Real Facts vs Misleading Statistics

 

Let's Base Policy on Real Facts, Not Misleading Statistics

Michael Barone, Jewish World Review

(Quintile: any of five equal groups into which a population can be divided according to the distribution of values of a particular variable.)

From all those lists of best books of 2022, here's one with the potential to change public policy debate and discourse for the better. It's "The Myth of American Inequality," and the three authors are two Ph.D. economists, former Sen. Phil Gramm and his long-ago Texas A&M colleague Robert Ekelund, and former Bureau of Labor Statistics assistant commissioner John Early. Their subject is government statistics — and how they present a misleading picture of recent economic history.

And the authors' conclusion is that long-standing complaints about the American economy — that the rich are getting richer and the poor poorer, that we declared war on poverty and poverty won — are wrong.

How can that be?

The first reason is that Census Bureau statistics on income, on which just about everyone relies, do not include two-thirds of government transfer payments. That made sense in 1947, when Census started reporting the number, and most transfer programs — food stamps, Medicare, Medicaid, the Earned Income Tax Credit, the child tax credit — didn't exist.

But today they do, and the bottom two quintiles on the income scale (each quintile is one-fifth of households) get 59% and 24% of their incomes from government transfers.

Second, Census income statistics don't account for taxes people pay. Since the United States has the most progressive national tax system of any advanced economy — because other advanced countries rely heavily on flat rate value-added taxes — the bottom two quintiles of Americans essentially pay no income tax, while the top quintile provides 83% of federal income tax revenue.

When we take government transfers and taxes into account, as "Myth" does, then the "government takes and redistributes enough resources to elevate the average bottom quintile household into the American middle class." The bottom three quintiles have incomes that are not that far apart, and the second-highest quintile is not all that far ahead of them.

In dollar terms, the lowest three quintiles post-transfer and -tax incomes range from (rounded off) $50,000 to $66,000, the second quintile is at $88,000, and the top quintile is at $197,000. That's far more equal than the difference in earned income between the lowest quintile ($5,000, since half don't have jobs) and the top quintile ($297,000).

So the ratio of top quintile to bottom quintile incomes from the Census Bureau's 16 to 1 decreases to Gramm, Ekelund and Early's 4 to 1.

And the poverty rate, which government statistics peg at 12%, is only 2% when you cover government transfers. Many of these are people who "lack the basic mental and physical capabilities to care for themselves and their children" and need not income but "specifically tailored programs to address their specific needs."

The authors also expose another myth, the idea that Americans' incomes have been stagnant over the past two generations. The reason again is misleading government statistics — inflation indexes, especially the oft-quoted CPI-U, that consistently overstate inflation and thus understate real economic growth.

These inflation indexes tend to assume static market baskets of goods and often fail to account for new products and quality improvements. In real life, when apples become too expensive, consumers switch to oranges. And how do you measure the worth of medical care innovations or the capabilities of the latest cellphones?

The argument against adjusting government statistics is that it risks political tampering, which U.S. statistical agencies are proud of having resisted. But using other government statistics to supplement familiar indexes, as "Myth" does to account for government transfers and taxes, is fair game.

If you do that to the average hourly earnings for production and nonsupervisory employees - a statistic that critics seize on to depict a static economy - then "real average hourly earnings would have risen 74% over the last fifty years rather than the official reported number of 8.7%."

Policy implications? One is that we already have plenty of economic redistribution, and maybe too much. Additional spending, such as the Biden COVID package, can cause inflation and encourage idleness. Advocates of universal basic incomes today, like John Maynard Keynes in the 1930s, imagined that people freed from the drudgery of jobs would read great books and enjoy classical music.

Instead, we see jobless men engrossed in video games or mainlining opioids, resulting in reduced life expectancy, family formation and community involvement.

To reverse such trends, Gramm, Ekelund and Early recommend work requirements similar to those in 1990s welfare reforms that increased work effort, earned incomes and family stability. Would there be a backlash for withdrawing such benefits? The lack of blowback from the phasing out of the Biden child tax credit suggests not.

Other suggestions include eliminating unneeded occupational licensing requirements and more school choice, already popular and needed more than ever to repair the damage to disadvantaged children from teacher union-forced public school lockdowns.

There's room here for debate — and debate conducted based on real facts, not misleading statistics — to which "The Myth of American Inequality" makes a useful contribution.

The coup we never knew

The coup we never knew

Victor Davis Hanson, Jewish World Review 

Did someone or something seize control of the United States?

What happened to the U.S. border? Where did it go? Who erased it? Why and how did 5 million people enter our country illegally? Did Congress secretly repeal our immigration laws? Did President Joe Biden issue an executive order allowing foreign nationals to walk across the border and reside in the United States as they pleased?

Since when did money not have to be paid back? Who insisted that the more dollars the federal government printed, the more prosperity would follow? When did America embrace zero interest? Why do we believe $30 trillion in debt is no big deal?

When did clean-burning, cheap, and abundant natural gas become the equivalent to dirty coal? How did prized natural gas that had granted America's wishes of energy self-sufficiency, reduced pollution, and inexpensive electricity become almost overnight a pariah fuel whose extraction was a war against nature? Which lawmakers, which laws, which votes of the people declared natural gas development and pipelines near criminal?

Was it not against federal law to swarm the homes of Supreme Court justices, to picket and to intimidate their households in efforts to affect their rulings? How then with impunity did bullies surround the homes of Justices Brett Kavanaugh, Samuel Alito, Amy Coney Barrett, Neil Gorsuch, John Roberts, and Clarence Thomas – furious over a court decision on abortion? How could these mobs so easily throng our justices' homes, with placards declaring "Off with their d—s"?

Since when did Americans create a government Ministry of Truth? And on whose orders did the FBI contract private news organizations to censor stories it did not like and writers whom it feared?

How did we wake up one morning to new customs of impeaching a president over a phone call? Of the speaker of the House tearing up the State of the Union address on national television? Of barring congressional members from serving on their assigned congressional committees?

When did we assume the FBI had the right to subvert the campaign of a candidate it disliked? Was it legal suddenly for one presidential candidate to hire a foreign ex-spy to subvert the campaign of her rival?

Was some state or federal law passed that allowed biological males to compete in female sports? Did Congress enact such a law? Did the Supreme Court guarantee that biological male students could shower in gym locker rooms with biological women? Were women ever asked to redefine the very sports they had championed?

When did the government pass a law depriving Americans of their freedom during a pandemic? In America can health officials simply cancel rental contracts or declare loan payments in suspension? How could it become illegal for mom-and-pop stores to sell flowers or shoes during a quarantine but not so for Walmart or Target?

Since when did the people decide that 70 percent of voters would not cast their ballots on Election Day? Was this revolutionary change the subject of a national debate, a heated congressional session, or the votes of dozens of state legislatures?

What happened to Election Night returns? Did the fact that Americans created more electronic ballots and computerized tallies make it take so much longer to tabulate the votes?

When did the nation abruptly decide that theft is not a crime, assault not a felony? How can thieves walk out with bags of stolen goods, without the wrath of angry shoppers, much less fear of the law?

Was there ever a national debate about the terrified flight from Afghanistan? Who planned it and why?

What happened to the once trusted FBI? Why almost overnight did its directors decide to mislead Congress, to deceive judges with concocted tales from fake dossiers and with doctored writs? Did Congress pass a law that our federal leaders in the FBI or CIA could lie with impunity under oath?

Who redefined our military and with whose consent? Who proclaimed that our chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff could call his Chinese Communist counterpart to warn him that America's president was supposedly unstable? Was it always true that retired generals routinely libeled their commander-in-chief as a near Nazi, a Mussolini, an adherent of the tools of Auschwitz?

Were Americans ever asked whether their universities could discriminate against their sons and daughters based on their race? How did it become physically dangerous to speak the truth on a campus? Whose idea was it to reboot racial segregation and bias as "theme houses," "safe spaces," and "diversity"? How did that happen in America?

How did a virus cancel the Constitution? Did the lockdowns rob of us of our sanity? Or was it the woke hysteria that ignited our collective madness?

We are beginning to wake up from a nightmare to a country we no longer recognize, and from a coup we never knew.

