White House Calls on Russia to Release Wall Street Journal Reporter Evan Gershkovich

A journalists worse nightmare.

At WSJ, "Biden Calls on Russia to Release Journal Reporter":

WASHINGTON—President Biden urged Russia to release Wall Street Journal reporter Evan Gershkovich Friday—shouting “let him go” as he boarded a helicopter—amid a rift in U.S.-Russia relations already so wide that the two powers barely maintain diplomatic communications.

Mr. Biden said the U.S. didn’t plan any expulsion of Russian diplomats. “That’s not the plan right now,” he said from the South Lawn of the White House before departing for Joint Base Andrews.

Past expulsions have prompted tit-for-tat retaliation from Moscow, leaving both the U.S. Embassy in Russia and Russia’s Embassy in Washington with skeleton staff.

More than three dozen top global news organizations joined in the call for Mr. Gershkovich’s release, saying they were deeply troubled by his detention.

“Gershkovich’s unwarranted and unjust arrest is a significant escalation in your government’s anti-press actions,” they said in a letter to Russia’s ambassador to the U.S. “Russia is sending the message that journalism within your borders is criminalized and that foreign correspondents seeking to report from Russia do not enjoy the benefits of the rule of law.”

The sunken state of U.S.-Russia ties will make any agreement on the release of Mr. Gershkovich, 31, difficult to secure as he heads toward a trial in a court under the control of Russia’s security service, the FSB, U.S. officials say.

Such a court is expected to operate on the orders of the Kremlin, increasing the prospect of a conviction after a trial that may be held in secret. The FSB said Thursday that Mr. Gershkovich was detained Wednesday for alleged espionage while on a reporting trip to the Russian provincial city of Yekaterinburg, around 800 miles east of Moscow. The Journal vehemently denied wrongdoing on the part of Mr. Gershkovich and called for his immediate release.

In Washington, President Biden urged on Friday Mr. Gershkovich’s release. “Let him go,” he said.

Kremlin watchers say Mr. Gershkovich was likely detained so Moscow could use him in a prisoner swap. The fact that Russia has charged him with espionage, rather than a common criminal offense, suggests the Kremlin will want a big prize in return for his release, said John J. Sullivan, who served as U.S. ambassador to Moscow until last year.

“This is not an arrest that the local police or FSB would do on their own,” said Mr. Sullivan, now a distinguished fellow at Georgetown University in Washington. The charge of espionage, he said, is a big development and a very bad sign.

The arrest of Mr. Gershkovich, a Russian speaker whose parents came to the U.S. from the former Soviet Union, marked the latest diplomatic flashpoint between Moscow and Washington. The two countries, already on opposite sides of the war in Ukraine, have also clashed over the arrests of each other’s citizens and the state of nuclear-arms treaties. The U.S. has also led an array of countries in imposing sanctions on Russia in a campaign to choke its economy following the Russian invasion of Ukraine.

“The Wall Street Journal vehemently denies the allegations from the FSB and seeks the immediate release of our trusted and dedicated reporter, Evan Gershkovich,” the Journal said. “We stand in solidarity with Evan and his family.”

Although Moscow has arrested American citizens on espionage charges, the detention of a journalist is rare. The last U.S. journalist to face such a charge was U.S. News & World Report journalist Nicholas Daniloff in 1986.

In that case, Moscow had a clear motive: Three days before Mr. Daniloff’s arrest, the U.S. had detained a Soviet employee of its United Nations delegation in New York in a Federal Bureau of Investigation sting. After intense negotiations, Mr. Daniloff was released less than three weeks later in an exchange for the diplomat. Mr. Daniloff denied the espionage allegation.

A swap for Mr. Gershkovich could be more difficult today because of the poor state of U.S.-Russian relations, former diplomats say. In 1986, relations between Moscow and Washington were on the upswing, and both sides were anxious to try to preserve some of the progress.

Today, ties are on a downward trajectory, and Russia’s rhetoric suggests it sees itself in an existential conflict with the U.S., said Andrew Weiss, a vice president of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, where he studies Russia and Eurasia.

Along with diplomacy, people-to-people contacts between the two countries have dried up, and the business relationship, which was never extensive, “is largely in tatters,” Mr. Weiss said...

 

The War Is Right And Just. But Is It Prudent?

From Andrew Sullivan, "A year later, the end-game of the war in Ukraine is dangerously murky":

There are so many ways in which the West’s defensive war against Russia is a righteous cause.

It is right and just to defend a sovereign country from attack by a much larger neighbor; to fight back against an occupying force committing war crimes on a massive scale; to oppose the logic of dictatorships and defend the foundations of democracy; to uphold a post-Cold War international order which forbids the redrawing of borders by force; to unite democratic countries in Europe against a resurgence of imperial Russia; to defang and defeat a poisonous chauvinism that despises modern freedoms for women and gay people.

It is indeed right and just. But is it prudent?

That’s the question I’m still grappling with, in a week which saw the conflict deepen and the two sides entrench their positions further. President Biden’s trip to Kyiv and his speech in Poland have heightened the stakes, turning this into a more obvious proxy war between the United States and Russia … edging gingerly but relentlessly toward something more direct. He’s all in now: declaring that Ukraine “must triumph” and that Russia cannot win a war that the Russian leader deems existential. NATO armaments are pouring into Ukraine at an accelerating rate. The training of Ukrainian troops is happening across the Continent. Germany is sending tanks. Pressure is building on Britain to send fighter jets.

The US is ratcheting up arms production as fast as it can, while seriously depleting our own Stinger surface-to-air missiles, 155mm howitzers and ammunition, and Javelin anti-tank missile systems. These are good times for arms producers:

The Army is planning a 500% increase in artillery shell production, from 15,000 a month to 70,000, according to Army acquisition chief Doug Bush … and intends to double the production of Javelin anti-tank missiles, make roughly 33% more Guided Multiple Launch Rocket Systems surface-to-surface medium-range missiles a year, and produce each month a minimum of 60 Stinger anti-aircraft missiles — which were “almost not in production at all,” according to Bush.

When Ukraine’s effective military is made up almost entirely of NATO equipment, and trained by NATO forces, there surely comes a point at which claiming NATO is not actually at war with Russia gets fuzzy.

It’s worth remembering how Biden put it less than a year ago: “the idea that we’re going to send in offensive equipment and have planes and tanks and trains going in with American pilots and American crews, just understand — and don’t kid yourself, no matter what you all say — that’s called ‘World War Three.’ Okay?” Well, technically, he’s still right. We don’t have American pilots and troops in the air and on the ground in Ukraine. But we do have them just over the horizon, along with tanks and planes and highly effective drones on the front lines in Ukraine itself. The munitions are being made in the USA — many in Biden’s beloved Scranton! And Ukraine cannot win without them.

And this is not exactly a proxy war like Vietnam — because the country involved is right on the nuclear super-power’s border and was long part of that power’s empire; and any attempt to reclaim all of Ukraine will obviously spill over into Russia proper at some point. And the logic of escalation in wartime has its own momentum, if we don’t want to seem as if we’re losing ground.

Sure enough, every time the Biden administration has said it would restrict the provision of arms to Ukraine, it has backtracked quickly, as Putin digs in. Upwards of 140 tanks are being sent from NATO, and hundreds more may follow. Long-range missiles capable of hitting Russia have also been sent — on the condition they not be used in Russia. The 2022 dynamic was summed up by the Ukrainian defense minister, Oleksii Reznikov:

When I was in DC in November [2021], before the invasion, and asked for Stingers, they told me it was impossible. Now it’s possible. When I asked for 155-millimeter guns, the answer was no. HIMARS, no. HARM [missiles], no. Now all of that is a yes. Therefore, I’m certain that tomorrow there will be…F-16s.

The Russians are escalating as well: they now have 300,000 troops in Ukrainian territory (way more than they had for the original invasion), are ramping their economy into wartime gear, and are still on the offensive (if ineffectively so). Their economy has held up far better than anyone expected. Last March, Biden assured us that “the totality of our economic sanctions and export controls are crushing — crushing the Russian economy.” The actual contraction was 2.1 percent in 2022, according to the IMF. A crinkle, not a crush.

In fact, Russia has merely diversified its customer base: “for all of 2022, Russia managed to increase its oil output 2 percent and boost oil export earnings 20 percent, to $218 billion ... Russia also raked in $138 billion from natural gas, a nearly 80 percent rise over 2021 as record prices offset cuts in flows to Europe.” This year, the IMF predicts that Russia will have a higher growth rate than either Germany or Britain, and in 2024, it will best the US as well. Yes, sanctions will, in the long run, hurt investment and future growth in Russia and cripple technological essentials for war. And tougher sanctions on oil are underway, and could have an impact. But Russia is far more resilient economically than almost anyone foresaw a year ago.

Russia’s isolation? Not so splendid anymore. The West is indeed united, for which Biden deserves real credit; the rest, much less so. India has increased Russian imports by 400 percent. But the real game-changer is China. Its initial neutrality is clearly shifting. Yesterday, Der Spiegel reported that “the Russian military is engaged in negotiations with Chinese drone manufacturer Xi’an Bingo Intelligent Aviation Technology over the mass production of kamikaze drones for Russia.”

Previously dependent on Iran for these weapons, a serious and reliable supply from China will come in handy. More significantly, as Noah Smith notes, in a long war of attrition, as this is becoming, mass production of weapons matters. And China has a much bigger manufacturing base than the West. Will they use it? It must be tempting to pin the West down in Europe. We’ll learn more when Xi visits Putin this spring.

Politically, moreover, Russia appears stable, if brutally controlled. Muscovites remain relatively protected and are carrying on as if the war didn’t exist. The public sphere has become ever more subsumed in militarism, dissent has been largely crushed, and the invocation of the fight against the actual Nazis seems to have helped galvanize public support. Popular backing for the war, even among non-Russian polls, remains high.

The most intense opposition has come from the far right, military bloggers and crazed TV jingoists, wanting to ramp up the action. In the US, in contrast, the opposition is in favor of less, rather than more. The two likeliest Republican candidates in 2024, Trump and DeSantis, favor talks and a peace settlement, along America First lines. As Biden was in Poland, Trump was in Pennsylvania; and DeSantis was urging restraint. The chances of an American pivot on Ukraine seem at this point higher than a Russian one, do they not?

