Stromata Blog

Social Credit Comes In on Little Cat Feet

Should a December day be too warm for you, you may chill your blood by reading “What the Hell Happened to PayPal?”, which recounts incidents in which the country’s most widely used method of transmitting electronic payments has canceled users’ accounts for reasons that it declines to disclose but that apparently have much to do with punishing wrongthink.

One by one, they go to start their business day only to find a baffling message from their payments app informing them: “You can no longer do business with PayPal.”

There is little or no explanation. They have somehow offended the sensibilities of someone somewhere deep inside the bureaucracy.

They are simply told via an email from PayPal’s Risk and Compliance Department that, after an internal review, “we decided to permanently limit your account as there was a change in your business model or your business model was considered risky.”

In case there is any doubt, the email adds: “You’ll not be able to conduct any further business using PayPal.”

Then, toward the bottom: “If you have funds in your PayPal balance, we’ll hold it for up to 180 days. After that period, we’ll email you with information on how to access your funds.”

Noting the irony that PayPal was founded by eccentric libertarians like Peter Thiel and Elon Musk (they sold it to eBay, which later spun it off to a new public company), the author summarizes thus:

But the company that was meant to liberate countless individuals is becoming something else.

Increasingly, it is becoming a police officer. It is deciding what is right and wrong, who gets to be heard, who is silenced. It is locking out of the financial system those people or brands that have slipped outside the parameters of acceptable discourse, those who threaten the consensus of the gatekeepers. The consensus is hard to articulate; it is an ideology lacking clearly defined ideological contours. But the tenets of that consensus are unmistakable: the new progressive politics around race and gender are a force for good, the Covid lockdown was just, the war in Ukraine is noble, and an unfettered exchange of ideas and opinions is an unacceptable threat to all of the above.

You may or may not sympathize with the article’s examples of individuals banned from PayPal. One is an entrepreneur whose product has been criticized (justly or not, I have no way of knowing; I had never heard of it before) as overpriced and underperforming. One is a biologist who publishes a newsletter “dedicated to providing weekly news, articles, and other content about the biology of sex and sex differences, gender ideology, Critical Social Justice, free speech, and related topics”. One “is the founder of the Free Speech Union, an advocacy group, and the editor-in-chief of the Daily Skeptic, which has questioned the efficacy of Covid vaccines”.

Let’s suppose arguendo that each of these characters is engaged in some variety of unsavory conduct that merits expulsion from the electronic economy. Such people exist. I don’t think that there would be many objections to banning fentanyl dealers from PayPal. But does it follow that PayPal should sit as unaccountable, unappealable judge and jury?

The company reportedly told the banned biologist “that, if he wanted to know why he’d been ejected, ‘an attorney or law enforcement officer must submit a legal subpoena.’” That response suggests that it isn’t very confident that its reasons will stand up to scrutiny. Refusing to disclose until and unless the former customer files a lawsuit and survives a motion to dismiss is a tactic for making complaints too expensive to pursue.

Yes, PayPal is a private company, and other payment apps exist. I have no proposal for compelling it to be a fair-minded intermediary rather than an enforcer of woke ideology. I only note this sign that an American version of the “social credit” system that suffocates the Communist-controlled regions of China is coming, softly on little cat feet, to a country near you.

Trumpling on the Constitution

Donald Trump ought to be fading away, but a symbiosis of his need to be the cynosure of the universe and progressives’ need for a Hitler-like bogeyman coalesce to keep him in the news. His and his most deranged enemies’ interests coincided a few days ago when he declared on his alternative Twitter, “Truth Social”, that “the revelation of MASSIVE & WIDESPREAD FRAUD & DECEPTION in working closely with Big Tech Companies, the DNC, & the Democrat Party . . . allows for the termination of all rules, regulations, and articles, even those found in the Constitution”. He suggested the alternatives of ousting Joe Biden in favor of “the RIGHTFUL WINNER” or holding “a NEW ELECTION”.

This nonsense has a handful of defenders. Few, if any, of them endorse the call for overturning the 2020 Presidential election. Instead, they contend that Mr. Trump didn’t demand that the Constitution be terminated in its entirety, only that the part about how the President is elected be set aside. That doesn’t strike me as much of a defense.

Trump defenders have also pointed out, quite correctly, that, no matter what the former President demands, he has not a whit of a chance of getting it. If his intention on January 6, 2021, was, as we are incessantly informed, to force Congress to negate the election results, he proved himself the most ineffectual overthrower of governments since the Japanese litterateur Yukio Mishima tried to resurrect the powers of the Emperor of Japan and the leading political role of the Armed Forces:

On Nov. 25, 1970, after months of meticulous planning, Mishima and four members of his self-styled militia, the Shield Society, attempted a coup by taking a hostage at Japan’s military headquarters. Mishima delivered a rousing speech to the young cadets but was unable to gain their respect or support. Seemingly anticipating the plot’s ultimate failure, he then committed seppuku. His alleged male lover, Shield Society member Masakatsu Morita, followed suit.

January 6th was to insurrection as sticking pins into voodoo dolls is to homicide. Progressives don’t really fear Donald Trump. If they did, the Democratic Party wouldn’t have spent millions of dollars backing his supporters in Republican primaries this year.

