Why China Must Be Held Accountable for the Coronavirus Pandemic

By Michael Auslin

Tuesday, March 31, 2020

The Chinese Communist Party (CCP) is waging a ferocious, global propaganda campaign designed to deflect blame for the origin and spread of the COVID-19 outbreak from Wuhan, China. Moreover, Beijing is trying to take advantage of the pandemic to increase its global standing and influence. There are three main reasons why the world must hold the CCP accountable for the first global pandemic in a century.

Morality

The first reason the CCP must be held accountable for the pandemic is that morality demands it. General Secretary Xi Jinping’s regime has refused to accept responsibility for allowing the epidemic to spread uncontrolled, first in Wuhan, then throughout China, and finally beyond its borders to the rest of the world. Chinese officials knew of the seriousness of the pandemic as early as December, yet waited weeks to begin restricting travel, allowing scores of Wuhan residents to visit relatives elsewhere in the country and abroad, spreading the virus as they went. British scientists have argued that if Beijing had acted just three weeks earlier, it could have reduced the spread of the virus by 95 percent.

We also know that in the time before the outbreak’s seriousness became apparent outside China, the CCP destroyed laboratory samples and punished the brave doctors and citizens who tried to warn their countrymen and the world about the pathogen, while refusing foreign offers of help. We are almost certain that Beijing dramatically underreported the number of deaths in Wuhan, and is no longer reporting new infections in China. Leaked photos have shown huge lines of Chinese waiting for the cremated remains of their loved ones in Wuhan, and widely shared calculations on social media of crematoria activity estimate up to 46,000 deaths in Wuhan alone, far above the country’s official death toll of just 3,300. Riots are breaking out as people desperate to leave Wuhan’s Hubei province are stopped at internal checkpoints.

In short, the CCP, which for years has claimed to be a responsible member of the global community, showed its true colors when this crisis hit. It can no longer be denied that Xi’s regime is a danger to the world. Justice demands it be held morally culpable for its dangerous and callous behavior.

Global Governance

The second reason that Beijing must be held accountable is a political one: The CCP’s actions have gravely undermined global political governance. As legal expert James Kraska has noted, China was morally and legally bound, as a party to the 2005 International Health Regulations, to “provide expedited, timely, accurate, and sufficiently detailed information to [the World Health Organization] about . . . potential public health emergencies” such as the coronavirus. Instead of doing so in this case, Beijing actively misled the WHO about the crucial fact that the pathogen was transmitted between humans. The result is that Xi can no longer credibly claim the CCP adheres to international law, and that the corruptibility of long-standing intergovernmental organizations such as the WHO is more apparent than ever.

Moreover, despite being portrayed as a selfless provider of medical aid to other affected countries, Beijing is actually reaping hundreds of millions in profits by selling equipment to panic-stricken governments abroad. Much of that is useless and is being returned by Spain, the Czech Republic, and Malaysia, among other countries. This sort of thing is typical of the least altruistic regime on earth, and worse may be on the way: Xi’s government will likely expect political favors from the countries it has “aided” during the crisis, the same way that aid recipient Greece was pressured to block an EU statement on Chinese human rights in 2017.

Those who believe that good global governance, however flawed, is an important tool for maintaining international peace and for contributing to development and growth should be appalled at how the CCP is undermining the liberal international architecture and suborning global institutions to its will. The normalization of such misbehavior cannot be allowed to stand.

Protecting against the Next Deadly Pathogen

The third reason Beijing must be held responsible is to prevent another pandemic from ravaging the world in the future. As we saw in the 2014 Ebola outbreak in Dallas, Texas, and are seeing again now, the era of globalization has allowed once-isolated pathogens to leap across national boundaries. Dr. Anthony Fauci of the CDC is among many who have pointed out that Italy has been devastated by the Wuhan coronavirus partly because it hosts a huge number of Chinese tourists as well as workers in the northern manufacturing regions where the virus emerged. In all, 310,000 Chinese live in Italy, and many returned there after visiting China for the Lunar New Year, spreading the virus to their adopted home country. This was, again, the fault of CCP officials, who failed to implement the proper travel restrictions despite knowing of the outbreak’s seriousness.

If Beijing escapes blame for its failure to curb the coronavirus pandemic, its lies, and its attempts to cover up the pathogen’s seriousness — or, worse yet, if it actually earns global plaudits for its actions — then no country will feel the need to be honest with the world when another epidemic breaks out, and the same deadly fiasco will repeat itself. Meanwhile, an emboldened CCP will grow only more aggressive and repressive, having learned that it can fool and bully the world into submission. Quite simply, if nation states do not understand that there will be repercussions for such malfeasance, then our globalized world will suffer more coronavirus-style pandemics in the future.

Beijing freely chose to deny the truth of COVID-19, and its governing malpractice and incompetence helped unleashed a pandemic on the world. For the sake of morality, political governance, and the future, the world must speak truth to power, remember the facts, and condemn the CCP’s actions.

A Crisis Is a Terrible Thing to Manufacture

By Rich Lowry

Tuesday, March 31, 2020

On January 21, the United States confirmed its first case of the coronavirus. The nation’s political and media elite obsessed over Mitch McConnell’s just-announced resolution governing the impeachment trial of Donald J. Trump.

On January 23, China locked down the city of Wuhan. Cable news in America lit up with praise for the epic, nay historic, performance by House impeachment manager Adam Schiff in the trial’s opening arguments.

On January 30, the World Health Organization declared a world health emergency. The U.S. Senate prepared to vote on impeachment witnesses.

On February 5, the cruise ship Diamond Princess quarantined thousands of passengers after a major outbreak on board. Mitt Romney announced that he’d vote to convict Trump on one of the two counts against him, and the Senate voted to acquit on both.

If the Senate had approved additional impeachment witnesses, the trial would have stretched into February at least, overlapping even more with the epidemic.

Trump closed off travel from China while the trial was still ongoing, the day after senators asked their final questions of the impeachment managers and the White House defense team. Only two and a half weeks after the trial, the White House requested $1.25 billion in emergency coronavirus funding from Congress.

If the trial hadn’t ended expeditiously, the Senate easily could have been still seeking the testimony of, say, former White House counsel Don McGahn about the details of the non-firing of special counsel Robert Mueller — at the same time that everyone expected the administration to be shifting into wartime footing against the virus.

In that circumstance, the impeachment trial obviously would have been immediately shelved, because a discretionary national crisis can’t compete with a real, unavoidable one. Political melodrama must give way to a potential public-health catastrophe. Purportedly historic events that were going to be forgotten within weeks can’t compare with days that genuinely might define our era.

For more than three years, American national politics has been constantly on a crisis footing over presidential tweets, two-day controversies, and dubious storylines whipped up by the media and Trump’s genuine outrages. Little of it has been enduring, or nearly as important as the intense, wall-to-wall attention at any given moment suggested.

Trump and his opposition have been engaged in a performative dance of mutual animosity that is angry, hysterical, and, ultimately, inconsequential.

The Mueller probe constituted the tent pole of this period. For years, it drew wishful comparisons to Watergate in the media, but it came up empty, since its premise of a Trump conspiracy with the Russians was always a progressive phantasmagoria.

After all the energy devoted to inflating the Russians into a clear-and-present danger to the workings of America here on our shores, that threat has instead proved to be China, which loosed a virus on the world that has temporarily crashed the American economy and shut down much of American life, including elections.

After we spent months pretending that Trump would somehow be ousted from the presidency by his own party in the Senate, not only is he still the president, all people of good will are rooting for him to perform as ably as he can in this crisis.

After acting as though we had endless time and energy to waste on nonsense because the stakes were so small in what was, until the day before yesterday, a time of peace and prosperity, we have been jolted into a period when our national decisions really matter, and time and resources are of the essence.

In short, the epidemic has put in stark relief the pettiness and absurdity of much that has taken place in our national life since Trump won the presidency. This crisis is the unmistakable punctuation mark on that post-2016 era and the beginning of something new.

How Trump performs now — finally without Mueller or impeachment, artifacts of another time, dogging him — will determine how this time is remembered.

