‘Neoconservative’ Is Being Abused

By Zach Kessel

Thursday, August 31, 2023

 

The notion that words have meanings, and that those meanings matter, was once intuitive for the Right. One of conservatism’s foundational texts — published even before the movement coalesced in the pages of National Review during the 1950s — is Richard Weaver’s Ideas Have Consequences, in which the Southern Agrarian argued, among other things, that the West’s broad acceptance of philosophical nominalism had led society to reject absolute truth. On a larger scale, Weaver contended, the improper and cavalier use of language had degraded and corrupted civilization. The importance of language, of truth, and of the idea that words mean what they mean has since been a cornerstone of movement conservatism.

 

In our political culture, words are now losing their meanings. Many in the electoral arena have demonstrated this reality. But the most recent offender is Republican presidential candidate and pharmaceutical executive Vivek Ramaswamy. Repeatedly attacked on foreign policy during last week’s debate, Ramaswamy posted a clip of an interview on X, formerly known as Twitter, in which he claimed that he “was the only non-neocon on the stage” and that “no difference” exists between President Joe Biden, former representative Liz Cheney (R., Wyo.), and his primary opponents on issues of international affairs. Ramaswamy is not the only figure to misuse the term “neocon” lately. Last Thursday, the Heritage Foundation’s Rob Bluey used the term in a piece taking issue with National Review writers’ position on Ukraine aid and their criticism of Heritage’s own view. 

 

In the popular imagination, the word “neoconservative” and its diminutive form conjure memories of War on Terror–era interventionism associated with former president George W. Bush’s administration. Used during that time to describe a set of idealists who believed the United States should promote democracy abroad and assist fledgling nations in the development of civic institutions — “nation-building,” as it is often known — the term has become an insult applying to any right-of-center individual who supports an assertive U.S. foreign policy. The Bush-era use of the word as an insult began on the left, embedding itself into popular culture to the extent that the Rolling Stones released a song titled “Sweet Neo Con” in 2005 as a protest against Bush.

 

That conception of neoconservatism has persisted into the contemporary political era on both sides of the aisle. Running for the Republican presidential nomination in 2015, Senator Ted Cruz (R., Texas) said, “If you look at President Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton, and for that matter some of the more aggressive Washington neocons, they have consistently misperceived the threat of radical Islamic terrorism and have advocated military adventurism that has had the effect of benefiting radical Islamic terrorists.”

 

Leaving aside legitimate debates over the efficacy of American military engagements in the Middle East, Cruz’s characterization of Obama’s and Clinton’s foreign policy as aligning with neoconservatives is a stretch. After all, the chief distinction between the group of people more accurately (though, as we will see, not faithfully to the term’s original meaning) called neocons in the Bush administration and many mainstream political figures of that era is the desire to export American-style democracy to the rest of the world. Most members of the House and Senate voted for the authorization of the use of military force that began the War in Iraq, even those who would later regret that decision. But very few of them did so because they wanted to impose American-style democracy on the Middle East. Rather, they wanted to depose a dictator they saw as a threat to U.S. national security. Certainly, those like Hillary Clinton are not neocons in that sense of the word. But the term has become, like so many others in our political lexicon, a stand-in for “people with whom I disagree.”

 

What makes that interesting is that neoconservatism has no real foreign-policy platform. As Irving Kristol, the “godfather of neoconservatism,” once wrote, “there is no set of neoconservative beliefs concerning foreign policy, only a set of attitudes derived from historical experience.” That history- and results-oriented outlook is a core tenet of neoconservatism, which Kristol described as a “persuasion,” rather than an ideology. The term began life as a derogatory utterance, first appearing in a 1973 piece in Dissent magazine by democratic socialist Michael Harrington. The people of whom Harrington wrote were men and women, formerly of the Left, who had journeyed rightward during the 1960s, and Harrington’s charge was that these men and women had become fellow travelers of the Right.

 

Kristol and the other thinkers and writers with whom he associated were members of a group known as the “New York Intellectuals,” a tribe of anti-Stalinist Marxists who largely converged around the City College of New York, with some hailing from New York and Columbia universities. Other members of the cohort included such figures as Midge Decter, Nat Glazer, Seymour Martin Lipset, and Norman Podhoretz. The group’s writing could often be found in the pages of left-wing journals like Partisan Review and the aforementioned Dissent, as well as in the then-leftist Commentary magazine, which New York Intellectual Elliot E. Cohen founded in 1945.

 

Many New York Intellectuals found themselves pushed rightward by their burgeoning anti-communist beliefs. But it was a critique of liberal domestic politics that characterized the neoconservative movement, not hawkishness on defense. Kristol, often referred to as the “godfather of neoconservatism,” used the Public Interest journal — which he and Harvard University sociologist Daniel Bell founded in 1965 before the latter’s departure and replacement by Glazer in 1973 — to warn against the unintended consequences of former President Lyndon B. Johnson’s Great Society programs and the rise of the New Left. The neoconservatives made their initial mark on the broader movement through the Public Interest, imbuing conservatism with a sociological depth and academic seriousness characteristic of the intellectual class from which its members came. As Jonah Goldberg wrote of NR founder William F. Buckley’s appraisal of Kristol, Podhoretz, and company, “the neocons . . . brought the new language of sociology to an intellectual tradition that had been grounded more in Aristotelian thinking.” The heart of neoconservatism can be boiled down to a Kristol quote: “The legitimate question to ask about any program is ‘will it work?’”

