Stromata Blog

The Case of the Leaking Pipelines

The leaks in the Nord Stream natural gas pipelines have attracted the attention of Internet Nero Wolfes, and why shouldn’t I join the investigation? Let us review the facts, Archie.

• Two pipelines running underneath the Baltic Sea connecting Russia with Germany have sprung major leaks.
• The leaks were preceded by seismic events in their vicinity, one measuring 1.8 on the Richter Scale, the other 2.3. The director of the Swedish National Seismic Network says that there is “no doubt” that the events were explosions rather than earthquakes. By earthquake standards, the blasts were puny, but as explosions they were more than a pipeline would likely be able to withstand.
• The pipelines are not currently doing anything useful, because Russia has cut off deliveries via Nord Stream 1, and Nord Stream 2 has yet to start up.
• There are no estimates of how long repairs will take. It doesn’t sound like they will be completed swiftly.
• Within the past few days, a natural gas pipeline connecting Norway and Poland via Denmark has begun operations, and Germany has secured supplies of liquified natural gas from Abu Dhabi.

Applying the reader-tested mantra of “motive, method, opportunity”, what can we make of this?

The suspects that have so far been suggested are Russia, the United States, Poland and Ukraine. All four surely possess the means to sabotage the pipelines. It doesn’t appear to be an overly complex operation. The Baltic is shallow. Properly equipped divers could reach the lines and plant explosives without great difficulty.

Opportunity is questionable for Ukraine. It has no access to the Baltic and would be very foolish to take the risk of hiring third parties who might betray the plot.

Motive is murky. If we rule out insanity, the ancient question cui bono offers little insight.

• Nord Stream gives Russia its major leverage over a Western Europe that is nearing an energy-short winter. That leverage is now gone. Russia can’t wave offers to resume the natural gas flow as a lure to freezing Germans. I have seen the suggestion that Putin wanted to demonstrate that he has the ability to render pipelines inoperable, in order to discourage competitors like the Norway–Poland line, but (i) who ever doubted that?, and (ii) if that were the motive, wouldn’t Putin be advertising what he did rather than denying it?
• The United States may be pleased that Tsar Putin has lost an important card from his deck, but the card is diminishing in importance. More seriously, inflicting damage of this kind on his country would be monumentally short-sighted. Someday Putin will no longer be in power, and it will be in our interest to repair relations with Russia. If the U.S. had a hand in this operation, the odds are high that it will come to light, as have so many secrets that would be better kept in the cupboard. That will certainly do nothing to foster amity. In any event, it stands not within the prospect of belief that the timorous fools around Joe Biden would take any bold action.
• Poland has very little to gain from shutting down Nord Stream. Its own new line would have an operational Nord Stream as a competitor, but there is plenty of demand for natural gas to go around, and any hint of Polish involvement would destroy its already frayed relations with other EU members.

Where does that leave us? We are looking for a suspect that (i) has reasons to keep Nord Stream from operating, (ii) has the capability of sabotaging it and (iii) would not be deterred by the prospect that its role might become known. Let me hazard a guess at a culprit that fits that description.

Eco-extremists loathe natural gas. They would like to see it replaced by wind and sunshine and fairy dust. They aren’t scrupulous about how they achieve their ends. Knocking out two major pipelines is a step toward their energy-free utopia.

Some eco-extremist groups are very well-funded. The cost of a few ships, trained divers and explosives would be well within their means.

Most importantly, these groups have demonstrated that they are utterly unafraid of adverse public reactions to their exploits. Being quasi-religious fanatics, they are willing to be martyred for their cause.

Of course, this is all theorizing in my study, and I have no Archie to do the leg work. Nonetheless, it seems to me to be a theory worth thinking about.

Praising GOP Governors with Faint Damns

The New York Times “Morning” newsletter, which it delivers en masse to nonsubscribers, presumably in hopes of persuading them to provide monetary support to the Sulzberger wing of the Democratic Party, today addressed “Republican governors’ immigration stunts”. It didn’t praise Governors Abbott and DeSantis. The writers (the piece took the form of one Times reporter interviewing another) took it for granted that it is unsavory for Texas and Florida to provide illegal immigrants with the means to travel to other parts of the country. Lest any reader misapprehend their opinion, they describe the governors’ motives thus:

Ultimately, it’s about optics. It’s in part about securing support from his right-wing base. They back cracking down on unauthorized immigration; punishing people who, in their view, didn’t come to the U.S. the right way; and placing the burden of helping the migrants on Democratic cities and states.