No, America’s Response to Coronavirus Isn’t the Worst in the World

By David Harsanyi

Monday, March 30, 2020

The coronavirus pandemic is already a catastrophe. How we fare in comparison to the rest of the world is hardly of paramount importance. Once the Chinese government hid the outbreak, failed to contain it, and then misled the world, there remained little possibility that any nation, much less an enormous and open society like the United States, was going to be spared its devastation.

Yet, when the political media isn’t preoccupied with a gotcha du jour, pundits, partisans, and journalists have seemed downright giddy to let their minions know that the United States now has the most coronavirus cases in the world. It took a six-siren-emoji tweet from MSNBC’s Joe Scarborough to tell us that fact.

Here is how the New York Times’ Paul Krugman framed the number:

A Nobel Prize–winning economist surely understands that we don’t have enough data to definitively declare the United States the world leader in cases. Even if we did, it doesn’t necessarily follow that this is the fault of public policy. There are plenty of unexplained coronavirus disparities around the world.

The Financial Times chart that that is circulated by Krugman and his fellow pundits, and sometimes cynically deployed as a means of attacking the administration’s response, is largely useless as a point of comparison. For one thing, a graph illustrating per capita cases in all the nations that the Financial Times chart includes looks different. A chart that combined all the cases in European nations — the continent has approximately the same population as the United States — would also look dramatically different. The known cases in Spain and Italy alone are nearly twice as many as the United States right now.

Cross-country comparisons at a given point in time fail to account for many things, including density and time. Iceland is not like Italy, and New York is not like Alaska. And simply because nations such as Italy and Spain experienced outbreaks earlier and more deadly than nations such as Germany and Sweden does not mean the disparities are destined to last.

Moreover, testing in the United States began slowly before being ratcheted up quickly (and criticism of that delay is a fair one). Thus, the curve reflects the reality of expanded testing as much as it reflects reality of the disease. And though I’m not a statistician, I do know that nations have varied criteria for testing, varied standards of testing, and varying effectiveness in the testing they do perform. Hundreds of thousands of Chinese coronavirus tests sent to European nations, for example, have turned out to faulty. The data are incomplete. Krugman’s claim lacks vital context.

Speaking of China, accepting the veracity of numbers offered by the ChiCom government without any skepticism might be good enough for The New York Times and other outlets, but it shouldn’t be enough for anyone who values facts.

It’s also worth mentioning that the timeline of these charts are also uncertain. It’s unlikely we know when the tenth or hundredth case was actually transmitted in China or Iran or even here — and it’s possible that some people had died and some others had recovered before most people understood the magnitude of the future pandemic.

All of this is worth keeping in mind when as we see journalists harping on the overall case number without context. If you want to continue to utilize this once-in-a-century pandemic as a cudgel against your political adversaries, have fun. But the most important gauges of success right now are flattening the curve so that hospitals aren’t overwhelmed with new patients, ramping up our testing capacity to get a better handle on the virus’s properties, and measuring the number of recoveries from coronavirus. Not owning Donald Trump.

The United States has already dealt with coronavirus far better than the Chinese government. The fatality rate in the U.S., so far, is nowhere near that of Italy. Our dynamism is one of the reasons why an early high case count is a not a measure of either national success or failure. It’s not our nature to allow the state to close down borders, travel, or trade, or to stop interactions with the world — or with each other, for that matter. And yet, many of same people who incessantly and cynically warned of the coming Fourth Reich are now blaming the administration for not acting like a dictatorship. It’s difficult to keep up.

Will the Second Amendment Survive Coronavirus?

By Stephen P. Halbrook

Tuesday, March 31, 2020

With panicked consumers emptying store shelves around the country, and shoppers in at least one city fighting over toilet paper, the coronavirus pandemic seems just a short distance from coronavirus pandemonium.

The panic comes at a time when many police departments, to reduce spread of the virus, have curtailed arrests and are releasing certain criminals from prison. This is exactly the type of situation that the Second Amendment is meant to address. The White House has publicly recognized that reality. Yet many public officials insist on flaunting the Second Amendment, ordering gun shops closed or banning firearm sales.

Governor Tom Wolf of Pennsylvania, for example, has ordered “all non-life-sustaining businesses” to close their physical locations. The long list of businesses that may remain open in Pennsylvania includes groceries, drug and hardware stores, newspapers, rental centers, and take-out from restaurants. But gun businesses didn’t make the cut.

Yet the Pennsylvania Constitution’s Declaration of Rights declares that “the right of the citizens to bear arms in defense of themselves and the State shall not be questioned.”

The Pennsylvania Supreme Court, without even mentioning that provision, refused to issue an injunction on behalf of some gun shops against the governor’s order. Three justices dissented, including Justice David Wecht, who wrote:

The inability of licensed firearm dealers to conduct any physical operations amounts to a complete prohibition upon the retail sale of firearms — an activity in which the citizens of this Commonwealth recently have been engaging on a large scale, and one guaranteed by both the United States Constitution and the Constitution of this Commonwealth.

The dissenting justices suggested that the constitutional right could be accommodated by allowing the completion of sales with minimal contact.

New gun buyers are often surprised by how difficult it is to purchase a gun in their state. In Maryland, for example, it takes a month to get a handgun-qualification license. It could take six months in New York, where a judge has to sign off on each handgun license. California has a ten-day waiting period for delivery of a firearm after the sale is approved.

Buying a gun requires a background check, which in most states is conducted by the FBI’s National Instant Criminal Background Check System (NICS). NICS conducted 2.8 million checks in February, the third-largest monthly total since the system was set up in 1998. Most NICS searches are automated and tell the dealer almost instantaneously to “proceed” or “deny” a sale, although some transactions must be delayed for examiners to research incomplete records.

Some states insist on conducting the background checks directly. That’s the case in New Jersey, where Governor Phil Murphy has ordered “non-essential” businesses, a category in which he includes gun shops, to close. The state police then shut down NICS checks as well, effectively banning all firearm sales. A legal challenge has been filed. By contrast, Governor J. B. Pritzker of Illinois declared that firearm retailers are “essential” and may remain open for business.

Gun sales already had been skyrocketing from the ever-escalating threats of gun bans coming from Democrat presidential contenders. The fear of societal breakdown stemming from the coronavirus has added to the demand for firearms across the country.

Everyone wants to slow the spread of COVID-19. The various emergency decrees being issued distinguish between essential and non-essential businesses. What could be more essential than protecting yourself and your family from criminal violence, especially when the Bill of Rights declares it to be an essential right that may not be infringed?

Americans should be mindful of the dangers of “emergency” decrees. History tells us that government diktats in response to man-made and natural disasters often lead to unprecedented restrictions on individual liberty that last long after the disasters are forgotten.

Some of the anti-gun decrees now being issued appear to be motivated by the false premise that limiting gun sales will prevent upheaval in the event that the contagion causes mass shortages and desperation. Yet citizens who purchase firearms must pass stringent background checks to ensure that they are mentally stable and have no felony records or other legal barriers to firearm ownership. They are exactly the kinds of armed citizens needed if law and order break down.

Strong measures must be taken against the spread of the coronavirus. But they must be tailored to accommodate the citizens’ ability to protect their safety in all aspects and to preserve their constitutional rights.

Joe Biden, Democrats, and Sexual Assault: They Never Learn

By Dan McLaughlin

Monday, March 30, 2020

They never learn, do they? Democrats and their pundit class have a long habit of promoting standards for others that their own side can’t abide living under. Somehow, they make arguments year in and year out that come back to bite them, and they never pick up on the slightest clue that this will, predictably, happen again.

So it is — now that the presumptive Democratic presidential nominee, Joe Biden, has been accused by a woman who worked for him in the early 1990s of sexually assaulting her. If we apply the standards that Republicans and conservatives have advocated for these kinds of things, the question we would ask right now is whether the evidence shows the allegation to be credible. We can return to that another day. Because under the “Believe All Women” standard promoted by Democrats, liberals, and progressives, Biden should be simply assumed to be guilty. Case closed. David Harsanyi has a selection of those arguments from the Kavanaugh hearings, including from Biden himself.

The examples he lists are not hyperbole; they are what Democrats argued with straight faces as recently as a year and a half ago. They made those arguments loudly, insistently, repeatedly, emotionally, sometimes with tears in their eyes and voices quivering with rage. They argued them in congressional hearings and on the campaign trail, tweeted them and memed them. And those Democrats who even bother to notice Tara Reade’s allegations against Biden will now be forced to explain that they never really meant any of it. To all of them, I now say: Not only did we warn you and warn you and warn you that this exact thing would happen to you sooner or later (and probably sooner), but it has happened to you before and you learned absolutely nothing from it.

