Dear WJer,
We round the turn of The Most Wonderful Time of the Year and, somehow, we are able to keep the horse galloping with just one hand on the reins. What’s the other hand doing? Why, holding the tin cup!
Okay friends, we’ll get to the juicy parts of this Almost Christmas Eve edition of WJ in a moment, but first comes the imploring of you — since you are already in a seasonal mood of generosity — to make a tax-deductible (magic words!) contribution to National Review Institute’s End-of-Year Fund Appeal. NRI owns NR (the magazine, the website) but it is not NR. Distinct? Yep. NRI employs, as fellows, over a dozen of your favorite conservative writers (that’s why NRI dubs itself a “journalism think tank”) and brings them hither and yon through its numerous consequential programs.
That hither-and-yonning struck me last week — it’s so vital to our movement that the propagators of the conservative faith meet with supporters and friends, in their hoods, for a variety of reasons (reinvigorating, listening, refining, discussing, building . . .). For more than a half century, Bill Buckley relentlessly careened across the fruited plains to build a movement. It was a gargantuan effort. And it succeeded.
NRI has taken WFB’s mega-example and made it a central practice of its operations. All of this reminded me of Johnny Cash’s great hit about the dude who has been everywhere, man — whether on the dusty road to Winnemucca or across the deserts bare. Because, like WFB, NRI has and NRI fellows have indeed been everywhere in 2018 and expect to do the same in 2019. That intimacy and healthy extraction from the bubble is darned critical to this movement of ours, and to the core principles its espouses and protects.
Almost done here: Even if you gave to National Review this year, I am asking you to consider a separate (and healthy!) donation to NRI. Yes, the names are similar. Yes, there is cooperation in advocating the Buckley Legacy. Yes, NRI “helps” NR — for example, it sponsors the magazine’s “Books, Arts & Manners” section. But NRI does so much more to complement the magazine’s mission via its consequential programs that it (and only it) operates. So . . . please be generous and contribute to NRI’s End-of-Year Fund Appeal.
If you don’t, I’m gonna Cry, Cry, Cry.
Editorials
1. We take issue with President Trump’s decision to withdraw U.S. troops from Syria. Here’s how our editorial concludes:
America’s military presence in Syria did suffer from one quite serious flaw: It had not been approved by Congress. The invasion and occupation of the territory of a hostile foreign state is an act of war, and constitutionally only Congress is empowered to declare war. The proper course of action for the president would have been to stay the course and seek congressional approval. Instead, he is now remedying the constitutional defect in the worst possible way — by abandoning the field without even granting Congress the opportunity to authorize a sound strategy.
One would think that a GOP administration would have learned the lessons of Obama’s reckless withdrawal from Iraq. American retreats often create power vacuums that are often filled by American enemies. Now, after all the blood spilled and tears shed since the rise of ISIS, Donald Trump is set to make his own version of Obama’s deadly mistake.
2. Federal judge Reed O’Connor has struck down Obamacare . . . let the applause begin. But not so fast, we say. Here’s how our editorial concludes:
The Supreme Court has preserved Obamacare, as it has been implemented, even against meritorious legal challenges. It seems highly likely to preserve it against a much weaker one. Republican politicians have repeatedly counted on the courts to deliver them from Obamacare without their having to take any heat for abolishing its popular elements, to come up with workable alternatives, or to accommodate the interests of people who rely on the law while pleasing those who oppose it. O’Connor’s decision is giving them a new dodge: As it winds its way through the courts, they can continue telling the opponents of the law that victory is at hand, continue telling those who benefit from the law that they will protect them whatever happens, and — continue not working on health care.
But the courts will almost certainly not, as they should not, deliver Republicans from their duties.
