Our Cities Are Run by Schmucks

By Kevin D. Williamson

Monday, September 30, 2024

 

There’s almost a surprising bit of good news in there if you squint: As hard as it is to believe, Eric Adams is the first sitting mayor of New York City to be indicted on federal charges. I’d have thought he’d be the fifth or the sixth or something. 

 

New York, our greatest city, is also our exemplary city, both at its best and at its worst. For 20 glorious years, New York showed the lesser American cities what a real urban renaissance looked like, with an economic boom and a complementary cultural revival. A generation of young people whose parents had prioritized getting the hell out of Brooklyn or Upper Manhattan moved into the city and turned around neighborhoods that once had been bywords for urban dysfunction. And then, for most of the past decade or so, New York showed the rest of the country how easy it is to piss away all those hard-won gains. Say what you will about the pathetic figure Rudy Giuliani has become or the weird-rich-dude obsessions of Mike Bloomberg, for a couple of decades there you could ride the subway after midnight without feeling the need for Kevlar or some kind of psychiatric SWAT team. 

 

Mayor Adams is accused of (blah blah blah, innocent until proven guilty, yadda yadda yadda) accepting favors from the Turkish government, gifts and benefits amounting to bribes for favorable treatment of businesses connected to the regime of Turkish strongman Recep Tayyip Erdoğan and the Turkish government itself. The allegations include a straw-donor scheme for laundering foreign money into Adams’ mayoral campaign. If the indictment is accurate, the whole thing was conducted with hilarious incompetence and pettiness. 

 

Longtime observers of American municipal politics will not be entirely shocked by the suggestion that a mayor applied some political pressure on behalf of a campaign donor. That happens all the time, and it is rarely prosecuted as a crime. A bribery charge requires a quid pro quo, and it is the pro that is the problem even when the quid and the quo are caught on tape or matters of public record: You can easily prove that the donation was made and that the favor was done, but proving that the favor was done in exchange for the donation is difficult unless somebody was dumb enough to put it in writing or to allow himself to be recorded describing the bribe. The case against Adams is a little easier to make, because those foreign donations would be illegal in the first place and would require an illegal coverup. 

 

Another way of saying that is that what Adams is accused of is in no small part only a more extreme version of business as usual in American municipal government. There are things that can be achieved as readily through noncriminal means as through criminal ones, and whether a given municipal official chooses criminal or noncriminal means often is simply a pragmatic calculation. If you are a clique of corrupt education bureaucrats who want to keep teachers from getting docked for poor performance, you can either cheat on the standardized tests like they did in Atlanta and elsewhere (which is fraud) or you can just gut performance-based compensation programs like they did in New York (which is politics, not crime). The mutually enriching revolving-door relationship between elected office, public-sector unions, and politically connected businesses in states such as California is gross and immoral, but most of it isn’t anything you could charge as a crime. 

 

There’s a lot of obvious corruption in politics at all levels, but not all of it is criminal: You can take petty bribes like Bob Menendez did, or you can set up a foundation like the Clintons did and use it to pay your private-jet bills, an especially enticing proposition if you can count on a political ally such as Barack Obama to quash any investigation into possible financial wrongdoing. If Adams is in trouble for doing illegally that which he might have done legally, his real crime isn’t corruption—it is stupidity. 

 

But there’s a lot of that stupidity to go around: In municipal governance writ large (local government per se, police departments, public schools, and quasi-public agencies) there have been dozens and dozens of corruption charges and convictions over the past several decades. Adams may be the first New York mayor indicted, but over the years the feds have convicted mayors from Newark (more than one of them), Hoboken, Secaucus, Jersey City, Camden, Atlantic City, Gloucester, Passaic—and that’s just New Jersey!—to say nothing of Miami Beach, Compton, Providence, Bridgeport, all the way down to White Castle, Louisiana. You could fill a cell block with the Chicago aldermen who have gone down on federal charges (at least 26 of them), and set up another one for the Philadelphia judges and city councilmen, the Clark County (meaning Las Vegas) county commissioners, the Boston school-committee members, etc. If past is prologue, we can expect 4 out of 10 Illinois governors to go to the pokey.

 

I prefer a policy of subsidiarity—of distributing both the responsibility for mitigating social problems and the resources to work on those problems to the most local and intimately connected institutions: We begin with family, friends, and civil society, and then move on to government, beginning with government at the local level. Subsidiarity is the right policy most of the time (but not usually for national defense or international relations, which is why our constitutional architecture reserves these to the national government) but the fact that it is close enough to keep an eye on doesn’t keep local government clean or smart. There is plenty of incompetence at the local level—tyranny, too. 

 

There are real American cities—lookin’ at you, San Bernardino—that have long been governed by the most useless, weedy thickets of human vegetation you could imagine. New York doesn’t have to be one—it chooses to be.

 

Conflating the Sacramental and the Sentimental

 

I spent a fair bit of a recent episode of The Remnant shouting at Jonah Goldberg, meaning shouting at the dashboard of my truck, and wanting very much to throttle Sam Harris. 

 

Harris seems like a nice enough guy. He once sent me a gift basket out of the blue–I was never quite sure what for. I don’t want to drop bombs on him … but. 

 

I don’t care that Harris is an atheist. Some of my best friends are atheists (Hey, Charlie!) and many are somewhere on the atheism spectrum: atheist, agnostic, Episcopalian. I do care that Harris sometimes talks like his head apparently is entirely full of mush and insists on talking as though he is ignorant—though he isn’t—of so many of the basic issues of religion, a subject about which he speaks and writes a great deal. 

 

I’ll limit myself to one example here. Harris argues that science offers a better way of doing things than religion does because science can self-correct, whereas religion—in this case, he’s talking about Christianity—cannot do the same, because its practitioners regard its founding documents as inerrant by definition, so these cannot be changed in light of new facts. He offers as an example the trials and executions of supposed witches, which is, in fact, a terrific example in that it illustrates precisely the opposite of the point that Harris is trying to make. Like most atheists in the Western world, Harris has an essentially Anglo-Protestant sensibility (Christopher Hitchens could have been a very happy Anglican) and, as such, he connects witch trials such as the ones we had in New England … some centuries ago … to the Bible. But, as anybody familiar with the history of magic in the Anglo-Saxon world would be happy to tell you—and as Harris seems to know without understanding the significance of the fact—the folk characters we call “witches” have almost nothing to do with the “sorcerers” and “diviners” and such of the Bible, though of course biblical injunctions against these were cited in witchcraft statutes, notably in Alfred the Great’s lawbook. We don’t have very much in the way of relevant records of the pre-Christian era in the British Isles (and not especially good records of Britain pre-Norman Conquest, for that matter) but it is very likely that our Puritans’ Anglo-Saxon forebears had witches on the brain a thousand years or more before the birth of Christ. Belief in witches and witchy characters is widespread across many cultures, as Harris himself notes. 