That’s why, I suppose, the chorus of support this past week in Washington — by almost the entire foreign policy Blob — had a slight air of desperation about it. Two Atlantic headlines blared the neocon message: a surreal piece arguing that “Biden Just Destroyed Putin’s Last Hope,” and “Biden Went to Kyiv Because There’s No Going Back.” Anne Applebaum says Biden’s trip is “putting everyone on notice, including the defense ministries and the defense industries, that the paradigm has shifted and the story has changed.” Europe is at war and there is no going back until Russia is defeated and has withdrawn from all of Ukraine. The off-ramps are being removed.

Which is a little bit concerning when the enemy has nukes. That’s why the US stood by when Soviet tanks went into Hungary and Czechoslovakia during the Cold War — a far greater incursion than a fifth of Ukraine. We held back not because it was right, but because the alternative could have been catastrophic. We can pray that nothing happens this time — but prayer is not that effective against a potentially desperate regime fighting for what it believes is its existential survival and for a leader who knows a loss would mean his possibly literal demise. In short: we’re objectively taking more of a risk now than we did for almost all of the Cold War, excepting October 1962, with far lower stakes. Has the nuclear equation changed that much since then?

Wars are dynamic and unpredictable. Will Putin invade Moldova? Will Belarus go all-in against Ukraine? Will this war cement a Russia-China alliance and deepen Russia-India ties? Or will battlefield success for Ukraine lead to some kind of breakthrough, as the current strategy seems to be aiming at? I don’t know, and none of us know. What I do know is that Russia is going nowhere; that getting it out of the Donbas may require a long WWI-style slog; that at some point, a territorial compromise is inevitable; and that the longer this war goes on, the worse the human and economic toll on Ukraine.

And as Ron DeSantis pointed out this week, the strongest argument for war — that anything less would put all of Europe at risk of Russian invasion — is a lot weaker now that the shambles of the Russian military has been exposed. A military that cannot occupy more than a fifth of a non-NATO country on its border is not likely to be entering Warsaw anytime soon. And the conflict has strengthened NATO immeasurably and accelerated Europe’s transition from carbon energy, both indisputably good things.

My worry is that the West is committing itself to an end-goal — the full liberation of all of Ukraine — that no Russian government could accept, without regime change in Moscow itself. Which means, as Biden’s gaffes sometimes reveal, that this is ineluctably a war for regime change in a nuclear-armed country — which is an extremely hazardous enterprise. It’s righteous but dangerous. Putin is very much in the wrong, just as Saddam was. Evil men, vile regimes. But the one thing I learned from all that, is that focusing on morality rather than prudence, and letting the former eclipse the latter entirely, can be a righteous and well-intentioned road to hell.

The Boomers in the Twilight Zone

Following-up, "Three-Quarters of Generation Z 'Not Interested In Sports'."

From Andrew Sullivan, "How exactly are they going to die? And how much choice should they have in it?":

I’m not particularly afraid of death. But I’m afraid of dying.

And dying can now take a very, very long time. In the past, with poorer diets, fewer medicines, and many more hazards, your life could be over a few months after being born or moments after giving birth or just as you were contemplating retirement. Now, by your sixties, you may well have close to a quarter of your life ahead of you. In 1860, life expectancy was 39.4 years. By 2060, it’s predicted to be 85.6 years. This is another deep paradigm shift in modernity we have not come close to adapting to.

For some, with their bodies intact and minds sharp, it’s a wonderful thing. But for many, perhaps most others, those final decades can be physically and mentally tough. Increasingly living alone, or in assisted living or nursing homes, the lonely elderly persist in a twilight zone of extended, pain-free — but not exactly better — life.

We don’t like to focus on this quality-of-life question because it calls into question the huge success we have had increasing the quantity of it. But it’s a big deal, it seems to me, altering our entire perspective on our lives and futures. Ricky Gervais has a great bit when he tells how he’s often told to stop smoking, or eat better, or exercise more — because leaving these vices behind will add a decade to his life. And his response is: sure, but the wrong decade! If he could get a decade in his thirties or forties again, he’d take it in an instant. But to live a crepuscular experience in your nineties? Not so much. “Remember, being healthy is basically just dying as slowly as possible,” he quipped. Not entirely wrong.

Anyone who has spent time caring for aging parents knows the drill: the physical and then the mental deterioration; the humiliations of helplessness; the often punitive absorption of drug after drug, treatment after treatment; multiple medicinal protocols of ever-increasing complexity and side effects. Staying in a family home becomes impossible for those who need 24-hour care, and for adult children to handle when they’re already overwhelmed by work and kids. Home-care workers — increasingly low-paid immigrants — can alleviate only so much.

All this is going to get much worse in the next couple of decades as the Boomers age further: “The population aged 45 to 64 years, the peak caregiving age, will increase by 1% between 2010 and 2030 while the population older than 80 years will increase by 79%.” I’ll be among them — on the edge of Gen X and Boomerville.

I mention all this as critical background for debating policies around euthanasia or “assisted dying” (a phrase that feels morbidly destined to become “death-care.”) Oregon pioneered the practice in the US with the Death with Dignity Act in 1997. At the heart of its requirements is a diagnosis of six months to live. Following Oregon’s framework, nine other states and DC now have laws for assisted suicide. Public support for euthanasia has remained strong — 72 percent in the latest Gallup.

But this balance could easily get destabilized in the demographic traffic-jam to come. In 2016, euthanasia came to Canada — but it’s gone much, much further than the US. The Medical Assistance in Dying (or MAID) program is now booming and raising all kinds of red flags: there were “10,000 deaths by euthanasia last year, an increase of about a third from the previous year.” (That’s five times the rate of Oregon, which actually saw a drop in deaths last year.) To help bump yourself off in Canada, under the initial guidelines, there had to be “unbearable physical or mental suffering that cannot be relieved under conditions that patients consider acceptable,” and death had to be “reasonably foreseeable” — not a strict timeline as in Oregon. The law was later amended to allow for assisted suicide even if you are not terminally ill.

More safeguards are now being stripped away:

Gone is the “reasonably foreseeable” death requirement, thus clearing the path of eligibility for disabled individuals who otherwise might have a lifetime to live. Gone, too, is the ten-day waiting requirement and the obligation to provide information on palliative-care options to all applicants. … [O]nly one [independent witness] is necessary now. Unlike in other countries where euthanasia is lawful, Canada does not even require an independent review of the applicant’s request for death to make sure coercion was not involved.

This is less a slippery slope than a full-on, well-polished ice-rink. Several disturbing cases have cropped up — of muddled individuals signing papers they really shouldn’t have with no close relatives consulted; others who simply could not afford the costs of survival with a challenging disease, or housing, and so chose death; people with severe illness being subtly encouraged to die in order to save money:

In one recording obtained by the AP, the hospital’s director of ethics told [patient Roger Foley] that for him to remain in the hospital, it would cost “north of $1,500 a day.” Foley replied that mentioning fees felt like coercion and asked what plan there was for his long-term care. “Roger, this is not my show,” the ethicist responded. “My piece of this was to talk to you, (to see) if you had an interest in assisted dying.”

It’s hard to imagine a greater power-dynamic than that of a hospital doctor and a patient with a degenerative brain disorder. For any doctor to initiate a discussion of costs and euthanasia in this context should, in my view, be a firing offense.

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Then this: in March, a Canadian will be able to request assistance in dying solely for mental health reasons. And the law will also be available to minors under the age of 18. Where to begin? How do we know that the request for suicide isn’t a function of the mental illness? And when the number of assisted suicides jumps by a third in one year, as it just did in Canada, it’s obviously not a hypothetical matter.

Ross Douthat had a moving piece on this — and I largely agree with his insistence on the absolute inviolable dignity of every human being and the unquantifiable moral value of every second of his or her life. I’m a Catholic, after all. At the same time, we have to assess what this moral absolutism means in practice. It can entail a huge amount of personal suffering; it deprives anyone of a right to determine how she or he will die; and it hasn’t been adapted to our unprecedented scientific achievements, which have turned so many medical fates into choices we simply cannot avoid.

Does the person who lives the longest win the race? So much of our medical logic suggests this, but it’s an absurd way to think of life. I’m changed forever by losing some of my closest friends when they were in their twenties and thirties from AIDS a couple decades ago. They died; I didn’t. Wrapping my head around that has taken a while, but it became a burning conviction inside me that their lives were not worth less than mine for being cut so short; that life is less a race than a performance, less about how many years you can rack up, but how much love and passion and friendship a life can express, however brief or interrupted.

I still think this. Which is why I do not want to force terminally sick people to live as their bodies and minds disintegrate so badly that they would really rather die. Dignity goes both ways. My suggestion would be simply not aggressively treating the conditions and illnesses that old age naturally brings, accepting the decline of the body and mind rather than fighting like hell against it, and finding far better ways to simply alleviate pain and distress.

And at some point, go gentle. Treating those at the end of life with psilocybin, or ketamine, or other psychedelics should become routine, as we care for the soul in the days nearer our deaths. (Congress should pass this bipartisan bill to waive Schedule 1 status when it comes to the terminally ill.) We can let people die with dignity, in other words, by inaction as much as action, and by setting sane, humane limits on our medicinal power — with the obvious exception of pain meds.

Even Ross allows that “it is not barbaric for the law to acknowledge hard choices in end-of-life care, about when to withdraw life support or how aggressively to manage agonizing pain.” But that should be less of an aside than a strong proposal. What kind of support for how long? In my view, not much and not for too long. What rights does a dying patient have in refusing treatment? Total. What depths of indignity does she have to endure? Not so much. I’m sure Dish readers have their own views and unique experiences — so let’s air them as frankly as we can in the weeks ahead (dish@andrewsullivan.com). There has to be a line. Maybe we can collectively try to find it

I think of Pope John Paul II’s extremism on the matter of life — even as his body and mind twisted into a contortion of pain and sickness due to Parkinson’s and old age. His example did the opposite of what he intended: he persuaded me of the insanity of clinging to life as if death were the ultimate enemy. There’s little heroism in that — just agony and proof that we humans have once again become victims of our own intelligence, creating worlds we are not equipped or designed to live in, achieving medical successes that, if pursued to their logical conclusion, become grotesque human failures.

Moderation please, especially in our dotage. And mercy.

 

The Normie Center Strikes Back

Do what you will with this.

