You Know Why

By Noah Rothman

Thursday, January 30, 2025

This post is in response to What Exactly Are People Mad at Tulsi Gabbard for Doing?

By Michael Brendan Dougherty

 

One of the dispositions that serve conservatives well is their understanding that good intentions do not excuse disastrous results. I am not sure why Michael seems inclined to dispense with that understanding in Gabbard’s case, save that it has become inconvenient.

 

“As Gabbard constantly explained to anyone who would listen, her objective was to seek an end to the war and to prevent deeper U.S. involvement in it,” Michael writes. Even if we take that stated intention at face value — a charitable dispensation — her intentions do not excuse her unconscionable blindness to the world around her.

 

“I asked him tough questions about his own regime’s actions, the use of chemical weapons, and the brutal tactics that were being used against his own people,” Gabbard said when asked during her confirmation hearing what she discussed in the three hours she spent with Bashar al-Assad in Damascus — a trip that was designed to embarrass Donald Trump over his decision to finally enforce Barack Obama’s “red line” (the use of chemical weapons on civilians). Apparently, she came away from that tough conversation wholly convinced that Assad didn’t do it — an assessment that ran contrary to U.S. and European intelligence. To date, the Assadist revisionist narrative she retailed remains unsupported, although she held fast to them well beyond the point at which her position could be attributed to prudence.

 

During her hearing, Senator Mark Kelly pressed Gabbard to explain why she doubted the intelligence indicating that Assad deployed chemical weapons against civilians. She replied that it was her “fear” that the intelligence was “being used as a pretext” for a regime-change operation. In other words, she subordinated the overwhelming assessment of Western intelligence agencies because that assessment might justify a policy she didn’t like.

 

That is precisely why she is unfit for the role to which she has been nominated. Gabbard will determine what goes on and off the president’s daily intelligence briefing. The Office of the Director of National Intelligence itself was established to prevent “stove piping” — the failure to share intelligence based on interagency politics — but Gabbard cannot be trusted to perform that role. Based on her own admission, when her priors conflict with the intelligence, it’s the intelligence that has to go.

 

This is just the most recent judgmental lapse in a career full of them. During Gabbard’s hearing, she suggested (albeit indirectly) that the U.S. and the West were better off with Assad in power — at least when compared with the al-Nusra-linked militants cobbling together a successor regime in Damascus today. Perhaps. But no one should be confused about the threat Assad posed to U.S. security; for much of her public-facing career, Gabbard seems to have been — until that disposition imperiled her political prospects.

 

The Assad regime was an Iranian puppet. It played host to Hezbollah and channeled weapons into Lebanon bound for Israel, where it was used to kill America’s allies (a relationship the anti-Iran successor regime, whatever its demerits are today and may be tomorrow, has severed). The Assad regime actively infiltrated insurgent elements into Iraq where they targeted and killed U.S. troops — activities that culminated in a 2008 raid into Syria to stanch the flow. The Assad regime was propped up by Russia’s armed forces. It provided them with bases in Latakia and Tartus, from which America’s adversary projected power into the Middle East and the Mediterranean.

 

And, despite Gabbard’s credulous assertions to the contrary, at no point were either Assad or Vladimir Putin’s regime invested in attacking Islamist elements during the Syrian civil war. They bombed hospitals and maternity wards, engineered starvation campaigns encircling whole cities like Homs and Aleppo, and subsidized ISIS elements in western Iraq. Russia’s and Assad’s support for Islamist elements in western Syria continued up to the fall of the regime, after which the U.S. targeted the militants that had previously enjoyed the protection of Russian air cover.

 

Michael maintains that Gabbard and company wanted only to keep “America out of the business of being al-Qaeda’s air force.” He has it precisely backward.

 

Those who lent credence to the notion that Assad and Putin were proper stewards of American security expend a lot of energy insisting that they, and they alone, want to keep America out of shooting wars. But their blindness contributed to the conditions that allowed ISIS to thrive, spilling out across the borders of Syria into Iraq and compelling U.S. intervention in the region in 2014; the very outcome noninterventionists insist only their careful stewardship of American foreign policy can prevent.

 

Again, intentions matter, but results matter more.

 

Michael closes with a realist appeal to the notion that, sometimes, the U.S. must work with bad actors abroad because the alternatives are worse. The threat posed by the late Assad regime and the Putin regime may not rise to the level of menace posed by the marauding Danes, but they were not America’s partners. Those regimes were adversaries, one of which continues to seek every opportunity to undermine U.S. interests, imperil the safety of U.S. citizens and our allies, and overturn the U.S.-led geopolitical order we take for granted. I can understand the rationalizations necessary to render that conclusion, but they are rationalizations.

Trump Targets EU Regulations and ‘Taxation’ of American Companies

By David Inserra & Jennifer Huddleston

Friday, January 31, 2025

 

Last week, President Donald Trump took the stage (virtually) at the World Economic Forum in Davos and proceeded to blast the EU for the impact their regulations are having on U.S. companies and American expression online.

 

Trump is absolutely right. For years now, EU policymakers, bureaucrats, and courts have been crushing their own member countries and American tech companies under the weight of onerous and censorious regulations that, as Trump put it, are “a form of taxation.”

 

But, having rightly identified the EU as a bad actor, President Trump and American policymakers must also resist the siren song to respond with our own taxes, tariffs, regulations, and “competition” policies that will cripple American businesses and harm the expression and pocketbooks of American citizens. The most obvious example of this is in the tech sector.

 

Europe’s chief technology export has effectively become its regulation, and President Trump is right that much of it directly targets American companies. Examples abound, from massive policies such as the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), the Digital Markets Act (DMA), the Digital Services Act (DSA), and the AI Act. Each governs the global tech-policy ecosystem, down to micromanaging which charging port smartphone companies must design into their devices through the EU’s Common Charger Directive. These myriad rules have imposed major costs on technological innovation and affect American companies’ ability to do business as well as American citizens’ ability to choose.

 

These regulations are part of why the EU’s tech sector has lagged. Start-up culture thrives in the U.S. — of the 49 start-ups worth more than $10 billion, only one is from the EU. There may be a growing realization that the EU is falling behind as its host of taxes and regulations strangle economic growth and dynamism. Nonetheless, its tech policy has focused on punishing successful American companies rather than examining how a precautionary approach has stifled its own.

 

The DMA, for example, has weaponized competition policy by labeling successful American tech companies as “gatekeepers,” preventing them from undertaking certain actions or otherwise offering the products and services that consumers prefer. Consumers in Europe have faced a number of “DMA fails” such as changes to Google Maps and smartphones that require an increasing number of steps for setup. The results haven’t benefited Europe either, with companies choosing not to launch new products. There are other negative impacts in some industries that the policy was designed to benefit.

 

European competition regulators have targeted leading American companies for their success by taking antitrust actions that do not accurately reflect the typical consumer experience or the dynamic nature of the market. The consequences of these misguided actions could eliminate the features that consumers want or prevent potential benefits from mergers. Concerningly, the prior FTC appeared to collude with European regulators to target American companies when the FTC was unsuccessful doing so at home. The impact of such rules extends beyond innovation and business and quickly turns into censorship. A significant example is former EU commissioner Thierry Breton’s threat to Elon Musk, which occurred during Musk’s “X spaces” interview with President Trump shortly before the 2024 election. Breton warned Musk that since EU users will listen to this live conversation and be subject to content that promotes “hatred, disorder, incitement to violence, or . . . disinformation,” the DSA required Musk to “mitigate” these harms. Failure to do so would be used against X in the EU’s ongoing prosecution of the platform for failing to moderate to the EU’s satisfaction.

