Stephen Miller time in the Trump admin

 

It’s Stephen Miller time in the Trump admin!

The threatened media and Dems are already spreading misinformation

 Michael Goodwin, California Post

There’s bad press, and then there’s the coverage of Stephen Miller’s promotion.

In making Miller his new chief of staff, President Trump unleashed an avalanche of pent-up resentment toward his new top aide.

The cruelest cut came from Rep. Hakeem Jeffries, the Democrats’ House leader who wants to be the next speaker.

He said his team would not work with Miller, whom he labeled a “stone cold racist.”

The outrageous slander said more about the embattled Jeffries than it does Miller.

Still, there is no arguing with the reasonable view that the new White House chief’s style is not one that ­endears.

Miller is whip smart and has a voluminous knowledge of government, laws and court precedents on immigration, all of which he routinely unloads on questioners in a machine-gun cadence.

His demeanor often conveys contempt and his habit of talking down to people has made him a favorite whipping boy for Dems and their media handmaidens.

Don still in charge

Part of that reaction stems from the fact that Miller is the ultimate Trump loyalist and has been with the president since the 2016 campaign.

As far back as his college days at Duke, Miller had a laser-like focus on immigration, which was long before Trump entered politics.

As such, Miller’s promotion from policy deputy to former chief of staff Susie Wiles to her replacement seems almost inevitable.

To judge from the river of bile flowing his way, detractors assume Miller will usurp all of Trump’s responsibility to set the agenda, and will be the only White House contact for the Dem congressional majority.

As The New York Times put it in a bizarre front-page headline, “Miller pursues agenda voters have rejected.”

Memo to the Gray Lady: Trump will remain president for the next two years, and the Dem Congress will not control the government.

Some of the anti-Miller hyperbole reflects how the president’s harshest critics tend to see the aide as a reflection of what they regard as Trump’s inner darkness.

Indeed, Trump himself has admitted agent mistakes in a few cases that involved shootings and promises to dial back aggressive actions.

Yet it is only fair to see Miller in other crucial ways because the personal dislike for him overshadows three key points.

First, he has never been a policy maker, and while he has served as an adviser of Trump’s immigration stances, he doesn’t make the policy he is called upon to explain and defend.

Second, it is critical to remember that Trump’s consistent hard-line on immigration is a major reason why he was first elected in 2016, and again in 2024.

In both cases voters, among other things, wanted a sharp change from years of lax border enforcement.

Inherited disaster

The third point is that the immigration disaster Trump inherited in his second term was not seen as crucial by Dems or the lefty media, and still isn’t.

They supported Joe Biden’s open-border policy, which was a total disaster.

The numbers alone remain staggering.

Biden’s decision to open the gates to 12 million or more illegals, without any assessment of who they were and how they would support themselves created an unprecedented problem that remains unsolved.

The 12 million or more entries dwarfs all historical comparisons.

A prior era of mass migration, the 30-year period from 1890 to 1920, saw about 18 million immigrants come to America.

To think that anywhere near those numbers could be seamlessly absorbed in a four-year term a century later is insane.

In fact, it’s not clear even Biden believed the influx could be managed.

Although he appeared to be concerned about the policy he supposedly had approved, his response was to make his incompetent vice president, Kamala Harris, the border czar.

The president said nothing as she dodged the assignment after a few fumbles.

Biden’s director of Homeland Security, Alejandro Mayorkas, consistently claimed to Congress that the border was safe and secure, even as drugs and migrants flowed in like a river.

For his lies and inaction, Mayorkas was impeached by a divided House of Representatives on charges that accused him of “willful and systemic refusal to comply with the law,” but the move was rejected by the Senate.

Exhibit A: NYC

Meanwhile, no Dem official in any blue state complained about the endless surge of unemployed and often unemployable men showing up in their cities.

Take New York’s then mayor, Eric Adams, who threw open Gotham’s doors to all comers.

His only complaint was to call Texas Republicans racists because they were sending buses full of migrants to New York and other blue cities.

The Republicans had a clear purpose — to share the pain and cost so those mayors would lobby Biden to close the border.

Adams’ only demand even as Midtown Manhattan was flooded was that Albany and Washington help fund his extravagant Welcome Wagon, which included free housing, food, transportation, education and medical care.

According to estimates, the city and state spent a combined $15 billion over a four-year period on the illegal newcomers — and many expenses are ongoing.

In his 2024 campaign, Trump repeatedly targeted ballooning costs, the ignorance about who the newcomers were, and cases of violent crime and murders committed by illegals.

There was no serious counterargument, just the Dems’ usual knee-jerk charges of racism and xenophobia, all of which were amplified by left-wing media.

Those outlets embraced the cases of high-profile illegal immigrants Trump tried to deport.

A telling example involved Kilmar Abrego Garcia, which most of the media identified as simply a “Maryland man” who was “wrongly deported.”

In fact, he was in the US illegally, and authorities believed he was a member of the deadly MS-13 gang, a human trafficker, and wife-beater.

Similarly, attempts to deport foreign students who engaged in anti-Israel protests and riots were met with hysteria.

Back to the future

Trump, in a 2023 campaign speech, laid out what his policies would be and cited the Hamas invasion of Israel that year.

He declared that “we’ll terminate the visas of all of those Hamas sympathizers, and we’ll get them off our college campuses, out of our cities and get them the hell out of our country.”

The Times countered those promises with a hysteria of its own making.

In a reflection of the paper’s anti-Trump agenda, a headline on a column by radical writer Michelle Goldberg declared that the Mahmoud Khalil case “Is the Greatest Threat to Free Speech Since the Red Scare.”

