Welcome to the Bloody ’20s

By Kevin D. Williamson

Sunday, February 28, 2021

 

The bloody year of 1968 was an extraordinarily violent one in the United States, with the murder rate increasing almost 13 percent year-over-year, the largest such increase that had been recorded before or since.

 

Until now.

 

In 2020, murders were up 21 percent, according to FBI data. Data from the 60 largest U.S. cities collated by the Intercept found murders up 36 percent in those cities, almost three times the previously unmatched frenzy of 1968.

 

The homicidal wave rolled through the big cities (New York City saw a nearly 50 percent bump in its murder count), through small towns (according to the Intercept, towns with fewer than 10,000 residents saw a slightly larger increase than cities with more than 1 million residents), and through medium-sized cities, including my hometown of Lubbock, Texas, which had more than twice as many homicides in 2020 as it had in 2019 and where one out of every 100 residents is a victim of a violent crime in a typical year.

 

Inevitably, the usual political ghouls are opportunistically trying to recruit all these dead Americans into their political campaigns and their just-so narratives.

 

Sometimes, that means trying to blame the rampage on guns. But there is not much reason to do so. Gun sales have indeed been very high in the past year, partly because of an instinct to arm up during times of social and economic disruption, and partly because those of us not ensorcelled by QAnon fairy-tales could see long before November that Donald Trump was likely to lose the presidential election and that he might take the Republicans’ Senate majority down with him, and that he would be replaced by a Democrat hostile to the Second Amendment. Even though the scary-looking black rifles that haunt the dreams of Democrats are used in only a vanishingly small share of murders (statistically, you are more likely to be clubbed to death or stabbed than to be shot by someone wielding an AR-style rifle, or, indeed, any rifle of any sort), they are the first weapons gun-grabbers are disposed to go after. Call it panic buying or call it prudence, elections have the power to move gun markets.

 

But more gun ownership does not mean more violent crime. There is very little correlation between those variables. And part of that is the fact that so many U.S. murders involve no firearms at all: Typically, firearms are involved in about two-thirds of U.S. murders, with the other third caused by stabbings, beatings, intentional drownings, poisonings, etc. Americans are much more likely to be shot to death than are Swiss, Japanese, or Emiratis, but they also are more likely to be stabbed to death, beaten to death, killed with an ax, etc. The variable that seems to be the best indicator is not the presence of firearms but the presence of Americans.

 

There is not much reason to believe that the COVID-19 lockdowns or the anti-police protests are a main cause of the higher murder rate. The murder rate already was up year-over-year in many communities before the lockdowns began, and murder rates already were elevated before the protests. In New York, the increase grew more dramatic as the year went on, as was the case in some other cities; but in places such as Austin and Minneapolis, the most dramatic increase came in the first quarter. Though many of the protests were themselves violent and hence contributed to the gross increase in violent crime, there is little evidence linking increases in murder rates to, say, police redeployments associated with the protests and riots. Complaints about the atmosphere of lawlessness in places such as Portland, Seattle, and Minneapolis are not without basis, and lawlessness can be contagious, but these complaints are for the most part vague and unsupported by rigorous analysis. They are a matter of mood rather than a matter of metrics.

 

Of course all of these elements interact with each other in ways that are easy to imagine but difficult to really pin down: The lockdowns increased the population of idle young men with circumscribed social lives, which is generally dangerous; the lockdowns coincided with an increase in alcohol consumption, which is very strongly linked to domestic violence; the lead-up to the election saw a significant increase in first-time gun ownership and mirror-image apocalyptic political tendencies on either side of the political spectrum; the riots produced both an atmosphere of lawlessness and an exaggerated sense of vulnerability; the coronavirus epidemic stimulated the End Times sensibility that is always present, if just beneath the surface, in American culture.

 

Much of the summer was taken up by irresponsible right-wing media figures warning of a second civil war and irresponsible left-wing activists endeavoring to make the case for the irresponsible right-wingers. But our poisonous political culture is the effect, not the cause, of our broader social and moral dysfunction. The uptick in violence is simply a dramatic and deadly manifestation of our underlying spiritual and intellectual chaos.

 

Nothing happened to us in 2020. We happened.

Is Biden Losing the Immigration Debate?

By Steven A. Camarota

Sunday, February 28, 2021

 

Earlier this month, Politico ran a story about a growing number of congressional Democrats who are worried that their party’s expansive approach to immigration may be unpopular with voters. Recent trends in polling data suggest that those Democrats are right to be concerned.

 

Rasmussen Reports has asked the same ten immigration questions every week since the middle of December 2019. The answers had been generally stable until late last year, when they began to shift markedly toward favoring more border enforcement, opposition to amnesty, and less legal immigration. It seems that Joe Biden’s election, and the rhetoric and policies of his administration, are alienating a significant share of voters. It is also possible that a larger share of centrist voters no longer see the issue as inextricably connected to Donald Trump and his polarizing style. Whatever the reason, if Rasmussen is right, public sentiment is moving away from Biden and his party on immigration.

 

As a candidate, Biden committed his administration to reducing immigration enforcement, increasing legal immigration, and giving legal status to illegal immigrants. In pursuit of the first priority, he has already undertaken a number of executive actions, including revoking the Trump administration’s efforts to punish sanctuary cities and reviving “catch and release” at the border. As for the second priority, on legal immigration, Biden has already announced a substantial increase in refugee resettlement.

 

Yet, executive actions can go only so far. The centerpiece of the administration’s legislative efforts on immigration is the proposed U.S. Citizenship Act of 2021, which would give amnesty to all illegal immigrants, reduce immigration enforcement, and significantly increase legal immigration.

 

As with the administration’s executive actions, it is hard to know the extent to which the public is aware of the bill’s particulars. It is also hard to know how much the public is following the “Biden surge” unfolding at the border. But the trends in the Rasmussen poll suggest that at least some significant share of the public is paying attention and do not like what they see.

 

One of the questions Rasmussen has been asking for the last 61 weeks is whether the government is doing too little or too much to reduce illegal border crossings and visitor overstays. As Figure 1 indicates, responses to this question shifted almost immediately once Biden won. On November 3, 40 percent of the public thought we were not doing enough to control illegal immigration, but today 55 percent think so. Since neither the question’s wording nor the method used to collect the survey has changed, it seems fair to conclude that a much larger share of the public now thinks we need to do more to stop illegal immigration.

 

 

Another interesting result from the Rasmussen poll is a large increase in the share who oppose “giving lifetime work permits to most of the estimated 12 million illegal residents” in the country (Figure 2). Why Rasmussen refers to “work permits” rather than “legal status” or “citizenship” is not clear. Nevertheless, the wording has remained constant since 2019, so the shift in responses likely reflects a real change in public sentiment.

 

In the poll released on February 18 of this year, 55 percent said they were strongly or somewhat opposed, compared with just 39 percent who supported the amnesty. Given that the question asks about “work permits,” perhaps the results reflect public concern over COVID-related unemployment. But unemployment has been high since March of last year, and the unemployment rate is a good deal lower now than it was back then. So it is hard to believe that the public suddenly became more concerned about that issue in just the last two months.

 

When the details of the administration’s amnesty bill leaked in January, the limited media coverage it received was generally positive. Nonetheless, some share of the public may have become aware of — and turned off by — the truly enormous scale of the administration’s proposal.

 

 

Contained within the broader amnesty proposal is a version of the DREAM Act, which would give legal status and eventual citizenship to those who came to the country at younger ages. It has always been the most popular type of amnesty with the public. Every week in which Rasmussen asked the question, a majority of the public strongly or somewhat favored “giving lifetime work permits” to “illegal residents” who came as minors (Figure 3). However, since the start of this year, support for the DREAM amnesty has fallen precipitously, while opposition has risen. The 50 percent who now support the amnesty is still higher than the 43 percent who oppose it, but the current gap is much smaller than the 58–36 advantage right before Christmas.

