Our Conspiracy-Minded Subculture

By Jim Geraghty

Wednesday, December 02, 2020

 

Yesterday afternoon, U.S. attorney general William Barr addressed the contention of the president, and many of his supporters, that the 2020 presidential election had been stolen, through vote fraud and voting machines that changed Trump votes to Biden votes. He sees nothing to support their accusations:

 

Disputing President Donald Trump’s persistent, baseless claims, Attorney General William Barr declared Tuesday the U.S. Justice Department has uncovered no evidence of widespread voter fraud that could change the outcome of the 2020 election.

 

Barr told the AP that U.S. attorneys and FBI agents have been working to follow up specific complaints and information they’ve received, but “to date, we have not seen fraud on a scale that could have effected a different outcome in the election.”

 

. . . Barr didn’t name [Sidney] Powell specifically but said: “There’s been one assertion that would be systemic fraud and that would be the claim that machines were programmed essentially to skew the election results. And the DHS and DOJ have looked into that, and so far, we haven’t seen anything to substantiate that.”

 

Back on November 9, Barr specifically “authorized federal prosecutors across the U.S. to pursue ‘substantial allegations’ of voting irregularities, if they exist, before the 2020 presidential election is certified, despite no evidence of widespread fraud.” President Trump appointed the U.S. attorneys for Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Nevada, and Pennsylvania. There is no rational argument that these prosecutors would turn a blind eye, or help cover up, credible and serious allegations of vote fraud on a massive scale.

 

Many Trump supporters appeared genuinely shocked that Barr said his department has not found any evidence of fraud on a scale that could change the election’s outcome, and that there wasn’t any evidence to substantiate the claims of voting machines altering the outcome. Rudy Giuliani and Jenna Ellis issued a statement that “with the greatest respect to the attorney general, his opinion appears to be without any knowledge or investigation of the substantial irregularities and evidence of systemic fraud.” (With the greatest respect, mind you.)

 

Apparently, some Trump supporters on Parler came to the conclusion that Barr had been a “Deep State” operative all along — including the president’s longtime friend, Roger Stone. Fox Business Channel host Lou Dobbs fumed, “For the attorney general of the United States to make that statement, he is either a liar or a fool or both. He may be, uh, perhaps compromised. He may be simply unprincipled. Or he may be personally distraught or ill.” Tom Fitton of Judicial Watch declares that Barr is “protecting Hillary Clinton” and trying to shut down all of his organization’s lawsuits. And over at Gateway Pundit, Jim Hoft declares: “The only people the FBI and DOJ target are patriotic conservative Americans who want things better for their country and for their children’s future . . . AG Barr had a good scam going but now it’s over. We now know definitively what he is all about. He is just another crooked swamp creature.”

 

They’re talking about Attorney General William Barr. The William Barr. The nation’s chief law-enforcement officer who has been described as the president’s “champion and advocate,” who’s been tough on illegal immigration, suggested the Russia probe was unfair to Trump, who described the Mueller report as a complete vindication of the president, who House Democrats held in contempt of Congress for failure to cooperate with probes, who reinstated the death penalty for federal crimes, who ordered the streets around Lafayette Square cleared, who defended law enforcement against congressional critics, who attacked “militant secularists” who “seem to take a delight in compelling people to violate their conscience,” who changed the sentencing recommendation of Roger Stone from its original, excessive call for a sentence of seven to nine years, the man whom 20 progressive groups are trying to impeach, who sent a surge of federal law-enforcement agents to cities that were plagued by skyrocketing violent crime, and who allowed federal lawyers to defend President Trump against a lawsuit from E. Jean Carroll alleging sexual assault.

 

That William Barr.

 

The man who is arguably the president’s most loyal and probably most effective cabinet official is, in the minds of some Trump fans, now revealed as a sleeper agent for the Deep State all along.

 

It’s been unnerving in the past few weeks to watch seemingly sane people — in some cases friends, allies, former colleagues — appear to get devoured and replaced by pod people. They look like the people we knew before, but this strange replacement starts spouting that the voting machines were hacked, that Governor Brian Kemp and Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger are in on some secret plot to steal the election in Georgia from Trump or turning a blind eye to massive voter fraud, that “these charts” prove that Biden couldn’t possibly have won, that turnout amidst a giant pandemic couldn’t possibly have been so high, that Biden couldn’t have won more than 80 million votes, and so on.

 

We may just be witnessing something very basic about human nature — the search for scapegoats in the aftermath of failure, and the preference to believe in the fantastical instead of the mundane.