From Andrew Sullivan, "Democracy works, survives, and can surprise us (including me). A great night":

Let’s first herald the truly good news. Democracy surprised almost all of us, as it sometimes does. It made some of us look a bit foolish (more on that in a bit). It defied most predictions and historic analogies. The election ended up with a super-close race for both House and Senate — highly unusual for a midterm when inflation is soaring and most people are super bummed about the country.

More good news: Joe Biden’s “Jim Crow 2.0” failed to materialize in Georgia. And most important of all: there are (currently) no widespread allegations of fraud or illegitimacy, despite many close races; and the candidates who made election denial their platform lost decisively. The thumping defeat of nutjob Doug Mastriano in Pennsylvania — and the way he helped drag down other Republican candidates in the states — is just fantastic. According to the exit polls, “79 percent said they were very (47 percent) or somewhat (33 percent) confident that elections in their state were being conducted fairly and accurately.” Huge and encouraging news.

And it behooves me to note that Biden’s speech on democracy last week was in retrospect right in its priorities. Voters are worried about democracy’s survival and Biden’s distinction between MAGA Republicans and the rest obviously worked with some, including Republicans. Voters who “somewhat disapproved” of Biden’s record nonetheless broke for the Dems when the alternative was a MAGA loony.

Yes, as I anticipated, there was pushback to Democratic extremism. Republicans look set to win the popular vote overall. Where CRT was on the ballot — in school board races, where it belongs — it lost badly everywhere. The Latino vote kept trending GOP, making even Miami-Dade a Republican bastion. In New York City especially, Asian-Americans’ support for the GOP soared. We even have the first openly gay MAGA congressman. The Squad members of Congress all saw their support slide in their safe districts.

On the “LGBTQIA+” question, “26 percent said our society’s values on gender identity and sexual orientation are changing for the better, 50 percent for the worse.” That’s a huge backlash against “queer” and trans extremism, and it’s hurting gays and lesbians. And in the face of media insistence that America is an objectively white supremacist country, 45 percent said racism was either not a problem at all or a minor one. (Fifty-three percent said major.)

This is striking: around a third of non-white, non-college voters went Republican. According to exit polls, Asian-Americans went from 77 percent Democrat in 2018 to around 60 percent now. Latinos went from 70 to 60. (One irony is that Republicans gained many minority votes in solid red states, which didn’t have much of an effect on the outcome, but bolsters their raw numbers.)

But these trends were overwhelmed by other issues, and did not amount to the kind of decisive rejection of Democratic leftism I favored and suspected would happen. I was wrong. I remain convinced that wokeness is terribly destructive to liberal society, but my obsessions are obviously not everyone’s. And my fault was in not seeing how MAGA extremism — the sheer anti-democratic crazy of the GOP — was seen by independent voters as far more dangerous than the crazy left. I actually agree — see this recent piece, for example — and if I didn’t live in a super-blue city, I might have felt differently about my protest vote. But from the broadest perspective, I was simply wrong to emphasize the impact of the far left as much as I have. You’ve told me this many times. I should have listened more, and I will.

Let’s first herald the truly good news. Democracy surprised almost all of us, as it sometimes does. It made some of us look a bit foolish (more on that in a bit). It defied most predictions and historic analogies. The election ended up with a super-close race for both House and Senate — highly unusual for a midterm when inflation is soaring and most people are super bummed about the country.

More good news: Joe Biden’s “Jim Crow 2.0” failed to materialize in Georgia. And most important of all: there are (currently) no widespread allegations of fraud or illegitimacy, despite many close races; and the candidates who made election denial their platform lost decisively. The thumping defeat of nutjob Doug Mastriano in Pennsylvania — and the way he helped drag down other Republican candidates in the states — is just fantastic. According to the exit polls, “79 percent said they were very (47 percent) or somewhat (33 percent) confident that elections in their state were being conducted fairly and accurately.” Huge and encouraging news.

And it behooves me to note that Biden’s speech on democracy last week was in retrospect right in its priorities. Voters are worried about democracy’s survival and Biden’s distinction between MAGA Republicans and the rest obviously worked with some, including Republicans. Voters who “somewhat disapproved” of Biden’s record nonetheless broke for the Dems when the alternative was a MAGA loony.

Yes, as I anticipated, there was pushback to Democratic extremism. Republicans look set to win the popular vote overall. Where CRT was on the ballot — in school board races, where it belongs — it lost badly everywhere. The Latino vote kept trending GOP, making even Miami-Dade a Republican bastion. In New York City especially, Asian-Americans’ support for the GOP soared. We even have the first openly gay MAGA congressman. The Squad members of Congress all saw their support slide in their safe districts.

On the “LGBTQIA+” question, “26 percent said our society’s values on gender identity and sexual orientation are changing for the better, 50 percent for the worse.” That’s a huge backlash against “queer” and trans extremism, and it’s hurting gays and lesbians. And in the face of media insistence that America is an objectively white supremacist country, 45 percent said racism was either not a problem at all or a minor one. (Fifty-three percent said major.)

This is striking: around a third of non-white, non-college voters went Republican. According to exit polls, Asian-Americans went from 77 percent Democrat in 2018 to around 60 percent now. Latinos went from 70 to 60. (One irony is that Republicans gained many minority votes in solid red states, which didn’t have much of an effect on the outcome, but bolsters their raw numbers.)

But these trends were overwhelmed by other issues, and did not amount to the kind of decisive rejection of Democratic leftism I favored and suspected would happen. I was wrong. I remain convinced that wokeness is terribly destructive to liberal society, but my obsessions are obviously not everyone’s. And my fault was in not seeing how MAGA extremism — the sheer anti-democratic crazy of the GOP — was seen by independent voters as far more dangerous than the crazy left. I actually agree — see this recent piece, for example — and if I didn’t live in a super-blue city, I might have felt differently about my protest vote. But from the broadest perspective, I was simply wrong to emphasize the impact of the far left as much as I have. You’ve told me this many times. I should have listened more, and I will...

 

Paywalls Are Closing Off the Internet

I have exactly three digital subscriptions, to the Los Angeles Times, the New York Times, and the Wall Street Journal. (I go for hard news, even if it's biased sometimes; the New York Times is an amazing paper despite it's identity as a far-left broadsheet: and, frankly, for straight news the Wall Street Journal is just the best all around.) I also subscribe to a few Substack newsletters --- like Andrew Sullivan's --- but I go for the free reader model, where you just get the minimum level of content. I'm not going to be in the business of having $6.00 pulled from my checking account monthly by dozens of writers, many of dubious ability. 

In any case, see Fortune, "Paywalls are here to stay, but they’re closing off the internet. Crypto can fix that."

The GOP Is Herschel Walker

From Andrew Sullivan, "A clarifying glimpse into the values of the Party of Trump":

There are times, I confess, when I decide to pass on writing another column on how degenerate the Republican Party is. What else is there to say? It’s not as if the entire media class isn’t saying it every hour of every day. And it’s not as if the depravity of the party hasn’t been a longtime hobbyhorse of mine. Unlike most of the Never-Trumper set, I was writing about this derangement on the right in the 1990s. I tore into George W. Bush’s spend, borrow and torture policies. I wrote a book on what I thought conservatism really was in 2006 — and why the GOP was its nemesis. I couldn’t have been clearer about what Palin represented — even as Bill Kristol selected her to be a potential president.

But then you come across the Senate candidacy of one Herschel Walker, and, well, words fail. No magical realist fiction writer could come up with something so sickeningly absurd. Walker is, of course, inextricable from his longtime friend, Donald Trump, who made his campaign possible in March 2021:

Wouldn’t it be fantastic if the legendary Herschel Walker ran for the United States Senate in Georgia? He would be unstoppable, just like he was when he played for the Georgia Bulldogs, and in the NFL. He is also a GREAT person. Run Herschel, run!

Which is to say: he’s a celebrity and a friend of mine. Enough said. That’s how a cult picks a Senator. And it worked with the incurious, star-struck base voters who gave Walker a 55-point lead over his nearest rival in the primary.

There are a few problems, however.

Walker is, to start with, very dumb. I don’t usually note this quality in a candidate and it doesn’t make him a huge outlier in politics of course. Being brainy, moreover, can be a serious liability for some pols. But seriously: this stupid?

ere is Walker’s grasp of climate change: “Our good air decided to float over to China’s bad air so when China gets our good air, their bad air got to move.” Here’s his take on John Lewis: “Senator Lewis was one of the greatest senators that’s ever been, and for African Americans that was absolutely incredible. To throw his name on a bill for voting rights I think is a shame.” On the Inflation Reduction Act: “They continue to try to fool you that they are helping you out. But they’re not. Because a lot of money, it’s going to trees. Don’t we have enough trees around here?” On natural selection: “At one time, science said that man came from apes, did it not? But if that’s true, why are there still apes? Think about it.”

Where do you even start? This man is running for the Senate for one of our major political parties. Not even the House. The Senate. He’s clearly incapable of understanding even a scintilla of what his job would entail, and manifestly incapable of doing it.

Maybe Walker makes up for it in charm and eloquence? Nope. He speaks like someone with brain damage. (As a pro-football alum, it’s amazing that the possibility of CTE has barely been raised, even though he has shown classic symptoms — no impulse control, murderous rage, incoherent speech, and even multiple personalities — for decades.) Just read any transcript of his incoherent rambling.

Is he just a good, honest guy who relates well to people? That can make up for a lot of flaws. But nope. He’s a serial liar. He has bragged that he served in law enforcement (he hasn’t); he said he’d been an agent for the FBI (untrue). He has lied about his business:

Walker claimed his company employed hundreds of people, included a chicken processing division in Arkansas and grossed $70 million to $80 million annually in sales. However, when the company applied for a federal Paycheck Protection Program loan last year, it reported just eight employees.

Much more seriously, Walker stalked, harassed and threatened to murder his ex-wife, threats that were enough for a judge to grant her a protective order in 2005. She had divorced him four years earlier, citing “physically abusive and extremely threatening behavior.” At one point, he put a gun to her head and said “I’m going to blow your fucking brains out.” This week, his son, Christian, claimed that he and his mother had to move six times in six months to escape his threats of violence.

Look: everyone’s human; everyone deserves a second chance. But when a man makes the problem of fatherlessness a central part of his campaign, and turns out to be entirely AWOL in the lives of his own four children — from four different mothers, three of whom he only publicly acknowledged after the press discovered them — he beats even Boris Johnson for chutzpah. In the words of his own son this week: “Family values, people? He has four kids, four different women, wasn’t in the house raising one of them. He was out having sex with other women.”

