Save Our Political System: Impeach and Convict Joe Biden

By Charles C. W. Cooke

Wednesday, August 31, 2022

 

If we keep doing what we’re doing, we’ll keep getting what we get. To avoid getting what we’re increasingly likely to get, Congress should impeach and convict President Biden.

 

Evidently, Biden feels as if there are no consequences to violating his oath of office. Last August, Biden “double, triple, quadruple checked” whether he was allowed to order another moratorium on evictions without Congress, and he concluded that he was not. Then he did it anyway — on the outrageous grounds that the time it would take to litigate might allow him “to keep this going for a month, at least — I hope longer.” Last Wednesday, Biden pulled the same trick with student loans. That the president does not have the statutory power to “cancel” college loans has long been so obvious that even Nancy Pelosi has managed to acknowledge it. “The president can’t do it, that’s not even a discussion,” Pelosi said last year. “People think that the President of the United States has the power for debt forgiveness.” But, she confirmed: “He does not.” A week ago, Biden did it anyway — with the help of what might be the single most cynical and embarrassing legal memorandum in modern American history.

 

And why wouldn’t he, given that presidents have started to get away with such behavior as a matter of routine? In 2012, President Obama told audience after audience that he couldn’t “suspend deportations through executive order,” “because there are laws on the books that Congress has passed.” Those “laws on the books by Congress,” Obama said more than 20 times, “are very clear in terms of how we have to enforce our immigration system.” “I’m not a king,” Obama said. “I’m not the emperor of the United States,” he noted. “There is a path to get this done and that is through Congress,” he insisted. And then he did it anyway.

 

And nothing happened.

 

In 2019, Donald Trump followed suit. Exasperated by his repeated inability to convince the Democratic Congress to appropriate funds for his border wall, Trump announced that he’d discovered some emergency laws on the books that, conveniently enough, allowed him to go it alone. Trump then took $6.5 billion from the Treasury.

 

And nothing happened.

 

Complaining about Trump’s unilateralism, the Brennan Center noted that Trump’s pivot had been executed “for the express purpose of subvert­ing the will of Congress” and warned the public of the “dangers that would be posed by allow­ing Trump’s declar­a­tion to stand.” The Brennan Center was correct. Only three years have elapsed since those words were written, and, inspired by the lack of meaningful accountability that he has now watched two presidents enjoy, Trump’s successor just took a set of illegal actions so enormous in scale as to beggar belief. Trump stole $6.5 billion. Joe Biden has just taken between 100 and 200 times that figure. What sort of “danger,” I must ask, might be “posed” by allowing that “declaration to stand?”

 

There is not a single person in America who believes that what President Biden has done is legal — and that includes the people who penned the contrived legal justifications for him. His order is a ruse, a scheme, a hijacking — the product not of genuine ambiguity in the law, but of a preference for brute force. I know it. You know it. We all know it. President Biden knows it. This is why, in almost taunting tones, the president’s apologists have begun to remind the dissenters that, under the current standing rules, there may be no person in America who can sue. “Well,” they ask, gleefully, “Whatjagonnadoaboutit?”

 

I’ll tell you what I’d do about it: I’d impeach and convict the president, and end this trend for good. In this country, Congress makes the laws. In this country, Congress appropriates the funds. In this country, Congress sets immigration policy. In this country, as Barack Obama liked to remind us, the president is not a dictator or an emperor or a king. In this country, there is a path to getting things done, and that path is through Congress.

 

And if the president doesn’t like that? Then the president can go home. Among the many scars that Woodrow Wilson left on the American system of government, we can count the notion that the three branches of government are “co-equal.” They’re not. Congress is prime. Congress can pass laws without the president; the president cannot pass laws without Congress. Congress can remove the president; the president cannot remove Congress. Along with the states, Congress can amend the Constitution; the president cannot. Look at any part of the American order, and you’ll find that Congress has the power either to veto the other branches or to change the status quo via other means.

 

Last January, Congress should have used this power to impeach and convict President Trump for engaging in what Senator Ben Sasse appropriately described as “one of the most egregious Article II attacks on Article I in all of U.S. history.” A decade ago, Congress should have used this power to impeach Barack Obama for relentlessly explaining that he wasn’t an emperor, and then taking the very action he had deemed a usurpation of legislative authority. Today, Congress should use this power to remove Joe Biden from office for repeatedly breaking his oath in the most transparent way imaginable. And if we don’t — because it’s too hard or too divisive or harrowing — then we’ll deserve the system we’ll inevitably end up with, which, at this rate, seems destined to bear an uncanny resemblance to the system we once fought a revolution to pull apart.

Our Political FBI

National Review Online

Wednesday, August 31, 2022

 

Quiet pink slips are not good enough anymore. The Federal Bureau of Investigation owes the nation an explanation about whether, yet again, it intervened in American politics in the heat of a closely contested presidential election. And Congress should begin to consider whether, after years of malfeasance and incompetence, it is time to reimagine the organization of federal law enforcement.

 

Last week, the assistant special agent in charge (ASAC) of the FBI’s Washington Field Office, Timothy Thibault, was discreetly terminated and reportedly escorted out of the building. His dismissal owes to his demonstrated political bias, which appears to be endemic among bureau bigwigs.

 

It was bad enough that Thibault was using a personal social-media account to trash Republicans, conservatives, the Catholic Church, and the American South (e.g., “Can we give Kentucky to the Russian Federation?”), and to exploit his FBI credentials in violation of various government rules. He is free to do those things as a private citizen or as a political candidate, but it is entirely inappropriate behavior for the head of a federal law-enforcement office that regularly conducts investigations in the storm center of national politics. According to Senator Chuck Grassley, the ranking Judiciary Committee Republican, while Thibault was advertising his partisanship, he was also doing the heavy lifting on a bureau-led effort to bury the Hunter Biden scandal in the waning weeks of the 2020 presidential race.

 

By then, Grassley and Senator Ron Johnson (R., Wis.) had for months been conducting a probe of millions of dollars of foreign money that had ended up in the Biden-family coffers, including from such entities as CEFC, a corporate front for Xi Jinping’s regime and the Chinese Communist Party. In the main, it seems that when President Obama asked his vice president, Joe Biden, to steer administration policy regarding such nettlesome countries as China, Ukraine, and Russia, and when Biden later emerged as the likely Democratic nominee in 2020, people connected to the regimes in those countries found it expedient to pay exorbitant sums to the now-president’s ne’er-do-well son. It is not hard to guess what these bad actors thought they were buying.

 

While the Hunter laptop — patently authentic and chockablock with blackmail material — is now the most notorious aspect of the scandal, Senators Grassley and Johnson had been following the money long before the computer emerged. So, apparently, had the Justice Department, which months earlier had launched a criminal investigation of Hunter — and which, in 2017, was evidently conducting FISA national-security surveillance of the Biden family’s CEFC business partners, one of whom was subsequently convicted on foreign corruption charges. (If you’re keeping score, that was Patrick Ho, whom Hunter labeled “the f***ing spy chief of China,” and who is thus not to be confused with two other Biden business partners, Devon Archer and Bevan Cooney, who were convicted in a different scheme to defraud a Native American tribe.)

 

In essence, Hunter Biden is what Democratic fever dreams depicted Donald Trump to be, complete with the porn tapes, the payments to Russian accounts for prostitution services, and the dingy financial ties to corrupt and anti-American governments — with whose cronies he conducts transactions counter to American interests. A politically disinterested law-enforcement agency would treat him as such.

 

Instead, Thibault and other FBI agents colluded with Democrats to portray as “Russian disinformation” the mounting, unsavory information about Hunter, as well as indicia of Joe Biden’s involvement in his family’s longstanding habit of cashing in on his political influence.

 

In the summer of 2020, top congressional Democrats began suggesting that questions being raised about foreign influence on Biden could signal foreign interference in the presidential election, and that the Biden evidence Grassley and Johnson were amassing could be shot through with Russian disinformation. One must be impressed by the chutzpah. The FBI collaborated, working up an intelligence “assessment,” which concluded that derogatory Biden evidence must be disinformation. The assessment was written by FBI supervisory intelligence analyst Brian Auten, whose previous claim to fame was to have led the FBI’s interviews of Igor Danchenko, the principal source of the notorious Steele dossier, after which the FBI continued relying on this actual disinformation in representing to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court that Donald Trump might be a Russian asset.

