Do Celebrities Really Buy the Climate-Change Story?

By Kevin D. Williamson

Sunday, December 29, 2019

I love Emma Thompson’s acting. I wish somebody would tell her about Skype.

The great English actress is a climate-change activist, “activist” here meaning “a celebrity who cares about popular causes in public.” When she recently was accused of hypocrisy for jumping on a jet to attend a climate-change rally — international air travel is one of the most carbon-intensive things a person can do — she attempted to justify herself, saying: “For decades now we have been asking for clean energy, and this has been ignored.”

That is some grade-A magical thinking: The constraints involved in the problem of moving x pounds of people or freight y distance at speed z are questions of physics, not questions of ethics. “Asking for” things to be different does not remove those constraints; for decades now, I have been asking for a way to live off bourbon and cheeseburgers without getting fat and unnecessarily dead but, so far, no dice. Physics always wins.

Thompson argues that she simply must travel: “I have to when I’m working,” she says. But she is as rich as Croesus — she has Harry Potter money, for Pete’s sake — and does not “have to” work at all. And if by “work” she means “seeing some friends and basking in the warm glow of public approval while enjoying some champagne and canapés in support of a very popular cause,” then she could teleconference in if her voice is really so irreplaceable.

It isn’t, of course. If Emma Thompson fails to show up for the party, there are a thousand celebrities ready to take her place, to say nothing of ordinary schmucks. Climate change is one of the most popular causes in the world. There isn’t anybody who hasn’t heard about it and is just waiting on that nice lady from Nanny McPhee to share the grim news.

But nobody really believes in the apocalyptic story that celebrity activists such as Emma Thompson and Greta Thunberg tell. Emma Thompson does not have to travel. Greta Thunberg does not have to sail in a boat made from petroleum to perform a publicity stunt and then fly crew around the world on a big-ass jet to fetch the silly thing. We have the Internet. We have TikTok. Got something to say? Twitter is ready when you are.

If you want to know how deeply people really believe in this stuff, look at the real estate. New York is a national and world leader in building energy-efficient “net zero” office buildings — and, as of summer, it had . . . four of them. The celebrities keep promising us rising seas, but real-estate prices remain quite high in Malibu, Miami Beach, and the Hamptons. Jane Fonda recently lectured readers of the New York Times: “We have to live like we’re in a climate emergency.” Apparently, “live like we’re in a climate emergency” means living in a 7,100-square-foot mansion with an elevator, pool, fountains, motorized blinds, etc.

“Alarmism and catastrophic thinking are valuable,” writes David Wallace-Wells, also in the Times. He has a book on climate change he’d very much like to sell you. Available in both hardcover and paperback. Don’t ask what it is printed on.

He should send a copy to Jane Fonda, at one of her expansive, energy-hogging homes.

It’s not just the real estate. Gulfstream sales were up 31 percent in the first quarter of 2019 — and some of those private jets are taking greenie-weenie activists to climate-change conferences, to be sure . . . or to Cannes, or shuffling them between Beverly Hills and London, etc. An activist’s work is never done.

My point here is not the hypocrisy and stupidity of celebrities, Leonardo DiCaprio sailing around on the world’s fifth-largest yacht and all that. I don’t mind hypocrisy all that much — it is right up there with alcohol among the most valuable social lubricants.

I just wish DiCaprio would pay more attention to his own movies: You know that scene in Once Upon a Time in Hollywood in which Cliff Booth (Brad Pitt at his best) walks a gauntlet of hysterical, screaming acolytes of Charles Manson? That’s modern celebrity-activist culture in concentrated form. You think Quentin Tarantino cast Lena Dunham of all people as the subaltern of that sorry little cult for no reason? Everybody seems to have been in on that joke except her.

There are many, many cult members who know in their hearts that the cult and its beliefs are bullsh*t. But they need something to which to submit and do not have the strength of mind or character to face up to the facts.

But everybody apparently needs an apocalyptic story to get them through the tedium of these prosperous and peaceful days, this “weak, piping time of peace.” For some people, that need is filled by actual apocalyptic fiction, The Walking Dead or The City Where We Once Lived. For right-wing talk-radio hosts, it’s a story about the coming American civil war. For nice urban progressives, it’s climate change. Why all the doom and gloom? Because the end of the world is the ultimate moral permission slip, the all-trumping “desperate times call for desperate measures” ethical get-out-of-jail-free card. Antifa goons aren’t putting on black masks and engaging in political violence because they’re convinced that the United States is about to turn into a neo-Nazi hellhole — they’ve convinced themselves that the United States is about to turn into a neo-Nazi hellhole because they want to put on black masks and engage in political violence.

And what does the global-warming gang want? There isn’t any mystery about that. You can ask them. They want political power. They want the power to reorder economic and social life along the lines they see fit, rewarding their friends and punishing their enemies, and they want to enjoy the ultimate pleasure that they can imagine — self-righteousness — while they are doing it.

I myself have more or less conventional views of climate change and believe that adapting to it will be a challenge that imposes real costs. But I’ll believe that the celebrity activists believe in it when they start acting like it and the general-aviation section of the Pitkin County Airport looks like Rick Husband Amarillo International (!) Airport. I’ll believe they think we’re in an emergency when they start acting like we’re in an emergency.

What they act like is people who want power. Because that is what they are.

There’s No Such Thing As Free Trade With China As Long As It Cheats

By Nathanael Blake

Friday, December 27, 2019

Contrary to the old adage, cheaters frequently prosper. From the New England Patriots to our Chinese trading partners, a lot of unscrupulous folks have done quite well for themselves by cheating. This invites the question of what sort of fools would keep dealing with known, unreformed cheaters?

This is among the questions raised by Kevin Williamson’s oblique seeming response to my criticism of one of his recent columns. I am unsure whether to feel slighted that this National Review writer did not deign to dignify me with a direct response or, given his abusive abilities when irate, to count it a small mercy.

Regardless, Williamson has implicitly acknowledged the problem with his snark about those who worried about the “sneaky Chinese” stealing American jobs. As he puts it, “the biggest beef U.S. firms have with China [is] the theft of intellectual property, particularly in the form of counterfeit goods.” He argues that the best response to this is to enforce, and perhaps strengthen, the laws we have against counterfeiting and importing counterfeit goods.

This is a reasonable point, and I support the stepped-up enforcement measures he recommends. If the goal is to protect ourselves while maximizing trade with China, these are good recommendations. However, in making the argument, Williamson concedes that there are significant costs to doing business with cheaters and scofflaws, and that regimes matter when trading. These points ought to be examined, for they complicate the narrative of free trade as an inevitable boon to all parties.

The Costs of Trading with a Dishonest Regime

One of Williamson’s mantras is that trade is between individuals, not countries. This is (mostly) true when we are discussing, say, Missouri residents buying single-malt Scotch, or Scottish barbecue aficionados (surely there must be some) buying Missouri barbecue rubs and sauces. It is not really true when we are talking about dealing with a totalitarian (nominally communist but really fascist) country like mainland China.

Trade with such a regime is never free because the government is always in control of business, which has no rights it can assert against the government. The Chinese government is uninterested in the fair and free exchange of goods and services, instead viewing trade as a form of leverage and a way to procure technology.

The Chinese government has an ideological imperative — communists disdain private property — as well as geopolitical and financial incentives to turn a blind eye toward and even to encourage fraud and theft when targeted at Americans. Of course, we have plenty of homegrown rip-off merchants and scam artists, but American law enforcement works to squelch them.

Dealing with honest businesses under an honest government (by the standards of governments) is not the same as dealing with a regime like China’s. The latter imposes extra costs, as doing nothing means intellectual property is stolen and counterfeits flood the market. Taking action, whether hiring more port inspectors or Amazon increasing its efforts against counterfeiters, costs money, and these costs are not necessarily borne by those who have been profiting from dealing with unscrupulous foreign business and regimes.

Such costs have not been honestly accounted for by those advocating for free trade with the regime in Beijing. There are also other social and cultural costs of which we are only just becoming aware. Doing business with China has made our movies subject to the censorship of the Chinese Communist Party. It has made NBA stars who boldly speak about domestic politics into cowards when asked about China’s current genocidal campaign against a Muslim-minority population. There are many more examples of China using its economic power to squelch the free speech rights of its critics.