 

Some people who work in politics say the most accurate portrayal of life in government is not The West Wing or other shows and movies that offer a more glamorous, noble, or generally competent portrait. No, they say the most realistic show is the HBO series Veep, where the vice president and her staff stumble from one mess to the next, and almost all of their efforts result in disappointment, if not humiliating disaster. Reality is full of drudgery, complicated details, incompetence, miscommunication, mundane mistakes, and misjudgments. There’s no sinister conspiracy that’s trying to paint Vice President Selina Meyer and her staff as bumbling incompetents. That conspiracy would be redundant. Their biggest enemy is themselves.

 

In short, reality is boring and often disappointing. We rarely watch dramatic or serious TV shows or movies that portray all this. We watch shows that are full of action, twists, and turns, and often with conspiracies of shadowy forces pulling the strings from behind the scenes. We see government conspiracies, corporate conspiracies, military conspiracies, media manipulation, double agents, sleeper agents, brainwashing and mind control . . . a huge portion of our entertainment is based upon the concept summarized by the title character in Blade: “You better wake up. The world you live in is just a sugar-coated topping! There is another world beneath it: the real world. And if you wanna survive it, you better learn to pull the trigger.” More classically minded folk might think of Plato’s cave — what we see determines our understanding of the world, whether or not it is the full picture. If all we see is only part of the picture, we end up with some seriously flawed ideas of how things work — and we never know that we’re wrong.

 

The vision of Trump — and Rudy Giuliani and Sidney Powell and Alex Jones — is a much more exciting world, and also a simpler one. There’s a big shadowy conspiracy that is trying to steal the election, impeach the president, hype the pandemic, brainwash our children, take over and throw people into jail for thought-crimes, open the borders to gangs and cartels, replace the current American population with foreigners, steal kids for celebrity sex-abuse rings. . . . It’s “Flight 93” not only in every election, but in every moment and every political fight. Every problem has a human face and is driven by the malevolence of powerful political foes. Whatever we’ve done wrong is inconsequential compared to the endless wickedness of “them” pulling the strings behind the scenes.

 

In this worldview, the conspiracy theorist is not just Joe Schmo, with a boring daily life, limited career prospects, and limited ability to find meaning in his life. In this worldview, the conspiracy theorist is Fox Mulder or Neo or Sherlock Holmes or Batman connecting the dots and finding the clues. They’ve found the glasses from They Live that show only the truth. When they buy into all of this, they become one of the select few who can see through the illusion; they’re no longer among the “Sheeple.” They’re doing something by posting about it on social media. In their own minds, they’re greater investigators than Woodward and Bernstein. They’ve discovered their own “Deep Throat” sources — usually some guy who’s posting anonymously on the Internet. But in this mindset, paranoia and rage aren’t problems; they are forces that give life meaning.

 

We might think that the futility of this kind of existence — always believing in the vast conspiracy, always finding more clues, but never exposing and unraveling it all — would make people eventually drift away from it, finding it unsatisfying. But perhaps this is how some people prefer it; on some level, they like the fact that the conspiracy is never fully exposed and the sheeple never wake up. If the “sheeple” ever woke up, then the enlightened few who recognized the conspiracy wouldn’t be special anymore. And if the conspiracy was ever exposed and torn down . . . there would be only “normal” life to go back to — and that’s frustrating and boring.

 

No matter how the transition to a new administration works, no matter what President Trump does after January 20, no matter what decisions are made at the news desks in the years to come, we are probably going to be stuck with an increasingly vocal, paranoid, conspiracy-minded subculture for a long time.

Wages of Error at the New York Times

By Ramesh Ponnuru

December 01, 2020

 

The New York Times ran a long editorial over the weekend arguing that higher wages can cause economic growth instead of its always having to be the other way around. The basic argument is succinct if conclusory: “Consumption drives the American economy, and workers who are paid more can spend more.”

 

The contrary view that wage growth will in the long run follow productivity growth is, the Times claims, mistaken: Since 1970, wages have increased much less than productivity. In saying that, it links to another Times story that, oddly, says nothing about productivity and includes no references to wage trends prior to 2000. That story does, however, make the related claim that workers’ share of national income dropped in the U.S. between 2000 and 2015. But these claims are misleading. Wages and productivity have not decoupled in recent decades, and the labor share of income has not been unusually low in recent years.

 

The editors of the Times further stack the deck for government-directed wage increases by misstating the argument against them. For decades, they say, the conventional wisdom has held that higher wage minima “would raise unemployment because there was only so much money in the wage pool, and if some people got more, others would get none.” This is not true. The reason a higher minimum wage is thought to cause higher unemployment is a straightforward matter of supply and demand: Raise the price of labor and its purchasers will buy less of it. It is certainly possible that this effect will be small, or that it will be considered worth it for the higher wages that some workers will receive; but the argument does not require there to be a fixed amount of money available for wages.