Nonetheless, the substance of the condemnation is hard to distinguish from praise, beginning with the full subhead: “Republican governors’ immigration stunts are actually helping some migrants.”

The writers note that a large proportion of the current wave of immigrants comes from Venezuela: “a broken country, where political dissent is repressed and the economy has collapsed. There are shortages of food, medicine and other staples” (no mention of what economic system did the breaking).

So these migrants were willing to basically risk their lives to reach the United States. They braved the lawless jungle out of Venezuela and passed through seven countries to ultimately reach the United States out of despair, out of a desire to make a living and support their families.

Bear in mind that, according to the Times, the motive for sending these desperate displaced persons to hellholes like Martha’s Vineyard is to punish them. How did that turn out?

Ironically, it’s benefiting many of the migrants.

For example: I met a Venezuelan migrant named Lever Alejos. He had used up all the money he saved to make the trek to the U.S. from Venezuela. He took one of the buses to Washington, D.C., where he found a bed in a shelter. In a matter of weeks, he has managed to not only find work; he has started sending money back to Venezuela to support his 7-year-old son. He said his son’s life is 100 percent better. He has also saved to buy a cellphone and plans to buy a used 2012 Honda Civic.

The incredulous interviewer asks, “Is this backfiring for Abbott, if the migrants are doing well and they’re filling an economic need for Democratic areas?” As already noted, the writers assume that the objective is to inflict pain on the aliens rather than to reduce the pain suffered by the border towns that have to cope with the influx (and also, indeed, to call attention to the disastrous failure of the Biden Administration’s border-neglect policy).

In the absence of a workable immigration law, spreading out the new arrivals is probably the best that can be done. The Biden Administration seems to feel the same way, since it has flown thousands of illegal immigrants to distant parts of the country, but, unlike Governors Abbott and DeSantis, under cover of darkness and with as little publicity as possible.

While some illegal aliens are criminals, terrorists, drug smugglers or economic opportunists, a great many are trying to escape intolerable conditions in their native lands. One can hardly blame a Venezuelan for thinking that life in U.S. shadows is better than trying to evade the spotlight in Maduro’s dictatorship. Unfortunately, letting in everybody who wants to cross the border is no solution. The experience of the past couple of years has proven that.

Moreover, the Democratic Party’s utter indifference to the problems created by uncontrolled immigration and non-enforcement of the law has created a political environment in which reasonable colloquies are all but impossible. Long ago, I came up with my own proposal, aimed at providing economic opportunities to foreigners who are willing and able to work, without throwing the border wide open. It no doubt had its flaws, but fifteen years ago it fit into mainstream thinking about the issue. Now the opposing camps will consider nothing but their own absolutes.

The present and the immediate past Administrations stand on opposite sides of the divide. It would be false to the point of comedy to call either one’s policy a “success”. At this point, I’m inclined to think that the Trump Administration, for all its rhetorical excess and not infrequent blundering, was the lesser failure, but that is hardly an encomium. Perhaps, after the “Big Guy” leaves office, we can hope for something better than a choice of follies.

A Scandal in Minnesota

Power Line has been covering a massive diversion of federal funds intended for Covid-19 relief into the hungry maw of an outfit called “Feeding Our Future”. The story has gotten little notice outside of Minnesota, but, even in this jaded era of trillion dollar spending programs, the numbers deserve attention. A preçis:

Briefly, Feeding Our Future (“FOF”) was a fraudulent nonprofit that accessed an astonishing $240 million in federal money, ostensibly to feed needy children in Minnesota. Under the supervision of Minnesota’s Department of Education, FOF distributed that money to a network of Minnesota nonprofits who allegedly delivered the actual meals to children. But it turns out that the money mostly went to luxury purchases, fancy cars, overseas vacations, gold and jewels, new houses, and property in places like Kenya and Turkey. FOF kept a slice of the $240 million and added to it by charging kickbacks. The entire fraud has now unraveled in a series of 48 or more indictments announced last week by the U.S. Attorney in Minnesota. [Link added]

The latest development changes this from another tale of graft into something worse.

Throughout, the public officials on whose watch this massive fraud occurred have relied mostly on a single defense: in 2021, the Department of Education, having become suspicious, tried to cut off funding to some of FOF’s clients. But a state court judge rejected MDE’s arguments and ordered the Department to resume funding what turned out to be one of the biggest frauds on record. That was the story.

Minnesota’s governor, Tim Walz, up for reelection this year, cited that decision after the FOF indictments were announced.

“I would hope there would be an investigation into that,” Walz told reporters Thursday. “I was speechless, unbelievable that this ruling could come down. (I) did not really know what to say. Obviously, we had to honor it but at that point I said, we have got to continue to push the federal government and the FBI to do the investigation.”