 

Grassley now says that FBI whistleblowers have informed him that frontline agents working on the Biden investigation pushed back against their supervisors’ assessment, pointing out that much of the evidence they’d gathered was based on records from U.S. financial institutions, not uncorroborated rumor and innuendo in the style of the Steele dossier. Yet the bureau forged ahead, convening an August 2020 briefing for members of Congress that was designed to cast doubt on the Biden evidence. The FBI assessment was conveniently leaked to Democrat-friendly media, which suggested that the Republican senators’ investigation was “mimicking” Russian disinformation efforts and “amplifying its propaganda.”

 

It was the FBI and its network of intelligence-community politicos that was peddling propaganda. Without specifically mentioning the New York Post’s reporting on the Hunter laptop story, Grassley notes that, as Election Day 2020 loomed, “an avenue of additional derogatory Hunter Biden reporting was closed at the direction of ASAC Thibault.” Grassley elaborates that, besides failing to “provide a valid reason as required by FBI guidelines” for this action, Thibault “attempted to improperly mark the matter in FBI systems so that it could not be opened in the future.” Around the same time, the motley crew of 51 self-described national-security professionals issued their “Public Statement on the Hunter Biden Emails,” in which they deceptively suggested that the laptop disclosures had “all the classic earmarks” of Russian disinformation (while fleetingly conceding that they “do not have evidence of Russian involvement” — they were just “deeply suspicious”).

 

The Biden campaign clung to the “Russian disinformation” fairy tale without providing an iota of reason to doubt the authenticity of the laptop’s Biden-family photos, its videos of Hunter’s sex, drugs, and rock ’n’ roll forays, and its emails tying Joe Biden to several of Hunter’s shady business partners. Facebook buried the Biden damage, too, limiting its members’ ability to share the story. Mark Zuckerberg now says that decision was made soon after the FBI warned the social-media giant about foreign interference in the election. Zuckerberg recalls that the bureau’s briefing did not mention Hunter Biden in so many words, but that the Post’s reporting “fit the pattern” of the FBI’s admonitions. In a statement, the FBI deflects but doesn’t dare deny: Yes, it provides U.S. media platforms with “foreign threat indicators,” but it is up to these companies to decide whether to take preventive measures. Who gave the FBI the job of policing political speech during American elections? Congress should make explicit that it has no such authority.

 

Hillary Clinton likes to pose as the victim of FBI skullduggery, but she was only able to seek the presidency in 2016 after then-director James Comey usurped the Justice Department’s charging discretion and distorted federal law in claiming she should not be indicted for mishandling classified information by storing it in her own home. The bureau, meantime, aggressively conducted the Trump–Russia “collusion” investigation, based substantially on absurd political opposition research from the Clinton campaign that it found too good to check. And now it appears that multiple scathing reports by the Justice Department’s inspector general, documenting its malfeasance, leaking, and political bias, could not stop the FBI from putting its thumb on the 2020 election scale.

 

Defunding actual federal law enforcement is not the answer. But the current structure of the FBI need not be immune to rethinking. Republicans, however, would be wise to promise that, if voters put them back in charge of Congress, there will finally be accountability for the FBI’s shoddy performance and consideration of whether the bureau needs to be replaced by an agency dedicated to police work and uncorrupted by politics.

Why Joe Biden Gets Away with Making Offensive Statements

By Jim Geraghty

Wednesday, August 31, 2022

 

President Biden, speaking in Wilkes-Barre, Pa., yesterday:

 

My deceased son, Beau, he was the Attorney General of the State of Delaware. And what he used to do is go down, in the east side, the — called the “Bucket” — highest crime rate in the country. It’s a place where I used to — I was the only white guy that worked as a lifeguard down in that area, on the east side.

 

And you know where the — you could always tell where the best basketball in the state is or the best basketball in the city is: It’s where everybody shows up.

 

The east side of Wilmington is indeed a primarily African-American neighborhood; earlier this year, Wilmington mayor Mike Purzycki described the East Side as “neglected for decades and decades” by city, county, and state leaders. Whether or not this neighborhood in Wilmington ever had the “highest crime rate in the country,” the area has been described as “Murder Town USA” in the not-too-distant past of 2014. And yes, this is the neighborhood with the swimming pool where Biden used to be a lifeguard (now renamed after the president) as well as Corn Pop’s old neighborhood.

 

“You could always tell where the best basketball in the state is or the best basketball in the city is” is a yet another classic, cringe-inducing use of stereotypes by Biden. It’s not the most consequential thing that Biden did yesterday, but it fits in with his long history of using racial and ethnic stereotypes that make him look like an ass: “You cannot go to a 7-Eleven or a Dunkin’ Donuts unless you have a slight Indian accent. I’m not joking”; “[Obama is the] first mainstream African American who is articulate and bright and clean and a nice-looking guy”; “gonna put y’all back in chains; “these Shylocks”; “Poor kids are just as bright and just as talented as white kids”; “Unlike the African-American community with notable exceptions, the Latino community is an incredibly diverse community”; “Are you a junkie?”; “You ain’t black”; and so on.

 

(Biden’s frequent use of racial stereotypes might be a little less irritating if he weren’t always telling us how he stood up to racism in his life, and about how racist all of his critics and opponents are.)

 

There are a lot of reasons we shouldn’t embrace cancel culture. One big reason is that it often elevates an off-the-cuff comment into a litmus test of a person’s character and decency; we would all hate to be judged by the dumbest or worst thing we’ve ever said or done. Another reason is that once a disputed comment becomes a major controversy, it becomes a binary choice where the person must be fired or canceled or not. There’s very little middle ground, such as, “You shouldn’t be fired from your job, but that was a dumb or offensive thing to say, and you shouldn’t have said it. You should apologize and try to do better in the future.”

 

But another big reason is that the amount of offense that is taken is often directly inverse to how important you are to the Democratic Party at that moment.

 

If a little-known Republican state legislator had characterized a heavily African-American neighborhood as “where the best basketball in the state is,” you probably would have heard it denounced as yet another example of the callous racial animosity coursing through the veins of the modern Republican Party. But Biden said it, and many people have gotten used to him using “poor” and “black” as synonyms.

 

(Right now, there’s probably somebody out there contending that “where the best basketball in the state is” is a compliment. African Americans can speak for themselves, but people generally prefer to be seen as multifaceted and complicated human beings, not reduced to one simple hoary stereotype. It’s a bit like describing America’s Latino communities “as distinct as the bodegas of the Bronx, as beautiful as the blossoms of Miami, and as unique as the breakfast tacos here in San Antonio.”

 

How Should We Remember Gorbachev?

 

By the standards of Soviet leaders, Mikhail Gorbachev was a great man. But that’s not saying much, because the leaders of the Soviet Union were literally a murderer’s row — a cavalcade of monsters, brutes, thugs, and mummified corpses. “Looks good compared to Josef Stalin” may very well be the lowest bar to clear ever.

 

The coming days will bring a lot of irksome, deliberate misremembering of Gorbachev in the Western press.

 

Gorbachev did not want to see the Soviet Union come to an end. “The greatest unintended outcome of all was the disintegration of the Soviet Union,” wrote Archie Brown, an emeritus professor of politics at Oxford University and the author of Seven Years that Changed the World: Perestroika in Perspective, in 2010. “Gorbachev, by 1988, had consciously set about dismantling the Soviet system. At no point did he wish to see the disappearance of the Soviet state.”

 

The Soviet system was slowly but surely failing; what made Gorbachev revolutionary was that, compared to his geriatric, half-dead predecessors, he wasn’t willing to pretend everything was running smoothly. As Gorbachev explained in a 2001 interview, “During the final years under Brezhnev, we were planning to create a commission headed by the secretary of the Central Committee, [Ivan V.] Kapitonov to solve the problem of women’s pantyhose. Imagine a country that flies into space, launches Sputniks, creates such a defense system, and it can’t resolve the problem of women’s pantyhose. There’s no toothpaste, no soap powder, not the basic necessities of life. It was incredible and humiliating to work in such a government. And so our people were already worked up, and that is why the dissident movement occurred.”

 

Gorbachev remained a believer in the Communist system until it no longer mattered. As Joseph Nye, a professor at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government, wrote in 2006, “[Gorbachev] wanted to reform communism, not replace it. But his reforms snowballed into a revolution driven from below rather than controlled from above. In trying to repair communism, he punched a hole in it. Like a hole in a dam, once pent-up pressure began to escape, it widened the opening and tore apart the system.” Long after he retired, Gorbachev himself admitted that he “went on too long in trying to reform the Communist party,” and that he should have quit the party during a key fight with other Communists in 1991.

