Greetings, and I hope you enjoy trudging through a slushy December “wintry mix” edition of the Carnival of Fools today. Yes, if I had realized when I was offered the Tuesday slot for a newsletter here at NR that it meant I’d be writing for both Christmas Eve and New Year’s Eve 2024, I’d probably have asked to be our Wednesday guy instead. So, while we have some seasonal fun to look forward to at the end of the year, we still have to scrape a bit of political sludge off the bottom of our boots. Let’s get to mopping up the melting mess for this last week, and later on we can all conspire as we dream by the fire. (Speaking of illegal Christmastime acts, a reminder: The months have grown long, and the hour is late — so subscribe, or else I may have to start threatening pets.)
We Narrowly Avoided a News Cycle Based Entirely on Falsehood
A question for my readers: How many of you have held onto an admission offer from your college application days? As a follow-up: Did any of you keep an offer letter from a school you decided not to attend? I’m going to assume that, unless you happen to be 18 years old and just got your early-action acceptance letters for fall 2025, the answer is no. (And if you are? Welcome, younger readers! I have such sights to show you!)
But Pete Hegseth kept his admission letter all these years — probably because his came from West Point and required jumping through real hoops to earn (and likely also because it looks pretty frameable). As some of you may already know, the activist outlet ProPublica was prepared to publish a piece purporting to prove that Hegseth — already battling for confirmation as secretary of defense — lied about his admission to the United States Military Academy at West Point. (He chose Princeton and ROTC instead.)
ProPublica first asked West Point’s administration about his application, and the school denied twice that Hegseth had been admitted or that he had ever even applied (it said it has “no file on him”). When ProPublica then came to Hegseth’s representatives for comment, he produced the evidence almost instantaneously — which he very fortuitously happened to have preserved — and West Point responded, “Oh, yes, as it turns out, we were wrong; he was accepted after all.” That was the end of it as far as most people are concerned.
Except me. We nearly averted the media equivalent of a midair collision, and a week later, everyone is whistling past the graveyard about it. Why aren’t people as appalled as I am? I’ve not been a defender of Hegseth’s nomination, but the fact that he came within a hairsbreadth of having his nomination sunk by what would have been a hurricane-force fake “scandal” makes me warier than ever of the media’s power to destroy. (The closest recent political analogy I can think of is Brett Kavanaugh’s improbably having held onto his high school–era calendars as proof of his thoughts and deeds from the early 1980s. One supposes that high achievers are generally better recordkeepers than the likes of you or me.)
Some GOP lawmakers have called for an investigation into why West Point twice denied having made Hegseth an offer of admission. While the question absolutely deserves to be answered, I’m less inclined to roast some junior office staffer who’s currently experiencing the worst professional moment of his life than I am of excoriating ProPublica for the arrogantly hectoring tone of its communications with Hegseth’s people in which the outlet essentially accused him of being a liar, said it had the goods, and snottily asked if he had any excuses to make for himself. In reality, ProPublica should be grateful that Hegseth happened to have held onto a copy of his admission letter. Had it gone to press, it might have faced the same fate that ABC and George Stephanopoulos are right now. In any event, ProPublica has made Hegseth’s confirmation vastly more likely.
An Electoral Obscenity in Romania
On November 24, the first round of presidential elections was held in Romania. Citizens of the Eastern European nation voted overwhelmingly against the EU-friendly establishment party in power, and a semi-obscure candidate named Călin Georgescu came from nowhere and marshaled that protest vote to secure a narrow plurality of nearly 23 percent. Georgescu, thought until that point to be a fringe player in Romanian politics, was then hailed as the front-runner to win the second round of elections.
Until, that is, Romania’s own high court simply stepped in and annulled the results, canceling the second round of voting altogether and ordering the government to simply restart the election cycle, putting it off until next year: “The electoral process to elect Romania’s president will be fully re-run, and the government will set a new date and . . . calendar for the necessary steps.” The excuse given? Apparently, a “Russian disinformation campaign” on TikTok, of all platforms, inappropriately directed frustrated Romanian voters to cast their vote for Georgescu. The argument — and I wish could find a better gloss on this, believe that I tried — is that even though nobody thinks that Georgescu is a Russian agent, his politics are amenable to Russian interests. And because the Russians spent time on TikTok coordinating messages in support of him, the entire race is presumptively invalid.
That’s it. That’s the entire logic.
There is absolutely no spinning the Romanian high court’s actions: What has taken place in Eastern Europe — in a NATO and EU member nation, with either the tacit permission or acquiescence of both institutions — is a naked affront to democracy. The claim is not that the vote was “hacked,” or that invalid voters cast illegitimate ballots. No, the “pro-democracy” court simply stated, in so many words: You people voted for the wrong candidate because you are stupid, easily misled sheep, and we are revoking your vote to save you from yourselves. It is impossible not to note that the court is, in fact, intervening to save itself.
Not even the BBC was convinced by this logic, pointing out that the reason Georgescu won enough votes to advance to the runoff was because of genuine popular discontent, not foreign interference. It looks for all the world as if the Romanian governing class, caught off guard by a populist revolt, used any pretext it possibly could to erase the results in the hope that, a year from now and with preparation, the foolish masses can be properly directed to limit the runoff choice to two of their proper governing-class betters. (Imagine if this excuse were used after 2016 in the United States — Adam Schiff, for one, would surely have approved.)
I am not a Romanian, so I can’t tell you how the average Romanian will react to having his vote simply annulled and told it wasn’t good enough. I do know that the nightmare of every skeptic of the Western liberal governing class came true in Romania two weeks ago, and absolutely nobody has a good justification as to why it was allowed to happen other than the specter of the Russians — a convenient bogeyman that allows those in power to avoid answering for their political failures.
Until next week — when we shall sing songs of Christmas blear.