Where We Go from Here

By Kevin D. Williamson

Wednesday, October 28, 2020

 

It is possible that Joe Biden hurt himself enough with his daft utopian talk of “transitioning” (what a funny recent career that word has had) Pennsylvania’s energy jobs into oblivion to cost himself the election. It is unlikely that Donald Trump will be reelected, though it was unlikely that he would be elected in 2016 — unlikely things are unlikely, not impossible. But if conservatives are faced with a Biden-Harris administration in 2021, then what?

 

The answer to that will depend immediately and urgently upon whether Mitch McConnell is the Senate majority leader or Chuck Schumer is. If Republicans maintain control of the Senate, then that body has a good chance of performing its authentic constitutional role — a brake — to a reasonably satisfactory degree. Senator McConnell is wise enough to keep as low a personal profile as his job allows, but, if he were more inclined to braggadocio, he might plausibly claim to be the single most effective political figure of his time. He may not be remembered that way, because his successes have been informed by Calvin Coolidge’s advice: “It is much more important to kill bad bills than to pass good ones.” The past decade would have been much more destructive if Senator McConnell had been less successfully obstructive. Holding the Senate is critical to Republicans.

 

Republicans should also try to learn the lesson of their great electoral success during the Obama years. Republicans lost the presidency, twice, but Democrats lost half of the governorships and 13 of the 27 state legislatures they had controlled; at the start of the 111th Congress (2009–11), Democrats occupied 256 House seats, but they lost their majority in the 112th and were down to 188 by the start of the 114th. By the end of the Obama years, Democrats had been reduced to a weaker position than any they had endured since the 1920s. Obama rode high into Washington, and with Democrats in control of the presidency and both houses of Congress, they were able to fulfill a generational dream of . . . enacting a half-bright health-care plan that was falling apart before it was even in place. When Republicans had reestablished their legislative position, Obama was reduced to that “pen and a phone” stuff, and his grand designs for “fundamentally transforming America” were frustrated.

 

Barack Obama is an unusually gifted politician who came along at an unusually propitious moment. Joe Biden is — not that. Neither is Kamala Harris.

 

Thanks in large part to the efforts of Senator McConnell, conservatives find themselves in a much better judicial position than they were only a few years ago, with courts that are arguably the most reliably constitutionalist that the modern era has seen. If there is a Biden presidency — especially a Biden presidency constrained by a Republican Senate — conservatives should shift their attention to litigation. The conservative legislative posture in Washington has been largely defensive, but conservatives have made real legislative advances at the state level. That means that every win for federalism in the courts is a win for conservatives, both as a matter of principle and as a matter of practical politics. The more power and decision-making can be pushed out to the states and municipalities, the better positioned conservatives will be. Beyond that, conservatives have a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to achieve lasting wins on issues ranging from the sanctity of human life to the sanctity of the Bill of Rights. These should be pursued relentlessly.

 

There is much that can be done, even in the event of a Biden presidency. But if Biden does win, Republicans and conservatives (these are not synonyms) should take the opportunity to do some soul-searching, too. Republicans have lost the cities and are losing the more urban suburbs as well — that, and not newly settled Californians, is why the 38 electoral votes of Texas are no longer a bulwark for Republicans. Educated and affluent Americans are trending Democratic. A Republican Party and a conservative movement that can speak only to Americans’ resentments and not to their aspirations does not have a future. Belittling and sneering at the aspirations of Americans who want to go to Stanford and work at Apple is as foolish and as wrong as sneering at the aspirations of those who want to stay in their hometown and work at the family hardware store or on the family farm. There are many ways to lead a good life. But every year, this country gets a little less rural and a little more urban, and a Republican Party that cannot compete in the cities cannot compete.