 

The focus on Scripture is an admirable part of many Protestant traditions, and one that my fellow Catholics would do well to learn from, but the Bible did not create Christianity—it was quite the other way around, and whole generations of Christians came and went before there was any such thing as the Bible as we know it today. As Christianity spread, it absorbed certain flavors from the terroir in which it was planted. British culture did not get its belief in witches and witchcraft from British Christianity—British Christianity got its beliefs about witchcraft from British culture, from pre-Christian, pagan sources from which Christian culture has drawn so much (like Christmas trees and Easter eggs). The oldest surviving charms from the British Isles aren’t directed at seeking the aid of Satan—they petition Woden, because they were invented by people who had never heard of Christianity, and their original authors (I mean the authors of the underlying source material) probably lived long before Jesus did. Harris concedes that belief in magic and witchcraft is something close to a cultural universal but does not consider how this fact makes an irrelevancy of his claim—an overblown claim—about the role of foundational documents, and attitudes toward those documents, in the public lives of religiously informed cultures. 

 

(“Religiously informed culture” is another way of writing “culture.”)

 

I’ve had this experience before. I like Bill Maher, who is in real life a much more gracious man than the character he plays on television, but I also think that a guy who made a whole film about the implausibility of religious claims ought to have taken the time to learn something about them. I remember a conversation I had with him in which he was surprised to learn—and was very skeptical of the claim—that the kind of biblical literalism associated with American Evangelical Protestantism is a relatively new phenomenon, and that the Jewish sages of old and Christian scholars of the Middle Ages took a distinctly different approach to the interpretation of Scripture, as indeed do contemporary thinkers in many different branches of Christian thinking. The notion that all of humanity is descended from two original parents, for example, is far from universally held and probably is a minority opinion among Christian intellectuals. That doesn’t mean that these thinkers demote the Bible to the position of folklore, only that they do not treat Scripture as a kind of magic in literary form. Christian scholars even have a word for the quaint superstitious belief prevalent among certain American Christians that one can simply crack open a Bible and expect to be directed to a solution for any of the modern world’s particular problems and dilemmas: “bibliomancy,” which, as the word suggests, is a form of magical thinking. 

 

Science really is more useful than religion in the sense that a pipe wrench is more useful than a bouquet of roses if you are trying to fix a pipe. “Non-overlapping magisteria” is how Stephen Jay Gould described the situation: different instruments for different things. The question of fact is distinct from the question of what to do about the fact. 

 

Which brings us right back to the issue of witches and witchcraft: As C.S. Lewis very amusingly argued, the error at work in those long-ago witch trials wasn’t a moral error at all, but an error of fact. Lewis argues that if there really were people doing what witches were accused of doing—using diabolical powers to kill their neighbors or to make them ill, to cause miscarriages, to cause crop failures, etc.—then they would be more deserving of severe punishment than practically any other class of criminals: “quislings,” he called them, a serious charge against the backdrop of World War II. The problem wasn’t the moral judgment but the misjudgment of fact. The witches of the Anglo-Saxon tradition are not real but are characters from the popular imagination. 

 

And, contrary to Harris’ claims and expectations, American Christianity did correct that error. The last execution of a supposed witch in the United States happened before there was a United States, way back in 1692. Lesson learnt—and not because somebody published an important paper in Nature in 1693. Europe learned, too, if a bit more slowly: The Swiss executed a supposed witch in 1782 and the Prussians in 1811, though it is important to note that in neither case was the condemned executed for—or even charged with—witchcraft, that having ceased to exist as a criminal offense long before those cases. Of course, in another sense the witch trials never really ended, we just stopped calling them witch trials when they mutated into the Satanic-daycare cases of the 1980s and 1990s—and it bears noting that the ritual-abuse panic was brought to us with a big assist from Harris’ idol of choice, the scientific consensus, kicked off by a graduate of the McGill University medical school and carried forward by psychiatrists working from approximately squat in the way of real evidence. Medical science, one of the most relevant branches of science for many people, remains absolutely full of quackery in our time, and, as with the case of religion, the quackery gets quackier as it approaches political power, which is why we see things like the Affordable Care Act entrenching the status of pseudoscientific “medicine” like chiropractic and acupuncture. 

 

The scientific consensus in favor of eugenic homicide and sterilization, depending on how you look at it, lasted either until about the day before yesterday in the historical record or endures still today. The last execution of a supposed witch in what is now the United States was nearly three and a half centuries ago—while the most recent eugenic homicide conducted under the auspices of science was probably about three and a half minutes ago. 

 

Harris and others of his stripe ought to have the courage of their convictions—and spare us the mushy-headed nonsense about “spiritual depth” and “self-transcendence” and “the sacred” and the rest of the New Age goo he so often traffics in. If we take the scientific view as the controlling view, setting the limits of reality—and there is an excellent case for doing so!—then there is no such thing as “spiritual depth” or “spiritual” anything, because there is no such thing as spirit, only a kind of cultivated emotionalism with its origins in neurochemical processes. There is no “self-transcendence” because the notion of transcending the self is in that situation literally meaningless, there being no state or situation to transcend into or toward—we are in that case talking about nothing more than moods. There is no such thing as “the sacred,” only the sentimental. All the psychedelics in the world aren’t going to change that. 

 

(Take it from one who knows.)

 

Harris argues that the secular world needs to develop better offerings to mark hallmark events such as marriage and death—but why would there be such a thing as marriage at all in the rationalists’ ideal world? And why would we mark death, which should be understood as simply another ordinary biological event, no more significant than passing gas? Why wouldn’t we instead try to educate people out of their irrational belief that these events have some transcendent (that word again!) significance? One suspects that so many of these crusading atheists turn either to numbing hedonism (Hitchens and his Johnnie Walker) or to pseudo-spiritual malarkey one step removed from the horoscope page (Harris and his mindfulness) because they cannot bear to live in the world they are constructing for themselves. That is intellectual cowardice. 

 

You buy the ticket, you take the ride. 

 

And it’s not like we need some gooey new philosophy to deal with the situation: Marcus Aurelius had this figured out 2,000 years ago: You live the life you have, doing your best to do your duty as a reasonable man, then you die, at which point there will either be an afterlife or annihilation, and, for the purposes of living your daily life, it doesn’t much matter which, because your legacy will fade and everybody who ever knew you will be dead soon enough, your progeny will die out, and your name will be forgotten—so there’s no point in getting very attached to the world, which isn’t very attached to you. That isn’t a despairing nihilism, or, at least, it doesn’t have to be—Marcus’ version of Stoicism is a perfectly adequate philosophy for living a decent life while we’re waiting around for the heat death of the universe. It’s a better philosophy than the default mental setting of the median meathead meandering about these fruited plains.

 

I did not know Christopher Hitchens (I encountered him only once—in church, strangely enough) but I read most of his sophomoric writing on religion, and I never was convinced that he was an atheist at all. It wasn’t that he didn’t believe in God—it was that he was angry at God and (much more understandably) at God’s supposed representatives on Earth, like a grown man who never got over the teenaged boy’s inevitable disappointment by his father, his discovery that his church is full of imperfect people and at least a few active hypocrites, the revelation that many of his teachers are just killing time waiting for their pensions, etc. Hitchens was a brilliant man in many other ways, but, on that subject, he wasn’t Diogenes—he was a permanent adolescent. Harris, by contrast, is a guy with one foot in scientism and one foot in the guru game—and, really, wasn’t one Timothy Leary enough? 

 

(Terence McKenna in his time already was a redundancy.)

