The MAGA Right’s Masochistic New January 6 Spin

By Noah Rothman

Wednesday, July 28, 2021

 

First, Republicans argued that an independent, bipartisan investigation into the events of January 6 was inappropriate because it could interfere with ongoing investigations conducted by law enforcement. Then, they claimed that the proposed independent commission’s remit was too narrow; that it should be empowered to investigate all mass violence, particularly the riots that engulfed almost every American city in the summer of 2020.

 

When the plan for an independent commission failed in the Senate, only to be replaced by a proposal for a Democrat-led House select committee, Republicans insisted it was a partisan fishing expedition. Whatever the commission found, the results would be tainted by the political polarization that prevails in Washington. Republicans might have left it at that, but they just couldn’t. Their latest effort to discredit the investigation into January 6 is likely to have the precise opposite of its intended effect.

 

One week ago, Speaker Nancy Pelosi rejected two of the five Republican members that Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy recommended to serve on that commission—Jim Banks and Jim Jordan. But not, she claimed, because these two members supported efforts to reject the certification of 2020’s election results from a variety of closely contested states. To admit that this was the rationale would be to indict the commission’s chair, Rep. Benny Thompson; after all, he had joined 30 of his fellow Democrats in objecting to the certification of Ohio’s election results in 2005. Instead, she justified her actions by citing the threat these members posed to the “integrity of the investigation.” It was imprecise enough to give Republicans a talking point in favor of their claim that the commission was designed to be a partisan affair. But what McCarthy did with that talking point was utterly ponderous.

 

“Unless Speaker Pelosi reverses course and seats all five Republican nominees,” McCarthy said, “Republicans will not be party to their sham process and will instead pursue our own investigation of the facts.” Given Republican opposition to every form in which a January 6 commission might have taken, it’s reasonable to dismiss this statement of support for a GOP-led investigation into the events of that day as a pique-fueled flourish. But in the days that followed, the party’s more MAGA-leaning members in the lower chamber latched onto McCarthy’s big idea.

 

“It is a fact that the U.S. Capitol Police raised concerns [ahead of January 6],” Rep. Elise Stefanik recently asserted, “and rather than provide them with the support and resources they deserved, [Nancy Pelosi] prioritized her partisan political optics over their safety.” Stefanik’s allegation continued: “The American people deserve to know the truth that Nancy Pelosi bears responsibility as speaker of the House for the tragedy that occurred on January 6.” She added that Pelosi merely objected to seating Banks and Jordan on that commission to avoid an inquiry into her role in the riot that targeted the Capitol.

 

Jordan subsequently lent credence to Stefanik’s claim. “Why didn’t the United States Capitol—the people’s house—have an appropriate security posture on that day?” he asked. “Those are the people we need to hear from. That’s the information and testimony we need to get.” He added that only “the Speaker’s office knows what the security posture [was] and why it was the way it was.”

 

Given all these outstanding questions, it sure sounds like we need an independent commission to investigate the events of January 6.

 

Regardless of the merits of the claim that Pelosi bears responsibility for leaving the Capitol open to being ransacked by a pro-Trump mob (a claim that contradicts what we know about security preparations ahead of the event and misrepresents the Speaker’s authority over the committees that oversee security on the Hill), that’s an allegation so inflammatory that we should hope to see an investigation into the claim. That is, unless ambiguity is what these members would actually prefer.

 

Though it seems a distant memory now, it was only three months ago that Rep. Liz Cheney was ousted from her House leadership role because the Republican Party could not “move forward” while she obsessed over the events of January 6. To judge from this new messaging campaign, Cheney’s harshest critics within the Republican conference are now willing to concede that she was right; there’s no moving on from the events of January 6 with so many outstanding questions about the chain of events that led to the sacking of the Capitol Building. In their effort to win the news cycle, whatever the cost, the MAGA wing of the GOP in the House has just handed their critics a major victory. And the hearings have only just begun.

Mitch McConnell, Kill the (Nonexistent) Bill

By Philip Klein

Wednesday, July 28, 2021

 

Senate majority leader Chuck Schumer has indicated that the chamber could vote as soon as tonight to advance a bipartisan infrastructure deal. Among the many problems: The bill doesn’t exist yet.