Going into business with murderous, quasi-communist bastards gives them leverage, and they use it. Our trade relations with China have not liberalized that country; they have given the thugs who rule it more tools of repression at home and the means to buy favor and bully critics abroad. After adding up the expensive externalities and the social cost, cheap stuff from China does not look as affordable as it does on the store shelf or the online cart.

Trade with China Has Created Real Problems

Perhaps trade with China and other totalitarian regimes is still worth it. Maybe the money is just too good to pass up, even accounting for the costs of dealing with a crooked government that encourages crooked businesses. It should nonetheless be clear that the carefree arguments used to justify free trade with other free and friendly nations are not obviously applicable to trade with a tyrannical geopolitical rival.

Our trade relations with China have not gone according to plan, and it is past time for a reckoning. President Trump’s trade war against China has been a haphazard campaign, but he was at least able to recognize that there was a problem with the autopilot trajectory of our previous trade policies. He has not provided a clear alternative trade policy, but his presidency has created opportunities for Republican politicians who will effectively rethink the issue.

Even if our trade relations with China are for the greater good, they have created real problems, including many caused by the malfeasance of that regime. These difficulties must be addressed, first of all by those who insist we continue our close economic relationships with China. Those who support free trade, even with regimes like China’s, should be offering solutions to the problems created by making deals with such tyrants, rather than sneering at those who have suffered by them.

A New Cause for Fear for Free Speech on Campus

By Jonathan Marks

Monday, December 23, 2019

In March, I reported optimistically about the state of free speech at our colleges and universities. At that time, the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (FIRE), which tracks attempts to disinvite or shut down campus speakers, recorded just nine “disinvitation” events in 2018. That was down from 43 in 2016, a record year, and 36 in 2017.

By 2018, 56 universities, 20 in that year alone, had adopted or endorsed versions of the University of Chicago’s impressive statement on free expression, according to which “concerns about civility and mutual respect can never be used as a justification for closing off discussion of ideas, however offensive or disagreeable those ideas may be to some members of our community.” Perhaps, I thought, the fever had broken.

But at the end of 2019, there are reasons to worry that the turn toward intellectual liberty on American campuses was a mirage. Having received additional reports, FIRE now records 18 disinvitation attempts for that year.

Still, that’s nothing compared to this year, with 37 recorded disinvitation episodes. Since reports will continue to trickle in after the year closes, the chances are that 2019 will set a new disinvitation attempt record, at least for the two decades or so in FIRE’s database.

But even if 2019 ends up beating 2016’s record, it will not be precisely a return to form.

As the political scientist Jeffrey Sachs has pointed out, disinvitation attempts that FIRE classifies as coming, ideologically speaking, from the left of a speaker remain down. In 2016, there were 35, making up 81 percent of the total. In 2019, there have been 19, just 51 percent of the total.

In contrast, attempts that come from the right of a speaker are up—FIRE has already recorded 11 in 2019, more than double 2016’s five. One of the most troubling cases of 2019 occurred at Georgia Southern University, where students burned copies of Make Your Home Among Strangers, a novel by Jennine Capó Crucet. Her critics objected to what they considered her racism against whites.

But although one wishes conservatives would eschew illiberal tactics, left-leaning schools typically hold the line against them. Apart from the incident at Georgia Southern, which FIRE misclassifies as emanating from the left, the database includes only two successful disinvitation attempts in 2019 in which the objection came from the speaker’s right. Both incidents involved Catholic institutions and concerned abortion rights.

In part, for this reason, attempts to disinvite or shut down speakers were less successful in 2019. In 2016, they had a success rate of about 56 percent. By 2019, that rate was down to approximately 46 percent. Though 2019 is likely to match 2016 in attempted disinvitations, it is unlikely to match it in successes.

Disinvitation attempts are only one way of looking at free speech on campus. Although they are rare, even in a record year, we can expect successful efforts to influence the calculations of almost any professor or administrator when deciding whom to bring in for a lecture, training, or commencement address.

2018 was, indeed, a blip. But 2019 doesn’t put us back at square one in the struggle to preserve free speech on campus. Meanwhile, as of November, 14 more institutions, including three state systems, have adopted or endorsed a version of the Chicago statement. At the close of 2019, there are grounds for cautious optimism.

Our Stupid Decade

By Kevin D. Williamson

Tuesday, December 24, 2019

In 2010, the U.S. electorate responded to the overreach of the Obama administration — on health care, but not only on health care — by giving Republicans control of the House in 2010 and then the Senate in 2014. The Obama administration had big ideas. So did congressional Republicans. Both sides failed, and not only because of the other.

Republicans vowed to repeal the Affordable Care Act, and Democrats vowed to implement it in full.

Neither of those things happened.

Republicans, hamstrung by the fact that their voters have a healthy appetite for free stuff, just like the Democrats’ voters, struggled to come up with a viable alternative satisfying more or less impossibly contradictory criteria: Keeping the popular, expensive benefits of the ACA, especially the mandate that insurers perform the logically impossible task of “insuring against” things that already have happened, while getting rid of the unpopular bits that support the popular ones, especially the individual mandate, without which the preexisting-conditions mandate is more or less guaranteed to cause the insurance market to fail. Republicans have repealed bits and pieces of the ACA but have done little to advance a health-care agenda of their own.

Democrats, hamstrung by the fact that their voters have a healthy appetite for free stuff, just like the Republicans’ voters, did as much as Republicans to hobble the ACA, mainly by refusing to implement the measures meant to help pay for it. Led by Senator Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts, Democrats put off implementing the tax on medical-device manufacturers, a disproportionate number of which are based in Boston. The so-called Cadillac tax on generous health-care plans, hated by Democratic union bosses, never has been implemented, either; it is formally only delayed, but its repeal is all but certain. Democrats who argued the ACA was the best model for reforming health care immediately moved on to push for a British-style monopoly system.

The Democrats spent a few years complaining about being called “socialists” by conservatives and then rallied behind declared socialists such as Senator Bernie Sanders and Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. Barack Obama, who came to power criticizing the excesses of the Bush administration’s war on terrorism, made his peace with extraordinary war powers and then added to them, expanding the drone war and deciding, with no obvious constitutional or statutory authority, to begin assassinating American citizens. Democrats who had produced a whole Chinese opera of discord and wailing over the risibly named PATRIOT Act and the nightmare scenario that Dick Cheney might peek at somebody’s library records, immediately made their peace with extrajudicial killings of U.S. citizens, as long as it was a Democrat pulling the trigger. By 2019, that was understood to be entirely unremarkable.

The Iraq War supposedly ended in 2010. In reality, the U.S. government has been unable to achieve its ends in Iraq or Afghanistan in spite of the extraordinary powers with which it has been invested since 9/11, and Americans have died in Iraq every single year since the supposed end of combat operations there in 2010, almost 50 during the Trump administration alone. President Obama came into office repudiating the Bush doctrine and Bush administration practices but was never able to articulate a plausible alternative. President Trump, who probably could not lay his finger on Iraq on an unlabeled map, has continued the Obama administration’s tradition of incoherence and adhocracy. Political cowardice and the declining political piquancy of Middle Eastern affairs, and of foreign affairs generally, have ensured that two presidents of two parties have left both our enemies and our allies doubting American resolve.

Total federal debt was $12.8 trillion in the first quarter of 2010; today it is almost twice that, at $22.7 trillion. In GDP terms, it has grown from 87 percent to 105 percent. Entitlements remain unreformed, with both the Obama administration and the Trump administration refusing to take one meaningful step on the issue, with reform being held hostage by a combination of cowardice and ideology. France’s socialist president has been a pillar of fiscal rectitude in comparison.

Earlier in the decade in Atlanta, public-school teachers and administrators were sentenced to prison time for cheating on standardized tests in order to paper over the comprehensive failure of the city’s public schools. (Atlanta’s schools are by no means unique in this.) At the end of the decade, celebrities and their enablers were convicted of crimes (and others still were on trial) for bribery and fraud committed in the process of getting their children into elite (and sometimes only decent) colleges. College tuitions were said to be “skyrocketing” in 2010; in the final days of 2019, they were still soaring. Which is to say, education remained unreformed at both ends, from kindergarten through college.