 

The neoconservatives, unlike those on the right who came before them, did not repudiate Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal. Kristol once said that “in our urbanized, industrialized, highly mobile society, people need governmental action of some kind . . . they need such assistance; they demand it; they will get it.” Rather than seeking to deconstruct the welfare state entirely, those within the neoconservative milieu argued for a conservative version of what was already in place. The neoconservatives understood that the state could not change human nature, but that an evidence- and outcome-based social policy could be a force for good. “A conservative welfare state should,” Kristol wrote, “discriminate in favor of satisfactory human results, not humane intentions.”

 

This outcome-based approach characterized the legitimate members of the loose connection of individuals known as neoconservatives. In fact, insofar as any central foreign-policy doctrine existed among the group, it would have to be one stemming from Jeane Kirkpatrick’s “Dictatorships & Double Standards,” published in the November 1979 issue of Commentary. Kirkpatrick argued that, in certain countries, democracy was an untenable political system. Traditional autocrats, Kirkpatrick wrote, “do not disturb the habitual rhythms of work and leisure, habitual places of residence, habitual patterns of family and personal relations,” while their Marxist counterparts “claim jurisdiction over the whole life of the society and make demands for change that so violate internalized values and habits that inhabitants flee by the tens of thousands.”

 

The Carter administration, Kirkpatrick charged, had pressured pro-U.S. autocratic governments the world over to liberalize, which in practice meant ceding control of their countries to anti-American, Marxist revolutionaries, yet had not extended the same rhetoric toward communist states. Though the U.S. was right to support notions of liberalization and democratization within autocracies, the folly came in assuming rapid reforms would not immediately lead to a power vacuum that America’s enemies would then fill. To avoid pro-Soviet revolution, she believed, the U.S. was required to support regimes in alignment with its broader Cold-War interests. This foreign-policy doctrine brought the movement’s core observations — a belief in universal morality and an understanding that human nature cannot be perfected from above — from the domestic stage into the international arena.

 

The Bush-era intellectuals commonly referred to as neoconservatives would be more accurately described as hard Wilsonians, as Max Boot — who was often described as a neocon before his recent move leftward — wrote in 2002. “Advocates of this view embrace Woodrow Wilson’s championing of American ideals but reject his reliance on international organizations and treaties to accomplish our objectives,” Boot explained. In fact, as Matthew Continetti explained in his 2022 book The Right: The Hundred Year War for American Conservatism, some original neocons were skeptical of the nation-building mission in Iraq. Irving Kristol, he writes, “argued for a foreign policy of unilateral nationalism that had an expansive view of the national interest while avoiding any large-scale diplomatic or military commitments,” while Kirkpatrick “thought that a modest foreign policy was appropriate for the post-Cold War world” and did not believe in “democracy promotion as the central task of diplomacy.” This conflict between those initially given the name and those to whom it later came to apply only highlights neoconservatism’s lack of a uniform agenda.

 

The coterie of intellectuals who became known as neoconservatives in the 1970s have little in common with many described with that term today other than a belief in an engaged U.S. on the international stage. Republicans like Ramaswamy, who would apply that description to many lawmakers and thinkers in both of the country’s political parties, ought to understand what the word actually means. Perhaps by looking back to the neoconservatives and focusing on a results-oriented approach to our nation’s ills, the Right can become a community of ideas once again.

Does ‘Systemic Racism’ Explain Anything?

By George Leef

Wednesday, August 30, 2023

 

Ask any leftist intellectual why we have inequality in America and you’ll invariably hear about “systemic racism.” And from there, the next step is to declare that the only solution is a complete transformation of the U.S. into a collectivist utopia where government ensures group “equity.”

 

In his latest Bastiat’s Window post, Bob Graboyes discusses a Liberty Fund roundtable discussion of the notion that “systemic racism” is the cause of disparities in health care. Suffice it to say that it receives very rough handling.

 

Here’s a slice:

 

Thomas Sowell and Roland Fryer have investigated and measured the effects of systemic racism. Their analyses stress that (1) The impact of systemic racism on health and other variables is greatly overstated by some in the policy sphere, and (2) The mere existence of disparities does not constitute prima facie evidence of bias. Their work is strikingly exhaustive and persuasive. But purveyors of systemic racism theory are often disinclined to consider such evidence or to debate it dispassionately and honestly. (To be honest, some classical liberals may be too willing to dismiss the idea of systemic racism out-of-hand.)

 

Right — the purveyors of this theory stop acting like scholars the moment anyone challenges them. Suggest that government policies might be at fault or that the proposed “equity” remedies will be counterproductive, and you’ll get a blast of invective rather than an argument.

 

In the post, Graboyes discusses the four other participants, and I can’t resist copying what he says about Professor John Sibley Butler:

 

Sociologist John Sibley Butler offers the most strident, multifaceted criticism of systemic race theory. Systemic racism, he suggests, conflicts with the successes of Jews, Mormons, Japanese Americans, Nigerian Americans, and other sometimes-marginalized groups. Systemic race theory, he says, overlooks social mobility and is especially poor at understanding the African American experience in America. African Americans, he argued, fared better in states with powerful Jim Crow laws than in states with less overt racism. He notes that, to a greater degree, those who remained in Jim Crow states began businesses, built universities, and achieved higher degrees of education. He is unflinching in describing past racism, but also says, “Legal scholars are trying to persecute America, not explain its vast ability to create new opportunities.”

 

Read the whole thing.

Bad Intentions

By Nick Catoggio

Wednesday, August 30, 2023

 

On Saturday, an attentive security team spotted a white man behaving suspiciously on the campus of an historically black university in Jacksonville, Florida. Having drawn their attention, the man left and ended up at a nearby Dollar General store. There, he murdered three African Americans in cold blood before killing himself at the scene.

