The American Jury System Holds Firm against ‘Wokeness’

By Charles C. W. Cooke

Monday, December 13, 2021

 

Asked to describe the discussions that yielded five “guilty” verdicts in the trial of Jussie Smollett, the sole juror to have broken her silence had a rather banal tale to tell. “The jury of six women and six men,” the Daily Beast reported, “didn’t have any major disagreements but took nine hours to deliberate because they wanted to properly consider all the evidence.” “We went in there with an open mind. I listened to both sides. We wanted to make sure that those who had doubts didn’t feel pressured,” the juror said. And that short delay before the unanimous conclusions were reached? That happened, according to the Beast, because the jury “just wanted more time to look over all the evidence again.”

 

You will have noticed, I hope, what this juror’s account lacks. It does not, at any point, mention Smollett’s race, sexual orientation, or work on network TV. It does not, at any point, inquire as to his pronouns or his politics or his tax bracket. And it does not, at any point, try to set the case within the broad sweep of American history. The headline on the Beast’s piece reads, “Juror Explains What Sealed Jussie Smollett’s Fate for Them,” and the truth, refreshingly enough, seems to be that Smollett’s fate was sealed by the overwhelming evidence of his guilt. The jury “wanted to properly consider all the evidence”; hoped to ensure “that prosecutors had proven their case beyond reasonable doubt”; asked for “more time to look over all the evidence again”; “found testimony from the brothers hired to attack Smollett to be more convincing”; and, eventually, “felt [Smollett’s] answers didn’t have credible reasoning, especially when there was zero evidence to back up his story.”

 

Put another way, the jurors ignored all the noise surrounding the case and did their job.

 

American juries have done sterling work of late. Indeed, in recent high-profile trials, they are an impressive three for three: Kyle Rittenhouse? Not guilty; the men who killed Ahmaud Arbery? Guilty as hell; Jussie Smollett? Don’t make us laugh. This, I’d submit, should give Americans who are alarmed by the march of “wokeness” some hope. Our universities may be full of lunatics, our media may be suicidal, and our corporations may have been captured by semi-literate race essentialists, but the good, old-fashioned American jury system seems to be holding fast.

 

In the wake of the Rittenhouse trial, Colin Kaepernick proposed that the outcome had highlighted “the need to abolish our current system.” As is typical, though, he did not explain precisely what he meant. At the time, I wondered which part of the “current system” he hoped to explode: The presumption of innocence? Trial by jury? Double jeopardy? The right to cross-examine one’s accuser? The very idea of “law” itself? Having followed the rest of the coverage, however, I think I now know. Kaepernick, and those who agree with him, wish to switch to a collective model of justice, in which broader historical considerations are weighed against the discrete facts of a given case. They want, in other words, to 1619 Project the courts.

 

Thus far they are failing spectacularly, and for that we should be grateful. The Anglo-American system of justice relies for its integrity upon the creation of a series of political vacuums. To operate properly, our courts must ignore the political preferences or immutable characteristics of those who come before them and adjudicate only the narrow questions at issue. There can be no such thing as a trial that implicates “America” or “white people” or “capitalism” writ large, because such a trial would inevitably have to ignore the individuals involved, along with their individual stories, defenses, and patterns of fact. At various points in our history — including during Jim Crow — Americans have forgotten this and given into the temptation of collective guilt. But we will not change that by abandoning our system now that, at long last, it is operating more closely to how it should. You will recall, I presume, that the implied antidote to the railroading in To Kill a Mockingbird was not more railroading. It was less.

 

I can comprehend why, having watched the universities, the media, the entertainment industry, and the corporate world descend into madness, many classical liberals have simply assumed that our justice system would be next. But there is a difference between those other institutions and the criminal courts: As a purely practical matter, it is far, far easier for committed activists to capture small bastions of prestige and power than it is for them to capture the American citizenry as a whole. If our juries were pulled only from bodies of which progressives approve, we would indeed be seeing some backsliding in our courtrooms. Happily, though, they are not. They are pulled at random, from the diners and schools and football fields of America, where the Jacobin stupidity of our vanguard is more diffuse, and, in some salutary cases, nowhere at all to be found.

Women’s Sports Should Be Women Only

National Review Online

Tuesday, December 14, 2021

 

At the end of The Incredibles, Dash — a superhero kid with superhuman speed — partakes in his middle-school track race. “Make it close!” his dad, a plainclothes Mr. Incredible, yells as Dash shoots past his non-super peers. “Go for second!” adds Mrs. Incredible. While the other competitors catch their breath after crossing the finish line, Dash, who has barely broken a sweat, gives his parents a thumbs-up. If only the University of Pennsylvania swimming coach had deployed the same strategy when allowing a transgender-identifying male athlete to dominate the women’s team.

