Putin’s Genocide in Ukraine

By Andrew Stuttaford

Thursday, July 28, 2022

 

When, during the Second World War, Raphael Lemkin, a Polish lawyer who had made it to the U.S., coined the word “genocide,” he intended that it should cover more than the Holocaust, which had consumed 49 members of his own family. Nazi-style annihilation was the ne plus ultra, but Lemkin argued that genocide could also be somewhat subtler. Genocidaires might want to destroy a national group as a distinct entity while being content to see many of those who had been a part of it survive, so long as they accepted the identity imposed upon them by their oppressors. Time would take care of the rest as the next generation grew up in a new order it did not know was new. 

 

This, not extermination, is what Vladimir Putin has in mind for Ukrainians. A democratic, Western-oriented Ukraine on its borders would be a threat not to Russia but to its ruling regime. That, to Moscow, is reason enough to lay waste to its unruly neighbor, though it would prefer to bind Ukraine de jure or de facto in a greater Russia (with Belarus, doubtless, to follow). The boost to Russia’s population — essentially stagnant but shortly to decline — would be welcome, especially as Ukraine is overwhelmingly Slavic while, to the Kremlin’s concern, Russia has a significant (10–15 percent) and growing Muslim minority. This would, however, work only so long as Ukrainians no longer saw themselves as different from Russians, except in sanitized, primarily folkloric ways. 

 

Thus Putin’s repeated attempts to push a dubious view of the past — set out perhaps most notoriously in his “On the Historical Unity of Russians and Ukrainians,” an article from 2021 in which he asserts that “Velikorussians” (Great Russians), “Malorussians” (Little Russians, an old-fashioned term for Ukrainians that many of them find demeaning), and “Belorussians” (White Russians) are one “large Russian nation, a triune people,” rather than three separate nationalities. The idea of a Ukrainian national identity is, Putin claims, an unnatural confection, the result of machinations by “part of the Malorussian intelligentsia,” the Polish elite, and the Austro-Hungarian authorities. Making matters worse, the victorious Bolsheviks adopted a federal structure for their new state, the Soviet Union — a collection of “national” Soviet socialist republics, including the Ukrainian SSR — to replace the unitary Russian empire they had overthrown. Russia, concludes Putin, was “robbed,” a theft sealed by the fact that each SSR had, in theory, the right to secede, a “dangerous time bomb,” which exploded once the “safety mechanism” — that’s one way of describing it — “provided by the leading role” — and that’s one way of describing that — of the Soviet Communist Party had disappeared. 

 

Federalization was reinforced by what Putin dismissively refers to as Bolshevik “localization policy” in the union’s republics, an undertaking then known as “indigenization” (korenizatsiya), a word that recognized that those territories were inhabited by distinct peoples. To Putin, “localization,” the building up of what he regards as artificial national republics, “undoubtedly played a major role in the development and consolidation of the Ukrainian culture, language, and identity.” The emphasis he puts on this is intended to undermine the notion that all three had flourished before the Bolshevik ascendancy, and comes complete with a tellingly misleading chronology. As Putin relates it, the Bolsheviks “actively promoted” localization “in the 1920s–30s,” which, in the Ukrainian SSR, took the form of Ukrainization. To be fair, that was true both culturally and, to a lesser extent, politically, but it lasted for far less than two decades. From the end of the 1920s, indigenization went sharply into reverse, an assertion of Moscow’s control that Putin, for obvious reasons, does not address. 

 

The Ukrainian intelligentsia came under attack, as did the Ukrainian churches, the Ukrainian language, and (actual or supposed) “national” elements within the Ukrainian Communist Party as Stalin tightened his grip. All this was capped by the transformation in Ukraine of the disastrous consequences of the collectivization of agriculture, a policy enforced across the USSR, into a man-made famine — the Holodomor — designed to crush the determinedly independent peasantry that was not only a class enemy but also the symbol, the repository, and the essence of Ukrainian national consciousness. Possibly 4 million died, mainly between 1932 and 1933, but no one can be sure (some estimates are much higher). 

 

In 1953, Lemkin, who considered that the Soviets were guilty of genocide in Ukraine, and indeed elsewhere, wrote that 

 

if the Soviet program succeeds completely, if the intelligentsia, the priests, and the peasants can be eliminated, Ukraine will be as dead as if every Ukrainian were killed, for it will have lost that part of it which has kept and developed its culture, its beliefs, its common ideas, which have guided it and given it a soul, which, in short, made it a nation rather than a mass of people.

 

This was a continuation of an argument Lemkin had made in 1944, that one of the “techniques” of genocide was the destruction of the victims’ culture. 

 

Lemkin was uninterested in the sources of that culture, those beliefs or common ideas. Whether they had, say, been shaped by outsiders or an elite or were — as in Ukraine — at their core more organic was immaterial to him. What counted was that they had come to represent to millions of Ukrainians what it was to be Ukrainian. That said, the emergence of national consciousness in the 19th century — particularly, but certainly not only, in the predominantly rural stretches of Eastern Europe — was a complex process and often influenced by a rising intelligentsia. Nevertheless, the extent to which it won acceptance in Ukraine suggests that its roots were real enough: They had been uncovered, not invented. 

 

Moreover, national identity is a work in progress. It is not static. Putin, an unconvincing historian, might enjoy rummaging through the centuries, fruitlessly trying to prove his point, but more-modern developments can reduce what this czar or that hetman did hundreds of years ago to comparative irrelevance. Contemporary Russian identity has been profoundly affected by that country’s 20th century, from revolution to totalitarianism to the Great Patriotic War. The same is true of Ukrainian identity, in ways that both overlap with the Russian story and diverge from it, not least when it comes to the Holodomor and, of course, the experience of having now been independent for over 30 years. The relationship between Russia and Ukraine will always be tangled, but after three decades apart, it will never again be the same, especially after the conflict in 2014 and, even more so, now, when Moscow’s aggression has brought many of the country’s Russian-speakers far closer to Ukraine than its flawed democracy ever could. 

 

***

 

For Putin to downplay, denigrate, or deny Ukrainian national identity, something he has been doing for years, and then wage a war to destroy it is, as Lemkin would have agreed, evidence of genocide. Putin’s tirades have been echoed by incendiary commentary in Russia, none of which, presumably, has appeared without some degree of official approval. This has included the dehumanization of Ukrainians — another characteristic of genocide — as, in a peculiarly perverse historical twist, “Nazis.” More-usual fare, such as comparisons with insects, has not been neglected but clearly was not thought to be enough. Some of this appears to have been internalized by the invading forces, with effects — such as the mass killing, torture, and rape of civilians in Bucha, not far from Kyiv — that have been as horrific as they were predictable. 

 

Some of the ruin that the Russians have left in their wake has been of Ukraine’s cultural heritage. Perhaps the destruction of museums, such as one dedicated to a prominent pre-revolutionary painter from Mariupol and another, near Kharkiv, to an 18th-century Ukrainian philosopher, was collateral damage. Perhaps. And perhaps, in Borodyanka, the shots into a bust of Taras Shevchenko, Ukraine’s national poet, who was persecuted under the czars for favoring something dangerously close to an independent Ukraine, were merely the result of malicious high spirits of a type not infrequently displayed by occupying armies. Perhaps. But as early as April, Ukrainian officials were talking of the destruction of dozens of churches, monuments, and other sites of cultural significance in what looks disturbingly like a repeat, sometimes improvised, sometimes more carefully targeted, of the wholesale destruction of, to quote one prominent Stalinist apparatchik, “historical junk” in Kyiv after the effective abandonment of indigenization in the 1930s. Meanwhile, Russian history books, those endlessly rewritten devices for the propagation of an invented past, have been arriving in the schools of occupied Ukraine. 

 

More sinister still, well over a million Ukrainians have been forcibly “relocated” across Russia, among them hundreds of thousands of children, including, reportedly, orphans — some young enough to forget their identity and their language and thus prime candidates for assimilation. Those who remain in Ukraine’s occupied cities are increasingly being taught in Russian, while Ukrainian is . . . discouraged. 