The approach allowed little or no coverage of cases where illegal migrants were charged with murders, rapes and other horrific crimes.

Now that Miller is Trump’s top gun and Dems control Congress, what’s old will be new again.

Don’t be shocked when the energized left demands open borders.

Genocide Hypocrites

Genocide Hypocrites

Victor Davis Hanson, Jewish World Review

On October 7, 2023, Hamas killers slaughtered 1,200 people, more than two-thirds of them civilians, inside Israel. For the ensuing three weeks, they refused Israel’s demands to turn over the 251 hostages and to surrender the architects of the massacre. No matter — within a day of the attacks, when Hamas gunmen were still fighting Israeli troops on Israeli soil, the American Left was already screaming "genocide!"

They did not mean Hamas’s intended genocide of Jews, a foretaste of which was seen when it launched a surprise invasion force of more than 4,000 terrorists some 15 miles into Israel. The killers were accompanied by some 2,000 "innocent" Gazan "civilians." All were bent on looting, murder, rape, torture, and hostage-taking of the defenseless.

Nor did the "genocide" chorus refer to the more than 13,000 rockets, missiles, and drones launched from Gaza after October 7 that predominantly targeted Israeli civilian neighborhoods.

What was most surreal about the charges of "genocide" against Israel — along with all the other slurs of "settler-colonialism," "apartheid," "occupation," "war crimes" — was that they so often came from elite first- and second-generation Middle Eastern immigrants to America. Yet these prominent American accusers have remained silent about whether their lurid accusations might far better reflect the sordid histories of their own homelands.

Take the Turkish-American anchor baby Hasan Piker, the millionaire podcaster who has dual citizenship and grew up in Turkey. Piker has gained celebrity as the socialist heartthrob who is the brain of the new Democratic/Socialist/Islamist alliance. Besides his antisemitic rants, he has declared that "America deserved 9/11" and "Oh God, I f-ing hate America so much."

Yet the outspoken Piker has only once in passing mentioned Turkey’s 1974 invasion and the half-century-long occupation of nearly 40 percent of Cyprus.

Nor did Piker, who damns the creation of Israel in 1948, ever say a word about the Turkish torching of the historic Greek-majority Ionian city of Smyrna in 1922, in which tens of thousands of civilians were incinerated.

Given Piker’s supposedly vast historical recall and outspoken human rights advocacy, one would at least expect him to be sensitive to the horror of Turkey’s Armenian genocide, in which Turkish troops slaughtered more than one million civilians, and for which the Turkish government still denies any culpability. But when once challenged by Armenian-Americans, he dismissed them, saying flippantly, "It’s more fun to enrage you."

And the pattern goes beyond mere podcasters.

Representative Ilhan Omar, a first-generation immigrant from Somalia, also brays loudly about supposed Israeli war crimes. Omar spouts "genocide" and "apartheid" in her frequently antisemitic rants. She has also labeled her adopted nation as "one of the worst countries" in the world.

But Omar is the daughter of a well-known colonel in the truly genocidal army of Somali dictator Siad Barre. The latter waged a decade-long war of extermination against the rival Isaaq clan that opposed Barre’s 21-year-long dictatorship. Estimates of the Barre regime’s murderous toll range from 50,000 to 200,000 killed, mostly civilians. Few in Omar’s politically active Somali immigrant community ever concede that many fled Somalia to America only when Barre’s two-decade reign of terror was finally overthrown, and they feared retaliation from his victims.

Of course, the nation’s biggest elected leftist rising star has also joined in.

Zohran Mamdani, mayor of New York City, employs the same tired anti-Israeli and anti-American verbiage. Yet he went further than other antisemites when he launched grandstanding threats to jail Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu any time the latter visited New York to address the United Nations.

For America’s 250th birthday, Mamdani’s July 3 "commemorative" address blasted American "monopolies that dominate every industry," federal agents supposedly "terrorizing our streets," and a country where we "sell our elections to the highest bidder." The calumny was odd coming from a dual citizen of the police state of Uganda, where there are no real elections but lots of Indian "monopolies."

Indeed, Mamdani himself better fits his own charges of "settler-colonist" and "apartheid." His Indian community in Uganda comprises less than 0.1% of the population. But somehow it still accounts for over 60% of Uganda’s GDP. It was implanted there by 19th-century British imperialists as a "settler-colonial" community to help control the indigenous black population.

In short, we should remind these privileged ingrates — regardless of what corner of the world they hail from — to look inward before they blast their adopted country and not to project the sins of their own homelands upon either Israel or America.

Victor Davis Hanson is the Martin and Illie Anderson Senior Fellow in Residence in Classics and Military History at the Hoover Institution, a professor of classics emeritus at California State University at Fresno, and a nationally syndicated columnist for Tribune Media Services. 

Strange Racist, Nikole Hannah-Jones

 

The strange racial solidarity of Nikole Hannah-Jones

Rich Lowry, Jewish World Review

The New York Times writer Nikole Hannah-Jones thought she was making her educational choices to favor the interests of black people, and she was -- just the wrong ones.

In a long essay for The New York Times Magazine, the radical African American journalist writes about how her decision to send her daughter to dreadful New York City public schools for ideological reasons ended in tears.

Jones, who achieved notoriety as the lead editor of the paper's 1619 Project, believed that putting her daughter in rotten elementary and middle schools would strike a blow for racial equity.

In her view, it's unfair that so many black kids are trapped in underperforming New York City schools, and if she trapped her own daughter in them, she and her husband -- with their superior wherewithal -- could make the schools better for everyone.