Then the coup de grace: the mother of one of his kids has now said Walker had also paid for an abortion for her. She provided the receipt, the cashed check and a personal card from Herschel. He responded by saying it was a “total lie”, and he had no idea who the mother of one his children was (he had previously identified her to the reporter). Her response? A classic:

He didn’t accept responsibility for the kid we did have together, and now he isn’t accepting responsibility for the one that we didn’t have.

Oof. When asked yesterday if he’d reached out to any of the mothers of his children with all this in the news, he replied: “Why do I need to?” (He also says he hasn’t spoken to his son since the news broke of the three step-siblings.) About the abortion itself, he said this to Hugh Hewitt: “Had that happened, I would have said it, because it’s nothing to be ashamed of there.”

And that’s when your head explodes. A candidate who would make abortion a criminal act without any exceptions — the most draconian regime imaginable — also says that abortion is “nothing to be ashamed of.” A man who says he believes that abortion is murder thinks it’s also no big deal if he paid for one.

And for this he is celebrated by the Christianist right. They speak of absolution when he hasn’t even confessed. They shield him from Satan. Ralph Reed went so far as to say that after the abortion news, “he ‘100 percent’ expected evangelical Christians would stick with Mr. Walker. He even argued that the latest report could lift Republican turnout by rallying social conservatives to defend Mr. Walker.”

I might add another twist: Walker’s race. The party that decries identity politics picked him in part because he’s black in a race against a black incumbent — the first African-American to represent Georgia in the Senate. Clarence Thomas and Alan Keyes were picked for similar reasons. But at least they were smart minds who had more qualifications than merely having been a football star. The use of race here is more egregious, creepy even — a sign to my mind of disrespect for black voters that a man like this was deemed qualified to represent them, or anyone else.

So here we have a celebrity candidate with no political experience, neither eloquent nor honest, who abandoned his kids, threatened to kill his ex-wife, and has serious mental health problems … who may hold the balance of the Senate in his hands. That’s what the GOP now is. And if he actually paid for an abortion, i.e. in the view of sincere evangelicals, paid for the murder of an innocent child? Here’s Dana Loesch’s response:

Does this change anything? Not a damn thing. How many times have I said four very important words? These four words: Winning. Is. A. Virtue. I don’t know if he did it or not. I don’t even care.

It’s rare to see this kind of nihilist consequentialism expressed so nakedly. It’s rare to hear someone publicly say something so deeply hostile to any shred of Christianity. (Christians never believe the ends justify any means. Christianism is defined by that principle.) But nothing matters to the current GOP more than victory, by fair means or foul, by democratic processes or not.

I am not saying that the Democrats are not also corrupted by rank tribalism. At their worst, they are, as I often point out. I am saying that they do not compare with the current GOP in its hollowness and depravity and madness.

The Tories' Weird Incoherent Collapse

She's backtracking on her supply-side economic policy reforms. Not good for so new a prime minister. 

More from Andrew Sullivan, "The contradictions of Brexit and a choice for conservatism":

At the heart of Brexit was, it is now becoming ever clearer, a contradiction. For some on the economically liberal right, it was a chance for Britain to wrest free from becoming a highly regulated, highly taxed province of the European Union. It was a chance to create what the EU always feared: a low-tax, deregulated Singapore-on-Thames that would snag more business investment and realize its Thatcherite potential. For others — call them Red Tories — it was a way to preserve the nation, to listen to working-class voters who felt they had become the victims of the free market and free movement of labor across Europe, and to return to a conservatism that sought to protect rather than liberate.

Boris Johnson represented both wings — he had a liberal mind but a Tory gut. And his emphasis on more public spending, redistribution of wealth from South to North (“leveling up”), new infrastructure projects, and pissing off EU technocrats all pointed toward a much broader coalition for the right. He won a stonking majority on those grounds, re-branded the Tory party, and provoked writers like me to grapple with a new bigger-state Toryism, much more similar to its Disraelian past than its Thatcherite inheritance. It was a risk — but one that reflected a genuine shift among many ordinary people, responding to the catastrophic success of the Thatcher/Blair revolution. And his charisma and charm sold it.

That brave new dawn for Toryism really wasn’t that long ago. It was echoed in much of the revamped debate about conservatism in America — with Republicans worried again about a beleaguered working class, the decline in domestic manufacturing, off-shoring, mass immigration, and the collapse of the family and a vibrant civil society. These intellectual and ideological realignments take time — but it seemed that Johnson had that time, and the wind behind him, when he won so convincingly in 2019.

But Boris was Boris; and it is difficult to be a pathological liar and deeply unserious about everything and stay in power in a parliamentary system where your peers matter. The right inheritor was Rishi Sunak, Boris’ sane chancellor. But the tiny Tory membership, like the much bigger Labour membership that once picked the nutter Jeremy Corbyn, went for the base-pleasing radical, Liz Truss, aka “the human hand-grenade,” as Dominic Cummings has dubbed her.

And almost instantly, whatever coherence or direction or even meaning that resided in post-2016 conservatism vanished. Overnight, Truss has gone full retro-Thatcher, with a dose of unfunded Reaganite fiscal stimulus thrown in. She and her chancellor, Kwasi Kwarteng, have backed a series of policies that will super-charge inflation, redistribute wealth back from the North to the South, super-size the post-Covid debt, and force the Bank of England to raise interest rates so high that soaring mortgage payments in Britain will cancel out much of the tax cuts’ stimulus anyway. It’s insane. And it has virtually no constituency beyond 20 percent of the Tory party’s elderly membership who picked her.

It’s true that some of the policies are popular. The “mini-budget” is a huge giveaway, after all, and the bulk of it is to cushion soaring energy prices because of the war in Ukraine. As Matt Goodwin shows here, Brits like the small tax cuts for the working and middle classes; and they support the energy subsidies for this coming winter and the next. But they have no idea why the government couldn’t claw back some of that money with a tax on the huge windfall profits of energy companies, and are disgusted by a set of measures that seem designed to alienate the very working-class voters Boris won:

Scrapping the cap on bankers’ bonuses? Only 12 per cent of voters support it. Abolishing the 45% top rate of income tax for people earning over £150,000 a year? Only 11% support it. Cancelling the planned increase in corporation tax? Only one in five think it’s good idea.

When a political party reverses itself so completely after a landslide election win, you’d imagine that there would be a huge campaign to explain why — a major communications push, briefings of journalists, speeches, and all the rest. But the day that Kwarteng introduced this shocker, he barely picked up the phone and went to a pub.

The prime minister herself went silent as the pound tanked, the IMF panicked, and the Bank of England said it would be forced to hike interest rates more decisively than before. Yesterday, she finally held a press call with regional and local papers in Britain … and was incapable of saying anything faintly coherent or compelling. The questions were tougher than any US president would ever face from the US media, but it was nonetheless painful to listen to. A brutal quip from an opposition leader, Angela Rayner, summed it up: “Liz Truss has finally broken her long painful silence with a series of short painful silences.”

Immigration? You might recall how Brexit was fueled in part by the demographic revolution initiated by Tony Blair, and the public’s sense that they had lost control of their own country. Yes, part of this was ethnic and cultural, as the once homogeneous island was turned into something it had never previously been at a breakneck pace. Both those in favor of staying in the EU and those who wanted to leave preferred immigration from the EU to immigration from the rest of the world.

But Boris’ immigration reform — while taking back control from the EU — massively liberalized skilled, non-white immigration from the rest of the world. This past year has seen foreign work visas surge by 80 percent. As Goodwin writes, there are now “close to 1.8 million non-EU nationals working in Britain — 302,000 more than a year ago.” The biggest contributors? India, the Philippines, Nigeria and, with a cool 744 percent increase, Zimbabwe. This is a great refutation of the idea that Boris was or is a racist. But I don’t think it’s what most Brexit voters were anticipating. (Ed West, in fact, observes how different this makes the British right from the resurgent right-populism in Italy and Sweden. The Tories have actually embraced mass non-white immigration since Brexit, not kept power by vowing to end it.)

It’s enough to make you think that the Tory party has become an incoherent, chaotic shit-show, zig-zagging, divided, bitter and exhausted after 12 years in power. This is not to say, of course, that supply-side reforms in a country with struggling productivity are bad; nor to deny that Brexit has widened the scope of actions the UK government can take. (Tyler Cowen notes that there’s less stimulus in the plan than some are claiming.) But policies this ill-timed, this different from what has gone before, and this horribly communicated are a form of collective political suicide. It does not in any way surprise me that the polling has shown a simply staggering and instant collapse in Tory support. In one poll, Labour now leads by 33 points — the largest lead by any party since the 1990s.

So what now? Well, the Tory party has its annual conference next week — so we won’t lack for drama. The most hopeful scenario, some Tory friends tell me, is that the energy crisis won’t be as bad as many feared, that the economy might rebound with this stimulus, and that some of these reforms will indeed juice some productivity gains. That’s a profoundly weak case for optimism. But the deeper problem is figuring out just what conservatism now is. Neoliberalism unbound? Or illiberalism unleashed? Protectionism? Ever freer trade? Pro-immigration neoliberalism? Or anti-immigration conservatism?

The good news is that the Tories are not careening toward the anti-democratic authoritarianism of the GOP. The bad news is that they have nothing else coherent to offer, and no one left with any talent to sell it. Advantage: Keir.

In Wyoming, Likely End of Cheney Dynasty Will Close a Political Era (VIDEO)

Stick a fork in her. She's done.

At the New York Times, "If Representative Liz Cheney loses her primary on Tuesday, as is widely expected, the Cowboy State’s conservative tilt will take on a harder edge":

CODY, Wyo. — At an event last month honoring the 14,000 Japanese Americans who were once held at the Heart Mountain internment camp near here, Representative Liz Cheney was overcome with emotions, and a prolonged standing ovation wasn’t the only reason.

Her appearance — with her father, former Vice President Dick Cheney, as well as former Senator Alan Simpson and the children of Norman Mineta, a Democratic congressman turned transportation secretary who was sent to the camp when he was 10 — was part of a groundbreaking for the new Mineta-Simpson Institute. Ms. Cheney was moved, she said, by the presence of the survivors and by their enduring commitment to the country that imprisoned them during World War II.

There was something else, though, that got to the congresswoman during the bipartisan ceremony with party elders she was raised to revere. “It was just a whole combination of emotion,” she recalled in a recent interview.