That’s a somewhat overlong way of saying that I see no need to decide whether to take the Trump effusion literally or seriously or both or neither. I wouldn’t have bothered writing about it at all, were it not for a remarkable coincidence. The Fall 2022 issue of the Claremont Review of Books was mailed to subscribers yesterday. Selected articles have been posted on the Web, one of which is Jeffrey H. Anderson’s “‘Our Democracy,’ Not Our Constitution”. It obviously was written well before the Twitter Files and the Trumpian response to them, yet it reads like a commentary on anti-Constitutional ideology, underscoring the close parallels between Donald Trump and some of the leading thinkers of progressivism’s academic apparat.

Many progressives, unsatisfied with the slow, halting pace at which America is being transformed into a unitary, semi-socialist state purged of wrongthink, believe that the fault lies not in lack of popular support for their ideas but in the manner in which the structure of the American government, as embedded in the Constitution, frustrates what they confidently believe is the will of the majority.

Mr. Anderson focuses on two particular progressive bêtes noires: the Electoral College and the equal representation of the states in the Senate, which he sees as correlatives: “The part of the document that progressives dislike the most is the Electoral College, but most of what they dislike about the Electoral College is rooted in the system of equal-state representation in the Senate.”

It is difficult to amend the Constitution, and instituting unequal Senate representation would require the unanimous consent of the states, a feat whose degree of difficulty is surmountable only in fantasy. Realizing that the Constitutional avenue to their desired remaking of our form of government is barricaded, leading left-wing intellectuals advocate just what Donald Trump does: They bemoan the failure of democracy, which “allows for the termination of all rules, regulations, and articles, even those found in the Constitution”. A book-length article (264 pages, 2,517 footnotes) in the Harvard Law Review, written shortly before the 2020 election, denounces “The Degradation of American Democracy” at the hands of the Republican Party and proposes to secure unassailable Democratic Party control of the Senate by either admitting new, Democrat-dominated states or by a shorter, more certain method:

The second way to pursue a fairer Senate apportionment would be simply to ignore the constitutional provision mandating two senators for every state as a particularly egregious example of dead-hand control. The Senate could then be reapportioned through statute or perhaps a national referendum. Ignoring a clear constitutional provision would trouble many Americans, but the [Supreme] Court has done this itself more than once when societal consensus strongly backed the move, such as by applying equal protection principles to the federal government despite the Fourteenth Amendment's plainly applying only to “State[s]” and applying the First Amendment to the Executive and the judiciary even though its reach is plainly limited to “Congress.”

Moreover, there are other contexts in which most Americans would surely agree that antidemocratic rules entrenched against change by a previous generation should not constrain today's majorities. In 1861, Congress passed, and the nation would probably have approved had the Civil War not intervened, a constitutional amendment to forever bar the national government from interfering with slavery in existing states. By its terms, this amendment would have been unamendable. Should a future generation have considered itself bound by such an amendment had it been enacted? If not, why treat the antidemocratic Senate differently? [Michael J. Klarman, “The Supreme Court 2019 Term: Foreword: The Degradation of American Democracy – and the Court”, 134 Harv. L. Rev. 1, 238-39 (Nov. 2020) (footnotes omitted)]

Well, the world would have become a very different place if slavery had been preserved and civil war averted. That hypothetical is a thin justification for replacing our present form of government with perpetual political warfare. If the Senate can be restructured by legislative fiat, so can every other organ of government. By Professor Klarman’s logic, if Republicans had won majorities in both Houses of Congress last month, they could have declared the Presidency vacant by majority vote and proceeded to install Donald Trump in the White House. If after 2024 the GOP controls the Presidency, Congress and (as it does already in Professor Klarman’s eyes) the Supreme Court, why should it not reduce California, New York and selected other states to one Senator each, reapportion the House of Representatives to take into account land area as well as population, transfer responsibility for judicial appointments to the Federalist Society and enact that the President may name his own successor? I suspect that Professor Klarman would then rediscover the merits of “dead-hand control”. (The Internet being the sort of place that it is these days, let me hasten to add that I think that all of those innovations would be horrible, but their imaginary proponents could cite the eminent professor’s reasoning in their behalf.)

Professor Klarman isn’t a lone eccentric. The article from which I quoted occupies the most prominent place in the most prominent number of the 2020-21 run of one of the country’s most prominent legal publications. Mr. Anderson also cites other progressive luminaries who espouse similar views, in some cases with less restraint.

When Donald Trump “trumples” rhetorically on the Constitution, everyone, quite rightly, condemns his foolishness. When progressives advocate identical contempt for the document, the silence is uncanny.

Mr. Anderson’s conclusion should be taken to heart by every conservative:

There is currently a debate among conservatives concerning whether there is really anything left to conserve. Have the Constitution and culture already been lost? Is it still possible for Red and Blue America to share one country, or has a “cold civil war” already begun?

Opposition to the Constitution by the Left’s leading intellectual lights makes clear that they think they’re in a war and that the Constitution is the principal obstacle between them and victory. The appropriate response from the Right, then, is to fight with increased vigor to preserve the Constitution, making the case to our fellow Americans about how vital and irreplaceable it is. Long too reluctant to discuss federalism and the separation of powers – Madison’s “double security…to the rights of the people” – we must do so with increased frequency and persuasiveness. Long too reluctant to defend our founding (except in these pages), we must do so without reservation. Long too inclined to be more accepting of executive overreach – and congressional negligence – than judicial overreach, we must lead by example when possessing executive or legislative power, valuing our Constitution more dearly than any potential policy victory. Despite what Joe Biden may think, American democracy cannot survive without the American Constitution.

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?

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?

