Nationalist Security

By Nick Catoggio

Friday, January 03, 2025

 

On Thursday, Harvard law professor Jack Goldsmith flagged an unlikely common thread among Donald Trump’s nominees for top national security positions. None seem terribly interested in, er, national security.

 

Kristi Noem, Trump’s nominee to lead the Department of Homeland Security, has zero relevant experience. His FBI pick, Kash Patel, and director of intelligence choice, Tulsi Gabbard, are marginally qualified but betray no zeal for the nuts-and-bolts “catching bad guys” elements of the job. And attorney general candidate Pam Bondi, while credentialed, has had little to say about national security despite having spent eight years as Florida’s top prosecutor. (She’ll talk your ear off about the supposedly rigged election of 2020, though.)

 

Goldsmith didn’t mention Defense Department nominee Pete Hegseth, as his portfolio will focus on external rather than internal threats—let’s hope!—but he fits right in. He’s unqualified, conspiratorial, and more interested in purging leftists from the agency he’s been tapped to lead than with how to use U.S. military power to advance national interests.

 

All five are terrible selections if your priority is protecting Americans from dangerous threats, but they’re exemplary if your priority is co-opting the federal bureaucracy to harass your political enemies and to carry out an authoritarian’s wishes, lawful or not. Nationalist security, not national security, is Trump’s utmost ambition for his second term and he’s staffing up accordingly.

 

Nothing new about any of that. We’ve been over the defects in Trump’s nominees many times in this newsletter. What’s new, and what inspired Goldsmith to write, are the terror attacks in New Orleans and Las Vegas on New Year’s Day. Nationalist security is all fun and games until things start blowing up; now that they have, the need for serious, qualified people atop the executive branch’s natsec agencies might weigh more heavily on the Senate than it did a week ago.

 

After the attacks, Dispatch staffers began debating whether Patel et al. are now more or less likely to be confirmed. Can you guess where a demoralized pessimist lands on that question?

 

Rolling over.

 

It’s an easy one to answer if we assume that the highest calling of Senate Republicans is to avoid being targeted by Trump and his base, politically or perhaps literally, rather than to do what’s best for the country.

 

Maybe it isn’t fair to assume. They showed some spine by quietly rejecting Matt Gaetz, Trump’s first choice for attorney general, didn’t they? They’ve resisted the idea of adjourning so that Trump can fill his Cabinet with unconfirmed recess appointees. And three of the seven Republicans who voted to convict him at his 2021 impeachment trial—Susan Collins, Lisa Murkowski, and Bill Cassidy—are still there. Three GOP defections is all the new administration can afford in confirmation votes.

 

But.

 

Trump is at the height of his political power, returning to office with a near-majority of the national popular vote to boost him this time. Cassidy is up for reelection in the next cycle and already faces a serious primary challenge. And if another terror attack occurs while Republican senators are dragging their feet on confirming Patel et al., they’ll be demagogued by Trump and his fans into oblivion for the carnage and they know it. Americans are dead because the RINOs left the FBI leaderless for too long.

 

The more badly Trump and his base want something, the less likely it is that Senate Republicans will go to war to deny them. Consider the bipartisan immigration bill that was negotiated last year by conservative Sen. James Lankford and went down in flames instantly once Trump informed the conference that passing the bill would be bad for his reelection bid. Few dared risk being scapegoated by him for having “sold out” on an issue as critical to populists as border enforcement.

 

MAGA influencers ran a similar playbook last month against Sen. Joni Ernst when she said she wasn’t (yet) supporting Hegseth for the Pentagon job. Ernst seemed to be under the impression that grassroots loudmouths weren’t particularly invested in his candidacy. The social media campaign against her proved otherwise, allegedly leading her to whine to a Trump adviser, “How do I make this go away?” After a few days of pressure, she crumbled and vowed publicly to “support Pete through this process.”

 

Trump and his base badly want U.S. intelligence agencies, the heart of the so-called “deep state,” to be controlled by Jacobin cronies like Patel and Gabbard. They didn’t make much of a fuss about Gaetz going down because they didn’t expect him to be the pick for attorney general and probably can’t stomach his sleaziness much more than the average American can. But now that that scalp has been taken, there’s even less excuse for Senate “RINOs” to deny them Trump’s other picks.

 

The New Year’s attacks have made the case for confirmation simple: With America under threat, the Senate must approve Trump’s nominees urgently so that intelligence bureaus are operating at full capacity. (Never mind that the entire point of nominating these people is to purge “disloyal” deputies willy-nilly, depriving the agencies of expertise.) Exploiting national emergencies to gain power is Authoritarianism 101; the fact that Patel et al. sound a lot angrier about Liz Cheney than about ISIS is beside the point.

 

If anything, the New Year’s attacks bolster the “what do you have to lose?” case for confirming Trump’s picks to Cabinet positions. We’ll hear a lot this month, I suspect, about how the FBI agent in charge in New Orleans foolishly denied that the rampage there was a terror attack initially, another black mark against a bureau that’s covered in them. In a post titled “Kash Patel, Now More Than Ever,” radio host Erick Erickson alleged that the feds overlooked the jihadist menace because they’re obsessed with white-nationalist terror and need a “disrupter” like Patel to challenge their political correctness. You might not agree with that logic—racist white guys going ballistic are a major threat—but I wouldn’t underestimate its ability to pressure wary Republicans like Mitch McConnell and John Curtis into rubber-stamping Trump’s nominees. Unserious about jihad is not a label any Senate Republican wants to wear, even those like Mitch who are (almost certainly) in their final term.

 

Combine all of the above with the fact that shirking responsibility for policymaking has become part of Congress’ institutional culture over the last 30 years, bleeding ever more authority to the executive, and we should bet on Senate Republicans using the attacks in New Orleans and Las Vegas as a pretext to defer to Trump on his Cabinet nominees rather than as grounds to resist him.

 

Risk for Trump.

 

In that sense, life got easier for the president-elect politically this week. In another, it got harder.

 

Senate Democrats were destined to confront Trump’s nominees during their confirmation hearings, but the terror attacks will help them build a comprehensive case along Goldsmith’s lines. These people aren’t merely unqualified, Chuck Schumer’s party will tell the public, they’re outright disinterested in the basic work of the departments they’ve been nominated to lead. Expect lots of questions at the hearings drilling down on what they would have done differently to try to avert what happened on New Year’s Day, each aimed at exposing how far out of their depth the candidate is in basic counterintelligence. That probably won’t keep Senate Republicans from voting yes, but it’ll make the vote considerably more painful.

 

Another problem for Trump: Assuming his nominees are confirmed, what happens when, inevitably, another lunatic goes off on a terrorist rampage?

 

Governments always take heat when they fail to prevent an attack, but this must be the first administration in U.S. history where there’s not even a pretense of filling the most important jobs with eminently qualified people. Patel plainly wasn’t chosen to head the FBI because he has cunning ideas about how to smoke out ISIS “lone wolves” before they strike; he was chosen because he’s eager to persecute Trump’s enemies in politics and the media and isn’t bashful about admitting it. 

 

Lots of people, left and right, will be on television to remind viewers of that the next time a bunch of Americans die at a terrorist’s hand, especially if the FBI is short-staffed at the time due to Patel’s purges. In fact, some of the harshest criticism of him has come from former colleagues during Trump’s first presidency, in fact. Charles Kupperman, a deputy national security adviser who worked with Patel, labeled him “unqualified” and “untrustworthy” and claimed it was an “absolute disgrace to American citizens to even consider an individual of this nature.” Not to be outdone, former national security adviser John Bolton compared Patel to the infamous Soviet secret police chief Lavrentiy Beria.

