Are We in a Revolution and Don’t Even Know It?

 

Are We in a Revolution and Don’t Even Know It?

We are in the midst of a revolutionary epoch and probably most don’t even know it.

Victor Davis Hanson, American Greatness 

Institutions are being absorbed not just by the woke apparat, but by an array of ideologies that seeks to destroy them. 

The collective madness that ensued from the pandemic, the quarantine, the self-induced recession, the George Floyd killing and subsequent months of exempted riots, the election year, and the resurgence of variants of the Chinese-engineered coronavirus, all ignited the fuse of formerly inert socialist dynamite. And the ensuing explosion of revolutionary fervor in just a few months has made America almost unrecognizable. 

“Workers of the world unite!” was the old Marxist internationalist war cry. The perceived enemies of coerced socialism were nationalism— and the idea of singular countries defined by borders containing unique citizens legally distinct from mere migratory residents, and sharing ties and traditions that transcended race and class. All that is now problematic. 

If it is true that two million illegal aliens will cross the southern border with impunity in the current fiscal year, then the Biden agenda is apparently to help erode the idea of citizenship and anybody defined as an American. Under the socialist ethos, the indigent in Yucatan and the impoverished migrant from Nigeria have as much right to enter and live in the United States as U.S. citizens. And their respective rights under the living Constitution are now nearly identical. 

In just seven months, our southern border has vanished. Apparently, it was an artificial construct that obstructed the migrations of the global community. We are back to a natural, pre-civilizational and Rousseauian idea of freeing migrating tribes from the chains of civilization. And what better way to start than dispensing with unique borders, citizenship, and the idea of a nation state? 

Socialism aligns foreign policy with the interests of the global oppressed rather than the citizens of a particular nation. In reductionist terms, what do lifting sanctions on Iran and appeasing its theocracy, reaching out to Hamas and snubbing Israel, and allowing the Taliban to overrun Afghanistan have in common? Just as the United States is trying to rebrand itself as a sort of new, non-Western nation, so it clumsily seeks to recalibrate its foreign policy to cease support for the overdog, the American client, and the more Westernized. We are to believe that an empowered Persian Shiite crescent offers equity to the silenced of the Middle East. The Taliban, perhaps regrettably, better represents indigenous Afghan culture than does the Westernized bourgeois elite in Kabul. Hezbollah and Hamas are the more authentic Middle Easterners than the Western Zionist interlopers of Israel. In other words, our foreign policy is in a revolutionary flux. 

Liberals try to yank capitalism to the left; but true revolutionaries seek to dismantle the very tenets upon which it is based. No wonder that a recent poll showed most Democrats had a more favorable view (59 percent) of socialism than of capitalism (49 percent). 

So, the Right shouts “They are socialists!” And the Left fires back “smears and lies!” while quietly the Biden Administration has already begun systematically to warp the rules of free-market capitalism. In other words, we are apparently all to be socialists now. 

By continuing to suspend rental payments to landlords who have no redress to the courts for violations of their contractual leases, the government essentially has redefined private property as we know it. Who really owns an apartment or a room in a house if the occupant has not paid rent since last spring? Is the de facto owner the renter in physical control of the unit, or the increasingly impotent title holder who must still pay the insurance, taxes, and upkeep? 

Do we still recognize the principle that those who owe money must pay it back? Biden is talking about vastly expanding any prior idea of student loan debt cancellations by massive new amnesties. As capitalism transitions into socialism, what about the parents who saved to pay their children’s tuition, the students who worked part-time and took only the units they could pay for, or the working-class youths who decided loans were too risky and preferred instead at 18 to go straight to work? 

Are they hapless Kulaks? And what do we name the indebted students and the loan-sharking universities who finagled a collective $1.7 trillion in student debt? Revolutionaries? Who pays for what others have incurred? 

Supply and demand under capitalism adjudicate wages and thus the rate of unemployment. But have we ever seen an expanding economy seeking to meet pent-up consumer demands for goods and services without the labor to meet that need? The workers are everywhere and nowhere, but the government has deliberately persuaded millions not to return officially to work, given rising unemployment compensation is more remunerative than the wages of working. Have we now finally embraced the old Marxist canard, “From each according to his ability, to each according to his needs”? 

Inflation and the devaluation of the currency are now seemingly a good thing; printing dollars erodes the savings of the thrifty and money spreads to those who allegedly need and deserve it. 

Note we owe nearly $30 trillion in national debt. Yet as the Biden Administration runs a $2 trillion annual deficit, it pushes an “infrastructure” bill that will mean additionally somewhere between $2 to $4 trillion of more printed cash. Ronald Reagan talked of “starving the beast”—cutting taxes to deprive the voracious bureaucratic state of its fiscal food. 

Now instead we are “gorging the beast”: exponentially expanding government with so much debt that higher taxes are inevitable. And with the red ink comes redistribution in the socialist sense of borrowing more to give to the deserving, and taking more from the undeserving—to borrow even more for the more deserving still. 

Socialism does not believe in the construct of “merit,” given it is predicated on free will that trends supposedly towards selfishness, and results in an absence of “equity”: that is why colleges have dropped standardized tests for applicants, and are jettisoning traditional ideas of “exclusionary” honors programs. 

Remember, under socialism, in T-ball style, we all win—or lose. Our shared purposes are not to help meet and surpass purportedly artificially constructed standards of excellence to ensure greater prosperity, security, and comfort, but to demolish such ossified constructs, and rebrand the formerly failed as the now successful. 

The revolution has already redefined crime as a construct in the eye of the bourgeois beholder. Our woke elite told us to cool it for 120 days of last summer’s riots, looting and arson, since in the words of the “1619 Project” architect and former New York Times reporter Nikole Hannah-Jones, “Destroying property, which can be replaced, is not violence.” Torch a federal courthouse, a church, or police precinct and why worry over mere “brick and mortar”? Take over a few city blocks and, presto, we have a “summer of love.” 

“Defund the police” became a socialist slogan supposedly to remind us that “crime” is what the rich call going into Walgreens to grab something they never fret about needing. COVID-19 is not the real reason why prisoners are freed from jails and prison to commit new crimes at an alarming rate. Indeed, those people didn’t really commit crimes so much as reflect society’s bad karma of arbitrarily labeling what they did as “crimes” in the first place, which in truth were often simply cries from the heart.  

Two years ago, it would have been considered absurd that youth would ride bikes into drug stores and steal with impunity as security guards watched, or thieves could enter into Neiman-Marcus department stores and skip out with thousands of dollars of rich people’s favorites. Over $2 billion in “stuff” was destroyed in 2020. And almost none of the violence was ever properly investigated, the perpetrators arrested, charged, tried, convicted, sentenced, or incarcerated. 

In such revolutionary times, no one knows any more what is and is not a crime. Illegally storming the border when positive for COVID-19? Destroying a public statue of George Washington or Thomas Jefferson? Looting a corporate chain store? Knocking out an Asian-American septuagenarian? Or turning over the tables of Jewish-Americans as they eat? Taking over municipal blocks and declaring the confiscation an autonomous zone? Not crimes. “Illegal parading” inside the U.S. Capitol building? Crime.

Twenty years ago, on the eve of 9/11, there were earlier heated debates over cash reparations. The acrimony has now again resurfaced after the rioting that followed the death of George Floyd. 

Yet the Left this time around did not envision reparations as just monetary gifting for the distant descendants of the enslaved and the generations who grew up under Jim Crow. Rather, it is already recalibrating the Great Society doctrine of “proportional representation” quotas, achieved through “disparate impact,” into new reparatory and disproportionate quotas and allotments. 

We are jettisoning the old idea under our Lebanese-like system of racial spoils that each group deserved representation in hiring and admission commensurate to its percentages of the population—trumping many traditional meritocratic criteria of examination scores, grades, or prior work experience. 