Today the Minnesota Judicial Branch took the unusual step of releasing an official statement about the case. After recounting the history of the litigation, the statement concludes:

On February 26, 2022, the Star Tribune reported on a federal investigation of FOF. The article included the following false statement: “In April 2021, Ramsey County District Judge John Guthmann told the department it didn't have the authority to stop payments and ordered the department to resume payments.” Since February, that Star Tribune quote has been repeated or paraphrased on many occasions by many other media outlets. The same media sources reported that, in her April 4, 2022, testimony to the Minnesota Senate, the Commissioner of the Education stated that the MN Department of Education tried to stop payments to FOF, only to be ordered by Judge Guthmann to resume payments. That is false. Then, when federal indictments were announced this week, many new reports were published. On September 22, 2022, Governor Tim Walz told the media that the Minnesota Department of Education attempted to end payments to FOF because of possible fraud, but that Judge Guthmann ordered payments to continue in April 2021. That is also false.

As the public court record and Judge Guthmann’s orders make plain, Judge Guthmann never issued an order requiring the MN Department of Education to resume food reimbursement payments to FOF. The Department of Education voluntarily resumed payments and informed the court that FOF resolved the “serious deficiencies” that prompted it to suspend payments temporarily. All of the MN Department of Education food reimbursement payments to FOF were made voluntarily, without any court order.

It should be noted that the local news report quoted above (by a FOX affiliate, no less) disputes the Judiciary’s account, asserting that the judge “ruled that Minnesota education officials lacked the legal authority to stop payments” and “held the Education Department in contempt of court for failing to process 143 applications from Feeding Our Future for new meal sites”. I imagine that we’ll soon learn soon enough where the truth lies. I doubt that the judges misrepresented the record.

One clear point is that the state’s Department of Education did sniff something rotten in FOF’s activities as early as two years ago. Another is that the DOE didn’t regard stopping the fraud as very urgent. Its excuses for forgoing an appeal of the judge’s purported decision, recited in the FOX article, are feeble: An appeal would have run up more legal fees. If the DOE had lost on appeal, more sanctions might have been imposed. Those are good reasons only if the department had little confidence in its position. It is obvious now that FOF’s activities were highly suspicious. The failure to appeal gave a massive benefit of the doubt to the organization, a benefit that it patently didn’t deserve and one that diligent protectors of the public purse would never have entertained.

The Times’ Anti-Democratic “Democracy”

This morning, the executive editor of the New York Times declares, “Representative government faces its most serious threats in decades.” You won’t be surprised to learn that, in the paper’s view, all threats come from the Right. You also won’t be surprised to learn that the Times’s definition of “representative government” doesn’t bear much resemblance to James Madison’s.

Identified as “the two biggest threats to American democracy” are “first, a movement within the Republican Party that refuses to accept election defeat; and, second, a growing disconnect between public opinion and government power”.

Claims that the 2020 Presidential election was “stolen” aren’t based on any large body of evidence – no more than were the same Democratic claims about the elections of 2016, 2004 and 2000 (i. e., every Presidential election that Democrats have recently lost). The Times hypothesizes that GOP office holders who “falsely claim that the 2020 election was rigged . . . may be willing to overturn a future election”. How they would or could do that is left obscure, nor is it obvious that people who decry what they perceive as election rigging are merely disappointed that they couldn’t do the rigging themselves.

There is, in fact, an easy way to shut up “election deniers”: Conduct elections under transparent rules that (i) ensure that only eligible voters will cast ballots, (ii) guarantee ballot secrecy and (iii) are not subject to partisan change at the last minute. The 2020 election satisfied none of those criteria. It was our country’s good luck that the Electoral College vote wasn’t close enough to sow much wider suspicion that the wrong candidate was declared the winner.

The Biden Administration’s ideas for election reform go in the opposite direction: toward forcing every state to make elections less secure. The proposed “For the People Act” and “John R. Lewis Voting Rights Act” would, among other assaults on election integrity, mandate universal voting by mail and forbid requiring would-be voters to prove that they are whom they claim to be. Elections would be conducted entirely on the honor system. American history suggests that honor isn’t the leading characteristic of those who oversee the polls.

The adoption of the Biden proposals would cast a pall of suspicion over every election that wasn’t a landslide, even if politicians forswore opportunities for fraud and the effective repeal of the secret ballot didn’t alter any outcomes. That is a graver peril to democracy than Donald Trump’s or Stacey Abrams’s sore-loser tweets. Republican efforts to reform slovenly state election procedures buttress democracy rather than undermine it.