 

To be clear, we have been critics of this expensive infrastructure boondoggle from Day One. David Harsanyi detailed that our infrastructure is not, in fact, crumbling and Charlie Cooke explained why there was no reason to spend trillions of dollars on this manufactured crisis. We editorialized on the charade of Republicans negotiating a “bipartisan” bill that Democrats view as in tandem with their massive social welfare bill cramming in a host of liberal priorities. I have written on how Democrats keep making Republicans look like idiots again and again by rolling them in negotiations. I noted the other day that Senator Joe Manchin blew up the rationale for cutting a smaller bill by explaining that passing the smaller bill was a key part of getting the entire massive Democrats-only package passed. This is a package that comes on top of the $6 trillion that was already spent in response to the pandemic and during a time when the White House’s own projections see debt as a share of economy surpassing World War II this year, making it the highest in American history. The larger package, which also hasn’t been released, promises to include a reckless expansion of Medicare even though the existing program is unsustainable.

 

If it weren’t preposterous enough that Republicans have gone on with this abomination for so long, chief Republican collaborator, Senator Rob Portman, now says that they are ready to vote to advance the bill which nobody has seen, because it hasn’t been written yet. “As of late last night, and really early this morning, we now have an agreement on the major issues,” Portman told reporters, according to Politico. “We are prepared to move forward.”

 

Any conservative should be enraged by what is happening now. Ten people have sat in a room behind closed doors for months with nothing to show the public and now all 100 senators are supposed to advance their work product despite the fact that they have not, in fact, produced anything tangible? What, exactly, is the rush? This isn’t even a situation in which there is a must-pass bill to keep the government open or to respond to an emergency. Senators are dealing with a totally artificial timeline. It seems that the only principle that any of these senators are operating under is that it’s of major urgency to authorize trillions of dollars in spending as soon as possible.

 

Enough is enough. In fact, enough was enough months ago. Senate minority leader Mitch McConnell should use all his powers and skills to kill this nonexistent bill. Vote it down, walk away, and let Democrats attempt to pass trillions of dollars of spending without a single Republican vote and be prepared to run against them next year.  

What the Biden Administration Fears

By Jim Geraghty

Thursday, July 29, 2021

 

We have nearly 80 million unvaccinated Americans out there. Some chunk of that group have had COVID-19 since March 2020, and thus have some immunity to reinfection. (Some good news this week from the United Kingdom is a new study suggesting that “the number of reinfections is low overall, and reinfections with a high viral load (which are more likely to cause illness) are even lower.”)

 

Last year at this time, we were averaging around 67,000 new diagnosed COVID-19 cases per day. At the time, we thought that was bad, in large part because on average, about 1,000 Americans were dying from COVID-19 each day. But as winter arrived, and people spent more time indoors because of cold weather, cases skyrocketed much higher, with the seven-day average peaking at 255,000 new diagnosed cases per day in early January. The seven-day average of daily new deaths peaked on January 13, hitting 3,496 new deaths per day.

 

In other words, whatever shape the country is in during summer, when good weather has people spending more time outdoors, the country is probably going to be in worse shape when winter arrives, and people begin spending more time in close contact indoors.

 

Right now, we are averaging . . . around 67,000 new diagnosed COVID-19 cases per day, right around where we were this time last year. Thankfully, our seven-day average of daily new deaths is much lower than it was a year ago: It currently sits at 303. A COVID-19 case in a vaccinated person is unlikely to lead to serious health problems and extremely unlikely to kill that person.

 

If we maintain the current relatively slow pace of vaccinations — averaging 608,000 shots per day for the past week — we will administer another 76 million shots by December 1. That sounds like good progress, until you realize that most of those shots will be Pfizer and Moderna, meaning two shots are required. So perhaps by the start of December, another 40 million or so American adults and teenagers will be vaccinated.

 

That would still leave about 40 million unvaccinated Americans as the winter begins — and while that would feature fewer deaths than last winter, that’s still a lot of potential hospitalizations and deaths.

 

In fact, we’re currently seeing full or near-full hospitals in certain corners of the country. The Salt Lake City suburbs; Brevard County, Fla.; Memphis, Tenn.; Augusta, Ga.