 

Gorbachev deserves no more than partial credit for ending the Cold War. Yes, a lot of us on the right can be accused of being excessively nostalgic and starry-eyed about Ronald Reagan. But if Reagan hadn’t enacted the 1980s defense-spending buildup and rejected Gorbachev’s proposal to end the Strategic Defense Initiative at the Reykjavík Summit, the creaky, wheezing Soviet Union might have figured out a way to keep on running for another decade or two.

 

Under the Reagan revolution and with the rapid technological advances occurring in the U.S. in the 1980s, the whole world could see that the Soviet Union was declining — an overmilitarized, backwards, no-longer-quite-so-“super” power, decaying from within and falling further and further behind a thriving, advanced, dynamic, and innovative alternative. When Gorbachev came to power in 1985, there were 50,000 personal computers in the Soviet Union; in the United States, there were 30 million. (The radioactive disaster at Chernobyl and the defeat of the Soviets in Afghanistan didn’t help the U.S.S.R.’s chances for survival, either.)

 

Gorbachev wasn’t always a reliable ally for democratic reforms in Russia. William Taubman, the author of the best English-language biography of Gorbachev, is a fan of the man but clear-eyed about his bad decisions, including those he made after leaving office:

 

I struggle to understand the degree to which Gorbachev has supported Putin, and I would say this, first of all: Gorbachev understood that by the time Putin took over in 2000 after nearly 10 years after the collapse of the Soviet Union under his own rule, Gorbachev believed that at that point, Russia needed a certain amount of authoritarianism. In fact, he said that, but he accompanied that by saying that he believed that Putin was basically a democrat, and that in due course, sooner rather than later, Putin would return to some of the democratic features that he and Yeltsin had tried to foster. I think in that sense he misjudged Putin. Gorbachev opposed Putin’s reelection in 2012.

 

So he’s been very critical, Gorbachev has been very critical of Putin, but as late as April 2017, when asked by a German newspaper, “Do you still trust Putin?” he said, “Yes, I still do.” . . .

 

I imagine that Gorbachev feels that when it comes to dealing with the West, some of Putin’s toughness in response to the expansion of NATO may not be an entirely bad thing.

 

Russia experts in the U.S. tend to have a clear-eyed and nuanced view of Gorbachev, but very little of this view permeated the minds of the more casual observers of Russia. It is hard to overstate how much the U.S. media perceived and celebrated Gorbachev as a visionary statesman. In 1989, Time magazine declared that Gorbachev was “the Man of the Decade” and called him, “the force behind the most momentous events of the 80s and the man responsible for ending the Cold War.”

 

The brief appearance of a Mikhail Gorbachev lookalike in the opening scene of The Naked Gun offers a little bit of sharp geopolitical commentary in the middle of an otherwise silly (and hilarious) movie. At an imaginary meeting of the world’s most notorious dictators, thugs, and extremists in Beirut, the lookalike suggests that he’s running a long con on the West:

 

Gaddafi: Nonsense! The solution is not bold enough for Libya. I say, wipe out Washington and New York!

 

Gorbachev: What? And spoil three years of good public relations? I have the Americans believing I am a nice guy! In some of their polls, I am more popular than their president!

 

I suspect that the Zucker brothers — descendants of Russian Jewish immigrants — were not going to forget that even a nice and polite head of the Soviet Union was still a Soviet leader.

 

So, why is Gorbachev a great man by Soviet standards? Because for two generations, every Soviet leader who faced an uprising suppressed it with brutal violence. Gorbachev wasn’t going to do that; his country and his people had suffered enough. He knew when to give up the ship, or more specifically, when the ship wasn’t worth saving.

 

Well, that, and the Pizza Hut commercial.

Don’t Reward Cowardice with Your Vote

By Kevin D. Williamson

Tuesday, August 30, 2022

 

Like Hammurabi, I am trying to organize my laws. Here’s what I have so far:

 

Williamson’s First Law: Everything is simple, if you don’t know a f***ing thing about it.

 

Williamson’s Second Law: When Democrats are in power, they act like they’ll never be out; when Republicans are out of power, they act like they’ll never be in.

 

Williamson’s Third Law: Candidates who aren’t with us on abortion really aren’t with us at all. The Romney Addendum: Be very, very suspicious of anybody who changes his mind about abortion — in either direction — after the age of 40 or so.

 

“I am very pro-choice,” Donald Trump said until about five minutes before he decided he wanted to make a run for the Republican presidential nomination, when somebody with a soothing voice and a fresh new coloring book explained to him that he wouldn’t get far embracing the same position on abortion as Hillary Rodham Clinton. (Before descending that escalator in 2015, Trump had also been a long-time advocate of anti-constitutional gun-control measures, confiscatory wealth taxes, and a whole lot of other bad ideas he shared with former allies such as Chuck Schumer.) Moving the other direction, Mitt Romney was firmly pro-choice when he was engaged in Massachusetts and then told a story — a preposterous story — about having his mind changed during the stem-cell debate. There is good reason to expect Romney to continue to be on the right side of the abortion debate now that he has found it: For one thing, it’s pretty obvious that the pro-choice Romney was the phony Romney, and, for another thing, there’s no juice in flip-flopping on that issue now that the honorable gentleman from La Jolla is pretending to be a Utah guy. But there’s always a mental asterisk there for those of us who remember.

 

One of the problems with the weird little gaggle of Peter Thiel–cultivated tech bros operating in contemporary Republican politics, Blake Masters prominent among them, is that they are typically pretty smart, at least in terms of raw intellectual horsepower, and so they come to believe — mistakenly — that Williamson’s First Law doesn’t apply to them. They think that politics is simple, that it is a kind of algorithm: Get a couple of smart guys into a room to figure out the most important variables and the rubes will salivate like Pavlov’s dogs every time you get a hit on Fox News. But voters aren’t schnauzers (except in Philadelphia). What they do have in common with that noble pooch is a sense of smell that is keener than you might expect it to be. The clever people who think that cleverness is all you need are going to be the death of us all.

 

Masters is pretty clearly a guy who has never given any serious thought to the issue of abortion. It seems that he was, at one point, as shallow and thoughtless a pro-choicer as he later was a gutless and uncommitted pro-lifer. He knows — or thinks he knows, or thought he knew until the issue blew up in his face — that the current Republican base is not very interested in nuance, moderation, or compromise: The people who decide who gets the nominations in the GOP today are maximalists who think that Fox News and social media are the real world, that getting retweets and getting votes are more or less the same thing. And so Masters embraced the maximalist position on abortion, declaring himself 100 percent pro-life, advocated a federal fetal-personhood law, a constitutional amendment prohibiting abortion, etc. It is likely that he did this in the belief that abortion was only going to be an issue for the angry base voters who demand maximum confrontation from Republicans.

 

But, after Dobbs, abortion took on a renewed salience, and swing voters in Arizona started to make noises indicating that Masters’s maximalism was not what they wanted. And so Masters scrubbed his website, rewriting or deleting five of his six statements of his views on abortion, and then ran ads pretending that he was interested in regulating only those grisly late-term abortions about which the overwhelming majority of Americans — including pro-choice Americans — generally agree.

 

Maybe Blake Masters never really believed what he said to Republicans about abortion in the first place, and just said it because it was what he thought Republicans wanted to hear; maybe his apparent pro-life change of heart was genuine, and he was just too weak to stick by it when doing so became difficult. Each of those is possible — and each possibility ought to be regarded as disqualifying.

 

As a practical matter, I expect that this line of criticism will come to nothing, because Republicans at the moment give every indication that they enjoy being cynically used by self-seeking amoralists who exploit everything and everyone — including the most vulnerable among us — in the service of their own banal and tedious small-ball ambitions, yet another way in which today’s Republicans have come to resemble yesterday’s Democrats.

 

Obviously, one does not enter into a relationship with the Republican Party in 2022 because one is seeking opportunities for the exercise of honor. But if you are in public life and you aren’t willing to pay a price for what you believe, then, really: What use are you to anybody?

 

Scripture advises us not to put our trust in princes. That goes double for cowards.

The Vatican Is Wasting Its Authority

By Michael Brendan Dougherty

Wednesday, August 31, 2022

 

You may not have noticed, but the Vatican under Pope Francis is busy destroying the Catholic Church’s own claims to divine authority to instruct man about matters of faith and morals — its claim to be Mater and Magister, mother and teacher. To take the latest example, look to the recent televised interview of Archbishop Vincenzo Paglia, president of the Vatican’s Pontifical Academy for Life, in which he said that the law that liberalized abortion in Italy was “now a pillar of our social life.” When pressed on whether it was up for debate, Paglia said, “But no, absolutely not, absolutely not.”

