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☐ ☆ ✇ The American Conservative

The First Twitter War

Par : Gavin Hamrick — 20 juin 2023 à 16:45

The Ukrainian military’s counteroffensive has struggled to live up to Western expectations, but wartime propaganda has gone on uninterrupted.

On Monday at 12:30 a.m., a video was shared on Telegram by the Ukrainian Special Operations Forces. The video contains brutal footage of trench warfare and the battlefield killing of numerous Russian soldiers—ten were “destroyed” according to the SOF. Only 17 minutes later the video made its way to Twitter, posted by the SOF with an English caption.

The original post has over 800,000 views; a version reposted by a journalist for the Kyiv Independent has over one million. One commenter reacted to the violence: “This went well with my morning coffee. I feel happy and energized.” Another viewer communicated his desire for more content, saying, “Cool. More vids like this? I wanna see more close quaters [sic] fighting.” The wish was granted. Another Telegram video, edited to include dubstep music in the background, was shared by the SOF on Monday afternoon, this time depicting a drone strike that “put an end to the senseless existence of the invaders.”

Public messaging in war has always sought to dehumanize the enemy. In World War I U.S. propaganda portrayed Germans as apes. During the Second World War Disney and Warner Bros. created cartoons mocking the Japanese. In eras past wartime propaganda was effective precisely because it was an exaggeration or caricature of the enemy. Indeed, many a war story include a soldier’s realization that he shares much more in common with the enemy than originally thought.

Likewise, intimate media coverage of fighting in Vietnam—a conflict often considered the “first television war”—had the effect of dramatically reducing domestic support for continued intervention. The bitter reality of wars previous could not be fully comprehended by those at home through print newspapers. When Pope St. John Paul II issued his 1995 encyclical Evangelium Vitae and lamented a “culture of death” that ignores the killing of the most vulnerable, he was at least able to find hope in a “new sensitivity ever more opposed to war as an instrument for the resolution of conflicts between peoples, and increasingly oriented to finding effective but ‘non-violent’ means to counter the armed aggressor.”

Yet only a generation later, full exposure to the reality of bloodshed between Ukrainians and Russians has hardly moved the American people toward a will for peace. While declining, 47 percent of Americans still say that Ukraine is either getting the right amount of aid or should be given more, while only 28 percent believe the U.S. is giving too much.

Maybe the insensitivity to war can be attributed to the fact that—at least for now—those dying are not American sons and daughters. Yet it surely has as much to do with spiritual decay and the continual growth of a culture of death.

The post The First Twitter War appeared first on The American Conservative.

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‘Risky’ Behaviors

Par : John Hirschauer — 20 juin 2023 à 23:00
Culture

‘Risky’ Behaviors

State of the Union: The Biden White House is wary of calling certain behaviors “risky.”

Screen Shot 2023-05-05 at 4.26.59 PM

Take yourself back to 2020. Your child’s school was closed. You couldn’t visit aging parents in a nursing home. You couldn’t host a wedding, sit indoors at a restaurant, or invite more than seven people to a graveside funeral service. You were told to stay home to stop the spread of a virus that may not have posed a meaningful risk to you and did not pose a meaningful risk to the overwhelming majority of the population.

In the earliest days of the pandemic, without the benefit of hindsight or knowledge about the nature of the virus and its transmission, some of these measures may have been understandable. By early April, though, we knew that the virus effectively didn’t spread outdoors, and states continued enacting draconian restrictions on public gatherings.

I encourage you to recall the sacrifices you were asked to make as you read what Demetre Daskalakis, the Biden administration’s national monkeypox response deputy coordinator, said on Sunday about the type of behavior that facilitates the spread of monkeypox:

Stigma tends to be a barrier to testing, a barrier to vaccination—really addressing stigma intentionally and making sure we get the word out in a way that supports people’s joy as opposed to calling them “risky.” One of the things to think about is that one person’s idea of risk is another person’s idea of a great festival or Friday night, for that matter. We kind of have to embrace that with joy and make sure that folks know how to keep themselves safe.

Maybe you should have told authorities you were going to a leather orgy.

The post ‘Risky’ Behaviors appeared first on The American Conservative.

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Starved for Peace

Par : Bradley Devlin — 21 juin 2023 à 06:01
Foreign Affairs

Starved for Peace

An African delegation meets with Putin and Zelensky in pursuit of peace.

Ukrainian President Zelensky Meets With African Leaders In Kyiv

At The American Conservative’s 10th annual Foreign Policy Conference on Capitol Hill two weeks ago, I asked Rep. Eli Crane whether the United States should be sending any kind of aid to Ukraine, and if so, what kind. The Congressman from Arizona replied, “Yeah,” shocking the restraint-oriented crowd. He continued: “The aid we should be sending to Ukraine is envoys to usher in peace talks.”

It’s the correct approach—tautologically, one cannot hope to end war without establishing a peace. The Biden administration hasn’t taken the Congressman’s sound advice. Like Ukraine itself and the other Western governments funding the war effort, the White House still seems to believe that peace can only be achieved through an outright Ukrainian victory and totalizing Russian humiliation. The dearth of our culture’s historical knowledge means all conflicts are cast in terms from World War II: Putin is Hitler, Zelensky is Churchill. But what is unfolding in Ukraine—entangling alliances in central Europe and a desire to humiliate the perceived aggressor—looks more like that war’s prequel.

Other and rather unexpected governments, however, seem to understand the axiom of war and peace. Last week, leaders of seven African nations met with Zelensky in Ukraine and then Putin in Russia. The delegation, led by South Africa and its president, Cyril Ramaphosa, also included representation from Egypt, Senegal, Congo-Brazzaville, Comoros, Uganda, and Zambia, sought to kickstart peace talks.

The African delegation proposed a ten-point plan for peace. The first three points sought to get Putin and Zelensky to commit to ending the war and all other hostilities through diplomatic means. The fourth step claimed that both sides would respect the sovereignty of states and peoples as laid out in the Charter of the United Nations. The fifth outlined security and economic assurances.

The sixth was of special interest to Africa because it sought to create assurances regarding the exporting of grain and fertilizers. The war has caused a shortage of grain imported from Ukraine and fertilizers imported from Russia on the African continent. The rise in food prices attributable to the war has been especially acute in Africa. The African Development Bank, for example, claims that the war has lead to a shortfall of thirty million metric tons of grain on the continent.

The seventh and eighth were devoted to humanitarian assistance and the exchange of prisoners and captives of the war. The ninth claimed that a plan for postwar reconstruction should go forward, and the tenth sought to get Zelensky to commit to working more closely with African nations.

All these items were vague, but intentionally so—these nations do not have the political capital to bring about peace without a major world power heading the effort. Both leaders received the ten-point plan with displays of gratitude, but suggested that even these vague terms were not workable.

“This conflict is affecting Africa negatively,” Ramaphosa said in a joint press conference with Zelensky last Friday. “I do believe that Ukrainians feel that they must fight and not give up,” Ramaphosa said. “The road to peace is very hard.” Nevertheless, the South African president added that “there is a need to bring this conflict to an end sooner rather than later.”

When the press conference turned to discussions of the peace plan, Zelensky got testy with some of the African leaders, saying he did not want “any surprises” from their “conversations with the terrorists” that would follow. Zelensky’s skepticism isn’t unwarranted. South Africa, for example, has good diplomatic relations with Russia dating back to the then-Soviet Union’s support of the African National Congress (ANC). Zelensky suggested that he was open to a peaceful resolution of the conflict, but has repeatedly stated that peace talks could only begin after a complete withdrawal of Russian troops from Ukrainian territory.

As for the Russians, Putin told the delegation that the conflict started long before Russia sent its forces across the border in February 2022 and that any peace brokered now must account for “new realities.” These new realities likely include a recognition of Russia’s annexation of the Crimean peninsula in 2014 and possibly the other territorial gains Russia has made in the war thus far, which constitutes just less than 20 percent of Ukraine’s territory. Other high-ranking members of the Russian government echoed Putin’s message. Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov said that Russia agrees with the “main approaches” of the deal, but Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov told state media that the African delegation’s plan was “difficult to realize.” 

Ramaphosa laid out the ten-point plan to Putin after Azali Assoumani, the president of Comoros and current chairman of the African Union, told the Russian president:

We’ve come here to listen to you, and, through you, the Russian people, and encourage you to enter negotiations with Ukraine in order to put an end to the difficult ordeal. We gave ourselves this mission because, as Africans, unfortunately, we have had to manage numerous conflicts, and it’s through dialogue and negotiations that we have succeeded at resolving them.

Putin affirmed the African leaders that Russia is “open to constructive dialogue with anyone who wants to establish peace on the principles of fairness and acknowledgement of the legitimate interests of the parties.”

Ramaphosa heralded the trip as “historic.” That seems hyperbolic, but the African delegation achieved about all it could. It got both Ukraine and Russia on record again about pursuing peace. Of course, both sides have indicated that their pursuit of peace is conditional on certain items. But which scenario seems more realistic: peace negotiations that take into account what has transpired up until this point in the war or one that wishes to pretend the last sixteen months never happened?

The African delegation’s efforts, as well as the other proposals floated to get the Ukrainians and Russians to the table, show that the war will last until either the West loses its appetite for funding the Ukrainians or Russian losses become intolerable. For a country that lost seventeen million people in the conflict that Ukraine’s supporters love to cite, one might reasonably suggest the former will come before the latter.

The post Starved for Peace appeared first on The American Conservative.

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Ancient Rome, Modern Violence

Par : Elad Vaida — 21 juin 2023 à 06:03
Politics

Ancient Rome, Modern Violence

History shows that there are few slopes so slippery as the descent into political violence.

Bas-relief,And,Sculpture,Of,Ancient,Roman,Warriors

Political violence is a virus that can steadily ruin a democratic republic—a warning worth reflecting on as America remembers several deadly anniversaries this month, including a deranged socialist’s shooting of members of the House Republican caucus at a baseball practice session six years ago and the deadly and costly riots in the summer of 2020. And though most of the violence has come from the left, we cannot neglect the storming of the Capitol on January 6, 2021. 

We can gain more insight on our modern problem by turning to ancient Rome for a lesson on how drastically a republic can decline once it indulges in political violence. 

Rome’s republic, like America’s, had a political system of checks and balances that served it well for centuries. At the top were two consuls, chief executives who led Rome’s armies and held important judicial functions. The Roman Senate was the aristocratic branch, which, among other duties, controlled the power of the purse and had great influence over foreign policy. Finally, the multiple assemblies were the system’s democratic members, passing laws and electing certain government figures. 

While the system was much more complex than this basic description, Rome’s secret to success, as the Greek historian Polybius believed, was its mixed system, which took monarchical, aristocratic, and democratic elements and forged them into a durable government. 

Rome’s governance structure was so flexible that it accommodated a centuries-long political struggle between the aristocratic patrician class and the non-noble plebeians. The two groups may have sometimes detested each other, but the plebeians successfully fought for more representation without resorting to coups or assassinations. 

But some political systems tend to go bad after a while, as Rome’s magnates found out. By the second century B.C., Rome had conquered all of its major enemies. But what the republic lacked in existential foreign foes it made up for in domestic chaos. 

The backbone of the Roman republican army were Rome’s small farmers, those men who fought for their country bravely when they weren’t tending their land back home. But over the years, these farmers—men who risked their lives for the glory of Rome—eventually found themselves crowded out of their own homes, with their plots of land getting smaller and smaller as the Roman aristocracy concentrated more of the land in its own hands. 

Into this turbulent context came the Gracchi brothers, populist reformers whose fates marked the beginning of the end of the republic. The elder, Tiberius Sempronius Gracchus, was intent on ending the land-ownership imbalance that had been affecting Rome. His priority was limiting the amount of land a Roman citizen could hold, thereby breaking up the massive estates of rich Roman senators and distributing the land to the poor. These rich senators fought Tiberius’ agenda, and what started out as a political disagreement quickly descended to murder. Accusing him of tyrannical behavior, Tiberius’ opponents beat him and hundreds of his followers to death. 

Gaius Gracchus, Tiberius’ younger sibling who bore a grudge against the men who assassinated his brother, stepped in to continue Tiberius’ reformist dream. An energetic man with big ambitions, Gaius not only continued Tiberius’ land reform plan, but, according to the historian Plutarch, also pushed for laws to lower the price of grain for poor Romans, rein in the Senate’s influence, and pay for soldiers’ clothes out of the state’s coffers instead of making the troops bear this cost themselves. 

Gaius, like his brother, lost his life to the Senate’s ire. The Senate blamed him for a riot that started in Rome, sending assassins after him. Rather than face them, Gaius committed suicide. Thousands of his followers were executed afterwards. 

The murders of the Gracchi set a deadly precedent that Roman political problems could be solved by the sword instead of by debate. Forty years after Gaius’ death, the Roman general Lucius Cornelius Sulla marched on Rome with an army to settle a longstanding dispute with his mortal foe, the populist Gaius Marius, violating a longstanding sacred tradition that decreed no one was allowed to bear arms within Rome. Sulla later declared himself dictator and murdered thousands of his political opponents after taking control of the city by force.

Not long after Sulla, Julius Caesar crossed the Rubicon and marched on Rome, triggering a series of events that would result in a civil war across the Mediterranean, Caesar’s assassination, and other civil wars that led to the fall of the republic and the rise of dictatorial rule by an emperor. The Romans were so exhausted by the century-long civil strife that stability—even stability imposed by a dictator—was accepted.

We would do well to study Rome’s decline into anarchy and eventual tyranny. It’s true that America has gone through cycles of political violence before: The ’60s and ’70s saw widespread unrest in the streets, terrorist bombings, and several high-profile assassinations. But that doesn’t mean we should write off what’s currently happening in our cities just because it seems like we’ve seen worse before. In many ways, the unrest of the ’60s and ’70s set the ground for the chaos we’re seeing now, and, as Rome proved, political violence can take decades to bring about the ultimate downfall of a democratic society. 

The turbulence we are living through today is a sign of a deep illness in America that has been manifesting in fits and starts. During the 2020 riots, unhinged mobs shouted that “silence is violence,” and the media told us that even staying neutral was not enough—one had to embrace the movement wholeheartedly to avoid being labeled a racist. The same people who advocated shutting up people in their homes for months during Covid suddenly justified allowing the riots to unfold.

Last June, a transgender-identifying man tried to assassinate Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh in his own home in response to a leak announcing that the Supreme Court was planning to overturn Roe v. Wade. The media buried the story. This March, a transgender-identifying woman shot up a Christian elementary school in Nashville, killing six innocents, half of whom were students. These examples don’t even touch on attacks on churches, crisis pregnancy centers, and a federal courthouse. The media either ignores or downplays these vicious attacks.

Is it any wonder that the havoc is so terrible, considering the media and their allies gleefully throw not just gas, but propane tanks on the fire every time they falsely claim that restricting abortion will result in a real-life Handmaid’s Tale, that recognizing the objective and inarguable reality of biological sex constitutes a “trans genocide”, and that defending yourself and your fellow citizens makes you a murderer?

Many members of our ruling classes, whether in politics, the media, or academia, see themselves as “The Anointed,” per Thomas Sowell’s famous phrase. They don’t want anything to get in the way of their utopia. They have already called for overturning centuries of tradition by packing the Supreme Court, ending the filibuster, and even abolishing the Constitution. So what’s a little street violence thrown into the mix? When the “peasants” are afraid of being attacked, that’s just a sign of “white discomfort.” 

What’s particularly toxic about our elites’ support for political violence, tacit or otherwise, is its impact on both the people torching our streets and on innocent Americans who just want to be left in peace. The criminals and vandals only grow encouraged when they see they have the backing of media personalities, tenured professors, and politicians, whereas normal Americans grow apathetic, believing that terms like “law and order” lose all meaning when they see justice is only selectively applied.

These normal Americans, excepting the obvious cases where their lives or the lives of their loved ones are put in danger by crazed mobs, should not respond to force with force. They should instead empower law enforcement to crack down on the maniacs who burn down cities in response to the media’s latest Two Minutes Hate, and they must continuously call out the self-appointed messiahs in our ruling classes who are enabling these madmen. 

The deaths of the Gracchi didn’t instantly collapse the Roman republic. Instead, they lit a long fuse. But the bomb did explode. Once you start murdering people because they oppose your policies, there is no return to an earlier, politer era of civil debate. There is just an increasing escalation of bloodshed that will end in civil war, tyranny, or both.

The post Ancient Rome, Modern Violence appeared first on The American Conservative.

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Hope in a Bankrupt America

Par : Micah Meadowcroft — 21 juin 2023 à 06:05
Politics

Hope in a Bankrupt America

American Compass’s “Handbook” for reforming our political economy will help the country chart its course.

Federal Reserve Raises Interest Rates
(Photo credit should read CFOTO/Future Publishing via Getty Images)

Rebuilding American Capitalism: A Handbook for Conservative Policymakers, foreword by Oren Cass, American Compass, 104 pages.

Announcing his bid for the presidency in 2015, Donald Trump said, “Sadly, the American Dream is dead.” He might also have said—and throughout his campaign did, though perhaps not in these terms—that America’s political system is bankrupt, the national parties are bankrupt, the country’s political class is bankrupt. Many Americans agreed with him and they swept him into the White House. Many Americans still agree with the diagnosis today: Morally, financially, legitimately, America’s ruling regime is in bankruptcy. 

Ours is still a capitalist regime, and, as Trump’s fellow populist in that early campaign, Sen. Bernie Sanders, might put it, American capitalism is bankrupt, too. American Compass agrees. Last week, the small think tank—the vanguard of the GOP’s much-discussed “realignment”—released its “Handbook for Conservative Policymakers,” a plan for Rebuilding American Capitalism. Today, in a show of force, Compass hosts four Republican senators—Tom Cotton, Marco Rubio, J.D. Vance, and Todd Young—on Capitol Hill. Readers of The American Conservative may have long nurtured fears from the right about libertarian economics and the consequent wage stagnation, inequality, and two-income trap, but now we are not alone. You cannot white paper your way to recreating 2015, but concrete policy proposals do matter, and Compass has distilled eight years of “New Right” conversations into a porch from which to step. 

There is too much detail in American Compass’s dense little handbook to review its proposals here, from plans for student debt to decoupling from China, each ably defended by members of the Compass Advisory Board. The broad theme of a worker’s republicanism is by now a familiar one. But in reading Rebuilding American Capitalism from stem to stern a new and unexpected motif emerges: bankruptcy. 

While American bankruptcy law has been instrumental to American growth and dynamism, so too has it been abused, and demands reform. In the same way, if American economic and political life is a kind of corporation in bankruptcy—an assertion I can only defend here with a gesture to look around you—then we have been in one of those private equity-driven wind-downs where vultures make their money off short-term stock inflation and long-term company failure. In its handbook, American Compass suggests a different bankruptcy plan, a humane political economy that makes sure the old regime’s shuttering pays out its workers, its citizens, its families, first and then sets out to build the future. 

As Henry Olsen lays out in his contribution to the collection, “The Meaning of Liberty,” liberalized debt laws are an essential underpinning to American capitalism at its best. The common law, “consistently enforcing the doctrine of personal responsibility,” demanded stagnating caution, as “an individual was liable to repay all of his debts regardless of his capacity to do so.” But, Olsen argues, America’s Founding Fathers “believed that individuals deserved second chances in life and ought not to be condemned to misery and servitude because of a risk gone wrong. They thus created the law of bankruptcy, which overrode common law to allow a person unable to repay his debts to have some of them discharged by law.” This new liberty encouraged the economic growth we no longer take for granted, as “more people were willing to take risks knowing they could preserve their freedom.” 

Like Chekhov’s gun promising something in the next act, however, Olsen concedes, “This surely created what is today called ‘moral hazard’ as the dishonest took advantage of this escape to take greater risks than perhaps they ought to, with borrowed money.” And, sure enough, in the handbook’s introduction to financialization—a section featuring Caleb Orr and Julius Krein—we read about financial engineering that shifts investment risks onto third parties while keeping the returns. “The leveraged-buyout model employed by many ‘private equity’ (PE) firms represents an extreme case, incurring high levels of debt that enable much larger profits when a transaction is successful, while accepting that some bankruptcies will occur along the way.” The political issue at play here: “The workers and communities devastated by the bankruptcies do not get to ‘hedge.’” 

Compass offers a response:

The United States should create a new, primary obligation to workers that is paid first in the event of a bankruptcy. This could equal, say, six month’s salary for all workers laid off in advance of or during a Chapter 11 reorganization, or for all workers in the event of a Chapter 7 liquidation. A similar claim should be created for local communities, equal to one year’s tax liability in each domestic locality where a business operates. These changes in bankruptcy rules would decrease the value that creditors can recover from a business in bankruptcy while increasing the value available to other affected parties. This would make much riskier the aggressive leverage strategies that accept the chance to bankruptcy as a cost of business and a means to higher returns. It would also give workers and local communities a seat at the table in reorganizations.

And perhaps that last line summarizes the political significance of Rebuilding American Capitalism. American Compass and its advisors, members, and allies in the U.S. Senate all want to give workers and local communities a seat at the table in a period of national reorganization. What else would you call this moment? All around us, amid gerontocratic leadership and collapsing bridges and falling fertility, are signs of decline, indications of bankruptcy. The vultures have been feeding. But this need not be cause for despair. There is much work to do, and in America, at least, we think people deserve second chances and ought not to be condemned to misery and servitude because of risks gone wrong—and bankruptcy can be a new beginning. 

The post Hope in a Bankrupt America appeared first on The American Conservative.

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The Art of the Deal

Par : Bradley Devlin — 21 juin 2023 à 20:30
Politics

The Art of the Deal

State of the Union: Renowned artist Hunter Biden has struck a sweetheart deal with the DOJ and will plead guilty to two misdemeanor tax charges.

Hunter Biden

The renowned artist Hunter Biden will plead guilty to two misdemeanor tax charges.

A court filing on Tuesday claimed that Hunter failed to pay his taxes on time in 2017 and 2018. In each year, Hunter owed $100,000 based on a taxable income of about $1.5 million. To avoid jail time, the Georges Berges Gallery artist struck a deal with the Justice Department, which still has to be approved by a federal judge.

But Hunter’s get-out-of-jail card isn’t free. The court filing also included one other charge—a felony. The third charge, possessing a gun while using illicit drugs, will be dismissed after two years of probation. Hunter reportedly will have to complete a diversion program, remain sober for two years, and forfeit his right to own a firearm. Maybe some hard time would have benefitted Hunter’s new “tortured artist” routine, but I digress.

Oh, and it might be worth mentioning here that the Department of Justice is under the command of his father President Joe Biden. Liberals simultaneously want people to believe that fact means everything and nothing. Hunter Biden is the president’s son, and we’re holding him accountable. The president’s son is being treated like everyone else. No one, not even the president’s son, is above the law.

Possessing a firearm while addicted to illicit substances is a felony that, in cases where the defendant is not named Hunter Biden, carries a five year mandatory minimum sentence. Not only will Hunter avoid jail time, but if he behaves, his record will remain untarnished from a felony charge. Everyone else gets three strikes; Hunter gets four.

But even the weapons charge is besides the point. It’s all a smokescreen of laughing gas.

It’s absurd for the Biden regime to assume that the public believes this is any kind of real accountability with a deal like this. But even if the DOJ prosecuted Hunter properly and sent him to the big house, tax violations and a weapons charge aren’t what comes to mind when one ponders Hunter’s possible criminality. 

What about Hunter’s time spent as a member of the board of BHR Partners, a China-based private equity fund that gave him a 10% stake at a discount in 2017? What about Hunter’s stint on the board of Burisma, during which he received more than $2 million in compensation? What about Viktor Shokin, the Ukrainian prosecutor that Joe Biden once bragged about getting fired? Who is the “big guy” and why was he getting 10 percent? What about those meetings Hunter helped score with then–Vice President Biden?

These are the questions that need answering, not if a drug addict owned a gun and remembered to pay his taxes on time. Follow the money and see where it goes. One might reasonably guess it goes all the way to the top, President Joe Biden. 

In the coming days, Hunter Biden will be in Delaware for his arraignment and to enter his guilty plea. This time, he probably should just leave his laptop at home.

The post The Art of the Deal appeared first on The American Conservative.

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The Fall of Housing First

Par : John Hirschauer — 22 juin 2023 à 06:01
Politics

The Fall of Housing First

Republicans have realized that Housing First is not about housing.

Lawmakers Unveil Initiative To Reduce Compliance Costs And Spur Growth And Innovation
(Photo by Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images)

For nearly two decades, everyone in Washington believed in Housing First.

Housing First holds that homelessness is a housing problem that can be solved—note the word “solved”—by giving the housing to the homeless, no strings attached. Proponents of Housing First believe that tying housing to users’ sobriety or their participation in drug-abuse or mental-health treatment is wrong on both practical and moral grounds. Not only do behavioral requirements make the homeless less likely to use state services, it infringes on what advocates claim is homeless people’s inalienable right to housing.

The policy had enjoyed broad support on both sides of the aisle. George Bush’s homelessness czar, Philip Mangano, backed Housing First with almost biblical fervor. Barack Obama made adherence to the policy a condition of receiving federal grant money, and promised its adoption would end homelessness nationally within ten years.

It is now a decade after Obama’s prediction, and cities across the country are grappling with an increasingly visible and violent homelessness problem. The number of unsheltered homeless people increased more than 20 percent between 2014 and 2020, even as Housing First proponents touted the program’s success.

On Monday, the New York Times profiled the growing opposition to Housing First among elected Republicans and conservative nonprofits. The write-up was prompted by Kentucky Republican Rep. Andy Barr’s new legislation that would prevent the Department of Housing and Urban Development from denying grants to shelters and other service providers because they impose behavioral requirements on their participants. Barr drafted the bill after several shelters in his district were denied federal funds for requiring residents to be sober.

Conditioning grant money on groups’ adherence to Housing First principles has been official HUD policy since 2013. On the original, since-deleted, grant-application page, the Department said applicants had to demonstrate that “at least 75 percent of the [Continuum of Care’s] permanent supportive housing project application … follow a Housing First approach,” which HUD defined as a “model of housing assistance that is offered without preconditions (such as sobriety or a minimum income threshold) or service participation requirements.” In other words, HUD could deny an applicant on the basis of his having proposed to use more than 25 percent of his requested award to fund programs with sobriety or mental-health-treatment requirements.

Barr’s bill, which would repeal those HUD rules and require the agency to give at least 30 percent of its grants to groups that provide the homeless with behavior-conditioned services, is not the first Republican move away from the Housing First philosophy. In 2019, Donald Trump appointed Robert Marbut Jr. to head the U.S. Interagency Council on Homelessness (USICH). Marbut was a proponent of what he called “Housing Fourth,” echoing earlier models of service provision to the homeless.

Before Housing First came in vogue in the early 2000s, services were provided to the homeless on what is sometimes called the “staircase” model. Providers would see a homeless person on the street, and offer him an emergency shelter bed. If he behaved, he would be given the chance to move into a transitional housing unit, where he’d have to find a job and, if he was an addict, participate in substance-abuse treatment. At the end of this process, the hope was that the man could pay his own rent—or, in Marbut’s words, “exit the condition of homelessness and not to be in a subsidized living condition.”

Housing First advocates claim, not entirely unreasonably, that the “staircase” sequence expected too much from a population of people who are, oftentimes, ill-equipped to hold down a job, or ill-disposed to participate in treatment. They argue that providing people with housing, no questions asked, helps to get people off the streets, and lowers the costs associated with those who fail out of the “staircase” program, such as incarceration or psychiatric hospitalization.

But housing is expensive, and the notion that we can afford to provide housing to every single homeless person is belied by experience. As the Times reported, in Los Angeles, which embraces Housing First as a matter of policy, building a new supportive living unit for just one homeless person costs nearly $600,000. We also know that providing mentally ill people who refuse treatment with unsupervised, unconditioned housing often leads to disaster.

We also know that a lot of the evidence marshaled by proponents of Housing First is misleading. While rates of chronic homelessness have declined between 2010 and today, some scholars believe homelessness was even lower during the skid row era than it is today, suggesting that the recent decline, whatever its cause, is not without precedent in the pre–Housing First era. And as Stephen Eide observes in Homelessness in America, the cities that have most vigorously embraced Housing First have seen spikes in their homeless populations, in part because of the “draw” that no-strings-attached housing provides to both other cities’ homeless populations and some number of marginal cases who may be in and out of traditional housing units. Between 2010 and 2020, when rates of homelessness elsewhere dropped by 26 percent, New York City and California saw 47 and 31 percent spikes in their homeless populations, respectively.

Republicans have realized that Housing First is not exclusively, or even primarily, about housing. As Eide put it, “The real distinction is whether residential stability should be the goal of the program, as it is with Housing First providers, or secondary to primary goals such as economic independence.”

Richard Cho, former deputy director of USICH, said “Housing First is not a ‘program,’” but “a whole-system orientation and response.” It is a paradigmatic approach to the provision of social services that “is, and always has been, about changing mainstream systems.” Housing First is as much, if not more, about dismantling what proponents see as the bourgeois assumptions of our social safety net than the merits of a housing-oriented homelessness policy. Elected Republicans, at long last, are starting to recognize as much.

The post The Fall of Housing First appeared first on The American Conservative.

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Handicapping the Handicapped

Par : Jude Russo — 22 juin 2023 à 06:03
Culture

Handicapping the Handicapped

If you’re instinctively bothered by betting on the Special Olympics, you should pay attention.

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This week sees the sixteenth Special Olympics World Games at Berlin. Seven thousand athletes and their trainers have traveled to the gray city to compete; the games will be televised in the United States on the broadcast channel ABC, on the cable channel ESPN3, and on the streaming service ESPN+. The Games forecast 300,000 spectators in the week of competitions.

The Special Olympics is one of the few popular institutions that enjoy a sterling public image. It is also one of the few institutions dedicated to the old-fashioned amateurist idea that virtue can be pursued and attained for its own good by anyone, irrespective of native ability. (In both respects it differs markedly from the regular modern Olympics, whose integrity and amateurism have always been equivocal and dubious.) 

The World Games, the summit of the local, regional, and national circuits of the Special Olympics, showcase feats of athleticism that not only put your poor correspondent’s modest physical prowess to shame, but also display the best sort of humanistic triumph. Excellence is within reach for all—which is, of course, a different and far more humane standard than mere identity of outcome.

Discipline, deeds of strength, and the soaring ambition of man’s spirit aren’t enough for everyone. If you need an extra jolt, you can make your way to an online sportsbook to lay wagers on the Special Olympians. BetOnline, an Antiguan-registered gambling company, made a splash by announcing that it would be taking bets on individual event outcomes and on aggregate medal counts. Other betting sites are offering similar wagers.

An unusually cretinous and subliterate soft feature for Forbes lays out the case in favor, parroting BetOnline’s statements almost word for word: “It will be interesting to see what reactions come of this barrier-breaking occurrence in sports history, but the bottom line is that as gambling continues to evolve on a global scale, athletes who might otherwise be ignored in Berlin next week are going to get a little extra attention. Gambling not only closes doors to those who become addicted to it, it opens doors to those who would otherwise be overlooked.” 

Well, then. Incredibly, it bears pointing out that there are plenty of things that can be used to draw attention to an event that perhaps ought not be so used—exotic dancers, bear-baiting, flash mobs. Attention is also not quite the same as revenue. BetOnline has pledged a $10,000 donation to a charity benefiting the developmentally disabled; this is hardly the same as giving the Special Olympics a cut of the vig—not that this would be especially desirable either. (The press office for the Berlin games did not respond to The American Conservative’s request for comment.)

There is a hierarchy of justifications used for liberalizing gambling; there is a similar hierarchy of problems associated with it. I address both at greater length in this feature for TAC’s latest print issue, but the short form is as follows. Historically, the privilege of running a gambling concern is granted to historically significant industries or groups that cannot otherwise easily support themselves—industries like horse breeding and racing, groups like charitable organizations and reservation-bound Indians. The new boosters of looser gambling regulation argue that betting will be easier to regulate and its concomitant ills easier to address in a legal environment and that it will boost league and state revenues. Some also argue, libertarianishly, that it is simply none of the government’s business.

The problems associated with a broader gambling regime are several. First is the threat to the integrity of a given game—this is a particularly strong concern for sports betting, and is why the Major League Baseball Players Association and, until recently, National Football League Commissioner Roger Goodell opposed the spread of sportsbook. (Skeptics of sportsbook legalization may soon see vindication as cases of players betting on games slowly start to come to light.) Second is the cluster of social dysfunctions associated with gambling concerns, foremost of which is gambling addiction itself. Third is the effect on groups who previously relied on the economic rents from a highly regulated gambling industry. (Some Indian tribes have been pauperized by the recent explosion in legal gambling.)

So we arrive at the question of what benefits are derived from allowing Special Olympics sportsbook. It bears no direct benefit for the organization or the athletes; it creates incentives for compromising the games’ unimpeachable integrity and beauty; it will encourage some number of ruined people to continue to make ruinous choices. No state entity—and certainly no American state entity—will derive appreciable revenues from it. At best, it will encourage some number of anhedonic gamesters to turn the bar TV to ESPN3 for a minute or two. What’s a handful or a hundred or a thousand destroyed lives compared to a goosed audience number for ESPN3’s 2 p.m. Thursday broadcast?

One of the dominant processes—perhaps the thematic process—of modern life is breaking down complex systems so the bits can be sold piecemeal, cracking open the piggy bank marked “civilization” to take the bills and leave the change. As nicely detailed by our own John Hirschauer, a broadly temperate society deregulated cannabis use in a paroxysm of greed; now, society is not temperate, and, as it turns out, the profits are not much to write home about either. 

Gambling liberalization is no different. Can we build an industry around online betting on sports events? Yes, we can. Will it bring a host of social ills with it? Yes, it will. Will it destroy some historical industries and disadvantaged groups along the way? Yes, certainly. Will it especially help anyone besides the bookmaker? No, not really. Well, take the bills and leave the change.

In a rare case of taste and morality breaking out on the internet, many people on social media seem to think a Special Olympics sportsbook is crass and unsavory. They are right. Is it too much to hope that it makes them bring more jaundiced eyes to the gaming industry writ large?

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Russia’s Crawling Neighbor

Par : Doug Bandow — 22 juin 2023 à 06:05
Foreign Affairs

Russia’s Crawling Neighbor

Would Europeans fight if NATO ends up in a real war with Russia?

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(Photo by JOHN THYS/AFP via Getty Images)

The Vilnius NATO summit is approaching, and the alliance is focused on the war in Ukraine. Kiev wants in on NATO. Many Europeans support Ukraine’s inclusion, including several whom I recently met when they visited America to press their case.

Of course, by NATO they really mean the protective umbrella provided by America—the only member with a military that matters. They are saying the U.S. should promise to go to war, if necessary, to defend Ukraine.

Why? Almost all of them insisted that if Russia’s Vladimir Putin “wins” he is sure to expand his ambitions. He will throw his vast legions at the Baltic States, Poland, and maybe even Germany and France, incorporating Europe into his new Soviet empire. This will require Washington to do even more in the future to protect its reliably helpless dependents, they warn. In this way the Ukrainians are fighting for all of us!