 

 

This huge decline in support for the DREAM Act is perhaps the most difficult to explain because it is hard to find any stories in the mainstream media that mention the cost of the bill, even though CBO estimated the net fiscal impact in 2017 and again 2019 and both times found it would create a large net fiscal drain. Moreover, virtually every story on the “Dreamer” population portrays them in a very sympathetic light. Yet the public has become dramatically less inclined to give them legal status, perhaps because they increasingly sense that the Dreamers are being used as props to secure a much larger amnesty that covers all illegal immigrants.

 

There are other questions in the Rasmussen immigration series, some dealing with the number of legal immigrants who should be allowed into the country, and others asking about guest workers, chain migration, and immigration-induced population growth. While it is not the case for all of the questions, the results generally show that the public wishes to see more enforcement and greater limits.

 

Of course, no survey is definitive, and none flawlessly captures public attitudes about a complex topic such as immigration. The 2016 and 2020 elections were stark reminders that our ability to measure public sentiment with polling is far from perfect. But by asking the same ten question for more than a year, Rasmussen has captured a real trend in public opinion that single-shot polls cannot.

 

Keep Rasmussen’s trend lines in mind as the amnesty debate heats up. We can expect an avalanche of single-shot polls that incorporate the administration’s preferred language in their questions. These polls will ask about “earned legalization” for “workers” and “children” who must “learn English,” “pay back taxes,” and “pay a fine.” The fact that the actual amnesty is in no way earned, and is not limited to workers or children, and most certainly does not require English, back taxes, or a fine, will make little difference to those who design polling questions. Given the favorable language and lack of any trend data, the administration and allied media will use these polls to claim that a majority of voters support amnesty. In reality, Biden is facing strong headwinds as he moves forward with his stated goal of radically expanding immigration.

Mr. ‘Cuomosexual’

By Madeleine Kearns

Tuesday, February 23, 2021

 

The role of a satirist is similar to that of a caricaturist, which is why Saturday Night Live’s recent skit of New York governor Andrew Cuomo in the aftermath of the nursing-home deaths scandal wasn’t particularly funny. “We are not the same,” says Cuomo (played by Pete Davidson) to Ted Cruz (Aidy Bryant), who is sipping a cocktail and wearing a Hawaiian shirt, just back from Cancun: “I am a man. You are a clown. If you mess with me, I will send you to a clown hospital. And if you die, I will not count your body.”

 

If anything, this portrayal is more flattering than how Cuomo appears in real life.

 

After the New York attorney general reported that the state had undercounted nursing-home deaths by as much as 50 percent, the New York Post revealed that Cuomo’s top aide, Melissa DeRosa, admitted during a video conference with Democratic lawmakers that the Cuomo administration had covered up the true death toll for fear that it would be “used against us.”

 

It’s not only conservatives who are furious with him. Last week, a news conference and rally were held outside the Department of Justice offices at which family members of elderly patients demanded a federal investigation. They will get their wish. The FBI and U.S. Attorney’s Office have subsequently opened an investigation. State assembly Republicans are moving to form an impeachment commission “to gather facts and evidence” surrounding Cuomo’s “handling and the subsequent cover-up of the COVID-19 crisis in nursing homes.” Even state Democrats are moving to strip Cuomo of his unilateral emergency pandemic powers.

 

Writing in Sunday’s Wall Street Journal, John Daukas, former acting attorney general for the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division, argued that Cuomo’s cover-up could merit federal criminal charges. And National Review’s Andy McCarthy has explained that “besides potential civil-rights liability, the Cuomo administration could face problems because the nursing homes that the state oversees receive lots of federal money through Medicare and Medicaid.”

 

Though his deadly mistakes aren’t amusing, the contrast between how he has acted and how he sees himself is certainly laugh-worthy.

 

What comedy skit of Cuomo could be more ridiculous than the sight of his own book on the window display at my local bookstore, American Crisis: Leadership Lessons from the COVID-19 Pandemic, with a picture of him on the front, hands clasped and looking regal? What could be more embarrassing for him than his appearance on Ellen last year in which he grinned at the term, “Cuomosexual,” as his host called him “charming and adorable” and said, straight-faced, that “people are in love with you.” He believed it. SNL presented Cuomo as “a man,” with at least a semblance of self-awareness. But Cuomo presents Cuomo as a god.

 

Let’s not forget that his fall from universal grace was preceded by stunning arrogance. Last year, he described the watchdog Empire Center for Public Policy’s lawsuit to force Cuomo to release the true death toll as “yet another publicity stunt from an arm of the far-right advocacy industrial complex.”

 

Then, last November, there was that shambolic press conference about school reopenings at which the Wall Street Journal’s Jimmy Vielkind asked whether schools in New York City would be opening the next day. “Let’s try not to be obnoxious and offensive in your tone,” the governor said, adding that the reporter was “100 percent wrong,” since, when it came to school closures, “we did it already. That’s the law. An orange zone and a red zone. Follow the facts.”

 

Vielkind replied: “I’m confused . . . and I think parents are still confused as well.” But Cuomo said, “No, they’re not confused. You’re confused. Read the law, and you won’t be confused.” At which point, a New York Times reporter said she also was confused, and Cuomo said: “Well, I don’t really care what you think. Of course you’ll agree with him because you’re in the same business with him.”

 

It turns out that, despite being 100 percent certain, Cuomo was 100 percent wrong.

 

Now that’s funny.

Neutralizing America’s Nuclear Deterrent to Own Trump

By Noah Rothman

Thursday, February 25, 2021

 

In 1985, President Ronald Reagan and Soviet General Secretary Mikhail Gorbachev adopted a joint statement acknowledging what seemed like a simple truth: “A nuclear war cannot be won and must never be fought.” That is not strictly true.

 

Then as now, the popular conception of a nuclear war envisions a global conflagration that sterilizes the surface of the earth, rendering victory in such a contest a hollow prize. That’s the most fearsome scenario, but not necessarily the likeliest. During the Cold War, nuclear war-fighting was not only conceivable; scenarios in which one side or the other could “win” that sort of conflict were not hard to imagine.

 

By the early 1970s, both the defense industry and private organizations had begun to paint frightening portraits of what a nuclear exchange might really look like. One such scenario that kept war planners up at night was the prospect that a peer competitor like the Soviet Union could launch a targeted strike on America’s Ground-Based Strategic Deterrent (e.g., its ballistic missile silos), taking most of those forces out of commission. The United States and its allies could respond, of course. Most of their arsenals would remain intact. But how?

 

America’s surviving delivery systems—submarines and bombers, primarily—would not be able to neutralize the Soviet Union’s remaining nuclear forces. The West would have little choice but to reciprocate against “value” targets—including civilian population centers. Of course, such a response would result in another Soviet volley targeting the West’s “value targets,” producing the kind of apocalypse that more closely aligns with popular culture’s idea of what a nuclear war should look like. In such a scenario, “there would be strong pressures on us to halt the conflict,” said the former director of the Pentagon’s Nuclear Targeting Policy Review panel, Leon Sloss. In that event, the United States would not have been deterred by the Soviet Union, per se, but it would have been “self-deterred” by the prospect of unimaginable death and destruction. In short: They win, we lose.

 

The basic laws of physics governing deterrence theory did not end along with the Cold War. While the United States does not have any peer competitors to worry about, the conditions that could precipitate a limited nuclear exchange with terrifying consequences that fall short of an extinction-level event still loom large.