As Ms. Cheney faces a near-certain defeat on Tuesday in her House primary, it is the likely end of the Cheneys’ two-generation dynasty in Wyoming as well as the passing of a less tribal and more clubby and substance-oriented brand of politics.

“We were a very powerful delegation, and we worked with the other side, that was key, because you couldn’t function if you didn’t,” recalled Mr. Simpson, now 90, fresh off being awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom and as tart-tongued as ever about his ancestral party. “My dad was senator and a governor, and if I ran again today as a Republican I’d get my ass beat — it’s not about heritage.”

He was elected to the Senate in 1978, the same year that Mr. Cheney won Wyoming’s at-large House seat, and they worked closely together, two Republicans battling on behalf of the country’s least populated state in an era when Democrats always controlled at least one chamber of Congress.

It’s not mere clout, however, that traditional Wyoming Republicans are pining for as they consider their gilded past and ponder the state’s less certain political and economic future. Before Tuesday’s election, which is likely to propel Harriet Hageman, who is backed by former President Donald J. Trump, to the House, the nostalgia in the state is running deeper than the Buffalo Bill Reservoir.

Mr. Cheney and Mr. Simpson were not only in the leadership of their respective chambers in the 1980s; they, along with Senator Malcolm Wallop, a Yale-educated cold warrior whose grandfather served in both the British House of Lords and the Wyoming Legislature, got along well and often appeared together as a delegation in a sort of road show across the sprawling state (“A small town with long streets,” as the Wyoming saying goes).

Even headier was the administration of President George Bush. Mr. Cheney became defense secretary, and his wife, Lynne, served as chairwoman of the National Endowment for the Humanities, while Mr. Simpson was both the second-ranking Senate Republican and one of the president’s closest friends. On top of that, the secretary of state at the time, James A. Baker III, spent summers on his Wyoming ranch, meaning two of the country’s top national security officials could be found doing unofficial promotional work for the state’s tourism industry.

“You’d have Army choppers snatching Cheney and Baker from fishing holes,” recalled Rob Wallace, who was Mr. Wallop’s chief of staff.

As conservative as the state was on the national level — Lyndon B. Johnson is the only Democrat to carry Wyoming in the past 70 years — the Wyoming Republican delegation worked effectively with two well-regarded Democratic governors in that same period, Ed Herschler and Mike Sullivan.

Now, Ms. Cheney hardly even speaks to the two other Wyomingites in Congress — Senators John Barrasso and Cynthia Lummis, both Republicans — and has little contact with Gov. Mark Gordon. Ms. Lummis has endorsed Ms. Hageman. But Mr. Barrasso and Mr. Gordon, who are mainline Republicans in the Cheney tradition, have sought to maintain neutrality in hopes of avoiding Mr. Trump’s wrath.

“They’ve got to make their own choices and live with the choices that they make,” Ms. Cheney said about the two men, before adding: “There are too many people who think that somebody else will fix the problem, that we can stay on the sidelines and Trump will fade.”

Asked about the Cheney legacy in Wyoming, Mr. Barrasso and Mr. Gordon both declined to comment...

 

U.S. Says Drone Strike Killed al Qaeda Leader Ayman al Zawahiri (VIDEO)

I watched President Biden's address live this afternoon, now available at the video below.

And at the Wall Street Journal, "First known U.S. counterrorism operation in Afghanistan since exit last year targeted a private residence in Afghan capital":

WASHINGTON—The White House said Monday that a U.S. missile launched from a drone in Afghanistan killed al Qaeda leader Ayman al Zawahiri, a founding member of the jihadist movement and one of the key strategists behind an international campaign of terror that culminated in the Sept. 11 attacks on the U.S.

The U.S. strike targeted a safe house in a residential area in central Kabul on Sunday morning, in what was the first known counterrorism operation in the country since U.S. forces withdrew last year. The Biden administration said the Taliban was aware that al Zawahiri was hiding in Kabul, the clearest display of the continuing alliance between al Qaeda and the group now ruling Afghanistan.

Speaking from the White House balcony on Monday, President Biden announced the strike, describing al Zawahiri as a terror leader who for decades “was the mastermind behind the attacks against Americans.” Those attacks included the 2000 attack on the USS Cole, which killed 17 sailors and wounded dozens of others and 1998 bombings of the U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania that killed 224 people and injured more than 4,500.

Al Zawahiri, 71, was an Egyptian national and longtime deputy of al Qaeda founder Osama bin Laden. In the lead up to 9/11, Zawahiri was the most important of bin Laden’s advisers as they planned the hijackings. He was also instrumental in shaping how the terror group used the 2001 attacks to gain members, often through propaganda letters and videos.

Mr. Biden during his eight-minute address said he approved the “carefully planned” operation a week ago “after being advised conditions were optimal.”

“The United States did not seek its war on terror. You came to us. We answered with the same principles and resolve that has shaped us for generations upon generation to protect the innocent and defend liberty,” Mr. Biden said.

The Taliban seized power during America’s final weeks in the country after two decades of war.

The group has publicly pledged to prevent Afghanistan from being used as a haven for terrorist organizations, and claims that it seeks peaceful relations with all countries.

The revelation that al Qaeda’s leader and family moved to a safe house in one of the most affluent parts of Kabul soon after the Taliban returned to power undermines those claims.

A senior Biden administration official said Zawahiri was killed by two U.S. Hellfire missiles fired from a drone as he stood on the balcony of the safe house in downtown Kabul.

“Senior Haqqani Taliban figures were aware of Zawahiri’s presence in Kabul,” the official said.

Pentagon officials said they had no knowledge of the strike and the senior Biden administration official declined to specify which U.S. agency was responsible, suggesting it was a CIA operation. The CIA declined to comment.

The strike is a badly needed victory for the Biden administration after the chaotic U.S. military withdrawal last summer that helped return the Taliban’s most conservative factions to power.

The White House said no civilian casualties resulted from the strike just after 6 a.m. on Sunday morning.

There was no known response from al Qaeda.

The Taliban condemned the attack, calling it a violation of international law and the agreement it signed with the U.S. in 2020 that set the terms of America’s withdrawal from Afghanistan.

“Such actions are repetitions of the failed experiences of the past 20 years and are against U.S., Afghanistan and the region’s interests,” said Zabiullah Mujahid, the Taliban’s chief spokesman.

The last U.S. drone strike in Afghanistan one year ago killed 10 civilian members of an Afghan family in the final week of U.S. presence in the country. The casualties included seven children. The operation was initially described as successful. The U.S. later admitted that the target was a mistake.

The U.S. intelligence community has “high confidence” that the dead individual is Zawahiri, the official said.

The president was first briefed on plans for a strike on July 1 in the White House Situation Room by advisers including CIA Director William Burns, Director of National Intelligence Avril Haines and Christine Abizaid, director of the U.S. National Counterterrorism Center, the Biden official said.

Mr. Biden made the decision to order the strike at a July 25 meeting with top advisers at which all the participants recommended going forward with it, the official said.

The official said that for several years, U.S. intelligence agencies had been aware of a network of individuals that supported the al Qaeda leader.

Intelligence agencies tracked several members of Zawahiri’s family, including his wife and children, as they moved to Kabul. The United States then got confirmation that Zawahiri himself was in Kabul.

In early April, that intelligence was briefed to deputy national security adviser Jonathan Finer and White House homeland security adviser Elizabeth Sherwood-Randall, then later to national security adviser Jake Sullivan and the president, the official said.

As with the 2011 raid that killed Osama bin Laden, U.S. spy agencies built a replica of the house where Zawahiri was staying, and brought it to meetings with Mr. Biden and his aides, the official said. Specialists used the model to confirm that Zawahiri could be killed in a missile strike without collapsing the entire structure and killing civilians, including members of his family.

After the strike, Haqqani Taliban members sought to cover up the fact that Zawahiri had taken shelter there by moving Zawahiri’s family to another location, according to the administration official.

“The safe house used by Zawahiri is now empty,” the official said.

Under the terms of the agreement signed with the Trump administration in February 2020, the Taliban vowed to prevent Afghanistan from being used as a haven for al Qaeda and other terrorist groups to plan attacks against the U.S. and its allies.

But the Taliban didn’t explicitly commit to continuing operations to target the group or to break ties with them.

The United Nations has since reported that the Taliban and al Qaeda remain closely connected...

U.S. Says Drone Strike Killed al Qaeda Leader Ayman al Zawahiri

Can the Biden Presidency Be Saved?

From Andrew Sullivan, "If he can sustain the deal-making, why not?":

Now we’re talking.

The entire promise and rationale of a Biden presidency was not, I hate to break it to my lefty friends, a total transformation of the country in favor of green energy and “social justice.” It was a return to constitutional normalcy, and the kind of legislative deal-making that offers gradual progress on the biggest challenges of the day.

We wanted a better rollout of vaccines, competent economic management of the bust-and-boom cycle of the pandemic, progress on the urgent question of climate change, and responsibility again on the world stage. Biden gets a B on the first, a C- on the second, a B+ on climate, and a solid B in foreign policy.

That B+ on the climate depends of course on whether the Schumer-Manchin deal struck this week can get to the president’s desk. It looks like it can, if Senator Sinema doesn’t blow it up, and some geezers can recover from Covid quickly enough. And it represents what a Biden presidency promised to a center-right voter like me.

It’s an old-fashioned political deal between two Senators, with Biden on the sidelines. Manchin gets some goodies for the carbon industries in exchange for the biggest federal investment in clean energy ever. There’s a tax on the super-rich. There’s even some incentives for keeping nuclear plants alive. There’s a popular move to reduce Medicare drug prices; and more secure access to healthcare for the less privileged.

And this popularist package is branded as an inflation reduction measure! That’s a bit of a stretch, of course, but it may have a mild deflationary effect in a couple of years. The widely detested Larry Summers — see the Dishcast below — reassured Manchin on the inflationary impact this past week, and, as Chait details today, Summers has credibility on the issue after his sane and prescient warnings about inflation a year and a half ago. It comes after a bipartisan computer chips bill to better compete with China.

It’s not a New Green Deal; and it’s not socialized medicine. It’s what we used to call pragmatic progress...

 RELATED: At NYT, "Manchin, in Reversal, Agrees to Quick Action on Climate and Tax Plan."