3. The District of Columbia Court of Appeals has once again ruled against National Review, and, we say, the First Amendment, in the case brought against us by climatologist Michael Mann. We remain determined to fight for freedom of speech. From the editorial:
This is extraordinary, especially given that at stake here is the integrity of the First Amendment. It is extraordinary foremost because National Review’s case is both straightforward and strong: that it is not, and it has never been, the role of the courts to settle literary or scientific disputes. But it is also extraordinary because National Review’s case is being heard under rules laid out by Washington, D.C.’s robust “anti-SLAPP” law, the explicit purpose of which is to make it more difficult to harass people and organizations with frivolous libel threats and thereby to protect a sturdy culture of free speech. How, we ask, can this be reconciled with a case such as ours, in which, among other inexplicable delays, the court has taken two years to add a single footnote to the records (and modify another)? That a slam-dunk case that is being examined under an expedited process should have yielded so many years of expensive radio static is a genuine national disgrace, and should be widely regarded as such.
After Two Years:
It took that long because the D.C. Court had to change a footnote and add another to the previous (appealed) decision. Thank the Lord they didn’t have to add a comma — that would have added another three months. Anyway, Yours Truly has provided an update about the ruling in The Corner.
Drummers Will Drop Their Drumsticks and Pipers Their Pipes So as to Read These 14 Dandy NR Pieces
1. Mai Khoi is “a symbol of democratic opposition to the Communist dictatorship in her country.” The former Vietnamese pop star is now a harassed dissident, and the subject of Jay Nordlinger’s expanded magazine profile. From his piece:
Mai Khoi is becoming known around the world, which is rare for a Vietnamese artist, of any type. Earlier this year, she won the Václav Havel Prize for Creative Dissent, given by the Human Rights Foundation, which is based in New York. She is a voice for people who cannot speak for themselves.
Yet she is controversial, and not just with Communists. She is on the outs with many Vietnamese Americans as well. She caused a “big scandal,” she tells me, when she showed up for a concert in Virginia. They had the old flag of South Vietnam on the stage. She demanded that it be removed, before she sang. She did not want to sing under the yellow flag (the flag of South Vietnam); she did not want to sing under the red flag (the flag of Communist Vietnam). She has her reasons for not swearing allegiance to either of those flags.
What does she have against the yellow flag? Well, in brief, they lost the country, consigning Vietnamese in the South, and everywhere else, to decades of Communist tyranny.
“I lost a lot of support because of this,” she says — meaning her stance on the flags — “but the valuable thing is that I created a big debate about freedom of expression. People are still talking about this and fighting over it.”
Last February, she released an album called, straightforwardly enough, “Dissent.” (It was released abroad, of course, not at home.) For a while, Mai Khoi’s band had the word “Dissidents” as part of its name. But this caused problems, such as threats to the bandmates’ families. So, with understanding and without hard feelings, Mai Khoi removed the word.
2. Andy McCarthy has lots of praise for (future AG?) William Barr’s memo on concluding the Mueller investigation. From his analysis:
Barr, whom President Trump has nominated to be the next attorney general, was not prejudging the facts. He was addressing the law and Justice Department policy. With great persuasive force, the 19-page memo posits two contentions. First, based on what is publicly known, the special counsel’s theory of obstruction is legally flawed. Second, if a Justice Department investigation is going to be used to take down a democratically elected president, the social cohesion of our body politic demands that it be over a clear, very serious crime, not a novel and aggressive theory of prosecution.
Readers of these columns will not be surprised to learn that I agree emphatically with the first point. As for the second point, I can’t fathom a meritorious disagreement with it.
But that is beside the point. What matters is that it was entirely proper for Barr to weigh in on these questions in the thoughtful manner he chose. As a former attorney general, he directed his views to Rod Rosenstein and Steve Engel, respectively the deputy attorney general and the head of the OLC, the lawyers’ lawyers at the Justice Department. Barr was not only attorney general in the Bush 41 administration; he also served in the weighty positions that Rosenstein and Engel now occupy. He is intimately familiar with the difficult decisions they have to make and the Justice Department guidelines and processes that are in place to guide decision-making.