 

What does Trump say when someone asks him, with innocents lying dead in the street, why he insisted upon an FBI chief who worries more about Sarah Isgur than about ISIS? How does he respond when reporters ask why it was necessary to let Charlie Kirk administer a loyalty test to his nominees (yes, really) but not necessary to listen to former aides like Bolton and Kupperman and find a nominee with more national-security chops?

 

This is no small thing. Perceptions of unseriousness about law and order are dangerous for a strongman whose appeal derives from the belief that he’ll keep the country safe. The more vulnerable Americans feel during his presidency, the more fragile that appeal might become.

 

Ironically, in other contexts Trump has seemed to understand that he owes his reelection not to personal hobby horses like “retribution” against his enemies but to quality-of-life issues. When he was asked last month what his keys to victory were, he named an insecure border and the price of groceries. But his Cabinet nominees contradict that lesson: The swing voters who decided the race surely care less about persecuting the “deep state” than they care about being safe.

 

So why is he giving them an FBI chief, an intelligence chief, a homeland security chief, and an attorney general who don’t share those priorities? Why place nationalist security, which matters only to a segment of his base, over national security, which matters to everyone?

 

The answer is partly a function of his worldview and partly a function of his confidence in being able to talk his way out of anything.

 

Nationalism is a tribal ideology that seeks supremacy over other domestic tribes, so it’s necessarily preoccupied with “the enemies from within,” to borrow a phrase. Its hot rhetoric toward foreign rivals is usually just a patriotic smokescreen for its true priorities. For all of Trump’s tough talk about China, for example, he’s barreling toward a capitulation on TikTok and can’t stop slobbering over Xi Jinping every time he mentions him. An easy prediction for his second term is that Beijing will persuade him, probably by brokering some sort of “deal,” not to intervene when it finally launches a blockade of Taiwan. It won’t take much to convince an America First-er that he’s better off with a Sudetenland bargain than with a major-powers war.

 

In MAGA politics, the most poisonous venom is reserved for anti-Trump Republicans, then for Democrats and the “deep state,” and only eventually for foreign adversaries—assuming there’s even a consensus anymore on the right as to which countries are adversaries and which are allies. Trump might understand intellectually that swing voters want him to focus on ISIS, not on hollowing out the FBI, but his nationalist nature will lead him irresistibly back to the “enemy from within.” Especially now that he’s term-limited: What does he stand to lose if a future jihadist manages to shoot up Bourbon Street because the entire FBI counterterrorism division was reassigned to investigate Adam Schiff?

 

But if worse comes to worst and he does face a nascent backlash for not preventing a terror attack, there’s no reason to have any confidence that the public will ultimately turn against him for appointing clowns to fill intelligence positions on which life and death depend. The shining lesson of Election Day is that if he and his propaganda organs could talk a a majority of American voters into believing that he’s fit for a second term after a coup plot and an attempted insurrection, they can talk Americans into believing anything.

 

When a bomb goes off on his watch, it’ll be a straightforward matter of finding and flogging a scapegoat—or, better yet, many scapegoats. He’ll blame the incompetent holdovers in the “deep state” who missed the warning signs and who haven’t yet been purged by Kash Patel but will be soon, rest assured. He’ll whatabout prior administrations: Why should his intelligence bureaus be expected to perform better than the “serious” establishment professionals who gave us 9/11 and the Iraq war under George W. Bush?

 

And he’ll find some way to drag immigrants into it, as he always does. He did it this week, in fact, screeching about Biden’s “open borders policy” after the attack in New Orleans—even though the shooter was born in Texas. If someone grumbles to you about the FBI being slow to call that incident terrorism, remind them that the guy to whom the bureau will answer in 17 days was busy lying out-and-out about what happened to serve his agenda at the same time.

 

Trump’s only real genius is his ability to shift blame, at least enough to turn what should be catastrophic, disqualifying failures into politically manageable ones. He’s a convicted felon who had three indictments still pending against him when he persuaded the great and good American people to reelect him: They’re not going to suddenly sober up because he prefers nationalist security to national security.

 

So Senate Republicans might as well confirm Patel and the rest of his nominees. Democrats and irrelevant Never Trumpers like me will blame them for the resulting disasters of Trump’s Cabinet, but so what? We also blamed them for not convicting Trump at his second impeachment trial and it hasn’t hurt the party at all. On the contrary, just a few hours ago the GOP officially gained majorities in both houses of Congress. And if the answer to all that is, “Senators should do what’s best for the country!” then consider the possibility that confirming Trump’s candidates is what’s best for the country—long-term, at least.

 

We deserve populist government, red in tooth and claw. We voted for it. We’ll learn from it. Let’s have it.

Sexual Terrorism in Britain

By Abigail Anthony

Friday, January 03, 2025

 

Users of Twitter/X have been inundated recently with material about Britain’s “grooming gangs.” For those who are outside of England and infrequently read British newspapers, the sudden onslaught of information is overwhelming: What are the “grooming gangs,” what has been done about them, and why the renewed public interest — particularly since some of the crimes occurred over a decade ago? Well, I’ll try to provide a simple synopsis. Here are some key facts.

 

Since at least the 1990s, networks of abusive men in England have sexually exploited thousands of young girls. Generally, the gangs recruit youngish males to pose as generous boyfriends and seduce young girls with gifts; eventually, the girls (sometimes as young as eleven) are introduced to drugs, older men, and prostitution. To call these pimps “groomers” or “grooming gangs” is woefully misleading, since such terms distract from the repulsive sex crimes. Consider the sentencing remarks from a 2013 case in Oxford. Mohammed Karrar (who was in his 30s) anally raped an eleven-year-old girl. When she became pregnant at age 15, he took her to receive an illegal abortion. He gave her drugs, including crack cocaine and heroin. On one occasion, Karrar prepared her for anal gang rape by using a pump to expand her anal passage. Later, she simultaneously had four men inside her, while a ball was placed in her mouth to silence her. Karrar treated that girl like cattle, branding his initial on her rear with a hot hair pin. Simply put, the “grooming gangs” are better characterized as torturous child prostitution rings that commit sexual terrorism.

 

Some brave people sounded the alarm years ago. For example, British feminist Julie Bindel published a well-investigated article in 2007 addressing the “growing problem” of “groups of men who had been preying on young, vulnerable girls and ensnaring them into prostitution.” Bindel later stated that, despite the evidence she had collected, it took until 2007 to publish an article on the topic because “in this particular geographical area, many of the members of grooming gangs were of Pakistani origin” and “some editors feared an accusation of racism.”

 

Devastatingly but unsurprisingly, it was not only editors who feared being called “racist.” The Rotherham scandal began in 2010 when five men — Zafran Ramzan, Razwan Razaq, Umar Razaq, Adil Hussain, and Mohsin Khan — were sentenced for sexual offenses against children. Everything escalated in 2012, when British journalist Andrew Norfolk published articles releasing evidence from hundreds of documents showing widespread child sexual exploitation in South Yorkshire since 2000, particularly in Rotherham; one report dated 2010 stated that police intelligence bureau was aware that thousands of such crimes occurred each year.