 

Return of the Babyface

Return of the Babyface

Donald A Jaffa

Our Christmas present this year was on the OPED pages of the LA Times, wherein Adam Schiff crossed the tee and dotted the Eye, but without the Panache of the Tuba player, at the end of Script Ohio. That fellow always merits a round of applause, especially if it is at the annual Michigan-OSU game for the Division Big Ten Championship.  OSU has been beaten by Michigan these last two years, but a possible nose to nose re-confrontation ended when both were eliminated in the CFP semi-finals.  His theory is that the referral to the DOJ and the decision of the Attorney General, will result in a (Finally!!!!) prosecution of Donald J Trump, and hopefully result in his going to jail instead of running against Biden in 2024. Adam Schiff hasn’t a clue as to what is coming in the future.   

A recent biography of Samuel Adams (yeah the one the craft brewery is named after!) delights us with the careful and calculated effort to slowly turn the Crown Colonies from subservience into a nation subject no sovereign authority. When the Royal Governor of Massachusetts was recalled in ignominy, Boston celebrated, and shortly thereafter celebrated the first anniversary of self-imposed non-purchase of British manufactured and taxed goods. It was celebrated with a noon to dusk pig-roast and a total of 15 early and 45 later toasts, and when ended, the carriage line was a mile and a half long returning to Boston.  

Now more than 15 years ago, the first criticism of Donald J Trump by Rosie O’Donnell, was emulated by a plump impersonator who climbed into the ring to berate the crowd with O’Donnell’s misogynistic rants. A Trump impersonator appeared, climbed into the ring, and knocked the O’Donnell onto the mat. The crowd went wild with enthusiasm. The little IDEA light went on in Vince McMahan’s brain so he called Donald J Trump to arrange the so called ‘Battle of the Billionaires!’  

With Trump notoriously vain about his hair, McMahan made the bet that the Loser would have his head shaved a ringside in full view of the entire arena. At the time the most vicious of Vince’s Samoan wrestlers was ‘Umaga,’ who used the Somoan Spike to paralyze using a stab at the throat. Umaga was bad boy who was undefeated. Trump either recruited or was provided Bobby Lashly: a one time Army Sergeant who was a maniacal body builder and became a Hercules.  The match lasted 33 minutes and Lashly pinned Umaga. McMahan was held fast in a barber’s chair already at ring side, and the crowd roared as he was covered in shaving foam and electric razors removed the hair from his head.  

On this New Year’s Eve, the 20th year of ‘Baby Face’ John Cena’s wrestling in the WWE was celebrated with the current generation of the Somoan Wrestling stable. They are all related to the previous generation, so they parade into and out of the wrestling ring as ‘The Bloodline.’ 

Some wrestlers were noted for their non verbal skills, such as the Undertaker’s sitting up straight in the middle of the ring, or in a coffin. But the Maestro in the ring, with verbal skills, was ‘Baby Face’ John Cena. His first WWE match was with Olympic Gold Medal Wrestler, Kurt Angle, who asked the ‘Baby Face’ why he thought he could wrestle an Olympic Gold Medal wrestler. Cena smiled, and replied “Unbridled Aggression,” and proceeded to demolish Angle.  

Cena mastered every variation of buffo performance in the center of the ring, from Hip Hop to whatever the writers in weekly scripting could come up with. For the next eighteen months there would be nothing sweeter than to see John Cena do the warm up every two weeks for Candidate Trump. Any venue would have every seat booked and filled, not just to see Trump, but to want to hear what John Cena would say and do in his warm up.  Not being a politician would enhance his respectability in any political arena, and his record in the ‘Make A Wish’ charity provides a credible barrier against any personal enmity on the political trail. 

Cena’s trademark admonitions to the crowd are what we need in the coming political debates, and in the speaking events: the proverbial ‘never give up,’ and the more provocative ‘You want some, come get some!’

For The FBI’s Problems, Look At The Leadership

 

For The FBI’s Problems, Look At The Leadership

Mark Verbräche, Daily Caller 

The release of the Twitter files has confirmed that the FBI and the intelligence community were collaborating with the social media titan on “content moderation” – or more precisely, censorship. Journalist Matt Taibbi sums it up: “Twitter’s contact with the FBI was constant and pervasive, as if it were a subsidiary.” Further, “Federal intelligence and law enforcement reach into Twitter included the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), which partnered with security contractors and think tanks to pressure Twitter to moderate content.”

The FBI has established prudent and pragmatic relationships with private sector industries through the Bureau’s InfraGard program, “a partnership between the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) and members of the private sector for the protection of U.S. Critical Infrastructure.”

Along with the DHS, the FBI informs key sector organizations of emerging cyber, terror, espionage, physical, and other threats identified through the government’s intelligence collection activities. Likewise, private sector entities provide the FBI with tips, trends and anomalies within their operational space.

Government warnings are shared with critical infrastructure owners, operators, and stakeholders usually through unclassified reports and assessments broadly disseminated within the industry. This kind of prudent public/private engagement safeguards the nation’s essential functions.

However, the FBI would never clandestinely assume the role as a “Director of Operations” for private corporations to determine what products, services, or information are suitable for public consumption, until now. The Twitter files not only exposed the FBI’s role in killing the New York Post’s Hunter Biden story before an election, but also its contempt of Constitutional prohibitions on government suppression of First Amendment-protected speech.

Despite possessing Hunter Biden’s laptop since December 2019, the FBI convinced Twitter  through meetings with Twitter Head of Site Integrity Yoel Roth that the New York Post bombshell on Oct. 14, 2020, was Russian disinfo. However, according to Congressional whistleblowers, the FBI never even examined the Biden laptop until after the 2020 election.

Twitter’s strategic hire, former FBI General Counsel Jim Baker, added his support for Twitter’s suppression of the Hunter Biden laptop. As the FBI/Twitter mind meld neared completion, other content viewed as counter to the political objectives of the company, FBI and the Biden campaign, was also moderated away. Finally, a collective blackout by major media outlets refusing to cover or report on the Twitter file revelations.  Is there a pattern here.

Retired agents, like myself, have decades of experience and intimate knowledge of the FBI’s mission and traditions. In our day, agents never voiced political views in the office or on public forums because personal politics or ideology didn’t matter – only evidence. Being an FBI agent wasn’t just a career choice, but a lifestyle commitment. An agent’s integrity is everything.

Certain basic ground rules were universally observed. FBI agents didn’t “leak” to the media. They didn’t lie. The Justice Department issued statements. Before applying the FBI’s immense power and authority, agents had to certify that their investigative activity was pursuant to a violation of federal law — no fishing expeditions for potential violations. In short, we played by the rules. But that’s changed. Here are a few highlights:

An egocentric Deputy Director of the FBI leaks to the media, blames others, and lies to his own agents investigating it.

Bureau executives approve multiple FISA warrants, to investigate a presidential campaign, relying on the debunked Steele dossier and an FBI attorney’s false statement.

FBIHQ officials interview Trump’s National Security Advisor, Michael Flynn, about lawful conversations with a Russian official captured by the FBI. Flynn is charged with false statements.

A senior FBI official at the Washington DC field office posts hyper-partisan rants on social media which bear directly on “matters under the FBI’s purview.”

FBIHQ reportedly “suggested” to the agents who uncovered the damaging Hunter Biden material that their reporting “was at risk of disinformation.”

The FBI raided the homes of journalists to recover Ashley Biden’s diary. When did personal diaries become an FBI priority?

There’s more, but you get the idea.

As former agents, we recall how we applied for, and executed, search warrants, interviewed witnesses, surveilled targets, drafted FISA applications, conducted arrests, drafted 302’s, testified in Grand Jury and Court, and worked with our federal prosecutors. Investigations were run from local field offices, not FBI headquarters.

After 9/11, the FBI realigned its operations. Terrorism investigations were then micromanaged from FBIHQ, undercutting local field offices’ independence and agility. Feeding the (HQ) beast came at the cost of investigative focus.When briefing the chain of command, accuracy and nuance were lost. The command-and-control emanating from FBIHQ continues today with even more disastrous consequences.