3. We’ve touched on the major schism in the Orthodox Church, and this week George Weigel weighs in again with analysis of the serious geopolitical ramifications of the split between Moscow, the Ukraine, and the Orthodox patriarch of Constantinople. From his piece:
Religion is rarely thought a factor in contemporary world politics. But Putin’s attempts to resurrect the Russkiy mir depended in part on the cultural magnetic field created by the claim of Russian Orthodox Patriarchate of Moscow to ecclesiastical sovereignty over the Orthodox churches in Ukraine and Belarus. That claim has now been falsified by the creation of the OCU. So the work of reconstructing a true (and, in the best sense of the term, “usable”) history of Christianity among the Eastern Slavs can now proceed, absent the burden of Muscovite claims to hegemony over all other Orthodox Churches in the Russian near abroad. And that effort, as President Poroshenko indicated last Saturday, will further deconstruct Putin’s geopolitical project of reconstituting something resembling the old USSR, which was premised on a re-creation of the near-abroad Russkiy mir. Those who imagine that religious conviction and passion have little to do with world affairs beyond the bloody borders of jihadist Islam might think again.
The creation of an autocephalous Orthodox Church of Ukraine was not without its difficulties, however, and as the new, unified church looks forward to the grant of the tomos on January 6, those challenges should be noted.
While one understands that Petro Poroshenko, as a faithful son of Orthodoxy, feels considerable satisfaction at the birth of a unified and independent Ukrainian Orthodox Church, the large role he played in engineering the drive for the creation of the OCU suggests some future cautions. As an evangelical enterprise, Orthodoxy has been hobbled for centuries by its not infrequent dependence on state power. In the independent Ukraine of the mid and late 21st century, a “national Church” may enjoy some social status as an expression of patriotic sentiment. But it will have no more claim on the religious loyalty of Ukrainians than Catholicism has on the people of rabidly secular Ireland today. Christianity in the 21st century must be proposed and offered; contemporary Christianity does not thrive where the Church depends on old ethnic-national transmission belts, and it never thrives under the heavy hand of state power.
4. There’s nothing like a good conspiracy theory involving those sellouts at National Review. One Emerald Robinson claims this fortnightly is somehow in the pocket of Google. Jonah Goldberg goes after the blatant, stupid lies being peddled. From his counterattack:
Let me put a few things on the record so I can go back to ignoring this ridiculous person and her hoodwinked fans: No one has ever told me what to write or not to write, re: Google or any other corporation throughout my entire time at NR (though I did once mock an oil company that advertised with us and got an earful since I could have used any other company. Oh, and I wrote a cover story calling for the bombing of Canada in the very issue that a US-Canada friendship group advertised with us. That caused some hullabaloo). I learned that Google gave some money to NRI for the Buckley Prize dinner only because I asked about it this week (something Robinson could have learned were she an actual reporter of some kind, rather than a MAGA infomercial hostess). But that just proves my point: No one is telling anyone what to write or not write. This is a joke.
Last, let me say I am open to the idea of breaking up Google and/or Facebook. But it’s worth noting that doing so would be a very radical move, which is why not even Robinson’s beloved Trump administration is considering it. It would also be an insanely stupid thing to do for the sake of stopping the suppression of conservative views, not least because it wouldn’t solve the problem and because it would do great harm to all sorts of economic and constitutional principles.
5. The Left’s protection of anti-Semites is called out by Ben Shapiro. From the end of his new column:
It’s a mark of the Left’s intersectional priorities that anti-Semitism from minority groups has been so widely ignored. It is a simple fact that anti-Semitism in the United States does not break down evenly by race. An Anti-Defamation League survey in 2016 found that 23 percent of black Americans had “anti-Semitic propensities,” as measured by an eleven-factor survey, compared with 10 percent of white Americans. That disproportion has been the norm since the ADL began the survey in 2007. Similar disproportionate anti-Semitism exists in the Hispanic community as well. But none of that draws any media coverage. As the New York Times admitted in its survey of anti-Semitic violence in New York City, “bias stemming from longstanding ethnic tensions in the city presents complexities that many liberals have chosen simply to ignore.”
