Are Trump’s or Biden’s Lies Worse?

By Jim Geraghty

Thursday, July 27, 2023

 

If you point out that Donald Trump lies a lot, quite a few Trump fans will respond that Joe Biden lies more and that his lies are worse. If you point out that Biden lies a lot, quite a few Biden fans will make the same argument in reverse.

 

That so few fans of the two men will even attempt to argue that their guy is fundamentally honest reveals a depressing truth about the state of our politics. These people appear to have convinced themselves that a leader doesn’t really need to be honest when talking to the American people; he just needs to be one iota less dishonest than the other pathological liar.

 

Trump currently enjoys a strong lead over all his rivals for the GOP presidential nomination, so the question of which man is the bigger or worse liar may well be with us until November 2024. Does it matter which of the two notoriously shameless liars is slightly less dishonest than the other? And if it does, how do we even begin to measure which ill-tempered, shouting, egomaniacal old man is worse?

 

Biden defenders may concede their man is full of “malarkey,” to use one of the president’s favorite terms, but they’re likely to argue that his lies are mostly harmless exaggerations and much less consequential than Trump’s.

 

Trump’s most consequential lie is his insistence, contrary to all available evidence and the decisions of multiple courts in multiple jurisdictions, that he won the 2020 presidential election. To this day he contends that his supposed landslide victory was covered up by a cabal of both Democratic and Republican state election officials executing an elaborate and far-reaching scheme to destroy legitimate votes for him and manufacture illegitimate votes for Biden.

 

These lies led to the Capitol Hill riot of January 6, 2021, in which U.S. Capitol Police shot and killed one woman protester and more than 150 officers were injured, and in the months after which four officers who had responded to the attack committed suicide. According to the U.S. Department of Justice, more than 1,000 individuals have been charged in connection with the riot, almost 600 have pleaded guilty, and 98 have been found guilty at trial. The riot caused more than $2.8 million in damage to the Capitol building and grounds.

 

Shortly after the election, almost everyone around Trump other than Sidney Powell and Rudy Giuliani was telling him that he had lost. If Trump had accepted the hard truth and conceded the election, none of the awful events of January 6 would have happened.

 

Some will offer a qualified defense of Trump and contend he genuinely believes he won the 2020 presidential election. But that doesn’t make what he said any less untrue, or the consequences any less pernicious — and far too many corners of the political Right have wholeheartedly embraced it. Even if you dispute the claim that Trump’s statements qualify as a conscious lie, they sure as hell aren’t the truth.

 

One of the less compelling defenses of Trump, going back years, is that he should be taken “seriously, not literally.” This is a convenient way of hand-waving away the false claims while insisting that he is telling the truth in some thematic or symbolic — but always conveniently nonspecific — way. It is sometimes a quiet concession of the Trump defender’s wish that what Trump said were actually true. Trump is a troll, and trolling often means lying and later insisting that you were joking the whole time. When a false statement generates more trouble for Trump than usual, he’ll sometimes insist that he was being sarcastic. He claims he was being sarcastic when, during a White House briefing on Covid-19, he turned to Dr. Deborah Birx and said, “I would like you to speak to the medical doctors to see if there’s any way that you can apply light and heat to cure.”

 

The argument that more-consequential lies should stir more opprobrium is logical. It doesn’t matter that much if your Republican neighbor believes that Trump won the election in 2020 or that he won the popular vote — or, for that matter, if the Democratic neighbor on the other side of your house believes that George W. Bush was “selected, not elected” in 2000 and that in 2004 the Diebold voting machines in Ohio were hacked. But with great power comes great responsibility, and the consequences are far more severe when the sitting president of the United States runs around insisting that the election results are fraudulent and that lots of government officials are involved in a vast conspiracy to rig election results.

 

The fact that none of Biden’s lies started a riot doesn’t mean that he’s the good guy in this situation, though. Less bad is still bad, and “less bad” is a pretty good way of summarizing the Biden team’s spin on inflation for the past year. (Back in July 2021, when the inflation rate had increased to 5.4 percent and was on its way to reaching 9.1 percent the following June, Biden insisted that “there’s nobody suggesting there’s unchecked inflation on the way, no serious economist,” which requires an extremely narrow definition of “unchecked” or “serious economist.”)

 

Perhaps the most unnervingly plausible defense of the president is that he doesn’t really realize he’s lying and that senility has made it impossible for him to clearly remember the truth, or perceive what the truth is.

 

Biden defenders would argue that their man mostly serves up tall tales about events from long ago, often barely remembered by anyone beyond the octogenarian in chief. As the New York Times generously described it in an October 2022 headline, “Biden, Storyteller in Chief, Spins Yarns That Often Unravel.” But he isn’t telling campfire stories or offering tall tales over dinner; he’s often attempting to defend his record or attack his rivals.

 

Biden lies about his policies. One boast he makes with metronomic regularity is that he has “cut the debt in half” or, in another version of that claim, “reduced the debt by $1.7 trillion” during his first two years as president. But he appears to be using the terms “debt” and “deficit” interchangeably even though they refer to different things. The federal deficit is the amount by which the government’s expenses exceed its tax revenues in a given year; the national debt is the accumulated total of all government borrowing that has not been paid back. What Biden ought to claim is that he cut the deficit.

 

But even this claim would be misleading, because the reduction was driven by the expiration of pandemic-era spending programs, not by any particular act of Biden’s. Any American who listens to Biden on these topics and believes him ends up knowing less accurate information about the issue than when they started.

 

Biden had every right to object to Georgia’s voting-reform laws, although it is worth noting that under them the state’s early-voting turnout rose considerably in both the primaries and the general election, and a University of Georgia survey found that zero percent of black respondents said their voting experience in Georgia was poor in the 2022 midterm election. Around 73 percent of black voters said it was excellent, equal to the percentage of white voters. But Biden furiously denounced those laws and said they were not merely as bad as those of the Jim Crow era but worse. He labeled them “Jim Crow 2.0” and declared, “It is the most pernicious thing. This makes Jim Crow look like Jim Eagle.”

 

In the run-up to Hunter Biden’s plea deal with the Department of Justice, President Biden didn’t merely say he believed that his son had not violated the law; he told MSNBC in May, “My son has done nothing wrong.” The president’s son later admitted that he hadn’t paid taxes for two years and that he had lied on a federal form to purchase a firearm.