 

Republicans have blown some important opportunities. When the so-called Affordable Care Act was being debated, Republicans had very little to say other than to insist that “America has the best health-care system in the world.” And maybe that’s true, but many people were — and are — dissatisfied with many aspects of it: the lack of price transparency, the insecurity of coverage, medical bills that make no sense, an insurance-dominated medical culture in which patients are treated like livestock, etc. The system makes too many Americans feel powerless — and that is a problem. “Free markets will take care of it!” is not a persuasive answer, even to those of us who do believe that market competition will produce the best outcome. There are many forms that a more market-oriented system could take, and Americans are not irrational for failing to simply trust that the right one will emerge.

 

Some of my more excitable friends insist that losing this presidential election will mean the end of the country. That’s irresponsible hyperbole, often put forward by people who have nothing else to offer. Whatever happens on Tuesday, there will be opportunities to do some good, and things in America will be what they always are: what we make of them.

Looking for Racism

By Bobby Jindal

Saturday, October 31, 2020

 

Liberals are expanding the definition of racism to silence their political opponents and justify their expansive claims on power. Despite America’s penchant for comeback stories and apology tours for celebrities and politicians — especially those involving sexual and financial scandals — racism remains one of the few political mortal sins. Mainstream politicians recoil at the charge and defend themselves vigorously, anticipating the accompanying widespread condemnation. Liberals have thus found a powerful weapon in critical race theory, whereby they view society’s problems through the lens of race and presume structural racism.

 

Starting with the disparate impact theory — which can identify racism even in the absence of intent — liberals have now expanded racism to include microaggressions individuals are not even aware they are committing because of implicit bias. Rather than first eliminating the far more real and harmful effects of explicit bias, proponents claim a majority of Americans evidence inherent bias. Shifting the focus from the evil acts of individual racists, liberals now assign culpability to society at large and millions of unwitting Americans. They’ve even changed the definition of racism to include recently lauded behaviors (e.g., rewarding effort in a meritocracy), allowing liberals to keep their political opponents in a constant defensive crouch and demand increasingly intrusive remedies such as reparations, mandatory corporate training sessions, and repressive speech codes.

 

The Smithsonian’s National Museum of African American History and Culture created an online portal discussing how America has normalized whiteness, where minorities are seen as inferior and white people enjoy privilege. The Smithsonian responded to the resulting controversy by removing a chart defining aspects of white culture and whiteness. Among these defining characteristics were rugged individualism, self-reliance, the nuclear family, “children should be independent,” the scientific method, “hard work is the key to success,” delayed gratification, “progress is always best,” and majority rules.

 

Sandia National Laboratories sent its white male executives to mandatory taxpayer-funded training at a luxury resort to counter their “white privilege,” “male privilege,” and “heterosexual privilege.” Participants learned a “can do attitude,” “hard work,” and “striving towards success” are “devastating” “white male traits.” Poor white families trapped in multi-generational poverty might wonder what privilege they enjoy over liberal wealthy academics and diversity consultants. This lab tests and designs the nation’s nuclear weapons; it’s the last place one wants this political correctness nonsense. Thankfully, President Trump recently signed an executive order ending federal funding for such training in critical race theory.

 

Imagine the rightful condemnation of any white supremacist who claimed that hard work, the scientific method, and self-reliance as inherently white attributes. While rich white liberal protesters decry delayed gratification and nuclear family in theory, they teach these universal values to their own children. This is yet another example of liberal hypocrisy hurting the very people they claim to champion. Liberals fought in the 1960s and 1970s against traditional family structures, but since the 1980s college-educated liberals have embraced family stability and “intensive parenting,” and exhibit declining divorce rates. Families with lower incomes and education attainment levels were the ones most hurt by the liberal assault on marriage. Today liberals demand smaller police forces, confident that their neighborhoods won’t be the ones impacted by rising crime rates.

 

Black Lives Matter serves as both a radical slogan and anodyne corporate branding. The problem of course is that many merely see the organization as highlighting the self-evident need to address African Americans’ poorer health, incarceration, education, income, and wealth outcomes. A smaller contingent, though, takes seriously the fact two of the three top BLM organizers are “trained Marxists,” and that BLM’s stated core beliefs include disrupting “the Western-prescribed nuclear family structure,” fostering a “queer-affirming network,” dismantling “cisgender privilege” and uplifting “Black trans folk.” The movement describes itself as decentralized, with the D.C. chapter calling for defunding the police, no new jails, decriminalizing sex work, and ending cash bail. The common theme is a belief in systemic racism that delegitimizes American society and requires structural changes.

