What the Gun Debate Misses

By Kevin D. Williamson

Tuesday, May 31, 2022

 

On Sunday, I answered as briefly as I could – which in many cases was not very briefly at all – some common questions about the gun-control debate. I have a few even-less-brief observations for Tuesday, but I think you will find them useful.

 

I begin with what seems to be a mystifying paradox at the center of our gun-control efforts: We only want to enforce the law on the law-abiding, while we ignore the law-breakers almost entirely in our gun-control debate.

 

Almost every single substantive gun-control proposal put forward by our progressive friends is oriented toward adding new restrictions and regulatory burdens to federally licensed firearms dealers and the people who do business with them: what they can sell and what they cannot sell, to whom they can sell, under what conditions they may sell, etc. But, as I often remark, gun-store customers are just about the most law-abiding demographic in the United States, even accounting for situations such as that of the Uvalde killer, who was able to purchase his firearms legally because he had no prior criminal record. The best information we have comes from the Department of Justice, which found in 2019 that less than 2 percent of all prisoners had a firearm obtained from a retail source at the time they committed their crimes. A different 2013 study by researchers at the Bloomberg School of Public Health at Johns Hopkins found that only 13 percent of the offenders in the state prison population obtained their firearms from a retail source.

 

Criminals mostly don’t get their guns at gun stores — because they mostly can’t.

 

In contrast to those modest figures of 2 percent or 13 percent, the great majority of murders committed in the United States — upwards of 80 percent — are committed by people with prior arrest records, often by people with prior convictions for violent crimes or prior weapons offenses — and almost none of our gun-control proposals is targeted at this group.

 

If you have not bought a gun from a gun dealer, then you might not appreciate just exactly how law-abiding and how i-dotting and t-crossing you have to be to make the purchase: Not only are you excluded for a felony conviction, you also are excluded for misdemeanor convictions involving domestic violence or any other misdemeanor for which you could have been sentenced to more than one year in jail, irrespective of the sentence you actually received; you are excluded if you are a “fugitive from justice,” meaning someone with an active arrest warrant who has left the state to avoid arrest; you are excluded if you have been dishonorably discharged from the military; you are excluded if you are a drug addict or a user of illegal drugs; you are excluded if you are an illegal alien or an alien legally present on a nonimmigrant visa; you are excluded if you have been judged mentally deficient by a court of law or committed to a mental institution; you are excluded if you are subject to a restraining order; you are excluded from purchasing a handgun if you are not a resident of the state in which the purchase is being made; you are excluded if you are buying a gun for anyone other than yourself; you are excluded if the information on your government-issued identification does not match current records and the information on your application, a provision that is enforced with such exactitude that an application may be rejected if it says “111 Main St.” instead of “111 Main Street.”

 

Democrats who complain that it easier to buy a gun than it is to vote are lying for partisan political purposes and should be dismissed with contempt.

 

That being said, there are some deficiencies in the National Instant Criminal Background Check System (NICS) that should be part of the conversation. One is that NICS depends on a variety of agencies for reporting, and these agencies are not always reliable. For example, the shooter in the Sutherland Springs church attack should have been excluded from buying firearms, but the U.S. Air Force neglected to report his criminal history to the FBI, which manages NICS. (A judge has held the Air Force partially responsible for the deaths in that case.) Other problems: Non-federal fugitives are not often reported as such, and in the majority of cases the state with the warrant does not know whether the fugitive has left the state; some localities are slow or negligent in reporting restraining orders or misdemeanor convictions, and some apparently don’t even know what needs to be reported; mental-health reporting has long been slow and desultory — the number of mental-health records in the NICS database jumped from 234,628 in 2005 to 3.8 million in 2014 not because of some sudden spike in mental illness in the United States but because the feds made a priority out of it and put money into helping states and municipalities meet their reporting obligations; the United States does a notoriously poor job of tracking illegal aliens and enforcing immigration law; the process basically relies on self-reporting for illegal drug use.

 

That lattermost issue is dramatically illustrated by the case of Hunter Biden, who almost certainly violated federal law by lying about his longstanding drug problems when purchasing a handgun in 2018, but was never charged — and, let’s be frank, never will be charged and knew he was never going to be charged, even if caught — under the very law his father boasts of having “shepherded through Congress.”

 

These are real shortcomings in the system. But, even with that being the case, I should reiterate here that the data very strongly suggest that people who buy firearms from firearms dealers very rarely commit crimes of any kind with those firearms — less than 2 percent of the prisoners in the federal system and about 13 percent of those in the state systems had a firearm obtained from a retail source when they committed their crimes. (And even those figures may overstate the prevalence of retail-sourced firearms in that they probably include some straw purchases and firearms stolen from retailers.) Given the very weak statistical relationship between buying a gun from a gun dealer and committing a crime with that gun, why is there so much focus on federally licensed firearms dealers and the people who do business with them?

 

The answer is that this conversation has almost nothing to do with violent crime, and almost nothing to do with policies aimed at reducing violent crime.

