Stromata Blog

What the Student Debt Story Tells Us

Business Insider, an anti-capitalist web site, has posted a screed designed to make what its socialist-leaning editors think is a telling point in favor of President Biden’s attempt to forgive student loans through the exercise of his caudillo authority: “The Supreme Court justices deciding whether to end Biden's student loan relief program paid an average of $42,539 to go to college. Today, they'd have to pay around $320,531.”

Anyone old enough to have been a college student in the 1960’s or 1970’s doesn’t need to be told that higher education costs have inflated at a much faster rate than almost any other expense. In my freshman year at Yale, tuition, room and board cost $2,800. Today, the price is around $70,000. The increase is approximately three times the rise in the cost of living over that period.

Business Insider’s scarcely veiled subtext is that the Justices lack empathy with students who, knowing the prices that their colleges were charging, financed their educations by taking on huge debt burdens. It would be more sensible to ask why education has grown so much more expensive. Has there been vast improvement in the quality of the product that universities deliver? (pause to let the laughter die down)

There are two glaringly obvious reasons for the price spiral. First, the federal government has freely poured vast sums of money into subsidizing higher education, without any regard to what students were getting in return. Because financial aid and low-interest loans have been so widely available, colleges have been able to charge more. The profits have by and large been used to pad endowments and hire phalanxes of administrators, not for any purpose that would improve students’ return on their educational investments.

Second, the drumbeat of propaganda for universal college attendance has increased demand. Adolescents who in an earlier era would have entered the job market, married and started families now spend several years going through the motions of paideia, emerging with a meaningless credential and often without even that.

One doesn’t need a Ph.D. in economics to figure out that meeting increased demand with an expanding supply of dollars leads to escalating prices. That is the moral of the student debt story.

Photo of the Day

A friend sent me this no-doubt-authentic Air Force photograph:

Put Not Your Trust in Serial Liars

Seymour Hersh, whose deceit-filled journalistic career is replete with “bombshell narratives” based on unidentified sources (in D.C. circles, it is generally believed that only the anonymous tell the truth), has a new narrative to bedazzle the gullible: “that Navy divers, operating under the cover of NATO’s annual BALTOPS exercise last June, planted remotely-operated explosives that were detonated months later, last September” and thereby put the Nord Stream pipelines out of operation for an indefinite period.

Right-of-center commentators who ought to blanch at the name “Hersh” have picked this story up with minimal skepticism (e. g., “BOMBSHELL: Yep, It Looks Like Team Biden Blew up Europe’s Nord Stream Pipeline”), presumably because the story makes the Biden Administration look bad (albeit cunning and competent, the first indicator that it’s all make-believe). The post under the headline just cited concludes:

In the reader comments a while ago, I responded to one reader with something like, “This is exactly the kind of stupid move the kids in the White House might think is really clever.”

Hersh is not always the most reliable source, but between Nord Stream and Keystone XL, it’s fair to ask: What does this administration have against energy pipelines, anyway?

Many comments on that post and on an Instapundit item linking to it took it for granted that of course the sabotage must be “Team Biden’s” doing. Some even applauded it.

Now, I yield to no one in my confidence in the ability of the incumbent Administration to act foolishly, but Hersh’s tale stretches credulity beyond the snapping point.

According to Hersh, “the planning took place late in 2021 and into the first months of 2022”, that is, after President Biden had waived sanctions on companies that were constructing Nord Stream 2, thereby making it possible for that pipeline to be completed, and before the Russian invasion of Ukraine.

Hersh has an elaborate and unbelievable explanation of why, having forgone the easy route to blocking Nord Stream 2, the Biden Administration decided to destroy it secretly. To add to the implausibility, an inter-agency task force – evidently of considerable size, “men and women from the Joint Chiefs of Staff, the CIA, and the State and Treasury Departments” – discussed and approved the operation. Some of those in the know were, according again to Hersh, strongly opposed to it. Nonetheless, it remained a deep, dark secret in leak-rampant Washington, D.C. until an unknown person told his story to Seymour Hersh months after the fact.

That putative source is, by the way, well-informed about every aspect of the project’s planning and implementation. There was seemingly no concept of limiting information to those with a need to know. The source knows the details of debates among the planners, of discussions with the Norwegian navy, of the way in which the bombs were planted and detonated, and so on. The Houston Astros had better operational security.

Mr. Hersh has, in short, written the scenario for a thriller rather than a credible account of events that happened in real life. This isn’t his first time. He has not with age become less of a monger of hate-America fiction.

Further Reading: Jim Geraghty, “Joe Biden, the Unilateralist Cowboy Warmonger? Really?”, rounds up more reasons to relegate Hersh’s story to the shelf reserved for fairy tales.

The Crimean Conundrum

Here is an interesting report, dated yesterday:

President Joe Biden announced on Wednesday that the U.S. would for the first time send 31 of the sophisticated [M1 Abrams] tanks to aid Ukraine’s war effort. Speaking anonymously during a press briefing, a senior administration official acknowledged that those tanks could roll on Crimea.

“We want to make sure that [the Ukrainians] have the capabilities to not only defend themselves against the Russian onslaught … but also that they have the ability to retake, to reclaim their sovereign territory, and that means everything that is recognized by international borders,” the official said.

The official was asked to clarify whether they meant retaking territory in Crimea or in Ukraine’s eastern Donbas region, where Russia purported to annex several areas last year.

“Crimea is Ukraine,” the official responded. “We’ve never recognized the illegal annexation of Crimea. But where the Ukrainians decide to go and how they decide to conduct operations in their country, those are their decisions to make.”

That “senior official” may be an outlier. The Biden Administration’s enthusiasm for Ukrainian victory seems to wax and wane unpredictably. The decision to equip Ukraine with our top-of-the-line armored fighting vehicles followed days of insistence that the country’s armed forces didn’t need and couldn’t effectively use M1’s. Still, the quoted statement raises a question that isn’t often addressed but will need to be answered if the current war is to come to a satisfactory conclusion: What should happen to Crimea?

Neither Ukraine nor Russia has strong historical ties to the peninsula. After the Mongol invasions in the 13th Century, it fell under the rule of the Golden Horde, then of the Ottoman Empire, then, briefly, of an independent Crimean Tatar state. In 1783, Catherine the Great annexed it to the Russian Empire. During the Russian Civil War, it was a White bastion under a democratic Tatar regime. After the Bolshevik triumph, it became the “Crimean Autonomous Soviet Socialist Republic”. Agriculture was collectivized with the usual communist brutality. The Tatars were subjected to forced Russification. During World War II, they were deported en masse to the Russian far east. After the war, the “autonomous republic” was demoted to an oblast.

In 1954, Nikita Khrushchev transferred Crimea from the Russian Soviet Federated Socialist Republic to the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic, an action of zero political significance. It wasn’t a recognition of any Ukrainian character. According to the 1959 census, ethnic Ukrainians made up only 22 percent of the population.

In the referendum on Ukrainian independence in December 1991, Crimea had the lowest voter turnout (68 percent versus 84 percent for Ukraine as a whole) and the lowest percentage of “yes” votes (57 percent in Sevastopol, 54 percent in the rest of Crimea; next lowest voting district was 83.9 percent). Those figures suggest tepid enthusiasm for the Ukrainian connection.

In 1992, the Crimean parliament voted to declare independence from Ukraine, then retracted the declaration the next day. In 1994, Yuri A. Meshkov, a supporter of Crimean independence and closer ties with Russia, won the Crimean presidency. A referendum endorsed greater autonomy for Crimea and dual Russian-Ukrainian citizenship for its residents, but the movement fizzled out as the separatists turned to fighting among themselves. The Crimean parliament and presidency were subsequently abolished (ironically, by a Ukrainian president known for his pro-Russian sympathies).

Also in 1994, Russia and Ukraine agreed to the Budapest Memorandum, which recognized Crimea as an integral part of Ukraine in exchange for Ukraine’s surrender of its nuclear weapons. That agreement seemed to settle Crimea’s status – until Russia’s “little green men” invaded in 2014 and, almost bloodlessly, seized control. A referendum in March 2014 supposedly gave 97 percent approval to annexation to Russia, but polls taken shortly before the Russian takeover showed majority opposition to joining Russia, and “a report by Russian human rights experts that was posted on the website of the Russian Presidential Council for Civil Society and Human Rights found that turnout was only 30 to 50 percent, with just 50 to 60 percent of participants voting in favor of annexation”.

Now it is 2023, Ukraine and Russia are at war, and among Ukraine’s overt war aims is the recovery of Crimea. The strongest basis for the Ukrainian claim is the Budapest Memorandum. If this were the 18th Century, when sovereigns exchanged territories like trading cards, that argument would have heavy weight, but the notion has since developed that the inhabitants of a region should have a major say in who rules them. One can hardly say with confidence what the Crimeans, given a free choice, would prefer, and no alternative looks very satisfactory.

The first idea that comes to mind is a referendum. Let Crimeans vote for Ukraine or Russia. That would indeed resolve the issue if one side or the other won decisively, but there’s no good reason to expect that outcome. A close vote would leave the losers discontented and determined to try again, a pattern that we’ve seen in Scotland and Quebec, while nationalists in the losing party’s preferred partner would press their government to work for a reversal (not necessarily peaceful) of the electoral verdict.

Unpromising as a solution via referendum is, annexation without any formal expression of popular consent, or with a phony plebiscite like the farce of 2014, would be worse, for reasons that are too obvious to need stating.

What about independence? In different circumstances, an independent Crimea with its own national identity might obviate the current ethnic divisions. In the world as it exists, there are drawbacks. Eastern Europe doesn’t need a minuscule state (about the size of Houston in population and Vermont in area) in a strategic location, encircled by neighbors (Russia, Ukraine, Turkey) with motives for interfering in its affairs.

All in all, it seems that Crimea is not a “problem”. Problems have solutions. Crimea may have none. If, as somebody in the Biden Administration thinks would be a good idea, Ukraine recovers it by force of arms, that won’t bother me at all, but the event will be just another stage in the conflict, not its end.

Breaking: More Biden Documents Found

Even if you’re one of those people who thinks that National Review is an arm of the Demopublican uniparty, you’ll want to read Rich Lowry’s news update. If nothing else, it will lighten your day.

P.S.: I wonder how long it will be before Politico and Glenn Kessler and Snopes “fact check” Mr. Lowry’s piece. Most likely, they already have. At least, he won’t be banned by Twitter.

Marking Time

On August 30, 2021, just before midnight, the last American troops scuttled from Afghanistan, leaving behind at least scores, perhaps hundreds, of American citizens and thousands of Afghans who had assisted our forces and were now marked for vengeance by the Taliban.

Jim Treacher has been patiently counting the number of days that our countrymen have been stranded in the Taliban realm. Today is Day 500. The media have lost interest in their fate. We don’t know how many survive, how many have been murdered, how many of died of disease or starvation, how many linger in captivity.

A quarter century after the end of the Vietnam War, our government was still looking for living MIA’s and recovering the bodies of the dead. The Biden Administration’s search seems to have fizzled after a quarter of a year, if not sooner. Amnesia is now its preferred state of mind.

A Strange Answer to an Anticipated Question

Rather than be the ten thousandth commenter on the discovery of classified documents in President Biden’s private office at the University of Pennsylvania, I’ll limit myself to looking at his first public statement about the incident. At a press conference following his meeting yesterday with the aspiring dictator of Canada and the president of those portions of Mexico not under the control of drug cartels, President Biden was asked, as part of a portmanteau query that also included questions for Messrs. Trudeau and López Obrador and one for Biden about border security, to “explain how classified documents ended up in one of your offices? And should the public get – have been notified sooner?”

In response, Mr. Biden read from a prepared statement. Here is the White House transcript:

Well, let me get rid of the easy one first. People know I take classified documents and classified information seriously.

When my lawyers were clearing out my office at the University of Pennsylvania, they set up an office for me – a secure office in the Capitol, when I – the four years after being Vice President, I was a professor at Penn.

They found some documents in a box – you know, a locked cabinet, or at least a closet. And as soon as they did, they realized there were several classified documents in that box. And they did what they should have done: They immediately called the Archives – immediately called the Archives, turned them over to the Archives. And I was briefed about this discovery and surprised to learn that there were any government records that were taken there to that office.

But I don’t know what’s in the documents. I’ve – my lawyers have not suggested I ask what documents they were. I’ve turned over the boxes – they’ve turned over the boxes to the Archives. And we’re cooperating fully – cooperating fully with the review, and – which I hope will be finished soon, and will be more detail at that time.

The President’s ghostwriter evidently didn’t anticipate, or didn’t care to answer, the second part of the question: Why was disclosure delayed for more than two months? The answer to the first part, to the extent that there is an answer, is confined to a single paragraph, and that paragraph is confused and uninformative. To quote again:

When my lawyers were clearing out my office at the University of Pennsylvania, they set up an office for me – a secure office in the Capitol, when I – the four years after being Vice President, I was a professor at Penn.

Three events are mentioned: (1) lawyers “clearing out my office at the University of Pennsylvania, (2) “they” (the same lawyers?) setting up “a secure office in the Capitol” for him, (3) the “four years after being Vice President” during which he “was a professor at Penn”. On the surface, the sequence is (3), (1), (2) – except that the “secure office in the Capitol” can have existed only while Biden was Vice President. The Veep has an office in the Capitol, because he is President of the Senate; the President of the United States does not. Therefore, the actual sequence is (2), (3), (1). There’s not a word about how classified documents got from the Capitol to the university. (Note, again, that the President was speaking from a prepared statement, not ad libbing. Some staffer, doubtless several decades younger than Joe Biden, wrote that garbled run-on sentence and thought that it made sense.)

Mr. Biden professes to “take classified documents and classified information seriously”. He’s not like that guy whom he condemned as “irresponsible” for having classified documents in his possession after leaving office. One presumes that serious attention to classification would have included procedures to prevent classified materials from being commingled with personal documents, so as to ensure that the former didn’t migrate from the “secure office in the Capitol” to “my office at the University of Pennsylvania” along with the latter. If the President had been prepared to answer the reporter’s question, he would have told us what procedures he had in place and would have announced that he had launched an investigation into why they failed.

I infer that he doesn’t want the question answered; he just hopes that it will go away. And it probably will, as the media and the Democratic Party (pardon the redundancy) rally behind the least implausible Presidential candidate that they have for 2024.

Addendum: Well, this happened fast, per NBC (posted at 1:11 p.m. PST):

Aides to President Joe Biden have discovered at least one additional batch of classified documents in a location separate from the Washington office he used after leaving the Obama administration, according to a person familiar with the matter.

