It’s All America’s Fault

By Ed West

Tuesday, March 30, 2021

 

During the absolute doldrums of the first lockdown last spring, I tried watching the first Jack Ryan series on Amazon Prime. Forgive me, but there was a lot of television to watch and my social life wasn’t looking too good.

 

I normally quite like mindless action films full of explosions but this time I just couldn’t get past the second episode. There was nothing wrong with it; I’m sure it was fine — I just didn’t want the protagonists to win. We were, of course, supposed to see what drove some Middle Easterners to hate Americans, one having lost a brother in an air strike as a child; American entertainment has moved beyond the “reel bad Arab” caricatures of the 1980s.

 

I actively wanted them to win, though, and found myself muttering “What are you even doing in their country?” at the Yankees as they ran around some forsaken place in the desert. Before last year I never would have felt that way.

 

My father was a refugee in the United States. His parents had sent him and his older brother to North America in 1940 because they wanted their children to grow up free. They spent Christmas that year in Manhattan staying with family friends in the Upper West Side, where they were doted on by all the neighbours and friends who came to visit and showered the two English boys with kindness.

 

But then America was a country famous for its incredible generosity, the welcome it gave newcomers; once you crossed that ocean no king, tsar or Führer could bother you again. Many enjoyed similar welcomes; a friend of dad’s remembered arriving around the same time and being picked up by a New York taxi driver who told him in a broad Nu Yoik accent: “Don’t worry, son, Uncle Sam’s gonna look after you now.” He never forgot that.

 

To my generation, growing up in the Cold War, that sense of America The Protector still lingered. I remember as a child seeing US troops at Checkpoint Charlie and being aware that it was thanks to them that we didn’t have to keep our eyes down like the poor prisoners of East Berlin. As a British child, when you watched American films or American TV, you identified with the Americans against our common enemies around the world.

 

Like many people here, I considered 9/11 as an attack on us too, and not just because of the dozens of Britons killed; I was furious when the BBC aired a panel show a couple of days later in which various (mostly Muslim) guests and audience members shouted about how the Americans had it coming, in front of a distraught-looking American diplomat.

 

And yet a lot has happened since. There is now a feeling, and I suspect it is growing on the British Right, that America is no longer a force for good in the world — quite the opposite. “Civilisations die from suicide,” as Arnold Toynbee famously said, and the United States, or at least its Ivy League-educated elite, is the Rev Jim Jones of the West.

 

The overwhelmingly Atlanticist wing of the British Right is, I suspect, going to experience a long retreat — one that will slot right into the long history of anti-Americanism on the Right. America, after all, was a revolutionary society founded by Whigs, and the country’s Tories were largely driven out, to Canada or Britain.

 

Conservatism, as it began in France and England around the time of the French Revolution, was defined by throne and altar, and so some American intellectuals argued that the country didn’t really have an authentically native conservative tradition. Yet paradoxically America, while being a young country, also has the most ancient of constitutions, and the deepest political roots. It really has something worth conserving. For that reason, until now, it always resisted utopian and revolutionary ideas, while Europeans could never resist them.

 

The European Right once had a strong anti-American streak, viewing it as a country filled with mediocrity and an absence of high culture. Those on the extreme Right disliked it as a land of racial degeneracy and Jewish influence; Hitler in particular hated everything the United States stood for.

 

But as America’s empire grew, however, it was the Left who came to see the US as the chief enemy of the wretched of the earth. Perhaps the lone Yankeephobe among senior post-war British Conservatives was Enoch Powell, who was deeply hostile to the United States, which he blamed for the downfall of the British Empire. Powell wasn’t totally alone, although anti-Americanism was largely on the fringe. The Right-wing Monday Club had been in favour of joining the Common Market because it was opposed to American influence. In 1967 it argued that the choice was between being “first-class Europeans” or “second-grade Americans”. Club chairman Sir Victor Raikes even made the case for the withdrawal of American troops from western Europe so that the continent could instead defend itself.

 

Yet this quaint nostalgia for the world before 1914 could not live up to a reality where western Europeans have been incapable of defending themselves and still rely on American support. And as the Common Market failed to become the alliance of independent states the Conservative Right hoped for, so the Tories became increasingly Europhobic. By the late 1980s pro-Americanism was imbedded in the British Right; the country’s Right-wing tabloids also became zealously pro-American, while continuously writing in derogatory terms about the Germans and French.

 

It had become a mantra among conservative commentators that everything America did was better. They believed in freedom rather than euro-socialism, they still cared about defending the West against its enemies. America was richer and technologically more advanced. It even had higher fertility, the highest sign of confidence in the future. None of these things are entirely true anymore.

 

On the Left, meanwhile, a casual sort of anti-Americanism has long since been the norm, fed by Americans like Michael Moore who use their countrymen as punchlines for European audiences. It is assumed that most of the world’s problems are caused by the Great Satan, whether through the machinations of the CIA, FBI or capitalism in the abstract.

 

Yet the same liberal middle-class Europeans who despise “inauthentic” mass-produced American food also hold the most basic, globalised political opinions mass-produced in America. The most successful of these beliefs — the Coca-Cola of bad takes — is that America is a unique force for racism and oppression, exported by Americans who can make a living precisely because it isn’t true. But if European liberalism think America hegemony is oppressive, wait till they see what follows.

 

So while far more British people on the Right see themselves as pro-American, this barely makes any sense anymore. Certainly on issues of social democracy, relating to welfare and redistribution, most Europeans are more Left-wing than Americans, with the British somewhat closer to the US median. Yet on social justice issues — related to race, immigration, gender and sexuality — America is far more radical than the European norm. And in 21^st century politics, those latter issues are more salient to people’s voting habits.

 

It was once a rather fond cliché to say that when America sneezes Britain catches a cold, but that idea seems less benign now that America’s politics has mutated into something genuinely toxic and destructive. Its elites are aren’t just misguided, they are deranged and malignant. With the country losing its Christian faith, they are driven by a new religious moral fervour towards the utopian goal of “equity”, equality of outcome transferred from the individual to the racial group, a project destined to stoke hatred and conflict.

 

And of all the people in the world, the British have the least immunity to these ideas, unprotected by any language barrier or recent cultural memory of utopianism. In France and Germany, American concepts at least have some linguistic hurdles before they come to spread and dominate; in central and eastern Europe, people recognise that purity spirals and cancel culture have obvious, dark comparisons with their own history. In Britain, however, we have an entirely naïve population.

 

Because our middle class desperately ape everything they read in the New York Times, or watch on Netflix, so America’s history and discourse is transferred onto ours, a form of cultural imperialism that our leaders are too conformist to resist. So we see nice, elderly Liberal Democrats voters in suburban Oxfordshire kneeling outside their homes in absurd imitation of American sportsmen protesting about a police shooting, the circumstances of which they are entirely, and wilfully, ignorant of. Would any of them protest police killings in Brazil, which dwarf the US rate? Would any of them care?

 

It’s not a thought-out belief with an understanding of the causes of a problem or the consequences of any proposed solution; it’s a meme, a fashion. It’s what anthropologists refer to as “prestige-biased group transmission”, when people imitate the fashions and mores of powerful groups without any understanding of whether these fashions will benefit them. It’s the same reason that my children are now being taught American history at school, the stories of Harriet Tubman and Rosa Parks, as if it was theirs.

 

It’s tragic, because on a personal level Americans are still as warm and generous as they’ve always been; their earnestness and kindness sometimes shames me, coming from a country so filled with cynicism and nihilism-disguised-as-irony. But their political culture is poisonous, and America’s progressive fundamentalists are a bigger threat to Britain, and to Europe, than probably any other force on earth, bar climate change.