 

The Times itself used to editorialize against raising the minimum wage because it would cost some people their jobs — and when it did, it said nothing about there being “only so much money in the wage pool.” In 2019, the Congressional Budget Office found that raising the minimum wage to $15 an hour would increase workers’ earnings by a net $44 billion while still causing 1.3 million people who otherwise would have been employed to go jobless. The increase in unemployment just isn’t based on an assumption of flat payrolls. 

The Right to Be Wrong

By Michael Brendan Dougherty

Wednesday, December 02, 2020

 

Who really determines our pandemic response? Is it public-health institutions and experts, or the public that they advise? Who is allowed to get major questions on the pandemic “wrong”? Just public-health officials, or the public at large, too? Who has freedom of opinion and the ability to express and deliberate in the modern public forums?

 

The question is about to become more acute, as we enter what Joe Biden called a “dark winter” during a nationwide peak of hospitalizations for COVID-19, but with hope of effective vaccines coming in the spring. Many conservatives have tried to tamp down the anger at Silicon Valley felt by more populist elements of the Right.

 

Our mainstream media outlets are starting to wind down their sense of alarm about the White House. For them, politics is going back to normal. Democrats will be in charge of the executive branch, but ones who are perfectly fine with big business calling most of the shots.

 

Reportorial passion and energy will be inclined toward a short hibernation in the lame-duck period, before it is aroused again and refocuses on the subversive and deviant lives of conservatives, religious people, and non-conformists out in the sticks somewhere. I’m sure somebody is listening to Joe Rogan’s podcast, or getting the wrong idea about gender relations or ethnicity from some young-adult fantasy novel that made it past the censors. The media will be there to frighten you about it.

 

But I don’t think they’ll have to look far for outrage and dissent.

 

Popular anger at pandemic restrictions on public life is growing. That anger is being heightened and given a conspiratorial edge by the fact that many governors, mayors, and county executives have been caught defying and breaking their own rules on COVID-19. These include California governor Gavin Newsom and California’s health-care lobbyists, San Francisco mayor London Breed, Denver mayor Michael Hancock, and Los Angeles County’s Sheila Kuehl. Other famous COVID scolds include Governor Andrew Cuomo, who discouraged travel but planned to eat with his octogenarian grandmother. Or his CNN-host brother, Chris Cuomo, who preaches masks on air but whose apartment building warned him that he was violating the own mask rules in common spaces. Or there’s Pennsylvania health secretary Rachel Levine, who withdrew her mother from a care home days before telling the public the care homes were safe. Leaders who apparently don’t believe in the danger themselves are still willing to shut down Thanksgiving or threaten livelihoods based on the danger.

 

The idea of “listening to the science” repels many people after experiencing the past several months, since the science in public health seems so unstable. Dr. Fauci once pooh-poohed mask wearing, based on a study. Now he says that we might be wearing masks after the vaccine. The World Health Organization was against travel restrictions, but it turned out this was entirely based on politics, not epidemiology. The most prestigious medical journal in the world published a hoax study on hydroxychloroquine, simply to own Trump.

 

The feeling that the restrictions are imposed without real conviction, that the science is a mess, and that the whole enterprise is corrupted by political fear of the masses, exacerbates already widespread distrust in the forthcoming vaccines. Anti-vaxxers can point to the many instances of groupthink or seeming contradictions in public attitudes. In the same moment that Governor Andrew Cuomo was warning people about the danger of a vaccine that was developed during the Trump administration, his own government in Albany was soliciting legal advice on making a COVID-19 vaccine mandatory for all New Yorkers, with no religious or health exemptions, because Cuomo aspires to be the first political leader to achieve universal immunity.

 

It’s easy and frightful to imagine polarization around the vaccine that turns into a Mexican standoff. The vaccine skeptics will be able to point to the low mortality rates of COVID sufferers and improving treatments, as well as especially low transmission rates in schools, to justify their reluctance to take a vaccine that they can justly say is novel, because it uses an mRNA mechanism. Political leaders who invested the most in restrictions will be inclined to require the most for full reopening. Some states and many corporations are effectively debating whether COVID vaccination becomes a kind of “passport” back to possessing full civil rights and participation in civil society.

 

And if this polarization comes about, Silicon Valley is going to be called in by the establishment authorities to referee and effectively end the debate, just as the social-media giants have been called in to adjudicate conspiracy theories about the 2020 election. Not that they always get everything right.

 

 

Social-media networks have no special expertise in determining what is misinformation or in fact-checking public discourse. The dispiriting truth of it all is that social-media companies have been doing their banning and labeling on an ad-hoc basis in an attempt to appease their workforces, who themselves are trying to appease the would-be censors who work as journalists in the Anglophone world. The tech companies duplicate the same exact prejudices found at the New York Times. The latter institution had an internal revolt over an op-ed written by a conservative Republican senator, Tom Cotton, about ending riots, but allowed Chinese authorities to use the Times — just as they use major social-media networks — to brag about their violent crackdown and oppressive measures that ended the democracy movement in Hong Kong.

