Reading Between the Lies

By Jonah Goldberg

Wednesday, January 31, 2024

 

On September 12, 2001, 24 hours after the 9/11 attacks, representatives of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization member states convened to invoke Article 5 of the NATO charter, which holds that an “armed attack” on one member “shall be considered an attack against them all.” This was the first and only time Article 5 has ever been put into effect. For the next two decades, NATO forces fought with us in Afghanistan and elsewhere.

 

On Saturday, former President Donald Trump ranted against NATO at a rally in Las Vegas. “We’re paying for NATO and we don’t get so much out of it,” he lied. “And you know, I hate to tell you this about NATO—if we ever needed their help, let’s say we were attacked, I don’t believe they’d be there. I don’t believe. I know the people. I know them. … I don’t believe they’d be there.”

 

Trump has long talked about NATO as if it’s some sort of obsolete club where everyone is supposed to pay dues into a common kitty but America has been left picking up everyone’s tab. That’s not how it works. NATO’s standalone budget is about $3.5 billion, of which we pay 16 percent or roughly $560 million. A new aircraft carrier costs about 20 times that. All other “NATO spending” takes the form of domestic defense expenditures by individual member states. When he was president, Trump was right to pressure other countries to spend more, but now that they are spending more, he doesn’t care.

 

Trump’s calumnies against NATO are offered to bolster his distortions about supporting Ukraine. In his telling, both are examples of how the United States gets ripped off by its alliances and foreign engagements. He claimed we’ve spent “$200 billion plus” on Ukraine while the Europeans “are in for $20 billion.”

 

This, too, is false. According to the Ukraine Support Tracker, in total assistance, the European Union has contributed more to Ukraine than the United States. We’ve committed not $200 billion-plus but about $75 billion in aid, about half of that in military assistance. The EU total is roughly 77 billion euros, or roughly $83 billion. As a share of GDP, America ranks 30th in Ukraine support, just behind Ireland and Malta.

 

We look better if you count only military aid, for the simple reason that we have the hardware Ukraine needs, and Malta not so much. Indeed, as my American Enterprise Institute colleague Marc Thiessen notes, the important thing—at least for domestic political purposes—about our military aid is that it doesn’t take the form of giving Ukraine a “blank check” as many Republicans claim. Nearly 90 percent of military aid dollars stay in America, disproportionately in Republican districts and states, because they’re used to purchase the weapons that go to Ukraine.

 

If you care about American relative military superiority, supporting Ukraine has been a huge bargain—degrading Russia’s military, helping update ours, and bolstering the security of our biggest trading partner, all without putting American troops at risk.

 

While it’s always useful to point out Trump’s thumbless grasp of the facts, none of this is exactly new information for people who actually care about the facts. The problem is how little facts seem to matter these days. 

 

Prior to Russia’s lawless invasion of Ukraine, the argument that NATO was obsolete had some superficial plausibility. But now that Russia has repeatedly signaled that it has aims beyond Ukraine, toward NATO members, those already weak arguments have evaporated. Certainly, our allies believe the threat is very real.

 

And those aren’t the only threats on the world stage. Proxies for Iran killed three U.S. service members over the weekend in a drone attack in Jordan. Russia, China, and Iran have grown quite chummy. Our ally Israel is in a bloody war with Hamas, an Iranian proxy that ignited the conflict on October 7. In short, this is the dumbest possible time to be talking about how America shouldn’t honor its alliances and commitments. 

 

Joe Biden’s critics love to argue that when it comes to Iran and China “weakness is provocative.” They’re right. But it’s also true with Russia. And tough talk can signal weakness, too. Trump’s denigration of NATO might sound like political “toughness” to his fans. But what Vladimir Putin and Xi Jinping hear is evidence of NATO’s weakness.

 

NATO, and our alliances generally, make America stronger. They allow us to project power globally at a fraction of the cost to do it in other ways. For those who disagree, it’s worth considering why the case against NATO the former president makes has to rest on so many lies. If the facts were on Trump’s side, he’d offer some.

End UNRWA

National Review Online

Wednesday, January 31, 2024

 

For the first time since the U.N.’s membership voted it into existence in 1949, the U.N. Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East is in a fight for its survival. It deserves to lose.

 

The recent allegations, based on Israeli intelligence, that have led to the current situation are as follows: Twelve of its employees took part in the October 7 attack, with two of them directly participating in the slaughter at the kibbutzim in Israel’s south; some 190 UNRWA employees are operatives of Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad, another terror group in Gaza; and approximately 1,200 UNRWA employees of the 12,000 in Gaza are otherwise linked to Hamas.

 

Put simply, U.N. employees participated in a horrific terrorist attack. Many of their colleagues are terrorists, too.

 

It’s arguably the biggest scandal in the U.N.’s history, or at least very close to the top of the list.

 

Now Turtle Bay, the international-development–industrial complex, and Foggy Bottom are working to evade what should be the consequences.

 

The leaders of the U.N. and UNRWA are “horrified,” the organization’s internal audit arm has launched an investigation, and the relevant UNRWA employees have been fired (two have already died and the identity of one is still being determined).

 

The State Department has “temporarily paused additional funding for UNRWA” while the U.N. investigates and Washington reviews the situation (after the Trump administration cut all U.S. funding for the agency, President Biden resumed it in 2021, with the U.S. sending it over $1 billion over the past three years). Other countries have done the same.

 

UNRWA and its apologists have already launched a PR campaign to pressure countries to reverse course and continue to send UNRWA money. Unfortunately, the liberal internationalist foreign-policy establishment has an unquestioning attachment to UNRWA as a concept, and the suspensions will almost certainly be temporary. In the U.S., even as top officials call the allegations credible and express horror at the situation, they continue to vouch for UNRWA as a critical vehicle through which to deliver aid to Palestinians.

 

But to resume funding for UNRWA would be a massive mistake. It would continue to lend legitimacy to the premise behind the agency — the idea that Palestinians are different from refugees in any other part of the world because they have a right to “return” to Israel.

 

And resuming funding would further entrench the unseemly incentives that have insulated the U.N. from accountability for the agency’s rank antisemitism and incitement of terrorism. It’s not as if 1,200 UNRWA staffers in Gaza woke up on October 7 and chose to embrace a mass-murder cult. The support for terrorism within the agency has been well established for decades. The international bureaucrats in charge have chosen to look away time and time again.