No more. If one examines current fall 2021 entering classes at many of our elite universities, many minority groups will enroll with numbers disproportionate to their current demographic percentages but proportionate to the idea of reparatory “overrepresentation.” 

The same holds true of the racial make-up of new television shows and commercials, pilot training programs, and corporate board room representation. Again, the idea is that blacks, for example, should be represented in percentages exceeding 12 percent in any coveted honors or awards—to make up for past underrepresentation, given prior mere proportionality offers no reparatory justice. 

In a strange way, for all the furor over reparation payments, the issue already is beginning to be settled quietly by our major institutions. Note class consideration will have no role in such disproportionate and compensatory action. 

Another revolutionary crackpot idea was ending nuclear power and fossil fuels and replacing them with wind and solar generation that would power our homes and our new envisioned national fleet of electric cars. No one quite believed the revolutionary Left would be so suicidal as to spike the energy costs of the middle class, make the United States dependent again on imported oil from the autocratic Middle East and Russia, and strangle the oil and gas industry that had enriched America. 

But without much debate, Joe Biden has cancelled the huge ANWR oil and gas project in Alaska. He shut down the Keystone Pipeline and destroyed Alberta’s export of oil to the United States. He nixed all new fossil fuel leases on federal lands. He discouraged frackers from using their full inventory of rigs. As gasoline heads to $5 a gallon, Joe Biden, in the months before the next midterm elections, asks OPEC to send us its hated carbon fuel to help our addicted, but suddenly furious, commuter-voters.  

Here is a final reminder of why the revolution has already turned society upside down. The canniest elements of the aristocracy always cut deals with the revolution and indeed often remain the nomenklatura. What unites Mark Zuckerberg, Jeff Bezos, Bill Gates, and the Silicon Valley billionaire crowd are the exemptions they purchased from revolutionary justice. 

In the old days they would have gotten dachas on the Black Sea coast and three dial phones on their desks. These days they keep their billions if they give a hundred million dollars in “civility” bounties here to Van Jones (ex-truther and expert on why white people are supposedly responsible for mass shootings) or there seed $500 million to key voting precincts to help ensure the good people defeat the bad. 

In 1961, Cubans were not quite aware that they were experiencing a Marxist takeover. Nor were Russians fully cognizant in 1917 of the plans that the Bolsheviks had for them over the next few decades. It is hard to see during anarchy, chaos, and collapsing institutions that leftists still have an agenda for what will emerge on the other side. 

In other words, we are in the midst of a revolutionary epoch and probably most don’t even know it.

About Victor Davis Hanson

Victor Davis Hanson is a distinguished fellow of the Center for American Greatness and the Martin and Illie Anderson Senior Fellow at Stanford University’s Hoover Institution. He is an American military historian, columnist, a former classics professor, and scholar of ancient warfare. He has been a visiting professor at Hillsdale College since 2004. Hanson was awarded the National Humanities Medal in 2007 by President George W. Bush. Hanson is also a farmer (growing raisin grapes on a family farm in Selma, California) and a critic of social trends related to farming and agrarianism. He is the author most recently of The Second World Wars: How the First Global Conflict Was Fought and Won and The Case for Trump.

It’s Not Just About The Masks

 

It’s Not Just About The Masks

We have not just lost our minds, but given them up voluntarily.

Peter Van Buren, The American Conservative.  

It was never just a mask, it has always been a way of thinking. “Mask” is just shorthand.

I got dumped from my volunteer work at the Hawaiian Humane Society for choosing not to wear a mask outside while walking their dogs. Neither science, the CDC, nor the state requires a mask outdoors, and I’m fully vaccinated. Some staff bot saw my naked face and informed me of their “policy.” I asked why they had such a nonsensical policy, and her only answer was “it is our policy.” The conversation ended like an ever-growing percentage of conversations in America now end, with her saying, “Do I need to call security?” I didn’t enjoy it, but I think she did.

I was left with no good to do this week, and a simple, real Covid-19 question. Why are fully vaccinated people treated the same as the unvaccinated? Everyone on the plane wears a mask and goes through the same mock social distancing. Everyone at a restaurant, office, concert, etc., does the same. The answer is at the heart of whether public policy in America will shift and allow us to crawl back into our lives.

The biggest reason for treating vaxxed and unvaxxed people the same miserable way is the claim that vaccinated people can still get Covid enough to pass it on. Funny thing is you can actually “get” the measles even after being vaccinated. The vax is actually only 97 percent effective, similar to the Covid ones. But nobody talks about measles or demands we wear a mask to prevent their spread. We simply accept and deal with the risk.

The next question is really, really hard to find an answer to. How many vaccinated people actually get Covid, the so-called “breakthrough” cases?

That exact number is critical because it is the pivot point for the risk vs. gain decision our society needs to make. If we cannot make a wise choice we will be struggling with and fighting over the restrictions on our lives and livelihoods forever. If we assume we’ll never have full vaccination and that breakthrough cases are a non-zero number and likely always will be then we need to make an informed decision about risk. So is it a non-zero number like, duh, “smoking causes cancer,” or a non-zero number like “very few people die from meteor strikes (or from the measles)?”

The current public policy decisions on risk are haphazard. All 50 states have different rules, many large cities, too, and each and every company. There are different rules if you take a bus or want to go dancing. One grocery store demands masks, another does not. It makes no sense. It becomes not a considered decision but an example of lack of public policy leadership. Into that leadership void enters superstition, pseudoscience, politics, voodoo, and most of all, fear.

So what are the chances of a fully vaccinated person getting a breakthrough infection? It turns out this pivotal question is not clearly answerable, but we act as if it is, with consequences for our lives, mental health, education, commerce, and more. Even for our stray dogs.

I started with Google and “What are the chances of getting COVID after being fully vaccinated?” expecting the answer in 0.0039 seconds, like when you ask what year some historical event happened. Nope. AARP says “less than one percent of fully vaccinated individuals have been hospitalized with, or have died from, COVID.” That’s a small number but does not fully address the question.

Over to NPR, which reports, “On rare occasions, some vaccinated people infected with the delta variant after vaccination may be contagious and spread the virus to others.” What does rare occasions mean? This is supposed to be, you know, science, so we finally get some numbers from the CDC: Out of 159 million fully vaccinated people, the CDC documented 5,914 cases of fully vaccinated people who were hospitalized or died from Covid-19, and 75 percent of them were over age 65. That means only 0.0000037 percent of vaxxed people were hospitalized or died, most of them elderly. That is a very small number. It is a lot less than one percent and a lot less than rare. Chances of dying in a car wreck are many tens of thousands of times higher and yet we drive on.

However, it still does not answer the question of how dangerous the vaxxed but unmasked are in terms of transmitting the virus. No one really knows. Recent scare headlines calling for reinstated restrictions and vax mandates are based on a single outbreak, 469 cases, in one city in Massachusetts, that appears to show (at variance with existing studies) 75 percent of those infected had been vaccinated and oddly, almost all of those people (87 percent) were male. Most of the infected were asymptomatic or experienced mild symptoms. No deaths.

What is believed is the a) Delta variant of Covid makes a b) temporary home inside a vaccinated man’s nose or upper respiratory area, c) outside the immune system. It waits there to be d) blown out and then be e) received by an f) unvaccinated person. So, all these things have to work out for it to matter. It is not simply a chore of toting up how many vaccinated people tested positive and then hitting the panic button. As one doctor put it, “We really need to shift toward a goal of preventing serious disease and disability and medical consequences, and not worry about every virus detected in somebody’s nose.”

Bottom Line 1: We need to stop the obsessive, simplistic, and misleading counting of positive tests and focus on real world consequences.