What started as a project motivated by a savior complex ended as essentially an episode of educational Munchausen syndrome by proxy.

Her bright young daughter fell far behind where she could have been academically.

Most parents who are paying attention and who have the means would immediately get a kid out of a school where there are fights during the lunch period, where there is no homework, where the principal and teachers are routinely absent, and where school work isn't graded -- but Nikole Hannah-Jones persisted.

By the time her daughter was old enough to realize what was going on and force her mother to let her apply to better high schools, she didn't know algebra despite getting excellent grades in math at the subpar schools.

Hannah-Jones should be furious at the adults who failed her daughter so abysmally, but she's, in effect, still on their side by portraying school choice as a racist scam and complaining about a lack of resources.

The New York City officials, administrators, principals and teachers who are blighting the futures of young people aren't white supremacists; by and large, they agree with Nikole Hannah-Jones politically and many of them are African American.

You can either be with them, and their narrow interest in protecting the school system from serious challenges, or with the kids.

Hannah-Jones is in a version of the same conundrum as the Black Lives Matter activists who believed it was "anti-racist" to agitate against the police. Then, when they got their way and the police stepped back, more black people were killed.

Here it is supposedly "anti-racist" to keep everyone in disorderly, incompetent public schools -- and the victims are black children who have no idea of how little they've learned until it's too late.

This is a strange form of racial solidarity.

There is no doubt that schools have a tougher job when they have a high population of disadvantaged students. But the problem is not funding, as Hannah-Jones suggests. Studies from the centrist Brookings Institution note both that high-poverty, non-white districts spend more per pupil than lower-poverty districts, and that higher spending doesn't ensure better results.

The Success Academy charter schools in New York City have shown that disadvantaged kids can thrive when there's an old-fashioned mix of high expectations, strict discipline and rigorous instruction -- in other words, what the traditional public schools, mired in a self-interested, unaccountable bureaucracy, can't deliver.

When she sent her daughter to failing schools, Nikole Hannah-Jones imagined herself acting in the tradition of pioneering parents during the civil rights movement who sent their children through their mobs to integrate whites-only schools. Those parents desperately wanted a better education for their kids, though, whereas Hannah-Jones fed her daughter into terrible public schools in the forlorn hope that maybe she'd be OK. If not, at least Hannah-Jones had steered her clear of competitive schools with lots of white and Asian kids.

That, of course, was a perverse priority. The famous line is that a neoconservative is a liberal mugged by reality. The New York City public schools mugged Nikole Hannah-Jones, and yet she still doesn't want to press charges.

SUPREMES SIDE WITH TRUMP

 

SUPREMES SIDE WITH TRUMP ADMINISTRATION IN VOTING CASE

John Hinderacker, Powerline

Yesterday, the Supreme Court issued a per curiam order staying a district court order that had blocked the Trump administration from implementing an election security measure. The case is Department of Homeland Security v. League of Women Voters. (As always, I encourage our readers to read the Court’s opinions for themselves. They are not impenetrable, and you don’t have to be a lawyer to follow them.)

The program in question arose from an executive order by President Trump that expanded the scope of the Systematic Alien Verification for Entitlements program, enacted in 1986. Historically, that program has provided an avenue for federal, state, and local government agencies to verify the citizenship and immigration status of noncitizens applying for public benefits. Trump expanded the program by executive order last year, directing the Department of Homeland Security to put systems in place to allow state and local officials to verify the citizenship status of registered voters or persons registering to vote, and directing the Social Security Administration to make its records available to DHS for that purpose.

The Court described the impact of Trump’s executive order:

The modified program differed from the original in two key respects. First, it incorporated checks against additional records—including social security numbers (SSNs)—maintained by SSA. Second, it allowed state and local authorities to conduct bulk searches of multiple individuals at once.

The issue in the case was whether Trump’s order violated privacy provisions of the Social Security Act or the Privacy Act of 1974. The Court’s 6-3 majority held that Trump’s order was authorized by the Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigrant Responsibility Act of 1996:

The first, section 1373(a), provides:

“Notwithstanding any other provision of Federal, State, or local law, a Federal, State, or local government entity or official may not prohibit, or in any way restrict, any government entity or official from sending to, or receiving from, the [DHS] information regarding the citizenship or immigration status, lawful or unlawful, of any individual.”

Like so many recent cases, this one came to the Court in a preliminary stage, so the Court held that the administration is likely to ultimately prevail on the merits, stayed the anti-Trump order that had been issued by the district court, and sent the case back to the district court for further proceedings.

The Court’s decision received quite a bit of attention, perhaps out of proportion to its practical import. Here are a few observations about it:

District court judges loyal to the Democratic Party have tried to interfere with virtually everything the Trump administration does, especially when it relates to illegal immigration. It is easy for plaintiffs recruited by the Democratic Party or other left-wing groups to judge-shop to get their cases in front of such judges.

These Democratic Party judges consistently enter orders barring the administration from implementing the policy in question. The cases then reach the appellate courts, sometimes the Supreme Court, in that posture. The Trump administration has won most of these cases, but the purpose of delay is always achieved, to some degree. The Supreme Court has had no choice but to get involved, lest partisan judges completely hamstring the administration with bogus legal rulings.