 

Biden framed his 2020 campaign as “a battle for the soul of America.” You would think a person so worried about souls would say he has seven grandchildren, not six, instead of instructing his aides to declare that Hunter Biden’s youngest daughter doesn’t exist. There’s ordinary lying, and then there’s the kind of lie where you disavow your own four-year-old granddaughter.

 

And Biden’s Walter Mitty fabulism isn’t as harmless as his defenders insist. No, he wasn’t arrested in South Africa while attempting to meet Nelson Mandela; Israeli prime minster Golda Meir never asked him to be her liaison between Israel and the Egyptians concerning the Suez Canal; he never hit a 368-foot shot that bounced off the outfield wall in the congressional baseball game; and there’s no evidence that he confronted Vladimir Putin face to face and told the Russian dictator that he didn’t think Putin had a soul. Besides revealing Biden to be an insufferable braggart, these stories offer reason to think Biden cannot see himself accurately or remember his own past clearly. In his stories, he’s always the toughest and smartest guy in the room, bold, brave, strong, the best of the best. Every foe is intimidated, and every ally is starstruck by his genius. It’s a fantasy world, a happy escape from the messy reality before him each day.

 

If today’s president ignores warnings — say, to keep Bagram Air Base open in Afghanistan instead of closing up shop before everyone is evacuated as the Taliban closes in — and disregards counter-evidence, it reflects his hubris and an unearned faith in his own instincts and judgment. Biden’s worldview is built upon a misremembered happy fog of past victories and everything working out great. Perhaps you can argue that statements like these aren’t conscious, deliberate lies, but a commander in chief who can’t distinguish between fantasy and reality is likely just as dangerous.

 

That Biden and Trump remain the two men most likely to take the oath of office on January 20, 2025, is a vivid demonstration that the fact-checking gang in the mainstream media — PolitiFact, FactCheck.org, designated reporters at CNN and the Washington Post — have zero impact on the conduct of elected officials. No matter how many times Biden and Trump get called out, they ignore it and keep plowing ahead.

 

Ultimately, the lack of consequences for the habitual lying — or, on a charitable reading, delusions — of Trump and Biden is the fault of the American electorate. Democrats know that Biden insisted that the tide of migrants at the border was just part of a routine seasonal pattern, that the Afghan army was sufficiently trained and equipped to repel the Taliban, that no serious economist was suggesting that unchecked inflation was on the way, and so on. But they shrug, accept that Biden says a lot of things that turn out to be false, and appear ready to bear the risk of renominating a man who will turn 82 shortly after Election Day. The overwhelming majority of self-identified Republicans think highly of Trump, and around half can’t wait to make him the GOP nominee for the third straight cycle. Not only do voters not mind notorious liars as their presidents, but recent primaries suggest that a lot of voters prefer them.

 

Our system of government cannot work unless elected officials, the press, candidates for office, and the electorate as a whole agree broadly on at least basic facts. A free society offers a lot of room for debate and there will always be things we cannot be certain of, but many of the facts pertaining to the issues we debate are verifiable. Either there was rampant voter fraud in 2020 or there wasn’t. Either more migrants are attempting to cross our southern border or they aren’t. We may disagree on what to do about the national debt — $32.5 trillion, as of this writing — but discussing it is unproductive if a large chunk of the country thinks it has lately been cut in half.

 

Life is tough because it requires us to deal with the world as it is, not as we wish it to be. We should demand no less of our leaders.

In California, Bad Ideas Lead to Worse Ones

By Will Swaim

Sunday, July 30, 2023

 

In politics, recommending “further study” is a well-known way to appease supporters without committing to anything. So it is that Governor Gavin Newsom likely figured he had satisfied his most radical supporters when, in September 2020, three months after the killing of George Floyd, he signed a bill creating the Task Force to Study and Develop Reparation Proposals for African Americans.

 

“As a nation, we can only truly thrive when every one of us has the opportunity to thrive,” Newsom said in his signing message. “Our painful history of slavery has evolved into structural racism and bias built into and permeating throughout our democratic and economic institutions.”

 

But over the following two years, details of the commission’s work emerged. They were not good for the governor. It turned out that task force supporters had taken Newsom seriously. There are the bank-busting financial demands (“qualifying Black Californians” will receive up to $1.2 million in cash payments) and misrepresentations of California history that are obvious to almost anyone with eyeballs.

 

By the time the task force returned late last month with great trumpet blasts and its final, 1,100-page report, Newsom was gone — had literally departed Sacramento for a press conference with state fire officials in remote Nevada County’s Sierra Nevada foothills. “The last thing fire needs is another politician,” Jonathan Burgess, a fire battalion chief from Sacramento and advocate for reparations, told CalMatters. Then, speaking directly to Newsom, he said, “If you are not here, I want you to know that Black America is watching nationwide.”

 

If black America is watching, what they’ll see next will likely horrify them. Task-force members in the state legislature are now using their report as evidence that what California needs today, in the midst of a dramatic rise in crime, is a bold experiment in decriminalizing crime. Already high, crime would rise higher, falling most heavily on poor communities.

 

Californians in those communities would have Newsom’s reparations task force to thank.

 

The first strange legislative fruit came in April, two months before the reparations task force completed its work. That’s when Ashley Zavala, one of the capitol’s few independent reporters, noted something unusual happening in the capitol’s lower house: Assemblyman Reggie Jones-Sawyer and the Democratic members of his Public Safety Committee were routinely “rejecting numerous measures to boost penalties for domestic violence, rape of a developmentally disabled child, rape of an unconscious person, [a previous bill to punish] human trafficking, and the use of a gun during serious crimes, among other issues.” Those “other issues” include “bills on gun violence, homeless encampments,” and “inmate release transparency.”

 

They weren’t just killing reasonable bills but advancing terrible ones. The worst of these may be Jones-Sawyer’s Assembly Bill 852. It would require that, “when determining what sentence to impose on a defendant,” judges “consider the disparate impact on historically disenfranchised and system-impacted populations,” Jones-Sawyer wrote. He is specific about his inspiration, saying that his bill would help “rectify racial bias that, as documented by the California Reparations Task Force to Study and Develop Reparation Proposals for African Americans (Reparations Task Force), has historically permeated California’s criminal justice system.”

 

Jones-Sawyer is more than a mere assemblyman, more than chairman of the assembly’s powerful Public Safety Committee. He’s also a member of the very same reparations task force. And he has allies outside the capitol. In supporting AB 852, the California Defenders Association asserted a claim so uninformed that it demands immediate investigation by the state bar, now busy prosecuting its case against Trump attorney John Eastman.