 

On any commonsense understanding of the word or, for that matter, of a reading of Lemkin, there can be little doubt that what is occurring in Ukraine is genocide. Unsurprisingly, given their countries’ own decades-long sufferings, the Latvian, Lithuanian, and Estonian parliaments have declared the war in Ukraine to be genocidal, in each case unanimously. Poland’s president, Andrzej Duda, has joined in arguing that it is “hard to deny” that genocide is under way. President Biden has also applied the term, explaining that he “called it genocide because it’s become clearer and clearer that Putin is just trying to wipe out the idea of even being Ukrainian.” The State Department has, however, stressed that the president’s comments should not be read as a formal declaration that that threshold had been crossed. 

 

***

 

There were probably two reasons for this hesitation, one having to do with the legal definition of genocide, the other with realpolitik. As for the first, U.S. government determinations of genocide have typically (since the end of the Cold War, anyway) been tied to the definition contained in the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide, which was adopted by the United Nations General Assembly in 1948, and that’s a tough test. Although the convention was heavily influenced by Lemkin’s work, its definition of genocide is narrower than Lemkin would, ideally, have liked (it excludes “cultural genocide” and the mass murder of people for their political beliefs or social class) and does not necessarily match the way the man in the street, or indeed in the Oval Office, understands the term. 

 

Under Article II of the convention, two tests must be satisfied to establish that genocide has taken place. The first is that at least one of a series of enumerated “acts” has been directed against a “national, ethnical, racial or religious group.” These include “killing members of the group,” “causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group,” and “forcibly transferring children of the group to another group,” all of which Russia has carried out in Ukraine. The second test is trickier. The intent behind the acts must “be to destroy, in whole or in part, the national, ethnical, racial or religious group, as such.” How to prove the necessary degree of intent, which must be aimed at physical destruction (as noted above, destroying a culture is not enough), has been the subject of extensive legal and academic debate. In the case of Russia’s war on Ukraine, the dehumanizing language of the aggressors, not to speak of calls for the elimination, imprisonment, or more generalized punishment of segments of the population, might — although the bar is very high — show that required intent. If so, the forcible transfer (at least in some cases) of Ukrainian children to Russia starts to look as if it might satisfy the convention’s definition of genocide. The same can be said of massacres, such as that in Bucha, where, allegedly, many of the victims were selected on grounds of (Ukrainian) ethnicity, creating clear parallels with the slaughter in Srebrenica, one of the rare cases in which an international court has held that genocide has occurred. 

 

A finding by the U.S. of genocide in Ukraine would have little or no immediate legal consequence, which brings us to the second reason why the State Department might be hesitating. Previous findings of genocide (such as in Darfur) were never likely to cause any problems for the makers of U.S. foreign policy. With Russia, it could well be different. Washington will, in all likelihood, have to continue to deal with Putin and his accomplices for the foreseeable future and, quite possibly, to rebuild a working relationship with them, something that could well be complicated, to say the least, by formally labeling them responsible for genocide. 

 

But if that is the decision, it should be taken without any illusions about either Russian expansionism or the Kremlin’s desire to tear NATO apart: Moscow is not going to change course. Nor should the U.S. be complicit in any efforts to deny the essence of what, on any reasonable view, and probably according to legal definitions too, Russia has done. And, even if it is irrelevant for the convention’s purposes, there should be no doubt that the assault on Ukraine’s culture, its heritage and language, is yet more evidence of Russia’s intent not only to break a nation, but to annihilate everything that makes it a nation.  

 

And the word for that is “genocide.”

The Democrats’ Unserious Climate-Change Deal

By Kevin D. Williamson

Sunday, July 31, 2022

 

The corporate-welfare “climate-change bill” that Joe Manchin and his Democratic colleagues in Congress wish to inflict upon the republic is a bad piece of legislation for any number of reasons. The obvious one is the economic reason — the combination of higher taxes and a rush of hundreds of billions of dollars in new federal spending lands on the wrong side of both parts of our don’t-call-it-a-recession stagflation, in which we are seeing declining economic output, declining real wages, and inflation above 9 percent overall — and above 40 percent in energy prices. More uncertainty is the last thing American businesses need.

 

Our progressive friends will tell us that a few hundred billion dollars is a reasonable price for a credible climate-change bill — but is it that?

 

There are reasons to be skeptical.

 

The Biden administration says it would like to see the United States reduce its emissions of carbon dioxide by 50 percent or more by 2030. Advocates of the Manchin folly say that its provisions could enable a reduction of 40 percent by 2030. Well, maybe. Keep in mind that when they say, “40 percent reduction in emissions,” they mean a 40 percent reduction from 2005 levels. Thanks in large part to the economic displacement of coal by natural gas in electricity generating — which is to say, thanks to fracking — the United States already has cut emissions by about 20 percent from where they were in 2005: We’re halfway there, having done not very much, and the trend line already is pointed downward — sharply downward during the economic pause associated with Covid-19, but gently downward even without that dramatic episode.

 

The Manchin bill is, à la mode, a cowardly piece of legislation, in that it is all carrot, no stick. Its environmental program is mainly one of subsidies for politically connected business interests engaged in the so-called green-energy trade and handouts to upper-middle-class urban progressives who enjoy getting a $7,500 tax benefit when they buy a new Mercedes.

 

What these subsidies amount to is a reverse carbon tax. The idea of a carbon tax is to make the costs of petroleum and coal high relative to renewables, in order to encourage the flourishing of those alternative sources; a subsidy does the same thing on the other end of the equation: The government is, in theory, spending money rather than collecting it, but the point is still to make wind, solar, and — with any luck — nuclear competitive with hydrocarbons by taking money out of someone’s pocket.

 

Everybody loves the carrot. But the proposition that we are going to get the outcomes the Green New Dealers want simply by shoveling great heaping gobs of money to Democrats’ political allies without any painful new regulation or taxes is one that deserves a great deal of skepticism.

 

The most obvious point of comparison is the European Union, which imposes an indirect carbon tax by means of a carbon-permit market; the benchmark contract currently trades around 76 euros per ton, but it has been as high as 100 euros per ton, a price level it is expected to achieve again or even exceed between now and 2024 as the (imbecilic and unnecessary) return to coal-fired power in Germany and elsewhere increases demand for emissions credits. As it stands, the price per ton of carbon emissions in the European Union is today about eleven times what it was a decade ago — as Milton Friedman never said, Ce n’était pas un repas gratuit.

 

The price of European carbon contracts is mainly of interest to our friends over at Capital Matters, but for our purposes here, one fact is of keen interest: In spite of its imposition of a significant carbon price and in spite of its much more activist approach to the climate issue, the European Union has not decarbonized its economy — not even close, not even halfway, not even one quarter of the way. In 2020, renewables accounted for about 22 percent of the energy consumed in the European Union and about 10 percent of the energy used in EU transportation.

 

Unsurprisingly, the European Union is farther along that curve than is the United States, which relies on renewables for about 13 percent of all its power compared with the European Union’s 22 percent, and which generates about 20 percent of its electricity by means of renewables, compared with the European Union’s 38 percent. That has real consequences for climate policy: By the most economically relevant measure (emissions per unit of GDP) the United States is about twice as carbon-intensive as Germany.

 

But it is Germany, not the United States, that is getting ready to fire up coal plants.

 

Policy proposals are constrained only by the utopian imagination; policy outcomes are constrained by physics, geography, and technology, among other inconvenient exogenous factors. At a sufficient level of subsidy, wind and solar are economically viable alternatives to coal and gas, but they are intermittent, and it is likely that their role in total electricity generation will always be a limited one. Affordable, nearby hydrocarbons — Russian gas or, in its absence, coal — are what is going to fill in the gaps.

 

(The French, doing themselves a favor for once, generate most of their electricity with climate-friendly nuclear power, which provides a nice baseline load to support fluctuating renewable output.)

 

Completely decarbonizing electricity is a long ways off, in reality something that probably isn’t going to happen and probably doesn’t need to happen — but consider that electricity is the low-hanging fruit: It is not want of forward-looking policy but physical and technological realities that fortify the central role of hydrocarbons in transportation. Even if we were willing to endure what surely would be an astronomical transition cost, there isn’t an electric long-haul truck on the market that can do what a diesel-powered semi does — at any price. Container ships are the lifeblood of the global trade in physical goods, and most of those run on barely refined oil. Even if we were willing to deal with the security issues involved in developing a nuclear-powered global cargo fleet (there have been prototypes), those ships do not yet exist, and neither does the fuel-processing infrastructure that would be necessary to sustain them.