This case has gotten quite a bit of attention, but I don’t think it will have much impact, at least as regards the 2026 elections. This is true for two reasons, one of which was acknowledged in the Court’s per curiam opinion:

The plaintiff organizations argue that the Federal Government will not suffer irreparable harm because federal law currently prohibits state and local election authorities from clearing their voter rolls in the weeks leading up to federal elections. The organizations point to the National Voter Registration Act (NVRA), 52 U. S. C. §20507(c)(2)(A), which provides that “[a] State shall complete, not later than 90 days prior to the date of a primary or general election for Federal office, any program the purpose of which is to systematically remove the names of ineligible voters from the official lists of eligible voters.”2 To be sure, that moratorium limits the potential impact of staying the District Court’s order in this case. Still, all agree that the order prevents the Federal Government from using the modified SAVE program to conduct individualized inquiries, which are permitted under federal law during this period. The District Court’s order thus inhibits the Federal Government’s efforts to assist state and local agencies in the proper administration of the midterm elections.

The second reason why the order won’t have much impact is that the modified SAVE system simply authorizes federal agencies to cooperate with state and local agencies who seek assistance in verifying the citizenship status of voters. But voter fraud occurs mostly in blue states and localities, and it happens because government authorities in those states (Democrats) want it to happen. So I doubt there will be many requests coming in from the jurisdictions where most fraud occurs.

Finally, the Supreme Court’s three political justices–Kagan, Sotomayor and Jackson–dissented from the per curiam opinion. This is a consistent pattern, pretty much every time any interest of the Democratic Party is at stake. In this case, as in quite a few others, the dissent was written by Justice Jackson. To be fair, however, and contrary to her reputation, Jackson’s dissent in this case is not stupid. I don’t think it is ultimately persuasive, but she makes a decent argument, enabled by the fact that the multiple statutes at issue in this case are drafted, as is generally the case, with less than mathematical precision.

Fauci and the great Covid cover-up

 

Fauci and the great Covid cover-up

Did scientists mislead the world about the origins of the pandemic?

Matt Ridley, Spiked-online

This week, Republican senator Rand Paul subpoenaed Dr Anthony Fauci – the Covid pandemic’s rockstar medic (and long-serving bureaucrat). He was to appear before Paul’s Senate hearing for a showdown about the origin of the Covid pandemic. In the run-up to the hearing, Paul released more than 1,000 pages of emails and Slack messages sent by Fauci and his associates before and during the pandemic, including an astonishing diary that Fauci had kept during the critical years of 2019 to 2022.

But at the hearing, Fauci invoked the Fifth Amendment against self-incrimination despite having been pardoned by then US president Joe Biden. So we learned nothing new from the Senate hearing. Nevertheless, the document dump has deepened the evidence of rank duplicity by Fauci and his associates. The people who spent most of 2020-2022 insisting a lab leak could not possibly have happened thought, in private, that it possibly had.

They lied to us. There is now little doubt that, like Chernobyl, Bhopal and 9/11, the pandemic was manmade. And it killed 100 times as many people as those three disasters put together. Yet a bunch of people with power and influence did their utmost to bury the truth about the cause.

For a long time, I disagreed with the focus on Fauci. It took the spotlight off the Wuhan Institute of Virology and the Chinese researchers working there – in Wuhan, the very city where Covid first emerged. They were engaged in ‘gain of function’ research, editing the genomic sequence of virus samples so as to make them much more infectious. These idiotic experiments almost certainly caused the outbreak and those carrying them out refused to share information about them. But I have to admit that the latest facts about Fauci are shocking.

This is a man who was for a time the highest paid federal employee, retiring on a pension of $400,000 a year. He ran the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) for an astonishing 38 years, one year longer than J Edgar Hoover lasted as the untouchable head of the FBI.

Like Hoover, power and status went to Fauci’s head. At the height of the pandemic his diary shows him obsessed with his own celebrity. Here’s what he wrote on 21 May 2020: ‘Deaths 9,800… It is not hyperbole to say that today I am the most famous and talked-about person in the country and one of the most recognisable people in the world.’ On another occasion he writes, ‘press still hot and heavy about me’. After meeting a celebrity he boasts that ‘one person said that Tyra [Banks] was sexy, but I was even more sexy than she was’.

Worse, at a time of great emergency, Fauci used federal colleagues to solicit scientists – funded by his agency – to nominate him for eight large cash awards, totalling over $1million. I paraphrase, but this example is real: Dear Barton Haynes, Here’s $282million for your research. Now, would you like to nominate me for a $900,000 award? My assistant will write the necessary prose for you. Yours, Tony. Haynes did as he was told. ‘You bet’, he wrote.

That is the public-sector version of insider trading.

But nauseating narcissism and gobsmacking greed (and using private email addresses for government business) do not in themselves cause or cover up pandemics. The far greater sin was deliberately misleading the world about the origin of Covid-19. And there in black and white on 26 January 2020 in his diary is Fauci’s line about the Wuhan seafood market, which many claimed was the origin of Covid: ‘Now we know the market was not the source, it was the amplifier.’

Yet, a week later, he convened a group of 12 scientists, most of whom thought it possible, perhaps even probable, that the virus had been engineered in a laboratory, to discuss their concerns. He then tasked four of the fairly junior ones in the meeting (a fifth author joined later), some of whom depended on grants from his agency, to write a paper, ‘The Proximal Origin of SARS-CoV-2’. This paper outright dismissed the possibility of a lab leak as the origin of Covid. He and Jeremy Farrar, the then director of the Wellcome Trust, edited and promoted the publication of that paper. Fauci then disguised his own role in doing so, and spoke about it from the podium of the White House as if he had nothing to do with it.