De Abortione Nil Nisi Bonum (II)

The elevation of unrestricted abortion from a progressive policy preference to a primary dogma is one of the most astonishing developments in intellectual history. From Bill Clinton’s “safe, legal and rare”, “rare” has been dropped entirely, and “safe” is hardly a consideration. Abortions performed by non-medical personnel or by the unsupervised ingestion of abortifacient drugs are regarded as quite acceptable. The child’s death has a higher value than the mother’s health.

Even more strikingly, pro-abortion progressives denounce any public criticism of abortion as fiercely as any religious fanatic has ever excoriated blasphemy. Several posts back, I cited a couple of examples. A couple more showed up today.

Sentinel Books, an imprint of Penguin Random House (a subsidiary of publishing octopus Bertelsmann), reached an agreement last year to publish a book by Supreme Court Justice Amy Coney Barrett. Justice Barrett has received a substantial advance; she reported $425,000 from Sentinel on her most recent financial disclosure form and is reportedly entitled to further installments in the future. All that is known about the subject of the book is that it will be “about how judges should avoid letting their decisions be shaped by personal feelings”.

Yesterday there appeared online an open letter signed by 263 soi-disant “members of the writing, publishing, and broader literary community of the United States” asserting “that moving forward with Coney Barrett’s book places Bertelsmann and Penguin Random House both in direct conflict with their own Code of Conduct and in violation of international human rights”.

The signers of the letter profess to “care deeply about freedom of speech”, but publishing a book by a jurist who voted to allow democratic processes to decide what laws will govern abortion violates the “imperative that publishers uphold their dedication to freedom of speech with a duty of care”. They have read not a single sentence of the manuscript, which may or may not yet exist. Their rationale for demanding that Penguin Random House drop it is based entirely on their opposition to Justice Barrett’s opinions about the morality of abortion:

The ruling in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health that overturned Roe hinged on exactly what Coney Barrett’s book is reportedly about – the judiciary’s role and “how judges are not supposed to bring their personal feelings into how they rule.” Yet, it seems this is exactly what Coney Barrett has done, inflicting her own religious and moral agenda upon all Americans while appropriating the rhetoric of even-handedness – and Penguin Random House has agreed to pay her a sum of $2 million to do it.

Dobbs did not, it should be noted, reflect what are most likely Justice Barrett’s private views. The Court didn’t prohibit abortion anywhere or overturn state laws that legalize the killing of unborn infants at any stage of pregnancy. To pro-abortion zealots, however, unrestricted abortion is an overriding good that no one has the right to disparage. Moreover, those who, like Justice Barrett, do anything to impede abortion’s advance are to be punished, even if the letter’s signatories do not – yet – demand total censorship.

A second “sign of the times” came to my attention via an essay by Rod Dreher. It concerned a recent ruling by the European Court of Human Rights reversing the conviction, for “unlawful sexual display”, of a bare-breasted woman who interrupted Christmas caroling at a Roman Catholic church and acted out an “abortion” on the Virgin Mary. She was sentenced to one month in jail and fined €2,000. The ECHR, whose view of free speech rights is, to put it mildly, far from libertarian, found that this exhibition was an exercise of the perpetrator’s protected human rights. Indeed, it ordered the French government to pay her €9,800 “for moral damages, legal costs and expenses”.

It isn’t hard to figure out why the court ruled as it did. It has no difficulty with governments that clamp down on criticism of Moslems or homosexuality or the new “transgender” craze. Abortion, however, is sacred, and protests in its favor are not to be constrained even by neutral laws for maintaining public order, applied without preference for any ideology.

It is a small and bitter consolation that the sacralization of “abortion rights” will in time enhance what James Taranto labeled “the Roe Effect”: “It seems self-evident that pro-choice women are more likely to have abortions than pro-life ones, and common sense suggests that children tend to gravitate toward their parents’ values.”

Roe itself may have had less of an effect than Mr. Taranto anticipated, so long as abortion was regarded by many supporters of “a woman’s right to choose” as a choice of last resort. Now, however, it is widely celebrated, and dissent will, if present trends continue, be slowly but relentlessly shut down. The day may come when it will rare for anyone but a strongly and sincerely religious woman to have more than one child and when childlessness will be considered praiseworthy. A generation after that happens, the United States will be a very different nation, and progressives may regret their neglect of the Law of Unintended Consequences.

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.

An Old Segregationist Canard Finds a Supreme Court Exponent

In the wake of Brown v. Board of Education, many critics of the Warren Court contended that the Fourteenth Amendment couldn’t properly be read to bar school segregation, because at the time of its ratification many states maintained segregated systems, and none took any steps to dismantle them after the Amendment was adopted. Indeed, the District of Columbia, over which the Reconstruction Congress held authority, had segregated its classrooms in 1862 and didn’t integrate them until 1954, when, in an adjunct case to Brown, the Supreme Court held that the federal government could not engage in racial discrimination any more than could the states.

The holdouts against Brown relied on a primitive form of originalism: The Fourteenth Amendment couldn’t mean what it seemed to say: “Equal protection of the laws” must not have been understood as precluding different laws for different races. That reasoning tracked Plessy v. Ferguson, in which the Supreme Court held that a state law mandating separate railroad accommodations for whites and blacks did not infringe the Fourteenth Amendment. So long as the accommodations were “equal”, state laws could reflect the “social inequality” of the races.