 

Responding officers found a swastika painted on one of his weapons. When they searched his home afterward, they found racist argle-bargle on his computer.

 

On Monday, at the White House, a reporter for NPR was keen to know how much blame, precisely, the governor of Florida bore for the attack.

The supposed blood on Ron DeSantis’ hands was a hot topic on the left all weekend.

 

DeSantis left the campaign trail and returned to Florida after the shooting, which was both the right thing to do and also unavoidable given the arrival of Hurricane Idalia this week. On Sunday, he spoke at a vigil for the three victims in Jacksonville and was received with the same enthusiasm he might currently expect at a Trump rally.

 

Angie Nixon, a state representative in Florida, stared daggers at him for the benefit of the cameras:

“It’s the audacity for me,” Nixon said on The App Formerly Known As Twitter. “Ron DeSantis is here and needs to apologize for his part in this.” After the governor spoke and called the shooter a “scumbag,” a pastor who followed him at the dais made a point of correcting him. “At the end of the day, respectfully, governor, he was not a scumbag,” he said. “He was a racist.”

 

On Tuesday, the Associated Press published its own report about the reception DeSantis received at the Jacksonville vigil. Steve Peoples, who co-wrote the piece, hyped it on social media by none-too-subtly implying that the governor’s policies had somehow—the mechanism isn’t clear—led to mass murder.

 

To a Blogger of a Certain Age, all of this seems familiar. And unfamiliar.

 

***

 

For my entire not-inconsiderable lifetime, a Republican politician addressing a black audience has been a hold-your-breath moment. Not if the audience is explicitly conservative, of course; an address to “African Americans for Trump” will be received as predictably as it would by any other “__________ for Trump” group.

 

But a prominent Republican addressing a general audience of black Americans? Awkwardness abounds. Friction is all but unavoidable, even on the most solemn occasions. No wonder it happens so rarely.

 

Blame Republicans for that. The so-called “southern strategy” that drew Dixiecrats from Team Blue to Team Red cemented the GOP as a heavily white party, willing to kiss off votes from the black minority by championing the grievances of the white majority. It was a ruthless yet fruitful trade-off in the medium term and it persists in some forms to this day. (See, for instance, the party’s dogged and dopey defense of Confederate iconography.) In the longer term, as America’s racial demographics have changed, it looks less fruitful.

 

Perhaps that’s begun to change under Trump as the GOP goes about remaking itself as a champion of the multiracial working class, ditching its “rich white guy” image. I wouldn’t bet my life on it, though. A populism that believes Trump’s mugshot is some sort of political masterstroke that connects with black voters is a populism that has a long way to go toward understanding unfamiliar constituencies.

 

We should, however, also reserve some blame for Democrats and their media allies for the GOP’s alienation from African Americans.

 

Because the parties now depend heavily on dominating different racial blocs, the modern left guards its enormous advantage among black voters jealously. Too jealously, in fact. Look no further than kindly grandpa Joe Biden viciously warning an African American audience in 2012 that Mitt Romney (Mitt Romney!) wanted to “put y’all back in chains.” Or the kindly grandpa’s current running mate flying down to Florida a few weeks ago to make the case that Republicans there are basically pro-slavery.

 

The left is never more cutthroat and demagogic than when it’s playing racial politics with the right—and it’s been that way for decades. The well is so poisoned that even if Ron DeSantis had spent the last four years governing like a smilin’ old-school Paul Ryan Republican, his appearance at Sunday’s vigil would have been tense. Decades of bad intentions across the political spectrum guaranteed the environment would be hostile during his appearance. That vibe was quite familiar.

 

Bad intentions also explain why DeSantis is being blamed for the massacre. That’s familiar too.

 

I’ve mentioned the near-assassination of Democratic Rep. Gabby Giffords in 2011 and its aftermath before, but, without writing at length, it’s hard to do justice to how much bad faith the left exhibited at the time in exploiting the shooting for political advantage. Giffords’ assailant turned out to be a barely lucid true-blue wackaloon; even so, in the hours after the attack many liberals coalesced around the idea that … Sarah Palin, of all people, was to blame.

 

Almost a year earlier, Palin had posted a map on her website emphasizing that certain Democratic incumbents should be targeted for defeat in the coming midterm elections. Giffords was one of them; the “targeting” symbol Palin chose to use was the crosshairs of a gun sight. In the hours after the attack, the map began to circulate among Democrats in the misplaced conviction that the attacker must have been inspired by it, proof at last that irresponsibly belligerent Tea Party rhetoric was going to get someone killed. Sarah Palin, the right’s most influential populist at the time, had blood on her hands.

 

But she didn’t. No evidence ever emerged that Giffords’ shooter saw the map or, if he did, that he gave it a moment’s thought. Liberals simply leaped to a political conclusion they wanted the wider public to draw—and were so insistent about it, and inspired so much media coverage of it, that Palin felt obliged to answer it in a video clarifying for the record that, no, she doesn’t support assassinations. She wasn’t governor of Alaska at the time, do note; she had already left that job. She put out the video as a private citizen, forced to try to hurriedly rebut an outrageous smear before the entire political world recklessly settled on the “fact” that she was a monster.

 

It didn’t work. The belief that Palin had inspired Giffords’ shooter remained so entrenched among liberals that it was still worming its way into New York Times editorials a decade later, when it almost (but not quite) resulted in a defamation judgment against the paper.

