I Thought Happiness Was ‘Idiocracy’ in the Rear-View Mirror

By Kevin D. Williamson

Saturday, November 30, 2024

 

I owe Mike Judge an apology. 

 

When the brilliant satirist behind Beavis and Butt-Head and Office Space came out with his 2006 masterpiece Idiocracy, I enjoyed the film but was critical of it. I thought it was too cynical, too cruel, that it took too low a view of human beings in general and of U.S.A.-American-type human beings in particular. 

 

Eighteen years later, the Trump administration is plumbing the world of professional wrestling for the next secretary of education. 

 

So, to the Prophet Mike Judge (peace be upon him), to President Dwayne Elizondo Mountain Dew Camacho, to Frito Pendejo, to Beef Supreme and all the rest of the Idiocracy gang, all I can think to say is … Idiocracy was still wrong, damn it, just not in the direction I thought it was. Incredible as the fact may be: Mike Judge took far too generous a view of boobus Americanus. 

 

It’s like we jumped off the ledge, landed in the world of Idiocracy, and then started digging until we were 20,000 leagues underneath whatever muck it is that is morally and intellectually beneath Idiocracy.

 

As an American, I mourn this. As a journalist, well, it’s awesome. I have a vision of the 2028 presidential election, and it is going to be a hoot.

 

Like Luke Wilson’s everyman hero in Idiocracy, J.D. Vance is now the smartest man in the world he inhabits—Trumpworld—and he’s a ruthless, hungry, amoral operator. People close to the Trump team say he wasn’t the boss’ first pick. Might he be tempted by some skullduggery? We can only hope. 

 

The obvious thing would be to give some sub rosa help to the Democrats in the impeachment they are sure to try to launch if they win big in the 2026 midterms, which is likely. But with Robert F. Kennedy Jr. running amok throughout the executive branch, maybe a nice lukewarm glass of unpasteurized raw milk swimming with some mutant strain of Mycobacterium tuberculosis would do the trick.

 

Either way, right now Vance is the man to beat. But there will be competition, of course. There’s the pro-wrestling roster to consider, and the UFC roster, too. 

 

I do hope Matt Gaetz hasn’t left the scene entirely. He should definitely run in 2028—as Donald Trump could tell you, running for president as a Republican turns out to be a terrific way to stay out of jail. But Gaetz needs something to do in the meantime. I think he was a terrible pick for attorney general, but he’d be a great replacement as secretary of education once that nice pro-wrestling lady burns out. Think about it: Republicans insist that the Department of Education is a cabal of woke bureaucrats who should be kept as far from our locally controlled public schools as is humanly possible—and if anybody on the current Republican scene is going to end up with a court order mandating that he cannot go anywhere within 500 yards of a school, it’s going to be Matt Gaetz.

 

If we can’t have education reform, we can at least get a restraining order. 

 

Sure, secretary of education is not the most obvious launchpad for a run at the presidency, but, then, World Wrestling Entertainment isn’t where you’d think you’d find a future secretary of education, either.

 

But Republicans are now all about We the People and against Them the Elites. And Republican anti-elitism is just a goddamned glory to behold: Tucker Swanson McNear Carlson of La Jolla Country Day School and whatever Swiss boarding academy it was that expelled him has taken off the bow tie and put on the flannel shirt. (Nice! J. Press?) He’s running around with the everloving moose up there in Maine, no doubt ruefully meditating on the fact that he has been supplanted as the biggest voice on the right by Joe Rogan, a meathead stand-up comedian and Ultimate Fighting Championship commentator who spends his days spreading imbecilic disinformation and his nights high as a Georgia pine. The editors over at William F. Buckley Jr.’s National Review (my journalistic home for many years) have rendered their verdict on future director of national intelligence Tulsi Gabbard: crazy as a bedbug, but hot. Beavis and Butt-Head could not have said it better. 

 

These are weird times, ladies and gentlemen, especially for Republicans.

 

Whatever happens to Trump, the Republican scramble in 2028 is going to be bananas. Obviously, nobody in the erstwhile Party of Lincoln gives one half of a rat’s fuzzy patootie about big policy ideas just now—I mean, Pete Hegseth wasn’t even intellectually serious enough for the weekday version of Fox & Friends and was relegated to weekends—but they do care a great deal about celebrity, and it would be something to see the House’s sergeant at arms intone in that grandiose way “Ladies and gentlemen! The president of the United States!” as President Kid Rock pimp-strolled down the ol’ congressional aisle in a lime-green fur coat and coonskin fedora. The problem is that, middle-aged and long-past-his-prime as he is, Kid Rock is still a little too hip and way too literate (he can be a clever wordsmith) for today’s Republican Party. 

 

You know who I’d like in the 2028 mix? Booker T. No, not Booker Taliaferro Washington—who was a Republican back when that meant something very different!—I mean Booker T the pro-wrestling guy. He has it all: the pro-wrestling connection, which apparently is now a GOP sine qua non, he’s a felon (armed robbery, and, unlike all those nice white Republicans, he actually did his time), he has a radio show like any good Republican would, and he already has been a candidate, albeit a kind of half-assed one, throwing his hat into the ring for mayor of Houston, America’s most interesting city. And he knows what’s expected of a Republican in our time: He went on Fox News in 2016 and affirmed that Donald Trump is “a man’s man first and foremost.” That’s kind of a weird thing to say about a guy who wears that much makeup, loves the Village People, and goes all misty when somebody plays “Memory” from Cats, but that’s Mr. Manly McMan’s Man for Republicans today.

 

I know what it feels like to take just a little too much LSD. This is a whole lot weirder.

 

A couple of weeks ago, I saw former Sen. Phil Gramm, Sen. Mitch McConnell, Betsy DeVos, and a bunch of other old-school Republican types at an American Enterprise Institute event, and it was like I’d traveled into the past in that time machine they’re looking for in Idiocracy, a long-ago world in which Kennedys were respectable Democrats who left women dead in the bay in Massachusetts instead of Republican-adjacent populist crackpots who leave children dead of measles in Samoa. This was a lost world of blue blazers and … well, not exactly sobriety, but a kind of Chamber of Commerce three-martini buzz at most. 

 

A few days later, I’m in a betting pool for when we’re going to have the first GOP-affiliated Cabinet member with face tattoos. (Doug Burgum needs to do something to establish his populist bona fides.) We have a former game-show host and quondam dabbler in pornographic films as the Republican president, while Republican former House Speaker John Boehner is your weed guy. Where do you go from there? 

 

If you think things are going to be any closer to normal the next time around, you weren’t paying attention to the last episode of Trumpworld. This installment—Trumpworld 2: This Time It’s Personal—is loopy enough already, but when they start setting things up for the next season, it’s going to go off the rails in a spectacularly glorious way.

 

Just drink the raw milk and enjoy the show.

2024: The Year ‘San Francisco Values’ Finally Failed

By Wesley J. Smith

Saturday, November 30, 2024

 

San Francisco was once a conservative city. Oh, sure, it had its bohemian side. The Beats of the ’50s were at home in North Beach, and Harry Bridges, the suspected communist who served for years as head of the longshoremen’s union, had a definite influence. But for the most part, San Francisco was well within the cultural mainstream. Indeed, the city was so staid that the Republican Party’s nominee for mayor won landslides in 1955 and 1959, and the GOP nominated the archconservative Barry Goldwater as its presidential candidate from the Cow Palace in 1964.