Before and after they wrote the paper its authors all thought a lab leak was possible, perhaps even likely, as their private messages have repeatedly confirmed. Here’s what the lead author, Kristian Andersen, said the day after the meeting:

‘The main issue is that accidental escape is in fact highly likely – it’s not some fringe theory. I absolutely agree that we can’t prove one way or the other, but we never will be able to – however, that doesn’t mean that by default the data [are] currently much more suggestive of a natural origin as opposed to [for example] passage. It is not – the furin cleavage site is very hard to explain.’

(Andersen’s concern about the furin cleavage site is important to note. Researchers at the Wuhan Institute of Virology are known to have planned to insert a furin cleavage site into the spike gene of a SARS-related virus, in order to increase infectivity in human beings but not bats. All you really need to know about furin cleavage sites is that Covid is the first and only SARS-related virus, out of many hundreds that have been described, ever to show up with a furin cleavage site in its spike gene.)

And here’s what Andrew Rambaut, of Edinburgh University, said about Covid’s origins: ‘I literally swivel day by day thinking it is a lab escape or natural.’

Yet both Andersen and Rambaut put their names to a paper that categorically ruled out a laboratory origin. When ‘The Proximal Origin of SARS-CoV-2′ shot up the scientific-impact charts, Rambaut crowed: ‘Top! Fuck me.’ And Andersen replied: ‘We RUUUUUUULE. That’s tenure secured, right there.’ Fauci’s agency finalised a $8.9million grant to Andersen’s lab, and co-author Bob Garry’s lab, shortly after.

Thereafter Fauci vilified anybody who even raised the possibility of a lab leak. It worked. Look at the way the media fell into line following that paper’s publication: ‘Scientists debunk lab-accident theory of pandemic emergence’, said National Public Radio. ‘Sorry, conspiracy theorists. Study concludes Covid-19 “is not a laboratory construct”’, said ABC News. ‘Fact check: Did the coronavirus originate in a Chinese laboratory?… We rate this claim FALSE’, claimed USA Today. ‘Anthony Fauci just crushed Donald Trump’s theory on the origins of the coronavirus’, said CNN.

Over here, Ian Birrell at the Daily Mail and Sarah Knapton at the Telegraph were honourable exceptions to this lemming rush. The rest of the media was supine. Today, the evidence for a natural source of the virus is zero. Researchers have found not a single infected animal in any market, nor any person who caught Covid from an animal. The evidence for the lab is overwhelming: we know they were doing precisely the right kind of experiment on precisely the right strain of virus at precisely the right time in precisely the right city and in precisely the wrong biosafety conditions.

What was Fauci’s motive for misleading the world? That is clear as a bell: he had spent decades championing the idea that gain-of-function research on risky viruses was a good idea, even as others expressed serious doubts. Here is what his nemesis, Richard Ebright of Rutgers University, had to say about his agenda in 2005: ‘A majority of the nation’s top microbiologists – the very group that the Bush administration is counting on to carry out its biodefence-research agenda – dispute the premises and implementation of the biodefence spending.’ In Fauci’s diary he calls Ebright ‘preposterous’ and a ‘villain’.

Specifically, Fauci’s NIAID funded the work on coronaviruses, first at the University of North Carolina, and then in Wuhan. Fauci himself knew this by 23 January 2020, when an email was sent with the following subject: ‘Urgent for Dr Fauci: China’s lab for studying SARS and Ebola is in Wuhan, the outbreak’s centre’, which discussed the grant NIAID had given the intermediary body, EcoHealth Alliance, to fund the work in Wuhan.

So Fauci knew from then onwards that if a lab leak looked plausible, his own role in godfathering the research would come out. He had to keep a lid on it for a few weeks until the outbreak petered out. Only it did not peter out. It turned into a three-year ordeal that killed 20million people and turned the world economy upside down. Naturally, people were keen to investigate how this happened.

To give one detailed example of the way we were all misled over a global disaster, consider the case of Ralph Baric – a scientist funded by Fauci, but who Fauci claimed he hardly knew. In the new dump of documents, there are key revelations about the role of this University of North Carolina scientist who developed fiendishly clever techniques for swapping genes between coronaviruses and taught the Chinese scientiststo do it.

One of the handful of feeble arguments against a lab-leak origin of Covid was that the virus that causes it was not a perfect fit for human receptors: if they were designing it to infect human cells then they would have done it better. It is not much of an argument but the ‘Proximal Origin’ paper placed a lot of weight on it. However, Baric knew by 2019 that making an imperfect match was actually the smart thing to do. If the fit is too good, the virus gets stuck and is less infectious. But he insisted to congressional investigators he never told his Chinese colleagues that.

Yet what does the independent sleuth Gilles Demaneuf find in Baric’s own notes for a talk he gave at a conference in Harbin in China in January 2019? ‘Creating a virus that is super-adapted to a particular host can actually result in an attenuation of virulence, if the virus interacts overly strongly with a cellular receptor.’ Whoops – it looks like he did coach the Chinese researchers on this step after all.

It is a weird experience reading the messages these scientists exchanged during the pandemic. They sent up to 50 messages a day to each other during busy periods – did they have time to do, er, science? They use the f-word repeatedly – I am no prude but who needs to do that in exchanges with colleagues? And they are obsessed with ‘discrediting’ (rather than rebutting) anybody who even toyed with a theory they themselves thought ‘friggin likely’. They call me a ‘complete idiot’ and say of my brilliant young co-author, Alina Chan: ‘We need to push hard to discredit people like Alina as conspiracy theorists.’