 

The case for a carbon tax is that current U.S. practice does not put any price on the externalities associated with burning hydrocarbons. And that is fair enough. But we should not delude ourselves into thinking that there exists some “clean” source of energy capable of sustaining modern life. As Thomas Sowell put it, “There are no solutions; there are only tradeoffs.” Some of those tradeoffs are economic: You can pay to make renewables relatively affordable either by subsidizing them or by taxing hydrocarbons. Others are environmental: The more batteries are used in transportation and utilities, the more battery manufacturing and disposal are going to be major environmental problems. Petrochemicals and petroleum-derived polymers are used in manufacturing solar cells, wind turbines, batteries, and much else that is “green.” When it comes to rare-earth minerals, many of the relevant geopolitical facts are geological facts. Beyond that, it is likely that demand for petrochemicals will in the near future outpace demand for fuels as the primary driver of worldwide oil consumption. Maybe at some point in the future the most common solar panels will be built of something other than petroleum-derived polymers, but in the here and now, that is not the case. There is no escape from the environmental effects of modern life, only management and mitigation.

 

Those being the facts, the case for shunting a few hundred billion dollars into corporate welfare for Democratic political supporters is far from self-evident. It is particularly amusing to watch Democrats argue for a bill that purports to address the problem of businesses not paying their “fair share” in taxes while larding up that same bill with billions of dollars in special-interest tax credits for their favorite businesses. That is the great Democratic tax strategy: create tax subsidies for businesses and then, two elections later, complain that businesses take advantage of tax subsidies. It is the unserious program of an unserious party run by unserious people who increasingly resemble the ignoramuses and maniacs who elect them.

 

If Democrats were trying to come up with a way of showing that they don’t think of the climate-change issue as anything more than an opportunistic pretext to raid the fisc on behalf of friends and cronies, they could hardly improve on this bill.

 

I hope Senator Manchin got something really good in exchange, and that his new position is not too hard on his knees.

The Prius Has Been Wronged

By Luther Ray Abel

Sunday, July 31, 2022

 

Commuters are rarely provided wondrous vistas during their daily drives, and this day was no exception. At the stop-and-go light at an intersection near my local Fleet Farm in Wisconsin, I had little recourse but to observe the other vehicles to pass the time. After all, a red light stays red longer if you watch it, or so grandmothers say.

 

Amid the usual Chevys, Subarus, and unburdened Ford F-150s whose daily workloads entail little more than groceries traveling home from Costco was a Toyota Prius sporting a remarkable bumper sticker proclaiming, “Not a Liberal.” Amusing, to be sure, but I then began to dwell on the stereotypes attached to various vehicles and was struck by how wronged the Prius has been by its association with the Left.

 

The Prius, a gas-sipping hatchback hybrid — meaning the vehicle’s propulsion is shared between a battery bank and a conventional gasoline engine — has long been considered a symbol of eco-snobbery and progressivism.

 

One could be forgiven for thinking “Feel the Bern” or “Resistance” stickers come standard from the factory floor, with “New Car Smell” being swapped for “Air of Superiority.” Pri’i (plural for Prius) are most often observed parked outside Whole Foods, vegan distilleries, and critical-race-theory champagne brunches.

 

This progressivist reputation is most unfortunate and ill-suited to such a brilliant machine. In many ways, the Prius is a conservative automobile: embodying a superior fusion of old and new technologies, practicability, and humble fiscal philosophies that stand the test of time.

 

We conservatives are occasionally accused of being Luddites. Baseless to be sure, however much we might squint suspiciously at certain newfangled technologies and perhaps opine about how the world is going to hell in a handbasket because of them. No, we generally welcome technological advancement and celebrate the free market’s capacity to offer incredible opportunities to raise standards of living worldwide. However, this warmth toward improvement is tempered by the understanding that with newness comes challenges. As Thomas Sowell is fond of saying, “There are no solutions. There are only trade-offs.”

 

Cars of yore were simple things, and often simplicity would be sufficient. However, they were grossly inefficient — especially those horrors of the Seventies; Ford LTD, anyone? — and with gas-price volatility, inefficient vehicles have become financially burdensome to the average commuter. Unconfirmed reports indicate some folks have even had to go down a drink size at Starbucks because of rising fuel costs.

 

Meanwhile, fully battery-powered cars such as the Tesla family struggle from their absolute reliance on battery propulsion. Drivers suffer from fluctuating travel range due to ambient conditions affecting the battery, luxury price tags, anti-consumer repair practices, and more. And forget about the good old-fashioned American road trip: Should you be fortunate enough to find a charger before running dry, the “fill-up” will consist of an hour-long irritation repeated every 200 miles for an EV comparably priced to the hybrid. Granted, when Cracker Barrel installs charging stations at all its locations, this may not be such an imposition.

 

The Prius, by contrast, is a manifestation of that most delicate balance between the advantages of the new — with its battery bank and gasoline savings — and the accepted wisdom of the ancients — that venerable internal combustion engine which has been ferrying humanity around for over a century. Should the Prius batteries go low, the engine transfers power to it. Similarly, the battery lends aid when the engine strains to get to highway speed. It is a most beautiful collaboration.

 

But vehicular fusionism is useless if the object in question isn’t practical. Thankfully, the Prius exhibits its brilliance in spades. Imagine a vehicle that can carry a truckload of material without exposure to rain and locust storms. Then, consider that this vehicle gets 50 mpg and routinely surpasses 300,000 miles on the odometer. Moreover, it can do all of these things and slide into any parking spot in any city or pot-luck function. Ladies and gentlemen, I present the Toyota Prius.

 

The Prius is a pickup truck in cruelty-free sheep’s clothing, and I know this personally. I have multiple family members who own one, and my wife and I drive a similar hybrid model. Transporting lumber, car parts, and a wheelchair? Easy day. The Prius is Mary Poppins’s bag with a marginally better sound system. If you just believe, there isn’t a thing you can’t fit in there.

 

Then there are the savings. There are fewer better feelings than pulling up to a gas pump and knowing the tank can be filled for less than 30 bucks. Dispositional conservatives are known for their frugality, and would it not be nice to have a vehicle that can be heard muttering from its tailpipe when your kid asks for spending money, “Do you think the stuff grows on trees?”

 

So to the Prius, we conservatives owe an apology. Or at least a second look. The vehicle’s longevity should not be dismissed — and remember this is Toyota we’re talking about, not the plaything of some guru-employing sentient beard amped up on VC cash who conceived of the idea on a spirit quest. Toyota, as a matter of philosophy, eschews the cutting edge for proven designs. The company has been duly rewarded by consumers, becoming the world’s largest auto manufacturer by sales.

 

The Prius should be considered conservative because it fundamentally is. May the day come when liberals feel it necessary to explicitly mention their politics on the bumpers of their Pri’i for fear of being thought conservative.

The Nuclear Heresy

By Kevin D. Williamson

Thursday, July 28, 2022

 

Who’s afraid of the carbon fairy?

 

If nuclear power did not already exist and someone invented it in 2022, he would almost certainly win a Nobel prize — and would be hailed as the greatest environmental champion of his time, and one of the greatest servants of humanity in history. 

 

But nuclear energy already exists — and the environmentalists who should be its most committed and energetic advocates positively hate it. 

 

Mostly. 

 

Which is kind of weird, but not unexpected — once you understand the daft, quasi-mystical underlying cultural politics. The foundering of U.S. nuclear power for a generation — from the 1980s until right about . . . now, really — is a story of missed opportunities: economic, geopolitical, and environmental. 

 

But there are welcome signs of a gradual enlightenment under way. 

 

Start in Europe, where even the goofiest kind of Cold War–hangover politics has not stopped France from generating the overwhelming share of its electricity (about 75 percent) with nuclear power, while Emmanuel Macron, with a wary eye on Moscow, has announced plans for more. 

 

But everybody knows about that already.

 

In the unlikely event that you are not up on the comings and goings of minority political parties in Finland: This summer brought an interesting piece of news. The Vihreät De Gröna (Green League) — Finland’s junior partner in the country’s current five-party coalition government — has amended its manifesto to include an endorsement of nuclear power. It was the first European green party to do so, and the vote on the question wasn’t particularly close. Finnish public opinion has shifted strongly in favor of nuclear power since Vladimir Putin’s invasion of Ukraine and Russia’s continued weaponization of the energy trade, with only 18 percent of Finns opposed to expanding nuclear power — down from 42 percent opposition in 2011 in the immediate aftermath of the Fukushima disaster. Similar shifts in opinion have occurred in much of the rest of Europe. 