 

Between 2016 and 2019, Will Thomas was an average swimmer for the men’s swimming division. But after adopting a female name (Lia) and identity, Thomas has been smashing records at every turn. Now, Thomas is supposedly the No. 1 female swimmer in the nation, with the fastest 500-yard female freestyle in the country and the all-time record for the Penn women’s team. In a sport that is known for slim margins, Thomas has been crushing the competition. At the Zippy Invitational at the University of Akron, Thomas’s time in the 200-yard race was better than last year’s gold-medal time in the NCAA finals, while notching a 4:34:06 in the 500 freestyle — a margin of victory of more than 14 seconds. And in the 1650 freestyle, Thomas beat the second-place woman by more than 38 seconds.

 

The explanation for such staggering victories is neither talent nor superpowers — merely biology. Since Thomas is biologically male, and since Thomas underwent male puberty with all the androgenizing benefits that this conferred, he is larger, faster, and stronger than most female athletes.

 

Just ask Thomas’s female teammates. Despite being “strongly advised” to stay silent, two teammates have anonymously spoken out to the sports website OutKick. “Pretty much everyone individually has spoken to our coaches about not liking this. Our coach [Mike Schnur] just really likes winning. He’s like most coaches. I think secretly everyone just knows it’s the wrong thing to do,” said one.

 

She observed that Thomas’s best swimming times as a woman are not far off college records set by then-future Olympic gold medalists Missy Franklin and Katie Ledecky. (The editor of Swimming World has written that the records of both should now be considered in jeopardy.)

 

Another teammate spoke of how soul-crushing it is for the other competitors who know they don’t stand a chance of winning.

 

“Usually everyone claps, everyone is yelling and cheering when someone wins a race,” she said. “Lia touched the wall, and it was just silent in there. When fellow Penn swimmer Anna Kalandadze finished second, the crowd erupted in applause.”

 

But Thomas, like UPenn, claims not to see any problem, saying that “everybody is able to compete in the category they’re most comfortable with unless there’s a proven unfair advantage that they have.”

 

Even if Thomas is in compliance with the NCAA rules that require testosterone-suppression treatment for one year for male-to-female athletes, this is still risibly insufficient at mitigating sex-based advantages that are years in the making and do not simply disappear with chemical or surgical interventions. Such policies fail on principle, in any case. As politically incorrect as it is to point out, there is no material difference between a man and a trans woman. This is not difficult. The athletes in women’s sports should be women only.

The Failure of ‘Latinx’

By Rich Lowry

Tuesday, December 14, 2021

 

What the progressive culture elite wants, it usually gets. Single-sex bathrooms changing overnight to all-gender or non-gender bathrooms? Done. Illegal immigrants becoming known as “undocumented persons”? But of course.

 

So when it was decided in the precincts of fashionable opinion that the term “Latino” would be retired in favor of “Latinx,” one could have been forgiven for thinking that this hideous neologism would, like so much else in American life, go from a fringe cause to mainstream soon enough.

 

But a funny thing happened on the way to the Latinx ascendancy — Latinos have rejected the term, at the same time that a big swing toward the GOP among these voters has highlighted the perils of high-handed cultural politics for the Democrats.

 

“Latinx” may end up being a woke experiment that failed, showing the vast gap between the identity-politics-obsessed progressives earnestly talking to one another in seminar rooms and on social media and the Hispanics in whose name they presume to speak.

 

“Latinx” is a project cut from the same cloth as the endless extension of LGBTQ, which, as of this writing, is now more properly and comprehensively rendered as LGBTQQIP2SAA.

 

The alleged problem that “Latinx” was invented to fix is that is Spanish has gendered nouns. This means that using the male “Latino” as an adjective to describe men and women of Latin American ancestry, let alone transgender and nonbinary people, is supposedly exclusionary, hateful, and downright dangerous. As a handbook on the terminology by a Princeton scholar explains, “to default to the masculine gender promotes interpersonal violence against women and nonbinary individuals.”

 

“Latinx” rose from the ashes of its predecessor neologism “Latin@,” an attempted amalgamation of the -o at the end of the Latino and the -a at the end of “Latina.” But no one knew how to pronounce the word. It was deemed insufficiently woke because the -o was supposedly graphically dominating the -a. (Yes, this is how some people think.) And it caused confusion on social media where the @ sign is used to tag someone.

 

Enter “Latinx,” which is only slightly less ridiculous.