 

The point of Democrats’ Palin calumny was plain even at the time. Having just gotten wiped out in a Republican wave election, they feared and loathed the ascendant Tea Party movement and couldn’t resist an opportunity to try to turn the balance of American opinion against it. If conservative populism was hypothetically dangerous enough to inspire assassinations, it was clearly too dangerous to be trusted with power. Liberals waved the bloody shirt not because the mainstream right was radical but because it wasn’t, and they wanted it to be perceived that way. Guilt by association with a mass shooting for the Tea Party’s favorite politician was the means to that end.

 

The same thing is happening to Ron DeSantis now.

 

Because they can’t defeat his agenda on the merits at the polls, some Democrats are trying to demagogue it as kindling for domestic terrorism and hoping that that moves the needle against Republicans among swing voters. They’re leveraging an actual crime—an unusually horrendous one—to try to criminalize mainstream politics.

 

They have bad intentions.

 

As once before with Giffords and Palin, left-wing lawmakers and their media allies have scrambled to push this smear despite the lack of evidence that the murderer was inspired by any right-wing politician. There is evidence that, like Giffords’ shooter, the Jacksonville lunatic may have been less than lucid when he struck, having been involuntarily committed for a mental health examination once before. But insofar as his act was lucid and political, National Review asks a good question: By what logic do we assume that he must have been motivated by the policies of his state when racist massacres committed by whites continue to happen in very liberal states as well? 

 

Does it seem likely that someone who’s sufficiently far gone to have put a swastika on his gun would have remained peaceful if not for Ron DeSantis blathering about “wokeness” and DEI at press conferences? A racist 21-year-old with a computer and a modem will find inspiration online if he goes looking, but I’m guessing we’ll discover he was looking for it in darker places than the news section of the Orlando Sentinel.

 

If that’s so, then what, precisely, is the alleged ideological chain of causation between the governor and the man he’s derided repeatedly as a “scumbag”? Was mass murder simply “in the air”?

 

All of this is very, very familiar to a conservative who followed the Giffords/Palin saga.

 

But there’s an element of it that isn’t familiar. To me, at least.

 

***

 

In 2011, I was still naive enough about politics to believe that right-wing populists have basically good intentions. And why wouldn’t I have believed it? The Tea Party movement mouthed many of the same platitudes about smaller government that Reagan Republicans did. Less government would mean more freedom for everyone, they said. More freedom is always good.

 

But other political currents were swirling at the time, ones I should have paid more attention to. One was the weirdly cultish popularity of Sarah Palin.

 

You might not have grasped how intense her support was among right-wing activists circa 2011 if you followed politics through newspapers or television. If you followed it online via right-wing blogs, as I did, you knew. I assure you, Donald Trump is not the first Republican politician of the post-Bush era to enjoy a fan base willing to stridently defend his or her every utterance, no matter how stupid.

 

The Palin cult wasn’t as frightening as the Trump cult. It wasn’t as big, for one thing, and she isn’t remotely as corrupt as he is. But Palin’s sudden ascendance as the grassroots right’s supreme champion did feel like the triumph of a strain of anti-intellectualism that had flowered during the 2008 campaign. That fall, before the election, liberals posted videos showing Republican voters calling Barack Obama a terrorist and questioning his “blood line.” The Birther conspiracy was in full swing. At one of John McCain’s town halls, an older woman famously told the candidate that she didn’t trust his opponent because he’s an “Arab.”

 

Not all Tea Partiers were primarily concerned with smaller government, it turned out. I didn’t realize.

 

Either because she was unwilling or unable, Sarah Palin couldn’t exploit those sentiments and ride the tide to power. But someone eventually would.

 

Fifteen years later, I no longer presume good intentions by populist Republicans. Rather the opposite. That’s what’s unfamiliar to me about this strange reprise of the Giffords/Palin saga.

 

In particular, I think Ron DeSantis has too often had bad intentions as governor of Florida. So do some African Americans:

 

As governor, Mr. DeSantis sought to restrict enacting a popular referendum to restore the voting rights of many felons. After the George Floyd rallies, he signed legislation that many civil rights activists said criminalized political protests, as well as laws eliminating diversity and inclusion spending from state universities and restricting the teaching of the academic framework known as critical race theory. He also set up a new state police force to enforce election laws that arrested mainly Black people in a high-profile sweep and has seen many of its cases stumble in court. And he removed two elected state attorneys from office. Both were Democrats who supported criminal justice reform. One was Black.

 

We might defend any of those policies in isolation, on their individual merits. (I defended him over Florida’s new curriculum on black history just last month, in fact.) But in the context of DeSantis’ strategy for winning the 2024 Republican presidential nomination, it’s impossible to give him the benefit of the doubt on the purity of his motives.

 

His candidacy, after all, is premised upon wooing MAGA voters by out-Trumping Trump, and the way he goes about doing that is by making their enemies his enemies. Do you dislike “woke corporations”? Here comes DeSantis to smack Disney. Are you suspicious of vaccines? Here comes DeSantis with a criminal investigation of their manufacturers. Do you resent illegal immigrants for burdening America? Here comes DeSantis to all but airdrop them into the ritziest liberal enclaves in the U.S.

 

Everything he’s done as a national candidate-in-waiting has been geared toward making “the right enemies” to impress populists. So what are we to make of the fact that so many of his culture-war initiatives, from his crusade against “woke” hobby horses like CRT and DEI to “election policing” that targeted black Floridians disproportionately, have antagonized African Americans?