 

An Italian commentator Thomas Scandroglio said, “We have hit rock bottom. We are at a point of no return, at ground zero of morality, faith, reasonableness and consistency. We have the president of an academy founded to protect life protecting a law that destroys life.”

 

This is an image of the Church in auto-demolition mode. With Rome having taken revenge on Benedict’s detested liturgical restoration, it’s not a surprise to see Rome now taking further actions against John Paul II and Paul VI’s legacy in moral theology.

 

It’s not controversial to notice that, officially, the Catholic Church’s position on sexual morality and matters of human reproduction is at odds with the zeitgeist. In fact, it might be more appropriate to say it is at odds with the prevailing norms of human civilization. The Church is against abortion and euthanasia. It’s against divorce, and premarital sex. It’s against in vitro fertilization. And, most controversially, in 1968 of all years, the Church reiterated its opposition to artificial contraception in a document called “Humanae Vitae” (Of human life). This was a position that had been common among confessional Christians until the Anglican Church abandoned it at Lambeth in 1930. All of these position flow, logically, from the Church’s other moral and theological commitments: that our reproductive capacity is good; that children deserve to be raised by their parents in committed families; that all human acts, including sex, have a non-self-referential purpose. Under John Paul II, the Church reaffirmed that all these teachings flow from the moral law, and that they are entailed in the very order of creation, in a document called Veritatis Splendor (The splendor of truth). These are not mere ideals that are proposed by the Church, and conformity to them is not a matter of individual conscience or some supererogatory feat reserved only to the most special saints. These moral laws are binding on everyone at all times, in all places, in any psychological, social, or cultural condition.

 

Those two documents, Humanae Vitae and Veritatis Splendor, were seen by conservative Catholics as vindication of the Church’s perennial moral teachings, its theological commitments about the moral law, and the sufficiency of God’s grace to assist Christians in obeying it. And to consolidate this understanding of morality and theology in the Church, the Vatican founded the Pontifical Academy for Life (PAL) in 1994 as a kind of ongoing think-tank dedicated to doing research on new biomedical issues and technologies and to promoting the protection of human life in biomedical fields.

 

But the Church’s internal critics of Humane Vitae and Veritatis Splendor did not go away. And under Pope Francis, they have captured momentum and the institutions of influence, even at the Pontifical Academy for Life. Pope Francis ended all the lifetime terms of the members of the Academy in 2016, making the new terms five-year renewable appointments. He dropped a requirement that members sign a document promising to defend life in accordance with Church teaching. Earlier this year, the PAL published a book — a summary of a seminar — in which Church teaching was often repudiated. The introduction, written by Archbishop Paglia, presented it as an authentic development of Christian doctrine and as a “paradigm shift.” The first claim is made dubious by the credibility of the latter one.

 

The theology that the critics promoted recast the laws of God as mere “ideals” that the Church proposes. By doing so, they largely make a hash of the Church’s teaching on sin, repentance, and actual grace. For if these are all ideals, and the Church is just accompanying people from where they are now, closer to the ideal later, then so long as one’s individual conscience approves of an act, all those actions formerly understood as sins are recast as approximations of the ideal. This radical rewrite of Christian morality already gained purchase in Pope Francis’ encyclical Amoris Latetia, which tried to find a way to allow remarried Catholics back to Holy Communion. In the months ahead, it is rumored, this relativizing understanding of conscience will be applied even more fully to the matters of contraception in another encyclical being prepared by members of the Pontifical Academy for Life.

 

So long as an active conscience is detected, who can say there is really sin? By such an understanding, the prophet Nathan could have excused King David as merely imperfectly approximating the idea for marriage when he sent the husband of Bathsheba to the front lines to die.

 

Under Francis, the Church is trying to swallow its own tail, to use the extraordinary authority granted to the Apostles and to Peter to question the Church’s own divine mission. If even the Catholic Church can no longer tell us what’s right and wrong, to hell with it.

(Political) Crime and (Legal) Punishment

By Kevin D. Williamson

Tuesday, August 30, 2022

 

Republicans really want to talk about Hunter Biden’s laptop. Democrats want to talk about January 6. Every partisan has his favorite story.

 

What if I told you, those are the same story?

 

They are, in a sense.

 

By the numbers, there isn’t much reason to care about January 6. The Capitol architect estimates that property damage was something around $3 million, and there were five deaths associated with that tornado of rage, filth, and stupidity. In term of loss of life, the fiasco at Travis Scott’s Astroworld show in Houston was twice as bad — ten dead — and, if you ask the lawyers, the dollar damages were a whole lot worse: They’re currently asking $3 billion in total, with 387 lawsuits from 2,800 alleged victims at last count. (The dollar figures are not strictly comparable: The $3 billion in damages sought in the Astroworld mess includes both property damage and bodily injury.) But I care a lot more about January 6 than I do Astroworld, because — this part matters! — it was an attempt to nullify a legitimate election and thereby effect the overthrow of the government of these United States. I care about that. There are lots of riots and lots of other crime. When those riots take on a particular political character, they are of much more urgent interest.

 

There are a lot of Hunter Biden types in the world, and I don’t care about most of them. Coke and hookers and all that? I’m a libertarian — that stuff isn’t very good for you, but I’m not inclined to throw anybody into prison over it. Corrupt business practices? I’m not going to say those don’t matter, but I’m a lot less fussy about that than many Americans are — I’m not convinced insider trading should be a crime, for instance. There are a lot of people who have gone to jail for financial crimes who shouldn’t have, in my view: Michael Milken, Martha Stewart, Conrad Black. (I’d be more inclined to put Baron Black of Crossharbour in a dungeon over that Trump book, even if the Supreme Court legalized that kind of performance in Lawrence vs. Texas.) There are a lot of idiot sons on a lot of corporate payrolls. But there is reason to believe that Hunter Biden was accepting payments for political favors secured through his father, and some reason to believe that he was acting as a conduit for payments to his family that amounted to bribes. There is very good reason to believe that Hunter Biden should have been charged with other serious crimes — crimes for which people without his family connections have been charged in similar circumstances. To be clear: There have been no such charges filed, much less charges that have been proved beyond a reasonable doubt in a court of law. But the Hunter Biden situation is serious in a way that the shenanigans of your average moneyed and coddled and drug-addled mediocrity are not — because of their political character.

 

I’m not really convinced that guys who peddle coke to such idiots as Hunter Biden should go to prison at all. I am very much convinced that politicians and members of their extended families who take bribes, sell favors, or steer contracts to friends and family should be dropped in the nearest oubliette for 20 years.

 

Where I disagree with some of my friends and colleagues is in the fact that I want heightened attention to politically connected crimes across the board. I think that those who argue that we should be gingerly about investigating such figures as former president Donald Trump because such investigations are bound to produce political convulsions are wrong on the merits: Former presidents should be subjected to a higher degree of scrutiny when it comes to illegal actions, not a lesser degree of scrutiny. If some nobody takes a bunch of classified documents home without going through the proper channels, that nobody is liable to go to prison. If we really mean what we say about equality before the law, then we must not refuse to investigate a former president for a similar offense because we are afraid that doing so will upset some people.

 

Not all riots are the same thing: Looting a sneaker store is a serious crime and ought to be treated as such, but attempting to overturn an election by means of violence is a very different sort of thing. Not all useless rich-guy drug addicts are created equal, and neither are their crimes. We should be more inclined to prosecute the powerful and the connected, rather than less inclined.

 

Crimes of a political character erode the foundations of the regime itself and as such are a menace more urgent and more general than what might be suggested by the particular details of the crime itself. In Texas, theft of less than $1,500 is a misdemeanor — but if Senator Bob steals $1 from the Treasury, he needs to go to the least pleasant prison we have for a very long time. A free society has to defend its institutions fiercely and with great vigilance.

 

The real cost of corruption is much, much higher than the value of the money that changes hands. The cost is high even when no money changes hands.

American Pop Culture Suffers under the Yoke of ‘Woke’

By Jim Geraghty

Tuesday, August 30, 2022

 

Michelle Goldberg of the New York Times is bored with American popular culture, and echoes literary critic Christian Lorentzen’s lament that, “Hollywood movies are boring. Television is boring. Pop music is boring. The art world is boring. Broadway is boring. Books from big publishing are boring.” She warns:

 

An obvious caveat: I’m a white middle-aged parent, so whatever is truly cool is, by definition, happening outside my purview. Still, when I go to coffee shops where young people are hanging out, the music is often either the same music I listened to when I was young, or music that sounds just like it. One of the year’s biggest hit singles is a Kate Bush song that came out in 1985. I can think of no recent novel or film that provoked passionate debate. Public arguments people do have about art — about appropriation and offense, usually — have grown stale and repetitive, almost rote.

