The New Nuclear Gap

By Rich Lowry

Thursday, April 28, 2022

 

Less than a year before Vladimir Putin invaded Ukraine the first time, President Barack Obama gave a speech in Berlin declaring that as long as nuclear weapons exist “we are not truly safe.” In the June 2013 address at the Brandenburg Gate, he said that he’d determined that we could reduce our nuclear arsenal by a third without any negative consequences. He pledged to negotiate more cuts with Russia and “seek bold reductions in U.S. and Russian tactical weapons in Europe.” All of this was in furtherance of his objective, announced at the outset of his administration, of creating a “world without nuclear weapons” — which announcement helped win him one of the least-deserved Nobel Peace Prizes in history.

 

Obama made no mention in Berlin of Russia’s massive increase in tactical nuclear weapons or of its extensive nuclear-modernization program. He skipped over Russia’s doctrine of “escalate to win” with nuclear weapons. He didn’t acknowledge Russia’s extensive, ongoing history of cheating on arms-control agreements. He gave no sign that it had occurred to him that the U.S. might need again to think about great-power competition with countries led by less deluded and much more dangerous men.

 

And he left all of this out, astonishingly enough, while warning of “a complacency among our Western democracies.”

 

Well, at least there’s a little less complacency now, although not nearly enough urgency.

 

Between the post–Cold War peace dividend, the focus on the War on Terror to the exclusion of attention to great-power rivalry, Obama’s delusions, the sequestration of the defense budget, a misbegotten worry about “provoking” our enemies, and a generalized neglect of our nuclear weapons and missile defenses, we’ve gotten behind the curve.

 

Our nuclear arsenal is aging and needs to be bigger, with new, different weapons. Our modernization of the triad (sea, land, and air delivery systems) is proceeding at a glacial pace. Our defense-industrial base has been allowed to seriously atrophy. Our hypersonic-weapons program is lagging those of Russia and China. Our missile defenses are much too limited.

 

Nearly everyone realizes that the holiday from history is over — the Russian invasion of Ukraine has put a punctuation mark on it, if anyone had any doubt. Yet an unwillingness to spend the necessary resources, an ideological hostility to nukes and missile defense among Democrats, and continued soft-headedness are preventing an effort commensurate to the stakes.

 

Recent decisions by Washington and Moscow around ICBM tests illustrate divergent approaches. In early March, the Biden administration canceled a scheduled test launch of a Minuteman III in order to supposedly diminish tensions with Russia, then in the process of trying to occupy Kyiv. In mid April, Putin went ahead and tested for the first time a Sarmat missile, a beast of an ICBM with massive throw weight. If that wasn’t message enough, Putin commented that the missile will “provide food for thought for those who, in the heat of frenzied aggressive rhetoric, try to threaten our country.”

 

Russia has been making nuclear threats going back to 2007, and has been making them more explicitly since the Ukraine war. As Keith Payne of the National Institute for Public Policy points out, these threats are different from those that undergirded the dynamic of classic deterrence during the Cold War, the so-called balance of terror. Russia has been using the prospect of its first use of nuclear weapons to warn the West off from interfering too directly with its expansionist designs in Europe.

 

It is easy to forget that deterrence isn’t just about a country preventing a nuclear attack on its territory — again, the Cold War model. It is about constraining the actions of the other side more broadly. This has been brought home in the Ukraine war. The Russians, for instance, deterred us from giving Ukraine the MiG-29 jets that Poland had offered to transfer to the Ukrainians via Ramstein Air Base in Germany.

 

Indeed, Russia’s nuclear capability and its potential willingness to use it has been top of mind for NATO throughout the conflict. It’s behind the constant warnings that a misstep could cause World War III. Reports suggest that China has noticed and feels an even greater incentive to put itself in a similar position of being able to deter the U.S. in a war over Taiwan.

 

***

 

So, for the U.S., reacting appropriately to the new strategic environment is about maintaining its freedom from undue constraint in the international arena, as well as deterring a nuclear attack.

 

Russia has matched its nuclear saber-rattling with a long-running, determined program to build up and modernize its arsenal. Mark Schneider, a Russia expert with the National Institute for Public Policy, believes that Russia has two to four times the number of warheads that the United States has, and more than 5,000 tactical nuclear warheads, many of them low-yield. These smaller weapons aren’t covered by the New START treaty, which applies only to U.S. and Russian strategic weapons, and suit the Russian “escalate to win” doctrine of using small nukes to make an adversary stand down in an otherwise conventional conflict.

 

The Russians have been modernizing their nuclear force since 1997 and upgrading every aspect of their triad. Admiral Chas Richard, head of the U.S. Strategic Command, said in congressional testimony, “It is easier to describe what they’re not modernizing, pretty much nothing, than what they are, which is pretty much everything, including several never-before-seen capabilities.”

 

China has been as active. Admiral Richard calls its buildup “breathtaking” and refers to it as “a strategic breakout.” The latest Pentagon estimate is that China will quadruple its force by 2030, reaching 1,000 warheads.

 

Beijing isn’t stinting on anything related to its program — it conducted 250 ballistic-missile tests in 2020, more than every other nation combined; it has been building more than 200 missile silos in Gansu Province and the Xinjiang region, both in its west; it has gone from 120 sensor and reconnaissance satellites in space not too long ago to more than 200. The U.S. believes that China has achieved its own triad and has the ability to “launch under warning,” or before enemy missiles strike its territory, a capability that only the U.S. and Russia have had previously.

 

Dean Cheng, an expert on the Chinese military at the Heritage Foundation, believes that China’s posture is beginning to look less like those of France and the U.K., which have relied on so-called minimum deterrence — the ability only to exact some price from an attacker, not to fight a nuclear war — and more like those of the United States and Russia.

 

The U.S. could, in effect, be up against two major nuclear powers, not just one.

 

Russia and China have also made concerted pushes on hypersonic missiles and are ahead of the U.S., which — in a common theme — took a long pause in investing in the technology.

 

The cliché is that hypersonics combine the attributes of ballistic missiles (speed and long range) with those of cruise missiles (maneuverability and low-altitude flight path). They provide more options to attack with a missile that is fast, precise, and able to complicate tracking and targeting. ICBMs were good enough during the Cold War because there were no defenses to speak of and the targeting didn’t have to be particularly exact given that the size of their nuclear payloads would make up for near-misses. Now there’s a desire to have the capability to hit the same sort of targets and do it with conventional munitions as well as nuclear.

 

A conventionally armed hypersonic missile could hit highly mobile targets from a distance on the battlefield, and a nuclear-armed hypersonic missile could target a nation’s political leadership, again with diminished response time.

 

***

 

What to do about all of this? First of all, the U.S. simply needs more nuclear weapons. The New START Treaty limits us to 1,550 strategic warheads, which isn’t enough. “Since effective deterrence requires targeting what potential enemy leaders value,” former arms-control official Franklin Miller writes in the Wall Street Journal, “we must be able to threaten, separately and in combination, both Russia’s and China’s key assets — including their leaders’ ability to command and control the state, their military forces, and the industrial potential to sustain war. New START constrains U.S. forces below the levels needed in the near future to accomplish this.”

 

We should get out of New START, which President Biden foolishly extended for another five years immediately upon taking office. The old arms-control logic that we can’t build new nukes because it will provoke our adversaries into acquiring more nukes obviously doesn’t apply, if it ever did — Russia and China are building apace regardless. Plus, arms-control treaties make little sense if China — our chief adversary and a growing nuclear threat — isn’t joining them. And it won’t.

 

We also need different kinds of nuclear weapons, especially low-yield warheads to counter the Russian threat. It’s not enough to have city-busting weapons and tell ourselves that if Russia goes nuclear in a battlefield setting, we will wipe out its population centers in retaliation in what would become a civilizational apocalypse. That’s simply not credible.