 

It is unnervingly conceivable that Delta or perhaps some other variant will cut another deadly swath through America’s unvaccinated this winter, filling up ICUs and spiking the daily death numbers again.

 

After one year on the job, President Joe Biden, who famously promised he would “shut down the virus, not shut down the country,” would have disappointingly modest results. Back in December, President-elect Biden insisted he was making a reasonable request for Americans to wear masks in public places for his first 100 days: “Just 100 days to mask, not forever. One hundred days.” It’s not forever, but now mask mandates have rapidly returned, including in every school, for the foreseeable future.

 

In fact, the CDC has turned on a dime. It doesn’t just want everyone in schools masked, and everyone in public spaces in areas with high caseloads. The CDC also wants vaccinated people to get tested if they’ve been around someone who has the virus, even if they don’t have any symptoms. “If results are positive, the infected should isolate at home for 10 days.”

 

Let’s walk through this. You get a vaccination that never promised to stop infections, only to greatly reduce the likelihood of hospitalization or death. After getting fully vaccinated, you go out and live your life and get infected, because there’s a really contagious variant going around. Even if you have no symptoms, you have to self-quarantine for ten days? For young and healthy people who were already at low risk for a serious reaction to COVID-19, just what is the upside of getting vaccinated here?

 

One of the really fascinating developments of this week has been health experts noting with frustration that the CDC hasn’t released the data to justify these recent reversals and are urging the federal agency to release this information. Now, the scientists are the ones expressing skepticism about SCIENCE™. There are concerning reports that this CDC decision was driven by the results of a study about breakthrough infections in India — where they’re using the AstraZeneca vaccine, not the Pfizer, Moderna, or Johnson & Johnson vaccines that Americans have received. Right on the CDC’s website, it declares that, “Studies from India with vaccines not authorized for use in the United States have noted relatively high viral loads and larger cluster sizes associated with infections with Delta, regardless of vaccination status.” The CDC also says that, “unpublished data are consistent with this,” which . . . is not really a triumph for openness and clarity in public-health policy.

 

And then there was this curious statement to STAT News Tuesday:

 

An administration official, speaking on the condition of anonymity, told STAT that health experts do not have studies proving that fully vaccinated people are transmitting the virus. Rather, the official said, the updated guidance is based on studies showing that vaccinated people who contract the Delta variant have similarly high levels of virus in their airways, which suggested that they may be infectious to others. With other variants, vaccinated people had substantially lower levels of virus in their noses and throats compared to unvaccinated people.

 

Whatever Biden thinks is the right approach to the Delta variant — and remember, he turns 79 in November, and hasn’t released a health report to the public since December 2019 — the country is full of federal, state and local officials, media voices, and medical talking heads who see the Delta variant as a reason to revert to March 12, 2020. No government official in a deep-blue state, county, or locality wants to be accused of underreacting to a rise in cases.

 

Then again, some of these deep-blue localities have surprisingly “meh” vaccination rates.

 

Montgomery County, Md., is contemplating reinstating social-distancing requirements and capacity limits for businesses. More than 69 percent of residents have received one dose, 63 percent are fully vaccinated.

 

Alexandria, Va., is urging people to wear masks indoors; the city is only 58 percent fully vaccinated, with 67 percent having one shot. It’s a similar story in Washington, D.C., where the district’s health director declared earlier this week, “Wearing a mask in indoor public settings provides an additional layer of protection for those who are fully vaccinated — and continues to be one of the key ways to protect those who cannot be vaccinated, namely young children.” Only 53 percent of D.C. residents are fully vaccinated, and 62 percent are partially vaccinated.

 

As I’ve been emphasizing all week, if you envision the unvaccinated as a pickup-truck-driving, MAGA-hat-wearing, rural older white male, you’re not getting the full picture.

 

And guess which big organizations just came out in opposition to vaccination requirements for their members?

 

So far, the nation’s two largest education unions, The National Education Association and the AFT, have declined to call for vaccine mandates. Instead, the NEA says that teachers should be given the option of weekly testing, while the AFT says it should be decided in contract negotiations between the workers and the company.

 

Oh, really? Who’s the paranoid anti-science anti-vaxxer now?