 

Some African American leaders have been suspicious of him for a while, believing that he’s trying to pander to the right’s worst elements by picking fights with them. “He attacks marginalized communities in general because his base doesn’t like them,” Angie Nixon told the New York Times. “Because that’s low-hanging fruit for him to gain even more points politically among a base of voters. That’s all he’s ever done—is to try to appeal to a base of people.” Is that not true? It precisely tracks his approach to exploiting the post-liberal populist zeitgeist. Your enemies will be President Ron’s enemies. He’ll keep the “wokesters” in line.

 

I don’t see why we shouldn’t arrive at the same conclusion as Nixon at this point, that his intentions in waging culture war are fundamentally selfish, demagogic, and bad. 

 

But of course that’s different than saying he should be blamed for a mass murder.

 

I don’t believe Ron DeSantis wants to see anyone dead. (Well, maybe one person.) And in the unlikely event that the Jacksonville lunatic found inspiration in the governor’s tired shtick about “wokeness,” I refuse to hold a politician morally culpable for what a psycho reads into otherwise mundane policy proposals—right-wing, left-wing, or otherwise. At the same time, I do understand why an audience of African Americans would greet DeSantis coolly, even at a moment when he’s keen to express sympathy and solidarity.

 

“You can’t take three or four years of his actions and then show up to the Black community saying, ‘I stand with you.’ No, you don’t,” one black state legislator in Florida told NBC News. They don’t trust a guy who’s bet all of his political chips on being perceived as “Trump but even more illiberal.” Can’t say I blame them.

Covid Restrictions Can’t Be Allowed to Return

By Noah Rothman

Monday, August 28, 2023

 

‘Covid closed the nation’s schools,” the New York Times declared in a Sunday headline. But that’s not quite right. Though the event that initially prompted school closures was the pandemic, schools in America stayed closed for longer than their European counterparts — and stayed closed longer in richer parts of the U.S. than in poorer parts — because an influential minority wanted them to.

 

The results of that experiment are generally regarded as disastrous, so you would think that all that is needed to ensure that we don’t repeat it is our collective resolve not to. Not so, says Times reporter Apoorva Mandavilli: “Clean air can keep them open.”

 

Mandavilli’s article opens with a clear premise, though it doesn’t remain clear for long: Covid cases are once again on the rise, so it necessarily follows that the menace of Covid-related restrictions looms large. But a return to the mid-pandemic status quo wouldn’t be necessary if school administrators had prepared for this moment. That preparation begins with ensuring proper ventilation.

 

Roughly “41 percent of school districts needed to update or replace the heating, ventilation and air-conditioning systems in at least half of their schools,” Mandavilli writes, “about 36,000 buildings in all.” She observes, however, that Congress appropriated about $550 billion for tasks like these, much of which has not yet been spent. Well, whose fault is that? Everyone’s, apparently:

 

Among the reasons: a lack of clear federal guidance on cleaning indoor air, no senior administration official designated to oversee such a campaign, few experts to help the schools spend the funds wisely, supply chain delays for new equipment, and insufficient staff to maintain improvements that are made.

 

If one or more of Mandavilli’s sources made the straight-faced claim that the prohibitive obstacle before improving ventilation in schools is the lack of a “senior administration official” dedicated to overseeing that project, her sources deserve to be laughed at. Indeed, as at least one confessed near the end of her piece, spending about $65 per student per classroom per year — a high estimate that amounts to a $5 billion annual expense —on air purifiers is sufficient to mitigate the risk of ambient pathogens in the air. But many localities devoted those funds to other priorities, among them, the Biden Education Department’s desire to engineer a “culture shift” toward “equitable practices.”

 

“In many schools, however, spending on ventilation trails other priorities, like hiring staff, purchasing laptops and other equipment, or extra help for students who have fallen behind,” Mandavilli writes. According to a CDC survey, just over “one-quarter had installed air cleaners or planned to do so,” while 70 percent of schools opted to address air-quality issues by pursuing “low-cost improvements, like opening doors or windows.” And implementing those improvements should not require constant guidance from the White House.

 

The banal manageability of this challenge belies the author’s premise from the outset, which is perhaps why her article quickly sprawls. “Indoor air may be contaminated not just by pathogens,” Mandavilli continues, “but also by a range of pollutants like carbon monoxide, radon and lead particles.” Indeed, even the plague of smoke that descended across the continent from Canada’s blazing forest fires presented a threat to indoor air quality — a threat that educators in Denver, Colorado, mitigated by, get this, keeping schoolchildren inside.

 

Expanding the utility of Covid-related mitigation measures so they might apply to far less extraordinary circumstances is a tactic to which advocates of the mid-pandemic status quo appeal with some regularity. “Masks also help protect from other illnesses like common cold and flu,” former CDC director Rochelle Walensky advised in a brief but aborted campaign to popularize masking in public as an essential element of basic hygiene. Dr. Anthony Fauci agreed. When pressed as to whether Americans will ever again fly maskless, the doctor had some bad news. “Even though you have a good filtration system, I think that masks are still a prudent thing to do, and we should be doing it,” he said. Indeed, indoor air quality, or lack thereof, was a point of leverage for Chicago teachers’ unions when they forced a work stoppage against the city’s wishes in the winter of 2022.

 

Blessedly, these and many other interested parties were ignored. Yes, it would be wise for states and municipalities to apply the federal funds on which they are sitting to improve air quality and increase access to climate control in America’s schools, but the lack of those conditions is not an obstacle to keeping schools open. So why introduce the binary at all? Why menace American parents with the prospect of a return to the pandemic’s calamitous restrictions if not to present them with an ultimatum?