 

That a high-level EU official felt it was appropriate to threaten an American citizen using an American tech platform to interview an American politician ahead of an American election is more than just foreign censorship run amok — it reeks of so-called foreign election interference, interference that the EU claims is a grave threat to democracy.

 

The EU’s censoriousness runs beyond these high-profile examples. It is at work in countless small moments in which American tech companies have felt the boot of EU regulators who threatened them with large fines if they didn’t run their platforms and moderate content as Brussels saw fit. Such pressure affects the overall approach companies take to content moderation.

 

For all these reasons, President Trump is right to call out the EU’s regulatory scheme as a large-scale grift intent on forcing EU views on American companies. Tariffs on French wine, Italian cheeses, or German autos may seem to hit the EU where it hurts, but tariffs would also penalize American consumers and fail to address the policy issues at hand.

 

The EU is apparently intent on crippling its own economy, silencing speakers, and stifling innovation. But that doesn’t mean the U.S. should shoot itself in the foot, too. Instead, the U.S. should illustrate the benefits of a light-touch approach to American innovation, support our companies that are standing up to regulation abroad, and resist the siren song to engage in similar regulations on antitrust and speech at home.

Will the Real Bobby Kennedy and Tulsi Gabbard Please Stand Up?

National Review Online

Friday, January 31, 2025

 

It shouldn’t be shocking that President Trump has nominated an evidence-based, pro-vaccine figure to be his HHS secretary.

 

It is, however, a little surprising that this person turns out to be Robert F. Kennedy Jr.

 

Or, so you’d believe, listening to Kennedy testify at his confirmation hearings. There are confirmation conversions, and then there’s what we’ve seen from Kennedy and Tulsi Gabbard the last couple of days. They’ve made the famous statement attributed to Henry of Navarre — Paris is worth a Mass — look sincere by comparison.

 

It goes without saying that there’s a role for gadflies and dissenters in our society (we’ve published many of them over the years), and their deep-felt convictions can make them admirable even if they are wrong-headed. They aren’t usually appointed to positions of major governmental responsibility after accumulating zero or very little relevant experience, though. Back in the day, no one would have thought to make Ralph Nader the secretary of transportation, and if he had been nominated, he surely would have stuck to his guns during his confirmation hearings.

 

Kennedy and Gabbard, in contrast, are selling new versions of themselves minted shortly after Trump picked them.

 

At his Senate finance committee hearing, Kennedy wanted everyone to know that he’s not anti-vaccine — and has the receipts. His own children are vaccinated. He left out that he has said that he regrets that. He’s written books about vaccines. Yes, but he didn’t mention that they were all intended to cast doubt on vaccines. He’s just been willing to ask uncomfortable questions. Asking questions is obviously fine — if you are willing to accept evidence not to your liking. But Kennedy has a long, undistinguished record of relying on the work of charlatans to make wild charges, of not correcting the record when he is proven wrong, and then going to find more bad evidence to continue to make the same insinuations.

 

Under more focused scrutiny on his second day of hearings before the Senate health committee, RFK Jr. had more trouble dancing around his views and pointedly refused to state that vaccines don’t cause autism. On top of this, he once again demonstrated his rank ignorance of Medicare. After he badly botched basic statements about that program and Medicaid on the first day, one might have assumed that he would have quickly read up to avoid further embarrassing mistakes, but he still couldn’t get the basics right (for instance, he struggled when asked to explain what the different parts of Medicare do).

 

Meanwhile, in her testimony before the Senate intelligence committee, Tulsi Gabbard couldn’t persuasively explain why she’d gone from a fierce, uncompromising opponent of Section 702 of FISA, which allows the U.S. to surveil foreigners overseas, to a firm supporter. Her sudden shift is as stark as a member of the Woman’s Christian Temperance Union suddenly endorsing Jägermeister shots during lunch breaks. She also seemed tenuously informed on the workings of the program.

 

Repeatedly pressed on her views on Edward Snowden, whom she once considered a brave whistleblower who should be pardoned forthwith, she reverted over and over again to a rote answer about how Snowden broke the law and shouldn’t have released our secrets the way he did. Gabbard held on to this talking point, clearly crafted by her handlers, for dear life.

 

Watching these performances, observers who have disagreed with Kennedy and Gabbard over the years might be tempted to conclude that at least they don’t have the courage of their convictions. But Kennedy and Gabbard are obviously trying to backpedal just enough to get confirmed without any true change in their worldviews. Senators shouldn’t be fooled.

Media Matters?

By Nick Catoggio

Thursday, January 30, 2025

 

I’ve never had much use for Jim Acosta, the now-former CNN anchor who left the network this week after management proposed moving his morning show to midnight.

 

He’s smug. He’s sanctimonious. He radiates scorn for the American right, particularly in its Trumpy incarnation. He … sounds like this newsletter! You would think I’d be a fan.

 

But no, Acosta’s politics are considerably more liberal than mine from what I can tell. And while I’m always down for anti-Trump polemics, I find them easier to take on the page than as performed on TV. Especially when they’re presented in the context of news.

 

Acosta was a chronic irritant for the president during his first term, even earning a temporary ban from the White House. (Trump received the news of his departure on Tuesday with as much grace as you’d expect.) And so watching the network ring in a second MAGA presidency by promptly exiling his nemesis to garbage time couldn’t help but seem like a capitulation.

 

The overt antagonism that colored much of our coverage of Trump 1.0 cannot and will not be repeated, CNN seemed to be saying. We need a new approach.

 

Which isn’t the first time we’ve heard that sentiment from cable news following the election.

 

But who can blame them? CNN and its more left-wing rival, MSNBC, were pulverized in the ratings after Election Day as demoralized Trump-hating viewers checked out of politics. That’s begun to change since the inauguration, but there’s no escaping the sense that Rachel Maddow’s exquisitely furrowed brow has failed as a business strategy and as a political strategy. If the goal of liberal media is to overcome Fox News and beat back right-wing authoritarianism, well, just check the scoreboard.

 

The definition of insanity, it’s said, is doing the same thing over and over and expecting a different result. The country’s political media seems poised to take that to heart in Trump’s second term. They want a different result so they’re going to stop doing the same thing over and over. Acosta-ism is out and soon to be replaced with, uh, what, exactly?

 

“It doesn’t matter,” says the pessimist, veering into nihilism.

 

Just the facts.

 

What is the point of political news coverage?

 

“To make money,” we might say, cynically and correctly. But if money’s all you’re after, you’d do better to become a forthright propagandist than a reporter. It takes less skill, requires much less overhead, and can even open up political opportunities for those who excel at it. Only a chump would work in journalism if he’s looking to get rich quick (or at all) but entrepreneurs resolved to take that path will get closer by emulating Gateway Pundit or Breitbart than the New York Times.

 

And never has that been truer than now. Our president is turning the federal government into a patronage system in which media moguls will or won’t find their business holdings harassed by the state depending on how “friendly” their newspapers are to him. Employing a reporter who insists on doing his or her job ethically, without favor, is now a genuine financial risk.

 

So forget money. The only reason to cover news in the Trump era is if you feel called to it, because you recognize there’s a civic benefit to doing so. Even postliberals would concede, albeit insincerely, that government should be accountable to the people. For that accountability to happen, the public needs to be informed about what the government is up to.