Since November, after the discovery of documents with classified markings in his former office, Biden aides have been searching for any additional classified materials that might be in other locations he used, said the source, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to provide details about the ongoing inquiry.

The White House did not return a request for comment. The Justice Department had no comment.

Donald Trump is no doubt very happy, even though, as Andy McCarthy points out, we don’t know, so far, that Joe Biden was an equal scofflaw where classification rules were concerned.

Second Addendum: In a post later than the one linked above, Andy McCarthy observes, “The president doesn’t seem to have gone about this in the manner of someone who ‘take[s] classified documents and classified information seriously’.” He notes in particular that the President, ostensibly on the advice of his lawyers, has disclaimed any interest in learning anything about the documents that were in his possession for four years.

Biden is the president of the United States, the official most responsible for national security. If top-secret information may have fallen into the wrong hands – a possibility that must be indulged when classified intelligence is maintained in an unauthorized place – then it is Biden’s responsibility to know what is in the documents so that he can assess the potential damage. That’s not just his duty; he is in the unique position of knowing who had access to his private office, what the security, visiting, and maintenance arrangements were in the years that the documents were apparently maintained there, and so on.

Mr. McCarthy also presents the most charitable explanation of Biden’s conduct that is at all plausible:

Biden first did what he habitually does, which is to assert that “people know” some supposed attribute of his that, in fact, is neither an attribute of his nor believed by “people” to be one. In this instance, he said, “People know I take classified documents and classified information seriously.” We don’t know any such thing. The most sensitive thing Biden is known to have handled in his long political career is the pullout from Afghanistan, an utter catastrophe of his own making. He is a notorious plagiarist and résumé inflater whose best-known trait is to say with brimming confidence things that are not only untrue but easily demonstrated to be untrue. Everything about him screams sloppy and erratic, which is why White House aides charged with damage control hold their breath every time he speaks. There is absolutely no reason to believe he is any more careful in his handling of classified intelligence than in his handling of anything else.

Less charitable hypotheses are also plausible.

Were the Jobs Really There? An Economic Mystery Story

A case for Sherlock Holmes, Economist: The Bureau of Labor Statistics reported in July 2022 that the U.S. economy had added an estimated 1,121,500 jobs in the second quarter of the year. In the same quarter, the GDP fell for the second quarter in a row, the popular definition of a recession. The Biden Administration and its supporters used that robust job growth as evidence that recession talk was just Republican gaslighting.

But was the job growth in fact robust? Last week the Philadelphia Fed’s research department published a revised estimate.

Our estimates incorporate more comprehensive, accurate job estimates released by the BLS as part of its Quarterly Census of Employment and Wages (QCEW) program to augment the sample data from the BLS’s CES that are issued monthly on a timely basis.

The result of the reevaluation:

In the aggregate, 10,500 net new jobs were added during the period rather than the 1,121,500 jobs estimated by the sum of the states; the U.S. CES estimated net growth of 1,047,000 jobs for the period.

Payroll jobs in the nation remained essentially flat from March through June 2022 after adjusting for QCEW data.

The Society for American Baseball Research has an ongoing program of reviewing the data underlying baseball statistics to correct inaccuracies. Here the discrepancy between the initial BLS estimate and the Philadelphia Fed revision is rather like changing a player’s batting average from .350 to .125. That has naturally led to suspicions that the numbers were cooked for the benefit of a particular political party.

I’m highly skeptical of the skulduggery explanation. While it’s likely that most BLS employees are liberal Democrats (the only one whom I know personally is), not all of them are. The risk that a whistleblower would expose the plotters is high, and what would the malefactors get for putting their careers in jeopardy? Joe Biden might win a news cycle.

It’s conceivable, of course, that the mistake is the Philadelphia Fed’s, that it somehow misinterpreted the BLS’s updated data. That seems just as unlikely as the conspiracy theory. All in all, we have an enigma. Perhaps it will someday be unraveled. Meanwhile, this incident is a useful reminder that statistics aren’t always what they seem to be.

Laugh of the Day

John Kirby has the unenviable job of serving as flack for Joe Biden’s National Security Council. The Defense Department’s just-released annual report to Congress on “Military and Security Developments Involving the People’s Republic of China” aggravated his woes. Its discussion of Communist China’s use of “a wide range of diplomatic tools throughout 2021 to erode U.S. influence globally and subvert U.S.-backed security partnerships” includes this:

PRC officials and state media outlets also repeatedly condemned the U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan and cited the withdrawal as evidence that the U.S. is an unreliable partner and declining power.

It’s only one sotto voce sentence, but it calls up recollections that must be painful to Foggy Bottom denizens who boast of their “smart power”. Mr. Kirby was sent out this morning to convince the world that, far from being a sign of weakness and unreliability, the American scuttle from Afghanistan was a triumph. Asked by Fox News about the DOD assessment, he declared (cross-talk omitted):

Nations like China and Russia took a look at what we did in Afghanistan . . . and had to marvel at the speed, the efficiency of the effectiveness [sc. with which] that very small number of troops are able to move that many Afghans safely out of that country. No other nation in the world can do that.

Even if one forgets about the chaotic scramble to get onto flights out of Kabul and the thousands of Americans and Afghan allies who were left behind, an evacuation under fire is not an impressive display of military prowess. Nor is it a testament to American reliability that our soldiers slipped away in the night, abandoning bases without notice to the Afghans, leaving billions of dollars of equipment behind, and rendering it impossible for the Afghan army and air force to continue effective combat operations. For those afflicted by amnesia, here is one of the many contemporary summaries of the debacle.

“No other nation in the world can do that.” Once we have identified the “that”, it is certainly accurate to say, “No other American President would have done that.”

As for John Kirby, he has clinched this year’s Baghdad Bob Award.

Why Do Leftists Hate Uncles?

The White House has twitted (why hasn’t it yet migrated to Mastodon?) a list of “some talking points when ‘that Uncle’ comes ‘at you’ about @POTUS”. I leave mockery of the substance (and it is eminently mockable) to others. What immediately strikes me is the assumption that “Uncles” (capitalized to emphasize the menace, I suppose, like “The Thing”) are particularly prone to start disruptive arguments at family gatherings.

I am an uncle myself, several times over, and I can say with confidence that the most disruptive thing I’ve ever done at a Thanksgiving feast is hog more than my fair share of the stuffing and dark meat. I also know scores of uncles, some of them my own, who are models of gentlemanly conduct on all occasions. No doubt there are fathers’ or mothers’ brothers who are rotten apples in the kinship barrel, but so too does the barrel contain annoying sisters and cousins and aunts.

So why do uncles get singled out when progressives send around their festal sound bites? The superficial answer is that most uncles are persons who were “assigned” to the male “gender” at birth and have stuck with it rather than celebrating fluidity. There’s also the fact that paradigmatic uncles are exemplars of toxic masculinity (Uncle Sam), the unequal division of wealth (Uncle Scrooge and Rich Uncle Pennybags) and racism (Uncle Tom, Uncle Remus, Uncle Ben).

Still, those explanations seem to me inadequate. Doesn’t the real offense lie in the fact that, in a world where humankind is a cancerous growth that aggravates Climate-Related Disasters and thus threatens the planet, no uncle is an only child. They are, by definition, brothers and hence unnecessary to the Utopia where birth will be the rare exception to abortion. Progressives who glimpse uncles are, I surmise, overtaken by rage against these despoilers of Gaia. Uncles are ideal villains for a day marked by such evils as meat consumption, carbon-emitting travel, homage to English colonizers and inattention to the urgent need to save our democracy by outlawing misinformation and hanging Donald Trump.

By the way, I killed a few excess brain cells reading “President Biden’s Top Accomplishments” as proclaimed by Chief of Staff Ron Klain. Under the heading “Despite global challenges, WE’RE MAKING PROGRESS”, one sees, “And NO taxes on people making above $400K – he kept his promise”. Maybe Slow Joe isn’t alone in his dotage.

The Great Climate Giveaway

As you may have heard, a United Nations convocation called “COP27” (an appropriate acronym for a body that seeks to police the lifestyles of us lesser beings) has established (that is, has agreed to engage in talks about someday establishing) a fund to compensate poor nations for the damage allegedly inflicted by Global Warming Climate Change Climate-Related Disasters. Joe Biden, following the Hobbit custom of giving presents to others on one’s birthday, has promised to kick in a billion dollars (to be provided by American taxpayers, not taken from Jim and Hunter Biden’s influence-peddling profits). A billion dollars doesn’t sound like much these days, but it’s only earnest money. The Dystopia Mafia wants much, much more.

Last July, a Dartmouth professor and one of his graduate students published a paper, “National attribution of historical climate damages”, that purports to quantify the costs that high-carbon-emitting nations have inflicted on the rest of the world. As summarized by an enthusiastic and credulous CNN report:

Researchers in a new study have put actual dollar figures on economic harm caused by the countries most responsible for the climate crisis, and the ground-breaking data could serve as a starting point for legal action against the world’s wealthiest nations.

The Dartmouth College study found that just five of the world’s top emitters of planet-warming gases – the United States, China, Russia, India, and Brazil – caused around a $6 trillion loss in gross domestic product from 1990 to 2014, adjusted for 2010 dollars, or about 11% of total global GDP.

The study also shows the US and China – the two biggest contributors to the climate crisis – individually caused global economic losses of more than $1.8 trillion each during that same period.

Despite much statistical jargon, it is pretty obvious that these conclusions are derived from speculation piled on top of surmise piled on top of guesswork, but even if they were unassailable, the paper’s methodology has a glaring and fatal flaw. It estimates how much richer the negatively impacted countries would be if the United States and other major carbon emitters had emitted much less in the past and yet had become just as rich. The hidden premise is that America’s $15 trillion economy would be the same size if coal, oil and natural gas didn’t exist.

That scenario is absurd. Without the use of fossil fuels for the past century or so, what is now the “First World” would be direly impoverished, and all the countries that Climate-Related Disasters affect would be poorer, too. Much of such wealth as they have is attributable to their dealings with rich countries: exports, offshored services, remittances from citizens working abroad, tourism, foreign aid. A true accounting would look not just at what climate change subtracts but at what energy produced by fossil fuels adds.

The point of analyses like the Dartmouth duo’s is not, however, to gauge economic consequences. Rather, they seek to furnish a rationale for turning the global economy into a gigantic lottery in which the winning tickets have been assigned to favored “victims” and responsibility for making the payouts has been imposed on alleged transgressors. There could be no surer way to cast away the economic progress of the past two hundred years.

A Progressive’s Constitution

Briahna Joy Gray, who was the press secretary of Bernie Sanders’s 2020 Presidential campaign, contends that Joe Biden’s “loan forgiveness” plan was never intended to take effect. In her opinion –

They used the promise of student debt cancellation to induce young voter turn out -- knowing it wasn't going anywhere bc they relied on faulty legal authority.

Hard to convince me the Biden admin didn't do this intentionally.

As you probably know, last Thursday a federal judge ruled, in Brown v. U.S. Department of Education, that the President has no authority to forgive student loans without Congressional approval. The Administration has defended its action against a barrage of lawsuits not by arguing that Congressional authorization isn’t needed but that no one has the right to take the question to court.

The Brown plaintiffs found an ingenious way around the Administration’s theory (as summarized in the court’s opinion) “that no one has standing to challenge the Program because where the government is providing a benefit, nobody is harmed by the existence of that benefit” (which implies that the President has unlimited power to provide benefits to anyone and to any extent that he wishes). The plaintiffs’ counterargument was that they are student borrowers whose loans the Administration had not purported to forgive and that the Department of Education’s failure to allow the public to comment on the action before putting it into effect, as required by the Administrative Procedure Act, deprived them of their opportunity to make the case for more favorable treatment of their own indebtedness. The court held that these facts resulted in a concrete injury that can be redressed by a favorable court decision. Those are the elements needed to establish standing to bring a lawsuit.

Standing is a complex and contentious subject. Discussing the merits of the court’s opinion in Brown goes beyond the scope of this post. What interests me at the moment is Miss Gray’s reasoning. Back in December, she declared, “Biden absolutely does have the power to cancel all student debut by executive order. No congressional involvement required.” After Brown, she elaborated, saying that the President “could’ve immediately canceled student debt instead of making it a means tested program, in which case there wouldn’t have been these opportunities for people to obstruct”. The Brown plaintiffs, for instance, would have lacked standing, because their loans would have been “forgiven”.

Note that her analysis doesn’t rest on the Constitution but only on the idea that the Constitutional mandate “No Money shall be drawn from the Treasury, but in Consequence of Appropriations made by Law” can, through clever maneuvering, be rendered unenforceable, in which case, she evidently believes, a progressive President has no duty to abide by it.

Briahna Joy Gray is just one progressive, but does anyone imagine that she is an outlier? We’ve heard a lot this year about how “democracy is in danger”. Doesn’t the enthusiasm of a large political movement for arbitrary, unconstitutional executive action carry a whiff of dictatorship?

Biden After Tuesday

The midterms defied expectations and, contrary to my prediction, are sure to strangle the Democratic “push Joe out” campaign in its cradle, especially if, as is not at all improbable, the Georgia runoff leads to another 50-50 Senate split. If that happens, the Democrats will need a Vice President to break ties, and Kackling Kamala is the only Veep they’ve got or will be able to get.

The problem is that the President’s mental decline is palpably accelerating. One may (and should) sympathize with a man facing the seventh and last of Shakespeare’s ages of man (“second childishness, and mere oblivion”), but sympathy is no argument to keeping him in the most important office on the planet. In an article bluntly titled “Biden’s Lost Marbles”, Jim Geraghty lists many, but not all, of the President’s recent mental stumbles.

Back in July 2021, as the U.S. presence in Afghanistan was ending in disaster and Biden’s public appearances were limited to short statements and he was refusing to take questions, John Ellis, formerly of the Boston Globe, summarized how it was acceptable to acknowledge Biden’s age and mental condition if you used certain euphemisms.

“Somewhere along the way of the last few years, Biden transitioned from ‘young old’ to ‘old,’” Ellis wrote. “Veteran reporters describe the transition in code. ‘He’s lost a step or two.’ Or: ‘He’s lost something off his fastball.’ You’re not supposed to talk about it. If you do, and you’re a Democrat, you’re scolded for aiding and abetting the enemy. . . . The problem is that it’s there for all to see. Pretending not to see it is untenable.”

And yet the White House pretends no one can notice Biden wandering around oddly at public events, see the vacant look in his eyes at times, or hear the meandering stories and mumbling. Anyone who has watched a parent or relative succumb to the ravages of age is familiar with the sad, inevitable decline. Biden is not well, and he’s not going to get any better. The presidency ages the most energetic and dynamic of men, and Biden was not among them when he took the oath of office.