 

And we need to catch up as quickly as we can with our modernization. The Minuteman, the Cold War–era missile that is a pillar of our force, is very long in the tooth. No one, according to Admiral Richard, makes the technologically obsolete launch switches that go into every launch command center. He compared making the inside of these switches to asking a company to make a dial-up modem, and said that “the Air Force has been consistently pulling rabbits out of the hat to solve these problems.”

 

Holding together a key missile system with baling wire and duct tape is not exactly the approach one would expect of a superpower entering a period of heightened nuclear threat.

 

Moreover, our defenses are not nearly what they should be. As a Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS) report authored by Tom Karako and Masao Dahlgren notes, the small number of surface-based radars we use for ballistic-missile defense is inadequate to defend against hypersonic missiles. The radars can’t see over the horizon. This means that they can only track hypersonic missiles late in their trajectory, giving us very little time to muster a defense.

 

We need a much greater presence in space. With space sensors, we can track a hypersonic missile all along its trajectory. We’ll need large numbers in different orbits to make it harder for Russia or China to take them out in a conflict. Space-sensor constellations were part of Ronald Reagan’s vision of the Strategic Defense Initiative. In the ensuing decades, launch costs have declined and the associated technology has improved, yet very little progress has been made.

 

And we have to acquire a new, hypersonic interceptor. Our current so-called midcourse interceptors are supposed to destroy ballistic missiles in the relatively forgiving (for a missile, that is) environment of space. Fixing and hitting a high-speed maneuverable object within the atmosphere is an entirely different task.

 

We don’t have the luxury of defending against only part of the missile threat. If we don’t have a defense against a certain missile, it puts a premium on our adversaries’ acquiring exactly those missiles. If we can’t stop hypersonic missiles, it creates the opening in, say, a war with the U.S. over Taiwan for the Chinese to use hypersonic weapons to knock out our radar at a base and then follow up with ballistic missiles. They’d also use hypersonic missiles to push our forward military presence back as far as possible.

 

Our challenges in the area of hypersonic missiles bring home how we have let our defense-industrial base erode. It’s hard to keep engineers with expertise in hypersonic technology if the funding isn’t reliable, and it hasn’t been. We don’t have enough wind tunnels for testing. “The shortage of facilities to model surface chemical reactions, conduct material screening, verify thermal protection system design, and support scramjet engine testing has bottlenecked the development of more advanced models,” the CSIS report notes.

 

We can’t afford ever again to so neglect our ability to research, design, and manufacture high-end weapons technology essential to our safety.

 

Finally, there’s the issue of missile defense more generally, which in the future has to be in space. To this point, we have limited our defenses to try to take out a one-off rogue-state attack or an accidental launch by Russia or China. Our ground-based system provides some cushion here. But we have refused even to try to widen the net to defend against a major Russian or Chinese attack — in part to avoid provoking Russia or China, in part because of the deep animus from Democratic administrations toward missile defense.

 

The fact is that we will never build enough ground-based interceptors to deal with a larger threat. But a space-based defense, relying on speed-of-light, high-energy lasers, opens the vista of potentially defeating or significantly diminishing a Russian or Chinese attack. This may seem fantastical, but we live in an age of technological wonders. Certainly, it makes no sense for President Biden to warn so forcefully of a potential World War III with Russia and not undertake the effort to protect ourselves to the maximum extent possible if the worst comes. If the U.S. government won’t make this effort, someone should tweet @elonmusk that we need defensive space lasers as soon as possible for the good of humanity.

 

No doubt, taking all of this on is a heavy and expensive lift, as one would expect after 30 years of neglect. Reasonable people can disagree about what particular systems we should prioritize, the best tactics, and exact levels of funding.

 

What no one can deny is that the era of delusion is over. Now, we need to act like it.

How to Press Our Advantage in the Wake of Russia’s Failures

By Kevin D. Williamson

Friday, April 29, 2022

 

The U.S. failed to meet its objectives in Iraq and Afghanistan for the same reason it failed to meet its objectives in Vietnam and Korea years ago: political failure.

 

Russia is failing to meet its objectives in Ukraine because of a different kind of reason: military failure.

That bears considering.

 

I do not wish here to relitigate Afghanistan and Iraq. Suffice it to say that if our only objectives had been deposing the Taliban in the course of hunting down al-Qaeda in Afghanistan and deposing the Saddam Hussein regime in Iraq, then we would have accomplished them without much difficulty and with minimal expenditure and loss of life; in fact, our objectives were grandiose and our political commitment unequal to that grandiosity. We were not ready to do in Afghanistan and Iraq what we did in Japan after World War II, and the cultural and economic specifics of those cases may have made a Japan-style reconstruction impossible at any level of American commitment.

 

The expenditures were heavy. The loss of life was considerable. We should always keep in mind the human toll of those wars. But there have been advantages, too: In essence, the United States went to war after September 11, 2001, and stayed at war for 20 years. The U.S. military is not only the world’s most sophisticated and well-equipped, it is also the most experienced of the world’s major militaries. As of 2019, we had almost 1.5 million veterans under the age of 34 and another 4 million aged 35 to 54. U.S. forces know their fighting capacities, know their logistical capabilities, know their strengths and their weaknesses. Our troops are quite limited in their ability to act as a national police force abroad or as an instrument of state-capacity building in countries whose people do not wish to be developed along Western liberal-democratic lines, but, as a fighting force, the U.S. military is like nothing else the world has ever seen. It is unmatched in its combination of firepower and brainpower.

 

The Russian military, on the other hand, turns out to be a paper tiger. While many of the world’s military experts had rated the Russian army second only to that of the United States in terms of its readiness and capability, Ukraine has exposed that as a fiction. Every army worries about bullets and missiles, but the Russians have been undone by much less lethal challenges — rain, among others. Russian armored vehicles have fallen to Ukrainian agricultural implements because of cheap and defective Chinese tires. Teen-aged conscripts rounded up from the schoolyards of Vladivostok have been shipped off to war, ill-informed and ill-prepared, and told they are hunting Nazis, which surely is understood to be a tall tale even in the hinterlands. Some Russian troops apparently were informed that they were going to war only as they were crossing into Ukraine. Russian corruption has left them poorly fed and poorly equipped, and Russian military incompetence has even fearsome Russian armored divisions being deployed in a way that one British military analyst describes as “suicidal.” A British estimate has the number of Russian dead in Ukraine already at 15,000 — more than were lost in the Russians’ decade-long war in Afghanistan.

 

The Russian army was fearsome on paper, and the Russian state is very focused and capable when it comes to a small number of tasks: terrorizing its critics and looting its people. But when they hit the field in a real confrontation, the Russians fell apart. It is worth keeping in mind that the Ukrainian government also is ineffectual and corrupt — only a little less corrupt than the Russian government by most prewar estimates — and that the Ukrainian military wasn’t exactly splendidly equipped and battle-hardened, etc. The Ukrainians are fighting bravely and deserve our admiration — and our help — but there were pretty good reasons for Moscow to think that it could conquer Ukraine with a few paratroopers and special forces.

 

Now, the United States finds itself in a position of great advantage. And we should work to preserve the advantages we have. By this I do not mean to put forward the horrifying proposition that we should send our forces into war willy-nilly just to keep them in practice, but we should take whatever steps we can to preserve our advantage in experience, in our knowledge base, and in our mastery of the practical logistical and support operations that have so flummoxed the Russians, without which fighting a modern war effectively is impossible.

 

We should also invest in one of the most important force-multipliers we can find: credible, confidence-inspiring missile defense. When Ronald Reagan proposed to develop a proficient missile-defense system in the 1980s, Democrats mocked it as “Star Wars,” a sci-fi fantasy. We have made considerable advances on that front since, as have a few other nations. But the most important limiting factor in our current confrontation with Vladimir Putin’s junta is Russian nuclear weapons, both the tactical and short-range weapons that are a threat to Ukraine and its NATO neighbors and the long-range missiles that are an existential threat to the United States.