Those of you old enough to remember the Clarence Thomas hearings will recall that a major part of the argument for believing Anita Hill’s sexual-harassment charges against Thomas was this same line of reasoning. We were told that men “just don’t get it” and cannot and should not attempt to evaluate the facts and testimony to judge whether Hill was telling the truth. This you-must-believe, you-may-not-question stance became a centerpiece of the Democrats’ 1992 “Year of the Woman” Senate campaigns. There were reasons that they took this tack: Polls at the time by Gallup and the New York Times/CBS News showed that more voters believed Thomas than Hill, and voters throughout the hearings favored his confirmation by a two-to-one margin. The cleanest way to avoid discussion of the credibility of your witnesses is to argue that their credibility is irrelevant.

This happens nowhere else in politics or the law. We should, of course, listen to every accuser who comes forward with a claim of sexual assault or abuse, and too often as a society we have failed to do so. We should listen to Reade, just as we should listen to the women who have made accusations against Donald Trump and other political figures of both parties. But in any accusation of misconduct (sexual or otherwise), what matters most is whether it is true or not. In the civil and criminal law, that means we have the protections of due process. In politics, it sometimes means making judgments about the facts without the benefit of a legal proceeding. But the duty to take the truth seriously and apply our common sense in finding the truth is no less important.

Lots of people on the right argued at the time that the “thou shalt not question Anita Hill” edict was an insane standard that would sting the Democrats at the next opportunity. Democrats, recklessly disregarding all these warnings, not only persisted in making the argument but also went ahead and nominated a notorious Lothario for president in 1992. Predictably enough, early in Bill Clinton’s presidential term, he was sued for sexual harassment by Paula Jones, a former subordinate in Arkansas. Kathleen Willey, a Democratic supporter of Clinton’s, accused him of groping her in the Oval Office. He was also accused, by Juanita Broaddrick, of rape.

The Paula Jones case eventually expanded to questions of Clinton’s other workplace sexcapades, thanks to the liberal discovery rules of civil litigation. That, in turn, led to the referral of the Monica Lewinsky affair to yet another liberal innovation — the independent counsel. The independent counsel was, itself, a Carter-era Democratic creation. In 1988, Justice Antonin Scalia tried to warn liberals of precisely why it was dangerous, with its presumption in favor of launching unaccountable investigations. Not one of these events dented the absolute certainty of liberal pundits and Democratic politicians in making deeply illiberal arguments, so long as the targets were Republicans. All of them were shocked when their own rules were forced on them during the Clinton presidency. The “believe all women” standards went quiet for a long time, workplace sexual harassment was shrugged off as “compartmentalized” from Clinton’s presidency, and the independent-counsel statute was allowed to expire by bipartisan consent in 1999.

But in the long term, Democrats learned nothing. When presented with the chance to play the credibility-of-the-accuser-doesn’t-matter card in pursuit of Kavanaugh, they took the same absolutist position all over again. It didn’t take long to blow up in their faces, as the thirst for corroborating allegations brought out people such as the bottom-feeding attorney Michael Avenatti to push ludicrous gang-rape charges against Kavanaugh that just proved his defenders’ point. Boxed in by their own standards, Democratic senators actually read Avenatti’s nonsense into the Senate record during the hearings. Republicans and conservatives warned them that they would regret these standards the next time charges were leveled against one of their own. It didn’t take long, as two women came forward to publicly accuse Virginia lieutenant governor Justin Fairfax of rape in mid-2019. Fairfax is still in office, and he plans to run for governor, and his party may well fall in line behind him. Now an accusation has been raised against the party’s presumptive presidential nominee.

Will Democrats learn their lesson this time? Don’t bet on it.

The Moral Heroism of Our Coronavirus Response

By Jonah Goldberg

Friday, March 20, 2020

I am not where the editorial board of the Wall Street Journal is on the pandemic, but I’m more sympathetic than some of my friends and colleagues. The economic toll all of all of this really can’t be exaggerated (though some will try!) or dismissed (though others will try!), and that will have profound consequences too.

A friend of mine said to me he’d rather have a 5 percent greater risk that his mom might die than a 25 percent risk that his kids may have to suffer through a Great Depression. I don’t see it that way, but I don’t think that’s an insane position, either. There are tradeoffs in all government decisions, because there are tradeoffs in all decisions. It’s not immoral to consider the scope of the sacrifices being asked of people.

But whatever the right course of action is—and I basically support what the government is doing, if not in how it helped get us here—it’s worth taking a moment to appreciate how this course of action defies so much of the glib rhetoric about America one hears bandied about.

While there’s some contrary data, for the most part we know that this virus is predominantly a threat to very old people and a few younger people with secondary ailments. If America was the land of unfettered capitalism where ruthless efficiency and productivity were the only things that mattered, this is not what we would be doing.

If we were some Capitalist Sparta, we’d be putting old people on figurative ice floes to fend for themselves or pushing them off cliffs, like Paul Ryan in that heinous ad. People older than 80 are not, as a rule, vital cogs in the capitalist machine. If one were to apply the butcher knife of Peter Singer’s ethical pragmatism, we might even be setting up death panels.

But forget Singer—I know I try to. It’s interesting how the progressive health care reformers aren’t talking about QALYs. This is technocrat-ese for Quality-Adjusted Life Years. A technique used to justify life-saving interventions based upon how many good or “productive” years you have left. Here a good explanation of the approach and here’s another from the Wall Street Journal. This idea, if not this precise technique, was discussed a lot during the fight over Obamacare. In countries with single-payer systems, it’s just a fancy way of talking about rationing health care, based on the perceived need of the rationers, not the patients. And you can be sure that if we had Medicare for All, this would be precisely how we’d handle health care. Many progressive health care economists routinely talk about the benefits of a QALY approach—when there isn’t a pandemic.

Well, here’s some back-of-the-envelope math. Say the U.S. economy is $20 trillion. Let’s also estimate that we’re looking at a 5 percent hit, which equals $1 trillion. Now suppose that we save 1 million lives, instead of the, say, 2 million we might lose if we did nothing or less than what we’re doing now. That would be $1 million per life saved. If the hit to the economy is greater than 5 percent, the cost per life saved—overwhelmingly the lives of old and sick people—the higher the cost would be.

Now, I don’t think we should let this kind of thinking be our guide, and apparently neither do all the progressive health care wonks, because none of them have dared to say anything like this. And neither have all the supposed fetishists of the free market. Even the Wall Street Journal is merely saying that the current approach is not sustainable indefinitely—and they may be right.

And, yeah, I understand there are other reasons to respond the way we have. An overwhelmed medical system is bad for everyone. But if we just ordered all the old folks into quarantine, fewer Americans would be inconvenienced and we’d see less economic damage. We’re not doing that.

The simple fact is that this country is doing something morally heroic. I hate metaphorical war rhetoric, but we’re taking the “millions for defense, not one penny for tribute” approach to this.

It may not work. It may not last. It may not make the most sense economically. But we’re doing it anyway. And that is something that should be appreciated not just for the “We’re all in it together” platitudes but as a rebuttal to the slanderous way many Americans describe this country.

Movements shmovements.

There’s another interesting takeaway from all of this. Readers may be aware that I am increasingly convinced that American nationalism and, to a lesser extent, socialism are paper tigers. These supposedly resurgent movements increasingly strike me as intellectual dress-up games. In the great war for nationalism and socialism there are  a lot of generals but not that many soldiers.

It’s sort of like Star Trek. In the show(s) the captain and the top officers go on all the dangerous away missions while the vast crew stays behind to be props and walk through the hallways like the cast of West Wing. I’ve long joked that if Gene Roddenberry wrote the story of World War II, FDR and Ike would parachute behind enemy lines to take out Hitler and Himmler all by themselves.

Eggheads and activists on the left and right have been telling us for years that the masses, particularly the youth, crave some grand new transcendent cause that allows them to leap out of the pits of despair, alienation, and anomie that late capitalism has exiled them to. On the left, they’ve tried again and again to make climate change into the moral equivalent of war to mobilize the masses to their preferred policies. On the right, more and more people are using the culture war the same way.