The President does, however, retain the last faculty to go: a stubbornness that refuses to acknowledge the inroads of time. He has become the White House Norma Desmond. We must hope and pray that our country doesn’t share the fate of Joe Gillis.

Those Masterly Biden Tacticians

The Washington Post, doubtless prompted by State Department officials who are Leaking As Instructed, has reported that the Administration wants Ukraine to show the world that it is willing to negotiate with Russia (non-paywalled summary here). The aim isn’t, however, to bring about actual talks between the warring parties.

“The request by American officials is not aimed at pushing Ukraine to the negotiating table, these people said. Rather, they called it a calculated attempt to ensure the government in Kyiv maintains the support of other nations facing constituencies wary of fueling a war for many years to come.”

What better way to maintain the support of war-worried friends than to announce to readers of the Post that you have launched an insincere peace initiative?

Not that a sincere peace initiative would be any better. It would only feed Tsar Vladimir’s belief that the decadent West will give up if he just fights on long enough. When one is fighting Joe Biden and his coven of America Lasters, that belief isn’t as absurd as it ought to be.

Joe Biden Gets the CNN “Fact Check” Treatment

There could be no clearer foreshadowing of the coming campaign to ease Joe Biden out of office than the strange new disrespect shown by CNN’s “fact checker”. For the first time ever, the President’s statements are being evaluated as if he were a Republican.

“Fact check: Biden’s midterms message includes false and misleading claims” embraces nine items. Some are the sort that any semi-honest fact checker would have to rate as false: Gasoline prices weren’t over five dollars a gallon when Biden took office. He didn’t get Congress to pass his student loan giveaway “by a vote or two” or by any other margin. The tax cuts enacted in 2017 didn’t benefit “only the top one percent of the American public”. The Biden spending splurge hasn’t reduced the federal debt.

The interesting fact checks are those of the kind ordinarily reserved only for the GOP, namely, those that attach “false” labels to allegedly false conclusions based on undeniably true statements and to trivial factual muddles. For example, it is true that the 2023 increase in Social Security payments will be the largest in many years. (The fact-checked statement says ten; the actual number is forty-two. The President was unwontedly modest.) That Biden presents the increase as an accomplishment of his Administration is a dubious interpretation, but the conclusions to be drawn from facts are outside the fact checker’s bailiwick.

On the trivial side is Biden’s claim that he has traveled “17,000 miles” with Communist dictator Xi Jinping. That’s an obvious muddle – untrue but insignificant.

Combining both facets of bad fact checking is the response to “Unemployment is down from 6.5 to 3.5%, the lowest in 50 years.” CNN sniffs that 3.5 percent unemployment is only tied for the lowest in half a century, then points out that the other months with that low a figure were during the Trump Administration, before the panicdemic struck. Once again, the error is trivial, and the “fact check” – assigning significance to it because “Biden uses these campaign speeches to favorably compare his own record to Trump’s record” – is argumentation rather than blue penciling.

Lest there be any misunderstanding, I think that CNN outargues Biden at every point. But a month ago, it wouldn’t have argued with him at all. Soon, I imagine, it will begin highlighting the spoors of his diminishing mental capacity. And then the guy whom Art Buchwald called “the Great Mentioner” will begin speculating about primary challenges, voluntary retirement, the Twenty-Fifth Amendment, perhaps even Impeachment. The Left’s Overton Window is opening. Joe soon will feel the breeze.

Update (November 7, 2022): CNN isn’t alone. This morning, the Washington Post’s fact checker awards President Biden “a Bottomless Pinocchio”, which sounds like a description of a Meta avatar. (If you don’t want to pay for access, you can read a summary here.)

I begin to wonder whether Slow Joe will make it all the way to 2023.

Warning People That They’re Being Discriminated Against Is Racist!

So says today’s Seattle Times in a story headlined, “Mailers spur debate over claims of discrimination against Asian Americans”. The America First Legal Foundation, about which I know not a thing (the Times says that it “is led by Stephen Miller, former senior advisor to President Donald Trump”), has sent a leaflet “to voters in Washington and across the country this week, appearing to target Asian American voters”.

One side of the mailer says that President Joe “Biden and the left want to decide who gets hired – and who gets fired according to their skin color,” and features pictures and headlines from news stories.

The other side says “Joe Biden and left wing officials are engaged in widespread racial discrimination against white and Asian Americans … even though it’s against the law.”

The reporter then quoted various Democratic partisans, who declared that such statements were “racially divisive and inflammatory” and “attempting to drive a wedge between Asian Americans and other communities of color”. A Republican Party official married to a Filipino was given a sliver of space to say that her husband “kind of just agreed with it” and that both of them opposed affirmative action. Aside from that, all was denunciation.

Guess what was never mentioned: the two cases that the Supreme Court heard last Monday challenging Harvard’s and the University of North Carolina’s blatant discrimination against Asian-American applicants, a practice energetically defended by the Biden Administration. According to the evidence presented by the plaintiffs, an Asian-American applicant to Harvard in the upper ten percent of academic performance has a worse chance of admission than an African-American applicant in the bottom 40 percent. Indeed, the Asian-American admit rate is below all other groups in every decile.

Might not a mention of that litigation furnish a scintilla of context? Is it possible that Asian-Americans are in fact targets of discrimination by the woke identitarians who nowadays dominate the Democratic Party? Or is the only acceptable “anti-racist” response to close one’s eyes tightly shut?

What Student Loan Forgiveness?

Is your mortgage a burden? Are you falling behind in your credit card payments? Did you learn too late that your health insurance doesn’t cover your facelift? Well, I’ve got a deal for you! Buy one of my stories (list here), and I’ll wipe out your debt.

Okay, maybe you have doubts about whether that will work. If so, ask yourself how my “forgiveness” of your mortgage differs from Joe Biden’s “forgiveness” of student loans. “No money shall be drawn from the Treasury, but in Consequence of Appropriations made by Law.” So says Article I of the United States Constitution. Forgiving debts owed to the United States, that is, destroying the value of government assets, is just as much a drawing of money from the Treasury as sending checks to the debtors. The Biden Administration has conceded as much by claiming that Congress has authorized the President’s action, an argument so preposterous that I direct your attention elsewhere if you want to see that butterfly mangled and torn to pieces.

As everybody who has even superficially followed this issue is aware, the Bidenoi aren’t relying on that broken legal reed. Instead, they count on the difficulty that objectors face in establishing that federal courts have the authority to hear their objections. The doctrine of “standing”, founded upon the Constitution’s grant to the courts of authority to hear only “cases” and “controversies”, mandates that, in order to get into court, “The plaintiff must have (1) suffered an injury in fact, (2) that is fairly traceable to the challenged conduct of the defendant, and (3) that is likely to be redressed by a favorable judicial decision.” Spokeo, Inc. v. Robins, 578 U.S. 330, 338 (2016). That has so far been a high hurdle for challengers to the Biden diktat.

Does that mean that no one can stop Joe Biden from spending half a trillion dollars on his own ipse dixit? Not quite. It means, assuming that lack of standing does bring all lawsuits to an end, that no one can stop Joe Biden from saying that half a trillion dollars of unpaid loans have been forgiven, just as no one can stop me from saying that you no longer have to make payments on your mortgage. Since neither I nor Mr. Biden has any legal authority to cancel the debts in question, however, they remain, and creditors can enforce collection.

As soon as a Republican President takes office, his obligation to “to take Care that the Laws be faithfully executed” will oblige him to direct the Department of Education to resume collecting student debt delinquencies, which will, during the phony Biden moratorium, have accrued additional interest and penalties.

One could go further. Mr. Biden’s action isn’t easily distinguishable from embezzlement of government funds, prompted by base political motives. There are many reasons why he is not even remotely likely to be indicted on criminal charges, but it is clarifying to think that he is just as guilty, in principle, as a bank clerk who excises the record of a loan from his employer’s books. It is an act that history will adjudge infamous. In five hundred billion ways, it is worse than Watergate.

“When you are not with where a majority of Americans are”

Last month, President Biden’s press secretary earned fifteen minutes of notoriety with her definition of “extremism”: “And so, when you are not with where a majority of Americans are, then, you know, that is extreme. That is an extreme way of thinking.”

This month, the Biden Administration will go before the Supreme Court to defend the practice of making race and ethnicity major factors in college admissions. The Pew Research Center recently surveyed Americans’ views on how much weight those factors ought to have. This table, to which Pew gave a classic lede-burying caption, summarizes the results:

Evidently, there are some issues about which the Bidenauts think it’s hunky-dory to be “extreme”, even if only seven percent of Americans and nine percent of Democrats concur.

[Hat tip to Ed Whelan]

Another Triumph of “Smart Diplomacy”

Nothing that happens in the U.N. Human Rights Council is of much significance, which is good, because the Council is rotten to the core. It’s basically a pack of wolves charged with watching out for the welfare of lambs. Nonetheless, because Donald Trump pulled the U.S. out of that snake pit, the Bidenites rushed to get back in. They assured us that American “engagement” with the likes of Red China, Cuba and Venezuela would do something to promote the Rights of Man.

Yesterday, the U.S. delegation moved to open a debate on communist atrocities in Sinkiang (Xinjiang). The motion failed: 17 yea, 19 nay, 11 abstentions.

One could hardly ask for a better illustration of the ineptitude of the Blinken corps of “smart diplomats”. Looking at the vote count, one doubts that Donald Trump would have done worse, and he wouldn’t have been trying.

• Ukraine abstained. The U.S. has poured billions of dollars into saving that beleaguered country from Russian tyranny. Red China, the target of the resolution, is Russia’s only noteworthy ally. But the Bidenites couldn’t get a “yes” vote from Kiev.
• The principal victims of communist atrocities in Sinkiang are Moslems. Only one Moslem-majority country (Somalia) voted “yes”.
• Somalia was also the only “yes” vote from the continent of Africa.
• Brazil and India, with which our relations were improving during the Trump era, abstained. Brazil has a strongly anti-communist government (at least for a little while longer), and India has no reason to cozy up to Peking.

To call this outcome a diplomatic fiasco might be an overstatement, but it’s certainly no sign that “adults” are back in charge at Foggy Bottom.

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?

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”

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”.

A New Litigation Frontier

Time for Big Honey to get its comeuppance! Sheriff Biden will soon dodder onto the case.

The Disinformation Governance Board: Good News and Bad

The good news came some time ago, when the Department of Homeland Security shuttered its nascent “Disinformation Governance Board”. The bad news arrived today, when the Homeland Security Advisory Council explained why the DGB isn’t needed: not because the government shouldn’t be policing Americans’ opinions, but because, as Jim Geraghty summarizes, the advisors “concluded that the DHS already had enough offices in enough agencies focused on rebutting disinformation, including disinformation coming from foreign governments. The Disinformation Governance Board was superfluous.”

To put that in plain English, the DHS decided that it already has enough censors to keep wrongthink out of circulation. The Advisory Council report consists largely of recommendations for making censorship more effective. Recommendation number one is, “It is Imperative that DHS Address Inaccurate Information that Undermines its Critical Missions”.

If that meant that government officials have the right to argue in defense of their actions, no one would object, but setting up a bureaucratic structure devoted to undermining critics is not reasoned argument. The mere fact that refutation of opposing views is sometimes difficult doesn’t justify trying to keep those views from being uttered.

After all, if the mere fact that an opinion is erroneous were sufficient reason to suppress it, there are many candidates for suppression. For instance, while economists disagree on many matters, there is an overwhelming consensus (more overwhelming that any scientific consensus about climate change) that wage and price controls lead inevitably to shortages and black markets. Yet many people assert that they are a prophylactic against inflation. Should the government launch a campaign to keep the public from hearing that falsehood?

And so, as I said, today’s news isn’t good – just further evidence that the powers that be in the Biden Administration don’t in their hearts support free expression and democracy in any real sense. Their ideal is government by soi disant experts.

A Better Name for a Bad Idea

The fraudulently named “Inflation Reduction Act” is being abbreviated as “IRA”, an acronym already in use for “Irish Republican Army” and “individual retirement account” and the seldom consulted baseball statistic “inherited runs allowed”, as well as being the Latin translation of the first word of the Iliad. I’m told, too, that kids on the Internet, type “ira” for “I ran away”.

Can’t we be a bit more original? I suggest: “Infraction”, formed from “INFlationReductionACTION”. Not only unique but both more accurate and more in line with what the public anticipates.

Thoughts for an “Interesting Time”

Whenever the world seems to be plummeting toward disaster, I find encouragement in Voices from the Ming-Qing Cataclysm: China in Tigers’ Jaws, a collection of writings by people who lived through the Manchu conquest of China. That was a far more harrowing episode than any that we face. Still, although I have lived through nearly a third of the United States’ existence as an independent nation, I cannot recall any moment with so many simultaneous crises: inflation and recession in the U.S., lawlessness in major cities, a visibly incompetent President, unchecked illegal immigration, a major war in Europe whose spinoffs are potential blackouts on the European continent and famines in the poorer regions of the world, an inchoate economic crisis on the communist-controlled Chinese mainland whose spinoff could be war in Asia, the accession to power of leftist regimes in major Latin American countries and – oh, by the way – a pretty much overt campaign by the incumbent President (or his court, as he doesn’t appear up to much campaigning) to jail his predecessor.

The last of those items has, for a news cycle or two, eclipsed the rest, thanks to yesterday’s mysterious FBI incursion into Donald Trump’s home in search of undisclosed evidence of unidentified crimes. The raid (but we’re not supposed to call it that; will “banana” do?) elicited this amnesiac comment in the New York Times’s “Morning” newsletter: “The Justice Department has long been aggressive about investigating former officials whom it suspects of improperly handling classified material, including Hillary Clinton and David Petraeus.” Yeah. You remember, don’t you, the raid on Hillary’s house in Chappaqua that seized the server she had been using to send and receive classified documents?

The Times sees only two possible scenarios: (i) This is a boring, routine investigation of mishandled documents. (ii) The Justice Department has uncovered “a major new legal problem” for the ex-President. “People familiar with the search told The Times that it was not related to the Justice Department’s investigation into the Jan. 6 attack and Trump’s role in it. And it’s unlikely that Merrick Garland, the attorney general, would have allowed the search-warrant request – or that a federal judge would have approved it, as was required – unless it involved something important.”

As Matt Taibbi reminds us, we’ve been spun like this before:

It’s amazing how short our cultural memory has become. Apparently few remember all the other times this exact rhetoric was deployed in the interminable list of other Trump investigations, only to backfire later. Does anyone remember this doozy?

