HOW MANY STRANDED AMERICANS?

 HOW MANY STRANDED AMERICANS?

John Hinderaker, Powerline 

As Scott has noted, the Biden administration now claims that having extracted around 6,000 Americans from Afghanistan, only a very few remain–a few hundred, or maybe just one hundred. But these numbers are radically different from what the administration was telling us only days ago.

The first estimate I saw from an administration spokesman was that there were between 5,000 and 10,000 Americans in Afghanistan. Just two weeks ago, Jen Psaki told us with seeming specificity that there were 11,000, or perhaps more:

We are — there have been — how the process works, I should say — I’ll tell you — is that there are individuals who will self-identify as American citizens — that number is around 11,000. Beyond that — around the country — beyond that, though, there are individuals who may not have self-identified, who may come and request assistance and come to the airport.

We’re going to work to assist, of course, American citizens, but we also have a responsibility and an obligation to help the men and women who served by our sides, many of your — the sides of your colleagues, as translators, and as interpreters, and our locally employed staff, and others.

Q So, just to confirm, 11,000 in the entire country, not just in Kabul? 

MS. PSAKI: Well, I would just say, that’s the self-identified number, right? So — but we will continue to provide assistance. And we are prioritizing American citizens. We are also working to get additional officials out who have played an important role.

There obviously was some kind of process in which around 11,000 people “self-identified” as American citizens, yet that number has now been dropped to 6,000. Why? Further, subsequent to Psaki’s August 17 press conference the administration estimated that there were 10,000 to 15,000 Americans in Afghanistan.

If the Biden administration has tried to explain why its estimates of the number of Americans in Afghanistan, made just days ago, were so drastically off the mark, I haven’t seen it. Failing a meaningful explanation, one is tempted to assume the worst: that the administration has no idea how many Americans it has left to the mercy of the Taliban and is simply pretending that there were around 6,000 Americans in-country when the evacuation began because that is the number its pathetic operation was able to save.

Biden’s first 200 days

            

Biden’s first 200 days

Hugo Gurdon, Editor, and Chief, Washington Examiner. 

Joe Biden, like most presidents, made much of supposed achievements in his first 100 days. Remember how, arriving in office, he promised 100 million COVID vaccine doses in that period. It was a soft target, for, as some of us pointed out, the vaccination pace on Inauguration Day, for which he could claim no credit, was sufficient to reach his goal. But by touting it, he demonstrated the significance attributed to the 100 days milestone.

Less attention is paid to the 200 days milestone. This is a mistake. For the first 100 days is a three-month blur when an administration is taking shape and its successes and failures haven’t had time to come into focus. It’s in the second hundred days, when the razzmatazz and newness are over and an administration has lost its first freshness, that one can really judge.

Biden’s second hundred days have been an unmitigated disaster.

It was then that inflation soared above 5%. It was on Aug. 9, Biden’s 199th day, that Democrats released their fiscally reckless and culturally destructive $3.5 trillion budget plan, drafted by socialist Sen. Bernie Sanders with the intention of reshaping American life with a big expansion of the ballooning welfare state.

It was in Biden’s second 100 days that illegal immigration turned from a mere fiasco into a national crisis. The number of illegal migrants doubled in January to 78,417 compared to the same month of 2020, as Latin Americans accepted Biden’s invitation to come north, no questions asked. The numbers jumped again each month, and by his 100th day, the March numbers were out at a shocking 173,283, five times what they’d been a year earlier. Yet it was only in his second hundred days that it became clear there’d be more than 2 million illegal border crossings this year, that there’d be no decline in arrivals during the intensely hot summer months as the administration has promised, and that Biden had created the worst immigration crisis in more than 20 years.

Then came the worst disaster so far, America’s collapse in Afghanistan. It was on Aug. 10, Biden’s 200th day in office, that the Taliban overran three provincial capitals and it became obvious that their barbarian blitzkrieg would consume the entire country, ending America’s 20-year efforts against them in a humiliating rout.