 

There is no doubt about where the major social-media networks will stand in the debates and dissent about vaccination. Old-line conservatives are correct to point out that, legally speaking, Twitter and Facebook would simply be exercising their own rights to free speech and free association if they heavily policed debates on these matters. But populists on the right will also see the real political implication, that some people simply aren’t allowed to deliberate in public, to be wrong in public, or to organize their political passions in public, in the same way as figures who have the blessing of the establishment. They will correctly perceive social-media companies to be not an independent part of the Fourth Estate but a cat’s-paw of an incompetent, hypocritical, and technocratic government that is trying to immunize itself against the dangers inherent in a democracy.

China’s Pandemic Deception

By Jim Geraghty

Tuesday, December 01, 2020

 

Nick Paton Walsh of CNN unveils a fascinating but ultimately frustrating work of journalism based upon 117 pages of leaked documents from the Hubei Provincial Center for Disease Control and Prevention from the start of the coronavirus pandemic — what the network calls, “the most significant leak from inside China since the beginning of the pandemic,” a leak that “provide[s] the first clear window into what local authorities knew internally and when.”

 

The first and most significant conclusion confirms what many suspected, that China had significantly more cases than the government’s official numbers claimed: “In a report marked ‘internal document, please keep confidential,’ local health authorities in the province of Hubei, where the virus was first detected, list a total of 5,918 newly detected cases on February 10, more than double the official public number of confirmed cases.” Elsewhere the report notes, “The leaked documents show the daily confirmed death toll in Hubei rose to 196 on February 17. That same day, Hubei publicly reported just 93 virus deaths.” You may recall certain outside observers pointing out that the known number of urns purchased by funeral homes and the operation of crematoriums suggested that the death toll was much higher than the Chinese government was willing to admit.

 

For what it’s worth, the discrepancy narrowed by March. The internal document said there were 115 new cases while the public number was 83, and internal document said the virus had killed 3,456 while the official number of deaths attributed to the virus was 2,986.

 

Toward the end of the article, Walsh writes: “China is close to zero local cases and although small-scale outbreaks continue to flare, the virus is mostly contained.” Except . . . the whole scoop from this article is that the Chinese government is not honest in its statements about how many cases exist, so it’s not clear why anyone should be so credulous about Beijing’s assessments now.

 

Early in the article, CNN offers another strange qualified defense of Beijing: “Though the documents provide no evidence of a deliberate attempt to obfuscate findings, they do reveal numerous inconsistencies in what authorities believed to be happening and what was revealed to the public.”

 

But based upon the comments of the experts consulted that appear later in the article, it is hard to believe that the Chinese health officials understated the number of cases accidentally:

 

William Schaffner, professor of infectious diseases at Vanderbilt University, said the Chinese approach was conservative, and the data “would have been presented in a different way had US epidemiologists been there to assist.”

 

He said Chinese officials “seemed actually to minimize the impact of the epidemic at any moment in time. To include patients who were suspected of having the infection obviously would have expanded the size of outbreak and would have given, I think, a truer appreciation of the nature of the infection and its size.”

 

Andrew Mertha, director of the China Studies Program at John Hopkins University, said officials might have been motivated to “lowball” numbers to disguise under-funding and preparedness issues in local health care bodies like the provincial CDC.

 

According to Mertha, the documents, which he reviewed and considered authentic, seemed to be organized so as to allow senior officials to paint whatever picture they wished.

 

Another indicator that the local early response to the virus was creaky and insufficient: “A report in the documents from early March says the average time between the onset of symptoms to confirmed diagnosis was 23.3 days, which experts have told CNN would have significantly hampered steps to both monitor and combat the disease.”

 

One section of CNN’s report focuses on a pre-pandemic internal audit of the Hubei CDC, which concluded the organization was “underfunded, lacking the right testing equipment, and with unmotivated staff who were often felt ignored in China’s vast bureaucracy.” By itself, it is not surprising to find an internal audit in any organization complaining about the budget being too small, not having the needed equipment, or employing subpar staff. But it is interesting to see that this internal assessment echoes the assessment of American officials who visited the Wuhan Institute of Virology — a separate Chinese medical-research institution — and who came away with concerns about the laboratory’s safety protocols and practices in 2018. Despite the confident assurances of the government in Beijing, China’s scientific community isn’t always running in tip-top shape. We’ve had accounts of laboratories with all kinds of troubles, from “problems with biological disposal” to scientists selling off laboratory animals on the black market. The argument that “Chinese scientists are too professional to ever have a lab accident this consequential” never held water.