 

The gun-control debate is first and foremost a culture-war issue for Democrats. There is a great deal of violent crime in the United States, and that crime is concentrated in big cities over which Democrats enjoy an effective monopoly of political power. The people who commit most of the murders in the United States — and the people who most often die in those murders — check a lot of Democratic-voter demographic boxes: They are very disproportionately low-income African Americans in urban areas. Democrats are desperate to put a more Republican-looking face on the violent-crime problem, preferably one that is older, white, middle-aged, rural, southern, and Evangelical. That is the reason for the focus on the National Rifle Association in particular and on gun dealers and “gun culture” in general. As is so often the case in our contemporary politics, what we are talking about matters mostly because it is a way of not talking about something else.

 

I am not particularly an admirer of the National Rifle Association. The NRA once was a very effective — and notably bipartisan — single-issue advocacy organization, focused on the legal rights and interests of U.S. gun owners. Contrary to the myth that has grown up around it, the NRA has never been powerful because it throws around a great deal of money — which it doesn’t do: In the 2020 cycle, the NRA was not among the top 1,000 political donors or among the top 250 in lobbying outlays. It is true that the NRA is currently in a weakened condition after a series of self-inflicted wounds, but even back in 2012 it was No. 301 among campaign contributors and only No. 181 on lobbying outlays. The NRA’s strength has never been its pocketbook — it has always been the fact that it represents millions and millions of American gun owners who prioritize Second Amendment issues when they go to the polls. The NRA’s political clout has always been of the most genuine kind — the kind you cannot purchase. If you think clout like that can be bought, ask Mike Bloomberg about his efforts on the gun-control front.

 

The NRA went wrong when it made itself into a subsidiary of the Republican Party and allowed itself to be taken over by people who wanted to be Fox News pundits — a textbook example of Yuval Levin’s observation about self-interested people who use institutions as platforms. (I do not and never have given a fig about Wayne LaPierre’s million-dollar salary and his natty Zegna suits — frankly, I am surprised that he isn’t paid more: Very effective nonprofit executives do pretty well.) The NRA was better off — and Americans’ gun rights were more secure — when the group still had a few high-ranking Democrats on its side, and when its employees were not famous. You probably can’t name one employee of Squire Patton Boggs, a Washington lobbying powerhouse, and that suits the firm and its clients just fine. It is true that the NRA’s position as culture-war lightning rod was not entirely a matter of the organization’s own choosing, but it has leaned into the role more than it had to.

 

If this were a matter of public policy, the thousands of people who were standing outside the convention center in Houston to shout obscenities at the NRA would be standing outside the office of the U.S. attorney for the Northern District of Chicago and raising absolute hell about the failure — about the refusal – of the federal government and most big-city DAs to prosecute straw-buyer cases. If this were about policy, Joe Biden would be in New York with Kathy Hochul in a headlock demanding to know why career criminals arrested on murder charges are being released — without bail! — into the streets of our largest city. Or, short of that, President Biden could take a brief walk down the street to the ATF headquarters and find out why the agency won’t even bother to go around and pick up guns in sales that it knows were wrongly approved. But none of that happens.

 

The reason none of that happens is that this is not about crime — it is about culture war and cultural enemies.

 

Don’t take my word for it: Ask Charles Blow of the New York Times, who demands that “Gun Safety Must Be Everything That Republicans Fear,” as the headline puts it — not what is effective, not what is reasonable or prudent, but whatever it is that Republicans don’t want. Blow is unusual only in that he is relatively open about the fact that this is a culture issue for him: “Gun culture,” he writes, “is a canard and a corruption.”

 

(Set aside, for the moment, that a marquee columnist for the New York Times apparently does not know what the word “canard” means.)

 

The Democratic Party and the progressive movement more generally are dominated culturally and financially by college-educated, affluent, white metropolitan professionals, mostly living in those two-thirds of U.S. households in which there is no firearm present. They present themselves as the champions of poor, black, urban communities about which they know almost nothing, and understand themselves as the enemies of lower-income, aging, white, rural communities — the stereotypical NASCAR crowd — about which they also know almost nothing. Never mind that much of the increase in gun ownership in recent years has been driven by women, African Americans, and recreational shooters in urban areas — the eggbound snake-handling hayseeds and would-be militiamen of Georgia and Alabama, whose cultural prominence is almost exclusively a matter of the progressive imagination, simply must be the face of gun ownership, at least for the purposes of culture war. Never mind that most of the violent crime involving guns in this country is carried out in zip codes where the voters elect Democrats almost exclusively, and never mind that the reason we do not act on those “common sense” gun-control measures on which almost all of us notionally agree — such as prosecuting straw-buying and other everyday weapons offenses — is the fact that doing this would irritate important Democratic constituencies in the big cities and among unionized government workers.

 

Even if we read the data in the way that is most generous to the gun-control cause, fewer than one in five criminals uses a gun acquired from a gun dealer, while more than four out of five murderers have prior arrest records. If we go by the DOJ findings, the share of criminals who use guns from gun dealers is more like 2 percent. And yet almost all of the new proposals from Democrats are new regulations and restrictions on firearms dealers, while almost none is focused on the relatively small body of prior offenders who carry out most murder and other violent crime. The progressives are protesting the NRA in Houston and not in front of city hall in Philadelphia or St. Louis.