This debacle is like the turn of a kaleidoscope that rearranges all the pieces into a new, unrecognizable, and startling pattern. The picture of America’s place in the world has been changed irrevocably. Friends and foes everywhere are reassessing their relationship with us. The former are making worried inquiries about whether our “leader” has entirely lost his marbles. The latter, knowing that America under Biden is no longer to be feared, are taunting America with unconcealed contempt.

We are living through a sort of implosion, in which no one seems to be in charge of America and our elected chief executive is a weak and shambolic embarrassment.

This is what Joe Biden has wrought in his first 200 days.

RACHEL CAMPOS-DUFFY: All of us have wondered who is behind this president? He’s clearly not in charge and I think Americans have a right to know who's in charge. Last night on Laura Ingraham's show, I believe it was Congressman [Mark] Green said that he was briefed that the president was told not to close Bagram Air Base and he did it anyway, and so we know that Joe Biden has bad judgment but we also know he’s not there and I’m sorry, 13 military members are dead. Hundreds of Americans are trapped behind enemy lines and the American people deserve to know who is in charge and if he's not up to the job, something has to be done. This is unsustainable.

Dems in Congress should impeach him.

 

If Biden were a Republican, Dems in Congress would have impeached him. They should

Victor Davis Hanson | Tribune Media Services

Biden keeps repeating that he was bound by Trump’s planned withdrawal. Really?

The American-nurtured Afghan military of the last 20 years that had suffered thousands of prior casualties evaporated in a few hours in the encirclement of Kabul. 

Enlistees apparently calculated that their own meager chances with the premodern Taliban were still better than fighting as a dependency of the postmodern United States — despite its powerful diversity training programs. 

Forces more powerful than the Taliban, in places far more strategic, will now leverage an ideologically driven but predictably incompetent administration, a woke Pentagon and politically weaponized intelligence communities. 

Why not, when President Joe Biden trashes both American frackers and the Saudis — only to beg the Kingdom to rush to export more of its hated oil before the U.S. midterms?

Why not, when Biden asks Russia’s Vladimir Putin to request that Russian-related hackers be a little less rowdy in their selection of U.S. targets?

And why not, when our own military jousts with the windmills of "white supremacy" as Afghans fall from U.S. military jets in fatal desperation to reach such a supposedly racist nation?

Biden keeps repeating that he was bound by former President Donald Trump’s planned withdrawal. 

Really?

A mercurial Trump repeatedly demonstrated that he was willing to use air power to protect U.S. personnel and to bomb an Islamic would-be caliphate. The Taliban knew that and so struck when Trump was gone.

Biden claims he was bound by Trump’s decision to withdraw and thus cannot be blamed for his reckless operation of a predetermined departure. But all Biden has done since entering office is destroy Trump pacts, overturning past agreements on energy leases, protocols with Latin America and Mexico on border security, and pipeline contracts.

No sooner did Biden claim he was straitjacketed by Trump than he reversed course to defend not just his own withdrawal but the disastrous manner of it. Biden claims that he has no free will while insisting he would have done nothing differently if he did.

In a sane world, the Joint Chiefs of Staff and the secretary of defense would resign. We have heard for too long their careerist boasts about assigning climate change as their chief challenge. For too long they have virtue-signaled their critical race theory credentials to Congress. For too long they have bragged about rooting out alleged white supremacists from their ranks. For too long they have sparred with journalists while fighting Twitter wars and issuing cartoonish commercials attesting to their woke credentials. 

In other words, they sermonized on anything and everything — except their plans to prevent a humiliating military defeat of U.S. forces and their allies. 

Our intelligence and investigatory agencies are just as morally suspect. The legacy of John Brennan, James Clapper, James Comey and Andrew McCabe has been the destruction of the reputations of the CIA, NSA and FBI.

Current and retired intelligence lackeys and careerists all wasted years promulgating Russian "collusion." They swore Hunter Biden’s laptop was Russian "disinformation." 

They surveilled and unmasked officials and hatched adolescent plots against an elected president. All that was more important to their careers than warning of the growing threats in Afghanistan. 

In the aftermath of the Afghan debacle, we must de-politicize and de-weaponize these warped agencies and incompetent institutions. 