Applications for FISA warrants, Comey said, are often thicker than his wrists, and that thickness represents all the work Justice Department attorneys and FBI agents have to do to convince a judge that such surveillance is appropriate in an investigation.

That Washington Post story from April 11, 2017, “FBI obtained FISA warrant to monitor former Trump advisor Carter Page,” by Devlin Barrett, Ellen Nakashima, and Adam Entous, was one of the key moments in the Trump-Russia scandal. It repeatedly stressed the illustrious credentials of all involved, noting, “any FISA application has to be approved at the highest levels of the Justice Department and the FBI,” before dismounting to the crucial conclusion:

The government’s application for the surveillance order targeting Page included a lengthy declaration that laid out investigators’ basis for believing that Page was an agent of the Russian government and knowingly engaged in clandestine intelligence activities on behalf of Moscow, officials said.

The next day, the New York Times kicked the story forward by citing “a government official” who confirmed that the FISA court had obtained a warrant against Page “based on evidence that he was operating as a Russian agent.”

We now know that there was no “there” there. The FISA warrants were based on what the FBI already knew were unverifiable claims by sources of dubious reliability. The motive for monitoring Carter Page was the hope that something would turn up. My guess is that the Mar-a-Lago raid banana was a similar long shot in the dark. Maybe somewhere in Melania’s wardrobe is evidence that Donald Trump ordered the murder of Jeffrey Epstein.

A cynic might add that, in the likely event that Mrs. Trump keeps only clothes and shoes in her closet, the raid banana has gotten people (or at least twitterers) off subjects like food and fuel prices, infant formula shortages, unsafe streets, the ravages of opioids and fentanyl, and Day 346 of Americans stranded in Afghanistan. If that’s the intention, it’s succeeded, which is why this post is the last time that I intend to say anything about Donald Trump until after the November election. Whether he or his personal Javerts are right about his conduct, neither needs any assistance from me, and the future of the Republic doesn’t turn on how a one-time President spends his retirement years.

The Surest Symptom of Rotten Legislation

Two weeks ago, the “Inflation Reduction Act” <fraudulent labeling alert> not only didn’t exist but wasn’t expected ever to come into being. Then Joe Manchin decided that he was tired of being elected to office in West Virginia and signed onto a deal with Chuck Schumer. Last Thursday, the deal was revamped to furnish 30 pieces of metaphorical silver to Kyrsten Sinema’s private equity funders. Today, the Senate passed the sausage on to the House after spending all night voting.

Like everyone else, except perhaps the overworked Senate parliamentarian, I haven’t read the resulting bill. But I don’t need to. The way in which it is racing through Congress is as sure a proof of rottenness as the odor emitted by a week-old mackerel lying in the Sun.

There are emergencies in which legislatures must act quickly if they are to act at all. Here there is an “emergency” in a different sense. Congress must pass INFRACT right away, lest people have time to think about its provisions. Whether the ideas underlying it are sound or spurious, they do not respond to an urgent need. Enacting them can wait, if the objective is to fashion laws that will actually accomplish their ostensible objectives.

Let’s leave to one side the question of whether the ideas embodied in the bill are good. Whatever their merits, their implementation will be complicated. Unintended consequences aren’t just a possibility; they’re certain.

To take just one example, the bill includes a 15 percent “minimum tax” on the income of large corporations as reported on their financial statements. Financial statements are prepared in accordance with Generally Accepted Accounting Principles, which vary widely from those used by the Internal Revenue Code. As the Tax Foundation has pointed out, the minimum tax “will have disproportionate effects on specific industries, and apparently unintended penalties for various company- and industry-specific expenses”. In many cases, those effects may undercut INFRACT’s goals. The only way to minimize undesired effects is through a careful analysis, for which no time has been allotted.

Other parts of the bill – drug price controls, expansions of Obamacare, tax credits and subsidies for wind and solar power, a massive increase in IRS oversight into citizens’ lives – are equally in need of careful vetting.

The law that has been the foundation of my professional career, the Employee Retirement Income Security Act of 1974, was the product of a legislative process that lasted six years, and even then not all of the bugs were plucked out. INFRACT hasn’t spent a lot longer than six days in the legislative pot, but the country will be consuming it for years. Would it be too much to ask for a thorough nutritional review?

Defining “Recession”: Meaningless But Important

Everyone knows how his own personal economy is performing: expansion, contraction, stagnation. And everyone acts on the basis of his own microphenomena. Some people prospered during the Great Depression. One of my grandfathers never missed a paycheck, bought stock when the market was at its nadir, and accumulated a modest fortune. (My other grandfather’s experience was more Depression-like.) “Recession” is a term for what is perceived, through the fog of statistics, as some kind of average of individual economies.

If the government didn’t feel a responsibility for steering the direction of the “average economy”, labeling periods as “recessions” would be of interest only to historians. In the era of King Stork (we have forgotten that King Log ever reigned), though, labels inspire action. They also influence voters, even those whose personal economy isn’t much like what the label says.

The Biden Administration may not understand much, but it understands that. Therefore, it would very much like for the current economic climate not to be called a “recession” – at least not now. Hence, we have heard much about how the rule-of-thumb definition, two consecutive quarters of decline in the gross domestic product (generally expected to be met when the next GDP figures are announced), isn’t the real definition as formulated by the National Bureau of Economic Research, the accepted arbiter of U.S. business cycle history.

The NBER goes to some trouble to explain to the public what it means by a recession. Here is the grain of truth in Treasury Secretary Yellen’s insistence that the definition is “holistic”:

The determination of the months of peaks and troughs is based on a range of monthly measures of aggregate real economic activity published by the federal statistical agencies. These include real personal income less transfers (PILT), nonfarm payroll employment, real personal consumption expenditures, wholesale-retail sales adjusted for price changes, employment as measured by the household survey, and industrial production. There is no fixed rule about what measures contribute information to the process or how they are weighted in our decisions.

That’s a lot to evaluate, and the process takes time. Historically, the NBER has announced the beginning and the end of recessions with time lags ranging from as few as four to as many as 21 months. Perhaps the most consequential instance was the recession that began in July 1990 and ended in March 1991. The NBER announced the start date on April 25, 1991, and the end date on December 22, 1992. Throughout the 1992 Presidential campaign, Bill Clinton and the media trumpeted that the economy was in a slump. Clinton compared it to the Great Depression. That may be why he won. The Biden Administration is rather overtly hoping for the opposite: that it will be able to declare for months and months that there is no recession, because the NBER hasn’t yet said so.

When the NBER reaches its decision about the state of the business cycle as of July 2022, there is one factor that will not enter more than marginally, if at all, into its evaluation: the unemployment rate. In its judgment, “The unemployment rate is a trendless indicator that moves in the opposite direction from most other cyclical indicators.” Unemployment results from diminished economic activity, but it doesn’t coincide with the diminution. Businesses are slow to fire and slow to rehire. Hence, one cannot tell whether the economy is contracting or expanding today by looking at today’s unemployment rate. That is the product of what happened in the past.

Moreover, the current labor market doesn’t look all that robust.

Real average hourly earnings for all employees decreased 1.0 percent from May to June, seasonally adjusted, the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics reported today. This result stems from an increase of 0.3 percent in average hourly earnings combined with an increase of 1.3 percent in the Consumer Price Index for All Urban Consumers (CPI-U).

Real average weekly earnings decreased 1.0 percent over the month due to the change in real average hourly earnings combined with no change in the average workweek.

Real average hourly earnings decreased 3.6 percent, seasonally adjusted, from June 2021 to June 2022. The change in real average hourly earnings combined with a decrease of 0.9 percent in the average workweek resulted in a 4.4-percent decrease in real average weekly earnings over this period.

As Kevin D. Williamson puts it, “‘Americans are working more hours for less money’ is not a plausible definition of a strong job market.”

What about the two-quarter rule of thumb? Here is what the NBER says about it:

Most of the recessions identified by our procedures do consist of two or more consecutive quarters of declining real GDP, but not all of them. In 2001, for example, the recession did not include two consecutive quarters of decline in real GDP.

Hence, two consecutive quarters of decline are not necessary for a recession. Are they sufficient?

The NBER definition includes the phrase, “a significant decline in economic activity.” Thus real GDP could decline by relatively small amounts in two consecutive quarters without warranting the determination that a peak had occurred.

We’ll see when the data come out whether the first and second declines have been “by relatively small amounts”. Empirically, as economist Michael Strain observes,

Question: Out of the past 10 times the U.S. economy has experienced two consecutive quarters of negative economic growth, how many times was a recession officially declared?

Answer: 10

Addendum: The GDP shrinkage number is now out. It’s “only” a 0.9 percent decline, on top of the first quarter’s minus 1.6 percent. In its release reporting the data, the Bureau of Economic Analysis summarizes:

Real GDP decreased less in the second quarter than in the first quarter, decreasing 0.9 percent after decreasing 1.6 percent. The smaller decrease reflected an upturn in exports and a smaller decrease in federal government spending that were partly offset by larger declines in private inventory investment and state and local government spending, a slowdown in PCE [personal consumption expenditures], and downturns in nonresidential fixed investment and residential fixed investment. Imports decelerated.

That’s not 1929, but it’s definitely contraction. The factors that limited the decrease (exports and a “decrease” in federal spending that the BEA attributes to sales from the Strategic Petroleum Reserve, which are counted as offsets to spending rather than increases in revenue) are likely to be transient, while inflation will aggravate the recessionary factors. With real incomes declining, personal consumption, business investment and home buying are in for rocky times.

You can read about the White House spin here.

Another English-Improving Typo

At Ringside at the Reckoning, Paul Mirengoff writes about a possible conflict of interest at the Biden Justice Department. (See also here.) I have nothing to say about that, though I haven’t the slightest doubt that, had Donald Trump been reelected and thrown his Administration’s support behind the plaintiffs in Students for Fair Admissions Inc. v. Harvard, outrage would have boiled over if one of the lawyers who signed the government’s amicus brief had also been receiving a six figure salary from another pro-plaintiff amicus filer, even if that filer were merely a think tank rather than an entity with a very direct interest in the outcome of the case.

But conflicts of interest are, in these overlawyered times, evaluated by parsing ethics codes rather than applying moral intelligence. By the letter of the law, as Mr. Mirengoff notes, there may be no violation.

Be that as it may, the Ringside discussion includes this sentence: “Stanford has a similar policy and had filed an animus brief in the Harvard litigation before Karlan’s arrival at the DOJ.” (Emphasis added) I assume that “animus” is a typo for “amicus”, but what an excellent typo! Courts are overrun these days with briefs that are more animus than legal analysis, essentially op-eds with lawyers’ names attached. The legal system would be better off without them. If they can’t be prevented, at least we now have an adjective with which to label them.

The Quid Pro Quo?

Peter Schweizer sums up in bullet points:

• Thanks to a Treasury Department “interpretation,” Americans can still own stock in companies that were placed on a blacklist by the Trump administration because of their direct ties to the Chinese military.
• Thanks to the Biden administration, the “China Initiative” at the Department of Justice to crack down on Chinese attempts to acquire or steal American technology has been discontinued.
• Thanks to the Biden administration’s “green energy” enthusiasm, tariffs on solar panels made by Asian countries who are assembling or repackaging solar panels made in China were removed.
• The Biden administration has also signaled its intention to remove or lift other tariffs imposed by the Trump administration on Chinese products. It has also been friendlier toward Chinese companies such as Huawei and ByteDance (owner of TikTok) in recent weeks.
• And all of this has been done with zero concessions from the Chinese government on any of the outstanding diplomatic, military, strategic, health or trade issues that so concern most Americans.
• Because the Biden family has been so deeply involved and so vehemently denied their involvement with Chinese business, the next question is as inescapable as the first: Does the flow of money to the Biden family from China influence the foreign policy of the United States?

Let me add that, whatever his motives, Joe Biden couldn’t do all that by himself. If his foreign policy appointees and their civil service underlings viewed the Communist-controlled regions of China as a genuine threat, they would throw up obstacles to the President’s actions. One can only conclude that they don’t take the Chicoms seriously, at least not seriously enough to let spats with them distract from reordering the world along progressive, neo-dystopian lines. If the President were Bernie Sanders or Kamala Harris or Gavin Newsom or any other Democrat, our China policy would almost certainly be just about the same, even if the Chief Magistrate had never taken a single dirty renminbi.

Covid and Punishment

Until a few days ago, when I began making plans for a trip to Europe, I was blissfully unaware that anyone who boards an airline flight from a foreign country to the United States is required to present a negative Covid-19 test “conducted on a specimen collected no more than 1 day before the flight’s departure” or proof of having recovered from the disease within the past 90 days. So the Centers for Disease Control decreed in a 30-page ukase issued on December 2, 2021.

The December order superseded an earlier one that required tests but allowed a three-day window for performing them. The rationale for shortening the period was the appearance of the omigod omicron variant, which at that time was brand new and a topic of much fearful speculation, notwithstanding that all indications were that it was milder than earlier Covid strains. Nearly six months have passed since then. Omicron hasn’t proven to be an omega, and it now accounts for almost all cases in the U.S. The incremental risk posed by returning travelers is indistinguishable from nil.

Yet the CDC order remains in place, inconveniencing Americans on their way home and worse than inconveniencing the small number who test positive and are then trapped abroad until they recover. Even though the government is purportedly preventing their return “for the public good”, it will do nothing to ease their burden. The Administration that sends crack pipes “safe smoking kits” to drug addicts free of charge has no sympathy for citizens who may run up thousands of dollars of costs while mandatorily stranded in other countries.

What is the motive for this measure? It does nothing to protect public health, and the high priests of CDC can’t reasonably believe that it does. It would have had little chance of keeping omicron out of the U.S. if it had been issued while the strain was confined to South Africa. It is now as pointless as plugging a leak in the dike after the water has overflowed it. No other country, so far as I can tell, imposes a reciprocal requirement on travelers entering from the U.S. Does the virus act differently in Europe than in North America?

Is the CDC indifferent to the hardships that its policies entail? Or does it see Covid sufferers as sinners who deserve punishment? Or do its leaders just enjoy the exercise of arbitrary power? Whatever the answer, this episode is enough to demonstrate that the organization needs a thorough top-to-bottom overhaul, lest in the future it inflict yet graver damage on the health, safety and prosperity of the Republic.

Update (June 11, 2022): With obvious reluctance, the CDC has rescinded the Covid test requirement for entering the United States by air, effective at a minute after midnight Eastern Daylight Time on June 12th. The order rescinding the previous ukase concedes, perhaps with regret, “that the now-dominant Omicron variant, though more transmissible than prior variants, has generally caused less severe disease among those who are infected”. There’s no admission that it was irrational to try to keep out of the country a virus that is already freely circulating within it.