Although Brown didn’t really overrule Plessy’s “separate but equal” doctrine, the popular impression of its holding is that government action founded on racial distinctions is now forbidden, except where there is a strong non-racial reason for the action and the correspondence to race is merely a coincidence.

That “color-blind” view of the Constitution has been growing less and less popular among academic leftists. It now has an explicit opponent on the Supreme Court.

Yesterday the Court heard a redistricting case, Merrill v. Milligan. As recounted by Ed Whelan, freshman Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson “capped her very long questioning of Alabama solicitor general Edmund LaCour with a speech/question that went on for around four minutes and that runs a full three pages (57:2-60:2) in the transcript”. Her conclusion was that the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments (the latter at issue in the case) are not “race-neutral or race-blind” and should be applied in a “race-conscious” way. Her argument for that proposition perfectly paralleled the old one against Brown: Some legislation passed immediately after the Civil War benefited only blacks (not surprisingly, since there were no white slaves). Hence, race-conscious government actions that benefit blacks simply because of their race are constitutional today.

This amateur attempt at originalist analysis is well-dissected by Mr. Whelan. I want only to take note of the underlying assumption: that “race” is so integral to human existence that the government can’t and shouldn’t ignore it; all that is possible is to see that the different races are treated equally (or, in more recent discussion, “equitably”, which in practice means unequally).

If our country acts on that assumption – and that certainly seems to be the direction in which we are headed – we can anticipate the same fruits that Thomas Sowell discovered when he surveyed Affirmative Action Around the World: As the government makes racial classifications (which in America are astonishingly arbitrary) central to its policies, society will divide more and more into self-conscious castes with strong motives to watch one another suspiciously, lest any snatch advantages or opportunities from the others. That isn’t a likely prescription for a happy future.

Further Reading: Paul Mirengoff, “Justice Jackson, doing the job she was hired to do”

De Abortione Nil Nisi Bonum

Blonde is a biopic about Marilyn Monroe. (One critic insists that it shouldn’t be called a “biopic”, because it is based on a novel, but the number of historically accurate Hollywood biopics can be counted on the fingers of a man whose hands have been amputated, so I think the term is good enough here.) In the course of the movie, the protagonist has two abortions, each coerced. Before the second, she has a vision of her unborn child, who begs, “You won’t hurt me this time, will you?”

Planned Parenthood is outraged by the scene, declaring, “As film and TV shapes many people’s understanding of sexual and reproductive health, it’s critical these depictions accurately portray women’s real decisions and experiences.” In the eyes of the organization’s “national director of arts and entertainment engagement”, there is evidently nothing “real” about a woman’s anguish at being forced to end her child’s life.

This is but one small aperçu into the contemporary pro-abortion mentality: Abortion is no longer presented as a difficult personal choice to which women turn only as a last resort but as something so benign that nothing ill can be said concerning it.

Another, more appalling bit of evidence showed up in my e-mail inbox today. It was sent to a mailing list that I happen to be on, and the writer was a clergyman. I’m not going to identify him or his denomination, because I cannot believe that he truly believes what he wrote. He begins by noting that the Supreme Court repudiated Roe v. Wade shortly before its fiftieth year and that, in the Old Testament, every fiftieth year was a “Jubilee Year”, in which debts were canceled, land returned to those from whom it had been taken and slaves set free.

The clergyman discerns an ironic inversion of the Biblical Jubilee. “This year, in a stunning reversal, hundreds of millions [sic] of Americans who are pregnant or concerned about becoming so unintentionally, find themselves in the same dire legal situation their foremothers occupied fifty years ago. This reversion does not liberate; as the dissenting justices [in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization] stress, it oppresses. A jubilee turned against itself, twisted into elegy.”

No summary of the Jubilee’s moral vision is [a] more succinct or more accurate summary than “liberty and equality”: slaves are freed and land is redistributed, erasing a half-century’s accumulated divergence of wealth. The Bible’s dream of liberty, born in Leviticus 25:10’s cry to “Proclaim Liberty Throughout All the Land Unto All the Inhabitants thereof,” arrived on these shores in the inscription of those very words on the hallowed Liberty Bell. The dissenting justices recognize this same liberty, first spoken into being at Sinai, in access to abortion: reproductive rights are a direct descendant and present-day expression of the Jubilee’s program for human equality and freedom. . . .

Abortion – as a choice in the fullness of a life, and all the more so as a shared moral, religious, and political reality – unites the tectonic biological, spiritual, moral, and political dimensions of human existence.

I forbear to quote more from this Molochian tirade. It has a parallel from our country’s past. Some supporters of ante bellum slavery were not content to defend the practice as a “necessary evil”. They argued that it was a “positive good”, that the world was a better place because of it. Similarly, the clergyman just quoted proclaims abortion as an expression of “human equality and freedom”.

Yet there is a difference. Slavery’s “positive good” school contended that slavery was also good for the slaves, that they led better lives under the lash than in their African homelands. That was preposterous, but it was at least a backhanded recognition of the humanity of the enslaved.

The champions of abortion “as a choice in the fullness of a life, and all the more so as a shared moral, religious, and political reality” utterly cast aside the victims of their quasi-sacrament, who are obliterated from human care, consigned not just to non-personhood but to nonexistence.

As I said earlier, I cannot believe that this clergyman is so indifferent in his heart to “the least of these my brethren”. Why he will write what he must know to be a lie is beyond my comprehension. It is a sign of the sad state of our world that he is not unique.

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?

“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.

 

Is America Underpoliced?