 

Without those Russian nuclear weapons, the U.S. scope of military action in Europe would be effectively unlimited. That is why the United States should be working against those nuclear weapons on two fronts: by developing our missile defenses and by making the nuclear disarmament of Russia a strategic priority. Of course, Moscow is not going to agree to such disarmament unless it has no other choice. And putting Moscow in that no-choice position, through economic and diplomatic means — and through military means if Putin makes the mistake of attacking one of our NATO allies — should be a guiding principle in our current relations with Russia. We can hope for a better and more decent Russia post-Putin but, for now, we have to work with the Russia we have.

 

The Russia we have does not look as fearsome today as it did a few months ago. Our position toward Moscow should reflect that.

Nina Jankowicz, Biden’s ‘Disinformation Board’ Chief, Must Be Placed in an Ankle Monitor

By Charles C. W. Cooke

Friday, April 29, 2022

 

Linguistically, the name of the Department of Homeland Security has always sounded a little off to me — a little . . . well, Russian. So I suppose that it is only fitting that it should be the DHS, and not, say, the Post Office, that will house America’s newest Ministry of Truth. Per Secretary Mayorkas, his already-sprawling agency will be adding a “Disinformation Governance Board” to its offerings, the better to fight the “huge threat to our homeland” that is free American citizens saying things that the federal government doesn’t like.

 

At the head of this new venture will sit an extremely strange woman named Nina Jankowicz, who, if her other activities are any indication, was apparently asked to choose between agreeing to the role at DHS and being turned down after yet another audition for the musical Wicked. A cursory look at Jankowicz’s social-media history suggests that, while she is certainly interested in disinformation, her passion is dressing up as Liza Minnelli. In one video, Jankowicz adapts the tune of “Supercalifragilisticexpialidocious” to convey that “Information laundering is really quite ferocious / It’s when a huckster takes some lies and makes them sound precocious.” In another, she offers up that pornographic twist on the Harry Potter books for which we’ve all been clamoring. “I helped him solve the mystery of the egg,” she warbles. “But I’d like to solve the mystery between his legs.” Her canon is limited in scope, but what I’ve seen of it is enough to test even the most committed civil libertarian in his opposition to casual waterboarding.

 

Fielding questions about the move, Jen Psaki told reporters yesterday that “it sounds like the objective of the board is to prevent disinformation and misinformation from traveling around the country in a range of communities,” before adding, “I’m not sure who opposes that effort?” As it happens, I can help Psaki out here: I do. I oppose it, because it’s grotesque and indefensible. If by “prevent disinformation and misinformation from traveling around the country” Psaki means that the federal government intends to censor its critics, then Jankowicz and her friends will immediately find themselves in court. And if she doesn’t mean that — if she means that Jankowicz and her team will act as PR agents for the Department of Homeland Security — then there is no need for anything as lofty as a “Disinformation Governance Board” in the first instance. The DHS already has a press office.

 

Given the manner in which Jankowicz’s appointment has been received by pretty much everyone, we are likely to see some backtracking over the coming days. But at this point, it’s too late for all that. Instead, we need some guarantees. At the very least, Americans ought to know what Jankowicz and Co. are up to at every point their “board” is in action. Her meetings must be taped; her emails must be made public; her phone calls must be recorded; and, as a modest prophylactic measure, she ought to wear a bodycam whenever she is carrying out her duties. This is the United States of America, not Cuba, and, as a matter of elementary principle, we ought not to have anything called the “Disinformation Governance Board of the Department of Homeland Security.” If, for whatever reason, the president disagrees with that principle, he must be made to account for it. Adding 24/7 surveillance and closely monitored ankle bracelets to figures such as Nina Jankowicz is the minimum the citizenry can demand in return.

All told, it will be tough to find a more perfect example of Modern American Progressivism than this for a good while. It exhibits an entirely undeserved epistemological self-confidence. It is driven by a niche moral panic that begins and ends online. It is unabashedly authoritarian in concept and in tone. It involves the addition to the public payroll of one of the silliest people in all the land. And, like so much that the contemporary Left ends up doing, it has pushed the vast majority of psychologically normal voters into paroxysms of derisive laughter. One of the most remarkable features of our age is that the more het up about an issue the American Left seems to be, the less serious its saviors seem to become. David Harsanyi is correct to argue that the very idea of “the state putting an imprimatur on ‘truth’” is both “dangerous to freedom” and “laughable,” but I wonder if he is perhaps overestimating the extent to which the Democratic Party and its chums will ever be able to control America’s national conversation. We are told that we are in the midst of a chronic “information crisis,” and yet the best progressives can do to fight it is promote Brian Stelter, Taylor Lorenz, Jen Psaki, and Nina Jankowicz.

 

It’s almost as if . . .

Instead of Wiping Away Student Debt, Bring the Cost of College Back Down to Earth

By Arjun Singh

Friday, April 29, 2022

 

Why is a college education so expensive? It’s the key question that not enough people are asking. As the Biden administration hints at mass student-debt cancellations, conservatives and progressives have been embroiled in a debate about the fairness of the move. But the debate we should be focusing on concerns the cost of college and how to control it. The real villains here are the universities.

 

In 1992, the average tuition for an undergraduate degree at a public, four-year university in the United States was $2,349. The average tuition at a private university was $10,294. Today, the average is $11,631 for public and $43,775 for private — increases of 495 percent and 425 percent, respectively. This is nearly five times the increase in the rate of inflation in that period.

 

Clearly, this increase isn’t due to skyrocketing operating costs. What has changed is the ability of colleges and universities to leech off the taxpayer, with students as the unknown middlemen. It was also in 1992 that President George H. W. Bush signed the Higher Education Act, creating the precursor of the Federal Direct Student Loan Program, the current system. Students could take on tens of thousands of dollars in easily available credit, repayable after they left college.

 

Demand for a college education soared, while the financial impacts for students and their families were deferred. The public was persuaded that “more people going to college” was an unmitigated good. Under the veil of that notion, universities realized a grand opportunity to make money, funded by the federal taxpayer. This is on top of the enormous endowments, donations, and research grants that colleges also enjoy. Elite colleges have capitalized on parents’ eagerness to have their children admitted to the very best schools, which families view as a ticket to success in life.

 

All this, while higher education’s nonprofit status — requiring schools to invest surpluses back into the university — makes them tax exempt. It’s a crass act of profiteering. In 2018, the approximately 4,000 American colleges and universities took in a combined $1.068 trillion in revenue, tax free. That averages out to about $250 million per school.

 

Bringing down tuition, rather than wiping away student debt, ought to be our focus. Regulate colleges’ tuition fees. Regulate their room-and-board fees. Regulate their faculty salaries. Most of all, shrink the bloated administrations and regulate the salaries of administrators. Federal authority to do this, directly or otherwise, shouldn’t be hard to find. Setting conditions on colleges’ receipt of billions in taxpayer-funded subsidies and grants is a good place to start.

Disney Just Fired Its Corporate-Affairs Chief

By Kyle Smith

Friday, April 29, 2022

 

Both Disney CEO Bob Chapek and its previous CEO Bob Iger made the spectacularly unwise choice to make Disney (as far as I can tell) the only major company to interject itself into Florida’s politics over its new parental-rights law, so naturally it’s . . . the head of corporate affairs who got canned.

 

Geoff Morrell, a former Pentagon spokesman who spent only three weeks as Disney’s head of corporate affairs, was said in a terse Friday-afternoon corporate memo to be “leaving the company to pursue other opportunities.”