 

“Would the coalition have waged Operation Desert Storm or Operation Iraqi Freedom had Saddam Hussein had a nuclear capability?” the RAND corporation asked in 2012. “Most often, the answer is probably not, meaning that big arsenals can be defanged by dictators with a handful of nuclear weapons.” This hypothetical scenario has become more urgent with the growing threat posed by North Korea’s functional nuclear arsenal and Iran’s covert nuclear program. “An even more worrisome meaning of self-deterrence is the reticence, or the refusal, to exert nuclear deterrence in any event,” RAND’s report continued. “Without the threat of use, use may become more likely … Self-deterrence encourages the proliferation of WMDs. And it may become an invitation to actually use them.”

 

These considerations contributed to Barack Obama’s reluctant decision to shed his ideological hostility toward nuclear weapons and greenlight a modernization program in 2016. The goal was to develop “adjustable yield” bombs and medium-range delivery systems that can penetrate hardened bunkers. Those would, according to the Pentagon, present a “tailored nuclear option for limited use” to “give the president more options than a manned bomber to penetrate air defenses” and create “more strategic stability.” The keyword here is “president.”

 

The split-second decision-making necessary to respond to a nuclear crisis to preserve America’s deterrent capacity has long been the president’s exclusive province. But that unilateral authority has also been a source of frustration and anxiety among nuclear weaponry’s ideological opponents. Such sentiments are alive and well in the Democrat-led Congress. And with a pliant Democratic president now in the White House, those interests believe they have momentum on their side.

 

This week, nearly three dozen House Democrats called on President Joe Biden to relinquish sole control of the nuclear arsenal. “While any president would presumably consult with advisors before ordering a nuclear attack, there is no requirement to do so,” the letter read. “Vesting one person with this authority entails real risks.” The letter frets over the fact that “past presidents have threatened to attack other countries with nuclear weapons,” which is an obtuse way to express the bedrock premises of deterrence theory.

 

The letter’s authors’ true concerns are expressed in a veiled allusion to Donald Trump. The note observed that certain unnamed presidents have “exhibited behavior” that led to concerns about their “judgment.” To remove the threat posed by a rogue president, these Democrats offer alternatives, including vesting launch control with both the president or vice president and perhaps even the speaker of the House or creating a permanent council that would deliberate over the matter. Many well-known skeptics of nuclear armaments seem to agree with the Democratic assessment, including former Defense Sec. William Perry. “Once in office,” he averred, citing the threat posed by a Trump-like president, “Biden should announce he would share authority to use nuclear weapons with a select group in Congress.”

 

The threat posed by a madman in the Oval Office isn’t one that we should sneer at, but hedging against that prospect shouldn’t take the form of unilateral disarmament. That is precisely what these House Democrats are demanding.

 

First, it is a misconception that the president alone determines when, where, and how to deploy nuclear weapons. Though the commander-in-chief has sole operational authority to issue such an order, it would fall on many service personnel further down the chain of command to carry out that order. That system provides a variety of checks on a president’s capacity to execute an unlawful order, for example. Not only is the jurisprudence on this clear, that outcome would also likely become public knowledge in short order.

 

In the scenario Democrats envision, in which the president orders a preventative first strike, the targeting, logistical, operational, and legal hurdles could take days to resolve. But the system is designed to move very quickly, and for a good reason. If the president has 30 minutes to determine whether to respond to an imminent attack that would neutralize the American deterrent, that is a decision that cannot be left to a congressional select committee.

 

We can and should concern ourselves with the character of the person we vest with the authority to respond to such a frightening scenario. And we have mechanisms to vet aspirants for high office and weigh in on their qualifications: campaigns and elections.

The Democrats’ New Schemes to Control Political Speech

By Alex Baiocco

Saturday, February 27, 2021

 

‘We the people. Those words changed everything. Power rested in the people, not the government. Freedom to think, to speak, to act, to criticize your government, all protected.” Great rhetoric, worthy of praise. Yet these words from candidate Joe Biden introduced President Joe Biden’s agenda to curtail the very freedoms those words extol.

 

Biden’s “Plan to Guarantee Government Works for the People” acknowledges that the First Amendment prevents his ultimate goal to “entirely eliminate private dollars from our federal elections.” That’s why he’ll push for a constitutional amendment to get the people’s rights out of the government’s way.

 

During the 2020 election, more Americans made campaign donations than ever before, and millions of Americans made their voices heard through independent groups that represented them. The president wants to ban such civic engagement, which is protected by the First Amendment.

 

Biden’s plan would bar so-called outside spending — speech from groups not controlled by candidates or parties. That term tells you all you need to know about the mindset behind the plan. Since when are the people outside our democracy? This, apparently, is the president’s vision of democracy: a status quo-preserving machine wherein those in power get a monopoly on political speech, while the people are mere spectators.

 

Democrats in Congress have introduced legislation to get us halfway there. H.R. 1 (S.1 in the Senate), takes aim at your “outside” voice, which Biden wants to silence. The bill also demonstrates how efforts to silence independent groups won’t stop at speech urging fellow Americans to vote for or against candidates. H.R. 1’s provisions for “Stopping Super PAC–Candidate Coordination” reach far beyond super PACs and would capture speech that has nothing to do with elections. Any organization that discusses policy issues could trigger the sweeping “coordination” standards. Communications about legislation made routinely by advocacy groups today would be illegal under H.R. 1.

 

Say a civil-rights group publishes an analysis highlighting areas of a criminal-justice reform bill that could be improved. The sponsor of the legislation reaches out to the group with questions. In the course of conversation, the senator mentions that she plans to highlight the bill at an upcoming campaign event. Just like that, this policy discussion has triggered a speech ban. The group has engaged in “communication . . . regarding the candidate’s or committee’s campaign advertising, message, strategy, policy, polling, allocation of resources, fundraising, or other campaign activities.”

 

As a result, the group is barred from spending a single penny on speech that “promotes or supports” the senator, “regardless of whether the communication expressly advocates the election . . . of a candidate.” This vague language applies to communications made at any time, not just close to an election. Simply urging lawmakers to “support Senator Jane Doe’s Sentencing Reform Act” could be banned under H.R. 1. If the bill is pending 120 days before a general election with the senator on the ballot, the ban would apply to “a communication which refers to” the senator, even if it is not deemed to promote or support the lawmaker.

 

Like Biden’s plan, the text of H.R. 1 states that ultimately “the Constitution should be amended” to rein in First Amendment freedoms. Separately, House Democrats recently reintroduced the “Democracy for All Amendment,” which would grant Congress the unlimited power to “set reasonable limits on the raising and spending of money by candidates and others to influence elections.” If the Biden plan is any indication of what Democrats consider “reasonable limits,” then one can assume that entirely eliminating campaign donations and independent speech is on the table. And again, don’t expect limits, or bans, to stop at electoral advocacy.

 

If H.R. 1 is passed, Americans will surely defend their rights in court. The bill’s supporters in Congress likely expect some provisions to be struck down under the First Amendment, as happened to both the Federal Election Campaign Act of 1971 and the Bipartisan Campaign Reform Act of 2002, better known as McCain-Feingold. They don’t care. They’ll have another Citizens United to hype, a new “threat to democracy” du jour. The substance won’t have to live up to the rhetoric — after all, Citizens United, a case decided in 2010, struck down a federal law that resulted in a ban on a movie about then-Democratic primary candidate Hillary Clinton. The Supreme Court’s decision has been a boon to free political speech, while none of the doomsday predictions have come to pass. And remember, congressional Democrats have long supported a constitutional amendment limiting First Amendment rights. Biden himself co-sponsored such an amendment in 1997. The rallying cry to “overturn Citizens United” is little more than a marketing tactic.

 

Too many elected officials think the people’s right to be heard in a democracy should begin and end on the day you vote. Perhaps that’s why they’re always sure to let you know they intend to make voting “easier, not harder.” It’s as if to say, “Here’s your democracy, now shut up.”