Ignoring anti-Semitism depending on the perpetrator’s ethnicity or background is simply lending cover to anti-Semitism. Alice Walker should be just as toxic for her anti-Semitism as David Duke is for his. After all, they push the same message when it comes to Jews. Failing to acknowledge as much lends credence to the anti-Semitic idea that Jews have somehow earned their hatred from certain groups.
6. As the controversial Interior secretary Ryan Zinke heads for the exit, Shawn Reagan lists the conservative accomplishments from his two years of reform. From the piece:
“The rough riders have arrived in Interior,” Zinke later told me. “There’s a lot of anger and resentment out West that our voice isn’t being heard.” He sought to grant more decision-making authority to the “troops in the field” so they could “make decisions that are more collaborative and locally driven, rather than having to go to D.C. for a decision of whether to clean a toilet or not.”
Zinke made some meaningful progress in this area. He led a bipartisan effort to address the $12 billion national-park maintenance backlog and grant park managers more authority to address critical needs on their own. He spearheaded an initiative to work with states and private landowners to protect wildlife corridors. He put forth regulatory reforms to the Endangered Species Act that will better align incentives for states and landowners to recover imperiled species. And he embarked on an ambitious reorganization of the Interior Department — which comprises 70,000 employees spread across eight bureaus and 46 regions — to reduce bureaucracy and shift more decision-making power out of Washington, D.C., and closer to the front lines.
Yet the popular narrative of Zinke portrayed by environmentalists and the press often overlooked these efforts, focusing instead on his regulatory reforms. The media’s characterization of these changes gives the impression that the secretary carried out a radical and seismic shift in public-land policy and conservation protections during his tenure — or, as one outlet put it, a “full-scale assault” on public lands.
7. Steve Moore reviews the economic boom and finds it is impacting those demographic notes that are most in need of the boost. From the analysis:
The poor and unskilled that Mr. Obama was supposed to lift out of poverty saw their incomes fall by 7.4 percent for those with less than a high school diploma and 8.2 percent for those with only a high school diploma. In dollar terms, between the time the Obama recovery began in June 2009 and until June 2014, median black household income fell by nearly $3,000, Hispanic households lost nearly $2,500, and female-headed households lost roughly $1,500. In 2015 and 2016, income gains were thankfully reversed for these demographic groups, but many still lost ground over eight years. The income gains under Mr. Obama were mostly concentrated in those Americans in the top 20 percent of income. This is why the income gap between rich and poor rose nearly every year under Obama.
Meanwhile, the gains to those at the bottom under Trump didn’t happen by accident but by design. Those of us who advised Donald Trump on his economic policies (including Larry Kudlow and Arthur Laffer) always believed that creating a tight labor market with more jobs than workers to fill them (right now that number has soared to seven million surplus jobs) would have to lead to higher wage gains as workers would have more bargaining power to command higher pay and benefits from their employers. That is what is happening now. Higher wages are now luring workers who sat out of the labor market in the Obama years, to reenter the workforce, as evidenced by the rise in labor-force participation.
8. D.J. Jaffe sees some positive changes — and potential for much more — in the approach to mental-health care for the seriously mentally ill thanks to new laws and Trump administration enforcement. Here’s how the piece begins:
This week, over 900 people died of opioid overdoses, and 400,000 mentally ill spent the night behind bars. But next year could be different if Congress continues its support of changes being made at the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration (SAMHSA) and its Center for Mental Health Services (CMHS).
Historically, SAMHSA and CMHS have been part of the problem, not the solution. They spent mental-health resources on improving mental wellness among the masses, rather than on lowering rates of homelessness, arrest, incarceration, and needless hospitalization of the seriously mentally ill. In 2016, to focus SAMHSA and CMHS on the most seriously mentally ill and better address the opioid crisis, Congress passed the 21st Century Cures Act — and in 2017 it confirmed addiction expert McCance Katz as the first assistant secretary of mental-health and substance-use disorders (working under Alex Azar in the Department of Health and Human Services). Those two actions are starting to have an impact.