 

“Criminal sentencing law in California rests on the presumption that all people are treated equally by the law,” the group declared. “Sadly, as every study to consider the issue has determined — that presumption is a myth. In fact, sentencing outcomes frequently turn on the accused’s wealth, national origin, poverty, and skin-color.” AB 852 would fix that, the group says, by releasing convicts today because of alleged racism in sentencing of others in the past.

 

This isn’t the place to argue over the phrase “every study,” except to say that it’s flat wrong and that its deployment in advancing this bill sure seems like legal malpractice. (Consider this, this, this, and this.) But it’s worth noting that the public defenders don’t identify a single specific case of racism in sentencing. They can’t even bring themselves to use the phrase “convicted criminals,” referring to them instead as “justice-involved individuals” in need of “job training” and “other meaningful alternatives to incarceration.”

 

Two weeks ago, Jones-Sawyer blocked a proposal that would have made child sex-trafficking a “serious felony.” Though authored by one of the legislature’s few Republicans, state senator Shannon Grove of Bakersfield, Senate Bill 14 had already passed unanimously in the upper house.

 

That rare unanimous vote in the senate seemed to assure SB 14’s passage in the assembly. But on first contact with Jones-Sawyer’s assembly Committee on Public Safety, all six Democrats, including Jones-Sawyer, abstained. That killed the bill.

 

“Those in the audience could be heard yelling, ‘You’re horrible!’ and ‘You should be ashamed of yourselves!’ to the committee members,” reporter Zavala noted. “Human trafficking victims embraced and sobbed in front of the dais.”

 

Twitter nearly burst into flames. Even reporters who might otherwise merely conveyor-belt the Democrats’ propaganda into the public square were scandalized.

 

The purpose of the Democrats’ united front in the committee was revealed later in the day. In a message on his official site, Jones-Sawyer said that calling child sex-trafficking a “serious felony” would qualify it as a strike under California’s Three Strikes law — and that would likely punish people of color who, let’s remember, will have been convicted of selling children for sex, children who are quite likely also people of color. According to Jones-Sawyer:

 

The Three Strikes model of sentencing is ineffective in preventing crime and protecting the public’s safety. We will not build on a deeply flawed sentencing system that unfairly punishes disadvantaged communities. SB 14 makes no new corrective actions or enhancements to laws already in place. Ultimately, members of the Assembly’s Public Safety Committee understood the author’s intent but recognized this bill needs considerable work and granted reconsideration.

 

The vote and the explanation for it were so outlandish that Gavin Newsom intervened. “I want to understand exactly what happened yesterday” in the committee, Newsom told reporters. “I take it very seriously.” He asked Jones-Sawyer to give the bill a second look.

 

Newsom’s “seriousness” won the day. Jones-Sawyer relented. On a second vote, just two of his committee colleagues abstained. But the chairman and three of his Democratic colleagues voted with the two Republicans, keeping the bill alive.

 

One of those who abstained is Mia Bonta, a Democrat who represents Oakland. In that city, politicians are already hard at work decriminalizing crime. The director of Oakland’s Department of Violence Prevention begged the public to go gently on nine minors arrested for several robberies — “our babies,” he called them.

 

The results of such initiatives speak for themselves in the recent headlines of Democratic-aligned newspapers. “These women were violently robbed. In Oakland’s crime surge, they say it’s ‘like nobody really cares.’” “Oakland police advise residents to reinforce doors as home invasions increase.” And, in a sign of things to come, “Angry crowd of more than 500 turn out for Oakland meeting on crime and violence.”

 

Speaking at that town hall, one man may have been speaking for all Californians of any color or political stripe. “We need to stop the violence and killers,” he told council members seated at a dais high above the crowd. “We’re coming after you all.”

 

It’s a safe bet that man was speaking of ballot-box revenge. But even pausing to consider the dark alternative is a measure of how far the problem of public safety is beginning to split deep-blue Californians.

 

Their divorce — and it’s coming to that — will have huge ramifications for California and the nation. In a sprawling, Day of the Locusts article for Vanity Fair, reporter Joe Hagan pushed a finger deep into that wound. Representative Ro Khanna, a Democrat representing a bluer-than-blue stretch of the Bay Area and Silicon Valley, told him that California dysfunction — homelessness, street addicts, burglaries, and outright violent crime — will leash in Newsom’s national ambitions. “I think the message that says ‘Make America California’ is not a winning message,” he told the reporter. Hagan meets newly minted Los Angeles resident Bari Weiss at a Hollywood Hills dinner party. She tells him, “One of the things that has shocked me about living in Los Angeles is how many people who are not at all politically conservative own guns here.”

 

During a sit-down at San Francisco’s landmark Pier 23 tavern, Hagan tells former House speaker Nancy Pelosi what he’s seen in the city’s Tenderloin (“drug addicts splayed out on street corners and a hundred human tragedies strewn across UN Plaza, City Hall looming helplessly in the background. Dickens meets Dante.”). In a moment that reveals the yawning chasm among California Democrats, Pelosi seems to agree with Hagan’s dark assessment: “Oh, it’s sad,” she tells him. “It’s worse now.”

 

It goes on like this for nearly 10,000 words, all of it balanced on this single, undeniable point: “Increasingly among Democrats,” Hagan concludes, “there is a call for greater toughness. Fear, as Pelosi knows, is contagious. And the ‘biggest challenge’ to California, she says, is ‘safety.’”

Critical Race Theory Doesn’t Empower Students

By Kenny Xu

Saturday, July 29, 2023

 

Recently, parents, teachers, and schools have been engaging in a cultural battle over what kinds of curricula should be taught to young minds. Should kids be immersed in the dynamics of privilege and oppression — à la critical race theory — or should we avoid exposing kids to this form of education?

 

Critical-race-theory proponents argue that this kind of education is empowering. As Paulo Freire, the Marxist educator and founder of critical pedagogy argued, “the only effective instrument” in education “is a humanizing pedagogy in which the revolutionary leadership establishes a permanent relationship of dialogue with the oppressed.” According to critical pedagogists, education in one’s “place” in society can empower and stimulate interest in and growth in the world.

 

Who is right? Are the critical pedagogists right? Or are their critics?