Requiring everyone wear masks again based on one outbreak may seem as if it can’t hurt, but it does. Organizations waste time and credibility enforcing measures that have limited if any impact (consider how many masks are so old, dirty, improperly worn, etc., to be fully useless.) To simply dismiss the reality of numbers with a blithe “well you can’t be too careful” only works if you imagine Covid restrictions have no secondary or tertiary effects.

Economies have been devastated. Education has disappeared for large numbers of kids. Despair grows menacingly. Suicide attempts by teen girls increased 26 percent during summer 2020 and 50 percent during winter of 2021. We are killing children to save them.

Economic inequality got a booster shot. The power of government has grown alarmingly. The ability to shape how we live, shop, work, and eat has been handed randomly to a near-endless range of actors, from the president to governors empowered with “emergency edicts” to clerks ever-anxious to call security not on shoplifters but on an exposed nose.

Americans’ irrational fears were created by politicians and the media, and have become a profit center. The New York Times for months ran columns saying Trump’s vaccine was another government syphilis experiment. The vice president refused to take the shot during the campaign. Biden took it, then went right on masking as if it didn’t work.

It was a very successful campaign to propagate uncertainty for a political purpose. It is all their fault vaccine acceptance now varies by political party, where we live, and how much education we have. It’s a form of blowback—the information operation worked too well.

So we won’t concede the reality kids are unlikely to get sick and should go to school. That the vast majority of deaths occur among the elderly with comorbidities, not the general population. That ill-fitting masks and wiping down groceries with Clorox are theater. That the debate has become a political argument instead of an evidence-based one. That everybody agrees the CDC has lost credibility until one side needs it for some partisan purpose. That previously healthcare decisions started with the premise of “first, do no harm,” while today there is no conversation allowed about the balance of benefits and damages. That we simply tally the collateral damage while the virus remains unaffected.

Bottom Line 2: If we are to heal as a society there is only one answer, at some point we must simply ask what works and do that.

But we lack the political leadership to say what’s true, so we’re going back to “let’s just argue about masks and mandates.” Meanwhile the virus continues to find unvaccinated hosts. The economy won’t snap back. Biden is facing a mini civil war over required vaccinations and restarting lockdowns but has no plan. Things will hit the fan in September as Hot Vax Summer sputters, when every school district does something different, and federal unemployment supplements run out.

People have grown weary of being afraid and grown weary of being subject to the paranoid demands of safety fetishists. Many did what they were told to do—get vaxxed—only to find themselves stuck inside the same dysfunctional loop of mask/unmask. We are killing ourselves. Somehow that must be factored into our Covid response.

Bottom Line 3: We can’t resolve the pandemic until we end the panic and the politics. Can Biden do that?

Peter Van Buren is the author of We Meant Well: How I Helped Lose the Battle for the Hearts and Minds of the Iraqi People, Hooper’s War: A Novel of WWII Japan, and Ghosts of Tom Joad: A Story of the 99 Percent.

What is American wokeness really about?

 What is American wokeness really about?

Victor Davis Hanson, JWV. 

Most Americans were as indifferent to the U.S. women's soccer team's recent loss to Sweden in the Olympics as they were excited about the team's World Cup win in 2019.

In between was the team's nonstop politicking, from whining about compensation to virtue-signaling their disrespect for the United States. The celebrity face of the team, perennial scold Megan Rapinoe, is going the way of teenage grouch Greta Thunberg, becoming more pinched the more she is tuned out.

Black Lives Matter co-founder Patrisse Marie Khan-Cullors Brignac used her corporate grifting to buy four homes. The one she bought in California's Topanga Canyon is surrounded by a new $35,000 security fence.

Critical race theory guru Ibram X. Kendi offers virtual, one-hour workshops for $20,000 a pop. He is franchising woke re-education kits — in between bouts of damning capitalism as a catalyst of racism.

The woke movement is a slicker, more sophisticated and far more grandiose version of Al Sharpton and Jesse Jackson's shakedowns of the 1990s. Those, at least, were far more honest in leveraging cash with charges of racism — and came without the academic gobbledygook of critical race theory.

Our freeways are jammed. Airports are crammed. Labor is short. Huge pent-up consumer demand for essentials and entertainment outpaces supply. Yet Major League Baseball's recent All-Star Game saw record low television viewership — about a quarter of the audience of 40 years ago, when there were 100 million fewer Americans.

The Summer Olympic Games are getting anemic TV ratings. The NBA's crashing TV ratings have followed the downward trajectory of the NFL's ratings. Woke sports earn the same public disgust as the accusatory and boring Emmy, Grammy, Oscar and Tony awards.

Cable news networks CNN and MSNBC fueled the story that former President Donald Trump allegedly colluded with Russia. They contextualized (to excuse) the summer looting and rioting of 2020. And they cheered on two impeachments as a prelude to their 24/7 woke drumbeat. Their ratings, too, have now dived.

Never has TV been more politicized. Sitcoms, dramas and commercials are designed more to resonate woke messaging than to entertain. So naturally, dismal TV ratings reflect the expected public boredom that ensues when art serves politics.

How many times will disingenuous Dr. Anthony Fauci swear that he never sent federal money to the Wuhan virology lab for gain-of-function research, or blame his critics for pointing out his gyrating advice on masks, or offer yet another noble lie on herd immunity?

In short, Americans are worn out from elite virtue-signaling and woke performance art from critical race theory capitalists, multimillionaire CEOs, revolving-door Pentagon brass, Malibu celebrities and credentialed elite.

The problem is not just that most of America is exhausted from being smeared as racists, or hearing that a wonderful country — the most free, just, equitable, affluent and leisured in civilization's history — must continually pay penance for its past and present. The public is more tired of projectionist hypocrisy. Those who scream the loudest are usually the most guilty of woke crimes.

The woke madness coincides with an epidemic of crises that go largely ignored as a distracted America cannibalizes itself.

The border is being breached at a time of pandemic. Migrants barge in without either COVID-19 testing or vaccinations — during a coronavirus spike that has government officials talking about going door to door to roust out American citizens to get vaccinated.

Whiteness is supposedly the cause of America's problems. But our inner cities are suffering historic levels of violent crime. Couldn't our critical race theory accusers take time out from their merchandising to address the soaring violence?

The Biden administration denies that huge deficit spending and generous cash payments to workers fueled inflation. But America hasn't seen anything like the current price hikes and labor shortages in the last 40 years.

The military, CIA and FBI have lost the confidence of the public — and not just because of their woke politicking. They are perceived as distracted and ignoring their primary missions of winning wars, catching terrorists before they strike, and offering superb intelligence about our enemies.

Wokeness is many things. But increasingly it seems a cover for careerism, profiteering and utter incompetence.

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.

Cringe worthy Joe Biden...

Joe, this is elder abuse, where is your family? 

Absolute farce, Biden-Lemon town hall

 

The absolute farce that was the Biden-Lemon town hall

Joe Concha, The Hill

The activism that infects much of modern journalism was featured under the lights of primetime on Wednesday night during President Biden's CNN town hall in Cincinnati.

Exhibit A came when the topic turned to the filibuster and the president signaling that abolishing it would throw Congress “into chaos,” likely angering many on the far left, including the moderator. 

“If you were to filibuster, you had to stand on the floor and hold the floor,” Biden said in explaining why he supports returning to a time when senators had to be present in the Senate chamber to filibuster.

“So, you had to take — there were significantly fewer filibusters in those days. In the middle of the civil rights movement.”

“Let me talk to you about that,” CNN host and town hall moderator Don Lemon attempted to interrupt.

"Well, let me finish my answer, because I'd tell you what I'd do. I would go back to that, where you have to maintain the floor. You have to stand there and talk and hold the floor. You can't just say..."