 

Following the lead of BLM protesters defacing statues across the country, D.C. mayor Muriel Bowser formed a committee to re-examine the names of local schools, statues, and parks. Later, the panel recommended removing Franklin, Jefferson, and other founders from the nation’s capital. Rather than judging individuals in the context of their times or overall accomplishments, liberals insist on evaluating America’s statesmen’s worst acts against modern liberalism’s ever-shifting standards. Franklin was known for many things, including becoming a leading abolitionist; condemning him denies the possibility of moral growth. Liberals insist on seeing the worst in America, justifying their efforts to tear down and replace society rather than striving to improve it.

 

The 1619 Project, developed by the New York Times Magazine, centers American history and its founding around the arrival of the first African slaves in Virginia, as opposed to the signing of the Declaration of Independence in 1776. The project frames American capitalism and slavery as inherently intertwined, and recasts the American Revolution as a fight to “protect the institution of slavery.” Prominent historians have pointed out numerous factual errors, but accuracy is beside the point to the project’s many establishment promoters. The radical Left rejects a view of America as an imperfect nation striving to live up its founding ideals of equality for all. Whereas previous civil-rights leaders saw the abolition of slavery and the passage of civil-rights laws as evidence of progress, and appealed to the nation’s conscience to live up to America’s promises, today’s liberals see America as irredeemably founded in slavery and racism. Yesterday’s liberals fought America’s hypocrisy; today’s liberals fight its very nature. Their goal is not simply to fight for inclusion within the existing paradigm, but to level it, and entirely restructure the nation’s economy, laws, and politics.

 

Conservatives must recognize liberals’ radical race rhetoric as the power grab it is — which allows them to enact otherwise unpopular policies and demand lucrative diversity training contracts — and also condemn actual racism that persists in the United States. Conservatives should continue challenging liberals to work across party lines on policies such as school choice, bipartisan criminal-justice reform, and pro-growth economic policies that actually benefit disadvantaged Americans of all races.

The Next Populist Revolt

By Matthew Continetti

Saturday, October 31, 2020

 

For the past half decade, Europe has acted as a preview of coming attractions in American politics. The reaction to the confluence of immigration and terrorism on the continent foreshadowed the direction the Republican Party would take under Donald Trump. The surprise victory of “Leave” in the Brexit referendum hinted at Trump’s unexpected elevation to the presidency. The terrible images from coronavirus-stricken Italy last March offered a glimpse into New York City’s future. This week, when Italian authorities reimposed curfews, restrictions on business, and bans on communal gatherings, violent protests broke out in Turin, Milan, and Naples. Consider it a taste of the next populist revolt.

 

Lockdowns remain the preferred tool of governments whose public-health authorities decide the coronavirus is out of control. In September, Israel shut down for a month during the Jewish holidays to reduce its coronavirus-infection rate. In October, New York City targeted certain neighborhoods. In recent days, Newark, N.J., ordered “nonessential” businesses to close at 8 p.m., a county judge imposed a curfew on El Paso, Texas, and Massachusetts has gone back-and-forth on whether schools should be open or closed.

 

This response has placed the public under extraordinary strain. When officials tell businesses to close, they not only deny individuals who can’t work from home the opportunity to earn a living. They also impose social costs that much of the public is increasingly unwilling to bear. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention report that depression, substance abuse, and suicidal ideation increased during the spring. Extended families limited contact. Religious practice was curtailed. Having canceled spring holidays, Americans are now informed that Halloween, Thanksgiving, and Christmas need to be reconsidered as well. When individuals inevitably question, disregard, or disobey the commands of science, they are censored, stigmatized, condescended to, or punished.