Yet the Russian leader, while capable of invasion, has demonstrated little interest in reviving the Soviet geopolitical corpse, which is beyond his means. Until February 2022, all he had managed was grabbing Crimea and establishing some control over disputed territories—Georgia’s South Ossetia and Abkhazia, Ukraine’s Donbas. Vlad the Conqueror he is not.

Unsurprisingly, Western officials continue to refuse to acknowledge their reckless post–Cold War treatment of Russia. Moscow long focused on the issues of NATO expansion, dismemberment of Serbia, and regime change efforts in Georgia and Ukraine. That doesn’t justify Putin’s invasion of Ukraine. But his treatment of the latter was sui generis and responded to multiple grievous allied missteps.

Moreover, the mess Putin and his military have made of the Ukraine invasion makes it highly unlikely that he would attack even the Baltic states, let alone Poland or Germany. Victory would be unlikely, and success would yield little gain.

My newfound friends responded that Ukraine has fought so well because it received a deluge of Western arms and cash. True, but that means Washington need not fight for other nations to bolster their defense. Military assistance can thwart Moscow’s objectives and make it pay a significant price for its actions.

The visiting Europeans also claimed to fear a change in the global balance of power. To not “defeat” Putin, whatever that means—the debate is largely between reclaiming just the territory lost since last February and recovering everything seized before as well—would “show weakness,” I was told, and would encourage aggression by China as well as Russia.

In fact, even a ceasefire along current lines would be a defeat for Moscow. Rather than cow Ukrainian nationalism, Putin’s war intensified it. Rather than keep NATO away from Russia’s borders, his “Special Military Operation” brought Finland (and also will presumably bring, at some point, Sweden) into the transatlantic alliance. Moreover, European governments now talk about spending more on the military, a dramatic turnaround for many—though whether they carry through on their promises remains to be seen.

More important, while the conflict is a terrible humanitarian tragedy, it involves no substantial U.S. security interests. Ukraine has never mattered militarily to America. It was part of the Soviet Union for the entire Cold War, and part of the Russian Empire before that. Ukraine’s status is no more important for America today. While it matters more for the Europeans, that should be their responsibility, not Washington’s.

Nor is Ukraine likely to change the China’s security calculations. Beijing has desired to reclaim Taiwan ever since Japan seized the islands in 1895. Irrespective of Ukraine, Beijing is likely to dismiss the likelihood of the Europeans allies taking a firm stand on the issue, which is so distant from them. The war may cause the Xi Jinping to be more cautious about his military’s ability to back his threats. But Western support for Kiev is unlikely to divert him from his basic objectives, along with his willingness to use military force if that is the only way he believes he can achieve them.

Playing to international sympathy for Ukraine, its advocates argued that the country not only has a right to join NATO but also wants to be part of Europe. Russia shouldn’t get to determine who joins the alliance or the West. Indeed, they insisted, the U.S. should prevent Moscow from establishing a sphere of influence.

Although Russia should not be able to decide Ukraine’s role in NATO, neither should Kiev. Existing NATO members select who joins, and the purpose of the alliance is their safety, not other nations’ welfare. Military allies are not the equivalent of Facebook friends, with more always being better. The U.S. should agree to further NATO expansion only if the process makes America more secure. Thus, Washington should consider Moscow’s opposition. Adding Ukraine adds not only an existing conflict, but one involving a hostile nuclear power.

Worse, the chief combatant in any hot war with Moscow would be America. Indeed, despite the fervent support for Ukraine by the European visitors with whom I spoke—mostly members of national governments and the European Parliament—several admitted that their publics were growing weary of providing material support to Ukraine, which led me to ask: Would their people fight if NATO ended up in a real war with Russia? None said yes.

Three years ago a survey by the Pew Research Center found that more European peoples opposed going to war on behalf of their neighbors than in fighting for them. (Naturally, majorities in those same NATO states assumed that the U.S. cavalry would ride to the rescue!) A recent poll by the European Council on Foreign Relations reported that “Europeans want to remain neutral in a potential U.S.–China conflict and are reluctant to de-risk from China—even if they recognize the dangers of its economic presence in Europe.” Apparently the Russian invasion hasn’t stopped Europeans from asking, “What’s in it for us?” So much for allied solidarity and all that.

Although many Eastern Europeans are now pushing for some form of NATO promise to Ukraine of inclusion in the alliance, every member government played along with NATO’s ostentatious lies to Kiev through last year. In truth, no NATO member wanted to fight for Ukraine. Nor was anyone willing to fight in 1994, when the U.S. signed the Budapest Memorandum formalizing Ukraine’s relinquishment of nuclear weapons. Washington and the other signatories promised in the event of war to go to the United Nations, the emptiest of threats. And so far no one wants to fight in the current conflict, despite the torrent of weapons delivered, money transferred, and praise offered.

My European interlocutors also claimed that the U.S. benefits as much from NATO as does Europe, which has spent more than seven decades underinvesting in its defense. After all, they pointed out, Article 5 has been invoked only once, and that was after 9/11. European soldiers died in America’s foolish Afghan and Iraq wars. Yet however welcome for Washington, inserting a limited numbers of troops, most with serious caveats or restrictions on their roles, does not compare with acting as chief guardian against a major conventional power that possesses nuclear weapons.

The Europeans also insisted that the U.S. needed their continent’s backing against China, both economic and military—that America could not go it alone. No doubt, both forms of support would be helpful. However, the first requires a close relationship, not a military alliance. And despite growing European disquiet with Chinese foreign policy, it will take much to convince the continent to sacrifice markets and profits on such a conflict with so little evident consequence for its people. So far European publics are not convinced.

The second is a fantasy aspiration unlikely to come to fruition for years or decades, if ever. After all, the Europeans won’t spend enough money to defend themselves; who seriously believes that they will construct a vast naval armada, filled with heretofore nonexistent marines, to speed eastward and join Washington in battling the Chinese hordes? Europe should provide for its own defense, relieving Washington of that burden. If that ever happens, then serious discussions about the continent’s military role in containing China could follow.

Moreover, Ukraine’s advocates claim that the war represents the broader struggle between democracy and autocracy. It is important that Ukraine wins, both for itself and for the rest of us. Indeed, the visiting Europeans insisted, victory for Ukraine could tip the global balance of power America’s way.

No doubt, Ukrainians feel, or at least want to feel, this way. However, this exalted interpretation has little to do with the conflict’s reality. Ukraine’s democratic credentials are considerably less than pristine. They look good only in comparison with Moscow’s. The U.S. and West more broadly have done much to crash their brands as well, which has led to significant reluctance in the Global South to join the U.S. and its allies against Russia.

Ultimately, Washington has no reason to fight for Ukraine. Most people’s sympathies naturally lie with Ukrainians. However, war should be an existential necessity rather than a charitable impulse. My European visitors insisted that Washington would not have to fight since NATO membership would prevent further conflict. That’s a comforting assumption, but who expected Russia to attack last February, Ukrainians included? Any peace is likely to be cold and dangerous. Both Russia and Ukraine, especially if the latter thought allied military intervention to be automatic, might soon be ready for a second round.

Never before have two significant conventional powers armed with nuclear weapons gone to war, which is the most important reason for Washington to say no to NATO membership for Ukraine. Even if the chances are small, the risks are enormous, too great for any justification offered. Especially by Europeans forever ready to fight to the last American.

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Patricians Over Praetorians

Par : Sumantra Maitra — 22 juin 2023 à 23:00
Foreign Affairs

Patricians Over Praetorians

State of the Union: A resolution to return war powers to Congress is a promising step toward reclaiming American republicanism.

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Sen. Rand Paul at TAC’s Foreign Policy Conference

“Use of the congressional power to declare war, for example, has fallen into abeyance because wars are no longer declared in advance,” Senator Robert Taft wrote in 1951. “It would be a tremendous stretching of the Constitution to say that without authority from Congress, the President of the United States can send hundreds of thousands of American soldiers to Europe when a war is raging over that entire Continent, and the presence of American troops would inevitably lead to war.”

It has only gone downhill since. The two most important causes are, first, that the authority of the Congress has been supplanted by a permanent bureaucracy in Washington, and second, that international institutions now dominate American grand strategy.

Chief among them is NATO, and with it the idea that NATO’s Article 5 automatically compels the United States to join a war. This is of course not so. Article 5 merely initiates a joint defense clause, which compels the treaty allies to come to each other’s defense, without mentioning the scope of the actions. Consider that, after the only invocation of Article 5, after the attacks on September 11, only around thirteen countries actually actively took part in combat sorties. The principle applies in reverse; Article 5 does not compel the U.S. to take part in combat operations without the authorization of Congress. 

To that cause, some Republican Senators and Representatives have introduced a resolution to take the war power back into the hands of Congress. Senator Rand Paul of Kentucky in the Senate and Representatives Warren Davidson of Ohio and Chip Roy of Texas are at the forefront, joined by Senators Cynthia Lummis of Wyoming, Josh Hawley of Missouri, Mike Braun of Indiana, and Mike Lee of Utah, as well as Reps. Dan Bishop of North Carolina, Troy Nehls of Texas, Harriett Hageman of Wyoming, Paul Gosar and Andy Biggs of Arizona, Andrew Clyde and Marjorie Taylor Greene of Georgia, and Matt Rosendale of Montana. 

Explaining his resolution, Paul wrote,

For decades, many legislators have incorrectly interpreted Article 5 as an obligation that unquestionably commits the United States to provide military support should a NATO ally be attacked… But that is not exactly what Article 5 states. Article 5 states, “The Parties agree that an armed take against one or more of them . . . shall be considered an attack against them all and . . . each of them, in exercise of the right of individual or collective self-defense . . . will assist the Party or Parties so attacked by taking forthwith . . . such action as it deems necessary, including the use of armed force…” In other words, NATO allies are committed to assist each other in the event of an attack, but military action is not mandated, and the United States maintains its sovereign capacity to determine what kind of response is warranted.

Davidson added, “Only Congress can constitutionally authorize the use of military force, and Article 5 of NATO does not supersede the Constitution”—a sentiment also echoed by other senators and representatives. For example, Lummis said, “America must honor our Article 5 commitment, but we cannot allow NATO to supersede our nation’s laws, or we risk losing sight of the principles and values that make this country so special.”

The potential return of war powers to Congress has gotten some serious push lately. Russ Vought, President of Citizens for Renewing America said to me that “NATO is too often treated as a foreign policy holy sacrament, by the foreign policy elite. Like any alliance, NATO’s utility should be constantly reexamined and it should not supersede the Constitution.”

But the core principle in question is even broader and theoretical. A functioning republic, to retain its republican character, needs a patrician class who are elected representatives of the people and are accountable ultimately to the public. Over the last few decades that has eroded to the point where they have given up their power to a praetorian class, a combination of unelected bureaucracy at home and international institutions abroad, simultaneously disdainful and unaccountable. 

That is, of course, unsustainable. This resolution, belatedly, attempts to claw back some of that power and signifies a reaffirmation of the core representative principles of the American republic. As Congressman Roy said, “No one has the power to declare war without Congress’s deliberation and our constituents’ consent; it’s high time this body conducted itself accordingly.”

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A Manhattan Original

Par : Anthony Paletta — 23 juin 2023 à 06:01
Culture

A Manhattan Original

Among the impressive structures in Midtown Manhattan, this one stands alone.

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Black bricks are relatively common building materials, but they crop up usually as architectural pinstripes, rarely as a whole suit, so to speak. One glorious exception stands on an especially prominent site in Manhattan: Raymond Hood’s American Radiator Building, the darkest masonry building in town. 

Currently housing the Bryant Park Hotel, the American Radiator Building was the third skyscraper in New York landmarked by the Landmarks Preservation Commission, preceded only by the Flatiron and Manhattan Municipal Buildings. And with excellent cause. Hood’s buildings don’t usually top lists of the finest buildings in Manhattan, but any Top 5 or 10 list without them is severely suspect. 

Raymond Hood didn’t design many buildings, a tragic consequence of his death at 53, but everything he did build was excellent. Hood, born in Pawtucket in 1881, attended Brown University and studied architecture at MIT. He worked for Ralph Cram, preeminent church-builder, before attending the École des Beaux-Arts, the world’s finest art and architecture institution.

After graduating, he worked for Henry Hornbostel in Pittsburgh, architect of much in that city and the Queensborough Bridge. In collaboration with John Mead Howells, Hood beat out all sorts of A-tier competitors for the Tribune Building competition, a neo-Gothic wonder that has enriched North Michigan Avenue ever since. He was principal architect on Rockefeller Center, one of the world’s greatest skyscraper ensembles, and designed several of the greatest Art Deco towers in New York: the McGraw-Hill Building (whose superb lobby was recently eviscerated), the Daily News Building, and a number of other stately offerings, including 711 Fifth Avenue and the Beaux-Arts Apartments on 44th Street. 

The tower of the American Radiator Building (1924, Hood & Howells), now the Bryant Park Hotel, as it appears during daylight, New York, mid 1930s. (Photo by FPG/Getty Images)

Those buildings share some common programmatic and volumetric solutions, but Hood did not repeat himself. Walter H. Kilham Jr., in his book Raymond Hood: Architect: Form Through Function in the American Skyscraper, writes, “His commitment to experimentation emerged from a conviction that each program must be translated into a building with a unique aura; there could be no prototypical skyscraper.” The McGraw-Hill Building stresses horizontal spandrels, while the Daily News emphasizes vertical piers and employs an enlivening series of zigzag setbacks. Hood was no stranger to color: There are green windows and bluish terracotta on McGraw-Hill, and brick and black spandrel brick patterns to contrast with white on the Daily News building.

But back to the source. His first substantial building was for the American Radiator Company, which was one of the lower tier industrial concerns that J.P. Morgan sought to aggregate among U.S. Steel, General Electric, International Mercantile Marine, and International Harvester. No concern was too small to seek to monopolize. Hood started small with them, literally designing radiator covers, then scaled up with this project. 

A parkside site is one of the few opportunities in Manhattan to build something that won’t be overcome by subsequent building, and Hood made superb use of this Bryant Park frontage. 

He didn’t merely slide another book into the shelf-like streets of Manhattan. He built an eighteen-story tower that’s both set back and angled at its corners. The base is a delightful oscillation between neo-Gothic and Art Deco. The first two stories are very 1924, with double-height showroom windows lined in bronze. Gold stone lines the entrance. One floor above, there’s a cornice with corbels containing glazed terracotta unapologetic grotesques, their expressions fully Brughelian, along with dragons. One floor up there are pinnacles in Cubist style. It’s a very sharp effort to make the street lively, and is all easy to admire. 

The tower slims down above the fifth floor; chamfering does wonders for its lithe silhouette, a choice enabled by steel frames. As Cervin Robinson writes in Skyscraper Style: Art Deco New York,

While not obvious on the exterior, a structural detail resulted that became very much a part of modern design in the era of glass and steel buildings that was to follow after the Depression. In traditional or classical buildings it was a custom to make the corner pier wider than those between the windows on the theory that it gave an illusion of strength, but the steel column in the corner actually carries only half the floor load of a column in the piers beneath. In beveling the corner Raymond Hood went one step further and eliminated the structural column entirely: the piece of floor that supported the three windows and tier piers that rounded out two corners of the building were cantilevered out, like a shelf, from the next two columns on either side.

The building tops off with a fantastic assortment of gold terracotta-clad pinnacles as well.

Back to the most important thing: that black shade, if it registers a bit more as brown these days. The building is full of windows and is fairly thin, with over 90 percent of its space within twenty-five feet of windows, which is quite a lot compared to some of its enormous peers. Hood did not want windows defining the appearance of this tower, however. Window frames were going to be black—Hood decided to carry over the shade. 

Kilham quotes Hood:

A somewhat off-hand suggestion was offered that the building be done in black and gold. As the study proceeded, the feeling became constantly stronger that “black” windows, and not the wall surfaces, were the dominating note of the exterior, and that tying the walls into the windows would create a more unified design and valuable aid in overcoming the depressing effect of monotonous regularity that windows placed on large surfaces often impart to even the most carefully studied office buildings.

There’s no other building in Manhattan that looks quite like this: Georgia O’Keefe painted it, a stark black silhouette, and you can find it in the Crystal Bridges Museum of Art.

There’s something exuberant about the whole exercise for a variety of reasons. More than one critic has noticed a certain resemblance to a radiator in the whole form, a nod that seems a welcome reminder of an age of rudimentary pride in industrial craft. Hood’s whole effort was happy to draw upon anything in devising his work; it’s a building with features and adornments impossible before 1900 and others that hearken happily to 1500. You can’t miss it in Bryant Park, and would never want to. 

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The Cobbler’s Children

Par : Helen Andrews — 23 juin 2023 à 06:05
Politics

The Cobbler’s Children

If Chinese-born scientists are taking their skills back home, maybe we should try investing in domestic talent instead.

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(Xinhua/Xie Huanchi via Getty Images)

Xiaoliang Xie, a leading expert in genomics and former professor at Harvard, renounced his U.S. citizenship earlier this month in order to pursue the rest of his scientific career in China. He becomes the latest in a trend of academics returning to China after years at Western universities. In May, Yonghao Zhang announced he was leaving the University of Edinburgh after twenty years to head up a hypersonics lab in Beijing. In December, Nieng Yan gave up a position at Princeton University to run a lab in Shenzhen.

The trend is real, according to data compiled by the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development. The OECD looked at the institutional affiliations of the authors of scientific papers and found that in 2021, for the first time, China gained more scientists than the United States.

Why are so many scientists making the jump now? China’s “Thousand Talents Program,” which offers perks and incentives to attract academics and researchers from the West, was launched back in 2008. 

The left’s explanation for the recent exodus is racism. Specifically, they say that Asian scientists resent being racially profiled by the Justice Department’s “China Initiative,” which was launched by Attorney General Jeff Sessions in 2018 to investigate Chinese espionage, intellectual property theft, and illegal technology transfer. It led to numerous indictments and convictions. This was in contrast to the period from 2013 to 2016, when the number of people charged by the DOJ with spying for China was zero.

I doubt that the insensitivity of the China Initiative is the real culprit. For one thing, as The American Conservative explained last year, the China Initiative targeted people based on actions, not ethnicity; its most high-profile conviction was the white Harvard chemistry professor Charles Lieber. For another, the China Initiative was canceled by the Biden administration, which apologized to any Chinese scholars who felt racially targeted. It ended, and they’re still leaving.

A better explanation is that China simply offers better opportunities now than it did fifteen years ago. Chinese-born scientists were happy to stay in the U.S. as long as all the cutting-edge labs were here, but now that their home country has caught up, many prefer to follow their natural loyalties.

The United States should avoid falling behind China in scientific fields like hypersonics, which not only are lucrative but have military applications. Should we do as the left suggests and stop investigating espionage so aggressively? Should we hand out more visas to Chinese applicants who want to work and study in the United States, in order to win the talent race?

Foreign students already outnumber Americans in many graduate science departments. Among full-time graduate students at American universities, 74 percent in electrical engineering are international students; 72 percent in computer and information science; 71 in industrial and manufacturing engineering; 67 percent in economics; and 54 percent in chemical engineering.

Investing in these foreign students only makes sense if we expect the best minds among them to stay here in the U.S. later on. If we no longer expect that, then maybe we should try investing in domestic talent instead.

Xie, who just renounced his American citizenship, got his Ph.D. at the University of California–San Diego and did postdoctoral work at the University of Chicago before being hired by Harvard. At every step of his career, there must have been native Americans who applied for those opportunities and who, in a different world, would not now be taking that education and those years of experience across the Pacific to a country that we may one day face in armed conflict.

In its recent policy brief A Hard Break from China: Protecting the American Market from Subversion by the CCP, the think tank American Compass offers several useful steps to stop China from draining American scientific expertise. One is to keep Presidential Proclamation 10043, banning students with links to the Chinese military from being issued visas for graduate study in the U.S., a Trump-era policy that, unlike the China Initiative, the Biden administration has maintained. 

The New York Times called Proclamation 10043 “paranoid” when Trump announced it. Chinese students should be “exposed to the liberalizing effects of Western institutions,” which would win them over to our way of life, the Times implied. Perhaps this was true once. But if the attractions of the American system are no longer so overwhelming to outsiders, then maybe the policy of filling our universities with Chinese-born students and professors should be rethought from the ground up.

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Blinken Said the Right Thing in Beijing

Par : Bradley Devlin — 23 juin 2023 à 18:00
Foreign Affairs

Blinken Said the Right Thing in Beijing

Critics of Antony Blinken’s comments in Beijing ought to take a look in the mirror.

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“He who wishes to fight must first count the cost.” — Sun Tzu, The Art of War

Earlier this week, the United States’ top diplomat, Secretary of State Antony Blinken, paid President Xi Jinping a visit in Beijing for the first time since 2018.

Suffice it to say, relations with China have not improved In the intervening years. When former Secretary of State Mike Pompeo met with Xi in October 2018, a burgeoning trade war was top of mind. Concerns about a Chinese invasion of Taiwan surely lingered in the background, but it wasn’t really until China’s crackdown on Hong Kong in 2019 that concerns about China’s near abroad came into focus.

Since then, a global pandemic that not just originated in China but likely leaked out of a Chinese lab ravaged the world. Its disruptions reverberated throughout the world economy, revealing just how fragile the supply chains that keep our globalized arrangement afloat. China has become even more assertive in its near abroad while modernizing and enlarging its military.

Just five years on, it’s the prospect of a real war, not just a trade war, that defines Sino-American relations.

Nevertheless, Blinken set expectations for his Beijing envoy low relative to the daunting task at hand. “It was clear coming in that the relationship was at a point of instability, and both sides recognized the need to work to stabilize it,” Blinken said, justifying his trip. “And specifically, we believe that it’s important to establish better lines of communication, open channels of communication, both to address misperceptions, miscalculations and to ensure that that competition doesn’t veer into conflict.”

After Blinken’s Monday meeting with Xi, the secretary of State hinted that the discourse was contentious. “We have no illusions about the challenges of managing this relationship,” Blinken claimed. “There are many issues on which we profoundly, even vehemently, disagree.”

Xi’s comments struck similar chords. “The competition among major countries is not in line with the trend of the times and cannot solve the problems of the United States itself and the challenges facing the world,” the Chinese president asserted. “China respects the interests of the United States and will not challenge or supplant the United States. Similarly, the United States should also respect China and not harm its legitimate rights and interests.”

Such comments are what’s to be expected from the U.S.–China relationship in 2023. So was another comment from Blinken. At a press conference held at the U.S. embassy in Beijing following Blinken’s meeting with Xi, the secretary of State said, “I raised U.S. concerns, shared by a growing number of countries, about the PRC’s [People’s Republic of China] provocative actions in the Taiwan Strait as well as in the South and East China Seas.”

The secretary continued: 

On Taiwan, I reiterated the longstanding U.S. One China policy. That policy has not changed. It’s guided by the Taiwan Relations Act, the Three Joint Communiques, the Six Assurances.

We do not support Taiwan independence, we remain opposed to any unilateral changes to the status quo by either side. We continue to expect the peaceful resolution of cross-strait differences. We remain committed to meeting our responsibilities under the Taiwan Relations Act, including making sure that Taiwan has the ability to defend itself.

These comments drew the ire of China hawks, Republicans especially. “Blinken flew to Communist China to appease Xi Jinping and state the Biden administration does not support Taiwan’s independence,” tweeted Sen. Marsha Blackburn of Tennessee. “Why won’t this administration stand up to bullies and stand for freedom?” “Blinken Blinks, Cowers To XI in Beijing,” tweeted Fox News’ Sean Hannity with a clip of Blinken’s remarks attached.

While the Biden administration has been hawkish at multiple junctures vis-à-vis Taiwan, particularly in Biden’s previous statements about how the U.S. military would come to Taiwan’s defense if China decided to invade, Blinken’s comments in Beijing were prudent. Blinken simply iterated the United States’ decades-long policy toward Taiwan, which, as Blinken stated, is outlined by “the Taiwan Relations Act, the Three Joint Communiques, [and] the Six Assurances.”

The pieces of U.S. policy Blinken listed are consistent, the most important among them being the Taiwan Relations Act (TRA). Enacted by Congress in 1979, the TRA replaced what some Republicans and China hawks seek, tacitly if not explicitly, today: a mutual defense treaty with Taiwan. 

But America’s policy of “strategic ambiguity” that stems from the TRA has delivered the same results as the mutual defense treaty that the U.S. had with Taiwan from 1954 to 1979: China has not invaded. When the U.S. dropped its explicit commitment to defend Taiwan with its blood and treasure, the Chinese did not rush in. When Taiwan transitioned from a military junta to a democracy less than a decade later, China did not scramble its jets. 

It’s the same result, but for a much lower cost to the United States. While the TRA stipulates that the U.S. will provide arms to Taiwan and “resist any resort to force or other forms of coercion” that could come from the mainland, the United States is under no obligation to send its sons and daughters to fight another war an ocean away. It leaves the door open to American involvement in a war between China and Taiwan, but leaves what exactly that constitutes up to the Chinese imagination, hence the “ambiguity.” The TRA speaks softly, but carries a big stick.

Furthermore, the effects of strategic ambiguity are felt not only on the mainland but across the strait. Not even Taiwan can be sure what kinds of aid the U.S. will provide if China does attempt to invade. Thus, rather than become a free-rider on the American military, like many European nations have become under NATO’s Article 5 commitments, Taiwan is under constant pressure to maintain defense expenditures. While Taiwan’s defense expenditures likely remain too low given the Chinese threat, the 2.1 percent of GDP it spends annually on its military is higher than most countries with outright mutual defense treaties with the United States. Taiwan’s unimpressive defense expenditures and nonstrategic allocation of those dollars (buying more tanks won’t do you much good when defending a mountainous jungle island from an amphibious assault) is not a consequence of strategic ambiguity. Rather, it’s Taiwan’s hubristic belief that no matter its behavior, America will send its finest to defend the island when bullets begin to fly.

“U.S. policy does not currently commit us to the direct defense of Taiwan. Since it isn’t in our interests to fight a costly war against China for this small island far away from home, this is a good thing,” Will Ruger, president of the American Institute for Economic Research, told The American Conservative. “But strategic ambiguity has value by constraining both China and Taiwan from making a destabilizing move away from a not-terrible status quo from the American perspective. This status quo also gives Taiwan, which isn’t currently doing enough, the chance to improve its defensive capability to dissuade any hostile move by China in the future.”

In other words, strategic ambiguity provides the U.S. leverage to encourage Taiwan to increase military funding and modernize, train, and equip its forces to stave off a Chinese invasion. If Taiwan doesn’t take its own defense seriously, why should the United States?

“Ending strategic ambiguity and moving to an American commitment would be strategically unwise to say the least—which is why the Biden administration has walked it back when the president himself has gone off script towards such a move,” Ruger added.

Hawkish Republicans can sound off on Twitter all they want, but any pejorative they levy against Blinken for his comments in Beijing this week ultimately reflects on them. Though the executive retains wide-ranging authority in foreign affairs—too much authority—in this instance, the executive branch is performing its duties within the confines that Congress has established. If Congress wants to drop strategic ambiguity, then it can change the law.

The hawks have tried that. Up to this point, they’ve failed for good reason, but their efforts will continue. This is Washington, after all. Here, when powerful people want a war, they often get it.

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Teaching the Truth About Communism

Par : Ken Pope — 24 juin 2023 à 06:01
Culture

Teaching the Truth About Communism

For students today, the fall of the Berlin Wall is ancient history, if they know about it at all.

Berlin,Wall

I still remember it like it was yesterday, those famous words spoken by President Ronald Reagan on June 12, 1987 at the Brandenburg Gate in Berlin: “Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall.” It was a momentous day for Russians, Germans, Americans, and the entire world. We hoped we had seen the last of its kind—both the wall and the regime it represented.

Communism, however, was far from dead; to this day it still holds 1.5 billion people captive in China, Cuba, North Korea, Laos, and Vietnam.

On paper, communism is appealing to those unaware of its brutal legacy. During the October Revolution, Lenin’s promise of “Peace, Land, and Bread” sounded like the perfect solution to Russia’s problems. That myth is tragically still prevalent today.

By definition, utopia does not exist, and thinking that we can make communism work “this time” has been shown repeatedly to only generate human suffering, rather than a worker’s paradise. Today’s problems of inequality, division, and strife will never be solved by a political theory responsible for the lives of 100 million people and counting.

Thankfully, our children are born without the Soviet nuclear threat that we experienced during the Cold War. But the clear and present danger of communist ideology still exists, and our students are not learning about its enduring legacy in the classroom. This rising generation deserves to know the truth—communism brings about only suffering and the abuse of human rights. 

At the Victims of Communism Memorial Foundation, our goal is to ensure that all students know about the crimes, and the victims, of communism. Next month, we look forward to hosting teachers from around the nation to discuss the truth about communism. VOC’s eighth annual National Seminar for Middle School and High School Educators will provide teachers with witness testimony, instruction from leading experts, and the newest tools and curriculum resources.

Unfortunately, there is only so much we can do within the classroom. It is up to state governments to lead the way. In 2021, we were honored as Florida’s Governor Ron DeSantis signed a historic education bill mandating the teaching of communism’s history in all public schools. In 2022, Arizona’s Governor Doug Ducey ushered in a similar piece of legislation. More states are following in their wake.

When I speak to students at the Victims of Communism Museum, their responses are both alarming and encouraging. As a 2020 VOC poll found, 40 percent of Americans have a positive opinion on socialism. This number increases to 49 percent in Gen Z, with a third even supporting the elimination of capitalism. Even more shocking, 18 percent of Gen Z and 13 percent of millennials believe that communism is a fairer system than capitalism. Yet when students see stories of the victims of communism on the wall in our museum, their visceral rejection is unanimous. 

Heroes like Milada Horakova know the real price of communism. Horakova, a Czechoslovak politician and resistance leader, was executed for standing for freedom in Communist-controlled Czechoslovakia. Before her show trial, she wrote a letter to her daughter, urging her to not give up, saying, “Life is hard. It does not pamper anybody, and for every time it strikes you, it gives you ten blows. Become accustomed to that soon. Decide to fight.”

Milada’s tragic story is sadly one of far too many highlighted at the Victims of Communism Museum, but her message rings true. From China’s genocide against the Uyghurs, to the political prisoners in Cuba’s modern-day gulags, this deadly ideology has left a scar across the world. It’s past time that our students learn the truth of communism so we can ensure that history will never repeat itself again. 

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Atmospheric Change

Par : Dominick Sansone — 24 juin 2023 à 06:03
Foreign Affairs

Atmospheric Change

The American-led sanctions regime is paradoxically hastening the end of Western economic hegemony.

PCK refinery in Schwedt
(Photo by Christophe Gateau/picture alliance via Getty Images)

While Russian and Ukrainian soldiers fight it out in the mud of the Donbas and its environs, the shifting terrain of the geopolitical landscape continues to portend the downfall of the neoliberal political-economic order. 

The West’s attempt to recruit large swaths of the global community to enlist for the sanctions war has decidedly failed. Outside of the U.S., E.U., and a few close allies (i.e., economic dependents and military protectorates) such as Canada and Japan, practically no other countries have joined in, preempting any economic dogpile sought by the self-proclaimed defenders of democracy. Increasingly, transatlantic policy seems to be having the exact opposite effect. 

As of June 9, Pakistan is the latest country to begin accepting large shipments of discounted crude oil from Russia, as much as 100,000 barrels a day. “This is the first ever Russian oil cargo to Pakistan and the beginning of a new relationship between Pakistan and Russian Federation [sic],” announced Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif.

Sharif initially came to power last year with hopes of improving relations with the U.S. and securing a favorable assistance deal with the IMF given the country’s economic problems. Previous Prime Minister Imran Khan’s ouster in April of 2022 was due in part to deteriorating Pakistan–U.S. relations and Khan’s perceived cozying up to Russia. While Sharif began his term intending to reverse course, austere IMF conditions and flagging support from Washington have apparently contributed to Islamabad’s reevaluation of international circumstances.

In the present geopolitical landscape, such a move is perceived to be in direct defiance of Western efforts to obstruct Moscow’s revenues. The motive behind Islamabad’s shifted political and economic calculations is not difficult to decipher. Nor is it exceptional. The International Energy Agency (IEA) reported that Moscow is now sending out 8.1 million barrels of oil a day, the highest number going back to April 2020. In January 2023, almost half of those shipments were destined for China and India, which have respectively increased as a proportion of Russia’s oil exports from 21 percent to 29 percent and 1 percent to 20 percent since January 2022.

Chinese oil imports alone jumped in May to the third highest level ever recorded. Beijing also recently issued a crude oil import quota of a whopping 62.28 million tons of allotments. This makes the total import quota amount issued by Chinese leadership 20 percent higher than that of the same time last year. At the same time, Beijing’s natural gas purchases continue to push upward, increasing 3.3 percent year-on-year in Quarter 1, with a 10.3 percent year-on-year increase in April of liquefied natural gas (LNG).

Chinese demand is the single greatest factor in international energy prices. Even though there is some concern regarding potentially lower demand if Beijing’s commodity exports are muted in the upcoming months amid market uncertainty, Russian oil and gas flowing to China is sure to continue its upward trend in the aggregate.

Just as important, if not more so, as the massive shifts in quantity and direction of the energy trade, however, are the size and scope of the joint initiatives—usually under the leadership of Moscow and Beijing—that continue to proliferate in opposition to Western-led international organizations.

The recent St. Petersburg International Economic Forum saw representatives of various economic groupings and cooperation organizations outside the Atlantic orbit meet to discuss greater interconnectivity, development collaboration, transportation corridors, as well as investment options for funding various cross border initiatives. One of these groups is the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO), which continues to focus on greater cooperation and integration with ASEAN nations. This year’s meeting included a notable presentation on the creation of a SCO investment bank to provide the capital necessary to facilitate such collaborative projects. 

The BRICS organization featured prominently at the St. Petersburg forum as well. It also includes an important investment bank—the New Development Bank—that provides ready access to liquidity for its members, funds infrastructure projects, and facilitates increased industrial manufacturing. BRICS continues to grow in both clout and size. A number of new countries applied for membership last year, including Iran and Argentina. 2023 has also seen membership bids from nineteen additional nations before an upcoming summit in Johannesburg this August. One of the most recent applications came from Egypt on June 14. Potential bids from important players in the energy market such as Venezuela (with direct support from Brazil’s President Lula) and the United Arab Emirates are also being discussed. UAE President Sheikh Mohammed bin Zayed Al Nahyan traveled directly to the St. Petersburg forum in order to meet with Putin on June 16, where the two discussed their desire to build a closer relationship between the countries. 

Gulf neighbor—and traditional U.S. ally—Saudi Arabia has to some degree also hedged its geopolitical bets. After refusing Biden’s phone calls in March of 2022 and denying his request to increase oil production to help lower international prices, Riyadh’s friendship with Washington has somewhat soured as of late. (Saudi Arabia also joined the SCO in March 2023, and is a potential candidate for BRICS membership.) In another move that will likely meet with the displeasure of its Western allies, Saudi Arabia additionally decided to move forward with further production cuts of 1 million barrels per day beginning in July. 