 

And so the easy, even obvious, advice to the press on how to approach Trump’s second term is to do just that. Drop the impassioned critiques of the president and take a “just the facts” approach to his administration. Inform the public. Give us fewer Jim Acostas decorating the news with smarmy asides and more Maggie Habermans breaking scoops. The more opinionated the media is about Trump, after all, the easier it becomes for Americans to dismiss negative coverage as liberal activism designed to turn them against him. They won’t hold him accountable under circumstances like that.

 

Just the facts. That’s what the people want. Tell them about the president’s power grabs and corruption and they’ll turn against him without needing to be led.

 

It’s a nice theory. It’s also nonsense. Where is the evidence, exactly, that modern Americans give a wet fig about power grabs and corruption?

 

The most brazenly corrupt thing Trump has done in his first 10 days in office is to free the January 6 insurrectionists—all of them, including the scores convicted of violent offenses. Political reporters have covered that story lavishly. It’s tailor-made to sour the public on Trump, as most Americans know what happened at the Capitol and opposed clemency for the perpetrators. It’s not a financial scandal in which only forensic accountants are capable of understanding the nuts and bolts. It’s gut-level, easy-to-grasp right-and-wrong stuff.

 

Or so you would think. Of the last six national polls taken following the release of the J6ers, Trump’s job approval is net-positive in four and barely negative in the other two. The most recent one, from Emerson, has him 8 points above water. A separate poll from Quinnipiac conducted after the rioters were let go found Trump’s Republican Party at 43-45 in favorability, meaningfully better than the 31-57 rating for Democrats. Never before in American history has a president rewarded those who committed violent crimes in his name with pardons; even so, 54 percent of registered voters pronounced themselves “generally optimistic” about what’s to come from this presidency.

 

Mind you, some J6ers have already been re-arrested on unrelated criminal charges since being freed. One was killed by police during a traffic stop when he allegedly resisted and had an “altercation” with an officer. The political press has been covering all of that too, just-the-facts style. “Trump puts public at risk by releasing dangerous offenders” seems lab-designed to detonate our law-and-order president’s public support on the launchpad, one would think. It hasn’t.

 

To explain why it hasn’t, you’re stuck arguing either that a popular backlash to the J6 clemency is in the process of forming but not quite “ripe” yet—or that it’s not coming, period.

 

All of which is to say that the dilemma for the political press in covering Trump’s second term isn’t actually a question about how opinionated or not reporters should be. The dilemma is that it’s unclear what purpose the political press now serves in a decadent country that no longer cares about holding government accountable and employs powerful tools to aggressively screen out information that might rouse it to do so.

 

Bad faith.

 

Thom Tillis, the most pitiful mollusk in a Republican Senate aquarium chock full of invertebrates, declared his support on Thursday for Trump uber-toady Kash Patel to lead the FBI. That was no surprise: Last week he supplied what amounted to the deciding vote to confirm talking head Pete Hegseth to lead the world’s most powerful military—after urging a witness against Hegseth to come forward with her testimony by implying that he’d vote no on the nomination if she did.

 

That’s weird, don’t you think?

 

After all, our political press has reported extensively on the foibles of Patel and Hegseth over the last few months. I’ve referenced that reporting many times in this newsletter. We’ve gotten “just the facts” about both men and the facts establish that each is grossly unfit for office, enough so that I’d be surprised if more than a handful of Senate Republicans were willing to say otherwise in private. Yet a senator from a swing state who’s up for reelection next year is supporting the two anyway, seemingly untroubled by the possibility that centrist voters who have access to the facts about their unfitness might punish him at the polls for voting yes.

 

Seems weird! But it isn’t, of course. Tillis is making a rational, if cowardly, calculation that Americans no longer care about corruption in their leaders even if the evidence substantiating it is right in front of them. They’ll always find a way to dismiss adverse facts—or to avoid them altogether.

 

Some will dismiss them because they’ve adopted the Trumpian view that corruption is evidence of strength and resolve. Some will dismiss them for reasons of partisanship, because being a member of the “team” means sticking with the team when things get rough. (Tillis is obviously more worried about being seen as not loyal enough by Republican primary voters than as too loyal by North Carolina’s general election voters.) And some will dismiss them because they’re boiled frogs—numb to all of this already after four years of Trump 1.0, overwhelmed by how much there is to keep track of, resigned to the notion that rampant corruption is somehow the price of making America great again, and whatabout-ed into believing that all presidents are as crooked as their leader is, if not more so.

 

But many won’t so much “dismiss” Patel’s and Hegseth’s corruption as remain blissfully ignorant about it, having never heard about it in the first place.

 

That’s the fatal flaw in the “just the facts” approach to how the media should cover Trump’s second term. Digging up unflattering facts about him and his cronies is easy; what’s hard is figuring out how to get those facts to a population that increasingly consumes bespoke news that’s designed to filter out information that might challenge their prejudices. Thom Tillis presumably assumes, correctly, that his Republican constituents and a decent chunk of independents have no idea why anyone would find Patel or Hegseth unqualified for the Cabinet because they’ve literally never seen an argument to that effect. If they lean right, their daily news menu has ruthlessly gatekept that information from them or clubbed it into submission with spin.

 

So why wouldn’t Tillis vote yes on both? Most of his voters literally have no reason to think he shouldn’t.

 

The story of Trump’s first 10 days is a story of him engaging in out-in-the-open corruption, the political press springing into action to report it out, and … seemingly no one caring. Take the new “memecoin” that the president launched a few days before being sworn in. Plenty of media outlets covered that, and not just political ones; obviously it was a big deal in the financial press too. Trump’s attempt to monetize the presidency was so brazen and scammy that even crypto enthusiasts took to complaining about it, fearing that it would give the industry a bad (well, worse) name.

 

Has it hurt Trump at all? The facts are out there, dispassionately reported. Who’s upset about it?

 

Or take the trend in media companies choosing to settle lawsuits filed against them by Trump despite the fact that American defamation law strongly favors the press in court. First ABC News did it, then Facebook did it, now Elon Musk’s Twitter (er, X) is poised to do it despite the fact that the president’s case against it is weak. That’s an unlikely winning streak for a guy prone to filing nonsense lawsuits against his political enemies seemingly just to harass them. A cynic might suspect that these “settlements” are really de facto bribes by corporate entities who understand that greasing Trump’s palm will make life under his administration more pleasant for them. We’ll see many more such “settlements” in the next four years, no doubt.

 

This too has been covered by numerous outlets. How many people have you encountered who are agitated about it? Has it been picked up by a single media property that’s remotely Trump-friendly?

 

To hold government accountable, political media need a public with an appetite for accountability and a pipeline to deliver pertinent information to that public. Lacking one is a crisis; lacking both means endgame for liberalism.

 

The kitchen table.

 

My advice to political news reporters on how to cover Trump 2.0, then, is this: Play Tetris instead. You’ll be just as productive.

 

If you feel you must expose his scandals as a matter of professional duty, though, I suppose there’s value in chronicling them for the historical record. Just don’t expect most Americans to care—and don’t expect too much of the historical record, frankly. History is written by the winners, and if postliberals prevail long-term, the mythmaking around Trump to come from future generations of Republicans will be so fulsome as to make even an elderly “Camelot”-worshipping Kennedy slobberer retch.