The DeSantis Dilemma

From Andrew Sullivan, at the Weekly Dish, "Is he the only politician who can save us from a second Trump term?":

“I would say my big decision will be whether I go before or after. You understand what that means?” Donald Trump told New York Magazine’s Olivia Nuzzi this week. He likes to tease. But we know what’s coming. The deranged, delusional liar who tried to stop the peaceful transfer of power is going to again. He still commands a huge lead in the GOP primary polls; he shows few signs of flagging energy; and the president who succeeded him is imploding in front of our eyes.

The preeminent question in politics right now is therefore, to my mind, a simple one: how to stop Trump — and the spiraling violent, civil conflict and constitutional chaos a second term would bring. To re-elect a man who attempted a coup is to embrace the definitive end of the American idea.

The Democrats, meanwhile, appear to have run out of fake “moderate” candidates, are doubling down on every woke mantra, presiding over levels of inflation that are devastating real incomes, launching a protracted war that may tip us into stagflation, and opening the borders to millions more illegal immigrants. They are hemorrhaging Latino support, and intensifying their identity as upper-class white woke scolds. And a Biden campaign in 2024 would be, let’s be honest, “Weekend At Bernie’s II.”

So get real: If you really believe that Trump remains a unique threat to constitutional democracy in America, you need to consider the possibility that, at this point, a Republican is probably your best bet.

One stands out, and it’s Ron DeSantis, the popular governor of Florida. And yet so many Never Trumpers, right and left, have instantly become Never DeSanters, calling him a terrifyingly competent clone of the thug with the bad hair. He’s “Trump 2.0” but even “more dangerous than Trump,” says Dean Obeidallah. “He’s dangerous because he is equally repressive, but doesn’t have the baggage of Trump,” argues a fascism scholar.

“DeSantis has decided to try to outflank Trump, to out-Trump Trump,” worries Michael Tomasky. He’s a clone of Viktor Orbán, says Vox, and on some issues, “DeSantis has actually outstripped Orbán.” Then there’s Max Boot: “Just because DeSantis is smarter than Trump doesn’t mean that he is any less dangerous. In fact, he might be an even bigger threat for that very reason.”

Jon Chait frames the case: “Just imagine what a Trumpified party no longer led by an erratic, deeply unpopular cable-news binge-watcher would be capable of.” Chait’s critique focuses at first on the fact that DeSantis is an anti-redistributionist conservative, and believes that pure democracy is something the Founders wanted to curtail. Sorry — but, whatever your view on that, it’s light years away from Trump’s belief in one-man rule.

On this, in fact, Chait acknowledges that DeSantis once wrote that the Founders “worried about the emergence of popular leaders who utilized demagoguery to obtain public support in service of their personal ambitions.” He meant Obama — not Trump. Unfair to Obama, of course. But the same worldview as Trump’s? Nah.

Chait then argues that DeSantis is an anti-vaxxer, or has at least toyed with anti-vaxxers, and out-Trumped Trump on Covid denialism. But like many criticisms of DeSantis, this is overblown. Dexter Filkins reports that DeSantis, after his lockdowns during the panic of April 2020, studied the science himself, became a skeptic of lingering lockdowns and mask mandates, and, for a while, risked looking like a crazy outlier.

But from the vantage point of today, not so much: Florida’s kids have not been shut out of schools for two whole years; the state’s economy beat out the other big ones except Texas; Covid infection and death rates were not much higher than the national average; and compared with California, which instituted a draconian approach, it’s a viral wash.

As David Frum put it in a typically perceptive piece:

The DeSantis message for 2024: I kept adults at work and kids at school without the catastrophic effects predicted by my critics. Because I didn’t panic, Florida emerged from the pandemic in stronger economic shape than many other states — and a generation of Florida schoolchildren continued their education because of me. Pretty powerful, no?

Very powerful in retrospect. And again: not Trump.

And this is a pattern: DeSantis says or does something that arouses the Trumpian erogenous zones, is assailed by the media/left, and then the details turn out to be underwhelming. His voter suppression law provoked howls; but in reality, as Ramesh Ponnuru notes,

the law includes new restrictions, such as requiring that county employees oversee ballot drop-boxes. But it’s also true that the law leaves Floridians with greater ballot access, in key respects, than a lot of states run by Democrats. Florida has no-excuse absentee voting, unlike Delaware and New York.

DeSantis wins both ways: he gets cred from the base by riling up the media, but isn’t so extreme as to alienate normie voters.

Ditto his allegedly anti-gay bigotry. Vox’s Beauchamp says DeSantis is another Orbán. But Orbán’s policies are a ban on all teaching about gays in high schools, a ban on anything on television before 10 pm that could positively show gay or trans people, and a constitutional ban on marriage rights. DeSantis’ policy is to stop instruction in critical gender and queer theory in public schools for kids under 8, and keep it neutral and age-appropriate thereafter. In other words: what we used to have ten minutes ago before the woke takeover.

And who but a few fanatics and TQIA++ nutters really oppose this? I know plenty of gay people who agree with DeSantis — and a majority of Floridians support the law as it is written. The fact that his opponents had to lie about it — with the “Don’t Say Gay” gimmick — and then resorted to emotional blackmail — “This will kill kids” — tells you how unpopular their actual position is.

Some more contrasts: Trump famously wanted to torture captured prisoners, steal the oil in occupied Iraq, and desecrate Islam to break down Muslim detainees. DeSantis, on the other hand,

was responsible for helping ensure that the missions of Navy SEALs and Army Green Berets [in parts of Iraq] … were planned according to the rule of law and that captured detainees were humanely treated. “He did a phenomenal job,” Navy Capt. Dane Thorleifson, 55, said of DeSantis … [describing him] as “one of my very close counsels that as we developed a mission concept of operations, he made sure it was legal. I respected him a lot as a JAG. He was super smart, articulate, resourceful and a positive part of the staff.”

Imagine Trump taking care to make sure anything is legal!

Trump ripped children from illegal immigrant parents. DeSantis opposed the policy. Trump launched his real estate empire with a “small loan of a million dollars” from his mega-wealthy dad. DeSantis grew up in a working-class neighborhood, scored in the 99th percentile on his SAT, and worked several jobs to help pay his tuition at Yale.

Trump is a teetotaler, and while in office “his administration made a number of hostile anti-marijuana actions — rescinding Obama-era guidance on cannabis prosecutions to implementing policies making immigrants ineligible for citizenship if they consume marijuana.” DeSantis ensured that Florida’s overwhelming vote in favor of legal medical marijuana was passed into law, and he even suggested that the drug be decriminalized — despite his distaste for the smell of weed in public.

Trump wings everything, and almost never delivers. He couldn’t even build a fraction of his wall. DeSantis is disciplined, studies issues closely, and follows through. On a good day, Trump is fun. DeSantis, to be kind, isn’t. He has a Nixonian edge.

Trump believes climate change is a Chinese hoax, and, given the chance, would cover our national parks with condos and oil rigs. DeSantis is a governor in a state where rising sea levels and floods are real, so Trumpian insanity is a non-starter. “I will fulfill promises from the campaign trail,” DeSantis said shortly after taking office:

“That means prioritizing environmental issues, like water quality and cleaning the environmental mess that has resulted in toxic blue-green algae and exacerbated red tide around the state. We will put Everglades restoration into high gear and make it the reality that Floridians have been promised for three decades.”

This year he followed through — with more than $400 million in funds for containing rising sea levels. And last year, Filkins noted,

DeSantis signed into law a remarkable piece of environmental legislation that could become a model for the rest of the country. The project will establish the Florida Wildlife Corridor, a blueprint for the state to connect all of its large national and state parks with tracts of open land.

The corridor, once complete, would create an unbroken swath of preserved land from the Alabama state line all the way to the Florida Keys, nearly eight hundred miles away. It would insure that a population of wildlife — whether it be black bears or panthers or gopher tortoises — would not be cut off from other groups of its species, which is one of the main drivers of extinction.

So far, DeSantis is not that far from the “Teddy Roosevelt conservationist” he claimed to be. Yes, he’s mainly focused on responding to, rather than preventing, climate change — “Resilient Florida” is the slogan. And he’s allergic to green uplift or catastrophism. But another Trump? Nope.

His authoritarianism? He certainly gives off vibes. He picked a fight with Disney, for example, over their belated opposition to his parental rights bill — and punished them even after the law had passed. Using executive power to target companies for their free expression is not conservatism. (It’s worth noting, however, that in this case, the “punishment” was ending very special state treatment for the company.)

There is also disturbingly vague wording and vigilante enforcement in his parental rights bill — which is why I opposed it. He has tried to curtail free speech in colleges in ways that will almost certainly be struck down by the courts. Three state university professors were prevented from testifying against state policies (DeSantis denies any involvement). His comments on tenure are chilling. He said something dangerous about the role of child protective services in punishing parents for taking their kids to raunchy drag shows. Parental rights for conservatives, but not for liberals?

His spokesperson, Christina Pushaw, is Trumpian in her provocations, reviving the ugly trope that gays are pedophilic “groomers” until proven otherwise. DeSantis wages the power of government in the culture war — and with alacrity. There’s a pugilism to his style that comes off as bullying at times, so he can, quite clearly, be a charm-free prick. He’s been a coward over January 6 and Trump’s Big Lie. And as Tim Miller notes, he hasn’t exactly declared he would not be another Trump in his contempt for constitutional democracy (although such a stance now would effectively sink his bid to replace Trump). He’s said nary a word on abortion; and has ducked real questions about guns in the wake of Uvalde. Who knows what his position on Ukraine is?

I’m deeply uncomfortable with much of this...

 

The Meaning of Patriotism

From Andrew Sullivan, "This July Fourth, two Republican women are keeping the flame of this republic alive":

To see what is in front of our noses is a constant challenge, and perhaps never more so in a time of such awful post-truth polarization. But what happened in the January 6 hearings this past week will, in my view, be seen one day as a watershed moment either in the history of this country’s revival as a liberal democracy or in this republic’s rapid collapse.

Two women, Liz Cheney and Cassidy Hutchinson, went back and forth, asking and answering questions, slowly, calmly, and methodically laying out a story of an actual attempt by a president of the United States to rally and lead an armed mob to assault the Congress to overturn an election. Yes, I just wrote that sentence.

Hutchinson’s testimony added critical facts to the record: that Trump knew full well what the mob was intending to do in advance; and knew that they were armed: “You know, I don’t fucking care that they have weapons. They’re not there to hurt me.” He knew what he was attempting was criminal; tried physically to lead the mob in their rampage; and when he was foiled, egged on the attack, and refused to quiet or quell the mob for hours — even as it threatened to kill his own vice president. There is no way now to deny that Trump was behind all of it, uniquely responsible.