 

Yet Norfolk’s reporting found that the authorities, including the police and social services, had been concerned that pursuing justice would inflame racial and religious tensions. Why? Well, in part because there was a clear trend among the offenders: “There is a problem with networks of Asian offenders both locally and nationally,” reads an excerpt from one document. “There appears to be a significant problem with networks of Asian males exploiting young white females.” A 2010 report for the Rotherham Safeguarding Children Board stated that the crimes had “cultural characteristics . . . which are locally sensitive in terms of diversity.” The report continued: “There are sensitivities of ethnicity with potential to endanger the harmony of community relationships. Great care will be taken in drafting . . . this report to ensure that its findings embrace Rotherham’s qualities of diversity. It is imperative that suggestions of a wider cultural phenomenon are avoided.” And so, in Rotherham, the perpetrators were largely ignored. The police misconduct was stunning: A 13-year-old girl was found intoxicated in a house with Asian men after a neighbor reported hearing her scream; the police arrested the child for being drunk and disorderly but didn’t interrogate the men.

 

Following Norfolk’s exposés, Alexis Jay was commissioned to conduct an independent inquiry, and the “Jay Report” was released in 2014. The bombshell review concluded that roughly 1,400 children — a conservative estimate — were sexually exploited in Rotherham from 1997 to 2013. It found cases of girls as young as eleven being gang-raped, as well as an instance where a child was doused with petrol and threatened with being set on fire. In two cases, the fathers tried to remove their daughters from the houses where the abuse was occurring, yet the dads were arrested. Victims and their families often remained silent because of the perpetrators leading intimidation campaigns, complete with stalking and threats. While the review identified many factors that contributed to Rotherham’s failed response, one aspect was the aversion to facing racism allegations: “Several staff described their nervousness about identifying the ethnic origins of perpetrators for fear of being thought racist; others remembered clear direction from their managers not to do so,” reads the report.

 

After the Jay Report, the National Crime Agency launched “Operation Stovewood” to investigate the abuse that occurred in Rotherham between 1997 and 2013. The project has since identified over 1,000 victims and led to the conviction of more than 35 individuals. According to a BBC story from August 2024, Operation Stovewood had roughly 50 ongoing investigations and does not plan to open new cases. But the gangs are not confined to the town of Rotherham; they’ve been found all over the country, including in Rochdale, Bristol, Telford, Bradford, Middlesbrough, Newcastle, and so on. It seems that, if you randomly pick a city in England and spend a bit of time on Google, you’ll find news stories about the gangs wreaking havoc.

 

So why the renewed interest on social media regarding Britain’s child-abuse gangs? There are a few reasons. The first is that some court transcripts revealing details about the gangs were recently released to the public. Second, judicial sentencing for the harrowing Sara Sharif case occurred in December. Although the Sharif case wasn’t exactly about “grooming gangs,” it did expose flaws in the immigration system, child services, and cultural assimilation; the judge’s sentencing remarks state that Sara had over 70 fresh injuries and 25 separate bone fractures when she died at age ten in 2023 at the hands of her father, stepmother, and uncle, who all fled to Pakistan after murdering her. Third, Jess Phillips (the U.K. safeguarding minister) recently denied an investigative inquiry into the gangs and suggested that such matters can be pursued by the local authorities — a big task for a local authority and insufficient to address the nationwide problems. Fourth, the town of Rotherham was declared the “Children’s Capital of Culture” for 2025; such a title is like a giant middle finger to the city’s long roster of child victims. And fifth, the abuse is still ongoing, not some historic tragedy that we can claim was squashed.

 

Of course, other circumstances also contribute to the renewed public interest: The online debates about H-1B visas led to general discussion about the values held in non-Western countries, there’s heightened sensitivity to gang rape since the Pelicot trials in France, and the right-wing news organization GBNews (particularly the reporter Charlie Peters) has done great work exposing the gangs; that news group’s channel launched only in 2021. In my assessment, these converging factors facilitated widespread interest in the United Kingdom and motivated discussion on social media; quickly, the disturbing stories were seen by individuals across the West, including Elon Musk and other high-profile figures, who further amplified the issue.

 

Given the recent outrage on social media about the expansive network of exploitative gangs, government action might be pursued. Some admirable efforts have made progress, such as the “Grooming Gangs Taskforce,” which has arrested over 500 suspects and identified thousands of victims. But more work is necessary. The Conservative Party leader Kemi Badenoch just called for a national inquiry into the gangs, stating that “trials have taken place all over the country in recent years but no one in authority has joined the dots.” The Independent Inquiry into Child Sexual Abuse has published nearly 20 reports on 15 investigations, and perhaps now there is enough public pressure for the government to enact some of the inquiry’s recommendations.

The ISIS Threat Never Left

By Matthew Continetti

Saturday, January 04, 2025

 

New Year’s terror in New Orleans: 14 people dead and dozens wounded after a 42-year-old man drove a rented pickup into a celebratory crowd on Bourbon Street. Police killed the terrorist in a shootout before he could wreak further havoc. The truck bore an ISIS flag, the banner of the global jihad. In a cruel irony, revelers had gathered to welcome a new beginning. The attack was a horrible reminder of ancient evils and enduring threats.

 

At such moments our attention turns inward. The media provide updates, profile victims, and explore how the assailant, U.S. citizen and Army veteran Shamsud-Din Jabbar of Houston, Texas, became a radical Islamist. It’s tempting to fixate on Jabbar’s crooked path to mass murder while neglecting the broader movement to which he belonged. Such temptations should be avoided. What happened in New Orleans was larger than one man’s pathology. It was the latest atrocity committed in the name of a sick ideology.

 

The jihadist worldview exemplified by ISIS has not been vanquished. On the contrary: It is resurgent. There was a terrible attack in Moscow last April. Radical Islamism is growing in and fuels violence throughout Africa. ISIS rages in Syria and Iraq as its Sunni compatriots in Hamas fight to the death in Gaza. Shiite radicals in Hezbollah and among the Houthis sow terror at the direction of their Iranian masters. Above all, ISIS has embedded in Afghanistan, where its leaders issue communiqués to an international following, plot against the West, and attack both the Taliban government and neighboring Pakistan.

 

Even a “virtual” caliphate such as ISIS has a physical infrastructure: fortresses, hideouts, safehouses, networks, and members. The strength of the material base has a direct relationship with the ideology’s global appeal. This is not idle speculation. It is historical fact. America’s global war on terror decimated al-Qaeda. The surge defeated al-Qaeda in Iraq. The anti-ISIS campaign initiated reluctantly under President Obama and intensified righteously by President Trump brought the group to its knees in Iraq and Syria. Israel’s response to the October 7 attacks has crushed Hamas, hobbled Hezbollah, and left Iran scurrying for an escape hatch.

 

Terrorist movements wax strong when they believe that history is on their side. And there is no better way to rid the terrorists of that notion than to deny them haven and reduce their leaders to ash.

 

America forgot this lesson. Our leaders reduced commitments in Iraq and Syria. Federal law enforcement shifted its attention to domestic extremism and white nationalism. Worst of all, President Biden beat a hasty retreat from Afghanistan that left 13 U.S. servicemen killed, U.S. citizens and visa-holders stranded, Afghan allies abandoned, the Afghan people in hock to a jihadist militia that calls itself a government, and Afghanistan’s ungoverned spaces in the hands of ISIS.