 

Jay Caruso made this point before I could: You cannot work yourself into a frenzy denouncing unvaccinated rural Americans and Trump voters as a bunch of ignorant, tin-foil-hat-wearing lunatics who are extending the pandemic and the suffering it has caused for everyone and then shrug when a bunch of teachers refuse to get vaccinated. The fact that these unions — powerful allies of the Democratic Party — are going to get little to no grief for their position that their members don’t need to get vaccinated if they don’t want to reveal that the vast majority of pro-vaccination rhetoric is really just political tribalism, dressed up in the rhetoric of public health.

Whatever Happened to Cows?

By Kevin D. Williamson

Wednesday, July 28, 2021

 

Speaking to a cheering throng in Arizona on Saturday, former U.S. president Donald J. Trump said: “Whatever happened to cows? Remember they were going to get rid of all the cows? They stopped that. People didn’t like that. Remember? You know why they were going to get rid of all the cows?”

 

The audience waits with bated breath.

 

“People will be next.”

 

It all makes sense.

 

Fox News regular and American Greatness crackpot Julie Kelly took to social media Tuesday to claim that D.C. Metropolitan Police officer Michael Fanone, who was assaulted during the Capitol riot, is a “crisis actor,” i.e. a professional performer hired to stage a fake emergency.

 

Elsewhere in the world of American Greatness, one of Kelly’s colleagues, Adam Mill, suggested Monday that the kidnapping plot directed at Michigan governor Gretchen Whitmer was an FBI scheme to influence the election, while another, Debra Heine, painted an episode in which a guy in a hardware store yelled at Tucker Carlson as — and this is presented in all seriousness — a CIA operation.

 

Remember they were going to get rid of all the cows?

 

Jacob Chansley, the “QAnon shaman” facing charges for his role in the Capitol riot, is reportedly negotiating a plea bargain after jail psychologists diagnosed him with a whole salad of mental illnesses.

 

Former general Mike Flynn was presented with a semiautomatic rifle painted in a camouflage pattern at an event at the Church of Glad Tidings in Yuba, Calif. Flynn was able to accept the rifle only because the felony charges to which he pleaded guilty were erased by a presidential pardon from Donald Trump. Holding the rifle and beaming, Flynn fantasized out loud: “Maybe I’ll find somebody in Washington, D.C. . . .” The congregation cheered. Earlier in the summer, Flynn attended a QAnon convention in Dallas, where he was asked if the coup in Myanmar was something that could happen in the United States. “It should happen here,” Flynn answered.

 

You know why they were going to get rid of all the cows?

 

From the New York Times:

 

“This ni**** voted for Joe Biden!” Capitol Police officer Harry Dunn told the panel a rioter had screamed at him, prompting a crowd to turn on him and scream, “Boo! Fu**ing ni****!”

 

On Monday, Donald Trump endorsed incumbent Ken Paxton in the Texas attorney general’s race. Paxton’s lawyers recently won a change of venue for his upcoming trial on felony securities-fraud charges.

 

Whatever happened to cows?

 

Former vice president Mike Pence said in a recent speech: “I will always be proud of what we accomplished for the American people over the last four years.” And the whole attempted coup d’état thing? “I will not allow Democrats or their allies in the media to use one tragic day to discredit the aspirations of millions of Americans,” he said, conceding that he and the former president may not “see eye-to-eye.”

 

Well, there’s that. But whatever happened to the cows, Mr. Vice President? Can you answer that? No? I didn’t think so.

 

Michael Bender of the Wall Street Journal quotes one of the Capitol rioters: “We weren’t there to steal things. We weren’t there to do damage. We were just there to overthrow the government.”

 

Forbes estimates that Sean Hannity is among the 100 highest-paid celebrities in the world. He invests in commercial real estate with HUD-backed mortgages when not denouncing “overpaid” media elites from his private jet. He says the January 6 riot was possibly the work of “groups like antifa, other radical groups, I don’t know the names of all of them . . . there to cause trouble.”

 

Remember they were going to get rid of all the cows?