 

Deadline reports: “The hope at the highest level is that Morrell’s removal and the new reorganization will allow the media giant to come out from underneath the falling debris of the current situation.” And who caused that debris to fall? It wasn’t Morrell. It was Chapek and Iger. Chapek preposterously claimed to employees on March 11, “Speaking to you, reading your messages, and meeting with you have helped me better understand how painful our silence was. It is clear that this is not just an issue about a bill in Florida, but instead yet another challenge to basic human rights.” He continued: “You needed me to be a stronger ally in the fight for equal rights and I let you down. I am sorry.” Even more inflammatory was Iger on March 31: “A lot of these issues are not necessarily political. It’s about right and wrong. So, I happen to feel and I tweeted an opinion about the ‘Don’t Say Gay’ bill in Florida. To me, it wasn’t about politics. It is about what is right and what is wrong, and that just seemed wrong. It seemed potentially harmful to kids.”

 

Parents were incensed. Both CEOs should have simply shrugged at Florida’s law, which had nothing to do with Disney anyway, but instead they allowed a handful of woke activists at the company to goad them into denouncing the law. Then the company lied about its supposed lobbying against the bill (which did not happen), and all that was accomplished was to make both sides angry. (The activist Left continued to shriek that Disney must “do something,” while conservatives and centrists resented Disney’s interference with parent-driven policies.)

 

Then Ron DeSantis and the Florida Republicans brought the hammer down on Disney’s special self-government status in central Florida. The Mouse never should have squeaked.

Woke Warriors

By Mike Gallagher

Thursday, April 28, 2022

 

Wolf Warrior II, released in 2017, is the second-highest-grossing Chinese film of all time. Early in the movie, the hero, a former People’s Liberation Army special-ops soldier named Leng Feng, sums up the film’s main message: “The Americans are good for nothing.” Posters promoting the movie featured the tagline “Anyone who offends China, no matter how remote, must be exterminated.” In the climactic scene, an American mercenary named “Big Daddy” is about to kill Leng Feng. As Big Daddy attempts to jam a knife into Leng Feng’s throat, he gloats: “People like you will always be inferior to people like me. Get used to it. Get f***ing used to it.” Spoiler alert: Leng Feng improbably turns the tables, brutally stabbing Big Daddy to death with a bullet he wears as a necklace, the same bullet that Big Daddy used years before to kill Leng Feng’s fiancée.

 

The movie’s message may be familiar territory for those who have watched the diplomatic corps of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) operate over the past few years. Responding to the call of General Secretary Xi Jinping to display more “fighting spirit” — and inspired by Leng Feng’s on-screen heroics — CCP officials have adopted a posture known as “Wolf Warrior” diplomacy. CCP Wolf Warriors aggressively confront and criticize China’s competitors abroad and promote CCP propaganda on American social-media platforms (to which Chinese citizens don’t have access). Both the Wolf Warriors and the Wolf Warrior movies are part of a broader effort to discredit democratic and liberal values globally and to demonstrate the superiority of socialism with Chinese characteristics.

 

Towards that end, the Wolf Warriors have blamed the U.S. Army for the Covid-19 pandemic, threatened nuclear strikes on U.S. allies Australia and Japan, and whitewashed the genocide of Muslim and other racial and ethnic minorities in Xinjiang. But their favorite pastime is painting America as an imperialist, racist hellscape responsible for almost all the world’s troubles. For example, last year Zhao Lijian, the spokesman for the Chinese foreign ministry, tweeted to his million followers that America “is the worst among developed countries in labor rights abuses, which can be traced back to its history of trafficking & abusing black slaves that spans hundreds of years.” During protests throughout America in the summer of 2020, the Wolf Warriors seized on American division by hijacking “Black Lives Matter” and similar slogans. During the recent U.S.-hosted Summit for Democracy, the Wolf Warriors posted on Twitter political cartoons criticizing “US democracy” and depicting police officers choking the Statue of Liberty.

 

Wolf Warriors were on the prowl in Alaska in March 2021, during the first meeting between CCP and Biden-administration officials. Yang Jiechi, the Chinese director of the Office of the Central Commission for Foreign Affairs, launched into a 16-minute diatribe, claiming that America wields force and financial hegemony to smear China, topple foreign regimes, and “massacre people of other countries.” Yang argued that America has no authority to criticize China’s human-rights record because “many people within the United States actually have little confidence in the democracy of the United States. . . . There are many problems within the United States regarding human rights, which is admitted by the U.S. itself as well . . . such as Black Lives Matter.”

 

Driving this propaganda is the CCP’s all-consuming insecurity over its legitimacy, both domestic and international. It can be tempting to dismiss Wolf Warriors as paranoid propagandists overplaying their hands and producing unintentionally comical scenes. That would be a mistake, not only because Wolf Warriors are playing to a receptive audience in China but also because they are weaponizing the worst beliefs held by the woke Left in America. The message of Wolf Warriors and wokesters is nearly identical: America is a systemically racist, imperialist bully that is a force for evil in the world. Taking its cues from critical race theory, the woke Left seeks to transform America and its allegedly racist institutions in the name of “diversity, equity, and inclusion” (DEI).

 

Like a virus escaping from a laboratory, this radical ideology, once confined to college campuses, has infected the general population. No American institution is immune — not even the U.S. military. Consider that, in his first week on the job, Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin ordered every military unit within 60 days to spend a full day conducting a “stand-down” to confront “extremism in the ranks.” As part of a PowerPoint presentation prepared by the Joint Chiefs of Staff, service members were forced to watch a TED Talk asking, “What is up with us white people?” and claiming that systemic racism is embedded in every American institution. Austin also created a new position, “senior adviser for human capital, diversity, equity, and inclusion.” He hired a man named Bishop Garrison for the position and to run his “countering extremism working group.” And though Austin could not define extremism when questioned by the House Armed Services Committee (HASC) five months later, Garrison can. Rather than focusing on violent or illegal behavior, his past tweets brand all those who voted for former president Donald Trump as extremists and racists.

 

The U.S. Military Academy at West Point likewise required cadets to attend a seminar on DEI and promoted presentations titled “White Power at West Point” and “Understanding Whiteness and White Rage.” When questioned by HASC members last year, General Mark Milley, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said he was offended by the accusation that the military is woke. He then defended DEI instruction, saying: “I want to understand white rage, and I’m white, and I want to understand it. . . . I’ve read Mao Zedong. I’ve read Karl Marx. I’ve read Lenin. That doesn’t make me a communist.”

 

***

 

We read Mao and Lenin to understand our enemies and their tactics. We do not read them for ideas of how to better run our military. Yet that is how some military leaders are approaching woke texts: as useful tools to help better run the Pentagon. For example, Admiral Mike Gilday, the chief of Naval Operations, included Ibram X. Kendi’s How to Be an Antiracist in his “professional reading program,” which is supposed to help sailors “outthink our competitors.” But rather than take aim at our competitors, Kendi takes aim at a core tenet of American civil-rights law — opposition to racial discrimination: As Kendi puts it in his book, “the only remedy to racist discrimination is antiracist discrimination.”

 

By defending DEI, these military leaders are not simply pointing out that America’s E pluribus unum melting pot is an asset for U.S. military recruitment and that we should be proud that we live in a diverse nation with a diverse military, a military that should not discriminate on the basis of anything except merit and ability to accomplish the mission. Nor are they making the narrower argument that, as the recent wars in Iraq and Afghanistan illustrate, a dearth of specialized linguistic and cultural skills can cause death on the battlefield. Milley and Gilday instead are asking the Armed Forces to embrace a brand of identity politics according to which people are judged by the color of their skin rather than on their merits as individuals.

 

They are also making specific and dubious claims, based on bad social science, about racial and gender diversity. Consider recent comments by Vice Admiral John Nowell Jr., the chief of Navy Personnel, who suggested that we need to reinstate photos for selection boards so that skin color can be factored into promotion decisions. “We know that diverse teams that are led inclusively will perform better,” Nowell asserted. Vice Admiral Roy Kitchener, the commander of Naval Surface Forces, recently made the same claim at the Navy’s first-ever Surface Force DEI Symposium: “It’s a proven fact that the more diverse you are, you’re going to be a better and more high-performing organization. But I just see it simply from the warfare perspective, where being able to have a team that can think with that kind of agility against an opponent that probably doesn’t have that agility is a huge advantage.”