In our efforts to understand the Bureau’s constant failures, we are confounded and troubled by the organization we believed in and dedicated much of our lives to. Even the current Director seems more like a passive spectator than a dynamic leader instituting corrective measures.

How can an organization with an international reputation for discipline and integrity become so inept and unbalanced? The FBI has cultivated a new generation of leaders – executive decision makers with a fundamentally skewed notion of the FBI’s role and mission. It has abandoned adherence to the rule of law and Bureau traditions, allowing itself and the organization to become an enforcement arm of the current administration. Their calling is far different from ours.

As divided as many are on the FBI’s conduct, threats of violence towards agents and other law enforcement officials are reckless and only encourage the unstable to act out. A healthy democracy allows for the legitimate questioning of our institutions and holds them accountable, not burn them down.

America needs a competent and trustworthy FBI that rigorously adheres to the core values it espouses, and backed by a Justice Department that applies the rule of law impartially, “without fear or favor.”

Fortunately, the foundational underpinnings of the FBI remain solid and intact. Each day, despite threats of violence and the profound disillusionment of the American people, FBI field agents quietly execute the Bureau’s mission with fidelity, bravery and integrity. Some agents have taken the courageous step of becoming Congressional whistleblowers, calling out those who have betrayed their oath and the American people. The leadership may be the problem, but don’t blame those who are trying to fix it.

Mark D. Ferbrache served as an FBI special agent for 27 years specializing in white-collar criminal investigations. He later worked in the bureau’s National Security Division and CIA’s Counterterrorism Center, and held diplomatic assignments in Prague, London and Bucharest, as well as field office assignments in Seattle, New York and the FBI Headquarters in Washington. He is currently employed as a contractor in the U.S. intelligence community.

Buttigieg Asleep at the Switch

 

Buttigieg Asleep at the Switch

Was Buttigieg Asleep at the Switch for Southwest Airlines’ Holiday Implosion?

Jim Geraghty, National Review 

Welcome to the last Morning Jolt of 2022; life will return to normal on January 3, 2023. On the menu today: As bad as the weather was in Buffalo and other parts of the Northeast, what’s bedeviled Southwest Airlines this month is an epic systemic failure — but that won’t stop a debate about how much blame should befall Transportation secretary Pete Buttigieg. And, come to think of it, from the backlogs at West Coast ports and other supply-chain issues, to the narrowly averted freight-rail strike, to the persistent difficulties in getting air travel back to something resembling the pre-pandemic normal . . . America’s transportation system really is going through a rough patch, isn’t it?

Southwest Is Now the Most Troubled West This Side of Kanye

No matter how the final days of this year are going for you, you’re doing better than Southwest Airlines CEO Bob Jordan.

Every airline has faced challenges since winter weather began disrupting travel on December 22. A blizzard hit Buffalo, N.Y., with unprecedented force, snarling carriers’ flight plans all over the place. But the northern states experience blizzards, high winds, and bad weather every winter, and this week, Southwest stands out for the sheer scale of its flight cancellations. As of this writing, shortly before 8 a.m. on Thursday, 2,446 flights into, out of, or across the U.S. have been canceled today, and 2,356 of them are Southwest flights, according to FlightAware. The next-highest share of the cancellations belongs to Frontier, which accounts for 15 of the cancelled flights.

Southwest isn’t currently collapsing because of weather; its meltdown stems from a massive technology failure. Specifically, just about the entire crew-scheduling system appears to have failed on an epic scale. The Wall Street Journal tells the unbelievable tale:

When Southwest Airlines reassigns crews after flight disruptions, it typically relies on a system called SkySolver. This Christmas, SkySolver not only didn’t solve much, it also helped create the worst industry meltdown in recent memory.

Airline executives and labor leaders point to inadequate technology systems, in particular SkySolver, as one reason why a brutal winter storm turned into a debacle. SkySolver was overwhelmed by the scale of the task of sorting out which pilots and flight attendants could work which flights, Southwest executives said. Crew schedulers instead had to comb through records by hand.

The airline has said SkySolver works well during a more typical disruption and had helped it manage recent hurricanes and snowstorms. But the scale of this past week’s storm, coupled with a network that still hasn’t been fully restored in the wake of the Covid-19 pandemic, gummed things up. Even as it tried to solve one set of problems, new ones would emerge.

Crews and planes were out of place. Phone lines jammed up, and Southwest pilots and flight attendants trying to get assignments couldn’t get through to the scheduling department. Some shared screenshots on social media that showed hold times of eight hours or more—which meant they could wait a full workday for instructions while flights were stuck for the lack of a crew. The airline was scrambling just to figure out where its crew members were located, union leaders said.

Jordan contends that the unique structure of Southwest is compounding the problems. In a statement released Tuesday, the CEO said:

Here’s why this giant puzzle is taking us several days to solve: Southwest is the largest carrier in the country, not only because of our value and our values, but because we build our flight schedule around communities, not hubs. So, we’re the largest airline in 23 of the top 25 travel markets in the U.S. . . .

Our network is highly complex, and the operation of the airline counts on all the pieces, especially aircraft and crews remaining in motion to where they’re planned to go [sic]. With our large fleet of airplanes and flight crews out of position in dozens of locations [sic]. And after days of trying to operate as much of our full schedule [as possible] across the busy holiday weekend, we reached a decision point to significantly reduce our flying to catch up.

If an airline operates out of a hub — let’s say, for example, Denver — it has a lot of crews and planes operating in that particular airport and coming from and going to that hub. If the flight from Buffalo to Denver can’t leave because of the weather, and that crew and plane were supposed to fly on from Denver to Los Angeles, the airline can scramble to find another crew and plane that are already in Denver as a substitute. But if your fleet is spread out because, like Southwest, you don’t use hubs, when the flight from Buffalo to Denver is canceled, you have no other planes in Denver to handle the second leg of the Buffalo flight’s day — and then you either must cancel the Denver-to-Los Angeles flight, even if the weather is fine, or find another flight and crew in another city and get them to Denver to work as a substitute.

If this debacle sounds vaguely familiar, that’s because Southwest and its passengers endured a similar experience in October 2021. At the time, some conservatives, including Senator Ted Cruz, contended that Southwest’s cancellations and a short-lived air-traffic-control staffing shortage announced by the Federal Aviation Administration reflected the consequences of Covid-19 vaccine requirements for travelers. But it didn’t make much sense that Southwest would be so much more severely affected by the vaccine requirements than other airlines, and the Southwest Pilots Association union said the problems weren’t the result of any work slowdown or sickout to protest the vaccine requirements.

The pilot’s union contends that the current meltdown is a nearly inevitable consequence of relying on antiquated and buggy scheduling systems:

The holiday meltdown has been blamed on weather that had been forecast five days prior, but this problem began many years ago when the complexity of our network outgrew its ability to withstand meteorological and technological disruptions. . . .

Once again, we call for investing in infrastructure that will improve conditions for both our passengers and pilots. Infrastructure in the forms of crew scheduling software that takes into account our point-to-point network, a modern collective bargaining agreement that reflects best practices in today’s demanding operation, and communication tools that would have allowed for displaced crews to remain in constant contact with our Company.

Call me crazy, but I don’t think this would have happened if founder Herb Kelleher was still alive.

Now, the question that will be most interesting to those who follow politics is: How much of this is Transportation secretary Pete Buttigieg’s fault? And it’s not just Republicans asking this question. David Sirota, a former speechwriter for Bernie Sanders, argues that Buttigieg was asleep at the switch . . . not all that unlike the time the ports on the West Coast got snarled and the nation’s freight-rail system came to the brink of halting:

Southwest Airlines stranding thousands of Americans during the holiday season is not some unexpected crisis nor the normal consequence of inclement weather — and federal officials are not powerless bystanders. Before the debacle, attorneys general from both parties were sounding alarms about regulators’ lax oversight of the airline industry, imploring them and congressional lawmakers to crack down.

The warnings came just before Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg appeared on national television insisting travel would improve by the holidays, and before Southwest executives — flush with cash from a government bailout — announced new dividend payouts to shareholders, while paying themselves millions of dollars.