 

Then, San Francisco changed. Radically. In 1964, the University of California, Berkeley, a few miles across the bay, became the center of the “free speech” movement. Civil rights and then militant anti–Vietnam War advocacy found great sympathy. The Haight-Ashbury neighborhood became a hippy haven and the focus of a growing drug culture. The gay-rights movement sprang energetically out of the Castro District, and the once predominately Italian working-class neighborhood was transformed into a radical front of the sexual revolution. By the 1980s, the term “San Francisco values” — wielded by conservatives to describe the cultural and political radicalism of the Bay Area — had turned the city into something of a national joke.

 

Over the years, policies enacted by the city’s ever more extreme progressive leaders slowly destroyed San Francisco. I lived in and around the city for almost 25 years, starting in 1992, and saw the decline happen in real time. It broke my heart.

 

Today, the city is a wreck. The commercial hub of San Francisco, a huge shopping mall at Fifth and Market, anchored by a beautiful multistory Nordstrom, imploded after the department store closed last year. Union Square, once the pride of San Francisco, with high-end retail stores, now sees many empty storefronts. Drug bazaars operate openly, enabled by city employees who hand out free drug paraphernalia. Homelessness abounds. Old men ride bicycles around the city naked. There is so much human excrement in the streets that maps have been created to warn people where not to walk. What was once a world-class city has become a lifestyle calamity.

 

But none of that steadily increasing misery deterred San Francisco progressives from proselytizing their politics. Over time, San Francisco values — sexual libertinism, maximum abortion rights, sanctuary-city protections, gender ideology, DEI impositions in employment and schools, soft-on-crime law enforcement, massive social spending, climate radicalism, and coercive Covid policies — came to dominate the state that had twice elected Ronald Reagan and had been administered by Republican governors for 16 straight years between 1983 and 1999.

 

Remarkably, only ten years later, Bay Area liberals and progressives, including Governor Jerry Brown — once denigrated as “Governor Moonbeam” — claimed the most important statewide offices. Former San Francisco mayor and future governor Gavin Newsom was then lieutenant governor, and former San Francisco district attorney and future senator and vice president Kamala Harris was elected attorney general. Both of California’s U.S. senators, Barbara Boxer and Dianne Feinstein, hailed from the Bay Area (Feinstein having once been San Francisco’s mayor). Not only that, San Franciscan Nancy Pelosi became one of the country’s most powerful leaders, serving as speaker of the House of Representatives between 2007 and 2011. Pelosi would resume that high office between 2019 and 2023. It was a remarkable takeover of an entire state by a small area’s politics. Alas, progressive policies did to California what they had done to San Francisco. California is in debt, it has lost population, and profitable companies are leaving in droves.

 

San Francisco values went national after the 2020 elections, when the supposedly centrist President Joe Biden governed from the hard left. Under Biden, the southern border was thrown wide open, and millions of illegal immigrants flooded the country, accommodated by lax enforcement and loose refugee policies. Gender ideology was promulgated by regulations of the Health and Human Services Department. The military featured soldier drag queens in recruitment advertisements, perhaps a contributing factor to the precipitous drop in enlistment. Massive spending programs were enacted to fight climate change, unleashing wild inflation, and the energy sector was throttled with canceled pipelines and suspended liquefied natural gas export licenses.

 

San Franciscans and Californians might have been unwilling to change political course in the face of calamities, but nationally, voters were unhappy. As the 2024 election approached, it looked bad for the aging president. But after panicked Democrats forced Biden to yield the presidential nomination to Harris and she soared in the polls, it seemed as if San Francisco values — once the brunt of so many denigrating jokes — would complete their national triumph when a daughter of the city’s progressive establishment took the oath of office as president of the United States.

 

But San Francisco values hit a wall of MAGA populism that was willing to push back against cultural progressivism. The unthinkable happened. A once disgraced and often indicted former president, Donald Trump, was elected for a second time, scoring a rare Republican victory in the popular presidential vote and a landslide in the Electoral College. Republicans retook the Senate majority, gaining four formerly Democratic seats in West Virginia, Pennsylvania, Ohio, and Montana. The GOP also maintained control of the House of Representatives. Even California and San Francisco were affected by the conservative shift in the public’s mood. The almost pro-criminal Los Angeles district attorney, George Gascón — who had formerly been San Francisco’s DA — was wiped out electorally, and San Francisco’s progressive mayor London Breed lost to a more moderate Democrat.

 

After decades of steady political advances, San Francisco values are finally in retreat. But was this progressivism’s Waterloo? If only. For someone who made it this far, Harris is an unusually bad politician. She was simply outworked and out-campaigned by Trump, whose remarkable courage after being shot by a would-be assassin, willingness to be interviewed anytime anywhere (except on 60 Minutes), and fun stunts such as working a shift at McDonald’s made Harris’s campaign of “joy” seem both dour and substantively empty.

 

And yet. Harris received the third-most votes of any presidential candidate in U.S. history, losing the popular count by less than two percentage points. Moreover, the rightward shift was hardly a sea change. Democrats won Senate seats in Wisconsin, Nevada, Arizona, and Michigan — even as all these states voted for Trump — that would surely have gone Republican in a true red wave.

 

But the GOP’s decisive overall victory has at least presented the new administration with a real opportunity to put the progressive beast back in its cage. If after four years Trump’s conservative populism produces greater prosperity and personal liberty, if woke goes the way of the dodo, if America is seen as both strong at home and abroad, if the world is at greater peace when the next national election rolls around, then perhaps San Francisco progressivism will be contained once again in its tiny original enclave — and jokes about the city’s loco values can resume.

 

But if Trump fails, expect San Francisco values to roar back, this time with sharper teeth fronted by politicians of far greater talent than Harris. If that happens, it could be curtains for traditional Americanism.

The Iranian Regime’s Weakness Is an Opportunity for the Trump Administration

By Daniel Twining

Saturday, November 30, 2024

 

It is no exaggeration to say that Iran is an unrivaled agent of chaos, death, and destruction in the Middle East today. From the multi-front war on Israel to the plots to assassinate President-elect Trump, the Iranian dictatorship is fundamentally incompatible with global peace and security.

 

But the regime is not the same as the Iranian public. In fact, new polling from Iran supported by the International Republican Institute offers striking new evidence of just how far apart the Iranian people are from their rulers.

 

Nearly 80 percent of Iranians blame Iran’s foreign policy for the country’s economic problems, and 63 percent do not think it advances the well-being of ordinary citizens. Additionally, a plurality, 43 percent, believe that Iran’s foreign policy is contributing to tensions in the region.

 

What about the war on Israel? In fact, as many Iranians (42 percent) disapprove of Hamas’s assault on Israel as support it (43 percent). Iranians are also split on support for the so-called “Axis of resistance,” composed of its proxy forces spread across the region: Public support for providing them with financial assistance sits at 49 percent.

 

Despite five decades of violent anti-American brainwashing, two-thirds of Iranians (67 percent) support normalizing ties with the United States. What’s more, the percentage of Iranians who strongly support normalization with Washington (55 percent) outstrips support for the “Axis of resistance” (49 percent).

 

Perhaps confirming Republican criticism that the defunct nuclear deal was too generous to Tehran, 61 percent of poll respondents believe Iran should make an agreement with Western countries to resolve the issue. As the ayatollahs accelerate Iran’s illicit weapons program with an eye toward a nuclear breakout, it’s not at all clear their exhausted public would support it, with most Iranians instead favoring accommodation with Washington.