 

I still cheer for the Americans in the old films. But when it comes to the American religion being forced on us, I empathise more with the desert tribesman than with Jack Ryan: Yankees go home and get out of our lives.

Democrats Burn the Dictionary: Why AOC’s Border Newspeak Should Be Ditched

By Charles C. W. Cooke

Wednesday, March 31, 2021

 

Dimly aware that the border crisis is taking a toll on its popularity, the Democratic Party has finally resolved to do something concrete: It is going to burn the dictionary.

 

Wands outstretched and shouting incantations, prominent Democrats have begun to curse our language. In a livestream performed last night, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez attempted to change the meaning of the word “surge” in the hope that she might be able to magic away the news from the border. “They wanna say, ‘But what about the surge?’” Ocasio-Cortez said. “Well, first of all, just gut check, stop. Anyone who’s using the term ‘surge’ around you consciously is trying to invoke a militaristic frame.”

 

Or, alternatively, they’re talking about the surge on the border.

 

“That’s a problem,” Ocasio-Cortez continued, “because this is not a surge, these are children and they are not insurgents and we are not being invaded.”

 

The “problem” here, of course, is that “surge,” “insurgent,” and “invasion” all mean different things, and that “they” — by which Ocasio-Cortez means “people with eyes who can read charts” — are only using one of those words. That word is “surge,” which, by any traditional use of the term, describes neatly what is happening on the border. If Ocasio-Cortez prefers, we could use a different word: Say, “deluge” or “swell” or “gush” or “flood” or “rush.” Hell, if she likes, we can call what is happening something entirely nonsensical: a “teapot” of migrants. But whatever we choose, it is not going to defy the reality, which is that there is a surge on the border. One suspects that, somewhere deep down, Ocasio-Cortez believes that if she can find a better word to describe gravity, she will become capable of levitation.

 

In Washington, meanwhile, Joe Biden has taken a break from litigating the word “crisis” and is joining Representative Joaquin Castro in his quest to remove the word “alien” from our immigration law. If, as seems likely, Biden prevails in this endeavor, he will have done nothing of value whatsoever. “Alien” derives from the Latin “alienus,” which simply means “stranger” or “foreigner.” The first definition of the word in the Oxford English Dictionary is someone “belonging to another person, place, or family; not of one’s own; from elsewhere, foreign.” To prohibit its use by the government will not destroy this concept; it will merely attach it to whatever replacement word is chosen and, over time, imbue that word with the same political context. There are, indeed, a few disfavored terms that have lost their sting having been marginalized, but only because the ideas they represented faded out alongside them. It should be obvious to anyone who has ever read a book that “foreigner” is unlikely to join their number.

 

And if it does? Then we will be poorer for it. Already, mainstream news pieces on this topic tend to leave me more confused than I was when I started. As a matter of habit, outlets such as the Associated Press and Reuters call illegal immigrants “migrants,” and people with fake papers “undocumented,” and deportees “non-citizens,” and, in so doing, flatten the key distinctions so dramatically that it becomes impossible to tell what is going on.

 

Which, of course, is the point. Increasingly, modern progressivism is predicated upon the belief that reality is meaningfully created by language, and that if the substance of that language can be forcibly altered, the real world will follow on cue. In its benign form, this approach is merely hackish: Consider, by way of example, how desperately progressives try to bully the press into describing radical gun-control measures as mere “gun safety,” or how quickly Democratic politicians rush to describe anything they dislike as “Jim Crow.” In its more sinister form, however, it is disastrous for common understanding. It has taken just a handful of years for CNN to go from being a news network that reported on the world as it actually exists to being so cowed by external pressure that it fills its straight news stories with sentences such as, “It’s not possible to know a person’s gender identity at birth, and there is no consensus criteria for assigning sex at birth” — a claim so patently ridiculous that, ten years ago, it would have been offered only by the sort of scatty, damaged, nutty professor-types who have multiple 35,000-word theories on the gendered way people eat dumplings but are incapable of changing a light bulb.

 

Politics, we are told, is the art of the possible. Increasingly, though, it is more accurate to say that it is the art of the euphemism. What is happening at the border is a real, tangible, physical problem: Too many people are coming to the United States because they believe that they will be allowed into the country if they do. Insofar as there is a verbal component to the matter, it is that many of those traveling have been encouraged to do so by Democratic rhetoric, but this is mostly a material issue that will be fixed by a combination of serious inquiry, a set of sober policies, and the efficient and persistent execution of the law.

 

And if that doesn’t work? Well, we can always amend the terms to our liking — so that nobody involved is able to tell what the hell we were talking about in the first place.

Corporate Taxes Don’t Just Soak the Rich

By Robert VerBruggen

Wednesday, March 31, 2021

 

Biden’s new infrastructure proposal is out. It would dump a lot of federal money into infrastructure and a long list of unrelated priorities, and pay for it by hiking taxes on corporations.

 

A couple weeks ago I explained why massive federal infrastructure funding should not be a priority right now. Here I’d like to spell out why the corporate-tax hikes in this proposal — which take several forms, including pushing the tax on corporate income from 21 to 28 percent — violate Biden’s pledge not to hike taxes on “anyone” earning less than $400,000.

 

In a certain literal sense, these taxes are paid by the corporations themselves. But of course, any tax paid by a business ultimately gets passed through to a flesh-and-blood human being, whether it’s a shareholder, a worker, or a customer. There’s a big debate over how much of the corporate income tax is borne by labor vs. capital, but the labor share is certainly not zero (and not all stockholders are wealthy anyhow). Therefore, hiking corporate taxes hits lower-income Americans to some extent.

 

The left-leaning Tax Policy Center puts the labor share at just 20 percent. As the center’s Howard Gleckman explained last year,

 

when TPC modeled Biden’s tax proposals in March (before he added about 20 new ideas) it found that low- and moderate-income households would on average see some decline in their after-tax incomes — not from individual taxes but from their share of corporate tax increases.

 

TPC estimated that in 2021 three-quarters of all Biden’s tax increases would be borne by the highest-income one percent of households (those making $837,000 or more). But after-tax incomes of low-income households would fall by about $30 on average, about 0.2 percent. Middle-income households would see an average decline of about $260, or 0.4 percent.

 

The next “quintile” above what Gleckman calls “middle-income” (those between the 60th and 80th percentiles of the income distribution) would see a tax hike of $590, or 0.5 percent of after-tax income. Basic division suggests these folks are taking home about $118,000 to begin with — well below the $400,000 threshold, which captures only about the top 2 percent of taxpayers.

 

Others argue that the capital share is well above 20 percent, which would mean much more damage to the middle and working classes. A 2017 Tax Foundation report said it’s probably 70 percent or higher, and could be as high as 100 percent.

Elizabeth Warren Is a Ridiculous, Power-Hungry Crackpot

By Kevin D. Williamson

Tuesday, March 30, 2021

 

Elizabeth Warren — the ridiculous hustling flatbilly grifter from Massachusetts from Oklahoma who snookered the academic establishment by pretending to be a Native American while writing dopey self-help books that are so sloppy and intellectually dishonest that it’s a surprise skeezy old Joe Biden hasn’t plagiarized them yet, a political grotesque who prides herself on being in the first generation of her family to attend college but rage-tweets as though she were in the first generation in her family with opposable thumbs, as ghastly and deceitful and god-awful a sniveling and self-serving a creature as the United States Congress has to offer — is, in spite of the genuine facts of her sorry case, getting a little full of herself, and believes that as a senator, she should be above the petty “heckling” of the little people.

 

You know, peons. Like you.