 

I would note that the Kate Bush song Goldberg is referring to became an (overplayed) hit this summer because of the new season of Stranger Things, which as a series is both an antidote to, and a reflection of, our sense of cultural stagnation. Here is a hugely popular television show that isn’t based upon a book series, or a comic book, or a reboot of an old television show or movie. By contrast, five of the top-ten highest-grossing movies of 2021 featured comic-book heroes; the rest were the ninth (!) offering in the Fast and Furious series, another James Bond movie, and sequels to A Quiet Place and Ghostbusters. Only Free Guy was based upon an original concept.

 

But the inspiration for Stranger Things is glaringly obvious from its callbacks and homages — Steven Spielberg’s early work such as Close Encounters of the Third Kind, E.T., and Jaws, the horror novels of Stephen King, The Goonies, and other 1980s adventures-in-suburbia movies. (I’d argue that what elevates Stranger Things is that the Duffer Brothers know their audience’s expectations and then do the opposite. The rich-family high-school jerk turns out to be a decent and charismatic guy who wants to be a better person, the hard-drinking small-town sheriff is actually a good detective, the weird loner teenager is a caring family member. The show’s continuing theme is that appearances can be deceiving.)

 

Cultural critics debate whether we’ve seen the death of the monoculture, the sense that, despite all our differences as Americans, there are a few cultural offerings that are enjoyed coast to coast, highbrow to lowbrow, and everywhere in between. When there were only three channels, the odds that you and your neighbor enjoyed watching the same television show were much more likely. (In other words, there may be some TV shows, movies, books, and music out there that would thrill Michele Goldberg, but she just hasn’t found them yet.)

 

The four most-watched broadcast-television prime-time shows today among adults from ages 18 to 49 are football games. The fifth is Yellowstone, averaging 2.7 million viewers, and the sixth is the NBC drama This Is Us, with just over 2 million viewers. By comparison, back in the 1980s, The Cosby Show regularly had more than 30 million viewers. As Variety has observed, Nielsen ratings, the traditional measurement of a show’s success, have become increasingly irrelevant:

 

How much longer can we even keep reporting young adult demos, when the numbers become microscopic? When there’s a 12-way tie for 19th place with a 1.0 rating, and the top 100 chart ends with a 28-way tie for 89th place with a 0.5 rating . . . the numbers lose any real meaning or value.

 

Those low numbers reflect that people from 18 to 49 are much less likely to watch live broadcast television anymore. They’ve got Netflix, Amazon Prime, Hulu, Disney Plus, HBO Max, Apple TV, and a lot more, where the show begins when they want, can be paused whenever they want, and often the next episode is available immediately. So Stranger Things was a hit, but there was a chance that your friend was an episode ahead or an episode behind.

 

Americans have more offerings and options than ever, which is good news. But one of the consequences is that it’s rarer and rarer to feel like you’re sharing in an experience where “everyone” is watching the same show.

 

But there’s another factor that Goldberg’s column doesn’t acknowledge at all, and I have a hard time believing it isn’t at least a contributing factor to that sense of cultural boredom and stagnation: The rules of “woke” pop culture stifle creativity.

 

It’s not just that woke doesn’t leave room for nuance; it often drains characters of what makes them fascinating and intriguing and exciting to watch. In almost every memorable story, the heroes are flawed, but find it in themselves to rise to the occasion and be heroic anyway. The villains or antagonists are bad or obstacles to the hero, but in their minds, they’re convinced they’re the heroes of the story. But in a political polemic, a flawed hero and a nuanced villain means that the opposing political side might have a point — and woke creators can’t allow their audiences to think that, now, can they?

 

There’s a difference between writing a story about a strong female character — Ripley from the Aliens movies, Sarah Connor from the first few Terminator movies, Clarice Starling from Silence of the Lambs, heck, even Maria from The Sound of Music — and writing a story deliberately setting out to feature a “strong female character.” You may have noticed that certain modern “strong female characters” are rarely allowed to have flaws, that other characters are often gushing about how amazing they are, and that they struggle less than you might expect in the second and third acts. The nickname for this type of character is “Mary Sue,” and as protagonists, they’re usually really boring.

 

Do we need another pop-cultural offering where the creative team or actors say the villain is inspired by Trump or his politics?

 

We get it. You think Trump is bad. This is not exactly a new or groundbreaking position in our politics. He’s been the center of our political world just about every day since mid 2015. Do we need to rehash all of this in our television shows or movies? Trust me, screenwriter, your thinly veiled fictional version of Trump isn’t as clever as you think it is, and it certainly isn’t original or all that entertaining.

 

What’s that? You say your story’s fictional version of Trump will be a vivid demonstration of the danger and power of lies? Just what is your fictional story going to demonstrate that is more powerful than, say, the events of January 6?

 

If Hollywood’s working screenwriters collectively believe that all evil in the world traces back to powerful straight white men and big greedy corporations, after a while, every villain starts to look the same. Everyone remembers Gordon Gekko’s “greed works” line from Wall Street, but no one remembers that in the scene, he’s ripping into the board of directors of a failing paper company because it has too much unproductive middle management and vice presidents, and the company’s leadership has gotten lazy and complacent. Your villain is much more interesting if they have a legitimate point! If your villain gets too much like Snidely Whiplash, no one relates to him or finds him all that interesting to watch.

 

If your villain needs to be irredeemably evil and can’t have a legitimate point, at least give them some traits your audience will envy. Hans Gruber is fascinating because he’s sophisticated, smart, meticulous, and even charming — even though he’s doing something bad. The Joker is usually intriguing to watch as a villain because he’s so unpredictable; he’s free to ignore all of society’s written laws and unwritten rules. Femme fatales are usually blisteringly sexy and fearless and determined in pursuing what they want.

 

A little while back, National Review’s old friend Rob Long, who’s worked in Hollywood for a long time, shared what felt like a really revealing anecdote about how Hollywood thinks:

 

Lionel Chetwynd, the gifted writer and director, tells a wryly funny story about pitching a World War II movie to room full of studio executives. The project was about a Canadian regiment on D-Day that had to invade a heavily fortified German redoubt on the French coast to divert Nazi forces away from the actual invasion at Omaha Beach. It was a suicide mission. A crucial suicide mission, but nevertheless one designed to result in catastrophic casualties. In his story, the brave men of the Canadian regiment ultimately know exactly what their fate is and face it with bravery. I’ve heard him give that pitch, and it’s a stunner. When he winds it up, there are lumpy throats all over the room.

 

“Love it,” one of the executives said at the pitch meeting. “But tell me, who’s the enemy here?”

 

“Um, Hitler,” Chetwynd replied.

 

“Yes, yes, right, of course,” the executive said. “But who’s the real enemy?”

 

All Chetwynd had to do was say “bloodthirsty American generals” or “munitions makers” and he would have walked out of there with a green light.

 

The military-industrial complex, rogue military contractors, hard-liner generals who think our heroes have committed some crime — these can be classic villains. But this is also well-trod territory, difficult to make fresh or new. In the real world, we can find menaces everywhere — from drug cartels to serial killers to abusive spouses and parents to gangs to terrorist groups to foreign spies to hostile foreign powers. Or you can look beyond reality to make up genocidal population-control enthusiasts or a rogue’s gallery of mad scientists or occult terrorist groups with seemingly otherworldly motives or rogue mercenary virologists, or you can make uncovering the identity of the antagonist a key part of the plot.

 

By the way, if you ever want to feel what a liberal feels while watching message movies all the time, watch 2012’s Won’t Back Down, a docudrama about the opening of a charter school in Pittsburgh. It hits a lot of familiar notes about underdogs taking on “the system,” but in this movie, the teacher’s unions and school-administration bureaucrats are the lazy, callous villains, and it’s up to a plucky and determined mom and frustrated teacher to fight the system.

 

At the risk of undermining everything I wrote above, Won’t Back Down is utterly, deliciously, hilariously one-sided; the sniveling, weaselly teacher’s-union representative repeats the contested Albert Shanker quote, “When school children start paying union dues, that’s when I’ll start representing the interests of school children.” The film’s tagline is: “A system can fail, but a parent can’t.” I remember watching this movie and thinking, “Wow, is this how liberals feel all the time? You would think they would be in a better mood.”