 

“I was among the vastly outnumbered group of law-enforcement officers protecting the Capitol and the people inside it,” says Officer Michael Fanone, covert thespian by the reckoning of the best minds on Fox News. “I was grabbed, beaten, tased — all while being called a traitor to my country. I was at risk of being stripped of and killed with my own firearm as I heard chants of, ‘Kill him with his own gun!’ I can still hear those words in my head today.”

 

People will be next.

We’re Not Going to Fix Our Spending Crisis

By Charles C. W. Cooke

Monday, July 26, 2021

 

Here’s a funereal thought to darken your Monday: The United States is not going to address its spending crisis. The Democrats aren’t going to address it. The Republicans aren’t going to address it. The voters aren’t going to address it. It will just roll on like the Mississippi, undeterred, untiring, and unstoppable. It is now a part of our firmament — assumed as the political starting point by every man and his dog.

 

We are told from time to time that we will eventually hit a crisis that will serve to wake us up. But, if anything, the opposite is likely true, for instead of prompting sobriety and retrenchment, the crises of recent years have served only to make things worse. The 2008 crash prompted a mitigation effort that not only cost trillions of dollars on its own terms, but led in turn to the creation of a host of new spending programs that have now been absorbed into the baseline. The same is true of the federal government’s COVID-19 relief efforts, which cost $5 trillion in and of themselves and are now being used as justification for a “rebuilding” agenda that will add another $4 trillion on top of that. One might have expected that, assessing the scene in January of 2021, the Democratic Party would have said, “Well, I guess all the money is gone.” But it didn’t.

 

And why would it, given that we are now so far down the hole that the public has come to see astronomical numbers as mere abstractions? Even ten years ago, a trillion dollars was regarded as an enormous amount of money — enough, perhaps, to disqualify any spending proposal at the first hurdle. Now? Nobody seems to care. $2 trillion? $4 trillion? $10 trillion? None of it is deemed real anyway, so what does it matter? Balance sheets, interest rates, opportunity costs — whatever. Tell me, instead: What’s the right thing to do?

 

Were an alien to listen to our political rhetoric, he would be forgiven for concluding that the United States had solved its fiscal issues somewhere around 2015. A decade ago, even Barack Obama acknowledged that America had a problem. Now, his party sees no issue with the debt hitting $30 trillion — and, in some influential quarters, it hopes actually to expand what we spend on entitlements. To make matters worse, the Republican Party has noticed recently that fiscal conservatism puts off a good number of potential voters, and it has concluded in consequence that it ought to shut up about spending on the things that truly matter to them. Somehow, in the space of just a decade, we have gone from Simpson-Bowles to silence.

 

Or, worse: To contempt. In our current political environment, those who worry about the debt are routinely treated as if they are unforgivably out of the step with the zeitgeist. During the 2016 election, the American media routinely wrote stories praising Donald Trump for having “realized” that talking about deficits, the debt, and our looming entitlements disaster was a buzzkill, and having moved the Republican Party away from such talk as a result — as if such problems only exist if politicians are willing to discuss them. This was perhaps inevitable from the press, which considers breaking the bank to be “governing” and casts any attempt to do anything about deficits as an unconscionable “austerity,” and yet its argument has been seamlessly absorbed by members of the “New Right,” who see Trump’s approach as the correct one and who regard any attempt to address our debts as an irritating distraction.

 

Meanwhile, the debt, which is indifferent to such concerns, continues to mount apace.

 

At present, the conventional wisdom in Washington, D.C., is that the Democrats are primarily constrained by what they believe they can get away with ahead of the midterms. In a political sense, this is, of course, true: The bar is high, but if the Democrats push their agenda too far, enough moderates may indeed vote Republican to flip control of Congress. In a fiscal sense, however, such considerations are irrelevant. The public backlash against the Democrats’ spending could be absolutely enormous, and it still wouldn’t make any difference in the long run. Come 2023, if the Republicans retake the majority, they’ll do . . . well, precisely nothing. Sure, they might slow the rate of growth for a while; but they won’t cancel any of the existing spending, they won’t repeal any of the programs that are driving it, and they certainly won’t touch entitlements.

 

And here’s the thing: Nobody, beyond a few worrywarts, will ask them to. As we have now learned over and over, the voting public is far more interested in punishing parties for their profligacy post hoc than it is in demanding that that profligacy be legislatively undone — which means that, irrespective of the political undulations it causes, whatever spending is in place on November 9, 2022, will be in place 20 years later, too. There’s no end to this, I’m afraid — or at least, no end that will be brought about by choice.