A study in the American Journal of Law and Equality (hat tip to Dominic Pino) argues the that answer is “yes”. “The Injustice of Under-Policing in America” by Christopher Lewis and Adaner Usmani concludes that the United States should add another half million police officers to the 700,000 that it already has. That isn’t an effusion of “law and order” fundamentalism. As its name suggests, the American Journal of Law and Equality is no bastion of right-wing thought, and the authors are Harvard professors, one of whom is a regular contributor to the Marxist Jacobin web site.

The heart of the study is a series of comparisons between the United States and a sample of “high-income countries with large populations” (Australia, Austria, Belgium, Canada, Finland, France, Germany, Greece, Italy, Japan, the Netherlands, Portugal, and Spain). The U.S. has a far higher ratio of prisoners to population than any of those countries, a fact that leads progressives to argue that our country is over-policed.

But is it? Instead of comparing prisoners and police to total population, the authors compare them to the number of homicides (which they argue is the best available proxy for the overall rate of serious crime).

One immediately sees something different. Now, America’s outlying level of incarceration looks relatively ordinary. Its prisoner/homicide ratio is a little higher than the developed-world median, but not by much. No less stark is the fact that its police/homicide ratio now appears exceedingly low. That is, if denominated by the level of serious crime, America is not normally policed but rather under-policed. America has about one-ninth the number of police officers, per homicide, than does the median developed country. [bolded emphasis added]

The numbers are 43 policemen per homicide in the U.S., 381 in the other countries. (In Chicago, by the way, the ratio is about 15 policemen per homicide.) The smaller U.S. police force isn’t lazy about its job either. It clears a much smaller percentage of homicide cases –

Yet this does not seem to be, as reformers imagine, because police in the United States are exceptionally focused on nonserious offenses. Consider one measure of police focus: the number of homicide arrests made per police officer. The clearance rate (homicide arrests/homicide) is the product of police focus (homicide arrests/police) and the police footprint (police/homicide). The conventional view of policing in the United States suggests that the problem with America’s clearance rate is that footprint is high, but focus is low. In fact, as Figure 3 suggests, the converse is true: footprint is low, but focus is high.

The authors also show that a low number of police per homicide correlates with a high rate of civilians killed by police, though they aren’t sure about whether causation can be inferred from that correlation.

The authors’ proposal is that the United States should aim for what they call “First World Balance”: “shift[ing] resources from incarceration to policing until the balance between the two looks more like the balance in the rest of the developed world”.

The United States today has almost three times as many prisoners as police officers. If it raised no revenue but simply used the money saved by cutting prison populations to hire police officers until the ratio was the same as the ratio in the developed world (about 3.4 times as many police officers as prisoners), the new United States would have about 370,000 prisoners and 1.1 million police officers. That is, the First World Balance, if implemented in the United States, would be a society with about 1.9 million fewer prisoners and almost half a million more police officers.

It’s not feasible, of course, to make a change like that by a simple shift of resources. The reason (though perhaps not the only reason) why crime rates are low in well-policed First World societies is that policing reduces crime by increasing its cost to criminals. (The authors agree and present supporting data.) Therefore, “First World Balance” requires a sharp increase in police numbers first. The prisons will become less well-populated as more active policing takes effect, and heightened deterrence will make it possible to reconsider prison sentences and, more important, the conditions in which prisoners are held.

The greatest beneficiaries of such a change would be the black urban poor, who suffer the most from crime. It is encouraging to see that at least some liberals are starting to realize that black criminals are the enemies of the black community.

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.

Conclusive Proof That the Democrats Are Desperate to the Point of Despair

Notwithstanding Glenn Reynolds’s reiterated admonition, an e-mail that I received today from the Democratic Senate Campaign Committee leads me to believe that the Dems themselves see their 2022 election prospects as nil and declining. Shrieking about the Supreme Court’s supposedly impending rejection of same-sex marriage, interracial marriage and contraception evidently is not enough to nudge the polls in the right (i. e., left) direction, so the DSCC wails this screed (all italics and boldface in the original):

ALERT: Experts warn that Social Security could be on the Supreme Court's chopping block

Team, by overturning Roe v. Wade, the Supreme Court just proved that NOTHING is safe from the conservative justices’ right-wing rampage.

In fact, experts warn that Social Security could be in danger, too. During her confirmation hearings, Amy Coney Barrett famously REFUSED to say if Social Security was constitutional – and if the Court strikes it down, 65 million Americans will LOSE the benefits they earned.

We can’t risk losing this bedrock of Americans' retirement, so we’ve launched an urgent Live Poll to PROVE that the American people support upholding Social Security – but we’re still short 37 responses in your area!

The “experts” consulted by the DSCC, whoever they may be, seem to believe that Social Security, like the right to abortion in Roe v. Wade, was created by the Supreme Court out of “emanations and penumbras” rather than by an act of Congress that was held, in the ordinary course of litigation, to fall within the enumerated powers of the legislative branch.

Next comes, I suppose, the warning that the Court is on the verge of deifying Donald Trump and commanding all citizens to sacrifice doves on his altar.

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.

Dobbs: The Left’s Share of the Credit

Donald Trump has demanded credit for the Supreme Court’s overthrow of the infanticidal regime of Roe v. Wade, and various dexterosphere mememasters have had fun at the expense of conservative commentators who praise Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization without mentioning the man who appointed three of the five Justices who rendered it.