SAMHSA has now funded 18 Assisted Outpatient Treatment programs. Assisted Outpatient Treatment is perhaps the most successful program for the most seriously mentally ill who fail to comply with treatment. By keeping them in one year of mandated and monitored treatment while they continue to live at home, it reduces homelessness, arrest, and incarceration of the seriously mentally ill by about 70 percent and saves taxpayers 50 percent of the cost of care. Before the 21st Century Cures Act and McCance-Katz’s arrival, the program was ignored and CMHS funds were actually funding opposition to it.
In fact, prior to the 2016 and 2017 congressional actions, SAMHSA and CMHS ignored all the institutionalized mentally ill by failing to even count them. They counted and focused their efforts on those well enough to live in the community. That is changing. SAMHSA recently convened a panel of experts to ensure that the mentally ill in hospitals, jails, prisons, group homes, adult homes, and other institutional venues are counted so SAMHSA and CMHS can take steps to reduce their numbers. She included members of the criminal-justice community, who had historically been shut out of SAMHSA, because they are in a position to help. Secretary Azar took steps supported by McCance-Katz to improve care for the institutionalized mentally ill when he recently announced a process that would allow states to receive Medicaid funds for them, a process previously prohibited.
9. Is Parliament sleep-walking to a “No-Deal” Brexit? Michael Brendan Dougherty thinks so. From his analysis:
At the same time, there is a decreasing chance that Tories and members of Northern Ireland’s Democratic Unionist Party will come together to support May’s negotiated deal. May’s popularity rises when the rest of Parliament seems to be engaged in pointless grandstanding. And even though May has essentially promised to resign as prime minister before the next election, the passage of her deal amid all the sturm und drang will look like an amazing, improbable act of political will and survival, a political victory amid dire and difficult circumstances. In other words, it may remake her popularity. If May is to be well and truly finished off by the result of her negotiations, then Tories have to see that her deal is not passed. There has rarely been a crisis in the United Kingdom’s life that seemed more urgent to Tory parliamentarians than their own party’s internal drama. Brexit is proving no different.
A no-deal Brexit would be revelatory. Britain’s economy has some long-term problems, but keeping control of its own currency should allow it to maneuver through some amount of economic disruption. The European Union would have egg on its face. Populist challenge is spreading well into Western Europe at this point. Nothing about being in the EU will become more attractive. The tough stance of Europe will come back in dramatically reduced orders for German manufactures. Likely it could kick off an economic slowdown.
It would also be revelatory in Ireland. The governments in Dublin and London have promised that in the event of a no-deal Brexit, they will not erect a physical border across the island of Ireland to impose customs checks. This is a fantasy. Without customs checks, Continental European countries would have to begin treating goods from Ireland as having the same status as those from the United Kingdom. To retain the favor of Brussels that it has so assiduously cultivated, Ireland would have to begin constructing a customs border across the political border that itself has been a source of political instability since it was drawn in 1922 — a border that has always been somewhat permeable and fudged with schemes, such as the common travel arrangement and the unique way the United Kingdom treats Irish claims of residency within her borders.
10. Back in high school in the mid ‘70s, there was always that kid who had a cucumber-sized click-your-Bic pen with an eyelet thingy on the top that sported a dozen colors. I’m reminded of that when I see Dan McLaughlin’s delightful and multi-colored graphs attending his analyses of elections and polls. Check out his latest on the Blue Wave’s waviness: How the Polls Broke at the End.
11. As the Left runs away from its once-upon-a-time love of civil liberties, the right, led by those icky Brothers Koch, have stepped up to support them. Teddy Kupfer profiles the shifting grounds and alliances under and behind political causes. From his piece:
But the Koch brothers’ support for civil-libertarian causes is of course not inconsistent with their longstanding skepticism of an overweening state, and their support for criminal-justice reform has not abated. Meanwhile, the Charles Koch Foundation (and its education-focused twin, the Charles Koch Institute) has redoubled its support not only for criminal-justice reform but also for other issues long held dear by civil libertarians, at a time when civil-liberties stalwarts are changing priorities — or compromising their principles to satisfy political objectives. As civil-liberties groups such as the ACLU change their tack, the Kochs are repositioning themselves as modern-day individual-rights activists.