 

Nor is expert authority the only form of power at work. In spite of evidence that schools are not sites of widespread transmission and remote education harms children in incalculable ways, only 39 of the 50 largest school districts have reopened for at least some in-person instruction. In Fairfax County, Va., the teachers’ union has called for schools to remain closed at least until September 2021. Amidst the many Biden-Harris lawn signs are a few for #OpenFCPS, a parent-driven campaign to resume in-person instruction. The parents are circulating a petition to recall members of the school board who oppose bringing the students back.

 

Governments resort to shutdowns to impose discipline on an unruly population. But shutdowns do not solve the problem. They turn public-health crises into economic and social ones. After a while, the price of shutdowns grows too high. The government reopens the economy. The virus returns. Before long, the cycle repeats.

 

There are plenty of ways to think about the politics of the Trump era. You can analyze the parties according to the traditional left-right axis. You can study public debate through the prism of liberal democracy versus authoritarianism. You can understand recent elections as pitting establishment insiders against populist outsiders. You can see the ideological contest as a three-way grudge match between common-good conservatives, neoliberals in both parties, and woke progressives. Coronavirus has spawned yet another interpretive framework. In this frame, politics is the struggle between the faction that wants to keep the economy and society relatively open during the pandemic and the faction that is ready and willing to shut them down.

 

Joe Biden has been able to straddle these two poles. He says you can have a (relatively) open society as well as a public-health system that reduces infection to a negligible level. He says he will “shut down the virus, not the country.” What he hasn’t explained is how that can happen in the absence of a widely administered vaccine. Only Taiwan and South Korea contained outbreaks without nationwide lockdowns. It is hard to see the United States replicating their success. Taiwan benefited from its rapid response at the outset of the crisis. South Korean authorities rapidly approved tests while enjoying access to cell-phone data. None of that happened here.

 

If Biden takes office during the “dark winter” he prophesied at the final presidential debate, he will have to decide, in addition to his national mask mandate, whether to put the country through another “30 days to slow the spread.” The bureaucratic pressure to shut down will be immense. The media, entertainment, and technology sectors will be sure to support and promote his decision. Polarization between “red” states and the nation’s capital will intensify. The commanding heights of culture and business will consign the Republican Party to the ash heap of history. And opposition to the restoration of progressive rule will manifest itself as a populist revolt whose character, magnitude, disposition, and endgame can only be imagined.

Charlie Hebdo, the Patsy

By Kevin D. Williamson

Thursday, October 29, 2020

 

A man walked into a French church and began knifing people to death while screaming “Allah akbar!” The crack squad over at the Associated Press produced the headline: “Terrorism suspected.”

 

Three dead: one woman beheaded, two others merely stabbed to death. Terrorism suspected. Mustn’t rush to judgment.

 

“Offensive Charlie Hebdo cartoon pushes Turkey-France tensions into overdrive,” says the NBC headline. Is that really true? Did offensive cartoons do that? Mightn’t it have been something else?

 

Because the world is full of offensive cartoons. Christians and Jews see offensive images all the time, but France is not convulsed by Christian or Jewish terrorism. Buddhists do not much appreciate the appropriation of the Buddha’s image as an interior-decorating motif, but this has resulted mainly in criticism and protest, not in a massacre at the Buddha Bar in Paris. Sikh men are subjected to unwanted attention — from curiosity to hostility — because of their beards and turbans, but there are no memorials to the victims of Sikh mass-murder attacks in New York City or Washington, because there have been none. Members of the Hare Krishna sect were for years practically stock characters in American comedy. In return, they have inflicted nothing worse on the world than a few questionable vegetarian recipes.

 

The Turkish dictator, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, is outraged by his being lampooned in Charlie Hebdo, the French satirical magazine whose staff was massacred (twelve dead, eleven more injured) by two outraged Muslim brothers, Saïd and Chérif Kouachi. (Terrorism suspected.) Abdoullakh Anzorov was outraged by such images, too: Earlier this month, the Chechen immigrant to France beheaded teacher Samuel Paty in retaliation for his having shown those images during a class on freedom of speech. (Terrorism suspected.) Are the cartoons the root cause of this?