Four months before Southwest’s mass cancellation of flights, 38 state attorneys general wrote to congressional leaders declaring that Buttigieg’s agency “failed to respond and to provide appropriate recourse” to thousands of consumer complaints about airlines customer service.

Back in September, I noted that Buttigieg played a surprisingly minor role in the Biden administration’s efforts to avert the threat of a freight-rail strike, taking a back seat to Secretary of Labor Marty Walsh. Looking over Buttigieg’s schedule and public events, it seemed like Buttigieg was treating his job like a de facto presidential campaign. (In mid September, the Hill wrote, “Some Democrats are speculating about what a second Buttigieg run could look like.”)

One of Buttigieg’s campaign-esque stops last fall was on James Corden’s Late Late Show, where he pledged to the host, “I think it’s going to get better by the holidays. We’re really pressing the airlines to deliver better service. So many people have been delayed, been canceled – it’s happened to me! Several times, this summer! And the fact is, they need to be ready to service the tickets they’re selling.”

As Bush said to “Brownie,” “Heck of a job!”

The editorial board of the Wall Street Journal argues that Buttigieg’s current proposals amount to “shooting the wounded”:

Buttigieg’s new rule won’t reduce turbulence. Some airlines already lure customers with the promise of refunds for delays under three hours. Refund policies are built into ticket prices, allowing passengers to choose their level of protection. Stripping airlines of their ability to compete on refunds and other things won’t help customers.

Requiring carriers to add unnecessary employees is inefficient, a sop to unions, and a recipe for higher fares. Imposing fines for non-weather-related delays or cancellations will put new pressure on airlines to cut other corners. The last thing the nation needs is 50 new state airline regulators.

Keep in mind, a lot of progressives absolutely loathe “Mayor Pete” for a variety of reasons. Some of this is down to the fact that Buttigieg used to work for McKinsey, which many progressives perceive as the devil’s consulting firm. (They might not be that far off.) Some of it goes back to Buttigieg’s rivalries with other, more progressive candidates in the 2020 Democratic primaries. And some of it reflects the fact that some progressives look at Buttigieg and have the same questions that some conservatives do: How did this guy, who was mayor of the 299th-largest city in the United States, suddenly become an A-list political figure? As Representative Bobby Rush asked in a debate with then-state legislator Barack Obama, when both men were competing in the Democratic primary for Rush’s seat in 2000: “Just what’s he done? I mean, what’s he done?”

Some leftists may be eager to scapegoat Buttigieg for anything going wrong in the transportation sector. Then again, Buttigieg makes it easy for his critics, doing things like bypassing the messes at the nation’s airports by flying on private jets so frequently. As I wrote back in September, U.S. secretaries of transportation are a bit like brake lines, offensive lines, and power lines — you only pay much attention to them when they don’t work.

Matt Stoller accurately observes, “If you want to know Biden’s problem, consider that Pete Buttigieg is an unmitigated catastrophe at the Department of Transportation. Yet there’s no criticism at all of his tenure on the Hill or within partisan media. The Dem political machine has no feedback loop to reality. . . . Buttigieg wasn’t qualified to run DOT, but he could nonetheless be learning how to manage transportation systems. He’s not, because the elite Dem world coddles him.”

Malthusian Environmentalism

Malthusian Environmentalism

Jesse Velay-Vitow, Law and Liberty

Malthus and his adherents have been proven wrong time and time again by the fruits of human ingenuity in agriculture, technology, and logistics. He will be proven wrong again when it comes to energy.

It doesn’t take an economist to see that we are in the midst of an energy crisis. Anyone who has frequented gas stations is well aware that fuel prices increased nearly 50% during the last year before settling down more recently. This rapid increase in prices doesn’t just affect what we pay at the pump, but what we pay to heat our homes as well. Both of these are examples of inelastic demand. In other words, as the price of fuel increases, demand doesn’t fall.

This is partially due to global supply chain issues and the actions of the Russian government but is also caused by fuel taxes and the costs imposed on oil companies by regulation. One of the main drivers of this regulation is the environmental movement with the purported aim of weaning western society off fossil fuels to alternative energy sources. Options like wind, solar, and geothermal are often discussed, but one of our best options is consistently absent from the discussion: nuclear energy. Understanding why nuclear power is strangely absent from the alternative energy discussion requires a close reading of the history of environmentalism as well as the nuclear disarmament movement. What we will find is that there is a dark anti-human streak running through these ideologies. A centuries-old solution looking for a problem: depopulation.

Thomas Malthus was the first to raise the concern that if population growth is exponential and food growth linear, we will eventually breed ourselves into starvation. Although there is abundant evidence that we exert control over how many children we have, and that resource development is not necessarily linear, Malthus’s belief that population control or even depopulation would be necessary still persists. It was and is a solution in search of a problem.

No matter if it is climate change, food availability, or energy usage, there have always been those who say that the solution is to reduce the number of people using those resources. This shows itself in such obviously anti-human sentiments as calling us a cancer on the planet, but also in more subtle ways such as assuming that the planet would be better off if the industrial revolution had never happened. When viewed through this lens, the curious alliance between the environmental and anti-nuclear movements begins to become clear. If we do use nuclear power, the energy crisis will abate and we will no longer need depopulation as a solution.

The story of nuclear power arguably begins with the Trinity test in the New Mexico desert, an event which prompted the two most famous quotes about nuclear power as a force of destruction: J. Robert Oppenheimer’s poetic paraphrase of the Bhagavad-Gita, “Now I am become death the destroyer of Worlds,” and Kenneth Bainbridge’s far blunter “Now we’re all sons of bitches.” The eventual use of two nuclear bombs by the Americans on the Japanese during WWII cemented the understanding that nuclear power could very well end humanity. This impression was strengthened by the following decades during which the world stood on the precipice of nuclear war.

However, in a parallel that Oppenheimer must have been aware of, connecting nuclear power to the Hindu god of destruction implies that it might also sustain or create. Shiva is, after all, only one-third of the Trimurti. What Shiva destroys, Brahma creates and Vishnu preserves. Correspondingly it didn’t take long for the science behind nuclear bombs to be directed at more productive aims. Just over six years after the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki the world’s first nuclear power plant EBR-1 generated electricity.

Since then, nuclear power has been expanded as an energy source, but not to the degree that one might expect. This is partially due to the efforts of the disarmament movement, which cautioned that nuclear proliferation for power generation was equivalent to nuclear proliferation for offensive capacity. This has guided American foreign policy for decades, leading to the prevention of nuclear energy capabilities in Iran among other countries. Although the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons does purport to have the peaceful development of nuclear energy as a subsidiary aim, in practice the two have been hard to separate. This might explain why non-western countries have had issues adopting nuclear energy, but why have we in the West dragged our feet? Let’s start with the safety objection.

For those of us who were born after 1980, our closest touchstone for the dangers of nuclear power is the Fukushima Reactor disaster of 2011. Chernobyl is a pop history fact and 3 Mile Island is long forgotten. Fukushima may have only killed one person. Even for those with longer memories, these disasters shouldn’t serve as a deterrent to pursuing nuclear energy. Technology and regulation have improved dramatically. In fact, the majority of radiation deaths in recent years have been radiotherapy accidents, not reactor meltdowns. Combine this with the fact that reactors have become increasingly safe, and that the next generation of reactors physically can not melt down, the safety concern seems moot.

If concern about safety does play a role in the slow pace of nuclear energy infrastructure development, it is limited to the preference that nuclear power plants should be further away from population centers. So how do we explain that a country as large and sparsely populated as, for example, Canada only has four operating nuclear power plants? On the surface, it would seem that nuclear power fits somewhere between fossil fuels and solar/wind in terms of environmental impact. So why are so many environmentalists around the world anti-nuclear?

To answer that we have to look at the history of environmentalism as a movement. Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring is often cited as the beginning of the modern environmental movement. Her focus was the use of pesticides and how they affected not just human beings, but the environment as a whole. This was a departure from the tradition of viewing pollution through the lens of its effects on human beings.