The second “threat to democracy” perceived by the Times is a defining feature of the American Constitution: It is very, very hard to enact fundamental changes to the nation’s laws without first obtaining a wide consensus in their favor. That is what the Times calls “a chronic threat: The power to set government policy is becoming increasingly disconnected from public opinion.”

Naturally the Times does not mean that laws are increasingly made by an unelected, rarely accountable Administrative State. Rather –

Two of the past four presidents have taken office despite losing the popular vote. Senators representing a majority of Americans are often unable to pass bills, partly because of the increasing use of the filibuster. And the Supreme Court is dominated by an ambitious Republican-appointed bloc even though Democrats have won the popular vote in seven of the past eight presidential elections – an unprecedented run of popular-vote success in U.S. history.

If one measures “popular vote success” purely by Presidential elections, that sounds superficially plausible. What it overlooks is that one can’t infer a great deal about public opinion “across the fruited plain” from the results of an election held every four years in which two atypical and not seriously contested states (California and New York) account for the Democratic Presidential majority. As a further, contemporary complication, Joe Biden didn’t run on the agenda that he is now trying to enact, and there isn’t much evidence that public opinion is thrilled with it. One might ask why, if Biden policies are overwhelmingly popular, he and his appointees are so zealous to stifle criticism.

One item in the Times’s litany of laments deserves special attention: “Senators representing a majority of Americans are often unable to pass bills.” Equal state representation in the Senate has that effect. It is one of the ways in which the Constitution hinders sweeping, non-consensus upheavals. Eliminating it through Constitutional means would be extraordinarily difficult, requiring not just an amendment but the unanimous consent of the states: “no State, without its Consent, shall be deprived of its equal Suffrage in the Senate.” As a practical matter, “democratizing” the Senate is possible only by overthrowing the Constitution. That doesn’t sound like the most democratic of ideas, but it is the only road ahead if the Times regards the Senate as a genuine menace to democracy.

Taken all in all, the Times harbors a concept of democracy that is seriously at odds with our present form of government. Could its professed fear of “insurrection” be an instance of projection?

Democrat Hidalgos and the Hispanic Working Class

Last week, the Wall Street Journal ran an interesting piece titled, “Latino Voters, Once Solidly Democratic, Split Along Economic Lines”. Once upon a time, “X Split Along Economic Lines” would have meant, “Affluent X’s are voting Republican, and working class X’s remain Democrats”. Today, you won’t be surprised to learn that the WSJ reporters – most likely liberals; the paper’s news pages, unlike its editorials, tilt strongly to port – found the opposite:

A few miles from the Las Vegas Strip, in a working-class neighborhood of one-story homes and scattered palm trees, Vania Oronoz is pushing her husband to give up his habit of voting for Democrats.

Mrs. Oronoz and many of her neighbors are shifting toward the Republican Party, a pattern that’s being replicated across the country. The move has been especially pronounced among working-class Latinos, whose votes have the potential to reshape the political parties in the same way that the movement of white, working-class voters has made them a pillar of the Republican Party.

Mrs. Oronoz, a 44-year-old immigrant from Mexico, runs a taco business with her husband and backed President Joe Biden in 2020 when she cast her first vote as a U.S. citizen. She said she has become disenchanted with Democrats over the state of inflation and school quality, as well as the party’s failure to approve a pathway to citizenship for undocumented immigrants. Instead she is putting her support behind GOP candidates in this fall’s election, including the Republican trying to defeat Democratic Sen. Catherine Cortez Masto, the only Latina ever elected to the Senate.

The article makes it clear that the trend away from an overwhelming Democratic advantage among Hispanic voters is a working class trend and that it is impelled by issues like border security, rising crime rates, woke public schools, abortion and Democratic politicians’ indifference to the real economic needs of working Americans, as exemplified by Covid-19 lockdowns. A taco store can’t do a lot of business over the Internet. In the WSJ’s generic Congressional preference poll, Hispanics with four year college degrees prefer Democrats over Republicans by 26 percentage points. Among other Hispanics, the Democrats’ margin is only six points. Overall, the Democrats’ 34 point lead in 2018 has fallen to 11 points.

The WSJ notes that Senator Masto, whose mother was Italian and whose husband is Syrian, “has been reminding voters she is the granddaughter of a Mexican immigrant”. For unknown reasons, I receive more-than-daily emails from the Masto campaign. Hardly a one omits mention of the Senator’s Mexican forebear, but almost the only political issue ever mentioned is abortion. Today, for instance, she tells people who she hopes will give money to her campaign:

Right now, I’m in the most important fight of my life, and our country’s future is at stake. If we lose this race, Republicans will retake the Senate, and they’ll pass a national ban on abortion. They’ll make it a CRIME from coast to coast.