 

At the time, Biden pledged continued surveillance of the enemy, “over-the-horizon” military capabilities, and support for Afghan women and girls. None of this was true. Retired general Frank McKenzie, former CENTCOM commander, said last spring that “in Afghanistan, we have almost no ability to see into that country and almost no ability to strike into that country.” The Taliban resumed public executions, imposed dress and behavioral codes on women, and deprived girls of schooling. The other day, the Taliban said it would shutter NGOs that employ women.

 

Consider the contrast between Israel and the United States. Israel possesses the will to strike its enemies, establish facts on the ground favorable to its security, and restore deterrence in a dangerous neighborhood. The United States, meanwhile, has been tossed about by a whirlwind of events that it believes are beyond its control: an open southern border, a passive-aggressive desire to renew the nuclear agreement with Iran, disaster in Afghanistan, war between Russia and Ukraine that is lessening weapons stockpiles, virulent antisemitism on campuses and in city streets, and long-running operations against the Houthis that have led nowhere. This aimlessness and passivity create openings for terrorists. It gives them the sense of impending victory.

 

I am not arguing that we re-invade Afghanistan tomorrow. Nor am I saying that a more assertive U.S. foreign policy would end every threat to the homeland. My argument is that the way to reduce the ISIS threat, foreign and domestic, is to take the fight to the evildoers. Don’t pretend jihadists can be left to their own devices. Put them on the defensive. Thin out their ranks, dry up their finances, keep them on the run. Then ISIS’s ability to inspire will wane. And justice will be done for the people of New Orleans.

Vivek Murthy’s Booze Bait and Switch

By Noah Rothman

Friday, January 03, 2025

 

The federal government, in all its wisdom, is once again gearing up to save the witless American people from themselves.

 

On Friday, Joe Biden’s surgeon general, Dr. Vivek Murthy, issued a call to Congress demanding that lawmakers update the warning labels on alcoholic beverages to include among the various negative outcomes that accompany excess drinking an elevated risk of developing certain cancers.

 

“Many people out there assume that as long as they’re drinking at the limits or below the limits of current guidelines of one a day for women and two for men, that there is no risk to their health or well-being,” Murthy told reporters. The fools.

 

“Higher alcohol consumption increases alcohol-related cancer risk,” Murthy wrote in a social media post, “yet only 45% of American adults are aware that consuming alcohol increases their risk of developing cancer.”

 

That doesn’t sound like Americans are wholly unaware of the potential cancer risk associated with alcohol drinking, to say nothing of other potential risks drinkers invite. Indeed, the 2019 survey Murthy cites indicates that, over time, Americans have grown more aware of the risks, insofar as only 39 percent of respondents possessed such awareness in 2017.

 

Still, that American Institute for Cancer Research study suggests that broader awareness of alcohol’s risks is hindered by “messages about the healthy heart benefits of modest alcohol intake” — a misapprehension that a federally mandated label might clear up. But the same study produces similar recommendations around the consumption of red meat and cured meats — that would be a lot of warning labels — as well as diets that are low in fruit and fiber and even low rates of physical activity — try putting a label on that.

 

According to the surgeon general’s data, the “cumulative absolute risk of alcohol-related cancer” in men who drink less than one drink per week raises from 10 percent to 13 percent if they consume two drinks per day. Likewise, the risk for women who drink fewer than one drink per week increases from 16.5 percent to nearly 22 percent when they become daily consumers of two or more drinks.

 

“If an individual drinks occasionally for special events, or if you’re drinking a drink or two a week, your risk is likely to be significantly less than if you’re drinking every day,” Murthy told reporters.

 

Do Americans really need the federal government to inform them that the daily consumption of a low-dose poison is bad for their health? If they do, there is a whole range of interventions into private behaviors that the benevolent state should probably consider. Moreover, if that is your outlook, a label is wholly insufficient to the scale of the problem.

 

For decades, alcohol producers have been required to warn consumers against operating heavy machinery under the influence. Murthy laments the fact that warning labels have not been revised since 1988, and he believes Americans would benefit from easy access to a more current scientific consensus. But drunk-driving deaths declined from 21,113 in 1983 to 15,827 in 1988, prior to the labeling exercise. And recently, drunk-driving deaths have increased, from 10,084 in 2013 to 13,524 in 2023. These trends suggest that other environmental factors have far more bearing on the number of drunk drivers than the labels on their bottles.

 

Likewise, even the National Institutes of Health’s research suggests that graphic warning labels have little effect on public attitudes toward potentially harmful substances like tobacco. “Placing graphic warning labels on U.S. cigarette packs did not have an effect on smoking behavior.” Neither cigarette consumption nor cessation rates among smokers who were not ready to quit were affected by explicit warning labels, although the messages did decrease “positive perceptions of cigarettes.” But we only learned that after years of study following the widespread adoption of the erroneous consensus around the notion that “graphic warning labels on cigarette packages can increase cessation behavior among smokers.” Best practices are a moving target because the data available to policymakers are forever evolving.

 

The foremost benefit social reformers gain from forcing producers to deem their own products harmful isn’t derived from the public information campaign itself. Instead, the most reliable outcome from these campaigns is to force consumers to pay more for their consumption habits. We know how this works. To compensate for the additional cost imposed on manufacturers and to offset the losses associated with negative perceptions of their products, producers boost prices. In response, consumers will either consume less of their preferred product or transition to lower-quality alternatives.

 

That would have the effect Murthy clearly desires — lower alcohol-consumption rates, at least on the margins — but it’s disingenuous to suggest that this outcome would be a result of sudden enlightenment among consumers. It would be a byproduct of an effort to make the things the surgeon general doesn’t want you to consume more expensive via the compelling power of the state.

 

It seems to be the opinion of the surgeon general that the public needs to be tricked into believing that they’re merely endorsing a salubrious public relations campaign when in fact they’re being gulled into endorsing a burdensome regulation. And all of it is predicated on uncharitable assumptions about how dirt-stupid most Americans are, and how terribly they will mismanage their own lives absent a guiding hand. That is a common misapprehension among aspiring reformers, to say nothing of the accompanying presumption that they are possessed of an above-average capacity for rational thinking.

 

But the surgeon general’s sneaky effort to force this change on Americans — all and only for their own good — betrays a conspicuous lack of faith in the public whose health he is tasked with preserving. That attitude and the hubris that fuels it have eroded the public’s trust in America’s governing institutions. If Murthy thinks further chipping away at that trust is worth it just to decrease alcohol consumption at the margins — and in ways consumers will deeply resent — maybe he’s not as smart as he thinks he is.

Donald Trump and the Houthis

By Elliott Abrams

Friday, January 03, 2025

 

For years, Yemen’s Houthi terrorists have been attacking U.S. Navy ships while the United States has been playing defense. Last July, CENTCOM commander general Erik Kurilla warned of the dangers our ships and sailors face. The Wall Street Journal reported this:

 

The top U.S. Middle East commander recently advised in a classified letter to Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin that military operations in the region are “failing” to deter Houthi attacks on shipping in the Red Sea and that a broader approach is needed. . . .”

 

As recently as last month, in December 2024, CENTCOM reported on more attacks:

 

The Houthis launched at least eight one-way uncrewed aerial systems, five anti-ship ballistic missiles and three anti-ship cruise missiles at USS Spruance (DDG-111) and USS Stockdale (DDG-106). . . . This is the second time the two independently-deployed destroyers have come under Houthi fire. The Houthis also launched an attack in late September against the two destroyers, as well as USS Indianapolis (LCS-17).