From the very beginning, we can see two strains of thought embedded in the environmental movement. The first is pro-human: we must protect the environment so that we can promote human health, flourishing, and happiness as well as take into consideration the well-being of non-human life. The second is profoundly anti-human, and sees human endeavors as fundamentally opposed to the natural order. The extreme logical consequence of this perspective is anti-natalism and depopulation, the idea that it is morally right to reduce or eliminate humanity. It is a sentiment that is similar to Malthus’s wish. With this in mind, the opposition to nuclear energy begins to make sense. With nuclear energy, we would no longer be at risk of our population growth outstripping our energy production. Population restriction would no longer be necessary.

The anti-human ideology finds a useful weapon through the re-working of Malthus’ original arguments. In neo-Malthusianism, rather than focusing on food as a resource, the same argument is applied to population and some other required resource—in this case, energy. The argument is exactly the same: human population grows in an unlimited fashion, but energy growth is limited. Therefore, we must place controls on the growth of human population. To preserve the validity of the neo-Malthusian argument, energy capacity can not be allowed to increase. This explains why many of the purported Green parties (though with some exceptions) have opposed nuclear energy to this day. It also provides some explanation as to the opposition to cleaner forms of fossil fuel use. This manifests as a doctrinaire divestment of all non-renewable energy sources. What has historically been an implicit call to reduce human populations now has become quite loud. Greta Thunberg has pivoted from calling for carbon reduction to human population reduction and even the end of capitalism!

It is hard to come up with a vision of the future that respects less the philosophical traditions of liberty and humanism than one wherein nuclear energy development is hamstrung for the purpose of immanentizing population control. We have seen what level of state control is required to effectively curb population growth in China’s one-child policy. This is to say nothing of the long-term negative effects of population reduction on the economy and innovation more broadly. Greater population allows for more specialization. In a world of 8 billion, we have the ability to allow scientists, artists, and entrepreneurs to explore their passions. It only takes a few capable and lucky people to change the world, and the more of us there are the better the odds are that this will happen.

One possible way to push back against the specter of Malthus is to reinvigorate the strain of environmentalism that views human flourishing as an end and that sees an increase in humanity as a good thing. In the same way that Malthus and his adherents have been proven wrong time and time again by the fruits of human ingenuity in agriculture, technology, and logistics, he will be proven wrong again when it comes to energy. Investment in nuclear energy is the surest way to ensure human flourishing and usher us forward into a future where energy concerns no longer apply.

Time to Reform the Bureau

Time to Reform the Bureau

When the FBI attacks its critics as ‘conspiracy theorists,’ it’s time to reform the bureau

Johnathan Turley, The Hill 

“Conspiracy theorists … feeding the American public misinformation” is a familiar attack line for anyone raising free-speech concerns over the FBI’s role in social media censorship. What is different is that this attack came from the country’s largest law enforcement agency, the FBI — and, since the FBI has made combatting “disinformation” a major focus of its work, the labeling of its critics is particularly menacing.

Fifty years ago, the Watergate scandal provoked a series of events that transformed not only the presidency but federal agencies like the FBI. Americans demanded answers about the involvement of the FBI and other federal agencies in domestic politics. Ultimately, Congress not only investigated the FBI but later impanelled the Church Committee to investigate a host of other abuses by intelligence agencies.

A quick review of recent disclosures and controversies shows ample need for a new Church Committee:

The Russian investigations

The FBI previously was at the center of controversies over documented political bias. Without repeating the long history from the Russian influence scandal, FBI officials like Peter Strzok were fired after emails showed open bias against presidential candidate Donald Trump. The FBI ignored warnings that the so-called Steele dossier, largely funded by the Clinton campaign, was likely used by Russian intelligence to spread disinformation. It continued its investigation despite early refutations of key allegations or discrediting of sources.

Biden family business

The FBI has taken on the character of a Praetorian Guard when the Biden family has found itself in scandals.

For example, there was Hunter Biden’s handgun, acquired by apparently lying on federal forms. In 2018, the gun allegedly was tossed into a trash bin in Wilmington, Del., by Hallie Biden, the widow of Hunter’s deceased brother and with whom Hunter had a relationship at the time. Secret Service agents reportedly appeared at the gun shop with no apparent reason, and Hunter later said the matter would be handled by the FBI. Nothing was done despite the apparent violation of federal law.

Later, the diary of Hunter’s sister, Ashley, went missing. While the alleged theft normally would be handled as a relatively minor local criminal matter, the FBI launched a major investigation that continued for months to pursue those who acquired the diary, which reportedly contains embarrassing entries. Such a massive FBI deployment shocked many of us, but the FBI built a federal case against those who took possession of the diary.

Targeting Republicans and conservatives

Recently the FBI was flagged for targeting two senior House Intelligence Committee staffers in grand jury subpoenas sent to Google. It has been criticized for using the Jan. 6 Capitol riot investigations to target conservative groups and GOP members of Congress, including seizing the phone of one GOP member.

Later, the diary of Hunter’s sister, Ashley, went missing. While the alleged theft normally would be handled as a relatively minor local criminal matter, the FBI launched a major investigation that continued for months to pursue those who acquired the diary, which reportedly contains embarrassing entries. Such a massive FBI deployment shocked many of us, but the FBI built a federal case against those who took possession of the diary.

Targeting Republicans and conservatives

Recently the FBI was flagged for targeting two senior House Intelligence Committee staffers in grand jury subpoenas sent to Google. It has been criticized for using the Jan. 6 Capitol riot investigations to target conservative groups and GOP members of Congress, including seizing the phone of one GOP member.

The ‘Twitter Files’

The “Twitter Files” released by Twitter’s new owner, Elon Musk, show as many as 80 agents targeting social-media posters for censorship on the site. This included alleged briefings that Twitter officials said was the reason they spiked the New York Post’s Hunter Biden laptop story before the 2020 election.

The FBI sent 150 messages on back channels to just one Twitter official to flag accounts. One Twitter executive expressed unease over the FBI’s pressure, declaring: “They are probing & pushing everywhere they can (including by whispering to congressional staff).”

We also have learned that Twitter hired a number of retired FBI agents, including former FBI general counsel James Baker, who was a critical and controversial figure in past bureau scandals over political bias.

Attacking critics

It is not clear what is more chilling — the menacing role played by the FBI in Twitter’s censorship program, or its mendacious response to the disclosure of that role. The FBI has issued a series of “nothing-to-see-here” statements regarding the Twitter Files.

In its latest statement, the FBI insists it did not command Twitter to take any specific action when flagging accounts to be censored. Of course, it didn’t have to threaten the company — because we now have an effective state media by consent rather than coercion. Moreover, an FBI warning tends to concentrate the minds of most people without the need for a specific threat.

Finally, the files show that the FBI paid Twitter millions as part of this censorship system — a windfall favorably reported to Baker before he was fired from Twitter by Musk.

Criticizing the FBI is now ‘disinformation’

Responding to the disclosures and criticism, an FBI spokesperson declared: “The men and women of the FBI work every day to protect the American public. It is unfortunate that conspiracy theorists and others are feeding the American public misinformation with the sole purpose of attempting to discredit the agency.”

Arguably, “working every day to protect the American public” need not include censoring the public to protect it from errant or misleading ideas.

However, it is the attack on its critics that is most striking. While the FBI denounced critics of an earlier era as communists and “fellow travelers,” it now uses the same attack narrative to label its critics as “conspiracy theorists.”

After Watergate, there was bipartisan support for reforming the FBI and intelligence agencies. Today, that cacophony of voices has been replaced by crickets, as much of the media imposes another effective blackout on coverage of the Twitter Files. This media silence suggests that the FBI found the “sweet spot” on censorship, supporting the views of the political and media establishment.

As for the rest of us, the FBI now declares us to be part of a disinformation danger which it is committed to stamping out — “conspiracy theorists” misleading the public simply by criticizing the bureau.

Clearly, this is the time for a new Church Committee — and time to reform the FBI.

Jonathan Turley is the Shapiro Professor of Public Interest Law at George Washington University. You can find his updates online @JonathanTurley.

Are Universities Doomed?

 

Are Universities Doomed?

Victor Davis Hanson, Daily Caller 

In a famous exchange in the “The Sun Also Rises,” Ernest Hemingway wrote: “How did you go bankrupt?” Bill asked. “Two ways,” Mike said. “Gradually, then suddenly.”