 

Sometimes, they mess up and tell you what they are thinking. And what Senator Warren is thinking is: “Shut up, or I’ll use the power of my office to shut you up.”

 

At issue is the senator’s recent social-media spat with Amazon. Because Senator Warren is as dreadfully predictable as a chlamydia outbreak in West Roxbury, you can imagine the insipidity of her complaint: “Blah blah blah, fair share, higher taxes on everybody except important hometown business interests and rich liberals in Cambridge, blah blah blah, Amazon.” Etc.

 

To which Amazon offered a perfectly sensible response, if I may paraphrase: “You’re in the Senate, you ridiculous ninny — and you are even on the freakin’ committee that writes tax legislation. You got a problem with tax law? We know a counterfeit Cherokee princess repping Massachusetts you might want to have a quiet word in private with.”

 

(My words, not theirs. Should have been theirs, though.)

 

Senator Warren, because dishonesty is her reflexive instinct (remember that bullsh** made-up story about being fired from a teaching job for being pregnant?), protested: “I didn’t write the loopholes you exploit.”

 

Well, senator . . . this is going to be kind of awkward!

 

Do you know what another word for “loophole” is? Law. Loopholes aren’t manufactured at some overseas sweatshop loophole factory operated by Charles Koch’s evil cousin Skippy — they are manufactured right there in the august body that is the United States Senate Committee on Finance, of which Senator Elizabeth Warren is, insanely enough, an actual member. She may as well have a sign on her door reading “Loopholes ’R’ Us.”

 

This is Senator Warren’s mess. Jeff Bezos just pays the bills.

 

And, of course, “loopholes” aren’t really loopholes. “Loopholes” are what useless low-minded demagogues call intentionally designed features of the tax code when they are being used by somebody it is politically convenient to attack. We see this year after year after excruciatingly stupid year: Somebody with big ideas about spurring blue-collar employment proposes a tax subsidy for politically connected manufacturers, and then two years later bitches that tax subsidies are being used by politically connected manufacturers. Because we tax businesses on their profits rather than on their cashflow, ordinary expenses are deducted from taxable income — and politicians bitch about businesses getting to deduct expenses resulting from business decisions the politicians don’t like. An endless cycle of asininity, over and over and over.

 

Amazon’s strategy for minimizing taxes on its profits is indeed a devious one: not making very much money. Amazon routinely posts quite low profit margins: Last year’s 5.5 percent, modest by the standards of an Apple or a Google, was unusually high for Amazon, and in many years Amazon has reported no profit at all or almost none, choosing to reinvest its income into the business — you know, that chronic capitalist short-termism we’re always hearing about.

 

That’s not a loophole. That’s how basic U.S. corporate-tax law works.

 

It doesn’t have to work that way, of course: Democrats control both chambers of Congress and the White House, too, and there isn’t anything stopping them from passing a big fat progressive tax-reform bill that raises corporate taxes and capital-gains taxes to 65 percent, that radically narrows the deductibility of business expenses, whatever.

 

Go ahead. Should be fun to watch.

 

But this isn’t about taxes. This is about power.

 

Senator Warren has informed Amazon that she intends to — her words, here — “break up Big Tech so that you’re not powerful enough to heckle senators.” If the people of Massachusetts had any self-respect, they’d remove her from office over that threat.

 

(If the people of Massachusetts had any self-respect, they wouldn’t be the people of Massachusetts, so she’s probably safe.)

 

But allow Professor Williamson to give Professor Warren a little civics refresher: Here in the United States, we have a nifty thing called the Bill of Rights, which means that everybody — everybody — is powerful enough to heckle a senator. It goes with the job you effin’ dolt. (See? Heckling is easy!) This isn’t North Korea or Venezuela or East Germany — not yet! — where people have to be afraid of criticizing those who hold government office. The fact that Senator Warren so obviously wishes that it were so is a real good reason to retire her pronto.

 

Heckling pissant politicians is our national pastime. It’s what we do. We have a word for the kind of society in which those without power are too terrified of those with power to criticize them: tyranny.

 

And tyranny is what Senator Warren plainly desires — if we take her at her own word. Of course, there are lots of reasons not to take her at her own word, beginning with the fact that she is a habitual liar.

 

If Senator Warren weren’t dumber than nine chickens and as useless as teats on a boar hog, it would be genuinely surprising that she would put this political extortion threat into writing and publish it. Because that is what she is doing and what must be understood: Senator Warren is threatening to use the power of her office to impose economic sanctions on Americans to keep them from publicly criticizing her. I don’t have any particular sympathy for the recreant techno-bullies over in Jeff Bezos’s shop — I think it is just damned weird that our nation’s biggest bookseller is also our premier book-banner — but once you accept this kind of abuse of political power, it’s a short route to chaos.

 

This is, in fact, precisely the kind of thing the Democrats impeached Donald Trump over: the abuse of official power. Senator Warren “has acted in a manner grossly incompatible with self-government and the rule of law.”

 

We have the senator’s own word on what must follow from that.

 

And it involves more than heckling.

Yes, You Can Be Pro-Life and Pro-AR-15

By Charles C. W. Cooke

Monday, March 29, 2021

 

‘You cannot be pro-life and pro-AR15 at the same time.” So says Stanford professor Michael McFaul, echoing a line that is thrown around the political arena each and every time Americans debate gun control. Like those whom he is channeling, McFaul is wrong. Worse still, he is repeating a cheap slogan that is designed to appeal to people who are neither pro-life nor pro-AR-15, and, in turn, to short-circuit the debate with half-witted question-begging. The sole effect of McFaul’s contribution will be to have made us all dumber and less precise in our thinking.

 

McFaul’s claim rests upon a comparison of apples and oranges from which there is no coming back. Abortion is a process that, as with suicide or euthanasia or murder, causes every person at whom it is directed to die. It is true, of course, that many practitioners of abortion think that they are killing a life of no value, or that they are killing a life of less value than their own. But, irrespective of their moral calculations, they are indisputably still killing. To abort a baby is to stop it living, growing, and, eventually, being born. That is the point — and the sole point — of the procedure.

 

A gun, by contrast, is a tool — like scissors, or vacuums. Those tools can kill, yes. But they don’t always. There is a reason that you don’t hear pro-choicers saying, “You can’t be pro-life and pro-scissors” and that reason is that you quite obviously can be both things. You just can’t be pro-life and pro-murdering unborn babies with scissors. The same rule applies to guns. I have many guns, and, while they are indeed all capable of inflicting horrible damage, I have never hurt a single person with any of them. As with scissors, I can absolutely be pro-life and keep those guns for my defense; I just can’t be pro-life and murder people with them.

 

At this point in the discussion, the McFauls of the world usually zoom out a little and say, “Okay, maybe you’re right about yourself, but other people use AR-15s to kill, and, as an opponent of their prohibition, you do not wish to stop that.” But this, too, is silly. For a start, for a person to be against the process of abortion does not mandate that he must be against the private ownership of all dangerous items. There are between 15 and 20 million “assault weapons” in private hands in the United States, and they are used in at most 200 murders per year. Knives, by contrast, are used in around 1,500. I wonder: Can I not be pro-life and pro-cutlery?

 

Besides, even if one were to concede that AR-15s differ from knives in that they have no purpose other than to kill, McFaul’s submission raises a couple of crucial questions to which the gun-control movement does not have good answers. The first question is whether, in the real world, a ban on AR-15s would indeed “stop” or reduce the deaths that they cause. There are more than 400 million privately owned guns in the United States, and their ownership is protected by a constitutional provision that is understood and supported by 80 percent of the population. Even if the federal government were somehow to craft a plan of which McFaul approved, the chance that it would be perfectly implemented is precisely nil. All too often, gun-control advocates start their entreaties with the presumption that, à la Thomas Paine, Americans have it within their power to “begin the world over again.” But, as Prohibition demonstrated, this is not true. Here, as elsewhere, the practical question before us is what would change within our tough-to-alter system if we changed our rules. And, here as elsewhere, the answers to this question are extremely complex. Reviewing the available evidence in 2020, the RAND Corporation concluded that there was no evidence that banning “assault weapons” would have any effect on murders or mass-shootings in either direction. Are pro-life advocates of the Second Amendment supposed to simply ignore that?