 

The Finnish greens have in mind an ambitious nuclear program. Not only would it extend the licenses of existing nuclear-power plants and replace a planned gas-fired plant — recently scrapped because it would have relied on a Russian state-owned supplier — with a new nuclear facility. More important, the program would streamline the cumbrous and time-consuming licensing system for “small modular reactors” (SMRs), innovative new plants that would bring nuclear power out of the 1970s and into the 21st century. 

 

This is in vivid contrast to green parties elsewhere in Europe, notably in Germany, where Green Party leader Annalena Baerbock, who currently serves as foreign minister, has been put in the ridiculous position of responding to Moscow’s aggression by preparing to reactivate coal-fired power plants as an “emergency reserve.” Even as Germans and their allies in the European Union prepare for a complete shutoff of Russian gas, Berlin has stuck to the decision — catastrophically wrongheaded on economic, security, and environmental grounds — to shutter three of its six remaining nuclear plants in January of 2022, while planning to take the last three offline by the end of the year. Germany — which is, bear in mind, a country officially committed to achieving 100 percent decarbonization in its electricity industry by 2050 — is firing up coal plants, and the country’s leading scientific and government authorities are planning to ration energy consumption for home heating while pleading, helplessly, that “less energy must be used overall,” as public broadcaster Deutsche Welle put it. 

 

If France can muster the technical means to run a safe and effective nuclear program, then Germany can, too. This is undeniably a policy problem, not a scientific or economic problem. 

 

It is a choice — the wrong choice. 

 

Sometimes, it is easier to spot the bad decision-making when it is someplace else. But while the United States happily is not in a European condition of energy scarcity — thanks, fracking! — Americans, too, are suffering from high energy prices and volatile global energy markets, and we are far from insulated against the Kremlin’s war by proxy in the energy markets. And though our Green Party is a political nonentity (the Greens and the Socialist Party USA linked up for a joint “ecosocialist” 2020 presidential ticket and commanded all of 0.2 percent of the nationwide vote), we do have a Democratic Party full of Green New Dealers who spent much of July trying to bully President Joe Biden into declaring a “climate emergency” and imposing a sweeping new environmental policy by diktat. It is far from a dead issue in the United States. 

 

U.S. regulators and industry groups have made some progress toward deploying modern nuclear power. In 2020, NuScale became the first company to receive the Nuclear Regulatory Commission’s blessing for a new SMR design, the first of which is planned for use at the Idaho National Laboratory in 2030. But there is a great wide gulf to cross between the plan on paper and new power coming into the market, and the fact is that very little new nuclear power has been brought online since the Three Mile Island–era collapse of the nuclear industry in the late 1970s and 1980s.

 

The politics aren’t great: Almost half of Americans tell Gallup that they are opposed to nuclear power. While the Democratic Party did take the welcome step of modernizing its platform in 2020 to endorse nuclear power for the first time in 50 years — along with “all zero-carbon technologies” — a decisive majority of Democrats oppose it, as do a large number of influential activists. Young Americans are more likely to oppose it than are older Americans. Democratic figures such as Governor Gavin Newsom and Senator Dianne Feinstein, who are currently working to keep the Diablo Canyon nuclear plant that provides 10 percent of California’s electricity from going offline, as scheduled in 2025, remain outliers in their party. The Biden administration has made some faint sounds about how nuclear power is “a very big part, potentially,” of its climate goals, and it has committed $14 million to a feasibility study for a potential new small modular reactor . . . in Romania . . . but, at home, the full-time green lobby remains largely resistant. 

 

Democrats, environmental activists, and young people: The very ones who say they are most worried about climate change are the most opposed to the one technology that can plausibly do something about climate change. 

 

What gives? 

 

***

 

Maybe I’m wrong about that hypothetical contemporary inventor of nuclear power. Maybe he wouldn’t get a Nobel prize or be hailed as a hero. Mark Lynas has his doubts. 

 

Lynas, a climate-change writer and pro-nuclear climate campaigner based in the United Kingdom, tells a depressing story. “I ask people to imagine that there’s a magic carbon fairy that could wave a wand and make the whole global-warming problem disappear straightaway. I ask: How many of you would want to wave that wand? And out of an audience of a couple of hundred, the number of hands that go up are only in the single figures. In some ways, nuclear is that magic carbon fairy wand. But people don’t want to solve the problem — they want to do something else. The people who are obsessed with climate change and say it’s the No. 1 issue in the world have a lot more on their agenda than carbon emissions.” 

 

Lynas, who has been a visiting fellow at Cornell’s College of Agriculture and Life Sciences and who serves as a climate adviser to the president of the Maldives, is encouraged by the recent news — that nuclear power has made even the slightest inroads with European greens was “previously unthinkable,” he says. “I’ve been campaigning as a pro-nuclear green for a long time, and I don’t feel isolated anymore, particularly given the geopolitical situation with Ukraine.” Closing down nuclear plants in Germany, on the other hand, “looks mad.” In his view, the argument is not a particularly difficult one: “People have to realize that nuclear is the only zero-carbon source we’ve got that works everywhere all the time. We all know that wind and solar are intermittent, that hydro you can only build in the mountains.” Nuclear doesn’t have those disadvantages, and it offers one critical geopolitical advantage. “With nuclear, you can stockpile fuel so that you have energy security for years at a time, without worrying about Middle Eastern despots and Russian dictators.” 

 

While U.S. greens talk about “ecosocialism,” Lynas is an advocate of what he calls “ecomodernism,” which he describes in a Guardian essay as “an attempt to transcend some of the political polarisation in current environment debates with a recognition that human ingenuity and technological innovation offer immense promise in tackling ecological challenges.” The ecomodernists hope that tools such as nuclear power and genetic engineering will minimize the human footprint in the natural world — not a neo-primitivist return to Eden but a science-driven “decoupling.” In the course of trying to launch a new environmental movement for people who take climate change seriously but accept that it is safe to eat GMO foods, he has, naturally, set himself up for abuse from both sides of the political spectrum: from a climate-skeptical Right that wants to use ecomodernism as a cat’s-paw against the mainstream environmental movement, and by a Left that derides ecomodernism as a do-nothing dodge. 

 

American conservatives for the most part do not put climate change at the top of their to-do lists — and a nontrivial share of conservatives believe that it is a hoax — but much of the case for nuclear is the same as the case for unleashing the rest of our country’s rich energy resources: Inexpensive, reliable energy is good for the rest of the economy, and it confers upon those who enjoy it critical geopolitical advantages. At the level of gross political calculation, you would think that the Right would jump on it, because taking up nuclear power as a climate policy gives Republicans an opportunity to blunt Democrats’ overwhelming advantage on an issue that resonates more strongly among independent voters, younger voters, female voters, and college-educated voters — demographics with which the GOP has, to put it gently, room for improvement. 

 

***

 

In reality, there are two environmental movements. One of them views environmental problems as an opportunity for problem-solving, and the other views them as an occasion for moral improvement. 

 

For the latter faction — for practitioners not of environmentalism but of environmental piety — the question is not one of economic trade-offs, technological development, or policy innovation. It is one of sin. 

 

And the nuclear-power people — with all their talk of being green and clean — are, from that point of view, heretics. 

 

In the theology of environmental piety, the original sin is consumerism. And, for that reason, the environmentalism is based on limiting or eliminating consumption of various kinds: Don’t use straws, don’t eat meat, don’t own a car . . . and don’t have children. 

 

One of the great advocates of not having children is Population Bomb author Paul Ehrlich, who has been wrong in practically every prediction he has ever made but still holds the status of a prophet among many environmentalists (see “Population Bomb Scare” in the March 17 issue of National Review). Ehrlich is definitely among those who would not want the carbon fairy to wave her magic wand, having famously observed: “Giving society cheap, abundant energy at this point would be the moral equivalent of giving an idiot child a machine gun.” 