 

To answer the question, we need to understand what the negative consequences of critical-pedagogical techniques could be. “The cold, hard scientific facts are that [people] think better when they are not stressed, afraid, or depressed,” writes clinical psychologist Henry Cloud of Biola University, and we have no reason to doubt him. There are two parts of the human brain: the upper brain and the lower brain. In the upper brain, we use logic, exercise judgment, apply our creativity, and otherwise develop into highly skilled thinkers. In the lower brain, we stimulate some of the most primordial emotions, including fear and panic. In the lower brain, we think mainly in two terms: “kill him” (fight) or “run away” (flight). Stress is the main cause of the descent down the staircase from higher-order to lower-order thinking.

 

During the lower-order-thinking stage, our high cognitive abilities, such as the ability to think critically and to memorize effectively, are impaired. Stress overtakes our mind, and we are thinking only in terms of survival. Children experience a variety of stressors in school — an overload of work, problems with discipline, teacher and friend issues. One place where stress should not be associated with the school setting is the curriculum itself, at least not until children experience enough maturity to handle it.

 

The endless, 24/7 news cycle surrounding race and discrimination has already done half of the work of the school system in bringing these stressors into the child’s brain. “Current events are clearly stressful for everyone in the country, but young people are really feeling the impact of issues in the news, particularly those issues that may feel beyond their control,” writes Arthur Evans, the head of the American Psychological Association.

 

In APA studies, nearly one quarter of adults say that discrimination is a major stress factor in their lives. That number increases to around 40 percent with African Americans and Latin Americans. Now imagine how much the percentage would increase with minority teenagers. Teachers need to be careful with how they teach racial justice in class — 14 percent of white Americans also state that discrimination is a stress factor in their lives. It’s extremely difficult to teach such heavy topics without putting additional stress on young minds.

 

Whatever the age should be at which students grapple with harsh narratives about a racist society, it should be after they’ve properly matured into free thinkers and won’t internalize the teachings into their own sense of self-worth. Schools teaching about race should follow the example of the young King Randall, who built a boarding school for young children in Albany, Ga. — the murder capital of the state. Mostly black, entirely poor, King Randall’s “X for Boys” school focuses on teaching children basic life skills before it addresses topics such as racism and discrimination. Those are topics for another day. Today is focused on building up a confident young man ready to take on society.

 

Randall’s No. 1 priority is basic reading. “I had to go through the entire alphabet, like ‘A’–‘ah’, ‘B’–‘buh,’ basic phonics,” Randall says, in describing his tutoring of a twelve-year-old. In his community, kids either didn’t know how to read or claimed they did but consistently read at lower than grade level. For Randall, by far the most important priority for him was to teach his low-income black brothers how to read and how to write properly. “In my X for Boys group chat — for our boys they’re mandatory — everything has to be spelled correctly, you have to use punctuation, capital letters, you name it. In that way they’re able to correct each other.”

 

At the X for Boys school, the boys learn how to take care of a garden. “They learn how to fertilize the land,” Randall said. “How to feed your family.” The entire point of the boarding school is to cultivate self-sufficiency for black kids.

 

And yes, Randall had been reading Malcolm X, one of whose points was that the black child should learn how to be self-sufficient. “And I was like, why don’t we do it for ourselves? Why don’t we try doing these things on our own? Because it seems like we’ve been begging these people for how many years to do something for us or to make life better for us when we could simply do it ourselves!”

 

Critical pedagogy that teaches that racism is overarching attempts to make black people think of their political status as inferior. Randall teaches black kids to view themselves as equals to the white man not by imposing the racial dichotomy on them but by enabling them to become equally skilled. In doing so he follows the line of thinking of Booker T. Washington, a black American teacher and orator who wrote in his autobiographical Up From Slavery: “I tried to emphasize the fact that while the Negro should not be deprived by unfair means of the franchise, political agitation alone would not save him, and that back of the ballot he must have property, industry, skill, economy, intelligence, and character, and that no race without these elements could permanently succeed.”

 

In light of this, there should be three “boundaries” on curricular materials when race is addressed in a school setting:

 

Don’t address race in a way that promotes the idea that society or one category of people are, as a whole, racist.

 

Don’t promote ideas that there are inherent differences in entire racial categories of people.

 

Don’t make it seem as if race limits what one can accomplish as a person.

 

If schools and teachers largely adhere to these guidelines in talking about race, they can succeed in opening children up to sensitive racial issues without making them feel as if the world is a bath of racism and prejudice against them. They can help discussions about prejudice and

 

discrimination truly empower minority children, rather than flatten them into an attitude of victimhood.

 

Note: This article is adapted from the author’s new book School of Woke.

Protecting the Bidens

National Review Online

Friday, July 28, 2023

 

It’s hard to believe, but the Hunter Biden plea agreement turns out to be even worse than advertised.

 

It blew up in court on Wednesday under questioning by Judge Maryellen Noreika, who was understandably mystified by its bizarre structure and opaque provisions.

 

Ordinarily, the provisions of a plea agreement are in the four corners of the plea agreement. Ordinarily, they are quite standard. Ordinarily, they are set out in crystal-clear terms. Ordinarily, they don’t undercut what is supposed to be an investigation into more serious matters. But everything about this was different because, ordinarily, the Department of Justice isn’t acting to protect the president of the United States from a politically sensitive investigation into his son’s corrupt business dealings.

 

DOJ tucked provisions giving Hunter Biden sweeping immunity from future prosecution in a so-called diversion agreement related to his gun offense. To review, Biden is pleading guilty to two minor tax charges arising from the cascade of sleazy foreign money that poured into his accounts and was distributed to other family members. He isn’t pleading guilty to the gun charge, instead simply agreeing to a couple of years of probation to get off the hook. Any immunity term should have been in the plea deal but instead was in the diversion agreement, where it wouldn’t be expected.

 

Since plea deals are usually above board, judges typically approve them without any fuss (the diversion agreement doesn’t need a judge’s approval). Clearly, DOJ was hoping that’d happen here and everyone could go home happy — Hunter would have gotten his immunity, and DOJ would have granted it without anyone noticing, all the while pretending to still be seriously investigating his influence-peddling.

 

The scheme fell apart when Judge Noreika began asking questions and DOJ couldn’t admit what it’d agreed to and Hunter Biden’s lawyers insisted on the original indefensible immunity term. After some complicated back-and-forth, the judge refused to approve the plea agreement.