“Gradually” and “suddenly” applies to higher education’s implosion.

During the 1990s “culture wars” universities were warned that their chronic tuition hikes above the rate of inflation were unsustainable.

Their growing manipulation of blanket federal student loan guarantees, and part-time faculty and graduate teaching assistants always was suicidal.

Left-wing indoctrination, administrative bloat, obsessions with racial preferences, arcane, jargon-filled research, and campus-wide intolerance of diverse thought short-changed students, further alienated the public – and often enraged alumni.

Over the last 30 years, enrollments in the humanities and history crashed. So did tenure-track faculty positions. Some $1.7 trillion in federally backed student loans have only greenlighted inflated tuition – and masked the contagion of political indoctrination and watered-down courses.

But “gradually” imploding has now become “suddenly.” Zoom courses, a declining pool of students, and soaring costs all prompt the public to question the college experience altogether.

Nationwide undergraduate enrollment has dropped by more than 650,000 students in a single year – or over 4 percent alone from spring 2021 to 2022, and some 14% in the last decade. Yet the U.S. population still increases by about 2 million people a year.

Men account for about 71% of the current shortfall of students. Women number almost 60% of all college students – an all-time high.

Monotonous professors hector students about “toxic masculinity,” as “gender” studies proliferate. If the plan was to drive males off campus, universities have succeeded beyond their wildest expectations.

The number of history majors has collapsed by 50% in just the last 20 years. Tenured history positions have declined by one-third to half at major state universities.

In the last decade alone, English majors across the nation’s universities have fallen by a third.

At Yale University, administrative positions have soared over 150% in the last two decades. But the number of professors increased by just 10%. In a new low/high, Stanford recently enrolled 16,937 undergraduate and graduate students, but lists 15,750 administrative staff – in near one-to-one fashion.

In the past, such costly praetorian bloat would have sparked a faculty rebellion. Not now. The new six-figure salaried “diversity, equity, and inclusion” commissars are feared and exempt from criticism.

Since 2020, the old proportional-representation admissions quotas have expanded into weird “reparatory” admissions. Purported “marginalized populations” have often been admitted at levels greater than percentages in the general population.

Consequently, “problematic” standardized tests are damned as biased and antithetical to “diversity.”

To accommodate radical diversity reengineering, the only demographic deemed expendable are white males. Their plunging numbers on campus, especially from the working class, are now much less than their percentages in the general population – regardless of grades or test scores.

At Yale, the class of 2026 is listed as 50% white and 55% female. Fourteen percent were admitted as “legacies.” In sum, qualified but poor white males without privilege or connections seem mostly excluded.

Stanford’s published 2025 class profile claims a student body of “23% white.” Fewer than half of the class is male. Stanford mysteriously does not release the numbers of those successfully admitted without SAT tests – but recently conceded it rejects about 70% of those with perfect SAT scores.

In fact, universities are quietly junking test score requirements. Ironically, these time-honored standardized tests were originally designed to offer those from underprivileged backgrounds, or less competitive high schools, a meritocratic pathway into elite schools.

At Cornell, students push for pass/fail courses only and the abolition of all grades. At the New School in New York, students demand that everyone receives “A” grades. Dean’s lists and class and school rankings are equally suspect as counterrevolutionary. Even as courses are watered down, entitled students still assume that their admission must automatically guarantee graduation – or else!

Skeptical American employers, to remain globally competitive, will likely soon administer their own hiring tests. They already suspect that prestigious university degrees are hollow and certify very little.

Traditional colleges will seize the moment and expand by sticking to meritocratic criteria as proof of the competency of their prized graduates.

Private and online venues will also fill a national need to teach Western civilization and humanities courses – by non-woke faculty who do not institutionalize bias.

More students will continue to seek vocational training alternatives. Some will get their degrees online for a fraction of the cost.

Alumni will either curb giving, put further restrictions on their gifting, or disconnect.

Eventually, even elite schools will lose their current veneer of prestige. Their costly cattle brands will be synonymous with equality-of-result, overpriced indoctrination echo chambers, where therapy replaced singular rigor and their tarnished degrees become irrelevant.

How ironic that universities are rushing to erode meritocratic standards – history’s answer to the age-old, pre-civilizational bane of tribal, racial, class, elite, and insider prejudices and bias that eventually ensure poverty and ruin for all.

Victor Davis Hanson is a distinguished fellow of the Center for American Greatness. He is a classicist and historian at the Hoover Institution, Stanford University, and the author of “The Second World Wars: How the First Global Conflict Was Fought and Won,” from Basic Books. You can reach him by e-mailing authorvdh@gmail.com.

GOP scores win in $1.7T budget deal by cutting IRS funding

 

GOP scores win in $1.7T budget deal by cutting IRS funding

IRS set to see $275 million cut next year

Haris Alic, FoxNews 

Congressional Republicans succeeded in slashing funding for the Internal Revenue Service in the negotiations over President Biden's $1.7 trillion omnibus budget. 

Senate Republicans forced Democrats and the White House to cut more than $275 million from the IRS over the next year. GOP lawmakers demanded the cut, arguing that the IRS is already slated to receive additional money over the next decade thanks to Biden's recently passed $739 billion Inflation Reduction Act. 

"This process was far from perfect, but ultimately it allowed Republican redlines to be adhered to and because of that I will urge my colleagues to support this package," said Alabama Sen. Richard Shelby, the top Republican on the Senate Appropriations Committee. 

Overall, the budget allocates $12.3 billion for the IRS — 2.2% less than the nearly $12.6 billion the agency received in the last fiscal year. The Biden administration initially sought a $1.3 billion increase for the IRS this year. 

The budget deal does not include additional money for the IRS to modernize its tax processing infrastructure. IRS Commissioner Charles Rettig has said that agency's antiquated computer system was responsible for a large backlog in process returns over the past two years. 

Biden's Inflation Reduction Act, which passed Congress over the summer, included $80 billion in additional funding for the IRS over the next decade. Democrats argued the money would help crack down on wealthy tax cheats, while Republicans said it would only hurt the middle class. 

"Democrats have invested $80 billion into the agency to hire 87,000 new IRS agents," said Rep. Vern Buchanan, R-Fla. "Everyone is worried about what these IRS agents will do, and we're committed to holding the agency accountable."

Republicans, who won control of the U.S. House of Representatives in the midterms, are set to make IRS oversight a top priority next Congress. 

"The American people are demanding oversight of this administration," said Rep. Jason Smith, R-Mo. "Over the years, they've seen an IRS that has targeted conservatives. They've seen an IRS that has allowed taxpayer information to be leaked for political gain."

Arbiters of Truth

 

Arbiters of Truth

Did Twitter’s stifling of debate about Covid lead to real-world harm?

Rav Arora, City Journal

During a global pandemic, the role of social media companies shouldn’t be to police discussions about highly complex, multi-factorial medical questions such as the effectiveness of cloth masks against viral infection, potential adverse events from mRNA vaccines, or the origins of Covid-19. Their role should be to allow free speech to thrive and opposing perspectives to clash in the marketplace of ideas.

Most Americans wouldn’t argue with those premises—but as recent revelations have made clear, under former CEOs Jack Dorsey and Parag Agrawal, Twitter assumed the role of arbiter of truth, deciding which scientific viewpoints to suppress and which to boost in visibility. Now, as part of his effort to re-orient Twitter, billionaire entrepreneur Elon Musk has recruited independent journalists Matt Taibbi, Bari Weiss, and Michael Shellenberger to sift through the company’s private documents and internal communications and publicly share the inner workings of its past moderation decisions.

In the second edition of the so-called Twitter Files, Weiss revealed the vast reach of the company’s exercise of its powers of censorship and control: “teams of Twitter employees build blacklists, prevent disfavored tweets from trending, and actively limit the visibility of entire accounts or even trending topics—all in secret, without informing users,” she writes.