Take mens rea reform, coming in the form of legislation floated toward the end of the Obama administration to strengthen the mens rea requirement of most federal crimes. The ACLU had once been a reliable critic of lax mens rea standards, under which people could violate arcane statutes without being aware of it, but this bill was opposed by a broad liberal coalition, with the ACLU at its forefront. Why? ACLU executive director Anthony Romero argued that the provision would “do little to help the vast majority of the 2.2 million people behind bars in America and those soon to be incarcerated,” a clear statement of the group’s class priorities. Mens rea reform helped the wrong group.
12. Jonathan Tobin does not worship at the Church of Environmental Alarmism. From his piece:
The majority of Americans have no problem accepting the idea that temperatures might be inching up and that there are problems that will be associated with this trend. Yet instead of approach the issue as a dilemma that requires solutions that won’t do more harm than good, environmentalists frame the issue as an apocalyptic choice. They consistently exaggerate the dangers and regularly shift the dates of total catastrophe so as to keep feeding the fears of the public even if these assertions have little to do with the actual scientific findings that we are supposed to venerate as revealed truth.
They treat any skepticism about theories rooted in computer models rather than objective observation as flat earth-style denial. They also refuse to consider the possibility that along with the problems there might be some benefits, as was the case every other time the climate warmed over the course of recorded history. And rather than propose reasonable ideas about combating warming, they demand — as was the case with the latest report from the United Nations’ Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change issued in October — measures that would cripple Western economies and that would cause great hardship and suffering that would do little to halt warming.
So long as the debate about warming hinges on doomsday predictions and radical appeals to cripple the economy, many Americans will ignore them as so much hyperbole.
13. Rich Lowry finds James Comey insufferable. From his new column:
In an interview at the 92nd Street Y in New York City, Comey delighted his Upper East Side audience with his tale of how he exploited the Trump White House’s disarray in its initial days to send two FBI agents to talk to then-national security adviser Michael Flynn without honoring the usual processes (e.g., working through the White House counsel’s office).
Comey said that in a different administration, it was “something I probably wouldn’t have done or maybe gotten away with.” He apparently didn’t consider how that might sound to anyone not already inclined to enjoy the wit and wisdom of James Comey, or old enough to remember when an FBI director pushing to “get away” with things wasn’t so amusing.
A lot of people have been diminished by the Trump years, Comey among them. He’s a bigger political figure than ever before but has revealed himself to be exactly what critics always said — a politically savvy operator who matches his bureaucratic skills with an impregnable sense of self-righteousness.
14. At NRO, Tevy Troy gives his fifth annual last-gasp-of-the-year roundup of 2018 books that made an impression on him. It’s a fun read.
From the Brand-Spanking-New Issue of National Review, the Fortnightly Marvel Printed on Dead Trees, Come These Four Beauts
The last issue of 2018 is hot off the presses. If you have a digital subscription to NR, which is part of an NRPLUS membership (sign up here) you can read it now. Otherwise, wait for the mailman. IN the meanwhile, let me recommend four articles from the issue. And away we go . . .
1. Ramesh Ponnuru assesses the Trump Presidency as it nears its halfway point. From his article:
During the campaign, many conservatives had doubts about whether Trump, who had a longer history as a liberal than as a conservative, would govern from the right. In office, though, he has largely deferred to a party that has grown increasingly conservative over time. Allaying earlier doubts has earned him his present degree of support from conservatives.