 

Kurilla’s letter comes after hundreds of “Houthi attacks” — except that these are actually Iranian attacks on the U.S. Navy, with Iranian missiles delivered by their Houthi proxy.

 

As the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) stated in February 2024,

 

Analysis confirms that Houthi forces have employed various Iranian-origin missiles and unmanned aerial vehicles against military and civilian targets throughout the region. . . . Since 2014, Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps-Qods Force (IRGC-QF) has provided the Houthis a growing arsenal of sophisticated weapons and training. Iran’s aid has enabled the Houthis to conduct a campaign of missile and UAV attacks against commercial shipping in the Red Sea since November 2023.

 

DIA’s report, entitled “Iran Enabling Houthi Attacks Across the Middle East,” states that:

 

Since at least 2015, Iran has provided the Houthis a diverse arsenal of short- and medium-range ballistic and cruise missiles, including anti-ship variants, enabling Houthi attacks against targets on land and sea. Iranian ballistic and cruise missiles allow the Houthis to attack targets at different vectors.

 

The real question is why General Kurilla’s letter did not spark more action against the source of the Houthis’ weapons, which is Iran. Kurilla told the Senate Armed Services Committee last March that there was no way to degrade the Houthis’ arsenal if Iran could simply rebuild it:

 

We also want to degrade the Houthis’ offensive capability, anti-ship ballistic missiles, anti-ship cruise missiles, and the myriad of other systems that they are using, all provided by Iran. But to degrade that capability means nothing if Iran is able to resupply them. So, we have an effort to deny Iran the ability to resupply them, and that’s where we need more of an international and a whole of government approach to be able to stop Iran from resupplying the Houthis.

 

The Biden administration has, in recent weeks, stepped up attacks on the Houthis — but has done nothing to penalize their supplier. As of January 20, that is the question facing President Trump. What will be done to prevent Iranian resupply of the Houthis? Will Houthi attacks on U.S. Navy ships with Iranian-supplied weapons be permitted to continue?

 

President Trump faced a similar issue in September 2020 after Iranian proxies stepped up their attacks on U.S. troops in western Iraq and in Syria during the summer. Americans were wounded but not killed. The Trump administration then advised Iran, through multiple channels, that if an Iranian proxy group killed an American in one of these attacks, the U.S. response would be directly against Iran — not only the proxy. Iran itself would pay a price. After that warning, such attacks in the last quarter of 2020 declined by about 90 percent. During the Biden administration, they rose again: For example, in the single year between October 2023 and November 2024, there were 125 attacks in Syria and 79 in Iraq. And on January 28, 2024, three Americans were killed in a drone attack on an American outpost just across the Syrian border in Jordan.

 

The right path forward for the new Trump administration is not to give in to Iranian and Houthi attacks by removing our troops from Iraq and Syria, nor by removing the U.S. Navy from international waters in the Middle East — the Red Sea and Bab al-Mandab. It is to repeat the Trump method of 2020: Let Iran clearly know that if an American is killed or wounded, or a Navy ship hit, by a Houthi weapon supplied by Iran, the United States will respond directly against Iran.

 

As General Kurilla said, we should be seeking to interdict the supply of such weapons, but that is not enough; that effort will never be 100 percent effective. A better way forward is deterring Iran from supplying the Houthis by making Iran pay for any damage done. Let’s stop playing Tehran’s game by allowing Iran to hide behind proxies. President Trump should make it clear that if Iranian-supplied weapons hit us, the United States will strike back forcefully — and directly — against Iran.

The Last-Minute Push from the Lamest of Lame Ducks

By Jim Geraghty

Friday, January 03, 2025

 

On the menu today: Back on December 13, I noticed that the Biden administration released its “National Strategy to Counter Islamophobia and Anti-Arab Hate” and announced the establishment of two China-focused initiatives and observed there was something a little absurd about the Biden team unveiling “short, medium, and long-term actions” with 38 days left in Biden’s presidency. These guys are the short term.

 

Now, we are 17 days away from the start of Donald Trump’s second term, and Biden — or more accurately, the team around our mumbling, stumbling octogenarian president — is trying to push through a difficult-to-rescind ban on new oil and gas drilling in large sections of the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans, enacted last-minute changes to the H-1B and H-2 visa programs to increase the number of foreign workers in the U.S., locked in hybrid work protections for tens of thousands of staffers at the Social Security Administration, set a new Paris Climate Agreement goal to reduce U.S. net emissions by 61-66 percent in 2035 (that one will be easier to rescind), and attempted to hinder efforts to increase U.S. exports of liquid natural gas. And of course, there’s been the pardon-palooza.

 

It makes Bill Clinton’s staffers stealing all the “W”s from the White House keyboards look quaint.

 

Festivus was December 23, but this bitter president has been airing his grievances for weeks.

 

A Disgraceful Ending to a Weak Presidency

 

Joe Biden is ending his presidency on one bitter note after another: a blanket pardon of his son that he repeatedly promised he would never give. A sweeping commutation for a group of allegedly “non-violent” offenders that included a Maryland woman nicknamed “the Black Widow,” for murdering two husbands and a boyfriend for insurance money. A ludicrously inconsistent commutation of the death sentences for every killer in federal custody, except for the three most famous ones. The same old hiding from reporters, with no sign of a term-closing press conference.

 

And now, the Washington Post reports, “Biden and some of his aides still believe he should have stayed in the race, despite the rocky debate performance and low poll numbers that prompted Democrats to pressure him to drop out. Biden and these aides have told people in recent days that he could have defeated Trump, according to people familiar with their comments.”

 

(As usual, the White House declined to make Biden available for an interview.)

 

This morning, the editors of National Review declare, “The nation (and our mainstream media) having long since accustomed itself to the reality that the president of the United States is mentally unfit for the job and that we are currently being governed by a cadre of his advisers instead.”

 

Perhaps the clearest sign that our octogenarian president is no longer of sound mind is that he thinks that after trailing throughout the year, he could have bounced back from that disastrous debate performance — the one that he attributed to a cold and jet lag from a trip overseas twelve days earlier — and beaten Trump, when Kamala Harris, Tim Walz, and $2 billion in spending couldn’t even win one of the seven swing states.

 

How easily some people forget that Biden stumbled around for more than three weeks after the debate, complaining to NBC’s Lester Holt that the media never covers any of Trump’s lies, referring to U.S. Secret Service director Kimberly Cheatle as a “he,” declaring he couldn’t remember whether he had spoken to Barack Obama since the debate, and forgetting the name of Defense secretary Lloyd Austin and referring to him as “the black man” in an interview with BET.

 

Biden started his presidency at the outer limits of age for a president and finishes it well outside. (Comparably energetic as Donald Trump is, it is not reassuring that the incoming president will turn 79 on June 14.)

 

If Biden wanted to drive a stake into Trumpism, he needed to address the insufficiently secure southern border and high rates of illegal immigration. Instead, when the pace of migration over the border increased in the first months of his presidency, Biden dismissed it: “It happens every single solitary year. There is a significant increase in the number of people coming to the border in the winter months of January, February, March. It happens every year.” U.S. Customs and Border Protection encounters at the border jumped in spring of 2021 and largely stayed high during Biden’s term. The problem festered because, according to Axios, “Any administration leaders treated the issue like a hot potato because it was politically thankless. . . . The idea that no one wanted to ‘own it’ came up repeatedly in interviews about the border crisis.” But when you are president, you “own” these issues, whether you like it or not. Through his neglect, Biden planted the seeds of the Trump comeback.