Textbooks used in U.N. classrooms glorified terrorism; the teachers did too. UNRWA schools doubled as arms depots and rocket-launch sites. The agency once dismissed its top official in Gaza after Hamas leaders demanded the personnel change.

 

UNRWA tried to cover its tracks. In December, it demanded that an Israeli reporter delete a social-media post in which he reported that one of the Hamas hostages had been held by a UNRWA teacher. In October, UNRWA made a post alleging that Hamas had stolen supplies, then deleted it and gave an explanation so incomprehensible that there can be no doubt that it was covering for the terrorist group.

 

All the while, U.N. leaders have dismissed the critical work of watchdogs such as UN Watch, which has brought evidence of UNRWA’s links to terrorism to light countless times.

 

In the short term, Congress needs to pass a blanket prohibition on the use of U.S. funds for any of UNRWA’s operations. It must do this to preempt any future decision to lift the temporary suspension of funding and to set the stage for UNRWA’s eventual elimination.

 

UNRWA’s supporters say that cutting the agency out of the picture would leave a gap in humanitarian aid for Gaza. They ignore that much of the assistance entering Gaza is likely snatched by Hamas anyway. Most important, to continue funding UNRWA would maintain America’s de facto culpability in financing terrorism. Other U.N. agencies with a better track record, such as the Office of the High Commissioner for Refugees and the U.S.-dominated World Food Program, should step in, and America should help them build the capability to do so.

 

But that’s just a start. America needs to fight hard to repeal UNRWA’s U.N. General Assembly–granted mandate. Given the rank antisemitism that goes unquestioned at the international body, that’s no small task, but Washington also has not tried particularly hard to get this done.

 

Other U.N. agencies need to be on the chopping block as well. UNRWA might be the worst, but that doesn’t say much.

 

John Bolton once said that if the highest ten floors of the U.N. headquarters were to disappear it “wouldn’t make a bit of difference.” But depending on where UNRWA’s offices are, it might lessen international support for Hamas terrorism.

What Is Biden Waiting For?

By Noah Rothman

Tuesday, January 30, 2024

 

One of the better-known of Iran’s cat’s-paws in the Middle East is attempting to weasel its way out of the consequences that tend to accompany the killing of American soldiers by declaring victory and retreating:

I guess it’s worth a try, but it’s hard to imagine that anyone would be convinced by timidity — even the sort dressed up in bluster. But why would Kataib Hezbollah know that? They shouldn’t have been granted the luxury of the time it took them to draft this pusillanimous statement. Its operatives should be too busy digging the bodies of their comrades in arms out of the rubble. And yet, they’re not.

 

President Joe Biden has reportedly decided on the retaliatory measures he will take against Iran’s Shiite militias and, perhaps, Iran itself. That retaliation will reportedly come in stages. As Jim Geraghty noted, the wisdom of Biden’s addiction to telegraphing his punches is questionable, particularly when it comes to the militias directly responsible for the attack on Tower 22 that killed three Americans and injured scores more. There is no strategic ambiguity there. If the Americans are coming at all, they’re coming for them first. But why should Kataib Hezbollah believe that Biden’s response would be a swift one?

 

He didn’t respond swiftly against Houthi aggression. He treated the drones and rockets raining down on naval and commercial marine traffic in the region like a nuisance for three months. He didn’t respond swiftly to Shiite-militia attacks on U.S. positions in Iraq and Syria. U.S. and coalition forces came under attack twelve times, producing dozens of injuries before Biden deigned to respond. And then he did only in a “narrowly tailored” fashion designed to convey America’s prohibitive fear of an escalating conflict.

 

Given Biden’s obvious distaste for punitive — much less preemptive — strikes against America’s adversaries, maybe Kataib Hezbollah thinks that he can lulled into a false sense of security. It’s insane, but it’s not exactly crazy.

The Border Crisis Is Biden’s Fault, the New York Times Admits

By Noah Rothman

Tuesday, January 30, 2024

 

Joe Biden’s latest argument for why the crisis at the southern border isn’t his fault is predicated on the assumption of widespread civic illiteracy.

 

The yet-unknown terms of a bipartisan deal designed to mitigate the border crisis and relieve the pressure it has put on the nation’s immigration system would, Biden insists, give him “a new emergency authority to shut down the border when it becomes overwhelmed.” The president assured voters that, “if given that authority, I would use it the day I sign the bill into law.”

 

The specifics in the bill are not yet public, but they do not need to be for observers possessed of a passing familiarity with the executive branch’s authority to know the president isn’t being honest. Biden has taken to insisting that the White House is all out of “options” when it comes to enforcing border security, only for the administration to suddenly discover unexplored avenues of executive power now that chaos at the border has become an acute political liability for him and his party. The president and his administration are not suddenly admitting to the scale of the disaster along the Rio Grande because they want to take ownership of it. They’re doing so to condition Americans into believing the GOP bears more responsibility for that crisis than the president does.

 

Today, the New York Times got in on that act, but half-heartedly and in an entirely unconvincing fashion. A three-bylined item in the Times casts Biden as a passive observer of the crisis over which he has presided — one that tragically “shattered his immigration hopes.” Moreover, it drafts the GOP into the role of antagonist against Biden’s leading man. Republicans “refused to provide resources, blocked efforts to update laws and openly defied federal officials charged with maintaining security and order along the 2,000-mile border,” the Times insists. Biden’s foremost shortcoming was that he “failed to overcome those obstacles.”

 

With that throat-clearing out of the way, however, the outlet goes on to explore the ways in which Biden exacerbated one of the growing number of crises consuming his presidency.

 

First “the children arrive.” Of course, Biden bears no responsibility for a surge at the border, despite his loud advocacy for pausing deportations, increasing asylum limits, and providing a pathway to citizenship for current illegal residents — what are known as “pull” factors contributing to the influx of migrants. But when these “pull” factors pulled, Biden could not adjust his approach. “Sending them back, the president said, would be unconscionable and inhumane,” the Times dispatch reads. So, the crisis grew.

 

Next, a wave of Haitian migrants descended on the country in response to Biden’s “more welcoming stance.” He joined his more trigger-happy administration officials in condemning his own Border Patrol officers for the erroneous impression conveyed in images that they were using horse tack as whips to beat Haitian refugees. While some in the administration favored a “tough-minded approach” to this politically sensitive migrant crisis, Biden channeled the instincts of his party’s immigration doves — both outside the administration and within it. The voices within the administration who favored laxity “saw the treatment of Haitians as a betrayal of the values that Mr. Biden had promised to uphold.” They won the argument.