 

Iranian youth are the greatest potential agents of change given their dissatisfaction with the status quo. Among 18- to 29-year-olds, 76 percent do not believe that officials care about the issues that matter to them, 77 percent do not see prosperity in their future, and 74 percent would prefer to emigrate from Iran.

 

The data are clear: Iran’s rulers are badly out of step with their citizens. The Iranian people do not want conflict with America or to live in a state of warfare with their neighbors. They overwhelmingly believe Iranian foreign policy has damaged their economic prospects, and a majority do not approve of the war on Israel. Young people in particular are sharply critical of a government that does not answer to them or offer any prospects for a better future. Indeed, the tremendous popular support for the pro-democracy “Women, Life, Freedom” protests of the past two years testifies to the deep desire for change and disgust with the Iranian regime.

 

With a second Trump administration preparing to reprise its “maximum pressure” campaign against Iran, these trends offer an obvious opportunity to further isolate this noxious regime from its citizens. If the regime finally falls under the weight of popular pressure, a successful democratic transition would have the potential to fundamentally transform Iran, the region, and the world for the better — and could provide the greatest boon to American interests since the collapse of communism.

 

The regime’s increasingly audacious attempts to bring violence to our own shores underscores the urgency of an aggressive approach. From the multiple assassination attempts on American soil of dissident Masih Alinejad to Tehran’s efforts to murder President-elect Trump, the Iranian regime has clearly felt emboldened in its shadow war on the United States.

 

After four years of disinterest from the outgoing administration, the Trump team ought to support freedom fighters as part of its Iran strategy. This should include harsher targeted sanctions on the officials responsible for oppressing the Iranian people, exposing the regime’s rampant corruption, disrupting Iran’s lucrative black-market oil trade and supply of weaponry to Russia’s war machine through sanctions and interdiction, equipping pro-democracy activists with the tools they need to build broad coalitions, and using offensive cyber tools to tear down the dictatorship’s internet firewall and thus enabling Iranians to access information about the true nature of the regime.

 

The scale of the threat posed by Iran demands the deployment of every tool at our disposal. Like all dictatorial regimes, Tehran fundamentally fears its own people. As the incoming administration prepares its new “maximum pressure” campaign, they would do well to consider the untapped power of the Iranian people.

No Thanksgiving for Collectivism

By Andrew Stuttaford

Saturday, November 30, 2024

 

Alex Tabarrok revives a Thanksgiving post from 2004 on some handy lessons to be learned from initial blunders made by the Pilgrims when they arrived in North America.

 

Tabarrok:

 

It’s one of the ironies of American history that when the Pilgrims first arrived at Plymouth rock they promptly set about creating a communist society. Of course, they were soon starving to death.

 

That the Pilgrims (or some of them) thought that this was the way to go is not too much of a surprise. Extreme egalitarianism ran through certain strands of Protestantism in post-Reformation Europe, as manifested most notoriously in the Anabaptist takeover of Münster nearly a century before the Mayflower set off on its voyage. In his book on the rise, fall, and (oh dear) rise again of communism (which I reviewed for the magazine here), Sean McMeekin highlighted the story of that 16^th century German “New Jerusalem.”

 

As I noted:

 

Millenarian Münster (which was declared to be the New Jerusalem) hung on between 1534 and 1535 . . . was an early example of radical egalitarian rule in practice, a clear warning of totalitarian nightmares to come and so extreme that it is better regarded as a preview of Maoism than of Bolshevism.

 

England in the early 17^th century was a land in which political, social, and religious dissent were fusing in an increasingly dangerous manner, stirred up by the arrogance, high-handedness, and incompetence of the country’s first two Stuart kings (James I, a clever man, was known as “the wisest fool in Christendom;” his son, Charles I, was for the most part just a fool). The Pilgrim’s “corn collectivism” reflected both the traditions of the radical Reformation and growing intellectual turmoil in England at that time.

 

Fortunately, Governor William Bradford ended this misguided experiment, delivering what Tabarrok rightly refers to as “one of the most insightful statements of political economy ever penned”:

 

[Ending corn collectivism] had very good success, for it made all hands very industrious, so as much more corn was planted than otherwise would have been by any means the Governor or any other could use, and saved him a great deal of trouble, and gave far better content.

 

To borrow Elon Musk’s phrase, collectivism is a “mind virus,” indeed one of the most persistent examples of one that there is (Bradford gives Plato and “other ancients” as examples of those who succumbed to it). Kudos to the governor for noting the presence of the dread word “community” lurking amid the justifications for corn collectivism. The idea “that the taking away of property and bringing in community into a commonwealth would make [people] happy and flourishing” was, he argued, a foolish and vain conceit.

 

This community (“so far as it was,” jeers Bradford) bred “much confusion and discontent” and shattered productivity.

 

Tabarrok:

 

Among Bradford’s many insights it’s amazing that he saw so clearly how collectivism failed not only as an economic system but that even among godly men “it did at least much diminish and take off the mutual respects that should be preserved amongst them.” And it shocks me to my core when he writes that to make the collectivist system work would have required “great tyranny and oppression.” Can you imagine how much pain the twentieth century could have avoided if Bradford’s insights been more widely recognized?

 

Indeed.

 

The problem, however (and this partially explains the survival of the collectivist mind virus over the millennia) is that for some the fact that making such a system “work” would require “great tyranny and oppression” was an obvious job opportunity.

The Feather-Pillow Principle

By Kevin D. Williamson

Friday, November 29, 2024

 

I cannot quite congratulate my colleague Kevin Hassett on his new appointment as director of the White House National Economic Council, from which position he will be—or should be—among the most important shapers of the Trump administration’s economic policies. But I do wish him success in the role—assuming we agree about what constitutes success, and I am not sure we can assume that. 

 

I have three related thoughts.

 

First: I will try not to repeat this every time I write about a Trump nomination or appointment, but I do not believe there is an honorable way to serve in this administration. Trump attempted to stage a coup d’état in 2021 in order to illegitimately remain in power, and no serious patriotic person can associate with him at this point without being tainted by that fact. Even the gentle Amish have a tradition of shunning, and it is not as though Trump or those around him have repented of their crimes and sought reconciliation—they celebrate their crimes, revel in them, and endlessly justify them.

 

That being said, there is, of course, an argument that a Trump administration advised by capable and decent men and women—and Kevin Hassett is one such—will be more likely to do more good and less harm than a Trump administration where the only voices are those of grifters and fanatics such as Steve Bannon and Steve Bannon, respectively. I am not convinced that is actually true as a matter of fact, as Trump is not famous for taking advice on the big things: It is not as though he had to be persuaded by someone to try to carry out the attempted coup in 2021 or that the better angels of his advisers’ spirits, if they were anywhere to be found, succeeded in dissuading him. 

 

It is true that in some matters, including a considerable swath of policy issues that he neither understands nor cares about, Trump can be like Lord Derby, who, “like the feather pillow, bears the marks of the last person who has sat on him”—which is no small thing given the assortment of asses we are talking about. But Trump makes a big impression of his own on the feather pillows he encounters. 

 

The wise position may be found in some golden mean between two of my intellectual heroes: Milton Friedman, who defended his advice to Augusto Pinochet on the grounds that it was good advice and that Chile would have been better off if he had followed more of it, and F.A. Hayek, who once received a gently corrective letter from Margaret Thatcher about his excessive indulgence of the same dictator.