We could get a symbolic start by pulling security clearances from all retired operatives, officers and diplomats who go on television to offer partisan analysis. 

The retired and pensioned top brass should finally be held to account if they violate tenets of the Uniform Code of Military Justice. When four-star generals lecture the nation that an elected president is a Mussolini or Nazi-like but keep mum during the greatest military setback in a half-century, they should forfeit exemptions from existing military codes.

Retired officers who revolve in and out of corporate defense contractor boards and Pentagon billets should have a cooling-off period of five years before leveraging their inside knowledge of the Pentagon procurement labyrinth.

As for Biden, his team in defeat threatens the victorious Taliban with possible ostracism from global diplomacy as the price of their illiberality. We are to assume that in between executing women, the Taliban will fear losing the chance to visit the U.N. in New York.

Biden has defied a Supreme Court ruling and assumed that it was a good thing to have broken the law. Under his watch, the fate of America’s border, equal enforcement of the laws, economy, energy, safety from crime, foreign policy and racial relations have imploded — and in seven months no less.

If Biden were a Republican, the current Democratic House would have impeached him. It would have been right to have done so.

Victor Davis Hanson is a distinguished fellow of the Center for American Greatness. He is the author of more than two dozen books, ranging in topics from ancient Greece to modern America. He lives in Selma, California. 

The Celestial Empire Fights Back

The Celestial Empire Fights Back

Three Asian-American authors offer interesting perspectives on how America can, and ought to be, an example to the world and how to stand up to their school boards.

 Ken Masugi, American Greatness. 

As the Taliban forces America into submission, we wonder about our country’s claim to greatness. What has our global prosperity and power brought us? In Federalist 11, Alexander Hamilton excited his readers’ imagination for a world where America, by its example, would liberate oppressed and backward peoples from enslavement and savagery.  In this way, a strong America is a civilizing force.

Hamilton spreads the revolutionary fire of the Declaration: “Africa, Asia, and America have successively felt [Europe’s] domination. The superiority she has long maintained has tempted her to plume herself as the mistress of the world, and to consider the rest of mankind as created for her benefit.” 

The Declaration of Independence condemned the barbaric, British-inspired slave revolts of  King George, but the new nation would constitute the greatest slave revolt in human history. “It belongs to us to vindicate the honor of the human race,” Hamilton proclaims. “Union will enable us to do it.” On this point, Lincoln would reassure Americans some 75 years later, and the 20th century has given further proof of America’s model and action for the world.

America once could show corrupt Europe, both its politicians and intellectuals and their American imitators, that only in the new republic can men show their true human selves. Contrary to the nonsense that in America “dogs cease to bark” free American air clears the minds and throats and allows human reason and speech to guide political life.

Although the immigrant Hamilton wanted future Americans from across the seas to come here and settle, he (as did the other founders) wanted citizens who respected and strengthened republican institutions. In other words, they didn’t want just anyone to come.

Today, three of Hamilton’s most effective supporters are the daughter and sons of Asian immigrants who, in various ways, would overthrow the critical race theory emanating from tyrannical German and French sources. These lively minds are the Filipino Chinese-American Yale law professor Amy Chua, Korean-American writer Wesley Yang, and Chinese-American journalist Kenny Xu.

Their arguments should inform today’s patriotic citizens, in particular those who are battling their local school boards and governments against the imposition of alien ideologies attacking the Declaration of Independence. 

Before reading them, I had long thought that the best essay I had read on Asian Americans was Richard Rodriguez’s essay “Asians,” in his 1992 book Days of Obligation. Reflecting on his life in the “Chinese” city of San Francisco, Rodriguez makes trenchant observations about how identity is formed by people other than from one’s own tribe, in his case, Irish nuns and a south Indian relative added to his Mexican ancestry. In school, he became Americanized and “ended up believing in choices as much as any of you do.” As a professor, his Asian students, because they were opposed to it, made him aware that he was putting too much emphasis on class participation. “Like most other American teachers, I equated intelligence with liveliness or defiance.”