Feeling that it is bad form to lambaste someone for doing what you want, I’m willing to commend Mr. Trump, but it is only fair to offer a modicum of thanks to the people who impelled the former President’s appointments, namely, the Hysteriac Left.

At a moment of crisis during the 1848 revolution in France, a leading politician is said to have exclaimed, “There go the people. I must follow them, for I am their leader.” Donald Trump’s service to the pro-life movement was in much the same spirit:

Donald Trump was, until he decided he wanted the Republican presidential nomination, an across-the-board social progressive: not only pro-abortion but “very pro-choice” in his own words, a supporter of gay marriage, a supporter of left-wing gun-control proposals, etc. . . . When Trump was asked what kind of justice he’d nominate for the Supreme Court, he suggested his sister – who is not exactly Clarence Thomas.

When friends asked me in 2016 why I wasn’t going to vote for The Donald (or, needless to say, for his crooked opponent), I answered that Trump had no credibility as a conservative and prided himself on having mastered “the art of the deal”. Once in office, he would inevitably follow the easy and attractive course of negotiating with Chuck Schumer and Nancy Pelosi to produce about the same results as the election of Hillary Clinton would have yielded. The deals would, of course, include “compromise” judicial nominees who wouldn’t disturb the “living Constitution” status quo.

And why didn’t that happen? Why did a man who had spent his business career treating promises like pie crusts suddenly stop breaking them? Could it have had something to do with the fact that leftists rioted and denounced him as a contemporary Adolf Hitler even before he took the oath of office? The most artistic deal maker has trouble working with materials like that.

So the newly installed President turned to the “establishment Republicans” whom he had mocked mercilessly during the primaries. “Conservatism, Inc.” was willing to overlook his faults in return for inter alia follow-through on judicial nominations. The upshot was the addition of Justices Gorsuch, Kavanaugh and Comey to the Court and the demise of Roe. None of which would have happened if the Left had been willing and able to subordinate its hatreds to its interests. Let me extend a hearty “thank you”.

“The End, Perhaps, of the Beginning”

After hearing news of the victory at El Alamein, Winston Churchill responded, “Now this is not the end. It is not even the beginning of the end. But it is, perhaps, the end of the beginning.” That is my sense of the significance of the Supreme Court’s overruling of Roe v. Wade, the 20th Century’s counterpart to Dred Scott v. Sandford. Just as Justice Taney opined that black men had no rights that a white man was bound to respect, Justice Blackmun dismissed the humanity of very young human beings, whether they were black or white or any other hue.

The Court has now corrected the notion that the Constitution stands for that proposition, but it refrained from trying to do more than is possible for a court. It did not declare that the Fifth and Fourteenth Amendments protect the lives of the unborn. That would have been as impracticable as it would have been for Justices McLean and Curtis, the dissenters in Dred Scott, had they been the majority, to hold that the Constitution forbade slavery.

The killing of the unborn is, sad to say, commonplace in modern society, as common and unthinkingly accepted as infanticide was among the ancient Greeks and Romans. Looking at it as is it and seeing what it involves requires new and better moral eyes, a vision that perceives what many people would prefer to ignore. Only when we recognize human beings as our brothers and sisters, without regard to their age, will abortion become unthinkable.

So Much for John Adams

Following the now almost forgotten event that was known as “9/11”, the U.S. government took action against a variety of individuals and groups who seemed highly sympathetic to the idea of overthrowing the current Constitutional order and replacing it with something else. One might almost label them “insurrectionists”. They were unpopular among large segments of the American public but had the good fortune to receive first rate legal counsel. Major law firms defended accused Islamofascists pro bono and responded to criticism by pointing to the example of John Adams, who appeared in court in behalf of the British soldiers charged with carrying out the “Boston Massacre” and secured acquittals of most of them. Adams was at that time engaged in polemics against the British Crown, yet he believed that the Crown’s agents were entitled to the services of lawyers.

Times have changed. It’s now an article of faith among the “wokened” segment of the legal profession that representing certain defendants is a blot on a lawyer’s character, if not grounds for disbarment. Today we saw a striking instance of that view. In the morning, the Supreme Court held “that the Second and Fourteenth Amendments protect an individual’s right to carry a handgun for self-defense outside the home”. On that basis, it struck down New York’s requirement that citizens must demonstrate “a special need for self-defense” in order to obtain licenses to carry firearms anywhere but in their own residences.

Arguing the case for the plaintiff gun owners was Paul Clement, one of the most eminent of Supreme Court advocates. When the Court announced its decision, he was a partner in Kirkland & Ellis LLP, one of the world’s largest law firms. The firm’s reaction to his victory in this high profile case wasn’t to congratulate him. Instead, it announced that it will “no longer represent clients with respect to matters involving the interpretation of the Second Amendment” and will withdraw from pending cases, leaving its clients to find new lawyers.

“We [Mr. Clement and another partner, Erin Murphy] were given a stark choice: either withdraw from ongoing representations or withdraw from the firm,” Clement said in a statement. "Anyone who knows us and our views regarding professional responsibility and client loyalty knows there was only one course open to us: We could not abandon ongoing representations just because a client's position is unpopular in some circles.”

The two ousted lawyers announced that they will form a new law firm and will take over the representations that Kirkland & Ellis, evidently without a thought for the interests of the clients, is abandoning. How its action can be reconciled with the rules of legal ethics is a mystery to me, but we can be sure that the firm won’t have to endure the slightest rebuke from the legal Brahmins who rushed twenty years ago to defend inmates at Guantanamo.