Whether or not this has much of an impact in raising prices in the international market (recalling that Chinese demand remains the primary factor effecting international prices), the Western price caps and various regulatory restrictions placed on Russia will ensure that the amount charged by Moscow remains under the market price in the short term, incentivizing even greater purchases by Beijing and New Delhi. Consider that, as discussed earlier, China alone has increased its trade with Russia by about 40 percent, and is set to reach a record $200 billion this year. Perhaps most importantly though, more than 70 percent of that trade has been settled in either yuan or the ruble, with the Russian central bank currently holding 40 percent of its reserves in yuan. Pakistan has reportedly also paid for its new shipments of Moscow’s crude with Chinese yuan. Earlier in 2022, Saudi Arabia suggested the possibility of denominating its oil transactions with Beijing in the currency. 

The present geopolitical system with all of its accompanying features is only made possible by the dollar reigning supreme as the world’s reserve currency. Champions of the present order faithfully hold that this system will be maintained indefinitely, guaranteed on the back of U.S. military might and Western economic dominance. But the international environment is beginning to shift, as much due to the burgeoning economic alliances outside the confines of Western-backed international agencies as because of the policy decisions of those latter agencies and their U.S. patron. No recent move has acted as a greater accelerant to this shift than Washington’s decision to freeze and then seize the foreign currency reserves of the Russian Federation at the outset of the Ukraine war. 

The weaponization of financial reserves has increased distrust in the present system to new heights. The end of dollar dominance may not be nigh, but it is a much more likely possibility than many in the West care to admit. Neoliberal proponents—such as those at the Atlantic Council—are correct that Moscow’s total revenue from oil and gas has decreased in the face of Western price caps (down 46 percent year-on-year this past February), resulting in significant debt accumulation and a large budget deficit that currently stands around $42 billion. They are wrong to believe that this is evidence of sanctions having their desired effect (i.e., changing behavior). Russia is undoubtedly content to post higher measurements of national debt in the short term if it means moving toward a system with greater financial independence. Moscow’s deficit is also likely to narrow as tax payments on energy shipments come in, not to mention the potential of eventually circumnavigating Western restrictions (the $60 cap is currently enforceable based on the fact that Russian ships transporting oil shipments use Western maritime insurance and financial services—a situation that could change).

Russia has demonstrated that having an economy based on commodities and heavy industrial production matters more in today’s international environment than a narrow set of economic indicators such as annual GDP growth or per capita income. Should dollar dominance ever come to an end, this fact will be made painfully clear.

The United States and other Western countries have adopted an increasingly ideological perspective regarding the future course of economic development. Leaders choose to accept only information that aligns with their dogmatic beliefs. Only a real faith could affirm outlandish recent predictions by the IEA that peak oil demand will be reached by the end of this decade. Contrary to their economic entrail reading, growth in E.V.s and increased energy efficiency will not portend the downfall of oil and gas in the near future. 

A failure to remove its ideological blinders and comprehend political and economic conditions as they objectively exist will spell disaster for the Western bloc. Moscow’s budget deficit may have temporarily ballooned, but international realignment continues. A robust service sector and low carbon emissions are not indicative of national greatness. Should the dollar eventually lose its status as the world’s reserve currency, and should the demand for American debt ever begin to seriously diminish, the nation’s economy will be exposed for the hollow shell that it is. 

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The Once and Future American

Par : Declan Leary — 24 juin 2023 à 06:05
Politics

The Once and Future American

Patrick J. Buchanan was the prophet not of revanchist fantasy, as some would have it, but of an old yet ever-current American realism.

Pat Buchanan Speaks At CPAC
(Photo by Mark Reinstein/Corbis via Getty Images)

No man in America in the last century has been more thoroughly smeared and more thoroughly vindicated than Patrick J. Buchanan.

In the latest hit, the founding editor of The American Conservative and the prophet of American populism is set up as the villain in a review of Paul Gottfried’s new volume, A Paleoconservative Anthology. It is always a feat, and rarely a good one, for a review to overshadow the book it takes as its subject. Yet the Law & Liberty reviewer—Michael Lucchese, a former staffer to liberal GOP Sen. Ben Sasse of Nebraska—ventures far beyond Gottfried’s anthology, far beyond paleoconservatism altogether, into foundational questions on the American order and American tradition.

Buchanan, his advisor Samuel T. Francis, and other so-called paleoconservatives are taken by Lucchese to represent a politics of racial animus, populist drive, and reactionary nostalgia. This school of thought Lucchese pans as “Right-Wing Marxism,” apparently because he can think of no other term for a tradition with minimal awareness of material forces and the political power of class dynamics. The slander is familiar, but not yet worn out.

While Buchanan takes the most heat simply by virtue of his prominence, it is Francis towards whom Lucchese directs most of his criticism—and not without good reason. Francis, the viciously secular anthropologist of “middle American radicals,” was wrong about a great deal. America’s next revolution will not come from the middle, as Francis predicted, but from the same place it always comes from: the highly educated, downwardly mobile upper-middle classes of both coasts. And Francis—who held a Ph.D. in modern history—doomed his own project by severing the tradition he inherited from its Christian roots and attempting to conform it to the intellectual standards of his enemies.

These are not the battles Lucchese chooses. Instead, he sets the paleocons up against 

twentieth-century conservatives such as Russell Kirk and William F. Buckley [who] built their movement on the idea of the American Founding. For them, conservative politics needed to be rooted in a reverential devotion to the Constitution, a healthy appreciation of the free market, and a vigorous anti-communism. And as Ronald Reagan’s stunning electoral successes proved, these ideas were immensely popular.

This is not just a gross oversimplification but an outright distortion. As Kirk’s former assistant attests to Chronicles’s C. Jay Engel, Lucchese is wrong not just in his conclusions but on the facts. Russell Kirk is not a counterpoint to Buchananite conservatism; he was the Michigan chair of Buchanan’s campaign! The backstop legalism to which Lucchese refers, moreover, did not overtake the conservative movement until nearly a full generation after Russell Kirk’s influence peaked. Kirk ended his life with very little faith in the schools of thought and action Lucchese tries to pin on him.

Such facts cannot be permitted to interfere with the standard myths and talking points of establishment conservatism, distilled here in a particularly careless and shallow illustration. I am, as it happens, in the middle-late stages of a book of my own on this very subject, so I will take the liberty of advertising by way of correcting the record.

The history of American conservatism has always been told as a story of unification. In the first years of the Cold War (the conventional narrative goes) religious and social traditionalists, individualists and anti-statists, anti-communists and national security hawks all came together against a common enemy. In fusionist institutions like National Review and Young Americans for Freedom, these disparate groups convened and quickly formed a cohesive philosophy. Their narrative became more refined as they melded more closely, banishing certain elements here and there, and reading their story backwards into a supposed history of American right-liberalism. This was, by the establishment’s own telling, the first time ever that an organized movement devoted to the preservation of this American way emerged.

There is a gaping hole in the history, of course: a cartoon version of the Founding—George Washington and Thomas Jefferson incanting Locke’s Second Treatise in a fateful Masonic ritual—and then static until 1955. If an actual dichotomy can be established here, it may be between those conservatives who have built their house on what Lucchese calls “the idea of the American Founding” and those who have built on the facts of the American Founding.

This is the great virtue of the best of the paleoconservative tradition: that it appreciates material and historical forces without falling into the kind of determinism that dominates the left. It will not treat a particular people in a particular time and place as an abstraction—or, worse, as a function of an abstraction. This is what the establishment has done: relegated the American people to a bit part in their own history, instruments or set dressing for the advent of a liberal epoch.

It is entirely forgotten in all of this that the Conservative Movement supplanted an older tradition—one whose virtues were broad and concrete and spanned both party and region. (Maybe the last clear illustration of the point is the alliance of Joseph McCarthy, a rough-and-tumble Midwestern Republican, with Robert F. Kennedy, an aristocratic Northeastern Democrat, to root out the communist threats of the early 1950s.)

This is not to say, of course, that everything in America before Hart-Celler and fusionism was hunky-dory, much less uniform. It is only to say that there was an old American consensus, whose defining features both provided for American greatness and set the U.S. firmly apart from the other nations of the world, that was displaced and then eroded by the arrival of what we now call intellectual conservatism.

What to call that tradition is a difficult question.

As a Catholic, I hesitate to claim “Americanism,” though it is the word employed by Joe McCarthy and other 20th century giants. Other words like “populism” capture some, but not all, of the contents and sense of what we mean to describe here. Inventions like “radical centrism,” “America First conservatism,” and “paleoconservatism” seem at once too narrow, too vague, and just a bit off base.

I have settled—when I cannot refer simply to “the American tradition“—on “realism“ (though this, too, is an imperfect choice). American realism is distinct from the European tradition of realpolitik, and it is broader than the attitudes on foreign policy it contains, to which specifically the term is most often applied today. It is a politics of prudence, established by practical men and founded in the Christian faith and principles they held dear.

In the 19th century, its economics were defined in opposition to the laissez-faire and free trade regimes of liberal Europe. This nationalist scheme of robust action—defined by trade protectionism, government spending on internal improvements, and other positive investments in growth and security—came to be known as the American School.  In the first half of the 20th century, this school of thought fought off an attack from the other side, as German-Russian communism swept across two continents and crept into the edges of American consciousness.

It answers force with force, as when Senator McCarthy used a small congressional subcommittee to strike back against the Soviet infiltration of our Republic, or when heroic frontiersmen met Indian savagery in kind.

Its valuation of man’s natural liberty was corrupted by a parasite—the foreign, European ideology of “libertarianism,” carried to these shores in the wake of the Second World War. Its interest in peace through strength was turned to a cheap slogan by the infiltration of neoconservatism, which wrought untold destruction in distant corners of the globe. It grew in a profoundly religious society, and the death of public Christianity in America forced perhaps its most destructive crack-up.

In pockets, though, it survived. Patrick Buchanan was one of very few men who kept the old tradition alive in the decades between the Second World War and the collapse of the liberal order, though historical circumstance may have bounded his ambitions.

The opponents of the old tradition have always been very sure of themselves—endlessly pointing back to Reagan’s ’84 landslide while shutting their eyes to the record of ’72. Lucchese likewise reads too much into more recent election results, assuring his readers that establishment conservatism has nothing to fear from any realist renaissance.

(I am reminded of a Never Trump event last spring at which uber-libertarian Katherine Mangu-Ward described herself to a mostly empty room as part of the “big round middle” of American politics.)

Since 1960—the last presidential election in which the two nominees both represented strains of the American tradition—things have indeed looked bleak. But the Democratic Party’s nomination of Joe Biden in 2020 suggested that many on the left at least still felt echoes of the old consensus. The unexpected rise of RFK Jr. will revive much deeper memories.

The class consciousness Lucchese so fears will be one major function of the reawakening, on both the right and the left. But the coming shakeup will no doubt be far broader, and the re-intrusion of historical force into American political life will bring far more dramatic changes than anything movement conservatism ever could produce.

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Guilty State of Mind

Par : Peter Van Buren — 26 juin 2023 à 06:01
Politics

Guilty State of Mind

The special prosecutor’s case may come down to one question: “What was Trump thinking?”

Trump Reportedly Brought Classified Documents To Mar-A-Lago During His Presidency
A car passes in front of former President Donald Trump’s Mar-a-Lago resort. (Photo by Joe Raedle/Getty Images)

An important point of law—mens rea—may decide how the Trump Mar-a-Lago documents case plays out, perhaps even deciding his innocence or guilt.

Section 793 of the U.S. Code (“The Espionage Act”) requires the government to prove that Trump knew, or had reason to know, he had National Defense Information (NDI) in those boxes at Mar-a-Lago, that Trump knew, or had reason to know, there was a government official entitled to receive the information, and also that Trump then willfully failed to deliver it to that official. That’s what the government has to prove, to a jury’s satisfaction, in order to convict Trump. Doing so will require understanding what Trump was thinking at the time he kept the documents. None of this speaks to the obstruction charges directly, except to say it will be hard to prove obstruction to a jury when there was no underlying crime.

Mens rea is Latin; it refers to criminal intent. The literal translation is “guilty mind.” It refers to the state of mind statutorily required in order to convict a particular defendant of a particular crime. Mens rea goes to an individual’s intent when an action occurs. For example, if you punched someone in the face and you intended to do so, that’s probably a crime, as opposed to hitting him by accident, or hitting him while truly believing the action was legal self-defense, which probably is not.

In Trump’s case, things are not as simple as the CNN version of events (“Classified Material in the Ugly Shower Room Spells Conviction for the Orange Man”). In order to convict, the documents, classified or not, are simply a starting point. Special prosecutor Jack Smith will need to prove Trump knew what he was doing, or that he had reason to believe his conduct would injure the United States.

Under the Presidential Records Act of 1978 (PRA), the president designates all records he creates either as presidential or personal records. A former president is supposed to turn over his presidential records to the National Archives and Records Administration (NARA), and he has the right to keep some of his presidential and personal Records as defined by the law (there are exceptions, such as for national security information), usually for his library. It is unclear whether Trump’s choices follow the letter of the Act.

Trump can, however, claim that he fully believed (even if wrongly) the boxes of material, most of which contained information that was not classified and included newspaper clippings and notes from other world leaders, are his personal records under the PRA. If so, did he knowingly retain NDI? Did he really think those documents “could be used to the injury of the United States” as the Espionage Act requires, or did he just think of them as mementos of his time in office, his personal records of the four years? If he thought these boxes were his personal records, he may have believed that NARA simply had no right to receive them at all. Prosecutors, by contrast, might argue that the statute’s “reason to believe” clause suggests Trump didn’t need to know that he had compromising information, only that he should have known.

We know what Trump is likely to say about such matters at his trial. If he elects to challenge Trump’s assessment of his mental state at the time of the alleged crime, can the special prosecutor successfully disprove that assessment? He seems to have three avenues by which to do this, two of which appear weak.

What may be the strongest evidence of Trump’s mens rea at one point in this saga are audio tapes of him. The indictment suggests there is a tape recording of one of at least two instances where Trump showed off the documents to people without security clearances. On the tape, recorded, per the indictment, with his knowledge and consent, Trump admits the document at hand is classified, and in a schoolboy-like way, says he should not be showing it to a writer, a publisher, and two Trump staffers. All that could be seen as a confession of sorts that what he held was NDI, not something personal. A lot depends on that tape, its admissibility in court, and whether a Florida jury ultimately takes it literally and not as just another episode of Trump bragging.

A second possible source of evidence of Trump’s mens rea are statements made by his own lawyer, Evan Corcoran, both via written notes and under compulsion before the grand jury, in contravention of standard attorney-client privilege. What might the lawyer have said, and how could he have violated attorney-client privilege and still have the material appear admissible in court?

The indictment claims Trump instructed his lawyers to claim falsely he did not have the documents DOJ subpoenaed and suggested his lawyers destroy some of the documents (“pluck it out”), or just “not play ball.” Trump allegedly spoke positively of Hillary Clinton’s legal team, which deleted tens of thousands of emails while supposedly not informing her to keep her clean. A jury might find Trump’s actions—namely his active attempts to hide physical boxes of documents from investigators—speak to intent, and treat the lawyer’s statements as confirmation.

Attorney-client privilege is recognized as one of the cornerstones of fairness in our system. In the Trump case, the Justice Department used the one major exception to privilege—when the communication is intended to further a criminal or fraudulent act (the “predicate crime”)—to compel Trump’s lawyer to give evidence against his own client. Justice asserted Trump lied to his own team about having no more classified documents, and that this constituted a crime of fraud and maybe obstruction, and thus privilege is not available and Trump’s lawyer can be made to testify against his client.

The crime or fraud exception to attorney-client privilege itself has a long history, dating back to English common law. Trump’s defense team will no doubt work hard to have the lawyer statements declared inadmissible, claiming without a clear finding on obstruction no crime was actually committed at that time by Trump.

The last avenue available to the prosecution to show Trump’s mens rea has some dandy complications flowering around it, and could help unravel the case to Trump’s advantage. Alongside Trump is his valet/aide, Waltine Nauta, who is charged in parallel with Trump under the Espionage Act. Any rendering of reality shows that Nauta simply was moving boxes around Mar-a-Lago at his boss’s request. That’s a long way from a crime, even considering the legal looseness of the Espionage Act. But the point in charging Nauta is not to seek to convict him; the point is to get him to accept a plea or even an immunity deal to tell everyone exactly what Trump was thinking at multiple critical points in the saga. As Trump’s closest non-blood-related aide, Nauta’s testimony would be compelling to a jury. If it shows Trump knowing he had done wrong keeping the documents, and that Trump actively used Nauta to try to hide them physically, that would be a pretty much slam-dunk case against the former president.

The problem, besides the unknown loyalty Nauta may harbor towards Trump, is that it appears DOJ leaned too hard on Nauta’s own lawyer in an attempt to get him to persuade his client to turn state’s evidence in favor of the prosecution. Nauta’s lawyer, Stanley Woodward, alleged in a court filing that during a meeting with prosecutors about his client’s case back in November, the head of the counterintelligence section of DOJ’s National Security Division, Jay Bratt, “suggested Woodward’s judicial application [for a DC Superior Court judgeship] might be considered more favorably if he and his client cooperated against Trump.” Bratt allegedly remarked that he did not think that Woodward was a “Trump guy” and that “he would do the right thing.”

Assuming this is not simply made up, this level of misconduct against a senior DOJ official could sink the Trump case, and at least remove Nauta from the picture. Woodward’s a poor candidate for the accusation that he made the whole thing up; he has a golden D.C. resume to stand behind, including a decade at Akin Gump Strauss Hauer & Feld, the second-largest lobbying firm in the United States and a consistently top-ranked law firm.

So, with all that as background, ask yourself: What was Trump thinking? Answer that, and you’re a long way toward knowing the resolution of the Mar-a-Lago case.

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A Technical Tool to Take TikTok to Task

Par : Tony Coniglio — 26 juin 2023 à 06:03
Politics

A Technical Tool to Take TikTok to Task

Make social media random rather than scale-free.

Children Screen Time Rockets
(Photo by Matt Cardy/Getty Images)

A specter more horrifying than communism is haunting Washington: bipartisanship. The pestilence has returned to batter the Chinese technology company ByteDance and its flagship application, TikTok. 

The popular app is a conduit for Chinese cyber-warfare efforts. No government but ours has been so slow to tend to the salus populi, but the threat TikTok poses to national security has stirred Washington to action. The elite’s attempted attack on the app represents the “kid soccer” swarm pattern we have grown accustomed to on so many issues. 

I don’t often believe that much is possible in Washington today. Most intelligent solutions are what political people call “outside the Overton window” and computer scientists might call “regime hard.” But in this case, there are options that are both effective and politically feasible. These solutions become clearer if one takes a step back and considers the problems of social media more broadly. 

Any attempted solution to the TikTok threat that mortally threatens Big Tech companies, especially American ones, will be a political non-starter. Although norms are regularly breached when it suits the elite, some breaches are difficult to sell to the public, and the government closing down an internet application would seriously breach expectations. It is safe to assume that anything that obviously imperils the fortunes of the Democratic Party or opposes “wokeness” is a non-starter. Anything that “harms” a favored constituency or lobby, or that elevates those of the “wrong sort” will not work. 

Many of the major problems associated with social media— addictiveness, the proliferation of socially and neurologically destructive content, and threats to national security—can be mitigated in one fell swoop, in a way that avoids these pitfalls. Congress should require social media apps to create their social networks to be “random” rather than “scale-free.” 

A scale-free network is one that contains nodes, or users, with a high degree of “preferential attachment,” and thus many more connections, than other nodes within the network. Scale-free networks allow growth in the network to accrue mostly to preferred users by presenting the accounts of preferred users more often than their non-preferred counterparts. If you plot a graph with the number of users in a scale-free network against the number of their connections, you will get a power-law distribution rather than a bell curve. In a random network, in which users are presented to other users stochastically, there would still be variance between each user’s number of connections, but the distribution of users by number of connections would resemble a bell curve. 

Most real-life social networks are random networks, or at least can be thought of as bell curve distributions. There are, after all, only so many acquaintances a person can have. A particularly charismatic person might have many more than average while a wallflower might have none, but compared to a scale-free network such as Twitter, it won’t vary by much. 

One should not confuse the fact that real-life social networks can have a “small world” effect with them being scale-free. The small world effect is the famous “six degrees of separation” phenomenon that emerges from the combination of clusters with random links. A scale-free network, on the other hand, requires growth and a higher degree of clustering than is necessary for the creation of a small-world network, though some small-world social networks—such as one that spreads a disease—can effectively resemble scale-free networks if growth is substantial.

Social media apps can be made into random or, at worst, small-world networks by taking measures such as limiting a user’s number of followers or creating random links between clusters of users. If Congress and federal regulators believe a company is not doing this, the agency responsible for enforcement could hire an expert witness to create visualizations of the network topography. The social media company could do the same in their defense. The consequences of this change would be the end of “influencers,” and fewer instances of content going “viral.” Most of the destructive and addictive content can be linked to those incentives. 

It might be objected that influencers would resist this change. But there are not very many of them; only the ones at the very top earn any significant amount of money, and they have no mechanism of coordination. Furthermore, some might find a way to live with this change. The effect on the consumer of social media would similarly be positive. While the most interesting and worthwhile influencers would be harder to listen to, it would still be possible. In any case, it would be the equivalent of reverting the music industry to before the winner-take-all effects induced by the record player and radio. You had professional musicians in every neighborhood, and while the top musicians could play to larger and more frequent crowds, there was a limit. Was music worse in the 18th century?

In fact, Facebook used to be like this, so we know it can work and be profitable. It was the norm before Twitter and Instagram exploded on the scene. When it was the norm, short-film companies like Vine and Beme could not be made profitable. Their odious Chinese successor would likely suffer the same fate if such a rule were applied to all social media. 

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Arms Must Cede

Par : Will Thibeau — 26 juin 2023 à 06:05
Politics

Arms Must Cede

Don’t be fooled: Sen. Tommy Tuberville’s hold on military promotions is the process of accountability working as designed.

GOP Senators Discuss Student Loans In Capitol Hill Press Conference

Senate Democrats, the military industrial complex, and Washington Post columnist Max Boot are desperate to preserve the military’s unrestricted stranglehold on general and flag officer selection and promotion. Senator Tommy Tuberville of Alabama’s hold on nearly 300 general officer promotions is rooted in righteous indignation over the military’s use of taxpayer dollars to pay for servicemembers’ and dependents’ abortion-related services. This is a good enough reason to support Senator Tuberville, but the root of the establishment’s indignation runs much deeper—to the very core of how the Pentagon avoids responsiveness to civilian leaders. 

Boot, along with his pro-war and pro-abortion Democratic masters, is incensed, because Senator Tuberville’s hold poses an existential threat to the very swampy nature of senior military officer promotions and selection. For too long, the Pentagon has ushered officers through the Senate confirmation process without pausing to seriously question their fitness for service. Senator Tuberville is giving conservatives their first chance to consider who, exactly, is leading our crumbling and tired military.

In a recent column, Boot, who has never served in uniform, insisted that Tuberville is compromising our military readiness with his typically “MAGA” extremism. His argument amounts to an insistence that the military usher its own chosen leaders into the general officer class without Congress or the American people having the opportunity to understand the profiles of these senior leaders. Add proper civilian oversight over military affairs to the set of beliefs that make one a MAGA extremist. 

A review of the Pentagon’s list of delayed nominees raises real questions about the suitability for promotion of too many of these supposedly politically neutral professional warfighters. 

Air Force Brigadier General Elizabeth Alredge, for one, tweeted her concern about the entrenched “whiteness” that exists within all organizations in America. In a Women’s Equality Day speech, Rear Admiral Shoshana Chatfield urged the audience to be skeptical of laws passed by Congress because of the fact “over 80 percent of legislators in Congress are men.” 

Another Air Force Brigadier General, Scott Cain, considered the establishment of one of the first DEI offices at Eglin Air Force Base, Florida to be his most significant accomplishment. This was the same general who insisted his command have “serious conversations” about the death of George Floyd to ensure their readiness to fight wars. 

General C.Q. Brown, the Air Force Chief of Staff and Joe Biden’s nominee to replace Mark Milley, implemented a system of racial and gender quotas for the Air Force officer corps. In Brown’s Air Force, subordinate commands are working hard to ensure white men only make up 43 percent of Air Force officers. While Brown would receive a Senate hearing regardless, one can hope Senator Tuberville’s hold will strike a spark of courage to complicate Brown’s confirmation. 

While the Senate is the only body with jurisdiction over promotions, Tuberville has allies in the lower chamber. With his amendment to the NDAA, Representative Jim Banks of Indiana has done the most significant work to ban irrelevant considerations of “diversity, equity, and inclusion” from matters of accession and qualification. The Senate needs to pick up the baton from Banks, and make genuine change possible at the Pentagon by holding generals and admirals to basic standards of conduct. 

Another of Banks’ amendments would end the Navy’s ludicrous drag queen recruiting program; the officers who gave Navy drag queens like “Harpy Daniels” their drag starts are also on the list of Tuberville’s holds. Admiral Michael P. Donnelly, up for promotion to two-star admiral, commanded the USS Ronald Reagan, a nuclear-powered aircraft carrier. Under Donnelly’s command of the Reagan, “Harpy Daniels” performed numerous drag shows to the adulation of the mainstream media. If Tuberville were not holding military nominations, hosting drag shows on an aircraft carrier would be baked into the military promotion process as an incentive.

Tuberville is using standard Senate procedure to hold the Pentagon accountable. Casting this basic modicum of due diligence as a threat to our national security is a tired tactic. Tuberville is threatening the unquestioned domination of a process by a military and department that are meant to be responsive to civilians. 

This renewed responsiveness could one day produce accountability for the foreign policy failures of the last 20 years. This kind of responsiveness could help the American people ask questions about the money we send to partner militaries overseas; it should compel Pentagon officials to explain why they are promoting so many senior officers dedicated to the DEI regime of the progressive left. The crusade against abortion is a righteous fight in itself, but the gnashing of teeth from the defense establishment shows that they are concerned about a more existential threat to their modus operandi

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Pugachev’s Ghost

Par : Sumantra Maitra — 26 juin 2023 à 18:00
Foreign Affairs

Pugachev’s Ghost

We will not like what comes after Prigozhin’s surreal insurrection against Putin.

Wagnerâs head Yevgeny Prigozhin leaves Southern Military District in Rostov
(Photo by Stringer/Anadolu Agency via Getty Images)

Truth is always implausible, as Fyodor Dostoyevsky wrote in Demons, arguably his most reactionary tome. At the time of writing, the world saw the most bizarre twenty-four hours in Russia, even by Russian standards. 

It started as one would expect events to start in Russia, with one Yevgeny Prigozhin—an ex-convict thief who became by turns Vladimir Putin’s cook, the Russian army’s meat supplier, a warlord and militia leader of one of the largest private armies, almost entirely now manned by former convicts and led by ex-Russian armed forces—marching on Moscow after a bizarre and violent outburst that made him look like a soyjak meme

Prigozhin looks like a character out of Death of Stalin anyway, and the entire episode of his day-long march and revolt seemed to be like a movie directed by Armando Iannucci. 

We found our protagonist marching his troops (around 25,000 of them, by his count) and circling back to Rostov, home of the southern military district, the tenth largest city; he captured its military headquarters, had tea with the locals, shot down a few Russian air force helicopters and jets, and demanded the heads of Sergei Shoigu and Valery Gerasimov, the Russian minister of defense and chief of general staff respectively. 

He then made an appeal to Vladimir Putin to declare martial law and fire Shoigu and Gerasimov. To his astonishment, he failed to see any defection in the Russian army and eventually turned back after a negotiated settlement and headed to Belarus. 

To add more layers to this already absurd plot, Putin at first declared him traitor. Rosgvardiya, the heavily armed Russian National Guards, appeared in Moscow alongside roadblocks and AFVs. Anne Applebaum wrote an article in the Atlantic claiming that this is the start of a Russian civil war. 

Then once this was all over, Putin pardoned Prigozhin in a backchannel deal, apparently negotiated by none other than Belarus’s autocrat, Aleksandr Lukashenko. In 2023, we have Lukashenko as a peacemaker. Truth is indeed implausible. 

It is far from over, of course; we haven’t seen the final act of this tale. When Prigozhin took his troops back and left Rostov for the barracks after the settlement, he was greeted on the streets by delirious and fawning Russians chanting the name of Wagner, his private militia group, and throwing flowers—a Caesarean moment in modern history. 

Putin has rarely been so humiliated. Whatever we know of former sovok KGB officers, they certainly do not forget public humiliation. Just ask the residents of Grozny. As Peter Hitchens wrote, Putin is the “milksop moderate” compared to what might come or what already waits patiently on the sidelines. “Believe me, there are devils in Russia far worse than anything most of us have seen in our lifetime, and you would not want them controlling a vast and slowly rusting arsenal of nuclear weapons, if you were wise.” But even a milksop moderate cannot just ignore this. 

Putin is often called a Machiavellian. If he has read Machiavelli, he would know that a prince is never safe from armed militia men and their divided loyalties. Divided loyalty is a topic we do not explore anymore, for obvious historical reasons. But it is an extremely important variable in the domestic politics of postmodern powers, just as it was in premodernity. Mercenaries and auxiliaries, as well as banished men in foreign courts, as Machiavelli wrote, have no fixed loyalty, and are disposed to constantly probing the limits of their power; only fear keeps them in line. 

Going further, if Putin has also read his Roman historians such as Vegetius, he would also know that a sovereign must punish and make an example of ringleaders of mutiny, to instill both accountability and discipline; this is a lesson for conservatives in the West as well, who cannot seem to comprehend the need for punitive retribution when faced with smug, insubordinate military leaders and civil servants, opposing their elected leaders without any reaction. 

Putin, as well as Shoigu and Gerasimov, are all similar to their counterparts in the Western bureaucracy in some ways. They might be smug and incompetent, but they have a strong sense of solidarity and power, and are extremely thin-skinned against any challenge to their collective swarm-lite rule, especially against what they consider “insurrections” by random citizens outside of the established power structure. 

Bureaucracy is a curse for humanity, but in Russia it is a tragedy. Russia started this conflict under a host of misguided assumptions. She tried to take over a country of around forty million people with a force of around 90,000, hoping that they would be greeted as liberators. The planners were Shoigu, the Russian version of an affirmative action hire with no military knowledge, and Gerasimov, the Russian strategist who once thought information warfare is the future rather than hard power. Any military strategist worth his salt knows that logistics is far more important than tactics. Gerasimov’s boneheaded plan to take Kiev led to Russia losing the cream of her VDV airborne troops in a matter of weeks. 

Here we have two highly credentialed midwit bureaucrats deliberately misleading their countrymen about a war that they thought would be won in three months at maximum with a strategy that did not consider local nationalism and resistance, and who thought postmodernity is all about gray zones, pink-haired people on computers, and utilization of disinformation, unlike those neanderthal hard men with blood in their eyes. If that sounds familiar, you might be having an attack of noticing things that you shouldn’t. 

Compare this to the invasion of Russia by the Germans in the Second World War with a force of around 3 million. That failed as well. Patriotism is a powerful force. Combined-arms land wars are difficult—occupation and pacification without resorting to premodern brutality, even more so. The reason Russia ended the Chechen rebellion was because of brutality. The reason Sri Lankans ended the Tamil rebellion was the same; brutality is exactly why the Taliban is currently more successful in driving away the poppy production than the trillions of dollars the West spent on Afghan civil society, police forces, and NGOs. Winning hearts and minds has never historically helped in the pacification of regions. Fear does

Prigozhin knew that instinctively, perhaps because he didn’t have any credentials. For good or for bad, he is the salt of the earth, an occupant of the lowest of the low rungs on the Russian power ladder. He has only three qualities: a primitive instinct for seeing an opportunity when one exists, a primitive instinct for utmost brutality, and an extreme Russian form of feudal patriotism. 

Russia needed and still needs men like Prigozhin to conduct a successful if brutal battle, just as we needed General Douglas MacArthur or Sir Arthur Harris in an earlier pre-human-rights and NGOcracy era when wars were actually ended and territories pacified. Fear is a requisite component for military victory and destruction of enemy morale, and will remain so for as long as human nature exists. 

That is what led to Prigozhin lashing out. His feudal loyalty compelled him to be increasingly frustrated at incompetence up top until the time he couldn’t take it anymore, as postmodernity gave way to premodernity. But his primitive patriotism couldn’t compete with the rival primitive patriotism of Russian nationalists and junior military officer class, who, while perhaps frustrated with how the war is being conducted, still couldn’t bring themselves to oppose their command hierarchy. The lack of defection doomed this endeavor. And Prigozhin’s desperate “Haro haro! À l’aide, mon Prince” failed because Putin is not an aristocrat—aristocrats can appreciate the ruthlessness and patriotism of someone uncredentialed—but an arch-bureaucrat who is far more interested in the continuation of his clique’s rule. 

This isn’t over. Russian rebel exiles usually get murdered abroad, or come back and foment more successful revolutions. We don’t know what might come next. Prigozhin knows that he is not safe, in either Russia or Belarus, and that Putin’s siloviki will carry their grudge. Putin knows that his rule is wounded with this display of defiance and mutiny, which will be a forerunner of more such behavior if this goes unpunished in the long run. The result is a slow power-struggle spiral, a return of the old demons. 

As the history of Russia demonstrates, the one who comes after is usually, if not always, worse. We will perhaps not like what is coming after this attritional war. 

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The Ukrainification of the World

Par : Katya Sedgwick — 27 juin 2023 à 06:01
Foreign Affairs

The Ukrainification of the World

Something has gone awry when American institutions embrace the myths of other countries’ revanchist nationalisms.

Opening Night, Texas Conference for Women 2019
(Photo by Marla Aufmuth/Getty Images for Texas Conference for Women 2019)

On the very day my piece about derussifying Russian art in Western museums was posted on this site, American writer Elizabeth Gilbert voluntarily withdrew her upcoming novel Snow Forest. This was the first time I had heard Gilbert’s name, but I was aware of her novel Eat, Pray, Love— probably because I saw the title embroidered on pillows at TJ Maxx. 

Gilbert’s decision, which she explained in a short video posted on Twitter, was motivated by an appeal from pro-Ukraine activists angered because the novel is set in Russia. Gilbert acknowledged being insensitive, but retained hope to eventually publish her work: “I am making a course correction and I’m removing the book from its publication schedule. It is not the time for this book to be published.”