One of the more prominent accounts blacklisted on the platform was that of Stanford epidemiologist Jay Bhattacharya. In 2020, Bhattacharya coauthored the Great Barrington Declaration, which advocated for governments and health authorities to follow a Covid policy of focused protection for the most vulnerable groups but freedom for the healthy, non-elderly population to resume their lives as normal. For this “crime”—differentiating between the minority of seriously vulnerable people and the majority of healthy Americans for whom Covid poses a near-zero serious threat—Twitter marginalized Bhattacharya’s account, placing it on a “trends blacklist.” This move prevented his tweets, regardless of the number of likes, views, and retweets they garnered, from appearing on the platform’s list of trending topics, thus reducing their visibility.

As Weiss has noted on her Substack, this and other mechanisms, which Twitter euphemistically called “visibility filtering,” allowed Twitter employees to minimize the reach of any accounts they deemed problematic. “Think about visibility filtering as being a way for us to suppress what people see to different levels. It’s a very powerful tool,” Weiss reported one senior Twitter employee as saying.

When I asked Bhattacharya for his take on the censorship, he said: “While there are a lot of questions about why Twitter 1.0 would place me on a ‘trends blacklist’ shortly after I joined Twitter, I think the important thing to understand is that this action (and I was certainly not the only one blacklisted) had damaging real-world consequences.” Bhattacharya strongly believes that the stifling of the public debate on Covid lockdowns and school closures played a crucial role in maintaining these economically damaging and scientifically misinformed policies.

While indeed striking, none of this comes as a surprise. As was previously known, the social-media platform banned professional doctors with contrarian perspectives on Covid, labeled tweets from public-health experts of peer-reviewed studies on mRNA vaccine side effects as “misleading,” and censored independent journalists, allegedly at the behest of interested parties.

Musk’s acquisition of the company appears to herald a new direction: publicizing the incoherence and arbitrariness of Twitter’s past content moderation, reinstating banned or blacklisted medical professionals (among other voices), and promising more transparency about content-moderation decisions in the future. If delivered upon, these moves would bode well for the future of online discourse.

Rav Arora is a criminology student and creator of a new Substack, “Noble Truths.” Follow him on Twitter at @ravarora1.

Manchin should join Sinema

Manchin should join Sinema

 Col Mike Walker, USMC (ret)

To send Washington an unmistakable message for compromise and moderation, Joe Manchin should go independent.

It will not just give Sinema and Manchin unprecedented power but will give political moderates, a block that includes most Americans, real power.

It would send a strong warning to both hardcore Republicans and Democrats that they do NOT speak for the majority of Americans.

It will compel the Senate to re-embrace its greatest strength: Centrist compromise to get things done that appeal to the large majority of our citizens.

In an era when hyper-partisanship has never been stronger and more divisive, the move will rebalance our nation's ship of state.

At this moment, a greater good for the United States of America is hard to envision.

How Corrupt is a Corrupt Media?

 

How Corrupt is a Corrupt Media?

The media has ceased to exist, and the public plods on by assuming as true whatever the media suppresses and as false whatever the media covers.

Victor Davis Hanson, American Greatness  

The current “media”—loosely defined as the old major newspapers like the New York Times and Washington Post, the network news channels, MSNBC and CNN, PBS and NPR, the online news aggregators like Google, Apple, and Yahoo, and the social media giants like the old Twitter and Facebook—are corrupt. 

They have adopted in their news coverage a utilitarian view that noble progressive ends justify almost any unethical means to obtain them. The media is unapologetically fused with the Democratic Party, the bicoastal liberal elite, and the progressive agenda. 

The result is that the public cannot trust that the news it hears or reads is either accurate or true. The news as presented by these outlets has been carefully filtered to suppress narratives deemed inconvenient or antithetical to the political objectives of these entities, while inflating themes deemed useful. 

This bias now accompanies increasing (and increasingly obvious) journalistic incompetence. Lax standards reflect weaponized journalism schools and woke ideology that short prior basic requisites of writing and ethical protocols of quoting and sourcing. In sum, a corrupt media that is ignorant, arrogant, and ideological explains why few now trust what it delivers.

Suppression

Once a story is deemed antithetical to left-wing agendas, there arises a collective effort to smother it. Suppression is achieved both by neglect, and by demonizing others who report an inconvenient truth as racists, conspiracist “right-wingers,” and otherwise irredeemable. 

The Hunter Biden laptop story is the locus classicus. Social media branded the authentic laptop as Russian disinformation. That was a lie. But the deception did not stop them from censoring and squashing those who reported the truth. 

Instead of carefully examining the contents of the laptop or interrogating Biden-company players such as Tony Bobulinksi, the media hyped the ridiculous disinformation hoax as a mechanism for suppressing the damaging pre-election story altogether.

Joe Biden’s cognitive state was another suppression story. The media simply stifled the truth that 2020 candidate Biden was unable to conduct a normal campaign due to his frailty and non-compos-mentis status. Few fully reported his often cruel and racist outbursts of the “lying-dog-faced-pony-soldier” and “you ain’t black”/“terrorist” sort. 

The #MeToo media predictably quashed the Tara Reade disclosure. In fact, journalists turned on her in the manner that they previously had insisted was sexist and defamatory “blame-the-victim” smearing. 

Joe Biden has long suffered from a sick tic of creepily intruding into the private space of young women and preteen girls: blowing their hair, talking into their ears, squeezing their necks, hugging in full body embraces—all for far too long. In other words, Biden should have expected the Charlie Rose or the Donald Trump Access Hollywood media treatment. Instead, he was de facto exonerated by collective media silence. To this day, despite staffers’ efforts to corral his wandering hands and head, he occasionally reverts to form with his creepy fixations with younger women. 

Ask the media today which administration surveilled journalists and they will likely cry “Trump!” Yet their own sensationalist reporting that the IRS was weaponized by Trump was proven a lie when the inspector general notedTrump never went after either James Comey or Andrew McCabe. And it was an untruth comparable to the smear that “nuclear secrets” and “nuclear codes” were hidden away at Mar-a-Lago or that Donald Trump sought to profit from the trove. Nor does anyone remember that Barack Obama went after the Associated Press reporters and Fox News Channel’s James Rosen. Nor do they care that Biden sought to birth an Orwellian Ministry of Truth censorship bureau.

Fantasy

The media does not just suppress, but concocts. The entire Russian-collusion hoax—Robert Mueller’s vain 22-month and $40 million investigation—was a complete waste of time on the one hand, but on the other an effective effort to destroy the effectiveness of an elected president. 

How many print and television celebrity journalists declared that Trump would shortly resign, be jailed, or impeached over the pee-pee tape or Christopher Steele’s other mishmash of lies? The problem for the media in promoting the fallacious dossier was not just that it was untrue, but that it was so awfully written, so obviously poorly sourced, and so Drudge Report-like amateurishly sensational that it could not be appear factual to any sane person—other than an agenda-driven and addled journalist who found it useful.

Do we remember the Hillary Clinton-approved Alfa Bank/Trump Tower fable that is now resurfacing for a second try? 

Or the Jussie Smollett caper that trumped even the Brett Kavanaugh-as-teenage-assaulter and rapist lie? Or the Covington kids fabrications that trumped the Duke lacrosse hoax that trumped the “Hands Up, Don’t Shoot” myth that trumped the “white Hispanic,” doctored photo/edited 911 call smear about George Zimmerman? 

Recall Trump’s supposed “immigration jails” and “kids in cages” at the border—in truth both not cages and in fact birthed by Obama. 

Then there was Trump’s supposedly impeachable offense of purportedly canceling military aid to Ukraine so that he could allegedly hound the innocent Biden family—rather than delaying, but not canceling, offensive arms vetoed by the Obama Administration for the prescient worry that the Biden family had left a trail of corruption in Ukraine. 

Who ran with the “voter suppression” untruth that Stacey Abrams was the “real” governor of Georgia or the yarn that Donald Trump was illegitimately elected? How exactly did Jeffery Epstein and Harvey Weinstein operate as sexual perverts and high-profile, liberal-benefacting deviants for years without media scrutiny? Who created the cable news myth of now-felon Michael Avenatti as presidential timber? 