 

Second: I do wonder if Trump’s promises of economic radicalism breaking from Republican and old-school conservative approaches are very much helped by his naming to this top spot an American Enterprise Institute fellow and the former economics editor of National Review rather than, say, Sohrab Amari or Mike Lindell, whose pillows do not even have feathers in them. (They are stuffed with polyurethane foam.) For all his sneering at conservative intellectuals and institutions, Trump has relied on a number of National Review veterans for economic advice: Hassett served in the first administration, as did Larry Kudlow, another former economics editor at the magazine that led, for a moment, conservative opposition to Trump. 

 

In a similar way, I wonder whether Trump’s “drain the swamp” talk is at all diminished in the minds of his admirers by his nomination of a billionaire hedge-fund manager (Scott Bessent) as treasury secretary, the billionaire CEO of Cantor Fitzgerald (Howard Lutnick) as commerce secretary, and a registered lobbyist formerly on the payroll of at least one foreign government (Pam Bondi, registered henchwoman of the Qatari monarchy) as attorney general.

 

Third: Power tests character, as does mere proximity to power. The temptation to engage in policy-shop turd-polishing is very strong, and Hassett has in the past taken an implausibly rosy view of what he surely knows to be bad policies (particularly on trade) while developing a certain cultivated reticence regarding things he knows to be true, such as the role of immigration in supporting economic growth and dynamism. Kudlow also has at times practically sweated through the effort to put a happy face on economic positions he knows to be both daft and destructive. 

 

My hope is that Hassett will be able to shape the Trump administration more than the Trump administration shapes him. But I worry about the sobering example of J.D. Vance, who has allowed himself to be so awfully diminished by the pursuit of something of such modest value as the vice presidency.

 

Lord Derby is long gone, but the relationship between feather pillows and that by which they are shaped remains the same.

Trust the Science: DEI Is Dangerous

National Review Online

Friday, November 29, 2024

 

We were told over and over again by leading institutions, high-profile figures, and the mainstream media that DEI fosters an “inclusive environment” and advances “equity” by eliminating biases and counteracting discrimination. A booming industry emerged: About $8 billion is spent each year on diversity trainings in the United States, and more than half of Americans report that their workplace has DEI trainings or meetings. Of course, DEI is not merely limited to programming at organizations, businesses, and universities. Now, it is entrenched in our laws. President Biden has issued executive orders to promote social justice, beginning on his very first day in the Oval Office.

 

While DEI was celebrated, its opponents realized that it is a dangerous ideology. Some supposedly “equitable” policies have been clear examples of illegal discrimination, while the efforts to be “inclusive” have had disastrous consequences, particularly for single-sex spaces. Yet some of DEI’s terrible effects have more subtly eroded our social fabric: Most, if not all, DEI-themed trainings promote a victimhood mentality by organizing society into a hierarchy of “oppressor” and “oppressed” on the basis of immutable traits, then demonize anyone who is supposedly sitting comfortably atop the totem pole. Regrettably, anyone who expressed even mild objections to DEI could be branded as a reprehensible bigot who needed immediate reeducation, thereby creating a demand for even more progressive-indoctrination sessions.

 

Now, a compelling new study confirms that DEI fosters racial and group animosity, not tolerance.

 

The study released on Monday by Network Contagion Research Institute (NCRI) and Rutgers University Social Perception Lab has devastating but unsurprising results: Across the three experiments, the researchers found that participants exposed to DEI materials were more likely to perceive prejudice where none existed and were more willing to punish the perceived perpetrators. Even worse, the participants who read DEI materials focused on caste were more likely to agree with Hitler quotes that substituted “Jew” with “Brahmin,” the top of the hierarchy group in the Indian caste system. The study found that “participants exposed to the DEI content were markedly more likely to endorse Hitler’s demonization statements, agreeing that Brahmins are ‘parasites’ (+35.4%), ‘viruses’ (+33.8%), and ‘the devil personified’ (+27.1%).”

 

Since DEI programming is so widespread, the study’s findings are obviously newsworthy. Yet our own Abigail Anthony reported that both the New York Times and Bloomberg had prepared articles on the study, then axed the stories just before publication.

 

Why? When asked for an explanation by the study’s authors, the editor of the Bloomberg “Equality” subsection simply cited editorial discretion. At the New York Times, the reporter admitted that he did not have “any concerns about the methodology,” and that someone on the publication’s “data-driven reporting team” had “no problems” with the study. Yet the journalist insisted that the study should undergo peer review before getting coverage, even though he had previously reported on NCRI’s reports that hadn’t been peer-reviewed. That journalist also stipulated, “I told my editor I thought if we were going to write a story casting serious doubts on the efficacy of the work of two of the country’s most prominent DEI scholars, the case against them has to be as strong as possible.”

 

As it happens, the study is strong, and the truth about DEI is getting out, no matter how uncomfortable it makes its reflexive supporters.

Trump Can — and Should — Fully Fund Our Military

By Bradley Bowman & Mark Montgomery

Friday, November 29, 2024

 

‘For almost twenty years we had all of the time and almost none of the money; today we have all of the money and no time.” That was then–Army Chief of Staff General George Marshall’s warning on July 22, 1940, a little more than a year before the Pearl Harbor attack and America’s entry into World War II.

 

Today, Americans find themselves in a similarly precarious geostrategic position and at risk of making the same mistake again — waiting until the last moments before a war to invest the necessary resources in defense. That undermines deterrence, invites aggression, and increases the chances that American war-fighters will not have what they need in the early months of a preventable war.

 

Each year, the Obama and Biden administrations failed to request from Congress sufficient resources for defense. Trump should not make the same mistake.

 

The bipartisan, congressionally mandated Commission on the National Defense Strategy assessed in its July 2024 report that the “threats the United States faces are the most serious and most challenging the nation has encountered since 1945 and include the potential for near-term major war.”

 

Consider the actions of America’s adversaries.

 

In preparation for potential aggression against Taiwan and a war with the United States, China is undertaking a breathtaking military modernization and expansion campaign. In March, the former top U.S. commander in the Pacific called Beijing’s military buildup “the most extensive and rapid” seen anywhere since World War II.

 

Russia, for its part, is waging a war of conquest against Ukraine that has cost hundreds of thousands of lives. If Putin’s might-makes-right aggression succeeds, the consequences will reverberate far beyond Europe for years to come.

 

Iran, meanwhile, is progressing toward a nuclear weapon even as its terror proxies wage a multifront war against Israel, conduct the most significant assault on maritime shipping in decades in the Red Sea, and have launched more than 180 attacks on U.S. troops in Iraq, Syria, and Jordan since October 17, 2023.

 

And nuclear-armed North Korea is expanding its missile arsenal, honing the ability to strike the U.S. homeland with intercontinental ballistic missiles, sending combat forces to fight Ukraine, and behaving even more aggressively on and near the Korean Peninsula.

 

To make matters worse, these four adversaries, which are part of a new axis of aggressors, are cooperating in unprecedented ways — making each of them more capable, resilient, and effective in their respective areas of ongoing or potential aggression. The results of their diplomatic, intelligence, military, cyber, and economic cooperation are greater than the sum of its parts, presenting genuine challenges and dilemmas for the United States and its allies.

 

Indeed, there is a significant risk that the United States could confront simultaneous great-power wars in Europe and Asia in the coming years, and the National Defense Strategy Commission concluded that the United States is “not prepared.”

 

Changing that reality will require many actions by the new administration, but the first and fundamental step is addressing America’s insufficient defense budget.

 

Many Americans who have spent too much time listening to Senator Bernie Sanders might be surprised by such an assertion and believe that the United States is on the verge of going bankrupt due to excessive defense spending.

 

The truth is quite different.