 

If you’re an atheist, go be a happy atheist. But shovel that happy horses—t somewhere else. 

 

Words About Words

 

How do you pronounce “Nazism”? 

 

I mean: How do you pronounce Nazism? 

 

The most common way among modern Americans, I think, is: not-zee-is-em, four syllables. But people who speak a more precise English often say: nots-is-em, three syllables. For comparison, think about Sufism: Here, most people use the more correct-sounding (to my ear, I mean) soof-is-em, three syllables, while some people use the clumsier-sounding soof-ee-is-em, four syllables. 

 

Nazi is from the German Nationalsozialist. The “sozialist” part of that word was sometimes abbreviated “sozi,” which literally means “social” but was understood in context to mean “socialist,” which gave rise to Nati-Sozi and thence to Nazi. With the -i already on there, it was natural—to many English writers—to just drop the -sm on the end. But that wasn’t the universal practice, and you can find literature from the 1930s and 1940s that spells the word Naziism. 

 

The German is Nazismus, three syllables, not not-zee-is-mus. So I suppose that argues for the three-syllable version in English. 

 

And then there’s the vowel issue: Most of us say not-zee, but in the 1930s and 1940s, you hear English speakers more often saying nat-zee—or na-zee, as Winston Churchill did. People who learned the word during the war years often maintained that pronunciation throughout their lives, which would sometimes be jarring in conversation. 

 

More Wordiness

 

Washington Post headline: “Tampa region emerges as epicenter of Florida’s death toll from Helene.”

 

To repeat: The epicenter is not the center. That’s why there’s an epi- on the front of the word. Earthquakes have epicenters; hurricanes do not. Somebody should tell the Washington Post. 

 

Slate Is Edited by Dumb People: A Series

 

A headline: “Well, This Letter From a Billionaire Conservative Kingmaker Is Downright Chilling!”

 

The article is about Leonard Leo, the head of the Federalist Society. Leo isn’t a billionaire. He’s a lawyer and a nonprofit executive. One of the organizations he runs has more than $1 billion in assets that it can use to make grants. Leo is no more a billionaire than the fellow who administers the endowment at Princeton is.

 

Slate’s other take is that Leo is a scary Catholic maniac. (You’ll not be surprised to learn that Opus Dei comes into the conversation.) Maybe. But the reason his fund has more than $1 billion in assets to do things with is that it received a very large gift from Barre Seid, a Jewish businessman from Chicago who also donates to pro-Israel causes, orchestras and operas, and to the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, among other worthy causes. Real life isn’t The Da Vinci Code. But taking any meaningful account of the facts would get in the way of the story being told in this case. 

 

Journalism: How does it work? 

 

The article and headline were corrected after I sent my—what, 54^th?—email to Slate, which sometimes corrects its errors and sometimes tries to brazen through them, which is always a mistake. I should start billing these incompetents. 

 

Economics for English Majors

 

My old National Review colleague Rich Lowry writes about the situation in Springfield, Ohio:

 

The New York Times reports that consultations began to take three times as long at the local community health center. The head of the clinic told the paper, “We lost productivity. We had huge burnout of staff.” It hired six Haitian Creole speakers, and annual spending on translation services increased from $43,000 in 2020 to $436,000.

 

Rich isn’t wrong about the numbers, but it is worth pointing out that that $436,000 is less than 2 percent of the institution’s budget. So, real money, but not an extraordinarily heavy institutional lift, either. Scale matters. Proportion matters. 

 

In Other Economic News … 

 

Writing in That August Journalistic Institution, Oren Cass has offered up another headache-inducingly stupid article in defense of industrial policy, in this case insisting that tariffs—because Donald Trump loves tariffs, and somebody has to act as his apologist—are a useful policy in that they address an “externality.” 

 

Tariffs address a different externality. The basic premise is that domestic production has value beyond what market prices reflect. A corporation deciding whether to close a factory in Ohio and relocate manufacturing to China, or a consumer deciding whether to stop buying a made-in-America brand in favor of cheaper imports, will probably not consider the broader importance of making things in America. To the individual actor, the logical choice is to do whatever saves the most money. But those individual decisions add up to collective economic, political, and societal harms. To the extent that tariffs combat those harms, they accordingly bring collective benefits.

 

Cass is involved in the usual motte-and-bailey stratagem, of course. The question isn’t “making things in America”—it is making these things in America at this price. The idiotic chorus of “We don’t make things in America anymore!” has never been louder—and, incidentally, it has never been more untrue: In 2023, the export of U.S.-manufactured goods hit an all-time high at more than $1 trillion; investment in manufacturing facilities hit an all-time high earlier this year; total manufacturing output is at record levels.

 

We make all sorts of high-end things in the United States—airliners, Teslas, etc.—and we make a lot of low-tech stuff too: You can buy an American-made T-shirt from James Perse, if you are so inclined, though it might cost you a couple hundred bucks. There are other made-in-the-USA options at a more reasonable price, too. The question isn’t whether American firms can manufacture a $200 or $50 T-shirt in the United States–the question is whether we are going to deprive poor people of the option of buying a $5 T-shirt made in Bangladesh on the theory that Oren Cass’ consumer preferences should be made mandatory.  

 

More generally: We aren’t having an argument about whether we should—and certainly not about whether we can—manufacture things in the United States, a country that accounts for about 16 percent of all manufacturing on Earth, in wild disproportion to its share of world population. The question is whether we should do political favors for lumber companies and microchip manufacturers, asking American consumers to pay higher prices in order to make profitable businesses more profitable and to subsidize their access to the U.S. market. (One reason to manufacture in the United States is to be close to American workers and American capital; another reason is to be close to American consumers, which matters more for some products than for others.) Cass’ effort to intellectually sanctify Trumpist anti-intellectualism notwithstanding, this isn’t a question of national priorities at all—it is a question of political favors and cronyism. Donald Trump most of the time is (contrary to his nature) something approaching honest about that, that it is mainly a matter of favor-trading. 

 

We don’t grow a hell of a lot of bananas in the United States. And, yet, we are just covered up with bananas. Plentiful, cheap, delicious bananas. We get those bananas from places that are better suited to banana cultivation than Idaho is. I don’t think Oren Cass probably dreams of a world in which his children have the opportunity to work on an American banana plantation. 

 

If you blockade someone else’s ports, it is considered an act of war. Cass et al. would have us blockade our own ports, in order to protect Americans from—what? Abundance and low prices? The potential loss of jobs working in flip-flop factories now that we’re losing the flip-flop race to Vietnam or wherever? It was dumb and dishonest back when the English land barons (a lot of them literal barons) were trying to protect their markets from the nefarious French while hungry Englishmen were going without bread because of high prices. 

 

If you want to define “externality” that vaguely, you have a case for regulating everything. Trump et al., being totalitarians at heart, are okay with that. But Americans’ traditional seven-letter answer to Washington busybodies who want to boss them around, unprintable in this space, is the right one most of the time. 