 

The second question is how pro-lifers should regard the role of firearms in preserving life. During an average year, Americans use guns in self-defense between 100,000 and 2 million times. Even to accept the (suspiciously) low numbers within that range — and there is no problem in our doing so, given that they are promulgated by the gun-control movement itself — is to grasp that there is a large number of moving parts here that McFaul’s construction simply refuses to admit. Add in that tens of millions of Americans believe that they have a duty to own firearms as a deterrent against tyranny — a theory that, as in Vietnam, Iraq, and Afghanistan, could only be proven or disproven in the real world — and we should begin to see the scale of the error. Judging by his other statements, McFaul seems dismissive of this latter argument, which, given how well he understands tyranny, is odd. But he does not have to agree with his critics’ estimations in order to comprehend that there is nothing inconsistent about believing simultaneously that we should not be killing unborn children and that the lesson of the enormously bloody 20th century is that it’s a bad idea for a citizenry to disarm itself.

 

Ultimately, McFaul’s proposition fails for the same reason so many glib gun-control slogans fail: It grossly misrepresents the viewpoint to which it is pretending to respond. Inherent in queries such as “What if it were your child?” or “What if you were shot?” or “What if you knew the victim?” is the assumption that the opponents of gun control quietly agree with most of the supporters’ proposals but are simply too selfish or solipsistic or lacking in empathy to admit it. They are not, and neither are the many adherents of the pro-life movement, whose starting point is that the deliberate killing of innocent human beings is wrong, and whose conclusions beyond that position cannot be reduced to idle musings of the sort that might fit neatly onto a bumper sticker.

The Voter-Suppression Lie

By Rich Lowry

Tuesday, March 30, 2021

 

President Joe Biden is so committed to bipartisan cooperation and fact-based governance that he’s launched an ignorant and incendiary attack on the new Georgia voting law.

 

Biden says the new law is “Jim Crow in the 21st century” and “an un-American law to deny people the right to vote.”

 

It’s now practically mandatory for Democrats to launch such unhinged broadsides. Elizabeth Warren, accusing Georgia governor Brian Kemp of having stolen his 2018 election victory over Democratic activist Stacey Abrams (a poisonous myth), tweeted, “The Republican who is sitting in Stacey Abrams’ chair just signed a despicable voter suppression bill into law to take Georgia back to Jim Crow.”

 

Anyone making this charge in good faith either doesn’t understand the hideousness of Jim Crow or the provisions of the Georgia law.

 

The old Jim Crow was billy clubs and fire hoses; the alleged new Jim Crow is asking people to write a driver’s license number on their absentee-ballot envelopes.

 

The old Jim Crow was poll taxes; the new Jim Crow is expanding weekend voting.

 

The old Jim Crow was disenfranchising voters en masse based on their race; the new Jim Crow is limiting ballot drop boxes to places they can’t be tampered with.

 

It’s hard to believe that one real voter is going to be kept from voting by the new rules.

 

To better ensure the security, the law requires that voters provide a driver’s license or state ID number to apply for a ballot and one of those numbers (or the last four digits of a Social Security number) when returning the ballot.

 

The law narrows the window for requesting absentee ballots, although still allows plenty of time. A voter can request a ballot as early as eleven weeks prior to an election or as late as eleven days prior (any later date risks the completed ballot not getting delivered in time).

 

Ballot drop boxes were a pandemic-era innovation in Georgia. The law keeps them, while limiting their location to early voting sites.

 

After getting blowback over proposed limits on weekend early voting when black churches run their “Souls to the Polls” events, Georgia lawmakers expanded the potential for weekend voting.

 

The law gives the State Election Board more authority to take over local election operations, but there’s no doubt that election officials in Fulton County, where metro Atlanta is located and long lines at the polls are common, have been incompetent.

 

Perhaps most controversially, it bans people from distributing food or drink to voters standing in line, an effort to keep partisans from trying to sway voters near polling places. But poll workers can provide food and drink for general use.

 

The deeper point is that in the contemporary United States, with such wide and ready access to the ballot, changes around the edges don’t disenfranchise people.

 

Georgia considered limiting no-excuse absentee voting to voters 65 and over. Even this wouldn’t have dissuaded anyone from voting. A study published by the Stanford Institute for Economic Policy Research found that turnout increased in 2020 just as much in states without no-excuse absentee voting as in states with it.

 

Strict voter-ID laws have long been denounced as voter suppression. It’s not true. According to a 2019 working paper for the National Bureau of Economic Research, “strict ID laws have no significant negative effect on registration or turnout, overall or for any subgroup.”

 

And Democrats issued dire warnings about the effects of the Supreme Court in 2013 ending so-called preclearance that required federal approval of changes in the rules in certain jurisdictions.

 

This, too, was wrong. A paper by a Ph.D. candidate at the University of Oregon concludes, “The removal of preclearance requirements did not significantly reduce the relative turnout of eligible black voters.”

 

None of the facts, though, can possibly overcome the attachment that Biden and other Democrats have to their emotionally resonant and politically powerful Jim Crow smear.

Time for Americans to Take Back Power from Teachers’ Unions

National Review Online

Tuesday, March 30, 2021

 

Tuesday was supposed to be a big day for a lot of kids in Oakland — they were supposed to be going back to school. Some of them were to be going to school for the first time. Unfortunately, it’s not going to happen.

 

A deal between the school district and the teachers’ union had provided for reopening all of Oakland’s elementary schools, but, in spite of the deal, more than half of teachers are declining to return to the classroom, and so most of Oakland’s schools will not reopen as scheduled. Out of 50 pre-K and elementary schools covered by the agreement, only 21 — fewer than half — will reopen.

 

A substantial number of teachers — almost a fifth — have indicated that they do not intend to return to school as required in mid April. While acknowledging the damage this is doing to children — isolation, depression, and other mental-health issues — Oakland School Board Director Shanthi Gonzales pleaded powerlessness, telling the San Francisco Chronicle, “I wish more teachers were volunteering.” That is what you get when the school district works for the teachers and not the other way around: schools in which the interests of children and their families take a distant second place to the desires of the public-sector unions that dominate Democratic politics around the country and run the show practically unopposed in California.

 

This isn’t bare-knuckle labor politics — it’s political child abuse.

 

The Centers for Disease Control has said that schools can be safely reopened while maintaining social distancing of as little as three feet. And, as we all know, the pronouncements of the CDC are the gold standard for our progressive friends — right up until they run into the demands of an important Democratic constituency, at which point, they become trash. American Federation of Teachers president Randi Weingarten says she’s “not convinced” by the CDC’s advice. Weingarten, a lawyer by education and a union goon by profession, is, to say the least, not very well prepared to critically review the CDC’s public-health findings.

 

We have been through a great deal in the past year, with the schools and other institutions taking extraordinary measures that were generally, even when we disagreed, understandable. But 100 million Americans have now received at least one dose of one of the COVID-19 vaccines, and the research overwhelmingly finds that elementary-school education is a relatively low-risk proposition — and that every additional unnecessary delay in the return of ordinary education does real and lasting damage to children, especially to those whose families do not have the resources to adequately pick up the slack. A great many people have worked throughout this terrible episode, many at some considerable personal risk, and not only doctors, nurses, and ambulance drivers but also grocery clerks, warehouse workers, and taxi drivers. They have kept the country running while unionized teachers in Oakland and elsewhere have turned up their noses at the children they are supposed to be serving and looked instead to their own two-point agenda: (1) not going to work; (2) getting paid.