 

The Post also reported, “In private, Biden has also said he should have picked someone other than Merrick Garland as attorney general, complaining about the Justice Department’s slowness under Garland in prosecuting Trump, and its aggressiveness in prosecuting Biden’s son Hunter, according to people familiar with his comments.” Right, right, that was the problem, not Hunter Biden’s spectacularly self-destructive decision-making. If Biden really believes, as he claims, the U.S. Department of Justice “selectively and unfairly prosecuted” his son, he ought to blame the guy who assured the country that Garland was, “a man of impeccable integrity, one the most respected jurists of our time. Brilliant, yet humble. Distinguished, yet modest. Full of character and decency.” The president can find that guy in the mirror.

 

Even the “history will remember him well” spin from Biden’s top aides doesn’t pass the smell test. Jake Sullivan, Biden’s national security adviser with strong prospects in the restaurant industry, told the Post, “The president has been operating on a time horizon measured in decades, while the political cycle is measured in four years.” Democrats can fairly ask why Biden, Sullivan, and the rest of the team didn’t pay more attention to that four-year time horizon; the American public is sufficiently patient and more than reasonable to expect some results by the end of the first term. Also . . . how is history going to remember Biden well if Trump is going to spend the coming years undoing so much of what Biden spent the past four years doing?

 

Biden’s term includes some accomplishments, including the rollout of the Covid vaccines and an initially strong response to the Russian invasion of Ukraine. (Initially strong; over time Biden grew more hesitant, terrified of any move being perceived as “escalatory” or “provocative.”)

 

But the Biden we see today is the one history will remember — a shuffling and muttering geriatric, usually away from the cameras, but when he is in front of them, he’s full of self-pity and blames everyone but himself for the disappointments of his lone term.

 

After Biden withdrew from the race, former House speaker Nancy Pelosi — who reportedly had a large role in prying the nomination from Biden’s fingers — said Biden had been “a Mount Rushmore kind of president of the United States. . . . You have Teddy Roosevelt up there. And he’s wonderful. I don’t say take him down. But you can add Biden.”

 

While I concur that granite is indeed a dense enough material to represent Biden’s noggin, few will ever rank Biden — the intermission between two Trump terms — among America’s greatest presidents. What we see today is who he always was: a bitter old man who overstayed his welcome.

 

ADDENDUM: Politico examined the Biden administration’s big spending initiatives and found, “A $42 billion expansion of broadband internet service has yet to connect a single household. Bureaucratic haggling, equipment shortages and logistical challenges mean a $7.5 billion effort to install electric vehicle chargers from coast to coast has so far yielded just 47 stations in 15 states.”

 

Ezra Klein responds, “It’s hard to run on your $42 billion expansion of broadband when it hasn’t expanded broadband. Change is what gets built, not how much money gets appropriated to build.”

 

Meanwhile, Matt Yglesias observes, “Journalists and (especially) academics are much more left-wing than the overall public, so the injections of nuance tend to be asymmetrical and, as a result, can sometimes leave you less informed than if you’d stuck with a simpler take.”

 

It took a long, long while, but those Vox guys are starting to grow on me! Although to be honest, I’ve never felt, as Klein described, “the feeling of anxiety around opening a new article and knowing that I was about to feel stupid. I was about to feel like I was outside the club. This is a real problem.”

Sorry, Canada — We Don’t Want You

By Rich Lowry

Friday, January 03, 2025

 

The slogan of James K. Polk’s supporters in the 1844 presidential campaign was “54 40′ or Fight,” referring to their desire to take a substantial slice of what would eventually become Canadian territory along the Pacific Northwest coastline.

 

For his part, Donald Trump isn’t bothering to set out any latitude lines when he discusses his ambitions on Canada — he wants the whole thing, or so he says in his trolling of our friendly neighbor to the north and its embattled progressive prime minister Justin Trudeau.

 

In recent weeks, Trump has mused about Canada becoming the 51st state, posted an artificially generated image of himself beside a Canadian flag atop a mountain, staring heroically into the distance, and referred to Trudeau, amusingly, as “governor.”

 

By all accounts, most Canadians have taken this in stride, but some have expressed consternation or indignation, to which we can reply, “Don’t worry, Canada — we don’t really want you.”

 

Even if Trump were inclined to dust off War Plan Red — the Department of War’s strategy in the early 20th century for how to conduct a war against the British Empire, featuring Canada as a key battlefield — it wouldn’t be worth the effort.

 

The United States doesn’t need another huge, misgoverned blue state. We already have California, where the climate and the surfing are better.

 

Over the last several years, Canada has managed to fall even further behind the United States economically. “The IMF forecasts that Canada’s national income per head, equivalent to around 80 percent of America’s in the decade before the pandemic, will be just 70 percent of its neighbor’s in 2025,” according to The Economist.

 

Writing on the same theme at the website The Hub, University of Calgary economics professor Trevor Tombe notes that “the gap between the Canadian and American economies has now reached its widest point in nearly a century.” The U.S., he continues, “is on track to produce nearly 50 percent more per person than Canada will.” Canada would be the fourth-poorest state per capita in the Union, beneath Alabama.

 

Why would we make Canada’s scuffling economic performance our problem?

 

Then, there’s the matter of politics. Canada would be a blue-state behemoth, matching California in population (roughly 40 million) and, presumably, in reliably Democratic politics. There are red areas of Canada, which have the same urban-versus-rural divide as the U.S., yet the Great White North is overall less conservative.

 

Polling in Canada before the U.S. presidential election showed Kamala Harris with a three-to-one lead over Trump and an advantage even in the more Trump-friendly prairies.

 

The U.S. and Canada are friendly neighbors with intertwined histories but have distinct political and economic cultures. We might think we’d annex Canada and make it more like us, but — with two Democratic senators and a huge tranche of electoral votes for Democratic presidential candidates — Canada would surely make us more like it.

 

In that sense, the joke would definitely be on us.

 

We’d also be buying ourselves an instant separatist problem by incorporating Quebec, the French-speaking province that has had a notoriously troubled relationship with the rest of Canada. If we want to add French, along with English and Spanish, as yet another obligatory language option, this would be a great move.

 

And there’s the matter of Justin Trudeau. After his irksome, grievous misrule of Canada, it would be even more annoying if the story ended with his becoming a U.S. citizen. Who knows? Still young, he might revive his career in Democratic politics. He couldn’t run for president, but might use his status as a kingmaker in the Ontario caucuses for power and influence.

 

All that said, national modesty compels us to admit that all our prior efforts to take Canada have failed, and our pleasant northerly neighbor deserves respect amid the ribbing. Let Canada be Canada.

Joe Biden Was Always Too Old for the Job

National Review Online

Friday, January 03, 2025

 

On August 16, 2021 – in the wake of an aggressive Taliban advance upon Kabul as the United States rushed its withdrawal from our military position in Afghanistan – Joe Biden addressed the nation to explain the sudden drawdown in forces and the chaos then enveloping the region. As he spoke, his slurred words and half-attentive bearing – during an address that any president would otherwise treat as a matter of paramount importance – shocked not only the nation but many of National Review’s writers, who immediately sounded the alarm that Joe Biden, a mere few months into his first term, seemed mentally unfit for the responsibilities of the job.