 

Here Navy leaders talk about diverse thought as essential to warfighting success but then define diversity purely in terms of race and gender, which implies that race and gender determine perspectives. They even quantify the claim that “diversity is our strength,” in a report called “Task Force One Navy” (TF1N). Though TF1N concedes that the Navy is more diverse than the U.S. population, it offers approximately 60 DEI recommendations.

 

TF1N asserts that “diverse teams are 58 percent more likely than non-diverse teams to accurately assess a situation.” Here TF1N cites a scholarly article about price bubbles in experimental markets. Experimenters used 180 strangers “trained in business or finance” whose exposure to “diversity” meant briefly seating white traders in a waiting room with other traders of whom “at least one” was “an ethnic minority.” The test subjects, alone in their “separate cubicles,” then made fake stock trades through a computer terminal. According to the study’s authors, the benefit in market-price assessments emerged because “ethnic diversity facilitates friction. This friction can increase conflict in some group settings, whether a work team, a community, or a region.”

 

Contrary to TF1N’s portrayal, the study says nothing about teams (decisions are made alone by individuals), nothing about assessing military “situations” (it is about pricing and purchasing decisions), and nothing about how much diversity is required to receive any potential benefits (the “diversity” of the study involved including as little as a single member of an ethnic minority).

 

TF1N also asserts that “gender-diverse organizations are 15 percent more likely to outperform other organizations” and that “diverse organizations are 35 percent more likely to outperform their non-diverse counterparts.” Those claims are inconsistent with the extant literature on gender, since recent meta-analyses have found either no effect or a negative one.

 

TF1N selectively cites “Diversity Matters,” a study from McKinsey in 2015. The McKinsey researchers used a formula such that a company with one white, one Native American, one Latino, and seven black members would score as less diverse than a board with six white and four black members. The report also lumps data on 366 public companies into quartiles, comparing only the bottom quartile to the top quartile and thereby conveniently omitting half the data set.

 

It should alarm us that the same military leaders we trust to train our sons and daughters for war are building their DEI agenda upon a foundation of fringe history and shoddy social science. Their underlying assumption that we can apply (questionable) general findings from academia and the private sector to the specific business of asking young men and women to kill and be killed for their country assaults common sense. Those who view DEI as harmless ignore recent evidence demonstrating that initiatives such as training to recognize and counter implicit bias are ineffective or even intensify intergroup hostility.

 

DEI is driving important policy changes that harm readiness by tying up commanders, units, and the military legal system in subjective investigations into alleged thought crimes. Last December, drawing on the work of Garrison’s group on countering extremism, Secretary Austin changed the DOD’s policy to include the prohibition of “likes” and retweets of social-media content deemed to promote “extremist activities.” Such content might include opposition to vaccine mandates and wokeness training. Though the services are still trying to figure out how to implement the policy, commanding officers will now have to spend time policing social-media use.

 

Here again, bad social science lurks in the background. The DOD’s understanding of extremism was largely informed by a civilian database, the Profiles of Individual Radicalization in the United States (PIRUS), that publicly reports information on “extremists” between 1948 and 2018. The researchers who maintain PIRUS do not provide access to the years of data (2019 through 2021) that are apparently informing the DOD’s current thinking, and they have warned that their data may not be representative because their measure of extremism mostly “reflects news reporting trends over time,” as it is “easier to identify individuals who are associated with the groups that are under intense media scrutiny.”

 

The Center for Naval Analyses, a federally funded think tank, also produced a report on racial extremism in the military. The “most critical” recommendation of the report is “recognition that the problem of racial extremism is not one of ‘a few bad apples,’ but is in fact a more pervasive challenge.” The only evidence offered for that sweeping claim is a footnote citing an article, from the New Republic, referencing the opinion of a professor of Middle Eastern studies who was affiliated with a progressive think tank.

 

***

 

With such a poor empirical and methodological foundation, at best DEI will waste service members’ time and taxpayers’ money. At worst, it will undermine the foundation of our modern, all-volunteer force. We want that force to consist of the best and the brightest. The military is an elite and meritocratic organization where only the most fit, disciplined, and lethal individuals should thrive, regardless of gender, race, or socioeconomic status. To that end, the military obsessively measures pull-ups, marksmanship, and a general ability to endure pain. Diversity may be a strength for America, but it cannot be an organizing principle for the Pentagon.

 

DEI initiatives risk sapping the strength of our armed forces. By co-opting the woke Left’s obsession with racial and gender diversity, the Pentagon’s DEI evangelists are ironically stifling the very type of diversity that might improve military performance: intellectual diversity. The growing DEI bureaucracy inside the military is the same woke commissariat that has put an ideological straitjacket on America’s educational institutions. The DEI agenda promotes a culture of conformity that elevates the mindless repetition of dogmas over a true exchange of ideas.

 

Such an environment risks further politicization of the officer corps. That could sap morale, sow division between officers and enlisted servicemen, and damage civil–military relations. A November 2021 poll from the Reagan Institute indicates that the number of Americans with “a great deal” of trust and confidence in the military has declined from 70 percent in 2018 to 45 percent today, with confidence lower among young Americans than any other cohort. If trust continues to drop, it will become difficult to recruit and retain talented warfighters. If the DEI agenda sends the signal that, to get promoted, one must affirm progressive dogmas or spend more time on inclusivity training rather than training for war, the services will attract fewer warfighters and more risk-averse political drones.

 

Warfighting, not DEI, must be the North Star of our military. As Marine Corps Doctrinal Publication 1, Warfighting, reminds us, the military has two basic functions: “waging war and preparing for war.” Further, “any military activities that do not contribute to the conduct of a present war are justifiable only if they contribute to preparedness for a possible future one.” By distracting from warfighting, and alienating current and prospective warfighters, DEI risks undermining readiness at a time when the DOD is struggling with preventable peacetime accidents that are killing more service members than combat is.

 

For example, in 2017 the USS Fitzgerald and the USS McCain collided with merchant vessels in separate incidents, killing 17 sailors. According to the official Navy investigation, which cited complacency, substandard training, and a lack of basic seamanship skills, the accidents were “avoidable.” A recently released investigation of the burning of the USS Bonhomme Richard found multiple leadership failures, “a pattern of failed drills, minimal crew participation, an absence of basic knowledge.” A separate investigation into the culture of the surface Navy after these accidents identified “an insufficient focus on warfighting skills, the perception of a zero-defect mentality accompanied by a culture of micromanagement, and over-sensitivity and responsiveness to modern media culture.”

 

Then there is the fiasco of our humiliating surrender and botched withdrawal in Afghanistan. Chairman Milley tried to spin it as a “logistical success.” CCP Wolf Warriors immediately exploited the situation to send a message to Taiwan that America could not be counted on in a crisis. Legitimate criticism of operational failures like those in Afghanistan helps the military learn, but embracing DEI disinformation merely validates the propaganda of our primary adversary. Moreover, while Pentagon leaders say that “diversity is our strength,” they do not apply these metrics to our enemies. They do not deduct accuracy from Chinese missiles in Taiwan war games because those missiles are not fired by inclusive, diverse teams.

 

This matters because, while the People’s Liberation Army prepares for war over Taiwan, CCP Wolf Warriors have launched a preemptive ideological strike designed to weaken America’s will to fight, poisoning many of our citizens against our nation. The stakes of this ideological competition between two incompatible systems of government include values such as human rights, freedom of conscience, and the principle that objective truth is knowable and independent of political dogma. If we give in to the Wolf Warrior fiction that America is a racist country whose military is rife with white supremacists, we will have disarmed ourselves in this ideological combat. If we succumb to the delusion that America is irredeemably racist, we will have given up one of our most potent ideological weapons: the idea that America is a free, multiethnic society, whereas the CCP is a profoundly racist and chauvinist entity, enslaving a million Uyghur and Kazakh Muslims in pursuit of the destruction of non–Han Chinese languages and cultures.