In fact, the entire essay, barely 16 pages, is a commentary on Jessica, Shylock’s treacherous daughter, in Shakespeare’s The Merchant of Venice. Shylock is the despised Jewish financier of Venetian prosperity. Venice’s Christian businessmen mock him while seeking low-interest loans from him. Shylock is content with this commercial relationship, but his daughter falls to the wooing of a young Christian lad and loots Shylock’s home, running off with the young man. Immigrant children observe Rodriguez, become Jessicas, rejecting spiritual tradition and faith while taking their fathers’ gold and then disappearing with other uprooting persons. “Foolish immigrant parents.” (An excerpt appears here.)  

Each of the Asian authors mentioned above deals with the flourishing and thwarting of immigrant ambitions in America. 

Amy Chua in her remarkable (and quite misunderstood) memoir—not about the superiority of Chinese parents but, as she says, “about a bitter clash of cultures, a fleeting taste of glory, and how I was humbled by a thirteen-year-old.”

In her vivid account of raising her daughters, Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother, Chua captivated and horrified readers. She detailed with alternate glee and frustration her demanding approach to disciplining her young daughters to become successful musicians and model Chinese daughters. (An excerpt appeared in the New York Times Sunday Magazine.)

Having now read the entire book, I see I had initially overlooked its literary qualities. (I had first heard of Chua when Patrick Buchanan praised her first book. Many scholars too, I add, approved of its observation about how ethnic conflicts shape national policies.) 

The war story—a metaphor I adopt from the mom’s account—between mom and daughters (ranging from threats of starving to burning stuffed animals) and brutal music practice sessions—is deliberately appalling and, at least in parts, exaggerated. It is a book to be taken seriously though not always literally. It shows the toughest of tough love, and it seems she succeeded, at least according to the glowing profiles that emerge. (Today the older daughter, Sophie, having clerked for Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh, serves in the U.S. Army in the JAG corps, while the younger daughter Lulu attends Harvard law school.) Their father, Yale law professor, Jed Rubenfeld, occasionally intervenes in the book when the children blow up at mom. 

Chua advises, “Chinese parents can order their kids to get straight As. Western parents can only ask their kids to try their best.” Chinese parents demand excellence. Often the Chinese approach gets results, while the Western often produces mediocrity and insecurity. (Later she admits that other immigrants have similar ethics. The cartoon version is seen here.) 

We see Professor Chua’s comeuppance—and her becoming the student—when, in a kind of postmodern development, she and her daughters critique the book as it is being written; by then the kids are in high school. 

Mother: “I refuse to buckle to politically correct Western social norms that are obviously stupid . . . I actually think America’s Founding Fathers had Chinese values.” That is, as Sophia rebuts, not a “totally Chinese way of thinking” but rather “an American way of thinking.” 

Instead of hiding the book from the local politicians who want to discriminate against high-achieving Asian-American students, it should elicit admiration and not resignation from parents who might even be tempted to resort to bribery (or its close relative, political power) to get their kids into colleges they regard as socially acceptable. This Tiger Mother is what you’re up against, and she will devour you.

Patriotic activists might also get a mixed message from Wesley Yang’s 2018 collection of profiles, Souls of Yellow Folk. The title is deceiving, for we might think of it as a version of W.E.B. DuBois’s classic, Souls of Black Folk, but Yang’s “yellow” does not refer merely to race but to various forms of cowardice. He crafts discerning profiles (like a disgusting spectacle one can’t turn away from) of horrifying and often appalling people such as the Korean-American student mass murderer Seung-Hui Cho. “He looks like me . . . ”

And as to his identity, Yang also confesses, “I have never dated a Korean woman. I don’t have a Korean friend. Though I am an immigrant, I have never wanted to strive like one.” He notes, with some admiration, that Chua’s Battle Hymn is “a very American project—one no traditional Chinese person would think to undertake.” Yet the academic assertiveness, he notes, does not produce Asian-American prominence in the ruling class or even corporate management. 

Do Asians lack imagination? Yang in a recent interview describes the regnant “successor ideology,” the confused racial advocacy that serves as racial justice equity in social and academic contexts.  