From health care to education to national security to entitlements to fiscal stability, the past decade has been one of missed opportunities. We have had a great number of tedious, self-aggrandizing speeches and, for the past few years, a flaming presidential Twitter account. We have had memes and cancelations, rage mobs, neo-nationalism, resurgent socialism, and generally ineffective government. On the cultural front, we have had stagnation: The top-grossing film of 2010 was Toy Story 3, while in 2019 it will be Avengers 22. The three best-selling books of 2018 were the Michelle Obama memoir Becoming, Girl Wash Your Face, and The Wonky Donkey, which is not an account of the sorry state of the Democratic party.

It was a wonky decade, indeed. And kind of a dumb one.

Buttigieg’s Mandate Makes Sense

By Kevin D. Williamson

Friday, December 27, 2019

The grievously misnamed Affordable Care Act was in part an effort to replicate the widely admired Swiss health-care system in the American context. The basic problem with that always has been that Switzerland is full of Swiss people, while the United States is full of maniacs.

The preexisting-conditions mandate, which is popular, creates a free-rider problem (i.e. nobody has any incentive to sign up for health insurance until they are actually sick, and so insurance cannot actually function as insurance), hence the hated individual mandate, the rule that people buy insurance. The Swiss enforce their individual mandate ruthlessly—if you fail to sign up for a plan, then the government signs you up for one, and you owe your new insurer back premiums and interest to cover any lapse in coverage. The Swiss achieve practically universal compliance; we repealed our mandate, because we like the benefits but don’t want them to have any strings attached.

Pete Buttigieg is attempting to resurrect the ACA mandate in part with his new health-insurance proposal, which would create a public option: basically Medicare for all who want it . . . and a few who don’t. Under Buttigieg’s proposal, those who fail to sign up for a qualifying health-insurance plan would automatically be enrolled in the government plan, and they would owe premiums — including retroactive premiums for lapses in coverage.

The Washington Post quotes left-wing critic Matt Bruenig characterizing the proposal as a “supercharged” version of the ACA mandate and accusing Buttigieg of deploying “misleading rhetoric” about his plan. Matt Bruenig is the dishonest fellow who fabricated quotations from me defending the racist antics of Donald Sterling, so I suppose he is something of an authority on misleading.

It is very difficult to disentangle the individual mandate from the preexisting-conditions rule and other benefits in the form of coverage and pricing controls. You can have insurance that functions as insurance (i.e. a financial instrument that hedges against the risk of future events that may or may not come to pass) but if you want insurance that functions as a welfare program (performing the logically incoherent task of “insuring against” preexisting conditions, i.e., things that already have happened) then you need the individual mandate and other unpopular measures in order for the market to function.

Buttigieg implicitly concedes as much. He is right to do so, and Republicans were wrong to repeal the mandate while leaving much of the rest of the ACA regime in place. An ACA-style program with a robustly enforced individual mandate may be a bad policy, but it is a coherent policy, and a better policy than an ACA-style program without an individual mandate.

‘A People Prepared’

By Kevin D. Williamson

Tuesday, December 24, 2019

Christmas Day, 1970-something, probably 1979, which meant Jimmy Carter, gasoline rationing, and stagflation. The nation was gripped with malaise. But children who have not been taught any better think only of themselves.

The malaise on 56th Street was pretty thick, and the rationing was at times severe. There was a great deal of uncertainty in my life. I had started kindergarten, my parents were in the process of getting divorced, and my mother had begun a relationship with troubled Vietnam veteran with a terrible drinking problem. He had moved in with us. That had been over the summer, I think.

He was meticulous. After he mowed the grass, he would disassemble the lawnmower, wiping down the parts and carefully cleaning the filter, a little brick of beige sponge he soaked in warm water and degreasing soap. He shined his shoes devotionally. When he drank, he carefully stacked those spent Coors Light silver bullets in a pyramid, a pharaoh in his own gassy little kingdom.

At some point, my mother got sick — she had a weak immune system, and a scratch from her poodle became infected, almost costing her her right arm, requiring skin grafts and an extended hospitalization, leaving her partly paralyzed and disfigured. During her hospitalization, my brother and I were sent to live with neighbors, one elderly couple during the day and a different family at night, because it was not safe to leave us in the house with the man who was living there with us. You would think that that fact would have set off some kind of bright cautionary yellow incandescent light bulb in some maternal cortex, but then, children who have not been taught any better think only of themselves, even when they are on the wrong side of 40.

We perceive time differently when we are children, and I do not know precisely how long that situation lasted. It began sometime after the first day of school and ended not long before Christmas. “I’ll be home for Christmas,” the song goes. Perversely, home was only about 60 feet away, just across the alley dividing 56th Street from 57th Street. It was like a mirage: You can see it from where you are, but you can’t get there from here.

There were no liquor stores in my hometown at the time and no package sales at the grocery stores. You had to drive to buy beer or liquor. That was inconvenient for the meticulous alcoholic. Eventually, the Coors Light was depleted and construction on the Great Pyramid of Stone-Cold Drunk came to a halt. Whatever was left of the Mogen David wine that my mother used to make fruitcakes with would already have been depleted by that point, I am sure. I do not know why Methodists from the Texas Panhandle insisted on using kosher wine for making fruitcakes, but that was how my mother’s family did it. When the beer and any other incidental liquor was gone, he switched to Mexican vanilla, which is about 80 proof.

(After that, it would be mouthwash.)

Christmas morning was grim, and everybody was on edge. In a twist that William Gaddis might have dreamt up, my mother worked for a bill-collecting agency for a while and spent a considerable amount of her free time dodging bill-collectors from the firm that employed her. Bill-collecting was a lot more face-to-face back when, which meant closing the curtains and pretending that no one was home when the doorbell rang. Credit was, of course, out of reach. There were Christmas presents, pro forma, nothing anybody wanted, wrapped up for the sake of appearances. My mother at that time still felt the lack of respectability more sharply than the lack of money, though that would change later in her life. We learn to make peace with things and to accept things, including those we should not accept. When a family fails, it isn’t usually one horrible dramatic thing that undoes it. It is a process of erosion, not a landslide.

Children who have not been taught any better think only of themselves, but, of course, no one had got my mother anything at all for Christmas. Broke, with little hope of financial advancement, left by her husband, cut up — she had grown up in a respectable family and played flute in the high-school marching band, had married a football player, had entertained her sorority sisters from the Jane Phillips Society, and had begun raising children in a house in what was at that time still the good part of town. All wreckage. Her new live-in boyfriend had what was, in our social context, a pretty good job as a driver for a regional courier and delivery service, essentially a truck driver who could come home at night. (Not that he always did, and my mother would pack us into her Volkswagen Beetle and troll through the parking lots of the Stumble Inn, the He Ain’t Here Saloon, the Branch Office — the Seventies were a golden age for evocative bar names — looking for his car.) I went with him on his work route a couple of times, delivering parcels as far away as eastern New Mexico and ducking into bars on the way. Good job, holidays off. But, of course, he hadn’t bothered to get her anything for Christmas, so he asked her to marry him out of shame and embarrassment. And, of course, she accepted out of shame and embarrassment, and loneliness and grief, and the belief that this was the best offer she was going to get. Christmas does funny things to people, especially when it comes to love and family. There wasn’t any ring. I may be backfilling in my memory here, but even as a child it seemed to me that her Christmastime hope and gratitude were obviously and disastrously delusional.

They were married at some point in the following months. I was not present for that.

Christmases did not improve. The marriage did not last long, descending into violence and, in one memorable episode, fire. Other husbands came and went, but the disappointment, bitterness, recriminations, and violence (of which my mother was both a victim and perpetrator) remained. That was life, until it wasn’t. She’s dead, the meticulous alcoholic is dead, and all the husbands who came after him are dead, too. So are some of their children and grandchildren: cancer, heart trouble, traffic accidents.

Things turned out differently for me. Every day is Christmas, and I have all the toys. Guilty? F — k you.