 

Of course not.

 

There were no cartoons behind the massacre of Jewish athletes and a German police officer at the Munich Olympics. There wasn’t a cartoon behind the massacre at a Sbarro restaurant in Jerusalem — seven children and one pregnant woman among the dead. It wasn’t a cartoon, or even an obscure Internet video, that led to the American deaths in Benghazi. Or consider the Nairobi hotel massacre, the Jolo bombings in the Philippines, the Sri Lanka Easter bombings, the Lyon bakery bombing, the Abu Sayyaf shooting attack in the Philippines, the London Bridge attack, the massacre of Sikhs in Kabul — all of which happened in 2019 and 2020, and none of which required so much as a sketch.

 

So no, the problem is not Charlie Hebdo. The problem is Recep Tayyip Erdogan and others like him. And in “others like him,” I include Jack Dorsey.

 

After the 2015 Charlie Hebdo massacre, all the good people came together in a grand display of free-speech piety. Twitter added a pro-Charlie Hebdo banner to its French site. That lasted a little while. By 2018, Twitter was blocking the accounts of Charlie Hebdo staffers for displaying Charlie Hebdo images.

 

“Je suis Charlie!” they said. Sommes-nous toujours Charlie?

 

Erdogan may or may not be a religiously sensitive man. My guess is that he is not. But in any case, he is politically compelled to respond to the religious sensitivities of his constituents, whose demands are often illiberal and sometimes fanatical. Twitter is not a hive of Islamic radicalism, but it can be bullied into responding to “Islamophobia” with the kind of censorship Erdogan demands. The thing about terrorism is: It works. And it works especially well when it is connected to social pressures of non-violent character, a kind of cultural good-cop/bad-cop routine.

 

That is why in a similar (though obviously not identical) way, both Twitter and Facebook were easily buffaloed into trying to suppress the New York Post’s reporting on Hunter Biden’s corrupt business dealings. Why? Because the Post’s story did not meet Twitter’s high standards of journalistic excellence?

 

Please.

 

Terrorism works, and so does pressure. Revenge works. Everybody in Silicon Valley has witnessed the Democrats’ campaign of retribution against Facebook for its alleged role in helping Donald Trump beat Hillary Rodham Clinton in 2016. Do you think we would have had all those hearings if Herself had won? No, we’d still have Barack Obama and Joe Biden mocking Republicans for identifying Russia as a principal opponent and competitor on the world stage. If Tucker Carlson were whispering darkly about Russian plots behind every political opponent, he’d be treated as the second coming of Tailgunner Joe.

 

A lot of people talk a good game on free speech. But when there is pressure, they reveal themselves. Some fold in the face of violence or the threat of violence. Some fold in the face of financial loss. Some fold in the face of mere social discomfort. Twitter and Facebook respond to Democratic sensibilities for the same basic reason they — and like-minded cowards in the media, the universities, the HR departments, etc. — respond to other kinds of pressure, including the pressure to censor Charlie Hebdo and other purveyors of unpopular thoughts and images: They may value free speech and freedom of the press, but not as much as they value their social position, an idol to which they will sacrifice many precious things, from principles to honesty to a bit of revenue.

 

Today, it’s “I am Charlie!” Tomorrow, it’s “Charlie who?”

In Defense of Trump’s National-Security Record

By Jim Talent

Friday, October 30, 2020

 

After I had gotten my first cup of coffee the other day, I did what I usually do early on Tuesday mornings: I turned to Kevin Williamson’s “The Tuesday” newsletter, where I read these lines:

 

One of the many perversities of Trump’s presidency is that Donald J. Trump’s core deficiencies as a chief administrator — his ignorance and his laziness — are the chief practical virtues of his presidency. He doesn’t know what he doesn’t know and doesn’t want to know, and this has created the opportunity for some of the people in his administration to get some useful things done. For this reason, the conservative advances that have accompanied the Trump presidency (and it won’t do to pretend that these do not exist) mostly have been in the fields in which the president has the least engagement and interest, whereas the catastrophes of the Trump presidency (and it won’t do to pretend that these do not exist) are strongly associated with those few areas of policy in which he takes an active interest or is personally and strongly engaged with ex officio.