 

The Battle at Lake Changjin, a three-hour film set in the Korean War, recently surpassed Wolf Warrior II as the highest-grossing Chinese movie of all time. It stars the same actor who plays Leng Feng in Wolf Warrior. The movie was financed as part of the CCP’s massive propaganda campaign leading up to the 100th anniversary of the party’s founding. It depicts the 17-day battle of Chosin Reservoir, at which 120,000 Chinese troops surprised and encircled the 30,000 U.N. Command troops, forcing a fighting retreat from Chosin to the port of Hungnam. The CCP-run Global Times praised the movie, which portrays Chinese troops winning against impossible odds, for pushing “the patriotic sentiment of people across the country to a peak amid the tense China-US competition and China’s effective control of the epidemic.” The message was clear: China is ready for war, and the Americans can be beaten.

 

In its Wolf Warrior fervor, the CCP missed, however, the point of the battle that Marines today know as “Frozen Chosin.” There, 8,000 Marines fought their way through those twelve Chinese divisions, not only surviving hand-to-hand combat and subzero temperatures but also inflicting disproportionate casualties on the enemy. They fought as fire teams, squads, and platoons that had recently been integrated. “The politicians had slashed military budgets so deep that many units were less than half strength,” wrote First Lieutenant Joseph Owen, commander of the Baker-One-Seven mortar platoon, in his memoir Colder Than Hell. “We could use all the men we could get. The overriding thought was that,” white or black, “a Marine was a Marine.” These “Chosin Few” held the line against communism. With faith in the goodness of our nation, we must do so again.

The Biden Administration’s Skewed Priorities

By Jim Geraghty

Friday, April 29, 2022

 

Over in The New Republic, Daniel Strauss writes a piece with the headline, “Republicans’ Midterm Play: Scare Up Another Border Crisis.”

 

The thing is, though, the Republican Party doesn’t need to “scare up” a border crisis; there really is an actual, genuine border crisis that is apparently hard to see from the offices of The New Republic. U.S. Customs and Border Patrol encounters with migrants at the southwest border jumped dramatically in March 2021, and have stayed high ever since.

 

If you live near the border, you probably think about illegal immigration and the consequences of it every day, or at least frequently, because you often see those consequences. If you live in other parts of the country — say, the well-off suburbs of a major northeastern city — you probably think about illegal immigration and the consequences of it much less frequently, or perhaps not at all. National Review's Carine Hajjar recently wrote a lengthy and detailed piece for the print magazine about life in Val Verde County, Texas, after riding along with border-patrol officials for a week:

 

Last month, Customs and Border Protection had 209,906 encounters — both expulsions and apprehensions — with migrants at the southern border. That number breaks a 22-year record. In March 2000, 98 percent of illegal immigrants were Mexican nationals. Last month, a record-breaking 39.5 percent were “long distance” migrants, meaning they were not from Mexico or Northern Triangle countries. Migrants far and wide are receiving a clear message: It’s easy to enter the U.S. illegally. And that message will only be reinforced by the termination of Title 42 in May. A Trump-era limit on asylum, Title 42 was invoked by the CDC in 2020 to mitigate the spread of Covid. The Biden administration has clung to it as its only remaining form of border control. But with the pandemic waning, it has become harder for the Biden administration to justify keeping Title 42. Without it, there will be a deluge. The Department of Homeland Security is preparing for up to 18,000 daily encounters.

 

“What we’re getting coming through here are the prior deports and criminals that have zero chance of ever getting any kind of asylum or paperwork to stay,” says a Kinney County officer while checking on Harris Ranch, where owner John Sewell manages over 30,000 acres with the help of his friend Jim Volcsko. The officer, who wished not to be named, mentions rape, aggravated robbery, and aggravated sexual assault of a child. Volcsko, a former CBP agent, chimes in: “There’s a lot of pedophilia.”

 

A trooper from the state’s department of public safety joins the conversation as we sit on the back porch of the ranch house: “For the most part, it’s all males. . . . They’re smuggling mostly people” (as opposed to drugs). Sewell speaks of an “unprecedented flow” in the last year. Just this morning, he had 15 migrants walk through.

 

Hajjar calls the current policy and circumstances at our southern border inhumane. “The lesson of all this suffering is clear,” she writes. “To have a truly humane border, and a system that keeps both migrants and Americans safe, there must be order.” The current chaos and widespread human trafficking isn’t good for the illegal migrants, they aren’t good for our border-patrol officers, and they aren’t good for our law-abiding legal immigrants and native-born citizens. It all seems to be working out pretty darn well for the coyotes and human smugglers, though.

 

Any commander-in-chief and White House staff worth their salt would look at the current U.S. border and see it as a dire and pressing crisis — particularly for a man who pledged “a presidency for all Americans.” Instead, there is a Mr. Magoo-like blindness, charging ahead with a policy that even loyal Democrats think could spell disaster. Senator Maggie Hassan (D., N.H.) seemed to suddenly remember that she’s facing reelection in six months and taped a video in front of the border fencing calling for more border-fencing construction. Back in 2018, she was not particularly enthusiastic about building additional border fencing:

 

Constructing a wall along the U.S.-Mexican border may not be the best barrier against the influx of drugs into Lawrence and New Hampshire communities, Sen. Maggie Hassan told reporters Monday.

 

Following a visit to both sides of the border last week, Hassan discussed the U.S. and Mexican governments’ efforts to stop drug cartels and the ferrying of drugs into the Granite State.

 

“In different situations, a physical barrier may be appropriate. There may be something they need first before that,” the senator said. “It is really clear from talking from to our border patrol agents that we need more tools are our disposal at the border to combat flow of drugs. We need more border patrol personnel, first and foremost, and we more infrastructure like roads for them to get to different portions of the border faster.”

 

It’s amazing what Senate Democrats discover in reelection years, huh?

 

Last week, Axios offered an unnerving report that even Homeland Security secretary Alejandro Mayorkas has privately told members of Congress he’s concerned with the Biden administration’s handling of its plans to lift Title 42 on May 23. Publicly, Mayorkas says Title 42 will end as scheduled.

 

You may have noticed that President Biden doesn’t talk about the southern border or migrants much. He discussed it briefly in the State of the Union Address, but on those rare occasions when he discusses illegal immigration, he prefers to focus on his plan to “allow undocumented individuals to apply for temporary legal status, with the ability to apply for green cards after five years if they pass criminal and national security background checks and pay their taxes. Dreamers, TPS holders, and immigrant farmworkers who meet specific requirements are eligible for green cards immediately under the legislation. After three years, all green card holders who pass additional background checks and demonstrate knowledge of English and U.S. civics can apply to become citizens.” Whether or not Biden is willing to call this policy an amnesty, it allows people who entered the country illegally to escape criminal prosecution and deportation and eventually become citizens. The prospect of amnesty is one of the factors that makes migrants in Central America conclude that trying to sneak across the border is worth the risk.

 

Contrast how the Biden administration sees illegal immigration, which worsened after it had been on the job for a month or two, to how the administration sees the issue of forgiving student loans.

 

The Atlantic’s Jerusalem Demsas, formerly of Vox, offers a surprisingly clear-eyed piece on who worries about student debt and how high a priority it is for them:

 

Just 13 percent of the country carries federal student debt. Gallup frequently asks Americans what they believe is the most important problem facing the country today. According to the Gallup analyst Justin McCarthy, the pollster is unable “to report the percentage of Americans who have mentioned student debt or student debt cancellation because it hasn’t garnered enough mentions to do so.” In 2022 so far, he told me via email, Gallup has conducted four polls on the question and “just one respondent mentioned this as the most important problem facing the nation.”