 

Randi Weingarten exercises more real practical political power than any senator or cabinet secretary, and her power is exercised exclusively in the interest of public-sector workers and the Democratic Party, which they effectively control. Perhaps it is time for Americans to take back some of that power.

The COVID Dead-Enders

By Michael Brendan Dougherty

Monday, March 29, 2021

 

There’s been a strange additive quality to the COVID-19 pandemic. First, health experts said not to wear masks. Then, they told you to wear masks whenever you were indoors and couldn’t socially distance. Then, most states issued guidance approved by their own health departments that required you to wear masks and socially distance at the same time. And suddenly, in deep-blue states, people began wearing masks even when they were completely alone outdoors. Then the authorities told you to wear two masks. At least until you could get the vaccine. And then, on second or third thought, maybe just start buying masks in bulk so that you’re supplied until 2022. So saith Fauci.

 

And now, in America, you may be getting the vaccine. Your elderly parents or grandparents very likely had access to get one already. If you have one of the many qualifying conditions, or your state is liberalizing the criteria quickly, you yourself may be getting the vaccines. You might be planning your first big family get-together again for this Easter because of it.

 

Or you may be one of the vaccine-hesitant and you intend to be a free-rider on the herd immunity that vaccination of over half the population and infection of many more will bring. You are looking forward to normality. To traveling again. Or to reunions, weddings, and yes, funerals that are unmasked and undistanced. To those life-moments when people cry tears of joy or sorrow into each other’s shoulders, rather than into N-95s, because that is the policy of the venue.

 

Unfortunately, for you, there is the COVID dead-ender, and he stands in your way.

 

The most common form are those who think some particular COVID-era convention must be a useful permanent obligation for the human race. Economist Bob Lawson wrote:

 

I have yet to see an argument for wearing masks (and distancing) now that doesn’t apply literally at all times. If you accept that masks have some effectiveness against spreading diseases, which seems reasonable, why should they not always be required? COVID-19 maybe 10x worse than say the flu and maybe 100x worse than other infectious diseases (even common colds can kill) but these diseases kill too. If masks are morally required now, why not before, and why not forever more?

 

It’s not that hard, actually. A mask might be required to help stop a particularly deadly pathogen. But it does have costs. First to socialization and development: Try putting a toddler through speech therapy when all institutions offering it require masks. People dislike the strangely clinical feel of masks in public spaces and the consequent reduced ability to read people socially. It also has costs to physical health. The transmission of less-serious colds and flus trains your immune system to fight off rhinoviruses, and even other coronaviruses.

 

There is also the chirping from many in the media and academia that they are “not ready for normal” life. Having chosen these fields already because they were predisposed toward introversion, they fear the exhaustion of the return of social obligations. Since May of last year they’ve been telling us, “I don’t like leaving the house anyway.” And with variants or even potential mutations out there, they think, maybe you — even you with the vaccine — you shouldn’t return to normal or leave the house, either.

 

And that is the real test, isn’t it? The final additive. Three weeks to bend the curve. Social distancing and masking. Just wait until the vaccine. Whoops! Never mind. Bloomberg writer Andreas Kluth put it simply at the top of his column: We must start planning for a permanent pandemic.

 

In Nature, Christie Aschwanden writes:

 

Scientists had thought that once people started being immunized en masse, herd immunity would permit society to return to normal. Most estimates had placed the threshold at 60–70% of the population gaining immunity, either through vaccinations or past exposure to the virus. But as the pandemic enters its second year, the thinking has begun to shift.

 

We’re in it forever. Kluth says that, while vaccines might be able to catch up with new COVID mutations, they won’t catch them all. Toward his conclusion, he writes: “The good news is that we keep getting better at responding. In each lockdown, for example, we damage the economy less than in the previous one.”

 

That’s the good news: We’re getting good at lockdowns! An adaptive skill of running and hiding. Even though the lockdowns have been a destroyer of small business, and a boon to big business. Even though COVID-19 lockdowns have brought about a baby bust across much of the world. Even though rates of depression are soaring, the good news is that lockdowns are getting less destructive.

 

Maybe because some of us aren’t locking down any longer. And as we see vaccination rates going up, and cases going down, we’re ready to live again.

Civics Showdown in Texas

By Stanley Kurtz

Monday, March 29, 2021

 

Texas is target number one in the Left’s play to turn the red states blue with a radicalized version of “civics.” What is variously called “action civics,” “civic engagement,” or “project-based civics,” requires K-12 students to engage in political protests, lobbying, and internships with advocacy organizations, all for course credit. The protests and lobbying are virtually always for causes on the left. In any case, it is totally inappropriate for schools to require extracurricular political activity, particularly when it subjects impressionable school children to teacher biases and peer pressure, as “action civics” invariably does.

 

The menu of practices that make up action civics has already been imposed by law in Illinois and Massachusetts. The coalition that brought action civics to Massachusetts gutted that state’s top-quality history standards and is currently leading a movement to impose leftist history and civics standards on the entire country. The Democratic bias of this coalition is painfully obvious.

 

The 2015 Illinois civics law, a Chicago-based application of Alinsky-style community organizing to school children, has recently been supplemented by statewide teaching standards that force critical race theory and “white fragility” training on even conservative downstate Illinois school districts. Now, iCivics, the Cambridge, Massachusetts-based organization at the head of the national effort to impose the Illinois and Massachusetts models on the nation, is working overtime to conquer Texas. If Texas falls, the remaining red states cannot be far behind.

 

Several civics bills have been introduced into the Texas Legislature and they run the gamut from 1) a bill that would impose leftist political indoctrination patterned on the Illinois and Massachusetts models on Texas; 2) stealth bills that would do the same over time; 3) a bill that would do no immediate harm but would offer no protections against the encroachments of action civics; 4) bills that would encourage civics, properly understood, while also protecting against the abuses represented by action civics and critical race theory.

 

I will treat each of these bill-types in turn. Given the clear and present danger, the moral is evident from the start, however. Texas needs to pass a law that not only supports genuine civic education but that blocks the dangerously politicized practices activists are currently trying to impose on the state’s schools under the misleading name of “civics.”

 

Texas state senator Judith Zaffirini, a Democrat firmly on the left, has introduced S. B. No 1740, a radical bill that would import the Illinois and Massachusetts models to Texas. Zaffirini’s bill would have civics teachers discuss current political and cultural controversies. This is the first plank in the action-civics platform, and it effectively permits a left-leaning teacher corps to import its political biases into the classroom. Zaffirini’s bill also mandates training in “media literacy, including instruction on verifying information and sources and identifying propaganda.” In practice, teaching materials on this topic push students away from conservative sources and portray mainstream media outlets and fact-checkers as fonts of truth. “Media literacy” teaching materials almost always avoid the issue of media bias and instead push what amounts to the Democratic Party’s position on “fake news.”

 

Most importantly, Zaffirini’s bill mandates the completion of a “civics practicum” — twice — first in eighth grade and then in high school. The term “civics practicum” is a euphemism for organized student protests and lobbying for course credit. In effect, the legislature would here be authorizing the state’s public-school teachers to organize students to lobby the legislature itself for (invariably liberal) legislation, all under the guise of “civics.”