 

Then came the GOP’s migrant-busing program — a political coup that put Republican arguments on the untenability of the situation at the border into the mouths of Democratic elected leaders in America’s bluest municipalities. “The administration scrambled to meet the Democratic demands, providing more money and speeding up the processing of work permits,” the Times observes. “But the busing of migrants clearly shifted the discourse around the issue.”

 

One year ago, under intense political pressure, Biden finally introduced “new restrictions on asylum” to partially address the crisis. Oddly enough, he took no credit for his action. Instead, he ascribed his change of heart to the “extreme Republicans” who rejected comprehensive solutions to America’s illegal-immigration problem. Accordingly, voters gave Biden none of the credit he didn’t seek. And yet, the new rules failed to entirely stanch the bleeding at the border. The crisis deepened when Biden “voluntarily dropped enforcement of the Title 42 authority” that had limited the flow of illegal migrants across the border during the pandemic.

 

That brings us to today, the point at which the border crisis became so acute that it sparked a dangerous conflict between the states and the federal government. Texas is in open revolt against Washington amid its effort to enforce federal law in ways Biden won’t. “Outrageously,” as we editorialized, “the federal government has treated Texas, not the flood of illegal migrants, as the problem.” Suddenly, Biden discovered the “options” he once claimed to lack. The White House committed to tough diplomacy with its Mexican counterparts culminating in renewed commitments from Mexico City to police its side of the Rio. “He appears ready to run more as a leader determined to keep people out and less as a champion of displaced people,” the Times concludes.

 

Careful readers of this piece of journalism might be confused by the degree to which it emphasizes the president’s agency and the consequences he is suffering as a result of his own actions. After all, they were assured at the outset that the president was merely a beleaguered spectator to conditions that were forced upon him by Machiavellian Republicans. Maybe the paper is hoping its readers don’t read that far down into this dispatch. After all, as the Times concedes, “Many voters now say immigration is their top concern, and they do not have confidence that Mr. Biden is addressing it.” That certainly does describe “many voters,” but not Democrats.

Iran’s Test of Biden Is an Existential Threat to His Presidency

By Noah Rothman

Monday, January 29, 2024

 

In his latest analysis for the New York Times, David Sanger vaulted off the news of an attack on an American outpost in Jordan by an Iranian proxy militia — killing three U.S. service personnel and injuring more than 30 — to fret about the obligations that attack imposed on the commander in chief of the armed forces.

 

Sanger speculates ruefully about the options before Joe Biden, all of which “range from the unsatisfying to the highly risky” — eventualities Biden has done his best to avoid. Indeed, that avoidance raised the stakes of Iran’s post-10/7 campaign of provocation. The president is now compelled to favor an approach on the “risky” end of the spectrum if his goal is to “restore deterrence” by compelling Tehran to back down. But retaliating against Iran for sponsoring American bloodshed is a low-reward proposition for Biden, Sanger seems to suggest, because Iran has cleverly covered its tracks.

 

While striking Iranian assets directly has “undeniable political appeal, especially at the start of an election year,” Sanger conceded, “it is not yet clear who, exactly, Mr. Biden aims to deter.” After all, there’s “no evidence” that Iran “calls the shots” that its proxy forces eventually take. Iran’s cultivation of terrorist proxies throughout the region is not without a “downside” or two. Among them is the fact that “Tehran will be blamed for everything the militias do, even acts the Iranians believe are too provocative.”

 

Sanger is correct that there is little conclusive evidence that Iran has given the “green light” for any of the attacks its surrogates have executed on and since 10/7 (although the proposition does not entirely lack substantiating evidence). Nevertheless, in the author’s estimation, Iran has boxed Biden into a fraught set of circumstances. “In the middle of an election, with two wars underway, he needs to put Iran’s sponsorship of attacks on Americans out of business — without starting another war,” Sanger concludes.

 

This is reflective of the logic that led the administration to ill-advisedly broadcast its prohibitive fear of antagonizing Iran. As the American dead and wounded suggest, that strategy is a failure. It must be abandoned. Biden is now obliged to respond dramatically to this deadly attack on U.S. forces. If he does, he would not be “starting another war.” He would be reimposing sobriety on an adversarial rogue state that has been engaged in an unreciprocated war against the U.S. and its allies for months.

 

Sanger’s copy is weighed down with his fear of the risks, both the geopolitical and conventionally political, that Biden courts if he finally gets serious about the aggression Americans in uniform have faced for months. But Sanger devotes little attention to the risks of inaction — or a response that is so transparently calibrated as to fail to communicate anything to Iran other than that it can continue to test American resolve.

 

It might come as a surprise to the New York Times, but Joe Biden’s handling of the Middle East is deeply unpopular not only among radical college leftists who want nothing more than for the president to throw Israel to the wolves. Pick your national-security crisis — from Russian revanchism to Chinese irridentism to Israel’s war against Hamas: Biden trails Donald Trump by ten or more points when voters are asked whom they trust more to handle those crises. The president practiced dithering for weeks on end as drones and rockets rained down on U.S. positions in Iraq and Syria and while the Houthi terrorist sect violently closed off the Bab el-Mandeb Strait to commerce. That probably did little to convince voters that Biden was up to the challenges America faces abroad. He is behind the eight ball and needs to start acting like it.

 

Inside the bubble in which Biden’s political career is slowly suffocating, executing a kinetic operation against Iranian assets risks further alienating Democratic base voters while weakening his pitch to swing voters that his administration is less chaotic than his predecessor’s. Outside the bubble, Americans are confronted with chaos every day — often in new and terrifying ways. The White House is right to surmise that core Democratic voting blocs will look upon a determinative retaliatory strike on Iranian assets with skepticism and apprehension. That’s not how the critical mass of voters whom Biden will need to attract in November are likely to see it. At least, that’s not how they viewed the decapitation strike that neutralized Qasem Soleimani in early 2020 following a series of similar Iran-sponsored attacks on U.S. service personnel.

 

Americans don’t like seeing men and women in uniform killed in combat. They do like to see those who are responsible for those attacks — both those who pull the trigger and those who train and fund their killers — punished. The president must repair his image with those voters today before their declining confidence in the president’s ability to keep Americans safe hardens into an utter lack of faith. The political risks to Biden if a justified retaliatory strike triggers a regional conflagration must be weighed against the risks that he courts with his conspicuous commitment to narrow, tailored, and oddly belated responses to Iranian aggression.