 

The United States is projected to spend 3 percent of its gross domestic product (GDP) on the Department of Defense for 2024. Other than the years just before the 9/11 terror attacks on our country, that approximate level of spending in recent years is the lowest percentage any time since 1940 — the year before the U.S. entry into World War II.

 

For comparison, measured as a percent of GDP, the United States spent about 11.4 percent on the Department of Defense in 1953 (Korean War), 8.6 percent in 1968 (Vietnam War), 5.9 percent in 1986 (Reagan buildup), and 4.5 percent in 2010 (wars in Iraq and Afghanistan).

 

If the threats the United States is confronting are the “most serious” seen since 1945, why is Washington spending so little on defense?

 

This is just the kind of Beltway nonsense that the next administration and its allies in Congress should correct — and fast. That’s because it can take a long time for increased defense spending to yield fielded combat capabilities, and war could come sooner than many expect.

 

After all, it is fielded combat capabilities — not defense spending — that deters and wins wars.

 

At a minimum, President Trump should seek to increase defense spending by 3 to 5 percent above inflation each year and ensure that any such increase amounts to at least a 0.1 percent GDP increase each year, including the FY 2025 budget still under review in Congress. That would boost defense spending back to 3.5 percent of GDP by the end of Trump’s term. That may be the maximum rate of increase that the services and the U.S. defense industry could effectively absorb under current conditions.

 

Regardless, any such increase should be decoupled from any increases in non-defense spending, especially given the Biden administration’s inflationary domestic-spending binge in recent years.

 

Some might point to Pentagon waste as an excuse not to increase defense spending. To be sure, the Department of Defense should serve as a responsible steward of tax dollars, and every dollar wasted is a dollar not available to help secure our country.

 

But the National Defense Strategy Commission was correct when it assessed that “no feasible combination of institutional adaptation, process improvement, or waste reduction will generate defense savings of sufficient size, and with sufficient speed, to finance” all the necessary steps.

 

“Bigger budgets are therefore essential,” the commission concluded.

 

Suggesting we must either cut waste or increase the defense budget is a false choice. We must do both simultaneously given the urgency of the threats we confront.

 

Indeed, in this geostrategic moment, prioritizing efficiency over speed would be a costly and short-sighted mistake. History reminds us that the worst waste of resources — both financial and human — are wars that could have been prevented with earlier and more concerted action to bolster deterrence.

 

If deterrence fails in the Taiwan Strait as it did in Ukraine, the costs for Americans will be even higher. The Trump administration plans to pursue a “peace through strength” foreign policy. If that laudable approach is to succeed, it must be based on unmatched U.S. military power. Such power is possible only if Washington invests sufficient resources in defense as Ronald Reagan did. Otherwise, such phrases will elicit little more than a shrug in adversary capitals, and Americans will confront wars of aggression sooner or later that could have been prevented.

What We’re Thankful For

National Review Online

Thursday, November 28, 2024

 

As Americans, we have much for which to be thankful.

 

As was traditional at harvest time, we can begin with our many material blessings. We remain the world’s richest nation, with a standard of living approached by no nation of even remotely comparable size. Many of Europe’s most distinguished states have a median income on par with the poorest states in our union.

 

The greatness of the United States and its way of life has many causes, but it would be churlish to deny the role that our land itself has played in that success. The Mississippi River basin, draining into the Father of Waters, contains more miles of navigable river than the entire rest of the world put together. We have many large natural harbors, around which have grown up great cities such as New York, San Francisco, Boston, Seattle, New Orleans, and Baltimore. The history of Africa alone shows what difference can be made by the absence of these two blessings. Unlike the nations of Europe and Asia, we enjoy the protection of two vast oceans, separating us from all but two neighbors by sea. As recently as 1917, we scarcely had or needed an army worthy of the name.

 

We are blessed by huge stretches of fertile farmland, sturdy forest, gorgeous beaches, and teeming fisheries. We were the first nation to strike oil beneath our own soil. From the gold rush to the natural-gas boom, the land itself has showered us with plenty. Our great diversity of climes and communities means that every American restless of home can find some place more congenial within our borders. There remains much room to grow. With nearly 340 million people, we still have a lower population density than the Faroe Islands.

 

And yet, many other big nations have natural resources and large, desirable territories. That alone has not made America.

 

We are thankful for our patrimony. Western civilization came down to us from its beginnings in ancient Greece and Rome, stretching back two and a half millennia. The Judeo-Christian religious tradition traces back even further. The political traditions of England planted the seeds of American exceptionalism in Jamestown and Plymouth from the outset: representative assemblies, consent to a constitutional charter, and the liberty of dissenting religious communities. Colonies founded by charters to private companies and peopled by restless dreamers gave us an entrepreneurial spirit from the outset. May we never lose it.

 

We are thankful, yet again after a national election, for the genius of our political system. We are thankful that over 150 million Americans were able to exercise their self-government and their God-given right to change their rulers with an election few doubt was free and fair. We are thankful that an assassin’s bullet did not derail that process, however close it came in a field in Butler, Pa.

 

We have the world’s oldest continuous written constitution and the oldest system for the peaceful transition of power. These things have proven enduring against internal dissension and civil war, disputed elections, riots, assassinations, leaders of dubious character and competence, and huge cultural changes and conflicts. We approach the nation’s 250th birthday in two years having survived and surmounted wars, depressions, slavery, plagues, and great-power nuclear showdowns. We traveled in less than two centuries from the Old North Bridge to the moon.

 

It has been our gratitude, not our grievances, that has allowed us not only to do great things as a nation, but to do them as a continuous nation, still following a common rulebook and still represented in a continuous national legislature. The hardship of the Pilgrims still reminds us of how we got here. The doughboys invoked a debt to Lafayette when he was nearly a century in his grave. We still revere the Declaration of Independence, argue over the Constitution, and recite the Gettysburg Address because our society has long understood that the harvest of our liberties and our prosperity are all the more bountiful from uninterrupted cultivation.

 

To say what we are thankful for is to acknowledge to whom we should be thankful. That starts with the Almighty, author of all blessings. It includes those who came before us, from the great leaders and founders who appeared at providential moments to the many who struggled and sacrificed. We are thankful to all those who serve and those who protect, especially those on duty today. We are thankful to all those past and present who instruct the next generation in the American tradition and the American way. And we are thankful to family and friends without whom blessings would be cold comforts to be taken alone.

 

This is a day to rest from our labors, the better to enjoy the spirit of gratitude. But it should also inspire us to this commitment: to pass on what we have inherited, preserved and enriched, so that our posterity someday has reason to give thanks for us.

Give Thanks for the Unsung Geniuses

By Christian Schneider

Thursday, November 28, 2024

 

A prehistoric man encounters a clay pot filled with liquid. He doesn’t know that it had contained fruit and had been sitting outside for some time. Looking at the earthen vessel, he utters the one syllable most responsible for increasing the human race’s knowledge base over millennia:

 

“Huh.”

 

As anyone with a modicum of curiosity would do, this man sipped some of the fermented liquid, immediately feeling its effects on his mood. Thus did he become the first Homo sapiens to sample alcohol, and the euphoria he felt led other humans to develop and perfect the fermenting process. (Presumably after drinking his fill, he began calling up ex-girlfriends, ordering ironic T-shirts online, and writing an insufferably self-absorbed novel.)

 

As November rolls around every year, Americans begin crafting lists of the things for which they are most thankful. Many of these things are tangible: family, job, Taylor Swift’s Eras Tour, and the like.