 

Your best bet for relevance in the here and now is to devote less coverage to Trump’s corruption and more to how he is or isn’t keeping the kitchen-table promises he made during the campaign. Most Americans are fine with authoritarianism, it seems, but they are not fine with out-of-the-blue federal spending freezes that suddenly threaten whatever particular gravy train they happen to be riding.

 

“Trump is a gangster shaking down companies for protection money and unleashing his imprisoned goons on the public” doesn’t inflame the noble American spirit. “Eggs are getting more expensive” is how you sell newspapers and get Capone.

 

Even then, there’s only so much you can do to sway Trump supporters by directly attacking their savior. Voters who have experienced ahem, a “MAGA revelation” will not lightly abandon the Good News because of some Maggie Haberman scoop. But the public might be more receptive to criticism of Trump’s deputies, the lesser beings around him to whom they owe no divine loyalty. Already, I see, Americans have begun to sour on his shadow president. “Trump is incompetent and failing to deliver” is not a headline that will meaningfully influence public opinion, true or not, but “Trump’s team is incompetent and failing to deliver”? That one might have legs.

 

Whatever happens, I hope the mainstream political press accepts the inevitable blistering criticism of its Trump coverage by right-wing media in the spirit in which it’s offered—as pure horse dookie, designed to discredit not the stuff they report that’s false but the stuff that’s true. Trump has been quite candid about that in the past. To the modern right, Jonathan Last recently noted, no amount of success by “elites” can compensate for elites’ mistakes and no amount of failure by populists can discredit populists’ successes. Their answer to the question “How should the media properly cover Trump?” will never be anything other in practice than “With the same degree of North Korean-style obsequiousness that we do.”

 

Still, Tetris is probably the way to go. If nothing else, it’ll be less aggravating than having to cover this dystopian circus for another 1,400-plus days.

The Federal Government Is Not a Startup

By Kevin D. Williamson

Friday, January 31, 2025

 

People have been saying “We need to run government like a business!”—and trying to do so—for 200 years. The project always fails. The question isn’t whether it is going to fail again this time around, with the Silicon Valley tech mafia leading the way—the question is whether Elon Musk is smart enough to understand why it is going to fail.

 

OpenAI, the firm that owns ChatGPT, reportedly loses about $150 … a second. Serious people value the firm at $300 billion. And that comes after DeepSeek, the Chinese open-source competitor, came out blazing. People who follow OpenAI closely argue that the firm’s business model has some pretty steep challenges: For anyone other than hobbyists, its tools are not actually all that cheap to use. So, it is losing money at a relatively high price point while facing competition from an open-source competitor, which is bound to put downward pressure on prices.

 

In the frothy days of the 1990s dot-com bubble, companies without a real business model and not much in the way of customers or revenue saw—for a time—sky-high market valuations based solely on the fact that they were positioning themselves to be part of the coming digital revolution. That worked out great for a few firms and not at all for a lot more. The tech sector is a little more buttoned-down these days, but the distance between big idea and big profit remains considerable, and there is a kind of cultural aspect to it as well, as in Silicon Valley’s eternal founder-vs.-manager discourse. And even in today’s more conservative business climate, tech firms are not in the main famous for being beady-eyed stewards of cashflow—they are epic pissers-away of money, but the upsides to startup success are so rich that they can maintain a pretty high burn rate. What’s $150 a second among friends?

 

The federal government currently spends a little more than $200,000 a second. And the big idea from Donald Trump and Elon Musk is to lower that number by bringing in the sort of people who are currently overseeing that $150/second loss at OpenAI.

 

Musk, like many of his Silicon Valley colleagues, has made a great fortune for himself, great fortunes for many investors, and more modest fortunes for any number of employees and business partners. Our nation’s high-tech economy is a national treasure, albeit one that is driven in large part by factors that Trumpism sneers at: higher education, high finance, immigration, and globalization. It is the envy of the world, but it is based on talents and capabilities that are not necessarily well-suited to the pursuit of efficiency in government—even efficiency per se—or to the grunt work of cutting spending. In fact, the gigantic revenue gushers and sky-high market valuations that characterize successful startups have created a Silicon Valley management model that is (with important exceptions) relatively lax when it comes to spending discipline.

 

Even successful firms such as Apple and Alphabet have long maintained large divisions that lose piles of money while offering no obvious path toward the creation of a profitable product. In theory, a lot of that is portfolio-building, a quest for “moonshot” ideas that could—someday—become big businesses. But as businesses mature, continuing to lose tens of billions of dollars on such projects becomes untenable. That’s why the big idea in the trenches over at Google these days isn’t artificial intelligence—it is job security.

 

Musk is probably not the best guy to run an efficiency project. It is true that since taking over the firm formerly known as Twitter, Musk, by his own account, cut about 80 percent of its work force—which very neatly mirrors the roughly 80 percent decline in the firm’s value. That isn’t efficiency—it is taking a big thing and making it a small thing. (Musk says the company is “barely breaking even.”) Jeff Bezos of Amazon, a relatively aggressive cost-manager, might have been a better choice. 

 

But Amazon, in spite of its reputation, isn’t exactly a model of ruthless efficiency, either. Its profit margins have historically been pretty modest, in the 4 to 6 percent range, less than half of what’s recently been typical of, say, Exxon. But when you have the kind of income and growth Amazon enjoys (it lately has been the world’s second-largest firm by revenue), there isn’t a lot of pressure to switch to cheaper coffee in the break room or count paperclips. If you can find business leaders and entrepreneurs who can deliver Silicon Valley-style explosive growth, you don’t keep them on a short leash or nickel-and-dime them. You just enjoy your dividend. OpenAI is losing a ton of money right now—but it is not right now that most investors are thinking about. Initial losses are part of the natural order of things in that kind of business.

 

The big tech startups have not been successful because they are themselves efficiently run businesses—they have been successful because they provide tools to achieve efficiency in other businesses, and throughout other industries. That is what drives their revenue and share prices. Facebook provides a way to circulate information (and disinformation!) much more cheaply than you could with a 20^th-century-style daily print newspaper—and it does so irrespective of whether Facebook itself is efficiently run. People who earn money through Substack or Etsy or Instagram don’t necessarily need those businesses to be efficiently managed—in fact, they may benefit from inefficiencies in the management of those businesses. They just need them to provide efficiency for their own purposes. Unless YouTube is so badly run that it ceases to operate, Mr. Beast is going to be just fine. 

 

And, for their part, successful new entrants to the tech-startup hall of fame will probably in most cases follow roughly the same pattern as their predecessors: burning through money with relatively little discipline during an initial stage of dramatic growth before either settling into corporate maturity or burning out. There are not a lot of lessons in any of that for achieving fiscal stability in government.

 

Washington’s problem isn’t that it lacks bold new ideas—it is that people who have to run for election every few years are disinclined to do hard, unpopular things. If straightening out the federal books were mainly a matter of boosting revenue or coming up with big, profitable new ideas, then looking to the tech sector for advice and inspiration would be the most natural thing. But what Washington mainly requires is the old-fashioned bean-counting stuff, and the tools that will get the job done have been with us since Luca Pacioli invented modern accounting in the 15^th century.

 

There is one very good reason smart businessmen fail when they try to run government like a business: Government is not a business.

I’m a Sucker for America

By Jonah Goldberg

Wednesday, January 29, 2025

 

A video of Anthony Mackie, the African American actor tapped to take over the role of Captain America, appeared on a panel in Italy to promote Captain America: Brave New World. “To me Captain America represents a lot of different things and I don’t think the term ‘America’ should be one of those representations,” Mackie said. “It’s about a man who keeps his word, who has honor, dignity and integrity. Someone who is trustworthy and dependable.”