 

A remarkable bit of history that has been forgotten, perhaps studiously forgotten: In the 1960s and 1970s, environmental groups such as the Sierra Club and progressive champions including Ralph Nader campaigned in favor of fossil fuels — as an alternative to nuclear energy. As Michael Shellenberger told the tale in his 2017 address to the American Nuclear Society, Nader at one time assured his allies that “we have a far greater amount of fossil fuels in this country than we’re owning up to,” and that nuclear was unnecessary given our access to “tar sands, oil out of shale, methane in coal beds,” and the like — i.e., all the stuff that today’s environmentalists want to keep in the ground. Shellenberger further noted that a Sierra Club adviser went as far as to contemplate doubling the amount of coal being mined to keep nuclear power at bay. In the 1970s, nuclear power wasn’t seen as a potential solution to a climate problem nobody was talking about yet — it was a tool of capitalism, militarism, and imperialism, at least in the eyes of the Left. 

 

“Nuclear weapons are the origins of it,” Lynas says. “We used to talk about beating our swords into plowshares, but they have stopped campaigning against weapons and started campaigning against reactors — stopped campaigning against swords and started campaigning against plowshares. Who campaigns against nuclear weapons now? Not Greenpeace. And it’s not like the issue went away — we are closer to nuclear Armageddon now than at any point since the Cuban missile crisis.” 

 

The activist class has indeed moved on from swords to plowshares. In November, I attended the United Nations’ big climate confab — COP26, in Glasgow — with my colleagues at the Competitive Enterprise Institute, a market-oriented think tank and the institutional home of Myron Ebell, a leading critic of “global warming alarmism” and “energy-rationing policies,” as his bio puts it. You’d think that the conservative magazine writer and the libertarian wonks from the home of global capitalism would be the least popular people at COP26 — which, as I reported at the time, was much more a tent-revival meeting than a policy discussion — but an invisible cordon was instead drawn around the delegation from the U.S. nuclear-power activists. As one of them told me, practically the only people who spoke to them at all were either curious journalists or angry eco-mystics lecturing them that they didn’t belong there. In fact, most of the nuclear-power groups that applied for credentials were rejected, while the meeting was thick with activists making not exactly plausible claims that the world’s climate challenges could be solved by reverting to Stone Age “indigenous peoples’” technologies. 

 

Nuclear power is exactly the sort of solution that the quasi-religious faction within the environmental movement doesn’t want to see succeed. And so you will hear anti-nuclear activists charge that nuclear power is too expensive to provide a sustainable alternative — while, as Shellenberger pointed out, the Sierra Club and other groups worked programmatically to raise regulatory costs for nuclear power in order to make it more expensive. He quoted from an old internal Sierra Club communiqué: “Our campaign stressing the hazards of nuclear power will supply a rationale for increasing regulation . . . and add to the cost of the industry.”

 

The people banging bongos outside of U.N. meetings are a very loud — for years, the loudest — voice in the conversation, but they aren’t the only voice. There is another discussion under way, as former Department of Energy executive John Kotek of the Nuclear Energy Institute observes. 

 

“It’s fascinating to me that there seem to be two different conversations going on,” he says. “In some quarters, particularly those focused on renewables as alternatives to nuclear, conversations that have come from a nuclear-critical perspective, you don’t hear much about nuclear as a solution to the carbon/climate challenge. But if you look at utilities and their planning, nuclear is very much a part of the decarbonization conversation. That’s because the utilities and the PUCs have to do the math and bear the responsibility for ensuring that a carbon-free system is not only clean but also reliable and affordable.”

 

And that, even more than fanatical religious opposition, is the immediate pressing challenge for the nuclear industry. 

 

***

 

The industry has a reputation for not finishing things on time or on budget — more often, the story is one of years of delay and expenses that run into multiples of the original estimates. Part of that is a knowledge problem: If you are a production homebuilder who puts up 25,000 slightly different versions of the same two or three basic designs every year, then your crews get really, really good at building those houses. If you are the U.S. nuclear-power industry — which in its recent history has undertaken only one or two major projects every couple of decades — then you don’t benefit from that kind of knowledge-building: In effect, every plant is a prototype. 

 

Kotek and his Nuclear Energy Institute colleagues hope that the industry is turning the page. The aforementioned SMRs — “small modular reactors” — are, as the name implies, smaller than traditional reactors and modular in that they can be chained together in various configurations to fit different situations. The advantage of this, Kotek says, is that workers and managers can build a more functional knowledge base through repetition, and that much of the most difficult work can be done in a factory setting rather than on site. “The new designs should be very conducive to pushing down this cost and learning curve faster than has been the case. We have simpler designs that rely on gravity and natural heat convection rather than pumps and valves to make the plants work.” The new designs are also safer than the old ones, he says. And that may be true, but what everybody seems to forget is that the big story in the worst nuclear-power disaster in U.S. history — Three Mile Island — is that everything worked, and nobody got hurt. 

 

Those who are looking for a more economically intelligent alternative to utopian Green New Deal thinking are generally friendly to nuclear, but what the nuclear-power industry wants for itself is not free-market policy designed by Milton Friedman: They want the same sweet deal that wind and solar have received, more or less. As things stand, it is less expensive to bring new solar online than new coal, but, given the various thumbs on various scales, that isn’t exactly a 100 percent free-market outcome. “Wind and solar didn’t get cheap all by themselves,” Kotek says. “We had federal and private investments in the technology itself, and then they were backed up by renewable-portfolio standards and tax credits at the federal level. A wind project today may cost a quarter of what it cost a dozen years ago, and solar has seen an even more dramatic price decrease, and that is because we had smart policies that gave the private sector confidence. We haven’t used that same tool kit for nuclear in the way that we need to.”

 

Some friends of nuclear hope that we are on the verge of a renaissance. Kotek thinks we are already in it. “We have seen consistent support across administrations going back to the George W. Bush administration at least,” he elaborates. He even puts in a good word for that project in Romania: “Once you get into the administration and start running the government, you recognize that having a strong civil nuclear export industry is really helpful — not just for job creation. When you work with another country on a nuclear plant, it’s operations, it’s safety, it’s cybersecurity, it’s nonproliferation, and it’s a whole bunch of areas in which you want to see the United States setting the global standard and spreading our norms around the world.”

 

In the meantime, the Biden administration is also spending not millions of dollars but billions to keep aging U.S. nuclear plants from going offline. These plants are well run, Kotek says. But they have not been economically viable during the last many years of very low natural-gas prices, and they haven’t been especially competitive vis-à-vis heavily subsidized renewables. But gas prices are volatile, and renewables have significant physical limitations, such as the fact that solar power doesn’t work at night. Some of those problems may — may — be mitigated in the future by means of more-efficient power storage, but that day is not yet here. 

 

The question for environmentalists in the here and now is: Do they want to wave the magic carbon fairy’s wand? Because there is a radically low-carbon energy source that is ready to go, right here and right now, and has been for years. What’s holding it back? Mostly fear and superstition.

China Wants to Do More Than Stop Pelosi

By Matthew Continetti

Saturday, July 2022

 

I’m not in the habit of saying that Nancy Pelosi is right. But if she wants to visit Taiwan next month as part of a congressional delegation to several countries in the Indo-Pacific, she really ought to go. Canceling the trip now would be a capitulation to tyranny.

 

Canceling now would mean that Congress buckled in the face of Chinese threats and Biden administration wavering. It would establish the principle that Beijing has veto power over the travel plans of senior U.S. officials. It would tell the world that America is more interested in mollifying Xi Jinping than in supporting the democratically elected Tsai Ing-wen. It would be another example of self-deterrence, Biden-style. And America would be weakened.

 

Pelosi would be the first speaker of the House to visit Taiwan since Newt Gingrich in 1997. The Chinese Communist Party was no happier 25 years ago than they are today. Back then, the People’s Republic said that Gingrich’s support of Taiwan was “improper” and “contradictory.” China’s rhetoric has grown harsher as it has grown stronger. Earlier this year, when Pelosi first scheduled a visit in April, a Chinese government spokesman called it a “malicious provocation.” He pledged that China would respond “resolutely.” Then Pelosi got Covid. She had to cancel.

 

Last week the Financial Times reported that the trip was back on and rescheduled for August. Once more, the jackals in Beijing began to howl. The enslavers of Xinjiang, the oppressors of Hong Kong, the bullies of the Indo-Pacific acted as if they were the victims. Foreign Ministry spokesman Zhao Lijian threatened  that China would “take determined and forceful measures to firmly safeguard national sovereignty and territorial integrity.” The Chinese propaganda machine spoke forebodingly of consequences for the United States. A former editor of Global Times, the Chinese Communist Party’s version of Pravda, wrote of Pelosi, “If the U.S. can’t restrain her, let China restrain her & punish her.”