 

In the normal course of things, there’d be an underlying indictment, but the DOJ never filed one. From its perspective, it is likely that there were two problems with an indictment. One, the indictment would involve setting out a damning set of facts embarrassing to the president. Two, it would freeze the clock on the statute of limitations for any other criminal offenses related to Hunter Biden’s foreign “work,” preventing DOJ from simply running out the clock.

 

If the IRS whistleblowers presented a shocking portrait of a DOJ doing everything possible to protect Hunter Biden and his father, the sham plea agreement suggests that they didn’t know the half of it.

 

Meanwhile, more evidence is emerging that Joe Biden was directly involved in Hunter’s business dealings, with a credible FBI source telling the agency that the head of Burisma characterized his lavish payments as bribes.

 

What should happen now? In a more normal world, a scrupulous prosecutor would be handling the case and have the time to conduct a thoroughgoing investigation. In the world we’re living in, the immediate problem is that the conflicted Biden DOJ has already lost potential criminal counts to the statute of limitations and stands to lose more the longer things drag out.

 

The best we can hope for, then, is that DOJ feels compelled to immediately file an indictment charging all provable tax and gun charges — meaning felonies, as well as any misdemeanors. This would end the statute-of-limitations problem (at least regarding those charges). It would not prevent DOJ from negotiating a new plea agreement with Hunter Biden, but it would be a valuable public marker for what an appropriate plea agreement should look like.

 

Meantime, the House must press ahead with its broader investigation of the Biden family influence-peddling business. That probe has the best chance of yielding valuable information and imposing some accountability. Congress should continue aggressively demanding answers and documents from DOJ, FBI, and IRS, and should be prepared to take action against recalcitrant officials.

 

The Washington cliché is that it’s the cover-up, not the crime. In this case, it might be both.

Thirsty Ron

By Nick Catoggio

Thursday, July 27, 2023

 

Ron DeSantis has been caught behaving like Ron DeSantis, and Ron DeSantis fans are beside themselves about it.

 

On Wednesday he sat for an interview with Clay Travis of OutKick, reminding us that the campaign’s alleged pivot to mainstream media remains a work in progress. OutKick is a populist outfit, initially a scourge of the sports media establishment, later an antagonist of the political establishment, more recently an enemy of the, er, scientific establishment. Travis spent the first year of the pandemic repeatedly assuring his many right-wing fans that the U.S. was at or near herd immunity, predicting in February 2021 that “COVID will be over by the end of April.” That summer the Delta wave arrived and laid waste to the country. Ron DeSantis’ Florida bore the brunt.

 

Any Republican politician speaking to Travis and his audience would understand that questions touching on the pandemic and vaccines need to be handled … artfully, especially if that politician is Ron DeSantis. The governor’s thirst for populist approval is unquenchable; OutKick is the last place you’d find him daring to deliver hard truths about COVID.

 

So when Travis asked whether he’d consider putting America’s most notorious vaccine skeptic on the GOP ticket—an increasingly hot topic on the right—the thirstiest Republican in all the land answered artfully. Robert F. Kennedy Jr. is far too liberal across the policy spectrum to be chosen as vice president, DeSantis said, hopefully correctly.

 

But he did have a few Cabinet positions in mind.

Reaction among many DeSantis fans was grim, for different reasons.

 

Some grumbled about the undue media attention being lavished upon a crank like Kennedy, neglecting to mention that most of that attention is coming from populist-friendly right-wing media like OutKick and Fox News. As the clip of DeSantis and Travis was coursing through political media on Wednesday afternoon, in fact, Greg Gutfeld was telling Fox viewers that he believes RFK would win the presidency as a third-party candidate.

 

Other supporters half-heartedly rode to DeSantis’ defense by noting that he didn’t say he’d put Kennedy in charge of the FDA and CDC, only that he would “sic” him on them. That’s true, but in context I don’t know what else “sic” could mean; clearly the governor is imagining some sort of official appointment per his reference to how Kennedy might “serve.” Either way, to quibble about language is to miss the point. DeSantis would let an infamous crank ride herd on America’s scientific bureaucracy somehow, laying the groundwork for a public health catastrophe if the country were to face some new medical crisis in the years ahead.

 

For traditional conservatives in the governor’s camp, however, there was no spinning his enthusiasm for Kennedy. It was “flat-out insanity,” “embarrassingly bad,” an “own goal” indicating that DeSantis’ political instincts had deteriorated. There were pleas for him to stop “alienating the voters he needs” and to launch a “normie insurgency” before his candidacy collapses under its own populist weight.

 

To which I reply: It is very late in the day for so many to be shocked—shocked to find—gambling going on in this casino.

 

***

 

I suspect that if DeSantis led Donald Trump by 10 points instead of trailing him by 30, the outrage among his fans at yesterday’s endorsement of RFK Jr. would have been quite muted. Do you know how I know?

 

Because DeSantis has been pandering to anti-vaxxers for years and the outrage among his fans to this point has been quite muted.

 

Not nonexistent, but decidedly muted. You’ll search hard to find a conservative who was once Ready for Ron but has since abandoned him in the belief that he’s unfit for office due to his long, unbearably cynical, possibly deadly populist pandering on COVID vaccines.

 

Last week the New York Times tracked DeSantis’ evolution on the subject. He began as an outspoken proponent of vaccination for senior citizens—too outspoken to suit some of his grassroots admirers, it turned out. In an article dated two years ago yesterday, Politico noted that whispers had been heard among anti-vax MAGA voters about DeSantis being a “sellout.” Seeing a threat to his 2024 presidential strategy, the governor abruptly changed course and began questioning the utility of vaccines for those under 65. The Times recounts what happened next:

 

While Florida was an early leader in the share of over-65 residents who were vaccinated, it had fallen to the middle of the pack by the end of July 2021. When it came to younger residents, Florida lagged behind the national average in every age group.

 

That left the state particularly vulnerable when the Delta variant hit that month. Floridians died at a higher rate, adjusted for age, than residents of almost any other state during the Delta wave, according to the Times analysis. With less than 7 percent of the nation’s population, Florida accounted for 14 percent of deaths between the start of July and the end of October.

 

Of the 23,000 Floridians who died, 9,000 were younger than 65. Despite the governor’s insistence at the time that “our entire vulnerable population has basically been vaccinated,” a vast majority of the 23,000 were either unvaccinated or had not yet completed the two-dose regimen.

 

More people died of COVID in Florida after the vaccines became available than before, the paper notes. That wasn’t true of America as a whole.