 

As the Daily Wire’s Giancarlo Sopo, who has been on a one-man crusade against the rise of the term, points out, “Latinx” is incomprehensible to any Spanish speaker without some knowledge of English. Most Spanish speakers don’t think that there’s something desperately flawed about their language or that Spanish grammar is a proto–hate crime. The Real Academia Española, Spain’s official institution charged with maintaining the integrity of the language, has ruled against the -x appendage.

 

Out in the real world, “Latinx” polls even more poorly than Joe Biden does. A Politico poll found that only 2 percent of Hispanics prefer the term, while 68 percent opt for “Hispanic” and 21 percent favor “Latino” or “Latina.” The term is considered offensive to 40 percent of respondents, and 30 percent said that they are less likely to support a politician or group using it.

 

Representative Ruben Gallego, an Arizona Democrat, tweeted in reaction to the poll that he forbids his staff from using “Latinx” in official communications. “When Latino politicos use the term, it is largely to appease white rich progressives who think that is the term we use,” he wrote. “It is a vicious circle of confirmation bias.”

 

Still, elite media outlets and other institutions susceptible to progressive influence, as well as many elected Democrats, have dutifully defaulted to the term. It’s one thing if an individual prefers to be called “Latinx” (or the even more cutting-edge “Latina/o/x” or “Xicanx”).  It’s another thing to apply the term to a large group of people who have no interest in being called a name that makes no sense to them.

 

The pushback is a heartening sign of the limits of elite cultural power, and of the lack of interest of most Latinos in being pawns in the ever more strained and obscure progressive politics of perpetual victimology.

Both Groups of Pessimists Were Wrong about Republicans and Hispanics

By Dan McLaughlin

Saturday, December 11, 2021

 

As Rich Lowry noted earlier this week, the latest Wall Street Journal poll showing nearly an even split in party preference among Hispanic voters is yet more evidence that Republicans are in a period of breaking through to something much closer to parity with Democrats among Hispanic Americans and are now capable of winning those voters outright in some elections. Rich observes that this is a rebuttal to the charge that “Republicans couldn’t be tough-minded on immigration and win Hispanics.” That is true, but it is also only half of the story.

 

For a long time, the demographic triumphalism of Democrats — premised as so much of it was on the growth of the Hispanic vote — was matched by a two-sided counsel of pessimism bordering on despair on the right. Like the Democrats, both factions on the right looked at California’s dramatic decline from a Nixon/Reagan stronghold to a blue state after 1992 and a deep-blue state after 2008. Republicans last won a Senate race in California in 1988, when Pete Wilson won 53 percent to 44 percent, and last fielded a competitive candidate in 1994, when Michael Huffington lost to Dianne Feinstein 47 percent to 45 percent. Since 2000, Carly Fiorina’s ten-point loss in 2010 is the only Senate race in which a California Republican has come within 19 points, and Republicans have not even had a candidate on the ballot since 2012.

 

There were two competing theories of what happened, both of which emphasized Hispanic voters and immigration. One theory was that California was flipped mainly by demographic change: Lots of Hispanic — especially Mexican — immigrants entered the state, they voted Democratic in large numbers, and that did most of the work in tilting the partisan balance. An entire culture of California conservatives grew up around the apocalyptic theme of invasion: “It could happen to you!” Fear of being demographically swamped by new Democratic voters who would be permanently unreachable drove a culture of demands for abolishing the birthright citizenship mandated by the 14th Amendment and infused a hysterical “Flight 93 election” tone into the Right’s political discourse.

 

The other theory — advocated most prominently by the Cato Institute’s Alex Nowrasteh — was that California turned left because of the backlash against Proposition 187, the Republican-backed initiative to deny public services to illegal immigrants. After the 2012 election, the Republican “autopsy” embraced this view, endorsing comprehensive immigration reform as a way to stop alienating Hispanics. Marco Rubio destroyed his presidential aspirations by buying into this theory. Even Sean Hannity embraced it at the time:

 

We’ve got to get rid of the immigration issue altogether. . . . It’s simple to me to fix it. I think you control the border first. You create a pathway for those people that are here. You don’t say you’ve got to go home. And that is a position that I’ve evolved on. Because, you know what, it’s got to be resolved. The majority of people here, if some people have criminal records you can send them home, but if people are here, law-abiding, participating for years, their kids are born here, you know, it’s first secure the border, pathway to citizenship, done, whatever little penalties you want to put in there, if you want, and it’s done.

 

As Sean Trende explained back in 2010, both theories had some problems: If you actually looked at California voters, you saw that the state was never as solidly Republican as it seemed. Hispanics’ perceptions of the Republican Party did not change much following Proposition 187. The decline of the Republican Party was a combination of a rise in the size of the Hispanic vote with a decline in the Republican share of the white vote — a decline that might have been partly due to distaste at Prop 187 but was likely due as well to a whole battery of other issues, including the end of the Cold War and the declining salience of the crime issue by the end of the 1990s.