 

Among the few proposals that are targeted at someone other than licensed gun dealers and their customers is the idea of so-called universal background checks, also known as “closing the gun-show loophole.”

 

According to the DOJ, the share of prisoners who obtained guns through gun shows was — commit this figure to memory — 0.8 percent.

 

Like I said, this isn’t about crime — it is about Kulturkampf.

 

A Few More Thoughts about This . . .

 

After nearly 3,000 Americans died in the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, nobody — nobody sane, anyway — said: “But the real killer is heart disease!” Terrorist attacks are consequential not only because of the numbers killed but also because they change the nature of public life — that is, after all, what they are intended to do. Likewise, the number of Americans who die in massacres such as the ones recently carried out in Buffalo and Uvalde represents a tiny share of the total number of Americans who die in homicides, most of those deaths being the result of ordinary, quotidian crime. An American public-school student is considerably more likely to die in a school-bus accident than in a mass shooting. But those homicidal spectaculars change the nature of school life, and of public life in general.

 

It is for this reason that they deserve our attention, not because they tell us anything about the lethality of any particular class of firearms or the prudence of changing the regulation of such firearms. The killer in Uvalde was armed with a semiautomatic 5.56mm rifle, not exactly a “weapon of war” (that phrase itself presents a complicated question; see below) but a very effective firearm, and, not coincidentally, the most common rifle sold in the United States. But the killer was barricaded in a room full of fourth-graders for an hour — he could have been armed with a revolver, a kitchen knife, or a brick and achieved the same results. Most of the victims at Sandy Hook were six or seven years old — it is difficult to imagine how magazine-size restrictions would make much of a difference in such a situation. The worst school massacre in American history was carried out nearly a century ago by a killer who used bombs rather than firearms. These kinds of crimes are not going to be prevented by the sorts of measures being put forward.

 

But surely it is the case that we could, if we were serious about this — which, as I argue above, we really aren’t — walk and chew gum at the same time, using straightforward law-enforcement methods to reduce the numbers of ordinary criminal murders while also working on new data-driven techniques to try to identify mass killers and prevent their crimes before they happen, while also taking commonsense measures to improve security at schools and in other public places.

 

One thing we are going to have to do is decide whether we still think 18-year-olds are adults. Some gun-control advocates would like to see all firearms sales restricted to those who are at least 21 years of age. This is not an isolated idea: Increasingly, our colleges are organized around the belief that students as old as 22 years of age are, in effect, children who require “safe spaces” and “trigger warnings” and other measures by which school staff members act in loco parentis. In certain situations, a person can be charged with a felony sexual crime for having consensual sexual relations with an 18-year-old or a 20-year-old, even in places where the formal age of sexual consent is less than 18 years of age. And, of course, we generally forbid alcohol sales to legal adults younger than 21 years of age.

 

I am not what Michael Oakeshott would have called a rationalist, in that I am perfectly comfortable with some measure of organic inconsistency in the law, but I do not think that it probably is tenable in the long run to have an explicitly guaranteed constitutional right denied to people who are old enough to vote. Nor do I think that it is tenable to have people who otherwise enjoy the full rights of adulthood treated as though they were children in the context of higher education. What this means — although the notion is practically taboo — is that it is time to reconsider not the Second Amendment but the 26th Amendment, which forces the states to enfranchise 18-year-olds. If we are going to proceed as though adulthood starts at 21, then we need to raise the voting age to 21, too — because we don’t give children the vote.

 

Of course, we’ll have to do something about all those child soldiers in our military, with the median age of new Marines hovering around 19.

 

‘Weapons of War’

 

As I have pointed out many times, the 5.56mm semiautomatic rifles that progressives like to call “weapons of war” are not really that, inasmuch as they are not generally issued to troops in the United States or elsewhere. But do you know what is a weapon of war? Granddad’s deer rifle. The ubiquitous Remington 700 bolt-action rifle has long been a favorite of hunters, and it also is the go-to sniper rifle for military services around the world. Earlier American wars were fought with bolt-action .30-06 rifles functionally identical to what most American hunters used for generations.

 

Gun-control activists insist that AR-style rifles are not hunting rifles. A typical tirade found on the Internet: “An AR-15 is not a hunting rifle. Do you really need a high-powered rifle round and high-capacity magazine to take down Bambi? Last time I checked, Bambi wasn’t wearing a bullet proof vest or hiding behind cement barriers.” That isn’t Joe Biden, but it could be.

 

This is, of course, wrong on every count: The rifles in question not only are hunting rifles; they are today the most common hunting rifle in the United States. But they are not rifles that typically fire a “high-powered” round — in fact, the standard 5.56mm round has long been considered insufficiently powerful for humane deer hunting and has been prohibited at various times in various places for that purpose for that reason. Hog-hunting is one of the most popular kinds of pursuit in the United States, and many outfitters will not allow a hunter to use a 5.56mm rifle for hogs — because it is not powerful enough. The idea of shooting through concrete barriers and body armor with that round is an uncertain proposal at best. You’d be better off with a traditional big-game hunting rifle, which is four or five times as powerful as the “higher-powered” 5.56mm. But, in any case, most of the popular hunter cartridges either began as military rounds (such as the .30-06) or still are military rounds (such as the .308 Winchester). As a practical matter, you aren’t going to find a rifle that is good for killing elk that isn’t also good for killing people.