"I understand that," Lemon, now playing the role of activist, jumped in again. "But what difference does that -- if you hold the floor for, you know, a day or a year, what difference does it make?"

“Here's the thing for me,” Lemon continued, shedding the last pretense of objectivity. “You talked about people -- and this is important for people who look like me. My grandmother would sit around when I was a kid, 5th grade, had a 5th grade education. I learned that she couldn't read when I was doing my homework. And she would tell me stories about people asking her to count the number of jelly beans in the jar – or the soap in – so why is protecting the filibuster, is that more important than protecting voting rights, especially for people who fought and died for that?"

Oh, what an absolute farce. 

Lemon was supposed to be the town hall’s moderator, not the lead spokesman of Blow Up the Filibuster PAC. 

This is the same anchor who claimed during a recent PBS interview: "I don’t do opinion. And I know — the difference for me is, I do point of view."

What is it about the filibuster – and the prospect of abolishing it – that exposes so many “journalists” for the activists they really are?

“When it comes to the filibuster, immigration is a big issue, of course, related to the filibuster, but there's also Republicans who are passing bill after bill trying to restrict voting rights," PBS's Yamiche Alcindor said during Biden’s first and only formal press conference in March. "[Senate Majority Leader] Chuck Schumer's calling it in an existential threat to democracy.

"Why not back a filibuster rule that at least gets around issues, including voting rights or immigration? [South Carolina Congressman] Jim Clyburn, someone, of course, who you know very well, has backed the idea of a filibuster rule when it comes to civil rights and voting rights," Alcindor finally concluded.

Yup. That was an actual question. And not included in this "question" was Alcindor failing to quote then-Sen. Biden's own words back to him from a speech he called one of the most important of his career in 2005, regarding said filibuster. 

"It is not only a bad idea, it upsets the constitutional design and it disservices the country," Biden said in 2005 in arguing against eliminating the Senate filibuster. "No longer would the Senate be that 'different kind of legislative body' that the Founders intended. No longer would the Senate be the 'saucer' to cool the passions of the immediate majority."

The only decent questions to come out of the CNN town hall were asked by audience members, most notably from the co-founder and owner of Cincinnati restaurant group Thunderdome.

"We employ hundreds of hard-working team members throughout the state of Ohio and throughout the country. And we're looking to hire more every day as we try to restart our restaurant business. The entire industry, amongst other industries, continue to struggle to find employees," said John Lanni in reflecting the sentiment of many restaurant owners across the country. "How do you and the Biden administration plan to incentivize those who haven't returned to work yet? Hiring is our top priority right now."

Biden went on to filibuster – for lack of a better term – for minutes before making this intellectually insulting and evidence-free conclusion: "I think it really is a matter of people deciding now that they have opportunities to do other things, and there's a shortage of employees. People are looking to make more money and to bargain. And so I think your business and the tourist business is really going to be in a bind for a little while."

Lanni seemed unimpressed with the answer. “I was hoping he would recognize it is every industry’s dilemma,” Lanni told the Cincinnati Enquirer afterwards. “We are in a labor crisis and we need to find a way to incentivize people to get back to work. I just heard restaurants are going to have a hard road going forward and that we need to pay our workers more. That’s happening and it’s still not enough."

He added: "I feel like he didn’t really answer the question." 

The final question of the evening went to Lemon, who ended things appropriately, considering the tone and context of the evening. Per the CNN transcript:

Lemon: "Mr. President, you've been the big guy for six months now in the White House. Can you take us behind the scenes, something that was extraordinary or unusual that happened that stands out to you?"

Biden: "Yeah, 'Mr. President, you didn't close the door. ... Mr. President, what the hell are you going out at this time for?'" (Laughter) "You know, it's a wonderful honor. As you can tell, I hope I have very good manners, but I'm not very hung up on protocol." (More laughter.)

The joke is on you, the American viewer or voter who simply wants the president to be challenged on the myriad of problems facing the country: Rising inflation (the president says his spending bills would reduce inflation), skyrocketing violent crime (Biden argues it's a gun problem), a border that isn't secure (with a record number of migrants entering the country this year, topping 1.1 million recently) and an an opioid crisis that is killing a record number of Americans (with a 30 percent jump in drug overdoses in 2020 over 2019).  

No matter: Here's how the network is spinning the event.

In his CNN town hall, Biden tackled Covid-19 vaccine hesitancy and misinformation and delivered some tough economic love as he discussed pressing issues.

Part of Biden's tackling of COVID-19 included his claim that vaccines prevent people from getting the virus. (It doesn't — just ask those six Texas Democrats and a White House staffer who tested positive in breakthrough cases recently.) 

And then there's his answer about whether children 12 and younger should be vaccinated. This is verbatim: "The question is whether or not we should be in a position where, you, uh, um, are why can't the, the, the experts say we know that this virus is, in fact, uh, um, is going to be, or, excuse me, we know why all the drugs approved are not temporarily approved." 

Got that?

Biden hasn't held a formal press conference in 119 days. If last night's performance – with the friendliest of friendly moderators largely running the show – is any indication of how Biden would perform in a free-wheeling session with the press, then don't expect to see him in that kind of format anytime soon. 

Joe Concha is a media and politics columnist for The Hill and a Fox News contributor.

The People v. Critical Race Theory

The People v. Critical Race Theory

Lawsuits are a vital tool in the struggle against race-based programming in public schools.

Kimberly Hermann, City-Journal 

The battleground for America’s future is in our nation’s K-12 public schools. Public schools across the country have replaced traditional education with race-based programming in the name of “equity” that evidently justifies punishing students as young as four years old based on the color of their skin.

For years, critical race theory in schools flew under the radar, but now, thanks to investigative reporting by Christopher Rufo and others, parents have seen enough. They want their state-funded schools to stop promoting concepts like race essentialism that divide Americans into groups based solely on skin color.

America remains a government of laws, not men. The American Founders knew that a strong government could threaten liberty, so they dispersed powers among the legislative, executive, and judicial branches and then placed ultimate sovereignty in the hands of the people. As James Madison wrote in Federalist 51, our federal structure assigns unique powers to each branch of government for “keeping each other in their proper places”—the critical separation of powers.

Public schools are an arm of the government. The check on their power resides in the courtroom. It is long-settled law in America that the government cannot discriminate against people because of the color of their skin. We call this equality under the law, and it is enshrined in the Fourteenth Amendment and in our civil rights laws.

“Classifications of citizens solely on the basis of race are by their very nature odious to a free people whose institutions are founded upon the doctrine of equality,” the Supreme Court has declared. “They threaten to stigmatize individuals by reason of their membership in a racial group and to incite racial hostility.”

It was to defend these principles that a brave teacher in Evanston, Illinois, represented by the Southeastern Legal Foundation, where I am general counsel, recently filed a lawsuit in federal court to stop Evanston/Skokie School District 65 from discriminating against its teachers and students on the basis of race through illegal and unconstitutional teacher training, classroom curriculum, and overall policies. The lawsuit became necessary after the Biden administration withdrew, without explanation or legal justification, the Department of Education’s January 2021 finding that the school district’s policies and procedures violated Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964.

Since 2017, District 65 has openly declared its commitment “to focusing on race as one of the first visible indicators of identity.” The lawsuit challenges what this commitment looks like in practice. For example, the district required its teachers to attend mandatory “antiracist” training, part of which involved segregating teachers into racially exclusive affinity groups and requiring them to engage in racial discrimination against one another. District 65 also required teachers to participate in mandatory “privilege walks,” in which they were segregated by skin color. Through these trainings, teachers were conditioned to see one another’s skin color first and foremost.

District 65 then turned to students. It divided them into racially exclusive affinity groups, required them to participate in racially segregated “privilege” walks, and administered race surveys to students. The district’s curriculum for pre-K through eighth grade includes books that reinforce discriminatory messages, such as Not My Idea: A Book About Whiteness.