 

What both crowds of pessimists missed was the possibility that Republicans could, in time, break the Democratic stranglehold on the Hispanic vote, and do so without significantly moderating the party’s stance on immigration. That could be done, not only because some Hispanic voters would agree with that stance but also because others would not place a high priority on the issue. Indeed, the optimists argued that immigration policy was never really why Hispanics voted Democratic in such large numbers in the first place.

 

Hispanic voters were never a monolith: Republicans in Texas and Florida always had more success than in California. The optimistic case argued that Hispanic voters tended to vote Democratic for many of the same reasons that previous groups of immigrants (the Germans, the Irish, the Italians) voted Democratic when they were composed heavily of first-generation immigrants living in poor and working-class urban enclaves and relying on a lot of public services and benefits. Individual voters in those groups, as they moved up the economic ladder and assimilated more into American culture, began to see themselves more as part of the American mainstream, with a stake in the system. With that came voting more often for Republicans.

 

That is where we are today. In July, Noah Smith argued the case:

 

The boom of 2014-2019 — and it was a boom, even though we kind of ignored it — was good for everyone, but in percentage terms it was especially good for Hispanics. . . . Part of this is from the end of mass net Hispanic immigration, which happened in 2007. With fewer poor immigrant families coming in, the natural tendency of incomes to rise from the first to the second generation is no longer being obscured by a composition effect. In fact, despite some claims to the contrary, Hispanic upward mobility has been a fact of American life for a long time now. . . . And perhaps most importantly, Hispanics themselves feel the upward mobility too. [Citing poll data]. . . . In other words, despite starting from a very humble base, Hispanics are treading the same upward path that American immigrant groups always tread. The history of the Irish, Italians, Poles, and so on is repeating itself.

 

When Mexican immigrants waved American flags at pro-immigration rallies in the 2000s, they weren’t just courting public opinion — they really believed in this country, and in the American Dream they were promised. The dream of working hard, bettering yourself, and moving up. They were immigrants, damn it. And their children and their grandchildren remembered that dream as well — and now they’re achieving it. America has kept the promise it made. So why would this make Hispanics shift toward the GOP? Maybe it’s because Trump presided over the most recent boom, in which Hispanic incomes did so well. Maybe it’s because when you start moving up the economic ladder, you get the urge to protect your gains with low taxes. . . . They, or their parents or grandparents, worked damn hard to get to this country and succeed here; my bet is that they do not want to see the America they believed in and fought so hard for be yanked away by pious White liberals and replaced with a stifling spoils system.

 

Improving one’s economic status doesn’t automatically turn people into Republicans, but it does make them much more receptive to persuasion by Republicans, who traditionally emphasize opportunity, economic optimism, and letting people keep more of what they earn. That is even a good part of the story of how Republicans broke through with white Southerners; Trende, in his book The Lost Majority, details at some length not just the shift among Irish and Italian immigrants as they became more economically established but also how the breaks in the Democratic Solid South tracked the growth of suburbs and the middle class in the “New South,” especially after the Second World War, while poorer and more rural Southerners were slower to change their voting behavior (at least until much more recently).

 

Reading that Wall Street Journal poll and other signs in his latest newsletter, Ruy Teixeira also continued to warn Democrats about the trend with Hispanic voters:

 

Turning to the nature and size of recent Hispanic shifts against the Democrats—it’s not as bad as you think, it’s worse. . . . In the hotly-contested 2021 Virginia gubernatorial election, according to the AP-NORC VoteCast survey . . . Democrat Terry McAuliffe actually lost the Latino vote and also lost ground among black and “other race’ (chiefly Asian) voters. This deterioration of nonwhite support also can be seen in analysis of precinct-level results. . . . It is hard to avoid the conclusion that Democrats have seriously erred by lumping Hispanics in with “people of color” and assuming they embraced the activism around racial issues that dominated so much of the political scene in 2020. . . . Latino voters evinced little sympathy with the more radical demands that came to be associated with the Black Lives Matter movement. . . . [In a post-election survey,] despite showing support for some specific policing reforms, Hispanics opposed defunding the police, decreasing the size of police forces and the scope of their work and reparations for the descendants of slaves by 2:1 or more. . . . They are also patriotic. By well over 3:1, Hispanics in the . . . survey said they would rather be a citizen of the United States than any other country in the world and by 35 points said they were proud of the way American democracy works.