America’s Self-Imposed Defeat in Afghanistan Grows Uglier by the Day

By Noah Rothman

Tuesday, July 27, 2021

 

“It’s not inevitable,” President Joe Biden insisted this month when asked if the Afghan government that the United States had supported for two decades was doomed. “The likelihood that there’s going to be a Taliban overrunning everything and owning the whole country is highly unlikely.”

 

The president’s conduct preceding this statement was hardly reassuring. The administration had rushed to withdraw America’s advisory troop presence from Afghanistan, seemingly without preparing for the consequences, and those consequences were materializing rapidly. Would the administration commit to airstrikes on advancing Taliban formations if the terrorist insurgency accelerated? Could the White House evacuate all the Afghans who assisted Americans over the decades, or would they be left to the mercies of this band of medieval paramilitaries? How would the United States preserve its capacity to disrupt terrorist operations in Central and South Asia after withdrawal? The administration seemed to be arguing with itself over these nagging questions in blind quotes provided to media outlets, even as the government in Kabul grew ever more besieged.

 

Joe Biden was right. The fall of Afghanistan and the return of the Taliban to power were not inevitable. His actions contributed to that increasing likelihood. And now, the tempo of unfortunate events is rapidly accelerating. For evidence, look to the headlines from the region that appeared on Monday alone.

 

The Biden administration had evinced an inexplicable reluctance to commit publicly to supporting the Afghan government from the air after America’s withdrawal. That reluctance has evaporated as the Taliban’s offensive operations have intensified. The White House had hoped to “dial back on strikes against the Taliban before Aug. 31,” according to the Wall Street Journal, and limiting air operations thereafter only to al-Qaeda-linked targets. The hesitancy was broken when the Taliban began to close in on Kandahar, Afghanistan’s second-largest city and the site of some of what were once America’s most critical training and basing facilities in the country.

 

There have been roughly a dozen strikes on Taliban positions over the last week. The New York Times reports that the strikes have stalled the Taliban’s advance and given Afghan troops time to regroup. But parts of Kandahar are already under Taliban control, and Afghan government forces have not recovered any territory lost to the insurgent militia. And without U.S. combat aircraft based in Afghanistan, U.S. Centcom Commander Gen. Kenneth McKenzie Jr. confessed that “it will be far more difficult than it was” to support Afghan forces. “We are limited.”

 

Elsewhere in Afghanistan, where the Taliban are in uncontested control, life is beginning to return to the status quo that prevailed before the American invasion in 2001. On Monday, Pakistan reopened a key border crossing in the southwestern part of the country that had been closed when fierce fighting erupted between insurgents and pro-government forces. The reopening of the border crossing signals what one local official called Pakistan’s willingness to resume “Afghan transit trade” with the Taliban. With that, Pakistan has legitimized the Taliban as a governing entity. The mundanities that typify relations between states—trade relations, customs, migration, and border enforcement—have resumed. Gen. McKenzie insists that the area remains “contested space,” but who’s doing the contesting?

 

And with the return of the bad old days looking more unavoidable by the minute, a nascent refugee crisis is brewing. Internally, hundreds of thousands of Afghans have been displaced by the Taliban’s advance. Thousands of routed or demoralized Afghan soldiers and civilians have fled across the border into Iran, Pakistan, and Tajikistan. Reuters reports that Pakistan lawmakers were informed of the terrifying prospect that up to 700,000 Afghan refugees could descend on the country, prompting Islamabad to commit to its initial border closures. Iran has already seen a significant influx of Afghan migrants, but not all are looking to settle into Iranian camps. Many already have or are seeking to cross the Iranian border into Turkey—already the scene of a decade-long refugee crisis spurred by the Syrian civil war—with the hopes of making their way into the European Union.