Unfortunately, the facts of the lawsuit against District 65 are not unique. Parents and teachers across the United States need to speak up. Legislators need to uphold their oath to the Constitution. More lawsuits will no doubt be needed to stop school districts from implementing practices that turn the idea of “equity” into a license to punish Americans because of their skin color.

Kimberly Hermann is general counsel for Southeastern Legal Foundation, a national constitutional public interest law firm and policy center. 

Blinken’s obscene invitation to the United Nations

 

Blinken’s obscene invitation to the United Nations

Post Editorial Board. 

Secretary of State Antony Blinken’s invitation to UN “experts” to investigate “the scourge of racism, racial discrimination, and xenophobia” in the United States is an utter travesty.

Bits of Blinken’s announcement were pure boilerplate, e.g.: “Great nations such as ours do not hide from our shortcomings; they acknowledge them openly and strive to improve with transparency.”

But the UN human-rights bureaucracy is all about politics, not truth. Most of the functionaries are left-leaning hacks, while the higher ranks respond mainly to orders from back home — from nations that mostly aren’t democracies and hold natural rights in utter contempt. Iran, China, Russia — countries that would never allow, much less invite, such an investigation will hold up the report as evidence of the Evils of America (while their despotic leaders chuckle to themselves about our self-destruction).

So the UN special rapporteurs on racism and minority issues that Blinken specifically invited to come take a look (along with “all UN experts who report and advise on thematic human rights issues”) are guaranteed to accentuate the negative, basically endorsing all the claims of American radicals and then some. UN human rights chief Michelle Bachelet has already endorsed reparations, a hot-button issue for the US left.

Sadly, Team Biden is routinely siding with racial radicals across the board, embracing pernicious “critical race theory” (and the tenet that all whites are irredeemably racist) in policy and in training across the government, including in the military.

Blinken and other Bidenites think they’re winning easy points with their party’s noisome left (or, worse, buy this bunk themselves), but it’s a huge loser with the great American center. And it’s beyond appalling that the head of the State Department actually invited UN apparatchiks to come in and support America’s own far-left culture-warriors.

Fair trade....

 

NSA reading private emails, planned to leak

So, NSA is in bed with the media, hey, defund the NSA...

NSA has been reading my private emails, planned to leak the contents

Intelligence agencies are not the friends of Americans, they are dangerous

 Tucker Carlson | Fox News.   

Last week, we told you that the Biden administration's largest intelligence-gathering agency, the NSA, had been reading my private emails. Even noting that out loud is weird. It's one of those segments we never thought we would do ever. 

But the country has changed that much that fast. And honestly, the whole thing was kind of shocking. The government was spying on us? Come on. It seemed crazy, but it's true. And no one in Washington appeared to be shocked in the slightest. In fact, the usual shills right after our segment had a ready explanation for it. 

Either it never happened at all, they said, just a cable news show lying for ratings, or there must have been a good reason it happened. And they begin furiously making excuses for the NSA. A powerful, heavily politicized spy agency surveilling journalists who've been critical of the regime? No problem. It's perfectly normal. Just don't call it spying. 

But it's not normal - at all. It is Third World, and as we told you repeatedly, it did happen. Now, that has been confirmed. Yesterday, we learned that sources in the so-called intelligence community told at least one reporter in Washington what was in those emails. My emails. It was nothing scandalous in there. Thank God. We're happy to report that. 

Late this spring, I contacted a couple of people I thought could help get us an interview with Russian President Vladimir Putin. I told nobody I was doing this other than my executive producer, Justin Wells. I wasn't embarrassed about trying to interview Putin. He's obviously newsworthy. I'm an American citizen. I can interview anyone I want and I plan to. 

But still, in this case, I decided to keep it quiet. I figured that any kind of publicity would rattle the Russians and make the interview less likely to happen. But the Biden administration found out anyway, by reading my emails. I learned from a whistleblower at the NSA plan to leak the contents of those emails to media outlets. Why would they do that? Well, the point, of course, was to paint me as a disloyal American. A Russian operative. Been called that before. A stooge of the Kremlin, a traitor doing the bidding of a foreign adversary. 

And of course, I'm hardly the only person who's been accused of those things in the last several years. We've seen this movie several times now. At the same moment, the Communist Chinese government increases its already stunning level of control over this country, our leaders prattle on about the threat of Vladimir Putin. He's an evildoer, they tell us. A totalitarian dictator. 

Vladimir Putin does things that no American leader would even consider. He runs domestic disinformation campaigns. He lies to the public. He punishes people for opposing him, or for believing the wrong things. He even uses intelligence agencies to spy on his own citizens. Beyond the pale stuff. So no decent American would interview Vladimir Putin, at least no reporter from Fox News. That was the point they wanted to make. That's why they plan to leak the contents of my emails to news organizations. And yesterday, as noted, we learned they actually did it. 

Even now, some of the media are claiming that we deserve this. Emailing with people who know Putin, are you? Of course, the NSA is watching you. That's what you get. But that's hardly the point. By law, the NSA is required to keep secret the identities of American citizens who've been caught up in its vast domestic spying operations. So by law, I should have been identified internally merely as a US journalist or American journalist. That's the law. 

But that's not how I was identified. It was identified by name. I was unmasked. People in the building learned who I was and then my name and the contents of my emails left that building at the NSA and wound up with a news organization in Washington. That is illegal. In fact, it is precisely what this law was designed to prevent in the first place. We cannot have intelligence agencies used as instruments of political control. 

Both parties used to agree on that. Democrats were especially adamant on the point, but not anymore. So that's exactly what is happening here. We need to find out how this happened, who did it, who allowed it? 

Paul Nakasone would know the answer. Paul Nakasone is the highly political director of the NSA. Paul Nakasone would have been required personally to approve my unmasking. That's how it works. Paul Nakasone should explain who asked for that unmasking and he should do it immediately. 

Avril Haines would also likely know the answer. Haines is the even more political director of National Intelligence who oversees all of it. She may have approved the unmasking as well. She would certainly know who asked for it and who approved it. That's her job to know. She should release that information immediately, tonight. And if Avril Haines does not release that information, she should be forced to release that information. 

We don't have a lot of power, we’re just a TV show. But we're going to keep pushing for that because it matters. Not just to us, but to the entire country. You can't have a democracy in a place where unaccountable spy agencies keep people in line by leaking the contents of their emails, discrediting them with their own emails, which they thought were private. It doesn't work if you allow that. And we suspect congressional Republicans will also demand an answer. 

Many have finally awakened to the fact that the intelligence agencies, which they have blindly supported for so long, are not, in fact, their friends. They're not the friends of anyone in this country. They're dangerous. That's obvious. 

This article is adapted from Tucker Carlson's opening commentary on the July 7, 2021, edition of "Tucker Carlson Tonight."

 

 

Eeyore’s Cabinet: The Paradoxes of Woke Racism

Victor Davis Hanson // Private Papers

Part One

Here are the first three of five observations about our current woke racial mania.

1. Are the non-white elite in government, universities, entertainment, and the corporate world who rail about “whiteness,” “systemic racism,” and pathological “whites” in general mostly referring to their own elite white colleagues? Are not they doppelgangers of the same class without knowing much about so-called white, working-class America outside their own enclaves?
   
   The social media crowd of Silicon Valley, the university administrative cadre, the corporate boardroom grandees, and the thousands of neurotic Hollywood elites are not exactly fond of the two-thirds of white America precisely because they feel their money, privilege, and zip codes exempt them from the consequences of their loud nihilist advocacies they are so eager to impose on others. In other words, is not most of the current racial war the infighting of those of the same class who agree in theory they are on the same side, but in the concrete don’t like each other much, as both claw for similar spoils?
   