Does she have any objection to Biden Administration regulations that would force K-12 schools to admit males into females’ gym classes and share the same showers? If so, she’s been very quiet about it.

Does she see anything wrong with closing down the economy for over a year, during which the hidalgos could work from home with hardly any inconvenience, while many of their fellow citizens saw their standard of living collapse or had to rely on government handouts (doled out by a hand that had to borrow the funds)? Not a word.

Will she care when the “greening” of the economy skyrockets energy prices and makes air conditioning (somewhat important to Nevadans) unaffordable to all but the wealthy? Not very likely.

Senator Masto and her financial backers can afford their “luxury beliefs”. Ordinary Americans can’t. It should be no surprise that the Hispanic subset of ordinary Americans is coming to realize that they can’t afford them either.

But Why Would Democrats Want to Have Fun?

In its “Notable and Quotable” sidebar yesterday, the Wall Street Journal excerpted an essay from The New Republic that took note of “Trump party boats”, which the writer wokely described as “jubilant white Americans . . . partying on boats festooned with banners supporting the former president”. She then conceded “something painfully true: Democrats just aren’t about having fun.”

Sadly, I get what she means. I was out on Long Island this summer, and it was clear that the people on the party boats with the Trump 2024 banners were having a blast. A lot of Democrats lack this spirit, and that’s a problem. The left needs more party boats and relatedly, a sense that, as Ronald Reagan famously exhorted, “it’s morning in America.” We need to make more space for joy in our understanding of the world, as Marjorie Taylor Greene is doing in her twisted and misleading way.

This call for “joy in our understanding of the world” clashes remarkably with the thesis of the essay: that it’s a very bad thing that climate optimists – people who think that a changing climate may improve life on Earth and certainly isn’t a catastrophic threat – may derail the transition to the austere future advocated by the Davos Dystopians. A measure of how much the writer fears optimism is that she links it to the most toxic exponent she can find.

She does try to put an optimistic spin on the “Green New Deal”:

By addressing the climate crisis, we are making the world better. With every policy step we take away from fossil fuels, we are cleaning up the air and water, creating new clean industries in which humans can thrive, making our cities greener, more beautiful, cooler, and full of life. People will live longer lives, evading heat waves and devastating storms. Indeed, our children could well have a future that is more pregnant with exciting possibility than the world we live in now.

In other words, after the inevitable blackouts, surging energy prices and multi-trillion dollar transition costs, we will emerge into a Brave New World. That message demands that we endure hardship now, not indulge in joy. The fun will arrive after the eggs have been broken – provided that we actually get an omelet.

The fact that many Democrats’ view of the current state of the world is ineluctably depressing and pessimistic doesn’t prove that it is wrong. Winston Churchill wasn’t wrong when he promised only “blood, toil, tears and sweat”. “Churchill party boats” would have been jarringly out of place during the Blitz. Those who believe in a “climate crisis” on a par with, or worse than, World War II have a duty to denounce frivolity and proclaim “sunset in America”.

Meanwhile, the rest of us will go out and have fun.

Abbott and DeSantis Call for Saul

Left-wing agitprop guru Saul Alinsky advised, “Make the enemy live up to its own book of rules.” He may not have foreseen that his tactics are usable by all sides.

The governors of Texas and Florida have dipped into the Alinsky playbook by asking soi disant “sanctuary cities” to live up to their declarations of solidarity with “undocumented Americans”. As you may have heard, that too, too solid empathy has melted, thawed and resolved itself into a dew when confronted in fact rather than fancy with even small numbers of the undocumented. Noah Rothman, who passes the very high bar of being one of the best writers at Commentary, has written an excellent summary of the situation, from which I extract the concluding three paragraphs:

Now, in dealing with some small measure of what these border states have been going through, Democratic officials are making all the GOP’s arguments for them. The flood of illegal migrants has overwhelmed emergency and social services. It has destabilized communities, displaced local labor, and undermined public safety. And quite unlike their Republican counterparts, the Democrats’ seething reaction is generating a level of national media attention that the GOP’s immigration hawks could never achieve.

In the Founders’ vision, the states were the laboratories of democracy. They are supposed to experiment with different models of social organization. But experimentation involves risk and, sometimes, failure. If the sanctuary city model fails in response to the modest pressure Republicans have applied to it, the sanctuary city model was never sustainable in the first place.