 

Walsh’s article notes near the end, “no mention is made by officials of a so-called laboratory leak, or that the virus was man-made, as some critics, including top US officials, have claimed without evidence. There is one mention of sub-par facilities at a bacterial and toxic species preservation center, though the point is not elaborated on, nor is its significance made clear.” If you type “bacterial and toxic species preservation center,” or “toxic species preservation center” into Google, Walsh’s article is the only reference to that precise wording anywhere.

 

Wuhan University has a “Typical Species Preservation Center.” Guangdong, China, which is 500 miles away from Wuhan, has a “Microbial Species Preservation Center.” (There would be little reason for the Hubei Province CDC to be assessing an institution that far away.) And there is a not-well-translated article from the Chinese news site, JQKNews.com, that refers to a “microbial (toxin) species preservation center” at . . . the Wuhan Institute of Virology.

 

One of the more confounding revelations of the leaked documents is that before and during the initial COVID-19 outbreak in Wuhan, the region was dealing with a concurrent severe outbreak of influenza. “It caused cases to rise to 20 times the level recorded the previous year, the documents show, placing enormous levels of additional stress on an already stretched health care system” — but this is referring to thousands of cases in a city, not tens of thousands.

 

Neither the leaked memos nor CNN can determine if there is a connection between the influenza outbreak and the pandemic of COVID-19. The symptoms of the flu and the symptoms of COVID-19 overlap quite a bit, so it’s easy to suspect that COVID-19 cases were mistaken for influenza. But one peer-reviewed study by Chinese scientists and published in the London-based journal Nature suggests that isn’t the case. That study “re-analysed 640 throat swabs collected from patients in Wuhan with influenza-like-illness from 6 October 2019 to 21 January 2020 and found that 9 of the 640 throat swabs were positive for SARS-CoV-2 RNA by quantitative PCR, suggesting community transmission of SARS-CoV2 in Wuhan in early January 2020.”

 

Two opposing currents shape American discussion of China in general, and particularly in the context of the pandemic. On the one side, we have much of corporate America that has invested heavily in China and that sees any potential conflict with China as more or less the end of the world. (If any conflict between the West and Beijing turned into a military clash, that might not be quite so hyperbolic.) American companies — and some policymakers and wonks — had traveled way too far down the road of partnership with China to turn back now and could do elaborate mental gymnastics to justify why Chinese oppression and brutality was qualitatively different from oppression and brutality anywhere else. This mentality took root at institutions such as the World Health Organization, too. And because of this, there is an instinct to downplay any wrongdoing by Beijing, lest any particular provocation turn into the 21st-century version of the assassination of Archduke Ferdinand.

 

The opposing current, less strong but still present, more or less loathes the Chinese government, for a slew of good reasons — from the brutal crackdown in Hong Kong, to the genocidal treatment of the Uyghurs, to a still-appalling human-rights record, to predatory trade practices, to military threats against Taiwan and aggressive moves in the South China Sea, to the treatment of Tibet, and so on. This side does want to “poke the bear” — poke the dragon? — because it feels like some retaliatory poking is long overdue. This side doesn’t spend much time worrying about a series of escalations in the conflict between China and the United States, and all too easily slips from thinking that Chinese negligence and reflexive dishonesty made the pandemic the crisis that it is, to thinking China deliberately started the pandemic. They’ll use the opacity of China’s government and society as proof to support the most malevolent interpretation of events. The thing is, the Chinese government can be malevolent and incompetent — and there are dangers to discounting Beijing’s internal problems as well.

Conservative Judges vs. Iffy Right-Wing Legal Claims

By Robert VerBruggen

Tuesday, December 01, 2020

 

Lately I’ve been joking about a vast right-wing conspiracy to shore up the power of the new Supreme Court. Conservative lawyers across the country have filed a series of legal claims with a very particular set of skills: These cases ask courts to step in to advance conservative political goals, they seek to achieve such big victories this way that they drive the Left insane with panic . . . and they are incredibly weak legally.

 

The goal can’t possibly be for these efforts to win in court, no matter how many Federalist Society-approved judges Trump has installed. After all, the defining feature of a conservative judge is adherence to the text and meaning of the law. It’s liberal judges who pretend that laws mean whatever benefits their side of the political aisle.

 

Instead, the goal must be to buff up the legitimacy of the Court through a series of high-profile cases in which Republican-appointed justices “defect” and rule against conservative litigants. Then the justices will have the political capital to overturn Roe!

 

This is, again, a joke; no one is playing four-dimensional chess here (as far as I know). But the scenario above, in which conservative judges come out of 2020 looking like the neutral arbiters of the law they’re supposed to be, may nonetheless be how the story concludes.

 

The most obvious example comprises the lawsuits to overturn the 2020 election results as fraudulent, a string of cases that Andy McCarthy has been covering diligently. During Amy Coney Barrett’s confirmation hearings, Democrats repeatedly raised the prospect that the courts could hand the election to Trump. Yet nearly a month after Election Day, there’s no sign that Trump-appointed judges are pursuing this goal.