 

Europe’s experience with the Syrian refugee crisis was not an enviable one. It tested Europe’s commitment to the Schengen Agreement, which permits passport-free travel between European Union nations. It prompted the governments of Hungary and Bulgaria to restore the steel and barbed-wire security fencing on their borders that had fallen along with the collapse of the Soviet Union. It led to an influx not just of migrants but also of aspiring terrorists, and the bloody events some of those elements were able to execute in Germany, France, and Belgium led to the rise of populist political parties and nationalist sentiments that are hostile to European integration. If a wave of Afghan migrants does crash into Europe’s borders, it is sure to be smaller than the human tide that cascaded into the continent in the 2010s. But Europe’s experience over the last decade may have left its political culture far more sensitive to the threat posed by this level of displacement.

 

Joe Biden was right; this didn’t have to happen. But the president was seduced by the promises of withdrawal. Those promises turned out to be false. Advocates of American retrenchment from Central Asia said our withdrawal would somehow end the war in Afghanistan. Instead, we’ve seen more war. They said it would pave the way for a more stable regional environment. But stability seems a far-off prospect. They said that Americans didn’t care about Afghanistan anymore, and we’d all be glad to wash our hands of this unfulfilling affair. But where are the parades? Where are the plaudits for the Biden administration? Who is celebrating this?

 

Joe Biden bet that Americans were ready to absorb a humiliating defeat in Afghanistan with far-reaching and unknowable consequences for the United States and the world. But as Americans watch as the Biden administration abrogates our commitments to the Afghan people and abandons our 20-year investment in that nation, their stunned silence is an ominous sign.

Vaccination Agitation

By Kevin D. Williamson

Tuesday, July 27, 2021

 

The news seems to be sinking into even some traditionally thick and numb Republican skulls: We need to have more people vaccinated against COVID-19. How to go about getting that done? Somewhere between persuasion and coercion lies the middle way.

 

Kay Ivey is the Republican governor of Alabama, one of the states with the lowest vaccination rates. As COVID-19 infections creep up around the country, Governor Ivey observed: “It’s time to start blaming the unvaccinated folks, not the regular folks. It’s the unvaccinated folks that are letting us down.”

 

Exemplary right-wing radio dope Phil Valentine, who, like most right-wing radio dopes, had played some pretty enthusiastic footsie with anti-vaccine activism and related conspiracy kookery, later found himself on oxygen in a critical-care unit with a bad case of COVID-19, and now has dipped a toe into the pool of regret. His brother relayed: “Phil would like for his listeners to know that while he has never been an ‘anti-vaxxer’ he regrets not being more vehemently pro-vaccine.” That is, with apologies to the afflicted, bullsh**. It isn’t true that Valentine was never an anti-vaxxer — anti-vaxxers rarely describe themselves that way, but he had pointedly refused the vaccine himself and argued that others should do the same if they did not have conditions likely to put them at risk of dying from COVID-19, because, as he wrote, “you’re probably safer not getting it.” That claim is — and this still matters! — not true.

 

It is strange and unpredictable what will get Americans’ libertarian hackles up. The Right, which has embraced theatrical self-harm as a kind of weird performative political ritual, is the political home of most (but by no means all) vaccine skeptics (and mask skeptics, and hydroxychloroquine quackery, etc.) and its tribunes worry about vaccine mandates of different kinds. Steve Holt, a Republican state legislator in Iowa, speaks for many when he calls so-called vaccine passports “un-American,” “unconstitutional,” and “unacceptable.” But I am not sure that is quite right.

 

Conservatives, including many libertarian-leaning conservatives, traditionally have been comfortable with such measures as registering young men for possible military conscription and placing limits on certain kinds of business transactions or travel during emergencies or out of concern for national security. During World War I, the United States drafted three men for every two volunteers, and the generals sent 116,516 Americans to their deaths in the service of interests that were quite remote from our own national interest. We drafted 10 million for World War II and 2.2 million for Vietnam. It is a peculiar libertarian principle that accepts marching tens of thousands of Americans to their deaths at Meuse–Argonne but balks at seeking to encourage wider vaccination by taking some active measure — presumably some measure short of the prison sentences given to draft resisters.