Although they appeal to compassion—“think what’s it like to have your country invaded” — I find Ukrainian nationalists hard to relate to. When were Jews trying to erase every mention of Germany—or Ukraine, for that matter? The great Yiddish author Sholem Aleichem, who in 1905 fled the pogroms in what is now Ukraine, once compared Ukrainian national poet Taras Shevchenko to the Song of Songs—even as some of Shevchenko’s verses praised pogroms. Aleichem rested on his own secure sense of nationhood, which stemmed ultimately from divine revelations like the Ten Commandments. Ukrainians, on the other hand, are not done with their forty years in the desert. They are involved in a battle with a nation that’s universally acknowledged to have a great culture, their ancestors enthusiastically participated in that culture, and their compatriots find it difficult to separate themselves from it. 

Ukrainians have a point when they complain of Putin wanting to erase the Ukrainian nationhood, but they attempt to do exactly that to Russia. Apart from the recent fashion of writing the words “Russia” and “Putin” with lower case letters, Ukrainian advocates in the West call to stop productions of Russian music—even if some composers, like Tchaikovsky, have Ukrainian roots—and to relabel Russian artwork as Ukrainian and generally erase every reference to Russia. 

Strange historical narratives have been coming out of Ukraine after the Soviet breakup. While all nations have an element of make-believe in their founding mythologies—I’m pretty sure George Washington told a lie a few times—the post-Soviet version of the Ukrainian story reads as both fantastic and jealous. 

Ukraine is said to have existed in perpetuity, long before Slavs settled the lands it now occupies and the word Ukraine was in use. Versions of that updated narrative have poured into the English language media. For instance, the Ukrainian Magazine of Chicago confidently asserts that “Ukrainian civilizations date back to 4800 BC” and “Ukraine’s ties to Western Europe span back more than 1,000 years.” But the ancient Scythians and Trypillians who dwelled in what is now Ukraine weren’t Slavs. Moreover, the principality that, prior to Mongol yoke, had extensive ties to Western Europe was called Kievan Rus. It was ruled by the Scandinavian Rurik dynasty from Novgorod. The land was settled by ancestors of both Russians and Ukrainians. 

“The Ukraine”—translated from Slavic languages as “Borderland”—was the eastern edge of the 16th-century Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth. A singular Ukrainian cultural and political entity emerged with the 17th-century Cossack uprising of Bohdan Khmelnytsky, but the Cossacks asked Russia for protection. Ukrainian nationalism dates back only to the 19th century. 

Equally dubious are the Kyiv Independent’s claims that Russia did not found Odessa and Kharkov because over the centuries other peoples established settlements in the areas around those cites. This proposition is analogous to contemporary land acknowledgments forced on American public and private sectors; surely Ohlone Indians resided on the territory of what is now San Francisco, but they didn’t build the city. Similarly, many tribes had settlements in the south and east of Ukraine, but its most important urban centers were founded by the Russian Empire. 

Now that Ukraine is fighting Russia on its territory, Ukrainians get our sympathy. Feelings of goodwill should not translate into allowing odd ideas to permeate Western academia, but unfortunately the talk of “decolonizing” Russian history has become a trend. It amounts to substituting the word “Russia” or “Russian” that was used during the period of time in question with “Ukraine” or “Ukrainian.” For instance, the ethnic Pole and Russian Suprematist painter Kazimir Malevich can be renamed Kazymyr Malevych and declared Ukrainian. 

This kind of cultural exchange is like glasnost in reverse—in the 1980’s Soviet people looked toward Western scholars to learn honest history, as it was practiced in the free world. But today ideologically-driven Western academia is fed the narratives of the failed states of the former USSR. 

These narratives might be new to us, but Russians and Ukrainians have been exposed to them for decades. I can’t tell you how many Ukrainians believe themselves to be Scythians—I don’t think most of them know very much about the ancient tribe in the first place—or think that Russia “stole” Ukrainian artists. In Russia, the post-Soviet Ukrainian narrative has been greeted with derision. No wonder: Some Ukrainians dare not say the word “Russia,” preferring “Moscovia” instead, and argue that famous Russians were actually Ukrainians, even if they obviously spoke Russian to each other. 

For the record, this kind of erasure is not limited to Russia. For instance, Ukraine claims the Kiev- and Odessa-born Jews Golda Meir and Vladimir Jabotinsky as its own, even as pro-Ukraine American academics at Harvard write pogroms by Ukrainian nationalists out of history. 

Those in the West following the events in Ukraine know about the issues frequently raised by both sides—the Neo-Nazi resurgence, Holodomor, the historical status of Crimea and Donbas, and maybe the language question. The relations between Russians and Ukrainians have been going south for decades and mutual distrust abounds. Ukraine has very real historical grievances against Russia—Catherine the Great’s dissolution of the Cossack self-governance, for instance. But then the nationalists turn around and drown these issues in a choir of nonsense. The end result is thirty years of independence wasted on dubious ideological projects and ruining relations with neighbors. 

In recent weeks Ukraine sponsored incursions into the Belgorod region of Russia. Some nationalists dream of not just retaking Crimea but marching on Moscow. Those are boasts and desperate attempts at relevance. Russia is the largest nuclear power and borders Ukraine. Ukrainian nationalists can’t will Russia out of existence. 

Nevertheless, the sheer force of their will goes a long way in the West. Gilbert might think that she can hunker down until the war passes and then publish her work, but the war might be lengthy, and so far Ukrainian nationalists have been fairly successful at imposing their agenda on American institutions. 

I can’t say I’m interested in reading Snow Forest, but the precedent Gilbert is setting is unsettling. This episode of self-censorship can’t be viewed outside of the larger context of Ukrainian self-invention. But I, an American reader, should be able to read any book with Russian content any time I want. Dubious scholarship shouldn’t pollute our educational and cultural institutions—although it must be granted, we’ve done plenty of damage ourselves. 

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Russian Revolution Redux

Par : Bradley Devlin — 27 juin 2023 à 06:03
Foreign Affairs

Russian Revolution Redux

To the chagrin of Wagner supporters, and, bizarrely, Ukraine supporters, this revolution will not be televised.

Russian President Vladimir Putin Attends The Saint Petersburg  International Economic Forum

Over the weekend, news broke that the Wagner Group’s leader, Yevgeny Prigozhin, had declared war on the Russian Ministry of Defense (MOD). Within a day, what some were calling an attempted coup had failed, which has left some wondering if this was an attempted coup at all, or just really intense negotiations.

On social media, initial reactions of Wagner’s move against Russia ranged from confusion to celebration. Those confused, such as myself, thought that although the Russians seemed to be sustaining heavy losses fending off the Ukrainian counteroffensive, the Ukrainians were suffering the same if not more and with little territorial advancement. And after the last 16 months of social media psy-ops (the “Ghost of Kiev,” Snake Island, nuclear meltdown, Nord Stream, etc.), some even questioned the authenticity of early social media reports.

But videos that came out of Rostov of Wagner vehicles rolling up to the MOD headquarters, including snippets of tanks with guns trained on the building, confirmed the authenticity of reports that Wagner was making a move against the Russian government. It was a nerve-racking sight: the prospect of state assets and power falling into the hands of not just a non-state actor or rebel insurgency, but a private company of mercenaries who unabashedly profiteer from war.

The fog of war sits thickly over the Russia–Ukraine war. This is by no means the whole story: For those who experienced these events firsthand, it’s likely much longer and much more complicated. Was this actually a coup, an attempt at strong-armed negotiations, or the heaviest-armed temper tantrum of all time?

In Washington, on the morning of June 23, accounts on social media began posting an interview of Prigozhin discussing the war up until this point. In it, the Wagner leader claimed that the war against Ukraine was being waged not on behalf of Russians living in eastern Ukraine or to denazify the Russian border state. Rather, he said, it is a war waged on behalf of Russian oligarchs (Prigozhin, apparently, does not consider himself in this class). These oligarchs, some close to President Vladimir Putin, “plundered” the Donbas for years, and have continued to do so throughout the war: “these people were stealing money from people in [the] Donbas.”

Later, Prigozhin claimed that the “war was needed for a bunch of scumbags to triumph and show how strong of an army they are.” Prigozhin also stated that by March of 2022, Wagner and the Russian military personnel on the front lines were dealt a losing hand. Force capacity was below what was required to meet Russia’s objectives in the invasion. These problems have continued to percolate, according to Prigozhin, who claimed that lines across the expansive front are under immense pressure from the Ukrainian counteroffensive and will likely fail to defend their positions.

Shortly thereafter, Prigozhin solicited an investigation from Russia’s Investigative Committee into Russian Minister of Defense Sergei Shoigu and Chief of the General Staff of the Russian Armed Forces Valery Gerasimov, claiming their corrupt ambitions are “responsible for genocide and murder of tens of thousands of Russian citizens and giving up the territory to the enemy.”

Into the early afternoon, chatter continued on social media and messaging platforms such as Telegram, with speculation and alleged leaked messages from troops that the Russian military could move on Wagner for Prigozhin’s earlier statements.

Prigozhin then released an audio recording shortly after 2 p.m. EST, claiming that the MOD “carried out a missile strike at Wagner rear camps,” killing a “huge number of Wagner fighters.”

“We will make a decision on how to respond to this,” Prigozhin’s message concluded. “The next step is ours.”

Within minutes, Prigozhin released another audio message, declaring that Wagner was now at war with the Russian MOD:

PMC Wagner Commanders’ Council made a decision: the evil brought by the military leadership of the country must be stopped. They neglect the lives of soldiers. They forgot the word “justice”, and we will bring it back. Those, who destroyed today our guys, who destroyed tens, tens of thousands of lives of Russian soldiers will be punished. I’m asking: no one resist. Everyone who will try to resist, we will consider them a danger and destroy them immediately, including any checkpoints on our way. And any aviation that we see above our heads. I’m asking everyone to remain calm, do not succumb to provocations, and remain in their houses. Ideally, those along our way, do not go outside. After we finished [sic] what we started, we will return to the frontline to protect our motherland. Presidential authority, Government, Ministry of Internal Affairs, Rosgvardia, and other departments will continue operating as before. We will deal with those who destroy Russian soldiers. And we will return to the frontline. Justice in the Army will be restored. And after this, justice for the whole of Russia.

The MOD released a statement of its own, claiming that Prigozhin was lying about a Russian missile strike against Wagner.

Nevertheless, Prigozhin continued on the warpath, and called for members of the Russian military to join Wagner’s cause: “There are 25,000 of us and we are going to figure out why this chaos is happening in the country. Twenty-five-thousand is a tactical reserve, but the strategic reserve is our whole army and the whole country. Everyone who wants, join us. We must end this disgrace.”

Another cohort found itself in league with Wagner. Bizarrely, some Ukraine supporters on social media cheered on the chaos, seemingly unaware that the issue between Wagner and the MOD was, in part, fueled by the Putin government’s restraint.

Further audio messages from Prigozhin piled on. He claimed that Shogiu fled Rostov while simultaneously saying, “the Minister of Defence urgently arrived to Rostov in order to conduct an operation to destroy PMC Wagner. He used artillerymen and helicopter pilots covertly to destroy us.” 

About an hour after Wagner had declared war on the Russian MOD, however, Prigozhin claimed, “This is no military coup. This is a march for justice. Our actions do not interfere with the army in any way.” At this point, there was a bevy of unsubstantiated, conflicting claims circulating on social media, particularly from the Wagner leader. Was this some kind of armed protest to get concessions from the Russian government, or did Wagner actually want to wage war against the MOD? It became clear that, whatever Prigozhin and Wagner’s ambitions were, they were throwing any and all narratives at the wall to see what stuck. 

Wagner quickly needed to ally as many as possible to their cause—not only Russian foot soldiers but higher-ups in the Russian military. Given private military companies are banned in Russia, Wagner simultaneously operates beyond the purview of Russian law and within the broader framework of Russia’s military. Wagner receives equipment from the MOD, uses Russian military installations for training, and relies on the Russian military for logistical support. Convincing military officers who could provide such support would be necessary if a coup is what Prigozhin wanted.

But the actors that Prigozhin needed to attract likely revolved around Shogiu’s orbit. Further announcements from high-ranking Russian military officials implied that Wagner would not be receiving the needed support. One example came from Russian General Sergey Surovikin, who made a video imploring Wagner to “obey the supreme commander.”

“I appeal to the leadership, commanders and fighters of PMC Wagner: Together with you, we walked a difficult path. Together with you, we fought, we took risks, we took losses, but overcome together. We are of the same blood. We are warriors. I call on you to stop,” Surovikin said. “The enemy is waiting for our internal political situation to aggravate. We shouldn’t play into the enemy’s hand in this difficult time for the country. It needs to be done before it’s too late: to obey the will and order of the people-elected President of the Russian Federation. Stop the columns, and return them to their permanent positions and places of concentration. To solve all problems with civil means only under the leadership of the Supreme Commander of the Russian Armed Forces.”

Getting the Russian military to turn its backs on Shogiu and Putin was a long shot. Surely Prigozhin knew this. Which gives credence to two theories: Either this was an attempt to negotiate with the Russian government for more concessions, or Prigozhin had completely lost it.

Evidence to back up the first theory is that though Wagner relies on the MOD for support, at the end of the day, it remains a private military company. Just as it was able to mount a brief challenge to the Russian MOD without the benefits the MOD provides, it is also capable of assisting state clients in this manner—admittedly in a much more limited fashion, as the failure of Wagner’s efforts against the MOD can attest. It’s a simple sentiment, however: A private military company attempting a bloody coup against its biggest client is bad for business. Hostile negotiations less so.

As for the second theory, if this were just hostile negotiations, why would Prigozhin declare outright war on the MOD? Admittedly, Prigozhin’s declaration of war was quickly walked back. Which seems to give further credence to the theory that Prigozhin was blinded by rage. It was an attempted coup, but a capricious, ill-conceived one. Despite attempts to flounder back across, Prigozhin crossed the Rubicon when he declared war on the MOD. He should have realized it was all or nothing for him and Wagner.

By 3:45 p.m. EST, Dmitry Peskov, Putin’s press secretary, confirmed that the president had been “informed about the situation around Prigozhin.” What that entailed, Peskov did not say. The Russian FSB, however, opened a criminal case against Prigozhin for inciting a rebellion.

Prigozhin claimed that his movement was gaining momentum. “The majority of the military are warmly supporting us,” the Wagner leader claimed. “We get messages: ‘Finally, the justice in the army will come! Finally, you will ensure we will get the ammo and won’t be thrown as meat!’”

Wagner-devoted Telegram channels celebrated Prigozhin’s bold move, repeatedly claiming he is “the most promising politician.”

“All military who do not support the coup will be considered collaborators who sided with Ukrainians,” one Telegram message on the AP Wagner Telegram channel claimed.

Rumors swirled that Wagner units were en route to Rostov, where Shogiu and advisors allegedly formed and approved plans for attacks on Wagner. The Russian government was reportedly erecting barriers to slow the suspected Wagner column’s route to Rostov. Wagner Telegram channels continued to levy threats against Russia’s military leadership, particularly Shogiu. “Only hohols [Ukrainians] are now mainly worried for the Tuvan degenerate. After all, after his resignation, the war will begin for real.”

Maybe the Ukraine supporters cheering on Wagner would get the message.

By early evening on the east coasts, footage emerged of Wagner vehicles descending on Rostov and received little pushback from Russian units. Some hypothesized that maybe part of the Russian military was in on the alleged coup. What seemed more likely, however, is that Russia wanted to avoid open war with its own side in a city with more than a million inhabitants. On highways outside of Rostov, Russian forces clashed with Wagner mercenaries.

Apparently, the warning that this war would begin “for real” fell on deaf ears. One Ukraine supporter, Igor Sushko, proclaimed on Twitter that “Wagner PMC has liberated Rostov-on-Don from Putin’s regime.”

Just hours after Prigozhin’s declaration of war, the Ukrainians doubled their efforts to reclaim territory. “Taking advantage of Prigozhin’s provocation to disorganize the situation, the Kyiv regime in the Bakhmut tactical direction focuses on the starting lines for offensive operations of the unit of the 35th Marine Brigade and the 36th Mechanized Brigade of the Armed Forces of Ukraine,” the MOD claimed.

Supposedly, this is what the Ukraine supporters cheering on Wagner were waiting for. The chaos unfolding in Russia, they believed, would provide the Ukrainians the opportunity for the counteroffensive, which has procured only small gains up until this point, the chance to break through. Despite the chaos, the gains made in the showdown between Wagner and the Russian government were meager. If Ukraine can’t break through under these circumstances, then little hope remains for a Ukrainian victory.

Those excitedly proclaiming the potential short-term benefits for Ukraine ought to have considered the consequences of the reported Russian coup they were cheering on: a hyper-nationalist, private military company taking control of a nation with thousands of nuclear warheads. Ukraine supporters should be thankful the coup failed.

Just past 7 p.m. EST, Prigozhin released another audio statement. “As of now, we’ve crossed the state borders in all areas. Border guards came towards us and hugged our fighters,” Prigozhin said. “Now, we’re entering Rostov. Units of the Ministry of Defence, in fact, the conscripts who were thrown to block our path, moved away.”

“If someone stands in our path,” Prigozhin said later in the message, “we will destroy everything in our way.”

Around midnight eastern time, it appeared that Wagner had more or less taken control of the part of the city where the MOD’s Southern Military District headquarters were located. Video of Prigozhin meeting with high-ranking members of the Russian military stationed there surfaced. In the video, Prigozhin threatened to march on Moscow if his demands are not met.

On the morning of June 24, Putin made his first appearance since the tumult began. In a televised address to the nation, the Russian president made an “appeal to the citizens of Russia, to the personnel of the Armed Forces, law enforcement and security services, fighters and commanders currently fighting on their positions, repelling the enemy attacks, doing it heroically.”

“I appeal also to those who were deceptively pulled into the criminal adventure, pushed towards a serious crime of an armed mutiny,” Putin said shortly thereafter. “Russia today is leading the most difficult war for its future, repelling the aggression of neo-nazis and their handlers. Against us, the whole military, economical and information machines of the West are turned.”

He likened what was unfolding to World War I. “Exactly this strike was dealt in 1917,” and “victory was stolen. Intrigues, and arguments behind the army’s back turned out to be the greatest catastrophe, destruction of the army and the state, loss of huge territories, resulting in a tragedy and a civil war.”

“We will protect our people and state from any threats, including internal betrayal,” Putin later stated. “What we’re facing is exactly internal betrayal. Extraordinary ambitions and personal interests led to treason. Treason of their own country and people and of the case that fighters of Wagner were dying for alongside our soldiers.”

He added, “As a president of Russia and the supreme commander, as a citizen of Russia, I will do everything to defend the country, protect the constitution, lives and safety, liberty of the citizens. Those who prepared the military mutiny, who raise weapons against combat brothers, have betrayed Russia, and will pay for this. And those who are being pulled into the crime, I’m asking to not make this crucial, tragic, unrepeatable mistake. Do the one right choice—stop participating in criminal actions.”

“I believe that we will defend and preserve what’s sacred for us. And together with the motherland, we will overcome all challenges, and become even stronger,” the Russian president concluded.

For the first time, Wagner Telegram channels issued direct threats to Putin himself: “Pypa (Putin) made the wrong choice. That’s worse for him. Soon we will have a new president.”

“The trigger of the Civil War was pulled by Pypa [Putin],” a message posted on AP Wagner claimed. “Instead of sending one or two degenerates into retirement, he gave the order to neutralize the most combat-ready unit in Russia. The life of one or two traitors was placed above 25,000 heroes. Who is evil in this conflict is already obvious. The victory will be for PMC ‘Wagner.’”

Prigozhin had his own message for Putin: 

Regarding the betrayal of the Motherland, the President is deeply mistaken. We’re patriots of our Motherland. We fought and we are fighting, all fighters of PMC Wagner. And no one is going to surrender to the demands of the President, FSB, or anyone else. Because we don’t want the country to live further in corruption lies, and bureaucracy.

In the hours that followed, videos posted on social media and reports claimed that Russian attacks on Wagner units involved in the mutiny had escalated. A Russian helicopter, according to Prigozhin, attacked a Wagner column and was shot down near Rostov. Videos from alleged Wagner fighters boasted that the mercenaries had shot down several helicopters and at least one plane. A large Wagner column was reportedly hurtling towards Moscow, and the Russian military had blown up roads and placed barriers to slow Wagner’s advance.

”If you’re wondering how things are going, everything is going just great,” the AP Wagner Telegram channel claimed. ”What is needed for success? Success needs eggs. And the most promising politician has them.” I leave it to you, dear reader, to deduce what “eggs” is a euphemism for.

At around 1 p.m. EST on June 24, about 24 hours since Prigozhin had declared war on the MOD, the Belarusian press service claimed that Prigozhin had accepted a proposal from Belarusian President Aleksandr Lukashenko to negotiate an end to the hostilities between Wagner and the Russian government.

As quickly as it began, it was over. “They were going to dismantle PMC Wagner. We came out on June 23 to the March of Justice,” Prigozhin declared in an audio message. “We are turning back our convoys and going back to field camps according to the plan.”

A few hours later, videos posted to social media apparently showed Prigozhin leaving the MOD headquarters in Rostov. The investigation opened against Prigozhin by the Russian government for inciting rebellion was closed. The Wagner telegram channels that celebrated Prigozhin quickly turned on him. “Prigozhin … is a dirty word” one message on the AP Wagner Telegram read. “A nominal example of how you can screw up everything because of your own cowardice and insignificance.”

Nevertheless, speculation on pro-Wagner Telegram channels about the deal brokered by Lukashenko continued, claiming that Prigozhin received guarantees that Shoigu would be fired, Wagner troops would receive amnesty, and that Prigozhin would receive safe passage to Africa where Wagner maintains operations via contracts brokered by the Russian government, such as training and security assistance in Mali.

Many of the details of the Lukashenko-brokered end to the alleged coup remain uncertain. What is known, however, is rather than finding safe passage to Africa, it appears that Prigozhin will live in exile in Belarus, granted in exchange for the end of Wagner’s march on Moscow and avoiding criminal prosecution by the Russian government, according to Peskov.

On Monday, Prigozhin delivered an address regarding Wagner’s so-called war against the Russian government. “The purpose of the march was to prevent the destruction of PMC Wagner and to bring to justice those who, through their unprofessional actions, made a huge number of mistakes during the special military operation,” Prigozhin stated. Prigozhin said that the purpose all along was not to overthrow the government, but to protest the government’s handling of the conflict thus far, which is why Prigozhin accepted Lukashenko’s request to negotiate.

For the time being, it appears that Prigozhin will remain atop Wagner leadership. Prigozhin, in part, agreed to the deal the Belarusian president brokered because it would allow Wagner operations to continue. Whether or not Prigozhin will remain the head of the Wagner group, much less if he’ll manage to keep his head at all, remains uncertain.

Can Prigozhin sleep soundly at night when he knows Belarus is a reliable Russian satellite state? Beyond Belarus’s relationship with Russia, allowing a mercenary leader who just attempted to wage war on its biggest client raises security concerns of its own. Prigozhin is more likely to go the way of Trotsky than Lenin.

For a moment, Wagner supporters and Ukraine supporters thought Gil Scott-Heron would be proven wrong. They spoke too quickly. This revolution will not be televised. What was televised, however, was Putin, still in command of his country and armed forces, declaring victory over the “insurgents.”

The post Russian Revolution Redux appeared first on The American Conservative.

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How Fake History Gets Made

Par : Helen Andrews — 27 juin 2023 à 18:00
Culture

How Fake History Gets Made

A minor incident gets distorted in order to provide the British with the racial history they desire.

A yellow Black Lives Matter flag waves in front of the Big
(Photo by Krisztian Elek/SOPA Images/LightRocket via Getty Images)

Over the weekend, a village in Lancashire celebrated the 80th anniversary of “the Battle of Bamber Bridge.” There was a dramatic reenactment as well as live musical entertainment, a history walk, and an academic symposium in collaboration with the U.S. embassy. In the American press, the anniversary was marked by long feature articles in both the Associated Press and NPR on the episode and its enduring significance.

This was all a bit excessive considering that the Battle of Bamber Bridge was not a battle at all. It was a race riot. Its central incident was not much more than a bar fight.

On June 24, 1943, two American military police on patrol in Bamber Bridge were told that there was a “disturbance” at Ye Olde Hob Inn. When they arrived at the inn, they found a black soldier not in proper uniform, Private Eugene Nunn, whom they attempted to arrest. A crowd of British civilians and a dozen black soldiers protested that Nunn wasn’t hurting anybody and menaced the M.P.s, who left in their Jeep. As they drove away, a beer bottle flew over their heads and broke on the windshield.

Having been prevented from carrying out a lawful arrest, the M.P.s got backup and returned. They found a group of black soldiers, including Nunn, drunk and disorderly in the street. When they attempted to arrest the men, a brawl began. Stones and bottles were thrown, breaking the nose of one M.P. and the jaw of another. One black soldier was shot in the back while trying to grab the gun out of the holster of an unconscious M.P. who had been knocked out by a rock. Two others were shot while hurling projectiles. 

The black soldiers retreated with their wounded back to camp, where they started wild rumors that white M.P.s were on a rampage. A mob of 100 to 200 black soldiers gathered at the main gate. Their NCOs either refused or were unable to impose discipline. At midnight, a group of M.P.s arrived at camp in a Jeep equipped with a machine gun, which inflamed the mob. The commanding officer ordered the M.P.s to leave but the sight of the machine gun had already resulted in a panic. The black soldiers raided the armory, and some took their arms into town. One black private, William Crossland, died in the confused gunfire overnight, the night’s only fatality. Weapons were collected the next morning.

Not much of a battle. Certainly not the glorious civil rights protest that AP and NPR try to make it out to be. Nunn and his friends were not staging a sit-in; they were drunk and disorderly and then spread wild rumors to fuel an angry mob. The NPR article, in its description of the fight, skips directly from the thrown beer bottle to the M.P.s coming back with a mounted machine gun, giving the impression that the M.P.s violently harassed the black soldiers for no reason and then overreacted. This version of events omits the soldiers’ escalating violent assaults, culminating in mutiny, a serious matter especially in wartime.

No one in the U.K. had ever heard of the “Battle of Bamber Bridge” until a few years ago, when the British decided to rewrite their own history to revolve around race. Inconveniently for them, there were only about 8,000 black people in all of Great Britain in 1939, so naturally they have had to blow minor events out of proportion. The 2022 reboot of the children’s classic The Railway Children has a plot line based on the Bamber Bridge incident.

What’s the problem with that? The Battle of Bamber Bridge may be a minor incident, but from the British perspective it was basically a nice one, emphasizing their national sense of fair play and sympathy for the underdog. Why rain on their parade?

Because once you bend the truth about stories like this, the lies tend to get out of hand. That’s what has always happened before. 

In 1972, President Richard Nixon pardoned the one surviving member of the three companies of black soldiers discharged over the Brownsville Raid of 1906. The Army retroactively gave all 167 men honorable discharges and sent pensions to the surviving widows. The lone surviving veteran, Pvt. Dorsie Willis, was invited to Washington and presented with an official apology for the federal government’s handling of the episode under President Teddy Roosevelt. 

The problem is, there is no reason to doubt the original story in the Brownsville affair. Teddy got it right the first time. 

On the night of August 12, 1906, shots were fired in the streets of Brownsville, Texas, in a part of town adjacent to the army fort. For 10 minutes, bullets went through the windows and walls of residences, including one where women and children were sleeping. Amazingly, only one person was killed, a Mexican bartender. A police horse was also shot and the policeman wounded, resulting in the amputation of his arm.

Within hours, everyone agreed that a group of about ten or twenty black soldiers from the 25th Infantry Regiment had done the shooting. There were eye-witnesses. There were ear-witnesses who heard the men shouting. Tensions had been building between the fort and the town, with the black soldiers resenting the way the white Texans treated them and the townspeople suspecting a soldier of a recent attempted rape. Shells and cartridges from military Springfield rifles were found in the alley where the shooting took place. This last piece of physical evidence convinced even the regiment’s white commanding officer that his men were guilty.

To get around this overwhelming evidence, revisionists have to construct an elaborate conspiracy where the people of Brownsville framed the soldiers. The physical evidence was supposedly taken from a box of discarded shells from the firing range and scattered in the alley. The trouble with this version is that the box in question held shells from fifty different rifles, and the ones found in the alley came from only three. The townspeople would have had to pick out exactly the right shells from a box of a thousand.

No one in any of the three companies suspected of the crime would testify and there was not enough evidence to identify individual culprits, so Teddy Roosevelt, thinking that the army should not employ men who cover for murderers, gave everyone “discharges without honor” (more neutral than a dishonorable discharge). The plight of the discharged soldiers was taken up by Senator Joseph Foraker of Ohio, a Republican business lawyer who hated Roosevelt for his economic populism and is generally thought to have used the Brownsville issue cynically. The black leaders who rallied behind Foraker did not argue that the soldiers were innocent, just that the mass discharge was unfair. 

Only in 1970 did a journalist publish a book arguing that the Brownsville shooting was not done by the soldiers at all. Nixon probably did not believe this revisionist version of events, with its allegations of an elaborate racist conspiracy. The White House probably just figured that it was all right to bend the truth a little, if there was a chance there could be votes in it. It all happened so long ago, it can’t hurt to print the legend. 

But there is a cost to printing the legend. The Houston Mutiny of 1917 was similar to the Brownsville incident, involving escalating racial tensions and a group of soldiers shooting at civilians. In 2021, the Houston Police Department tweeted a memorial to five of its officers killed during that 1917 riot, with the hashtag #NeverForget, as part of its “End of Watch” series. They deleted the tweet after social media users accused them of celebrating a “race massacre.” 

Once again, the activists were distorting history in order to paint a violent riot as a noble uprising. The actual facts of the Houston mutiny are not at all favorable to the black mutineers. There was very little connection between their grievance—racist treatment by Houston police—and their victims.

On August 23, 1917, approximately a hundred soldiers left camp and marched armed through the streets of Houston shooting civilians almost at random. Their victims included a white teenager who came out onto his porch to see the commotion and a Mexican worker who had fallen asleep on a bench. One group of soldiers waylaid an ambulance, forced the driver and two medical officers to get out, and shot at the men as they fled. They shot Charles W. Wright as he raised his hands to surrender. One man was pulled from his car and beaten to death. In all, eleven civilians were killed, in addition to the five Houston police who died trying to halt the senseless shooting.

A movie was recently made about the incident, The 24th, which thankfully got buried during Covid. The movie itself is well done (Trai Byers of Empire and Mykelti Williamson of Forrest Gump give excellent performances), but its message is evil.

During the soldiers’ march through the streets of Houston, a white civilian comes out onto his porch and asks if they are on night maneuvers. For his curiosity, he gets a bullet through the chest. When our main character, Corporal William Boston (Byers), looks uneasy about this cold-blooded murder, one of his companions reassures him, “Ain’t nobody innocent here. Not them, not us, nobody.”

The climactic monologue takes place when a friendly white officer (played by Thomas Haden Church) tries to convince Boston to testify at the court-martial in order to escape hanging. Boston refuses: “I wanted to kill them just as much as the others did. Every time they spit, they pissed, they beat us down, I could feel it. Hate. But when I aimed the gun…I won’t stay unheard forever. You keep pushing people down, sooner or later they rise up. And they won’t see a man, they’ll see murder. If death is the price for a night of justice, I’m ready to pay it.”

Here we have the end result of all this historical revisionism: referring to the murder of innocent civilians as “a night of justice.” Again and again, activists are allowed to rewrite history because the rest of us can’t be bothered to insist on the truth. The activists care so much more than we do, and we don’t want to waste political capital relitigating what happened in a Texas alley 100 years ago. But energy spent fighting over history is not wasted. This revisionism has political consequences in the present day—as we will all be reminded the next time violent riots are depicted as “mostly peaceful protests.”

The post How Fake History Gets Made appeared first on The American Conservative.

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Why Aren’t Americans Having Children?

Par : John Hirschauer — 27 juin 2023 à 22:00
Culture

Why Aren’t Americans Having Children?

State of the Union: Are young people willing to sacrifice?

Rear,View,Of,Happy,Couple,Walking,With,Children

There is an interesting piece in Deseret News by Washington Examiner columnist and author Tim Carney on America’s declining fertility rate.

Carney spoke to several families and couples about their decisions to have, or not to have, children. An exchange between Carney and a couple from Utah—a state that, despite having the third-highest birth rate in the country, has seen its fertility rates fall below replacement level—stood out:

Nicole nods and says, “We don’t want kids.”

I ask if she means they don’t want kids right now, or they don’t ever want kids.

“Probably ever,” Isaac says.

I ask why not.

“We can’t afford it,” Nicole replies.

What costs in particular do they have in mind?

“Everything,” Isaac begins. “Health care.… But honestly, it’s just selfishness.”

I look at Nicole’s face, but she gives little reaction. Isaac continues: “I joke with Nicole, ‘some people are watching Teletubbies and cleaning up vomit, and we’re going to be drinking margaritas in Paris.’”

People like Nicole and Isaac very often say they don’t have kids because kids are expensive. They’ll cite things like health care, clothing, and education costs, and point to their own lack of financial stability. But is that really why they’re not having kids?

I don’t think so. Kids can be expensive, it’s true, and policymakers should do what they can to change that. Some families do decide against having an additional child because of the costs involved. But for many people, cost has very little to do with it. As Carney points out, poor countries outbreed wealthy countries by a sizable margin, and previous generations of Americans, who were materially much poorer, had much higher fertility rates than we do. Our grandparents got married young, had a bunch of kids, and made it work. Many today simply do not want to introduce someone or something in their lives that requires them to make that kind of sacrifice.

Carney adds that not all young adults are like Nicole and Isaac, and that those exceptions to the rule are often found in communities with higher levels of religious observance:

Americans who attend church, synagogue or mosque services at least once a week have birthrates well above 2.1. The nonreligious have birthrates well below 1.5 and falling fast. The moderately religious are in the middle.

There is a connection between a town, state, or country’s religious adherence and its fertility rates. But is the causal mechanism religious belief itself—people acting in accord with what they perceive to be a divine mandate to procreate—or something else? Carney suggests a sort of mimesis effect at work:

But the real story is probably a lot more complicated. The interaction between religion and baby-making is not as simple as mitzvahs, dogmas or church teachings. And you can tell because secular Jews in Israel have more babies than do the average European, and, as Gochnour tells me, the Catholics in America who have the most children are the Catholics in Utah. “It’s in the air,” she says.

This makes sense, in part because there isn’t a necessary connection between fecundity and religious belief, particularly Christian belief.

Pastors and priests have placed an understandable emphasis on family formation given the dramatic declines in fertility in the Christian West, but the goods of marriage and family life are only one half of the story, from a Christian perspective. Chesterton said the Church is “fiercely for having children and fiercely for not having children”—family life is good, but celibacy, in object, is better. St. Paul counsels those who are not married to remain unmarried to avoid distractions in the religious life. The Church—the New Testament, for that matter—teaches in no uncertain terms that declining to marry and start a family is objectively holier than doing so, since celibacy anticipates the eschatological reality that, in the world to come, men will neither marry not be given in marriage.