Far more serious, however, is the way they try to prevent information coming out. British scientist Peter Daszak was the intermediary whose EcoHealth Alliance shovelled American taxpayer funds to the Chinese laboratory that did the dangerous experiments. Here he is coaching his Chinese colleagues on how to be non-transparent, warning Shi Zhengli of the Wuhan Institute of Virology not to respond to very polite and reasonable requests from a very distinguished American scientist, Jesse Bloom, for detailed information about certain experiments:

‘Dear Zhengli,

I strongly recommend you don’t answer more questions from Jesse Bloom. The questions may seem harmless, like he is trying to find out more about basic information, but his goals are to continue attacking you, the WIV, and our collaboration. He has already asked me about the RaTG13 information separately, and I responded with a single sentence to tell him the sequence is incomplete at the end of the genome. In other words he already knew the answer but wrote to you separately anyway, I believe he is trying to see if one of us says a different response so he can accuse us of lying

With someone like this, if you give home [sic] more than a short response, he will use the information against you. He has done this with us in the past by making public statements about things we’ve said in emails to him and criticising us.’

Think about this for a second. Millions of people are dying; finding out why should be a priority. But a British ‘grantrepreneur’ who has done very nicely out of supporting very risky and foolish experiments wants a citizen of a communist country not to help a scientist find out more.

The likes of Daszak and especially Anthony Fauci still have serious questions to answer.

Matt Ridley is a science writer and co-author of Viral: The Search for the Origin of Covid-19, with Alina Chan.

Odysseus Visits the Smithsonian

 

Odysseus Visits the Smithsonian

The National Museum of American History, like so many aspects of the Smithsonian, has strayed far from its original purpose.

Roger Kimball, American Greatness

It seems that everyone is talking about two things these days: The Odyssey (or, to be more strictly accurate, The Odyssey as reimagined by Christopher Nolan) and the Smithsonian Institution, specifically the National Museum of American History (NMAH), one of the roughly 20 museums that huddle under the taxpayer-funded umbrella of the Smithsonian.

I have not seen the film version of Homer’s epic. But I feel confident in reporting that, for sheer entertainment, the televised cross-examination of NMAH’s longtime director, Anthea Hartig, easily beat out the cinematic version of The Odyssey. How can I say this, not having seen Matt Damon emoting around in his beard and shiny armor? Well, Sydney Smith (1771–1845) said that he never read a book before reviewing it because he found that the exercise prejudiced him. So it is with me. I shall endeavor to escape prejudice, bias, both intentional and the other kind, as well as parti pris altogether, by boldly commenting on some aspects of the Nolanized version of the story without having seen it. And seeing it is work, dear reader. A look at the screening schedule tells me that it runs nearly three hours, 172–173 minutes by the clock, though no one has been able to tell me why, in this homogenizing age of atomic clocks, we can’t get a more precise reckoning of the time.

By all accounts, Nolan’s Odysseus, unlike Odysseus in Homer’s telling, is a troubled, guilt-ridden specimen, forever agonizing over his aggressive behavior and mistreatment of others. He has, not to put too fine a point on it, anger issues, unlike Homer’s Odysseus, who experienced anger but no anger issues. In Homer’s version, Odysseus is a hero. He is clever, yes, both cunning (“πολύμητις”)  and complicated (“πολύτροπος”). But even more often than Achilles, Odysseus is described as πτολιπόρθιος, “sacker of cities.” He was a warrior. He didn’t anguish about those to whom he caused anguish. It was part of who he was. He gloried in it.

Given the length of the movie and the many liberties taken with the script, I am surprised that no one suggested having Matt Damon pay a visit to the Smithsonian or at least the congressional hearing about the Smithsonian. We know that Anthea Hartig is keen on beginning meetings with a “land acknowledgment.” It’s all a little masquerade, of course, a rancid bit of virtue signaling that costs its performer exactly nothing. But I suspect that behind the theater—by which I mean the hypocrisy—is a timid bid for expiation or absolution. There is a lot of unearned guilt sloshing around the National Museum of American History these days, and the ritual of land acknowledgment, though ever so specious, might be seen as a moral or existential hedge, drawn from the same sort of calculation Pascal conjured with in his famous wager about how individuals ought to think about the odds when it came to the existence of God.

What I want to know, however, is what Odysseus, the Homeric hero, not the movie mannequin, would have thought about the practice of land acknowledgments. Let me put cards on the table and say that I believe he would have treated the people insisting on them as he treated the Cyclops Polyphemus or, come to that, the suitors pestering the patient Penelope, his wife.

I said that the best entertainment I enjoyed last week was the cross-examination—not to say the thorough exposure and humiliation—of Anthea Hartig. And the best of the best, I thought, was the brilliant surgical evisceration conducted by freshman representative Brandon Gill (R-TX). In under 5 minutes, he performed an elegant posterior sagittal anorectoplasty on Hartig’s long tenure at the National Museum of American History. And he did it by the simple, revelatory expedient of confronting her with the Smithsonian’s own public educational materials. “Are you a white supremacist?” he asked. “Oh no, no,” replied Hartig, smiling weakly. “Do you think we all have implicit biases?” asked Gill. “If so, what are yours?” Oh dear. “Do you think it is important to be polite?” Gill wondered. “Oh yes,” quoth Hartig, perhaps thinking that if she said she approved of politeness, Gill would be polite to her. No such luck.

Politeness, you see, is one of the many bourgeois virtues that literature distributed by the Smithsonian has identified as a symptom of white supremacy. Other behaviors and attitudes that raise the alarm about lurking white supremacist tendencies are hard work, rational thinking, respect for private property, delayed gratification, and rugged individualism.