 

An old cynical maxim maintains that voters don’t care about foreign policy unless and until one of two things occurs: either a crisis abroad humiliates the United States, or a hot conflict begins sending Americans home in caskets. The ongoing region-wide conflict with Iran has now achieved both of those conditions. The same circumstances confronted Biden following his slapdash withdrawal from Afghanistan in 2021, a disaster from which Biden’s job-approval ratings never recovered. Iran’s actions and Biden’s response to them will either wipe that bitter memory away or remind voters of it at the most politically inopportune moment. The president faces not just a test of America’s resolve but the viability of his presidency, whether his credulous allies know it or not.

Put an End to the U.N.

By Noah Rothman

Monday, January 29, 2024

 

United Nations officials were shocked — positively stunned —  to learn that employees of the U.N. Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East (UNRWA) directly supported and even participated in the massacre, torture, and kidnapping of thousands of Israelis on October 7, 2023. The agency took swift action to dismiss staffers implicated in those attacks following its receipt of Israeli intelligence detailing the evidence against them. “Any UNRWA employee who was involved in acts of terror will be held accountable, including through criminal prosecution,” UNRWA commissioner-general Philippe Lazzarini insisted.

 

Neither Lazzarini nor any other U.N. functionary deserves the benefit of the doubt. If any U.N. officials are genuinely surprised by the conduct of its contractors, they are confessing to willful blindness. Indeed, virtually every organ of this institution has conducted itself contemptibly since the 10/7 attacks, calling into question the value of an organization that appears to exist for the benefit of terrorist organizations and their sponsors.

 

The specific allegations against UNRWA should be sufficient to scuttle the whole enterprise. Israeli intelligence reportedly implicated at least twelve of the agency’s staffers in efforts to coordinate and affiliate with Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad terrorists. UNRWA staffers are accused of kidnapping Israeli women, hiding captives from Israelis, distributing ammunition to terrorists, and even participating in the massacre of civilians at one kibbutz.

 

That doesn’t come as a surprise to anyone who followed reports outlining the extent to which UNRWA staffers and school teachers openly celebrated the slaughter of Israeli Jews. It doesn’t shock those who have followed the extent to which UNRWA schools participate in Hamas’s pedagogical efforts to steep Gaza’s children in Jew-hatred. It doesn’t astonish anyone familiar with the ways Palestinian terrorists have used UNRWA infrastructure as weapons depots and staging areas for attacks on Israelis for more than a decade.

 

If these developments have chastened the U.N., it’s hard to tell. Its functionaries seem far more horror-struck by the threat to their own bottom lines after a handful of Western countries responded to the allegations by pulling some of UNRWA’s funding. Lazzarini insisted that it “would be immensely irresponsible to sanction an Agency and an entire community it serves” in response to these allegations, but he isn’t alone. “We appeal to donors not to suspend their funding to [UNRWA] at this critical moment,” wrote World Health Organization director-general Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus. “Cutting off funding will only hurt the people of #Gaza who desperately need support.” U.N. secretary general António Guterres agreed. “The abhorrent alleged acts of these staff members must have consequences. But the tens of thousands of men and women who work for UNRWA,” he said in a statement, “should not be penalized.”

 

If it seems like the whole sprawling United Nations apparatus is not all that alarmed by the discovery that its associates have lent aid and support to terrorists, that impression is reinforced by the degree to which the U.N.’s organs are engaged in the same project.

 

The U.N.’s juridical organ, the International Court of Justice, last week issued a “series of near-unanimous” rulings on allegations brought by South Africa alleging that Israel’s defensive war in Gaza was a campaign of genocide. At least, some of Israel’s actions could conceivably constitute actions that roughly approximate the “intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group.” But the scant proof the country could marshal in support of that conclusion is betrayed by the evidence of your own eyes. Moreover, in declining to condemn Israel’s war in total but merely to report back in a month about the steps it was taking to avoid genocide, the ICJ did not evince the courage of its own alleged convictions. Rather, it set out to ratify a preexisting bias in the non-aligned world against Israel and its democratic sponsors.

 

The U.N. agency tasked with being a “global champion for gender equality,” U.N. Women, exhibited conspicuous impassivity when confronted with allegations that Hamas terrorists wielded rape as a weapon of war. The outfit’s functionaries buried reporters in a blizzard of meaningless diplomatic newspeak designed to acquit them of having to render a judgment on those allegations of sexual violence. But U.N. Women has never been similarly reluctant to condemn groups that use rape as a weapon when the people being raped are not Israelis. Nor did the outfit need a thorough High Commissioner on Human Rights investigation to pronounce a verdict on Hamas’s conduct as its functionaries claimed. All it took for U.N. Women to behave like an apparatus staffed by human beings was for their cowardice to become sufficiently embarrassing.

 

The U.N. Human Rights Council (UNHRC) has been singularly devoted to whitewashing acts of antisemitism for decades. It has promoted the “boycott, divestment, and sanctions” (BDS) campaign by promoting economic pressure campaigns targeting specific Israeli commercial interests. It staffs itself with 9/11 conspiracy theorists and champions of anti-Western propaganda. It attacks Israel with monomaniacal frequency — partly in deference to a permanent item on the UNHRC’s agenda compelling it to regularly condemn Israel’s right to self-defense — all while denouncing the civilized world’s efforts to pathologize the conduct of genuinely murderous regimes such as the one operated by Syria’s Bashar al-Assad.

 

From UNESCO — supposedly a body devoted to preserving antiquities which, instead, violates U.S. law, denies Israeli sovereignty over its cultural heritage, and drafts resolutions that refer to Israeli sites by their Arabic names — to the United Nations General Assembly, which exists only to empower the world’s worst regimes, what is the point of the United Nations? To the extent that any of its organs are valuable, the United Nations Security Council at least reflects the hard-power realities that govern the anarchic international environment — and then, only its permanent members. But the idea that any of those nations exercise a diplomatic veto over another’s conduct is a fiction. The United States doesn’t need a compromised venue like the U.N. to conduct bilateral and multilateral diplomacy with its peers.

 

The United Nations long ago reached its sell-by date. It serves only to lend diplomatic cover to rogue states, revisionist great powers, and the terroristic non-state actors in their orbit. Its primary purpose is to tie the hands of responsible diplomatic nations committed to the pleasant fiction that geopolitics is something that happens in talk shops on Turtle Bay. It absorbs exorbitant sums of American taxpayers’ dollars only to spit in their faces. The institution is worse than worthless. The U.S. pays for the privilege of having its interests undermined while lending a portion of its legitimacy to a wholly illegitimate institution. That’s a bad deal. It’s time to cut our losses.