Trade policy has been the great exception to this deference. Many conservatives, especially economically minded ones, disagreed with Trump on that issue and hoped that he would not follow through on his views — as he has not followed through on his occasional endorsements over the last three years of gun regulations, a higher minimum wage, and so forth. His views on trade are, however, both strong and longstanding, and he has acted on them: placing tariffs on solar panels, on steel and aluminum, and on imports from China.
The results of these policies have yet to be determined. They seem to have contributed to the decline of stocks during 2018. Some companies are benefiting from the tariffs, but many more companies are paying higher prices for inputs because of them, and still other companies now face retaliatory tariffs when trying to export. Trump has gotten Canada to agree to allow more American dairy exports; in what some people will consider an accomplishment, he has gotten Mexico to agree to impose higher minimum wages on its auto industry. Negotiations with China have been listless, in part because Trump’s officials have not put forward specific demands.
2. With impeachment chatter thickening in the MSM air, Andy McCarthy explains how the Constitutional process to boot presidents and judges really works. From his essay:
Trump’s potential impeachment is a front-burner issue. What can the Clinton proceedings tell us about how to navigate it?
The first lesson is that the Constitution’s process makes paramount the building of a political case for impeachment. Again, impeachment is political in nature. “High crimes and misdemeanors” is a legal standard, but the question whether to impeach is a political calculation, not a legal mandate triggered by impeachable conduct. In 1970, just a few years before the Nixon-impeachment episode ironically landed him in the Oval Office, Gerald Ford — then the House minority leader enmeshed in a failed attempt to impeach the irascible Supreme Court justice William O. Douglas — declared that “an impeachable offense is whatever a majority of the House of Representatives considers it to be at a given moment in history.” Cynical? Perhaps . . . but, as a practical matter, it is true.
The question is when the House ought to exercise its broad, judicially unreviewable discretion. The answer, contrary to the received wisdom of the post-Clinton era GOP, is not “Never.” Yet any consideration of impeachment must be informed by the Constitution’s structure, which is designed to make the expulsion of a president very difficult.
3. Immigration and assimilation may rhyme, but in Sweden, they don’t interact. Andy Ngo tells the story of a “Scandinavian Parallel” society. From his article:
University West sociologist Göran Adamson blames, in addition to poor urban planning, Sweden’s state-sponsored multiculturalism for financing separatism through various ethno-religious institutions. “The shrewd thing about multiculturalism is that it has somehow fused with the state,” the associate professor tells me.
Sweden’s institutionalization of multiculturalism began in 1975, when a parliament led by Social Democrat Olof Palme rejected assimilation in favor of policies that encouraged minorities to keep their separate identities. “Of course, if you say these things [critically] in Sweden, you’ll be ferociously attacked by social workers and the dominating left-wing academia for being inhumane,” Adamson says.
Most then choose to remain silent. But some of the loudest dissident voices are coming from immigrants themselves, who experience firsthand the failures and contradictions of Swedish multiculturalism.
4. Kevin Williamson pens the cover story, visiting Portland to report first-hand on the ruling of the city’s streets by hooded leftists. From his essay:
Antifa has hijacked the name of an earlier German organization, Antifaschistische Aktion, a front for the Communist Party of Germany, itself a creature of Moscow and no stranger to authoritarianism, political repression, and political violence. (The Communist Party of Germany was banned in 1956 by the same constitutional court that prohibits neo-Nazi organizations.) Germany of course had some genuine fascists to fight, but, as in the Soviet Union itself, “anti-fascist” came to cover action against everything displeasing to the Kremlin. It probably is worth noting that these black-bloc hooligans do not always call themselves “Antifa.” The Portland march was organized by Abolish ICE PDX. Sometimes they call themselves “Smash Racism” or something else. But they are the same people, and their goal is the same: They are fascists, albeit fascists whose idol is the proletariat rather than the nation. The helpful people at Merriam-Webster remind us that fascists seek “severe economic and social regimentation and forcible suppression of opposition.” Senator Warren pursues the former, and the blackshirts pursue the latter. Their efforts are perfectly complementary.