 

If you listened to the pessimists for the past decade and a half warning about an “invasion” of people who did not share our values and could not be assimilated into America, you would never have expected these survey results. We turn out, as a nation, to be better at passing on our principles and culture than conservative pessimists think. That even includes selling new arrivals on the value of enforcing our immigration laws.

 

On the other hand, paranoia about immigrants and non-white ethnic groups can be a self-fulfilling prophecy. Republicans who give up trying to reach voters will find that they do not reach them. Even Donald Trump’s campaign in 2020 spent less time bashing immigrants and more time highlighting immigrant stories and appeals to Hispanics and South Asians. One of Trump’s assets as a politician was his salesman’s shamelessness: He was never afraid to ask for votes even from people whom one might expect to be skeptical. That helped.

 

What does all this say for the party’s immigration policy going forward? Will the same process continue for other immigrant groups in the future? One thing Smith notes is that the shift among Hispanics has taken place after the end of the big waves of Hispanic immigration. That, in effect, suggests that Republicans who are worried (if we are analyzing immigration in strictly partisan terms) about waves of new voters should think less in terms of restricting immigration generally than in terms of having a more even and diverse flow that is not composed disproportionately of new arrivals from a single country or region. After all, the electoral problem for Republicans is not that Hispanics were undergoing the classic American immigrant experience, but that so many of them were doing so at the same time, often in communities with one another. A balanced mix of skilled and unskilled immigrants, varied in their origins, present less of a demographic bulge that can be politically exploited in the short term.

 

The future of immigration to the United States will likely be dominated by the groups that have been overtaking Hispanics since 2010: newcomers from Asia, South Asia, and the heartland of the Muslim world. Hispanic Americans are, like the Irish, Italians, and other European groups, still fundamentally Western. They are mostly Christians, speak a Western language, and came from countries established by Europeans. While there are other optimistic stories that can be told about immigrant groups from non-Western societies and non-Judeo-Christian religious backgrounds, it is unwise to simply assume the same trajectory. But we would be well-advised to be less consumed by fear that new immigrants and their descendants will permanently tilt the partisan balance of the country, and less worried about compromising our principles rather than simply doing outreach and treating people with respect.

The Vision Thing

By Kevin D. Williamson

Friday, December 10, 2021

 

In the late 1970s, German chancellor Helmut Schmidt was asked about his “vision” for Germany. Schmidt scoffed at the question: “People who have visions should go see a doctor.”

 

Germany has just elected a new chancellor, Olaf Scholz. Like Schmidt, he is a member of the Social Democratic Party but is not the kind of social democrat given to the utopian reveries that afflict Americans of that persuasion. “Sell the world a BMW” — that’s the German ideology in our time. Germany has had worse ideas.

 

Modern German coalitional politics — and the rest of modern German politics — can seem damned peculiar to an American. Scholz is nominally a socialist, but he served as finance minister — the second-most-powerful position in German government — under the conservative Angela Merkel. His new coalition government comprises three parties: the Social Democrats, the Greens, and the Free Democrats, who are Germany’s libertarian party. The new finance minister, Christian Lindner, comes from those libertarian Free Democrats, but he is expected to follow much the same policy as Scholz did before him. Put another way: The libertarian serving under the socialist is expected to conduct business in much the same way as the socialist did when he served under the conservative.

 

The thing about German socialists and German libertarians is that they are German, and as finance minister Scholz was much more a fiscal conservative than any Republican actually holding high office in the United States. You want fiscal conservatism? Germany’s debt-to-GDP ratio is just over half that of the United States, and, in spite of its more-expansive welfare state, Germany’s government spending as a share of GDP isn’t much more than ours: 51 percent for Germany vs. 46 percent for the United States. Germany’s new socialist leader ran on a platform of no tax increases and no new debt. These will be difficult promises to keep, but the fact that he made them and was elected on them should tell us something about how he sees the world and what to expect of him. Don’t think that he is going to get carried away by any “visions” — not his own, and certainly not Joe Biden’s.

 

The United States needs to figure out its relationship with Germany, because Germany is the key to American relations with the European Union and the European Union is critical to dealing — as we eventually must — with China.

 

Things are not off to a great start there. President Biden had been hoping that some other democratic powers would join in our not-quite-a-boycott of the Beijing Winter Olympics. Biden found no taker in Olaf Scholz. When asked whether he was signing on, the new German chancellor took about 600 words to say Nein. That shouldn’t surprise us: Biden’s policy is a stupid and cowardly one, and there wasn’t anything in it for the Germans. A “diplomatic boycott” is a protest that nobody would have noticed if there hadn’t been a press release: “Where in the World Is Deputy Assistant Secretary for the Bureau of East Asian and Pacific Affairs Melissa A. Brown” is not a game that anybody really plays. Of course, we’re still sending the athletes — the only people anybody cares about when it comes to the Olympics — because this is America, where sports is the most weirdly sensitive nexus of capitalism and nationalism. That’s American diplomacy in our time: China may be a genocidal police state and our No. 1 global adversary, but, by God, our figures skaters stay off the ice for nothing and no one!