 

Mandavilli’s piece isn’t the first sign that those who subscribe to a particular psychological disposition are keen on seeing a restoration of the Covid protocols. Businesses that seek to limit masking for all but the immunocompromised — either among employees for the purposes of preserving customer relations or among patrons to discourage consequence-free theft — are threatened with lawsuits and public shaming campaigns. Medical settings that reintroduce masking mandates insist they are only focused on preserving hospital capacity as Covid hospitalizations tick upwards slightly. And now, we’re implicitly threatened with the return of school closures.

 

Maybe threats are all that justify the readoption of the pandemic’s failed and otherwise unenforceable mitigation strategies. That is telling enough. But there can be no doubt that, in the last month, a powerful coalition of the perpetually anxious has floated trial balloon after trial balloon, testing your willingness to acquiesce to renewed restrictions on your social and economic activity. If the balloons float by without so much as a scoff, that will only serve as proof of concept. It’s incumbent on all of us to say, loudly and unambiguously, whenever we encounter too-clever appeals to our sense of solidarity or paranoia in the effort to bring pandemic-mitigation measures back: No.

To Address Shootings, Do the Work

By Kevin D. Williamson

Wednesday, August 30, 2023

 

The recent shooting at a Dollar General store in Jacksonville, Florida, has something in common with a great many other mass shootings of its kind: The shooter was known to police and mental health professionals, who did essentially nothing to prevent the atrocity that the killer ultimately carried out.

 

Doing nothing is, in fact, a pretty common course of action in these cases—right up until the point at which everybody says that nobody could have seen this coming when, in reality, a whole lot of people pretty plainly did see it coming. You could have watched the Jacksonville killer getting geared up on TikTok if you wanted to literally see it coming—there was a video taken by a bystander after he was turned away by security at nearby Edward Waters University, a historically black institution that was probably the killer’s intended target. 

 

The Jacksonville shooter was a troubled young man from a troubled family. Police had been dispatched to his family home over at least one domestic-disturbance complaint involving the future killer (a minor at the time) and his older brother, who currently is serving a prison sentence for felony robbery. As an adult, the killer again came into contact with authorities when he threatened to kill himself and was involuntarily held for psychiatric evaluation under a Florida law known as the Baker Act. 

 

Getting “Baker Acted,” as the local legal jargon puts it, is a serious matter in Florida. It begins with a 72-hour period of involuntary custody, after which the subject may be held for as long as six months for involuntary treatment after a court hearing. Baker Act proceedings can be initiated by a judge, by certain mental health professionals, or by law enforcement personnel. The law requires that the subject be mentally impaired in some significant way (and not merely from the results of drug or alcohol abuse), unable to understand why a mental health evaluation is necessary, and likely to cause harm to himself or others without intervention. 

 

All of those criteria sound like an excellent reason to put someone on the list of people prohibited from buying firearms, but a temporary commitment under the Baker Act is not disqualifying under federal firearms laws. As ATF documentation puts it, the prohibition requires:

 

the formal commitment of a person to a mental institution by a court, board, commission, or other lawful authority. The term includes a commitment to a mental institution involuntarily. The term includes commitment for mental defectiveness or mental illness. It includes commitments for other reasons, such as for drug use. The term does not include a person in a mental institution for observation or a voluntary admission to a mental institution.

 

A Baker Act commitment can lead to a court-ordered commitment of the kind that disqualifies a person from legally purchasing a firearm, but that requires a process involving a judge, a court hearing, and a public defender or other legal counsel. That, in turn, requires somebody willing to put in the work to make it happen. In this case—and there are many other cases like this case—what happened after the 72-hour examination was: nothing. The examining physician or mental health professional could have petitioned for a hearing and additional treatment, and a court could have ordered that treatment. But, instead, the future killer was released. There was no report to the Florida Department of Law Enforcement, because there was nothing to report, and so the episode had no effect on the future killer’s background check when purchasing a firearm. Asked for comment, the ATF confirms that, given the specifics of the case, nothing about the Jacksonville killer would ever have reached their desks.

 

This—almost exactly this—has happened before, both around the country and right there in Florida. 

 

The killer in the 2018 Parkland massacre had also been the subject of an attempted Baker Act process, but, in spite of the recommendations of the high-school counselors who suggested involuntary evaluation, mental health authorities determined that he was “at low risk of harming himself or others.” Not having been excluded on mental health grounds, the Parkland killer was able to legally purchase firearms in the runup to that infamous crime. That killer had been the subject of dozens of police calls, had threatened to shoot up the school, and had been described by one terrified party as “a school shooter in the making.” He was a walking red flag, and, long before Florida passed its current red flag law, law enforcement and mental health professionals already had adequate tools to intervene in his case—and, at the very least, to keep the future killer from buying firearms legally. But they did not use those tools in a proactive and effective way.

 

Beating up the responsible authorities for making the wrong call is easy—and, in some of these cases, there should be very uncomfortable questions asked about the apparent negligence involved in letting these future killers run around unsupervised. But the more important point to understand is that there isn’t a good process that can be relied upon in these situations. We could have the smartest people in the world making these decisions at the institutional level, but simply hoping they get it right—every time—is not much of a plan. We have a procedural lacuna between institutionalization and laissez-faire, and we should try to fill it. 

 

Take, for example, the “red flag” laws that have been put forward as a promising bipartisan reform measure. Despite the hype, they really do not seem to actually accomplish very much. As the Associated Press reports, Chicago had 8,500 shootings from 2020 to late 2022—resulting in 1,800 deaths—and the Illinois red flag law was invoked in Chicago only four times during the course of all that bloodletting. In the overall picture of American violence, red flag laws are unlikely to prevent very many murders, because very few murders are the demonstrative kind carried out by maladjusted young men with manifestos. Most murders in the United States are criminal-on-criminal violence, with majorities of both shooting suspects and shooting victims having previously been convicted of a crime of one kind or another. 