Well, President Trump is right that this is as close to a war as you can get. And yet, we see videos of young people refusing to forgo the opportunity to pound Jäger shots at a Fort Lauderdale Chili’s or get Chinese character tattoos on their lower backs (that probably say “I have syphilis” or “Kung Pao Chicken—extra spicy.”).

In fairness, there’s little evidence that young people as a group are especially likely to be slackers in the Great Patriotic War against COVID-19. The truth is people of all ages have responded in different ways to the threat.

I think the folks who are blowing it off are wrong. But what does their attitude say about efforts like socialism and nationalism that don’t have anything like this kind of threat to galvanize them? A pandemic literally gives government officials the constitutional and legal authority to order people to radically disrupt their lives—and people are still defying it. I think Evangeline Lilly is insanely hot, but that’s not important right now. I also think she’s making an ass of herself. But how many more Evangeline Lillys will there be in America where the government bosses people around based on some abstraction like nationalism or socialism?

Sure, you can say that the socialists and nationalists don’t want to boss people around. But if that’s the case, what is the point? If it’s just a slogan to throw around, you’re making my point. If it’s something real, it necessarily involves imposing one vision on the whole country.  At least the post-liberal Catholic integralists (there’s a banner for the masses!) are honest about wanting to impose their definition of the Highest Good on everyone. One of their generals is actually furious that the Catholic Church is canceling masses out of a desire to save lives. One has to wonder how mad he’ll be if the wrong “one-size-fits-all” ideologue gets in power.

The people who want some new, post-liberal reorienting of society need to offer an answer for what they will do when the cats refuse to be herded.

Still, I am very worried about the damage being done to capitalism during this crisis—even if I think it is necessary. Progressive economic planners used the statism of Wilson’s “war socialism” to massively transform the American order once they had a chance. “We planned in war!” they cried during the 1920s until they seized the reins and planned in peace. I am positive I’ll spend the rest of my life arguing with people who will offer some version of “We planned during the pandemic!” You can be sure that once we’re through with all of this, both the AOC and Rusty Reno types will use the steps being taken now as proof that the government can simply will into existence whatever economic system they want. And it will fall to members of the (classically) liberal remnant to point out that income inequality isn’t like a pandemic—and neither is Drag Queen Story Hour.

Elizabeth Warren’s Amiable Panting Dogs

By Christine Rosen

Monday, March 30, 2020

In May 2019, Time magazine put Elizabeth Warren on its cover. In describing the Massachusetts senator’s stumping on the campaign trail, reporter Haley Edwards gushed, “Just as her diagnosis of the problem reaches a crescendo, she takes a step back and performs a rhetorical swan dive into crystalline pools of policy: and here, she says, is how we fix it.” She said Warren was leading a “populist political revolution”—albeit a revolution that was, at the time, polling at just 8 percent. Projecting an image of her own behavior around the candidate, Edwards even described Warren’s dog as “panting amiably.”

Time wasn’t the only outlet to garland Warren in this way. The Guardian declared her “the intellectual powerhouse of the Democratic party” in April 2019; GQ announced, “Elizabeth Warren Deserves Your Undivided Attention,” in May; and the HuffPo went so far as to defend Warren’s skin-care routine as recently as January.

So favorable was the coverage of Warren in the early months of her campaign that supporters of Bernie Sanders felt shortchanged. The progressive magazine In These Times was so annoyed by the liberal media’s more favorable approach to Warren that they studied MSNBC’s coverage and found that “Warren had the lowest proportion of negative coverage of all three candidates (just 7.9 percent of all her mentions) and the highest proportion of positive mentions (30.6 percent).”

The uncritical coverage continued after a CNN-sponsored town-hall meeting on LGBTQ issues. After Warren was asked a planted question about opposition to gay marriage, she delivered a clearly rehearsed response: “I’m going to assume it’s a guy who said that,” she said, adding, “Then just marry one woman—I’m cool with that. Assuming you can find one.” The Washington Post’s Annie Linskey devoted a story to Warren’s manufactured zinger, noting the millions of positive responses it received on Twitter and arguing, “She is quick-witted and sharp-tongued in a way that has played well in the Democratic primary and could prove effective against President Trump.”

Warren’s fabulations about her Native American heritage and her claim that she was fired from a teaching job because she had been pregnant at the time would have derailed almost any other candidate, but in Warren’s case neither gained traction because mainstream media outlets didn’t ask too many questions.

In fact, the pregnancy story likely wouldn’t have appeared in mainstream media outlets at all if it hadn’t first been broken by Collin Anderson at a conservative outlet, the Washington Free Beacon. Publications such as the New York Times covered it only after Warren was forced to respond. And the Times downplayed the fact that Warren had lied by spending most of the story discussing the legal history of pregnancy discrimination, which Warren had not, herself, suffered.

Even as her campaign began to founder in the polls, positive coverage continued. As Jack Shafer (one of the few non-sycophantic media observers of Warren) noted in Politico, “Warren got twice as many mentions on cable news as Buttigieg over the last three months of 2019, when she experienced the steepest decline in her Real Clear Politics poll. But she still took second place in mentions behind only Biden.”

Then she tanked in the first four states that actually voted. On Super Tuesday, she came in third in her home state. Despite the efforts of her superfans in the media to sell Democratic-primary voters on the virtues of Elizabeth Warren, they were not buying. She withdrew from the race.

Warren’s journey to oblivion pained reporters. As Annie Linsky and Amy Wang of the Washington Post wrote in the immediate aftermath, “Elizabeth Warren attracted big crowds. She won rave reviews in nearly every debate. Her organization was second to none. She developed plans, a strategy and a message. Yet when voting started, she not only lost, she lost by a lot.”

The media class that had spent a year celebrating Warren almost perfectly reflected the average Warren supporter. FiveThirtyEight’s Clare Malone noted matter-of-factly that “the media and its dominant demographic group (college-educated white people) are Warren’s base.” To a media establishment still nursing its wounds over Hillary Clinton’s loss to Donald Trump in 2016, she seemed like a political Athena, sprung fully formed from the Senate and armed to wage a kinder, gentler form of class warfare than Bernie Sanders while simultaneously breaking the presidential glass ceiling.

The tenor of the response among Warren-supportive media outlets demonstrates the extent of their misguided overinvestment in her—an investment that didn’t extend to other female candidates such as Kirsten Gillibrand, Kamala Harris, and Amy Klobuchar. The New York Times claimed, “Ms. Warren’s impact on the race was far greater than just the outcome for her own candidacy.” Writing in Salon, Amanda Marcotte raged, “Americans apparently couldn’t see that she is a once-in-a-generation talent and reward her for it with the presidency. That is a shameful blight on us.” The headline for a story in Politico simply read: “‘White men get to be the default:’ Women lament Warren’s demise.”

The public mourning continued on television. Trying to make sense of it all with Representative Abigail Spanberger, NBC News’ Andrea Mitchell confessed, “Well, Congresswoman, you brought up exactly a moment that was so emotional for me frankly and for a lot of others watching,” then played a clip of Warren saying, “One of the hardest parts of this is all those pinky promises and all those little girls who are going to have to wait four more years. That’s going to be hard.”

Self-described “feminist journalist” Lauren Duca was more blunt. In a Substack post that she wrote “while sobbing into my partner’s chest,” she described a “pain not unlike the one that followed Donald Trump’s election and Brett Kavanaugh’s confirmation to the Supreme Court. The agony of watching Elizabeth Warren be diminished by the mainstream media has been infuriating. To watch that dismissal be reflected at the polls is almost unbearable.” She lamented that Warren, whom she called “a geyser of brilliance and enthusiasm powered by pure love of democracy” was what everyone should have wanted and claimed, “We should all be so furious that we’ve been bullied into not only accepting less, but collectively fretting that, for a woman, the best of the best is still not good enough.”

Many other journalists also sought to pin the blame for Warren’s decline on sexism. CBS News political reporter Caitlyn Huey-Burns tweeted, “We cannot talk about Warren’s fail without talking about the sexism so prevalent in American politics.” Writing in the New York Times, Lisa Lerer asked plaintively, “Was it always going to be the last men standing?” Megan Garber of The Atlantic identified the culprit as “internalized misogyny,” suggesting that it was not Warren’s weaknesses as a politician, but the sexist false consciousness of nonwhite, non-college-educated Democratic voters, that led them to reject Warren.