 

The problem with bringing the Germans around to the U.S. position vis-à-vis China is that the Germany–China relationship already is too much like the U.S.–China relationship: Germany’s leaders, like ours, will occasionally make some ceremonial gestures toward democracy or human rights, and there are a few German and American policy thinkers who still take a long-term geopolitical view, but the governments of both countries still approach their respective relationships with China as an almost exclusively economic matter.

 

And the economic footprint there is a big one. Trade between the United States, the European Union, and China accounts for almost half of the world’s total trade in goods, and Germany is both Europe’s largest economy and its largest exporter. While the prominence of Chinese imports in the United States is wildly exaggerated in our political discourse (Chinese goods account for only about 18 percent of U.S. imports), China does send more goods to the United States than any other country, well ahead of No. 2 Mexico (11.8 percent of U.S. imports) and No. 3 Canada (11.4 percent). China is the third-largest buyer of U.S. exports, behind Canada and Mexico. The biggest buyer of German exports is the United States and the biggest source of German imports is China. Germany is the sixth-biggest buyer of U.S. exports.

 

That’s a lot of trade, a lot of money, and a lot of jobs.

 

Nobody wants to put all that at risk — yet. And, furthermore, nobody wants to be the first to admit that the turn-of-the-century confidence that economic liberalization would bring other kinds of liberalization to China has not been borne out by subsequent events, partly because Chinese nationalism is a real and organic phenomenon rather than a mere instrument of the Communist Party, partly because the credibility and prestige of Western liberalism have been damaged in recent years, and partly because the assumption was unrealistic to begin with. And so the fruitful and dynamic commercial relationship with China remains the dominant consideration in both the United States and in Germany, while other aspects of the Chinese challenge to the liberal-democratic order produce neither consensus nor urgency — only a vague sense of dread.

 

Joe Biden may not take precisely Donald Trump’s elbows-and-knees posture toward Xi Jinping, but, like Trump, he sees the U.S.–China relationship basically in terms of steel-mill jobs and “Made in China” stamps on flip-flops at Walmart. Biden sees China that way, he sees the European Union that way, and he even sees the United Kingdom, our closest ally, mainly as a trade challenge. And, in spite of a slight stiffening in the European attitude toward China in the past two years, it is safe to expect the new German chancellor to take roughly the same nickel-and-dime view of China for the immediate future — but with a twist: The Europeans increasingly see the United States as a potential long-term threat, too, an unpredictable, unreliable, mercantilist power willing to deploy economic coercion (among other means) in the service of a foreign-policy agenda entirely dominated by domestic political calculation. From the European point of view, the transition from Trump to Biden has only confirmed that the United States is a country with two nationalist-populist parties and no party with anything more than a superficial commitment to trans-Atlantic cooperation.

 

Olaf Scholz couldn’t really overturn the status quo if he wanted to, because Germany is not the kind of power the United States and China are. Germany cannot lead the world, but it can lead Europe, and that makes it worth having as an ally — preferably, an active and invigorated ally, not one whose alliance is a matter of inertia. Unfortunately, the reality is that when Olaf Scholz asks, “What’s in it for us?” Joe Biden is not going to have much of an answer. It is peculiar: In spite of the fact that the United States and China maintain more or less ordinary diplomatic relations and vigorous, mutually beneficially commercial relations, that there is a coming existential conflict with Beijing is practically the only matter of broad bipartisan consensus in Washington. And nobody seems to have even four or five practical ideas for what to do about that, even as the Washington Post takes note of “the president’s oft-stated vision that democracies are locked in a must-win historic battle with autocracies.”

 

President Biden may have a vision. He may have several of them. There are doctors for that.

The Uniquely Dangerous Movement to End the Electoral College

By Jim Inhofe & Trent England

Monday, December 13, 2021

 

Over the years we have witnessed a reliable pattern develop in American politics: When the Left loses, instead of changing its arguments or its candidates it opts to change the rules. When Democrats lost the White House and President Trump filled three vacancies on the Supreme Court, they called for packing the Court. When they failed to win a large enough majority to advance their radical agenda in the Senate, they called for abolishing the filibuster. And perhaps most insidiously, after losing presidential elections, they have set their sights on scrapping the Electoral College.