Worried about Student-Loan Debt? Start Firing Administrators

By Ellen Carmichael

Tuesday, August 30, 2022

 

According to U.S. News and World Report, the average tuition and fees at ranked colleges for the 2021–22 academic year were $10,338 for in-state public schools, $22,698 for out-of-state public schools, and $38,185 for private schools. With no-questions-asked access to educational loans, it’s no surprise that U.S. student-loan debt topped $1.75 trillion last month.

 

The social ramifications are very real. Families are struggling with student-loan debt, while many young professionals are delaying marriage or opting not to have families at all because they feel their repayment obligations are too great.

 

Democrats in Washington, as is their wont, promulgate their perpetual policy panacea: throw money at the problem. They’ve made student-loan forgiveness a platform plank for their party and a primary imperative of the Biden administration, with POTUS fans celebrating his illegal student-loan bailout last week, which will transfer $10,000 to $20,000 in debt from some taxpayers to others, in addition to making other sweeping changes that ultimately reduce borrower responsibility. Never mind, of course, the legality, fairness, or economics of the matter.

 

Perhaps this is because treating the symptoms of the student-debt crisis is intellectually and politically easier than meaningfully addressing the cause. It takes no courage to willfully ignore the experts who have sounded the alarm for decades that government subsidy of higher education drives up its price. And while they’ve given themselves permission to turn a blind eye to the inflation pains Americans are feeling, it might be harder to ignore its effects on higher education, given that tuition already grew at twice the inflation rate over the past few decades.

 

Even as universities employ emerging technologies and produce groundbreaking new research, it’s hard to imagine that these innovations in education warrant the ever-increasing costs of sending a young adult to college. That’s because the increases aren’t connected to new learning at all.

 

In his 2017 paper “The Changing of the Guard: The Political Economy of Administrative Bloat in American Higher Education,” George Mason University law-school professor Todd Zywicki concludes that administrative hires at colleges and universities increased “50 percent faster than the number of classroom instructors.” Today, three in ten higher-education dollars go directly to what researchers have deemed “administrative blight” or “administrative bloat,” a phenomenon that has spurred record numbers of collegiate professional staff. This group does not include the professors or instructors responsible for educating young scholars.

 

During the 2014–15 school year, instructional costs in higher education were around $148 billion, while administrative expenses nearly caught up to them, at $122.3 billion. Seven years later and amid skyrocketed inflation, the costs of college administration are indubitably even higher. From a review of current job openings at higheredjobs.com, their priorities are even clearer: Today, there are approximately 38,000 faculty positions open nationwide, just half of the more than 75,600 administrative and executive jobs available.

 

At some elite institutions, administrators have begun to outnumber the students they’re meant to serve. By 2015, there were the same number of administrators at Harvard University as undergraduate students. In 2021, Yale earned a similar distinction, as the number of its non-instructor professional staff had ballooned 45 percent in less than two decades. As of 2018, Stanford University, which has recently come under fire for its micromanagement of adult students that includes racially segregated housing and draconian rules governing alcohol consumption, employed 14,448 nonteaching employees, more than double the nearly 6,679 instructional employees on the payroll, a rather remarkable feat considering that the university’s enrollment was approximately 17,000 students that academic year.

 

These bureaucrats are often hired for deliberately opaque positions, with titles such as “Senior Student Accountability Coordinator” and “LGBTQIA+ Equity, Success, and Wellness Coordinator.” At California State University, Sacramento, an administrator can make upwards of $13,750 monthly for serving as the “Associate Athletic Director for Diversity, Equity and Inclusion.” And at Jefferson Community College in Louisville, Ky., a “Student Affairs Assistant III” position exists, whose holder is to “collaborate with faculty, staff, and community partners to promote a supportive environment where students thrive,” whatever that means.

 

“The interesting thing about the administrative bloat in higher education is, literally, nobody knows who all these people are or what they’re doing,” Zywicki told Forbes in 2017.

 

And even with all their staffing largesse, universities continue to demand more money in tuition, student fees, and taxpayer dollars. My alma mater, Louisiana State University, periodically attempts to force lawmakers to raise taxes to funnel more money to it. In 2016, Democratic governor John Bel Edwards, on behalf of the school, insisted that if the legislature wouldn’t come up with the funds to close the budget gap (read: raise taxes), some students couldn’t attend classes, endangering their graduation tracks, and the school’s beloved school football program would be put on ice.

 

Because universities remain the primary beneficiaries of the federal government’s irresponsible student-loan policies, it is imperative that a full-scale audit is performed of the administrative state of America’s higher education. Lawmakers must weigh the educational benefit of instruction against administration, prioritizing the latter over the former, to bring down the costs of higher education. Without such bold action, alumni, their families, and, apparently, taxpayers will all pay the price.

Leon Trotsky’s Last Resting Place

By John J. Miller

Thursday, August 25, 2022

 

Mexico City

 

You can still see the bullet holes in the walls of Leon Trotsky’s house in Mexico, from the night when assassins came for him. They opened fire around 4 a.m., waking the exiled communist from a sleep induced by a sedative. “The explosions were too close, right here within the room, next to me and overhead,” wrote Trotsky about the events of May 24, 1940. “Clearly what we had always expected was now happening: we were under attack.” 

 

He and his wife, Natalia, rolled off their bed, hit the floor, and played dead. When the gunfire ceased, a stranger entered their room. Biographer Bertrand M. Patenaude describes the harrowing moment: “The intruder seemed to be inspecting the Trotskys’ bedroom for signs of life. Although there were none, he raised a handgun and fired a round of bullets into the beds, then disappeared.” Somehow, he missed his target. “It was a sheer miracle that we escaped with our lives,” said Natalia.

 

Their luck ran out three months later. Joseph Stalin, the leader of the Soviet Union, still wanted to kill his great rival. His minions in Mexico switched tactics. Instead of trying to overpower guards in an organized raid, they dispatched a lone-wolf assailant. Ramón Mercader penetrated Trotsky’s compound on August 20 and drove an ice axe into the skull of the Russian revolutionary, who died the next day. It’s a strange story of murder, martyrdom, adultery, art, and radical politics. 

 

The scene of the violence is now a Ford’s Theatre of communism — part historical crime scene and part left-wing memorial, in a sleepy section of Mexico City’s Coyoacán neighborhood, about six miles south of downtown. A yellow house contains colorful serape rugs, bookcases with volumes by Marx and Lenin, and the Ediphones that Trotsky used for recording his rants onto wax cylinders. Outside is a garden, where Trotsky grew cacti and raised rabbits in hutches. It’s a tranquil place, except for the fact that it’s surrounded by high walls, a watchtower, and bunk rooms for sentries. Trotsky’s home was in fact an ad hoc fortress whose purpose was to protect its main occupant. A reminder of its ultimate failure comes in the form of Trotsky’s gravesite: an upright concrete slab that flaunts a hammer and sickle, marking the location of his ashes. On a pole above it hangs a red flag, which on the day of my visit this summer drooped limply.

 

Tickets to the Museo Casa de León Trotsky cost 40 pesos (about $2). An exhibit space includes photographs of the “Old Man,” as he was sometimes called, and relics such as the round glasses that combined with his pointy beard and billowing hair to give him a distinctive look. (The lethal ice axe is in the collection of the International Spy Museum in Washington, D.C.) There’s also a café and a gift shop, where tourists can buy T-shirts with images of a bespectacled Trotsky for 140 pesos, and black hats with red stars for 180 pesos. A rack of books, all in Spanish, includes works by Trotsky as well as a hagiography of Hugo Chávez, the late socialist leader of Venezuela. 

 

What Trotsky would make of all this is anyone’s guess. Born in 1879 in present-day Ukraine, he became a key ally of Vladimir Lenin during the Russian Revolution of 1917. He delivered stem-winders, led the Red Army, and helped establish the Soviet Union as an authoritarian state. When Lenin died in 1924, Trotsky hoped to succeed him but lost a power struggle to Stalin, who first isolated Trotsky and then expelled him in 1929. From abroad, Trotsky remained a dedicated communist but also became a fierce critic of Stalin and a general annoyance to the governments that hosted him. By 1936, he needed to find a new home — and when he arrived in Mexico early the next year, it was because no other country would have him.

 

Mexican president Lázaro Cárdenas offered asylum to Trotsky at the behest of Diego Rivera, who may be the greatest artist in Mexican history. Rivera had become famous for decorating public spaces in a series of nationalist projects that drew inspiration from the Mesoamerican past, added European influences, and forged a new mestizo aesthetic that had strong political dimensions but also honored the dignity of peasant life and factory workers. As his reputation grew in the 1930s, he took commissions from wealthy Americans, including Edsel Ford, who paid for a major work in a courtyard that is now the centerpiece of the Detroit Institute of Arts.