 

Punish her? Any hostile action taken against the speaker of the House of Representatives, no matter her party and no matter the circumstances, would be an act of war. Is China willing, much less prepared, to provoke armed conflict with the United States over a co-del? If so — and I doubt it — then China is itching for a fight and will ramp up its demands no matter what Pelosi decides.

 

If the visit does happen, China will respond for sure. But the cost it might impose on U.S.–China relations still will be less than the price of cancellation. Neither China nor the United States is prepared for a major confrontation. Better to take the hit to the relationship now than let Xi Jinping dictate Nancy Pelosi’s — or anyone else’s — itinerary.

 

As usual, President Biden is not helping. Asked about the controversy on July 20, he said, “The military thinks it’s not a good idea right now,” and “I don’t know what the status of it is.” Thanks for letting the world know what the joint chiefs are telling you, Joe. And what a way to go to bat for a fellow Democrat. Another command performance.

 

Biden’s mention of his upcoming call with Xi — it took place on July 28 — suggested that he doesn’t want Congress to get in the way of presidential diplomacy. That’s understandable. The elected branches always compete for foreign-policy influence and prestige. There probably ought to have been closer coordination between the speaker’s office and the White House. But once the visit became the object of China’s vitriol, the only sensible response was to close ranks and defend Pelosi’s right to travel where she pleases, when she pleases.

 

Why? Because China’s aim isn’t just to stop Pelosi. It wants gradually to isolate Taiwan by coercing the United States into abandoning a longtime ally. It wants to replace the United States as the preeminent power in the Indo-Pacific. Giving China what it wants now helps it achieve its goals. If Pelosi can’t visit Taiwan, then surely other U.S. officials will think twice before traveling there. And if Beijing calls the shots for Washington, D.C., why should other regional governments take us seriously?

 

The Washington Post editorial board is wrong to suggest that Pelosi postpone her visit until “the optimal moment.” There is no optimal moment. There are only moments when we decide to act and take responsibility. Does the Post believe that China would be any less angry at a Pelosi visit six months or a year from now? “Given the temptation for Mr. Xi to divert attention and bolster his own political standing by targeting Taiwan and the United States,” the editors write, “it’s smart not to give him any excuses.” Reading those words, I hear an echo of Barack Obama. As if Xi Jinping needs an excuse to further his evil designs. As if America and Pelosi are the problem, and not the despotic, expansionist, belligerent government in Beijing.

 

“Those who play with fire will perish by it,” Xi told Biden on Thursday, according to the Chinese Foreign Ministry. It’s a line Xi has used before. But who is playing with fire here? Pelosi, by following a precedent set by Newt Gingrich a quarter century ago? Or China, by trying to steamroll the speaker of the House? U.S. foreign policy works best when America acts boldly to create facts on the ground favorable to freedom. Which is why I am about to commit to print words I never thought I’d write: Go, Nancy, go!

Stagflation by Any Other Name

National Review Online

Friday, July 29, 2022

 

It is almost comical how much work the Biden administration is putting into denying that the U.S. economy has entered a recession.

 

Here is what is not in dispute:

 

One, real GDP is contracting and appears to have been for half a year now. Two consecutive quarters of GDP contraction is the commonly accepted definition of a recession when there is a Republican incumbent facing reelection; when Democrats are in danger of a midterm wipeout, “recession” becomes a term of art. The Biden administration has really been trying to work the National Bureau of Economic Research, who are the guys who will decide whether to call the recession a recession. Meanwhile, Janet Yellen is out there like Baghdad Bob, insisting that this can’t be a recession because the labor market is strong and because “household finances remain strong.”

 

Two, the labor market isn’t actually strong. If the labor market were strong, then real wages would be going up, and the number of jobs would have recovered to its pre-Covid level. Neither of those things has happened. In fact, real wages are going down, not up. Which is to say, Americans are working more hours for less pay — hardly the sign of a good jobs market. And the declining real GDP means that Americans are doing more work but producing less value. And as for those “strong” household finances . . .

 

Three, inflation is currently at 9.1 percent, meaning that those “strong” household finances are experiencing something just short of literal decimation. The inflation rate for food is more than 10 percent, and the inflation rate for energy is 41 percent.

 

Four, declining GDP and high inflation, or “stagflation,” as it was known in the 1970s, is something the U.S. economy has not experienced since Jimmy Carter’s grim mug was on the cathode-tube television while Walter Cronkite read the news.

 

Also: Do you know what will not make inflation better? A great big injection of more money into the markets with a $369 billion “Inflation Reduction Act” — which, ridiculously enough, is what Senate Democrats are calling their latest “deal.”

 

The situation is in some ways even worse than it looks at first glance. The growth of nominal wages in 2022 (meaning wages not adjusted for inflation) has been very modest, and, in fact, it has been even slower than it was in 2021, while inflation in 2022 has been more rapid than in 2021. Put another way: Prices are increasing about twice as fast as wages. The fact that this is happening while the unemployment rate is relatively low is not a great sign in that it suggests wages may be stuck on their current sorry trajectory for some time. When you have a tight labor market, and real wages are headed lower rather than higher, you have an economic problem that probably is not going to be solved by an even tighter job market.

 

Is it a recession or not? Whatever the NBER calls it, it’s 9.1 percent inflation, declining real incomes, and declining economic output. Professor Pangloss himself couldn’t spin that into good news.

The Dobbs Health Scare

By John McCormack

Thursday, July 28, 2022

 

Leftists resort to scaremongering about abortion

 

Ingrid Skop, a pro-life obstetrician based in San Antonio who has delivered more than 5,000 babies in her career, thought in the wake of the Dobbs decision that media fearmongering amounted to little more than idle, if shameful, talk. But it’s begun to look a little more like a self-fulfilling prophecy.

 

“Unfortunately, I see it is affecting what’s happening on the ground,” Dr. Skop told me in a phone interview on July 22, a month after the Dobbs decision. “The media misrepresentation of the law has been taken as truth by many doctors. They have not looked at what the law actually says.” For example, Texas law explicitly excludes treatment of a miscarriage from the definition of abortion, but Skop says her trusted colleagues have “seen and heard from women who have been told by emergency rooms that there is no other option for their miscarriage except to pass it on their own,” she said. “It’s just not good care.”

 

One of the most important pro-life battles in the states right now is clearing up misinformation and disinformation about what abortion laws mean for women with life-threatening conditions. One blatantly false claim that has been spread in the media is that pro-life laws may prohibit treatment of ectopic pregnancies.

 

“‘Do I abort this ectopic pregnancy to literally save my life or do I go to jail?’” Daily Beast columnist Wajahat Ali wrote on Twitter the day of the Dobbs decision, adding that it’s a “question women in America now have to ask.” Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez wrote in a July 8 tweet that abortion laws mean that women in “half the country should risk death if they have an ectopic pregnancy within the wrong state lines.” 

 

But every state abortion law before Roe included an exception to save the life of the mother, and that is true of every abortion law that has taken effect following the Dobbs decision. Before Roe, ectopic pregnancies were routinely treated as soon as they were detected. Many states, including Texas, explicitly exclude treatment of ectopic pregnancies from the definition of abortion. An ectopic pregnancy is a life-threatening condition in which the embryo implants outside the womb, and lifesaving treatment always results in the death of the embryo. Skop said she hasn’t personally heard of any doctors who have delayed treatment for an ectopic pregnancy, but a small number of such stories (which are seemingly impossible to confirm) have cropped up in the press. 

 

On July 14, the Dallas Morning News reported that the Texas Medical Association sent a letter asking state regulators at the Texas Board of Medical Examiners to clarify the law. The News reported that one hospital “in Central Texas allegedly told a physician not to treat an ectopic pregnancy until it ruptured, which puts patient health at serious risk, according to the letter.” The letter and article didn’t name the hospital or person who “allegedly” gave the physician this terrible advice — and do not suggest that the physician acted on it — but if the story is true, the advice would appear to amount to malpractice. “Every ER doctor and every ob-gyn knows that an ectopic is a big deal, so I don’t think anyone has been willing to wait on those,” Skop said.