Maybe you believe that, maybe you don’t. The point is that Christianity, properly understood, is not a fertility cult. And if people were making procreative decisions solely or even primarily on the basis of their religious traditions, adherents of a religion that teaches it is better not to marry and whose Founder told His followers to “hate father and mother, wife and children, brothers and sisters” would be unlikely candidates to lead a baby boom. So there is something about religious cultures, not entirely dependent on religious doctrines, that explains the connection between belief and babies.

Carney highlights a secular man in Israel to illustrate the point:

“God has nothing to do with our children-making decisions,” a secular dad named Tsachi tells me while pushing two children in a stroller around Tel Aviv. His third child is home with his wife.

Tsachi points to Jewish history and current geopolitics as to why secular Jews in Israel average two children each, more than Catholics in Europe do. A more generalizable explanation is that religion helped create an ecosystem that is fertile for families.

What religious cultures enable, which makes even non-believers more likely to have children, is a shared sense that there exist things worth sacrificing for, things worth giving up dreams for, things worth dying for. Religious cultures are organized around rules that were not chosen by their members, that were bequeathed to the communities from sources outside the communities themselves. They incubate among their members a willingness to sacrifice for something outside of themselves.

Carney suggests that to encourage fecundity stateside, we should “build a culture that makes the sacrifice required by parents a bit smaller, and make the idea of sacrifice seem a bit less foreign.” I think the latter idea has more promise than the former.

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The Real-Life Wrong Man

Par : Peter Tonguette — 28 juin 2023 à 06:01
Politics

The Real-Life Wrong Man

A Hitchcock classic offers a paradigm for understanding the Trump troubles.

Screen Shot 2023-06-27 at 11.51.34 AM
(Warner Bros., Inc./Public Domain)

Last summer, at the end of the week when the FBI raided Donald Trump’s residence at Mar-a-Lago in search of secret documents, I went to the movies.

I considered not going. Those of us who see merit in the Trump agenda and are charmed by Trump’s extravagantly unvarnished personality and old-fashioned showbiz-style excesses have sat through countless media-fueled faux controversies; it is easy enough to tune them out and go on with day-to-day life. But the blitz on Mar-a-Lago was of a different order—not merely an escalation, nearly everyone agreed, but a step into a more ominous future. 

My instinct was proven right when the Biden Department of Justice indicted Trump on a slew of offenses related to the storing of documents at Mar-a-Lago. Yet I went ahead with my plans to see Alfred Hitchcock’s solemn true-life drama The Wrong Man, which was being screened as part of a local summer film series. I had a sixth sense that the film might help me better process the pursuit of Trump at the hand of a politicized justice system. It did then, and it does now.

Released in 1956, Hitchcock’s film is perhaps the least remembered of any of the Master of Suspense’s mature efforts. Derived from an actual incident, the film stars Henry Fonda as Manny Balestrero, a pious, stoic family man employed as a bass player at the Stork Club in New York. Through an accumulation of misidentifications, misunderstandings, and misinterpretations, purposeful and accidental, Manny comes to be a suspect in a wave of robberies, ultimately standing trial for the crimes—none of which he committed.

The film is a bleak affair. The Wrong Man has none of the spit and polish of Hitchcock’s grand entertainments, such as North by Northwest or To Catch a Thief. The principal characters are conspicuous for their passivity—Manny, though unwavering in insisting upon his innocence, allows himself to be carried along by the criminal justice system like a bottle bobbing in the tide, and his wife Rose (Vera Miles), having been mentally undone by the ordeal, begins to withdraw from reality itself. As a result, the film lacks the psychological complexity of the director’s masterpieces Vertigo or Marnie

Yet The Wrong Man has much to say about how innocent people—even, perhaps, former presidents—can get caught up in the webs woven by law enforcement. Hitchcock captures the way ordinary behavior, inexplicable coincidences, and plain and simple lapses in memory can be perverted in the eyes of those looking for signs of criminality. 

In the movie, Manny has the misfortune to resemble the actual robber, at least in the eyes of panicked, flighty, squinting robbery victims—all of whom the police believe, of course. In an excruciating sequence, Manny is grilled by the cops about his financial straits; with each admission of his family’s money woes, we see his interrogators becoming surer and surer that they have their man. Likewise, when the cops insist that Manny print out the words used in an actual hold-up note from one of the robberies, we see his accusers’ faith in their hunches strengthen with each stroke of the pen. Manny has the misfortune to print much as the robber does.

The lesson of the picture is essential. The cops’ rigid reasoning does not account for the strangeness and complexity of life—that two people, one innocent and one guilty, can look alike, print the same way, have money problems. 

That takes us to Trump, who may be, in Hitchcock’s definition, the ultimate, even the archetypal, “wrong man.” The former president is the wrong man not because of mistaken identity—he did indeed have in his possession all of those secret documents—but because of intentions either willfully misstated or dumbly misunderstood by his pursuers. 

Again and again during the last eight years, Trump has had his naive, haphazard, or merely misguided actions viewed as malicious or criminal or worse; thus, a probably ill-thought-out phone call by the schmoozing, talkative Trump to the president of Ukraine was laughably distorted into a high crime and misdemeanor. 

In the ongoing documents matter, it seems more likely than not that Trump’s actions were motivated less by the sort of conduct covered under the Espionage Act and more by those of a fired employee absconding with office supplies, trinkets, and mementoes. Let us not forget how reluctantly Trump left the White House after his defeat in the 2020 election. The act of packing away physical emblems of his tenure—tangible reminders that he was, in fact, president—seems in keeping with his personality. 

Straining to ascertain a motive for Trump’s alleged crimes, a story in the New York Times recently connected his conduct to his lifelong affinity for keeping “news clippings, documents and other mementoes.” The story continued: “His office at Trump Tower in New York, a corner space on the 26th floor, had a desk that was often piled high with papers.” In other words, he is a packrat who collects stuff if his name or likeness is on it.

Yet the prosecutors who see evidence of wrongdoing in Trump’s vanity and penchant for memorabilia are making the same error as the cops in The Wrong Man: They are perceiving benign, explicable, or at least comprehensible actions through a criminal lens. In both Hitchcock’s film and the Mar-a-Lago matter, we have examples of a bureaucratic state whose overlords and worker bees cannot comprehend the complexities of human behavior. Let us remember the wisdom of the detective in another Hitchcock masterpiece, Rear Window: “People do a lot of things in private they couldn’t possibly explain in public.”

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‘Phooey on FOIA’

Par : Peter W. Wood — 28 juin 2023 à 06:03
Politics

‘Phooey on FOIA’

Public universities are supposed to be repositories of information; why is it so difficult to get them to answer the public’s queries?

Daniel Ellsberg at a Banquet
(Getty Images)

In the last few years, I’ve become interested in extracting bits of information from public colleges and universities. It is a bit like prying nails out of old boards. They don’t come easily, and you aren’t really doing it to collect the nails. You really want to see how badly damaged the boards are and whether they can be repaired.  

The best tool for extracting actual nails is the claw end of a crow bar. The best tool for getting information from a public university is a freedom-of-information request. Such requests are a rather modern invention. The ancients didn’t have them. Nathan resorted to allegory to get David to fess up. Pericles had no need to hide secrets under the Parthenon. Lincoln kept his own counsel.  So where did FOIA come from?

In 1966, Congress passed the Freedom of Information Act. It was meant to open up the records of federal agencies to the public. The law came about because of public unhappiness with the way the federal government had been handling things since the end of World War II. With the Nazis and the Imperial Japanese vanquished, Americans might have imagined that the country would return to older norms of governmental openness. The days of “loose lips sink ships” were behind us.  

But by then the Cold War had made its chilly entrance, and in 1946 Congress passed the Administrative Procedure Act (APA), which created the postwar template for how our vastly larger collection of federal agencies would go about their business. This meant the galaxy of new agencies created under the New Deal as well the expanded powers of the wartime government now had their own rule of law, crafted to keep them within Constitutional bounds. I am no expert on these matters, but the APA included in Section 3 a license for federal agencies to exercise their own discretion over the information they disclosed.

Of course, there were always state secrets, many of them zealously guarded, and there were other no-go areas such as not compromising law enforcement operations or disclosing the private information of individual citizens. But Section 3 of the APA gave federal bureaucrats many more zippers to zip and buttons to button up. And whether it was justified fear of the Soviets or the unjustified arrogance of Washington paper pushers, the flow of information from the federal government on matters of legitimate concern to the general public had slowed to a trickle by the mid-1960s. In 1966, Congress acted by wresting the disclosure rules out of the APA and giving them their own separate standing as the Freedom of Information Act.

Did that suddenly mean we could count on federal agencies to disclose their questionable practices and flubs, or even their everyday haplessness? Not really, but if we had any doubt about that, it was put to rest in 1971 by Daniel Ellsberg, a RAND Corporation economist who was himself just put to rest June 16, at age 92. In 1971 Ellsberg leaked what became known as the Pentagon Papers to the New York Times. This work—3,000 pages of analysis and 4,000 more pages of documentation— was an internal study commissioned by Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara in 1967 of how the United States became militarily involved in Vietnam from 1945 to 1967. The study was completed in early 1969 and promptly classified as “Top Secret—Sensitive.”  

FOIA requests would never have pried the Pentagon Papers from the iron grip of the Pentagon, but angry and disaffected figures such as Daniel Ellsberg didn’t bother with that route. “Phooey on FOIA” has been standard practice ever since. Mark Felt (“Deep Throat”), John Roberts (who ratted out the FBI, retaliation for which prompted the passage in 1989 of the Whistleblower Protection Act), and Edward Snowden are among the better known of the hundreds of individuals who went to the press rather than through the iron gates of FOIA.

Ellsberg, Felt, and Snowden aren’t heroes. The liberators of state secrets often seem to have excessive self-regard and bent personalities, but they do at times perform a public service. In Ellsberg’s case, we needed to know what a mess the American military had made of the effort to stymie the communist advance in Southeast Asia. Left to the Pentagon, that public reckoning would never have happened. Today we wait for a similar reckoning for Iraq, Afghanistan, and our woke military’s crazy descent into transgenderism. Will a FOIA request lay bare the nipple rings on General Mark Milley’s chest?

Some Americans, however, continue to uphold the principles of FOIA, which were strengthened in 2007 by the Open, Public, Electronic, and Necessary (OPEN) Government Data Act. This measure aimed at punishing officials for their “arbitrary and capricious rejections” of requests, and imposed a 20-day time limit for filling most requests. Since then Congress has taken further steps such as the 2018 Open Government Data Act, which “requires federal agencies to publish their information online as open data, using standardized, machine-readable data formats, with their metadata included in the Data.gov catalog.”

So much for the federal government. The states also generate vast numbers of documents in which the public has an interest. Every state has some version of FOIA, though they are on the books under a bewildering variety of names: public records request laws; public information acts; sunshine laws; open public records laws; open records acts; inspection of public records acts; right to know acts, etc. Not just the names, but the terms of these differ dramatically. What the governments in Vermont and Arkansas are required to give you in three days will come to you in New Mexico in fifteen, and in Maryland within thirty. But if you are a frequent filer, you quickly discover that most state entities have a large variety of tricks and obfuscations that can multiply the days into months, and often into “never.”  

States differ as well in how much they allow their agencies to charge the person who files a request for information. “Freedom of information” is seldom actually as free as sunshine. Most states permit their agencies to charge “reasonable” fees to cover the coast of retrieving and copying the requested information.  

My staff at the National Association of Scholars file many such requests, usually at public colleges and universities. For the same items of information, Georgia Institute of Technology asked us to pay $46.12, the University of Kansas asked us to pay $66.50, the University of Wyoming asked us to pay $220; Mississippi State University asked us to pay $513.26, and the University of Maryland college Park initially quoted $5,000–7,000 but came down to $1,800; and the University of Nebraska-Lincoln asked for $8,000.  

How much time and effort is it to look up a few documents and copy them? It is hard to believe that any institution acting in good faith need charge more than $100. At the high end, the quoted fees are either evidence that the institutions are desperate to hide something, or just determined not to comply with their state law. We don’t have the equivalent of a Daniel Ellsberg at any of these places, but it is clear why some people take the law into their own hands. What do you do when a college or university acts this way? My standard procedure is to get in touch with the office of the state’s attorney general, and to make inquiries with the state’s congressmen and senators. Sometimes it works.  

The sorts of documents in which the National Association of Scholars is typically interested have to do with topics that America’s colleges and universities tend not to want to divulge. How actively is your medical school imposing diversity tests on applicants for admission? What criteria did your biology department use to assess candidates for that tenure-track faculty position? How much money did your institution receive last year in the form of “gifts” from governments hostile to the U.S.?  

To succeed FOIA requests need to be targeted and specific. You don’t ask for all the documents on a broad subject. The request should be as easy to answer as possible. “We request the emails among the members of the X committee from March 1 to April 30, 2022.” “We would like copies of the thank you communications to all foreign entities that contributed $50,000 or more during 2021.” Even then, universities can feign confusion if the requester fails to provide them with their exact desired language – language that often differs from university to university.

It is understandable why a university in the Age of Woke would prefer not to provide such information to an organization such as the National Association of Scholars that is known as a critic of wokeness. But there is a public interest at stake. Public colleges and universities serve public needs; they are funded by taxpayers; and they thrive on the largesse of the federal government through federal student loans and research grants. They have no right to bury this information and hide it behind sandbagged walls of unjustified fees.

The 1966 Freedom of Information Act and its supplements over the decades and the fifty state daughters of FOIA with their own distinctions ought to be enough to bring American higher education within the compass of the rule of law. Some colleges and universities definitely take that responsibility seriously, but many don’t. It never ceases to surprise me how determined many colleges and universities are to act as though they be nations unto themselves. Granted, we are seeking small and very particular pieces of information, but they are the equivalent of those rusty nails. If we want to restore American higher education to intellectual and moral health, someone will have to pry them out and assess how to repair the holes they have left.

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How Does Hunter Affect 2024?

Par : Frank DeVito — 28 juin 2023 à 06:05
Politics

How Does Hunter Affect 2024?

Gavin Newsom couldn’t ask for a better setup to a presidential run.

California Governor Newsom Speaks On State's School Safety And Covid Prevention Efforts
(Photo by Justin Sullivan/Getty Images)

Last week, it was reported that Hunter Biden was pleading guilty to two misdemeanor counts of willful failure to pay income tax, as well as agreeing to enter into a diversionary program to deal with charges related to unlawful possession of a firearm. Neither of thes is particularly surprising. Hunter Biden is, after all, a known addict with a history of shady business deals. The fact that he did not pay his taxes, that he allegedly lied in order to obtain a firearm while addicted to drugs, and the fact that he is making a plea deal that will likely avoid jail time are all expected occurrences. As several writers at the Wall Street Journal opined this week, an honest look at comparable criminal charges shows this isn’t quite the outlandish “sweetheart deal” the Republican media is already complaining it is. 

But beneath the surface-level whining that Hunter is getting off easy, there are some serious issues worthy of more reflection. First, there is the laughable notion that this ought to be the end of the investigations of Hunter Biden. His lawyer rosily made the claim that “with the announcement of two agreements between my client, Hunter Biden, and the United States Attorney’s Office for the District of Delaware, it is my understanding that the five-year investigation into Hunter is resolved.” Not likely. 

The U.S. Attorney’s Office for the District of Delaware, which is filing these charges, said that the “investigation is ongoing.” Gary Shapely, a special agent with IRS criminal investigations, recently came forward as a whistleblower and stated that broader charges against Hunter Biden were sought by the U.S. attorney in Delaware, but those charges were stopped by U.S. attorneys in California and Washington, D.C. Under oath, the whistleblower pulled no punches: “I am alleging, with evidence, that DOJ provided preferential treatment, slow-walked the investigation, did nothing to avoid obvious conflicts of interest in this investigation.” 

It seems that there are tax problems beyond the two years—2017 and 2018—for which Hunter Biden will enter his plea deal. And even if the criminal statute of limitations has run, the IRS is clear that in cases of tax fraud there is no statute of limitations for civil assessments. In summary: Hunter Biden has a history of potentially criminal behavior, of making enormous sums of money in questionable circumstances, and of not paying his taxes in the process. It looks like the charges Hunter will plead to are merely the tip of the iceberg. There is a good chance that this plea deal resulting in a diversionary program and some probation will not be the end of his legal woes; if the Pandora’s box of Hunter Biden’s misdeeds has been opened, it is hard to believe that this is the end of it.

A greater political question hovers over the sudden media focus on Hunter Biden’s legal troubles: Why is this happening now, several years after the incidents, several years after law enforcement was made aware of this, just as his father’s re-election campaign gets underway? 

It is clear that Joe Biden has become increasingly unpopular among his own party, and many do not want Biden to run for president in 2024. His natural successor, Kamala Harris, polls slightly worse than Biden. But Biden has announced he will seek re-election, and it appears Biden/Harris will again be the ticket. What is the Democratic party machine to do?

The Democrats have an alternative in Gavin Newsom, who of course has said he is not running for president against the Democratic incumbent. But it looks a lot like he is. We all knew last year that Ron DeSantis was running for president when he announced the release of a book offering Florida as a blueprint for America; when we see Gavin Newsom on national television proposing a gun control constitutional amendment and offering California’s economic successes to the nation, it seems as though he is running for president. 

Governors already popular at home do not boldly offer their states as models for the nation or execute nationwide political publicity stunts just for fun. Perhaps the party machine has found its way out of a Biden candidacy and into a Newsom candidacy via the airing of Hunter Biden’s dirty personal and familial laundry.

This could be dismissed as a reach. After all, one should be cautious not to attribute to malice what can be explained by stupidity. It is quite possible that there is no politically-motivated plot behind the emergence of this Biden family scandal as the primary election heats up. Hunter Biden has been making bad decisions for years; perhaps they are simply catching up to him. But the nation recently found out that government agencies were quite willing and able to collude with social media companies to censor the Hunter Biden laptop story on the eve of the 2020 election. Is it so inconceivable to imagine that perhaps the powers that be now find it convenient for this story to go public?

Whether the current Hunter Biden headlines are a conspiracy to replace Joe Biden on the 2024 ticket or simply Hunter’s many bad decisions catching up with him, this looks like more than mere passing clickbait. President Biden is implicated in some of his son’s misdeeds: Hunter’s deals include kickbacks for “the big guy,” and there is apparently a WhatsApp message from Hunter to a Chinese business associate where Hunter claims that his father was sitting right next to him as the demands were being made. 

The Democratic Party has an incumbent president who is 80 years old, prone to falling, stumbling, and embarrassingly bad public speaking. He has announced his re-election campaign, but many within his party want him out. If the evidence against Hunter continues to grow and the president turns out to have involvement in any of these criminal misdeeds, perhaps we will have a Democratic primary race on our hands after all.

Correction: An earlier version of this piece claimed that Biden was vice president when sitting next to his son at the time of the Chinese business associate’s WhatsApp message. He was no longer vice president at that time.

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To Save Democracy, Zelensky Will Push Elections

Par : Bradley Devlin — 28 juin 2023 à 15:00
Foreign Affairs

To Save Democracy, Zelensky Will Push Elections

State of the Union: Will Russia host elections before Ukraine?

Ukrainian President Zelensky Meets Polish President Duda In Warsaw

In case you didn’t already know, Russian President Vladimir Putin is a dictator. 

He’s such a mean, bad dictator that Chris Christie, known for being fat first, the former governor of New Jersey second, and a (twice) failed presidential candidate third, proclaimed at a recent town hall in New Hampshire that “if you don’t think Putin is as bad as Hitler, you’re wrong.” 

Ukraine stans and democracy fans will tell you that Putin is Sauron, Darth Vader, and Voldemort all rolled up into one. Which is why some were cheering on Wagner mercenaries in what they believed was an attempted coup. 

Has to be a little awkward then that Putin will likely answer to his people in elections before Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky answers to his.

In a recent interview with the BBC, Zelensky reaffirmed that there will not be elections in Ukraine until the war comes to an end. “Elections must take place in peacetime, when there is no war, according to the law. I really want there to be peace in the next year, and life to be as it was before the war.” 

Parliamentary elections are supposed to take place in October of this year, and the presidential election in the spring of 2024. But with no end to this war in sight, it appears that Zelensky’s declaration of martial law, issued and approved by the Verkhovna Rada on Feb. 24, 2022, will remain. The Verkhovna Rada has extended Zelensky’s martial law declaration several times, most recently in early May.

What Zelensky told the Washington Post in May, “the constitution [of Ukraine] prohibits any elections during martial law,” is correct. The current Ukrainian constitution, adopted initially in 1996, forbids elections while martial law or a state of emergency has been declared.

It’s difficult to say who could challenge Zelensky’s Servant of the People party (Zelensky has indicated that he will not run for reelection). Zelensky has already banned the largest opposition party, Opposition Platform—For Life and ten other parties declared “anti-Ukrainian” and “collaborationist.” Can we drop the charade that Ukraine is the lynchpin of the democratic world without which all democracies will crumble under the jackboot of Putin’s Russia?

As for the Russian presidential election, that’s expected to go forward as planned in March of 2024. “But the election will be rigged!” screams the self-identifying democracy lover. In the words of one former president, “you’re telling me now for the first time.”

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Biden’s Border Disaster

Par : Phillip Linderman — 28 juin 2023 à 18:00
Foreign Affairs

Biden’s Border Disaster

Wrongheaded State Department diplomacy in the Americas places a higher priority on “irregular” movement of illegal migrants than on respecting rule of law and national borders.

US-POLITICS-BIDEN-BORDER
(Photo by JIM WATSON/AFP via Getty Images)

As the 2024 Republican presidential nomination cycle heats up, GOP hopefuls need to pledge themselves to specific border-security measures. Our candidates need to be smart and informed on policy details. Governor Ron DeSantis of Florida set a good example with his recent remarks in Eagle Pass, Texas, but candidates also need to address undoing the Biden administration’s immigration mess. 

High on the long list of action items is reversing President Biden’s disastrous open-border diplomacy known as the Los Angeles Declaration on Migration and Protection. Too often overlooked, this declaration is Biden’s radical blueprint to transform migration policy for the entire Western Hemisphere. It was proclaimed last year at the Ninth Summit of the Americas and has become the Biden administration’s signature policy for Latin America and the Caribbean.  

The State Department has used the declaration to strong-arm other governments across the Americas into discarding common-sense measures that protect national frontiers in favor of unrestricted movement of “irregular” migrants. Protecting borders was already difficult enough for governments in the Western Hemisphere; the Biden administration, in pursuit of accommodating unlawful migrants über alles, has made the situation much worse.  

It is all part of advancing the open-border Compacts on Migration and Refugees, finalized by the United Nations in 2018 to much fanfare among global elites. But political elites in Brussels are also encountering fierce resistance; opposition in Europe to accommodating illegal immigrants remains strong. Unfortunately, the situation is different in the Americas, as the Biden administration repudiated Trump-era policies while successfully pushing the ideology of the compacts across Latin America and the Caribbean.  

The first anniversary of the L.A. declaration was celebrated last week, fittingly at an international gathering at the World Bank in Washington. Secretary of State Antony Blinken lauded countries in the hemisphere for their “historic commitment to transform our region’s approach to migration.” Although the administration has neither Congressional authority nor any foundation in U.S. law for its actions, Blinken explained:

We’re committed to expanding other legal pathways, building on the success of initiatives like the innovative parole process that we’ve put in place for those migrating from Cuba, Haiti, Nicaragua, and Venezuela. We’re working with El Salvador, Guatemala, and Honduras to match qualified workers to temporary job opportunities in the United States, and we hope to roll out similar efforts with other countries very soon. And we’re partnering with Mexico to increase opportunities for temporary workers to come to the United States.

The White House wants to convince the U.S. public that the Biden administration is responding to extraordinary phenomena that have produced a unique surge of international migrants. Their experts speak about unprecedented migratory “push” forces that are making downtrodden people everywhere pull up roots and claw their way to American borders. 

In his remarks, Blinken asserted that currently 100 million migrants are moving around the globe, and there are “about 20 million” afoot in the Americas, constituting a “long-term phenomenon.” Of course, like DHS Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas, Blinken has not one word to say about how Biden administration policies themselves are largely the engine of that movement. Instead, they obfuscate.   

Blinken attributes much of the chaos to “climate change,” which he fingers as one of the leading “root causes” for illegal migration. But the secretary of State has little new evidence to offer; extreme weather patterns in the region, such as tropical storms, hurricanes, and the El Niño phenomenon have caused havoc for decades. Despite the efforts of climate change alarmists to drum up this issue, the impact of weather events on migration is nothing new, and it certainly is minor in comparison to the effect of having Joe Biden, as opposed to Donald Trump, in the White House. 

Secretary Blinken does not explain, moreover, why climate change is forcing economic migrants to move thousands of miles and across oceans from Africa, the Middle East, and Eurasia, bypassing dozens of other safe countries, to appear precisely on the Rio Grande, where they can download the “CBP One app” on their latest iPhones to schedule their crossing at a U.S. port of entry.

In ballyhooing his other favorite root-cause themes—poverty, crime, and political upheaval—Blinken again has no new evidence to offer. In the Western Hemisphere, much-touted economic and political push factors have actually not appreciably changed in years.   

The macroeconomic picture for the region, although far from booming, is relatively unchanged even after accounting for the global pandemic. The situation today still compares favorably to past turbulent decades, which were far worse and never came close to creating 20 million migrants. 

Unemployment rates are actually trending downward, with the International Labor Organization reporting the region’s unemployment rate for 2022 at 7.2 percent. This number is actually significantly lower than that from 2019, before the Covid crisis, when it was registered at 8 percent.

While economic growth data for Latin America and the Caribbean indicate overall middling growth, the region is far from imploding, and again the statistics actually point to surprising stability: Central America and Mexico will expand 2 percent in 2023 (3.5 percent in 2022); the Caribbean, excluding Guyana, will grow 3.5 percent (5.8 percent in 2022); and South America 0.6 percent (versus 3.8 percent in 2022) – not particularly great, but past years in the region have been far worse, again without causing unprecedented illegal migration. 

The crime situation, a constant hemispheric concern, has also been relatively stable, and in some key migrant-sending countries even improving. As guerrilla conflicts have subsided in Colombia, homicide rates have plummeted and the numbers of internally displaced persons have steadily decreased. In violent Central America, there are also downward trends. Homicide rates and displaced person data for years has indicated overall steady declines in the sending countries of GuatemalaEl Salvador, and Honduras.  

Yes, crime continues unabated in Haiti, but high levels of violence have been that country’s reality for many years; and while crime doubtlessly drives Haitians to migrate, it is nothing new. A review of most data trends across the region indicates that there have been no new major crime patterns to account for massively boosting the number of migrants moving north.

Consider Mexico. According to Blinken’s push theory, the number of illegal Mexicans moving clandestinely across the U.S. border should have skyrocketed in recent years. By all accounts, Mexico has endured a decade of unprecedented cartel violence, but the bloody period has been marked by a declining rate of unlawful Mexican migration into the United States.  

The dislocation attributable to the hemisphere’s dysfunctional Marxist dictatorships—Cuba, Nicaragua, and Venezuela—has also been a factor at play for decades. Perhaps Nicolás Maduro is today driving off more of his countrymen than ever before, as he continues to ruin Venezuela’s economy, but before Biden, most were content to flee to Colombia or Peru while the U.S. took its fair share and no more. Massive numbers of Venezuelans did not generally attempt to make the dangerous journey through the Darien Gap until the Biden administration came to office and ended American border security.

Very little in the L.A. Declaration speaks to the need for governments to protect their national frontiers, combat visa and residency fraud, or take similar security measures. This kind of law enforcement and border-security cooperation should be key elements of U.S. foreign policy in the region, but they are far from State Department priorities.

Yes, the declaration has throwaway language on thwarting human smuggling and trafficking rings, but foreign governments in the Americas—many with corrupt officials at the highest levels personally profiting from human smuggling and trafficking—know that the Biden-Blinken-Mayorkas team is not serious about law enforcement. For corrupt officials, the U.S. open-border ideology provides a golden opportunity to extort more illicit profits from migrants. When Secretary Blinken talks about “protecting” migrants, he is actually clueless. 

Republican presidential candidates who denounce Biden’s declaration will not only win GOP primary voters at home, but if their arguments are presented as common-sense policies, they can also send an important message to the 180 million middle-class citizens across the Americas who themselves actually want their countries to promote border integrity; for sure, many are appalled at Biden.  

Yes, regional elites, like Mexican President López Obrador, continue to preach open frontiers, but these voices do not speak for millions in Latin American and the Caribbean. The hemisphere is also home to national patriots who share our values and do not want their countries to be illegal migrant doormats. And that is particularly the case when these clandestine migrants come from outside the Americas.

In proposing fixes to Biden’s regional migration mess, GOP presidential candidates should recapture the foreign-policy spirit of President Herbert Hoover. It was Hoover – not Franklin Roosevelt – who initiated the Good Neighbor Policy with Latin America and the Caribbean; Hoover pledged Washington to reinforcing our common values of commerce, faith, and rule of law across the hemisphere.

In his day, President Hoover promoted an American foreign policy called “continentalism,” a Republican tradition of defending and building up our region. Hoover’s vision is still useful today. A new Republican president should not only repudiate Biden’s L.A. Declaration, but indicate that he will replace it with a new Washington-led policy of partnering with governments in the hemisphere to shut down illegal smuggling rings that are currently facilitating clandestine migration from Africa, the Middle East, and Eurasia into the Americas.  

Time is of the essence. An important first step is for Republican presidential candidates to pledge their willingness on January 20, 2025, to renounce Biden’s disastrous Los Angeles Declaration on Migration and Protection.

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Biden Administration Embraces Realpolitik, Abandons Human Rights

Par : Doug Bandow — 29 juin 2023 à 06:01
Foreign Affairs

Biden Administration Embraces Realpolitik, Abandons Human Rights

Americans shouldn’t expect Uncle Sam to save the world.

US President Biden Visits Kyiv
(Photo by Ukrainian Presidential Press Office via Getty Images)

As a candidate, Joe Biden posed as a human rights champion, declaring, “Human rights will be the center of our foreign policy.” As a president, Joe Biden embraces confirmed autocrats and faux democrats. 

One such is India’s Prime Minister Narendra Modi, who visited Washington last week. Although there was no karaoke sing-a-long at the White House, Modi received virtually every other available courtesy, including the trappings of a formal state visit. Only South Korean President Yoon Suk Yeol and French President Emmanuel Macron have enjoyed similar favor.

It was quite a change for Modi. When his Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) first won a parliamentary majority in 2013, he could not travel to the U.S. He had been banned by the State Department, ineligible to receive a visa for his role in the death of some 1,200 Muslims while chief executive of Gujarat state. Since then, his government has used Hindu nationalism to tighten its hold on power, increasing persecution of Muslims and Christians.

Even more striking, given the Biden administration’s emphasis on democracy, is Modi’s unashamed turn toward political authoritarianism. Rather like Turkey’s President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, Modi has preserved the form of democracy, with a nominally free vote, while crippling opposition to his rule.

Freedom House records that India dropped out of the “free” category in 2020 and has continued to decline. Today India is only “partly free,” with especially significant limits on civil liberties. According to Freedom House, Modi’s government 

has presided over discriminatory policies and a rise in persecution affecting the Muslim population. The constitution guarantees civil liberties including freedom of expression and freedom of religion, but harassment of journalists, nongovernmental organizations (NGOs), and other government critics has increased significantly under Modi. The BJP has increasingly used government institutions to target political opponents. Muslims, scheduled castes (Dalits), and scheduled tribes (Adivasis) remain economically and socially marginalized.

Perhaps most dramatic was the criminal prosecution of chief opposition leader Rahul Gandhi and his subsequent expulsion from parliament’s lower house, the Lok Sabha, for criticizing Modi. Gandhi is appealing a two-year sentence for defamation. Leaders of other parties also have been targeted and jailed on equally dubious charges. If there is one hallmark of genuine democracy, it is the right to criticize political leaders. That no longer obtains in India.

Nor are politicians alone in facing punishment for expressing their opinions. Amnesty International warned, “The Indian government’s criminalization of freedom of expression and peaceful assembly has placed dangerous constraints on civil society. Human rights defenders, journalists, lawyers, political opponents, peaceful protesters, academics and students all face arbitrary arrests and detention, unjust prosecutions and other forms of harassment and intimidation.” Even U.S.-based organizations fear retaliation against their Indian operations if they criticize Modi.

Biden administration officials admit their hypocrisy, lecturing adversaries about human rights while celebrating leaders of countries considered more useful for American interests. Not that India is the first case. Washington continues to subsidize the el-Sisi government in Egypt, a noted human rights abuser rated “not free.” Bahrain and the United Arab Emirates are other dictatorial bottom-feeders feted by Washington. Turkey receives fewer accolades, but the administration still wants to purchase its favor with F-16 sales

And, of course, there is Saudi Arabia. The latter is among the ten worst regimes on Freedom House’s scale. To the good, Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman has relaxed the kingdom’s once-totalitarian social controls. However, religious restrictions remain among the world’s tightest, and he has expanded political repression. His most notable crime was turning his country’s Istanbul consulate into an abattoir with the murder and dismemberment of journalist Jamal Khashoggi. 

After this gruesome crime, Biden promised to treat MbS, as the killer prince is known, as a “pariah.” However, last summer the president dropped any human rights pretense while fruitlessly begging Riyadh to increase oil production, leaving him humiliated before the world. Yet the administration is now offering to turn American military personnel into modern Janissaries tasked with protecting the Saudi royal family. Biden insists that Washington fight a dangerous proxy war against Russia over Ukraine because the latter is a democracy (at least partially). Yet, the administration is simultaneously prepared to sacrifice American lives to protect one of the most tyrannical regimes on earth. 

The reason for Biden’s inglorious Modi suck-up—a technical diplomatic term—is geopolitics. The Cold War featured many Washington concessions to a plethora of tyrants, murderers, authoritarians, thieves, dictators, and other assorted oppressors, with the main requirement being opposition to communism and the Soviet Union. The latter’s collapse freed American foreign policy from the need to accommodate regimes so antithetical to U.S. principles and values. However, Washington continues to rent friends even when they are not essential.

India is a prime example. Modi has benefited from generous doses of flattery and bribery because China is widely feared. Washington hopes that India will join America’s side and fight Beijing. With Russia essentially forced into China’s arms, New Delhi is the obvious counterweight.

Alas, this expects far too much from the relationship. Foreign Policy’s Howard W. French writes, “India has unleashed what are probably exaggerated hopes that the emergence of a powerful new giant on the world stage can alter a potentially terrifying unfolding dynamic of zero-sum contest between Washington and Beijing.” Modi has demonstrated his independence by participating in the BRIC (Brazil, Russia, India, China) grouping, buying Russian oil, and tempering any criticism of Moscow. The Indians are concerned about China, but will not go to war for American interests, including Taiwan’s status. Better relations and increased cooperation with Washington would be positive, not transformational. For that the president should not abase himself before Modi.

Human rights will always pose a challenge for American foreign policy. The desire to spread liberty is worthy. However, contra the assumption of many officials and activists alike, the U.S. has little ability to force recalcitrant governments to conform to American wishes. For an authoritarian government, repression is essential. While such a regime might free a person or adjust a policy in response to foreign criticism, no government will dismantle itself at Washington’s command.