 

On January 1, 2025 – in the wake of an ISIS-inspired terrorist atrocity in New Orleans – Joe Biden addressed the nation to explain nothing at all, merely to mark his continuing presence amidst a crisis. As he spoke, his slurred words and half-attentive bearing – during an address that any president would otherwise treat as a matter of paramount importance – shocked absolutely nobody whatsoever, the nation (and our mainstream media) having long since accustomed itself to the reality that the president of the United States is mentally unfit for the job and that we are currently being governed by a cadre of his advisers instead.

 

Given the stakes involved, the journey America has traveled in the span of those four years – from the raising of dismissed qualms about President Biden’s mental decline at the start of his term to a cynical denouement where we are expected to shruggingly grant that our president is and has always been mere nominal fiction – is the single most scandalous, and poorly reported, story in 21st century American politics.

 

CBS’s Jan Crawford said much the same thing on Face the Nation this past weekend, applying it only to the year 2024; she tactfully understates the matter. If one trusts the reporting of the Wall Street Journal – and expect more to emerge soon to buttress its claims – then President Biden’s mental and physical decline was in fact evident as early as the spring of 2021, mere months after he took office. Not only was this concealed by the White House, who managed Biden carefully to keep him out of public (and even private) eyes, it was treated with immense indifference – even hostility – by the Washington, D.C. press corps whose job it is to cover the presidency.

 

Now we are told the real story. Now we are “allowed” to know that which the American people, by all public polling, understood long before Joe Biden ever took the stage on June 27, 2024: The president of the United States was mentally collapsing, and nobody outside of conservative dissidents wanted to talk about it until Joe Biden forced the matter upon us all by dissolving in public. Just because this is pathetic does not mean it is not also disgraceful.

Hollywood Pete

By Kevin D. Williamson

Friday, January 03, 2025

 

I am an admirer of Audie Murphy, the celebrated yet troubled hero who was the most decorated U.S. soldier of World War II but struggled with mental illness and addiction for the rest of his relatively short life before dying at the age of 45. Murphy was something of a real-life Captain America—he lied about his age in order to serve and was rejected by all three (at the time) branches of the military for being too small to fight before the Army relented and allowed him to enlist. Murphy, who killed easily and well, was made for the kind of service his country required of him at the time, and he took the lives of at least 241 men in his fighting days. In one famous engagement, he stood for an hour atop a burning vehicle—while wounded—and fired at advancing Germans until he ran out of ammunition. He shot at least 50 men that day. After the war, he acted in movies (he played himself in a film based on his memoir, To Hell and Back, and appeared in a bunch of Westerns) and drank and took pills and wrecked a marriage and got into fights and got arrested and gambled his money away. He died in a plane crash at age 45. 

 

He was a hell of a soldier, by all accounts. 

 

Nobody ever thought he should be secretary of defense. 

 

Pete Hegseth is something of a soft echo of Audie Murphy—an Ivy League version for our wan times. Like Murphy, Hegseth served honorably in combat (you will have heard that he was awarded two Bronze Stars), went into the entertainment business (his last job was as one of the hosts of Fox & Friends Weekend), took up drinking, wrecked some marriages (he is on his third), etc. He is today one year younger than Murphy was when he died. 

 

Hegseth has an excellent general education, having done his undergraduate degree at Princeton and his master’s in public policy at Harvard. Harvard’s MPP program will graduate almost 700 students in its next class, and those are the only 700 people in the world who think any of them ought to be the next secretary of defense. There isn’t anything wrong with Hegseth’s education or his military service, but neither is there anything about either that is particularly relevant to the position for which he is to be nominated: He is not seeking to serve as an infantry platoon leader, which is what he was, or a think-tanker, or a McKinsey consultant, but the lead manager of one of the largest bureaucracies of any kind in the world. 

 

There isn’t anything terrible about being a television personality. But what else has he done? He ran a veterans’-interest group, badly, and oversaw a PAC that spent much of its money on Christmas parties for his friends and family. He worked very briefly at Bear Stearns as an analyst. Mainly, he has worked in entertainment, most notably as the host of a Fox News morning show. There is very little that Fox News does that could be called “journalism,” but, to the extent that Fox News has done serious journalistic coverage of military and DoD affairs, Hegseth had nothing to do with it. He was the clown riding tricycles and mechanical bulls on Fox’s answer to Good Morning America. Again, there isn’t anything necessarily wrong with that, but Hegseth’s time at Fox News did nothing to prepare him to lead the Defense Department—he is better prepared to work in a circus. Like Audie Murphy, he could play a very convincing soldier in the movies. 

 

The question isn’t just what, if anything, is wrong with Pete Hegseth–it is what, if anything, is right about him–in the context of being secretary of defense. 

 

Hegseth is not an idiot. And he certainly could have gone into the sort of career that would have prepared him to serve as secretary of defense—but he did not do that. He made different choices. He preferred Princeton to West Point and the entertainment business to the policy business or a continued military career. Again, there isn’t anything wicked about any of that. There just isn’t anything in it to recommend him for the position to which he is to be nominated. 

 

There is much that is troubling in Hegseth’s personal life, and “Oh, well, that business with the married woman in the hotel wasn’t actually rape” is not a good enough answer for all of it—but, set that aside for the moment. There is no need to speculate about what isn’t on the record when what is on the record is easy enough to see. And what it amounts to is: not much. 

 

Being secretary of defense is not like being a television host or even a military-focused television pundit. It is, in terms of budget, responsibilities, and personnel, a lot more like being the chancellor of Germany. The DoD is the largest employer in the United States; it is one of the largest organizations of any kind in the world; its budget allocation, which runs the better part of a trillion dollars, actually understates the total financial resources committed to national defense, which is more like $2 trillion, roughly the size of the German, Japanese, or French national government budgets, with only the U.S. government itself and the Chinese government budget being much larger; in FY2023, DoD reported $3.8 trillion in assets and $4 trillion in liabilities; DoD has nearly 3 million employees, more than 2 million in uniform and nearly 1 million civilians; the Navy has more than 300 ships to keep up with and more than 4,000 aircraft; the Army has nearly 50,000 combat vehicles on its maintenance roster; the Air Force has more than 6,300 aircraft to keep up with and nearly 400 ICBMs. The managerial challenges of running that organization are immensely complex. 

 

If you read through the U.S. National Defense Strategy documents, you won’t see very much about infantry maneuvers, but you will see a good deal about different approaches to financial management. “Audit remediation is one of the major components of the National Defense Strategy’s line of effort focused on reforming our business processes,” reads one document. Now, go look at that video of Pete Hegseth riding around on the tricycle and tell me that—stone-cold sober or blackout drunk—he is the man to undertake that apparently critical audit-remediation work. 

 

He isn’t.

 

A man can be a good soldier and a poor choice for secretary of defense. There is a reason those who have been successful in the role of secretary of defense have tended to have long histories in adjacent roles and senior leadership positions in business, government, and universities. Consider the CVs of Robert Gates or William Perry vs. Hegseth’s, whose work history has more in common with William Perry the football player and entertainer than William Perry the secretary of defense. Robert McNamara had a long career between Harvard Business School and the Pentagon, but he wasn’t grilling bratwurst on the morning show—he was the president of Ford Motors. Hegseth might have stayed on a while at Bear Sterns or the Manhattan Institute and followed a similar path, but he didn’t. 

 

One understands the appeal of a TV-host Cabinet for a game-show-host president. But the Senate owes the American people a bit of sobriety in this.

