his book on the subject, described as the “usurpation of power by a small, strategically placed group within the government.” But this wasn’t the story that ended up being emphasized by a press corps which had “become more preoccupied with daily coverage” than with “probing, investigative reporting.” Instead the story was about Ronald Reagan’s hard-charging, camera-ready National Security Aide Colonel Oliver North, a fount of “quote-ready” commentary heavy on convoluted descriptions of his relationship with the “man at the top,” Ronald Reagan. This commentary, in turn, functioned to distract from the suspicious pro-contra organizations and their sprawling network of funders described in Draper’s book.
Fifteen years later, the target was Iraq, and the players were Dick Cheney, then Vice President after a stint with a major war contractor, and Paul Wolfowitz, former Dean of the School of Advanced International Studies (SAIS) at Johns Hopkins, pushing the Bush White House’s argument that “disarming Iraq of its chemical and biological weapons and dismantling its nuclear weapons program is a crucial part of winning the War on Terror.” The pliant reporters were Judith Miller and Elisabeth Bumiller of the New York Times, at the expense of the Times’ James Risen, whose skeptical reports were “back-paged,” a process he later characterized with as telling a description of 21st century establishment journalism as may yet exist: “It’s like any corporate culture, where you know what management wants, and no one has to tell you.”
Only later, when America was already in Iraq and no WMD was to be found, did the administration begin its explanatory turn, making “the intellectual argument” that “there is a war in Iraq and a war on terrorism and you have to separate them, but the public doesn’t do that”—as if the Administration hadn’t been the one pushing that very conflation on the public in the first place.
Fifteen years after that, the target was President Trump; the justification was Russian collusion; and the reporters included Bumiller, now Washington Bureau Chief for the New York Times, and Natasha Bertrand, who made her career beginning in 2017 off reporting intelligence leaks alleging Russia-Trump collusion from an FBI investigation that was riddled with problems from the start. Even the Washington Post had criticized Bertrand in February 2020 for the unquestioning way she pursued the Russia story in 2016. Interestingly, this was not a prominently featured point on or after October 19, 2020, when Bertrand broke news of the “Russian disinfo” letter.
Instead, by their own admission, reporters in October 2020 were busy blaming themselves for, and vowing not to repeat, what they saw as their real failure four years earlier: going against the dictates of “national security” by reporting on (genuine) emails leaked from the Clinton campaign by actors connected to Russia. In this context, these reporters’ willingness to accept Bertrand’s “Russian disinfo” claims despite her history and despite the October 19 letter’s actual text is the only way the Washington side of the “spies who lied” story could end.
This is not representative government. Instead it’s a government within the government, predicated on the casual coordination of people who came up in the same institutions and rose through the same defense-and-intelligence agencies, law firms, contractors, press pools, and green rooms in Northwest Washington. These people know that, when they want to run an agenda, “plotting” is less necessary than a dropped hint or implication over the phone or dinner which can easily turn into a leaked letter powering lurid headlines they can deny later.
This government within a government may not be as far from Parks and Recreation and Space Force episodes and from Democratic imaginings as it may seem. After all, a tagline of the New York Times op-ed video in support of the deep state, between featurettes of friendly administrators at the Planetary Missions Program and the Environmental Protection Agency and the Department of Labor, is this: “The ‘deep state’ is hard at work making America great. Just because we don’t know about it doesn’t make it suspicious.”
The question for Americans is whether this shadow government allows us to make informed choices as citizens of a constitutional republic. For those of us who answer “No,” the follow-up question is whether, in 2024, we’ll let the deep state and its operators exercise their influence again.
The post Will We See a Deep State Playbook Again in 2024? appeared first on The American Conservative.
The tech-fueled political polarization of our current moment began over 10 years ago.
The idea that 2013 was more than ten years ago baffles me, but while dwelling on how much time has passed, I was thinking about how that singular year redefined the current state of affairs in America. Since 1968 or even 1945, has a single year seen so much change?
When we look at the landscape of existential crisis facing the American public, a few things stand out: loneliness, mental illness among the young, the Great Awokening, and political polarization. Obviously, these aren’t the only political issues facing the United States. We have a broken border and out-of-control spending, but these issues are at the root of many of our social conditions.
2013 wasn’t the year these problems started, but it was the point of no return, at least no return that I can see. Although many of these issues are political, politicians aren’t responsible for this turning point – so much to some people’s chagrin, this won’t be a tirade on Obama.
Why was 2013 so important? It was the first time a majority of Americans had a smartphone, and the first time the iPhone became available on all cell phone providers’ plans. It was the first time a supermajority of Americans were on social media. And it was the year that the media began their Great Awokening, whereby all news centered around race and racism. All these technological and social advances fed into one another to further drive Americans apart.
There’s now a wide body of scientific literature showing that smartphones, combined with social media, are linked to anxiety, depression, and social contagions among teenagers, especially teen girls.
From 2010 to 2019, as smartphones and social media became more commonly used, rates of depression in adolescents rose more than 50 percent. The suicide rate rose 48 percent for adolescents ages 10 to 19. For girls ages 10 to 14, it rose 131 percent.
Jonathan Haidt noted in the Atlantic how the extreme pivot in most measures of teens’ mental health (which he says began in 2012 instead of 2013) occurred with easy access to social media and the smartphone.
Social isolation wasn’t limited to teenagers; adults became more transfixed in their own worlds. Why hear from your liberal cousin or your conservative uncle when your social media feed could narrowly focus on the politics or worldview you already believe in?
By 2013, 30 percent of Americans, about half of all users nationwide, got their news from social media outlets. This was especially true of Millennials and Gen-Xers, nearly 40 percent of whom received their information from Facebook. Democrats were also much more likely to get their news from social media than Republicans.