   Does not a Don Lemon or LeBron James privately believe that many so-called “whites” are similar to the CNN crowd they hang with, or the basketball corporate apparat? Do the elite non-white who fuel the war against “whiteness” mostly dislike, envy, fear, or compete with their own white mirror-images? I think a Van Jones has far more in common with Brian Selter than does half the white people in the country. In terms of class, do middle-class blacks especially identify with the multi-homed BLM head Patrisse Marie Khan-Cullors Brignac or 1619 promulgator Hannah Nikole-Jones? Do working class whites seek solidarity with Bill Gates, Dr. Fauci, or Steven Colbert?
   
   
2. We still have not received any systematic exegesis why the non-white are pouring into a country whose racism, they are warned by our current cultural and political elites, defines America. Why would the Squad or the Biden clique want two-million foreign citizens in the current twelve-month period to cross the border and thus suffer the terrible wages of racism? 
   
   Either one of three things surely must be true: 1) either the Left doesn’t really believe the country is racist, and so assumes illegal aliens don’t either; 2) or if they do believe it, and if illegal aliens believe it, then they feel legions of angry new recruits are being prepped for the holistic cultural, race, ethnic, and gender take-over to come; 3) or the more they claim America is racist, the more their opponents will compromise and let in more illegal immigrants to prove they are not racist. 
   
   
3. Since the writs against “whiteness” are detailed and nearly endless, and since the prosecutorial case is conducted in starkly racial terms, will there be a defense in kind? I mean if a sometimes New York Times contributor Mr. Damon Young lists all the reasons whites have destroyed life on this planet (and thus deserve what exactly?) or a Dr. Aruna Khilanani damns all white people as sick and pathological liars and fantasizes of shooting them (as opposed to the Bernard professor who dreams of gassing them), will the people they despise and wish eliminated offer a defense in similar stereotypical and generalized terms? That is, would America unwind in the manner common throughout history, when tribes go full tribal? Would the white counter-defense appear something like calibrating the white percentage of the population and then scanning data tables to see whether such a mythical group is under- or over-represented in various good and bad categories: combat deaths in Afghanistan and Iraq? Violent crimes? Homicides? Victims or victimizers in interracial crimes? Nobel Prize winners? DUIs? Do we really wish to go down this road, where each tribe tries its case before other tribes? 
   
   One can see where this racism is going, for if there is such a thing as whiteness that characterizes all 230 million Americans, as seems to have been alleged nonstop since June of last year, then there is a commensurate “brownness” or “blackness” that is to be on similar grounds defined by the sum total of its purported demerits? Is that the logic of tribalism on the horizon?
   
   In sum, why do nonwhite racists think they are not racists, 60 years after the Civil Rights movement? Why do they think it is in their interest to establish the principle that it is perfectly fine to categorize, systematize, stereotype, and generalize about tens of millions on the basis of their skin color, and why do they think that in a multiracial democracy their own protocols and tropes won’t boomerang on them?

ELECTRIC VEHICLES.... COLLISION

 

ELECTRIC VEHICLES ON COLLISION COURSE WITH REALITY

John Hinderacker, Powerline

California’s energy policies are a mess. Ostensibly committed to cutting CO2 emissions, the state shuttered its main nuclear power plant. California has invested massively in wind and solar energy, but since these technologies produce electricity only a minority of the time, California keeps the lights on by importing electricity from other states–electricity that was generated using the reliable sources that California ostensibly eschews.

Then we have electric vehicles. Currently, fewer than two percent of the vehicles on the road in the U.S. are electric. That percentage may be a little higher in California, but it is still miniscule. Nevertheless, California has enacted legislation that seeks to ban gasoline-powered vehicles beginning in 2035. Where the infrastructure will come from to support such a transition in the automobile fleet in the next 14 years is anyone’s guess.

Meanwhile, California’s grid is so inadequate that it can’t effectively charge the tiny number of electric cars already on the road. Newsweek reports:

As temperatures hit triple digits during California’s heat wave last week, the state’s power grid operators encouraged residents to relieve pressure on the grid by charging their electric vehicles before the peak energy use times of day.

“Now is the perfect time to do a load of laundry,” the state’s Flex Alert Twitter account posted on June 18. “Remember to use major appliances, charge cars and devices before #FlexAlert begins at 6 p.m. today.”

It is characteristic of some especially poor or war-torn third-world countries that electricity is available only intermittently during the day. California, welcome to the third world.

Patty Monahan, the lead commissioner on transportation at the California Energy Commission, told Newsweek last month that the times of day Californians choose to charge their electric vehicles will be important in keeping the power grid balanced as reliance on electric vehicles grows.

Matthew Moniot, a researcher with the National Renewable Energy Laboratory, said during a recent interview with Newsweek that electric vehicle owners now mostly charge their vehicles at night, but that will likely have to change so that more drivers are charging while energy production levels are higher.

There is a reason why EV owners charge their cars at night. It is because that is when they are not driving them. The problem is inherent, since the Sun doesn’t shine at night and winds tend to die down at night, as well. There is no real solution to the problem when EVs represent two percent of the cars on the road, let alone in the hypothetical world where they are 100 percent.

Increased reliance on solar and wind energy will present a “tricky problem” regarding “how much can we move what’s currently overnight charging to be during the daytime hours, when generation may be more excessive,” Moniot said.

“The key is flexibility,” he added.

Sure. Drive your car at night, and charge it during the day.

“Green” energy policies are a disaster everywhere they are being implemented, but California will probably crash and burn before the other states that have gone down the “green” path.

Why Obama Failed

Especially poignant in his third term... 

 Why Obama Failed

Cameron Hilditch, National Review   

In a revealing interview, Obama tried to burnish his image for progressive posterity — but he still doesn’t understand his fundamental errors.

Barack Obama rose to political stardom in the wake of his 2004 convention speech, during which he made an implicit promise that he could transcend party divisions in Washington, bridge the gap between Republicans and Democrats, and make the federal government functional again. I’ll confess that I really thought he wanted to do this when he ascended to the presidency. It took the first volume of his memoirs and a recent interview he gave to Ezra Klein of the New York Times to fully and finally disabuse me of that notion.

During his 2008 campaign, Obama seemed to display a certain capaciousness of intellect and imagination that would allow him to get inside his opponents’ heads, understand their position in good faith, and address it in a perspicacious way, creating an illusion of rapport. He also knew how to do this with journalists. The conservative columnist David Brooks, for instance, was caught off guard during an interview with Obama when it became apparent that the then-senator had a favorite theologian, Reinhold Niebuhr, of whom he could speak learnedly and with enthusiasm — a pleasant surprise for a conservative admirer of Niebuhr like Brooks. This circumspection is clearly a part of the Obama mythos that the man himself values, because he restates it at the beginning of his interview with Klein:

I forget whether it was Clarence Darrow, or Abraham Lincoln, or some apocryphal figure in the past who said, look, the best way to win an argument is to first be able to make the other person’s argument better than they can. And for me, what that meant was that I had to understand their worldview. And I couldn’t expect them to understand mine if I wasn’t extending myself to understand theirs.

After reading this quotation, many conservatives will likely wonder if they have gone through the looking glass. Close observers of American politics over the last decade will be aware that President Obama made very little effort to understand the worldview of his Republican colleagues in Washington. In fact, an interesting companion piece to Klein’s interview is this reported essay by Alex Thompson, written last summer for Politico, on the Obama-Biden relationship. Thompson’s sources indicate that Obama was exceedingly bad at persuading his Republican colleagues to back his proposals:

“Negotiating with President Obama was all about the fact that he felt that he knew the world better than you,” said Eric Cantor, the Republican House majority leader from 2011 to 2014. “And he felt that he thought about it so much, that he figured it all out, and no matter what conclusion you had come to with the same set of facts, his way was right.” Biden, he said, understood that “you’re gonna have to agree to disagree about some things.” A former Republican leadership aide described Obama’s style as “mansplaining, basically.”