 

In 2006, frustrated Al Gore supporters, still fuming from his close loss to George W. Bush six years prior, launched the National Popular Vote Interstate Compact (NPVIC), a voluntary agreement among states to award their electoral votes to the winner of the national popular vote. The NPVIC is designed to go into effect once its signatory states comprise an absolute majority of all electoral votes (EV) — 270 EV, under the current map. Ten left-leaning states initially signed on, including California, Illinois, and New York, and five more blue states joined them after 2016. The plan is now nearly three-quarters of the way to taking effect, and in Michigan its supporters are currently gathering the signatures needed to put it on the ballot next year. While it suffered a major setback with Republican Glenn Youngkin’s win in the Virginia governor’s race, the NPVIC is coming closer and closer to fruition, making our efforts to oppose it more vital than ever.

 

NPVIC supporters’ aim is to eliminate the Electoral College without doing the hard work of amending the Constitution. The Compact requires states to choose presidential electors based not on their state popular vote, but on the national popular vote. This sounds simple, but the devil is in the details. Each NPVIC-signatory state would determine the national popular vote on its own. That means a single official in each state would decide what votes to count from every other state. In a world of perfect peace and harmony, that might work. But American politics is not a world of perfect peace and harmony.

 

What’s more, even if it were — even if the potential for partisan abuse were never realized — the NPVIC would still dramatically increase the power of big cities at the expense of the rest of America. Without the Electoral College, our national elections would become a coastal affair. Just nine states — including the liberal bastions of New York, Illinois, and California — make up more than 50 percent of our population. The NPVIC would strip away the voices of Oklahomans, North Dakotans, Alaskans, Arizonans, and many others. Some Democrats see this as a feature of the plan, not a bug.

 

The Constitution reserves nearly all the power over elections to the states. It requires state legislatures to determine how best to represent their state in the Electoral College. It bars federal officials from serving as presidential electors. The Electoral Counts Act of 1887 reiterates this constitutional design by limiting federal power to interfere in states’ electoral-vote counting — no matter how good the intentions or real the concerns of members of Congress.

 

The United States is hardly alone in using a two-step democratic process to choose our national executive. Parliamentary systems work that way, and Germany and India have their own unique electoral-college systems. Requiring concurrent victories across multiple states or districts forces presidential candidates to appeal to the broadest possible cross-section of the electorate, which in turn ensures a government that reflects the diversity of its constituents.

 

Our great American Founders knew what they were doing in constructing a system of government that delicately balances power between cities and rural communities, between coastal communities and inland regions. The Electoral College is a critical part of that system, a guarantee that while political candidates may treat states such as Oklahoma as flyover country, Oklahomans will have as clear and powerful a voice in electing presidents as San Franciscans and New Yorkers. The very future of our republic depends on its preservation.

Biden White House Censors Taiwan at Democracy Summit

By Jim Geraghty

Monday, December 13, 2021

 

Remember when so many of our leaders thought greater interaction with China was going to make them more like us? And yet the reverse seems to have occurred. Just take for example the NBA banning pro-Tibet, pro-Hong Kong, and pro-Uyghur banners in its arenas. Instead of American values taking root in China, the values of the Chinese Communist Party started taking root in the United States.

 

Well, now the White House is cutting video feeds at a “Democracy Summit,” lest the Taiwanese representative’s map irk the Chinese:

 

A video feed of a Taiwanese minister was cut during U.S. President Joe Biden’s Summit for Democracy last week after a map in her slide presentation showed Taiwan in a different color to China, which claims the island as its own.

 

Sources familiar with the matter told Reuters that Friday’s slide show by Taiwanese Digital Minister Audrey Tang caused consternation among U.S. officials after the map appeared in her video feed for about a minute.

 

The sources, who did not want to be identified due to the sensitivity of the matter, said the video feed showing Tang was cut during a panel discussion and replaced with audio only — at the behest of the White House.

 

Our leaders are such damnable wimps. We say we want to stand up for democracy and that we won’t get bullied by authoritarians. And then we bend over backwards to avoid offending the far-reaching and ever-changing sensitivities of the brutes in Beijing. There’s no need for China to censor what our leaders can say to us. Our leaders are now preemptively censoring themselves.

 

If you’re afraid of the Taiwanese representative showing a map that indicates Taiwan is a separate country at your much-touted “Democracy Summit,” why did you invite her? And if you’re afraid to have a Taiwanese representative speaking her mind in a way that might irk the Chinese government — keeping in mind that Taiwanese representatives irk the Chinese government by existing — why are you hosting a much-touted “Democracy Summit”?