A Time of Troubles for the Disinformation Tsarina

This morning’s Washington Post carries the welcome news that the Disinformation Governance Board has been “paused” and may very likely die its cradle, as Bolshevik enterprises should. The piece, written by famous crybully Taylor Lorenz, laments “How the Biden administration let right-wing attacks derail its disinformation efforts” [paywalled; excerpts here and here] and quotes an Administration flunky as saying, “Nina Jankowicz has been subjected to unjustified and vile personal attacks and physical threats. In congressional hearings and in media interviews, the Secretary [Department of Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas] has repeatedly defended her as eminently qualified [link added by Stromata] and underscored the importance of the Department’s disinformation work, and he will continue to do so.”

Well, the prospective tsarina did have to endure mockery of her TikTok videos and criticism of her dismissal of Hunter Biden’s notorious laptop as a “Trump campaign product”, but her ideas about what disinformation is and how to combat it deserved condemnation. I went to the trouble of reading her book on the subject and summarized her recommendations, which amount to government supervision of social media, large-scale subsidies to pro-government news outlets, and tools “integrated into the user interface” designed “to change user behavior” on the Internet, that is, to make “disinformation” (as defined by the government) hard to access.

The government already has two agencies that deal with “disinformation”: the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (“CISA”) and the Global Engagement Center. The latter focuses on foreign governments and “non-state actors” (the approved euphemism for foreign terrorist organizations) and is a Trump Administration revival of a State Department office that President Obama shut down in 2015. It could be misused but seems harmless at the moment. CISA is a purveyor of government propaganda but not, so far as I can tell, a very effective one. Its work product includes comic books and rather silly “infographs”. As high school projects, they might get a B+.

It’s pretty obvious that the Disinformation Governance Board was created as a more robust organ, and it seems quite reasonable to infer that Tsarina Nina was chosen to head it because the DHS bureaucracy likes her ideas. To somebody like Taylor Lorenz, who seeks to confine the entire populace inside a left-wing bubble, effective pushback against those ideas is doubtless a tragedy. The rest of us have reason to be pleased.

Update (11:15 a.m.): The Tsarina has officially abdicated.

Further reading: Robby Soave, “Nina Jankowicz’s Faulty Record, Not Her Critics, Doomed the Disinformation Board”

Quote of the Day: Facts and Disinformation

Barton Swaim, “How Disagreement Became ‘Disinformation’” (Wall Street Journal, May 13, 2022):

One of the great ironies of American political life in the 2020s is that the people most exercised about the spread of false information are frequently peddlers of it. Their lack of self-understanding arises from the belief that the primary factor separating their side from the other side isn’t ideology, principle or moral vision but information – raw data requiring no interpretation and no argument over its importance. It is a hopelessly simpleminded worldview – no one apprehends reality without the aid of interpretive lenses. And it is a dangerous one.

Further on, Mr. Swaim notes how progressives, having fallen off one side of the disinformation horse, have remounted and fallen off the other:

Skeptics mostly attribute this new support for censorship to bad faith. I prefer a more charitable explanation. The new censors sincerely mistake their own interpretations of the facts for the facts themselves. Their opinions, filtered unconsciously through biases and experience, are, to them, simply information. Their views aren’t “views” at all but raw data. Competing interpretations of the facts can be only one thing: misinformation. Or, if it’s deliberate, disinformation.

It is in many ways a strange outcome. From the 1970s to the early 2000s, academic philosophies associated with “postmodernism” coursed through American higher education. They held that there was no objectively knowable truth, only subjective interpretation. As if to demonstrate postmodernism’s total impracticality, yesterday’s straight-A college students have now retreated into a risibly facile non-philosophy in which there is no interpretation, only objective “fact.”

There couldn’t be a more concise and accurate summary of the mindset of Disinformation Tsarina Jankowicz and her ideological colleagues. Odd how quickly they forgot their Foucault.

Covering for the DGB

A Washington Post editorial (which I didn’t see until it emerged from behind the pay wall) reassures readers: “Ignore the hysteria over the Disinformation Governance Board”. According to the Post, all is benign:

The Disinformation Governance Board (whose acronym is the Soviet-sounding DGB) is supposed to aid coordination among DHS offices as they counter viral lies and propaganda that pose a threat to domestic security. Done right, this is a useful function. Mr. Mayorkas mentioned campaigns by human smugglers targeting migrants to trick the Haitian community into thinking they could enter the United States without risk of deportation. Russia’s persistent efforts to influence U.S. elections are well known. Studying the “best practices” for stymying these attempts and sharing them with government actors could do a great deal of good.

What the board is not tasked to do is to establish what is true and what is false, or to push Internet services or anyone else to take a tougher line on expression in general. Indeed, the board has no operational authority at all.

Already, components of the agency are gathering knowledge about what rumors are circulating so that they might respond. They, as well as government actors charged with disseminating the facts to debunk popular falsehoods or with educating citizens on how to avoid being fooled in the first place, need to know how to execute their roles effectively – as well as how to do so without infringing on civil liberties. The board is supposed to ensure that these government authorities – from the Federal Emergency Management Agency as it counters scammers after natural disasters to the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency as it instructs critical infrastructure companies on how to secure themselves against hackers – respect human rights.

As the Post mentions in passing, the Department of Homeland Security already includes a Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency. CISA’s efforts focus heavily on “resources that individuals; State, local, tribal and territorial (SLTT) governments; the private sector; academia; and others can use to understand the threat of malicious information activities and includes actions to mitigate associated risks from mis-, dis-, and malinformation (MDM) and foreign influence activities”. Unmentioned in the editorial is the State Department’s Global Engagement Center, whose mission is “To direct, lead, synchronize, integrate, and coordinate efforts of the Federal Government to recognize, understand, expose, and counter foreign state and non-state propaganda and disinformation efforts aimed at undermining or influencing the policies, security, or stability of the United States, its allies, and partner nations”.

What will the DGB add to the already existing agencies? Does it have a function other than giving employment to its executive director and a few other progressives? A “fact sheet” issued by the Department of Homeland Security purports to furnish the answer:

The Department is deeply committed to doing all of its work in a way that protects Americans’ freedom of speech, civil rights, civil liberties, and privacy. In fact, the Disinformation Governance Board is an internal working group that was established with the explicit goal of ensuring these protections are appropriately incorporated across DHS’s disinformation-related work and that rigorous safeguards are in place. The working group also seeks to coordinate the Department’s engagements on this subject with other federal agencies and a diverse range of external stakeholders. The working group does not have any operational authority or capability.

One who read that in a vacuum would infer that DHS has discovered that its anti-disinformation activities infringe civil liberties and need to be reined in, much as the Church Committee’s investigations led to new restraints on the CIA, FBI and other government intelligence operations. Strangely, the announcement of the creation of the DGB and initial reports about it made no mention of those alleged concerns.

The choice of the DGB’s executive director is likewise a clue to the thinking behind its creation. As I discussed in an earlier post, the appointee, one Nina Jankowicz, has written a book titled How to Lose the Information War, in which she laments the insufficiency of government anti-disinformation efforts and proposes three steps to remedy matters:

1. ”[S]et the guardrails of the internet and the social media platforms on which we share so much of our lives.” While saying that “we are hesitant to allow government bodies jurisdiction over our right to free speech”, she goes ahead and defends enhanced government supervision of social media.
2. ”Investments in journalism as a public good are critical to maintaining a healthy information environment in which disinformation can more easily be dispelled, and in which a trusted voice is readily accessible in times of chaos and turmoil.” If that doesn’t means government-funded media that will be endorsed as “trustworthy” information sources, I don’t know what she has in mind. She expresses nostalgia for the era when a handful of newspapers and television networks dominated the dissemination of news, and dissent from their monologues was confined to obscure publications on the fringes of public awareness. Americans were protected, it’s true, from claims that President Eisenhower was a communist agent and that fluoridation of water supplies would endanger children’s health – and also from the facts about Stalinist genocide in Ukraine, John F. Kennedy’s serious health problems and rampant womanizing, and the failure of the communist Tet Offensive in Vietnam. Media monopoly is a spreader of falsehoods, not a remedy.
3. Finally, Miss Jankowicz, doubting that the preceding two steps will be sufficient, advocates one more: “deep-rooted attempts to change user behavior” that are “integrated into the user interface of the platform – not buried in a help section or in a print newspaper advertisement”.

If DHS Secretary Mayorkas intends that the DGB will protect free speech, he may want to reconsider his choice of a guardian.

One may hope that the furor raised by the DGB will render it wholly ineffectual, but the only way to be sure of that is, if one may borrow Winston Churchill’s line about Bolshevism, “to strangle it in its cradle”.

The Unsung Villains of the Supreme Court Leak

Someone among the tiny group that has access to unreleased Supreme Court opinions – nine Justices, 36 clerks, 27 administrative assistants, an unknown but undoubtedly small number of IT staffers – filched a draft opinion and handed it to a Politico receiver of stolen goods. The opinion has caused a stir; the leak seems to interest only conservative commentators. President Biden’s silly statement denouncing the Court, in which he announced ex cathedra that Roe v. Wade “says what all basic mainstream religions have historically concluded”, didn’t contain even a pro forma “of course stealing judges’ papers is bad”. Asked directly, “Do you think that this leak has irreparably changed the Court?”, he ignored the question.

Chief Justice Roberts has ordered the Court’s marshal to investigate the leak. Whether the culprit will be found seems dubious, but there are three guilty parties who can be identified and who, although they almost certainly cannot be prosecuted, can be shunned by all polite company. They are Politico and the two writers whose names appear on the story proclaiming the leak: Josh Gerstein and Alexander Ward.

Neither the web publisher nor its employees innocently picked up the draft opinion from off the street. They knew that it was stolen. They knew that no Supreme Court opinion has ever, in the history of the United States of America, been released without the Court’s authorization, no matter how important or controversial its subject. They knew that, in the normal course of its activity, the Court would have published its decision within the next two months. They knew that the Justices often continue considering and refining opinions until shortly before they are announced. They knew that the Court’s effectiveness has for over two centuries depended crucially on trust among the Justices and their staff.

They knew and didn’t care. For the frisson of a “big story”, and almost certainly with the hope of assisting the Democratic Party, they peddled their ill-gotten goods and inflicted serious harm on our nation’s highest judicial body. Honorable men would have written a story beginning, “Today, a person connected to the Supreme Court attempted to give Politico confidential Court documents concerning an upcoming decision. Politico has returned the documents unread to the Court chambers and advised the Justices of the identity of the miscreant.”

One of the benefits of an unfettered press is that scoundrels eventually identify themselves. Remember their names and cover them with maledictions: Politico, Gerstein, Ward.

Addendum: It is instructive to compare progressive insouciance about the theft of a draft Supreme Court opinion to the fury unleashed against the computer repair shop owner who exposed the content of Hunter Biden’s famous laptop. In addition to being accused by prominent Democrats and former intelligence community leaders of peddling “Russian disinformation”, he “was bombarded with hate mail and death threats revolving around the idea that I was a hacker, a thief and a criminal” and eventually “was forced to close his computer repair business near the Biden family homes in Greenville, Delaware, after people started throwing vegetables, eggs and dog excrement at his store”. Messrs. Gerstein and Ward face no worse consequences than lionization for their “courage”.

Further Reading: Andrew McCarthy, “The Supreme Court’s integrity demands its leaker be prosecuted – and the decision released now”

From the Pen of the Disinformation Tsarina

If the information that we receive is going to be “curated” by the federal government, we should pay attention to the views of the curator. With that in mind, I expended ten bucks for the Kindle version of Nina Jankowicz’s book How to Lose the Information War. It’s easy to see why Biden minions wanted its author on their information control team. For the past several years, she has engaged in research on Russian disinformation campaigns. Her book includes chapters on the responses of the United States, Estonia, Georgia, Poland, Ukraine and the Czech Republic, responses that she judges to have been sadly inadequate. So she brings a plausible aura of expertise to her new post as executive director of the Department of Homeland Security’s Disinformation Governance Board (a name that could have been coined only by some bureaucrat who privately loathes it).

She has a second qualification that comes through as one browses through the book. She is a one-dimensional political partisan: There is a “near-complete lack of evidence” for “alleged anti-conservative bias on the [social media] platforms.” [p. 130] It is a “falsehood” to say “that the Biden family engaged in corrupt activity in Ukraine”. [p.149] In what is clearly a sub silentio allusion to the New York Post’s coverage of Hunter Biden’s “laptop from hell”, she commends Twitter for “no longer allow[ing] the distribution of hacked materials” (the ex post facto excuse for blocking the Post reporting). [p. 130] The Trump Administration enacted a “travel ban on people from predominantly Muslim countries”. [p. 22] The Mueller Report is mentioned but not its most dramatic disinformation-related finding, that the “Steele Dossier”, the bludgeon that Democrats wielded for three years against Donald Trump, was a work of fiction. [pp. 23 and 31] And so on.

So what prescription does Tsarina Nina have for disinformation? After six chapters of case studies, Chapter 7 deals with remedies. She quotes testimony that she delivered before a Senate committee in 2018 regarding what will not suffice:

Even if the United States Government were to acknowledge the threat posed by Russian influence campaigns today in no uncertain terms, and we were to walk out of the hearing room and secure beyond a shadow of a doubt the country’s election infrastructure; even if we hermetically sealed our information environment from inauthentic users and false or misleading information, and if social media companies finally put forth a good faith effort to put users and the security of our democracy first; even then, we would still not successfully dispel the threat our democracy faces from malign actors’ political influence operations. [p. 137]

She goes on to say –

These short-term solutions do not address the underlying societal fissures that left us vulnerable to information operations in the first place. As Estonia, Georgia, Poland, Ukraine, and the Czech Republic have learned, it’s past time to begin a generational investment to build resilience within populations and target the root causes of our weaknesses. [p. 139]

She has already observed that –

many of the countries I’ve profiled here still believe that good communications or the establishment of a compelling narrative is the key to winning the information war. They’re not alone. This sentiment is popular in the West as well. It is misguided, but persistent. [p. 134]

The “generational investment” is not, then, to go toward expounding truth and countering falsehood. The Tsarina and I almost agree here. Government investment in “narratives” generally has a low ROI, particularly where citizens are left free to dispute the narrative. That is as far as our agreement goes.

The first, near-term element of the Tsarina’s program is –

to set the guardrails of the internet and the social media platforms on which we share so much of our lives.