 

A Milwaukee study, for example, found that 97 percent of the suspects in one year’s non-fatal shootings had at least one prior arrest, along with 86 percent of the victims. In New York City, one survey found that about 80 percent of all murderers and a comparable share of murder victims had prior criminal histories. The majority of violent crime in the United States is the work of a relatively small number of dedicated career criminals: Prisoners currently in state custody have an average of 10 arrests and five criminal convictions.

 

Manifesto killers (not all of whom leave behind actual manifestos) are black swans—rare overall, but appearing regularly enough to constitute a phenomenon. And just because these killings are rare—relatively rare in our extraordinarily violent society—does not mean that we should shrug our shoulders and concentrate the entirety of our efforts on the more than 99 percent of murders that do not follow the manifesto-killer pattern. But given how poor a job we do with the ordinary killers—leaving them at large to commit murders even after a half-dozen or a dozen arrests and any number of criminal convictions—it is no surprise that we do such a poor job with the manifesto killers. Those in that latter group are very often are white and middle class, may have concerned parents interceding on their behalf when they get into trouble, and typically do not have any criminal convictions on their résumés—all of which tends to correlate with relatively gentle treatment from police and other authorities. The Jacksonville killer was clearly troubled, but he went to his grave with a clean criminal record.

 

We probably should be more assertive when it comes to involuntary psychiatric treatment. But there is a lot of open policy space between a court-ordered involuntary commitment and offering the obviously mentally disturbed a hearty, “So long! Good luck!” An involuntary commitment can be suspended, for example, on the condition that the subject voluntarily cooperates with treatment. Most states already have some version of “mental health probation,” in which troubled people may avoid being put involuntarily into the custody of an institution (hospital or prison) subject to ongoing treatment, check-ins, surveillance, or school or work requirements—not unlike the conditions that go along with probation or parole. But this is typically part of a sentence following a criminal conviction rather than a preventative measure. And, as with ordinary probation, the level of supervision and surveillance is often superficial and ineffective. 

 

(Mental health is, of course, a big part of the picture when it comes to crimes other than those associated with manifesto killers, too; the people who complain that troubled middle-class white kids are treated as victims in need of sympathetic care while troubled poor black kids are “super predators” and “thugs” in need of severity are in many cases much more correct than many law-and-order advocates would care to admit.) 

 

But even if we agree with the relevant authorities that the Jacksonville killer did not at the time of his involuntary examination obviously meet the requirements for further involuntary care, surely turning him loose and then doing—again—nothing, was plainly and inarguably the wrong decision.

 

One obvious problem is this: Implementing a broader program along the lines of an expanded version of mental health probation would be (new flash, Vivek Ramaswamy!) expensive, and it would require a great deal of work. Government can do work, when it wants to: If you have ever been delinquent on your taxes, for example, you know how energetic the feds can be. It is important work, but we have had very little success in getting government to do the work when it comes to violent crime involving firearms—gun-specific crimes short of murder are prosecuted sparingly, straw purchasers are almost never prosecuted outside of a broader organized-crime investigation, and the most likely outcome after arrest for a gun-related crime short of murder is—there’s that word again—nothing. In Philadelphia, for example, the majority of gun charges are dismissed or withdrawn—and that is policy at work: A few years ago, only 30 percent of those cases were withdrawn or dismissed, and today it is more than twice that figure.

 

If the most common outcome for someone being dragged in on a gun charge is for prosecutors to throw him back in the lake and keep fishing, then it is going to take a real change in institutional culture to get the relevant authorities to muster an adequate and appropriate response in cases where there often is no criminal charge at all. 

 

On the other hand, if you think that we can deal with these complex problems by intensifying the federal regulatory oversight of $12-an-hour clerks at sporting goods stores—which is what 97 percent of gun-control proposals amount to—then you are almost as delusional as one of these Baker Act cases. We have a lot of tools in the toolbox, but we do not—choose not to—use them.

The Disgraceful Attempt to Blame DeSantis for the Jacksonville Shooting

National Review Online

Wednesday, August 30, 2023

 

Having learned that a white supremacist had murdered three innocent African Americans at a Dollar General store in Jacksonville, Fla., Governor Ron DeSantis took every appropriate step. He recorded that the shooter, whom he called a “racially motivated” “scumbag” and a “coward,” had been “targeting people based on their race.” He confirmed that the killer had penned a “manifesto.” He made it clear such behavior was — and would always be — “totally unacceptable.” Next, DeSantis announced plans to suspend his presidential campaign and return to Florida, he pledged funds to protect a historically black college in North Florida, and he resolved to visit the community where it had happened — despite activists’ promises to shout him down if he did.

 

For this, DeSantis was blamed by the press for the actions of the killer.

 

Quite how DeSantis is responsible is never explained. Instead, the charge relies upon insinuations, elisions, and non sequiturs. DeSantis is guilty of rhetoric that is never quoted, of policies that do not intersect with the crime, of an attitude that is widely implied but narrowly sourced. At no time is any effort made to connect any of this to the man who pulled the trigger. The state’s new slavery curriculum is mentioned but never connected to anything concrete. So, too, are the governor’s opposition to DEI, his contention that critical race theory teaches people to hate one another, and his disdain for racial gerrymandering — all of these stances against race-conscious thinking and collective racial guilt. The chief political writer at the Associated Press, Steve Peoples, observed on Twitter that “Ron DeSantis scoffed when the NAACP issued a travel advisory this spring warning Black people to use ‘extreme care’ if traveling to Florida” and yet, “just three months later, DeSantis is leading his state through the aftermath of a racist attack.” How these two things relate wasn’t addressed. At the White House Monday night, NPR’s Franco Ordonez asked, “Does the White House see any connection with the changes that the Florida governor has made in teaching about African-American history to the kind of violence that we saw in Jacksonville?” Does Ordonez? What is it?