Democrats Are Playing a Dangerous Game with COVID Giveaways

By Noah Rothman

Friday, February 26, 2021

 

In his effort to drum up support for the nearly $2 trillion COVID relief package meandering its way through Congress, the Biden White House’s unusually forward-facing chief of staff, Ron Klain, has engaged in some rhetorical sleight of hand. The bill, he insists, is “bipartisan.” Not in the definitional sense, of course, insofar as representatives of one of America’s two parties in Congress remain largely skeptical of the proposal. In Klain’s poetic reimagining of the word, “bipartisan” describes the level of support the package receives in polls from both self-described Democrats and Republicans.

 

Klain’s prestidigitation is a clever act. Who doesn’t like bipartisanship? At a time when the country’s divisions are on full display, only a true misanthrope would stand athwart this outbreak of interparty collaboration. But by resting his argument not on the bill’s immutable features but the shifting winds of public opinion, Klain and his fellow Democrats are playing a dangerous game.

 

The agony of the Bernie Sanders wing of the Democratic Party notwithstanding, the Senate parliamentarian’s verdict, which will strip the COVID relief bill of one insurmountable sticking point—hiking the federal minimum wage to $15—must have been welcome news in the Biden White House. The conventional wisdom is now that the bill is on a glide path toward passage. Again, who can resist the demands of two-thirds of the voting public? And Democrats have every reason to anticipate that the bill will be a political benefit well into the 2022 midterm cycle.

 

If it’s popular now, just wait until its stimulative effects begin to be felt. Even if its economic impacts are more muted than the bill’s boosters expect, financial forecasters expect the American economy to grow at a fantastic rate in 2021 as the pandemic recedes and a year’s worth of pent-up demand manifests in consumer spending. If that bonanza isn’t directly attributable to stimulus spending, so what? Democrats will take the credit for it anyway, much as they have for the COVID vaccine regime they inherited. There are no downsides. Right?

 

Perhaps. But the bill as it is currently written provides its critics with ample opportunities to sever its effects from the economy’s performance. Some of those pitfalls could have an unexpectedly long tail.

 

Take the “relief” provided to federal workers who are experiencing hardships associated with school closures. The “Emergency Federal Employee Leave Fund” within the “American Rescue Plan Act” sets aside $570 million for federal employees who are the parents of school-age children so long as their “place of care” is closed or hybridized. Full-time employees of the federal government can claim up to $1,400 per week until September 30 so long as their children are shut out of their public (not private) school.

 

But why are their children not in public school? In Washington D.C. and the surrounding counties in Virginia and Maryland, it’s not out of deference to the vicissitudes of the pandemic. Those schools are closed because the unionized educational workforce wants them to be closed, and they have been particularly obdurate about it. In Fairfax County, Virginia, for example, the school system demanded and received high-priority placement for teachers and administrators on the list of vaccine-eligible workers. But then the goalposts moved. Suddenly, the local union began insisting that normalcy couldn’t return until students were vaccinated, too. But the vaccine hasn’t even been approved for children, and that isn’t likely to change until early 2022.

 

If past performance is indicative of future results, when we finally reach that milestone, you can bet that there will be some new stipulation that will perpetuate the pandemic’s status quo. Now add to this dynamic a carveout for federal workers that creates financial incentives to keep children out of school.

 

Let’s call this what it is: A conspiracy of Democratic interests rewarding each other for nonperformance at the expense of the general public. That is the sort of thing that cuts through the clutter. Republicans will have an honest and valid grievance to litigate, and it is one that can and should be evaluated entirely independently of how the economy is performing.

 

Klain’s determination to hang his hat on the polls could easily come back to bite him if provisions like these become law. It’s not hard to imagine a backlash against such a shameless payout for federal workers—one that is designed not to get America back to “normal” but to preserve the present abnormality in amber. What’s more, you could certainly see that backlash earning the support of a handful of Democratic poll respondents. In that event, Republicans would have every right to claim the outrage over Democratic gamesmanship was overwhelming, intractable, and truly bipartisan. And who could argue against that?

Define Strategy

By Wolfgang Münchau

Friday, January 08, 2021

 

An advanced technique in chess is called the positional sacrifice. It is a technique used by grandmasters where a player sacrifices a figure in exchange merely for a positional advantage. This is a more subtle strategy than the one where you sacrifice a pawn for an opponent's knight. Military strategists like Sun Tsu and Carl von Clausewitz have employed similar notions. Strategy is not doing what you want to do when you want to do it. Strategy involves sacrifice in exchange for a greater goal, with uncertain paths in between.

 

When we talk about strategic autonomy for the EU, what is definitely not meant is listening to lobbyists. Or to misquote von Clausewitz, it is not the continuation of mercantilism by other means. When Helmut Kohl, Gerhard Schröder or Angela Merkel visit Asian countries, they usually travel with hordes of businessmen in tow. A strategy would be to leave them at home, and to tell your trading partners that you only conclude preferential free trade agreements with countries that meet minimal criteria for human rights. Sacrifice is not an optional by-product of a strategy. It is the essence of it. You gain something you want, and in turn you give up something that is valuable to you.

 

A strategy is not objectively right or wrong. There is no such thing as the European or American interest. Strategy, and the lack of one, are political choices. During the Cold War it was the primary geostrategic goal of the US to contain and defeat communism. But Henry Kissinger's diplomacy to collude with fascist dictators was a controversial price the US was willing to pay for that strategy. It is already becoming clear that the EU - like Kissinger - has a relatively high tolerance of undemocratic regimes, both inside and outside the EU. So when I say the EU should become a strategic actor, I am fully aware that I might end up disagreeing with the strategy it chooses.

 

The most important geostrategic position for the EU right now is its relationship with China. There are a number of plausible alternative strategic goals. The EU could choose to prioritise climate change and co-opt China into a strategy of carbon neutrality by 2050. Alternatively, the EU could choose to prioritise human rights. Economic policymakers have known since time immemorial that you cannot pursue two goals with one policy instrument. I personally would prioritise human rights on the grounds that regimes that don't respect minorities and democratic freedoms do not stick to internationally agreed targets either. China's non-cooperation with the World Health Organisation right now should serve as a warning.

 

But whatever strategy the EU chooses, it should not pretend that a perceived commercial advantage constitutes an act of strategic autonomy.

 

That said, the EU was right not to consult with the incoming Biden administration before taking a decision. The EU should be free to strike its own bilateral deals just as the US does. The power vacuum in Washington was almost certainly a reason why Angela Merkel chose to press ahead with the EU/China deal. The chess grandmasters would approve.

 

But the converse statement is not true. We are not strategically autonomous simply because we decide to go our own way. The whole idea behind EU is that we give up part of our national sovereignty in exchange for a greater good - the exercise of shared sovereignty. It has been one of the more questionable claims of the pro-Brexit campaign to argue that national sovereignty increases strategic autonomy.

 

I think Merkel has drawn the right conclusion from the US elections: when 75m voters support Donald Trump, we cannot claim that his America-first ideology is defeated, no matter what happens to him personally after last week's events. The US is a deeply divided country that could easily flip the other way in a future election. The EU is definitely well advised to become less reliant on American goodwill.

 

But real strategic autonomy will require a much broader discussion in the EU about the strategic goals. This cannot be left to technocrats or lobbyists. What is good for Volkswagen is not necessarily good for the EU. If you reduce your strategic perspective to trade and investment alone, you confuse welfare maximisation with strategy. Strategic choices are usually not economically optimal ones.

 

Just ask the grandmasters. They will tell you that strategic autonomy requires positional sacrifice - the one where the quid pro quo is neither immediate nor objectively true. And as with real-life strategies, reasonable grandmasters also disagree.

Biden’s Cynical ‘Foreign Policy for the Middle Class’

By Kevin D. Williamson

Friday, February 26, 2021

 

God save this country from the middle class.