 

Allegations of fraud and other election shenanigans deserve investigation, but Trump appears unable to credibly challenge enough results to make himself the winner, and GOP-appointed judges are not going to hand him the election on the basis of challenges that are not credible. Stephanos Bibas, a Trump appointee to the Third Circuit (and a noted conservative legal thinker whose work has run on National Review), recently clobbered one attempt to stop certification of the results in Pennsylvania, writing that the campaign’s claims had “no merit.” The decision was unanimous, with Bibas’s opinion joined by two other Republican appointees. I expect similar results if cases such as this one are appealed to the Supreme Court.

 

During the Barrett hearings, Democrats also seemed highly concerned that the Court would overturn Obamacare on the basis of a ridiculous legal theory in which Congress rendered the law unconstitutional by removing the penalty for violating the individual mandate. One senator even proposed an elaborate conspiracy in which congressional Republicans had set up the legal challenge on purpose when they changed the law.

 

But when the case was argued before the Court a few weeks back, it became clear that the justices weren’t having it. The final decision still hasn’t come down, and the Court could do a variety of different things regarding the case’s second-tier legal issues. But Obamacare is almost certainly not getting struck down.

 

Then, this Monday, the Court confronted Trump’s plan to subtract illegal immigrants from the census for purposes of apportionment — meaning states with lots of illegal immigrants would get less representation in the House. Standing in the way of this plan is the text of the Constitution, which says that “representatives shall be apportioned among the several States according to their respective numbers, counting the whole number of persons in each State, excluding Indians not taxed.”

 

As I laid out in July, that language does have some wiggle room, as the government has changed its treatment of certain groups (such as overseas federal personnel) over time. But it takes a creative reading of the law, and a departure from historical precedent, to declare that illegal immigrants in general don’t count as persons in the states where they live, and in many cases have lived for years. The idea is that “persons” really refers to “inhabitants,” and that “inhabitants” is a term of art that doesn’t include people living somewhere without authorization.

 

Just as happened at the Obamacare oral argument, some conservative justices heavily implied they were not friendly to this reading. Justice Barrett told a Trump-administration lawyer that “a lot of the historical evidence and longstanding practice really cuts against your position. And, you know, there’s evidence that in the Founding era, an inhabitant was a dweller who lives or resides in a place.” Justice Brett Kavanaugh told the other side that they’d “advanced forceful constitutional and statutory arguments” against excluding illegal immigrants.

 

Now, also like the Obamacare case, the census case features a lot of smaller details on which the Court’s position is less clear. Most important, the Trump administration now says it probably won’t be able to identify illegal immigrants comprehensively with the data it has, meaning it may have to settle for subtracting specific subsets of them, such as those who have been ordered removed from the country or are detained by Immigration and Customs Enforcement. The government also has records on illegal-immigrant “Dreamers” brought to the country as minors who signed up for “deferred action.”

 

In some of these cases, one can argue that the immigrants in question aren’t really residing in the states the census counted them in, so there’s room for a narrow Trump victory. But these folks might not even be numerous enough to shift any House seats, and the president’s original plan, to exclude illegal immigrants to the maximum extent possible, has been reduced to a shadow of its former self.

 

All of this speaks well of conservative judges. To the extent that Americans worried about the Supreme Court being run by shameless GOP hacks, these skeptical moves by justices should calm their fears. For that we can thank the conservatives who filled the courts with iffy claims and the lefties who went to DEFCON 1 over it.

Biden’s Socialism Will Be Green, Not Red

By Iain Murray

Tuesday, December 01, 2020

 

One of the most interesting results of our recent elections was that Americans rejected socialism — or at least its close American equivalent — despite its seemingly growing popularity. Successfully labeling their opponents as socialists propelled many Republican candidates to victories in down-ballot races, particularly in areas with immigrants who had fled avowedly socialist regimes. Socialist-style policies were also defeated in ballot-measure votes, even in progressive states such as California.

 

Many commentators have noted that Joe Biden’s record of moderation in the Senate made it difficult to paint him as socialist. That does not mean, however, that socialism in all its variations has been defeated outright. As we are seeing in other parts of the world, what we once would have called socialism has evolved: Its future is green, not red.

 

This is most apparent in Europe. Across the western half of the continent, old-style socialist and social-democratic parties have seen their vote shares plunge in recent years. Green parties have risen in their place. Indeed, the Guardian characterized their successes in the 2019 European Parliament elections as a “quiet revolution.”

 

Yet the Greens are no less radical than their red predecessors. As the Guardian put it, “they have consolidated a manifesto that puts social justice and human rights at the heart of the fight for the planet, drawing in voters disillusioned with mainstream centre-left parties.”