 

And that fact matters . . . almost not at all, since rifles are almost never used in murders in the United States, accounting for only 2.5 percent of homicides. What murders in 2022 have in common with murders in 1922 is that the gun most commonly used in a murder is the most common handgun. Once upon a time, it was the Colt Single-Action Army revolver, and then it was the .38 Special, and now it is the 9mm pistol. In 20 years, it may be something else — but the shooters probably will be the same people, i.e., habitual criminals with prior records.

 

And gun-control advocates will still be focused on the 2 percent of criminals who buy guns from gun dealers, or possibly the 0.8 percent who get them from gun shows.

 

In Other News . . .

If you haven’t had enough gun stuff, check out this brief report from NYPD. In 2021, the department made 4,499 gun arrests, resulting in . . . one conviction at trial. There were 698 plea deals and 983 dismissals.

Bezos Schools the White House

By Tomas J. Philipson

Tuesday, May 31, 2022

 

As the White House is running through all possible causes of inflation except the real ones (its policies and the Fed’s), the latest and certainly most novel economic cause involves the rich paying too little in taxes. The White House’s inflation response is becoming a bit like having an arsonist put out fires.

 

Just as the White House lacks an understanding of the causes of inflation, it does not understand that the rich, such as Jeff Bezos, are already paying their fair share. Our country’s roughly 700 billionaires and the 1 percent they are part of are helping others more than the rest of us are, even if they paid nothing in taxes.

 

While the rich are often portrayed as not helping out, the argument is completely divorced from economic logic and assumes that sending taxes to Washington is the only way to help. Indeed, a large literature in economics finds that nearly all of the benefits of technological change, often spearheaded by entrepreneurs such as Bezos who wind up personally wealthy, are passed on to consumers through lower prices and access to new goods and services. In addition, the super-wealthy often give away much of what they earn as charitable donations — a more efficient way to help the poor than paying taxes.

 

In a capitalist economy, no one gets rich without helping others. If you would be willing to pay $10,000 for having a cell phone but bought it for $500, the difference of $9,500 is what economists call “consumer surplus” and represents the added value the company helped to give you — by definition free of charge. The companies created and/or operated by our richest citizens help others more than anyone in this way, and they create the opportunities and openings to help workers get jobs — the best welfare program available.

 

Just think of the recent examples of Covid vaccines with sales in the billions but restoring trillions in economic activity. As the Covid vaccines also illustrate, the rich are getting richer over time for a great reason — they now can help more people around the world through globalization, as opposed to only helping people closer to home. If someone paying a “fair share” means contributing an increasing share of the value he or she creates to others, capitalism itself is more progressive than any income-tax schedules devised by politicians.

 

But politicians in Washington, many of whom have work experience that has given them little connection with market logic, argue the rich are not helping others enough because the only help that matters, so far as they are concerned, is helping the government with more tax revenue. This self-interested argument is often used in attempts to shame people into going along with a higher-tax regime. And it’s finally produced a response from an unexpected source, Jeff Bezos, who points out that raising revenue is not the solution to all problems, particularly inflation. Bezos even goes as far as arguing that “the newly created Disinformation Board should review this tweet” in response to Biden’s call to stem inflation with billionaire taxation.

 

Often the lawmakers’ rhetoric is framed in ways that suggest that billionaires’ wealth should be redeployed in ways to help the government do more to improve the social safety net, rather than helping the poor through the private sector. But taxes don’t provide this sort of support as efficiently as private donations do. Taxes introduce middlemen, politicians, who use taxes for many other purposes than helping the poor. Private donations are far more focused on the poor than tax revenues.

 

In 2020, about 88 percent of the $470 billion in giving in the U.S. was by individuals and their foundations, largely focused on church, educational, and welfare activities for those most in need. In contrast, federal spending is sprayed across all incomes as well as on corporate welfare. Indeed, only about 17 percent of mandatory federal spending in 2019 was on poverty programs. This is likely smaller than the percentage of donated income spent on the poor. Thus, an extra $1 billion in taxes from billionaires would generate $170 million to the poor, but $1 billion in private donations would likely yield much more. Moreover, a donor can freely choose to allocate all of his donations to the poor, which he cannot when taxed.

 

Indeed, public spending on the poor is often less productive than believed. One study found that government spending crowds out private donations to charities by 75 percent. That’s because organizations that receive government money fundraise less, and people feel less prone to give when they feel they already helped out through taxation. What’s more, private giving is likely to be more in tune with local needs and communities. The Giving Pledge of Warren Buffett and Bill Gates currently has 227 billionaires who have committed to give away a majority of their wealth. This far more effectively helps the poor than a 50 percent wealth tax on those same individuals.

 

The bottom line is that billionaires help others, especially the poor, more than anyone both indirectly through the goods and services their companies provide but also directly through charitable giving.