That begins with setting clear and unified definitions of not only the rules of the road, but the vehicles on them. . . . Imagine how difficult driving would become if neighboring states or countries defined simple concepts like right of way or speed limits differently. This is essentially how social media platforms operate today. Each has its own definition of disinformation, of hate speech, and of targeted abuse, among other concepts, and each deals with each of those concepts differently. [p. 139]

While conceding that “we are hesitant to allow government bodies jurisdiction over our right to free speech”, she justifies the intrusion by the fact that “social media platforms are highly curated, highly addictive content farms that have total control over what we see and how we communicate; it’s time they do it in a way that promotes the greater democratic good and not just their bottom line”. [pp. 139-40] The same phenomenon – “control over what we see and how we communicate” – is often cited by right-wing critics of social media. The difference is that the latter argue, rightly or wrongly, for limiting the ability of the platforms to block content that they don’t like. The Tsarina wants to expand social media censorship and give the government control over how the censors operate.

Phase two of the Tsarina’s plan is a great expansion of government-funded media.

I hope to one day see an America that invests more in journalism as a public good, not only through the variety of philanthropic initiatives to support the industry that have proliferated since 2016, but through further government investment in public broadcasters. In 2018, the US government allocated $447 million to the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, which funds the Public Broadcasting Station and National Public Radio, as well as their local affiliates. In comparison, the British Broadcasting Corporation’s budget for the same year was over $6 billion, despite the fact that Britain’s GDP is about a fifth of the size of the United States’. [p. 141]

She laments that the BBC didn’t save Britain from Brexit but happily notes that 57 percent of the British public regards it as the country’s most trustworthy news source (at least according to the BBC survey that she cites). She continues –

Investments in journalism as a public good are critical to maintaining a healthy information environment in which disinformation can more easily be dispelled, and in which a trusted voice is readily accessible in times of chaos and turmoil. [p. 142]

Put slightly differently, the U.S. government needs a propaganda arm and has been remiss about funding it. That need is all the more acute, because –

In New Jersey [where the Tsarina grew up], no one is ever very far from several bustling metropolitan areas, and the coverage afforded by any one of those cities’ newspapers or radio and television stations is applicable and useful for daily life. But imagine a similar situation in the nation’s heartland, and you begin to understand why so many people are flocking to dubious websites that replicate their worldview; the connective tissue between the local and the national or international has been lost. [p. 141]

Still, social media “rules of the road” and tax-funded subventions to friendly newspapers and TV stations aren’t enough.

Even with greater investments in quality journalism, people will still need help navigating the unending flow of information that characterizes the modern media environment, as I found in every country I visited over the course of researching this book. In Estonia, education and outreach form the backbone of the government’s renewed efforts to build an inclusive Estonian identity that is resilient to outside influence. As Irene Käossar, the head of Estonia’s Integration Foundation, told me, the government is no longer trying to express “why” ethnic Russians should pursue citizenship or learn Estonian language; instead, the onus is on the government to figure out how to “change thinking.” [p. 142]

Estonia is a tiny country threatened by a huge, hostile neighbor that conquered it once and shows many signs of seeking to absorb it again. An unassimilated Russian minority is a threat to its very existence. I will wager a good deal, though, that Nina Jankowicz would find Estonia’s policy abhorrent if pursued by a country with which she didn’t sympathize. Note that she has taken an initiative to persuade resident aliens to “pursue citizenship or learn Estonian language” as a template for a government program to furnish “help navigating the unending flow of information that characterizes the modern media environment”. These things are not quite like one another.

The nature of the “help” that the government is to provide and how it is to be inculcated are the vaguest parts of the Tsarina’s plan. She complains that the social media platforms have made only perfunctory attempts to educate their users:

So far, efforts to raise awareness of media and digital literacy best practices on the platforms have been lackluster; in its “Tips to Spot False News,” which is available online in the “Help Center” and has run in several of the world's major newspapers (arguably not the audience that most needs assistance spotting “false news”), Facebook even writes “reliance on unnamed experts may indicate a false news story,” a tip that might cause readers to discount reporting that uses anonymous or background sources, as many whistleblowing investigations do. More worryingly, the Trump administration has used this tactic to question critical reporting from a variety of outlets. [Did I mention that the Tsarina is a Thoroughly Progressive Tsarina?]

Overall, platforms’ efforts to promote media literacy awareness have been surface-level distractions, not deep-rooted attempts to change user behavior. They should be developed in broad consultation with experts in the field and be integrated into the user interface of the platform – not buried in a help section or in a print newspaper advertisement – at the platform’s expense. Like reminders to grab an umbrella or do your civic duty, social media platforms can empower users to be more discerning consumers of information. It is not a question of ability; it’s a question of volition. [p. 145, footnote omitted; emphasis added]

What the tools “integrated into the user interface” would look like is hard to discern, but it certainly sounds like a mechanism not simply to warn users about trollish Internet tricks but to make it impossible, or nearly so, to get access to government-disapproved content. That the Tsarina favors limiting choices rather than relying on users’ judgment is suggested by the scenario with which she closes the chapter, a hypothetical happy ending six years hence.

It’s Election Day, November 2028. The latest polls are close; it will probably be another nail-biter. But unlike eight or twelve years ago, this campaign hasn’t been characterized by the rancor of the past. After the scandalous foreign hack-and-leak operations that marked the 2016 and 2020 elections, affecting first the Democratic and later the Republican Party, a remarkable thing happened. Party leaders, editors-in-chief of the country’s newspapers, major broadcasters, and even the social media platforms convened to sign a Declaration on Truth and Integrity: they would not discuss, cover, or amplify content for which a legitimate source could not be established. This bipartisan effort did not eliminate all attempts at foreign interference, but rather than boosting the bogus claims, repeating them on the airwaves, printing them on front pages, and retweeting and sharing them online, it relegated them to the fringes of the internet, where they never gained much traction. The publicity surrounding the declaration served as a primer and awareness campaign for millions of Americans who believed for years that foreign interference was a specter politicians unleashed for personal gain.

In the months after the declaration, while the new administration settled into office, Congress took stock of what the document had achieved. It engendered cooperation between politicians and the fourth estate, across social media platforms, and between all these groups and law enforcement, which was notified as suspicious posts were encountered. They worked to build on the informal structure they created, creating an independent government hub to serve as coordinator, watchdog, and educator. The new body worked with civil society to write a curriculum for schools and professional development programs, doled out educational grants, and advocated for users’ rights in the development of new technologies on social media platforms. It also acted as a neutral researcher, employing an apolitical group of experts to act as a watchdog on questions of hate speech, political bias, disinformation, and “fake news,” among others. The government allocated greater funding to American public broadcasters, encouraging a more balanced news landscape.

In 2028, the information war is still not won. There were and continue to be challenges. It is not utopia; the project of democracy will never be. Online abuse, while on a downturn, is still a problem. But people are beginning to have more inquisitive, respectful conversations, based on responsible, level reporting. They are recognizing the humanity in their fellow avatars. Americans regularly have heated debates about how to protect free speech in the age of the internet. But unlike during the height of the information war, that speech is not being manipulated to drive division and chaos from without and within.

This may only be a dream for the future, but it is one that feels possible to achieve. [pp. 146-47]

The dream of the totalitarian utopians, from Rousseau and Robespierre to Marx and Lenin: All will be peace and harmony when the wise and the virtuous shape how everyone else is permitted to think.

Further Reading: Jonathan Turley, “Biden’s ‘Mary Poppins of Disinformation’ the perfect nanny to tidy up mess of free speech?”

The Disinformation Fighters

The most interesting fact, to my mind, about the Disinformation Governance Board is the silence that surrounded its creation. Secretary of Homeland Security Mayorkas announced it this afternoon at a Congressional hearing on his department’s budget for fiscal year 2023 in response to what I assume was a planted question from a Democratic representative. The new board obviously wasn’t a spur-of-the-moment idea. It has already hired an executive director, Nina Jankowicz, who tweeted after the secretary’s announcement:

Cat’s out of the bag: here’s what I've been up to the past two months, and why I’ve been a bit quiet on here.

Honored to be serving in the Biden Administration @DHSgov and helping shape our counter-disinformation efforts.

We may safely assume that DHS didn’t decide that it needed a disinformation board on Day 1 and start talking to potential staff on Day 2.

The media reaction has also been interesting. Except for a paragraph buried far down in this morning’s Politico Playbook, I haven’t been able to find a word about it anywhere except on right-leaning sites. The Daily Mail and Fox News have stories. Unless Google is falling behind, the news didn’t immediately interest the New York Times or the Washington Post or the Wall Street Journal. (As regular WSJ readers know, the news operation is distinctly left-wing; I imagine, though, that the editorial page will have something to say tomorrow morning.)

One might have thought that a governmental body with a mandate to combat “disinformation” would arouse a modicum of interest on the Left. Do progressives recall the House Committee on Un-American Activities or the Defense Department’s thankfully short-lived “Total Information Awareness Program”? One fears that they do, but as models rather than warnings.

No doubt Secretary Mayorkas and Executive Director Jankowicz are certain in their hearts that the Disinformation Governance Board will be entirely benign, but they can’t have thought that their opinion would be universally shared. The fact that they kept the DGB under wraps is strong evidence that they wanted to keep this venture into manipulating opinion out of the public eye until it was ready to roll.

The new executive director, by the bye, doesn’t seem particularly skeptical of disinformation that supports her prejudices. As the Daily Mail report observes, she was sure that Hunter Biden’s laptop was a “Trump campaign product”. She also swallowed without reservation reports that Russia was paying the Taliban bounties for killing American soldiers, an implausible tale (did the Taliban need incentives to do that?) to which the U.S. intelligence agencies eventually assigned “low to moderate confidence”.

The idea that the government has a legitimate role in identifying false statements about political issues and cleansing them from the public square has nothing to recommend it. I’d like to think that, somewhere in the recesses of their minds, Alejandor Mayorkas and Nina Jankowicz and the serried ranks of left-wing journalists sense that. Their silence may be a sign of guilty consciences. Unfortunately, guilt may not be a sufficient deterrent to crime.

The “Submerged State” and Its Concealed Costs

The New York Times’s “The Morning” newsletter today laments the “Perils of Invisible Government”. The “perils” that worry it are not silent governmental intrusion into every nook and cranny of life but, rather, the failure of so many people to take note of all the wonderful things that the government is doing for them.

More than a decade ago, the political scientist Suzanne Mettler coined the phrase “the submerged state” to describe a core feature of modern American government: Many people don’t realize when they are benefiting from a government program.

“Americans often fail to recognize government’s role in society, even if they have experienced it in their own lives,” Mettler wrote. “That is because so much of what government does today is largely invisible.”

Her main examples were tax breaks, including those that help people buy homes, pay for medical care and save for retirement. The concept also included programs so complex or removed from everyday life that many people did not understand them, like federal subsidies for local governments.

The Times writer’s specific lament is that voters aren’t giving the Biden Administration credit for the so-called “American Rescue Plan”, the $1.9 trillion grab bag of spending (following the Trump Administration’s $2.2 trillion “CARES Act”) that Democrats muscled through Congress in the hope of claiming credit for an economic recovery that would have inevitably followed as the Covid-19 panicdemic subsided. The “program has become a case study in how easily voters can overlook even a lavishly funded government initiative delivering benefits close to home”.

Examples in the American Rescue Plan include community center renovations, housing initiatives and health programs. Collectively, the projects may be valuable. Individually, many may be so modest as to go unnoticed. Americans also may not realize that the projects are connected to a federal law.

A specific example cited is three bus lines in Boston that are now free of charge thanks to federal subventions. “It hardly seems like the kind of program that all of Boston will be talking about.” The not-too-hidden message is that President Biden and his party would regain their popularity if only the public talked more about how much largesse has been showered upon it.

That is, the Times complains, quite different from the good old days of Democratic Party hegemony. “Social Security, Medicare and the G.I. Bill – as well as New Deal parks, roads and bridges, many with signs marking them as federal projects – helped popularize government action because they were so obvious.”

Let’s not discuss for the moment the reality vel non of the “submerged” benefits. (They have certainly been real for fraudsters; the amounts stolen from the various Covid relief programs are staggering.) There is another side of the ledger that is likewise submerged or, more accurately, concealed: how the recipients of “benefits close to home” also bear the costs.

The New Deal and its immediate successors at least made a show of paying visibly for visible benefits. Over two-thirds of American households pay more in Social Security and Medicare taxes than their income tax bills. The American Rescue Plan and its ilk weren’t paid for by raising taxes, a step that would have immediately exposed their very high cost-to-benefit ratio. Instead, the cost was concealed by borrowing.

From the point of view of legislators with two-, four- and six-year time horizons, borrowing is a wonderful expedient, and it was especially attractive in an era of low interest rates. So long as the federal government could borrow at one or two percent, servicing a debt load not seen since World War II didn’t look all that difficult. True, the government’s capacity to borrow in the future would be reduced, but that was a problem for posterity, and, as the Irish politician famously asked, “What has posterity ever done for us?”

Now we are discovering, as we should have known all along, one of the lesson of “The Gods of the Copybook Headings”:

In the Carboniferous Epoch we were promised abundance for all,
By robbing selected Peter to pay for collective Paul;
But, though we had plenty of money, there was nothing our money could buy,
And the Gods of the Copybook Headings said: “If you don't work you die.”

A vast influx of dollars coupled with the enforced idleness of Covid lockdowns had its inescapable consequence: Prices are rising and with them interest rates. Both are costs of that benevolent “submerged state” that the Times touts. Let us by all means talk about free bus rides in Boston, but also about five dollar a gallon gasoline, rising grocery bills and the government’s diminished resources with which to confront whatever crisis comes next. All of those costs, by the bye, fall most heavily and immediately on the least wealthy segment of the population.

“Submerged state” is, one might say, an apt term. The fatal prow of an iceberg is also submerged.

Mask Madness

As I have mentioned before, various left-wing grifters (or perhaps right-wing agents provocateurs) deluge me with a dozen or so e-mails a day peddling progressive hysteria. Here is one that landed this morning. I reproduce it in its full amateur-layout glory:

The guys behind the “Progressive Turnout Project”, whoever they may be, evidently think that their target audience is gullible enough to believe that 50,000 SIGNATURES BY MIDNIGHT will reverse a federal court order that the Biden Administration itself hasn’t sought to stay pending appeal. It’s not even clear that an appeal will be filed. It is clear that, outside of certain twitterati bubbles, the demise of mandatory mask-wearing on airplanes, trains, buses and ride shares has been greeted with enthusiasm. A new City Journal article explains why that reaction is exactly right.