 

We can discuss what the Greens mean by “human rights” on another occasion.

 

Meanwhile, the British Green Party is touting not just a Green New Deal for energy, but ones for housing (building 100,000 new state-owned homes) and income (introducing a universal basic income of $120 per week), among many others.

 

Climate change is at the heart of this radicalism. It represents the perfect excuse for socialist central planning. Industry and individual choices such as automobile driving, the argument goes, are wrecking the planet, and therefore must be centrally controlled and regulated so that emissions are reduced to a level that constrains climate change.

 

The regulations to achieve this end must be introduced now on an emergency basis and exist in perpetuity. According to the climate warriors, there is virtually no aspect of American economic life that does not have some effect on climate. It’s misbegotten, of course, but to be expected: If climate is at the heart of your policy, you will need to control all the myriad human actions and interactions that might affect it.

 

Since the early days of the Biden campaign, climate activists have happily proclaimed that his climate agenda is “a Green New Deal in all but name.” The Biden-Sanders Unity Task Force document on environmental policy, coauthored by the newly named special envoy for climate, John Kerry, is entitled “Combating the Climate Crisis and Pursuing Environmental Justice.”

 

The transition team’s summary memo on how to approach climate aspects of the transition includes policies not just for the Environmental Protection Agency, the National Atmospheric and Oceanic Administration, and the Departments of the Interior, Energy, and Transportation, but for the Departments of Agriculture, State, Justice, and Treasury, as well as the Office of Management and Budget. Personnel is policy, goes the saying in Washington, and, evidently, the Biden transition team’s plan to staff all these departments with climate activists.

 

The memo envisages “new authorities that allow for structural and systemic changes.” Without control of the Senate, the new administration will find it difficult to set these up. However, thanks to excessive delegations of power from Congress to the executive over the years, President Biden will be able to do a lot through regulation via executive order — with the power of the “pen and phone,” as President Obama put it.

 

We can expect significant restrictions on the use of fossil fuels and machines that use them. Massive amounts of public funds will be spent on promoting “green jobs” — and the administration will use its powers under labor law to ensure that these are union jobs. Non-union jobs such as independent contracting will come under increased fire, with emissions-heavy delivery services probably in the crosshairs once the COVID crisis eases. Trade tariffs will be raised on the basis of emission levels in the trading partner’s country — which will hit the developing world hard.

 

Even financial regulation will likely play a role in this bout of central planning. Regulators can use an array of supervisory powers to intimidate bankers into not lending — or denying other banking services — to fossil fuel-related businesses. This was the model the Obama administration used to try to drive the payday loan industry out of business, in something called Operation Choke Point. We can expect the new administration to try again, with a wider array of targets this time.

 

The tech industry is likely to be another target. We have already seen how tech companies have used the power of moderation to target sources of “disinformation” regarding the election and the pandemic. The threat of antitrust action by the new administration is likely to make them take more action against climate-change skeptics. The chances of an article like this being shared over social media will diminish.

 

“Red” socialism may have been vanquished at the ballot box, but Americans need to be aware that its green successor is just as much of a threat to their freedoms.

Cinderella Man 2

By Kevin D. Williamson

Tuesday, December 01, 2020

 

The Ron Howard film Hillbilly Elegy, a cinematic extract from J. D. Vance’s eponymous memoir, has received savage reviews. Remarkably so, in fact. One suspects that this is not entirely a question of its cinematic merits.

 

Howard is a conventional Hollywood commercial filmmaker and has made a conventional Hollywood commercial film. Howard’s record for adapting literature into film is mixed: His adaptation of Sylvia Nasar’s A Beautiful Mind is good, but his films based on Dan Brown’s novels are dreck, as are the novels themselves. Howard often has been at his best when there is no underlying literature to agonize over (as in The Paper and Cinderella Man) or when adapting a play, as in Frost/Nixon. In Hillbilly Elegy, Howard has bitten off a big morsel, and, though he intelligently shapes the film as a family drama in which the social commentary is generally implicit, it may be more than he can chew.

 

I know J. D. Vance a little, and occasionally we are lumped in together as writers who sometimes share a subject (this is in the same sense that the New York Yankees and the Milwaukee Brewers both are comprehended by the category of Major League Baseball teams) and broadly similar origins, and I will confess to having a slightly proprietary feeling about certain aspects of his work and its source material. I have criticized certain aspects of the book but, failing to take my own advice about one-armed paper-hangers, I often have bristled at criticism of the book offered by people who seem to me unqualified to do so, and much of that criticism has been stupid. (Writing in Slate, Rebecca Onion insists that Vance’s citation of Losing Ground is a “warning sign” and suggests that the author of that book, Charles Murray, is a racist, one of the most genuinely stupid ideas in general circulation.) You can take the foregoing as a full disclosure.