An Incident in the Cloisters of the Woke

Have you ever dreamed of belonging to the woke nomenklatura, of being free to harass and bully the deplorables to your heart’s content? It sounds like a wonderful life, and many of your contemporaries have chosen it. But before you join them, listen to this true tale. (Caveat: You may or may not be able to worm your way into the web site. If you can’t, the following summary furnishes all the pertinent facts.)

Facebook hosts a private group called “Law Mamas”. Its members are female lawyers with children, and it reportedly has 13,000 members, though it is now closed to new entrants. Krista joined in 2016, shortly before the birth of the first of her three children. The group was then accepting members, but, quite appropriately, Krista had to wait nine months before she was admitted.

Krista describes herself as a “liberal Democrat”, but she had a dark secret. One of her children went into anaphylactic shock some years ago after being vaccinated (not for Covid). That didn’t turn her into an anti-vaxxer but did lead her to weigh benefits versus risks. When the topic of Covid vaccines for very young children arose on Law Mamas, she offered her opinion:

I’m obviously in the minority here. But I’m not even remotely interested in my 2/4/5 year olds getting a covid vaccine. The relative/absolute risk is so low for this group I couldn’t justify it. I’m pretty crunchy generally, but especially with stuff like this. Totally respect everyone’s choice and Glad it’s our choice to make. It’s all so hard.

Note the defensive tone. Perhaps she had already gained some insight into what a Law Mama is really like.

The backlash came quickly. One of the group’s moderators replied: “This was unnecessary and triggering. You know you are in the vast minority in this group and it’s not a hard decision for most of us. … This is not the group to provide your opinion on this much more deny the statistics.

What “statistics” was Krista denying? According to 2020 World Health Organization data for the world as a whole, children under five years old accounted for about two million Covid-19 cases and fewer than 2,000 Covid deaths. Put another way, if young children contract the disease, their chance of death is on the order of one in a thousand. Other data indicate that their risk of hospitalization is likewise vanishingly low. But woke facts are whatever the wokerati assert. Statistical analysis is just another form of white supremacy.

Within a few minutes after she posted her heresy, Krista was expelled from Law Mamas. Another member then complained, “Hey, I don’t love that we all just kicked out this girl from our group for making the statement.” She was expelled, too.

After that, one presumes, the Law Mamas returned to denouncing the intolerant ways of Republicans and trembling at the descent of fascism on America.

Progressive Caesaropapism

For progressives, “separation of church and state” means that religious believers must forgo all attempts to influence what the state does. Secular believers have no corresponding duty to refrain from demanding that the church submit to their preferences. Accordingly, leftists are loudly condemning the Roman Catholic Archbishop of San Francisco, the Most Rev. Salvatore Cordileone, for directing the priests in his diocese to refuse the sacrament of communion to Nancy Pelosi. Whoopi Goldberg, whose theological expertise derives from playing a nun in the movies, said of the Archbishop’s action, “This is not your job, dude.” Other progressive voices were less calm and restrained.

The San Francisco Examiner forthrightly demanded that Pope Francis sack the archbishop for holding and propagating opinions that deviate from progressive orthodoxy. The church, it declares, ought to be “a place that welcomes people of all political backgrounds and all faiths” (emphasis added).

There’s half a truth in that statement; no one should be told that he is so sin-ridden that he can never be a Christian. But the other half is that the essential precondition for membership in the Body of Christ is acceptance of the doctrines of the Faith, and Holy Communion is, for Roman Catholics and other Christians, no mere gesture signifying self-identification with the church. Rather, it has tremendous consequences for the soul. As the Orthodox prayer before partaking the sacrament expresses it, “May the communion of thy holy mysteries be neither to my judgment nor to my condemnation, O Lord, but to the healing of soul and body.”

Archbishop Cordileone would not object to Speaker Pelosi’s lighting a candle or kissing an icon or joining in coffee hour after mass, but he is mindful of the fact that those who receive the sacrament risk “judgment” and “condemnation” if they partake it while alienated from the Faith. From his point of view, keeping an impenitent advocate of abortion away from communion is no more a punishment than keeping a child’s hand away from the fire.

The Speaker obviously sees matters entirely differently. She has made clear her belief that abortion in a fundamental human right and has exerted all of her political power to turn that belief into the law of the land. In doing so, she disagrees with Christian teaching that dates back to the earliest period of church history. In the Epistle of Barnabas, written around the end of the First Century A.D., one reads, “You shall not slay the child by procuring abortion; nor, again, shall you destroy it after it is born.” Slightly later, Athenagoras of Athens, a philosopher who had converted to Christianity, writes that Christians “regard the very fetus in the womb as a created being, and therefore an object of God's care” and “say that those women who use drugs to bring on abortion commit murder, and will have to give an account to God for the abortion”. Indeed, in all the writing of all the Church Fathers, one can find not just no favorable word about abortion but nary a neutral one.

To the Caesaropapists of the Left, the Fathers are just a bunch of dead white males (probably racists) whose opinions are entitled to no deference even within the church cloisters. When someone like Archbishop Cordileone deprecates killing small, innocent human beings, he fails, according to his detractors, to realize that those beings may belong to “populations that we don't want to have too many of”, and he inadequately honors the progressive-secular doctrine that adult and adolescent humans have an absolute right to dispose of the lives of infants until at least the moment of birth.