Lest these recollections be dismissed as Republican potshots, Thompson also quotes from the memoirs of David Axelrod, one of Obama’s chief advisers, who makes the same point: “‘Few practiced politicians appreciate being lectured on where their political self-interest lies,’ he wrote of Obama’s style. ‘That hint of moral superiority and disdain for politicians who put elections first has hurt Obama as negotiator, and it’s why Biden, a politician’s politician, has often had better luck.’”

Despite his self-image as a latter-day Pericles, Obama turned out to be bad at building legislative coalitions inside the Beltway. Why was this? In short, it was because of his views on persuading the public as opposed to persuading his colleagues. As he told Klein:

The premise of persuading somebody who you can build some trust with, and have a history with and relationship, then there might be times where you say, you know what? You’re just full of it. And let me tell you why. And you can be very logical and incisive about how you want to dismantle their arguments. . . . But look, when you’re dealing at the macro level, when you’re dealing with 300 million people with enormous regional, and racial, and religious, and cultural differences, then now you are having to make some calculations. So let’s take the example you used. And I write extensively about the emergence of the Tea Party. And we could see that happening with Sarah Palin. She was sort of a prototype for the politics that led to the Tea Party, that in turn, ultimately led to Donald Trump, and that we’re still seeing today.

There were times where calling it out would have given me great satisfaction personally. But it wouldn’t have necessarily won the political day in terms of me getting a bill passed. And I think every president has to deal with this.

Obama seems to believe that when he was in discussions with congressional Republicans, face-to-face in the Oval Office, his best play was to try to win the argument on the theoretical plane, explaining forcefully and straightforwardly why their positions were flat-out incorrect. This is what appears to have rubbed Cantor the wrong way. Obama made a political bet that the context of one-on-one relationships would allow for this kind of argument from principle to be effective. His watertight syllogisms and unwavering honesty would, he imagined, cause the scales to fall from the eyes of McConnell & Co., ushering in a new era of “unity.”

By way of contrast, he also seems to believe that when dealing with the electorate, one has to handle arguments more carefully, to rhetorically triangulate in such a way as to offend the lowest number of potential voters. These two beliefs, about how a president persuades Congress and how he persuades the public, are sufficient to explain why Obama’s presidency was a failure, because the truth about political persuasion in America is precisely the opposite of what he thinks it is.

By temperament, Obama is a classical figure. His notion of changing the minds and policies of his fellow statesmen by having it out with them until they relented harks back to the senatorial style of the Roman Republic. He fatefully, and fatally, failed to take into account that national politics has not worked like this in the United States since the 1820s, before the presidency of Andrew Jackson.

The statesmen of pre-Jacksonian America — especially the senators — believed that government should be undertaken by a natural aristocracy of talent and intellect, which should be accountable to the public in only a limited and convoluted way. This was as true of Jeffersonians like John Quincy Adams as it was of Federalists like his father. In such a climate, political leaders at the national level could allow themselves to be persuaded by their peers into changing positions on a given issue without fearing fatal electoral reprisals. Politics at that time really did happen in Congress more than in the country at large.

But the huge wave of democratic discontent that swept General Andrew Jackson of Tennessee into office put an end to the aristocratic manners and mores that had governed national politics up to that point. As Arthur Schlesinger wrote in his great work The Age of Jackson:

The growing importance of the common man was accompanied by a declining importance of Congress. The function of the legislature was now rather to elicit, register, and influence public opinion than to assert its independent will. The great party leader was no longer the eloquent parliamentary orator, whose fine periods could sweep his colleagues into supporting his measures, but the popular hero, capable of bidding directly for the confidence of the masses.

Previously, the statesman had been relatively unbound by the will of his electorate. But in the new democratic age brought about by the Jacksonian revolution, he could be sure that any policy deviation from the expressed will of his constituents would cost him at the ballot box. Persuasion no longer happened in Congress. It happened in the country.

The man who fully grasped the profundity of this change was not Jackson himself but his successor and ally, Martin Van Buren. As Schlesinger writes, Van Buren

protested repeatedly against romantic views of the magic of oratory. When Macaulay declared grandly, in the well-known passage on Pitt, “Parliamentary Government is Government by speaking,” Van Buren begged to differ. True parliamentary leadership, he declared, involved “powers of the mind more humble in pretension and less dazzling in appearance but, as experience has often proved, far more effective in the end than the most brilliant oratory when not sustained by them.” Good judgment in timing measures, the capacity to strike directly at the opposition’s weakest point without wasting time in “mere oratorical” disquisition, skill in guiding the debate so as to capitalize on “latent diversities of feeling and opinion on points either not at all or only remotely bearing upon the principal subject,” and good sense to strive for objects not beyond practical reach — oratory was useless without these technical skills.

Schlesinger further notes that the two statesmen of the age most attached to the rhetorical, congressional model of persuasion, Daniel Webster and Henry Clay, lost almost every political battle they fought during the 1830s. Their politics was out of place in the new democratic order, in which persuasion entailed appealing to the electoral interests of one’s colleagues in a way that was “intimate and conversational, with low-pitched voice and clear enunciation,” as Schlesinger describes it. “John Quincy Adams,” he goes on to write, “former professor of rhetoric at Harvard, . . . perfectly expressed the baffled exasperation of the old school in an outburst against James K. Polk: ‘He has no wit, no literature, no point of argument, no gracefulness of delivery, no elegance of language, no philosophy, no pathos, no felicitous impromptus; nothing that can constitute an orator, but confidence, fluency, and labor.’”

It’s easy to imagine President Obama saying something similar about Cantor or McConnell.

The really successful presidents also took an opposite tack to Obama’s when it came to persuading the public. Obama clearly felt that he had to handle the electorate with kid gloves. He tells Klein that “as the first African-American president, there was a presumption, not incorrect, that there were times where I was biting my tongue.” He uses the issue of race as an example: “Is it more important,” he asks, “for me to tell a basic historical truth, let’s say, about racism in America right now? Or is it more important for me to get a bill passed that provides a lot of people with health care that didn’t have it before?” He describes this as a choice between his “prophetic voice” and his “coalition-building political voice.”

Obama, clearly more comfortable using his “prophetic voice” in private political negotiations, told Klein that “there might be times where you say [to your colleagues], you know what? You’re just full of it. And let me tell you why. And you can be very logical and incisive about how you want to dismantle their arguments.” But it was in public, when using his “coalition-building political voice,” where he made his fatal mistake. Successful presidents have done precisely the opposite, using their “prophetic voice” to whip up popular energy and enthusiasm for their agenda and their “coalition-building political voice” to sell their colleagues on that agenda as something that is in the electoral interest of those same politicians. In short, instead of laying himself bare before the people and then managing their representatives carefully in private, Obama sought to manage the people carefully and then lay himself bare before their representatives, hoping to persuade the few where he knew he could not persuade the many.

The trouble for Obama was simply this: For any politician to use his or her “prophetic voice” effectively on the electorate, there has to be an authentic sense of solidarity and mutual affection between the former and the latter. Jackson, for instance, had a greater mutual affinity with the average American voter in the 1820s (at that time, only white men, sadly) than John Quincy Adams did. As Jackson’s biographer Robert Remini notes, “At one time in the history of the United States, General Andrew Jackson of Tennessee was honored above all living men. And most dead ones, too.” The same affection existed between the common man and Franklin Roosevelt a century later. For example, during the Roosevelt administration, the British ambassador sent this report back to London: “Every house I visited — mill worker or unemployed — had a picture of the President. . . . He is at once God and their intimate friend; he knows them all by name, knows their little town and mill, their little lives and problems. And though everything else fails, he is there, and will not let them down.”