This concentration of influence in a tightly controlled algorithm where nearly everything and everyone echoed your political persuasions was just the start of our current era of division, with Americans passing each other like ships in the night. It was the start of a world where we not only come to different conclusions, but live in different realities selected for us by tech overlords who insist we never stop doom-scrolling.
Political polarization obviously didn’t start in 2013; it had been going on for decades, but never has true isolation been available as it was in the hyper-individualistic digital society. Even a viewer watching MSNBC at that time would have to see Pat Buchanan or Ann Coulter make a guest appearance, and a Fox News viewer would see Patrick Caddell or Alan Colmes. Now, not only could you avoid political commentary you didn’t enjoy, but you could also build up your own political sources that were free from the constraints of the cable news industry.
The creation of political social media influencers started around this time, and while they haven’t all been grifters, many have an open relationship with the truth. A business model that only works if people rage-post demands that viewers spend their day in a constant state of disbelief that everyone is corrupt and nothing is working as it once was. Some of that sentiment is true, but a lot isn’t.
The conditions also create a demand for political purity. Had the Salem witch trials occurred in the era of anonymous social media posts, there would have been so many women burned that the state of Massachusetts would have entered a demographic winter.
Accounts, writers, influencers, and journalists who build themselves up by going after the correct enemy—real, overblown, or imaginary—are richly rewarded with thousands or sometimes millions of followers. All of a sudden, people who decided to become journalists weren’t tied to mediocre salaries and small bylines in dying newspapers. You could become a pseudocelebrity, able to warrant book deals, television appearances, and hefty speaking fees if your following became large enough.
It was the ideal moment for the start of the Great Awokening.
Journalists from even reputable outlets started to increase their focus that all inequalities in human life were related to overt racism or unconscious racial bias.
(Source: Zach Goldberg)
Way before Donald Trump allegedly ignited the flames of racial tension with his 2016 presidential campaign, the media was already turning the heat up on the subject.
The media became a powderkeg of racial tension stoked by white liberals, where they were gleefully willing and waiting to declare every institution an irredeemably racist institution in need of being torn down. Liberal readers of these outlets and journalists began seeing the racism they were reading about everywhere.
According to Zach Goldberg, “In 2011, just 35% of white liberals thought racism in the United States was ‘a big problem,’ according to national polling. By 2015, this figure had ballooned to 61% and further still to 77% in 2017.”
White liberals weren’t the only ones affected by this constant news coverage of racism. The percentage of black Americans who believed they were treated the same as whites fell from 40 percent in the early 2000s to just 18 percent in 2018, lower than it was the year before the Civil Rights Act.
When Michael Brown was killed by police in Ferguson, Missouri, the fire was lit; a wave of violence in our cities primarily from young black men followed. White liberals said it would decline if only we defunded our police. The result was devastating: National homicides increased from 14,196 in 2013 to 15,696 in 2015.
The internet may have created a larger world with easier access to more information, but 2013 was the year our world started getting smaller. Living more life online than in person, our politics became more rage-induced, and left-wing obsession over race ultimately created the political and social conditions for defunding the police, wiping away merit, and promoting critical race theory, all in the name of equity.
For the last decade, we have lived in a world created in 2013—as monumental a change as any other year in the last century.
The post Sad Digital World: How it All Started in 2013 appeared first on The American Conservative.
Democrats have saved Speaker Mike Johnson’s foreign aid package. In doing so, they also may have just sealed his political fate.
This is a developing story.
Democrats have saved Speaker Mike Johnson’s foreign aid package. In doing so, they also may have just sealed the fate of his speakership.
Just before midnight, Democrats on the Rules Committee sided with Republican supporters of the aid package to overcome the objections of Reps. Chip Roy, Thomas Massie, and Ralph Norman—the conservative representation on the Rules Committee. Johnson rushed the rule to the House floor on Friday morning, where Democrats once again sided with the Louisiana Republican. The rule passed on the floor by a vote of 316 to 94, with a majority of yes votes coming from Democrats (165 of them, in fact). Meanwhile, 55 Republicans objected to the rule. Any number of them could join Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene and Massie on a motion to vacate.
Rep. Warren Davidson was among the 55 Republican objectors. “My constituents in Ohio’s Eighth District are tired of broken promises by Speaker Johnson,” Davidson told The American Conservative in a written statement. “They know Republicans promised to fund a secure border and a smaller government. The Speaker must understand that passing more foreign aid without legitimate border security legislation hurts America. Speaker Johnson must do what he already promised to do.”
Johnson’s betrayal of his own conference is historic. As Rachel Bovard of the Conservative Partnership Institute told TAC yesterday, “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.”
“This is worse than John Boehner. If you consider John Boehner the peak level of violence against conservatives,” she added.
“If he forces a rule out of the Rules Committee on the backs of Democrats to fund a war that his conference doesn’t want to fund,” Bovard said, then “nobody’s in charge at that point. You don’t have a majority party at that point.”
Fitting, then, that if there is no majority party that there may soon be no Speaker of the House. If Johnson remains, it will be because he is once again saved by Democrats.
The post Democrats Save Johnson’s Military Spending— But Will They Save His Speakership? appeared first on The American Conservative.
State of the Union: Both Israel’s strike and Iran’s reaction to it have been much more tempered than many expected. Is this it? Or is the global community underestimating the danger of the moment?
Israel carried out a retaliatory strike against Iran Friday in the early morning hours.
Unnamed Israeli defense officials, as well as a number of Iranian officials, confirmed the strike on Iran. 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, Iran’s 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 Re-Escalates 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 What is Johnson Thinking? 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. Tom 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 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 Donald 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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