 

As Rivera finished in Detroit, the Rockefeller family hired him to create a big fresco in the lobby of Rockefeller Center in New York City. Man at the Crossroads was supposed to depict the struggle between capitalism and socialism, but Rivera failed to control his left-wing enthusiasms, and controversy erupted when he inserted a favorable portrait of Lenin. Nelson Rockefeller canceled the project. It was destroyed in 1934.

 

Today, there are two ways to see Man at the Crossroads. The first is to study the black-and-white photographs that survive from its brief existence at Rockefeller Center. The second is to visit the Palacio de Bellas Artes, which is one of Mexico City’s architectural highlights as well as the place where Rivera re-created the work shortly after the destruction of the original. Renamed “Man, Controller of the Universe,” this replica includes the notorious picture of Lenin. It also adds an image of Trotsky, in what is perhaps the most famous artistic rendering of him.

 

So Rivera immortalized Trotsky in art and then secured his asylum in Mexico — and Trotsky thanked his friend by having an affair with his wife, Frida Kahlo, also an artist. In recent decades, feminists have turned Kahlo into a hipster icon. A painting of hers sold last year at Sotheby’s for nearly $35 million. She had talent, but whereas Rivera often included politics in his art, Kahlo allowed her work to become agitprop. One of her self-portraits, for example, shows the head of Karl Marx and a white dove floating above her. It’s called “Marxism Will Heal the Sick.” It could be a poster in Havana or Pyongyang.

 

When the affair started, Trotsky and his wife were living with Rivera and Kahlo. The Old Man was nearly twice the age of his paramour; he was 57 and she was 29. Each member of the love triangle was a serial philanderer. Only Trotsky’s long-suffering wife, Natalia, was innocent. Trotsky and Kahlo carried on for several months, and then they seem to have called off their liaison. Rivera and Kahlo divorced, but their relationship already had been tumultuous and the couple soon remarried. Meanwhile, the Trotskys moved into what would be their final home together.

 

At the Palacio de Bellas Artes, near Rivera’s Man, Controller of the Universe, are several big and garish murals by David Siqueiros. If Rivera is Mexico’s greatest muralist, Siqueiros is its second-greatest — a distant second, perhaps, but second nonetheless, and his work may be seen all over Mexico City. It’s celebrated outside Mexico, too, and one of his self-portraits hangs at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C., alongside works by 20th-century masters Jackson Pollock and Mark Rothko.

 

Siqueiros also tried to murder Trotsky. He was one of the hitmen on the unsuccessful raid of Trotsky’s compound. Whereas Rivera was a leftist who associated with communists and sympathized with the political ideas of Trotsky, Siqueiros was a full-on Stalinist who was happy to take his orders from Moscow. Working with the NKVD — the forerunner of the KGB — he helped organize the attack. Those bullet holes still visible on the wall of Trotsky’s study may have come from a weapon he fired. 

 

He also got away with his crime, or mostly got away with it. Police arrested Siqueiros, held him for six months, and put him on trial, where he spoke in his own defense. Just as Stalin liked to blame Trotsky for every problem in the Soviet Union in the 1930s — a practice that George Orwell satirized in his portrayals of Napoleon and Snowball in Animal Farm, and of Big Brother and Emmanuel Goldstein in 1984 — Siqueiros claimed that the goal of his raid was “to help expose the treason of a political center of espionage and provocation.” The artist was acquitted of attempted homicide but convicted of trespassing and breaking and entering. Released on bail, he left the country for two and a half years. Siqueiros returned to Mexico in 1943 and went back to work as an artist, producing his murals in the Palacio de Bellas Artes and beyond. In 1966, toward the end of his life, the government of Mexico gave him its National Art Prize. In 1967, the Soviet Union awarded him the Lenin Peace Prize, an honor he shares with Fidel Castro and Angela Davis.

 

An irony of the period is that none of Mexico’s great muralists — neither Rivera, nor Siqueiros, nor José Clemente Orozco, who is often counted as the third member of their triumvirate — produced what may be their country’s most compelling political image, which happens to be a blurry photograph. It was taken on November 23, 1927, and it shows Miguel Pro, a Jesuit priest who served his faith in defiance of a ruthlessly secular government’s crackdown on churches and religious liberty, in a conflict called the “Cristero War.” People outside Mexico tend not to know much about Mexican history, and especially not this aspect of it, but readers of The Power and the Glory, the novel by Graham Greene, at least will have gotten a glimpse of the anti-Catholic oppression that had become both outrageous and routine.

 

Police had arrested Padre Pro in connection with an attempted assassination of a former Mexican president who had persecuted Catholics. The priest knew the conspirators, but he seems not to have joined their plotting. Yet he was immediately condemned to death without a trial. A photographer captured Pro’s last moments, most notably in a stunning image from when Pro faced a firing squad without a blindfold and stretched out his arms, in imitation of Christ on the cross. The priest’s final act was to forgive his enemies and shout “Viva Cristo Rey!” The Mexican-born archbishop of Los Angeles, José H. Gomez, has written that Pro “may be the only martyr in the history of the church whose execution was photographed.”

 

The man who ordered the photography was the then president, Plutarco Elías Calles, who wanted the pictures of Pro’s death to frighten Catholics into submission. His plan backfired. At least 20,000 people came out for Pro’s funeral, and the priest’s martyrdom inspired Catholics both in and out of Mexico. My first encounter with his name and story came years ago at a church in Royal Oak, Mich., where he is portrayed in a golden bas-relief, installed back when he was still a cause célèbre. In 1988, Pope John Paul II beatified him, putting Pro on a path to sainthood. His remains were moved from a cemetery in Mexico City to the nearby Parroquia de la Sagrada Familia, a parish church that now houses his shrine, which is beside a chapel dedicated to Our Lady of Guadalupe. About seven miles to its north is the Hill of Tepeyac, site of the Marian apparitions of 1531, where today a big basilica displays Juan Diego’s tilma with the famous image. It’s behind bulletproof glass.

The Missing Republican Agenda

National Review Online

Monday, August 29, 2022

 

In the midterm elections, Republicans are running against an all-Democratic government that has produced record inflation, falling real wages, insecurity at the border, and weakness abroad. The indictment is just, the instinct to capitalize on public dissatisfaction sound.

 

But there’s something missing from the Republican campaigns. With rare exceptions, Republicans are doing little to explain what they would have the government do differently if they took power. If Republicans take the House and the Senate, what kind of legislation do they intend to send to President Biden? Detailed plans aren’t needed; nor must all the candidates agree on a singular platform, Contract with America–style. But voters deserve to have a sense of how Republicans intend to wield the power for which they are asking.

 

Spelling out a sensible conservative policy agenda might even help Republicans win their campaigns. But that consideration, weighty as it is, is secondary. As Yuval Levin elaborates in the lead essay of our new issue, the point of the campaigns ought to be better, and more conservative, government. Defeating Democrats and their terrible ideas is important, but if that is all Republicans want they are acquiescing to every past victory for progressivism and every other outdated or dysfunctional policy. To seek nothing more is to say that Americans are already governed as well as they can be — and thus to undercut the premise that they are right to be dissatisfied in the first place.

 

That’s why our offerings at National Review Online regularly include proposals to address America’s challenges in ways that are consistent with our constitutional order. Our special issue on a GOP agenda presents several that are particularly compelling at this moment. Daniel Lips explores the new opportunities that post-Covid America offers for giving parents more control over education — including letting states use schools’ unspent pandemic-relief funds to promote school choice. Beth Akers argues for holding predatory colleges accountable for saddling students with debt without giving them the skills needed to pay them, and for ending government-backed loans for graduate school altogether.

 

Adam White takes up the hydra-headed problem of Big Tech. He would have Republicans in the next Congress conduct oversight hearings on the way Big Tech has insinuated itself into American classrooms and what legislation could do about it. He also recommends some practical reforms to mitigate the damage Big Tech is doing, such as restricting social-media accounts to adults and placing controls on TikTok. Perhaps most important, he urges Republicans to look at regulatory changes that would provide start-up firms with more sources of financing outside Silicon Valley.

 

Alexander William Salter urges Congress to use oversight and legislation to constrain the activism and discretion of the Federal Reserve, arguing that requiring more predictable monetary policy would enhance its credibility. In this way Congress could do its part to prevent the continuation or recurrence of today’s inflation. Chris Pope explains how government keeps health premiums too high, and what legislators could do to lower them if they wished. And Ramesh Ponnuru argues that congressional Republicans will be in a better position to win the abortion debate if they renew their push for a 20-week ban.