 

But I am also thankful for the things that can never be known. So I salute the nameless, faceless individuals who will never be recognized for inventing or discovering the great things we now take for granted.

 

Take, for example, a dispatch written from Italy in 1860 by an English travel writer. The Londoner describes a “peculiar” food product eaten by the Neapolitans.

 

“It is not considered good, nor will those by whom it is made ever succeed in turning it out good,” the traveler wrote. Nevertheless, the “Neapolitan delicacy” was a “social leveller,” as the shops that sold it were the “only places where the members of the Neapolitan aristocracy — far haughtier than those in any other part of Italy — may be seen masticating their favourite delicacy side by side with their own coachmen, and valets, and barbers.”

 

This local delicacy, of course, was pizza. But we will never know who the first person to slap tomato sauce and cheese on a flatbread was. Nor will we know precisely which Italian immigrant brought it to our shores. “Surely this food of kings deserves its own hut!” this new American likely exclaimed.

 

Look around you: Much of what you see was created or discovered by some anonymous person who will never have a statue erected or a building named in their honor. The first person to decide that peanut butter and jelly might make a good sandwich is not getting their picture on the American dollar bill, as deserved as that honor is.

 

Consider all the things we now take for granted that had to be discovered by an earlier human. At some point, a caveman trying to remember things (likely his Amazon password) thought, “Maybe I should write this down.” So he took a rock and scratched a picture into the side of his cave, and began bragging to women that he had his own newsletter and they should check it out.

 

Or, as crazy people and those on paleo diets do, just sit and stare at a loaf of bread for a while. What a complicated process this bread-making is! Aren’t you glad someone in an earlier age figured out how to go from grinding up wheat to baking up a loaf? And what about the beef that would eventually go on the bread? At some point, some guy looked at a cow, and the rest is Arby’s.

 

For that matter, the human mating process isn’t particularly self-evident. Someone had to figure this all out. First, the male had to lure the female back to his cave (with the promise of seeing his newsletter), then some trial-and-error ensued, after which he immediately fell asleep and lost her phone number.

 

Obviously, not every unidentified first is worthy of honor. At some point, someone decided to convince women that “sex work” was a signal of feminist empowerment, making Matt Gaetz a modern-day Mary Wollstonecraft. Similarly, we will never know the name of the person who decided to ingest the first processed coca leaf, even if it temporarily gave us some awesome soft drinks and a few great Rolling Stones albums. More recently, as soon as the internet allowed photos to be attached to emails and texts, some guy had the thought, “The world deserves to see the contents of my drawers, starting with Alice in accounting.”

 

Today, we focus on firsts in terms of “identity,” not accomplishment. Democrat Andy Kim of New Jersey was fêted for being the first Korean American elected to the U.S. Senate. Hooray for representation, sure, but let me know when Kim does something as important as the man or woman who pulled the first potato out of the ground and said, “I bet I can think of 500 recipes for this dirt-encrusted tuber.”

 

This Thanksgiving, we can be thankful for those potatoes, mashed with gravy, and all the things seen and unseen, identifiable and mysterious, that enrich our lives. Thank you to the person who figured out that glass could bend images to the point where if you strapped lenses to a nerd’s face, he would be able to see the world more clearly. Thank you to the first folks to let a dog or cat into their home, inventing the concept of pets.

 

Let us, this holiday, pay tribute to the nameless smarties whose contribution to society has been unmeasurable. Especially the guy whose discovery of alcohol makes Thanksgiving with the family tolerable this and every year.

And They Began to Be Merry

By Kevin D. Williamson

Thursday, November 28, 2024

 

The miracle at Cana—that water-to-wine business—wasn’t only molecular. 

 

Jesus wasn’t the first wine god to rise up in the Mediterranean world—Bacchus’ myth was an old story a thousand years before Jesus was born—but He was a wine god of a different sort. There was a lot of water-to-wine stuff in the Bacchus-Dionysus mythology, springs that produced wine on holy days, devotees of the god being given the power to turn water into wine, that sort of thing. The people who heard about Jesus’ miracle had heard things like that before. Pliny the Elder relates the story of a certain fountain, “consecrated to Father Liber, from which wine flows during the seven days appointed for the yearly festival of that god, the taste of which becomes like that of water the moment it is taken out of sight of the temple.” 

 

The difference is in that last bit: Father Liber, like Eros, like the God of Israel, is a jealous god. Don’t try to take that miraculous wine out of the temple precincts, or it turns back into water. The deity has a proprietary interest in it. 

 

Jesus’ first miracle isn’t about transmutation of beverages—it is about social anxiety. It is about shame. Some relations have not planned well for their wedding, and they are going to be embarrassed, and probably gossiped about, when they run out of wine to serve their guests. Shame related to such an occasion was a big deal in that world. This is, emphatically, not Jesus’ problem. But Jesus has a mother, and mothers of the kind He had have a good way of making things that aren’t our problem our problem, and so Jesus’ mother gives Him a nudge. Jesus is not obviously ready to be nudged, and replies: “Woman, what concern is this to us?” Mary, deploying a classic passive-aggressive maternal strategy, tells the servants: “Do whatever he tells you.” 

 

Checkmate. 

 

And so Jesus launches the public part of His career on someone else’s schedule in order to spare some relatives embarrassment. Embarrassment is such a little thing, it might seem, in the context of Jesus’ story: What’s a little thing like deficient event planning in a story that climaxes with the conquest of death itself? 

 

Only everything. 

 

Jesus doesn’t just restock the bar in a miraculous manner. He makes a grand gesture on behalf of His anxious hosts, providing wine that not only is sufficient but that is better than the stuff they had been serving before. As the evening’s master of ceremonies notes, that inverts the usual order of things: Normally, you serve the good stuff on the first round and, then, once everybody has a nice little buzz going, you serve the economy-class stuff, since they’re probably not going to notice; in the Cana case, they went from the boxes of Franzia to 1982 Chateau Lafite Rothschild. The admiring “master of the feast” remarks on the grand gesture: “Thou hast saved the good wine until now.” 

 

This is another version of the story of the Prodigal Son. In his moment of need, the Prodigal Son returns home in shame, hoping for nothing more than a place as one of his father’s workers. “I am no more worthy to be called thy son: Make me as one of thy hired servants.” The father has other plans: “He ran, and fell on his neck, and kissed him.” And you all know the next part:

 

The father said to his servants, Bring forth the best robe, and put it on him; and put a ring on his hand, and shoes on his feet:

 

And bring hither the fatted calf, and kill it; and let us eat, and be merry:

 

For this my son was dead, and is alive again; he was lost, and is found. And they began to be merry.

 

The miracle at Cana isn’t water becoming wine—any old magician could do that sort of thing. Whatever it was that Jesus was about, it wasn’t stupid party tricks. The miracle is that the Ruler of the Universe cared about such a little thing as the social anxieties of a bunch of nobodies in an obscure little corner of the world of no particular importance, and that He loved them the way a father loves his children—and what kind of father offers just enough at a time like that when he has, at his disposal, the very best? The best robe, the gold ring, the fatted calf, the wine that was better than any wine the local whatever-was-Hebrew-for-sommelier had ever tasted? The supernatural stuff is one thing, but consider the magnificence of that gesture, the sheer audacious style of it. I do not care if you are the most cynical atheist walking the Earth—it is impossible not to admire the panache. He bends reality into a new shape, makes the universe follow new rules, to help out a friend, and He does it cool—nobody even knows what happened except for the waiters. 

 

It wasn’t that He did the thing—it was that He did the thing because He loves us like His own children. 