What Might Actually Help Stop Mass Shootings

By Jim Geraghty

Tuesday, May 31, 2022

 

If Congress or state legislatures want to change laws regulating firearms because of the mass shooting at Robb Elementary School in Uvalde, Texas, then logic dictates they should focus on enacting reforms that would have prevented the Uvalde shooter from obtaining his weapons. A seven-day waiting period might have briefly delayed his rampage but wouldn’t have stopped it. The so-called “gun-show loophole” had no role in the massacre. Limits on magazine capacity would not have made much difference when the police waited more than an hour before confronting the gunman.

 

The shooter passed a background check, and many Americans are likely reading stories of his horrific behavior and wondering just how that could’ve been allowed to happen.

 

One of his former friends said he had slashed his own face, “drove around with another friend at night sometimes and shot at random people with a BB gun,” and egged people’s cars. The shooter reportedly boasted about torturing animals:

 

One Yubo [a social-media platform] user graphically described to ABC News how “the shooter would allegedly publicize the abuse, and would ‘put cats in plastic bags, suspend them inside, throw them at the ground and throw them at people’s houses.’”

 

Users of that same social-media app said he had “told girls he would rape them, showed off a rifle he bought, and threatened to shoot up schools in livestreams.” Other classmates described the shooter getting into “about five” fistfights in middle school and junior high, and remembered him commenting he “wanted to join the Marines one day so he could kill people.” Police reportedly visited the home when the gunman got into angry arguments with his mother on more than one occasion, but no charges were filed. A former classmate told CNN other teens actually called him “school shooter.”

 

Quite a few of these actions — particularly the shooting others with a BB gun and making threats of violence — could have and should have spurred criminal charges. (Texas courts have upheld treating a BB gun as a deadly weapon because it is “capable of causing serious bodily injury.”) Texas law also states that a person commits the felony offense of “terroristic threat” if he “threatens to commit any offense involving violence to any person or property with intent to . . . place any person in fear of imminent serious bodily injury.”

 

If the shooter had been convicted of a crime, he would have been barred from purchasing a firearm.

 

The shooter also sounds like a prime candidate for being involuntarily committed for demonstrating behavior indicating he was a danger to himself or others. Under Texas law, if a person is committed for temporary or extended inpatient mental-health treatment, is found incompetent to stand trial after being charged with a crime or is acquitted of a criminal charge for reasons of insanity or mental defect, that information must be made available to the FBI for inclusion in the National Instant Criminal Background Check System (NICS), where it would cause him to fail a mandatory background check if he tried to purchase a gun.

 

Texas law does not require the reporting of emergency mental-health detentions, admissions or warrants, or voluntary commitments to NICS. (That might be a useful change to the law, but had that change been in place, that would not have prevented this massacre.)

 

We have a national problem of angry young men, disturbed and fantasizing about inflicting horrific violence upon innocent people. These angry young men often make threats to others before carrying out their massacres, but those whom they threaten rarely feel compelled to report the threats to the police because they don’t think it will make a difference, or they fear they will be targeted for retribution after the police contact the person making the threats. It is hard to blame them; in far too many cases, law enforcement does not take significant action. (I think going to police and filing a complaint is a lot to ask of teenagers.)

 

Similarly, getting a troubled person committed to a mental institution requires someone who cares enough about the troubled person to take that action, and who knows how to navigate the legal process for this “last resort” in mental health.

 

Federal law bars those under age 18 from purchasing any firearm, and those under age 21 from purchasing a handgun. In the aftermath of the Uvalde shooting, a few governors, such as Phil Murphy in New Jersey and Kathy Hochul in New York, have announced an intention to pass legislation barring those under age 21 from purchasing any firearms. But the problem is not all 18-, 19-, and 20-year-olds; the problem is emotionally disturbed and mayhem-minded 18-, 19-, and 20-year-olds. (No institution in America puts more guns into the hands of 18-, 19-, and 20-year-olds than the Pentagon.)

 

Our old friend David French notes that “in every one of the deadliest school shootings, the shooter exhibited behavior before the shooting that could have triggered a well-drafted red flag law.” To French, “well-drafted” means that “the law should contain abundant procedural safeguards, including imposing a burden of proof on the petitioner, hearing requirements, and a default expiration date unless the order is renewed through a clear showing of continued need.”

 

From what we now know about the Uvalde shooter, he seems like a slam-dunk case of demonstrating behavior indicating that he was a threat to others.

 

But my friend Cam Edwards points out that there’s a flaw in most of the red-flag laws on the books in the 19 states that have them. In just about all of the cases, the court system and police seize the firearms of the troubled individual and then . . . that’s it. There’s no requirement for subsequent counseling or mental-health treatment. The state has taken away that person’s guns and called it a day. That emotionally disturbed or threatening person is still free to attack someone with a kitchen knife or try to run down someone in their car. As D. J. Jaffe wrote in 2019, “It makes no sense to let people who are known to be seriously mentally ill and believed to be dangerous go without treatment, even if they have had their weapons taken away. It’s not compassionate. And it can be dangerous.”

 

Ideally, every state in the country would have a “red-flag law” that sorted out the legitimate cases of threatening behavior from people venting grievances by making unserious claims, that had a clear appeals process, and that took the mentally ill and treated them so that they were no longer a threat to others. And then, instead of just nicknaming a troubled teenager “school shooter,” people would take action to ensure that he did not actually become a school shooter.