Children who have not been taught any better think only of themselves. But we can be taught. As it turns out, we can learn to think, and learn to be human. As it turns out, you can get there from here, here being Bethlehem, its filth and its indifference.

He shall go before him in the spirit and power of Elias, to turn the hearts of the fathers to the children, and the disobedient to the wisdom of the just; to make ready a people prepared for the Lord.

Happiness, like much else, is learned. For a long time, I thought that this time of year would always be for me a time of bitterness and regret, mourning for things that were not lost because they were never in my possession to begin with. But there is not any reason for that. No good one, anyway. I have a different kind of family now and blessings beyond counting. I know that my Redeemer liveth. The effort necessary to be happy does not always produce exactly the desired results, and so I spend the last part of the year vacillating between my Clark Griswold mode and my bargain-basement Henry Miller imitation: “We all derive from the same source. There is no mystery about the origin of things.” Treacly, sentimental Christmas stuff sometimes makes me angry, and it is hard to explain to people who care about me why that is. Children who have not been taught any better think only of themselves. But we do not have to remain in that state. We can, eventually, put away childish things. It is never too late for that. It certainly is not too early here in the waning days of Anno Domini 2019.

A people prepared — for what? Gold for a king, frankincense for a priest, myrrh for a dead man. Nails, in time. The cross. Thomas Harris, the culinary-minded horror novelist, once described the Uffizi museum in Florence as a “great meathouse of hanging Christs.” We derive “incarnation” from the Latin caro, meaning “flesh,” as in the English “carnal” and the Latin carnifex, which means both “butcher” and “executioner.”

(“You Christians must find your faith so comforting!” Oh, Sunshine, have you read the Bible?)

Man is meat. About that there is no question. The question is whether he is to be only that. We Christians should not be too otherworldly, because the facts as we understand them are bloody before they are glorious and glorious only because they are bloody. The truth of the Incarnation — God as meat — is not that the facts and events and suffering of this world do not matter in light of the glorious kingdom to come but that they do matter. Meat matters. Blood, too. Metaphor won’t do. The Incarnation is our only link to that other kingdom. It is our only bridge and our only connection. Without that, you can’t get there from here.

In 1979, I wished that someone had done something for my mother for Christmas, and for a long time I thought that things might have turned out differently if someone had. Alleluia, Emmanuel, someone did. I hope she knew. I hope she knows.

Trump Isn’t a Nazi. He’s a Failure.

By Kevin D. Williamson

Friday, December 27, 2019

Nancy Pelosi’s fecklessness has ensured that Americans understand impeachment to be a purely political matter, and as a purely political matter impeachment is as dead as your leftover Christmas turkey.

Only a few days after the impeachment vote, President Donald Trump hit his best job-approval rating ever in the Quinnipiac poll. Senate majority leader Mitch McConnell is ready to slap the process around like a housecat tormenting a sparrow. The magic bullet missed, and now Democrats have to make a more ordinary case against Trump.

The problem is: They don’t know how.

The case against Trump in 2016 was that he is unfit for the office. The case against Trump in 2020 is — or should be — that he is not very good at his job.

In 2016, Trump promised Americans sustained 3-percent economic growth, but the economy has not met that standard. He promised a shrinking trade deficit, but the trade deficit has grown. He promised to build a wall along the southern border and to make Mexico pay for it, which he has not done. Which is to say, on the core issues of economic growth, trade, and immigration, President Trump is a failure by his own criteria.

But the Democrats are poorly positioned to take Trump to the woodshed on these issues.

Consider immigration. In 2016, Senator Bernie Sanders toured Iowa union halls with an immigration message that was not too different from Trump’s. He denounced “open borders” as a billionaires’ plot to flood the U.S. market with cheap labor. At the time, Democrats still talked about illegal immigration like it was . . . illegal.

In 2020, ascendant Democratic primary candidate Pete Buttigieg has just published a plan that would reduce the deportation of illegal immigrants, including those guilty of certain categories of crimes, and Democrats as a whole have invested a great deal of political capital in opposing Trump’s efforts to control illegal immigration.

Why? A majority of Americans say they personally worry about illegal immigration, and a large majority — 77 percent in the most recent Gallup poll — say they see illegal immigration as a “critical threat” or an “important threat.” Trump has thrived on the issue of illegal immigration, and, in response, Democrats have taken a position that is both bad policy and bad politics.

On trade, Democrats have done the opposite: Rather than blindly opposing a basically good policy, they have adopted the worst of Trump’s ideas. Senator Elizabeth Warren apes Trump’s nationalist posturing, insisting that trade is a question of “loyalty to America” and charging that American businessmen “have no patriotism.” Her proposals would essentially prohibit trade deals with China and Mexico, among other countries. But two-thirds of Americans say Trump’s trade war is unlikely to improve their lives and a third say it will leave them worse off, according to a Hill/HarrisX survey. Warren is unlikely to outdo Trump on a nationalism agenda, but nonetheless she has maneuvered herself into a position that is both bad policy and bad politics.

On the economy, Trump has seen modest success after tax cuts and deregulatory efforts. The Democrats oppose these for ideological reasons, but also because they have the stink of Trump on them.

A more intelligent approach for Democrats (and for us lonely few anti-Trump conservatives) would be to concede that the president’s positions on issues such as illegal immigration and trade speak to concerns that are genuine and legitimate while pointing out that his actions have been in the main ineffective or genuinely destructive. But the Democrats are so committed to their exotic fairy tale — Trump is a monster, Trump is a Nazi, Trump is a white nationalist, etc. — that they have forgotten how to run an ordinary campaign against an ordinary failure.

Lovable Ol’ Bernie

By Mona Charen

Monday, December 23, 2019

You won’t hear young Democrats deride Bernie Sanders with the “Okay, Boomer” dig. At 78, he’s actually too old for the cohort, but that’s not why he won’t get dinged. He’s the most popular Democrat among the under-35 crowd, and judging by recent polling, he’s the second most popular Democrat overall. Sanders has raised nearly twice as money as the front-runner, Joe Biden, and seems to have scooped up support from a declining Elizabeth Warren in the past 60 days. Despite a heart attack that sidelined him for a week, he marches on, now buoyed by a poll showing that in a head-to-head match-up against Donald Trump, he would do better than Biden — though within the margin of error.

Sanders’s appeal, the experts explain, is founded on “authenticity.” Is he humorless, repetitive, cloying, and rigid? Sure. But these are signs that he really believes something! He’s not a packaged, blow-dried (no argument there), insincere pol cooked up in a political laboratory. He’s the real deal.

Let’s concede that Sanders is sincere, and that he is, with some small hypocrisies (did you know he was a millionaire?), honest. But what people actually believe is kind of important, and Bernie Sanders professes and sells a series of prejudices that do him no credit.

Sanders claims to be a democratic socialist in the European mold; an admirer of Sweden and Denmark. Yet his career is pockmarked with praise for regimes considerably to the left of those Scandinavian models. He has praised Cuba for “making enormous progress in improving the lives of poor and working people.” In his memoir, he bragged about attending a 1985 parade celebrating the Sandinistas’ seizure of power six years before. “Believe it or not,” he wrote, “I was the highest ranking American official there.” At the time, the Sandinista regime had already allied with Cuba and begun a large military buildup courtesy of the Soviet Union. The Sandinistas, Mr. Sanders had every reason to know, had censored independent news outlets, nationalized half of the nation’s industry, forcibly displaced the Misquito Indians, and formed “neighborhood watch” committees on the Cuban model. Sandinista forces, like those in East Germany and other communist countries, regularly opened fire on those attempting to flee the country. None of that appears to have dampened Sanders’s enthusiasm. The then-mayor of Burlington, Vt., gushed that under his leadership, “Vermont could set an example to the rest of the nation similar to the type of example Nicaragua is setting for the rest of Latin America.”

Sanders was impatient with those who found fault with the Nicaraguan regime:

Is [the Sandinistas’] crime that they have built new health clinics, schools, and distributed land to the peasants? Is their crime that they have given equal rights to women? Or that they are moving forward to wipe out illiteracy? No, their crime in Mr. Reagan’s eyes and the eyes of corporations and billionaires that determine American foreign policy is that they have refused to be a puppet and banana republic to American corporate interests.