 

What is to be done to clear up the misinformation and disinformation about abortion laws? Pro-life doctors, advocates, and journalists have been trying to correct the record. To that end, in her capacity as senior fellow and director of medical affairs at the pro-life Charlotte Lozier Institute, Skop has produced a pair of papers (one in May and another in July) on treatments to save the life of the mother. Ultimately, it’s going to fall to those in positions of authority to correct the record. In Skop’s view, both the Texas Medical Association, which represents doctors, and the Texas Medical Board, which has the power to discipline doctors, have the authority and responsibility to clear up the misinformation. “I do blame the medical organizations,” she said. “That’s what they’re there for — to help the doctors understand these situations.” 

 

It was a matter of weeks following the Dobbs decision before the hospital system where Skop has worked sent out an email in which a lawyer “cut and pasted the text of the Texas law and basically outlined, this does not include miscarriages, does not include ectopic pregnancies.” Skop said she “asked the attorney who sent me the email if I can share it with other friends outside of the system. And she said no, this was only for the doctors in our system.”

 

Ideally, Skop said, there needs to be an “all of the above” approach from medical organizations and government lawyers in clearing up misinformation. At the very least, attorneys general and medical organizations should say that doctors operating in hospitals should continue to exercise the same standards of medical judgment and care when treating women with life-threatening conditions as they did before Dobbs. Such conditions include, but are not limited to, cases of severe hypertension and times when a pregnant woman’s water breaks before the baby can survive outside the womb — when the baby is delivered before viability to save the mother’s life. 

 

Some advocates of a right to abortion and doctors have said that the law leaves unclear whether they need to wait until a woman’s condition becomes dire before delivering, but that was not a requirement of abortion laws before Roe, and it is not a requirement of abortion laws after Dobbs. Paul Linton, a constitutional lawyer who formerly served as general counsel for Americans United for Life, told me in a phone interview that life-of-the-mother exceptions in laws banning abortion “do not have any requirement of imminency or immediacy” of a threat to the mother’s life.

 

Skop gave the example of a woman whose membranes rupture — her water breaks — before viability, when it is appropriate to offer immediately to deliver the baby. “I say this as a pro-life physician: It is appropriate to deliver at that point. Because we know that likelihood that four days, six days [later], she’s going to be clinically infected,” and that infection can lead to potentially fatal sepsis. She added: “We know that the likelihood this child was going to make it to be born alive, to stay alive, not die in the neonatal period, is super low.” There is no need to wait until day four or day six; the delivery may occur on day one. 

 

Yet there was a troubling American Journal of Obstetrics and Gynecology pre-proof article released at the end of June that reported two major hospitals in Dallas had stopped offering the option of immediate delivery in these circumstances following the enactment of the Texas Heartbeat Act in September 2021. Those hospitals offered only “expectant management” of the mother’s condition, which is associated with greater risks to the mother. (Expectant mothers will sometimes choose to take these risks — rather than deliver immediately — despite the very low odds that the baby will survive.) 

 

National Review contacted both Dallas hospitals, seeking comment about how and why they had concluded that the law prohibited offering immediate delivery in these circumstances. A spokesperson for Parkland Health told NR in an email: “We do not have anyone available” for an interview. The other hospital, UT Southwestern, also declined an interview request, but the hospital’s media-relations department sent an email to NR that said: “UT Southwestern continues to review the U.S. Supreme Court opinion in conjunction with Texas laws and will not be commenting at this time. The findings speak for themselves. UTSW followed the appropriate guidelines on the provision of care reflected in this retrospective review.”

 

But it was legal to offer lifesaving treatment before Roe, and Skop says there is no good reason to believe it is illegal to offer such lifesaving treatment after Dobbs: “If [the mother] wants delivery at the time of initial diagnosis, it is the standard of care to do so and is allowed by all state pro-life laws.”

 

In the intervening five decades, of course, a whole army of risk-averse lawyers have encouraged doctors to practice defensive medicine — always keeping an eye on protecting themselves from liability. Some hospital administrators may be taking “measures thinking they’re protecting themselves from the law. But if they’re not following the standard of medical care, and people get hurt, the flip side” is that the hospital or doctor “can be sued for medical malpractice,” said Skop. “So it’s very important that the medical societies set ideology aside and make sure that the members who rely on them for advice are given appropriate advice and that they can care for women well.”

 

Abortion-rights activists would surely like to turn a life-of-the-mother exception into a loophole to perform any abortion. But that risk is very low because almost all women with life-threatening conditions would already be in hospitals, and it would be very rare for a doctor to diagnose a woman with a life-threatening condition that didn’t exist. Statistics show that only a very small percentage of abortions are performed to save the life of the mother. For example, last year in the State of Florida, 0.15 percent of all abortions were performed “due to a life endangering physical condition,” according to Florida’s Agency for Health Care Administration. If Planned Parenthood tried to reopen a clinic doing abortions only to “save the life of the mother,” it would be obvious what was going on.

 

Why medical organizations and attorneys general haven’t done more to clear up the disinformation isn’t entirely clear. Many state pro-life laws are being challenged in court, and attorneys general could worry that any statement could be used against them in a trial. But if that’s what is holding them back, they are behaving like lawyers concerned only about representing their client (the government) when they should be taking a broader view of themselves as statesmen dedicated to protecting women, babies, and the law. In short, when Dr. Skop speaks, they should listen.

Manchin’s ‘Inflation Reduction’ Deal Won’t Save Democrats

National Review Online

Friday, July 29, 2022

 

If reducing inflation were as simple as passing a law, Congress would have done it already. Democrats are claiming that a new deal between Senate majority leader Chuck Schumer and West Virginia senator Joe Manchin is the ticket back to price stability. That’s nonsense, and it won’t save Democrats’ reputation among voters.

 

Democrats aren’t calling this bill Build Back Better, and they shouldn’t because it isn’t. Build Back Better was an absurdly large progressive wishlist that would have cost trillions of dollars and included countless new welfare programs and industry subsidies for Democratic interest groups. That bill died, as it deserved to, because even after a year of haggling and horse-trading, it never had a majority of senators in favor of its provisions.

 

What we have instead is what Democrats are calling the Inflation Reduction Act, which is composed of a few random parts of Build Back Better that Manchin agrees with. For revenue, it includes a 15 percent corporate minimum tax, prescription-drug pricing reforms, and more IRS tax-code enforcement. On the expense side, there are $369 billion in green-energy programs and subsidies, plus a $64 billion extension of the Affordable Care Act.

 

It’s a delicious bit of Washington-speak that the Inflation Reduction Act, which will not reduce inflation, contains an extension of the Affordable Care Act, which did not make care more affordable. The Manchin–Schumer deal also hides the true cost of the Obamacare expansion by letting the subsidies expire in 2025. Last year, Manchin said temporary expansions of budget items intended to be permanent in the Build Back Better bill were “budget gimmicks” and “shell games.”

 

This bill would add new spending on government boondoggles at a time when plenty of other government boondoggles are already on their way out the door. The bipartisan infrastructure law, we were told, also contained green-energy programs that would help fight climate change, and it will be rolled out over the next nine and a half years. That “once-in-a-generation investment,” it turns out, wasn’t enough (surprise!), which is why we need more “historic investment” now. Something tells us that this time won’t be enough, either, and in a few months, progressives will again be hectoring Congress to “save the planet” from the “climate emergency,” which conveniently involves shoveling more taxpayer money to Democratic special interests.

 

The revenue provisions aren’t any better. Increasing taxes on corporations as the economy contracts is not exactly a recipe for economic growth, or for correcting supply-chain issues. At a time when Americans are being squeezed by inflation, Democrats apparently want them to also be squeezed by the IRS. The tax-enforcement provisions would effectively double the size of the agency, giving it more manpower to audit taxpayers. That’s what “closing the tax gap” will mean in practice: more audits. Hooray.

 

Democrats claim this bill would reduce the deficit by $300 billion, a “historic deficit reduction to fight inflation.” At least they have included more realistic estimates of their revenue provisions this time around, rather than the sham overestimates they were using to justify Build Back Better. They say IRS enforcement, for example, will raise $124 billion, which is far more realistic than the $400 billion to $1 trillion some Democrats were claiming it would raise last year.