But this gynocentric wishful thinking on the part of female reporters was belied by all the evidence of voters’ intentions. When reporters bothered to talk to actual voters, many of those voters were clear that they were going to cast their ballots based on who they thought could win against Trump, not on gender. “I’m not going to vote for someone simply because we share identity,” one young woman told the Times, by way of explanation for her vote for Biden over Warren.

Just before Super Tuesday, Duca tweeted, “Elizabeth Warren is the president we deserve.” Given the willful disregard of the weaknesses of her candidacy on the part of the journalists covering her, and their failure to acknowledge their own biases, Warren’s failure was the punishment her panting media followers deserved.

Pandemic: The First Great Crisis of the Post-American Era

By Kevin D. Williamson

Sunday, March 29, 2020

Faced with the great challenge of his time — the thermonuclear menace of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics — Jack Kennedy famously laid out the American position: “We shall pay any price, bear any burden, meet any hardship, support any friend, oppose any foe, in order to assure the survival and the success of liberty. This much we pledge — and more.”

That was heady stuff — but exhausting, too, and expensive. Americans tire of heroism pretty quickly. We are the weary kind,  and the weariness is thoroughly bipartisan: Kennedy’s determination to fight the Cold War was met with opposition not only from the Left, which was sympathetic to the Soviet Union, but also from the Right, with some conservatives of the old school taking to heart Randolph Bourne’s dictum that “war is the health of the state” and believing that what they saw as imperialism abroad was inexorably linked to imperialism at home. And both sides coveted the money that was being spent, calculating that we could fill a lot of potholes in Poughkeepsie for the cost of an aircraft carrier or three. The Walter Mondale Democrats and the Ron Paul Republicans saw eye to eye on that, at least.

That dynamic has not changed much: Barack Obama complained about the money the George W. Bush administration spent chasing jihadists around the world and declared, “America, it is time to focus on nation-building at home.” Donald Trump’s embarrassing nickel-and-dime attitude toward U.S. commitments abroad, from NATO to USAID, is the barstool version of Obama’s schoolboy posturing. But, of course, we are Americans, we are restless, we like a fight, and we cannot actually mind our own business for very long. Our method is to get ourselves into a fight, grow bored with it, become agitated by the expense of keeping it up, and then retreat in a huff.

That makes for a peculiar politics on the Right, especially, as conservatives make like a guy trying to pat his head and rub his belly at the same time, simultaneously beating their chests and pinching pennies. On 24 June 2019, Sean Hannity lamented that President Trump had failed to follow through on his insane proposal to hijack Iraqi oil output, which Hannity proposed using to compensate the families of American soldiers who died in the American invasion and occupation of Iraq at a rate of “millions of dollars per family.” Warming to his theme but never quite managing to call his proposal “tribute,” the AM-radio moral philosopher concluded “We have every right to force you to pay for your own liberation.”

Us pay any price, bear any burden? No, you will pay any price, and you will bear any burden we damned well tell you to, buddy.

Kennedy laid out an invitation to ancient friends and new cooperators alike:

To those old allies whose cultural and spiritual origins we share, we pledge the loyalty of faithful friends. United, there is little we cannot do in a host of cooperative ventures. Divided, there is little we can do–for we dare not meet a powerful challenge at odds and split asunder.

To those new States whom we welcome to the ranks of the free, we pledge our word that one form of colonial control shall not have passed away merely to be replaced by a far more iron tyranny. We shall not always expect to find them supporting our view. . . . To those peoples in the huts and villages across the globe struggling to break the bonds of mass misery, we pledge our best efforts to help them help themselves, for whatever period is required — not because the Communists may be doing it, not because we seek their votes, but because it is right.

That is . . . not exactly how we talk about those things today.

It is easy to criticize President Trump for his pettiness — in rhetoric and in fact — but he is not the cause of American surrender, only its symptom. It is impossible to blame the American people for their weariness. For one thing, the critics of JFK-style imperialism and those Poughkeepsie pothole-watchers are not without a point: There is an economic and a moral price to be paid for that kind of leadership, and government should, in most ordinary times, be mainly preoccupied with those potholes and not with dreaming up new crusades through which to aggrandize itself and its officers. And didn’t Hercules himself, sometime between killing the Nemean lion and that unpleasant Augean housekeeping business, look over his shoulder and mutter about the unfairness of it all, and wonder aloud why the . . . Belgians . . . weren’t shouldering more of the burden? “They have been very unfair to us,” I am sure he said.

The coronavirus epidemic is a global problem, one that points to the current deficit in global leadership. Americans are paralyzed by resentment. The European Union, having just been gutted by the departure of the United Kingdom, does not know quite what to do, and those European universal health-care systems so admired by U.S. progressives are failing. China has just reminded the world that it is a socially backward gulag state that is stalled right there between Mexico and Bulgaria in real economic performance. Putin is the czar of Twitter trolls. The U.S. president has two pornographic films, six bankruptcies, and a game show on his curriculum vitae, and the country is so short of emergency supplies that Ralph Lauren is making medical garments and Tito’s is producing hand sanitizer instead of vodka — not exactly in a position to exercise global leadership.

With the prominent exception of the European Union and a few relatively minor exceptions (ASEAN, OIC, etc.), the success of the prominent multilateral institutions of the post-war era depended to an extraordinary degree upon the willingness of the United States to carry them, applying its vast wealth, military power, and credibility to their missions. The United States is, at least for the moment, no longer as willing to do that as it once was — our relationship with NATO in the Trump era is indicative of a deeper and broader change in our national orientation. This is the age of the Little American, who turns up his nose at the world and asks, “What’s in it for me?”

The absence of American leadership in the current crisis is not an aberration, and it is not temporary. This is the new world order, light on the order.

First and Foremost, Defeat the Virus

National Review Online

Saturday, March 28, 2020

If President Trump is right that the fight against the coronavirus is the equivalent of a war, we need to focus first and foremost on defeating the enemy.

That means, as an urgent priority, getting hospitals the protective gear and ventilators that they need to handle the surge of patients that is already showing up in New York City, New Orleans, and other hot spots. If nothing else, it’s a sign of seriousness in meeting this need that President Trump invoked the Defense Production Act — the Korean War–era law allowing the government to direct the manufacture and distribution of goods necessary for the national defense — on Friday to compel General Motors to make ventilators on an emergency basis.

The action comes after a typically confusing back-and-forth over GM. If a report in the New York Times was to be believed, the $1 billion price tag of a potential deal with GM for the ventilators caused the administration to have second thoughts. Given the massive economic cost of the current lockdowns and the amount of money Congress is spending to try to cushion the blow, obviously, $1 billion is a pittance. The Times also reported that the administration worried about getting saddled with too many unused ventilators, a concern that accorded with President Trump’s statement on Fox News a day earlier that he doubts that New York City will really need 30,000 ventilators.

At the end of this, though, if we have kept hospitals from getting overwhelmed at the cost of paying top dollar for gear and buying too much of it, our response will have been a success well worth the price.

In tweets after the publication of the Times story, Trump said the issue was that GM couldn’t produce enough ventilators quickly enough, a much more legitimate concern. The Times noted, too, that officials worried about putting all of our eggs in one basket, rather than spreading production around to different companies. Meanwhile, traditional medical-device makers have worried about automakers sucking up component parts. Sorting through all of this on the fly in the midst of a crisis would tax any administration, but the emphasis should be on more material rather than less, and as quickly as possible.

As bad as the escalating numbers of cases and fatalities have been in the U.S. over the last week, the situation is surely going to deteriorate further. Besides fortifying the medical system, the massive scale-up in testing has to continue and every exertion must be made to develop and deploy therapies as soon as possible. The roll-out of a test by Abbott Laboratories that can reveal a positive in five minutes is a sign of the role technological innovation can play in this fight.

The hope that Trump expressed earlier in the week to open up the economy again by Easter weekend is understandable, but nothing is truly going to open up — nor should it — unless we have clearly gotten a handle on the virus and its spread has begun to wane. More important than coming up with an aspirational date for a return to normalcy is thinking through what our post-lockdown strategy will look like — how testing, masks, contact tracing, and other methods will be deployed to allow to a return to economic and social activity without risking a second wave of infections. Life in a place like New York City may not look the same for a long time.