Republican governors have managed to draft their opponents into their effort to popularize the burdens illegal migration imposes on border states. And they’ve done so evidently without inflicting any hardship on the migrants themselves, beyond those that already accompany illegal residency. Liberals’ discomfort over this is a consequence of their own policy preferences. There are many players in this drama who deserve our sympathy, but the sanctuary cities that now must live up to their rhetoric are not among them.

Now go read the rest.

Further reading: Paul du Quenoy, “Martha’s Vineyard and the fraud of the rich white liberal”
Paul Mirengoff, “One man’s political theater is another man’s poetic justice”

Echoes of Robespierre

Law & Liberty has posted an interesting review by Daniel J. Mahoney of the English translation of the awkwardly titled Robespierre: The Man Who Divides Us the Most (Robespierre: L’homme qui nous divise le plus) by French political philosopher Marcel Gauchet. The Italian translation has a more descriptive title: Robespierre: L’incorruttibile e il tiranno. Tra libertà e Terrore: le memorie divise della Rivoluzione francese. If I had been the publisher, I would have called it Robespierre: The Union of Liberty and Terror.

Maximilien Robespierre (1758-1794) began his career as a provincial lawyer and advocate of humanitarian causes. One of his early works was “Discours sur les peines infamantes” (1784), which denounced the degrading punishments meted out by French criminal courts. In March 1789, he was elected to the Estates-General, the body that fomented the French Revolution. He swiftly became one of its most prominent members and rose to the top of the political scrum during the turbulent years that followed. By 1793, he was the leading member of the Committee of Public Safety and the most eloquent proponent of the Reign of Terror.

His ascendancy didn’t last. On July 27, 1794 (9 Thermidor, Year II, in the Revolutionary calendar and, ironically, exactly one year after he took his place in the Committee of Public Safety), the National Convention, France’s legislative assembly, accused him of tyranny and ordered his arrest. The next day, after one of the wildest and most memorable nights in all of French history, he and a score of his followers were executed by the guillotine, that emblem of Revolutionary “justice”.

As Professor Mahoney observes, “Robespierre and the Jacobins have their contemporary partisans (and even imitators)”, both inside and outside of France.

For Robespierre is no ordinary tyrant, no man of unhinged ambition striving for power at any cost. In the early years of the Revolution, Robespierre spoke of nothing but the “rights of man,” of popular government, and the need to eschew any compromise with the remnants of the ancien regime. In his view of things, before 1789 one sees only tyranny, darkness, and oppression; on the other side of the chronological divide there is liberty, emancipation, and the dawn of the reign of the “rights of man.” But the transition required rivers of blood to flow. The “killing machine” that Robespierre became is inseparable from his uncompromising dedication to the “rights of man.” The “hero” and the “monster” are one and the same man fanatically dedicated to the same principles. This ought to give us pause.

Several of Robespierre’s traits have eerie echoes in our present day turmoil.

Immense political power was not accompanied by much interest in the mundane tasks of government. “In place of governing, Robespierre and his allies searched for enemies, discerning corruption and conspiracy everywhere.” Rarely attending sessions of the Committee or the Convention, paying scant attention to such crises as spiraling inflation, Robespierre warned in speech after speech that everyone who questioned his opinions was a conspirator against the principles of the Revolution. He often sounded much like Joe Biden excoriating “MAGA Republicans” while ignoring trivial matters like a looming rail strike, a porous Southern border and, by the bye, inflation.

Another audible echo is Robespierre’s rejection of all tradition and history. His principles were, like those of the today’s Woke fanatics, plucked out of his own head. He attributed them to Reason, while the Woke regard rational thought as one of the evils of Western civilization, but the consequences are the same in each case: a set of dogmas that rests on ipse dixit and justifies, indeed demands, the persecution of dissenters. Contemporary persecution is milder than Madame Guillotine, but exclusion from the Public Square and the destruction of livelihoods are far from benign.

Robespierre believed, too, that the nation should possess “une volonté une” (“one single will”). He would have nodded in agreement with the White House press secretary’s declaration, “If you are not with where the majority of Americans are, that is extreme.”

I wouldn’t go so far as to aver that the parallels between President Biden and Citizen Robespierre are exact. For one thing, the “Big Guy” doesn’t qualify for Robespierre’s sobriquet, “l’Incorruptible”. Nor does he possess Robespierre’s intellect, energy, eloquence and charisma. Nor is he in much danger of a Ninth Thermidor, however stridently he may proclaim the imminent danger of insurrection. He is the Revolutionary tyrant recreated as a Twenty-First Century caricature.