 

And He did it knowing that Golgotha was waiting. 

 

Of course, every father knows that there is a time for saying “No,” a time for making the children work hard for something so that they will learn to appreciate it, all that sort of thing. But there also is a time for saying, “Yes,” and “Yes!” and for delighting the little ones with a gift beyond what they were expecting or even knew to hope for. Wine gods come and go—you don’t meet a lot of confessing Dionysus worshipers anymore. The difference between the Cana story and the miraculous fountain consecrated to Father Liber goes to the heart of the Christian experience and why it is so shockingly different from that which came before: God has come out of the temple, and He is bringing His gifts with Him. Everyone is invited to the party, even us prodigals whose RSVP reads: “I am no more worthy to be called thy son.” 

 

I know a little something about that robe and that ring. I don’t drink as much wine as I used to, but I cannot think of anything more fitting to say to our Host on this Thanksgiving: “Thou hast saved the best until now.” 

Happy Thanksgiving

By Jonah Goldberg

Wednesday, November 27, 2024

 

It’s the day—more specifically, the very early morning—before Thanksgiving. I’m in New York City with my daughter for some quality time. Or I was. Now I’m in New York with one goal in mind: Getting out of it with my kid and my luggage intact on one of the worst travel days of the year. 

 

That’s why I’m not really writing a full-fledged G-File. Then again, full-fledged is redundant. To be fledged is to be fully fledged. But that’s not important right now. 

 

I just wanted to talk to you a little about gratitude, Thanksgiving, conservatism, and The Dispatch. 

 

I had Yuval Levin on The Remnant this week to talk about gratitude. I associate Yuval with gratitude, and not just because he was so generous with his prison toilet wine back in the day. I think of conservatism as an expression of gratitude, and I credit Yuval with injecting that idea into my cabeza. I think I always believed it to one extent or another. But Yuval’s articulation of it a decade ago crystalized the idea for me:

 

To my mind, conservatism is gratitude. Conservatives tend to begin from gratitude for what is good and what works in our society and then strive to build on it, while liberals tend to begin from outrage at what is bad and broken and seek to uproot it.

 

Read the whole thing. 

 

This basic idea is the TL;DR of my book Suicide of the West. It’s also one of the reasons we launched The Dispatch. We wanted to defend what we believe to be good and what works and build on it, at a time when fellow conservatives were behaving like liberals, full of outrage against the system.

 

Thanksgiving also plays a central role in the founding of The Dispatch. When we were pitching the idea, I used to talk about how there was a market for something to deal with the Thanksgiving problem. At Thanksgiving dinner you often have to deal with your cranky right-wing uncle or crazy left-wing aunt. We wanted to create something that has some credibility with both camps. If your Marxist aunt insists that Republicans want to drill for oil in the Vatican, using kittens for drill bits, and you say, “That’s not true Aunt Ethel,” and send her a Fox News article proving it, she’ll say “I don’t believe Fox.” If you tell your super-MAGA uncle that in fact Joe Biden has not been replaced by an animatronic robot from Disney’s Hall of Presidents, he’ll say, “prove it.” But if you send him an article from the New York Times to do just that, he’ll snort “fake news.”

 

We wanted to create something that had at least some credibility with the aunts and uncles. Steve and I were both Fox News contributors, one from National Review, the other from The Weekly Standard, but neither of us was interested in carrying water for the GOP or Donald Trump. Maybe that earned us a little benefit of the doubt on either side. 

 

I’m sure we have plenty of work to do with specific aunts and uncles, but broadly speaking I think we’ve done a good job on that front. 

 

Anyway, if you’ve read me much over the years, you know my view of Thanksgiving. It’s my favorite holiday in part because it’s the most immune to politics and modernity. What I mean is that it successfully fends off not just ideological and partisan corruption, but materialistic seduction as well. For most of us, it’s about the little platoon, the microcosm, and little else. It’s about home. There’s a reason most Thanksgiving movies are about going home, getting home, being home. 

 

As I make my way home, I just wanted to give some thanks to all of you for being part of my new professional and political home these last five years. I’m grateful for all of you—well, almost all of you. 

 

Happy Thanksgiving. 

The Intellectual Collapse of DEI

By Rich Lowry

Wednesday, November 27, 2024

 

DEI is a bad idea whose time came with a vengeance several years ago, but now its continued ascendancy is in doubt.

 

Perhaps the most important event this year outside of the presidential election is the intellectual collapse of so-called diversity, equity, and inclusion, which is poisonous hokum that is finally being exposed as such.

 

DEI has been one of the most morally perverse and damaging fads in recent American history.

 

We’ve been spending an estimated $8 billion a year telling Americans in training sessions, workshops, and educational material that they are, depending on their race or gender, victims or oppressors, and that the country is shot through with white supremacy. The DEI mindset is dominant in human-resources departments and on college campuses.

 

Common sense says that this racialist hectoring — often administered by people who brook no dissent — must be unhealthy, and, sure enough, evidence is beginning to pile up.

 

Research has suggested that DEI can create negative feelings or make people afraid to speak their minds. Now comes a compelling new study from an outfit called the Network Contagion Research Institute and Rutgers University Social Perception Lab. It found that DEI amplified “perceptions of prejudicial hostility where none was present, and punitive responses to the imaginary prejudice.”

 

In other words, if its goal is to create illiberal racial paranoiacs, DEI is succeeding brilliantly.

 

In one experiment, the study’s architects gave one group of students an anodyne essay about U.S. corn production to read while another got an essay drawn from the work of DEI superstars Ibram X. Kendi and Robin DiAngelo. Then, the students were asked to evaluate a simple, racially neutral scenario involving a college applicant getting rejected by an East Coast university.

 

The students who had read the DEI material were more likely to believe that the hypothetical admissions officer in the scenario was more discriminatory, more unfair, and more harmful, as well as guilty of more micro-aggressions — again, even though nothing in the scenario suggested as much.

 

The Kendi-DiAngelo students were also more likely to want to require DEI training for the admissions officer, to suspend the officer for a semester, and to demand a public apology. Why let an absence of facts stand in the way of punitive measures?

 

Meanwhile, a report in the New York Times Magazine found that the University of Michigan’s decade-long, roughly $250 million experiment in making DEI part of the warp and woof of the school’s life has been a failure.

 

“In a survey released in late 2022,” the Times notes, “students and faculty members reported a less positive campus climate than at the program’s start and less of a sense of belonging. Students were less likely to interact with people of a different race or religion or with different politics.”

 

Ordinary campus disputes have become five-alarm DEI crises, administrators complain about all the new DEI-created paperwork, and students and faculty are afraid to say anything that might offend anyone.

 

It’d be one thing if it were only the University of Michigan that had sunk itself in this mire, but this dynamic has been duplicated throughout corporate America and our education system. There are signs, though, that the wave has crested. Walmart just announced that it will stop using the term “diversity, equity, and inclusion,” and end various DEI-related initiatives. Other companies have been pulling back, as well. The trend will presumably only accelerate with a new Trump administration hostile to DEI.

 

The end of DEI would be a net addition to our collective life. It would avoid, at best, a waste of time and, at worst, a gratuitous source of conflict and mutual suspicion. It would roll back the undue power given to fatuous martinets. It would stop the spread, under the guise of inclusion, of lies about American society.

 

The old saw is that socialism hasn’t failed, it just hasn’t been tried. Well, DEI has been tried, and the dismal results are now becoming known.