In the face of this, so many Republican men have kept quiet, caved, slunk away, equivocated, or changed the subject. So many, like Tucker Carlson, have responded with smears and foul lies. So many have refused to testify, or dodged subpoenas. These sickening cowards wouldn’t vote to impeach after the grossest attack on the Constitution in history; and wouldn’t cooperate with the committee.

But two Republican women faced our hideous reality this week — even if it meant the obliteration of their careers, and being subject to real threats of violence. And let us pause to note just how Republican these two women are. Cheney is the daughter of the former vice president, a man who once defined Republicanism; she represents Wyoming, the most Republican state out of 50; she’s pro-life, defended torture, never saw a war she didn’t want to start; opposed even her own sister’s same-sex marriage; and voted with Trump 93 percent of the time, more than the woman who ousted her from House leadership, Elise Stefanik.

Hutchinson, for her part, was at the heart of the Trump world. She ascended from mere intern — working in the offices of both Ted Cruz and the House minority whip — to become the primary assistant to Trump’s chief-of-staff, Mark Meadows. If she dyed her hair blonde, she could read the news on Fox.

Hutchinson had a lot to lose by testifying — as women seem to in general compared to men:

[T]here is evidence that women suffer more direct retaliation as whistleblowers. One study in 2008 found that women who reported wrongdoing within their organizations experienced more retaliation than men who did the same. And, while higher-ranking men who reported wrongdoing experienced less retaliation, higher-ranking women were not as insulated.

And notice the tone of the exchange between the two women. In a world of hyperbolic, pontificating males, Cheney asked clear, direct, empirical questions, and Hutchinson replied with the same attention to detail, the same surety of voice, the same care not to exaggerate, and to get things right. Yes, some of it was hearsay — but Hutchinson herself took pains to note when it was. And both, it seemed to me, understood their grave responsibility.

This is the Republican Party I used to respect. This is the conservatism I believe in. A conservatism whose first tasks are the defense of the Constitution, the rule of law, and a belief in objective truth.

Like Margaret Thatcher in her day, Liz Cheney has a steel stronger than most men, and similar courage. In her superb speech at the Reagan Library this week, Cheney also emphasized the feminine qualities that made this week historic:

I come to this choice [between Trump and the Constitution] as a mother, committed to ensuring that my children and their children can continue to live in an America where the peaceful transfer of power is guaranteed.

And she paid tribute to the women, often low on the DC totem pole, who rose to the challenge of citizenship, when so many powerful men failed:

I’ve been incredibly moved by young women who have come forward to testify, some who worked on the Trump campaign, some who worked in the Trump White House, some who worked in offices on Capitol Hill, all of whom knew immediately that what had happened must never happen again … Little girls across the country are seeing what it really means to love your country, what it really means to be a patriot. And so I want to speak to every young girl who may be watching tonight. The power is yours and so is the responsibility.

Listen to it all...

 

He Was Just a Bitter Man With a Mob

From Andrew Sullivan, "A Man And A Mob: Our Constitutional crisis is due to Donald Trump. And Donald Trump alone":

“Frankly there is no idea more un-American than the notion that any one person could choose the American president,” - former veep Mike Pence.

There is a tendency, and I understand it, to view the crisis of democratic legitimacy in this country as multi-determined. The rank failure of elites this century, the intellectual barrenness of the pre-Trump GOP, the ever-further radicalization of the left, along with the cultural impacts of mass immigration and free trade, all count as contributing factors. You can tell the story in many different ways, with varying emphases, and assignations of blame.

But this complexity misses something important — the contingent importance of individuals in human history. And the truth is: we would not be where we are now without Donald Trump, and Donald Trump alone. He is unique in American history, a president who told us in advance he would never accept any election result that showed him losing, and then proved it. He tried to overturn the transfer of power to his successor by threats and violence. No president in history has ever done such a thing — betrayed and violated the core of our republic — from Washington’s extraordinary example onwards. The stain of Trump is as unique as it is indelible.

Without Trump, January 6 would never have happened. It was his idea, and his alone. No one in his closest inner circle believed he had won the election on November 3. They all knew that the Trump presidency was “the rotten carcass of a boat, not rigg’d, / Nor tackle, sail, nor mast.” None of them would have attempted to keep it afloat.

And, thanks to the January 6 Committee, we now know this for certain. Mike Pence, his vice president, didn’t believe Trump had won, let alone by a landslide — for which he was targeted to be hanged by the mob Trump gathered. (A new detail: Trump — after the violence had already broken out — incited the mob against Pence directly, and they surged to get within 40 feet of him.)

His daughter Ivanka and Jared Kushner also didn’t believe Trump had won — and we now know they planned to move to Miami only 24 hours after Trump declared he had been robbed. Trump’s beloved Hope Hicks didn’t believe he’d won. His campaign manager Bill Stepien didn’t either, and in a lovely understatement said he “didn’t think what was happening was necessarily honest or professional.” Even Kellyanne “alternative facts” Conway didn’t think he’d won.

Trump’s attorney general, Bill Barr, didn’t think he’d won either, and told him so: “I made it clear I did not agree with the idea of saying the election was stolen and putting out this stuff, which I told the president was bullshit. And I didn’t want to be a part of it.” Here’s how Trump responded to his top cop telling the truth: “This is killing me. You must have said this because you hate Trump, you hate Trump.” For Trump, there is no objective reality; no actual facts to be considered. There is only his subjective reality, where non-facts are asserted with the intensity of a madman.

Who did believe that Trump had won? A shit-faced Rudy Giuliani on election night; the fruitcake — and now disbarred — conspiracist Sidney Powell; QAnon nutter Lin Wood, who wanted the vice president to face a firing squad for doing his job; and another deranged flunky, Peter Navarro. Then there was the disgraceful John Eastman, who crafted a legal strategy that he knew was unconstitutional, illegal and could lead to riots. “Garbage in, garbage out,” was how Trump’s former chief of staff, Mick Mulvaney, described the clique and their plots.

The cockamamie scheme these oddballs constructed aimed at bullying Republican state legislators to provide alternative electors who would back Trump in the Electoral College, despite the votes in their states, and to coerce Mike Pence to refuse to certify the election on January 6, so they’d have time to overturn the results. (A freelancer to the fiasco, Ginni Thomas, wife of Clarence, pressed 29 legislators in Arizona to change their slate of electors.)

This required harassment of GOP officials in the states to simply “find” more votes for Trump. At this point, it’s only Trump, his new inner circle of nut-cases, Fox News, and mobs around the country. Nothing was ruled out. At one point, they considered seizing voting machines and calling out the military. Trump tweeted threats to individual office-holders to get them to bend the knee. Here is an account by one, a Republican commissioner in Philly, who looked into Giuliani’s claim that 8,000 dead people had voted in his city, found none, and said so:

[P]rior to that [tweet from Trump], the threats were pretty general in nature. Corrupt election officials in Philadelphia are going to get what’s coming to them. You’re what the second amendment is for. You’re walking into the lion’s den. All sorts of things like that.

After the President tweeted at me by name, calling me out the way that he did, the threats became much more specific, much more graphic, and included not just me by name but included members of my family by name, their ages, our address, pictures of our home. Just every bit of detail that you could imagine.

That’s Trump leveraging violence against election officials for defending the integrity of the vote. No surprise then that he repeated this strategy against his own “pussy” vice president and the Congress itself — egging on a mob he had summoned to ransack the Capitol building to stop the certification (“it’s going to be wild!”), and refusing repeatedly to intervene throughout the day to stop the violence, even as others begged him to. The night before the mayhem, Trump had left the White House door open — highly unusual for him. And this was winter in Washington. According to Costa and Woodward, when Trump was asked to shut it by shivering staffers, he responded: “I want to hear my people. Listen. They have courage. Listen.”

He was emphatically told he’d lost the election. He was told what he was trying to do was illegal and unconstitutional, days before he directed the mob. But he didn’t care and did it anyway. Eastman for his part knew he was committing a crime against the Constitution, a crime which might have set off rioting in the streets, which is why (we now know) he sought a preemptive pardon for his malfeasance. How’s that for an admission of guilt? But he didn’t care and did it anyway.

There are simply no precedents in history for this kind of assault on the core principles of the American republic. None. And there is no precedent for a president, having been exposed as a fantasist, to carry on, insisting that his fever dream remains reality, attacking the very legitimacy of our democracy, day after day. The idea that he could run again — or again become president — could only be entertained by those who wish to end the American experiment.

Peruse the 12-page letter Trump put out in response to the hearings. It is the work of someone with no grip on reality, absurd lie after lie after lie, barely literate, the kind of thing you’d think was written by a lunatic if you received it in the mail. Any other president would have conceded on election night. Others with a real case (unlike Trump’s) — Nixon in 1960, Gore in 2000 — knew what their duty was. They cared more about the republic than themselves — a concept simply outside Trump’s cognition. In four years, he never acted as a president. He only ever acted as Trump.

In the bitter end, he was just a man with a mob. Not a Republican. Not a politician. Not a president. Not a member of any political party but his own cult. A mindless, raging, bullying thug. The hearings have methodically and calmly revealed this, masterfully led by a Republican, Liz Cheney, through testimony supplied by Republican after Republican witness.

And yet just this week, Trump acolytes repeating his lies won primaries in Nevada and South Carolina. Republican election officials in some states have said they will decide the results of future elections — and not the voters. Steve Bannon has encouraged a wave of new candidates in positions overseeing elections to foment chaos. The crisis Trump — and Trump alone — has created is not over. Biden’s legacy — an abandonment of his mandate for moderation, soaring inflation, an imminent recession, yet another new war, and woker-than-woke extremism — has only deepened it.

So it’s up to Republicans to save us. In the words of Michael Luttig, “as a political matter of fact only the party that instigated this war over our democracy can bring an end to that war.” And here I just want to appeal to any conservatives or Republicans who might read this. You know I’m not a flaming liberal. You know I agree with many of you on the threat from the far left. So hear me out: The party of Lincoln cannot coexist with the cult of Trump. What Trump did to the republic has nothing whatsoever to do with conservatism. It’s the antithesis of conservatism, a revolutionary act to create a constitutional crisis, an assault on tradition, an attack on America itself. You may soon have a chance to run the country again. Don’t throw that away for the sake of a man who cares about nothing but himself...