 

Much like the influenza in my bloodstream, it went viral. 

 

By Tuesday, Mackie tried to clarify. “Let me be clear about this, I’m a proud American and taking on the shield of a hero like CAP is the honor of a lifetime,” he wrote on Instagram. “I have the utmost respect for those who serve and have served our country. CAP has universal characteristics that people all over the world can relate to.”

 

I’ll be honest. I don’t think it’s a great mea culpa. The issue wasn’t that he insulted “those who serve and have served our country.” The issue was he insulted America itself. We’ll return to that in a moment.

 

I’m happy to take Mackie at his word, that he didn’t mean it to sound the way it did to some. I should also say that I’m also incredibly tired of these sorts of controversies. We went through this when Superman dropped “fighting for the American way” from his motto. In 2021 it was “Truth, Justice and a Better Tomorrow.” In 2006, it was “truth, justice, and all that is good.”

 

Now, I didn’t like that stuff very much back then, and I still don’t. But I will say that the case for Superman going full cosmopolitan—citizen of the world and all that—is much stronger than the case for Captain America. Superman isn’t from here—Earth, I mean—and you could tell he was already trending globalist by 1987 in Superman IV: The Quest for Peace (known in my corner of the world as Superman IV: Quest for My Money Back):

 

The culture war fights over these things can be exhausting, even for people not sweating Theraflu. It’s a bit like the war on Christmas or the Gulf of America: The point is just to make people angry as simplistically as possible. By the way, there are arguments other than “Hollywood hates America” that explain why an actor promoting a movie in Italy might opine, clumsily, that you don’t have to be an American to like Captain America. But, for obvious reasons (or at least once-obvious reasons), blaming capitalism is less fun for righties than blaming America-hating Hollywood libruls.

 

Now, let me be clear: I am not saying that there isn’t ample anti-Americanism, from subtle to strident, in Hollywood fare. There is. A lot of West Coast progressives are, or have been, quite hostile to America. And I don’t just mean Oliver Stone or Jane Fonda, or the aforementioned Martin Sheen. I could give you a few paragraphs on my contempt for Adam McKay’s contempt for America and capitalism, the two things that made it possible to translate his talent into fabulous wealth. But my tank is running low. 

 

Suffice it to say, I think a lot of prominent Hollywood types are uncomfortable talking about America in basic patriotic terms, never mind making a good case for America as an indispensable nation and force for good in the world. Some can: Tom Hanks and Gary Sinise come to mind. And some of the right-wingers in show business can go too far in the other direction, thinking that defending your country to foreigners means pointing out that without us you’d be speaking German. 

 

That’s one reason I hate these fights. The loudest voices are more scared to concede a point to the other side than to take a reasonable, nuanced position. Saying America has fallen short of her ideals more than once doesn’t make you an America-hater. And saying that Americans should be proud of America’s ideals and her commitment to them, no matter how flawed, doesn’t make you some jingoistic freedom fries gobbler or the closeted Nazi dad in American Beauty.

 

The point is, Hollywood needs to get over its reflexive discomfort with basic patriotism. Saying this is a good country and a force for good in the world isn’t the same as saying it’s perfect or that it hasn’t made mistakes. And saying it’s better than a lot of authoritarian countries should come easily—if you’re not worried about box office returns in China or Iran.  

 

But let’s get back to America. Mackie says that the defining characteristics of the character he plays are “honor, dignity and integrity. Someone who is trustworthy and dependable.”

 

Is it so hard to add “patriotism” to that list? And is it too heavy a lift to concede that being patriotic isn’t at odds with those other virtues? Indeed, should patriots, regardless of where they are on the ideological spectrum, think that honor, dignity, and integrity should define America’s conduct whenever possible?

 

Yesterday, I had a great conversation with Francis Dearnley from the Telegraph. He closed with a dire warning about the direction some fear America is going. Geopolitically, America’s strength doesn’t just come from our military might. It comes from the fact that our allies want to be with us for other reasons, starting with the fact we are a good country. They are our friends, and they look to America for moral, principled leadership. Lots of countries have superficial alliances—formal or informal transactional relationships with other powers. These are mercenary relationships. 

 

America has real friends who see America, for all of its flaws, as a nation that stands up for certain American ideals. They expect an America that conducts itself—or tries to—with honor and integrity. These friends organize their foreign policies around the idea that America is trustworthy and will honor her commitments. And we reap enormous benefits from that. 

 

I want America to be the preeminent global superpower not because I love being the strongest. I want America to be the preeminent global superpower because that’s good for America and the world. And, more importantly, the alternative contenders for the job all suck. If China, Russia, Iran et al. were liberal democracies, I wouldn’t care that much about who the toughest kid on the block was. But when all the other toughest kids are bullies, it’s good that the toughest isn’t a bully.

 

Not so, say the America Firsters. We need to be a bully, too. 

 

Now, some of Donald Trump’s defenders say that’s a misreading. Trump is just delivering the long-needed tough love our friends need to get their acts together. And if that’s all it turns out to be, that’s fine. 

 

But whatever four-dimensional-chess theory you want to deploy to defend Donald Trump’s rhetoric, it should account for the fact that a lot of his superfans don’t see, or care about, any alleged subtext. Just text. They don’t talk like this is all an effort to beef up the defenses of the free world. They talk like the free world doesn’t matter—unless it pays up. They think it’s great for America to bully allies and talk about using force for territorial expansion. They think, as podcaster Matt Walsh put it, “the moral of the story is that we can and should simply force lesser countries to fall in line.” 

 

This week, Sen. Mike Lee tweeted, “If you could snap your fingers and get us out of NATO today, would you?” He has taken to arguing that NATO is a “raw deal” for America. “NATO members must pay up now,” Lee declared. “If they don’t—and maybe even if they do—the U.S. should seriously consider leaving NATO.”

 

This is embarrassing. The “pay up” thing in particular is a sign of how Twitter rhetoric can break the blood-brain barrier. Pay up to whom?  The issue isn’t about paying dues or tribute to America, it’s about NATO members spending more money on their own defense—which they’ve been doing. 

 

Even if Trump doesn’t understand how NATO works, Lee does. But he mimics Trump’s mafioso-protection-racket rhetoric all the same.  

 

There was a time when Mike Lee would have been appalled by Donald Trump because Donald Trump doesn’t behave with honor, dignity, or integrity. And I’ve talked a lot about how the right has bent its definition of good character to fit Donald Trump. Apparently it’s too much to ask that Trump conform to the preexisting definition.

 

The NATO talk is just how this dynamic gets applied to foreign policy. The currency of life and politics for Trump is domination, intimidation, subservience, and transaction. Now we’re told that’s how America itself should interact with the world. 

 

***

 

To come back to Mackie, my problem with his statement and apology is that he still seemed incapable of understanding—and articulating— that there is no contradiction or inconsistency about a character defined by honor, dignity, and integrity being called Captain America. After all, in the comics and even in the Marvel movies, Captain America was never a “love it or leave it,” or “fight for it wrong or right” guy. He stood up for American ideals and American decency. When America was in the right, he fought for it. When America—or the American government—was wrong, he still fought for what is best about it. As Cap once put it:

 

Doesn’t matter what the press says. Doesn’t matter what the politicians or the mobs say. Doesn’t matter if the whole country decides that something wrong is something right.