President Trump has gotten a bump in the polls recently, perhaps a rally-around-the-flag effect or a reaction to his briefings, where new measures are announced every day. We suspect that his mini-bounce would be even higher if he could at least stop warring with governors and shooting at his critics during this interlude. Trump should know that how he responds in this moment will define his presidency and determine his odds of reelection.

We hope and expect that our country will, in its characteristic fashion, find its way through this crisis by marshaling huge resources, discovering innovations, and relying on the incredible courage and initiative of medical personnel, grocery-store clerks, and countless millions of others who make our civil society so robust. But the worst is yet to come.

The Scarlet ‘NYC’

By Noah Rothman

Friday, March 27, 2020

New Yorkers have suffered extreme whiplash at the hands of their public officials.

Only a few short weeks ago, city residents wary of a rapidly spreading contagion in Asia were castigated for their concern. To avoid at-risk populations, enclosed spaces, and mass crowds then was considered anal-retentive, at best; racist, at worst.

A few short weeks later, and underreaction has been replaced with excess and hyperbole. Actions that were once praised as altruistic are now regarded as reckless and misanthropic. New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio—who less than one month ago was encouraging New Yorkers to congregate and patronize local businesses, contending that it required direct physical contact with a symptomatic individual to come down with COVID-19—now insists that at least 4 million New Yorkers will contract the Coronavirus.

It’s now certain that the defiance and lethargy encouraged by city officials over those crucial early weeks of the outbreak contributed to New York City’s dubious status as the nation’s leading exporter of COVID-19 cases. On Tuesday, Dr. Deborah Brix, the response coordinator for the White House’s Coronavirus task force, revealed that a staggering 60 percent of all new cases in the United States originated in the New York City metro area. She advised “everyone who has left New York over the last few days” to shelter in place, wherever they may be, for the next 14 days. Accordingly, residents of New York City and the surrounding suburbs are now an unwanted presence in much of the country.

In Rhode Island, Gov. Gina Raimondo is “mandating, not suggesting” that New Yorkers coming to her state self-isolate for the next two weeks. “National Guard troops will be stationed at bus stops and train stations to speak to collect contact information from travelers arriving from New York, and the state police will be stopping cars with New York plates that enter the state,” the Providence Journal reported.

Rhode Island isn’t alone. In Florida, travelers entering the Sunshine State are greeted first by National Guard soldiers, who inform them that residents of the tristate area must self-isolate or face criminal penalties. Texas Gov. Greg Abbott issued a similar directive that compels air travelers entering the Lone Star State from the NYC area to self-quarantine for no fewer than 14 days or the duration of their stay—whichever comes first. The message couldn’t be clearer.

But Abbott did not limit this order only to the metro area, which is indicative of the policy’s likely fatal flaws. Travelers arriving in Texas from neighboring Louisiana—specifically, New Orleans—are also required to shelter in place for the maximum observed length of this unique Coronavirus’s incubation period. The situation in the Big Easy is growing more dire by the day. The story is much the same in cities like Chicago, Los Angeles, Atlanta, Miami, Detroit, Washington D.C., and the greater Los Angeles area.

The impulse to affix a scarlet letter to New York City-area residents is understandable; it’s the same instinct to which the city’s elected leaders deferred when the COVID-19 threat was purely academic. No one wants to suffocate their local economies, even for the sake of public health. The Northeast, West Coast, and Mid-Atlantic states were forced to make that terrible choice only when all other options had been exhausted. But in procrastinating, the states that now operate under the assumption that they can avoid New York’s fate are inviting something worse and more prolonged.

In theory, if everyone in America stood still for two to three weeks, the spread of this virus would be all but arrested. That will forever remain a theory. But the staggered, piecemeal implementation of ordnances that temporarily close non-essential businesses and guidelines that require all citizens to self-isolate will only ensure that this crisis rolls along for an indefinite period. Branding New York City-area residents as a unique threat to the nation is a faulty panacea and a source of false comfort.

It is a historic tragedy that a pandemic of this scale is upon us, but it is upon us. The sooner the nation, as a whole, commits to measures that prevent communities from transmitting the disease—a phenomenon that the CDC has observed in almost every state—the sooner it can be behind us.

Goodbye, Green New Deal

By Kevin D. Williamson

Friday, March 27, 2020

What will happen next with the coronavirus epidemic is unknown, but it seems certain to claim one very high-profile victim: the so-called Green New Deal.

Good riddance.

The current crisis in the U.S. economy is, in miniature but concentrated form, precisely what the Left has in mind in response to climate change: shutting down large sectors of the domestic and global economies through official writ, social pressure, and indirect means, in response to a crisis with potentially devastating and wide-ranging consequences for human life and human flourishing.

What is under way right now in response to the epidemic is in substance much like the Green New Deal and lesser versions of the same climate-change agenda: massive new government spending, political control of critical industries, emergency protocols modeled on wartime practice, etc.

But the characters of the two crises are basically different.

Set aside, for the moment, any reservations you might have about the coronavirus-emergency regime, and set aside your views on climate change, too, whatever they may be. Instead, ask yourself this: If Americans are this resistant to paying a large economic price to enable measures meant to prevent a public-health catastrophe in the here and now — one that threatens the lives of people they know and love — then how much less likely are they to bear not weeks or months but decades of disruption and economic dislocation and a permanently diminished standard of living in order to prevent possibly severe consequences to people in Bangladesh or Indonesia 80 or 100 years from now?

For years, we’ve been hearing, “This is climate change” and “That is climate change,” every time there’s a flood or a storm. If that’s the fact, then climate change is, relatively speaking, manageable. There is no way Americans—or people around the world—are going to agree to endure anything like the current economic downturn in order to prevent problems of that nature.

Without failing to appreciate the severe immediate economic consequences being felt by Americans in this episode, asking retail and service-industry workers to forfeit their incomes for a few months until their establishments can reopen is a relatively manageable thing even if we are (as I believe we should be) very liberal in doing what we can to protect them financially in the meantime. Telling everybody who works in coal, oil, natural gas, petrochemicals, plastics, and refineries — and a great many people who work in automobiles, aviation, shipping, utilities, construction, agriculture, manufacturing, food processing, utilities, and dozens of other fields — that their companies and their jobs are going away forever is a much larger thing. Telling everybody who does business with those people that they’ll have to consult Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez for solvents and industrial polymers — and, you know, lights — would send waves of chaos rippling around the world hard and so fast that you’d need Tom Araya to properly give voice to them.

“Oh, but we’ll find them jobs in the new green economy!” comes the response. “It’ll be a net positive!” As though petroleum engineers were lumps of labor that could be reshaped at will by a committee of lawyers in Washington, if only we gave them the power. Nobody is buying that. Not many people are that stupid.

As I wrote at the beginning of this outbreak, Americans are hard to quarantine. We may yet end up paying a very heavy price for that — in some circumstances, a non-compliance rate of 20 percent (i.e., if every fifth person is a knucklehead) will have effects quite similar to a non-compliance rate of 95 percent. A 51 percent majority works in a city-council election, but an effective social-distancing regimen requires much more.

Those spring-break clowns down in Florida and the “coronavirus party” doofuses in Kentucky are We the People, too, and if they are not willing to spend a couple of weeks watching Netflix to save grandma’s life — or their own lives — then do you really think they’re going to take an economic bullet over the prospect of losing 3 percent of world economic output a century from now to global-warming-mitigation costs?

What we are seeing right now is what it looks like when Washington tries to steer the economy. There are times when that is necessary, and this is one of those times. But emergencies do not last forever, and emergency measures should be, by nature, temporary. The attraction of the climate-change crusade is that it creates a permanent state of emergency. The Left wants very much to convince Americans that climate change presents an emergency of the same kind requiring the same “moral equivalent of war” worldwide mobilization.

One suspects that the people who are missing their paychecks right now, and the ones who worry that they may be missing them soon, are going to need some convincing. The adverse effects of climate change are likely to be significant and may prove severe — as noted, many of our progressive friends insist that they already are. But we have a new point of comparison, and those challenges feel relatively manageable if the alternative is an extended version of the coronavirus shutdown — and no amount of marketing will change the fact that that is precisely what is being advocated.