 

Oh Look, Another Lab Leak!

 

One of the dumbest arguments against the lab-leak theory in early 2020 was the argument that the scientists working at the Wuhan Institute of Virology were just too careful and professional to ever have a lab leak. To this day, WIV deputy director Yuan Zhiming contends that his institution’s biosafety-level-4 labs has never seen any laboratory leaks or human infections since it began operating in 2018.

 

There is a long, long list of accidental leaks and releases of pathogens from labs. The Bulletin of Atomic Scientists summarized in 2014 that, “SARS has not re-emerged naturally, but there have been six escapes from virology labs: one each in Singapore and Taiwan, and four separate escapes at the same laboratory in Beijing.”

 

Speaking of Taiwan, the Taiwanese just announced an accidental SARS-CoV-2 infection in a research lab either from mice bites or contamination in areas where technicians remove their personal protective equipment:

 

Taiwan’s latest local COVID-19 case had likely contracted the virus at work at an Academia Sinica laboratory, the Central Epidemic Command Center (CECC) said yesterday.

 

The woman, who is in her 20s, worked as a research assistant at the Genomics Research Center in Taipei’s Nangang District until Friday last week, where tests on mice using the Delta variant of SARS-CoV-2 are conducted, the center said.

 

The genome of virus samples taken from her and the genome of the virus tested at the lab were found to correspond, it said.

 

Her genome sequencing results showed that she was infected with the virus used for testing at the lab, Chen said.

 

Her virus’ genome differed from that of Delta cases reported between June and September, he added.

 

“We can determine that the case’s source of infection is the laboratory, not the local community,” Chen said.

 

Academia Sinica Department of Academic Affairs and Instrument Service Director-General Chen Chien-Chang said the woman in October reported to her supervisor that she had been bitten by a lab mouse.

 

However, the incident was not reported to the institution’s dedicated department as required by its standard operating procedure of disaster response, he said.

 

Last month, the woman was again bitten by a lab mouse infected with the Alpha variant, he said.

 

The fact that this poor woman was bitten twice by lab mice raises the question of how often lab technicians get bitten by mice being used in experiments and how often those bites spread pathogens. The article continues:

 

Chen Shih-chung said that it is unlikely that she contracted the virus from mouse bites, but added that she might have contracted the virus in a contaminated laboratory environment, for example the area where workers remove personal protective equipment.

 

He said environmental surface testing was yesterday performed in the building that houses the lab, and preliminary results showed that COVID-19 was detected in a few spots in the laboratory, including on doorknobs and desktops, but the virus was not detected anywhere outside the lab.

 

And lest you think American laboratories don’t have accidents worth our attention, this past summer, a Los Alamos National Laboratory plutonium facility accidentally spilled 200 gallons of contaminated, “mildly radioactive” water. Thankfully, the subsequent safety report concluded that, “There was no risk to employees, public health and safety, or the environment. The majority of cleanup is complete, and the laboratory is conducting a fact-finding mission to determine the cause of the incident and will develop appropriate corrective actions.”

 

The answer to this is not to never conduct scientific research, although I think you have to look far and wide to find someone who wants to shut down all biological-research labs, national energy labs, etcetera. Virologist Michael Worobey complains that, “Loud voices with little sense of proportion but a high degree of certainty that a lab error led to the pandemic are being given undeserved credibility. Their predictable calls to burn the virology house down risk hobbling our ability to fight future pandemics.”

 

When those anti-science luddites in the, er, Obama administration placed a nationwide halt on gain-of-function research from 2014 to 2017, was that “burning the virology house down”? Or is it that different researchers have different thresholds of acceptable risk, and those who are willing to accept a higher level of risk prefer to paint their critics as anti-science?

 

I suspect that Worobey and his colleagues probably run a tight ship in their labs. But that doesn’t mean I have the same faith in the 59 biosafety-level-4 labs all around the world.

 

Last month, The New York Times Magazine ran a lengthy article contending that whether or not the Covid-19 pandemic stemmed from a leak at the Wuhan labs, nothing has changed to reduce the risk of another leak from some other lab:

 

When I asked Rocco Casagrande, the study’s lead author and a former United Nations weapons inspector, what we don’t know about the global risks of high-containment labs, he ticked off a long list. “Well, it’s still almost everything,” he said. “We don’t know how often incidents happen, or how often those incidents lead to exposures. We don’t know what factors are driving those exposures and incidents. We don’t know what features, like training or extra containment equipment or engineering controls, are effective at mitigating those incidents. So we have no idea if we’re spending way too much on biosafety or way too little or just the right amount. And if we should spend more, what should we spend it on?”