A Red Scare over ‘Comrade’ Omarova Is Warranted, Actually

T he Left is quite perturbed that Louisiana Republican senator John Kennedy had the gall to suggest, during a confirmation hearing, that “comrade” might be an appropriate way to address Joe Biden’s nominee for comptroller of the currency, Saule Omarova. “The attacks on your nomination have been vicious and personal. We’ve just seen them. Sexism, racism, pages straight out of Joe McCarthy’s 1950s Red Scare tactics,” whined Senator Elizabeth Warren. In a piece taking Chris Hayes’s feigned outrage seriously, The Daily Beast categorized the incident as “Red Scare 2.0.” The Guardian asked, ‘Professor or comrade?’ Republicans go full red scare on Soviet-born Biden pick.”

A little “red scare” is fine — especially when collectivists are trying to infiltrate the bureaucracy. The problem isn’t that Omarova is “Soviet born” but that she’s . . . let’s call it “Soviet curious.”

In one ridiculously misleading piece, headlined “A different John Kennedy but the same old red scare,” the Washington Post’s Philip Bump took the senator to task for his questioning of the nominee about her having once belonged to a Communist youth group. Bump stressed that Omarova “grew up in the Soviet Union, where membership in the group was mandatory,” and demanded that Republicans avoid “sloppy, McCarthy-era insinuations about her participation in a youth group in the 1970s.” Now, it’s true that Kennedy didn’t engage in the kind of nuanced questioning Democrats deployed when spreading uncorroborated gang-rape charges against a Supreme Court nominee.

But in fact it’s not Omarova’s time at Moscow State University or her having received the “Lenin personal academic scholarship” — as listed on her résumé — that’s problematic. It’s her advocacy for central planning right here in the United States. It’s not Omarova’s 1989 thesis, “Karl Marx’s Economic Analysis and the Theory of Revolution in Das Kapital,” that we should be worried about, but it’s her 2020 paper, “The People’s Ledger” — a bit on the nose, no? — in which she proposes nationalizing the American banking system and empowering the Federal Reserve to take over consumer deposits and “effectively ‘end banking,’ as we know it.” It’s not her youth-group participation that’s problematic, but her proposal for a “National Investment Authority,” a nomenklatura run by unelected academics tasked with using banking to redistribute your money into a “big and bold” climate agenda. Omarova has also expressed great interest in the bankrupting of private energy companies by the state and has said she wants to “basically get rid of these carbon financiers” by “starv[ing] them of their source of capital.”

During yesterday’s hearing, Omarova implausibly claimed that, on certain of these matters, she had misspoken and that many of her writings were merely theoretical. Indeed, all ideas not yet implemented are theoretical. But of course, modern academics like Omarova never post theoretical proposals about deregulating or dismantling centralized bureaucracies. If Omarova joined a Facebook group “Marxist Analysis and Policy,” it was only out of pure intellectual curiosity, we were assured; funny, though, how she’d never join “Minarchists for Bringing Back the Gold Standard,” or some other group that didn’t comport with her speculative ideological positions, out of similar curiosity.

A number of people in the media have insinuated that Omarova was some kind of defector from the Soviet Union. It’s untrue. It was only by happenstance that she was stranded as an exchange student at University of Wisconsin–Madison — where at that time collectivist ideas were even more popular than at Moscow State University — when the USSR fell apart, at which time her Soviet citizenship ceased to exist. As my parents were defectors, and I have known many others, I can confidently say that people who risked something to escape communism are unlikely to start a sentence, as Omarova did, with, “Say what you will about old USSR . . .” Her nonsensical and pernicious defense of Soviet gender equality (the rest of the sentence is “. . . there was no gender pay gap there”) ignores the fact that American women lived vastly better lives by every conceivable economic and moral measure. Her comments on that issue alone should be disqualifying. Need it be said that if a Republican president’s nominee had tweeted “Say what you will about the tenets of National Socialism, the health care was amazing,” Democrats (hopefully all people) would have recoiled?

That’s fine. I’m happy Omarova prospered in a free, capitalistic system, becoming a Beth and Marc Goldberg professor at Cornell Law. And, of course, she’s free to hold any views she desires. She does not, however, have a God-given right to hold a powerful position in the bureaucracy, nor is she exempt from accountability for her words and ideas.