 

I’ve written before about the history of DeSantis’ turn on vaccines and won’t rehash it again here. It should suffice to note that by the fall of 2021 he was participating in photo ops like this …

… and appointing Dr. Joseph Ladapo as Florida’s surgeon general. Given Ladapo’s thinking on vaccines and his alleged doctoring of studies to exaggerate the health risk of vaccination, I don’t understand the umbrage taken by DeSantis fans at him wanting to elevate Robert F. Kennedy Jr. to a position of medical influence. He’s already proven in Florida that he’s willing to risk public health for the sake of ingratiating himself to anti-vax Republicans. If you’re on Team Ron, presumably you made peace with that long ago.

 

So long as DeSantis seemed likely to threaten Trump for the nomination, his vaccine nonsense could be waved away—even, to a lesser degree, by reluctant supporters like me. Everyone understood his strategic logic: To pry cultish MAGA voters away from their hero, the governor would need to exploit cultural divisions between Trump and his base. Vaccines were an obvious wedge opportunity, pitting the man responsible for Operation Warp Speed against a populist cohort that preferred to risk its own lives than take health advice from the expert class. It was cynical to the point of nihilism to use that wedge but conservative supporters of Thirsty Ron tolerated it in the hope that his thirstiness would ultimately end Trump’s reign of terror.

 

Until yesterday, when the governor’s praise for RFK led many to suddenly and very belatedly conclude that it’s bad politics. 

 

Is it? If it’s bad politics, why have so few of DeSantis’ Republican opponents attacked him for it?

 

Donald Trump hasn’t said a word about the governor’s vision of Kennedy leading the CDC despite the fact that on a typical day he can’t get through three sentences without ripping the guy, even for something as petty as how he pronounces his name. I can’t recall a single case of Team Trump angrily blasting away at DeSantis for doubting the efficacy of the former president’s great big beautiful mRNA vaccines, in fact, despite Team Thirsty’s dogged attempts to bait them into engaging on it. The closest Trump’s camp has come to criticizing him on the subject is by occasionally highlighting the fact that DeSantis enthusiastically endorsed vaccination during the spring of 2021.

 

Rather than fault the governor for being anti-vax, in other words, Team Trump recognizes that they can do more damage to him in a Republican primary by accusing him of being a closet pro-vaxxer.

 

Trump isn’t alone in his silence. As of Thursday afternoon, Tim Scott hadn’t complained about DeSantis’ admiration for RFK. Neither had Nikki Haley, who took a veiled jab at the governor on Wednesday night not for wanting to put a kook in charge of the federal health bureaucracy but for not wanting to fly commercial.

 

The only candidate willing to say something disapproving of DeSantis’ OutKick soundbite was Mike Pence, who objected to the idea of Kennedy assuming a position of government authority—but not because he’s America’s most febrile vaccine conspiracy theorist. Pence’s  problem with Kennedy, of course, is that he’s pro-choice. 

 

Pence, Haley, and Scott are traditional conservatives. They have every incentive to try to woo away the considerable bloc of traditionally conservative voters in DeSantis’ coalition. What does it say about the politics of this issue that they see more downside than upside in faulting him for flirting with vaccine skeptics?

 

In fact, leave DeSantis out of this for a moment. What incentive does any Republican candidate have to criticize Robert F. Kennedy Jr. right now?

 

Last week I flagged a Quinnipiac poll placing Kennedy’s favorability at 21-47 within his own party nationally and at 48-22 within the GOP. A new survey from Morning Consult released on Wednesday confirmed that disparity. RFK is an increasingly unpopular figure on the left and an increasingly popular one on the right.

A few days ago he was granted a town hall forum with Sean Hannity in prime time on Fox News, an honor that operates as an announcement that a political figure has officially “arrived” in Republican politics. The audience cheered when RFK blamed the war in Ukraine on the United States rather than Russia.

 

Just this morning, when Karl Rove tried to educate Fox’s viewers about Kennedy’s nuttery, anchor Bill Hemmer pushed back by insisting that the candidate’s environmental views are quite reasonable. He’s “a different kind of Democrat, the kind of Democrat that, frankly, you and I grew up with,” Hemmer said admiringly. It seems that even the “news” side of Fox, insofar as such a thing still exists, feels obliged to normalize a progressive Democrat so long as he’s on the right (read: wrong) side of the Ukraine and vaccine debates.

 

There’s no way to quantify this but I’ve begun to sense that one’s view of Kennedy has become a litmus test among populist Republicans not unlike how one’s view of Trump became one in 2016. He’s popular enough already among the grassroots right that I wouldn’t feel confident about Scott, Haley, or especially Pence defeating him in a GOP primary head-to-head. DeSantis probably would, but I think the governor also senses a litmus test developing around RFK that he can’t afford to fail lest he alienate the MAGA voters he’s spent two years courting.

 

Put simply, by dint of his willingness to adopt every wacky anti-establishment opinion he stumbles across, Bobby Kennedy has proved to the right in just a few months that he’s more of a “fighter” than most Republican politicians. DeSantis has staked everything—everything—on convincing the base that he too is a “fighter,” more so than even Trump is. That would be up in smoke if he were to treat RFK like a kook, just as it would be if he took sides with the establishment against Trump on matters like January 6 or his classified documents scandal. You will not be president if you offend the MAGA bloc, something Haley, Scott, and Pence (well, maybe not Pence) also understand.  

 

I suspect the governor’s conservative fans understand all this. When they lambaste him for wanting to put RFK in the Cabinet, they’re not really mad at him. They’re mad at what the party has become and the sort of political incentives it now creates and they don’t know how to cope with it. They can’t disengage from politics; they won’t vote for Democrats or (I hope) for Trump; they see no chance of a traditional conservative winning the nomination. So they’re stuck going wherever DeSantis wants to take them, and DeSantis is stuck going wherever populists want to take him. No matter how stupid that destination might be.

 

***

 

And so we arrive at our own destination. Question: How many conservative DeSantis supporters who expressed their disgust at his Kennedy comments yesterday have concluded that he’s unfit for office?

 

Not unfit to be the nominee, mind you. I concede that he’s “fit” for that inasmuch as he’s preferable to Trump. I mean fit to be president.

 

I know of one person who’s said so. For the rest this is likely to be dumped into the long and growing list of “unfortunate, but …” items that almost but not quite add up collectively to withholding one’s vote from Thirsty Ron next November if he makes it that far.