Sanders now calls for a revolution in this country, and we’re all expected to nod knowingly.  Of course he means a peaceful, democratic revolution. It would be outrageous to suggest anything else. Well, it would not be possible for Bernie Sanders to usher in a revolution in the U.S., but his sympathy for the real thing is notable. As Michael Moynihan reported, in the case of the Sandinistas, he was willing to justify press censorship and even bread lines. The regime’s crackdown on the largest independent newspaper, La Prensa, “makes sense to me” Sanders explained, because the country was besieged by counterrevolutionary forces funded by the United States. As for bread lines, which soon appeared in Nicaragua as they would decades later in Venezuela, Sanders scoffed: “It’s funny, sometimes American journalists talk about how bad a country is, that people are lining up for food. That is a good thing! In other countries people don’t line up for food. The rich get the food and the poor starve to death.”

Bernie Sanders stopped learning about economics and politics about the age of 17. He still believes that corporate “greed” is responsible for human poverty and that the world is a zero-sum pie. The more billionaires there are, the less there is for everyone else. “I don’t think billionaires should exist,” he told the New York Times. So in the Bernie ideal world, we non-billionaires would be deprived of Amazon.com, personal computers, smartphones, fracking (which reduces greenhouse gases), Uber, Walmart, Star Wars movies, and very possibly our jobs. Millions of children would be deprived of school scholarships, while the arts, medical research, and poverty programs would be that much poorer. Billionaires are not heroes, but by making them boogeymen, Sanders betrays his economic infantilism along with a large dose of demagoguery.

Rachel Maddow’s Reckoning

By Jim Geraghty

Friday, December 27, 2019

You may recall that back in March 2017, MSNBC host Rachel Maddow shocked the world by declaring “we’ve got Trump’s tax returns!” Then she later clarified she had obtained Donald Trump’s 1040 form from … 2005. Those who tuned in to her program that evening had to watch a meandering 19-minute soliloquy and a commercial break before Maddow showed anything from the tax return, which wasn’t much. Her guest, David Cay Johnson, speculated that Trump may have also leaked nude photos of Melania.

That night was a massive letdown for those who believed Maddow’s initial announcement, but it previewed what we could expect from Maddow for the next three years, as the Washington Post’s Erik Wemple lays out in exhaustive detail in a review of Maddow’s reporting and discussion of the Steele dossier. His assessment is scathing:

When small bits of news arose in favor of the dossier, the franchise MSNBC host pumped air into them. At least some of her many fans surely came away from her broadcasts thinking the dossier was a serious piece of investigative research, not the flimflam, quick-twitch game of telephone outlined in the Horowitz report. She seemed to be rooting for the document.

And when large bits of news arose against the dossier, Maddow found other topics more compelling.

She was there for the bunkings, absent for the debunkings — a pattern of misleading and dishonest asymmetry.

Justice Department Inspector General Michael Horowitz issued his report earlier this month and concluded, “much of the material in the Steele election reports, including allegations about Donald Trump and members of the Trump campaign relied upon in the Carter Page FISA applications, could not be corroborated; that certain allegations were inaccurate or inconsistent with information gathered by the Crossfire Hurricane team; and that the limited information that was corroborated related to time, location and title information, much of which was publicly available.”

The night Horowitz released his report, Maddow ignored that and emphasized other conclusions: “The inspector general debunks that there was any anti-Trump political bias motivating these decisions. They debunked the idea that the Christopher Steele dossier of opposition research against Trump was the basis for opening the FBI’s Russia investigation.”

Wemple writes: “Asked to comment on how she approached the dossier, Maddow declined to provide an on-the-record response.”

Like other prime-time cable news hosts who receive much more criticism, Maddow shows up every weeknight and tells a devoted audience, “the world is as you want it to be.” Trump is the worst, he’s committed many terrible crimes, a reckoning is coming, we will be vindicated. Her audience is not interested in hearing the host or guests declare: “While we are vehemently opposed to Trump, but there is no evidence he’s being blackmailed or controlled by the Russian government.” Her program includes bits of news and other substances that appear to be like news, but are not — fervent speculation, conjecture, assumptions, theories. If it is too harsh to call it “fake news,” then it is news with artificial flavors and sweeteners, designed to make it more exciting and appealing than it really is.

30 Years Later, 3 Lessons From The Fall Of Romanian Communism

By Jayme Metzgar

Monday, December 23, 2019

When communism collapsed across Eastern Europe in 1989, the process was swift and surprisingly peaceful. Decades of terror and tyranny came to a sudden end with hardly a shot fired: governments stepped down, borders opened, walls fell.

One country, however, proved to be the exception. Thirty years ago this week, citizens of Romania were being killed by the hundreds as they took to the streets to demand liberty from their brutal communist regime. Unrest that had begun December 16 in the southwestern city of Timişoara soon spread throughout Romania, fueled by the news that protesters were being gunned down by secret police.

The dictator Nicolae Ceauşescu, returning from an overseas trip with his wife Elena, tried to quell the growing chaos in a speech from his balcony in Bucharest on December 21. As he looked out over the usual mass of compulsory adoration—the people in neat rows bearing Marxist slogans and portraits of the Ceauşescus—the aging despot had hardly begun to speak before he was interrupted by a growing chorus of boos, hisses, whistles, and shrieks.

It was both unprecedented and unthinkable. Television cameras momentarily broadcast Ceausescu’s astonished face live across the nation, before quickly cutting away. For the first time, the people had seen his vulnerability. It was the beginning of the end.

The Ceauşescus fled Bucharest the following day and were caught by their own people on a rural Romanian roadside. On Christmas Day—a holiday that had long been suppressed by Ceauşescu’s atheist regime—the dictator and his wife were put on trial by a kangaroo military court. They were quickly found guilty, marched out to the courtyard, and summarily shot.

My Introduction to Romania

I first set foot in Romania five years later, a young high school graduate on my first long trip away from home. When I arrived, Ion Iliescu—the rebranded communist who had seized control in the chaos following Ceauşescu’s fall—was still president. The fresh scars of communism were obvious: cities filled with ugly, gray concrete structures; ragged children begging on street corners; a dearth of commerce, beauty, and civic life.

As I spent more time in Romania—a year living there in 1997 and two subsequent decades as head of an orphan care nongovernmental organization—I began to discern communism’s less-visible scars. They are pervasive and devastating, especially for society’s most vulnerable. While many perceive conservatism to be uncompassionate, I’ve become an even firmer believer in American-style liberty and capitalism precisely because of my nonprofit work among abandoned children in Romania.

What I’ve learned is this: there is a grim symmetry between the promises of Marxism and its real-world results. Simply put, Marxist ideology promises specific virtues, but it delivers their polar opposites. (No communist comes to power promising bread lines and prison camps, I assure you.) The result is human suffering that should grieve any person of compassion. Allow me to tell you just three of the long-term societal harms I have witnessed.

1. Marxism Promises Belonging But Delivers Isolation

The desire to belong to something larger than oneself is universally human. Marxism appeals to this desire by preaching collectivization, with the rights of the individual subordinated to society as a whole. It sounds good and righteous on paper, especially to those craving a sense of larger meaning for their lives. Shouldn’t we set our own individual interests aside for the greater good?

Yet what the communists in Romania delivered was a total destruction of cohesive community. Not only did they bulldoze villages—forcefully relocating peasants to miserable block apartments in the cities—they also figuratively bulldozed Romanians’ sense of trust and reliance upon one another.

Informal community associations are always a threat to communist governments, which can allow no loyalty higher than the party, and Romania was no different. Spies and informants infiltrated nearly every relationship and every gathering. Those willing to denounce their close friends and family earned special favors.

With no one to trust, Romanians became deeply isolated from one another. This ingrained sense of mutual mistrust continues to be a major obstacle in bringing Romanians together to solve societal problems.

2. Marxism Promises Equality But Delivers Scarcity—for Everyone But the Elites

Besides being collectivist, Marxism is first and foremost an ideology of envy. Wealth and prosperity are zero-sum, and we’re all in competition for it. Anyone who has more than I do is clearly taking something from me. Government should ensure that we’re all equal, not just in opportunity but in outcome.