You think that I am making this up, but I am not. It’s all there in an official NMAH brochure called “Aspects and Assumptions of Whiteness and White Culture in the United States.” File it under “Things are always worse than you think.” Here’s a thought experiment: What if these habits and behaviors really were signs of “whiteness” or “white supremacy”? What then? Or to put it another way, how much of a racist would you have to be to promulgate a brochure like “Aspects and Assumptions of Whiteness and White Culture in the United States”? (It would be interesting to know whether most of the authors of that odious document were themselves white. I’d wager most of them were liberal white women.)

The point is this: the Smithsonian Institution was created to preserve and celebrate the American heritage. By the same process of moral entropy that has undermined American educational institutions, transforming them from unapologetic repositories of our storied past into tenebrous havens for those “men without chests” that C. S. Lewis delineated, the Smithsonian Institution has abandoned its original mandate. No longer is it about celebrating America’s past, where by “celebrate” I do not mean “exonerate” past evils and failures, the sort of deficiencies that are part of every nation, no matter how great. The Smithsonian should not be about covering up America’s failings. It should be about putting those failings in the more capacious context of America’s stupendous achievements. This the Smithsonian under its current leadership has conspicuously failed to do.

Some observers are puzzled that President Trump should lavish so much attention on what is, after all, merely a cultural institution. He does so, I believe, because he understands that the ulterior motive of the Smithsonian Institution in its current incarnation is to rob us of our heroes. As I have put it elsewhere, Trump’s attention to institutions like the Smithsonian is part of his ambition to give America back its heroes. That is why he has overseen such meticulous criticism of the Smithsonian. Admonition, Montaigne observed, is one of the highest offices of friendship. Criticism takes time and effort to formulate and dispense. If he didn’t care, President Trump could, like presidents before him, just pass by cultural institutions like the Smithsonian and our educational apparat. But he does care, which is why he devotes serious attention to improving them.

Above all, The Odyssey is a story about νόστος, homecoming. The National Museum of American History, like so many aspects of the Smithsonian, has strayed far from its original purpose. It is wandering amongst monsters, enchanted by Sirens, lost in its fatuous, puerile disillusionment. It is time to bring it home. Perhaps Donald Trump is the Athena-like guide who can pull it off.

Roger Kimball is editor and publisher of The New Criterion and the president and publisher of Encounter Books. He is the author and editor of many books, including The Fortunes of Permanence: Culture and Anarchy in an Age of Amnesia (St. Augustine's Press), The Rape of the Masters (Encounter), Lives of the Mind: The Use and Abuse of Intelligence from Hegel to Wodehouse (Ivan R. Dee), and Art's Prospect: The Challenge of Tradition in an Age of Celebrity (Ivan R. Dee). Most recently, he edited and contributed to Where Next? Western Civilization at the Crossroads (Encounter) and contributed to Against the Great Reset: Eighteen Theses Contra the New World Order (Bombardier).

California’s Road to Serfdom

 

California’s Road to Serfdom

Property rights are an essential liberty. Violating them is the very definition of tyranny.

Marc Wheat & Mitchell Bahnsen, essay,  Law & Liberty

Several years ago, California brothers Arron and Arthur Benedetti inherited 267 acres of farmland from their father, a turkey farmer who spent his life working that land. They were not asking for a subsidy, tax break, or any government benefit. They simply wanted to build a home on property they had lawfully inherited. The government of Marin County, however, took it upon itself to say that the brothers could have their permit, but only if they signed a covenant permanently committing the land to commercial agricultural use, farming it themselves, or contracting it out in perpetuity.

The result is a trap with three exits, none of them acceptable: sell the land, farm it commercially, or sit on it and do nothing. Even though the brothers have a strong incentive to take good care of the land they own, building a home and living on what their father built is, apparently, not among the options Marin County is prepared to allow. Now, with a petition before the Supreme Court, the Benedetti brothers, two plumbers who have resided in California their entire lives, are asking the nation’s highest court to affirm a freedom the rest of the Western world has long held dear. Their case is not merely about a building permit or a zoning dispute, but whether the government may use its regulatory leverage to conscript private citizens into occupations of its choosing, and whether property rights in America retain any real meaning at all.

Friedrich Hayek warned in The Road to Serfdom that the path to tyranny is rarely dramatic. It does not typically announce itself with jackboots and seizures, but arrives quietly, incrementally, through the accumulated weight of regulatory conditions that strip individuals of the freedom to direct their own lives and labor. It may start as small as a permit denial, and before long the citizen finds himself not the master of his property but its captive, working it as the state commands, or not at all. Marin County, California, has offered a case study in exactly this dynamic, and the Supreme Court now can say, clearly and finally, that this is not how American property law works.

When Americans want to modify their property, they must first ask permission from the state. That requirement may sound innocuous, but it gives local government the power to withhold the permit until the owner surrenders something the government wants but cannot legally demand outright. Marin County pulled that lever here, in direct defiance of controlling precedent.

In Nollan v. California Coastal Commission (1987), the Supreme Court struck down a California agency’s demand that homeowners grant public beach access as the price of a building permit. The condition, the Court held, lacked any “essential nexus” to a legitimate government interest, making it not a regulation at all, but what the Court bluntly called “an out-and-out plan of extortion.”