 

That list hardly exhausts the ways conservatives could make American government less burdensome. Republicans have been listless even on taxes, with few of them calling for an extension of tax cuts that are due to expire. Legislative attention to immigration, where action is needed if we are to have a system that looks like someone designed it on purpose, is sporadic at best.

 

This is a moment of liberal overconfidence and failure that should create numerous conservative opportunities. But those opportunities will be squandered if Republicans persist in not even trying to identify them.

Which Side Is Itching for a Civil War Again?

By Jim Geraghty

Monday, August 29, 2022

 

Sure, a future second American civil war seems like a ridiculous thought.

 

And yet, some governors and aspiring governors do feel entitled to call for the expulsion of citizens who don’t share their political beliefs — such calls have been heard in the not-too-distant past, and they’ve been heard again recently.

 

Back in 2014, then-New York governor Andrew Cuomo took it upon himself to decide who was and who wasn’t a New Yorker, and decreeing that those with certain political views should leave the state: “These extreme conservatives who are right-to-life, pro-assault-weapon, anti-gay? Is that who they are? Because if that’s who they are and they’re the extreme conservatives, they have no place in the state of New York, because that’s not who New Yorkers are.”

 

Now, think about it: There’s a big step between, “Those who think differently from me are a bunch of idiots,” and, “Those who think differently from me are a bunch of idiots and they shouldn’t be allowed to live here.” And there’s another big step between some random schmuck’s running around saying that people of certain beliefs have no place in their home state, and the governor’s declaring that people with certain beliefs have no place in his state.

 

Andrew Cuomo eventually made his sterling character, sensitive touch, good judgment, and keen wisdom abundantly clear. And Cuomo’s replacement, Kathy Hochul, apparently shares the same outlook. On Monday, she declared at a campaign rally, “And we are here to say that the era of Trump, and Zeldin and Molinaro, just jump on a bus and head down to Florida where you belong, okay? Get out of town. Because you do not represent our values. You are not New Yorkers.”

 

Once again, the governor believes she has the moral, if not legal, authority to declare who is and who is not a New Yorker; in her mind, your status as an authentic New Yorker is proven by certain “values,” not a place of residence in the state. (If only she applied the same litmus test to state taxes: “Your honor, I am exempt from paying New York state taxes because the governor herself decreed I am not a New Yorker.”)

 

Keep in mind, Hochul’s opponent, Lee Zeldin, was physically attacked by a man with a knife, shortly after her campaign called upon supporters to “stalk” Zeldin. Maybe she meant he should get out of New York because he’s not safe there as long as she remains governor.

 

Indeed, with sterling past leadership such as Eliot Spitzer, Eric Schneiderman, Anthony Weiner, and Cuomo, who wouldn’t want to be a New York Democrat? Their leadership over the past two decades has been so corrupt, sordid, and shameless, that any movie made about the state party would have to be directed by Roman Polanski.

 

Meanwhile, on Wednesday, newly nominated Florida Democratic gubernatorial nominee Charlie Crist said of past supporters of Ron DeSantis, “Those who support the governor should stay with him. I don’t want your vote. If you have that hate in your heart, keep it there.” Apparently, Crist isn’t interested in earning the votes of the 4,076,186 Floridians who voted for DeSantis in 2018, or the 54 percent of Floridians who currently approve of the job DeSantis is doing.

 

Are you starting to see a pattern here? Hillary Clinton’s “basket of deplorables” crossed a key moral threshold. For most of modern history, political candidates denounced other political candidates. “Don’t vote for the other guy. He’s a crook, an extremist, a lunatic, a moron, etc.” But Hillary’s comment was a denunciation of voters who supported the other guy: “If you support my opponent, you’re a crook, extremist, lunatic, moron, etc.” Until then, candidates had typically refrained from denouncing their opponents’ supporters, on the theory that you should never willingly cede potential votes.

 

Those who vote for the opposition are American citizens. They’re moms and dads and grandparents and brothers and sisters. In many cases, members of the same family, neighborhood, groups of friends, and teammates don’t vote the same. You don’t have to like them, and you don’t have to agree with them. But you must respect them as fellow citizens because they have the same rights that you do. Your political beliefs don’t elevate you to some higher plane of consciousness or more advanced state of humanity.

 

Do Democratic officials who think and speak like this want to start a civil war? Not necessarily, but they are starting to casually declare that people who think differently from them don’t belong in “their” states. Those who can’t anticipate the kind of trouble this can stir up have a remarkable lack of foresight. We’re already living with the challenging consequences of “The Big Sort.” What happens when people start thinking that Republican voters in blue states or Democratic voters in red states deserve to be ostracized and driven out? What happens when Americans start thinking they’re entitled to live in a community or state of political homogeneity?

 

When you’re a governor, you’re the governor of everyone, even the voters whom you vehemently disagree with and who didn’t vote for you. It’s the same with legislators. If a citizen shows up at a House member’s district office and says that their Social Security checks stopped arriving, the staffer isn’t supposed to ask whether they voted for their boss or not. It’s right there in the title, “public servant.” You serve the public, not just members of your own party.

 

So no, I can’t stand it when some Floyd R. Turbo out there talks up a second civil war, or wild-eyed activists in the Texas Republican Party put a call for a state referendum on “Texas independence” in the state-party platform. Some of us have lived through Waco and Ruby Ridge and Oklahoma City, and the elders among us remember the Weather Underground and “Days of Rage.” There have always been some yahoos calling for a revolution. Most days, they never amount to much — which doesn’t mean they aren’t capable of killing people or committing outrageous atrocities.

 

But those yahoos don’t control any levers of government — at least, not yet. Cuomo did, Hochul does, and Crist is still a congressman.

 

Not Every Piece of Bad News Is Someone Betraying You

 

Chris Stirewalt, the former political editor of Fox News Channel, has a new book out, entitled Broken News: How the Media Rage Machine Divides America and How to Fight Back. In an excerpt in Politico, Stirewalt offers this useful anecdote about the dynamics within Fox News, and the difference between the election analysts who wanted to get their assessments right and the election analysts who tell the audience what they want to hear:

 

Sean Hannity, in particular, would bring [Dick] Morris on to say that the red wave was a Krakatoa-sized tsunami that would change politics forever. They, and some other analysts who I previously thought were more principled and smarter than Morris, used the same routine for the 2012 presidential election. That time they made preposterous claims not only that Mitt Romney was obviously going to win, but that it would be by a landslide. The best I could say for Romney in that cycle was that he had a path to a narrow victory by picking off a couple of Blue Wall states if he could turn things around in Ohio, where he had been sucking wind all summer. But a landslide? Pish posh.

 

That 100-seat [GOP House pickup] number in 2010 was just hype to juice ratings, and Ailes had to know that. Right? He was messing with the new guy. Right? . . .

 

The lesson I learned was that Hannity, Morris and the rest of the crew of the crimson tide were certainly engaging in wishful thinking, but certainly also motivated reasoning. The story they were telling was good for ratings or the frequency of their appearances. They wanted it to be true because they wanted Republicans to win, but keeping viewers keyed up about the epochal victory close at hand was an appealing incentive to exaggerate the GOP chances. It was good for them to raise expectations, but it wasn’t good for the party they were rooting for.

 

There are at least two wings of Fox News: one that wants to give it to their viewers straight, whether it pleases the audience or not, and another that wants to give their audience whatever they want to hear, and/or will bring in the biggest audience. And keep in mind, Fox News is not the only television-news channel that experiences this tension.

 

This doesn’t mean that the election analyst who gives you bad news is always right, and the election analyst who gives you good news is always wrong. It just means that when someone tells you something you don’t want to hear, it doesn’t mean they’re trying to sabotage your side. (As Stirewalt notes, the party in the lead still wants their voters to think the race is close so as to keep their grassroots motivated and prevent anyone from taking victory for granted. When Dick Morris predicted a GOP landslide that would never happen, he was actually hurting Republicans a little bit.)

 

The political landscape today clearly looks slightly better for Democrats than it did a few months ago, when the outlook was so bleak that even Democratic senator Patty Murray of Washington felt the need to start running television ads.

 

Chalk it up to the overturning of Roe v. Wade, the decline in gas prices, the reemergence of Trump after the Mar-a-Lago search warrant, some subpar Republican nominations in statewide races, Biden’s scoring some legislative wins, or some combination of all of these. But Biden’s approval rating is still low by historical standards and the right-direction/wrong-track numbers remain terrible. Americans generally feel like their lives and economic conditions are lousy. And this usually points to big losses for the incumbent party.