The Election Was Never Close

By Noah Rothman

Wednesday, November 27, 2024

 

From almost the moment Joe Biden settled into the ejector seat that rocketed him into political oblivion, the race for the White House seemed like a competitive contest again.

 

Now that the truth can be told, however, Kamala Harris’s campaign adviser, David Plouffe, confessed that the tight public polling punctuated by even the occasional Harris lead didn’t match the campaign’s data.

 

During a roundtable postmortem discussion with the hosts of Pod Save America, Plouffe admitted that the campaign was “hopeful” but not necessarily “optimistic” about Harris’s chances despite some shock surveys that found Harris performing well. “I think it surprised people,” he said of the polling landscape, “because there was these public polls that came out in late September, early October, showing us with leads that we never saw.”

 

Preliminary exit polling of voters in the 2024 race found that the vast majority of voters settled on their preferred candidate over the summer, which suggests that a stable but modest Trump lead was the state of play throughout Harris’s candidacy. And Harris didn’t do much to change those circumstances, as the campaign chair she inherited from Joe Biden — Jen O’Malley Dillon — tacitly admitted, albeit amid a lot of excuse-making.

 

“We women don’t get far in life talking about double standards, so that’s not the point,” O’Malley Dillon stressed in her appearance on that same podcast. That uncharitable characterization of her fellow Americans lacquered with a heavy gloss of self-pity aside, she proceeded to do just that. “One-hundred and seven days. Two weeks f***ed up because of a hurricane. Two weeks talking about how she didn’t do interviews — which, you know, she was doing plenty, but we were doing — in our own way.”

 

“We had to be the nominee,” she continued. “We had to find a running mate and do a rollout.” In sum, the candidate was expected to run for the presidency. The unmitigated gall of it all!

 

O’Malley Dillon’s victimization narrative is belied by the timeline of events she’s attempting to revise retroactively. Harris’s campaign didn’t spend two measly weeks avoiding the press. That avoidance became a conspicuous feature of her candidacy long after she became the presumptive nominee and even after her party formally nominated her. She didn’t give her first solo interview as her party’s presidential nominee until September 14. And when she deigned to make herself available to interviewers, it was the soft-focus sort set against friendly interlocutors. That dynamic prevailed into October. Her first (and, really, only) adversarial interview took place on October 16 — past the point at which voters in key states had already begun casting their ballot and far beyond the point at which most voters had already made up their minds.

 

Harris’s failed media strategy was, in O’Malley Dillon’s estimation, the political press’s fault. She complained that “real people heard in some way that we were not going to have interviews, which was both not true and also so counter to any kind of standard that was put on Trump.” And when the candidate did speak to the press, “the questions were small and process-y,” O’Malley Dillon complained. “They were not informing a voter who was trying to learn more or to understand.”

 

“Being up against a narrative that we weren’t doing anything or we were afraid to have interviews is completely bulls**t, and also, like, took hold a little bit,” O’Malley Dillon mourned wistfully. “And we just gave us another thing we had to fight back for that Trump never had to worry about.”

 

Say what you will about Trump’s successful effort to mobilize low-propensity voters via his appearances on unconventional media outlets (a strategy the Harris campaign did eventually mimic), Trump has developed a reputation for being available to the mainstream press. Sometimes, to hear his advisers tell it, too available. It was Harris who cultivated an air of fragility around her by delicately curating a stable of genial reporters and refusing to break out of that cocoon until it was too late.

 

Presuming Plouffe is correct, all this table setting is valueless. It serves only to absolve the campaign of its strategic mistakes. Harris didn’t lose because she declined to go on the right podcasts. She lost because she needed to change the dynamic of a race that never favored her candidacy.

 

Either out of timidity or a clear-eyed assessment of Harris’s capabilities, the campaign settled into a level of risk-aversion that voters noticed. The campaign let Trump be the star of the show, relegating itself to the role of responding to the tempo of events the Republican nominee set. Harris didn’t run to win; she ran to not lose. It was a gamble that didn’t pay off. But the candidate doesn’t bear all the blame for that failure. As her campaign staff’s defensive posture suggests, history will find that there is plenty of blame to go around.

Mass Deportation Is an Appropriate Response to Mass Illegal Immigration

By Rich Lowry

Tuesday, November 26, 2024

 

There is about to be an outbreak of lawfulness in the United States, and Democrats and the press can’t handle it.

 

President-elect Donald Trump’s talk of “mass deportation” is being treated as a clear and present danger to the American order that blue jurisdictions need to mobilize to stop.

 

Governor J. B. Pritzker of Illinois has vowed, “I am going to do everything that I can to protect our undocumented immigrants.”

 

Denver mayor Mike Johnston talked of a lurid fantasy where there’d be a “Tiananmen Square moment,” with the Denver police and civilian population confronting federal immigration authorities. He subsequently admitted that invoking a historic massacre wasn’t so apt. He still says he’s willing to go to jail to oppose anything that is “illegal or immoral or un-American.”

 

How about something that is mandated by law? Deportation is explicitly authorized in federal statute and a legitimate, necessary tool of immigration enforcement.

 

It is a symptom of how perverse the immigration debate has become that it is treated as the norm to allow millions of people to defy our laws, but it’s a five-alarm fire if an incoming U.S. president vows to get serious about enforcing those same laws. If mass deportation is a hateful notion for Trump’s opponents, maybe the Biden administration shouldn’t have allowed a mass illegal influx.

 

Given the scale of the problem that he is seeking to address, Trump’s rhetoric is appropriately extravagant. It makes sense, though, to think of his impending deportation program as broadly consistent with enforcement as it existed in the decades before Biden’s presidency.

 

As Andrew Arthur of the Center for Immigration Studies points out, 316,000 aliens were removed or returned in fiscal year 2014 under President Obama before collapsing to 28,000 in fiscal year 2022 under President Biden. It wasn’t until toward the end of his presidency that Obama began to restrict Immigration and Customs Enforcement, while Biden set out to kneecap interior enforcement at the outset. He created a host of new rules to protect illegal aliens from enforcement action and defined swaths of cities off-limits to ICE.

 

Clearly with an eye to the election, the administration bumped up removals and returns to more than 200,000 in fiscal year 2024. If Biden could increase deportations several times over without unleashing the immigration gestapo, why can’t Trump also increase them several times over without creating a dystopia?

 

As a practical matter, there’s a limit to what can be done. ICE Enforcement and Removal Operations has only about 6,000 officers. Even with all the political backing in the world, they aren’t going to be able to find and deport the roughly 8 million illegal aliens admitted under Biden. Realizing this, Trump’s choice as border czar, Tom Homan, says his first priority will be removing criminal aliens and national-security threats.

 

This is what Trump did the first time around. The majority of arrests in the first administration were of aliens with criminal records or pending charges.

 

The next logical priority would be to target the 1.3 million aliens who have already been ordered deported but are still in the country. Will Governor Pritzker also seek to protect “his” undocumented immigrants who are defying explicit court orders?

 

Trump talks of the military assisting in mass deportations, which his critics assume will involve the 101st Airborne going door-to-door in Los Angeles. Actually, the military has already been involved in various forms of logistical support of immigration enforcement. Surely, this will be the nature of its role again.

 

Despite all the fearmongering about it, most people know that Trump’s deportation program is a response to a crisis that wasn’t of his making and that the vast majority of people never wanted. In a new CBS News Poll, 57 percent of people say they support Trump starting a program to deport all illegal immigrants in the U.S.

 

Unlike Trump’s enemies, the public doesn’t fear enforcement of immigration laws that have been systematically ignored for much too long.