 

The middle class has held domestic politics hostage for generations, which is why the federal government’s main activity is transferring money to the middle class, which is the principal beneficiary of the major entitlement programs that account for the largest share of federal spending — and of much of the so-called discretionary spending, too. And now Joe Biden has taken foreign policy hostage on behalf of the middle class as well, promising a “foreign policy for the middle class,” which is how you say “America First!” without sounding like the Tangerine Nightmare.

 

President Biden, who in the past has resorted to plagiarism in order to compensate for the fact that he never has had an original thought or produced an interesting sentence, is a plodding vote-counter who ought to be retiring from the Wilmington Zoning Commission rather than getting started in the White House. But Americans are politically unserious people, and Biden won the gold in the Clown Olympics in November, so, here we are.

 

Biden is a flatterer and a panderer, which is what the market demands just at the moment. And so he declares: “There’s no longer a bright line between foreign and domestic policy — every action we take in our conduct abroad, we must take with American working families in mind.”

 

Working families?

 

If we were to pretend for a moment that this is an actual idea rather than a rhetorical pose, it would be interesting to consider how it might be applied: An Iranian nuclear weapon detonated in the San Francisco Bay presumably would incinerate a fair proportion of the nation’s most irritating idle rich, out there kayaking around or whatever it is they do all day, but it also would inconvenience some “working families,” assuming the blast radius and prevailing winds were sufficient to reach the plebs out there in Manteca or wherever. I suppose that preventing the atomic ayatollahs from stockpiling and deploying nuclear weapons would be in the interests of “working families” in exactly the same way it would be in the interests of the rich guys on Sand Hill Road and the derelicts in Berkeley. It is not clear where the middle class’s particular interests enter into it.

 

There are many things the federal government can and should be doing around the world that would provide no immediate material benefit to the American middle class — and that might even cost that middle class, to the relatively modest extent that middle-class Americans are ever asked to pay for anything. If the United States intends to stand up for the Uyghurs on the theory that the grateful clients of our human-rights patronage are going to turn around and buy a lot of Buicks, then Americans are going to be disappointed. All of the stories about real-world economic payoffs from action on human rights or climate change are fairy tales. If you want action on those items, then you’d better be pursuing that action because you think it’s right, and you’d better be willing to pay for it — because it is going to be expensive.

 

Biden’s reliably primitive analysis notwithstanding, the American middle class does not have an undivided economic interest when it comes to foreign relations. Biden has not learned from the Trump administration’s errors, because Biden’s economic- and foreign-policy thinking are based on the same assumptions even if they are couched in more conventional diplomatic language. Some American workers would be better off if there were less competition from abroad, but many would be worse off: The Trump administration’s imbecilic misadventures with China cost American farmers dearly — and if there is a definition of “working families,” it is farmers — while recent attempts to put Washington’s big fat thumb on the scale of international trade in steel and aluminum punished American manufacturers of everything from construction products to ice-cold cans of domestic beer. Trade with China is a challenge for Americans who want to manufacture cheap sneakers domestically but a boon for working families of modest means with a need for new shoes. There is no magic formula by which Americans get to enjoy the benefits of globalization without also enduring the tradeoffs.

 

As Wolfgang Münchau put it in a useful essay, “maximizing your trade surplus is not a strategy,” because strategy means choices, and choices mean tradeoffs. “If you reduce your strategic perspective to trade and investment alone, you confuse welfare maximisation with strategy. Strategic choices are usually not economically optimal ones.”

 

But Biden’s formulation (“a foreign policy for the middle class”) insists that foreign policy be made subordinate to a very narrow set of economic considerations, considerations that just happen to coordinate with short-term Democratic political ambitions.

 

There is strategy at work, true. But it is only an electoral strategy.

Fact-Checking the Fact-Checkers on Becerra and the Little Sisters

By Alexandra DeSanctis

Friday, February 26, 2021

 

During a confirmation hearing on Wednesday, responding to a question from Senator John Thune, Biden’s HHS pick Xavier Becerra uttered the lines, “I have never sued any nuns. I have taken on the federal government, but I have never sued any affiliation of nuns.”

 

When I heard this remark, I thought to myself, “It’s just barely true enough that fact-checkers will run with it and claim he’s correct.”

 

Sure enough, they rose to the challenge. In the Washington Post, Salvador Rizzo — whose fact-checking efforts I’ve rebutted for National Review Online in the past — insists that Becerra “sued the Trump administration, not a group of nuns.”

 

According to Rizzo, “It’s misleading to say Becerra sued the nuns” because “the California attorney general has not filed lawsuits or brought enforcement actions against the Little Sisters of the Poor, a charity run by Catholic nuns.”

 

But Becerra’s assertion is true only in the narrowest sense: He has never initiated any direct legal action against a group of nuns. Though Rizzo doesn’t seem to notice it, the actual facts of the case expose how disingenuous Becerra’s response really was.

 

The case in question has to do with the Health & Human Services Department’s contraceptive mandate, which HHS attached to Obamacare requiring that every employer subsidize birth control and abortion-inducing drugs through their employees’ health-care plans.

 

Numerous employers, especially religious ones, took issue with the mandate and refused to comply. One such group was the Little Sisters of the Poor, a charitable order of Catholic nuns that cares for the elderly poor and sick, and which objects strenuously to covering products that violate Church teaching on the dignity of human life.

 

Despite the efforts of the nuns and other employers to obtain a religious exemption so that they wouldn’t have to cover or subsidize products in violation of their beliefs, the Obama administration wouldn’t budge. When Donald Trump came into office, his administration promulgated new rules, offering more generous religious and conscience exemptions to organizations whose First Amendment rights were violated by the HHS mandate.

 

It was then that Xavier Becerra, as attorney general of California, entered the scene. Though he never filed a lawsuit against the nuns directly, he initiated legal action against the Trump administration explicitly because it had granted religious employers such as the Little Sisters an exemption from the contraceptive mandate. From Becerra’s perspective, the mandate that employers subsidize birth control was so crucial that he, as California attorney general, needed to take legal action to ensure that no one — not even a group of Catholic nuns — could get away with refusing to comply.

 

A case called California v. Little Sisters of the Poor exists because Becerra’s legal action intentionally and directly threatened the religious exemptions the nuns had been granted, such that they joined the case as a plaintiff.

 

It’s technically accurate, then, in the most granular legal sense, to say that Becerra never sued any nuns. But the far more important fact is that he legally challenged a federal exemption specifically because, if undone, it would have forced the Little Sisters to cover birth control and abortion-inducing drugs.

 

Not to be outdone by the Post, the Sacramento Bee ran a similar fact-check of Becerra’s comment, noting that, yes, he “did target a federal government exemption that — if it no longer applied to [the nuns] — would have forced them to either cover contraceptives or pay fines.” Yet despite this concession, the fact-checker labeled Senator Ben Sasse “misleading” for having stated exactly the same thing.

 

It seems there is no limit to how low credulous fact-checkers will stoop to protect their ideological allies.

The Democrats’ Calculated Moral Panic over the Filibuster

By Isaac Schorr

Friday, February 26, 2021

 

Let the word go forth from this time and place: The filibuster — that Jim Crow relic — is to blame for the progressive defeat in the “Fight for $15.”