What Happens on Campus Doesn't Stay on Campus

From Bari Weiss, "Graduation Week With Common Sense:"

There is no more reliable cliché in the news business than “if it bleeds it leads.” But the rule of thumb that was just as dependable, if not quite as catchy, in the years I spent at legacy newspapers is this one: campus craziness sells. It sold to readers of The Wall Street Journal just as reliably as it did to readers of The New York Times. If conservatives and progressives can unite over anything it’s that neither can resist hate-reading a story about Oberlin kids protesting the cultural appropriation of dining hall banh mi.

Until very recently, though, neither group took those kinds of stories very seriously. Neither did most of the editors who commissioned them. They were not unlike the crossword puzzle: a fun distraction. A nice mix for the reader dutifully getting through serious, important coverage about foreign policy and the economy and politics.

Sure, sure, the kids were doing crazy things. And yes, some of it was a little excessive—even most of the progressives could agree on that. But this was college! Remember Berkeley and Columbia and Cornell in the 1960s? Campus was always a radical place. Everyone assumed that the kids would grow out of it. That the politics of the quad would inevitably fade as these young Americans made their way in the world, onto marriage and kids, onto mortgages and life insurance policies, and onto jobs at places like JP Morgan and Bain, Amazon and Random House.

This isn’t at all what happened. Rather than those institutions shaping young people in their image, it’s the young people who are fundamentally reshaping those institutions in their own. As Andrew Sullivan put it: We all live on campus now. It turns out those campus stories were serious in ways many couldn’t—and still refuse to—imagine.

But you already know that. If you’re a Common Sense reader you’ve long noticed that one of our main areas of focus from the start has been education. Our reasoning is simple: We believe that if you want to understand what’s coming for the country and the culture you better pay very close attention to what’s happening on college campuses. Also: our high schools. And increasingly, our elementary schools. Even our kindergartens.

That’s why we’ve done deeply reported stories about the transformation of America’s elite high schools and the radicalization of our medical schools and our law schools.

It’s why we have been ahead of the curve in our reporting on the terrible consequences of Covid lockdowns.

It’s why we’ve run whistleblowing essays, like Paul Rossi’s first-person account of his refusal to indoctrinate his students and Gordon Klein’s essay about suing UCLA.

It’s why we’ve reported on the smearing of parent activists and free-thinking professors—and introduced you to courageous figures like Kathleen Stock, the University of Chicago’s Dorian Abbot, and Peter Boghossian, who resigned his post as a philosophy professor at Portland State University last year with these words: “For ten years, I have taught my students the importance of living by your principles. One of mine is to defend our system of liberal education from those who seek to destroy it. Who would I be if I didn’t?”

For every professor who refuses to cave, though, there are so many more who don’t. Indeed, the major theme that has emerged in our reporting is institutional retreat—schools that have abandoned their founding mission, leaders that have decided to follow, and professors paid to think for themselves who seem very scared of doing so. Exhibit A: Suzy Weiss’s story last week on the destruction of David Sabatini, the world-renowned molecular biologist who, until recently, was a star at MIT’s Whitehead Institute. Now he’s unemployed. Sabatini is a symbol of a system and culture that has eaten its own.

But it’s not all bad news—not by a long shot. Just as we have exposed what’s gone so wrong, we have been moved as we watch people, often ordinary Americans, try to make things right.

Those builders include the parents behind the homeschooling boom—which appears to be even bigger than we understood when we reported on it back in September; the fascinating group that has convened around Synthesis; and those who have planted a flag in Texas with the University of Austin, or UATX. Since Pano Kanelos, the university’s inaugural president and former head of St. John’s College, broke the news of the new university in Common Sense half a year ago, UATX reports that they have raised over $100 million in donations, pledges, and land from more than 1,000 donors. Perhaps most amazingly, the school has received some 5,000 inquiries from prospective faculty. This summer, they are offering their first summer school program in Dallas. I’ll be there, along with teachers like Niall Ferguson, Ayaan Hirsi Ali, Rob Henderson, Thomas Chatterton-Williams, Nadine Strossen and Arthur Brooks.

None of these projects lack naysayers. But I’m bullish on the builders...

Keep reading, especially for all the links she's posted.  

The Sinister Symmetry of CRT and GRT

From Andrew Sullivan today, on Substack, "The extremes of right and left on immigration are fueling each other":

The MSM rushed last weekend to explain the previously obscure conspiracy theory that motivated a mass-murderer on a shooting spree in a black neighborhood in Buffalo, New York. We didn’t get to read the warped “manifesto” of the mass shooter, but we were told about its account of “Great Replacement Theory.” It posits that a shadowy, global elite (in this case — surprise! — Jewish) is deliberately fostering mass non-white immigration to dilute the voting power of white Americans. The goal is a minority-majority country in which the Republican Party is doomed by inexorable racial demographics, and a whole new multiracial society can be built on the smoldering ruins of “white supremacy.”

“Wait a minute!” as Homer Simpson might say. Haven’t I heard some of that kind of talk before? It’s coming back to me now. Here’s one devotee: “Folks like me who are Caucasian of European descent — for the first time in 2017 we’ll be an absolute minority in the United States of America. Absolutely minority … That’s not a bad thing. That’s a source of our strength.” Here’s another: “There’s nothing really [the Republicans] can do against this incredible demographic revolution.” And another: “The Republican majority has always been based upon whites and, in particular, white males … The bulwark of Republican electoral strength is disappearing.”

These quotes are from then-VP Joe Biden, Univision founder Jorge Ramos, and sassy Dem Party hack James Carville celebrating the implosion of white America. This was also the theory that drove the 2016 Clinton campaign to ignore white swing voters and focus instead on the non-white: “What I found fascinating about the primary was how we got into our different demographic lanes, and demographics were to some extent destiny,” was how the genius Robby Mook put it, before he helped elect Trump.

No, these people do not represent a secret conspiracy — let alone a Jewish one — to dilute the “whiteness” of America. There is nothing secret about it at all. The majority-minority enthusiasts represent instead a transparent movement to see Americans primarily in racial/generational terms, to view a multi-racial society as a zero-sum endeavor in which a gain for whites always means a loss for non-whites, and who therefore cheer the declining percentage of Americans who are deemed “white.”

Whole libraries could be constructed by the books outlining this thesis. It really got started with John Judis’ and Ruy Teixeira’s “The Emerging Democratic Majority” (2002), Sid Blumenthal’s “The Strange Death of Republican America” (2008), Carville’s “40 More Years: How the Democrats Will Rule the Next Generation” (2009), Ron Brownstein’s Next America project (2012), Paul Taylor’s “The Next America” (2014), and William Frey’s “Diversity Explosion: How New Racial Demographics Are Remaking America” (2014), to cite a few. All of them argue that mass immigration is a critical factor in making America majority non-white and therefore Democratic. And all of them are pretty much psyched.

When I say “psyched,” there is a spectrum. Here’s Michelle Goldberg not so long ago: “Right now America is tearing itself apart as an embittered white conservative minority clings to power, terrified at being swamped by a new multiracial polyglot majority” — and she “felt good” about that non-white future. Here’s Jen Rubin, reacting to the news last year that the Census found numbers of white people falling: “This is fabulous news. Now we need to prevent minority White rule.” And who can forget Michael Moore’s reaction to the same news “Best day ever in U.S. history.”

None of them seemed concerned that the thesis could boomerang on them. By “boomerang,” I mean racializing politics so aggressively that you actually help create and legitimize a racially white party — because of negative partisanship. In the words of Michael Barone: “When you keep telling white Americans that they will soon become a minority — a message that sometimes sounds like ‘hurry up and die’ — then many non-college graduate ‘deplorables’ may start acting like members of a self-conscious minority, and vote more cohesively.” Exactly.

And when this demographic prediction is combined with constant denigration of “white people,” and when a simple white majority is suddenly redefined as “white supremacy” — indistinguishable from the era of Jim Crow — then feelings might get, shall we say, “triggered.” If you demonize an entire race, you may at some point get the compliment returned. The more you raise racial consciousness among non-whites, the more you risk the same among whites. As Thomas Chatterton Williams warned: “so long as we fetishize race, we ensure that we will never be rid of the hierarchies it imposes.”

As for the GRT notion that demographic transformation was somehow imposed on America by cunning elites, there’s no real evidence for that. The key moment — the Immigration Act of 1965, which made non-white immigration a priority — was not deemed demographically revolutionary at the time. Attorney General Nicholas Katzenbach testified: “This bill is not designed to increase or accelerate the numbers of newcomers permitted to come to America.” Senator Edward Kennedy pledged:

The bill will not flood our cities with immigrants. It will not upset the ethnic mix of our society. It will not relax the standards of admission. It will not cause American workers to lose their jobs.

His brother, Bobby, told the House subcommittee his prediction of Asian immigration under the bill: “I would say for the Asia-Pacific Triangle, it would be approximately 5,000, Mr. Chairman, after which immigration from that source would virtually disappear … we do not expect that there would be any great influx after that.” Emanuel Celler, House sponsor of the bill, insisted: “Quota immigration under the bill is likely to be more than 80 percent European.”

And yet by 1998, Patrick Reddy, a Democratic consultant, boasted that the act had “resulted in a wave of immigration from the Third World that should shift the nation in a more liberal direction within a generation. It will go down as the Kennedy family’s greatest gift to the Democratic Party.” And by 2018, 78 percent of immigrants were non-European, and Europeans made up a mere 9.8 percent of new green-card holders in 2020. As for Bobby Kennedy’s prediction of 5,000 immigrants from Asia, the number now is 14 million. Not a plot. Just a massive predictive error.

Mass illegal immigration has also lent legitimacy to gripes about rapid demographic change against the majority will. You could argue that the 1965 Act was a democratic process; but you can’t really say that about subsequent illegal immigration. The GOP liked the cheap labor; the Democrats believed that it would eventually help them win elections. That wasn’t a conspiracy, but it was a kind of anti-democratic mutual understanding — and you can’t blame someone for thinking it felt like one. Voters repeatedly voted for border control, but even Trump failed...

If we are to get past the kind of ugly violence and race essentialism in Great Replacement Theory, then we also need an antidote to the toxins of Critical Race Theory. The two illiberalisms are profoundly connected. They need each other. And, in their racialized heart, they are morally exactly the same.