In exploring non-Asian topics, Yang portrays cowardice or reticence, a form of mikropsuchia or unmanly lack of ambition, in grotesque online sex sites, an internet genius who committed suicide when confronted for hacking the academic repository JSTOR, and finally, racial divisions over exploitative episodes—flyers with the message, “It’s OK to Be White” and indeterminate but actionable definitions of “white supremacy.” The calculated cowardice of school boards and local government produces an “intricate system of racial casuistry, worthy of Jesuits, . . .  a beguiling compound of insight, partial truths, circular reasoning, and dogmatism operating within a self-enclosed system of reference immunized against critique and optimized for virality.”  No friend of Trump, Yang is nonetheless a spirited voice for reason. 

In An Inconvenient Minority: The Attack on Asian American Excellence and the Fight for Meritocracy, Kenny Xu has provided more reasonable (or at least less yellow-bellied) school boards and their energetic allies a comprehensive guide to how politics, culture, and the new “diversity, equity, and inclusion” ethic damage the futures of Asian-American students and employees. 

The young author’s book details how Harvard (and other elite schools) craft policies that result in discriminatory practices against Asian-Americans in order to bolster more black, Hispanic, and favored white applicants. On academic standing alone, the Asians clearly prevailed over the others. The book as a whole is not about the cases but how the prejudices that led to Harvard’s approach are found in society in general. Asians are an “inconvenient minority,” which overcomes discriminatory barriers but fall prey to other, invidious practices. I have previously reviewed this book for Liberty Fund’s Law and Liberty site, but Xu’s understanding of “meritocracy” needs a defense.

Meritocracy is a republic that requires loyalty to the regime, and in the American instance, an understanding of and action promoting the founding principles of equality and liberty. Compare what Aristotle says about officeholders: they must love the republic, first of all, and next perform their duties well, and finally be just and virtuous. Woke education attacks the first two in the name of a twisted notion of the third. 

As Xu’s book points out, leading Asian-American academics already have adopted the “diversity, equity, and inclusion” ethic. His response, focusing on Asian-American super skills, is wanting. His overall argument needs to satisfy the patriotic and virtuous elements of citizenship in order to be part of Jefferson’s natural aristocracy. This would be a kind of populism needed to attach these great performers to their country. That would obliterate Harvard’s and other woke admissions policies that are subverting academia. Of course there are plenty of other changes required before Harvard and higher education generally can be made safe for democracy, but that can be the subject of Xu’s next book.

These resources and authors should be familiar to all Americans interested in giving the American democratic republic a vital future. Each answers Richard Rodriguez’s observations and gives advice that would produce more grateful Jessicas. 

In antebellum America, The Merchant of Venice was the Shakespeare play performed most frequently. Jessica’s father Shylock initially wins his court case demanding a pound of flesh from his enemy Antonio. When, in Act IV, scene 1, the Venetian judge asks that Shylock relent from this barbaric demand, he replies,

You have among you many a purchased slave, . . . 

You use in abject and in slavish parts,

Because you bought them: shall I say to you,

Let them be free, marry them to your heirs?

. . . You will answer

‘The slaves are ours:’ so do I answer you: 

The pound of flesh, which I demand of him,

Is dearly bought; ’tis mine and I will have it.

If you deny me, fie upon your law!

There’s an even deeper tie of the Merchant of Venice to America: not just America’s conquest of the Jessicas so dear to immigrant fathers but America’s grappling with an ultimate rejection of slavery through its embrace of equality. That is another tale I’d like to relate to sometime.

Ken Masugi, Ph.D., is a distinguished fellow of the Center for American Greatness and a senior fellow of the Claremont Institute. He has been a speechwriter for two cabinet members, and a special assistant for Clarence Thomas when he was chairman of the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission. Masugi is co-author, editor, or co-editor of 10 books on American politics. He has taught at the U.S. Air Force Academy, where he was Olin Distinguished Visiting Professor; James Madison College of Michigan State University; the Ashbrook Center of Ashland University; and Princeton University.

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.