 

But it’s hard to believe the Democrats have found religion on deficit reduction, given their actions earlier this congress and the actions they want to pursue going forward. The American Rescue Plan, passed by these very same Democratic senators and representatives, is partially responsible for the inflationary pressures our economy is facing and added $1.9 trillion in new debt. That debt was entirely unnecessary, and the rising interest rates that have followed the rising inflation have made financing that debt less affordable. Democrats are also still toying with student-loan forgiveness, when even just extending the pause that’s already in place would be deficit-increasing and inflationary. And we all know many of them wanted to spend way more than this and Manchin and Schumer negotiated it down.

 

Negotiations are likely incomplete. Arizona senator Kyrsten Sinema has yet to indicate her position on it, and she opposed similar corporate-tax provisions in the past. Other potential holdouts include Democrats from states with high property and income taxes, most prominent among them New Jersey senator Bob Menendez. That’s because this agreement does not include restoration of the SALT deduction, which Menendez believes is the greatest thing since sliced gabagool. If restoration of the SALT deduction does get included, then Manchin will likely be out, and Democrats can’t have a single defector.

 

Regardless, even if it does pass, this cynical plan to throw together a few legislative proposals Democrats have wanted for years and call it “inflation reduction” will not work, even as a piece of deceptive labeling. Voters want to see inflation actually come down, not their member of Congress vote for the words “inflation reduction.”

The Solution to Campus Wokeism? Enlightenment Principles

By Charles Hilu

Thursday, July 28, 2022

 

James Lindsay, who has worked to expose the lunacy of leftist ideologies such as critical race theory, spoke to young conservatives at Young America’s Foundation’s National Conservative Student Conference on Thursday.

 

He outlined to students the connections between identity politics and Marxism, explaining that the view of one group as an inherent oppressor and the other as inherently oppressed is an intrinsically collectivist and authoritarian one.

 

While the subject of his talk was interesting, there was a point in the question-and-answer portion of his lecture that was especially important. It gave students an idea of how they can fight back against indoctrination without necessarily calling it out publicly and risking cancellation.

 

A student told Lindsay about his experience in his math class, recounting that he felt the lectures he was supposed to attend were useless, given that the professor was just repeating the material in the textbook without challenging students to think critically about it. He said this phenomenon was also likely happening in the liberal arts and asked Lindsay how students can learn about the world despite their dogmatically leftist professors.

 

“You actually pointed at [the solution], which is that you have to do the study yourself. You have to be autodidactic,” Lindsay answered.

 

“You are going to have to step outside of the frame of your professors,” he added, “and you’re going to have to start coming together as students who are interested to learn, interested to find the truth.” He advised conference attendees to simply read the texts for themselves, maybe forming little book clubs where they discuss their ideas freely outside of the classroom.

 

This advice may seem like common sense now, but it was once a revolutionary idea, especially during the advent of the classical liberalism of the Enlightenment. One of the first people to articulate it as political theory was Immanuel Kant. In his 1784 essay, “What is Enlightenment,” he defined the concept as “man’s leaving his self-caused immaturity.”

 

That immaturity, he said, comes about when people allow others to think for them, abdicating their responsibilities to gain knowledge. If a man wants to become enlightened, Kant argued, he must “dare to know,” not accepting the dogma of a church or a state without question.

 

Now, some in our contemporary culture need a reminder of Kant’s ideas. There are people in our world who have taken up the mantle almost as a magisterial authority in their advocacy for social justice.

 

Ibram X. Kendi has said that “the very heartbeat of racism is denial,” arguing that people who push back on allegations of racism against them are illustrating their own bigotry. In this view of the world, people must accept critical race theory unquestioningly, which flies in the face of the ideas Kant expressed.

 

In Kant’s time, achieving personal enlightenment was much more difficult to do. Though the printing press was centuries old by the time he wrote his essay, books were still expensive, and people had far less leisure time and disposable income. Now, we have access to the mass production of books both old and new, as well as libraries at our universities that are filled with them.

 

Additionally, governments in Kant’s era were wont to ban books that challenged their authority. Though we have seen publishing companies and retailers engage in soft bans, these controversial books are still ultimately available, at least, far more than books that were prohibited in the 18th century.

 

Conservative college students have the resources at their fingertips to achieve Kantian enlightenment, and Lindsay’s advice allows them to do so without necessarily facing too much pushback. Having the fortitude to speak unpopular truths is courageous, but not all people are willing or equipped to do that.

 

But the least everyone can do is read materials themselves and come up with their own opinions. Brave people in Kant’s time did it amidst harder barriers than there are today. What excuse do we have?

Higher Education’s Credibility Time Bomb

By Jonathan Marks

Wednesday, July 27, 2022

 

In recent years, the sizable gap between Republicans and Democrats concerning their opinion of higher education has widened into a chasm. “Overall, do you think colleges and universities are having a positive or negative effect on the way things are going in this country today?” the Pew Research Center asked in 2015. Seventy percent of self-identified Democrats and Democratic leaners and 54 percent of their Republican counterparts answered “positive.” In 2017, Democrats hadn’t much budged; 72 percent still chose “positive.” But Republicans had soured on higher education. Only 36 percent thought well of its effects on the country. Last year, 76 percent of Democrats and just 34 percent of Republicans held our colleges and universities in tolerably high regard.

 

Blame the rise of Trumpian populism or the widely publicized protests that swept across colleges and universities beginning in 2015. We’ve moved in a short time from a 16-point gap between Democrats and Republicans, with both groups favoring higher education, to a 42-point fissure, with Republicans disdaining it.

 

Because the news about institutional trust has been bad nearly across the board, one can argue that colleges and universities are not so bad off. Republicans love large corporations even less nowadays. Overall, Pew’s findings suggest higher education is faring better with the public than such corporations, as well as banks and technology companies. Taking Republicans and Democrats into account, 57 percent still thought, in 2021, that colleges and universities were having a positive effect on the country. President Biden would kill for such numbers.

 

A new report from New America, a left-leaning think tank, offers such a spin. Their findings from a survey conducted in April and May of this year resemble Pew’s 2021 findings. Fifty-five percent—37 percent of Republicans and 73 percent of Democrats—think that colleges and universities are having a positive effect. Yet, the authors argue, they were collecting data while “warning signs in the economy grew stronger” and after more than two years of COVID. They observe that the National Opinion Research Institute has been collecting data on self-reported happiness for a half-century and, in 2020, “the share of Americans who said they are not too happy surpassed those saying they were very happy for the first time.”

 

In light of the public’s foul mood, it’s surprising that higher education’s position hasn’t eroded more than it has. In an atmosphere in which questions about higher education’s value arise not only in conservative circles but also at NPR, it’s surprising that 75 percent of respondents, including 69 percent of self-identified conservatives, agree that “education beyond high school offers a good return on investment for the student.” That’s not great, but it’s not alarming for colleges and universities either.

 

Even so, there is some bad news for people who value higher education’s health in that survey. The first concerns our partisan divide. Even though matters haven’t gotten much worse since the drastic turn in Republican public opinion five or six years ago, colleges and universities, facing both short-term and long-run decline in college-aged students, can ill-afford to be despised by half the country. The second concerns those same college-aged students, all of whom are in Generation Z. Only 48 percent of that generation’s respondents think that higher education is having a positive effect on the country. Forty-nine percent disagree.

 

That makes Generation Z more dubious about higher education than any generation other than the Silents, some of whom are now in their nineties. Generation Z respondents were also less likely than any other age group to agree that four-year colleges, public or private, are worth the cost of attendance. And they were less likely than average to view education beyond high school as a good investment.

 

All that says nothing about the actual value of higher education as an investment. The Bureau of Labor Statistics puts the median weekly wage for holders of a high school diploma or GED at $838. For bachelor’s degree holders with no higher degree, that’s $1,441, about 72 percent more. The value of a four-year degree varies greatly. A significant minority of programs may fail to offer a positive return on investment when measuring the costs and benefits carefully. Still, education analyst Preston Cooper concludes that “on average, there is still a significant financial return to attending college.” For those reasons, 56 percent of Asian respondents to the New America survey consider a bachelor’s degree to be the minimal requirement for the financial security of their immediate or close family members. Only five percent of Asian-Americans consider a high school degree sufficient, which may be closer to the truth than what white respondents apparently believe. Among them, 29 percent believe a college degree is a necessity.

 

Whatever the truth of that matter may be, higher education has a credibility problem, not only with Republicans beyond their college years but also with the very young people they hope to attract.