 

In Conclusion 

 

I have written a great deal about actors and acting over the years, and the art remains a mystery to me. The death of Maggie Smith raised the question in my mind once more: How does this work? There are a million people, millions of people, who could have delivered Maggie Smith’s lines in any of her performances, but no one who could do it quite like her. What was it? It isn’t really a matter of facial expression, or tone of voice, or the inflection in the delivery, or anything you could really isolate. We don’t have good words for whatever it is. It’s probably related to understanding faces, at least in part, and we don’t have good words for that, either: Think of the face in this world that is most precious to you, and then think of how you would try to describe that face to someone who never had seen it. It doesn’t matter how articulate you are, you couldn’t describe the face well enough that the person would know what that face actually looks like.

 

My own view is that the fundamental human tragedy is that we are all trapped in our bubbles of radical subjectivity (“thinking of the key, each confirms a prison”), and the spaces between us are mysterious and dangerous places. That’s why shared experiences, and the performers who raise them to the state of art, are so powerful. People who can cross those interpersonal chasms or play in the spaces between us are rare and sort of magical. Even a very limited actor (say, a guy like Jason Statham, who can really do only the one thing) or musician (Hank Williams) has a kind of mysterious quality that is impossible to really explain. Maggie Smith, of genuinely beloved memory, had an unusual set of gifts and an admirable commitment to her work—and, fitting to the role for which she probably is most famous, a touch of magic too. 

How to Lose a War

By Noah Rothman

Monday, September 30, 2024

 

Retired U.S. Army general Stanley McChrystal was summoned to the set of CBS’s Face the Nation on Sunday to talk about his endorsement of Vice President Kamala Harris, not Israel’s war against Iran’s terrorist proxies. He should have stuck to that plan.

 

“I spent a long time in counterterrorism,” McChrystal replied when asked if Israel should continue to “take Hezbollah to the mat” or take the opportunity presented by the organization’s decapitation to de-escalate. “We killed a lot of people, and what I learned was, unless you have an outcome, a political outcome that is durable, that all of those kinds of activities don’t last,” he said.

 

Right now, the war is “spiraling,” and more “violence is unlikely to produce a good outcome,” McChrystal added. But “I can sympathize with both sides, the visceral desire to go after the other.”

 

It’s not hard to sympathize with Israel’s aggressive prosecution of the defensive war imposed on it by Hamas’s genocidaires — a war joined by Iran’s various terrorist cutouts within hours of the 10/7 massacre. It requires no special benevolence to empathize with the Israelis displaced from their homes and forced to cower in bunkers for the better part of a year under a regular barrage of rocket, missile, and drone attacks launched by Iran’s agents. That’s easy. What, exactly, is the sympathetic reading of Hezbollah’s actions?

 

The blood-soaked terrorist outfit responsible for the deaths of hundreds of Americans, to say nothing of the Israelis and Sunni Arabs it has slaughtered over the decades, launched a campaign of unprovoked aggression. Its fighters and commanders have been targeted with more precision than any other Western power could hope to emulate. The Israel Defense Forces are incurring less collateral damage than one might expect in a war against non-state actors whose tactics revolve around hiding behind civilians. The Israelis are defending themselves against millenarian sects with explicitly eliminationist goals. Hamas, Hezbollah, and the Houthis are meting out indiscriminate violence against civilians while the Israelis aren’t. The moral equivalency here is elusive.

 

McChrystal’s misplaced commiseration served to burnish his self-set reputation as a peacemaker. “I think he’s got a strategy to try to push Iran into a corner,” he said of Benjamin Netanyahu’s remorseless liquidation of one terrorist leader after another. “And he may be doing that, but the long-term outcome in Palestine writ large is going to be from a statesman-like view. And so, if he’s taking a wartime view only, I think at some point he’s either going to have to widen that aperture or take a longer view of it.”

 

“The more you press the fight, the harder you go for the jugular, the more you create scar tissue that’s going to last for generations,” McChrystal concluded. That sums up McChrystal’s approach to the management of a counterinsurgency operation — to win wars by not fighting them.

 

The general announced that the U.S. mission in Afghanistan had “turned a corner” by early 2010 following a “surge” of troops into Central Asia. But McChrystal was too quick to pivot from warfighting to an omnidirectional campaign of peace overtures. “He emphasized the need to win over the Afghan public and focus the fighting on the Taliban heartland in the south,” a summer 2010 New York Times profile of the general read. “He withdrew troops from peripheral areas and publicly announced military operations well before they began.” He “issued directives ordering his troops to drive their tanks and Humvees with courtesy, and he made it more difficult to call in airstrikes to kill insurgents because they risked civilian casualties.”

 

Indeed, McChrystal “issued strict guidelines forbidding air strikes except in the most dire circumstances,” Wired’s Noah Shachtman reported at the time. “The U.S. needed to rob the militants of popular support, he argued. Dropping bombs only disrupted lives and drove people into the arms of the Taliban. So civilian casualties from air strikes had to stop — immediately.” McChrystal’s approach necessarily put American soldiers in more danger than was strictly necessary, and his troops resented it.

 

A June 2010 Times report clocked the “palpable and building sense of unease among troops surrounding” the restrictions imposed on their lethality. It noted a “perception now frequently heard among troops that the effort to limit risks to civilians has swung too far, and endangers the lives of Afghan and Western soldiers caught in firefights with insurgents who need not observe any rules at all.”

 

“Winning hearts and minds in COIN [counterinsurgency] is a coldblooded thing,” McChrystal told the late Rolling Stone reporter Michael Hastings for the profile that put an end to his career in the armed forces. The remark constituted McChrystal’s response to a soldier who warned that NATO troops weren’t “putting fear into the Taliban” because “the more we restrain ourselves, the stronger it’s getting.” McChrystal was unmoved. “I can’t just decide, ‘It’s shirts and skins, and we’ll kill all the shirts,’” he explained.

 

But that’s what Israel is doing. It’s taking every shirt off the battlefield with ruthless disregard for how that makes its terrorist targets or their foreign sponsors feel. What McChrystal seems to off-handedly dismiss is that the rapid degradation of the Iran-backed terrorist networks that ring Israel’s borders is more likely to produce a durable settlement to Israel’s post–October 7 wars than a premature cease-fire that leaves Israel’s tormentors intact. “The Iranians understand that their main investment in recent decades is falling apart in terms of its status and ability to pose a strategic threat to Israel,” an Alma Research and Education Center report said. “Therefore, at this time they will not want to place additional capabilities under threat.”

 

As for the “outcome in Palestine writ large” about which McChrystal fretted, it’s unclear what connection that bears to the battlefield calculus in southern Lebanon, save for the fact that Israel’s enemies justify their murderous aggression on that tenuous basis. The long-term peace McChrystal envisions is more realizable if Iran and its proxies are materially weaker after this campaign. What were the Abraham Accords but an informal defensive compact between Israel and its Sunni neighbors designed to deter Iran and its proxies? That initiative was successful because it sidelined the intractable Palestinian question.

 

Why would the region’s anti-Iran neighbors resume the process of diplomatic and military integration with Israel if it relents just as it has the Islamic Republic on the ropes? There are some justified fears that Iran, lacking the operational capacity to effectively attack Israel, will turn on the Jewish state’s Arab partners. That is a real risk, but it’s hard to see how it would derail the inducements that resulted in the Abraham Accords in the first place.