A couple of months of this is going to be very hard to take. Nobody is signing up for a lifetime of it.

Europe Wasn’t Ready for Coronavirus. It May Never Fully Recover.

By Itxu Díaz

Friday, March 27, 2020

On November 28th, 2019, the European Union officially and solemnly declared the “climate emergency,” in a ceremony presided over by the would-be 17-year-old prophet Greta Thunberg. Today, almost four months later, in the midst of a real emergency, the only thing that remains official and solemn in that declaration is its ridiculousness. That, and the no-holds-barred death match between the Union’s partners to seize containers of respirators and face masks destined for other countries in order to save their own. “The European Union either gets this health crisis right, or it will be dead,” I heard the former president of the European Parliament, Antonio Tajani, say the day before yesterday. At the moment, the European Union seems to be MIA, along with the “climate emergency.” Each day that passes, the hope of finding it alive diminishes.

A month ago, while the coronavirus was invading the Old Continent, we Europeans were busy with much more important matters than ‘a little flu.’ In early March, Spain’s Communist government was focused on passing its aberrant “sexual freedom law.” With a name like that, you might think that we Spaniards have been procreating by pollination for 2000 years. Meanwhile, the Swiss press, strangely enough, seemed intent on overthrowing the Spanish monarchy, as if we hadn’t had enough of church-burning and coldblooded murder at the hands of the Second Republic. And a few days earlier, on March 2nd, the big issue in Switzerland was a referendum to pass a law banning any comments or attitudes against gay-friendly policies. It brings to mind the warning that Gómez Dávila, Colombian intellectual, gave us towards the end of the 20th century: “Despite what they teach us today, easy sex isn’t the solution to all our problems.”

In Sweden, Germany, and half of Europe, the front-page news on March 7th was another issue: (again) Greta Thunberg’s statements about the need to impose measures that reward women over men. It was around those days that the Dutch government announced a bill that would allow the euthanasia of any elderly person “tired of living.” It comes as no surprise that the Netherlands doesn’t seem too concerned about this coronavirus business. The last we heard from Holland is that the official channels are telling people: “Don’t bring weak patients and old people to hospital.” Looks like they’re only interested in saving the lives of young people. I guess they’re more photogenic and look better on postcards of tulip fields.

Also during the first week of March, almost the entire European press devoted rivers of ink to discussing whether two transgender athletes should compete in the 2020 Tokyo Olympics as men or women. One of Europe’s many progressive newspapers began this momentous debate thus: “Well into the 21st century, there is still much to be done on issues like racism, sexism and religion. And even on sexual identity.” These are classic phrases for an unserious mind; they never fail. If you want to know if someone is a charlatan, just listen out for the expressions, “Well into the 21st century” and, “There is still much to be done.”

In Germany, at the beginning of March, the controversy that dominated the nation was whether to erect a huge statue of Lenin in a small North Rhineland town. Interesting. Perhaps it was to scare the virus off. But Scotland is definitely my favorite. As the pandemic began to spread dramatically, the main debate in Scotland was the imperative need for a new government law to provide free tampons and sanitary pads. The issue went beyond Scotland and was the subject of some very intellectually dense op-eds in the broader European press. It was clear that the festival of incompetence and unicorn politics was to go on right up until the last minute before cataclysm.

Everyone wanted to drag out that last drink on the Titanic. Nobody wanted to go to sleep. Neither did the U.N. On March 10, with 118,100 diagnosed and 4,262 dead from coronavirus in Europe, the U.N. held a press conference . . . to commit to the political and economic fight against the climate emergency! Yes, it would appear that the plan is to leave the pangolins a beautiful and temperate planet. Thus, secretary-general Antonio Guterres trumpeted a report at us, saying that climate change acceleration will trigger heat and dengue deaths in Africa, and cause drought and flash floods in countries such as Spain, without explaining how it’s possible to die from thirst and drown at the same time. Of course, we can’t really expect any explanations from an ex-president of the Socialist International who praises the policies of the Cuban regime and now hints that China’s response to the coronavirus is the example to follow. Someone should make it clear to him, however, that China will be the example to follow in a health crisis when it ceases to be a Communist dictatorship, and when the Chinese end their unfortunate preference for meat from exotic jungle animals slaughtered in front of them at wet markets.

In the midst of this festival of frivolity, harsh reality landed in Europe. In just ten days, we discovered that neither the tampon issue, nor the participation of transsexuals in the Olympic Games, nor the climate emergency were real problems, nor emergencies, nor anything of the sort. They were just fictitious problems, the pastimes of a generation that hadn’t known tragedy.

The reactions of politicians in Europe reflect the bewilderment of those who were living in the Matrix and have just been awakened. Most governments in Europe have moved from denial to chaos. But probably the most vile reaction has been that of the Social Communist government in Spain, which encouraged Spaniards to participate massively in the March 8 feminist rallies, the next day hiding reports that the coronavirus was already out of control in the country — something they may well have to answer for in court. Vice President Carmen Calvo said at the time that to attend the demonstrations was a moral obligation for all Spaniards: “what is at stake is the life” of many people. She was referring to violence against women, I think. It goes to show that Sanchez’s government only tells the truth by accident. Yes, many people’s lives were at stake, as we have unfortunately found out. Now Calvo is recovering from coronavirus, as are most of the members of government who took part in the demonstrations. Of course, the Spanish do not seem to be worried about the government’s taking a few days holiday: It’s worse when they’re actually on the job. The government is currently returning 650,000 defective coronavirus tests bought a few days ago. The president appeared on TV to show them off last Saturday, saying: “These are approved tests and that is very important, very important.” They don’t work. They weren’t from an approved Chinese supplier. Spain has been ripped off. A joke going around here in Spain says: “I took the government’s coronavirus test and… it’s a girl!”

Something similar happened in France, where president Emmanuel Macron closed bars and discos but refused to suspend the March 15 elections. Even so, until a few days ago, Germany and France both boasted about their good crisis management. However, the truth is that lying does not solve the problem: We now know that neither Germany nor France is counting the deaths from coronavirus that occur outside of hospitals, and that the Germans don’t call it “death from coronavirus” if the patient had a previous illness.

At some point between March 8 and March 15, all European countries unilaterally closed their borders. For 20 days, as nations took the lead, the European Union ceased to exist. Even today, it is  discussing possible economic measures, without any decision being made. The main obstacle to an economic agreement is that the countries that have been frugal for years, in particular the Netherlands and Germany, refuse to bail out the more wasteful Mediterranean countries with their money again. And that’s understandable. However, for those who are now on their own, namely the United Kingdom, things aren’t looking any better. The UK will pay a heavy price for its experimental immune policy. Prime Minister Boris Johnson’s infection looks like writing on the wall. To survive in a globalized world, you have to do more than just antagonize everyone else all the time.

Europe, whose nations had staked everything on an all-powerful state that could protect its citizens from all evil, has been cruelly disappointed. The future is uncertain. But what is certain is that death and poverty are two words that will stay with us for a long time. Europeans now miss having competent governments, cohesive civil societies, responsible economic administrations, and citizens capable of giving their lives for others — that is to say, citizens with values. The same values that were deliberately excluded in the European Constitution in order to please the extreme left-wing secularists.

Tajani was right. The coronavirus has reopened the deepest wounds in the European Union.

Will Biden Live Up to His Own Principles?

By David Harsanyi

Friday, March 27, 2020

In the midst of the Democrats’ campaign to deny Brett Kavanaugh confirmation to the Supreme Court, Lawfare’s editor in chief, Benjamin Wittes, took to the pages of The Atlantic to argue that traditional concepts of due process were not applicable under the circumstances. Justice, he wrote, was merely an “optical” consideration, and in this case, “Kavanaugh himself bears the burden of proof.”

This upending of liberal ideals had nothing to do with the veracity of Christine Blasey Ford’s accusations — opaque, decades old, and unprovable — and everything to do with the accused party, upon whom, Wittes noted, we were about to “bestow . . . an immense honor that comes with great power.”