 

On Thursday evening, Senate parliamentarian Elizabeth MacDonough ruled that Democrats could not raise the federal minimum wage to $15 an hour as part of their $1.9 trillion spending jubilee masquerading as a COVID-relief measure, which they are trying to pass through the budget reconciliation process. Reconciliation allows the Senate majority to sidestep the filibuster and pass bills that affect spending, revenue, or the federal debt ceiling. There are limits on how it can be used, though. One is that at maximum, three bills can be passed a year using the mechanism. Another is the Byrd Rule, which states that certain kinds of provisions are “extraneous” and therefore cannot be passed under reconciliation. These include those that:

 

1.      Do not produce a change in outlays or revenues

 

2.      Produce changes in outlays or revenue which are merely incidental to the non-budgetary components of the provision

 

3.      Are outside the jurisdiction of the committee that submitted the title or provision for inclusion in the reconciliation measure

 

4.      Increase outlays or decrease revenue if the provision’s title, as a whole, fails to achieve the Senate reporting committee’s reconciliation instructions

 

5.      Increase net outlays or decrease revenue during a fiscal year after the years covered by the reconciliation bill unless the provision’s title, as a whole, remains budget neutral

 

6.      Contain recommendations regarding the OASDI (social security) trust funds

 

It is the Byrd Rule that has compelled MacDonough to rule the minimum-wage hike out of order. Remember, she’s no GOP hack; MacDonough was appointed to her position back in 2012 by Harry Reid.

 

But MacDonough hasn’t been the focus of Democratic criticism, even if she has been come under some fire for her decision. No, the talking points have gone out, and they are aimed squarely at the filibuster. Hawaii senator Brian Schatz tweeted that:

 

The filibuster was never in the constitution, originated mostly by accident, and has historically been used to block civil rights. No legislatures on earth have a supermajority requirement because that’s stupid and paralyzing. It’s time to trash the Jim Crow filibuster.

 

Newly minted California senator Alex Padilla weighed in with more pith, stating simply “End the filibuster. Raise the minimum wage.”

 

Massachusetts’ delegation to the upper chamber chimed in as well. Elizabeth Warren suggested that “It’s long past time to get rid of the filibuster. We must remove Mitch McConnell’s veto power over broadly popular policies the American people want to see passed,” while Ed Markey recommitted himself to “abolish[ing] the filibuster.” And that’s just a small sampling of the emerging party line. The problem with this formulation is that it’s not really the filibuster that’s holding back Senate Democrats from raising the minimum wage to the arbitrary and ill-advised $15 mark — a goal inspired by the aforementioned “Fight for $15” slogan.

 

That distinction belongs to Democrats Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema, both of whom oppose such a drastic increase and would have stood in its way even if the filibuster were done away with and reconciliation were rendered unnecessary. Moreover, Schatz, Warren, Markey, and the rest of the Democrats were not just quieter about the apparently racist legislative tool when they were in the minority, they were complicit in its use. Just last September, they used it to kill a more discerning COVID-relief bill. The calculated moral panic over the filibuster has nothing to do with the relief package being pushed or the call to remedy racial injustice in America, and has everything to do with the Democrats’ desire to slowly lay the groundwork for pushing through even more controversial legislation if they expand their majority in 2022.

 

The Democrats are outright lying about an important counter-majoritarian institution that they used without remorse when it suited them by tying it to America’s racial history. Worse yet, they’re doing so not on principle, but in the pursuit of power.

When the Cancellers Are Scheduled for Cancellation

By Noah Rothman

Tuesday, February 23, 2021

 

The latest controversy in the world of American wokeness reads like a parody of the phenomenon.

 

This week, the online publication Slate indefinitely suspended without pay one of its most well-known podcasters, Mike Pesca, after it became known that he had a private conversation with a fellow employee about the controversial firing of New York Times staff reporter, Donald McNeil. McNeil was let go after the outside world became aware of a conversation he had with students in 2019 when he was asked for his thoughts on whether it was appropriate to impose professional consequences on someone who uses a noxious racial slur. During that conversation, McNeil used that slur (which he was encouraged to do) to illustrate his point. And for that, he was fired. “My points,” Pesca told his colleagues in an internal chatroom discussion, “are his internal conduct was in a grey area, you guys don’t think it was.” This offense resulted in Pesca being consigned to professional limbo.

 

To summarize this ponderous case, Pesca was fired for discussing in a private conversation the firing of someone who, also in a private conversation, was prompted to reference a slur in an academic context.

 

If it wasn’t clear before, it should be now: We are in the midst of a moral panic. This episode represents yet another assault on discourse which now includes shared frames of reference. It is of a piece with the mission to “disrupt texts,” which posits that we should not contextualize literature that is a product of its time; instead, we should bowdlerize it or even ban it. It is the same mission that would tear down statues of Abraham Lincoln as readily as it would statuary memorializing Confederate dead because it is disdainful of the norms that prevailed in his lifetime. It is the same censorious, power-mad cultural ethos that has transformed even the pedagogical exploration of offensive subject matter a fireable offense.

 

This is an utterly uncompromising assault on context, the study of history, and the value of unfettered intellectual debate. It is a wonder that the executors of this cultural revolution are shocked to find that some people don’t take too kindly to the effort. What’s more, some of those who aren’t comfortable with this campaign of historical revisionism helm some rather powerful institutions. And those institutions, some of which are not beholden to America’s constitutional protections on speech and expression, are fighting back.

 

The government of France, for example, has all but declared war on the woke. “There’s a battle to wage against an intellectual matrix from American universities,” French President Emmanuel Macron averred. In France, a nascent intellectual movement alleges that some of the tenets of modern social justice, particularly the activists’ view that racial characteristics are linked to immutable habits of mind, are an assault on the preferred French conception of race as a subjective condition. In the view of its opponents, these uniquely American ideas poison the water, sow discord, and give comfort to an “Islamo-leftism [that] corrupts all of society.” And now, the heavy hand of French cultural policing has descended on universities that lend credence to these views.

 

A similar backlash is underway on the other side of the Channel. “I am deeply worried about the chilling effect on campuses of unacceptable silencing and censoring,” British Education Secretary Gavin Williamson declared in a speech last week. “That is why we must strengthen free speech in higher education by bolstering the existing legal duties and ensuring strong, robust action is taken if these are breached.” The speech was accompanied by a declaration of the British government’s intention to impose legal mandates on universities to actively promote free expression and fine those institutions that fail to uphold this charge.

 

Framing the issue in no uncertain terms, Secretary of State and Housing Robert Jenrick vowed to “save Britain’s statues from the woke militants who want to censor our past.” The government’s move has been bolstered by private British institutions, which are ramping up their efforts to petition courts for redress on behalf of those who face professional consequences for violating social justice’s tenets.

 

It shouldn’t be, but it is somewhat surprising that the most aggressive defenders of social justice’s campaign of intimidation are horrified by the counterattack.

 

“In reality, the biggest threats to academic freedom and free speech come not from staff and students, nor from so-called ‘cancel culture,’ but from ministers’ own attempts to police what can and cannot be said on campus,” mourned Britain’s University and College Union general secretary, Jo Grady. London’s initiative, she continued, will rob academics of their ability to “speak truth to power.”

 

In France, the academic community has lashed out at Minister for Higher Education Frederique Vidal’s investigation into researchers whose work looks “at everything through the prism of wanting to fracture and divide” and blur the distinctions between scholarship and “activism and opinion.” A statement from the National Center for Scientific Research accused Paris of seeking to “delegitimize different fields of research such as post-colonial studies.”

 

The world of woke political commentary is particularly incensed by this censorious assault on their own censorious values. “This is very worrying,” one French academic told VICE News. “This is a political attempt to control knowledge.” Another added that the French government had committed itself to a course of action precedented only by the Vichy regime. And as VICE chronicled, academics and university-affiliated researchers have been bombarded of late by “threats from France’s far-right,” which are largely supportive of the government’s move.

 

In the U.K., Guardian columnist Zoe Williams accused London of creating “more divisions” in pursuit of “monoculturalism” at the expense of more “productive discussions.” Historian David Olusoga agreed, charging Boris Johnson’s government (and Donald Trump’s) with promoting a “vision of the past is simplistic, reductive and ahistorical.”