 

This past week alone has added several such items, starting with the fracas over Florida’s new African American history curriculum. DeSantis got a bad rap for that, but the Kennedy episode reminds us why it was so easy to assume the worst in that case. The man became a presidential contender by continually indulging the right’s worst impulses. It’s not hard to believe he might sneak something into the state lesson plan about slaves learning useful skills from enslavement to make the alt-right chumps in his fan base giggle.

 

Speaking of which, there was also l’affaire Hochman, in which a former Dispatch intern (alas) turned New Right “it boy” turned DeSantis comms person was let go from the campaign after posting a video to social media that featured the following image. That’s the governor of Florida, his head framed by a white-supremacist symbol, with what looks to be stormtroopers marching on either side of him. To be clear: This was a video celebrating DeSantis, not mocking him.

The soundtrack for the video was, no joke, a Kate Bush song. It’s one thing to dip your toes into proto-fascism, it’s quite another to be cringe about it.

 

DeSantis did the right thing by letting Hochman go but his involvement in the campaign didn’t happen accidentally. In fact, DeSantis hired Hochman months after The Dispatch revealed that he had praised white supremacist Nick Fuentes for having “gotten a lot of kids based” and for being “probably a better influence than Ben Shapiro” on young right-wingers. If you’ve spent five minutes on Twitter you know that post-liberals are an important part of the governor’s coalition, one he and his team have courted assiduously. And continue to court, right up through the current uproar over what he said about RFK:

Do traditional conservatives who are committed to him understand how they’ve enabled this by handing him a “blank check for right-wing pandering”? 

 

It’s passing strange to hear pleas for a pivot to normalcy now, two years in, from those who indulged the governor’s MAGA-but-more-so strategy as long as it looked like it might deliver the nomination and ultimately the presidency. If he had faced more resistance for pandering to anti-vaxxers early on from normie Republicans, he might have thought differently of trying to beat Trump in 2024 by somehow out-Trumping him.

 

The fact that he didn’t face that resistance ironically proves that his current strategic instincts are correct, I think. DeSantis calculated that no matter how crazy he got with the populist Cheez Whiz, traditional partisan conservatives would grin and bear it. In the name of supporting him in the primary on anti-Trump grounds and in the general election on anti-Biden grounds, they’d rationalize or excuse every illiberal hairball he vomited up.

 

The populists who support him aren’t such cheap dates. One false move from Thirsty Ron could send millions of them scurrying back to Trump, preferring the genuine MAGA article to a candidate who turned out to be a pale imitation. If that happened, boosting Trump’s national numbers above 60 percent, how exactly would DeSantis’ pivot to normalcy gain him a majority in this godforsaken party?

 

It’s the populist hostage crisis all over again, playing out in miniature this time within the second-place candidate’s voter coalition. Partisan conservatives don’t need to sit still for it. Eight years of rationalizing support for a morally corrupt leader and his morally corrupt base is more than enough.

 

I’ll leave you with a thought I’ve offered before: Consider the possibility, just the possibility, that Ron DeSantis and his cronies have come to believe their own post-liberal nonsense. That it’s not just an ultra-cynical angle to keep the Hochmans of the world on his side.

 

Yes, the governor is a brilliant guy; yes, he’s exceptionally well educated; yes, he has roots in pre-Trump conservatism that should render him immune to it. But he’s spent five years inside an ideological cocoon receiving truly massive doses of success and adulation for his willingness to be the rootin’-est tootin’-est populist in Republican politics. That’s a lot of psychological reinforcement.

 

Recently none other than Robert F. Kennedy Jr. recalled a conversation he had with DeSantis during the pandemic. “We talked about him possibly running for the presidency, and I said, how will you handle the NIH?,” Kennedy remembered. “And he said: ‘I’ll burn it to the ground.’ You know, I understand the impulse. But I think I can have a more surgical impact on these agencies.” The governor, not the hair-on-fire conspiracy theorist, is the more committed civic arsonist according to that conspiracy theorist’s own telling. Hand power to a man who’s as thirsty as that at your peril.

The Kamala Harris Insurance Policy

By Noah Rothman

Thursday, July 27, 2023

 

Sure, Joe Biden’s reelection prospects don’t look great today. Inflation remains stubbornly high, the president’s advanced age and its attendant infirmities are a bipartisan concern, and his family’s legal woes are only getting worse, threatening to consume his administration. But things change.

 

The Federal Reserve now forecasts that its efforts to rein in inflation will not produce a recession. The southern border is still a mess, but it’s not the mess many predicted it would be after pandemic-related enforcement policies sunsetted. The Ukrainian counteroffensive in which the administration has invested both political and hard capital is producing green shoots. The violent-crime rate in some of the nation’s most besieged cities appears to be declining. Republicans need an insurance policy if the issues they are leveraging against the Biden administration in 2023 lose salience in 2024. Fortunately, they have one in the form of Vice President Kamala Harris.

 

On Thursday, the Messenger reporters Amie Parnes and Marc Caputo chronicled the response the GOP’s 2024 field has adopted to efforts by the Biden administration to elevate Harris’s profile. Harris, they write, serves as Biden’s “campaign trail attack dog,” training her fire on the party’s presidential aspirants and drawing theirs away from the president. At least, that is the traditional dynamic. But Joe Biden faces a unique predicament in the fact that the GOP’s criticisms of Harris are explicit critiques of the president’s judgment and cognitive decline.

 

“I think the American people should know if you’re voting for Biden, you know, you are effectively voting for Harris to be the president of the United States,” Ron DeSantis remarked. “I pray every night for Joe Biden’s good health,” Chris Christie concurred. “Not only because he’s our president but because of who our vice president is.” Asked if she would support Donald Trump as the GOP nominee, Nikki Haley said she would if only to avoid the prospect of a President Kamala Harris. For his part, Trump welcomed the prospect of “running against Kamala.”

 

Conventionally, the role vice presidents serve the incumbent administration on the campaign trail is two-fold. First, they make baser political arguments against their opponents that allow the president to hover at an Olympian distance above the political fray. Second, they absorb the attacks that would otherwise be directed at the president or deflect those criticisms away from the Oval Office. Harris has so far been unable to execute either imperative effectively, and that is becoming a source of anxiety among Biden’s allies. That is the impression a casual reader might take away from Marquette University professor Julia Azari’s piece for Politico, amusingly titled, “Why Kamala Harris Is a Better VP Than You Think.” The piece is an effort to retroactively condition the nation to the idea that Harris is actually good at her job.