The Half Liz

By Nick Catoggio

Monday, January 29, 2024

 

On Friday evening we had a family quarrel in the Dispatch Slack channel. I started it.

 

It began with this tweet from Nikki Haley reacting to the latest hourly evidence that her opponent’s thriving political career is an unanswerable indictment of America and its people.

As the most insufferably shrill Never Trumper on staff, I naturally shared the tweet with our Slack community and sniffed that Trump being distracted from policy is perhaps not the biggest problem with him manically defaming a woman he was found liable for sexually abusing.

 

Sure, said a colleague, but Never Trumpers aren’t the target of that tweet. Persuadable Republicans are.

 

Haley can’t attack Trump’s fitness directly without essentially telling GOP voters that they’ve made a terrible mistake in supporting him for so many years, another commented. That would alienate people she’s trying to win over.

 

What’s the upside of Haley burning Trump down, a third asked? Many Republican officials formerly trusted by his base, like former Attorney General Bill Barr, have spoken bracingly about his fitness yet he’s still on track for a 50-state sweep in the primary. Shouldn’t she try to be effective rather than cathartic?

 

“Effective or cathartic?” has been a hot topic among the wider punditocracy over the past week as Haley has tiptoed toward sharper criticism of Trump.

 

Some, like Ross Douthat, believe Haley should spend her remaining time in the race calibrating her message toward maximizing her share of the vote, eschewing nuclear attacks on the frontrunner. Others, like Peggy Noonan, want Haley to be more aggressive toward Trump but with a lighter, more oblique touch than the glowering batting ram Chris Christie. Our friends at The Bulwark, on the other hand, see no point in Haley restraining herself in a race she obviously won’t win. “This moment in American history calls for bold truth-telling, drawing lines in the sand,” Michael Wood wrote recently for the publication. “It’s time to embrace your inner Liz Cheney,” he advised Haley.

 

Is that right? Is it time for “the full Liz”?

 

By “the full Liz” I mean a frontal assault on Trump’s fitness for office, largely dispensing with arguments over policy differences. Cheney has sharp disagreements with Trump on foreign policy, for instance, but those have become an afterthought to her core critique that he’s unbalanced and an authoritarian threat to American democracy. The full Liz is a fast track to pariah status in the modern Republican Party, as Cheney and Christie might tell you.

 

Opposite from “the full Liz” is what we might call “the full DeSantis.” If the full Liz concerns itself with character to the near exclusion of policy, the full DeSantis concerns itself with policy to the near exclusion of character. The governor of Florida had much to say during his campaign about Trump’s handling of COVID, his failure to build the wall, and so on, but had precious few thoughts about whether a coup-plotting demagogue is worthy of the White House. The full DeSantis, it turns out, is a fast track to underperforming abysmally in a primary against Trump.

 

Neither the full Liz nor the full DeSantis are great options for Nikki Haley.

 

So it looks to me like what she’s currently attempting, perhaps novelly, is what we might call “the half Liz.”

 

***

 

Haley spent most of the campaign practicing the full DeSantis, deflecting questions about the frontrunner’s fitness with meekly passive formulations about how “chaos follows him.” Fergus Cullen, the former chair of the New Hampshire Republican Party, summarized her approach memorably: “She says in her stump speech, ‘I’m going to give you hard truths,’ and then she gives you easy truths.”

 

Now that she’s become the last challenger standing, she’s gotten punchier. Particularly on the subject of Trump’s mental competence.

She didn’t just say that to reporters, she said it to crowds of supporters on the trail in New Hampshire. And she hasn’t limited herself to age-based critiques. She’s begun to describe Trump lately as “unhinged” per his boorish victory speech last week in New Hampshire, even resorting to armchair psychology to explain his behavior. “When he feels insecure, he starts to rail. He starts to rant. He starts to flail his arms, and he starts to get upset. When he gets—feels threatened, he starts to throw all kinds of things out there,” Haley said Sunday on Meet the Press, describing Trump’s speech as a “temper tantrum.” The analogy is unmistakable: Nikki Haley, a mother of two, knows better than to take a cranky child seriously and so should you.

 

There was another notable exchange in that interview. When she was pressed about Friday’s blockbuster defamation judgment against Trump, for once Haley sounded conspicuously more like Liz Cheney than Ron DeSantis.

Benjy Sarlin pointed to that answer as tantamount to “crossing the Rubicon” in a piece published Sunday at Semafor. He summarized the essence of “the half Liz” in tracking Haley’s recent evolution on the subject of Trump’s fitness and her growing willingness to tell the truth about who won the 2020 election. 

 

What stands out about Haley’s remarks is not just that it’s a Republican taking on Trump over sexual misconduct, something that’s almost unheard of since he survived the Access Hollywood tape in 2016. It’s that a top rival is actually addressing the core argument of Trump’s candidacy: That he is the target of a vast conspiracy that stole the last election and is targeting him now in order to steal the next one.

 

These twin premises, which Trump has spent years working to build up and maintain, have made it virtually impossible to attack him. “Electability” is not an effective angle when losses are not considered legitimate. Attacks on Trump’s personal character, ethics, and competence are not effective angles when some malicious outside force — the “deep state,” “partisan prosecutors,” etc.— is to blame for his problems. To the extent his nomination looks inevitable, this is the reason.

 

The “core argument of Trump’s candidacy” is really just the man’s narcissism distilled to its essence, that he’s never to blame for his own failings. Whether personal, political, or legal, he’ll invariably attribute his setbacks to the corruption of others. You can’t be a Republican in good standing in 2024 without sharing that belief. It’s the first commandment of the cult.

 

Nikki Haley will probably never follow Liz Cheney’s lead by calling Trump an existential threat to the constitutional order. But Sarlin is right that questioning his mental stability and vouching for the defamation judgment are meaningful, if lesser, transgressions to GOP orthodoxy in their own right. By moving past policy to blame him for causing his own biggest problems, Haley is rejecting the first commandment. From “chaos follows him” to “he surrounds himself in chaos”: That’s the half Liz.