 

McChrystal’s outlook is representative of a particular sort popular among those in the defense establishment who cannot conceive of victory as an outgrowth of terms dictated on the battlefield. They don’t believe wars are won by force of arms alone, so they cannot comprehend what Israel is seeking to achieve by neutralizing its enemy. Yes, the party that loses a war it starts may bitterly resent its fortunes. But if you take away its capacity to do anything about it and convince others to align with the stronger party against the weaker one, the “scar tissue” nursed by a vanquished adversary is a tertiary concern. That’s how wars are won. America’s generals may have forgotten how to achieve that sort of lasting victory, but Israel has not.

Kamala Harris Is an Enemy of the Second Amendment

National Review Online

Monday, September 30, 2024

 

They say that once is an accident, twice is a coincidence, and three times is a pattern. If so, Kamala Harris’s three attempts to impose draconian gun-control measures on the citizenry of these United States ought to terrify the voting public. Thrice now, Harris has made plays against the Second Amendment that have no parallel in this country’s history. Were she to be elected, the chances of a fourth would be unacceptably high.

 

On the stump, Harris likes to scoff that she has no interest in “taking away your guns.” But this belated assurance is belied by every piece of evidence in her record. In 2006, from her perch as the district attorney of San Francisco, Harris backed Proposition H, which prohibited residents of that city from buying, selling, or owning handguns of any kind, and banned “all City residents, without exception, from selling, distributing, transferring and manufacturing firearms and ammunition.” Had the measure not been struck down by the courts, it would have yielded precisely the sort of mass confiscation that Harris now indignantly insists she disdains. In endorsing the proposal, Harris set herself apart from even Dianne Feinstein and Gavin Newsom, both of whom considered the project to be a step too far.

 

Two years later, Harris went one further and signed an amicus brief in the case of D.C. v. Heller that argued that the Second Amendment to the United States Constitution furnished Americans with no protections whatsoever. Harris’s brief contended not only that “the Second Amendment applies only to federal legislation, not to legislation of the states or local governments,” but that “the Second Amendment provides only a militia-related right to bear arms.” If the Supreme Court had adopted this preposterous reading, it would have entirely obviated the right to keep and bear arms in America and cleared the way for the abolition of private ownership — which Harris had hoped to achieve in San Francisco — nationwide.

 

Today, Harris suggests that she is “in favor of the Second Amendment.” But there is no indication that this is the case. In 2019, when she first ran for president, Harris openly rejected the idea that she would need Congress’s approval before imposing a ban on “assault weapons,” and she enthusiastically supported the mandatory confiscation of the 20 million-plus that are already in circulation. Today, her aides suggest that she has moderated on both points. But that moderation has taken the form of a proposed ban on the most popular rifles in the United States — rifles that, per the plain terms of the Heller decision that Harris opposed, are indisputably “in common use.” At her campaign stops, Harris often avers that “it is a false choice to suggest that you’re either in favor of the Second Amendment, or you want to take everyone’s guns away.” Her record shows that it is not. Harris has spent a career opposing the Second Amendment because she has spent a career trying to “take everyone’s guns away.” The last-minute Annie Oakley act does not alter that one whit.

 

On the contrary: It suggests only that Harris has learned the hard way that her true preferences are an impediment to the power she desires, and that, temporarily at least, she has resolved to fit in with the Democrats’ official line. One does not accidentally propose the universal confiscation of handguns, or threaten free citizens that the police will “walk into [your] home and check to see if  you’re being responsible,” or file briefs pretending that “the right of the people to keep and bear arms” does not mean “the right of the people to keep and bear arms,” or laugh out loud at the mere mention of the Constitution — these are all symptomatic of an attitude that has been developed over time. In 2019, Harris showed us that she still seeks the mass confiscation of guns. Now, she is favored to win the presidency. Americans who wish to preserve their Second Amendment rights cannot say that they weren’t warned.

We Still Need a Functioning President

By Michael Brendan Dougherty

Monday, September 30, 2024

 

Last week, I wrote that geopolitical events — namely, the crucial decisions that must be made about American aid to Ukraine in these weeks — were too important to leave in the hands of a president who is not in possession of his full faculties.

 

I reiterate the same claim, but this time, the subject matter is the ongoing devastation in North Carolina, both in and around Asheville. I know from personal experience how difficult traveling some of those mountain roads can be after a week of steady rainfall. By all reports, many thousands of people are trapped in their homes, and many of those homes are now in a parlous state. Communication lines are down for much of the state. Aid is coming, but an energetic executive should be coordinating federal resources with the governors of North Carolina and surrounding states.

Biden’s response has been, typically, defensive and ornery, rather than reassuring and supportive. Again, this is a man who would have trouble obtaining an apple sauce and toast for lunch. So it’s not surprising. But, we should demand better — and lawmakers in the House and Senate should be demanding it too.

The Foreign-Policy Delusions of the 2024 Race

By Noah Rothman

Thursday, September 19, 2024

 

Of all the straightforward questions Kamala Harris dodged in her debate with Donald Trump, and there were many, the one focused on her muddled outlook toward the war in the Gaza Strip might have been the starkest. If there is “not a deal in the making” and President Joe Biden has been unable to “break through the stalemate,” ABC News anchor Linsey Davis asked Harris, how would she secure a cease-fire between Israel and the terror group Hamas?

 

Davis might as well have been interrogating an inanimate object. “What we know is that this war must end,” Harris replied, “and the way it will end is we need a cease-fire deal, and we need the hostages out.” If the vice president had ever thought about Hamas’s rejection of five distinct peace overtures from the Biden administration and its counterparts, she kept her conclusions to herself. Instead, Harris pitched Americans on the notion that there will be a cease-fire only because there must be a cease-fire. And when that goal is somehow achieved, “we must have a two-state solution where we can rebuild Gaza.” Those shibboleths appeared to satisfy ABC’s moderators, but anyone who’s following the conflict in any detail was probably less impressed.

 

Turning to another war, Russia’s campaign of conquest and subjugation of Ukraine, ABC anchor David Muir pressed Donald Trump to clarify his views. “You have said you would solve this war in 24 hours. . . . How exactly would you do that?” he asked, adding, “Do you want Ukraine to win this war?” The simple yes-or-no question produced neither. Instead, Trump replied with a meandering tirade that had something to do with the “fake numbers” around Europe’s collective contributions to Ukraine’s defense. Nevertheless, he recommitted to his pledge to put an end to the war in Europe “before I even become president” by simply sitting down with Russia’s and Ukraine’s leaders and hammering out a deal. Much like Harris, Trump supposes that there will be a deal only because there must be a deal. After all, he warned, “you have millions of people dead, and it’s only getting worse, and it could lead to World War III.”

 

Unnervingly enough, one or the other of these people will be elected to serve as commander in chief of the armed forces, but neither of them seems willing to acknowledge the world as it is, preferring instead one that their imaginations have conjured.

 

***

 

Hamas will not consent to its own destruction and submit itself to Israeli justice. Moreover, it has no interest in a “two-state solution.” It does not seek to exist in cooperative harmony with the Palestinian factions that govern the West Bank, much less with Israel. Consequently, there will be no permanent cease-fire in the Gaza Strip until Hamas is neutralized, because Hamas’s destruction is the objective desired by the Israeli people.