 

This nation was founded on one principle above all else:

 

The requirement that we stand up for what we believe, no matter the odds or the consequences. When the mob and the press and the whole world tell you to move, your job is to plant yourself like a tree beside the river of truth, and tell the whole world – “No, YOU move.”

 

This gets to my whole thing about the difference between nationalism and patriotism. The patriot sides with what is right, the nationalist for “the nation”— or its leader—right or wrong. America is not just an idea. But it is a nation formed around one. 

 

When it comes to foreign policy, my problem with Trump, Lee, and that whole crowd is that they’re bending American idealism to what is really just nationalism, rather than trying to guide the nation in the direction of American ideals. And it seems to me that the patriotic thing to say in response is something like, “No, YOU move.”

So Much for Germany’s Alternative to American Capitalism

By Dominic Pino

Thursday, January 30, 2025

 

On January 26, the Wall Street Journal published a long article headlined, “Germany’s economic model is broken, and no one has a plan B.” One of the reasons no one has a plan B is that Germany was not supposed to need one. Just ask a non-free-market commentator from the past decade or so: Germany had gotten away from all that “market fundamentalism” nonsense and had figured out how to prosper with big government and powerful unions.

 

It seems that Germany’s economic planners believed all the glowing press they were getting about how they had triumphed over “neoliberalism” and ushered in a golden age of manufacturing, proving those American capitalists wrong. Now, the American economy has been leading the developed world in economic growth since the pandemic, and Germany is stagnating under the weight of its own policies.

 

What Germany Was Supposed to Be

 

“Economists have caught a case of Germanophilia,” wrote Derek Thompson for The Atlantic in October 2010. “Americans have looked across the ocean with envy. As we cut costs, outsource jobs, drown at double-digit unemployment and run up huge trade deficits, Germany seems to be doing the opposite: reaping the benefits of cheaper labor, keeping German workers in German jobs, and running surreal trade surplus numbers.”

 

The Washington Post reported in June 2011, “The German government has been unafraid to pursue policies that induce companies to preserve high-paying jobs and boost exports, embracing two words that can make lawmakers in Washington recoil: industrial policy.” Industrial policy, which has become more popular among policymakers since then, involves close cooperation between government, businesses, and labor unions to structure the economy in the national interest.

 

Germany’s labor model eschews that icky competition stuff that greedy Americans are obsessed with. “Employers group together in what would probably be considered illegal cartels in the United States to work with government officials to define what kinds of certifications and training programs they need,” wrote Matt Yglesias for Vox in April 2014. “But that strong employer-state collaboration is tempered by a much more powerful voice for organized labor than exists in the United States.”

 

That includes worker representation on corporate boards, often called “co-determination” in the German model. In a December 2018 column headlined “American Capitalism Isn’t Working,” David Leonhardt of the New York Times praised a bill from Elizabeth Warren that would have brought that idea to the United States. Susan Holmberg of the Roosevelt Institute wrote for the New York Times in January 2019, “German workers have fared well under co-determination. . . . Workers traded raises for job security, but that investment has paid off.”

 

The German model has also drawn praise from the self-described conservative group American Compass, which published an article in September 2020 called “Workers of the World” praising Germany’s labor policies. Despite using poor methodology to perpetuate the myth of U.S. wage stagnation since the 1970s in other articles, American Compass in this article echoes Holmberg in praising the German model for encouraging lower pay for the greater good, noting that “trade unions have agreed to set wages below marginal productivity in order to increase the competitiveness of export sectors.”

 

Those export sectors, guided along by the wise hand of government, were supposed to be the evidence of Germany’s economic success. Unlike the financialized and tech-heavy American economy, Germany was focused on making physical stuff and sending it to the world. Harold Meyerson wrote for the Washington Post in September 2014 that Germany’s “economic optimism” could be explained in part by “the strength of the country’s manufacturing sector and the concomitant weakness of its financial sector.” Because many major German companies are privately held, German CEOs aren’t as subjected to shareholder pressure in decision-making, which had “ensured that prosperity is widely shared in Germany — not concentrated at the top, as it is in the United States.”

 

Germany put aside rapacious American-style capitalism to keep more employees in manufacturing even when it was less profitable to do so. “American companies are looking to make money — they have a pretty single-minded commitment to profitability,” Martin Baily of the Brookings Institution told the Washington Post in February 2017. “German companies make money too, but they’re a little more committed to the long term and to their workforce.” That same article also quoted Peter Navarro, an anti-trade adviser to Donald Trump, who said, “We envision a more Germany-style economy, where 20 percent of our workforce is in manufacturing.”

 

In addition to manufacturing tons of cars, Germany was also manufacturing the transition to renewable energy. This other industrial-policy choice was also supposed to be a masterstroke by the German government, praised as “ambitious” by sophisticated commentators around the world. Chancellor Angela Merkel was Time’s Person of the Year in 2015, the same year The Economist named her “the indispensable European.”

 

What Actually Happened

 

It has all come to a grinding halt. “Germany’s manufacturing industry, the world’s third largest, has shrunk steadily for seven years,” that Wall Street Journal article from Sunday reports. “Germany’s industrial output has fallen by 15% since 2018, and the total number of people employed in the manufacturing sector is down 3%.” (For perspective, U.S. industrial output has grown by 10 percent since 2018, and manufacturing employment has grown by 2 percent.)

 

“Gross domestic product has roughly flatlined since 2019, before the start of the Covid-19 pandemic—the longest period of stagnation since the end of World War II,” the story continues. “Most economists expect it will stagnate again this year.”

 

Germany’s economic planners actually did what free markets are accused of doing: They made Germany’s economy dependent on China and have encouraged the consumption of dirtier sources of energy. China was buying a lot of those exports Germany was producing, but as China’s economy has slowed, so has Germany’s. And the predictable — and predicted — failure of Germany’s energy transition has led to use of coal and purchases of Russian natural gas whenever the wind doesn’t blow or the sun doesn’t shine.

 

As always, one of the major problems with economic planning is the inability to adapt when circumstances change. The market system is a trial-and-error process guided by profits and losses — with emphasis on the errors and losses, which help in discovering what works. German policymakers who thought they could outsmart market prices are now out of ideas. “I see no serious initiative to try and develop a new economic model,” a German economics professor told the Journal.

 

“Trade in goods is more critical to Germany’s economy than oil is to Texas or tech to California—an overdependence that is the result of decades of government policy that supported export manufacturing while creating hurdles to investment in new sectors such as IT or in the country’s infrastructure,” the story continues. The U.S. is home to 61 of the 100 most valuable technology companies in the world, including eight of the top ten. Germany is home to two: SAP at No. 14 and Infineon at No. 85. Neither of them was founded this century.

 

But Germany was able to make a company town out of Ingolstadt, a city in Bavaria. “Today, nearly half of the jobs in Ingolstadt are in the auto industry. Many of the rest provide services to those auto workers,” the Journal reports. And now that the auto industry is struggling, “there are signs of a Detroit effect,” a hotel owner in the city said.

 

The energy transition has yielded energy prices sometimes ten times as high as those in Texas. “Over a third of industrial companies in Germany are cutting investments in core processes due to high energy costs,” the story says. On top of that, residents face a heavy tax burden, with the average single worker paying 47.9 percent of his income to the government. (But universal health care!)