 

The full Liz is a nonstarter among Republican voters because it aligns foursquare with Democratic messaging about Trump. Liz Cheney will tell you that Trump is the most dangerous, least qualified person ever to run for president and Joe Biden will tell you the same, verbatim. Cheney would also doubtless have many dark observations about Trump’s psychological disposition if pressed to comment on it, and those observations would likely be indistinguishable from the average Democrat’s.

 

The half Liz seeks ways to challenge Trump’s fitness that don’t perfectly replicate Democratic talking points. For instance, Haley won’t praise E. Jean Carroll as some truth-to-power feminist hero or the various prosecutors who’ve indicted Trump as pillars of the rule of law, as liberals might. She will say that she trusts juries composed of everyday Americans, as many Republican voters do. Haley won’t denigrate Trump by speculating where, precisely, he sits on the spectrum of “dark triad” personality traits, but she will hint repeatedly that politicians over age 75 have lost some of their marbles. That’s an argument that the Biden White House is, er, reluctant to make but one that Republican voters have spent the last three years warming up to.

 

There’s another important difference between the full Liz and the half Liz: Tone.

 

Trump’s harshest critics, like Liz Cheney and Chris Christie, are inescapably dour, apocalyptic, and prone to chastising Republican voters. Marco Rubio and Ted Cruz sounded similar in the final days of their campaigns in 2016, plainly mortified by the choice their party was preparing to make. Watching the American right rally around a lowlife has always been dispiriting but watching them do so again after he attempted a coup will leave any decent person exasperated and even contemptuous of his fellow citizens. There’s a reason this newsletter routinely reads the way it does.

 

Haley doesn’t sound like that, though. Strangely, as numerous political reporters have observed, she seems to be enjoying herself on the trail after losing Iowa and New Hampshire. Whether that’s because she feels liberated by her situation to speak her mind more freely, because she’s jonesing on having outlasted the other pretenders in the race, or because she’s in denial about the looming end of her political career, only she knows. But it’s notable how little scorn there seems to be in her recent attacks on Trump’s fitness. The vibe, as I’ve said, is less Cheney-esque fire and brimstone than that of a parent amused by the silly fit their attention-seeking child is pitching. 

 

There’s no venom toward Trump in the half Liz, just a patient, ever-smiling grown-up encouraging Republican voters to be as much of a grown-up as she is. The repeated use of the term “temper tantrum” is surely no accident.

It must drive Trump batty to be genially condescended to not just by an opponent but by a woman. Historically he’s shrugged off jabs thrown at him by male candidates, expecting a competition for dominance with them and never doubting that he’s the most alpha of the bunch. Being needled by women has always seemed to bug him as a special affront, though. He’ll have to endure it for another month now, maybe more.

 

Which brings us back to our threshold question. Is the half Liz effective as a strategy for Nikki Haley? Would catharsis, a la the full Liz, be preferable?

 

***

 

We can answer that question with a question. What does it mean for a candidate in Haley’s position to be “effective”?

 

Traditionally, to campaign “effectively” means to increase one’s chances of victory. If you’re winning over undecideds and closing the gap with the frontrunner, you’re being effective.

 

Haley has no chance of victory. She won’t win a single state. Her realistic best-case scenario is to lose in South Carolina by a smaller margin than expected, fight on to Super Tuesday, then bow out after getting swept. She might as well go full Liz, deliver the catharsis anti-Trumpers are craving, and bolster the “permission structure” Chris Christie tried to create for disaffected Republicans to oppose the miscreant nominated by their party in November. By any typical definition of “effective” electoral politics, the half Liz strategy is pointless.

 

But it’s silly to apply the typical definition of “effective” politics to a party that is, to put it charitably, atypical. What does it mean to be “effective” running against a strongman backed by a personality cult and bent on provoking multiple constitutional crises if reelected?

 

I would say that an “effective” campaign under those circumstances is one that weakens that strongman’s chances of winning the general election to the maximum extent possible. And by that definition, the half Liz might be optimal.

 

If Haley went full Liz before South Carolina, there’s every reason to think some of her supporters would peel away in disgust at seeing their favored candidate suddenly adopt “Democratic talking points.” New Hampshire was the experiment that proves it. Haley ran the full DeSantis strategy there while Christie ran the full Liz; Christie is now an ex-candidate while Haley is being given national platforms to rip Trump for being a squealing geriatric manbaby who seems increasingly “confused” as he approaches 80.

 

Assume that the full Liz would produce an 80-20 Haley defeat in South Carolina while the half Liz would hold Trump’s margin to 60-40. That might be the difference between Haley dropping out immediately versus sticking around for Super Tuesday, giving her more time to get under Trump’s skin, creating more opportunities for him to needlessly alienate Republicans who prefer Haley, and possibly changing the tenor of the news coverage about his victory. In an 80-20 landslide, the story will be how utterly Trump dominates his party. In a 60-40 win, the story will be that the candidate who supposedly dominates his party keeps losing 40 percent of “his” voters to Nikki Haley in Republican primaries.

 

If, in other words, the half Liz strategy ends up revealing the hidden extent of the GOP electorate’s misgivings about its leader, incrementally normalizing opposition to him on the right, I’d say that counts as “effective” for the anti-Trump cause before the general election.

 

There are other points in its favor. As one Dispatch colleague pointed out to me, voters, staffers, and donors may be more inclined to stick with a candidate who’s trying to win, however improbably, than with one who’s resolved to burn the party to the ground a la Liz Cheney. Haley’s extra weeks on the trail will also give Democrats an opportunity to study which of her attacks on Trump are landing with special force, information they can repurpose for November.

 

Even after she leaves the race, the residue of the half Liz approach might be useful in persuading wavering Republican voters not to support their nominee. Someone who’s categorically unwilling right now to listen to Cheney’s critique of Trump might have a seed of doubt about his fitness planted in their mind by the more amiable Haley. If that leaves that voter more susceptible to the full Liz argument this fall, that’s valuable.

 

But it’s also pure speculation, maybe even wishful thinking.

 

The obvious problem with the half Liz strategy is that it offers no reason not to prefer Trump in November as the least bad option available.

 

The full Liz strategy does. Trump is a threat to democracy, Biden is not: Cheney has been clear in framing the stakes of the election in those stark terms. Those who agree with her will vote accordingly this fall. Haley’s message, by contrast, is that Trump is “a raging incompetent who upsets swing voters that Republicans need to win,” as Sarlin puts it. He’s old, in decline, and needlessly alienates Americans who’d be willing to vote for a less objectionable nominee …

 

…but all of that is also true of Joe Biden. Absent the moral force of Cheney’s case, it’s not clear why any wary Republican would view Trump as the greater of two evils in the general election. There’s nothing in Haley’s criticism about that, only that the GOP can do better in a nominee. Even her complaint about the defamation judgment against him, that it’s a needless distraction from making the case against Democrats on policy, will evaporate when the primary is over and he’s the only game left in town for right-wing voters.