A Reckoning for MeToo

By Madeleine Kearns

Tuesday, May 31, 2022

 

Is Elon Musk a sexual predator? Did he, as allegations unveiled by Business Insider suggest, flash his erect penis at a SpaceX flight attendant, asking her for sexual favors in exchange for buying her a horse? Insider’s source, a friend of the accuser, claims that he did. But Musk, the CEO of SpaceX, has forcefully denied all allegations, dismissing them as a political attack intended to foil his acquisition of Twitter.

 

Certainly, Musk has his enemies. Not everyone was happy about the billionaire’s $44 billion bid for Twitter and his pledge to uphold the principles of free speech, which he called “the bedrock of a functioning democracy.” Amnesty International warned of “violent and abusive speech against users, particularly those most disproportionately impacted, including women, non-binary persons and others.”

 

Whether the accusations are true, partially true, or “utterly untrue” (as Musk claims) is hard to say. Insider reported that SpaceX paid a flight attendant $250,000 in severance after she complained of Musk’s alleged misconduct. Initially, Musk told Insider that there was “a lot more to the story.” However, he soon decided the piece was just a “hit job” and that no good could come of providing further details.

 

As is usually the case with accusations like these, what it boils down to is he-said–she-said (or, in this case, he-said–she-said–she-said). But that, in a way, is the point in using such allegations as a political weapon. As we’ve seen in the Depp vs. Heard trial, disputes such as these can be mutually damaging. That’s why the accuser often prefers to be anonymous. As for the accused, however, the mud has a way of sticking, regardless of the facts.

 

For example, in the past, Business Insider published a piece alleging sexual misconduct by Barstool Sports founder Dave Portnoy. Portnoy disregarded the advice of his lawyers and, believing the attacks on him to be politically motivated, made a video with his side of the story. Portnoy’s account of his behavior is very unflattering — though, of course, that’s not the same as pressuring someone into sex. As with the controversial piece about comedian Aziz Ansari, it seemed that the women he’d tactlessly hooked up with felt degraded and regretful. That’s sad, bad even, but is it predatory?

 

In some cases, the court of public opinion descends into mob justice with real-life consequences. Consider the treatment of Cardinal George Pell of Australia, criminally prosecuted on dubious “historic sexual abuse” charges. Pell spent a year in prison before the Australian High Court granted him a full acquittal, entering the belated judgment of “innocent.” Though he has now had his name cleared, Pell will forever be associated with accusations of one of the worst crimes possible (sexually abusing a child), even though there was never any solid evidence to back up those claims.

 

A similar injustice occurred when Justice Brett Kavanaugh was subjected to a congressional kangaroo trial concerning allegations that, more than 30 years earlier, at age 17, he had drunkenly pinned Christine Blasey (then age 15) to a bed, covered her mouth, and groped her. This was the beginning of the “believe all women” phase of MeToo which, oddly, Democrats did not apply to Joe Biden’s accuser Tara Reade during his 2020 run for president.

 

Using allegations of sexual misconduct to attack one’s opponents may be politically effective, but it also does little to protect or empower women.

 

Consider the recent case of Princeton professor Joshua Katz, whom the university fired after receiving a “detailed written complaint from an alumna who had a consensual relationship with Dr. Katz while she was an undergraduate under his academic supervision.” Once again, the timing of the complaint appears to be political. The relationship was in 2006 and 2007, but the complaint was made in 2021 after Katz had publicly criticized the antics of social-justice warriors on campus in an article for Quillette.

 

Due to its politicization, the cynicism of MeToo is transparent. Most of us intuit that injustice runs in both directions. Sexual harassment and assault ought to be taken seriously, but so too should the gravity of these accusations. Throwing around serious allegations without respect for objectivity and due process resembles the overuse of the term “racist.” The result has been a cheapening of public discourse, a disregard for the truth, and the undermining of the MeToo movement’s legitimacy. None of this helps actual victims of sexual abuse.

Green Rope-a-Dope: China Watches as America Greens

By Joel Kotkin

Monday, May 30, 2022

 

The color green has long been associated with envy, but increasingly it’s becoming a pigment of mass delusion. Amid near-hysterical reporting about the climate, the U.S., and much of the West, is embracing willy-nilly policies likely to weaken our economy and boost China’s ascendancy at the expense of democracy and market economies.

 

In essence, China is adopting a version of the great Muhammad Ali’s “rope-a-dope” boxing strategy, which had the opponent wear himself out by launching harmless punches as Ali lounged on the ropes. Then, as the rival began to weaken, Ali would seize the moment and pummel him.

 

Much the same is happening with the emerging climate agenda. Under Paris and other accords, China, as well as India and other developing countries, essentially have been given a pass not to achieve “carbon neutrality” until 2060. The argument is largely (at least formally) that the West is responsible for the heavily hyped climate “apocalypse” because of its longer history of industrial growth, although neither China nor India seems eager to de-industrialize, cut itself off from medical advances, or otherwise halt its progress toward Western levels of prosperity.