It’s a difficult addiction to overcome, according to the Japanese therapists who specialize in treating it – but a simple remedy might help some maskaholics. It’s a graph that should be required viewing for everyone still wearing a mask and every public official or journalist who still insists that mask mandates “control the spread.”

The graph tracks the results of a natural experiment that occurred nationwide during the pandemic. Eleven states never mandated masks, while the other 39 states enforced mandates. The mandates typically began early in the pandemic in 2020 and remained until at least the summer of 2021, with some extending into 2022. The black line on the graph shows the weekly rate of Covid cases in all the states with mask mandates that week, while the orange line shows the rate in all the states without mandates.

The picture needs no embellishing words.

That masks, especially the porous cloth coverings that most wearers adopt, are useless against airborne viruses was a fact well-established before the Covid-19 outbreak. Anthony Fauxi’s early exhortations against masking weren’t, as he later claimed, a “noble lie” but simply a science-based recommendation that he later repudiated for patently political reasons.

The madness is nearing its end, even if the madmen aren’t yet entirely departed.

Update (4:10 p.m.): Contrary to my optimistic skepticism, the government has announced that it will file a notice of appeal. The Justice Department’s twitter statement and the Wall Street Journal’s report make no mention of a motion to stay the district court’s order. Travelers remain free for at least a little while longer.

Excuses, Excuses

If there were a federal “Truth in Headlines” law, the Washington Post would be facing severe penalties for the banner over last Sunday’s editorial “The Hunter Biden story is an opportunity for a reckoning”. Any reader who expected a mea culpa found the opposite, a series of excuses for mainstream and social media’s pre-election suppression of news about the contents of the laptop that Joe Biden’s son dropped off at a computer repair shop and never reclaimed.

The editorial does its best to minimize the significance of the laptop’s information, which it belatedly started covering last week:

The Post reported Wednesday on the multimillion-dollar deals the president’s son made with a Chinese energy company. The investigation adds new details and confirms old ones about the ways in which Joe Biden’s family has profited from trading overseas on his name – something for which the president deserves criticism for tacitly condoning. What it does not do, despite some conservatives’ insistence otherwise, is prove that President Biden acted corruptly. This is a reality that an election-year probe by Senate Republicans into improper influence or wrongdoing has already confirmed.

It’s true that Hunter’s hard drive doesn’t contain an e-mail from Biden père to fils saying, “Great work, son. Thanks for my ten percent of the bribe money.” But it does furnish much circumstantial evidence that Joe Biden knew about his son’s activities and that money from them wound up in his bank account. The WaPo’s assertion that a “probe by Senate Republicans” cleared the President of corruption allegations is sleight-of-hand. The report discussed in the New York Times story linked by the editorial never mentions Hunter’s laptop. It draws entirely on other records and was completed in September 2020, weeks before the New York Post broke the laptop story.

Let’s give Joe Biden a gigantic dose of benefit of the doubt. The WaPo itself concedes that “Joe Biden’s family has profited from trading overseas on his name – something for which the president deserves criticism for tacitly condoning”. (Not that the WaPo has ever proffered any such criticism.) Why is criticism deserved? Because Joe made it possible for his relatives to profit from their corrupt schemes. And this wasn’t the petty profiteering from kinship of which figures like Donald Nixon, Billy Carter and Hugh Rodham were at various times accused. Hunter Biden and his uncle Jim have raked in millions of dollars by exploiting their relationship to Joe. What the laptop materials reveal is that Joe knew that he was being exploited and cooperated. Whether he himself received a share of the loot hardly matters.

Why, then, was this important insight into Joe Biden’s character suppressed? The WaPo doesn’t deny the deliberate suppression but tries to attribute it to appropriate skepticism:

When the New York Post published its blockbuster exclusive on the contents of a laptop said to have been abandoned at a Delaware repair shop by Hunter Biden, mainstream media organizations balked at running with the same narrative. Social media sites displayed even greater caution. Twitter blocked the story altogether, pointing to a policy against hacked materials, and suspended the New York Post’s account for sharing it; Facebook downranked the story in the algorithms that govern users’ news feeds for fear that it was based on misinformation. Now, The Washington Post and the New York Times have vouched for many of the relevant communications.

This series of events has prompted allegations of a coverup, or at best a double standard in the treatment of conservative and liberal politicians by mainstream media and social media sites. Yet there was reason in this case for reluctance on the part of the publications and the platforms alike. Both had been the unwitting tools of a Russian influence campaign in 2016, and it was only prudent to suspect a similar plot lay behind the mysterious appearance of a computer stuffed with juicy documents and conveniently handed over to President Donald Trump’s toxic personal attorney, Rudy Giuliani. Indeed, at the time there was also an ongoing disinformation operation from Moscow involving – among other things – doctored recordings supposedly showing Joe Biden improperly pressuring the then-president of Ukraine to aid Hunter Biden’s business interests – a fraud promoted by Mr. Giuliani.

That political campaigns are rife with what is now trendily called “disinformation” isn’t exactly a new discovery. It’s been true ever since polities started holding elections. One would think that the WaPo’s editors would have some tools in their kit for distinguishing the plausible sheep from the meritless goats. If they do, they didn’t bring them out to evaluate the laptop disclosures. Instead, they and their MSM peers assumed that Russian skullduggery likely lay behind the story. Writing in The Spectator, Peter Van Buren, a veteran of many years of U.S. “information operations”, explains why the notion that Russia fabricated the laptop requires heroic suspension of disbelief:

During my twenty-four-year State Department career, I was exposed to foreign disinformation, and as a journalist today, I read the Hunter Biden emails. There is no way experienced intelligence officers could have mistaken the contents of the Biden laptop for fake, produced material.

The most glaring reason is that most of the important emails could be verified by simply contacting the recipient and asking him if the message was real. Disinfo at this level of sophistication would never be so simple to disprove.

In addition, the laptop contents were about 80 percent garbage and maybe 20 percent useful (dirty) information, a huge waste of time if you are trying to move your adversary to act in a certain way. Such an overbearing amount of non-actionable material also risks burying the good stuff, and if this is disinfo you want your adversary to find the good stuff. It is also expensive to produce information that has no take attached to it, and fake info of any kind is at risk of discovery, blowing the whole operation. Lastly, nothing on the laptop was a smoking gun. You need the disinfo to lead fairly directly to some sort of actionable conclusion, a smoking gun, or your cleverness will be wasted.

One shouldn’t need 24 years in the State Department to reach those commonsensical conclusions. Mr. Van Buren contrasts the laptop with a real disinformation document, the “Steele Dossier”, whose allegations were zealously pursued by the WaPo, among many others, during and after the 2016 Presidential campaign. (I’m pretty sure that the WaPo’s reference to a “Russian influence campaign in 2016” isn’t to Mr. Steele’s production. If it is, the editorial is a cosmic instance of “buying the lede”. Surely the editors aren’t now conceding that the dossier was “fake news”.)

To begin, Steele pastes fake classified markings on his document. That signals amateur work to the pros but causes the media to salivate: Steele’s goal (always remember who your target is and who you are trying to fool).

Steele never names his sources, to prevent verification by the media (a major tell). Steele also finds a way to push the important info up front, in his case a Summary. If Biden’s laptop was disinfo, the makers could have included an Index, or Note to Self where “Hunter” called out the good stuff. Or maybe even a fake email doing the same. Steele’s dossier is also concise, at 35 typed pages. Hunter’s laptop is a pack rat’s nightmare of jumbled stuff: thousands of pages, receipts, info on cam girls and the like.

The WaPo editors pose as naïve babes in the wood, only now forced to think about the rudiments of their craft. Therefore, they and their counterparts can’t be blamed for their innocent dismissal of news first trumpeted by the declassé New York Post. They argue, in short, that because they are fools, they can’t be knaves. But in fact it’s possible to be both.

Joe Biden’s Stealth Nominee

When George H. W. Bush got his first opportunity to pick a Supreme Court Justice, he (or perhaps his chief of staff, John Sununu) devised a stratagem for avoiding a Bork-level controversy: He would choose someone whose writings and record couldn’t be attacked, because they effectively didn’t exist. This “stealth nominee” would be immune to demagogic denunciations and thus would breeze through his confirmation hearings and Senate vote, after which he would be a reliable “conservative”, replacing “liberal” William Brennan.

The man chosen for this mission was Judge David Souter, recently appointed to the First Circuit Court of Appeals after several years of service on the New Hampshire Supreme Court. He came highly recommended by Sununu, a former governor of New Hampshire, and Senator Warren Rudman, the state’s occasionally conservative Republican Senator. Except for a reputation as a tough-on-crime prosecutor, a college thesis on Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., and registration as a Republican, his biography was bare of clues to his judicial philosophy. He had not, during his few months as a federal judge, authored any opinions.

Nonetheless, both Right and Left were sure that they knew how the nominee would decide controversial cases. The president of the National Organization for Women yelped that, if confirmed, he would “end freedom for women in this country”, and the NAACP added its opposition. Ted Kennedy berated him. Conservatives rallied behind him. There was, however, no flare-up of opposing ideologies, because the fire lacked kindling. The Senate vote for confirmation was 90-9.

As it turned out, Justice Souter truly was a stealth choice – for the progressive view of law and the Constitution. Perhaps more attention should have been paid to his paper on Justice Holmes. By the end of his first term on the Court, the New York Times’s Linda Greenhouse, arbiter of left-wing judicial orthodoxy, was praising his “moderation” (i. e., adherence to the progressive party line).

The preceding memories have surfaced as President Biden’s Court nominee, Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson, progresses toward what is now an all but inevitable confirmation (“all but” to account for the slender possibility that Tsar Putin really will start a nuclear war). Progressive organizations have praised her in terms that would be overboard for John Marshall (not that they would ever praise Marshall). John Sununu called the Souter nomination “a home run for conservatives”, but he didn’t go so far as to laud the nominee’s “unique wisdom and perspective”.

The progressives’ confidence may be well founded. They presumably think that they have a window into Judge Jackson’s mind, and they could be right! Still, the evidence is shrouded in mists.

When asked at her confirmation hearing about her judicial philosophy, Judge Jackson sounded like someone who had clerked for Antonin Scalia rather than Stephen Breyer:

During her exchange with Senator Charles Grassley (R., Iowa), Jackson rejected the idea “that there is a living Constitution in the sense that it’s changing and it’s infused with . . . the policy perspective of the day.” Later, in response to Senator Mike Lee (R-Utah), she said that “in order to interpret provisions of the Constitution, we look to the time of the founding and ascertain . . . the original public meaning.” Later, she reiterated the claim, telling Senator Ben Sasse (R., Neb.) that “I believe that the Constitution is fixed in its meaning. I believe that it is appropriate to look at the . . . original public meaning of the words . . . because again, that a limitation on my authority.”

“Original public meaning” is one of the key concepts of the “originalist” school of Constitutional and statutory interpretation. It is anathema to progressive jurists. It’s possible, of course, that the judge was lying. The Democratic senators who will vote for her unanimously in a week or two must believe that she is. If they thought she was sincere, she wouldn’t get ten votes from their caucus. As one commentator put it, the hearings were “a rout for progressive pieties”.

There is, however, a more charitable interpretation. District court judges aren’t often called upon to delve into Constitutional theory, and Judge Jackson has never, so far as one can tell from her public record, explored the topic deeply on her own. Originalist ideas, hated though they are on the Left, are “in the air” among lawyers. The shibboleths are familiar, and they roll off the tongues of many people who haven’t given them much thought and don’t apply them in practice. It was, after all, self-identified “originalist” Justice Gorsuch who decided that the original public meaning of “discrimination on account of sex” was “discrimination on account of sexual practices”. Puns are the lowest form of wit and even lower as a canon of construction.

I don’t think that there’s a high likelihood that Justice Jackson will become a disciple of Justice Thomas. I do see a probability that she has no well-formed notions about how to read and take direction from the Constitution.

There are a couple of other, albeit faint and flickering, signs that Judge Jackson hasn’t fully absorbed progressive dogma.

One was her much derided response – “I’m not a biologist” – when she was asked to define “woman”. If she were truly “woke”, she wouldn’t have said anything so cisgenderist. Denying biology has become a central principle of progressivism. Again, she might have been lying, afraid to say outright, “A woman is someone who identifies as a woman – and people who believe in chromosomes and testosterone and estrogen are bigots who deserve to be canceled.” And, again, her progressive admirers evidently believe that she’s a liar. But they may be wrong.

Another sign will make sense, I fear, only to lawyers, but I’ll try to explain it anyway. (Feel free to let your eyes glaze over.) A bête noir of progressive jurisprudence is “contributory negligence”, the rule that someone who is injured can’t collect damages if his own actions contributed to his injury. Since it was first enunciated by Lord Ellenborough (“that immortal blockhead”, one of my liberal law school professors called him), it has been unpopular. It is now festooned with qualifications and exceptions and has been abandoned wholly or partially in many jurisdictions. Nevertheless, it endures. It is, for example, part of the law of the District of Columbia, where Judge Jackson sat on the bench, and she heard a case in which it played a leading role (Whiteru v. Washington Metropolitan Area Transit Authority, 480 F. Supp. 3d 185 (D. D.C., 2020), reversed and remanded, 25 F.4th 1053 (D.C. Cir., Feb. 11, 2022)). An intoxicated man fell between two walls in a Washington Metro station, lay there for several hours and died of his injuries. His parents sued the Metro, alleging that his death was due to Metro workers’ negligent failure to discover him in time for medical assistance to be of avail. Judge Jackson dismissed the action on the ground of the decedent’s contributory negligence.

A curt opinion by the District of Columbia Court of Appeals reversed the dismissal and sent the case back for further proceedings, pointing to a clearly defined exception to the contributory negligence rule that fit the circumstances. Conservative legal commentator Ed Whelan, in describing the case, suggests Judge Jackson’s failure to recognize that exception reflects poorly on her analytical skills. Maybe so (or maybe the plaintiffs’ lawyer overlooked it, and a busy trial judge didn’t have time to engage in independent research), but what is interesting to me is that she apparently exerted no effort to find a loophole in D.C.’s law of contributory negligence that would enable her to keep the plaintiffs’ case in court. It’s almost as if she didn’t think that Lord Ellenborough was such a blockhead.

All this not to say that Joe Biden’s stealth Justice will be the mirror image of Justice Souter, ironic and amusing as that would be, but her future career may be more interesting and less predictable than many observers anticipate.

Note: Lord Ellenborough was, in truth, a highly skilled jurisconsult, though hardly a model of judicial temperament. In Patrick O’Brian’s nautical novel The Reverse of the Medal, Captain Jack Aubrey comes before Ellenborough on a charge of stock fraud and suffers severely at his hands. The fictional trial is based on based closely the real trial of the naval hero Thomas Cochrane, over which Ellenborough presided.