 

I hesitate to contradict Kevin, but in my estimation, the Trump administration has accomplished quite a lot in the field of foreign and defense affairs, and the president — who practically and constitutionally controls those responsibilities — has to be given the lion’s share of credit for it.

 

Let’s look at the administration’s top three national-security achievements.

 

China

 

As Dan Blumenthal and Nick Eberstadt brilliantly explained in the pages of National Review, the United States facilitated the rise of China for almost 40 years without considering the downsides of allowing the authoritarian Chinese state to embed itself in the global economy and the international system. To be sure, that began to change with the Obama administration’s “rebalance” policy, but Trump catalyzed and accelerated a shift in direction. In Trump’s first year in office, his National Security Strategy made competing with Beijing the priority goal of American foreign policy.

 

Since then, his administration has reviewed, upgraded, and engaged the tools of national power to protect American national security and preserve the rules-based international order against the challenge from China. The tariff war has been the most visible aspect of Trump’s policy, but the administration has also used export controls, sanctions, a robust FBI campaign against technology theft, diplomatic offensives in the South China Sea, a comprehensive approach to 5G technology, freedom-of-navigation patrols, and a spotlight on Beijing’s treatment of the Uyghurs to expose Chinese machinations and organize counterpressure against Beijing.

 

As I said, Trump’s China policy has its roots in Obama’s Asian rebalance, and some of the current tactics have been used in the past. But the administration broadened and deepened the effort, increased its tempo, and, most important, gave it strategic depth and coherence.

 

Trump has, in one term, pulled the national-security apparatus into the 21st century, and he did it with solid bipartisan support. It’s been messy, and not all of it has been effective. But the magnitude of the achievement ranks with that of the Truman administration in the years following the Second World War, when Truman (one of Missouri’s many gifts to the nation) recognized the Soviet threat, shifted the goals of the foreign-policy establishment, and began to build the national-security apparatus that prosecuted and eventually won the Cold War.

 

The Middle East

 

When he entered office, President Trump completely reversed the direction of America’s Middle-Eastern policy. He made constraining Iran his top priority. He discarded the JCPOA, imposed strong sanctions against Iran that starved the regime of resources, and, when Iran attacked American forces, retaliated by targeting and taking out Qasem Soleimani.

 

All of that restored American credibility while at the same time creating common strategic interest with the Gulf states, for whom constraining Iran is also the top priority.

 

Trump also took consistent action to normalize relations with Israel and reduce its international isolation. Moving the American embassy to Jerusalem was a key factor, though by no means the only one.

 

Trump also recognized that the Palestinian leadership would never negotiate a deal with Israel, because — for reasons of fanaticism, fear, and greed — they didn’t want one. So Trump decided to plow around them, and sent his son-in-law Jared Kushner to broker diplomatic and economic partnerships between Israel and the Gulf states on whom the Palestinians depend for support.

 

Trump has been ridiculed for relying on Kushner, but the Middle East is a place where family connections matter; in retrospect, Kushner’s involvement signaled the seriousness of Trump’s policy much better than sending yet another professional envoy or diplomat.

 

The efforts of the Trump administration have come together in the last six months to create the best chance for Middle-Eastern peace since the collapse of peace talks at the end of the Clinton administration.

 

The Armed Forces

 

The single-most-insane piece of national-security legislation during my years in Washington was the defense sequester that passed Congress on a bipartisan basis in 2011. It officially went into effect in 2013, and cut the defense budget by hundreds of billions of dollars in the years thereafter. Then-secretary of defense Leon Panetta called it “shooting ourselves in the head.” He was right; as then-secretary Jim Mattis said in 2017, “no enemy in the field has done more to harm the readiness of our military than the defense sequester.”