 

And then Demsas offers this particularly astute observation:

 

Advocates of debt cancellation are trying to build a coherent narrative for why a diverse coalition, many of whom have never attended college, should be in favor of forgiveness.

 

College-educated voters are not just dominant within the Democratic Party; they also dominate the media and, naturally, academia — two institutions that have significant power over what issues are brought to the fore. Importantly, academia and media have also become notoriously unstable work environments lacking sufficiently well-paying jobs. The demographics and precarity of these fields are likely playing a role in the prominence of the student-loan-forgiveness debate.

 

Illegal immigration isn’t often on the minds of the Democratic Party’s chattering class, so the administration pays it intermittent attention. But repaying those student loans looms heavily in the minds of the Democratic Party’s chattering class, so that policy proposal gets pushed to the forefront. Demsas notes that this proposal is akin to certain Democrats’ support for lifting the cap on the state and local tax deduction, a move that would primarily benefit upper-middle-class and wealthy suburbanites in places such as California, New York, and New Jersey. As racially diverse as the Democratic Party is, the party’s agenda is largely set by economically comfortable professionals in media, academia, certain corners of corporate America, and government workers.

How Much More, Exactly, Do America’s College Students Want?

By Charles C. W. Cooke

Thursday, April 28, 2022

 

This is a joke. But it’s also not:

When you strip away all the talk, that’s the case being made. “Give me lots of money because I want it.” “It’s a big part of my budget” is another way of saying, “I want more money.” “It would be good for the demand side of the economy” is another way of saying, “I want more money.” “College was expensive” is another way of saying, “I spent a lot of money on a service I wanted, and now I would like other people to pay for it instead.” Phrase it how you like, it all amounts to the same thing.

 

In and of itself, this is grotesque. But it becomes even worse when one acknowledges that, relative to pretty much everyone else in America, the people asking for this favor are in an excellent position. The unemployment rate for college graduates is currently two percent. Thanks to Covid-19, nobody with federally held student loans has had to pay anything toward their debt for two years. Along with almost everyone else in America, they were sent a few rounds of large checks during 2020 and 2021. And that high inflation rate that is screwing the poor? Slowly, but surely, it is eating away at college graduates’ debts, allowing them to pay loans that were already below the market interest rate with dollars that are now worth less than they were when the debt was contracted. That the president of the United States is seriously considering making our dire fiscal situation even worse in order to help those people is just beyond surreal.

New York Listened to the Activist Left, and Look What Happened

By Noah Rothman

Thursday, April 28, 2022

 

For the better part of a decade, Democratic activists and their allies in media went about convincing themselves that the GOP’s electoral strength was a function of its willingness to hit below the belt. The Republican Party secured political power, so the thinking went, because it either gamed the system or benefited from its defilement. The only way to prevent Republicans from “rigging the 2022 election” by gerrymandering themselves into a House majority would be to abandon “nonpartisan redistricting.” Democrats, too, needed “to play dirty to win.”

 

Thus, the left embarked on a campaign aimed at convincing Democrats to use the power of reapportionment to engineer victories for themselves, even though it ran counter to a decade of Democrat-led efforts to decouple redistricting from the political process. The campaign worked, nowhere more so than in the state of New York.

 

Following her predecessor’s ignominious resignation, New York Gov. Kathy Hochul signaled a willingness to wrest the decennial redistricting process from the hands of the Independent Redistricting Commission tasked with drawing new maps of the Empire State. “I am also the leader of the New York State Democratic Party,” she told the New York Times last August. “The Democratic Party has to regain its position that it once had when I was growing up.”

 

Indeed, given the GOP’s commitment to using the political process to shore up its incumbents and expose Democrats to as much vulnerability as possible, it would be “political malpractice” not to “come up with lines that are most favorable,” New York Public Interest Research Group executive director Blair Horner observed. “The temptation to do so will be great,” the Washington Post reported, given a rare convergence of forces that favor the left in New York. So, when the state’s redistricting commission reached a stalemate, the Democrat-led legislature eagerly took control and went about crafting as aggressive a Democratic gerrymander as possible.

 

The final product, which Gov. Hochul approved, was breathtaking in its audacity. Experts expected Albany’s new congressional map to cut New York’s Republican delegation in half. The new lines could provide Democrats with as many as three new seats in the next Congress, despite the state’s declining population. While New York’s map was among the boldest, the state was hardly alone in the effort to shore up Democratic prospects ahead of a challenging midterm election season. Even before New York submitted its new maps, gerrymanders in Democrat-led states like Illinois, Colorado, Washington, Maryland, and Virginia ensured that, as Cook Political Report’s David Wasserman observed, “there will actually be a few more Biden-won congressional districts after redistricting than there are now.”

 

Democratic audacity notwithstanding, the law is the law, and the primaries were imminent. Prospective candidates made their peace with the new facts on the ground and made plans to run in—even move into—the new districts they sought to represent. Sure, there would be perfunctory legal challenges to these new maps, including one in New York that argued the legislature had violated the language in a constitutional amendment adopted after a 2014 referendum establishing the redistricting commission in the first place. But these are states with high courts dominated by Democratic appointees. Surely, those judges would be in on the scheme. As it turns out, they weren’t.

 

On Wednesday, New York’s highest court struck down the state’s new congressional map—a “procedurally unconstitutional” hash that was “drawn with impermissible partisan purpose,” per Chief Judge Janet DiFiore’s decision. In a ruling that is not subject to appeal, the court summarily stripped New York’s lawmakers of the opportunity to try again, remanding the process to a “special master” tapped by a lower court earlier this month to develop alternative maps at the state legislative level. New lines will now have to be adopted and approved ahead of the state’s June 18 primary. If that proves too ambitious, the state’s primaries may have to be postponed until August.

 

New York is not the only state that tried and failed to seek unfair advantages for its majority party this cycle, and it’s not the only state to have been reprimanded by the courts as a result. Courts tossed Democratic gerrymanders in Illinois and Maryland. Republican maps were similarly dismissed in Kansas, North Carolina, and Ohio. But this disreputable balance favored Democrats. They had fabricated what FiveThirtyEight’s Nathaniel Rakich deemed a “national redistricting advantage,” and New York’s map was the jewel in the party’s crown. Rearguard actions have since whittled that advantage down to the point of near negligibility.

 

What Democrats should (but won’t) confront as a result of this debacle is the extent to which they bought into their own paranoid narratives. For over a decade, politics obsessives on the left convinced themselves that reapportionment was an antidemocratic scourge—at least, when Republicans control the process. Politicians, “especially Republicans,” manage to “cling to power” only as a result of the maps they draw for themselves, said Princeton University professor and redistricting reform activist Sam Wang. That logic compelled Democrats around the country to advocate for independent reappointment committees, which are now active in 21 states. But those committees didn’t deliver what Democratic activists really wanted: political dominance (which is perhaps why Wang is under investigation for allegedly “manipulating data to achieve the outcome he wanted” while he served as an adviser to New Jersey’s redistricting commission).

 

Democrats convinced themselves they had to play the same dirty pool they were sure Republicans played, even if that contravened state-level laws and constitutional provisions. Democratic lawmakers listened to their cheering section, at long last applying what Washington Post columnist Paul Waldman called “a ruthlessness Democratic voters often accuse their party of lacking.” Just look where it’s gotten them.

Biden Must Reap the Whirlwind If He ‘Cancels’ Student-Loan Debt

By Charles C. W. Cooke

Wednesday, April 27, 2022

 

If President Joe Biden follows through on his threat to unilaterally “cancel” all, or any, of the $1.7 trillion in federally held student-loan debt, the Republican Party must respond to the move by taking an industrial-grade flamethrower to the status quo until it is reduced to ashes. What Biden is considering would be an act of political, economic, and constitutional warfare, and Republicans at both the federal and state levels would be obliged to immediately treat it as such by salting the earth as soon as they possibly can.