Foolish Vengeance on Woke Billionaires

President Biden’s budget proposal for 2023 picks up the idea, popular among progressives, of taxing unrealized capital gains under the label “Billionaires Minimum Income Tax”. It differs in detail from the version that the Senator Wyden floated last year but retains the combination of administrative complexity and economic stupidity. I think that my critique of the Wyden proposal applies to this one, too, and you can read others here and here and many other wheres.

But this post isn’t about the idea’s well-known flaws. Instead, I want to take note of the reaction of some on the political Right who have suggested that BMIT is just what the current generation of plutocrats deserves. For example:

Rare is the wealthy man who actually stands up for America and American values any more. So let DC take their money and run. I don't care. I have 99 problems. Protecting Warren Buffett from the tax man is not one of them. . . .

The argument that confiscatory taxation of billionaires will lead to recession falls on ears deafened by the election of a billionaire-backed Biden. They made a recession inevitable. Undoubtedly, they will benefit from this recession as they did the last one.

The political calculus of the rich is pretty simple. Suck up to the liberals because conservatives will always back the rich, right? We are for limited government and therefore limited taxes.

But if the rich are now for unlimited government, then I have four words to say to them:

You pay for it.

My message for readers is quit being a patsy. Conservatives need to play hardball. If the billionaires aren't with us in opposing abortion, pedophilia and CRT, then why should we be with them on taxes?

When Instapundit linked to that effusion, comments were overwhelmingly positive. Well, when I hear Bill Gates’s yammering about how we need to eat fungus-derived ersatz meat in order to save Gaia, I sometimes feel like confiscating his wealth, just as I sometimes feel like slapping someone who speaks rudely to my wife. But I’ve managed to stifle both impulses.

Since the author of the screed just quoted is undeterred by the negative economic effects of a BMIT, let’s leave that aside and think instead about whether his venture into moral pragmatism will accomplish anything more than feeding a hunger for revenge.

Very few woke billionaires got rich by exploiting government largess. Taxpayers don’t subsidize Microsoft. Regulators don’t force anyone to buy from Amazon or subscribe to Bloomberg or waste time and brain cells on Facebook or Twitter. Google doesn’t have a legal monopoly on Internet searches. The primary way that Gates and Bezos and the rest made their fortunes was through free economic exchange.

They have used those fortunes, alas, to promote ideas that are inimical to civilization. One of those ideas is that men should be punished for espousing the wrong opinions. But let’s close our eyes to the irony of adopting the techniques of “cancel culture” for the purpose of expunging its partisans. After all, isn’t turnabout the only rule of fair play?

So realpolitik avers. But it also reminds us, “If you shoot at the king, you must kill him.” Joe Biden’s BMIT won’t reduce the wokexecs’ wealth by enough to diminish their influence materially, and conservative support for, or indifference to, the concepts of free speech and fair play won’t lead Michael Bloomberg to start reading Thomas Sowell. All that vengeance will accomplish is to make ordinary citizens poorer by putting economic obstacles in the way of innovations that improve the quality of life. The assault on civilized values will meanwhile continue unabated.

“Revenge is a dish best served cold.” And the reason is that vengeance in hot blood runs a high risk of missing its target and doing more damage to friends than to foes. If Western civilization survives that current assault, future historians’ damnatio memoriae of the propagators of wokeness will be more than sufficient retributive justice.

Still Waiting

Although political leaders and diplomats are fighting the Russo-Ukrainian War with ever increasing fury, and its consequences are spilling over into domestic politics as the Biden Administration insists that rising fuel costs are solely Tsar Putin’s fault and have nothing to do with the President’s stifling of American oil and natural gas production, the situation on the ground remains rather static. An assault on Kiev has been 24 to 96 hours off for the past week or so. Here is the Institute for the Study of War’s March 8th update:

Russian forces continued concentrating in the eastern, northwestern, and western outskirts of Kyiv for an assault on the capital in the coming 24-96 hours. The reported appearance of forces belonging to Chechen leader Ramazan Kadyrov, Russia’s Rosgvardia internal security formations, and the Liga (former Wagner) Private Military Company in the western outskirts of Kyiv may indicate that the Russian military is struggling to assemble sufficient conventional combat power to launch its assault on the capital. Russian forces near Kyiv made limited gains and prepared for limited drives to continue their attempted encirclement to the west.

Ukrainian forces have continued to challenge the lengthy Russian ground lines of communication leading from near Sumy to eastern Kyiv. Russian forces near Kharkiv have been steadily diverting to secure and extend those lines over the past few days, as we have reported. The Ukrainian General Staff reported on March 8 that Russian troops currently near Chernihiv appear to be moving east. We assess that those forces may seek to link up with troops coming from near Sumy to help them consolidate and protect their extended lines in support of the planned offensive against Kyiv.

The situation in eastern Ukraine and southwestern Ukraine remained largely unchanged in the past 24 hours. Ukrainian General Staff reporting of additional Russian efforts to advance on the city of Zaporizhya likely confirm that Russia intends to make blocking that city a priority. The forces Russia is so far moving toward Zaporizhya appear to be far too small to encircle or take it.

On a somewhat related note, wasn’t Joe Biden going to restore America’s place in the world after Bad Orange Man cut us off from the international community? Today the Wall Street Journal headlines, “Saudi, Emirati Leaders Decline Calls With Biden During Ukraine Crisis” (summary here if you can’t penetrate the WSJ paywall).

 

News, Unexpected and Otherwise

Some days are like sudden squalls at sea, arising unexpectedly and without apparent cause. So it is with the news of the past 24 hours, though not every wind blows from an unexpected quarter.

First, Fidel Trudeau abruptly canceled the emergency that he declared last week and that the Canadian Parliament approved just two days ago. Did a threat so severe that scotching it necessitated the invocation of martial law vanish within fewer than 48 hours? The most plausible answer is that there was never an emergency of that magnitude, as was pretty obvious to foreign (i. e., American) observers. One didn’t need to see pictures of smiling protesters lounging in hot tubs or distributing free food to the homeless to figure that out. The tip-off was that Fidel padded the alleged “insurrection” with talk of Nazi salutes and Confederate flags. One of his supporters declared that truckers who honked their horns were calling for the second coming of Adolf Hitler. (“Honk, honk” = HH = “Heil Hitler; “Elementary, my dear Justin.”) It was the empty rhetoric that demagogues resort to when they run out of facts.

Non-unexpectedly, the dictator of Canada didn’t explain his abdication by saying that it had all been a mistake and he was going to purge his shame by resigning. It was just “over”. Various theories are floating around: that the polls were looking terrible, that several of his party’s senators were about to denounce his actions, that the freezing of protesters’ accounts had sparked a run on Canadian banks. I doubt that we’ll ever get a straight account. Fidel has said that he’ll investigate why martial law was declared. I foresee that his hand-picked investigators will conclude that Donald Trump was about to invade but was stared down by the dauntless Trudeau.

Second, it looks like the former President won’t be indicted in New York on charges of loan fraud and tax evasion. If news accounts are accurate (they’re from the New York Times, anonymously sourced, so proceed with caution), the two lead prosecutors resigned after their boss, Manhattan’s pro-crime district attorney, decided that they won’t be able to put together a winnable case. Andrew McCarthy, who served as a federal prosecutor in New York, has drawn on his knowledge of the local criminal law enforcement scene to conclude that the DA is probably right. If so, that doesn’t prove that the Trump Organization has never cut a corner, but it suggests that due process may yet have some life in it.

Finally, the expected news: Russian “peacekeepers” have entered Ukraine to “protect” the pro-Russian enclaves that have been in revolt for the past eight years. Tsar Vladimir signaled that step earlier this week in a speech that was evidence of dementia or overweening confidence or unbridled contempt for the flaccid leaders of the Western democracies, or at least two out of three.

Just before the invasion (or will it be defined down to a “minor incursion”?) began, President Biden announced economic sanctions so feeble that they would barely deter Lichtenstein. House Republicans tweeted, “This is what weakness on the world stage looks like.” The inimitable Jim Treacher has collected left-wing responses from Bill Kristol, Jen Rubin et al. that share a theme: Criticizing Joe Biden’s soft-handed approach equals support for Vladimir Putin. The logic behind that conclusion emanates out of some universe where reason follows different laws from our own. I mention it only because it offers a dram of levity at a moment when the world could use it. (If you don’t want to pay five bucks a month get the daily Treacher newsletter, you can ask for a seven-day free trial that will get you past the pay wall.)

What will tomorrow bring? I’m not entirely sure that I want to know.

The Federal Fact Checkers

On Monday the Department of Homeland Security issued an updated National Terrorism Advisory System Bulletin, which purports to summarize the “Terrorism Threat to the U.S. Homeland”. It begins with a paragraph that, read carefully, should chill the blood of anyone who cherishes liberty:

The United States remains in a heightened threat environment fueled by several factors, including an online environment filled with false or misleading narratives and conspiracy theories, and other forms of mis- dis- and mal-information (MDM) introduced and/or amplified by foreign and domestic threat actors. These threat actors seek to exacerbate societal friction to sow discord and undermine public trust in government institutions to encourage unrest, which could potentially inspire acts of violence. Mass casualty attacks and other acts of targeted violence conducted by lone offenders and small groups acting in furtherance of ideological beliefs and/or personal grievances pose an ongoing threat to the nation. While the conditions underlying the heightened threat landscape have not significantly changed over the last year, the convergence of the following factors has increased the volatility, unpredictability, and complexity of the threat environment: (1) the proliferation of false or misleading narratives, which sow discord or undermine public trust in U.S. government institutions; (2) continued calls for violence directed at U.S. critical infrastructure; soft targets and mass gatherings; faith-based institutions, such as churches, synagogues, and mosques; institutions of higher education; racial and religious minorities; government facilities and personnel, including law enforcement and the military; the media; and perceived ideological opponents; and (3) calls by foreign terrorist organizations for attacks on the United States based on recent events. [emphasis added]

Vigilance against real terrorist activities is, of course, justified, but the DHS sounds less interested in uncovering plots than in combating what one might call the “root causes” of violence, which are equated with erroneous opinions. One of the entries under “How We Are Responding” is –

DHS is working with public and private sector partners, as well as foreign counterparts, to identify and evaluate MDM, including false or misleading narratives and conspiracy theories spread on social media and other online platforms that endorse or could inspire violence.

Let us cast our minds back in time. “During and eighteen-month period in 1971 and 1972, the FBI reported more than 2,500 bombings on U.S. soil, nearly 5 a day.” [Bryan Burrough, Days of Rage: America’s Radical Underground, the FBI, and the Forgotten Age of Revolutionary Violence, p. 5] It was a period when “acts of violence” referred to something more serious than bumptious conduct at school board meetings, yet the public – liberals in particular – would have reacted with alarm and outrage if government law enforcers had devoted their attention to identifying and, by implication, suppressing “false and misleading narratives and conspiracy theories”.

David Harsanyi puts it well:

It is, of course, the constitutional right of every American to undermine public to trust in the U.S. government. Oftentimes, it is well deserved. Even if it’s not, a person is free to misinform or theorize or simply spread outright insane notions about the world for kicks. . . . Speech that’s been labeled “misleading” or “false” or “fake” is often just political speech that has fallen into disfavor with those in power. And neither Kirstjen Nielsen nor Alejandro Mayorkas nor whoever comes next in DHS leadership has any business deciding what constitutes fact or fiction.

On a purely practical level, hunting for heresies that infect the public square is a wasteful misuse of DHS’s far from unlimited resources. “Mis- dis- and mal-information” abounds, but stamping out the current MDM wouldn’t produce domestic harmony. Men don’t become terrorists because they believe falsehoods; they believe falsehoods because they are prone, for psychological or ideological reasons, to become terrorists. To the extent that they need a “narrative” to rationalize their actions, they will find or invent it.

Also on a practical level, the anti-MDM tools available to the Department of Homeland Security aren’t ones that government agencies ought to be wielding. “Identify[ing] and evaluat[ing] MDM” puts the Department into the “fact checking” business. A “fact checker” armed with investigative and prosecutorial powers is an ominous beast. Even one that limited itself to propagandizing for the “correct narratives” – and nothing in the DHS bulletin suggests that it will content itself with a war of ideas – would be reminiscent of regimes that are far removed from America’s constitutional order.

Further Reading: Roger Severino has gone through the DHS screed more thoroughly than I did. The more one delves into it, the worse it looks:

Note that the DHS is not here talking about speech actually coordinating or inciting violent terrorist actions. Such conduct is clearly criminal and is discussed elsewhere in the bulletin. Rather, the DHS makes clear that purely lawful speech and opinion is now the number one contributor to the current threat environment and cites “misleading narratives” regarding Covid-19 as a leading example of this terroristic threat.

The DHS defines Covid “misinformation” as being “false, but not created or shared with the intention of causing harm,” and defines Covid “malinformation” as being “based on fact, but used out of context to mislead, harm, or manipulate.” Under these definitions, you can be guilty of contributing to terrorism without any bad intent or by disseminating known Covid facts if you omit what the DHS considers proper context. . . .

The bulletin additionally directs us to resources “to stay safe” including on how to “recognize and build resilience to false or misleading narratives.” For example, we are to “[t]ake care when viewing or sharing content that uses sensational terms to divide us in a time of crisis” and must be “especially careful of content that attempts to make people angry or sad or create division.” . . . The DHS also recommends a comprehensive guide for parents and caregivers, titled “Building Resilience and Confronting Risk in the COVID-19 Era” co-written by the hyper-partisan Southern Poverty Law Center. This DHS-endorsed resource includes advice such as “help children develop an understanding and appreciation for gender beyond the binary of boys and girls,” and “don’t stay silent about the history and ongoing injustices of white supremacy and male supremacy,” and conveniently provides links to local Black Lives Matter chapters. . . .

Rational people will still wonder how Covid information — even if false, outdated, or taken out of context – has anything remotely to do with terrorism. But to the DHS, the answer is blazingly clear: “Malignant actors [are] seeking to interfere with and undermine our democratic institutions and national cohesiveness,” duh. “COVID-19-related MDM activities seek to undermine public confidence and sow confusion,” of course. “Creating or spreading this type of online content can undermine public confidence in our system of government and its institutions,” obviously. Also “every individual plays an important role in recognizing and building resilience to [these] false and harmful narratives,” like that even needed to be said – what are you, a terrorist sympathizer?

Perhaps it is time to resurrect the House Un-American Activities Committee to uncover and root out every last unpatriotic Covid-misinformation terrorist and their fellow travelers out there in fly-over country.