 

This is all rather inconvenient. Sure, it is in America’s strategic interests to see this State Department–designated terrorist group defeated — an outcome that would take one of Iran’s most lethal pieces off the geopolitical chessboard. But the far-left fringes of the Democratic Party’s base are besotted with the notion that Israel is an apartheid state, a human-rights abuser, and the enemy of civilizational norms. Harris dares not acknowledge the realities that have brought the Middle East to the brink lest she offend that faction and risk its ire. So she retreats into the unreality she and they prefer.

 

Trump faces a parallel situation. A vocal but unrepresentative contingent of right-leaning activists have convinced themselves that the victim of Vladimir Putin’s war was asking for it. Ukraine’s selfish desire to throw off the Russian yoke and integrate economically with Europe was too provocative, they tell themselves. Ukraine’s NATO-accession plan, which stalled out at the Bucharest Summit in April 2008, somehow represented an intolerable threat to Russian national security, they maintain. What was Moscow to do but stage a second invasion of Ukraine, slaughter its people, abscond with and reeducate its children, and erase the Ukrainian language from the face of the earth? Really, who wouldn’t?

 

Ukraine, too, is America’s partner. Indeed, its desire to fold itself into the American-led world order is what the Kremlin seeks to prevent. It is reasonable to expect presidential aspirants to value and preserve that order against external threats — even to build on it, as both Trump and Biden did by presiding over the admittance of four new NATO members (none of which provoked Putin to arms) in the space of eight years. That proposition might appeal to most voters, but it is anathema to the fringes that have hijacked American politics.

 

Failure in Ukraine could have severe consequences. A cessation of hostilities that leaves Moscow in control of the industrial regions in eastern Ukraine would leave the country more dependent on the West and more vulnerable to future Russian attacks. It would unnerve America’s NATO allies on the alliance’s frontier, some of whom would prepare to defend their own borders with or without America’s support or even input. But just as Harris dares not offend the sensibilities of some of the most aberrant elements of the American political landscape by backing Israel’s mission, Trump prefers to dance with the eccentrics who brung him.

 

Harris and Trump are beholden to remarkably similar fictions. “He’s got nuclear weapons,” Trump said of Putin in the last presidential debate. “Nobody ever thinks about that. And eventually, uh, maybe he’ll use them.” A paralyzing fear of Russia’s nuclear saber-rattling is precisely what led the Biden administration to mishandle the crisis Moscow inaugurated in February 2022. “There was a moment in the fall of 2022 when I think there was a genuine risk of the potential use of tactical nuclear weapons,” CIA director William Burns confessed at a recent event alongside the U.K.’s intelligence chief. Indeed, throughout the course of Russia’s war, Biden-administration officials cited a variety of inviolable Russian red lines that they had wholly imagined. The U.S. couldn’t possibly supply Ukraine with long-range rocket and artillery systems, tanks and half-tracks, fixed-wing aircraft, or cluster munitions. How would Russia respond? Only when Ukraine’s position deteriorated did Biden relent. And when he did, he found that Russia’s threats were a hollow scare tactic.

 

Even today, the Biden White House hems and haws when asked to lift restrictions on Ukraine’s use of U.S. ordnance on targets inside Russia from which Moscow stages its invasion. Russian territory is sacrosanct, they had long assumed. But when Ukraine invaded Russia’s Kursk and Belgorod Oblasts, Putin downplayed the incursions lest he unnerve his domestic constituents. Somehow, that failed to produce a eureka moment for either the Biden White House or its chief Republican critic. Only when Russia finally began to retake its own territory did Biden see the value of lifting restrictions on Ukraine’s use of U.S. weapons platforms — which is to say, too late.

 

To his credit, Trump is far more clear-eyed than Harris has been about Israel’s virtues as a reliable U.S. partner. That might have something to do with the Abraham Accords: the normalization of diplomatic relations between Israel and its Sunni Arab neighbors, which succeeded only by the Trump administration’s cleverly pushing the intractable Palestinian issue to the back burner. The outbreak of war arrested the tempo of those agreements, and they will not resume in the absence of an Israeli victory over its Iran-backed adversary. After all, what were the Abraham Accords but a regional security framework designed to check Iran and the terrorist groups in orbit around the Islamic republic? Why would Israel’s Arab neighbors proceed toward normalization with Israel if Jerusalem isn’t the strong horse they thought it was?

 

Harris and her fellow Democrats seem to prefer a world in which Iran can be bribed and cajoled into abandoning its nuclear ambitions, and its genocidal terrorist proxies tamed by integrating them into the community of responsible state and non-state actors. Honestly, it sounds like a lovely dream. But when deterrence has broken down, it is not restored by the offering of carrots alone. Sticks come first. If Harris is blind to that reality, it’s a truth to which Trump, too, is allergic.

 

Trump is the first to tout his justified and laudable decision to order the 2020 air strike that eliminated Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps commander Qasem Soleimani. But that successful attack was preceded by long stretches of dithering and inaction from the president in the face of naked Iranian aggression.

 

In the months preceding that operation, Iran had pirated foreign-flagged vessels in the Strait of Hormuz. It had engaged in “sophisticated and coordinated” strikes on oil tankers. It had downed a multimillion-dollar American surveillance drone over international waters. And it had executed a daring direct attack on Saudi soil, targeting two major petroleum-processing facilities. Trump absorbed it all. Why? “In the days leading up to this moment, he had talked with Tucker Carlson, the Fox News host, who reminded him that he had come to office to get out of endless wars, not start a new one,” the New York Times reported at the time. Trump blinked, and Iran took its cues. Soon enough, Tehran-backed Shiite militias began targeting U.S. positions in Iraq with rocket and artillery fire, and one of those attacks resulted in the death of a U.S. contractor. To this, Trump finally responded, albeit only against those militias. Predictably, Iran was not deterred. In short order, Tehran orchestrated a mob attack on the American embassy in Baghdad in which well-armed rioters breached the outer perimeter. Only then did Trump get serious about the danger posed by Iran, and only after the Soleimani strike did Iran draw down its attacks on U.S. interests.

 

This saga should have imparted some lessons about how authoritarian revisionists respond when confronted by Western military power. It seems they went unlearned.

 

***

 

The next president will inherit a Middle East defined once again by an undeterred Iran. American soldiers are defending themselves against a campaign of attacks on U.S. positions in Iraq and Syria. Three U.S. service personnel died in a January attack on an outpost in Jordan. The American naval assets parked off the coast of Yemen are under constant assault by the Iran-backed Houthi terrorist sect, which “has turned into the most intense running sea battle the Navy has faced since World War II,” according to the Associated Press. U.S. naval assets are patrolling off the coast of Lebanon, bottling up the well-armed Hezbollah terrorist group that Israel will have to disarm or else functionally cede the territory in its north, which Israeli citizens evacuated after the October 7 massacre.

 

The next president will also be bequeathed a war on the European continent to which NATO states have responded by boosting their military presence along the alliance’s periphery. At summits in Madrid and Vilnius, the alliance agreed to scale up its multinational battle groups to brigade size and augment integrated regional-defense plans. NATO’s European and North American members have already committed vast sums of capital and prestige to Ukraine’s defense — investments that cannot be simply withdrawn. They will either generate a return or they will be lost.