 

Western countries, notably the United States but also the EU, have reduced their emissions significantly over recent decades. They have assumed considerable costs in making their economies more “green” and, in some cases, have sought to eliminate or constrict whole industries, such as oil and gas, while imposing enormous costs on their farmers, manufacturers, small-business owners, and, directly or indirectly, consumers.

 

In contrast, despite its penchant for tantalizing Western greens with demonstration projects suggesting a turn toward a “net zero” policy at some point in the future, China has made a recent decision to slow its greenhouse-gas reduction. Amid a global energy crisis, China continues to expand its use of coal and other fossil-fuel plants. This allows the likes of Apple’s Tim Cook to pose as a progressive green visionary here, while basing his company’s production in a country that emits more greenhouse gases than the United States and the EU combined.

 

Nor is China alone. India is doing the same, and we can imagine that over time other developing countries, notably in Africa, will want access to power. Today, one in ten people globally have no access to electricity and over 3.5 billion lack reliable access to it. Many of these countries now look to China, not the West, to meet this demand with new fossil-fuel projects.

 

Ironically, green policies tend to push production out of places with strong environmental controls and into dirtier places with lower energy and regulatory costs. According to one study, California’s draconian laws have pushed so many industries and people out of the state that the net impact of emissions — this is global after all — has been negligible at best. Green policies have already accelerated the de-industrialization of countries such as the United Kingdom and could undermine recent efforts to bring factories back from China.

 

Chinese dictator Xi Jinping’s commissioning of new fossil-fuel plants likely reflects pragmatic concerns about inequality and economic costs for the country’s masses. As someone with an analytical, longer-term view of politics, and more importantly as an already-significant figure in Chinese history, Xi knows that a weak economy could demolish both his imperial “mandate of heaven” and undermine the legitimacy of the Communist Party. The cadres may well address climate issues over time, notably by massively ramping up nuclear power, but they will continue to maintain a wary eye on how policy affects a potentially restless citizenry.

 

Xi is an awful, even genocidal dictator, but he is focused on his subjects, if only out of political calculation. In the West, an odd coalition of the upper-end gentry in Silicon Valley and climate activists on Wall Street impose increasingly draconian “net zero” policies. As the U.S. faces a growing energy shortage, President Biden and most of his party still seem determined to reduce energy investment, with new regulations making it harder to build new fossil-fuel plants, a factor that is contributing to soaring energy prices. Earlier this month, the Biden administration canceled a lease sale for some large oil and gas projects.

 

In some ways, the embrace by many of the most powerful Western companies of environmental, social, and governance (ESG) goals and the notion of “the Great Reset” represents nothing less than a modern equivalent of class war. The potential profits for Wall Street and tech firms to be made by capitalizing on an enforced jihad against fossil fuels may be profitable, but for most people in the West the prospects are less rosy.

 

Eric Heymann, a senior economist at Deutsche Bank Research, may be an advocate of the “Great Reset” or something akin to it, but he still warns that Europe’s Green Deal and its goal of climate neutrality by 2050 threatens a European mega-crisis, leading to “noticeable loss of welfare and jobs.” Overall, it is the industrial areas and the countryside that suffer, not the favored cities of Western elites — even though the unfavored geographies are “on a par” with big cities in terms of greenhouse-gas production. Already as many as one-quarter of Germans and three-fourths of Greeks have had to cut other spending to pay their electricity bills, which is the economic definition of “energy poverty.”

 

Much the same has happened in America, most notably in the center of green virtue: California. Because of strict climate rules, California electricity prices have increased five times as fast as the national average over the past decade. In 2017 alone, they increased at three times the national rate, devastating poorer Californians, particularly in the less temperate interior where “energy poverty” has grown rapidly. Last year, residential energy prices grew 2.7 times the rate of the rest of the country. California’s environmental policies, as a new Breakthrough Institute Report suggests, are creating a “Green Jim Crow,” whereby housing, jobs, and upward mobility vanish for the state’s largely minority working class.

 

California’s high energy prices have had a particularly harsh impact on blue-collar sectors, too. Indeed, an analysis by the Chapman Center for Demographics and Policy details how California’s anti-climate-change regime has exacerbated economic, geographic, and racial inequality by depressing historically well-paying jobs in manufacturing, energy, and home-building, all key employers for working and middle-class Californians. Even without adjusting for costs, no California metro ranks in the U.S. top ten in terms of well-paying blue-collar jobs. But four — Ventura, Los Angeles, San Jose, and San Diego — sit among the bottom ten.

 

The green future, as it is unfolding, will be a distinctly inegalitarian one. It’s hard to imagine a future Houston, with its vast middle-class economy, being built around “renewable” energy. Of course the media and their environmental allies hail the promise of “green jobs,” but even the climate-obsessed New York Times admits that these jobs — which tend to be temporary and non-unionized — pay for less than those in fossil-fuel energy and manufacturing.

 

Nowhere is the danger posed by green delusions clearer than in the race to electric cars. Even as gas-powered cars are getting cleaner and new workable technologies, such as hybrid cars, are emerging, the green elite has decided that only one kind of car — an electric one — can be permitted over time. As states such as California seek to ban gas-powered cars, something the Biden administration has also proposed, we could be undermining our own transport sector, ceding a large part of our economy into the hands of China.