 

These concerns are perfectly valid. Indeed, they are precisely the accusations leveled by opponents of social-justice maximalism. In service to a shallow and revisionist account of human events, one which seeks to distill complex narratives and even more complicated people down to one unified theory of history, a tyrannical contingent of cultural revolutionaries are attacking the foundations of our shared cultural understandings. Those who resent the severe reaction their activism has produced in France and Britain are staring into their own reflections, and they don’t like what they see.

Against the Equality Act

National Review Online

Thursday, February 25, 2021

 

The Equality Act, which passed the House in 2019 then stalled in the Republican-controlled Senate, is set to pass in the House today. It is a misnomer and a travesty.

 

The bill would add to the Civil Rights Act of 1964 to prohibit discrimination on the basis of “sex, sexual orientation, and gender identity,” each of which is categorically distinct from one another and each of which is, more to the point, radically different in origin, nature, and prevalence to the historic problem of racism in the United States.

 

The Equality Act would redefine sex to include “gender identity,” thus forcing every federally funded entity — most notably schools and colleges — to treat males who declare transgender status as if they were females. It would stamp out religious exemptions by regulating religious nonprofits and even goes so far as to block the Religious Freedom Restoration Act from applying to its provisions. And it would, as National Review’s John McCormack has explained, greatly expand “the number of businesses that count as ‘public accommodations’ under the Civil Rights Act.”

 

It is neither proportionate nor desirable to use the full weight of the federal government against every injustice, real or imagined. But the bill’s drafters are transparently exploiting the association with a historic bill fighting racial discrimination in order to smuggle in false equivalences and unsupportable claims.

 

For instance, the bill states that “transgender people have half the homeownership rate of non-transgender people and about 1 in 5 transgender people experience homelessness.” This is alarming, certainly, but what proof is there that the predominant cause for this is discrimination? Psychiatrists and psychologists in the field of gender dysphoria have long observed that, even in instances of social acceptance, mental health co-morbidities are high among this population.

 

Moral platitudes are similarly deployed to smooth over the bill’s shortcomings. President Biden — whose administration endorsed the Equality Act, and who promised during his campaign to sign it into law within 100 days of office — says that “every person should be treated with dignity and respect.” And who could object? Actually, many people could when “dignity and respect” are hijacked to include a legal requirement to treat men as though they are women in various contexts that would grossly disadvantage females.

 

The law’s drafters assert that “many lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and queer (LGBTQ+) individuals often continue to face discrimination, harassment, and violence at work, at school, and in public accommodations,” yet rely largely on an activist definition of “discrimination, harassment, and violence” that would be unrecognizable to any reasonable person.

 

Is it “discrimination” to insist that young men do not compete against women in sports, for instance? Is it “harassment” to refuse to use — out of conscience or good grammar — newly invented speech codes (“call me they/them”)? Is it “violence” to insist that men who undergo “sex change” genital surgery are still, biologically speaking, men? The bill’s most ardent supporters and lobbyists think so.

 

Moreover, the cultural effect of adding the most outlandish tenets of identity politics to the legacy of anti-racism will be to chill speech and bypass debate on important and complex issues. We are seeing this already, for instance, in Amazon’s decision this week to remove conservative scholar Ryan Anderson’s thoughtful critique of transgender ideology. Amazon didn’t even bother to explain its decision. Such is the prevailing moral certainty.

 

Again, this is not to say that sexual minorities or transgender-identified persons don’t experience genuine injustice. Rather, it is to insist that such discrimination is not comparable to the “persistent, pervasive and widespread” evil of racism that Congress was asked to prohibit in 1964, and so does not warrant the same response from the federal government. Ultimately, what the Equality Act represents is a cynical attempt to use the Civil Rights Act as a Trojan horse for radical leftist social orthodoxies. Such a law would cause far more injustice than it would prevent.

The Soullessness of Socialism

By Christine Rosen

Wednesday, February 24, 2021

 

In an episode of the NBC sitcom 30 Rock, the narcissistic actress Jenna (played brilliantly by Jane Krakowski) and her boyfriend Paul (Will Forte), who had spent their relationship thus far indulging in one weird fetish after another, suddenly find themselves lapsing into a comfortable, mundane existence. Horrified at the thought that they were like any other couple, they recast activities like going to bed early and grocery shopping as an entirely new fetish they called “normaling.” (Not surprisingly, their attempt at relationship normcore ends when they are mocked by their normal peers).

 

The fetishization of the normal appears to much less comic effect in a recent, flattering profile of socialist feminist scholar Silvia Federici in the New York Times Magazine. Federici, we are told, “is a longtime advocate of the idea that domestic work is unwaged labor and was a founder of the Wages for Housework movement in the early 1970s.” Housework, Federici argues, “is a form of gendered economic oppression” and “an exploitation upon which all of capitalism rests.”

 

Federici isn’t just displeased with housework. “Nearly everything,” she argues, “has become ‘enclosed’ within capitalism: not just property and land but also our bodies, our time, our modes of education, our health, our relationships, our attention, our minds.” Her solution to this totalizing force is something she calls “commoning.” The Times describes the practice as follows: “Instead of your hiring a handyman, a neighbor might come to your house to help install your ceiling fan; in exchange, you might help him, or someone else, with his taxes or pet-sitting or garden work.”

 

If, like most people, you read this description and think, “Isn’t that just being a decent person and helpful friend and neighbor?” you clearly haven’t been properly steeped in radical socialist economics. According to Frederici, “commoning” is “a powerful and rare experience as that of being part of something larger than our individual lives, of dwelling on ‘this earth of mankind’ not as a stranger or a trespasser, which is the way capitalism wishes us to relate to the spaces we occupy, but as home.”

 

Whatever “commoning” is, it, along with Federici’s argument in favor of wages for housework, is becoming more mainstream. As the Times notes, “In the last year, she has been cited over and over in popular publications—from The New Yorker to The Atlantic to The Cut to Teen Vogue.”

 

“Everyday life is the primary terrain of social change,” Federici says, and it’s worth examining what she means by this: That caring for one’s children and home is exploitive; that any pleasure one might derive from doing so is merely an expression of false consciousness; that society owes those who perform such “reproductive labor” not merely relief from the “second shift” but wages for doing such work at all. As Samuel Hammond of the Niskanen Center recently told the Times, “I do think it’s a market failure in capitalist economies that there isn’t a parenting wage.”

 

Such proposals come at the same time that many on the progressive left are also advocating for a Universal Basic Income because, as Jamila Michener, co-director of Cornell’s Center for Health Equity, told Times columnist Ezra Klein, “There’s no natural dignity in work.” This is a departure from the message President Joe Biden promoted on the campaign trail. As he said during a Democratic primary debate, “My dad used to have an expression. He said, Joe, a job is about a lot more than a paycheck. It’s about your dignity. It’s about respect.”

 

Is dignity to be found in paying people for the tasks they perform in their private lives? Or paying them for raising their children (as even Republican Senator Mitt Romney has suggested with his recent child allowance proposal?) Or can dignity only occur when the government pays everyone an income regardless of whether or not they work at all?

 

One need not idealize the Sisyphean tasks of daily life—the cleaning, cooking, and caring for others—to understand that doing them has a worth not measurable in dollars. But context matters. Socialists like Federici would prefer that the context always be political. In their view, no private act is without political significance. Therefore, nothing one chooses to do in one’s home should be free from government intervention (and ideally, payment).

 

In practice, Federici’s approach suffers from the same totalizing worldview as the capitalists she excoriates.

 

For socialists like Federici (and for an increasing number of progressive activists who embrace such ideas), private acts can be made meaningful only if they are put to political purpose, namely, the destruction of capitalism. As Federici argued in a 1975 essay, “Wages Against Housework”: “To say that we want wages for housework is to expose the fact that housework is already money for capital, that capital has made and makes money out of our cooking, smiling, [expletive that describes sexual intercourse].”