“Protecting” Democracy Through Censorship

Today I devoted quite a few neurons to thinking about something to say about 9/11 and decided that I have nothing new and interesting to add to the flow of discourse on that topic. I did, however, notice an essay behind National Review Online’s paywall (Kenin M. Spivak, “The Biden Administration Is Engaged in a Massive Censorship Campaign”) that is 9/11-adjacent and deserving of close attention. It recounts, in startling detail, the Biden Administration’s strenuous efforts to subject online speech to what can only be called “censorship”, as revealed by evidence presented by the plaintiffs in one of the several ongoing court cases styled Missouri v. Biden, this one seeking to “to enjoin the defendants [an array of Executive Branch agencies] from taking any steps to demand, urge, pressure, or otherwise induce any social-media platform to censor or restrict access to content”.

The evidence shows that at least 80 senior officials have participated in a concerted federal enterprise involving at least eleven federal agencies, including the White House, Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), Department of Homeland Security (DHS), Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), Office of the Surgeon General, Census Bureau, and FBI. The manifestly unconstitutional public–private partnership between the administration and Big Tech disregards Chief Justice Warren Burger’s warning that it is “axiomatic that a state may not induce, encourage or promote private persons to accomplish what it is constitutionally forbidden to accomplish.”

Responses to Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests and emails produced in discovery show that White House, DHS, and HHS officials flagged specific content and examples of content for censorship, including factually accurate dissenting views, under the guise of suppressing “domestic terrorism.”

That President Biden would seek to use government power to silence criticism was sadly predictable, if only the electorate had been paying attention to what little he said during his basement hideaway campaign:

In January 2020, then-candidate Biden told the New York Times editorial board that Section 230 [of the Communications Decency Act] should be “revoked” because social-media companies like Facebook did not do enough to censor false information in political ads criticizing him, and that Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg should be subject to civil liability and possibly criminal prosecution for not censoring the Trump campaign. In June and again in September 2020, the Biden campaign demanded that Facebook censor Trump and his supporters.

Examples follow of the implementation of what was thus foreshadowed. To take just three:

At a White House press briefing on July 15, 2021, White House press secretary Jen Psaki explained: “We are in regular touch with these social-media platforms . . . through members of our senior staff.” She made explicit the administration’s unconstitutional violation of free speech when she admitted, “We’re flagging problematic posts for Facebook that spread disinformation,” and added, “They certainly understand what our asks are.”

On February 7, 2022, DHS issued a National Terrorism Advisory Bulletin that claimed that the “proliferation of false or misleading narratives, which sow discord or undermine public trust in U.S. government institutions,” constitutes a “domestic terror threat.” Then, on April 12, CISA announced that it was coordinating directly with social-media platforms to police “Mis-, Dis-, and Malinformation.” Premising its activities on unconstitutional motives, CISA stated: “False or misleading information can evoke a strong emotional reaction that leads people to share it without first looking into the facts for themselves, polluting healthy conversations about the issues and increasing societal divisions.”

At an Axios event on June 14, 2022, White House national climate adviser Gina McCarthy demanded that “tech companies have to stop allowing specific individuals over and over again to spread disinformation” – speech that contradicts federal officials’ preferred narratives on climate change – and threatened congressional action to “hold companies accountable.”

I doubt that very many Americans think that it would be a good idea for the government to take up the role of Supreme Fact Checker. The Administration probably has the same doubt, for it fought hard – unsuccessfully – to hide much of the key evidence sought by the Biden v. Missouri plaintiffs behind a wall of executive privilege.

President Biden talks a lot about “saving democracy”. There will be little democracy left to save if the incumbent regime can decide who is allowed to speak and what they are allowed to say.

Further reading: Jacob Sullum, “Biden’s Sneaky Censors”

Covid, Masks and Posies

While one may not think of science fiction fans as an especially stodgy, risk-averse cohort, SF conventions tend to conflate Covid-19 with bubonic plague. This year’s World Science Fiction Convention (Chicon 8), held in Chicago from September 1st through 5th, required all attendees to present proof of full vaccination and to wear masks “in all convention spaces, during move-in, the convention, and move-out, except when actively eating or drinking in designated areas”. I’m told that compliance with the masking policy was extremely high. Certainly, I saw plenty of masked convention goers from my vantage point on the outskirts of the event.

Did these precautions achieve their objective? The current rate of new Covid cases in Illinois is 164 per week per 100,000 inhabitants. Chicon has been sending its members (of whom I am one, though I never picked up my badge or entered any “convention spaces”) regular e-mails reporting the number of Covid cases among those in attendance. Today’s update says that there have been 42 confirmed cases among the 3,574 attending members.