Chronological Manipulation

Why, after the midterms, did we suddenly learn that Donald Trump did not, as in the case of Barack Obama’s Lois Lerner skullduggery, manipulate the IRS for political purposes to go after James Comey and Andrew McCabe? Why suddenly post-election did we read that his presidential papers at Mar-a-Lago really did not contain “nuclear codes” and “nuclear secrets” or stuff intended for sale? Why did we learn after November 8 that a special counsel was suddenly appointed? Why did we discover the Ponzi scheme of Sam Bankman-Fried only after the midterms and why is he treated as an aw-shucks teen in bum drag rather than a calculating and conniving crook?

The answer is the same as why, just days before the 2016 election, we were assured suddenly by the media that the DNC’s planted stories about Christopher Steele’s dossier “proved” that Trump was a Russian stooge. 

Asymmetry 

When did the media finally dribble out that Obama’s memoir Dreams From My Father was chock full of lies and thus was intended all along to be read as “impressionistic” rather than factual? 

We only learned belatedly that Hillary Clinton did not brave the front lines in virtual combat in Bosnia. We were assured that she was completely out of the loop on the Uranium One deal and thus knew nothing about the cash that poured into the Clinton Foundation and Bill Clinton’s honoraria from Russian sources? 

Did the media ever fully report that Hillary Clinton: 1) broke the law by using a personal server to communicate while Secretary of State; 2) lied about the missing emails by claiming they were all personal about “yoga” and “weddings” and such; 3) destroyed subpoenaed evidence by smashing her devices; 4) had her husband accidently bump into Attorney General Loretta Lynch on a Phoenix tarmac who was supposedly investigating Clinton at the time; and 5) became our first major election denialist by declaring “Russian collusion” to be true, Donald Trump to be illegitimately elected, and the 2016 balloting to be “rigged”?

Unethical Behavior 

Our once lions of network news were long ago revealed to have feet of clay. Dan Rather insisted that “fake but true” memos “proved” George W. Bush got special exemptions from military service. Brian Williams fabricated an entire Walter-Mitty fantasy existence with ease. The Wiki Leaks Podesta trove revealed blue-chip reporters checking in with the Clinton campaign and the DNC to “fact check” and brainstorm their pre-publication puff pieces. 

Throughout the Obama years, Ben Rhodes, the failed novelist and deputy national security advisor distorted U.S. foreign policy, as CBS News, overseen by his brother, warped its coverage of him. 

Do we remember the commentary on MSNBC of the brilliant Vanderbilt professor and MSNBC “analyst,” presidential historian Jon Meacham? He periodically praised Joe Biden’s eloquence and moving addresses without informing his audience that he contributed to or indeed helped write what he gushed about. No problem. Even after finally being fired, Meacham is still at it, offering his input on Biden’s September 1, Phantom-of-the-Opera “un-American” rant.

CNN Sums It Up

The long, slow death of Jeffery Zucker’s CNN is emblematic of all the mortal sins listed above of our present-day corrupt media.

It is ancient history now and thus forgotten that the self-righteous MSNBC anchorman Lawrence O’Donnell falsely claimed that Deutsche Bank documents would prove that Russian oligarchs co-signed a loan application for Donald Trump. 

Over a decade ago, CNN’s Candy Crowley—remember this impartial “moderator” of the second 2012 presidential debate?—infamously transformed before our very television eyes into an active and shameless partisan by attacking candidate Mitt Romney. CNN commentator Donna Brazile topped Crowley when she unethically leaked primary-debate questions to candidate Hillary Clinton. When pressed, Brazile serially denied her role.

CNN’s former Obamaite Jim Sciutto is known as a serial offender of journalistic ethics and was recently the subject of an internal investigation. Sciutto has also alleged, falsely, that the CIA had yanked a high-level spy out of Moscow because of President Trump’s supposedly dangerously reckless handling of classified information. Sciutto joined CNN’s Carl Bernstein and Marshall Cohen to falsely report that Lanny Davis’ client Michael Cohen would soon assert that Trump had prior knowledge of an upcoming meeting between his son and Russian interests.

Another CNN trio of Thomas Frank, Eric Lichtblau, and Lex Harris were forced out from CNN for their mythologies that the Trump-hating Anthony Scaramucci was directly involved in a $10 billion Russian fund.

CNN’s Julian Zelizer fabricated his own tall tale that Donald Trump never reiterated America’s commitment to honor NATO’s critical Article 5 guarantee. The quartet of CNN’s Gloria Borger, Eric Lichtblau, Jake Tapper, and Brian Rokus all were exposed wrongly assuring that former FBI director James Comey would unequivocally contradict President Trump’s prior assertion that Comey had told him he was not under investigation. 

CNN reporter Manu Raju in December 2017 trafficked in lots of fake news stories that Donald Trump, Jr. supposedly had prior access to the hacked WikiLeaks documents. And he offered another fable that Trump, Jr. would be indicted by Mueller’s special-counsel investigation. But then, who at CNN did not blast out such “bombshells” and “walls are closing in” lies?

The once supposedly great Chris Cuomo—finally fired for softball incestuous interviews with his brother Andrew while serving as confidant to his sibling’s sexual-harassment dilemmas—had been caught on tape screaming obscenities. He also lied on the air when he assured a CNN audience in 2016 that it was illegal for citizens to examine the just-released WikiLeaks emails.

Julia Ioffe was eagerly hired by CNN after Politico fired her for tweeting that the president and his daughter Ivanka might have had an incestuous sexual relationship. CNN Anderson Cooper was every bit as creepy. He harangued a pro-Trump panelist with “If he [Trump] took a dump on his desk, you would defend it!”

Erstwhile CNN religious “expert” Reza Aslan was not so subtle. He trashed Trump as “this piece of sh**.” The late CNN cooking show guru Anthony Bourdain openly joked about poisoning Trump with hemlock. Recall CNN New Year’s Eve host Kathy Griffin posing with a bloody facsimile of Trump’s severed head. Was there something in the CNN contract that stipulated CNN journalists had to be obscene, vulgar, and threatening? 

The CNN circus also hired as a “security analyst” the admitted liar James Clapper. So, was it any surprise that on spec Clapper did what he was hired to do—by falsely claiming that President Trump was a veritable Russian asset?

But for that matter, former CIA director Michael Hayden preposterously alleged that Trump’s immigration policies resembled those in the death camps of Nazi Germany. Was it any wonder either that CNN host Sally Kohn and her roundtable panelists raised their hands to reverberate the “hands up, don’t shoot” lie of the Ferguson shooting?

Do the bias, invective, and lack of ethics of the media even matter anymore? 

In truth, media corruption has changed the course of recent history. 

Had the true nature of the contents of the Hunter Biden laptop been reported, the 2020 voters have polled that the revelation may well have made a difference because they would not have voted for a candidate so clearly compromised by foreign interests. 

Tell the full story of death, destruction, arson, looting, and injured police of the post-George Floyd rioting and what emerges is not the MSNBC denial of violence or the August 2020 CNN lie of a “fiery but mostly peaceful” sort of idealistic protestors.

The Kavanaugh and Smollett fake news accounts helped further to tear apart the country and greenlighted the new assaults on the Supreme Court, from Senator Chuck Schumer’s (D-N.Y.) rants and threats to the would-be assassin who turned up near the Kavanaugh residence. 

The Russian collusion hoax and the first impeachment media hysteria virtually ruined a presidency and have had grave foreign-policy consequences vis à vis Russia.

The media, moreover, matter-of-factly assumed Twitter was an arm of the Democratic Party. Mark Zuckerberg and the FBI worked together to suppress any news embarrassing to the Biden campaign. Do not expect much media coverage of Elon Musk’s serial disclosures of Twitter’s efforts to suppress free communications.

No thanks to the media, after nearly three years we are finally learning that the Wuhan Lab proved the likely source of the COVID pandemic and that the media-sainted Dr. Anthony Fauci subsidized gain-of-function viral research in Wuhan. 

Despite the lies, Americans assumed that Officer Brian Sicknick was not killed by Trump supporters as reported. The public shrugged “of course” when the media did its best to suppress the name of the Capitol policeman who lethally shot Ashli Babbitt for attempting to go through a broken window inside the Capitol. And on and on.

In sum, there is no media. It has ceased to exist, and the public plods on by assuming as true whatever the Pravda-like news outlets suppress and as false whatever they cover.

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, The Case for Trump and the newly released The Dying Citizen.