 

The full Liz is an earnest argument against returning Trump to the presidency; the half Liz is agnostic at best on that subject and, pending Nikki Haley’s eventual endorsement, potentially counterproductive at worst. After all, who cares about mental fitness or defamation once it’s a binary choice between Trump and yadda yadda “Flight 93” “end of America”?

 

All of this is a (very) long way of saying, I think, that what Nikki Haley says about Trump after her campaign ends will be much more significant than what she says about him during its current “hospice care” stage. The half Liz strategy is fine for now—she’s earned the benefit of the doubt on her political instincts by overperforming in the primary—but if she turns around after exiting the race and supports Trump, she’ll have proved my critique correct. Unless it eventually progresses to the full Liz, the half Liz is ultimately just a “permission structure” to vote MAGA in the general election, albeit a bit more grudgingly than you otherwise might have.

 

But we’ve got another month at least before Haley comes to that fork in the road and no suspense whatsoever about who’ll win the nomination to occupy our time until then. Go figure that certainly insufferably shrill Never Trumpers might cope with their boredom and fatalism by obsessing over the precise phrasing of the incantation that will at last break Trump’s spell over Republican voters and restore sanity to the right. Half Liz or full Liz? It could matter! Maybe!

Biden’s Destructive Decision to Stymie Natural Gas

National Review Online

Tuesday, January 30, 2024

 

Rarely does a policy change make no sense on its own terms, contradict other policies of the same administration, and harm America’s domestic and foreign interests. But the Biden administration has managed to do all of that with its decision to stonewall approval of new liquefied-natural-gas export terminals.

 

The White House statement on the decision begins with a high-school-freshman opening sentence (“In every corner of the country and the world, people are suffering the devastating toll of climate change”), and the quality of analysis doesn’t improve from there.

 

Nowhere in the statement or the accompanying fact sheet does the administration explain the mechanism by which it believes the existence of new LNG export terminals would hurt the climate. The fact sheet mostly consists of a list of other climate-related policies the administration has pursued.

 

According to the EPA’s own methodology, which is more prone to overstate climate effects than other approaches, canceling all U.S. LNG exports forever would reduce global temperatures by 0.013°C by 2100. That tiny effect would be for a far more draconian policy than the Biden administration has pursued. LNG exports simply aren’t contributing to climate change in any significant way.

 

Here’s reality: LNG is going to be produced. It is going to be sold on the global market. It is going to be used. Those things will happen whether new export terminals are built or not. The question is whether the U.S. wants to make exports easier or harder.

 

Making it harder doesn’t help the climate. Countries that would have purchased U.S. LNG can substitute LNG from other countries. Mother Earth doesn’t really care which country it comes from.

 

Countries that aren’t able to substitute LNG from elsewhere are likely to use coal instead. Coal burns dirtier than LNG. The largest single reason for the decline in U.S. carbon emissions in the past several years is the switch from coal to natural gas for electricity generation. Making LNG exports more difficult hinders the ability of other countries to make that switch.

 

The U.S. did not export any natural gas until 2016. Now, the U.S. is the world’s top exporter. American LNG dominance is primarily a function of the fracking revolution. It is not only a manifestation of American innovation. It also presents a new tool for the U.S. in geopolitics.

 

Providing an alternative to Russian natural gas should be a primary objective of U.S. policy in Europe. The Biden administration likes to pride itself on restoring the confidence of U.S. allies, but our European allies are now concerned about the future if LNG export capacity won’t be expanded beyond projects that have already been approved.

 

The White House fact sheet says one reason the moratorium is needed is that current review processes do not “adequately account for considerations like potential energy cost increases for American consumers and manufacturers.” But the administration’s stances on other issues related to LNG demonstrate little care for costs.

 

If the Biden administration is really concerned about domestic natural-gas prices, it should urge the repeal of the Jones Act. Not one LNG tanker in the world currently meets Jones Act requirements, which makes it much more expensive to transport LNG domestically. The White House statement’s promise not to “cede to special interests” rings hollow considering the administration’s continued support for this special-interest-backed law.

 

And of course, the Biden administration is perfectly happy to listen to environmentalist special interests. The New York Times reported that this moratorium came after Biden advisers met with a 25-year-old TikTok influencer known for climate activism. It said activists used the same strategy they deployed against the Keystone XL pipeline during the Obama administration. The White House statement on the LNG decision said the administration would “heed the calls of young people” on climate issues.

 

The administration should also allow more pipeline construction if it wants to reduce costs. Instead, the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission has slowed down the approval of new pipeline projects since Biden took office. The insufficiency of domestic LNG transportation infrastructure (for Democrats, everything is infrastructure, except private infrastructure) means that regions such as the Northeast and the West Coast are often better off importing natural gas.

 

The U.S. already tried energy autarky with crude oil. Exports were prohibited from 1977 to 2015. Since repeal, U.S. crude-oil production has soared, and it currently sits at a record high. And U.S. dependence on oil from outside North America has declined: In most months in 2023, the U.S. imported more crude oil from Mexico than from all Persian Gulf countries combined.

 

An unnamed source in the Biden administration told Politico that the message of the policy change is, “Look, we can’t just keep building and building and building.” Whatever happened to Democrats’ enthusiasm for the expression “Yes, we can”?

The ‘Intersectionality’ Canard

By Wilfred Reilly

Tuesday, January 30, 2024

 

‘Intersectionality” is just a badly done “woke” version of regression analysis.

 

The old feminist idea of intersectionality has been popping up across the mainstream media of late, as the latest round of the national debate over “DEI” (and CRT, ESG, SEL, NU-HR, and the rest of today’s insufferable corporate alphabet soup) rages on. Its resurgence seems like a worthwhile topic, while I am on a 3–4-week run of discussing academic issues for the gentle readers of National Review.

 

Per Merriam-Webster, which updated its definition of the term November 30, 2023 — the major dictionaries have been doing that kind of thing a lot lately — intersectionality is “the complex, cumulative way in which multiple forms of discrimination (such as racism, sexism, and classism) combine . . . especially in the experiences of marginalized individuals or groups.” The United Nations’ Global Citizenship initiative has, also within the past year or two, adopted this concept as a primary analytical framework, and defines “intersectionality” as “how multiple identities interact to create unique patterns of oppression.”