Why Do We Accept Government by an Invalid?

By Jeffrey Blehar

Wednesday, January 01, 2025

 

In the early-morning hours of New Year’s Day, a terrorist committed an atrocity in New Orleans, driving a truck into a crowd of Bourbon Street revelers and then emerging to spray automatic gunfire on the crowd. The scale of the attack is as yet undetermined: Several IEDs were discovered near the scene; the murderer, an apparently self-radicalized Muslim and U.S. Army veteran flying the flag of ISIS, is suspected to have had help; and a federal manhunt for potential accomplices is currently under way as I write this.

 

In news that may or may not be related — it is currently impossible to know, and the only connecting thread may be the simple fact of a high-profile holiday — a Tesla Cybertruck loaded with fireworks and flammable materials was driven up to the valet doors of the Trump Hotel in Las Vegas and detonated, killing the driver and injuring at least nine. The fact that both killers rented their vehicles using the same low-profile app is suggestive but not even remotely conclusive.

 

I am not here to waste words talking about the grave details of these matters. It is still New Year’s Day, and I must wring a last few hours of repose out of it before plunging once again into the maelstrom tomorrow. I am here only to ask why we as Americans have become so cavalier about the fact that our president is simply unavailable for response outside of press releases and official tweets during times of potential crisis like these, until such point where Biden stumbles out to peer into a teleprompter — his fogged eyes squinted into mere dashes — and slurs a half-articulated “update” speech. Was anyone reassured by that speech? Did it alleviate anyone’s unease that the sitting president of the United States is a half-functional, quasi-vegetative person at this point?

 

I am also here to ask why we as Americans have become so cavalier about the fact that tolerating a president who is permanently mentally incapacitated invites crises like these. Nineteen days yet remain until the animate shell of Joe Biden formally departs from the presidency. Pray for peace and hold your breath until then.

A Bloody, Fiery Start to 2025

By Jim Geraghty

Thursday, January 02, 2025

 

Shortly after we rang in the new year, two men — using the same car-rental app — took rented vehicles to the heart of two great American cities and tried to kill as many people as possible.

 

Authorities have now identified the driver of the Tesla Cybertruck — who was killed when the vehicle blew up outside Trump International Hotel in Las Vegas — as Colorado resident and Army veteran Matthew Livelsberger. Reportedly Livelsberger and the perpetrator of the New Orleans attack, Shamsud-Din Jabbar, both served at Fort Bragg (now named Fort Liberty), but there’s not yet any confirmation that the two men served there simultaneously or that they knew each other. Keep in mind, “Ten percent of the Army’s forces are assigned to Fort Liberty including 50,662 military and 14,036 Department of Defense civilian personnel who work there,” and the base “spans across 160,700 acres or 251 square miles. The compound is so large that it touches four counties.” So even if the two men served at Fort Bragg at the same time, it’s conceivable they never encountered each other.

 

Whatever you think of the U.S. “war on terror” and whether it ever ended, the threat of terrorism never completely disappeared. You may not be interested in terrorism, but terrorism is interested in you.

 

The car bomb in Las Vegas killed one person and injured at least seven more. When you detonate a truck made by the company of Elon Musk in front of a hotel with Donald Trump’s name on it, I think the political message of the attack is awfully darn clear. Nonetheless, the New York Times reports that as of yesterday, the FBI was still attempting to determine whether placing gas canisters, camp fuel canisters, and large firework mortars in a car associated with Musk, and in front of a building associated with Trump, meets their technical definition of “terrorism”:

 

“There is no further threat to the community,” [Sheriff Kevin McMahill of the Las Vegas Metropolitan Police Department] said. As of Wednesday afternoon, there was no indication that the explosion was connected to ISIS, which President Biden said had inspired the New Orleans attack, but the investigation remains ongoing, he said.

 

At a news conference on Wednesday, Jeremy Schwartz, the acting F.B.I. special agent in charge in Las Vegas, said the agency is investigating whether the explosion “was an act of terrorism or not.”

 

“I know everybody’s interested in that word and trying to see if we can say, ‘Hey this is a terrorist attack,’” Mr. Schwartz said. “That is our goal, and that’s what we’re trying to do.”

 

Does anyone in the FBI seriously think the choice of vehicle and location for detonation were just coincidences?

 

This hesitancy to call detonating a car explosion in the center of Las Vegas on New Year’s Eve “terrorism” comes after Alethea Duncan, New Orleans FBI assistant special agent in charge, initially said in a press conference, “As [New Orleans Police Superintendent Anne] Kirkpatrick said, we’ll be taking over the investigative lead for this event. This is not a terrorist event. What it is right now, is there improvised explosive devices that was found [sic], and we are working on confirming if this is a viable device or not [sic].”

 

If you’re finding improvised explosive devices — whether they’re viable or not — why would you declare that it is not a terrorist event?

 

The FBI subsequently declared in a written statement, “We are working with our partners to investigate this as an act of terrorism.”

 

But it often feels as if in circumstances like this the FBI has a definition of “terrorism” that is as specific and pedantic as Rob Lowe’s character’s definition of champagne in Wayne’s World. Unless it is imported from the specific “Terrorista” region of the Islamic State, it’s merely sparkling mass violence.

 

In the case of the New Orleans attack, it may well be that Shamsud-Din Jabbar was a troubled guy, with a life unraveling from a messy divorce, increasing debts, and failed business ventures — your garden-variety angry, middle-aged man lashing out at a world that he feels has done him wrong. But the investigation has reportedly turned up a series of videos where he “discussed planning to kill his family and having dreams that helped inspire him to join ISIS.” In other words, whether he was ever a “member” of ISIS, he turned to ISIS to give his life purpose and meaning. (Straight out of someone’s twisted fiction.)

 

Our Mark Wright:

 

When Shamsud-Din Jabbar drove into a crowd of New Year’s revelers with a pickup truck flying an Islamic State flag and then engaged in a shootout with the police, his psychopathic, murderous intent shocked the nation. Unfortunately, it shouldn’t have. This tactic is a well-known and celebrated ISIS calling card. The carnage on Bourbon Street is the direct descendant of the 2016 Islamic State truck rampage in Nice, France, that killed 86 people and injured hundreds of others. It’s the deranged offspring of the 2016 attack in Berlin’s Christmas market that killed 13. It’s the direct follow-up to the 2017 truck attack that killed eight people and injured a dozen others on Manhattan’s West Side.

 

There have been many other such incidents over the years, including in London, in Spain, and in Canada.

 

Around midafternoon yesterday, when it became clear that the country has suffered two simultaneous terrorist attacks, people started to notice that the only response from President Joe Biden had been a two-paragraph released statement that he was being “continually briefed.”

 

Finally, in the early evening hours, our squinty, mumbling president read off a teleprompter for four minutes and after pledging, “We will keep you fully, contemporaneously informed,” served up the trademark move of his administration by turning from the podium and ignoring the shouted questions.

 

Our Jeff Blehar expressed what almost everyone is thinking but can’t seem to say out loud:

 

Was anyone reassured by that speech? Did it alleviate anyone’s unease that the sitting president of the United States is a half-functional, quasi-vegetative person at this point?

 

I am also here to ask why we as Americans have become so cavalier about the fact that tolerating a president who is permanently mentally incapacitated invites crises like these. Nineteen days yet remain until the animate shell of Joe Biden formally departs from the presidency. Pray for peace and hold your breath until then.