 

The most recent racially motivated mass shooting that captured the media’s attention was carried out in Buffalo, N.Y., in 2022. Ought we to assume that it was the product of New York’s policies? That abomination was four times deadlier than the one in Jacksonville. What might we conclude from that? The answers, we’d venture in both cases, are “nothing.” Indeed, there can be no answers to such questions because their framework is absurd. The killer in Florida, like the killer in New York, acted out of raw hatred — a flaw that exists in humans everywhere, and always has. Their acts were not caused by arguments over the meaning of tangential terms in the school curriculum, or by esoteric debates over the legality of affirmative action, or by ineffable atmospheres of any sort. They were caused by an old-fashioned sort of evil that, through hard work and the passage of time, has been divorced from our political debates. There is almost nobody in America who approves of what the scumbag did in Florida. Mercifully, it was universally condemned — on the left, on the right, and everywhere in between. Such unanimity, which was not always the case following racial violence in America, is today routine.

 

The scale of the outpouring ought to have inspired defiance. Instead, it prompted a handful of political entrepreneurs to search for whatever fault lines they could find and to start banging away at them with a chisel. This was a profound mistake. It has taken a great deal of pain and an extraordinary amount of work, but Americans can now say without doubt or hesitation that their country is better than the racist loser from Jacksonville, whose grotesque worldview did not have a constituency and, despite his baleful behavior, is not likely to have one ever again.

Two American Childhoods

By Michael Brendan Dougherty

Wednesday, August 30, 2023

 

We often seem to live in two different political worlds. There’s the one we experience in real life, in which neighbors of different political views mostly get along fine. They might avoid certain topics of conversation, particularly if there are “In This House We Believe” yard signs that rule out certain topics peremptorily. Then there’s the world we experience through our screens — the phone and the computer, in which our neighbors and old high-school friends rant wildly and there’s constant talk about the fragility of our democracy and about deep-state coups. The culture war can often seem like an online-only role-playing game.

 

I’m often tempted to dismiss, in the name of the normalcy all around me, the insanity presented to me on the screens — even if I know that that normalcy has a lot of troubling trends. But there’s one trend that really indicates the depth of America’s cultural divide. Americans can no longer speak coherently about “our kids.” In fact, progressives and conservatives are engaged in a war of criminalizing the other side’s parenting.

 

A happy neighborhood, and a happy country, does talk about “our kids.” Well-funded after-school programs are good for “our kids.” A refurbished public playground is good for them too. “Our Kids” is the title of a book by the famous sociologist Robert Putnam. Putnam was focused on the class divide: The kids of well-connected parents see their blunders turned into harmless learning experiences, while the kids of poor parents make the same mistakes and their lives are changed.

 

But the culture war has changed in recent years. It’s true that progressives have long worried about conservatives and religious people brainwashing children. And conservatives have in turn worried about progressive parents that indulge and corrupt their own children. And the wars over school curricula have been with us for a long time. But they’ve picked up new urgency in recent years. Any elementary-school library can see its contents subjected to a painful public audit.

 

It is now becoming clear that conservatives and progressive parents view each other as a danger to children; a danger that needs to be handled with the intervention of the law.

 

Conservatives have launched their successful counteroffensive in World War T, making it criminal for doctors to prescribe off-label puberty-blocking drugs or perform surgeries that remove functioning sexual organs and replace them with nonfunctional facsimiles. The media have dutifully found the progressive families who are abandoning states such as Texas and Missouri over the issue.

 

But liberals can play that game as well. California’s attorney general sued a school district in its state for its policy of notifying parents when children request to be addressed by new pronouns or a different name. Michelle Goldberg, writing in the New York Times earlier this year, acknowledged why parents might be uncomfortable with their kids experimenting with new gender identities at school that they hide at home. But she landed on supporting the role of public schools and teachers in helping children develop private lives into which their parents cannot see.

 

Meanwhile, the State of Massachusetts denied a married Catholic couple the chance to foster a child because of their religious convictions. Noting that they were otherwise “lovely people,” the state determined that the couple “would not be affirming to a child who identified as LGBTQIA.” Note that it didn’t even allege that the Burkes wouldn’t love a child who identified as such. But consistent with the emerging view of sexual identity and harm on the progressive left, the state naturally disqualifies as proper parents anyone whose religious convictions trespass upon the total moral, legal, spiritual, and aesthetic equality of all sexual desires and the identities shaped around them. For Massachusetts, this is their bare minimum standard of care. And it will be increasingly codified into the laws of blue territories.

 

The sentiment of national belonging, the font of patriotism, is rooted in the idea of sharing a given territory with one another and attempting to live under the same set of laws. That’s why these wars over how we raise children are so disquieting. They make it clear that we aren’t arguing over matters of mere prudence anymore but over deep and divisive principles. We don’t really share the laws with each other but increasingly use them to restrain those people who used to be our fellow citizens but are now defined as our political and moral antagonists. We need to find a way out of this dynamic, because if there is one thing I know, it’s that parents will fight for their children unto the last breath.