 

There was a brief moment in 2010–2011 when Germany was closing the gap on the United States in GDP per capita. But the U.S. has left Germany in the dust since then. The U.S. was about $6,000 per person ahead of Germany in 2012 and is about $11,000 ahead today, adjusted for inflation.

 

Ten years ago, U.S. commentators did the same thing with Canada as they have done with Germany, hailing it as the new, genteel economic model that would triumph over rough-and-tumble American capitalism. Today, the richest Canadian province has lower median earnings per person than the poorest U.S. state. As the failures of Germany’s economic planning become apparent, maybe it’ll click that there’s something to those dusty old ideas about free markets.

Thank Trump’s Iconoclasm for the ‘Deferred Resignations’ Masterstroke

By Noah Rothman

Wednesday, January 29, 2025

 

Donald Trump’s fans and critics alike acknowledge that the president’s contempt for orthodoxy guides his decision-making and policy preferences. To his fans, that characteristic serves him well. Among his critics, it is a prejudice that drags his administration and the country through crisis after crisis. The truth is likely somewhere in the middle. The president’s iconoclasm creates its fair share of headaches both for Trump and his supporters. But it’s not without its upsides.

 

The Trump administration’s experimentative approach to identifying and excising government waste has been many things, but unenthusiastic is not one of those. The executive branch’s approach seems to have been to shut off as many spigots as they could all at once and wait to see which wheeze first. That approach produced a lot of wheezing, and some of the administration’s most controversial (and legally dubious) maneuvers have already been paused.

 

“This is a really sloppy way of doing this,” said Wall Street Journal opinion writer Bill Galston of the administration’s efforts to halt the disbursement of congressionally appropriated funds. “This is just classic Trump. He believes it’s better to be fast and sloppy than slow and precise.”

 

True enough, and the lawsuits surrounding this administration’s headlong rush to control wasteful spending may haunt this presidency. And yet, there’s a lot to like about the president’s decision to offer a “deferred resignation program” to every member of the executive branch save military personnel, the U.S. Postal Service, immigration enforcement, or other roles relating to national security.

 

On Tuesday evening, federal employees received a terse letter with the subject line “Fork in the Road.” It informed them that they would be expected to report back to the office full-time and in person (something only 6 percent of federal employees do at present), that their roles may yet be eliminated, and the offices in which they worked may be auctioned off. And if the discomfort or uncertainty of all that is too much to bear, they were invited to resign.

 

“If you resign under this program, you will retain all pay and benefits regardless of your daily workload and will be exempted from all applicable in-person work requirements until September 30, 2025 (or earlier if you choose to accelerate your resignation for any reason),” the letter read.

 

A federal freakout followed.

 

“This offer should not be viewed as voluntary,” the head of the public sector union, American Federation of Government Employees, said in response to the edict. “Between the flurry of anti-worker executive orders and policies, it is clear that the Trump administration’s goal is to turn the federal government into a toxic environment where workers cannot stay even if they want to.”

 

Two unnamed federal employees filed an immediate request for relief from the courts in the form of a class-action lawsuit alleging that it is somehow outside the purview of the president to retain “information about every employee of the U.S. Executive Branch” for the purposes of . . . emailing them.

 

Others insisted that the Office of Personnel Management’s (OPM) program cannot be described as a buy-out (which OPM did not) because employees who take advantage of it are expected to work until the end of the fiscal year. But they don’t have to work at all — not until they find employment elsewhere. “Except in rare cases determined by your agency, you are not expected to work,” the very first entry on OPM’s FAQ on the program read.

 

The Trump administration estimates that up to 10 percent of the federal workforce — roughly 200,000 government employees — may take the offer, saving the feds $100 billion in the process. That won’t avert the fiscal crisis this country is heading toward, but every little bit helps. Moreover, Trump’s maneuver is likely to be well-regarded by voters — at least, initially. Of the 15 executive orders Reuters/Ipsos put to respondents in its latest survey, “Downsizing the federal government” was by far the most popular. Sixty-one percent of those polled approved of that objective, while only 35 percent opposed it. No other initiative achieved anything like that level of acclaim, which suggests “deferred resignations” aren’t cutting against the cultural grain but with it.

 

Moreover, given the form in which opposition to this initiative has taken, the federal employees displaced by this program shouldn’t count on the public’s sympathy. “Many described conditions as reminiscent of the McCarthy era,” a recent New York Times report on the rampant hyperbole sweeping through the executive branch read, “and were despondent to see how quickly their office’s leaders acquiesced.” Department of Labor staffers were said to be inconsolable to learn that “a former political appointee” would be compelled to relinquish her civil service role. “Afterward,” the Times reported of one distraught DOL official, “she went into a closet, called her mother, and wept.”

 

There are bumps in the road ahead. This initiative might become less popular over time if it contributes to unresponsive or suboptimal government services. The federal employees who take advantage of this opportunity are likely to have prospects elsewhere in government or in the private sector, leaving a lower caliber of employee behind. Wholly unhelpful but typically intemperate comments from White House deputy chief of staff for policy, Stephen Miller, asserting that “federal government [employees] are overwhelmingly left of center” and that “it is essential for [Trump] to get control of government” will support the inevitable legal contention that this personnel shakeup was not value neutral. The president is entitled to the administration he wants, but political discrimination is still a violation of federal law.

 

For now, however, the maneuver looks like a masterstroke. And although Trump’s supporters are too quick to attribute his eccentricities to genius, it is hard to imagine a more conventional president of either party taking such a leap. And if, in its wake, this step shrinks the federal government and limits its reach into private affairs in which it should have no role, it will be a conservative reform that conservative reformers should welcome.

Bring On Iron Dome

National Review Online

Thursday, January 30, 2025

 

When, in March 1983 in a nationally televised speech, Ronald Reagan proposed the Strategic Defense Initiative, he asked the American “scientific community” — “those who gave us nuclear weapons” — “to turn their great talents to the cause of mankind and world peace, to give us the means of rendering these nuclear weapons impotent and obsolete.”

 

Reagan was proposing SDI as an alternative to the doctrine of Mutually Assured Destruction that he found personally repugnant. From the beginning, however, SDI was controversial. Opponents said it would cost too much, or lead to a renewed arms race, or scare the Soviets into striking first. Those who believed Reagan to be a warmonger or a dunce ridiculed the idea of space lasers and science-fiction weaponry. Ted Kennedy derisively called SDI “reckless Star Wars schemes,” and the name stuck. In 1986, then-senator Joe Biden harangued Reagan, calling his idea “one of the most reckless and irresponsible acts in the history of modern statecraft.”

 

Funny how that all turned out. Fully fledged ballistic missile defense technology (BMD) may not have been ripe in the ’80s, but not only did Reagan’s push to strengthen America’s defenses not lead to nuclear war between the superpowers, it arguably contributed to the end of the Cold War by forcing Soviet leadership to realize that they had no hope of outcompeting the West in technological prowess at the dawn of the Information Age.

 

Now, 40 years on, President Trump has issued an executive order mandating the development and deployment of an American “next-generation missile defense shield” designed “for the common defense” of “its citizens and the Nation.” Because the Trump White House entitled its executive order “Iron Dome for America,” there has been much guffawing and mockery, not very dissimilar to the Kennedy/Biden reaction four decades ago. New York Times reporter Matthew Bigg’s reaction was typical: “Experts immediately raised questions about whether an Iron Dome-style system was feasible for the United States, which is more than 400 times the size of Israel,” he wrote.