 

There is much in the film that is physically true. The filmmakers went to great lengths to make Glenn Close resemble Vance’s grandmother, who is in turn a pretty good representation of a certain class of grandmothers. She looks a lot like a lot of grandmothers, including my own. (Her glasses, on the other hand, are almost identical to the ones my mother wore.) The omnipresence of cigarettes, the houses and their interiors, the clothes, the sight of someone washing disposable plastic utensils in order to reuse them — all of these have the feeling of documentary truth. And there is much that is situationally true in the film as well: the difficulty of traveling while broke and the loneliness of the late-night long-distance driver, household finances upended by the ruinous expense of untimely car repairs, the lordly attitudes certain low-class people affect toward people in service positions who are their temporary social inferiors, the perversity of families whose members suffocate one another with verbal and physical affection but who cannot bring themselves to behave in the way someone who genuinely loved them would, the immoveable objects of bureaucracy and mulish corporate policy. Some of the events are familiar to me and must be to others: the woman who loses a good job in health care because she is raiding the company pharmacy, the emotional manipulation of a purely pro forma suicide attempt, etc.

 

And there is much that is emotionally true as well: Hillbilly Elegy is in its largest part a story about shame that is almost never named or acknowledged.

 

(I watched the film under the immediate influence of The Last American Aristocrat: The Brilliant Life and Improbable Education of Henry Adams, and could not help thinking that a little Yankee reserve and Puritan repression would be just the things for these people, and also that it is unfortunate that orphanages developed such a bad reputation in the 19th century.)

 

One of the reasons that the shame in Hillbilly Elegy is acknowledged only obliquely is the fact that it is shame connected to maternal guilt of a nature that is at least partly sexual: When the cinematic Vance flies into a violent rage after one of his mother’s former lovers calls her a “whore,” it isn’t because the characterization is unwarranted. This emotional situation put me in mind of T. S. Eliot’s famous essay “Hamlet and His Problems,” in which the poet defended a lonely (and eccentric) critical position about Hamlet, that “far from being Shakespeare’s masterpiece, the play is most certainly an artistic failure. . . . More people have thought Hamlet a work of art because they found it interesting, than have found it interesting because it is a work of art. It is the ‘Mona Lisa’ of literature.” Eliot argues that “the essential emotion of the play is the feeling of a son towards a guilty mother,” and quotes the critic J. M. Robertson, who writes that Hamlet’s

 

tone is that of one who has suffered tortures on the score of his mother’s degradation. . . . The guilt of a mother is an almost intolerable motive for drama, but it had to be maintained and emphasized to supply a psychological solution, or rather a hint of one.

 

“Hamlet,” Eliot writes, “like the sonnets, is full of some stuff that the writer could not drag to light, contemplate, or manipulate into art.” Eliot goes on to consider the “excess” of Hamlet’s emotional situation: “The words of Macbeth on hearing of his wife’s death strike us as if, given the sequence of events, these words were automatically released by the last event in the series. The artistic ‘inevitability’ lies in this complete adequacy of the external to the emotion; and this is precisely what is deficient in Hamlet. Hamlet (the man) is dominated by an emotion which is inexpressible, because it is in excess of the facts as they appear.”

 

Excess seems to me exactly the right word for the emotional state of the protagonist of Hillbilly Elegy. After leaving his family for service as a Marine in Iraq and then succeeding in the gentler ordeal of Yale Law School, he not only had the opportunity to extricate himself from the snake-pit of his family but had successfully done so as a matter of practical fact. It is difficult to understand why the escaped hostage would return to the hostage-takers. In the film’s most deft moment, Vance is gushing sentimentally about his young grandparents uprooting themselves from their home in Kentucky and going all the way to Ohio, at which point his polished Ivy League girlfriend reminds him that her father emigrated to the United States from India with nothing. I believe that much of the anti-immigrant sentiment — and particularly the sometimes-shocking anti-Indian sentiment — that one encounters in parts of poor-white America is a reaction to the rebuke Indian (and Vietnamese, Taiwanese, Nigerian, etc.) immigrants represent to those native-born Americans who believe themselves to be victims of mysterious external forces. In that quick exchange with the woman Vance would go on to marry can be seen the great political truth of Vance’s memoir and Howard’s film is intensely concentrated: Whatever it is that American poverty ultimately and finally is about, it isn’t about being poor.

 

The critics say that Glenn Close — in the inevitable stupid phrase — “chews the scenery” as Vance’s grandmother. I would suggest that it is the case that she is about as stagey and histrionic on film as the characters she represents are in real life, and that in this dramatic play-acting we can detect the wet, rotten smell of a great quantity of that “stuff that the writer could not drag to light, contemplate, or manipulate into art.”