Building on this, Dolan v. City of Tigard (1994) held that even where a nexus exists, the burden imposed on the property owner must be “roughly proportional” to the government’s actual interest. Marin County’s demand satisfies neither test. There is no meaningful correlation between Arthur Benedetti’s desire to build a home and the county’s interest in preserving agricultural land, especially since agricultural land already accounts for over half of the US land base. Even worse, permanently conscripting a family’s property into commercial farming is wildly disproportionate to any legitimate regulatory goal. As the Court made clear in Koontz v. St. Johns River Water Management District (2013), this framework applies regardless of how the government structures its demand. It is a foundational truth in constitutional law that the state cannot do indirectly what it is forbidden to do directly. The county may argue it is simply protecting open space and agriculture, both legitimate interests, but that is precisely the problem. If those interests are legitimate, the county has legitimate tools, by purchasing the land, negotiating a voluntary conservation easement, or deploying its taxing power. What it cannot do is coerce a private citizen into a particular occupation by holding his building permit hostage.

To understand what Marin County is doing to the Benedetti brothers, it helps to understand what it is undoing. The instinct to protect private property is not a modern political preference. It is a thread woven through the entire fabric of Western civilization, from the earliest moral codes to the constitutional settlements that shaped American law. Russell Kirk, in his classic The Roots of American Order, traced the moral inheritance of America through four cities: Jerusalem, Athens, Rome, and London. Each contributed something essential to the Western understanding of property, and together they form a tradition that Marin County’s permit condition casually discards.

From Jerusalem came the foundational moral prohibition against violating private property. The Ten Commandments, Kirk wrote, were intended as “liberating rules that enable a people to diminish the tyranny of sin.” Prominent among them is the command, “Thou shalt not steal.” The prohibition is brief, but its implications are vast, with the commandment presupposing private ownership as a moral fact, and its violation as a moral wrong. This means property, stewardship, and justice were woven together from the beginning of Western moral order.

Athens refined the intuition about property into philosophy. Aristotle, laboring for years to define justice, concluded that people will be equals and partners in a community precisely when people still have their own things, “for when everyone has a distinct interest, men will not complain of one another and they will make progress, because everyone will be attending to his own business.” Ownership, for Aristotle, was not merely an economic arrangement but a precondition for the kind of exchange and reciprocity that makes justice possible. When the state disrupts that arrangement, forcing an owner to use his property as the government prefers, it substitutes bureaucratic preference for the merit-based distribution that justice requires. “All agree,” Aristotle wrote, “that what is just in distributions ought to accord with a certain merit.” Marin County’s permit condition holds no merit at all.

Roman statesman Cicero maintained that “each one should retain possession of that which has fallen to his lot,” in opposition to the redistribution of property. Nearly two millennia later, Justice James Wilson of the early Supreme Court would later paraphrase Cicero in describing a just state as one formed by free persons united “to enjoy peaceably what is their own” in Chisholm v. Georgia (1793).

From London came the philosophical architecture that most directly shaped the American founding. John Locke argued in the Second Treatise that “every man has a property in his own person: this no body has any right to but himself,” and that “the labour of his body, and the work of his hands, we may say, are properly his.” Property, on Locke’s account, is not a gift of the state. It precedes the state, arising from the natural relationship between a person and the fruits of his labor. Edmund Burke, writing as the French Revolution unfolded in 1790, was equally direct, maintaining that people “have a right to the fruits of their industry; and to the means of making their industry fruitful,” and “whatever each man can separately do without trespassing on others he has a right to do for himself.”

The turkey farmer who worked 267 acres of Marin County land had a claim on that land that no county permit condition can extinguish, and his sons’ claim is no less legitimate. Across every city in Kirk’s moral geography, the conclusion is the same. Forced occupation, or the compulsion to use one’s property as the state commands, is not regulation, but simply tyranny by another name.

The Founders did not merely inherit this tradition but secured into the heart of early American governance. James Madison wrote in 1792 that “that alone is just a government, which impartially secures to every man, whatever is his own.” He was equally clear about what an unjust government looks like, primarily one that uses “arbitrary restrictions, exemptions, and monopolies” to “deny to part of its citizens that free use of their faculties, and free choice of their occupations, which not only constitute their property in the general sense of the word; but are the means of acquiring property strictly so called.” This was a consensus shared widely among the Founders, including Hamilton, Jefferson, and others. Property rights were, as William Michael Treanor points out, understood by “the key writers who set the intellectual framework of our Constitution—John Locke, David Hume, William Blackstone, Adam Smith, and James Madison” as “a bulwark of the individual against the arbitrary power of the state.”

What Marin County is attempting, in the end, is to make the Benedettis serfs on their own land, forced by regulatory fiat to work on the soil as the government prefers, or else forfeit what their father built. The Supreme Court has the tools to stop it, including earlier judicial precedent, the original meaning of the Fourteenth Amendment, and a tradition of Western jurisprudence stretching back through London, Rome, Athens, and Jerusalem.

Hayek understood that the road to serfdom is paved not with dramatic usurpations but with small, incremental surrenders of economic freedom, each one justified by some legitimate public interest, each one eroding a little further the citizen’s ability to direct his own life and labor. A permit condition in Marin County may seem like a small thing, but the principle at stake is far from small—it concerns the foundations of our civilization itself. The Supreme Court should remind California and other governments tempted by the same logic that property rights are not a second-class freedom.

Marc Wheat is the general counsel for Advancing American Freedom, the advocacy group founded by former Vice President Mike Pence.

Mitchell G. Bahnsen is a policy & legal intern at Advancing American Freedom and a student of politics, philosophy, and economics at Westmont College. He concurrently serves as a research assistant at the California Policy Center, and his commentary on constitutional principles, technology, and culture has been featured widely across conservative and classical liberal publications.