 

That misses the point, though. The “Iron Dome” moniker is more branding — as what everyone knows as a highly effective defense system — rather than the precise model of what Trump seeks to create.

 

Iron Dome, of course, has been defending Israel from Hezbollah and Hamas rocket attacks since 2011. That system, whose deployment and improvements have been partly funded by the United States, was designed to work against low-tech rocket and artillery attacks fired from relatively short range.

 

But while Iron Dome is by far the most famous layer of Israel’s integrated air-defense complex, it is by no means its only component: David’s Sling, Arrow 2, Arrow 3, and the U.S.-developed Terminal High Altitude Area Defense (THAAD) systems are designed to kill more advanced and harder-to-hit targets, including cruise missiles, kamikaze drones, and ballistic missiles.

 

What the United States needs — as the Trump executive order states — is a defense against “ballistic, hypersonic, advanced cruise missiles, and other next-generation aerial attacks from peer, near-peer, and rogue adversaries.” That’s a tall order, and it will require fully exploiting the opportunities presented by space.

 

It’s not as if America is starting from scratch. Work done in the Reagan years has borne fruit in the design and development of THAAD and other currently deployed U.S. missile-defense systems. And much progress has been achieved in the years since President Bush’s 2001 decision to withdraw from the misguided 1972 Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty.

 

But we are going to have to prioritize, develop, and deploy advanced missile-defense technologies in space, as the Trump executive order calls for. In an era in which American aerospace companies are plucking their rocket systems from the sky for reuse as launch vehicles, during which Americans are contemplating manned missions to Mars, and when launch costs are drastically declining, a transformative system of space-based sensors and interceptors is plausible.

 

A space-based system opens up the possibility of tracking and engaging many more missiles than is feasible with ground-based interceptors. We should be thinking not just in terms of defeating a rogue-state attack from North Korea or Iran, but a wider assault from our peer adversaries in China and Russia.

 

For most of our history, the American people were free to live largely in peace, protected from foreign threats on our continent by our oceans. For three generations, however, we have lived under the black cloud of foreign tyrants pointing their missiles at us, threatening our people, our allies, and our way of life. No technology can forever solve the problem of evil men who wish to do us harm. But the American people have the power to develop tools that can, if not solve, then at least mitigate the threats against us. President Trump is right to make missile defense a national priority.

America’s Dangerous Flirtation with RFK Jr.

By Christian Schneider

Thursday, January 30, 2025

 

You may not have heard of Edwin Chadwick, but you most certainly have been affected by his work. As Londoners in the mid-19th century suffered from outbreaks of disease, Chadwick pioneered the idea that the state should be directly involved in protecting citizens’ health and that significant investments in infrastructure could help people live longer. Steven Johnson notes in The Ghost Map, his history of the cholera epidemic, that, “for better or worse, Chadwick’s career can be seen as the very point of origin for the whole concept of ‘big government’ as we know it today.”

 

Though Chadwick sought to improve sanitation — a sewage system that would dump waste into the Thames and an improved water-delivery system — his tenure ended up being a horror show. Obsessed with the “miasmatic” theory of disease transmission, or the idea that all disease is transmitted through the air, he failed to understand that cholera was waterborne. He also failed to understand that the river, the city’s water supply, was now a giant cesspool. Thus the water being piped to Londoners courtesy of Chadwick was the exact thing carrying the deadly bacteria making them sick. It turns out the only thing worse than there being no one in charge of public health is a public health czar who is wrong, leading to deadly consequences.

 

As Johnson notes, “a modern bioterrorist couldn’t have come up with a more ingenious and far-reaching scheme.”

 

Nearly 200 years later, the United States is poised to have a nepo crank in charge of the Department of Health and Human Services. Robert F. Kennedy Jr., President Donald Trump’s nominee, is a long-time vaccine denier who has spent a lifetime cashing in on his name in service of notions that make people sicker.

 

Embraced by Team MAGA because he endorsed Trump, Kennedy would be a Chadwick-style disaster as the leader of public health in America. He has a long, distinguished history of scaring yoga moms into believing vaccines cause autism, amid increasing rates of measles, tuberculosis, mumps, and whooping cough. Even polio has also begun its return after Dr. Jonas Salk’s miraculous work in eradicating it.

 

Vaccines work. According to the Centers for Disease Control, the measles shot has prevented over 94 million deaths over the past 50 years. One study by the University of Colorado-Boulder found that more than 1.8 million more Americans would have died of Covid-19 without the vaccine and certain behavioral changes. (This is not to discount the harms done by lockdown policies, particularly keeping children out of school for far too long.)

 

But now it appears President Trump’s supporters have signed on to RFK Jr.’s dangerous nonsense as they try to push him through the nomination process. In many ways, trying to fit RFK into a MAGA box is like trying to squeeze a leopard into a toaster oven — he doesn’t fit and it only makes him crazier.

 

After all, throughout his career, RFK has been the exact type of delusional lefty Trump’s supporters abhor. For decades, conservatives condemned the loopy anti-vax positions of liberal celebrities like Jenny McCarthy and her ilk.

 

And Kennedy has been on the left edge of the lunacy. As recently as 2020, he threatened to sue the first Trump administration in the name of “climate justice,” whatever that is. He is a dedicated pro-abortion Democrat, spending his career in search of fetuses to terminate.

 

And, of course, there is his personal life, which makes Matt Gaetz look like Gandhi. The man who now wants to tell us how to lead healthier lives spent years as a womanizing drug addict, and only recently said that his brain had been infected by worms.

 

During his current nomination process, RFK has tried to back off his lifetime of anti-vax statements. While questioned on Wednesday, he said he was not anti-vaccine, despite declarations he made on a podcast in 2023 in which he said, “There’s no vaccine that is safe and effective.”

 

The Wall Street Journal noted this week that Kennedy has raked in truckloads of cash from law firms suing on behalf of individuals referred to them by Kennedy who claim to have been injured by vaccines. As secretary of HHS, he could release proprietary information about vaccine trials that could cripple the vaccine industry via lawsuits. The conflict of interest is glaring.

 

Of course, there have already been plenty of Republicans rushing to RFK’s defense simply because the pick to run America’s top health department was made by Donald Trump.

 

It’s been a whiplash-inducing trajectory. After tweeting in June 2024 that “RFK Jr. 100% buys into the globalist scheme of fear mongering over climate change to limit energy consumption, kill jobs and reduce the quality of life for normal people,” Donald Trump Jr. counseled his followers, “Don’t fall for this fraud!!!” But just months later, Trump donors were offered the chance to “Win a Day of Falconry with RFK, Jr. and Don, Jr.”

 

Evidently some sort of Nepo Yalta Conference was held to secure a truce, as DJTJR recently called out the “disgusting fake doctors” who signed “a fake petition to try to stop @RobertKennedyJr from exposing all the flaws in our healthcare and food systems.” They have seen the enemy, and it is seed oils. “Let him MAHA (Make America Healthy Again) & stop these clowns from making us all, especially our kids, SICK!” Don Jr. bleated.

As Steven Johnson writes about Edwin Chadwick’s disastrous turn as London’s health commissioner, “The first defining act of a modern, centralized public-health authority was to poison an entire urban population.” RFK Jr.’s tenure would be one that makes Americans sicker and could cost many their lives. But his last-minute conversion before the congressional committee may not be enough to save Kennedy’s nomination. Wouldn’t it be something if it was vaccines that killed off RFK’s chances at holding office.