In reality, what Marxism delivers, in Romania and elsewhere, is scarcity. Lacking the necessary motivation of self-advancement that fuels most human achievement, the communist economies in Eastern Europe faltered. While the entire Soviet bloc suffered economically, prompting Gorbachev to promote the reforms that quickly snowballed into revolutions, Romania’s suffering was especially severe.

Middle-class Romanian friends my own age can distinctly remember the first time they caught a glimpse of a banana or an orange (one friend didn’t know what to do with the banana, so he ate it along with the peel). Other friends have shared their memories of standing for hours in line every week to receive meager food rations. While I lived in Romania in those early post-communist years, I learned to do without grocery stores, fruit in the winter, or reliable hot water. If all citizens were equal under communism, they were equally impoverished.

But the truth is that they weren’t equal. There was a path to wealth and prosperity open only to a very few: the elites in the Communist Party. While Romanians came close to the brink of starvation, and while half a million children were robbed of their childhoods in orphanages, Ceauşescu built himself the largest palace in the world, grotesque and staggeringly opulent.

It was from the balcony of this palace that he delivered his final speech, laced with tributes to socialism and “the working people.” This is the hypocrisy that Marxism never fails to deliver.

3. Marxism Promises Dignity and Compassion But Delivers Degradation and Cruelty

Everywhere communism has reared its head, it portrays itself as the advocate for the worker, the defender of the common man against the rapacious bourgeoisie. Young people who consider themselves compassionate toward the downtrodden are typically drawn to leftist ideologies.

In the real world, however, I have seen communism foster nothing but cruelty, selfishness, and a lack of empathy. These outcomes are the natural and bitter fruit of an ideology that isolates people from each other, casting them as rivals for the same scarce goods.

In Romania, even to this day, it is rare to find public officials, either elected or appointed, who see their positions as anything other than a platform for self-advancement and enrichment through corruption. (While many will see the United States as increasingly fitting that description—with good reason!—our public corruption is still far less than that of a nation like Romania.) Marxism’s “one for all” dogma quickly morphs into “every man for himself.”

The weak and the vulnerable are the first to suffer. One common feature of communist nations has been a legacy of inhumane state-run orphanages.

Romania is infamous for its hellish orphanages, but its chaotic revolution simply allowed Western journalists to enter and discover what was happening everywhere throughout the Soviet bloc. Even today, while conditions for abandoned children have undeniably improved, the communist mentality and lack of empathy among government officialdom continues to make our work to advocate for children difficult.

Marxism vs. Communism vs. Socialism

Finally, a word about terms: I have repeatedly used the word “Marxism” to encompass both socialism and communism, both of which are stages of Marxist theory. However, in speaking with Romanian friends about their system of government under Ceauşescu, some have objected to my usage of the term “communism.”

“No, no, we weren’t a communist nation, even though we were run by the Communist Party,” one friend told me. “Romania was a socialist country. They told us this over and over, in schools and everywhere. We were working toward communism, but we hadn’t achieved it yet.” Indeed, in rewatching Ceauşescu’s final speech, I counted a total of eight mentions of “socialism” or “socialist Romania,” with nary a mention of communism.

Terminological niceties aside, it’s clear that younger Americans are growing increasingly comfortable with ideologies on the Marxist spectrum. Even the term “communism” doesn’t seem to carry with it the stigma that “fascism” does, despite being an equally savage and murderous form of tyranny.

To any American inclined to believe the false promises of Marxism rather than the historical reality, to anyone who believes this ideology is in any way humane or compassionate, I offer this warning. I have witnessed the ugliness, the poverty, and the despair it leaves behind. I have spoken to those who suffered in Marxist prisons and have seen the memorials to those who died in the streets seeking freedom.

I have spent my adult life working to alleviate the damage done to vulnerable children—the damage still being inflicted every day—by the evil legacy of communism. We don’t want this here. Pray God it never comes.

The Revolution Came For J.K. Rowling

By Sumantra Maitra

Monday, December 23, 2019

It is said that hell hath no fury as a Scotswoman scorned. While reading Maddy Kearns, one of the finest recent exports from these gloomy islands to the fairer shores (lightly balancing the trauma of unleashing John Oliver on Americans), on the cancellation of Joanne Kathleen Rowling for asserting women are women, I realized how hapless Englishmen must have had their knees shaking facing Robert the Bruce in Bannockburn.

Long story short, a think tanker lost her job for speaking the simple, factual, biological truth that men and women on God’s green earth are born different and will remain different ‘til the end of times, and no amount of scientific wizardry or willy-nilly genital modification will make that disappear. Just like a cripple doesn’t prove that humans are not by design bipedal, an intersex person doesn’t prove that, in strictly scientific terms it is the males who breed and the females who give birth.

But, since this is 2019, free speech in the United Kingdom isn’t codified in a written constitution, and, most importantly, since British judges are fundamentally so illiberal and activist that they all make Elena Kagan sound like Edmund Burke, this poor woman lost her job from a think tank. The Guardian reports that she was accused of using “offensive and exclusionary” language, for the crime of tweeting “men cannot change into women,” which is apparently protected under ​some European Union Equality Act.

Then it took a somewhat surprising turn. So far, these type of cancellations have been unanimous. There has been no barking back, so to speak. This time, however, for some reason, the Harry Potter author who hadn’t tweeted since November took to Twitter for a fierce reprimand. The reaction was devastating.

Our resident village gossips at Vox asked if Rowling just destroyed the legacy of Harry Potter with transphobia. Mary Sue, the feminist blog, was apparently shocked. CNN said Rowling was flat-out wrong, as she had no experience about transgenders, like the author of Harry Potter has no idea of imaginative beings. Predictably, both the New York Times and Washington Post found two transgender people to write about how Rowling hates them.

Meanwhile, the LGBT activist lobbies were not silent either. From the American Civil Liberties Union, to Amnesty, to GLAAD, to PinkNews, all the transnational LGBT activist groups were equally vocal in denouncing not just Rowling, but also other prominent women who are against this new movement, including former athletes like Martina Navratilova and Sharron Davies, as well as comedian Ricky Gervais.

Rowling and the other celebs who are slowly speaking out against the creeping trans orthodoxy are a litmus test for these groups. If they succeed, the revolt will spread, and more and more people will see the same slippery slope conservatives have been warning about: if this menace is not confronted, telling the truth about the sexes will lead to not just a loss of honor, but also to losses of jobs, and even jail. This is not a phenomenon solely in the U.K. In Iowa a man was jailed for 16 years for burning a rainbow flag.

Yet, despite Maddy’s considerable bravery speaking up on television and eloquent defence of Rowling, somehow, I don’t feel compelled to congratulate Rowling. Why should we congratulate the same author whose work is a simplistic Manichean struggle against magic Nazis, and has repeatedly caved in​ ​to leftist demands thus far, only to see the revolution coming for her at last?

I am old enough to remember the “Dumbledore is suddenly gay” controversy, and the resistance against President Trump named (no marks for creativity) “Dumbledore’s Army.” The woke generation is a product of Rowling’s philosophy, and a bunch of people Rowling repeatedly encouraged on Twitter for every liberal cause she supported.

They are a generation of simpletons, only understanding a grand struggle between good (which means “what I feel good about”) versus evil (“anything I oppose”). It is somewhat fittingly amusing to see the Jacobins coming for the Girondins. The revolution is always hungry for consuming more of its own. There’s no end to purity when everything is dependent on feelings, and all social gods eventually disappoint.

The issue is not just about transgenderism. This overwhelming woke era is essentially just silly outrages for a generation of people who are among the most privileged financially in the Western world. Like everything else, it is a ridiculous utopian fad that will die down in time, like hippies or heroin chic, leaving a trail of destruction and broken and scarred lives. It’s an effect, not the cause.