President Reagan could boast of a similar, though less intense, connection with the electorate; President Trump made the same kind of connection with the white working class in 2016, but, unlike Roosevelt and Reagan, he failed to expand his coalition beyond this base to any great degree.

Jackson, Roosevelt, and Reagan could use their prophetic voices in public because there was a genuine and unaffected synergy between the values of the electorate, broadly speaking, and their own. The public sensed that these presidents liked Americans (though with shameful exceptions in the case of Jackson, who despised two groups, African Americans and Native Americans). There are, as it turns out, a great many Americans whom Barack Obama doesn’t like and doesn’t trust, and he clearly feels that these Americans were sufficiently powerful during his presidency to prevent him from speaking frankly to the public about his beliefs without incurring a backlash. Unable or unwilling to trust the voters, both Obama and his successor squandered political opportunities for compromise.

This is an unpleasant conclusion. But the partisan rancor of Obama’s interview with Klein makes it quite unavoidable. He talks about Republicans’ “complete unwillingness to do anything about the slaughter of children,” totally ignoring his own party’s fanatical defense of an abortion regime the extremity of which is equaled only in China, Vietnam, and North Korea. He describes his opponents as “folks who feel threatened by change,” and calls the Republican voters represented in the Senate “irreconcilably wrong.” Of the Democratic Party, he boasts that “we don’t have the luxury of just consigning a group of people to say, you’re not real Americans,” implying that Republicans are engaged in this kind of activity habitually. Obama accuses “the previous Republican administration” of “completely ignoring science” on vaccines, a claim that none other than Anthony Fauci, who was there and should know, has debunked on several very public occasions. He also repeats the ahistorical lie that all the counter-majoritarian mechanisms in the Constitution arose out of a “very intentional desire for Southern states, for example, to maintain power and reduce the power of the federal government” — a kind of intellectual 7/10 split that must spell doom either for the former president’s intellectual reputation or for his honesty.

Perhaps the most partisan remark that the former president made came as part of his familiar critique of what’s often called “both-sidesism” in the media. He notes that “there are certain bad habits that the media cultivated and it had to, then, reexamine during the Trump era, the classic being what constitutes objectivity, as I joke about.” As an example of such joking, he feigns a bit of media commentary: “President Obama, today, was savagely attacked by the Republicans for suggesting that the earth is round. Republicans suggested that there’s some hidden documents showing the earth is, in fact, flat.” This is the kind of sarcasm that one would expect from a Twitter troll, not from a former president of the United States (though the line between those two things is admittedly blurrier than it used to be).

During his presidential campaign, Barack Obama told a story to the electorate, about himself and about America, that he believed he could win over the voters he needed. He was right. But it’s clearly not the story he believed himself. These days, he’s telling a different story with a different audience in mind. In the pages of his memoirs and in interviews with progressive tastemakers like Klein, Obama is speaking in his prophetic voice at last. He’s authoring a revisionist history of his own presidency in real time, offering a commentary on his internal monologue as it played out during his eight years in office. The purpose of this revisionism is apparent. As he told Klein:

Part of what I try to make clear in the book is, and sometimes my friends in the Democratic Party who criticize us on the left misapprehend this idea that we had some ideological aversion to pushing the envelope on policy. That’s not the case. We had just political constraints we had to deal with, and we had an emergency we had to deal with.

Obama’s new audience is progressive posterity. He’s attempting to burnish his credentials with the radical activists of the present and the radical historians of the future. He wants to make it clear to them that any ostensible respect he may have shown for Republicans during his career was nothing more than a concession to electoral necessity. He wants them to know that the moderation was all for show — a tragic obligation kenotically undertaken by a progressive savior in a reactionary nation that couldn’t keep up with the pace of his moral leadership.

Ultimately, Obama failed as a leader because, unlike presidents past, he didn’t trust the public. He lacked both the courage and the convictions required to thrive in the democratic polity the birth of which Van Buren chronicled during the 1830s. To borrow from his own terminology, Obama would not prophesy for the public and he could not build coalitions with his colleagues. He knew that history had not dealt him an electorate the makeup of which intersected perfectly with his own ambitions, as it had for Jackson, Roosevelt, and Reagan. This is why he resents his Republican opponents so much. Neither they nor their voters were sufficiently made according to his own political image, an image that he still believes to be the best and clearest evidence of the small measure of moral credibility that can justly be claimed by the United States of America.

The Texas Voting Lie

The Texas Voting Lie

Rich Lowery, National Review 

None of the bill’s provisions would actually prevent anyone from voting, no matter what Democrats say.

The Democratic opposition to legislative minorities using whatever leverage they have to block legislation is highly situational.

In Washington, D.C., where Democrats control the White House and both chambers of Congress, the Senate filibuster is portrayed as a Jim Crow relic that is profoundly undemocratic.

In Austin, Texas, where Republicans control the governor’s mansion and both chambers of the legislature, House Democrats’ walking out to prevent the passage of a bill with majority support is portrayed as a heroic act preserving our democracy.

The bill in question is an election-reform measure that Democrats allege is the latest instance of state-level GOP voter suppression.

The only recourse, they say, is at the federal level. The Senate filibuster should be eliminated — so much for the rights of legislative minorities — and then the narrowest-possible Democratic Senate majority should pass H.R.1, overriding long-standing, duly-passed election laws all around the country and essentially federalizing our elections.

Democracy, they tell us, demands nothing less.

To the contrary, this would be a power grab carried out under blatantly false pretenses.

The Texas bill is no more a voter-suppression measure than the Georgia election law that passed a few months ago, which occasioned outraged accusations of the arrival of Jim Crow 2.0 that ultimately fell flat.

The least defensible part of the Texas law is its provision saying that early voting on the Sunday before the election can’t begin until 1 p.m., which could crimp the traditional “souls to the polls” turnout efforts of black churches. A Republican legislator says this was a drafting error. Regardless, the provision should — and almost certainly will be — changed.

The rest of the legislation is unobjectionable. It pushes back against what were supposed to be temporary expedients during the pandemic, such as drive-through voting and 24-hour early-voting marathons. Texas democracy was healthy and robust prior to these emergency innovations, and it will be when they are gone.

It explicitly forbids election officials from implementing practices not contemplated under the state’s election statutes, as sometimes happened during the pandemic.

In many counties, it will extend the daily minimum time for early voting by one hour.

In certain circumstances, by the way, employers are required to give employees time off to go vote.

Its provisions for increased security and transparency are hardly draconian. Among other things, it would require voters to write a driver’s license number or other identifier on absentee ballots, matching the existing voter-ID requirement for registering to vote and voting in person.

It would ban public officials from sending out unsolicited mail-in ballots, a commonsense provision to keep excess ballots from floating around. Certainly, it’s not too much to ask that people affirmatively request their mail-in ballots.

It would mandate that all voting systems have a paper trail on or before 2026, with a funding incentive for counties to comply early.

For sizable jurisdictions that can easily pull it off, it would require livestreaming of vote-counting proceedings.

All of this is reported as “restrictive” in the press, but none of it would actually prevent anyone from voting, and there is zero chance that the bill would discernibly affect turnout.

To make this proposal the triggering event for a radical change in U.S. Senate rules to pass the most far-reaching, high-handed federal election bill in the country’s history, one that would wipe out countless state laws as well as bipartisan federal election legislation passed over the past 30 years, would be absurdly pretextual and disproportionate.

The Democrats, just like the Republicans, tend to be hypocritical on legislative-process questions, depending on what advances their interests. But on one thing they are admirably consistent, whether at the state or federal level, whether in the minority or majority — stirring up self-serving hysteria over GOP election laws.

© 2021 by King Features Syndicate