 

The distinctions the Trump and Harris campaigns are wont to emphasize between Russia and Iran have proven no obstacle to these countries’ close coordination. On at least two occasions in the lead-up to October 7, 2023, the Kremlin welcomed high-level delegations from Hamas for consultations. Moscow has maintained warm relations with Iran’s proxies for years, but that relationship was operationalized amid Russia’s all-out effort to save Tehran’s cat’s-paw, Syria’s Bashar al-Assad, from his own people’s wrath. Russia contributes to Iran’s objectives in the Middle East, and Iran repays the favor by transferring drones, helicopters, radar systems, and ballistic missiles for use on Ukraine’s battlefields.

 

Meanwhile, China, which has embarked on an increasingly reckless campaign of naval adventurism targeting Philippine merchant vessels in the South China Sea, provides both Iran and Russia with weapons and dual-use materials and conducts joint military exercises with their armies and navies. Last year, a flotilla of Chinese and Russian vessels unnerved American war planners by descending on Alaska’s Aleutian Islands in a menacing formation — an approach that compelled the U.S. to dispatch four destroyers and a P-8 Poseidon surveillance aircraft.

 

China is sending all the signals that preceded Russia’s and Iran’s escalatory behavior, but neither Trump nor Harris is especially receptive to them. One relies on the magic of trade barriers and tariffs to tame the Chinese dragon. The other promises to cut Beijing off from access to U.S. technology — which might further incentivize China to lash out — while doing little to expand America’s blue-water fleet and failing to arm to the teeth our front-line partners in the Pacific.

 

With two hot wars on as many continents and a third looming on the horizon, these are sobering times. And yet, owing mostly to their parochial political ends, the Republican and Democratic presidential campaigns prefer to draw immaterial contrasts between America’s adversaries and to pick and choose which American interests they plan to defend.

 

Kamala Harris cannot say that she wants America’s most stalwart ally in the Middle East to win its war against Iran-backed terrorists. Donald Trump will not say that he wants a Western-facing country, which is being dismembered by one of America’s oldest enemies, to win its righteous war of self-defense. Both campaigns pay lip service to the need to confront China without leveling with the American people about what it will take to achieve our objectives. These may be serious times, but they have not generated commensurate seriousness in our politics. Pray that it doesn’t take an epochal disaster for America to come to its senses.

For My Friends, Everything

By Nick Catoggio

Friday, September 27, 2024

 

The great consolation for Never Trumpers as we wander the political wilderness is knowing that we’ve been right all along about you-know-who.

 

We can be smug about it at times, admittedly. Whenever some Republican hack scoffs on social media at warnings that Donald Trump will try to overturn this election if he loses, one of us reliably pops up to point out that the very same hack scoffed at the very same warnings before the last election.

 

It’s no wonder that conservatives who stuck with the tribe hate us. The most intolerable phrase in the English language is “I told you so.”

 

I’ve never been much for Never Trump triumphalism, though, because I wasn’t “right all along” about the man and his movement. Each has degenerated much further, morally and civically, than I expected they would in 2016.

 

I didn’t foresee January 6. I didn’t foresee Trump getting indicted (and indicted and indicted and indicted) and his primary polling going up. I didn’t foresee the endless wackaloon road show that right-wing political culture would become. And I certainly didn’t foresee the degree to which conspiracy theorizing would become the dominant mode through which grassroots Republicans engage with reality.

 

I underestimated how bad things would get and I’m not the only one, which I suppose is another consolation of a sort.

 

The latest example of how bad things have gotten on the right is, improbably, Eric Adams.

 

Adams is the Democratic mayor of New York City and, as of Wednesday, the defendant in a federal corruption case. Normally when a prominent left-wing politician is slapped with criminal charges, that’s a moment for right-wing partisans to engage in a bit of smug, triumphalist told-you-so-ing of their own. Adams is ripe for it, too: Before he’d even taken the oath as mayor, some who followed his career predicted he’d land in legal trouble.

 

They told us so.

 

He was all teed up to be the new main character in Republicans’ eternal narrative of how thieving Demon-crats can’t be trusted with power. The timing of his indictment so soon before an election should have made him especially attractive as a target, as rampant corruption in urban centers with large black populations is a core component of the MAGA “rigged election” mythos.

 

Look around social media over the last 48 hours, though, and you’ll find one right-wing populist after another riding to the mayor’s defense. 

 

Why?

 

The enemy of my enemy.

 

The cultiest element of Trump’s very culty political movement is that it has its own internal morality that supersedes traditional morality. That’s why so many creeps, crooks, and kooks are drawn to it. Like any cult leader worth his salt, Trump offers acceptance and community to those who find such things hard to come by in respectable society.

 

MAGA’s internal morality is based on two principles. First, Trump’s needs trump all other interests, political, moral, or legal, without exception. Second, one’s moral worth is measured by how antagonistic one is toward the enemy. No one who hates the right people can be truly “bad,” no matter how badly they’ve behaved in conventional moral terms.

 

Apply those two principles and you can safely predict how populists will react to practically any political development. Like, for instance, the indictment of Eric Adams.

 

One could argue that Trump’s great political need in the Adams case is to discredit Democratic leadership of America’s major cities, but that’s not a very useful argument to make regarding New York. After all, the election won’t be decided there. If Adams were the mayor of, say, Philadelphia, then he’d be an irresistible poster boy for left-wing sleaze.

 

Trump and his fans do see a useful lesson about liberal corruption to exploit in the charges against Adams. But it’s not the defendant who supposedly embodies that corruption—it’s the prosecution.

 

Donald Trump is facing charges in two separate federal criminal cases, one related to his coup attempt and the other to his concealment of classified documents after leaving office. Both cases are languishing as Election Day approaches, but they’ll pick up next year if he loses this race. And the fact that he’s under indictment increases the likelihood of that, of course. Diehard Republicans might not mind having a criminal suspect (who’s already been convicted of state felonies) as president, but plenty of normie voters do.

 

In a test of credibility between Eric Adams and the same Justice Department that’s prosecuting Trump, MAGA Republicans have a moral duty to convince the public that Adams is the more credible of the two.

 

Still, the fact that both the prosecution and the defendant are Democrats makes a firm preference between the two tricky for populists. Cue the second principle: In an important way, Eric Adams has an enemy in common with Trump and his supporters. With the possible exception of Sen. John Fetterman, he’s the most outspoken critic of mass immigration of any major official in his party.

 

For years, Adams has complained about the burden being placed on New York City by migrants who’ve crossed the southern border and then made their way north, sometimes with help from Texas Gov. Greg Abbott and sometimes under their own power. That’s a twofer as far as Republicans are concerned. It’s sweet to see a prominent Democrat attacking the Biden administration, but it’s really sweet to see one doing so over Trump’s pet issue in an election year.

 

“Hate” is probably too strong a word to describe how Adams feels about the president and the migrants flowing into New York City, but it’s close enough for MAGA morality. Eric Adams hates the right people.