 

The other key plank of the action-civics platform is “service learning,” a euphemism for after-school student internships at (overwhelmingly leftist) community organizations for course credit. While Zaffirini’s bill doesn’t mandate “service learning,” it does create an opening for it by listing a series of “civic skills” to be inculcated. One of the approved “civic skills” is learning to “collaborate and engage in community organizing.” Here the Texas legislature would turn students into unpaid laborers for Alinsky-style community organizing groups (with indoctrination thrown in free of charge), already a routine practice in Illinois.

 

While these troubling practices are openly authorized, there are also stealth provisions in S.B. No. 1740 that could easily be used by state education bureaucrats to import Illinois-style teaching standards based on critical race theory. Zaffirini’s bill mandates that teachers be trained in techniques for “educating diverse student populations,” including the “educationally disadvantaged” and those with “limited English proficiency.” For many, this might call to mind remedial English programs, and such. This legislative language, however, could easily be used by education bureaucrats to impose “Culturally Responsive Teaching,” a pedagogy grounded in critical race theory and focused on battling “white privilege,” “Eurocentrism,” and “white fragility,” while promoting “gender fluidity,” and grading based on student participation in political advocacy rather than classroom performance.

 

To top it off, S.B. No. 1740 creates a dedicated funding system that would allow leftist private foundations to gain control of civic education in Texas. This is modeled on Illinois, where the private funding of civic education is permitted by law. The result has been de facto management of civic education by foundations dedicated to leftist activism and critical race theory. You can bet that rich donors in Hollywood and Silicon Valley will take advantage of this law to turn Texas blue. In the guise of “free” private money that would ease the burden on Texas taxpayers, woke out-of-state donors will effectively wrest control of the state’s education system from voters.

 

This bill is being pushed on Texas by Massachusetts-based iCivics, and its allies. As I hinted in my public exchange with the head of iCivics, Louise Dube, iCivics has made a concerted effort to fool Texas Republicans into sponsoring this clunker of a bill. That effort failed and the bill has been picked up by a Democrat instead. The handful of conservative educators and policy wonks who have foolishly allied themselves with iCivics in search of “bipartisanship” need to understand that this is what their names are being used for — to trick red-state Republicans into backing this pernicious bill, and others like it.

 

I wish this were the only bad civics bill proposed in Texas, but that is far from the case. The other bills are worse for being even stealthier than the already misleading Zaffirini bill. Representative James Talarico and Senator Nathan Johnson, both Democrats, have introduced identical bills, H.B. No. 57 and S.B. No. 229, which direct the state to offer courses and develop curricula in “project-based civics.” The problem is that almost no one understands that “project-based civics” means group protests and lobbying by students. These bills are filled with anodyne-sounding phrases that require students to “work cooperatively,” “identify issues in the community,” “develop solutions,” and create public policy “action plans.” Unless you already know a lot about action civics, it is almost impossible to recognize that the bill is authorizing group political protests and lobbying by school children.

 

In the last session of the Texas Legislature, what is now H.B. No. 57 cleared the House almost unanimously, largely because it looked like a harmless, non-controversial civics bill. At that point (and even today), almost no representatives had even heard of “action civics” or “project-based civics.” It wasn’t until the bill got to the Senate that anyone recognized the legislature was about to authorize after-school student protests and lobbying for course credit. The advocates of action civics are well-practiced at deception.

 

The most devious and potentially damaging bill of all may be Keith Bell’s H.B. No. 3211. Bell is a conservative Republican, and I can well understand how he might have been lured by lobbyists into carrying this bill. H.B No. 3211 authorizes the establishment of “civics academies,” schools dedicated to promoting civic education, and the language doesn’t overtly mandate action civics. Sounds okay. If you know the history of the action-civics movement, however, this bill is clearly recognizable as a stealth attempt to plant action civics in Texas.

 

Illinois remains the purest and most radical model of action civics. The groundwork for the 2015 Illinois action civics law was laid by the creation of “democracy schools,” also called, “civic readiness schools,” precisely like the “civics academies” established by H.B. No. 3211. Those Illinois “democracy schools” adopted the whole panoply of action-civics practices, from discussion of current controversial issues, to internships with leftist community organizations, to mandated student protests and lobbying via “action civics.” All of this came under the innocent-sounding heading of “civic skills.”

 

Bell’s H.B. No. 3211 includes a directive for civics academies to discuss current controversies and teach media literacy. The rest of the action-civics menu is covered under the vague heading of inculcating “civic skills” like learning how to “effectively engage.” You have to be pretty knowledgeable to realize that “civic engagement” is another common euphemism for action civics. In short, H.B. No. 3211 sets up a little kingdom within the Texas school system that will be run on the same radical principles Zaffirini’s bill tries to force on the entire state system immediately. In Illinois, the “democracy schools” ended up as a kind of trial-run for the law that eventually forced action civics on the entire state. No doubt, the same endgame is planned for Texas.

 

As in Illinois, there are even provisions in H.B. No. 3211 that allow “private providers” to “assist” in setting up the civics academies. That is an open invitation for liberal foundations, including the “experts” from Illinois, to come down to Texas at the invitation of left-leaning state bureaucrats and set up civics academies on the Illinois model.

 

Perhaps most disturbingly of all, H.B No. 3211 gives the state education bureaucracy virtual carte blanche to revise the state’s education standards in line with the latest civics “research.” There’s plenty of “research” done by highly interested advocates of action civics for state bureaucrats to draw on. That means this bill is an open invitation for left-leaning state bureaucrats to import action civics materials from Illinois and Massachusetts, free from legislative oversight (a process I’ve warned about before).

 

Texas Senate Education Committee Chair Larry Taylor’s civics bill, S.B. 2026, provides welcome relief from the aforementioned legislative disasters-in-the-making. Taylor’s bill directs the Texas State Board of Education to draw up a curriculum around the core features of a proper civics course, with specific direction to focus on documents such as the Declaration, the Constitution, the Federalist Papers, Tocqueville, the first Lincoln-Douglas debate, and the writings of the Founders. Although state bureaucrats have some scope for interpretation, the directives are admirably specific and on the mark. In my ideal world, curricular issues would be handled chiefly at the local, rather than the state, level. That said, this is a workable civics bill.

 

Although Taylor’s bill has merit, overreaching leftist bureaucrats (and Texas does have some) might still find a way to get around it and impose action civics. It would not be difficult to take advantage of a provision in existing law calling on educators to “keep abreast of the development of creative and innovative techniques of instruction,” to start sliding action civics into the schools.

 

Given the raft of bills trying to quietly impose action civics on Texas, not to mention the scope for bureaucratic manipulation and overreach, the only real solution is a legislative ban on the whole menu of action civics techniques. That is exactly what is proposed in identical bills offered by Republican State Representatives Steve Toth and James White, H.B. No. 7979 and H.B. No. 4093. These bills contain the “positive” provisions of Sen. Taylor’s civics bill, while adding provisions that bar action civics and critical race theory. With one exception, the “negative” provisions of these bills are based on the “Partisanship Out of Civics Act,” model legislation I have published with the National Association of Scholars and explained here.

 

Like the Partisanship Out of Civics Act, the Texas bills by Steve Toth and James White protect teachers from being forced to discuss current political and social controversies, and encourage teachers to explore divergent and contending perspectives when they do choose to raise current debates. The Toth and White proposals also bar extracurricular political activity — like internships with lobby groups or out-of-school student protests — from receiving course credit. Training based on critical race theory is barred for teachers and other educators. Private funders are barred from grabbing control of the state’s civics programs as well.