 

Trump campaigned on the promise of peace through strength, and early in 2018, with yeoman help from Senator John McCain and Representative Mac Thornberry, he got the sequester lifted and defense spending increased by $100 billion. It was by no means enough to fix the damage to American power, but it was the best piece of budget news for the armed forces in decades.

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At Trump’s insistence, the Pentagon has finally begun increasing the size of the Navy — it has reached 300 ships, up from 271 five years go — and Congress created a Space Force to upgrade and manage America’s satellite architecture. Both are necessary steps in reshaping the armed forces to meet an increasingly aggressive China. Beijing has been emphasizing the maritime domain for years and recently reorganized the People’s Liberation Army to give space forces a higher priority.

 

This is probably the place to note that Trump is the first president since Reagan who hasn’t started a war.

 

Trump engineered the elimination of the ISIS territorial caliphate without getting American troops mired in the Syrian mess. He avoided a confrontation with Turkey over the Kurds when just about everyone in Washington wanted one, and was then able to negotiate a cease-fire with the Turks instead. He could have gone to war with Iran in the Persian Gulf last year, but instead responded to Iranian provocations by taking out Qasem Soleimani — a bold and brilliant stroke that restored the credibility of American deterrence after the red-line fiasco in 2013.

 

Williamson ascribes much of the Trump administration’s success to the Washington establishment and specifically to “Conservative Inc.” Whatever the merits of that claim with respect to the administration’s domestic policy, it’s not credible where national security is concerned, for two reasons.

 

First, for good or ill, the president runs foreign policy. Success in national-security affairs is difficult even with good presidential leadership, and impossible without it.

 

Second, the doleful fact is that, from the end of the Cold War until Trump took office, the record of the national-security establishment consisted largely of one catastrophic mistake after another.

 

Even a partial list of those mistakes is long and discouraging:

 

·         The failure to anticipate, much less prevent, the 9/11 attacks.

 

·         The prosecution of a global war on terror without adequately identifying the aims of the conflict, or even defining the enemy.

 

·          The intelligence mistakes that led to the Iraq War, the errors that prolonged it for so long, and the abandonment of Iraq in 2011 after our armed forces had sacrificed so much to secure it.

 

·         The failure to prevent North Korea from developing nuclear weapons.

 

·         The naïveté where Vladimir Putin was concerned, which culminated in the 2009 “reset” policy and the unilateral abandonment of the missile defenses bases in Poland and Czechoslovakia.

 

·         The pointless war in Libya, followed by the red-line fiasco in Syria, that gave Putin a doorway into the Middle East.

 

·         The overuse and underfunding of the armed forces, culminating in the disastrous sequester.

·         The blind continuation of engagement with China, long after it was clear not only that Beijing would never liberalize its political institutions but that it represented a first-order threat to American interests and, more broadly, to the international order itself.

 

Each of these blunders weakened America, and they were mostly if not exclusively the product of the Washington establishment — Conservative Inc. or Liberal Inc., or both.

 

I do not say this with any pleasure. I have immense respect and no little affection for many of the experts in the national-security establishment. More to the point, I’ve been part of that apparatus in one capacity or another since 1993, and I bear my full share of the responsibility for the decisions in which I participated.

 

I say it rather to clarify the extent of Trump’s success. He inherited a much weaker hand than his predecessors, yet he created strategic purpose, energized the civilian tools of power, began to rebuild the armed forces, restored important partnerships, and built new ones, and wrested the initiative from the aggressors.

 

The global-threat environment will remain high no matter who is elected next Tuesday, but America is at least better positioned to deal with such risks than it was four years ago. Whether Donald Trump gets a second term or not, he deserves credit for the national-security achievements of his first.

No Newsroom Is Safe If The Intercept Can Fall Victim to Media Groupthink

By Jack Crowe

Thursday, October 29, 2020

 

Glenn Greenwald founded The Intercept in 2013 with the explicit goal of creating a news outlet that would be insulated from the partisan and financial pressures inherent to corporate media.