The infection rate thus was just under 1.18 percent, 1,175 per 100,000. If it had matched the Illinois average, there would have been (taking into account the fact that Chicon lasted five days rather than a full week) about four cases rather than 42.

No matter what adjustments one makes for the differences between Illinois as a whole and the corner of it that Chicon occupied for a few days, it’s absurd to argue that the vaccination and mask mandates had any beneficial impact. Of course, the convention venue was more crowded than downtown Springfield, and one would expect an airborne virus to spread more widely there than the state average, but can one truly believe that a tenfold increase is evidence that masks were effective?

This is a micro-datum among the many that disprove the superstition that wearing a mask will ward off Covid-19 any better than a pocket full of posies protected against the Black Death.

A Straightforward Answer to What May Be a Sincere Question

The Morning Dispatch, a conservative, vehemently anti-Trump web site, asks, at the end of its account of Joe Biden’s Riefenstahl-style oration at Independence Hall:

Do Republicans blasting Biden’s speech last night as overly partisan have a point? Was there any way the president might have drawn attention to concerns about Republicans’ democratic backsliding without being accused of being divisive?

Rarely does anyone ask a question with such a simple, straightforward answer: A President who was genuinely concerned about “democratic backsliding” would take note of both parties’ trajectories. Denunciations of “MAGA Republicans” would have more credibility if the President also denounced backsliding by his own party, over whose conduct he presumably has some influence.

• Many Democrats insist that their candidates were the real winners of elections (Stacy Adams in Georgia in 2018, John Kerry in Ohio in 2004) that weren’t nearly as close as the Presidential tallies in Arizona, Georgia, Pennsylvania and several other states in 2020. Moreover, it is practically an article of Democratic faith that George W. Bush and Donald Trump were illegitimately elected, the former allegedly installed by the Supreme Court, the latter by Vladimir Putin. None of these claims rests on any more evidence than does Trump’s fantasy that he won reelection by millions of votes.
• Riots broke out when Donald Trump was nominated for President and again when he was inaugurated. Like the January 6th riot at the Capitol, they weren’t especially bloody, but they showed similar disrespect for the outcome of democratic processes.
• Definitely bloody and destructive were the riots in the summer of 2020. The unanimous Democrat response was that they were “mostly peaceful” and were motivated by a virtuous desire to call attention to injustices. Fine, but what was democratic about refusing to prosecute the unpeaceful protesters who burned police stations, vandalized businesses, terrorized innocent citizens and, in cities like Portland and Seattle, established enclaves that rejected the authority of the local, state and federal governments?
• The victories of “MAGA Republicans” in GOP primaries owe much to the support that they have received from Democratic campaign organizations. Boosting anti-democratic forces in one of the two major political parties is a strange way to promote democracy.
• Documents have come to light showing that numerous federal agencies have been working with social media companies to censor opinions that the government regards as false or dangerous. Unless one believes that freedom of speech is an expendable luxury, that is an ominous development for the future of democracy.

The case that large elements of the Democratic Party will accept democracy only so long as it produces their preferred results is at least as strong as the case against “MAGA Republicans”. Friends of democratic rule need to rebuke the authoritarians on both sides. It is safe, though sad, to say that Joe Biden has revealed himself as not one of those friends.

That is, I believe, the answer to the Dispatch’s question.

 

An Angry, Flailing, Failed Mediocrity

There is no reason to read grave portents into President Biden’s Mussolini-like rant against the “MAGA Republicans” who are supposedly attacking democracy. If he were a real Mussolini, his next step would be to mobilize the National Guard to round up the enemies of the state. But he won’t do that. The worst that will occur will be continuing collusion between federal bureaucrats and social media companies to keep critical voices off the latter’s platforms, which would mean something only if Twitter and Facebook were the real world. While the Administration’s soft censorship is despicable, it isn’t likely to have much effect.

No, the Biden harangue, set against a blood-red background and backed up by Marine guards, should be seen for what it truly is: the flailing of a man far out of his depth (which isn’t very deep) who at some level realizes that his policies are comprehensively failing but refuses to consider any alternatives and imagines that shouting into the night sky will exorcize the phantasms with which his feverish brain surrounds him.

He is a pitiful figure, no more to be feared than a lunatic ranting on a street corner. We should pray for his recovery, which will be hastened by speedy retirement from public life.

Above all, let us look to the example of Abraham Lincoln, who, entering the fourth year of a genuine insurrection, had the greatness of spirit to counsel “malice toward none, charity for all”.