Indeed, public demands often make foreign states more intransigent. After all, who in the U.S. would support making concessions while under fire from an adversary overseas? Private efforts, by individuals and organizations, to embarrass human rights abusers might be more effective, highlighting violations without posing a geopolitical threat to target regimes.

As a result, Washington often turns to coercion, with sanctions its “go to” response. Alas, they rarely achieve their purported ends. For instance, Cuba has been under an American embargo for more than six decades. Economic penalties are most likely to work when narrowly focused and generally supported. Moreover, the demand must be clear and limited—e.g., the release of American pastor Andrew Brunson by Turkey. Insisting that, for instance, China stop incarcerating Muslim Uyghurs in Xinjiang, will not succeed.

General sanctions also have the unfortunate side effect of hurting the wrong people. For example, the U.S. is impoverishing the Syrian people, preventing them from reconstructing their country after a decade of war, to force the Assad government to make political concessions. It is a cruel and stupid policy, with the regime, which withstood a brutal civil war, determined to remain in power.

Magnitsky Act sanctions, which target individuals, satisfy the determination to do something, but, alas, achieve nothing in terms of changing offensive policies. As yet individual penalties have not forced any government to change its practices.

Although such sanctions usually are harmless, there can be downsides. For instance, the U.S. targeted Chinese officials for their nation’s purchase of Russian weapons, including the current defense minister. He won’t engage Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin so long as Washington lists him. Despite the complaints of Biden administration officials, the U.S. almost certainly would behave in the same manner if circumstances were reversed.

The ultimate means to improve human rights are war and regime change, but the resulting horrors are too great. The Iraq War, which was supposed to liberate the population, turned the entire nation into a sectarian battlefield, on which hundreds of thousands of people died and millions were forced from their homes. In Afghanistan the U.S. became just another foreign invader, treating the countryside as a battlefield in support of distant, alien rule. The promise of democracy was drenched in blood.

The alternative to foolish intervention need not be Biden-style reluctant acquiescence mixed with craven submission. Instead, the U.S. should treat other nations normally, with prudent, low-key backing for human rights. 

In India’s case, Washington’s objective of a de facto military alliance is unattainable. Lesser agreements, such as improving diplomatic access, visa approval, and economic cooperation, benefit both sides. However, those could have been achieved by lower-level negotiations, followed by a phone conversation. Modi certainly didn’t rate a state dinner. By embracing him and ratifying his premiership, the president gave him an undeserved reelection boost. 

Nor should Modi have escaped a private discussion of New Delhi’s human rights record. At the very least, he should have been informed that further human rights reversals would make an invitation to another official democracy conclave impossible. Official economic aid could be cut or eliminated. That would be better than conditioning assistance, which almost certainly would create more resentment than benefit.

Washington’s principal duty is to those it represents, the American people. Serving them will sometimes force tough trade-offs, in which U.S. officials prioritize this nation’s security over other peoples’ human rights. 

However, that shouldn’t mean anything goes. Washington should observe a foreign policy Hippocratic Oath—first, do no harm. America shouldn’t actively encourage repression or underwrite authoritarian rule or legitimize dictatorship. The U.S. shouldn’t treat foreign peoples as a cheap means to America’s ends, in which American policymakers get to decide that any geopolitical objective is worth any human price. And Washington should hold its friends and, more important, its own policymakers accountable for human rights violations.
Modi has come and gone. What should U.S. human rights policy be? A good starting point comes from the Apostle Paul: “As we have opportunity, let us do good to all people.” America should be a voice for liberty. Even more so, Americans should be so. However, Washington finds it hard enough to keep this country safe. Americans shouldn’t expect Uncle Sam to save the world.

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The Eggman Endures

Par : Jude Russo — 29 juin 2023 à 06:03
Culture

The Eggman Endures

Drug culture is rooted in the war of the elite few upon the many.

Japan Bans Hallucinogenic Mushrooms
(Photo by Yamaguchi Haruyoshi/Corbis via Getty Images)

A splashy feature in Wednesday’s Wall Street Journal held a light up to the drug use that characterizes Silicon Valley’s culture. The story was illuminating mostly in the details; the tech industry’s affinity for psychotropics is neither new nor particularly secret. Elon Musk is on ketamine, Sergey Brin is on mushrooms, and everyone is on prescription amphetamines.

Spencer Shulem, a startup CEO that the Journal interviewed, commented, “[Venture capital investors] don’t want a normal person, a normal company. They want something extraordinary. You’re not born extraordinary.” Hence, in Shulem’s case, a turn to LSD—a substance that the late Steve Jobs also praised.

The association between creative genius and an “alternative lifestyle” is longstanding. The Bloomsbury Group experimented with various innovations in sexual relations. The Californian futurists of the ’60s who invented Silicon Valley as we know it were enthusiastic proponents of the drug culture, which got started with LSD experiments at Stanford around the same time that the school was hosting experiments in computing in a serious way. The standard synthesis of MDMA or ecstasy was invented by Alexander Shulgin, who was given free rein by Dow Chemical to work on whatever projects he saw fit after he invented Zectran, a predecessor to the pesticide RoundUp. 

This is one sort of argument that proponents of drug liberalization field—the use of substances unlocks higher capacities in individuals who can handle them, so it’s all to the good to allow them safe and legal access to them. (Check out the link above for this argument in the context of pharmaceutical-grade amphetamines.) Sherlock Holmes! The Beatles! Hunter S. Thompson! The list goes on.

Of course, there are rather a lot of people, even highly talented people, who don’t benefit from the creative use of substances; the Journal notes the case of Tony Hsieh, the founder of the online shoe emporium Zappos, whose ketamine habit destroyed his life before he died—apparently high—in a house fire; we may add Hsieh to the list of “scromiting” cannabis overuse patients in John Hirschauer’s feature for the latest print edition of The American Conservative. These substances, whatever the benefits, are addictive and dangerous; the dose makes the poison, and there is precious little natural or formal control over dosing.

The direct intellectual antecedent for drug liberalization boosters—and, really, for all proponents of relaxing moral legislation—is John Stuart Mill’s liberalism. The old utilitarian outlined the basically elitist argument for moral deregulation in On Liberty

Persons of genius, it is true, are, and are always likely to be, a small minority; but in order to have them, it is necessary to preserve the soil in which they grow. Genius can only breathe freely in an atmosphere of freedom. Persons of genius are, ex vi termini, more individual than any other people—less capable, consequently, of fitting themselves, without hurtful compression, into any of the small number of moulds which society provides in order to save its members the trouble of forming their own character.

If from timidity they consent to be forced into one of these moulds, and to let all that part of themselves which cannot expand under the pressure remain unexpanded, society will be little the better for their genius. If they are of a strong character, and break their fetters, they become a mark for the society which has not succeeded in reducing them to commonplace, to point at with solemn warning as “wild,” “erratic,” and the like; much as if one should complain of the Niagara river for not flowing smoothly between its banks like a Dutch canal.

The interests of the weak must be sacrificed to those of the strong and able. Mill’s political conclusion is sinister: “No government by a democracy or a numerous aristocracy, either in its political acts or in the opinions, qualities, and tone of mind which it fosters, ever did or could rise above mediocrity, except in so far as the sovereign Many have let themselves be guided (which in their best times they always have done) by the counsels and influence of a more highly gifted and instructed One or Few.”

It seems unlikely that the tide will soon turn against freer and freer drug use, not to mention the relaxation of other moral standards. Even on the right, “Barstool Conservatives” and a turn toward counterculture revivalism are ascendant. Yet conservatives cannot abandon the cause of moral regulation. As the editorial for our latest print issue argues, “Vice is incompatible with republican virtue.” Political self-government is possible only when based on personal self-government. Deregulation of moral issues sacrifices the interests of the many to the hobbies of the few; vice tends to spread beyond its initial venues to an ever-wider sphere of behaviors. Eight years after Obergefell, it is difficult to argue against slippery slopes.

In other words, just say “no.”

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The Post-Cold War Consensus Is Dead. What Will Take Its Place?

Par : Marco Rubio — 29 juin 2023 à 06:05
Politics

The Post-Cold War Consensus Is Dead. What Will Take Its Place?

America needs to revive its long tradition of supporting domestic manufacturing.

Black,And,White,Photo,Of,Handsome,Engineer,Standing,On,Building

We are living through a historic inflection point—the passing of a decades-long economic obsession with maximized efficiency and unqualified free trade. Overseas, this obsession has prompted an explosion of economic growth and technological change. But here in the United States, families have fallen apart, communities have imploded, and entire industries have ceased to exist. Americans, leaders and citizens alike, must finally face this challenge head-on. It’s time to dust off the economic playbook that made America the most prosperous and powerful country in the world. It’s time to revive the American System.

The term “American System” was coined by the statesman Henry Clay in the early 19th century, but it refers to something as old as the republic itself—the use of public policy to support domestic manufacturing and develop emerging industries. You wouldn’t know it from today’s market-liberal economists, but this has been the preferred approach of virtually every major leader in our country’s history.

Alexander Hamilton, for example, believed private capital should be supplemented with “the incitement and patronage of government” to encourage manufacturing. Thomas Jefferson used public revenue to support “new branches of industry that may be advantageous to the public.” Abraham Lincoln invested dramatically in “internal improvements” to American infrastructure. And 20th century presidents from Franklin Roosevelt to Dwight D. Eisenhower to Ronald Reagan used public-private partnerships to win World War II, the Space Race, and the Cold War, respectively.

What happened? In short, we got complacent. The Soviet Union fell, and the United States became the world’s unchallenged superpower. For some reason, our leaders assumed it meant that human beings had moved past our fallen nature. That the lessons learned from thousands of years of history meant nothing. That the well-being of our nation could be subordinated to the well-being of the “international community,” or that there was no possible conflict between the two. In short, our leaders embraced a turbocharged and ideological form of liberal economic theory—long admired by academics but never fully adopted by the government.

Elites rejoiced when the U.S. enacted the North American Free Trade Agreement and China joined the World Trade Organization. For the next 20 years, cheap foreign labor fueled record corporate profits. In exchange, Americans were promised cheap TVs and the opportunity to retrain for “jobs of the future.” Wall Street made a bundle, but working-class Americans experienced a far different reality. They saw their jobs disappear and their communities fall apart as production moved overseas. They saw innovation stagnate as private equity firms dismantled venerable companies and bought back shares instead of investing in production. And they saw the people who benefited from the status quo use all their wealth and influence to marginalize the “complainers” who disagreed with them.

Until 2016, that is, when a brash billionaire with no need or respect for the Washington establishment finally gave voice to the working class. Donald Trump’s wrecking-ball presidential campaign reopened the conversation on political economy, and his election opened the door to real change. But Washington wasn’t ready for a changing of the guard. Instead, it resisted the president’s policies every step of the way. Lobbyists, the liberal media, and donor-funded think tanks argued that Trump’s America First policies were just reactionary protectionism doomed to harm, not help, the U.S. economy. They even succeeded in weakening Trump’s efforts to change our economic relationship with China.

Not all was lost, though. Senator Mike Lee and I saw an opening in the 2017 tax-reform debate to show the public that Republicans can be the party of the worker and family, not big business. At the time, far too many Republicans were focused on corporate tax cuts. Those reforms, while necessary, would do little in the short term to help America’s working class. We argued that families deserved an expansion of the federal child tax credit, that if we valued parents and the role they play in the lives of their children, our tax code should reflect those values. So we put our money where our mouths were, refusing to approve a bill that did not include our request.

Our hard work paid off: Congress agreed to double the size of the child tax credit, putting the needs of working families ahead of the wants of multinational corporations. It was a major victory over the post-Cold War consensus. Nevertheless, it was obvious any more gains we would win would have to be clawed tooth and nail from the establishment.

That remained the case until world events took a nasty turn. In 2020, the COVID-19 pandemic revealed America’s crippling economic fragility. People from every income bracket and background felt the consequences of offshoring and deindustrialization—especially the danger of our markets’ dependence on foreign adversaries—first-hand. Suddenly and (I hope) irrevocably, the stranglehold of the post-Cold War consensus was broken.

Over the last three years, I have introduced bills to re-shore pharmaceutical production, provide long-term, low-interest capital to small manufacturers, accelerate the production of rare-earth elements in the U.S., and increase strategic coordination among federal finance programs. Some of these bills have been dismissed by the Wall Street Journal, but many have bipartisan support, and all are treated as serious proposals. That would not have been the case as recently as 2015.

Nor is the new openness to change restricted to Congress. Pro-working-class institutions like The American Conservative, the think tank American Compass, and the quarterly journal American Affairs were once lonely voices in the conservative movement. Now they wield considerable influence. Meanwhile, more and more mainstream pundits, liberal and conservative alike, are ready to admit that the post-Cold War consensus is “dead,” whether or not they are also happy to see it go.

Don’t get me wrong—there are still plenty of elites giving TED Talks about the power of unqualified free trade and attending conferences in Davos. In fact, they remain the dominant force in Silicon Valley, on Wall Street, and apparently, on the editorial board of the New York Times. But theirs is no longer the first and last word in political economy. There is a growing awareness that we are transitioning from the “end of history” to a new era.

A greater danger comes from those who claim the mantle of “economic nationalism” and industrial policy but undermine efforts at reform with carve-outs for Wall Street donors and China-obsessed climate activists. Read Senator Chris Murphy’s “The Wreckage of Neoliberalism.” Listen to Jake Sullivan’s call for a “new Washington consensus.” You would think the Democratic Party had learned the right lessons from the mistakes of the past 30 years. You would be wrong.

The Biden administration and its congressional allies may borrow populist rhetoric and harken back to the days when the Democrats could really claim to be the party of the working man, but they cannot escape the fact that their donors and supporters are increasingly ideological extremists and beneficiaries of the status quo. Their policies bear that out. The CHIPS and Science Act, for example, is currently pouring U.S. taxpayer dollars into semiconductor companies that operate vast factories in mainland China—building the industrial and technological base of our greatest adversary. Meanwhile, instead of promoting American energy independence, the Inflation Reduction Act has boosted Beijing’s hold on the global solar-panel and electric-battery markets, all in a pathetic parody of environmental activism.

Rebuilding the American economy will therefore require leadership from Republicans, who are unabashedly patriotic and willing to break our dependency on China. Nevertheless, if we want to resurrect the American System—that powerful combination of public policy and market ingenuity that protected our infant republic from being strangled in the crib by Old World empires, turned the untamed West into the American heartland within a matter of decades, and saved the world from the darkest forms of totalitarianism not once, but twice—we cannot stay within the confines of the Republican Party.

As Michael Lind points out in Compact, creating a new economic consensus will take a multiethnic coalition of patriots who are willing to put the long term over the short term and nation over party. The members of such a coalition may come to it for different reasons—some to counter Beijing’s aggression, others to revitalize working-class communities, still others to strengthen the institution of the family. Nevertheless, if they are united in advocating common-sense, pro-America industrial policy, and if they stand firm against attempts to co-opt populist language for elitist ends, they will have the power to effect lasting change.

When I made the case for a common-good capitalism back in 2019, I was embarking on a lonely journey. But today, the realignment is happening faster than anyone could have imagined, myself included. We saw what a new political coalition looks like last fall in Florida. But only time will tell if we can create such a coalition at a national scale and achieve our long-term goals. For my children and grandchildren’s sake, I hope we can—because if we fail to recover the American System, I am afraid our economy and our country will continue to stagnate and decline.

This article is part of the American System series edited by David A. Cowan and supported by the Common Good Economics Grant Program. The contents of this publication are solely the responsibility of the authors.

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Afflict the Comfortable

Par : John Hirschauer — 29 juin 2023 à 18:00
Culture

Afflict the Comfortable

Both sides responding to new sociological data on religiosity get it wrong.

Church,Wooden,Bench

The political scientist Ryan Burge this week used national survey data to argue that religion in America “has become an enclave for people who have done everything ‘right’”—for people who have gotten married, college degrees, and middle-class jobs.

The numbers are striking.

Burge found that 42 percent of non-high school graduates, in the most recent survey, identified as atheists, agnostics, or according to no religion in particular. By contrast, just 32 percent of post-graduate-degree holders did the same. The gap was similarly large in weekly church attendance, with less than 20 percent of non-high school graduates attending weekly compared to 30 percent of people with post-graduate degrees. Both gaps persisted over a decade’s worth of survey data.

The poor were also significantly less likely to attend religious services weekly than were the wealthy. Middle-class professionals making between $60,000 and $100,000 a year were more likely than both the poorest and richest survey participants to attend weekly religious services. The only demographic for which Burge reported this wasn’t true was people with a high school degree or less, who were even more likely to attend weekly worship services if they made more than $250,000 a year than they were if they made between $60,000 and $100,000.

Perhaps the least surprising of the three findings was the association between marriage and religiosity. Burge reported that across all age groups, married people are more likely to attend weekly services than those who are separated, divorced, or never married. About 30 percent of married 40-year-olds attend weekly services, for example, compared to just 15 percent of 40-year-olds who fall into one of the other three categories.

These are pitiful numbers across the board—a third of married adults going to church does not a religious revival make—but it’s clear that, bad as things are, religious observance is worse among the downwardly mobile than it is among the middle and upper-middle classes.

There have been two popular responses to that fact, and to Burge’s write-up of the results. Burge himself, and many progressive respondents on Twitter, said the data illustrated that churches are at fault, and are becoming, as Burge put it, “hospital[s] for the healthy.” In Burge’s mind, churches have become “less and less inviting to those who did life another way,” and are pushing people away who would otherwise attend weekly services.

The “conservative” response has been to suggest that Burge has the causation backwards—that it’s the religious observance that leads to better socioeconomic outcomes, not the other way around. Going to church is associated with religious observance, and religious observance, on this view, is associated with chastity (not sleeping around), fidelity (not getting divorced), and industry (making a living for oneself and one’s family). It’s little wonder, they argue, that people who go to church regularly are more “successful” than those who don’t, since the values promoted by Christianity are also those most conducive to temporal success.

Both responses ultimately miss the point. To those who argue that churches need to be more “welcoming” to those on the “margins,” it depends on what exactly they mean. If they’re talking about placing a greater emphasis on God’s preference for the poor, that’s one thing. If they’re talking about omitting parts of Matthew 19 to avoid upsetting divorcees, that’s another. Placing “inclusion” before the truth can, as Burge said, provide a space where “people from a variety of economic, social, racial, and political backgrounds can find common ground”—but, to borrow from Flannery O’Connor, “if it’s just a symbol, to Hell with it.”

And the “conservative” response, which is right inasmuch as following Christian sexual ethics is all but a guarantee that one won’t get divorced, is wrong to identify Christianity with worldly success. One way to square one of the great paradoxes of Christianity—that Christ simultaneously asks you to “pick up your cross” while telling you His “yoke is easy”—is that it’s the picking up of the cross that makes the burden light. For example, if you “pick up your cross” and resist the impulse to cheat on your wife, you’ll enjoy the “easy” yoke of not having to tell your wife you cheated on her. If you “pick up your cross” and forgive those who harm you, you’ll enjoy the “easy” yoke of not holding a grudge.

The mistake of the conservative response is to apply that principle to earthly success, when Christianity is predicated on what Burge rightly calls the “great inversion”—the idea that the meek will inherit the earth, that’s it’s easier for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle than a rich man to enter the Kingdom of God, that many who are first shall be last and many last first. Not only is there no guarantee that following Christianity will result in a person’s economic success, that success, according to Christ, may well hinder his ability to live out the Christian life.

There is something to be said for those who see the rigor demanded by Christian life and decline to submit. It’s not praiseworthy, certainly, but it’s honest. Some people have sat down and counted the cost before constructing the building. Maybe the question is not why those on the “margins” decline to attend church services, but why so many living bourgeois lifestyles find themselves comfortable following a religion that is anything but.

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National (Geographic) Decline

Par : Jude Russo — 29 juin 2023 à 19:02

Like many children of baby boomers, I grew up in a house chock-full of middlebrow physical media—a local and a national newspaper, several glossy weeklies or biweeklies, and, once a month, the thick, gloriously full-color National Geographic

I am not going to argue that NatGeo was a perfect publication, or that it hadn’t been politicized—indeed, even to ten-year-old eyes, it seemed as if an awful lot of the editorial line could be boiled down to “there are too many people, and something ought to be done.” 

Yet it was a beautiful and humane object, underwritten by a spirit of inquiry and adventure. The whiff of physical peril behind the magazine’s coverage gave it a mystique in an era where most journalism happens in air-conditioned Washington and New York offices.

And there were the pictures. Nothing could compromise these. Big cats, pharaonic tombs, the jungled mountains of Canton, sherpas on Everest, red-painted neopagans dancing around a fire—the wide world is still, in my mind, illustrated by the magazine’s photographs, shining from the magazine rack in the grocery store checkout.

The Washington Post reported today that National Geographic, suffering the decline of all print media, has laid off its remaining staff writers, and, while it will still be available by subscription, it will no longer appear on newsstands. That, to me, seems like a terribly sad thing. Where will my children see pictures of jaguars?

Editor’s note: The original language of this post has been clarified to indicate that National Geographic will still be available by subscription.

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The Radiant City

Par : Patrick Tomassi — 30 juin 2023 à 06:01
Culture

The Radiant City

Le Corbusier’s influential vision of totalitarian architecture has never coexisted with organic human reality.

Le Corbusier
(Photo by Günter Bratke/picture alliance via Getty Images)

No single person—no elected official, designer, planner, architect or style-setter—has had a more profound effect on the built environment worldwide than the Swiss-French architect and city planner Le Corbusier. His buildings litter the covers of books and magazines on architecture. He fathered the concrete-based architectural movement of brutalism and was one of the founders of architectural modernism; the “international style” of architecture is heavily indebted to him. But even more significantly, his ideas about cities have radically reshaped the places we live, especially those American cities built mostly after World War II. And yet most of us have never heard of him. While his many books and articles contain the musings of a visionary, they also provide alarming clues about why so many of the places we have built over the last hundred years are soul-crushing.

When he published his seminal work, The Radiant City, in 1933, Le Corbusier was clear about the scope of his project. He was not just laying out some principles for the organization of modern cities or providing solutions to the problems of industrialization. Rather, his purpose was “a manifestation of the new spirit of our age,” the creation of human happiness through modern technology, analysis, and planning. 

Elsewhere, Le Corbusier had written that “there is a new spirit: it is a spirit of construction and synthesis guided by a clear conception…A GREAT EPOCH HAS BEGUN.” He would usher in this great epoch, in which cities were laid out following rational principles, where people could breathe freely, walk through green open spaces unmolested by vehicle traffic, and feel sunlight in their bedrooms and offices. He believed deeply in the power of human ingenuity, of data and calculations, and of rational design. His was a future based on the success of the American factory, the grain elevator, the automobile, and the steamship. These masterpieces of efficiency were his models for the reorganization of all of society, and he was anxious to begin this work.

In the Radiant City, people would live in “Cartesian skyscraper” towers in the park.

Through his many books and plans, Le Corbusier fleshed out his vision for the city of the future. In contrast to the “organic” cities of the past, whose winding roads and random-seeming arrangement of buildings felt chaotic and pointless, the Radiant City would be laid out on a grid and clearly organized. Following the model of the factory, different uses—residences, industry, commerce, office work, culture, recreation—would occupy completely different sectors of the city. 

In Le Corbusier’s planned cities, people would live in mass-produced inexpensive housing organized into towers that covered only 15 percent of the ground, the rest left for green space full of sports facilities and parks. The towers would be cross-shaped in order to maximize the number of windows and amount of natural light. At home, residents would live in pure leisure, freed from the need to toil by a 24-hour maid service, childcare, and pre-made meals. Travel between home and work would be facilitated by elevated superhighways that moved at incredible speeds, so that even people who lived far from their work would not need to commute for long. “The city that achieves speed,” Le Corbusier writes in Urbanisme, “achieves success.” The superhighways would meet, appropriately, in the very center of the city.

In many of his plans, the center of the city was also occupied by the bureaucrats and planners. Le Corbusier’s was a thoroughly planned vision of society: Every aspect of the city, civic life, and economic activity, would be planned and controlled from above. This would require a powerful and centrally located bureaucracy with the will to act decisively.

Le Corbusier recognized that such a grand vision would require clearing large areas. His famous (never implemented) Plan Voisin proposed that most of central Paris be leveled to make way for new highways and towers. “We must pull things down…” he wrote in The Radiant City, “and throw the corpses onto the garbage heap.”

Like all utopian visions, upon closer scrutiny Le Corbusier’s dream begins to appear dystopian. The Radiant City would be the perfect setting for New London in Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World. The two books, both written in France and published a year apart, predict a near-identical world, although only one author realized he was describing a nightmare. In fact, when Peacock released a new TV adaptation of Brave New World, the New York Times’s review described it as looking “as though Le Corbusier’s studio had taken on a commission for a high-end spa.”  

But the dystopian nature of Le Corbusier’s vision goes beyond aesthetics. As Robert Fishman explained in Urban Utopias of the Twentieth Century: Ebenezer Howard, Frank Lloyd Wright, Le Corbusier, Le Corbusier’s ideal city completely eliminates politics. There is no place in that city for people to guide the course of their society—the “plan” has already provided for that. All that is left to do is implement the plan.

His clearest proposal for the city of the future is laid out in The Radiant City, which is subtitled “elements of a doctrine to be used as the basis of our machine age-civilization.” The title page includes a dedication in the upper left-hand corner, which one could be forgiven for missing: “to authority.” Near the end of the book he includes a caption “Little by little, the world is moving to its destined goal. In Moscow, in Rome, in Berlin, in the USA, vast crowds are collecting round a strong idea.” The text sits below an image of a crowd in Venice’s Piazza San Marco: a rally for fascist leader Benito Mussolini. It is clear what strong idea he had in mind: an authority capable of remaking society.

Le Corbusier wrote in 1929 that for many years he had “been haunted by the ghost of [Jean-Baptiste] Colbert,” the reformer who remade French society under Louis XIV. As Fishman explains in Urban Utopias, Le Corbusier spent his own John the Baptist years wandering in the desert seeking an authority great enough to realize his dream. He went to Moscow several times, but his proposed design for the Palace of the Soviets was rejected. In 1934 he traveled to Italy and was received with enthusiasm by Mussolini. But alas, Il Duce became bored with modern architecture. Le Corbusier’s hatred for democracy—for the madness of people governing themselves—led him to support a French fascist party, and he started publications to promote fascism and syndicalism in France. He wrote an article in 1934 in which he boldly stated, “France needs a Father. It doesn’t matter who.” Finally, when France signed the armistice with the Nazis in 1940, Le Corbusier moved to the southern town of Ozon, where he sought to provide his vision to the collaborationist Vichy regime. After 18 months he left, defeated.

Le Corbusier is often accused of being sympathetic to totalitarianism. This is true; he never saw a totalitarian regime he didn’t like. But it does not go nearly far enough. As Theodore Dalrymple argued in a 2009 article in City Journal, Le Corbusier needed totalitarianism in order to impose his worldview on people. His ideal city intentionally made no space for politics because people, who had to live in the world he sought to create, could not be allowed to change it. Le Corbusier was never able to find a totalitarian regime that would let him realize his vision. Unfortunately, though, he found acolytes including Robert Moses and Oscar Niemeyer who succeeded in spreading large parts of that vision all over the world.

While his Plan Voisin to remake Paris was rejected, Le Corbusier did eventually design a city. When the Indian state of Punjab needed a new capital after the partition of India in 1947, they decided to build the new planned city of Chandigarh, and recruited Le Corbusier to design it. Here he could put his perfect plan into action. The result? He built massive highways and ample parking, split uses into their own sectors, and designed monumental concrete public buildings. But the city is considered by many to be a failure. Indian culture and ways of life were ignored in the design, and have only survived in spite of it. 

“Chandigarh never achieved the cosmopolitanism it craved,” writes Sunil Khilnani in The Idea of India. People are rarely seen on the streets. The distances between buildings are too great. Chandigarh is, as Kenneth Frampton writes in Modern Architecture: A Critical History, “a city designed for automobiles in a country where many, as yet, still lack a bicycle.” There are more cars per capita in Chandigarh than in any other Indian city.

The Plan Voisin served, in the words of Robert Fishman in Urban Utopias, as “the archetype for so many disastrous plans that others subsequently carried out.” Oscar Niemeyer, a disciple of Le Corbusier, designed the planned city of Brasília, the capital of Brazil, which lacks the active streetlife of other Brazilian cities because of its auto-centric design. People drive to work and drive home—so much for the thriving city of the future. This problem is made more difficult to fix by the fact that UNESCO took no time in deeming it a World Heritage Site.

In the United States, Robert Moses set out to rebuild New York under the influence of Le Corbusier. He demolished “blighted” black and immigrant neighborhoods in order to build Corbusian cross-shaped towers in the park—vertical slums, as they turned out to be—such as Stuy Town. Other neighborhoods he bulldozed to make way for over 600 miles of highway. Moses is regarded as one of the most powerful people in the history of New York, despite never having been elected to office. He found the “authority” Le Corbusier could not.

In the introduction to The Death and Life of Great American Cities, Jane Jacobs described the planning gurus who know “about how cities ought to work and what ought to be good for people and businesses.” She wrote that “when contradictory reality intrudes, threatening  to shatter” their doctrine, “they must shrug reality aside.” Le Corbusier could not have said it better, but he tried. In The Radiant City he wrote:

The problem is to create the Radiant City. The Radiant City already exists on paper. And when once a technological product has been designed on paper (calculations and working drawings), it does exist. It is only for spectators, for gaping bystanders, for the impotent, that the certainty of its existence lies in the execution. The city of light that will dispel the miasmas of anxiety now darkening our lives, that will succeed the twilight of despair we live in at present, exists on paper. We are only waiting for a “yes” from a government with the will and the determination to see it through!

One of these gaping bystanders was Jane Jacobs, who set about observing reality as it actually was rather than as a totalitarian doctrine said it should be. She watched as Robert Moses’s towers in the park separated people’s homes from their necessities, so that they had to walk long distances across dangerous empty lawns to buy a gallon of milk. A keen observer of reality, she saw how the new highways destroyed functioning communities and pushed people into the new auto-oriented suburbs where they were victim to the “great blight of dullness.” And she saw how simple blue-collar neighborhoods like her own Greenwich Village, where people could live near their work, walk to buy groceries or get a beer, and watch their kids play on the street, provided the great joys of city life in safety.

Jacobs is credited with ending Robert Moses’s stranglehold on New York, and with helping Americans begin to wake up from our Corbusian nightmare. Her work was the beginning of a new and truer way of conceiving of cities. There are now many who have taken up her mantle and begun working to reverse the destruction Le Corbusier’s totalitarian vision wreaked. But American cities still have a long way to go.

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Seed Oils and Statins

Par : Carmel Richardson — 30 juin 2023 à 06:03
Culture

Seed Oils and Statins

The human body is not a machine.

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High cholesterol runs in my husband’s family. After being prescribed a statin medication to bring down her cholesterol numbers, however, my mother-in-law suffered debilitating pain and muscular dysfunction, prompting her to prefer the risks of foregoing it to losing the freedom to run, walk, and use her two hands. So when The Atlantic reported this week that scientists have discovered a possible explanation for the statin muscular problem, I was immediately intrigued. 

The widespread use of statins to treat high cholesterol has been growing since the early 2000s. U.S. government data from the Medical Expenditure Panel Survey (MEPS) showed that, between 2000 and 2010, purchases of statin cholesterol medications rose from 3.4 million to 9.5 million prescriptions, an increase of 179 percent. The statin sales rate outpaced the growth of two other fast-growing pharmaceutical markets, those of antidiabetics and antihypertensives. And while antidiabetics in the form of semaglutides like Ozempic and Wegovy have skyrocketed in popularity in the last few years, changing guidelines on what healthy cholesterol levels look like have continued to expand the circle of Americans deemed in need of prescription medication, while Americans struggle to keep up.

Muscular pain, aches, and weakness are fairly common side effects of these medications. While clinical trials only found muscular dysfunction in 5 percent of statin-using patients, observational studies recorded a much higher 30 percent, which is consistent with anecdotal evidence. Still, enough users have no trouble with the drug that the connection has remained baffling.

That is, until recently, when two groups of scientists stumbled upon a potential explanation while studying an unrelated muscular disease. What these Mayo Clinic doctors found was that patients with the muscular disease had mutations in a gene encoding in an enzyme: HMG-CoA reductase, the same enzyme that statins block in the process of halting cholesterol production. In other words, problems with this enzyme, whether caused by a genetic disease or by a cholesterol-reducing drug, seem to signal problems for healthy muscular function as well. 

Surprisingly to absolutely no one, this discovery has arrived hand-in-hand with a brand new drug to treat the problem. Mevalonolactone, as it is called, has shown promise in treating statin-induced limb weakening in mice, and increased limb control for one bedridden Bedouin woman with a genetic disease. And so, we are told, “problem solved.” For every problem, a pill; for every pill, a side effect; for every side effect, another encapsulated solution. Rinse and repeat.

A few steps removed from the granular level of mutated genes, HMG-CoA reductase, and cholesterol standards that your grandfather could never have met, however, is the broader question of what it means to be healthy. Why, in other words, is cholesterol considered to be bad enough that doctors would prescribe more drugs for the side effects of statins rather than returning to the root? 

The history of high cholesterol as a medical bogeyman is a long one, too long to be chronicled here. It is enough, for now, to note that standard medical practice today links high cholesterol to heart disease and stroke. 

But one of the few long-term, controlled studies on the health effects of vegetable oils done in 1968–73, the Minnesota Coronary Experiment, casts doubt on this bedrock belief, as I have previously reported. The experiment was one of the most rigorous ever conducted on vegetable oils and cholesterol in the human diet, and included 9,423 participants in state mental hospitals and nursing homes, between the ages of 20 and 97 years old. Participants were studied for 56 months, both groups eating the same healthy diet, with the exception of fats: one group’s fats came exclusively from corn oil, the others from animal fats. 

What the experimenters found was remarkable: While substituting vegetable oils for animal fats lowered the total level of cholesterol in the participants’ blood, this lowered cholesterol did not result in longer life. In fact, as cholesterol fell lower, the risk of death increased—22 percent for each thirty-point fall. Incidence of heart attacks, most notably, was unchanged in the first group, despite their eating what is still today considered to be the gold standard of a “heart healthy” diet. (Fifty-five years later, five of the seven oils on the American Heart Association’s list of recommended, “heart healthy” fats are still vegetable oil.)

It is enough, in short, to say that there is more to the story here than what we have been told. While scientists’ understanding of cholesterol, its purpose in the body, and the effects of blocking its production, is incomplete, their eagerness to sell pharmaceutical solutions to the perceived problems is nevertheless unabated. Their Baconian belief in nature as a machine, in which there’s always a technical—or pharmaceutical—solution, suggests that every part is interchangeable, that one cog can be added or removed and the others will still hold constant.