 

But the libertarian principle here is very subtle indeed. Representative Holt is a vocal supporter of a new Iowa law that forbids private businesses to require customers to prove that they have received the COVID-19 vaccine. Some businesses, as you may have noticed, have put up signs asking that non-vaccinated people continue to follow such protocols as wearing masks and observing physical distancing. But there is no practical way to enforce that. Perhaps there are other businesses that wish to limit their clientele to those who have been vaccinated, though I am unable to find any serious or widespread effort at that. Such businesses may be operating from an excess of caution — or they may simply be marketing themselves to the more cautious among us. Who knows?

 

But haven’t conservatives traditionally believed that a business has the right to manage such affairs on its own terms? Conservatives made such arguments against, to take one very prominent example, the Civil Rights Act of 1964. How is it that the libertarian principle that bucks at requiring restaurants and hotels to serve African Americans somehow necessitates requiring the same businesses to serve people who, for whatever reason, fail to get themselves vaccinated?

 

It is unlikely that the United States would have much luck implementing something like the Israelis have tried (with limited success) with the recently reinstated “green pass” program. The green pass showing that someone is COVID-immune (from vaccination or prior infection, or confirmed by a recent negative test) is used to control admission to such venues as gyms and restaurants. This is technologically feasible in the United States but culturally impossible for our increasingly ungovernable people.

 

Americans’ lack of faith in the government and other institutions is a real problem — and the worse problem is that this lack of faith is not entirely unjustified. We have seen the weaponization of the IRS and other federal agencies along with grotesque abuses of prosecutorial power by, among others, the former California attorney general who is today the vice president. We have seen elected officials in New York, to take one example, abuse their powers and lean on financial-services companies in order to try to ruin political enemies such as the National Rifle Association. We have Democrats right now threatening to pack the federal courts, expanding the bench until enough Democratic partisans can be seated for Democrats to be confident in getting their way. We have seen Democratic operatives and progressive activists line up behind the multi-billion-dollar extortion attempt directed at Chevron. This isn’t conspiracy-theory stuff — this is stuff that holds up in court.

 

I sympathize with Michael Brendan Dougherty’s plea for a more respectful and charitable dialogue on the subject of vaccines. But I also believe that while it is true that you will attract more flies with honey than with vinegar, you’ll attract even more with manure — and we should identify bovine byproduct as such when we encounter it. And a lot of the anti-vaccine discourse has been that very stuff in refined form.

 

With that in mind, of course businesses — and employers — ought to be free to make their own arrangements as they see fit when it comes to COVID-19 vaccines. The federal government probably ought to apply some pressure, too, for example by requiring proof of vaccination for people entering the United States, whether they are foreign nationals or American citizens. The federal government should use public-health spending to encourage laggard states and municipalities to pursue more active vaccination programs. Colleges and universities would be entirely within their rights to require vaccination against COVID-19, just as kindergartens and elementary schools require vaccination against measles, mumps, rubella, polio, diphtheria, tetanus, pertussis, etc. Churches, surely, must be free to approach this on their own terms.

 

Of course, we’d be better off if vaccination were the overwhelmingly prevalent norm, in much the same way that we’d be better off if having health insurance were the overwhelmingly prevalent norm. And there’s the thing. We tried to fix the health-insurance system by copying aspects of the Swiss system, including the “individual mandate,” the rule that people take the initiative to sign themselves up for insurance. The Swiss have something like 99.7 percent compliance with their mandate — because they enforce it, aggressively. Our mandate was such a joke that we ended up abandoning the idea entirely. We could pass a vaccine mandate tomorrow, but getting Americans to comply with it is another thing entirely.

 

But we should make an effort to persuade the persuadable, imposing inconveniences and both informal and formal sanctions. Un-American? George Washington ordered his troops to be inoculated against smallpox during the Revolution.

 

But the Spirit of ’76 is, in our time, somewhat attenuated.

 

The way this whole thing has unfolded has been both head-clutchingly stupid and deeply unpatriotic. The COVID-19 epidemic was received as a political gift by Democrats, who saw in it their best chance for getting rid of Donald Trump back when the unemployment rate was under 4 percent and wage growth was strong. President Trump, ever incapable of thinking more than one step ahead, obliged his critics by treating COVID-19 as a political liability for himself and trying to wish it away, thus setting up the minimization-maximization dialogue that still dominates our COVID politics. It did not have to be this way. But democracy apparently must mean that 500,000 dead Americans got the leadership they deserved.