 

“In the United States,” author and Global Citizen Sarah El Gharib declaims, “Women earn 83 cents for every dollar a man earns.” But, the situation is even worse for black women, who pull in “a mere 64 cents for every dollar a white man earns.” The reason for all of this? Obviously, oppression: The analysis almost invariably stops there.

 

The problem with all of this, which needs to be discussed if radical-feminist analysis — intersectionality as a concept was first outlined by UCLA’s Kimberlé Crenshaw in the late 1980s, and traces its roots back to “a Black lesbian social justice collective formed in Boston in 1974” — is now prevalent in the United Nations and around the Fortune 500, is fairly basic. The idea that multiple independent variables can influence a dependent variable like income is not exactly a new one. And, the actual range of potential “IVs” that can do so extends well beyond race and sex to include: age, the regions where people and groups live, test and IQ scores, patterns of study time, crime rates, desire to work at all (in the context of men vs. women), and so on down the line.

 

Simply put, racism or sexism can only be said to exist where we find that pretty much identical people, who differ only in terms of the characteristic of race or sex, are still being treated differently — after all of the other factors which might explain performance differences between them have been accounted for. This sort of real bigotry is, today, fairly rare. Many “intersectional” studies that purport to find giant residual effects of race or sex on some specific thing — individuals’ chances of going to prison, let’s say — literally just consist of unadjusted comparisons between citizens in two or more different groups.

 

This, however, is not how serious people conduct this sort of analysis. The pay gap between men and women, in fact, provides one of the best examples of an apparently giant gulf which vanishes almost as soon as anything but sex is competently adjusted for. As it turns out, one major reason that women make so little money relative to men — less than 70 cents per dollar, in some analyses — is that 39 percent of women “prefer a home-maker role” and about one-third are housewives . . . who often earn almost no money, but have access to all of the resources of what is usually a middle-class household.

 

Even if we focus only on working men and working women, it remains the case that males and females prefer to work different jobs, men work slightly longer hours, men took virtually no time off from work for pregnancy and child care until quite recently, and so forth. When the quantitative team at the PayScale business website took all of this into account and ran some models, they found that any actual gap in same-job wages which could be attributed to sexism would be on the order of –(1 percent). At some level, this is not even surprising: American corporate business is ruthless, and any trading floor or shark-tank start-up that could actually save 17–31 percent on labor costs by hiring only women would do so immediately.

 

Pay gaps between white and black guys, for that matter, do not survive serious analysis. As I have noted elsewhere, the labor economist June O’Neill attempted, back in the 1990s, to distinguish the impact of racism from that of plain human capital on the B/W wage gap. What she found was stunning, almost remarkable. An initial gap of 15–18 percent, which has been attributed to “racism” by almost everyone to write about it during the modern era, in fact shrunk to about 1 percent when adjustments were made for basic variables like the mean age of each racial population, region of residence, and IQ- or aptitude-test scores.

 

O’Neill and a co-author found almost exactly the same pattern to still hold more than a dozen years later, in 2005. As both she and I have pointed out, groups that are different as re very major traits such as race and religion also invariably vary in terms of other characteristics — and any effects of racism simply cannot be parsed out without adjusting for all of these important differences. Simply put, there is no reason to expect a 27-year-old black man living in Mississippi to earn anything like as much as a 58-year-old white dude with a residence in mid-town Manhattan.

 

What is true in the critical context of money is true almost everywhere else. For years, the “Black Lives Matter” movement argued that young African Americans are being “murdered” or “genocided” by police officers, because members of this group are more likely to be shot by law enforcement than members of the general public. Again, however, there is an elephant in the room. As the Manhattan Institute’s Heather MacDonald has pointed out for decades now, the crime rate for black Americans — certainly before we adjust for age, or sex ratios, or living in mile-spire cities instead of Green Acres — is about two to 2.5 times that for whites. As an obvious result, we tend to encounter on-duty cops about that much more often.

 

Just adjusting for this one variable entirely removes the gap in rates-of-shooting. In the fairly representative year of 2015, which I select for analysis in my brilliant and best-selling book Taboo, there were 999 fatal police shootings nationwide — out of tens of millions of police/citizen encounters — of which 250 (25.1 percent) involved African Americans. That figure, which is 1.92 times the nation’s black population percentage, is almost exactly what any reasonably intelligent person would expect to see after taking a single glance at the crime statistics — if anything, a bit on the low side.

 

Entertainingly, the Reilly Rule about the impacts of the real, multi-variate version of “intersectionality” on day-to-day life applies even in the context of “white privilege.” As it happens, there exist several scales that attempt to measure personal privilege — such as this popular but quite empirical example, which several hundred thousand people have taken (a little bird tells me the average score is 43). When I have administered the 100-item ordinal survey, which includes Yes/No questions ranging from “I have never gone to bed hungry” to “I went to private school,” to sizable groups as a learning exercise, I do find that being white does have a small effect on ease-of-life: about two–three points, with all else adjusted for.

 

However, almost everything else has a bigger one. Other more influential variables recorded by myself and others to work with the test include female sex (yes, sure) — but also where people live (the suburbs as vs. the “hood or the “holler,” the North vs. the South), being gay rather than straight, and most notably plain social class. The largest chunk of “privilege” appears to be pure socio-economic status: crudely put, how much money a test taker and his or her family happen to make in a year. Across the aforementioned 100 questions, poor Appalachian or immigrant respondents often post “have not experienced” scores on the order of 17, while well-off ones “achieve” 69s and 73s.

 

At some level, none of this is particularly surprising, to the average human being with eyes. Of course, having wealthy parents, or not committing crimes, or not living on an isolated farm, or being a 6’4” blonde or black jock might sometimes help you along in life. However, this empirical point is a useful rebuttal to the much simpler standard idea of intersectionality — that what matters is race, or sex alone, or perhaps something like “being non-binary.”

 

In reality, conservatives don’t make fun of that simplistic concept because we are too unsophisticated to understand it, some pack of rubes who believe that only hard work and lovin’ America predict life outcomes. Instead, we do so because we recognize that many, many factors predict those outcomes. And, in the end, if dozens or hundreds of things predict where each singular human being will end up in life, we should turn our focus back to that smallest and most vulnerable of minorities: the individual.