 

The first step for the GOP to take would be ending the student-loan program completely. Given the obvious political temptations that program was always going to create, the federal government should never have gotten into the student-loan business in the first place. But it did, and so here we are. If President Biden goes through with his threat, we will have been shown once and for all that the government cannot be trusted to issue these loans on behalf of America’s taxpayers, and that it must not be allowed to do so again. In 2010, Congress authorized a loan program, not a system of politically motivated rolling jubilees. If the program becomes that — as it would under Biden’s loan-forgiveness scheme — it must be killed. Such a repeal would not only inoculate Americans against this happening again, it would help to limit the government-created increases in tuition that, paradoxically, are being used to justify further federal action.

 

Second, a GOP-led Washington, D.C., would have to get the Treasury to recoup the “forgiven” loans so that non-graduates — a majority of Americans — didn’t end up paying for the commercial products that graduates freely chose to buy. There are many potential sources for that money, including the beneficiaries themselves. Tax them. Tax the universities they went to; tax the enormous endowments those universities enjoy; tax as income any gifts those universities are given, however small; and, where possible, remove the nonprofit status of donations so that those who give gain no fiscal advantage. When all that is done, sue the worst offenders for fraud. Clearly, if the government is required to bail out every college graduate in the country, colleges are not doing what they promised they were doing, and they must be immediately investigated. You can’t have it both ways. The current unemployment rate for college graduates is 2 percent, and their incomes are well above average. If those facts are a sign that college is working well for its customers, then there’s no need for a taxpayer bailout. If those facts are irrelevant, then something is very, very wrong with the higher-education sector, and it must be rethought from the ground up.

 

Third, the federal GOP would have to tie up the move in litigation in every way possible. Neither the American constitutional system nor any of the statutes that Congress has placed on the books give the executive branch the power to single-handedly spend $1.5 trillion of taxpayers’ money in this way. The Department of Education has already confirmed that the president “does not have statutory authority to provide blanket or mass cancellation, compromise, discharge, or forgiveness of student loan principal balances, and/or to materially modify the repayment amounts or terms thereof,” and nothing has changed since that declaration. Joe Biden knows this. The Republican Party knows this. Everybody knows this, including those demanding to be let out of their obligations. If the president cannot abide by the oath he took to uphold the law, he must be forced to do so by the courts, or, if necessary, by Congress. If the issue is deemed non-justiciable, Biden must be impeached.

 

At the state level, Republicans would have to respond by destroying the overzealous accreditation system that helped to create this mess, and by considering whether it is a good idea to treat would-be college students differently than, say, would-be roofers, plumbers, or entrepreneurs. Most jobs do not — and should not — require degrees, and Republican state legislatures should nuke any public-sector certification requirements that cannot stand up to review. A college degree can be enormously helpful, but it can also be enormously useless, as the call for student-loan “cancellation” has made clear. There can be no way out of this mess — that is, there can be no way for prospective students to accurately weigh whether going to college is in their interest — if governments simply assume that their job is to encourage and pay for university attendance. If they wish to create a more rational incentive structure, Republican-run states will need to address this problem head-on.

 

Ultimately, our public officials have two choices: They can either allow the current situation to resolve itself via the time-tested method of supply and demand, or they can admit that there is a massive problem in American higher education and end the status quo as we know it. They cannot do both. To foist all of the existing debt on innocent taxpayers and then to start the same disastrous process all over again would be an act of incomprehensible vandalism. If, in a moment of dramatic cowardice, this president takes that course, he, and those who benefited from his folly, must be made to reap the whirlwind.

An Echo of the Holodomor

By Kevin D. Williamson

Thursday, April 28, 2022

 

Russians are renewing a vicious tradition: starving Ukrainians to death.

 

The legislature of Russia’s Krasnoyarsk region has voted to “expropriate the excess harvest” of farms in Russian-occupied Ukraine, reports Yaroslav Trofimov of the Wall Street Journal.

 

This is a policy that has some precedent.

 

The Ukrainian language has a word for carrying out political mass-murder by means of starvation: Holodomor. This word exists as a name for what the Russians did to the Ukrainians in 1932–33, when Ukraine was a not-entirely willing constituent of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics. Socialist central planning achieved in Soviet agriculture what it achieves everywhere — shortages caused by the misallocation of resources — resulting in a collapse of the grain and potato harvests in the early 1930s. The socialist rulers in Moscow saw both a potential threat to their regime and a political opportunity, and so food was taken away from Ukrainian-populated areas and redirected toward Russian cities. The Russian elites and urban populations were fed, and the man-made famine was used as a political weapon to crush independence-minded anti-Soviet movements in Ukraine.

 

Nobody knows how many millions of people died in that famine. Estimates run as high as 10 million.

 

Some 200,000 people were imprisoned for “theft” under a special law adopted at the time; their “crime” was searching through agricultural waste for anything edible. Entire municipalities and regions were stripped of everything from grain to livestock as punishment for trumped-up political crimes. Moscow introduced a new internal-passport system to keep those being starved to death from leaving their towns and villages to seek food. Ukrainians attempting to flee the artificial famine zone were gunned down by Soviet troops. Soviet propaganda insisted that the Ukrainian farmers were dangerous traitors who were sheltering “kulaks,” Moscow’s all-purpose label for political enemies in the peasant classes.

 

The German-Hungarian writer Arthur Koestler was on the scene, having been granted permission to travel through the Soviet Union for the purpose of writing a pro-Soviet propaganda novel. What he saw was desperate mothers trying to pass their cadaverous, starving children through the windows of trains to strangers in the hope that they might be carried off to some place less hellish than the workers’ paradise.

 

(You can read about this and much more in Anne Applebaum’s Red Famine.)

 

The Soviet Union was committed to the worldwide workers’ revolution for about five minutes, after which it became what Russia still is today: a grotesque police state organized around Russian nationalism and kleptocracy, whose rulers rely on murder, torture, and state terrorism to maintain their power. Moscow isn’t Ukraine’s enemy or NATO’s enemy — Moscow is the enemy of all civilized peoples and countries. The Holodomor of the 1930s was intended in part to wipe out Ukrainian identity as a political force, and the current war in Ukraine has much the same goal, as Putin himself has so eloquently explained. There is no Ukraine and there are no Ukrainians, as far as he is concerned.

 

Perhaps it is only symbolic that the Krasnoyarsk legislature should so obviously evoke the Holodomor — approvingly — as Russians once again do their worst in Ukraine: murdering, raping, torturing, stealing, burning. But symbolism matters, and here, it speaks to intent.

 

Ukrainian forces are conducting operations inside Russia, as of course they should be, and are having more success in their efforts than the Russians would like to admit. The United States and our NATO allies should be clear-eyed about the fact that the weapons and intelligence we are providing to the Ukrainians are being used in that way, and should understand that sooner or later, Vladimir Putin and his wretched junta will decide that this amounts to a plain act of war and respond in some way that seems fitting from Moscow’s depraved and isolated point of view. We should be ready for that, and we should think carefully about what our own response is going to be.

 

President Joe Biden has pledged to defend “every inch” of NATO territory — and Putin already has made it clear what he will do if given an inch. President Biden is going to be tested, but he does not have a great deal of credibility in this matter, and neither do his Republican rivals: They remain committed to Donald Trump, who could not have made more plain or emphatic his contempt for NATO and its underlying principles of collective defense. If the world is looking to America for leadership in this crisis, the world is likely to be disappointed. We have the great luxury of not having been forced to learn the lessons that the Ukrainians have learned.

 

They are lessons we keep failing to learn, a fact in which there is both discredit and danger.