Consider the history of the late 19th-century Victorian Europe, and you’d see a bunch of wealthy people who believe in all the conventional wisdom of their times, have not seen great power wars for decades, know relative peace in a world where there ​is​ enormous free movement and free trade, claim to be rational and scientific and children of the enlightenment, and yet believe in planchets, witchcraft, the healing effects of cocaine and clairvoyance, and skull shapes determining intelligence. Nothing is ever thematically new in this planet. History is cyclical.

However, the difference between our times and the Victorians is that the Victorians knew civilization was more important than individual lives. Of course there were vices in the Victorian age as well. But they were astute enough to understand that normalization of deviance is detrimental to civilization.

The entire history of humanity until then was one to reach and move beyond the original state of nature and savage existence. Manners, stoicism, discipline, public propriety, sense of style, merit, emotional composure, bravery, a belief in the laws of Nature, and most importantly sacrifice for a greater cause, were the marks of an advanced civilization. The Victorians worked to perfect that civilizationally, even at the cost of individual lives and feelings.

The art, adventure, architecture, science, and music of that era harked to some ethereal glory, something to leave behind for posterity to remember. All that has been in an exact reverse since the 1960s sexual revolution, a deliberate attempt by a section of the elites to turn back the contemporary sexual and social ethos in time to a pre-civilised, primitive existence.

While the Victorians aspired to earn respect, the modern society promotes those who demand respect, but because they want to show how vulnerable and weak they are. It creates a paradox, in which the most emotionally fragile narcissists group together like a pack of hyenas to bully others while claiming victimhood.

Liberals think intersectional progressivism and post-modernism is an aberration of liberalism and modernism, whereas conservatives think post-modernism and progressivism is the logical conclusion of modernism and liberalism. The ‘60s liberals gave birth to this monster that now smites them.

Liberalism, from Immanuel Kant and Jeremy Bentham onwards, is based on the modernist and rationalist paradigm. G.W.F. Hegel twisted it, Karl Marx twisted Hegel further, and Jacques Derrida, Michel Foucault, and Herbert Marcuse twisted Marx. The reason to get this clear is to understand that trans movement ideologues are the ideological children of the same 1960s radical-feminists, sometimes namecalled TERFs, who once proudly wanted to destroy the old order, the hetero-patriarchal society, by destroying its primary unit of family, in their own words, through “promoting polyamory, promiscuity, pornography and prostitution.” Now that they have turned full Cylon, it is somewhat amusing to conservatives. But hey, conservatives warned about this for decades. If only someone listened!

Libby Emmons wrote that the last decade is one of the trans movement. One feels optimistic that the tide is turning. That doesn’t mean all is well, or that things will be easy for conservatives in the future. But extremism of any kind eventually overreaches and cocoons itself from greater society.

That’s because most people are essentially normal, and they don’t want to be a part of nonsensical and unnatural crusades. From the Me Too movement to the transgender movement, everything is the logical culmination of a social revolution that originated 80 years back. And every revolution inevitably invites a disproportionate reaction.

Conservatives should be careful, but they should also take heart that this is mostly an intra-liberal/intra-feminist fight. And nature always takes its course and balances itself.​

Nancy Pelosi, What Are You Doing?

By Noah Rothman

Thursday, November 19, 2019

When it comes to impeachment, the House Democrats’ job is essentially over. The two articles before the chamber have passed, and Donald Trump is now impeached. The only obligations left to them are to notify the Senate of their conclusions, name managers of the process, and allow the Republican-led chamber to reach a verdict, which some of its members (including leadership) say they’ve already reached. It should hardly come as a shock that a legislative chamber full of lawmakers who have been outwardly skeptical of the drive to impeach Trump will take a dim view of the articles against him, but the inevitability of what’s about to happen seems to be a surprise to Democrats.

Late Wednesday night, Speaker Nancy Pelosi floated the possibility that the House might withhold the articles of impeachment against Trump and not transmit them to the Senate at all. At least, not until she receives assurance from Majority Leader Mitch McConnell that the process will proceed in a manner that satisfies House Democrats.

The Speaker has been in politics for a long time. She has a demonstrated capacity to advance her party’s interests at all costs, even including her speakership. Perhaps she’s playing a shrewd game here, too. But you have to squint to make the end game out. And even then, the blurry object on the horizon looks decidedly unsatisfying from a Democratic perspective.

There are three obvious downsides associated with Pelosi’s apparent strategy. The first is that it utterly contradicts the approach the House has taken over the last three months.

The need to impeach the president was such an urgent matter, we were told, that the House could not wait for the courts to rule on challenges to the White House’s efforts to prevent key witnesses like Mick Mulvaney, Don McGahn, and John Bolton (whom House Democrats didn’t even subpoena) from testifying. These important figures all claimed they would await guidance from the judiciary before consenting to testify, and the indications were that the extraordinary nature of the impeachment process would prove compelling. Now the courts aren’t even sure if they are obliged to continue litigating the matter. With the articles passed, the issue is all but moot. Democrats now insist that the Senate cannot proceed unless it hears from these witnesses, but that is also tacit admission that the fact-finding portion of impeachment proceedings was unduly rushed.

The second problem with Pelosi’s maneuver is that she will be ignored. Perhaps the speaker is trying to establish herself as McConnell’s foil, but the majority leader would have to confer upon her the authority she is demanding. And why would he? The House has no authority to dictate terms to the Senate. Nor should the Senate establish the rules that will govern Trump’s trial until the chamber has been properly informed by the House of the president’s impeachment. Pelosi is essentially threatening the GOP with a good time. Why shouldn’t the upper chamber simply dismiss the demands of House Democrats, making them look impotent in the process while drawing the inevitable out?

And that establishes the third problem with Pelosi’s maneuver: Time has not been on Democrats’ side. Democrats had little choice but to rush the depositional phase of impeachment proceedings, in part, because of the presidential campaign calendar bearing down on them but also because public opinion is slowly reverting to the mean. Support for impeaching Trump has declined steadily since the revelations involving Ukraine began to be litigated in a partisan environment like Congress, and that effect shows no signs of slowing. As for the Democrats who supported these articles, why wouldn’t members of the GOP in the Senate want to allow them to twist in the wind while also giving the Trump-supporting constituents of persuadable Senate Republicans time to pressure their lawmakers?

It’s easy to see why Democratic leadership was so eager to tamp down the demand for Trump’s impeachment from her caucus’s most zealous members. Whatever the merits of Pelosi’s strategy may be—and if you are aware of them, please let me know what they are—they seem objectively outweighed by the downsides. If Pelosi has bluffed her way into a loss, it is a rare strategic mistake on her part. But you do what you can with the hand you’re dealt.

The Lesson of Corbyn’s Crash

By Chris Truax

Thursday, December 19, 2019

It’s been said that it’s good to learn from your own mistakes but it’s better—and much safer—to learn from the mistakes of others. So, American progressives, it’s time for the Dutch Uncle talk. Last week, the U.K. held an election and the Labour party ran on the most progressive platform in living memory. Not coincidentally, Labour also suffered the most crushing defeat in living memory. To understand how awful this performance was—and what it means for the Democratic party in the United States—requires a bit of background in U.K. politics.

For the last four years, Conservatives have been a byword for incompetence and infighting—and if there’s one thing the British public dislikes, it’s incompetence. The Conservative party has careened from one disaster to the next, including blowing what should have been an easy election victory in 2017 and having their Brexit deal rejected by the biggest margin in modern parliamentary history.

While the Conservatives’ current leader, Boris Johnson, is no Donald Trump, he’s bad enough. Johnson is famous for many things, including barely being on speaking terms with the truth and having a colorful personal life. Much to the amusement of U.K. voters, he’s notorious for being either unwilling or unable to say how many children he has. Labour could have had an easy victory.

But that’s not what happened. Not only did Labour lose last week’s election, they turned in their worst performance since 1935. Labour activists on the left were quick to offer excuses for all this—none of them, oddly enough, having anything to do with the policies they ran on.

The first excuse was that this election was really all about Brexit. But that doesn’t really add up. Recent polls suggest that a majority of voters now favor remaining in the European Union. Leaving the EU with no deal—something Boris Johnson has pushed for—is even less popular. Labour’s somewhat complicated Brexit position wasn’t very exciting but that was the point. It was an acceptable fudge for most voters.