 

The current debate about wages, housework, “commoning” and the dignity of labor does create an opportunity for conservatives to reiterate their values if they are willing to take it. A common theme emerges in these debates that has nothing to do with government payment for private domestic labor, or a universal basic income, or even the creation of “commoning” socialist utopias. It’s the importance of bonds of community that develop organically, steeped in a particular place, or among people who share specific beliefs, who have made a commitment to care for one another.

 

Republicans and Democrats can wrangle over policy solutions in the form of tax credits or child payments or universal basic incomes. But if you lack a sense of community (as far too many Americans do, particularly after a year of pandemic lockdowns and the ensuing retreat from public space), a check from the government will not fill that void.

Stanford Lefties Must Swallow Their Hoover Hate — for Now

By Jack Fowler

Thursday, February 25, 2021

 

It gnaws away at Stanford University’s woke faculty: Harbored in their midst is that nominally conservative outfit, the Hoover Institution, which more than a few professors hold as an infestation of the liberal citadel. It is, after all, named after a Republican president — never mind being home to the likes of Thomas Sowell and Victor Davis Hanson and H. R. McMaster (and yes, plenty of establishment GOP types, and even a lefty or two). And there’s this: The campus is visually dominated by the striking eleven-story Hoover Tower, which scrapes the Palo Alto sky like some right-hand middle finger. Housing vast and important archives (much of the contents are about the evils of Marxist-Leninism), the tower is crowned by a 48-bell carillon that no doubt triggers faculty and students with the occasional auditory reminder of Hoover’s confounding and unwelcome presence.

 

Who will rid us of this troublesome think tank and its more Trumpy fellows?

 

There is no paucity of willing hitmen amongst Stanford’s more fevered and Hoover-obsessed faculty, who of late have mounted a campaign to diminish Hoover’s standing and to bully the institution’s more important and controversial (meaning, from their perspective, notorious) fellows. Of particular focus are the aforementioned Professor Hanson, known well in National Review’s precincts and the author of The Case for Trump (word is he also has a weekly podcast); Scott Atlas, a prominent member of former President Trump’s COVID task force (his nondoctrinaire, wrong-partisan stands prompted a hundred-plus of his former colleagues to publish an open letter last September that berated him as a threat to public health); and historian Niall Ferguson, who was accused (projection warning) of suppressing the free-speech rights of students in 2018.

 

Under the cover of COVID, not wanting to let this crisis go to waste, the plotters plotted. Led by the uber-leftist comparative-lit professor and Twitter junkie, David Palumbo-Liu, over 100 Stanford faculty corralled in late September 2020 to sign an open letter (does anyone at Stanford write closed letters?) attacking the Hoover-Stanford relationship and insisting the Faculty Senate take very public steps:

 

A closely connected concern which needs to be addressed by the Senate is our relation to an Institute that has a narrow focus and a pre-determined point of view which it is committed to retain and reinforce in all its research. This is not conjecture, it is manifested in the Hoover’s mission statement. . . . This commitment to producing knowledge that constantly validates a specific belief makes the Hoover distinct and is troubling when we find Stanford linked to this kind of guided research. It is antithetical to the open scientific inquiry that drives all research universities.

 

Action was demanded: “The relationship between the Hoover Institution’s way of promoting their policy preferences and the academic mission of Stanford University requires more careful renegotiation.”

 

Who can blame Team Palumbo? Imagine what could be bankrolled should they get their mitts on a carefully renegotiated part of Hoover’s $577 million endowment?

 

Plotting done, they struck: A Stanford Faculty Senate meeting scheduled for February 11 was the scene of an hours-long effort to skunk Hoover and the targeted fellows. Palumbo-Liu and his entourage — fellow comparative-lit teacher Joshua Landy, engineering professor Stephen Monismith, and psychiatry professor David Spiegel (quite the generous donor to various leftist Democratic candidates) — prepared a massive “Report on the Hoover Institution and Stanford University” that catalogued a plethora of contrived accusations and scratched a fierce audio-visual itch: The diatribe was accompanied by more slides than Ricky Henderson or Lou Brock ever made in their careers.

 

Its introduction contained gratuitous kumbaya throw-offs, but language of the accusation was direct:

 

Too much of what we have seen coming out of the Hoover has made a travesty of honest intellectual debate, because an excess of partisanship has led some Hoover fellows out of the realm of fact, science, and good faith argumentation.

 

For hours, the lefty scholars took turns prosecuting, leveling niceties such as “Hoover as a Feeder of Alt-Right Propaganda,” “Hoover Against Diversity, Gender, Sustainability,” and “COVID Misinformation from Other Fellows,” strewn amongst attempts to link VDH to the Capitol riot (“excuse me, ‘insurrection’”), drub Atlas as the pathogen’s BFF, and cast Ferguson as a free-speech foe.

 

The marathon concluded with a demand: “What we are asking is simply for an impartial committee to be appointed by the Committee on Committees to delve deeper into the relationship between the Hoover and Stanford.”

 

’Twas not to be. Put in the form of a resolution, the demand was essentially defeated: What prevailed was a watered-down, amended version that stated that Hoover director Condoleezza Rice (who was offered a few minutes to rebut the quartet’s onslaught) and Stanford provost Persis Drell would present a report later this year on “increasing interaction” between the two bodies.

 

It was, a wound-licking Palumbo-Liu wrote in a Stanford Daily op-ed, “a tragic day.” We are unsure as to whether he typed his column’s concluding paragraph from a fainting couch:

 

In my opinion, and mine alone, the Senate’s failure to take on the task of independent research, their ready acquiescence to power, their timidity before peer pressure and, worst of all, their deployment of the most illogical, unfactual and bad faith arguments, is a stain on the Faculty Senate and an abrogation of duty.

 

(There was, of course, ample Palumbo-Liu in-defeat tweeting about the “Stan-Hoov” conspiracy and other gems lecturing that “the Hoover/Stanford relationship is largely about $$. Hoover directly and indirectly brings in big donors. All universities are ultimately not about ideology, but about cash. Ideology is barely secondary.” Uh huh.)

 

Cue curtain?

 

Not so fast. This affair is not over. Not by a long shot.

 

What of the Hoover fellows — Hanson, Ferguson, and Atlas — slammed and sullied ad nauseam at the senate circus, a venue in which they were not allowed to appear to counter the tendered lunacies?

 

This week, the trio took to the Stanford Review, the school’s independent, conservative alternative publication, to respond and defend their honor. The rebuttal, “On Free Speech at Stanford,” is well worth the read in its entirety, as it takes to task the accusers (and their own hypocrisies), in part declaring that their statement’s central aim “is to object to a group of professors’ deliberate misuse of the Faculty Senate and the student newspaper to act as purveyors of their defamation.”

 

If cowering was expected, if dodged-a-bullet gratitude was considered, well, it wasn’t to be. The trio’s counterpunching ends with this:

 

Regardless of the outcome of current and future deliberations about the relationship between Stanford and Hoover, as individuals we now seek meaningful reassurances that these unwarranted attacks on our reputations will no longer be legitimized by some in the Faculty Senate and disseminated by the student newspaper. If Hoover fellows continue to be targets for character assassination, it will be clear to us what the true nature of free speech at Stanford has become — and not only to us.

 

Last year, Stanford sadly placed 35th out of 55 in the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education’s College Free Speech rankings. In this regard, we note the relevant warning of the prior Provost, Professor John Etchemendy, “Over the years, I have watched a steady and frightening evolution of the University — my University — into an intellectually, increasingly homogeneous place.”

 

We agree, and ask the greater Stanford community of which we are indeed full members to ask themselves: Does the wind of freedom still blow at Stanford? Or is it the stale breath of ideological conformism and intimidation that we detect?

 

From all the way over here on the East Coast, you can smell the answer: It’s stale.