 

And so, bobbing around in the toxic waste of Twitter this week, you’ll find everyone from conservative Washington Post columnists to right-wing media firebrands to populist “influencers” to MAGA satire sites speculating that Biden’s Justice Department set its sights on Adams to punish him for his heresies about immigration. Trump himself soon picked up the claim, as inevitably happens whenever the grassroots right finds a new conspiracy theory to play with:

What’s stupid about all of this is that, given the screwy politics of this election, I suspect Kamala Harris would have relished having a scandal-free Eric Adams as a campaign surrogate. She’s visiting the southern border today in her latest sweaty ploy to put some political distance between herself and Biden’s record on immigration. Enlisting Adams—a rare Democrat with immigration cred—to vouch for her as a prospective tough-on-the-border president might have helped her build a touch of cred of her own.

 

But Adams isn’t scandal-free, so Harris stayed away from him and the DOJ moved forward. And why shouldn’t it have?

 

Had it decided not to charge Adams for the illicit political reason that it feared being accused of persecuting an anti-immigration Democrat, Republicans would have cried foul about that too and alleged that Biden’s Justice Department didn’t want a major Democratic scandal erupting so close to the election. Merrick Garland and his team were damned if they did and damned if they didn’t.

 

Meanwhile, underlying all of these machinations is the right’s devout faith that federal law enforcement in the Trump era slavishly serves Democratic interests by harassing Republicans. The facts contradict that—ask Bob Menendez or Henry Cueller or, yes, Eric Adams—but where facts and belief disagree, the facts must yield. The MAGA effort this week to celebrate Adams as an “independent-minded Democrat” is transparently a scheme to salvage their theory that Trump’s criminal trouble is and can only be the fruit of scandalous partisanship, nothing more. It’s their own idiotic version of “I told you so”: By converting Adams into a de facto Republican, their claim that the DOJ lets politics dictate its charging decisions remains vindicated.

 

Someday, perhaps, they’ll explain how every MAGA Republican in Congress along with “independent-minded Democrats” like Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema who’ve been chronic thorns in the White House’s side managed to escape the Justice Department’s alleged ideological vendetta. But it won’t be today.

 

Friends and scapegoats.

 

There are other interesting elements to the Adams saga and the right’s reaction to it. One is that the mayor himself has begun insinuating that his stance on immigration had something to do with why he was prosecuted. Watch this video at around 1:10.

 

I assume that flourish was less about ingratiating himself to Republicans than with Adams being desperate for a pretext to remain in office while his case plays out. If he can’t convince New Yorkers that he’s innocent on the merits, maybe he can get them on his side by reminding them that he’s tried to reduce the burden migrants have placed on housing and social services.

 

But one never knows. Adams wouldn’t be the first Democrat to spare himself from criminal consequences by making himself politically useful somehow to Donald Trump. What separates Trump’s cult from every other is that its leader once wielded the power to place his disciples beyond the reach of the law and might soon do so again. Every creep, crook, and kook who joins it does so knowing that, with the right connections and enough obsequiousness, he too might see his legal jeopardy disappear as if by magic.

 

“For my friends, everything. For my enemies, the law.” That’s how postliberalism works, by design, and never more so than when it’s under the influence of a narcissist as extreme as Trump. A man who divides the world morally between people who like him and people who don’t will judge everyone by whether they’re part of the first group, including foreign leaders. That’s why the hero of Ukraine was obliged to pay his respects at Trump Tower on Friday morning. He didn’t have important policy business that couldn’t wait; he had to reassure Trump, urgently, that he still liked him.

 

If you’re Eric Adams, facing years in prison, it’s suddenly very important that Trump views you as someone who likes him. Accusing the hated Justice Department of persecuting border hawks is a step in that direction. Un-endorsing Kamala Harris for president would be another. And nothing would please Trump more than to see Adams, a Democratic elector in New York, switch his vote from Harris to Trump when the Electoral College votes in December.

 

That vote wouldn’t count, mind you. But even an ineffectual show of loyalty at a moment of high political tension might be enough to assure him a pardon next year. For Trump’s friends, everything.

 

The other intriguing angle to the Adams mess also has to do with the election. It becomes clearer every day that, if Trump loses, this winter’s iteration of “Stop the Steal” will fixate on illegal immigrants supposedly voting en masse for the Democrats. And Adams, in his own small way, is now enabling it.

 

Trump has pushed that nonsense before, you might recall. His tender ego was bruised in 2016 when he lost the popular vote to Hillary Clinton so he claimed that her margin must have been due to millions of migrants casting invalid ballots in states like California to help her run up the score. But the theory never got much traction, partly because victorious Republicans didn’t care about the popular vote and partly because it was never explained why Democrats would have launched a massive illegal-voting scheme in states they were destined to win anyway.

 

The theory seemed poised to come roaring back in 2020, when Trump ended up losing most swing states narrowly. Yet, weirdly, it never did. It remains a strange quirk of the original “Stop the Steal” hysteria that no core villain was ever identified. “Democrats” rigged the election, we were told, but how they did it remained scrupulously obscure. There were ballot “mules” and corrupt election workers and shadowy forces tinkering remotely with voting machines, but things never got much more specific than that. No scapegoat-in-chief was named.

 

Immigrants, the supposed shock troops of Clinton’s popular-vote victory, somehow escaped becoming the scapegoat four years ago. Probably that’s because, between Trump’s halting construction of the border wall and his use of Title 42, he and his fans were required to believe that he had solved the problem of illegal immigration as president. Four years and one protracted border crisis later on Biden’s watch, that logic no longer obtains.

 

So I predict that “Stop the Steal” 2.0, which is already in motion politically, will make voting by immigrants the scapegoat-in-chief. Everything points to it. Some of Trump’s most devoted cronies in Congress are obsessing about it. So is the world’s richest edgelord, an immigrant himself, along with many lesser examples of the species. The political pump has been primed by tales of migrant savages consuming pets in Ohio; surely a cohort as wretched as that won’t think twice about casting illegal ballots. Trump himself is so invested in the possibility that he warned this week of a Democratic plot to mail ballots overseas without verifying the recipient’s citizenship or even their identity.

 

The great conspiracy to let foreigners vote in our elections is so vast that it will even include foreigners who haven’t immigrated!

 

The “illegals stole the election” scam won’t be designed to convince a judge but to cast a political cloud over Harris’ victory so that Republicans in Congress have a pretext not to certify it on January 6. Mike Johnson sounds up to the challenge, assuming he’s still speaker by then. And Republican voters are more than prepared to rally behind anything Trump tells them about the election.

 

Whether Eric Adams realizes it yet or not, his demagoguery about supposedly being indicted for his dissent on immigration plays into the disinformation campaign to come. He’s essentially volunteered as a character witness in the looming trial in the court of public opinion over whether a Harris victory should be trusted as legitimate. Adams’ answer, implicitly, is no: An administration so committed to importing foreigners that it would prosecute him on false pretenses for opposing the policy is surely also an administration that would connive to let foreigners vote to maintain its grasp on power. At a certain point of extreme corruption, the graft turns indiscriminate. 

 

No wonder Trump and MAGA Republicans feel defensive on his behalf. In no time at all, Adams has gone from being an ally on a discrete issue to something like a friend—and in a second term, the law will apply only to their enemies. That pardon is in the bag.