We don’t know if, in 1993, presidential hopeful Joe Biden sexually assaulted a woman named Tara Reade by pressing her up against a wall and digitally penetrating her without her consent. But under Wittes’s standard, it shouldn’t matter. Indeed, that we do not know is all that we need to know. No person in America is accorded a more “immense honor” or more “great power” than the president. Surely, as with Kavanaugh, the existence of the accusation is disqualifying?

Apparently not, for ideals of justice seem to be quite malleable these days. Journalistic norms, too. The same media that relayed every unsubstantiated and tawdry rumor during the Kavanaugh confirmation, and that happily transmitted the Michael Avenatti–produced gang-rape smear, is treating Reade’s story quite differently. Why, we might ask, isn’t Reade receiving the same coverage as E. Jean Carroll, a woman who accused Donald Trump of assaulting her in 1995 or 1996 at a Bergdorf Goodman store in Manhattan? Virtually every major news organization let Carroll tell her story. Reade has been trying to tell hers for decades. Believe women?

Indeed, to understand how to proceed, the media has only to take the advice of Biden, who two years ago argued that society had an obligation to presume that women who come forward with allegations of sexual assault should be believed irrespective of how flimsy that accusations may be:

For a woman to come forward in the glaring lights of focus, nationally, you’ve got to start off with the presumption that at least the essence of what she’s talking about is real, whether or not she forgets facts, whether or not it’s been made worse or better over time.

Democrats should also be following this advice. Back in 2018, you will remember hearing the party arguing incessantly that “due process” was only a legal right, and that it was inoperative in Kavanaugh’s case because a Supreme Court hearing was nothing more than a “job interview.” Well, so is the presidency. A presidential election is just a job interview with the American voter. There are plenty of other candidates, no doubt, willing to take Biden’s place in the race. In fact, one major candidate is still in the race. (Granted, Bernie Sanders once wrote a creepy essay describing the sensuality of rape, but let’s set that aside for now.)

During the Kavanaugh hearings, Jeffrey Toobin, CNN’s “chief legal analyst,” noted that “40 percent of the Republican appointees to the Supreme Court have been credibly accused of sexual misconduct.” Using this standard, if Biden wins in November, we will be able to say that two of the last three Democrats in office have been “credibly accused of sexual misconduct.”

Like many others, however, Toobin wants to have it both ways. Simultaneously, he argues that any genuine due process was impossible — and, by the “believe all women” standard, even undesirable — yet also describes Blasey Ford as “credible.” But if the integrity of the accuser and the plausibility of her claims matter in determining the credibility of her allegations — and I certainly believe they should — then we are in a due-process debate. And we can really only determine the “credibility” of an accuser who offers vague accusations if we question them.

Embarrassingly for Biden, he has argued that such questioning is per se inappropriate:

What should happen is the woman should be given the benefit of the doubt and not be, you know, abused again by the system. I hope that they understand what courage it takes for someone to come forward and relive what they believe happened to them and let them state it, but treat her with respect.

If this is what “should happen,” why don’t Democrats practice it — and why doesn’t Biden himself step aside in order to live by the standards he championed only two years ago?

We know why.

Conservatism in the Time of Coronavirus

By Matthew Continetti

Saturday, March 28, 2020

Not long ago, as the severity of the coronavirus pandemic became clear, journalists were quick to say that the crisis marked the end of an era. “The Trump Presidency is Over,” declared a headline in The Atlantic. One article in Politico said, “The Pandemic Is the End of Trumpism.” A New York Times op-ed column carried the headline, “The Era of Small Government Is Over.”

Well, yes. At least so far as that last article is concerned. The era of small government has been over for decades (if it ever happened at all). The highpoint of Republican and conservative efforts to limit the size and scope of the federal Leviathan was either Ronald Reagan’s 1982 budget or the Clinton–Gingrich welfare reform of 1996. Then the GOP abandoned its plans for minimal government.

Even the Tea Party insurgency — which began as a rebellion against standpatters in the Republican establishment — protested cuts to Medicare and achieved little more than a sequester that severely damaged military readiness. And, of course, the current Republican president was elected on a pledge not to touch senior health care and retirement benefits. No small-government conservative, he.

What the moment requires is some intellectual modesty. It is far too early in the development of this national emergency to make definitive judgments on its political, economic, social, and cultural effects. We might as well explore alternative scenarios. For example: The coronavirus might not signify a conclusion to or beginning of a historical era, so much as an acceleration of previously germinating inclinations.

This quickening is most visible in the United States Senate. It was the youthful and heterodox members of the Republican conference who first recognized the severity of the challenges emanating from Wuhan, China. As Congress put together its economic-relief bill, these lawmakers did not worry about violating free-market dogma. They recognized the extraordinary nature of the situation. Their primary concern was the fate of the unemployed. In so far as “Trumpism,” to the degree that it exists, describes a political tendency that is suspicious of overseas commitments, international trade, and unchecked immigration, and more worried about the rise of China than the revanchism of Russia, this pandemic does not spell the “end.” It may even serve as vindication.

The Republican senators most widely seen as preparing to run for president in 2024 have used the past few weeks to articulate a conservatism that is more heavily weighted toward security than freedom. Tom Cotton has a bill, cosponsored by Mike Gallagher in the House, to end U.S. dependence on the Chinese manufacture of pharmaceuticals. Josh Hawley introduced an “Emergency Family Relief Act” that was much more ambitious than the (for now) onetime payments included in the economic triage bill. Marco Rubio designed the small-business lending component that is essential to the CARES Act. They all criticized the Chinese government for lying about the coronavirus as it spread throughout the world.

On Capitol Hill, then, the virus has elevated the senators and staffers who have spent the last few years calling for a “realignment” of Republican politics away from the prerogatives and priorities of corporate America and toward those of middle- and working-class families without college degrees. The China hawks, economic nationalists, and advocates of industrial policy have found themselves playing the role of Cassandra, who saw the cost of war firsthand after her warnings were dismissed.

The young people on the right drawn to the agenda of national populism will come out of this experience more skeptical of China, more critical of the pre-crisis economic policy of the GOP, more suspicious of uncontrolled flows of labor, capital, and goods across borders. They may find that they have company, since the number of unemployed and nonparticipants in the labor force is about to swell.

If the results of the disease and recession are widespread and long-lasting, expect the new acolytes of realignment to adopt Tyler Cowen’s formulation of “state-capacity libertarianism” as a possible model for reconciling markets with a state strong enough to boost infrastructure, education, and research and development. The lack of capacity in the public-health system and in the domestic manufacture of pharmaceuticals and personal protective equipment is a tragic reminder of the consequences of drift. Recent days have provided empirical proof of the aphorism that capitalism is, in the end, a government program.

A traditionalist right that understands the United States is in a full-spectrum competition with China, that uses public policy to strengthen working families in both the service and manufacturing sectors, and that observes and promotes American traditions of constitutional liberty would not be the worst upshot of this calamity. But it is just one conceivable outcome. And by no means the most likely.

The debate over conservative economic policy is just that, a debate, and the pro-market and supply-side constituencies, while no longer fashionable in certain corners of the Internet, have lost none of their vigor, none of their intellectual ability, none of their institutional power. The mounting pressure from some on the right to restore economic normalcy as soon as possible testifies not only to the un-sustainability of lockdowns over time, but also to the potency of the status quo ante coronavirus.

After all, the law of unintended consequences stipulates that for every action there is an equal and unplanned and (probably) negative reaction. The cascading collapses of demand, liquidity, and solvency may soon put us in a world more unstable than the creaky one we already inhabit. And if past is prologue, the monetary and fiscal expansion that authorities have used to stave off doomsday will look very different to conservatives out of power. One year from now, the American political scene could well resemble that of a decade ago, when a unified Democratic government was under siege from Red State outsiders who had rekindled opposition to deficit spending.

If that happens, then anyone connected to the coronavirus response will be exposed to intra-party challenges. And Nikki Haley, who defended capitalism with aplomb in the Wall Street Journal, and resigned from the board of Boeing after the company requested a federal bailout, will benefit from an anti-statist turn on the grassroots right. In the long run, then, coronavirus may end up reinvigorating both the nationalist and free-market camps.

But you know what else happens in the long run. For the time being, coronavirus has accelerated a generational and ideological transition within American conservatism toward the politics of social conservatism, foreign-policy unilateralism, and economic solidarity.