 

The ever-quickening pace of mandates for electric cars, with little in the way of new electric capacity, seems likely to serve Chinese interests more than ours. Beijing maintains almost total domination of the solar-panel industry — its battery capacity is now roughly four times ours, a gap projected to expand by 2030. They also have effective control of the requisite rare-earth minerals and the technology for processing them.

 

Indeed, given China’s growing dominance in computer production (and its drive to control semiconductors as well), the future of American automobile production could very well consist of slapping a Chinese computer to a Chinese battery with some bent metal, arguably also sourced there, around it. The much celebrated big reductions in solar prices, it turned out, came with government subsidies, and now that China has removed these, prices for the materials for solar panels have surged to the point that many planned projects are being delayed.

 

Like many other current green policies, the shift to electric cars will also threaten the living standards of working- and middle-class households. As the prices of rare metals and computer chips surge, the prices of EVs have grown. Electric-truck maker Rivian recently raised the price of its pickups by $12,000 to nearly $80,000, not normally what working- or middle-class Americans can afford to pay for a pickup. The enormous demand for both rare earths, such as lithium, as well as such basic commodities as copper and aluminum — critical for EVs — has sparked a mounting inflationary wave in EV costs and could lead to more environmentally challenging mining projects.

 

When California’s governor Gavin Newsom announced an accelerated schedule to ban gasoline-car sales by 2035, Assemblyman Jim Cooper, an African American from Sacramento, denounced the proposal, pointing out that the low- and middle-income drivers he represents can’t afford vehicles that “cost more than $50k each.” “How will my constituents afford an EV? They can’t,” he tweeted. Besides denouncing this move as “environmental racism,” he also pointed out that Newsom’s move doesn’t “take into account the strain an all-electric vehicle fleet will have on our state electric grid.”

 

Emboldened by its mission to “save the planet,” the climate–industrial complex is not focused on such things as looming power shortages, national security, or conditions for the masses. Instead, it chants doggedly about the most extreme projections while ignoring that there is considerable debate — even within the ranks of the IPCC — about the extent of the threat, its timing, and best solutions. This embrace of apocalypse, now deeply entrenched in the mass media, allows it to ignore both class and national-security concerns.

 

China’s reluctance to adopt a quick “net zero” agenda for the near future, however, suggests a critical flaw in the policy of an ever-accelerated climate-change regulation. After all, the Chinese see the same data and will know what the implications of its greenhouse-gas emissions are meant to be, and yet Beijing still seems unworried enough to recognize that climate policies also involve a trade-off, not something that suggests that it believes that a planetary catastrophe lies ahead. Certainly, the reluctance among American greens to allow for natural gas or nuclear power (a view that may be losing its edge in Europe, if the EU Commission’s green taxonomy goes through) means that our industries will remain underpowered relative to China’s, whose firms can access a broader mix of alternatives. Even Elon Musk, whose fortune depends on electric cars, has slammed “green hucksters” making U.S. energy policy.

 

In the future, we must confront the reality that our energy policies are playing into the hands of a Chinese-led authoritarian bloc, fueled increasingly by Russian oil and gas, including one new gas pipeline (and there may well be more). Rather than use our domestic production to secure our economy, and middle-class jobs here, the administration has sought out supplies from such enlightened places as Saudi Arabia, Venezuela, and, perhaps soon, Iran’s forward-thinking mullahs. This seems fine with our virtue signalers such as Blackrock’s Larry Fink, an enthusiastic ESG advocate, who told investors last fall to triple their exposure to China.

 

There may be some stirrings in our corner of the ring. As noted above, Russia’s war in Ukraine has spurred the EU to change its energy policies to accommodate natural gas — including from the United States — and, in some places (notably, France), to return to nuclear power. Many Europeans now openly admit that wind and solar cannot solve the continent’s short- or medium-term needs without an expansion of both gas and nuclear energy. In the private market, realities concerning energy are devastating the sky-high prospects for green-energy firms and may lift the fossil-fuel investments so despised by the enlightened classes.

 

Reality may be dawning, if slowly, on this side of the Atlantic as well. Faced with the prospect of widespread power shortages, President Biden, no doubt to the horror of many greens, has decided to send federal money for nuclear plants. Even in California’s green dreamland, Governor Newsom has reversed his position on shutting down natural gas and the state’s last nuclear plant in order to avoid massive shortages this summer. This reflects a reality that California, with enormous fossil-fuel deposits, has become hopelessly dependent on imports of energy, largely from less regulated states and abroad.

 

We need to find better ways to deal with climate issues besides undermining our economy for the benefit of autocrats and the unelected bureaucracy that enforces their will. Less intrusive methods, such as promoting home-based work, energy efficiency, and even carbon taxes, would be less damaging than the current, often ineffective regulations. Also necessary may be a growing focus on climate adaptation, as the Dutch have done for centuries, that could allow for economic growth even as emissions drop. But first we have to recognize the consequences of our current trajectory: a weaker middle class, mass immiseration, and growing global dominance by China. If this is what we are being told we must do for the “Great Reset,” it’s time to unset it.