But this is not the way that nature works. The fabric of the human body is deeply integrated, and the discovery of the enzyme linking two seemingly unrelated parts—cholesterol production and muscular function—could not more beautifully depict that. The mere fact of our not understanding it should inspire a reverence for the processes as they exist, rather than an eagerness to stick our fingers in the holes.

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The Iron Cross Returns to the East

Par : Sumantra Maitra — 30 juin 2023 à 18:00
Foreign Affairs

The Iron Cross Returns to the East

Is Germany resuming its historical role as Russia’s counterbalance on the continent?

Ulrich von Jungingen (1360 - 1410), Grand Master of the Teutonic Knights
(Photo by: Universal History Archive/Universal Images Group via Getty Images)

“Germany is prepared to permanently station a robust brigade in Lithuania,” Germany’s Defense Minister Boris Pistorius said in a visit to Vilnius for a summit. Germany is apparently planning to send around 4,000 troops to a permanent base in the Baltic Country. 

“We as the Federal Republic of Germany explicitly acknowledge our responsibility and our obligation as a NATO member state, as the largest economy in Europe, to stand up for the protection of the eastern flank,” Pistorius added, hinting at Germany’s historic role and diminished force posture since the end of the Cold War. In 1989, West Germany was the frontier, and had around twelve divisions of troops ready for the radio announcement that the Soviet Union’s core 3rd Shock Army was rumbling across the Baltic front. 

The historic Eisernes Kreuz, it appears, is ready to return east

Keen readers of NATO military force posture and other relevant esoterica would find the proposal familiar, written by a certain writer of these pages recently arguing for the same:

Similarly, there are Polish-British security arrangements and talks of the German army permanently stationed in Lithuania. While premature, these provide opportunities for the United States to partially retrench. 

Following the degradation of Russian conventional forces, there is no need for the United States to deploy any armored infantry or combat support units to Eastern Europe. All infantry brigades and logistics permanently deployed in East Europe should be European in combination and command. Poland is on its way to being the largest European NATO force after Turkey. At the same time, Finland has large infantry reserves, and Germany can resume its Cold War-era role as NATO’s armored backbone.

So how does this make me feel? 

First, easy on the triumphalism. If one thing foreign policy experts instinctively know, it is that you cannot trust Germany. The French found that out in the 1860s, as did Stalin in 1941. More recently, Germany’s much touted Zeitenwende has turned to Zeitenwon’t

So, one should at least wait until the Bundeswehr is permanently garrisoned in Lithuania, with local auxiliary industries such as coffee shops, German supermarkets, apartment buildings, and schools for German kids springing up. 

The current strategy of sanctimonious circumlocution about a grand liberal internationalist order while free-riding on the Anglo-Americans, buck-passing the security burden and encouraging the frontiers continuously to shift further east, has worked out very well for Germany in the last thirty years. As Stephen Walt wrote, despite the misperception of Germany being a laggard when it comes to defense, the reality is that Germany has had the smartest foreign policy of any major power in recent years. It would be interesting to see them actually do something to change that status quo. Trade-offs come with costs. Germans, so far at least, have been reticent to pay any cost for security and peace. 

For centuries occupied by Teutonic knights, the Baltic states were the borderlands between two great civilizations, the German settlers from the West who eventually settled, married, and started businesses, and the Slavic East. Many Balts have German ancestry similar to Germans who once were the ethnic majority in modern day Gdańsk or Kaliningrad, whence they were forced out of by the weight of history. 

Russian Bolsheviks ceded the control of the Baltics after Imperial Russia’s defeat and revolution; the table was again turned under the ridiculous Allied peace plan that coerced Imperial Germany to cede its eastern territories. 

History is always written by victors, and in these parts of Europe, by those who lord over the Baltic states. Historically, Germans touted Germanic blood ties with the Balts. This narrative changed when the Baltic communists rolled out the red carpet for the Red Army. After the Second World War, Stalin forcibly occupied the Baltic countries to coerce a permanent solution to any future German threats. The Baltic communists were some of the most fervent supporters, as well as the most efficient soldiers and administrators, of the USSR. 

That changed when the USSR lost its relative power in the 1980s. The narrative has now changed again to the narrative of Russians being a historically brutal occupier. Currently the Baltic states are some of the most fanatical Atlanticists and NATO-enlargement enthusiasts. But the history of the region is not just the history of Freikorps invited by the Balts to balance communists, or the history of the Imperial “Latvian Rifles” formed under Russians. It’s both. The truth is, as always, far more complicated than the narratives. 

But in light of all this history, the irony of the current Baltic rhetoric is remarkable. “We have a strong political willingness in Lithuania to find the necessary financial resources to be able to finance the infrastructural needs”, Lithuania’s President Gitanas Nausėda told NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg. Germany currently leads a token NATO battlegroup in the Baltics as well. The German army is once again being invited to balance Russians in the historic civilizational frontiers between historic Russian- and German-occupied lands. 

As Peter Hitchens, the prophet of our times, once said, we tend to consider the great wars of the last century as epochal struggles between freedom and liberty of Anglo-America against various forms of continental despotism—when they were in reality much simpler conflicts fueled by repeated German expansions eastward and the Russian reactions to them, while smaller states in between played each other as small states are supposed to do, ultimately dragging the great maritime powers to war. 

There are arguments that we ought to have stayed out of European conflicts then. We certainly should stay out now, and should welcome this current and interesting development, if Germany again seriously takes up its historic role in balancing Russia. If

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More Gambling Scandals for the NFL

Par : Jude Russo — 30 juin 2023 à 18:20

Four more professional football players have received disciplinary suspensions for violating the NFL’s gambling policy. The Indianapolis Colts’ Isaiah Rodgers and Rashod Barry and the free agent Demetrius Taylor got indefinite bans for betting on football; the Colts waived Rodgers and Barry almost immediately following the announcement. The Tennessee Titans’ Nicholas Petit-Frere is out six games for betting on other sports.

Doesn’t this problem with broadly legal online bookmaking seem obvious in retrospect? We have introduced both the opportunity and incentive to compromise the integrity of a given sport. While fixed events—the sports-themed theater of professional wrestling, for example—may have their entertainment value, at the end of the day, the appeal of sports as such is the showcase of excellence, the true competition between athletes. Sports betting cannot help but compromise this appeal, throwing a shadow over every outcome, even over every point scored.

Gambling is, at best, a highly context-dependent good. (I write about this at length in the latest print edition of The American Conservative.) When deregulated so as to be ubiquitous, it serves as a classic case of letting short-run economic gains trump the value of our longstanding institutions. Was it worth trashing some of the few broadly unifying American institutions, the professional and college sports leagues, so states could add tenths of a percent to their education budgets? That seems like a bad bet.

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Strange Bedfellows

Par : Evan Myers — 1 juillet 2023 à 06:01
Culture

Strange Bedfellows

Mrs. Davis is a television show for our cultural moment with its odd alliances.

A,Distorted,Tv,Transmission,Or,Vhs,Tape,,A,Noisy,Signal

In the midst of increased concerns about ChatGPT and A.I.’s potentially transformative influence, enter Mrs. Davis, a new science fiction comedy series streaming on Peacock. The show’s best moments are so brilliant, but its worst moments are dire—blasphemous even. But upon reading Bishop Robert Barron’s review, in which he called Mrs. Davis his new “favorite show,” some of my concerns were assuaged. 

Mrs. Davis is both the title of this new series and the name of its primary antagonist, an A.I. program that has taken over the world. A siren of sorts, Mrs. Davis has brought the world under her sway by seduction rather than force. But, in an important lesson for our times, that doesn’t make her any less totalitarian. Quite the opposite, in exchange for the A.I.’s promise of material well being, emotional fulfillment, and social satisfaction, everyone in this dystopian world has given up his freedom. 

Well, almost everyone. There are two central characters in the show who have not succumbed to what Bishop Barron rightly calls the rest of the world’s “idolatry” of Mrs. Davis: Sister Simone (Betty Gilpin), a nun and the show’s heroine, and Wylie (Jake McDorman), Simone’s wealthy childhood friend and ex-boyfriend who is part of an underground anti-A.I. resistance. These characters drive the show forward, and each represents a distinct response to our modern, digitized, and disembodied world. 

Simone represents a Christian community’s response to the digital world. While we initially find Simone at a remote off-the-grid convent outside of Reno, Nevada, Mrs. Davis, working through her human subjects, soon infiltrates the facility. Shortly thereafter, Simone realizes that the A.I. will not let her rest and resolves to destroy it. Though she knows that doing so is almost impossible and will require dangerously engaging with Mrs. Davis, she doesn’t have any other options. 

Her story resonates with the experience of American Christians, many of whom sought refuge in their churches only for the country’s cultural radicalism to follow them there. In the negative world, with their backs against the wall, many Christians, like Simone, are now taking a more direct and hostile approach to engaging in the culture. 

Next comes Wylie. Formerly a subject of Mrs. Davis, Wylie even went so far as to trade his life for “wings”—a sort of social symbol that the A.I. can confer upon her most devoted subjects—and is soon set to “expire,” i.e., to be sacrificed to the A.I. Now he and his fellow travelers have formed a militia to take down Mrs. Davis. Hyper-masculine, decked out in black leather, and as chiseled as statues from classical antiquity, Wylie and his friends represent the return of the ancient man—or at least the modern person’s idea of the ancient man. 

This underground resistance, which is composed almost entirely of young men, reflects a more Nietzschean response to a world that technology has sucked the life out of. It can be associated more broadly with the group Matthew Walther has called “barstool conservatives.” As Nate Hochman argued in a New York Times article last year, this group forms part of an ascendant force in an increasingly post-Christian Right. 

Simone and Wylie’s common enemy draws them together, and their relationship is one of the most interesting aspects of the show. While at first reluctant to cooperate, the pair begrudgingly learns to rely on each other, and eventually even recovers the old flame they once shared. Almost as soon as it begins, though, Wylie and the nun must end the love affair; Simone’s vows constantly draw her back to God, giving the show a refreshing spiritual side. 

Indeed, some of the show’s best and worst moments occur in depictions of Simone’s prayer life, where she interacts with Jesus (Andy McQueen). In the latter category are several entirely unnecessary scenes in which Simone and Jesus are portrayed being physically intimate. Objectionable as these scenes may be, they are few and far between; Jesus serves as the primary foil to the malevolent Mrs. Davis.

Upon her departure, Wylie’s oscillation between his inescapable fear of death and his desire to prove himself only intensifies. He soon learns that Mrs. Davis has actually been using his underground headquarters—chock full of computer servers and advanced technology—as her home base. This devastates Wylie and eventually leads him face to face with death by A.I. in the season finale. 

It is a lot to take in, and at times the show’s wild swings from episode to episode can be somewhat disorienting. But it makes for gripping viewing, and it contains within it important lessons for our current moment. 

More specifically, Mrs. Davis confronts people like Wylie, who find themselves in today’s vitalist “resistance,” to consider difficult questions: What is the difference between freedom and power? Where does power come from? And what’s really worth living for? At the same time, it reminds Christians that though current circumstances might require us to make unsavory political alliances, ultimate victory will always come through Jesus. 

Most of all, Mrs. Davis is a powerful testimony to the dangers of idolatry, and a reminder that totalitarianism is just as likely to come from our moral licentiousness as it is to come from moral absolutism. As Benjamin Rush once put it, “the temple of tyranny has two doors.” 

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Found Patriotism

Par : Nic Rowan — 1 juillet 2023 à 06:03
Culture

Found Patriotism

It is the accidental and even amateurish displays of enthusiasm for America that really stick with us.

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I live near the Naval Observatory in Northwest D.C., and every morning I am awakened by the sound of the national anthem echoing off the hill directly behind my house. My wife, who is shaken from sleep about an hour earlier by Reveille, is already downstairs feeding our daughter yogurt on the back porch. Our daughter, who will soon turn two, tells us that she likes the “song.”

In most circumstances, I do not like the song. I have studiously avoided venues throughout my entire adult life where I may be forced to hear the national anthem—Little League games, local political rallies, church picnics—not out of disdain for my country, but because I think it’s a bad song. There seems to be no way to perform it except as bombastic and overdone. It can be a little embarrassing. (I have been to Fort McHenry. It is not like that at all.) 

I feel similarly about the American flag. The Italian social critic Luigi Barzini was right when he described it as “strictly Louis XVI.” The red and white stripes look as if they have been copied from upholstery of the period, and the star-spangled field could easily double as the lining of some decadent Bourbon’s waistcoat. It lends itself easily to tackiness. I could go on like this at length, nitpicking at Washington Crossing the Delaware and the Jefferson Bible, but that would be puerile. America was born in the Age of Light, and it will never fully satisfy those of us with a darker cast of mind.

And anyway, I would be lying if I didn’t admit that deep within me there is some primeval attachment to the United States’s pious customs. When these customs are presented in strange or decontextualized ways, I am often overcome with a love of country. My morning routine is the perfect example. The Naval Observatory appears rather haphazard in its daily observance of the national anthem; I’m not sure it is ever played at exactly the same time. (I should add that the Observatory also plays Taps every evening at what seems like randomly chosen hours.) And the recording itself—I am certain that there is not a full band on hand every morning—is the opposite of impressive. When the swelling strain of “o’er the land of the free” echoes off the hill, the woozy horns sound oddly comic, like a parody. It gets me right out of bed. 

This version of the national anthem is an instance of what I call “found patriotism.” Like found poetry, it presents itself by accident. And it usually arises out of attempts at straightforward patriotism. If the Observatory assembled a band to play a crisp and respectful anthem every morning at 8:00 a.m. sharp, I and no doubt everyone else in the neighborhood would be annoyed. But, since the show is lackadaisical and half-hearted, it becomes in its way an inspiration, and a comfort—a wry tribute to our country as it really is. 

Other examples of found patriotism abound in most Americans’ lives, and I believe they are what really instill filial piety in us. A professional fireworks show held year after year on Independence Day soon becomes forgettable, but drunken fireworks mistakenly set off on the Third of July are spirited and remembered for decades afterwards. “My Country ’Tis of Thee” is a joyless tune, but when bellowed out in church, its reckless claims make an Americanist of even the most measured men. Perhaps the greatest example of found patriotism is the improperly hung American flag; here is a people who love their country so fervently that they do not even bother to respect its symbols.  

A naysayer might argue that I am just describing bad taste. And I freely admit that I am, in part: That is half the point of found patriotism. (It’s also the reason why the cult of such a place as Breezewood, Pennsylvania, is so widespread.) But there’s more to it than that. The greatest things about America are our landscapes, which we were given by accident: the Great Lakes, the Brandywine Valley, Manhattan. So it is also with our customs. The United States was conceived at a constitutional congress nearly 300 years ago, but the country’s endurance is due to accidental occurrences seen on strange vistas where rational thought dare not intrude. 

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To Fight Another Day

Par : Declan Leary — 1 juillet 2023 à 06:05
Politics

To Fight Another Day

The breathing room afforded by the Court should not give Christians a false sense of security.

Supreme Court of the United States 303 Creative v Elenis
Lorie Smith, a Christian graphic artist and website designer in Colorado, center in pink, prepares to speak to supporters outside the Supreme Court. (Kent Nishimura / Los Angeles Times via Getty Images)

I tend to think of myself as a fairly strong communitarian, or at least an enemy of the rigid individualism that has afflicted certain strains of American thought since the middle of the 18th century. A society cannot be built on antisocial pillars. Yet even my skin crawls at the dehumanizing mass-man newspeak of the civil-rights branch of the left.

Charlie Craig and David Mullins, the litigious pair who dragged the baker Jack Phillips through court for half a dozen years over his unwillingness to participate in their gay wedding in 2012, take the form to a startling extreme in USA Today this week. 

You see, when the Supreme Court ruled in 2018 that these two men and the deferential agents of the Colorado government did Mr. Phillips a grave injustice, it did so only on the grounds that Phillips’s treatment was a blatant instance of religious persecution. 

When the Colorado Civil Rights Commission issued the vindictive instructions that Phillips must “change [his] company policies, provide ‘comprehensive staff training’ regarding public accommodations discrimination, and provide quarterly reports for the next two years regarding steps [he] has taken to come into compliance and whether [he] has turned away any prospective customers,” they did so merely because they despised his Christian faith. The Supreme Court thus overturned the commission’s verdict without taking a stance on the underlying issue.

Lorie Smith, a web designer who has been barred from the wedding market by the same “anti-discrimination law” that strung up Jack Phillips, thus brought her own case against the compelled-speech statute, hoping to score a broader victory. On Friday, the Supreme Court granted one, affirming the obvious fact that a man or woman cannot justly be forced to produce speech that contradicts his or her sincerely held beliefs.

Craig and Mullins write that this First Amendment liberty “greenlights discrimination” as they grumble about “the harm caused to LGTBQ+ individuals who are denied equal access to public accommodations.”

Never mind that no real harm can possibly be caused by the restriction of available bakeshop options by one. The term on which their argument hinges is a bothersome one: public accommodations.

It has its roots in the civil rights regime of 1964, which superimposed a new system on the longstanding United States Constitution. And it would be reasonable enough if it meant what it says; nobody will argue that the town should shut off a man’s public water for the crime of sodomy, much less for a simple fact like the color of his skin.

But this is not what public accommodation means in civil rights jargon. It means you. It means Jack Phillips, and anyone else who hopes to live some part of his life outside the four walls of his home. Whatever is intended by the letter of the law, the new regime in practice has made clear that operation in the public square—participation in the common life of society—requires compliance. You cannot opt out. You cannot plead conscience. State-enforced homosexuality is more than an edgy meme.

The overreach is justified by a good deal of fear-mongering about supposed harm. Craig and Mullins lay it on thick, but their melodrama is nothing compared to the dissent of Justice Sonya Sotomayor. The justice preaches that “invidious discrimination” is not one of “the values in the Constitution.” She worries that the resurrection of such practice “reminds LGBT people of a painful feeling that they know all too well: There are some public places where they can be themselves, and some where they cannot.… Ask any LGBT person, and you will learn just how often they are forced to navigate life in this way.” (Every Christian in America unavailable for comment.) She even makes an emotional appeal to the death of Matthew Shepard, a 21-year-old meth dealer who happened to be gay and was murdered by two drug-trade associates.

The activists attempt to contrast this harm with the rosy life of the people they persecute. Both the Craig-Mullins op-ed and a number of other early takes on the ruling note bitterly that Smith was never asked to design a website for a gay wedding. They take this to mean that no person was harmed, and it is difficult to read this conclusion as anything other than blind egotism. 

When Jack Phillips was forced to stop making wedding cakes altogether, he lost 40 percent of his business. A similarly sizable chunk of income is no doubt lost by a boutique web designer driven out of a massive sphere of the small-scale web design market. Yet it seems beyond these people’s moral capacity to put themselves in her shoes.

It is also worth noting that the radical front has framed itself (in this as in so many other battles) as David up against the reactionary Goliath. Never mind the long march through every institution, the unanimous endorsement of every cultural power, the outright criminalization of dissent. By sheer numbers, the claim is absurd. In each of these related cases, the persecuted artist has been represented by Alliance Defending Freedom, a scrappy legal outfit dedicated to an ethos of Christian liberalism; the activist complainants, meanwhile, have prosecuted their cases through the American Civil Liberties Union, a 1.8 million-member behemoth that has spent the last century using courtroom bullying to drag this country leftward. 

Even discounting the latter’s numerous affiliates, ADF has barely one-fourth the annual budget of the ACLU. With no sense of irony, the men who trampled on the rights and livelihood of a humble baker for nothing but their own smug self-interest and satisfaction groan that the ADF’s cases “advance conservative Christian power and privilege at the expense of everyone else, especially LGBTQ+, women, and racial and religious minorities.”

Plaintiffs like Craig and Mullins lost these cases not because the cards were stacked against them, but because their causes were so plainly unjust that even a stacked deck could not ensure their desired outcome. It is a thin safeguard, and the breathing room afforded by the Court should not give Christians a false sense of security. As Jack Phillips has learned, the next attacks will follow quickly.

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The End of Affirmative Action?

Par : John Hirschauer — 1 juillet 2023 à 21:30
Politics

The End of Affirmative Action?

State of the Union: Racial preference won’t go away. It will just go underground.

Annual March For Life Held In Washington, D.C.
(Photo by Anna Moneymaker/Getty Images)

The Supreme Court this week banned the use of race as a factor in college and university admissions.

It’s unlikely the ruling will have the majority’s desired effect. Schools and activists are already mulling in the pages of the New York Times how to do an end-run around the decision.

What’s more likely is that the admissions process will become even more opaque. More schools will ditch standardized testing requirements, and use the personal essay and other subjective criteria as proxies for race.

Racial preference in admissions won’t go away. It will just go underground.

In overturning Bakke‘s holding about the supposed educational benefits of diversity, the Court at least returned the debate over affirmative action to a more honest station. It was never about whether and to what extent a diverse student body improved educational outcomes. It is about whether and to what extent we should reward and punish people for the actions of their ancestors.

Maybe the fact that a New York neighborhood was “red-lined” in 1935 really should entitle the son of a black professional athlete to have a built-in advantage over the son of a white Iowan pea farmer in the college admissions process. Many Americans find that argument compelling. I don’t. And as we found out Thursday, the Supreme Court, to its credit, doesn’t either.

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The Wild Hunt

Par : Peter Van Buren — 3 juillet 2023 à 06:01
Politics

The Wild Hunt

Hunter Biden’s plea deal touches only the tip of the iceberg.

Hunter Biden
(Photo by Teresa Kroeger/Getty Images for World Food Program USA)

About two years ago during a debate with Donald Trump, Joe Biden dismissed stories about his son’s laptop emails as disinformation. After becoming president, Joe said that his son Hunter was innocent. Most recently, even after Hunter pleaded guilty to tax evasion and weapons charges, the president said that he was proud of his son.

Which part are you proud of, Joe? The video evidence of his crack use? The video evidence of his cavorting with prostitutes? The tax evasion charges? Or was it the weapons charge, where Hunter lied to obtain a handgun?

Joking aside, the easy-sleazy plea deal Hunter accepted, which has him serve probation in lieu of jail time, leaves several important questions about exactly what Hunter (and Joe, and Jim, Joe’s brother) were doing in return for millions of dollars in consulting fees. Tax evasion seems to be just the beginning. Let’s get specific. Most of the incidents below are drawn from Hunter’s email and laptop documents. (The American Conservative published a dive into the laptop’s contents online in December 2020, and a deeper dive in our print edition.)

The reason we have to ask all these sticky questions is because half of Americans—including a third of Democrats—think Hunter got favorable treatment from federal prosecutors after he agreed to a sweetheart plea deal.

So, Hunter, you joined the Burisma board at a salary of $83,000 a month. You had no obvious work duties. What was your actual job at Burisma? We ask because on April 16, 2014, while Papa Joe was vice president, he met with your business partner, Devon Archer, at the White House. Three days later, Joe traveled to Ukraine to lobby for increased fracking. Burisma was one of the few companies licensed to frack in Ukraine. Burisma made hundreds of millions of dollars from Ukraine’s new policy. Burisma paid more than $4 million for your and Archer’s board memberships. You never registered as a foreign agent.

While you and Archer were serving on Burisma’s board, Ukraine’s top prosecutor, Viktor Shokin, was investigating Burisma and its owner. In his official position as vice president, Biden demanded that Ukraine fire Shokin, and threatened to withdraw $1 billion in U.S. military aid if it did not do so. Shokin was fired.

While serving on the Burisma board, you and Archer sought meetings with senior State Department officials, including then-Secretary of State John Kerry and then-Deputy Secretary of State Antony Blinken. Did you guys get to chat? The reason we ask is because whatever your job description read, your value to Burisma was your perceived access to the executive branch. Papa Joe was at least a passive participant in the scheme, maybe more than that.

Your laptop shows that you used front entities to take money from foreign firms and then moved that money to American institutions, from which the funds were parceled out to other persons and entities, including Joe’s brother Jim. Some of it then went back to foreign hands. This is dirty stuff. Enormous transfers to LLCs without employees, residences used as business addresses, institutions registered in Cyprus and the British Virgin Islands. Can you explain why your fees traveled such circuitous routes? What did you pay Uncle Jim for, and why did he appear to kick back some of the money you paid him?

What is this money all about, Hunter? In 2014, you received a $3.5 million wire transfer from Elena Baturina, the richest woman in Russia and the widow of Yury Luzhkov, the former mayor of Moscow. Baturina became Russia’s only female billionaire when her company received a series of Moscow municipal contracts while her husband was mayor.

But let’s move on to China; Russia and Ukraine are so depressing. The majority of the contents of your laptop are a jumbled record of your international business ventures. Sticking out from this farrago of irregularity is a large number of wire transfers to and from your clients. (But no evidence of what “work” you performed for those clients.) The addresses that can be traced lead to what look to be mostly employee-free anonymous shell companies run out of lawyers’ offices.

In August 2018 you also returned $100k back to CEFC in China via its own New York subsidiary LLC, Hudson West V, whose listed address was on Foxwood Road in New York state. That address is not a business office but instead a residence worth over $5 million. It looks like the place has new owners, but phone records seem to suggest two people lived there when you were in business, including Gongwen Dong.

These complicated transfers look an awful lot like money-laundering. Is that what you were really up to, fee-for-service to the Chinese? Inquiring minds and all that, you know.

The Foxwood address also appears on millions of dollars worth of bank transfers among Cathay Bank, CEFC, and multiple semi-anonymous LLCs and hedge funds. One single transfer alone to Hudson West III on August 8, 2017 moved $5 million from Northern Capital International, apparently a Chinese government-owned import-export front company. What was that all about?

In addition, the house on Foxwood was the mailing address for a secured VISA card in the name of your company, Hudson West III. The card is funded anonymously through Cathay Bank for $99,000 and is attached to a Cathay checking account worth $450,000. Shared users of the card are you, Hunter, and Gongwen Dong. The card was opened as CEFC secured a stake in a Russian state-owned energy company. You and others subsequently used the credit card to purchase luxury goods. A Senate report identified these transactions as “potential financial criminal activity.” 

Jim Biden was also an authorized user of the credit card. When he ran into financial trouble, he was bailed out with loans from the rest of the family, including from you, Hunter. Jim also received a loan of $500,000 from John Hynansky, a Ukrainian-American businessman and long-time Biden campaign donor. This occurred at the same time that the then-vice president oversaw American Ukraine policy. 

Where does all this leave us? With President Joe Biden, who ran in part on an anti-corruption “normality” platform. Biden says he regrets meeting with the Burisma official. It’s always easier to apologize than to seek permission. Is that what your dad always says, Hunter?

Do we even need to address the infamous 2017 email detailing a prospective venture with an explicit set-aside for the “big guy,” publicly identified as Joe Biden by Hunter’s former partner Tony Bobulinski?

There is a lot more, but you get the picture. It looks like a lot of impropriety from your dad. In corrupt stews like China and Ukraine, the sons of powerful men have and trade on access to their fathers. Is that where you picked up the idea?

Joe Biden said of Hunter, “I have never spoken to my son about his overseas business dealings.” So Hunter, help us out. Explain.

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What Is Gender Ideology?

Par : Jay W. Richards — 3 juillet 2023 à 06:05
Culture

What Is Gender Ideology?

Just because something is incoherent doesn’t mean that it isn’t real—and dangerous.

US-PRIDE-LGBTQ-RIGHTS
(Photo by ALLISON JOYCE/AFP via Getty Images)

Recently, I received separate inquiries from reporters working on stories about the use of the term “gender ideology.” What do I think it means? What is its origin?

The requests, though they came from different reporters, were identical. This seemed suspicious. After all, these journalists showed no interest in explaining or analyzing the ideology that has passed through our culture faster than a viral particle through a loose-fitting surgical mask. They wanted to know, rather, whence this nasty right-wing slur, “gender ideology,” came.

This seems to be part of a larger media campaign to discredit this and related terms. For instance, the new AP style guide advises, “Do not use the term transgenderism, which frames transgender identity as an ideology.”

The Wikipedians are also doing their part. Something called the “anti-gender movement,” the website explains, “is an international movement which opposes what it refers to as ‘gender ideology,’ ‘gender theory,’ or ‘genderism.’ The concepts cover a variety of issues and have no coherent definition.”

The giant online encyclopedia even quotes some European academics who claim the term is an “empty signifier.” Rubes who use this purportedly content-free word “include right-wingers and the far right, right-wing populists, conservatives, and Christian fundamentalists.”

The charge is not so much that the term gender ideology is unfair or inaccurate—which the AP suggests—but rather, that it doesn’t refer to anything at all.

Yet clearly such an ideology exists and can be named. If thousands of people use a term to refer to the same set of related facts out in the world, then it both means something to them and has a referent. This is true no matter where the term originated, even if it’s hard for a random person on Twitter to formulate a tight definition on command.

Anyone following politics in recent years already has some idea what “gender ideology” means and what it refers to. It gave us the Gender Unicorn. It inspires every new letter and symbol added to LBG in the Pride Month alphabet. It coaxes school districts to allow males who “identify as” females to compete in girls’ sports and use their bathrooms. It hypnotizes the media into pretending the man who won the decathlon in the 1976 Olympics is a woman.

Gender ideology is the source of the belief that children can be born in the wrong body. It leads Californians to think that if a young girl feels anguish over her body, the doctors should not help her adjust to her body but should change her body and her surroundings—name, bathroom, pronouns—to conform to her “gender identity.” It fuels the spread of concepts like “gender identity”—including the many new supposed identities such as non-binary and pansexual—and the telling phrase “sex assigned at birth.” It inspires opaque proclamations like “transwomen are women.”

It prompts the State Department under Joe Biden to fly the progress flag during Pride Month. It led Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson to answer “I can’t…. I’m not a biologist” when she was asked “What is a woman?” during her Senate confirmation hearing to the U.S. Supreme Court.

The ubiquity of gender ideology is why the Babylon Bee headline, “Bigoted Gender Surgeon Still Only Offering ‘Male’ and ‘Female,’” is funny. Get it? Of course you do. You know tacitly what gender ideology refers to. It’s ludicrous to pretend that these ideas have no nameable source.

Still, defining an ideology is much harder than pointing to its effects. That’s why critics of gender ideology often come up short when challenged to do so. They might say, for instance, that it claims that people can change or choose their sex or gender at will. But that’s not what its adherents claim.

Any good definition of a term should make explicit what its users already tacitly understand and refer to. It should also reveal the thing itself. In this case, it should capture the view of gender ideology’s champions who would much rather it continue to work its magic in the shadows, than be named—and so examined—under the glaring light of reason.

Gender ideology is even harder to define than most terms because it refers to a protean postmodern confection. If you try to collect all the claims of its adherents over the years into a single long conjunctive proposition, as Ryan Anderson did in 2018, it looks downright incoherent.

It is child’s play to point to its effects, but the thing itself is shrouded in obscurity and equivocation. Its proponents play a constant game of Motte and Bailey with the public, redefining familiar words and creating new variations of those words that only make sense within their own paradigm. As a result, one can’t really define gender ideology without invoking some of the terms it has already inserted into our language—terms that also cry out for definition. 

Nevertheless, it can be done—so long as we focus on its current incarnation. Recently, “gender-critical” physician Jeremy Shaw queried the Twitterverse for just such a definition. I sent one back without much thought—as one does on Twitter. It read: 

Gender ideology is the theory that the sex binary doesn’t capture the complexity of the human species, and that human individuals are properly described in terms of an “internal sense of gender” called “gender identity” that may be incongruent with their “sex assigned at birth.”

Gender ideology is certainly more than that. But it is at least that.

On reflection, I’d replace “theory” with the less highfalutin “view.” Like all definitions, this one contains terms that are not themselves defined. It also contains terms that are artifacts of the ideology, such as “gender identity” and “sex assigned at birth.”

According to Google’s dictionary function, “gender identity” is “a person’s innate sense of gender.” The term, we’re told, is “chiefly used in contexts where it is contrasted with the sex registered for them at birth.” So, we’re supposed to understand each of these terms in light of the other.

This circular definition of gender identity is the standard. The word “gender” appears in both the definition and the term being defined—in both the explanans and the explanandum.

Despite this deficiency, we can get a better sense of gender ideology by focusing on its use of “gender” and “sex.” To most outsiders, “gender” might look like a synonym for “sex”—as it has been for centuries. Presidential candidate Vivek Ramaswamy, for instance, recently tweeted ten “truths,” among them, “2. There are two genders.” It would have been better if he’d said, “There are [only] two sexes”—which is clearly what he meant.

Why does this matter? Because gender ideologues tend to use “gender” as a shorthand for “gender identity”—as in the euphemism “gender affirming care” in medicine. Such “care” affirms the presumed gender identity of the patient, even if that means destroying the patient’s primary and secondary sex organs. In such a lexicon, “There are two genders” could mean “There are two gender identities,” which I doubt anyone would bother to defend. Gender ideologues, for their part, admit no limiting principle to the number of gender identities. And their critics should just say, “There are only two sexes.”

Rather than denying the reality of sex outright, though, gender ideologues employ the now-ubiquitous substitute, “sex assigned [or registered] at birth.” They thus avoid using the word “sex”—the real biological difference between male and female human beings—and posit, instead, a mere social construct. It’s no wonder normal people are confused.

As bizarre as this is to those still in command of their senses, this gender lexicon is already so advanced that if you google, “What is the sex binary?” it will redirect, or rather misdirect, you to pages trying to debunk the “gender binary.” Google is clearly doing its part to advance the cause of gender ideology—though, according to recent polls, fewer and fewer people seem to buy it.

Why do gender ideologues play such verbal shell games? Why pretend their view cannot be defined? It’s surely because they want it to be seen as a simple deliverance of science and sweet reason, rather than a dogma so outlandish that almost no one would accept it if it were explained precisely and without the threat of social opprobrium.

The plain truth: Gender ideology does not accommodate the reality of sex—the reproductive strategy of mammals including human beings. Sex, in this reckoning, is not an objective truth about men and women. We are not male or female by virtue of our body structure or the fact that our bodies are oriented around the production of sperm or eggs. Human beings, are, in essence, psychological selves with internal senses of gender—like disembodied gendered souls. These “gender identities” are independent of, and can be incongruent with, the bodies that God gave us and that medicine has come to associate with “male” and female.” These “sex” categories are mere conventions, says the gender ideologue, not facts.

For obvious reasons, gender acolytes rarely speak so bluntly. But don’t be fooled. When you see these confusing terms deployed to explain away what you know to be true, you can be quite sure you’re not dealing with sound science or sound philosophy, but with an incoherent kludge of concepts that we may rightly call gender ideology.

I hope this clears things up for those curious journalists who seem to be perplexed by the term.

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France’s Floyd Moment

Par : Sumantra Maitra — 3 juillet 2023 à 15:30
Foreign Affairs

France’s Floyd Moment

State of the Union: Western elites’ response to the civil unrest from clashing cultures grows more untenable by the day.