Progressives are here a mirror image of theocrats. One would purge Christian doctrine from the Christian church, the other make it paramount in secular politics. The essence of “separation of church and state” is that both are wrong, that we should address all issues using the tools appropriate for them. Political authorities can’t be expected to bow to the naked ipse dixit of ecclesiastical authority, nor do Christians expect them to. The pro-life position rests on two fundamental principles: that unborn children are human beings and that killing human beings, except in very limited circumstances, is morally wrong. Those are principles that are widely agreed outside the ranks of churchgoers.

By contrast, Whoopi Goldbeg and the San Francisco Examiner believe that the church has no right to limit its holiest mysteries to those who accept the truth of Christianity. “Welcome all faiths” means nothing more than “Stop practicing you own”.

A Progressive Path to Madness

A brand new Substack blog, Ringside at the Reckoning (very much worth your time), calls attention to a paper by a progressive law professor who unapologetically espouses the idea that moral responsibility doesn’t exist, from which he concludes that although “society must obviously protect itself from dangerous people”, it ought not to punish them for their misdeeds. I quote the abstract, which, as the saying goes, must be seen to be disbelieved:

Modern criminal justice presupposes that persons are not morally equal. On the contrary, those who do wrong are viewed by the law as less worthy of respect, concern and decent treatment: Offenders, it is said, “deserve” to suffer for their misdeeds. Yet, there is scant logical or empirical basis for the law’s supposition that offenders are morally inferior. The usual reasoning is that persons who intentionally or knowingly do wrong are the authors and initiators of their acts and, as such, are morally responsible for them. But this reasoning rests on the assumption that a person’s mental states, such as intentions, can cause physical effects (bodily movements) – a factual assumption that is at odds with the evidence of neuroscience and whose only empirical support rests on a fallacious logical inference (post hoc ergo propter hoc). There is, in fact, no evidence that mental states like intentions have anything to do with causing the bodily movements that constitute behavior. Nonetheless, the mental-cause basis for moral responsibility, though it rests on a false factual inference, has enormous implications for criminal justice policy.

While society must obviously protect itself from dangerous people, it does not have to torment them. The imperative to punish, a dominant theme of criminal justice policy, is not supported by evidence or logic, and it violates basic moral equality.

So what does cause our actions? Some force, evidently, external to ourselves of which we are unaware. If that is so, someone who inflicts punishment is no more responsible for his actions than is the criminal being punished. Therefore, it is absurd to chastise him for violating “basic moral equality”.

The author is, in fact, aware of this objection and addresses it briefly at the end of his paper. He offers two arguments: first, that acts can be moral or immoral even if the actors have no responsibility for them; second, that humans “are conscious beings that have rich phenomenological lives” and therefore are different from puppets.

Neither of those points impresses me as pertinent.

No one attaches moral significance to events, such as hurricanes, volcanic eruptions and meteor strikes, that have no morally responsible agent as their cause. If a thunderstorm isn’t blameworthy, because no conscious agent caused it (unless you believe in Zeus or Thor), and if crime and punishment are likewise without conscious cause, what sense does it make to assign moral categories to them?

The second argument is simply beside the point. If a man’s mental states don’t cause his acts, what difference, from a moral point of view, does the quality of those mental states make? Suppose that a human being with a rich phenomenological life, one immersed in complex thoughts and feelings, murders a child or executes a murderer. Suppose that a lion kills and devours a gazelle. If the human’s thoughts and feelings did not cause his acts, can he or they be judged differently from the lion and what it did?

Moreover, we have no evidence of the nature of mental states other than our own. How do you know that you are not the only conscious, self-aware being in the universe? The others may be robots with no inner feelings at all. In any case, their putative mental states, rich or impoverished, do not, on the author’s view, cause anything and can give no moral color to any act.

While I won’t claim that the author doesn’t believe his own argument – men believe all manner of bizarre notions – I am very confident that he doesn’t live his life as if it were true. No one could. If we do not believe that we are the makers of our own deeds, we have no reason to care what we do, for all of our acts are merely things that happen to us, over which we have no control. It is impossible even to imagine believing that; indeed, the belief would be indistinguishable from madness.

The Post-Roe Parade of Horribles

For some days now, progressive commentators have been regaling us with lists of the horrible laws that states will be able to pass if the Supreme Court overturns Roe v. Wade. Those lists strike me as much too timid. There is much more that Congress and the state legislatures could enact in a post-Roe environment. They could, for instance –

• abolish Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid and all other welfare and social insurance programs,
• reverse the income tax brackets, so that the higher one’s income, the lower one’s tax rate,
• halt immigration,
• outlaw electric vehicles,
• forbid wearing masks in public places,
• ban the sale of alcoholic beverages,
• require all businesses to close on Sunday (or any other day of the week),
• and much, much more.

But lawmakers don’t have to wait for Roe’s demise to do all that. Every one of those actions is possible right now. The U.S. Constitution established a structure of government and contains a small number of prohibitions against particular government actions. The framers didn’t try to foresee and prohibit every unwise law that might ever be dreamed up in legislative chambers, nor did they set up a board of philosopher-kings to strike down folly. One of the consequences of popular rule is that “the people” are no more immune than any individual to stupidity, fanaticism, ignorance and bigotry.

Though progressives talk incessantly these days about “saving our democracy”, they display diminishing confidence in the demos and increasing unwillingness to accept the possibility that it might reject their preferred policies. Hence they look to the philosopher-kings for salvation and are appalled when the kings disappoint them. “Our democracy” is evidently so precious to them that they want to keep it out of sight.

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”.