 

The Toth and White bills add an additional provision not in the model Partisanship Out of Civics Act, however. This provision bars critical race theory from the K-12 curriculum. I am both deeply sympathetic to this provision and concerned about unintended consequences. This is not fundamentally an issue of free speech. K-12 teachers have an obligation to impart officially approved curricula and do not enjoy academic freedom on the university model. Nonetheless, banning ideas from the classroom, even where the right to do so exists, invites abuse and blowback. Beyond that, I worry about state curriculum bans overriding local authority. On the other hand, state education bureaucrats in Illinois have already imposed outrageous critical race theory-based teaching standards on the entire state, and without proper legislative warrant. Moreover, just as Title VI of the Civil Rights Act bars federal aid to colleges that discriminate by race, making school children feel guilty or ashamed of their skin color and its supposedly inborn “privilege” is well into the territory of intolerable discrimination that any state ought to be allowed to ban. The complex challenge raised by state-level curriculum bans on critical race theory is something I hope to take up in greater detail in the future.

 

That issue aside, Texas needs to pass the matching civics bills offered by Steve Toth and James White. If one of the action-civics bills on offer passes instead, or if overzealous education bureaucrats find a way to impose action civics on the sly, Texas classrooms will be irrevocably politicized, and leftist indoctrination will surely turn this great state blue.

 

One more point. A broad coalition has now organized to oppose action civics. Up to now, legislators could not be expected to recognize or anticipate this stealthy education initiative from the left. Henceforth, however, the stakes are out in the open. Should legislators impose leftist protests and indoctrination on K-12 systems in their states via “action civics,” voters will hold them responsible.

A Senseless Murder in D.C. Receives Little Outcry

By Alexandra DeSanctis

Monday, March 29, 2021

 

Last week in Washington, D.C., two teenaged girls attacked and killed an Uber Eats delivery driver while attempting to steal his car. The girls, whose names haven’t been released as they are minors, entered the car of 66-year-old Mohammad Anwar carrying a Taser.

 

Anwar’s death was caught on video, but I warn you, the footage is horrifyingly graphic.

 

“This is my car!” Anwar shouts at one point as he attempts to reenter the car, which he had exited to make food deliveries. The suspect behind the wheel then accelerates with Anwar hanging halfway out of the car, stuck between the driver’s seat and the door. At the next intersection, the car veers and crashes between parked cars, and Anwar can be seen flying from the vehicle and landing on the sidewalk, no longer moving.

 

National Guard members who happened to be present removed the girls from the car, and one of the girls walks past Anwar, lying lifelessly on the sidewalk, without looking at him. Unaccountably, the National Guard members present did not appear to stop and try to help the victim. Anwar died in the hospital from his injuries. Police later said that the suspects had used a Taser on him.

 

According to the Metropolitan Police Department, the suspects are a 13-year-old girl from southeast Washington, D.C., and a 15-year-old girl from Maryland. They have been charged with murder and armed carjacking. Anwar, a Pakistani immigrant who arrived in the U.S. in 2014, worked for Uber Eats in order to help support his wife, children, and four grandchildren.

 

In the wake of this brutal and senseless murder, some of the public responses have been especially egregious. For example, D.C. mayor Muriel Bowser, who offered no comment on Anwar’s murder, nonetheless tweeted a video on how to prevent carjacking.

 

“Auto theft is a crime of opportunity,” Bowser tweeted. “Follow these steps to reduce the risk of your vehicle becoming a target. Remember the motto, #ProtectYourAuto.”

 

Her tweet appears to have since been deleted.

 

CNN, meanwhile, shared the site’s news story reporting on the murder on Twitter with this thoughtless tweet:

 

Police said the girls, 13 and 15, assaulted an Uber Eats driver with a Taser while carjacking him, which led to an accident in which he was fatally injured.

 

Anyone who’s seen the video or has read about what’s shown in the footage is well aware that the incident wasn’t “an accident” that fatally injured Anwar. The only word for it is murder. One can’t help but wonder if the reluctance to condemn this crime stems from left-wing hesitancy about naming the race of the perpetrators, who are African American.

 

Hunter Walker, a White House correspondent for Yahoo News, for instance, tweeted over the weekend that “there are a lot of far right commentators sharing this horrific story and highlighting the fact the perpetrators are Black.”

 

Walker went on to assert that “there are also more mainstream conservatives sharing this story including from outlets like the Daily Caller and GOP operatives. In some cases, they’re cooying [sic] videos taken directly from the far right explicitly racist voices including popular Gab and Telegram accounts.”

 

But of course, the race of the perpetrators doesn’t matter at all, and no credible source on the right is suggesting that it is the key issue here. What matters is that an innocent man was senselessly murdered, and his horrible death deserves attention and outcry no matter who killed him.

 

Big Tech Targets Religious Groups, Too

 

A new report from the Napa Legal Institute suggests that it’s not just conservatives and right-wing groups that have had trouble with social-media and tech companies removing their content. The report highlights the many occasions on which big tech companies have banned, silenced, or otherwise flagged online content from religious groups and individuals, as well.

 

According to the report, religious leaders and institutions have experienced this behavior from tech companies about once per week this year alone. In a Wall Street Journal op-ed, Napa Legal Institute president Josh Holdenried has more details:

 

The previous month, Twitter blocked a post from the Daily Citizen, which is run by Focus on the Family, an evangelical Christian nonprofit, and suspended its account. The reason: a tweet that respectfully challenged the underlying premise of transgenderism. Twitter made a similar move against Catholic World Report, though the company later said it had acted in error. Ryan T. Anderson of the Ethics and Public Policy Center saw Amazon ban his book criticizing transgenderism, “When Harry Became Sally.” Amazon shows no signs of changing course.

 

Books from specific publishers are often targeted, such as Catholic TAN Books. One of its authors is Paul Kengor, who wrote an anticommunist tract called “The Devil and Karl Marx. ” TAN Books can’t advertise his work on Facebook, or that of Carrie Gress, who wrote a book on “rescuing the culture from toxic femininity.” Facebook has also banned ads for Kimberly Cook’s book, “Motherhood Redeemed.” The offending ad called it “a book that challenges feminism in the modern world.”

 

When posts are removed, ads are blocked, and accounts are banned, public pushback and media criticism often lead tech companies to rethink their actions. Last October, after the pro-life Susan B. Anthony List was targeted by one of Facebook’s third-party fact-checkers for “misleading claims” about Joe Biden’s policy on late-term abortions, the group went on a media blitz, securing both a reversal and an apology.

 

There’s no question that tech companies see themselves as having a role to play in our “cancel culture,” though progressives generally prefer to call it something like “combatting disinformation.” But if a book as sensible, compassionate, and rigorously researched as Ryan Anderson’s When Harry Became Sally is no longer allowed to appear on Amazon’s shelves, we are left to believe that, in the view of tech companies, there’s simply no room for debate.

 

Conservative views on marriage, sex, and gender are, in essence, anathema in the world of the Internet — and, according to this new report, all the more so when those arguments or beliefs are put forth from a religious perspective.

When the Party’s Over

By Kevin D. Williamson

Sunday, March 28, 2021

 

Somebody needs to remind President Biden about the Golden Rule — the real Golden Rule: He who has the gold makes the rules, and we are clean out of ducats.

 

Jim Rogers, the famous investor, offered a version of that golden rule when explaining why he decamped to the Far East and has raised his daughters speaking Mandarin: “You know where the assets are, and you know where the debts are.” President Bill Clinton, enraged at the way the financial markets constrained his grandiose ambitions, observed ruefully that in his next life he wanted to be reincarnated as the bond market so that he would finally know what it’s like to have some real power. Mann Tracht, Un Gott Lacht, goes the Yiddish proverb: Man plans, and God laughs.

 

The bond market isn’t God, but, if you are a politician living on credit, it’s close enough.