FRANCE-CRIME-POLICE-DEMO
Protestors flee from smoke on a street in Nice, southeastern France early July 2, 2023. (Photo by VALERY HACHE/AFP via Getty Images)

At this point everyone knows the play. There’s a death, often under unclear circumstances. Before the smoke is clear, there are riots. The riots are dubbed protests “towards justice.” In reality they are anything but, given that most rioters loot consumer goods like shoes, bags, and television sets, and burn down schools, libraries, and the small businesses of those who have nothing to do with the original issue at hand. Most of the riots are carefully planned and organized on social media, whether by BLM and Antifa in Kenosha or Minneapolis, or in the mosques in the French banlieues and suburbs. 

Left-wing politicians call for calm. Right-wing politicians call for control of social media. Police arrest hundreds and then let them off after a few days. No one does anything about the underlying problems of the mass migration of people who are socially incompatible with civilized society, or human rights laws and the NGOcracy that are often shields for disorder. 

This again happened act by act in France; the proximate cause was the shooting of a 17-year-old Algerian man. There are scenes on social media of a library that housed priceless medieval manuscripts being burned down. The library had miraculously survived the Second World War; it did not survive the riots. There are scenes of radicalized Arab kids looting and committing arson, egged on by their elders. There is now an investigation of an attempted murder of the wife and children of a French mayor by rioters who tried to burn the mayoral house down. 

It’s easy to blame it all just on new migration, which of course didn’t help European social cohesion. But that is only partly responsible for what just happened in France. The perpetrators of this outrage are third-generation immigrants from former French North African colonies. Unfortunately, they do not identify as French, and probably never will. That fact should bring everyone rational to a few uncomfortable realizations. 

At some point sane minorities will have to mention in public that uncontrolled mass migration is a curse that often imports incompatible cultures. And culture is a very strong variable regardless of how taboo it is to mention in sophisticated elite circles. Not all minority cultures are the same. Some migrants attempt to integrate. Some do not. It is a fact, and denying it or refusing to study it further will do no one any good, least of all those minorities who want to assimilate to the host culture and contribute towards civilized life. 

Assimilation is a two-way street. If a person remains more concerned about his native culture or country of birth, then he has not made any effort to assimilate and should receive no sympathies in return. 

A final point: If normal political parties fail to restore order by force, and tackle the corrosive human rights NGOcracy, people will eventually elect those who will. 

A self-neutered France, impotent due to European Union’s human rights laws, is teetering on the brink of a civil war following mass unrest and radicalization on both sides. It is haunted by its own history and governed by an elite whose worldview dictated that politics is simply a domain of perpetual management, not action. That is now unsustainable. And that is a lesson for us all. 

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Indiana Jones, Independence Day, and the Presence of the Past

Par : Adam Ellwanger — 4 juillet 2023 à 18:00
Culture

Indiana Jones, Independence Day, and the Presence of the Past

Jones’s malaise now animates our society at large: We, too, are exhausted by the present.

indiana_jones

If reviews of 2008’s Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull made reference to an “aging” Harrison Ford, in 2023 there is no denying that the actor is now old. Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny does not shy away from this fact. The film opens by showing Indiana Jones in 1969: We find him clad only in his underwear, awakened in his easy chair by the longhairs partying in the adjacent apartment, blasting the Beatles first thing in the morning. 

Still a bit drunk from what appears to be a nightly routine of solitary boozing, Indy grabs a baseball bat and heads to confront the revelers, who laugh and tell the old man to get lost. Humiliated, he returns to his tenement, where he confronts the reality that his family is falling apart. Outside his apartment building, New Yorkers are enjoying a ticker-tape parade celebrating the moon landing. But Dr. Jones is exhausted by the present.

As Americans celebrate the Fourth of July in 2023, we are confronted by a nation seemingly drained of its past vitality. Jones’s malaise now animates our society at large: We, too, are exhausted by the present.

In both cases—the real America of 2023 and Jones’s life in 1969—our exhaustion stems primarily from the present’s stark contrast with the past. There is some sense that our halcyon days are over, and that they cannot be recaptured. Today, the country grapples with the important questions posed by this fatalism. What is the value of the past? Who, if anyone, has the rightful claim to it? Should it have any role in the life of the present – or does the past have a right to stay in the past?  

These are the issues addressed by Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny. While it isn’t a great film, it does offer some compelling answers—answers that can help those of us who sense that the great America that we used to know is taking on the status of an ancient relic.

In many ways, the Indiana Jones series itself is a historical artifact. The first film was released in 1981 to universal acclaim in a much different America. While everybody loved these movies, not everyone has loved Indy. Critics have derided the character as an avatar of western colonialism, an educated cowboy who travels to exotic places, blasts and whips his way through the local muscle, and locates cultural treasures—only to steal them back to the safety (and sterility) of an American museum. Indeed, the screenwriters apparently feel a bit ashamed of Indiana Jones: All five films include characters who level charges that he is a “thief” and a “graverobber.”

But contrary to what woke critics and Indy’s fictional detractors say, he is not a thief or a graverobber. In Raiders of the Lost Ark, Jones doesn’t try to procure the Ark of the Covenant as much as he tries to prevent the Nazis from doing so, and he protests when he learns that US authorities will simply keep it in secret storage. In Temple of Doom, when he finds that a small Indian village’s sacred Sankara Stone has been stolen by a Thuggee blood cult, he retrieves it and returns it to the people. In Last Crusade, Indy doesn’t want to seek the Holy Grail—he is compelled to do it in order to rescue his father, a grail expert who has been kidnapped by the Nazis. The goal is not to possess the grail, but to keep it out of Nazi hands. When they find it, there is a brief moment where the younger Jones does want to take the cup, but when his father tells him to leave it behind, he complies. Similarly, the entire plot of Crystal Skull is driven by Indiana’s effort to return the artifact to its indigenous place of origin . 

In short, the films don’t depict a rapacious crusader, but rather a man with a deep and abiding respect for the past. Time after time, his impulse is to protect artifacts, to honor them, and when possible, to leave them be. When the situation does not allow them to be left alone, his refrain is that they “belong in a museum.” Woke zealots today see museums as mere storage houses for the spoils of colonialism and war, but that’s not what they are for Indiana Jones. He wants the remains of the past in a museum precisely so they will be protected. 

But protection isn’t enough. After all, the Ark of the Covenant would be quite secure sitting in a locked crate at a secret government facility. The museum is a place where the relics will get the reverence that they deserve. Reverence from whom? Professors? Curators?  No. Reverence from everyone. Reverence from the people. This indicates Dr. Jones’ recognition that if anyone “owns” the past, it is a collective ownership, a human ownership that reflects our shared history. To know our own time is impossible if we don’t understand both how the present differs from the past and how it represents a continuity with history.

Early in the Dial of Destiny, Jones’s partner insists that “some things should stay buried.” This a pithy digestion of the entire theme of the film, which culminates in a moment where Indiana must decide whether he will live in the glorious past or in the present. While the present is less than ideal, making a choice to abandon the past in its favor amounts to a gesture of hope. The future is uncertain, after all. Choosing to live in the present reflects a will to believe that the future will be worth living. Viewers of the film will find that Jones needs a little intervention in order to let the past go—but he does. 

Ultimately though, (re)resurrecting a beloved film franchise—a piece of our shared (pop) cultural inheritance—simply to have an octogenarian encourage us to honor the past by leaving it behind…well, it’s a strange bit of metafiction. After all, if Ford and the makers of the movie really believed its message, they would have never set out to make it. Indeed, for decades Ford himself scoffed at the idea of revisiting classic characters like Han Solo and Indiana Jones. But he has returned to both. 

This unwillingness to let cinematic history stay in the past is also underscored by Dial of Destiny’s impressive use of computer technologies that “de-age” Ford in certain scenes, depicting him as a younger man around the age he was in the first three films. Again, this is a very odd choice for a film that finally tells us to let go of the past and live in the now. One wonders: with technology like this, have we really seen the last Indiana Jones movie featuring Harrison Ford (or at least his digitally rendered likeness)? New stories featuring a 35-year-old Indy in his prime could be made in perpetuity. There’s a lot of money to be made. Let’s hope Hollywood can learn the lesson of Dial of Destiny and respect the past by leaving that money on the table.

Which brings us back to our present. This week we celebrate the foundation of this nation and our shared history. The great symbols of our heritage have not been treated well as of late. The founding is falsely smeared as an effort to protect slavery. Whether it’s via demands to expand the Supreme Court or calls for abolishing the electoral college, the government bequeathed to us by the Constitution is under attack. Many Americans now see these documents as relics: ones that deserve no reverence, even ones that might need to be destroyed. In making these attacks, the belligerents of our society assert some ownership of that past—they claim the right to do with it what they will, even if that means their destruction. 

The Fourth of July is a holiday where we remember our past, and how our present is an extension of it. By remembering it, we revere it. And while the America that we see in 2023 may never again be what it once was—before the cultural revolution and its assassinations, before 9/11, before the terrible year of 2020—it still belongs to us. That means that while the past perhaps cannot be recaptured, we nevertheless have an obligation to honor what remains, to protect it, and to transmit that legacy to a new generation. That Independence Day remains an occasion to celebrate this nation is one of many ways we continue to fulfill that duty. In doing so, we rededicate ourselves to its legacy, and choose to look toward a shared future in a spirit of American optimism rather than one of trepidation.

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Dobbs Comes to Maryland

Par : George Liebmann — 5 juillet 2023 à 06:01
Politics

Dobbs Comes to Maryland

The state and localities are wrestling with post-Roe realities.

President Biden Highlights The Bipartisan Infrastructure Law That Funds Replacement Of The Baltimore And Potomac Tunnel
Maryland Governor Wes Moore (Photo by Drew Angerer/Getty Images)

The Dobbs decision brought an end to the federal regime of abortion-on-demand, with only a vague “mental health” standard previously limiting third-trimester abortions. Abortions are no longer available with certainty.

The screams that the decision provoked have been equaled only by those accompanying the Welfare Reform Act of 1996, with its time limits and work requirements. Yet when word got out that teenage pregnancy did not bring with it economic independence and 18 years of assured cash payments, the teenage pregnancy rate fell from 213 per 1000 in 1990 to 65 per thousand in 2016. 

No longer do Baltimoreans and Marylanders have occasion to decry three-generation welfare families. Yet it has not yet dawned on Governor Wes Moore of Maryland or Mayor Brandon Scott of Baltimore that the uncertainty induced by Dobbs may be a similar gift to Baltimore and Maryland in addressing their most serious social problem: family breakdown and the attendant crime and delinquency.

Each day shows us that Roe v. Wade was a social disaster. Contrary to the premise of Justice John Marshall Harlan’s concurring opinion that unwed motherhood would almost disappear, the percentage of white children born out of wedlock increased from 3.1 percent in 1965 to 27.5 percent in 2021; among black Americans, it skyrocketed from 24 percent to 70.1 percent. 

So-called shotgun weddings declined from 59 percent of unwanted pregnancies to 9 percent. Unimpeachable scholars, Professor Janet Yellen, now Secretary of the Treasury, and her husband, Nobel-winning economist George Akerlof, showed in a 1996 study that the change was due to altered abortion rules and resulting changes in mores, what they called “reproductive technology shock.” 

The increased availability of contraception and abortion made shotgun weddings a thing of the past. Women who were willing to get an abortion or who reliably used contraception no longer found it necessary to condition sexual relations on a promise of marriage in the event of pregnancy…women feared that if they refused sexual relations they would lose their partners. Sexual activity without commitment was increasingly expected.

Many less privileged women, relying on the new-found right as a “backup,” discovered that—because of ignorance, procrastination, lack of means, parental pressure, fear of losing the ability to conceive, or a maternal instinct to protect the fetus—they did not want or could not obtain an abortion. For their consorts, the newly discovered right operated as a hunting license.

The Dobbs decision is thus cause for rejoicing. Situation ethics is no longer a rule of constitutional law. The ruling already appears to be inducing greater care in the choice of sexual partners, the use of precautions, and a reduced rate of unwed motherhood. The consequences of a 70 percent rate of unwed motherhood in certain populations may be invisible to privileged professionals and journalists, but even Baltimore’s unionized schoolteachers are highly aware of it.

Of course, the legislation that states enact must be drafted with a view to prudence as well as principle. Laws that are unenforceable bring the law into disrepute. Surgical abortions, denials of the purposes of medicine, were long condemned. Not so pills, whose use can be punished only with difficulty, a gift to the underworld.

Simone Veil, a Holocaust survivor and later president of the European Parliament, when sponsoring French abortion law reform as health minister in the Giscard government, urged “not allowing abortions to produce scandalous profits…. Foreign women will have to fulfill conditions of residence…. Information about birth control [is] an obligation, on pain of administrative closure, for the establishments where abortions are performed.” 

Further, she advised that medical and social consultations and a waiting period be provided to ensure that “this is not a normal or banal act but a serious decision…the pregnancy can only be terminated early because … [of] intrinsic physical and psychological risks of terminating a pregnancy after the end of the tenth week following conception…When one knows that dentistry, non-mandatory vaccinations and prescription glasses are not or are only minimally reimbursed by the healthcare system, how can it be acceptable to reimburse a termination of pregnancy? Medical aid has been provided for, for the most destitute…. the law no longer forbids, it does not create a right to abortion.”

Yet the responses of Maryland’s Moore and Baltimore’s Scott to Dobbs have been perverse, abandoning the erstwhile pretense that abortions should be “safe, legal, and rare.” Instead, they are now some sort of blessed sacrament, the subject not of tolerance but of promotion. 

As Baltimore’s own H.L. Mencken wrote nearly a century ago, “Nor is the moral virtuoso made more prepossessing when he takes the Devil’s side and howls for license instead of for restraint. The birth controllers, for example, often carry on their indelicate crusade with the pious rancor of prohibitionists.” But abortion law affects not only those already pregnant, but those not yet pregnant, now rendered more cautious by potential perils that lie ahead: economic burdens in middle age, loneliness when old.

Maryland’s governor has proposed a constitutional amendment that would sweep away the remaining feeble restrictions on third-term abortions—making way for, among other things, non-doctors to perform them—and enacting laws of dubious constitutionality precluding Maryland courts from honoring the subpoenas of neighboring states. The mayor proposes to stockpile abortion pills. He thus gives force to Mencken’s prophecy that if there were a substantial number of cannibals in the electorate, politicians would promise them regular meals of grilled missionary. If assisted suicide becomes more fashionable, Mayor Scott will no doubt want to stockpile strychnine also.

Baltimore is to be rendered an abortion Mecca, a curious economic development decision given the failure of previous administrations to encourage financial institutions fleeing New York in the 1980s to relocate there and its active repulsion in the 1980s of immigrants, including those fleeing Hong Kong.

The efforts to undermine the policies of neighboring states are especially repulsive. General De Gaulle once wrote of pre-Roe America that “the central government and Congress normally confine themselves to larger matters: foreign policy, civic rights and duties, defense, currency, overall taxes and tariffs. For these reasons, the system has succeeded in functioning up to now in the north of the New World.”

National legislation where public opinion is evenly divided will produce only continued dissension. In most American states, divisions are far from even, and those dissatisfied with each state’s law will make up a much smaller portion of the nation’s population. 

One must ask: How would Governor Moore or Mayor Scott like it if Governor Glenn Youngkin of Virginia were to offer inner-city Baltimore residents free bus transportation to the nearest Virginia gun shop in order to subvert the Old Line State’s efforts at firearms control? 

Baltimore’s vital interest in socializing its minority young is being subordinated to a vote-buying agenda promising short-sighted college coeds a moral climate fostering situation ethics and free love. As the post-Dobbs statistics relating to unwed motherhood improve, it is to be hoped that the governor and mayor will withdraw from their exposed positions.

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Fast Times at Shandong U.

Par : Jesse Russell — 5 juillet 2023 à 06:03
Foreign Affairs

Fast Times at Shandong U.

A new memoir from a Westerner living as a bureaucrat in China’s education system has important lessons for America.

Aerial,Photography,Of,Jining,City,Scenery
Aerial photography of Jining city scenery (4045/Shutterstock)

The Dean of Shandong: Confessions of a Minor Bureaucrat at a Chinese University, Daniel A. Bell, Princeton University Press, 196 pages

In 2004, global audiences were treated to the martial-arts epic Hero, a masterful work of the Chinese director Zhang Yimou. The film, set in the Warring States era of Chinese history, tells the story of multiple assassination attempts upon the king of the Qin state. A visual feast, loaded with philosophical reflections as well as Alfred Hitchcock-esque plot twists, the film is also often criticized for being Chinese Communist state propaganda—the ultimate message of the film is the sacrifice of an individual for the collective good of China. 

Nonetheless, Hero, which was nominated for multiple awards in the West, including Best Foreign Language Film at the Academy Awards, represents how China of the 21st century wishes to be viewed by the world—a country deeply rooted in the past and at the same time more modern than modern. It is, further, a country that utilizes technology, science, and art from the West, but as the Japanese did in the 20th century, puts a distinctly Asian stamp on it. Finally, it is a country that, while collectivist, does in its new, rebranded form allow for some individualism and even individual heroism. 

In his new work from Princeton University Press, the Confucian scholar and Chinese educator Daniel Bell attempts to provide a similar portrait of today’s China. Indeed, Bell, who has received strong criticism from Western figures because of his defense of China, explicitly states in The Dean of Shandong that it is his goal to convince readers that, despite some authoritarian tendencies, China is not the dangerous red dragon of Western imaginings. In fact, Bell notifies the readers that it is his goal to live and work in China for the rest of his life, and hopefully to obtain Chinese citizenship. 

En route to this puzzling and controversial rhetorical goal, Bell provides a portrait of his life as an administrator in a Chinese university; laying aside his support for China, he gives Western readers a unique vision into the new China.

From 2017 to 2022, the Canadian-born Bell was the dean of the School of Political Science and Public Administration at Shandong University. The fact that the Chinese Communist Party would allow a foreigner to serve in an administrative post at a Chinese university may seem strange. Bell assures readers that he is not a member of the CCP. He was appointed because he is well known for his research on Confucianism, and China has been attempting to reclaim its Confucian heritage in recent years. Bell further notes that, for the past 40 years, China has been trying to “internationalize” its universities. Bell advocates for further reformed China, which draws from the principles of Confucianism. 

At the beginning of the book, Bell provides a brief history of Confucianism, which he sees as playing a central role in shaping a reformed modern China. As Bell notes, Confucius (551–479 B.C.) did not see himself as the creator of a school of thought. Rather, he viewed himself as a midwife of an earlier tradition of thought. Like Plato, Confucius tried and failed at politics, settling into the role of a teacher. As with the case of Aristotle, his students recorded his writings into the Analects. Bell notes that Confucianism was later joined with Daoism and Buddhism and, in our day, with liberalism and democracy. 

At the heart of Confucianism is the idea of harmony, which starts with “filial piety” or respect for one’s family. One should practice humaneness toward others, and, as in Stoicism, one should dedicate himself to the service of the state (this notion, reflected in the film Hero, is clearly amenable to the contemporary Chinese Communist Party). Moreover, Confucian rules should govern the people with ethics as well as ritual and only use force if other means have failed—this point is key to Bell’s argument, for Bell is attempting to provide a kindler, gentler version of China. 

Bell’s desire to reform China is noble, but his belief that China can be reformed through the implementation of Confucianism is perhaps unrealistic. Moreover, his limited defense of contemporary Chinese policy—Bell has himself run up against CCP censors for some of his work—is something to which Christians, human rights activists, and other critics of China might object. 

He does nonetheless provide a curious portrait of life for a foreigner in contemporary China. Bell curiously notes the importance of hair-dying in China; black hair is a sign of vitality, and there is whole culture of hair-dying; as part of his unconventional nature, Xi Jinping has created a revolution of his own by allowing streaks of natural grey to appear in his hair. Bell further notes the importance of a drinking culture in China—especially toasting. While countries like England, Ireland, and Germany are notorious for their immoderate drinking, Bell notes that certain provinces in China likewise have such a reputation. Moreover, drinking and driving became a problem as part of the rapid increase in wealth and technology created new opportunities as well as new problems for the Chinese in the 21st century. 

Bell’s defense of China may not convince most readers. Yet his apologetic depiction of China has some pronounced lessons for the West. The first is the notion of meritocracy. If China surpasses the West in the 21st century, it will be because China, as the West once did, prizes merit over political correctness. As both the public and private sectors in America continue to lower standards and expectation both of employees and for consumers, America risks further losing the innovation that drove the American Century.

Also, as Bell indicates, Chinese education prizes excellence, and seeks to appropriate both Western and Eastern culture for the progress and flourishing of China. The West is crippled with self-criticism and guilt and is actively attempting to erase its past. While there are certainly dangers of chauvinistic nationalism as well as merits to self-criticism, China’s patriotic and meritocratic approach to education will likely win in the end. 

Finally, and perhaps most importantly, is the question of why Bell (and others) seek to leave the West for the East—Bell notes that much of the world currently sees America, once the world’s preeminent power, as a dysfunctional basket case. It is incumbent upon Americans, especially American educators, to help craft a future in which Americans not only want to succeed and flourish, but who actually want to live in the land of their birth. 

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The Divine Right of Joe Biden

Par : Chad Nagle — 5 juillet 2023 à 06:05
Politics

The Divine Right of Joe Biden

Wishing away the ghost of a slain predecessor, our president is trying to bury a living law.

President Biden And Vice President Harris Speak At DNC Event In Washington, DC
President Joe Biden speaks during an event hosted by the Democratic National Party at the Howard Theatre on November 10, 2022 in Washington, D.C. (Samuel Corum/Getty Images)

Hypocrisy is never a good look. On June 30, our secretary of Education declared that the Supreme Court, by striking down President Biden’s student-debt forgiveness program, had “substituted itself for Congress.” On the very same day, Biden issued his “Memorandum on Certifications Regarding Disclosure of Information in Certain Records Related to the Assassination of President John F. Kennedy,” decreeing that, from now on, executive-branch agencies would adopt the CIA’s “Transparency Plan” for releasing assassination related files they control. 

The problem: The federal law governing disposition of such files, the President John F. Kennedy Assassination Records Collection Act of 1992, is still in force. It set a deadline of October 26, 2017, nearly 54 years after the horror in Dealey Plaza, Dallas, for the release of any still-withheld documents. By executive fiat, Biden made his memo the “final certification” under the Act, meaning that, at least so far as our commander-in-chief is concerned, the legislation passed unanimously by Congress over three decades ago is now dead.

To those familiar with this situation, Biden’s edict looks like an effort to preempt a troublesome conclusion to legal action currently under way. In October 2022, the non-profit Mary Ferrell Foundation (MFF) filed suit in federal court against Biden and the National Archives, charging that the president had already violated the JFK Records Act when he certified postponement of withheld files in October 2021. In December 2022, Biden proclaimed he was again certifying postponement, the fourth time a president had done so since the legal deadline. His 2023 diktat is trying to put a “final stamp” on an already illicit process, in hopes of brushing away the will of Congress forever. 

MFF v. Biden raises constitutional issues related to the separation of powers, but its most important element may actually be an ancient principle of Anglo-American law. The defendants’ lawyers argue that the courts have no authority to enjoin or constrain the President in the exercise of his powers, including declassification of government records, and their argument rests on the idea that there is nothing special about the JFK Records Act. Yet they know this is untrue. 

The JFK Records Act is a “remedial statute.” That means it was designed to correct an error in the implementation of another law. As the plaintiffs’ lawyers explain:

The canon grew from the “mischief” rule that calls on courts to identify the mischiefs and defects that the legislature identified when it enacted legislation, and then construe the statute in a manner that would suppress the mischief and advance the remedy.

In other words, the courts should interpret the law as broadly as possible to fulfill Congress’s objectives, and a run-of-the-mill “executive privilege” claim shouldn’t be good enough. In contending that Biden is “above the law” regarding declassification of assassination records, the government is flouting the “mischief rule” on the grounds of “national security,” expecting us to trust that the CIA and other executive-branch agencies have our best interests at heart, even as they collude with industry to censor free speech and commit other rights abuses. But what is at the heart of the secrecy that is now set to continue indefinitely if the CIA’s scheme takes root?

While educated guesses are not irresponsible in contemplating government abuses of power, it is unlikely that conspirators would have put a plot to kill the president in writing, to say nothing of documenting it in official files. Still, suspicion that President Kennedy’s murder was the result of a conspiracy remains widespread, and an examination of the historical record may offer clues to what transpired on November 22, 1963—and to why our national-security grandees might be hiding a titanic disgrace to their reputations and consequent mortal threat to their power.

In early 1962, the Pentagon conceived and approved a program called Operation Northwoods, involving “false flag” attacks to be staged on American territory and blamed on the Communist regime in Cuba. These would have constituted acts of terror, but hawkish members of the U.S. national-security state saw them as worth the price, since they would create the pretext for a full-scale invasion of Cuba and removal of its charismatic leader, Fidel Castro, whose CIA cryptonym was “AMTHUG.”

When presented with Operation Northwoods, President Kennedy rejected it. He had already nixed hawks’ exhortations to bomb Soviet military bases during the Cuban Missile Crisis of October 1962, and in 1961 reportedly had walked out of a National Security Council briefing during the Berlin Crisis. The chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff was explaining how the United States might launch a surprise nuclear attack on the Soviet Union and survive the response. As he was leaving the room, Kennedy remarked to his secretary of State: “And we call ourselves the human race.”

But Operation Northwoods lived on. The JCS revived its “pretext” plans without presidential approval in spring 1963, and by November a complementary CIA psychological warfare operation codenamed AMSPELL was in full swing. Designed to trumpet the menace of Cuban Communism infiltrating American society and institutions, AMSPELL made a special target of the New York-based Fair Play for Cuba Committee (FPCC), a group calling for normal diplomatic and trade relations with Havana. In violation of the Agency’s own charter prohibiting operations on American soil, the CIA funded and directed U.S.-based anti-Castro Cuban exiles for propaganda purposes. In August 1963, the group at AMSPELL’s core—the Revolutionary Student Directorate, or DRE—had an altercation on the streets of an American city with the man ultimately accused of killing JFK.

As the CIA financed the DRE to the tune of half a million dollars a month in today’s money, Lee Harvey Oswald was captured on camera handing out FPCC leaflets to passers-by in downtown New Orleans, a city with no official local chapter of the organization he claimed to represent. After a scuffle seen by many, Oswald and the DRE activists were briefly jailed, and within days the twenty-three-year-old Oswald was speaking on TV about U.S.-Cuba relations and debating the local DRE leader on the radio. Wittingly or unwittingly, Oswald thus perfected his own “legend” as Castro-sympathizing Marxist oddball, so that hours after the assassination, the DRE was broadcasting (without evidence) that he—an “ex-defector” to the USSR—had murdered JFK on Castro’s orders.

These events hint at some toxic mix of the Northwoods and AMSPELL having led to Kennedy’s murder, prompting an official cover-up to protect careers. The DRE’s “conspiracy theory” about Castro would be abandoned, and the man in police custody—describing himself angrily on camera as “just a patsy”—would be depicted instead as just a lone nut. Plans to invade Cuba would fizzle as preparations for the Vietnam intervention ramped up, and documentation of AMSPELL and Northwoods would be withheld from the public to the present day. While it may be a stretch to suggest anything in these files reflects foreknowledge of Kennedy’s murder, the idea that the CIA knows much more about the assassination than it has ever revealed seems inescapable.

In October 2017, CIA Director Mike Pompeo—appointed to head a powerful agency with which he had no professional experience, and that both he and his boss were keen to appease—convinced President Donald Trump to continue withholding assassination-related files. Whatever the former president saw, he probably did actually lay eyes on “sensitive” materials. He has reportedly conveyed his shock at their contents to people he knows. The anonymous source quoted by Tucker Carlson in December, in answer to the question of whether the CIA had a hand in the assassination, sounded distinctly Trump-esque: “The answer is yes. I believe they were involved. It’s a whole different country from what we thought it was. It’s all fake.”

But is Joe Biden, who doesn’t even appear to know where he is most of the time, aware of any of this? So far, he has evinced no emotion about the files, never mind shock, so maybe he’s seen nothing meaningful at all. The JFK Records Act vests the president with the sole, non-delegable duty to review assassination records, to certify whether—by “clear and convincing evidence”—“identifiable harm” to national security from disclosure outweighs the public interest in transparency about an acutely painful episode in our nation’s history. It looks as if unlawfully delegating this duty to agencies such as the CIA is just fine by Joe Biden. He might rather take a nap anyway. 

As for any agency in control of embarrassing or incriminating files, the current scenario is ideal. With a little CIA sleight of hand, an apparently debilitated chief of state can be convinced to sign anything. Endowed with a “divine right” he can’t even perceive, our elected king can avert his unsteady gaze from a bloody ghost of America’s past while a corrupt national-security state continues to get away with murder at home and abroad. Figuratively speaking, of course.

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Reaffirming Merit

Par : Sumantra Maitra — 5 juillet 2023 à 18:00
Politics

Reaffirming Merit

We shouldn’t expect much to change from the Supreme Court ruling, but it is at least a decent start to a different debate.

SCOTUS Affirmative Action
(Bill Clark/CQ-Roll Call, Inc via Getty Images)

“It’s not about being colorblind. It’s about being blind to history, blind to empirical evidence about disparities, and blind to the strength that diversity brings to classrooms.” So sagely opines America’s vice president, whose qualification for high office seems to be the fact that she brings diversity to the cabinet. 

I am not sure what other qualities she possesses that my flawed mortal eyes cannot detect.  It is certainly not English grammar, syntax, or linguistic ornamentation, or rhetorical flourish, or timeless historical wisdom. Her ode to empirical evidence doesn’t count for much. Arguments for empirical evidence that fail or refuse to consider cultural variables that contribute to group failures or group successes are, by definition, not very empirical. Harris’s tweet was prompted by the recent Supreme Court ruling in the cases brought by a group representing Asian American students against Harvard and the University of North Carolina. The court ruled that affirmative action is basically illegal and discriminatory. Naturally, Harris, among others, was livid.

Consider the academic standards at the founding of the republic. When Alexander Hamilton entered King’s College (now Columbia University), he could read Cicero and Virgil in the original Latin. Likewise, James Madison during his time at the College of New Jersey (now Princeton) had already mastered Virgil, Horace, Justinian, Caesar, Tacitus, Lucretius, Phaedrus, Herodotus, Thucydides, and Plato. 

Standards remained relatively high until the end of World War II and the beginning of the current “diverse” regime in the mid-1950s. One can see the question papers set by Hannah Arendt for students during her professorship. Nowadays, we have David Hogg in Harvard taking the place of some smart hard-working Asian. Noticing the steady declension in quality of higher-education question papers for the past six decades, give or take, one should be at least cautious in opining about “empirical” evidence in the presence of such strong observable patterns and correlations.

But the ruling brought forth a governing conundrum. The core function of higher education, in a republic, is not simply the creation of an imperial meritocracy. It is maintaining stability between competing factions of the citizenry and to foster an elite core that reflects the country; to create a detached and smart national governing elite, as well as to promote a competitive meritocracy that pushes the polity forward. 

Our universities, for the most part, now fail in both charges. To think that the state has no interest in the creation of this national elite through education and that higher education will not be used to shape an elite is not only idiotic, but also in fact futile and makes space for chaos. One of the first acts in Massachusetts was an education bill known, perhaps somewhat unsurprisingly, as the “Old Deluder Satan Law of 1647.“

Michael Brendan Dougherty wrote an interesting essay on the topic recently.

Our top colleges know that their admissions process is a significant force shaping the nation’s governing class. But the fact is, in a democracy, representation is an essential principle. And if Harvard, Yale, and Princeton are curating our elite, then it makes perfect sense—for reasons of political stability and fairness—to make sure that African Americans and Hispanics are well represented in those classes. This is a consideration that is perennial in government and in life—it’s why English kings once contemplated giving out peerages to loads of Labour members and Catholics, to balance an overly Tory and Protestant body.

That is, of course, correct in principle. Social equilibrium and stability are some of the highest conservative virtues. Pure meritocracy cannot simply exist without an imperial governance system. There will be some form of selective representation, and the state will interfere in some ways to decide that. 

That said, where I disagree is the assertions that affirmative action in its current form is leading to that formation of a competent national elite and that torching the quota regime will lead to complete disaster. First, there is no evidence that the current elite is either competent or nationalistic, or in fact republican in spirit. Second, the Asian or Indian kids who study for 12 hours a day and learn to play Chopin and to spell some of the most exotic English words by the time they are 13 will simply learn how to write a good admission essay, adhering to the new social norms and using the new normative lingo that any colleges impose. The cream always rises to the top, as the great philosopher Macho Man Randy Savage once said.

The point is that the colleges have simply given up on excellence. There’s now an elite consensus that any form of blindly tested merit—or anything that goes against an egalitarian orthodoxy or enforces some boundaries or hierarchy—is equal to “white supremacy.” Yes, of course a republic needs social equilibrium, but a republic will not survive at all if members of the governing elite are all ideologues or imbeciles. 

This incredible essay by Rupa Subramanya, published immediately prior to the ruling, showed what was at stake. It showed the parallel story of one Calvin Yang, who was a party to the lawsuit, a university swimmer and rugby player, debate-club champion, and a speaker of six languages. He scored a 1550 out of 1600 on his SAT, and was then rejected by both Harvard and Yale. On the other hand, there was Sonia Green, a 19-year-old black woman who was “accepted almost everywhere, including Harvard—despite scoring a 28 on her ACT, much higher than her public high school’s average of 12, but lower than the average at the most competitive schools.” In the end, she ended up at Duke with a full scholarship, where her mother is an administrator in the university’s African and African American Studies Department. 

That is both indefensible and unsustainable. Likewise, Chesa Boudin, Lori Lightfoot, Jacinda Ardern, and Anthony Fauci getting tenure at top universities is not the formation of an elite reflective of the values of the country. This is not lending a hand to the hardworking underprivileged in order to have an elite reflective of the national milieu, either. This is the reverse of that, a form of nepotistic kakistocracy. 

In the short term, not much is going to change, for as long as America is haunted by its original egalitarian dogma of collective group excellence. A republic is not designed to have caste systems, strictly based on quality or professions, nor should it be that determined in its hierarchy. A republic is likewise not an empire (or a certain dictatorship ruled by a certain vanguard party geared towards hegemony) with a ruling elite that picks and chooses winners and losers in a system and enforces brutal meritocracy. 

But any functioning republic is a polity in need of a patrician class, often decided by its institutions of state-building: in our times, the universities. This affirmative action ruling improves the law, but will not change much, as long as we have thousands of universities churning out hundreds of thousands of credentialed bureaucrats designed for an ever-growing Soviet-style administrative state. The sheer mass opposes any form of genuine meritocracy. 

The colleges will continue to take in a mass of superficially diverse midwits who will look different but with the same social values and internalized dogmata—a very similar group to the range of students representing all the way from Syria to Kazakhstan at Moscow State University in 1982. The way to a superior national elite, as well as proper meritocracy, is not some court ruling, but shrinking the current bloated higher education model altogether in favor of more hands-on work, trade education, and apprenticeships. But we are not having that debate yet.  

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