 

As he acknowledges in a resignation letter published Thursday, that project has ultimately failed.

 

The Intercept’s editors, who Greenwald notes repeatedly are almost all based in New York, forbade him from publishing a column airing well-documented allegations of Biden family corruption. They told him that he couldn’t publish the piece as written at The Intercept, supposedly in violation of his contract, and discouraged him from publishing it elsewhere, as doing so would be “unfortunate and detrimental to The Intercept.”

 

“The final, precipitating cause [of resignation] is that The Intercept’s editors, in violation of my contractual right of editorial freedom, censored an article I wrote this week, refusing to publish it unless I remove all sections critical of Democratic presidential candidate Joe Biden,” Greenwald wrote.

 

In so doing, the editors were following in the footsteps of their media betters at the New York Times, the Washington Post, CNN, and MSNBC, all of which have either ignored the documents and first-hand accounts of corruption proffered by the former CEO of a Biden family business, or woven them into some meta-narrative about the importance of media gatekeeping in protecting credulous readers from foreign disinformation.

 

As Greenwald puts it, his editors were taking their lead from the very corporate media properties that The Intercept was founded to “oppose, critique and subvert.”

 

But we should turn to a less obviously noteworthy section of Greenwald’s resignation letter for an insight into the causes of media groupthink and censorship. Towards the end of the letter, Greenwald thanks The Intercept’s benefactor, Pierre Omidyar, who funds the publication through his non-profit First Look media, for honoring “his personal commitment never to interfere in our editorial process.”

 

When he founded The Intercept, Greenwald — a committed leftist who made his bones criticizing the excesses of the Bush-era surveillance state — identified corporate power as the source of much of the partisanship that pervades mainstream political reporting. Because corporate media outlets depend on advertising dollars, they inevitably toe a neoliberal, capitalist line in order to keep their advertisers happy, or so the argument goes. On the flip side, they also pander to their readership, indulging their political superstitions in order to keep them basking in self-affirmation.

 

If it hasn’t quite proven false, Greenwald’s departure exposes this diagnosis of media bias as lacking.

 

That The Intercept’s New York-based editors succumbed to groupthink and quickly fell into lockstep on the Biden-corruption story exposes the true source of the bias and partisanship that pervades so much of our media class: cultural affinity. It’s been said hundreds of times before, but it can be said with more confidence now that Greenwald has made his exit: Most of the people who inhabit our elite newsrooms have the same partisan interests and cater to them in ways explicit and subconscious — and that fact, not nefarious corporate power, is the true source of our media monoculture. These reporters and editors don’t require some bottom-line obsessed boss to come downstairs and put the squeeze on when they risk jeopardizing corporate interests; they do it themselves, but to preserve their social status, not to protect the bottom line.

 

The Intercept’s editor-in-chief Betsy Reed issued a response to Greenwald’s resignation Thursday afternoon in which she claimed that he was simply throwing a “tantrum” after refusing to assent to the typical editing process required of any journalist.

 

“Glenn demands the absolute right to publish whatever he wants. He believes that anyone who disagrees with him is corrupt, and anyone who presumes to disagree with him is a censor,” Reed wrote.

 

It wouldn’t be the first time a reporter raised hell over what he considered to be heavy-handed editing. But given that the publication forced a reporter to apologize on threat of firing for quoting a black interview subject who departed from woke racial orthodoxy, I’m willing to take Greenwald’s word for it. And Greenwald’s email correspondence with his editors, which he released shortly after resigning, show that while they disagreed with him on matters of interpretation, his editors failed to identify a single factual inaccuracy in his column, which he subsequently published independently.

 

That this propagandistic mentality has taken hold within a non-profit newsroom that was founded explicitly to counter it does not bode well for the future of journalism. It has confirmed that however a media outlet might be structured — if it’s staffed by people who share the same zip code, attended the same colleges, shop at the same stores, and vote for the same candidates — it is destined to fail.