Another excuse offered by activists is that Labour lost because Jeremy Corbyn is “uniquely unpopular.” In terms of his personality, this is nonsense. Corbyn is about as inoffensive as they come. Nor does he have the checkered personal past that Boris Johnson has.

But the worst thing about this argument is that it infantilizes voters. According to this theory, British voters were offered a choice between a socialist paradise and the grinding horror of Conservative rule but they voted Conservative because they thought Jeremy Corbyn was a meanie. This is Obama’s complaint about the working class clinging to guns and religion on steroids.

Voters in the U.K. knew exactly what they were doing. Corbyn’s unpopularity didn’t stem from his personality, it stemmed from his policies and attitudes. Given the disarray in the Conservative party, Labour’s hard left reasoned that Labour could run on a platform of remaking both the economy and society, including things like forcing companies to give board seats (and stock) to workers, free college tuition, taxes designed to soak the rich, and a Green New Deal. They offered slogans like “It’s time for real change” and “For the many, not for the few.” Is any of this sounding familiar yet?

But, as it turned out, U.K. voters didn’t want a revolution, and the Conservatives, despite their incompetence, were the lesser of two evils. As one member of parliament put it, “People just didn’t trust the economics, the confetti of promises that was thrown at the public without any clear and honest way they were going to be paid for.” Again, is this ringing any bells?

Had Labour simply offered to restore sanity and competence to government, they quite likely would have won. They certainly would have done far better than they did. Now what’s left of the Labour party can look forward to five years of irrelevance as Boris Johnson leads a Conservative government with the largest majority since Margaret Thatcher’s two landslide victories.

Even taking into account the differences between the people and politics of the United Kingdom and the United States, the lesson for American progressives is both manifest and chilling. In the face of chaos and incompetence, voters want a return to sanity and responsible government, not revolution. If Democrats make the 2020 election about who can return a sense of stability and decency to American political life, they’ll have an easy victory. If they make the 2020 election about which party is slightly less frightening, they may very well lose. One of Elizabeth Warren’s slogans is “Dream big, fight hard.” But come November 2020, there will be a thin line between progressives’ big dreams and the nightmare of four more years of Donald Trump.

Progressives need to concentrate on one job: beating Donald Trump. That is hugely consequential, much more so than adopting Medicare for All or instituting a wealth tax. Progressives’ big projects can wait for a few years, but four more years of Donald Trump will do untold damage to our democratic institutions. So forget “Dream big, fight hard.” In the immortal words of Al Davis, “Just win, baby.”

How to Deal with the Counterfeit Goods Problem

By Kevin D. Williamson

Sunday, December 22, 2019

President Donald Trump’s incompetently executed trade war is set to cost U.S. companies something like $316 billion through the end of 2020, a conservative estimate, and the indications from the tentatively emerging trade armistice with Beijing is that it has accomplished donkey squat on the biggest beef U.S. firms have with China: the theft of intellectual property, particularly in the form of counterfeit goods.

The effort to control counterfeit goods is a lot like the effort to control the use of firearms in violent crime: Government is willing to try almost anything short of doing its job.

The gun-control case and the counterfeit-goods case contain important parallels. A significant one is the government’s attempt to outsource hard law-enforcement work to businesses. That’s a textbook example of the paradoxical fact that it is far easier to enforce the law on people and institutions already inclined to obey it, e.g. federally licensed firearms dealers and the (by definition) law-abiding types who do business with them. Chasing illegal gun dealers working out of the trunks of their cars through the streets of Chicago is exhausting work, whereas leaning on a multi-billion-dollar sporting-goods company with a fixed address, regular hours, and business records is a piece of cake.

In April, President Trump signed a memo — he signed a memo! — expressing the president’s presidential displeasure with the fact that counterfeit goods are sometimes sold on Amazon and Alibaba and directing those companies to do . . . something . . . about it. Amazon already takes proactive if imperfect measures against counterfeit goods at a cost it estimates around a half-billion dollars a year. That is why you do not see a lot of items such as fake Rolexes on Amazon. (Fake here meaning counterfeit, not cheesy knockoffs that borrow the design cues of the real thing but not its brand name.) The memo also directs the Department of Homeland Security, the Commerce Department, and the Justice Department to come up with recommendations for reducing the sale of counterfeit goods. Donald Trump has been bitching about trade since I was in elementary school — you’d think he’d have one or two ideas of his own by now.

I have a recommendation: Enforce the law. Get off your asses and do your jobs.

The United States has robust anti-counterfeiting laws, which would be even more robust with the implementation of Counterfeit Goods Seizure Act of 2019, a bipartisan bill (from Senators Bill Cassidy of Louisiana, Thom Tillis of North Carolina, Chris Coons of Delaware, and Mazie Hirono of Hawaii) that enjoys the support of the International Trademark Association. The U.S. government already has the power to seize certain counterfeit goods; the bill would expand the category of goods eligible for seizure to include those that infringe “design patents,” which is to say, counterfeits that replicate the real thing in everything but name.

That’s a good idea, but it won’t work unless the U.S. government gets serious about doing its job when it comes to law enforcement. As it stands, only about 3 percent of the shipping containers entering U.S. ports are inspected. The U.S. government manages to seize only about $1.4 billion a year in counterfeit goods, almost all of that being goods sent through the mail, mostly fake watches and handbags. All the statutory power in the world will not do any good unless Uncle Stupid puts in the grunt work: inspecting, investigating, indicting, seizing goods and financial assets, making it impossible for offenders to access shipping and banking services, etc. There is not a lot that we can directly do about what happens inside China and other countries, but somebody in the United States is receiving U.S.-bound counterfeit goods, and we could prosecute the heck out of them — if somebody were willing to put in the work.

It’s a funny old world: Federal agents will birth bovines if you try to bring a Diet Coke through airport security, but the vast majority — nearly the entirety — of the shipping containers entering U.S. ports do not get so much as a peek. We could hire a lot of port inspectors with what we’ve just pissed away on the trade war.

Lawyers, too. Some people bitch and moan about their intellectual property, but the big boys do something about it. The Scotch Whisky Association, for example, is a tireless defender of the intellectual property of its defenders; it has just sued a U.S. distillery over using the word “highlands” in its marketing material, which, the whisky police insist, falsely suggests an association with Scotland and its famous potables. More significant, the Scotch Whisky Association also has been successful in defending its members intellectual property in China, working through Chinese institutions. But that kind of work is not easy or cheap — it requires investigators, litigators, lobbyists, and that most precious of all commodities: time. A few other trade associations have had similar success, the Swiss watchmakers among them.

Businesses will have to help themselves to some extent. (And they do.) But protecting our rights is the reason we institute governments to begin with. It is the reason we have those great big heaving public payrolls. (In almost every federal agency, personnel is far and away the largest expenditure.) But even with all that money and manpower, it can be difficult to get the U.S. government to focus on its job. There are reasons for that — laziness, bureaucratic inertia, the dread of substantial accountability, etc.

Rather than take meaningful discrete steps with definable goals on the matter of counterfeiting, the Trump administration (like its predecessors) has chosen to lump counterfeit goods in with a slop-bucket of other trade complaints ranging from the substantive to the farcical. Properly understood, counterfeit goods aren’t even really a trade question at all: There are counterfeits produced right here in the United States, too.

Diplomatic efforts have been incompetent under the past three administrations: The proposed Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement failed for reasons that should be familiar to those who have followed other multilateral trade negotiations, and attempts to revive an international accord on counterfeiting through the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership were torpedoed by the Trump administration. No such accord will be effective unless China is a party to it and agrees to some reasonable enforcement protocols.

Sounds like a job for a great negotiator, some peerless practitioner of the art of the deal.

If one of those comes along, he’ll have his work cut out for him.

In the mean time, we should understand that fighting counterfeiting with tariffs and other taxes is dancing about architecture. There are a lot of guns being put into the hands of felons because our police and prosecutors refuse to do the work of enforcing the law on straw-buyers, and deputizing some $8-an-hour clerk at a sporting-goods shop is no substitute for police work. Throwing memos at Amazon isn’t going to get it done when it comes to counterfeit goods, either.

We know what needs to be done. Do it.