 

The U.S. government currently is flooding the markets with newly issued U.S. debt, and President Joe Biden (three words still incredible to write) and his Democratic allies in Congress intend to keep the tap wide open as long as they can. But there are real limits on what they can do — and we already may be starting to feel the pinch.

 

The U.S. government borrows money mostly by selling bonds at auction. Demand for those bonds has been very strong for a very long time, for reasons that should be obvious: The United States has the largest economy of any nation in the world, is a financial and military superpower, and enjoys stable government (miraculously stable, considering the character of the jackasses we routinely put in charge of it). Though the dollar may not be quite as good as gold, it’s still the best option on offer. (There aren’t enough Swiss francs to go around.) But even if you are the world’s premier Triple-A platinum-level borrower, nobody (normally) lends for free. The interest the U.S. government pays on its debt is the price we pay to borrow money.

 

And, for a long time, that interest rate has been approximately squat.

 

So, from one point of view, Washington’s recent borrowing spree has been rational: When you can borrow for next to nothing, why not max out? Governments are not like families, political rhetoric notwithstanding, but think of it in the household context: If you’re making 5 percent on your invested savings, then borrowing money at 2 percent to pay for your kids’ college is a perfectly sensible thing to do, even if you have the money to simply write the check. Borrowing at 2 percent and investing at 5 percent is a great deal — for as long as it lasts.

 

But it won’t last forever. It never does. And the debt piles up in a sneaky fashion: Even at the low interest rates we’ve seen in recent years, paying interest on our national debt adds up to a heavy expense, amounting to more than a tenth of all federal tax collections in 2019.

 

The U.S. government has recently held a few auctions for some billions of dollars’ worth of new debt, and those auctions have ranged from “tepid” and “weak” to “not a good sign” to “a disaster” in the estimates of market-watchers quoted in the Financial Times, which has reported a great deal of not-as-bad-as-it-could-have-been, whistling-past-the-graveyard talk, e.g.:

 

Blake Gwinn, head of US rates strategy at NatWest Markets, said the auction was “not a good sign for demand”, but compared with the “disaster” of the previous seven-year auction in February, which rekindled fears about the health of the $21tn US government bond market, it was something of a “relief” for investors.

 

If anything short of “disaster” is a “relief,” it is time to start paying attention — especially if you happen to be a representative of the most indebted organization in human history.

 

One of the things that spooks bond investors is the fear of inflation. Another way of saying “fear of inflation” is “fear that the dollar will lose value,” meaning that when you lend the U.S. government money, the dollars you eventually get paid back with are going to be a hell of a lot less valuable than the dollars you lent. If you lend somebody money at 2 percent when there’s no inflation, you’re making a profit; if you lend somebody money at 2 percent when inflation is 5 percent, then you’re losing money. The guys on Wall Street and in the central banks may not be as smart as they think they are, but they are smart enough to know when they are losing money. They have people who keep up with that sort of thing.

 

The U.S. government props up demand for its own debt in part by having the Federal Reserve buy its bonds when nobody else wants them. That ends up being what is known as “monetizing the debt,” or creating new money ex nihilo in order to finance borrowing when the normal lenders are no longer entirely buying your story. That puts our government — and our entire economy — on a tightrope. Creating new money invites general price inflation, and the threat of such inflation makes investors less likely to buy our bonds at the low rates Washington has come to take for granted, which puts more pressure on the Fed to create even more money to take up the slack — your classic vicious circle. It’s the kind of trick that is hard to get right and easy to get very, very wrong.

 

We Americans sometimes arrogantly think of debt crises or problematic inflation as problems experienced only in the poor and sweaty and exotic corners of the world — I am pretty sure the editors over at the Wall Street Journal must have a keyboard shortcut for “Argentina defaults” — but the United States was a perfectly normal and reasonably well-governed country when it was ravaged by inflation from the 1960s until the 1980s, and Canada was not a banana republic when it was wracked by a debt crisis in the 1990s.

 

These problems aren’t the result of divine judgment — they are the result of math.

 

During the Trump years, the U.S. government blew through money like MC Hammer at a Lamborghini dealership in 1991, and, with Democrats controlling all the levers in Congress, the Biden administration is freight-training U.S. dollars out the door as fast as it can. That $1.9 trillion stimulus bill comes on top of a $900 billion package passed in December, $953 billion allocated to extend the Paycheck Protection Program in July, the $2.2 trillion CARES Act before that, etc. Biden is about to propose another $3 trillion in infrastructure spending. For many people, those numbers are pure gobbledygook. But look at them context: The U.S. government expects to collect only about $3.8 trillion in taxes this year. A third of that will be consumed by Social Security alone, while Medicare will eat up almost another $1 trillion by itself. That doesn’t leave much left over, and we’ve been running big deficits even in years when we don’t have an epidemic to deal with or multi-trillion-dollar infrastructure schemes.

 

So where will the money come from?

 

Some will answer, tremulously: China!

 

Japan is actually the largest foreign holder of U.S. debt, with China in second place, followed by the United Kingdom in third. But overseas central banks have not shown an enormous appetite for U.S. debt recently: China spent much of 2020 reducing its holdings of such debt, and so did Japan. (It should be noted that these things do not move in a linear fashion — they’ll go up and down. But the recent trend is down.) For a long time, China bought up U.S. bonds for many of the same reasons as any other institutional investor, and also because Beijing has a preference for a relatively strong dollar, which makes Chinese exports more attractive to U.S. buyers. But that math is changing a little bit, because China also is a big importer of U.S. goods, from farm produce to aircraft. (Before President Trump launched his trade war, China accounted for 20 percent of U.S. motor-vehicle exports, up from less than 1 percent in 2001.) You wouldn’t know it from our political conversation, but it’s actually been quite some time since Beijing was making serious efforts to drive down the value of its currency in pursuit of an export edge. Even a brutal and nonconsensual government will do that only for so long, because it is in reality a policy of artificially lowering your own people’s standard of living and devaluing your own assets. Back in the queasy days of 2009, China’s top banking regulator gave a blunt assessment of Beijing’s relationship with U.S. debt as it appears in trillion-dollar installments: “We know the dollar is going to depreciate. So, we hate you guys, but there is nothing much we can do.” That was then; figuring out what might be done about the same relationship now is one of the aims of Beijing’s “dual circulation” strategy.

 

We spend a lot of money on Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, and the military — sobering, incomprehensible, vertigo-inducing amounts of money. If interest rates on our debt go back to something closer to their historical averages, then that would add about a Pentagon’s worth or a Social Security’s worth of new spending obligations onto the federal budget. For context, interest payments could easily jump from around 11 percent of all federal tax revenue to half of all tax revenue — and they conceivably could jump to more than 100 percent of tax revenue, which would be catastrophic. Unlike farm subsidies or cowboy-poetry festivals, paying the interest on the national debt is not really optional. Defaulting would crater the U.S. economy and set off an economic crisis unlike anything the world has ever seen.

 

There’s an old joke that if you owe the bank $1 million and can’t pay, then you have a problem — but if you owe the bank $1 billion and can’t pay, then the bank has a problem. There is some truth to that, but only a little. It isn’t the case that debtors are always defenseless hostages to creditors, but when it is time to go and ask for yet more money, every debtor is a dancing monkey to precisely the extent that the guys with the gold demand. That’s the real inflection point: the point at which creditors start to say, “No,” or, more likely, “Okay, but it’s going to cost you a lot more than what you used to pay.” And so we have two options. The first is that we can start taking the necessary measures to put our fiscal affairs in order and reduce the deficit and debt to a manageable size relative to that of our economy.

 

And the second option?

 

Dance, monkey.