 

The evidence marshaled in support of Azari’s proposition is thin. It rests primarily on why her accidents of birth render her an effective representative of the Democratic Party’s self-image and aid her efforts to keep the party’s coalition intact. Beyond that, the piece devotes lengthy digressions to examining past vice presidents and their conduct, which she implicitly suggests compare favorably with Harris’s.

 

But then there is this:

 

Harris fits into this model pretty clearly — she’s been given important and difficult issues to address. Like some other post-Mondale vice presidents — Al Gore for example — she’s been assigned to head up specific policy areas, like abortion and reproductive rights, voting rights and immigration, as well as some other foreign policy assignments. . . . In other words, Harris has been identified with a portfolio that’s connected to key Democratic priorities and is also consistent with the descriptive representation expected of her.

 

Azari eventually acknowledges that the portfolio with which Harris has been saddled is a Gordian knot. Either her party lacks the votes in Congress to pursue the policy remedies it wants to see, or the party has no interest in resolving the issues Harris is assigned and burdened her with the mission only so the administration couldn’t be accused of ignoring them. Some might call that treatment abuse — I certainly have.

 

“In the final analysis,” Azari concludes, Harris’s “political difficulties, and their causes, are nebulous and hard to pin down. Kind of like the vice presidency itself.” This final shrug hardly justifies the definitive conclusion retailed in Politico’s headline. Azari is correct insofar as it’s not at all uncommon for the veep to serve as an administration’s lightning rod. Harris is not, however, redirecting negative energy away from the president but toward him. In that sense, Harris’s vice presidency is, indeed, historic.

Staying Safe: Try That in a Small Town

By Kevin D. Williamson

Friday, July 28, 2023

 

I am not really from a small town: The Lubbock metropolitan area—a phrase that makes me smile a little to write—is home to 328,283 people, right between Boulder, Colorado, and Green Bay, Wisconsin, in the population rankings. It feels smaller because it is isolated: the nearest big cities being Dallas and Fort Worth, 330 miles to the east, or Albuquerque, about the same distance to the west. Turn the axis a little bit, and Lubbock sits about halfway between Denver and Houston, neither of which is very close. It is a small city rather than a small town, and it has something in common with a lot of small cities and small towns: a crime rate that is three times that of New York City, almost twice that of Los Angeles, more than twice that of Boston or Laredo, about 80 percent higher than Las Vegas, higher than Dallas, Pittsburgh, Philadelphia, Atlanta, or Seattle. 

 

Life in a big city, particularly a transit-oriented northeastern city such as New York, is public in a way that life in a small city—where everybody gets around in cars and the sidewalks are mostly empty—is not. On the street level, New York (or parts of New York) feels a lot more dangerous than, say, Odessa—the most dangerous city in Texas when it comes to violent crime and overall crime. Yet, in reality, that small Texas city has a crime rate per 100,000 that is similar to what you would find in the second tier of the most dangerous American cities (Detroit, Tulsa, Kansas City, Missouri). Though it is still short of the top tier of high-crime cities that includes St. Louis, Memphis, and Albuquerque, each of which has an overall crime rate more than four times that of New York City.

 

Jason Aldean, who has made a stink with his “Try That in a Small Town,” should think about spending some time in a small town. He might learn something. (If you missed it, the ruckus began with complaints that Aldean shot a video for the song near where a lynching had happened many years ago, though it isn’t clear that that horrible crime had anything to do with the site selection; the criticism later moved on to the generally vigilante-ish tone of the song.) Like so many of the self-appointed spokesmen for small towns and simple country folk, Aldean himself is nothing of the sort: He is, in fact, a former private-school kid from Macon, Georgia., metro population 420,693, adjacent to the greater Atlanta metropolis, population about 6.3 million. Macon, you may not be surprised at this point to learn, has a considerably higher crime rate than New York, Los Angeles, or Newark, New Jersey.

 

When it comes to actual small towns and rural areas, the data can be a little wonky—one ugly Saturday night in Muleshoe, Texas, can throw the numbers off for a whole year. But the data we do have do not support the hypothesis that life is safer in small towns: The aforementioned Muleshoe has had a higher-than-average crime rate in recent years. Homicides jumped 25 percent in rural areas in 2020. “It was like people lost their ever-lovin’ minds,” one small-town prosecutor told the Wall Street Journal. 

 

Isolation correlates with certain kinds of crimes: Because the news is mostly written by college graduates, you probably have heard a great deal about sexual assault on college campuses; in reality, women in college are less likely to experience sexual assault than are women in the general population. There are high levels of sexual assault in isolated rural areas, on Indian reservations, and in Alaska, which has by far the nation’s highest rate of rape, more than twice that of Arkansas, which comes in second place. Sexual assault, like most violent crimes, tends to disproportionately affect people who are poor, who are not white, and who lack access to social capital. Crimes of domestic violence are, by some measures, much higher in rural areas than in big cities. 

 

I don’t worry too much about Jason Aldean per se. Pop stars in our time are actors, either implicitly or explicitly. Ice-T, responding to a ninny who nettled him for making a living playing cops on television after making a pile of money from his “Cop Killer”-era music, gave the only sensible reply: “It’s both acting.” John J. Mellancamp didn’t hang around Seymour, Indiana, his whole life: He went to college and then went to New York and became Johnny Cougar. “I can breathe in a small town,” he sang, and the air is pretty nice in Montecito, California. Entertainers aren’t the characters they play—poor Jim Parsons apparently has to remind people that he isn’t a brilliant physicist—and I don’t begrudge Jason Aldean how he makes his money. But people who can’t tell the dog-and-pony show from the real world need to get off social media for a minute and read the damned news. 

 

Critics such as my friend Kathryn Jean Lopez who have suggested that Aldean has perhaps struck the wrong tone in his song have, predictably, been subjected to a torrent of abuse from people who insist that they just don’t know what life is like in a small town. Maybe Kathryn, a daughter of Manhattan, doesn’t. But, then neither does Jason Aldean, apparently, and neither do those who embrace his righteous tough-guy posturing while in pristine ignorance of the actual facts of the case. 

 

Proud to be an Okie from Muskogee, like Merle Haggard? Go be a beat cop in Muskogee, Oklahoma, for a couple of years, and you’ll be singing a different tune.