It is tempting to think of the street brawls between Antifa and the Proud Boys and their ilk as a kind of midget Battle of Stalingrad during which all good republicans should stand to one side and cheer for casualties.
But it is more serious than that. Once political violence is out of the box, it is hard to put it back in. Left-wing militias such as Antifa beget right-wing militias that cite the existence of left-wing militias as justification for their own, and on and on it goes. We have seen this before in many contexts, and it rarely ends well. The original German Antifa served an enterprise whose worldwide affiliates would murder some 100 million people in the 20th century alone. But those were sober times.
The Six
1. At The Imaginative Conservative, Thomas Ascik reviews Roger Scruton’s recent book, Conservatism: An Invitation to the Great Tradition, which Scruton calls an attempt to convince “well-meaning liberals.” From the review:
Prof. Scruton says that human beings “live naturally in communities, bound together by mutual trust. We have a need for a shared home.” Echoing Aristotle, who in his Politics and Ethics was the first, of course, to systematically consider and then establish the fundamental truth that we are “political” animals — that is, we live together not in isolation — Prof. Scruton sets out the natural basis for conservatism based on five “features of the human condition.” First is social membership, of which worldwide there continue to be three kinds: tribal, religious, and political. In modern times, especially in the West, political membership is governed not only by law but by law made through elected representatives. Second is individual attachments, based on motherhood, the family, and the household, as well as the household’s setting in “places, networks, and institutions.” Social memberships and individual attachments join together to create the needed setting for human “cooperation.” But, third, as Prof. Scruton says, people not only cooperate, “they also compete.” Competition both creates and solves problems, and a main purpose of society is to “ensure that competition is peaceful.” Fourth, referring to Aristotle again, Prof. Scruton argues that though conservatives agree that humans are rational beings, they maintain that human rationality thrives in the political sphere only because of “customs and institutions that are founded in something other than reason.” This, which he calls “the principal contribution that conservatism has made to the self-understanding of the human species,” is Prof. Scruton’s principal thesis. In politics, reason is not autonomous.
2. The recent Claremont Review of Books publishes Christopher Caldwell’s essay titled “What Is Populism?” It is well worth your time. From the essay:
In Italy, interior minister Matteo Salvini has become one of the most popular politicians in Europe by turning his party, the League, from a regional separatist group into a nationwide anti-immigration force. For years now, foreign non-governmental organizations (NGOs) have been chartering boats to mount extensive rescue operations of African migrants adrift in the Mediterranean. Salvini derided these efforts as taxi services to deliver migrants from the North African coast. Extraordinary maps published by the New York Times in June 2017, which showed rescue operations moving steadily closer to the port of Tripoli as humanitarian operations increased, provide considerable justification for Salvini’s view. But he went further. Salvini accused humanitarians of acting as go-betweens for two mafias: one that trafficked humans in Africa, and another that scammed Italy’s social-welfare system in Europe. He then closed Italy’s ports to such rescue vessels — first foreign-registered ones, then Italian ones. The result is that Salvini, called an “extremist” in many newspapers in the run-up to elections last March, now commands the support of 60% of Italians.
European leaders have assailed Salvini in the name of their values, none more volubly than French President Emmanuel Macron. In early June, when Salvini refused landing rights to 629 migrants aboard the German rescue ship Aquarius, Macron denounced him as irresponsible, cynical, and extremist. Salvini replied that, if Macron cared so much about European values, perhaps he could take some of the migrants himself. Macron did not. Indeed, when the same ship, the Aquarius, made for the French port of Marseille in late September with only 58 migrants aboard, Macron’s government denied it authorization to dock. In mid-October, newspapers across Europe reported that French authorities had apprehended African illegal migrants in the Hautes-Alpes region, driven them across the Italian border in a police van, and dropped them off in the woods.
The debate between Salvini and Macron revealed something formulaic and flawed in the latter’s way of thinking. Macron and his globalist allies sometimes acted as if the problems of human conflict had been solved by the Western “values,” and as if history were done presenting contingencies and surprises. That made it easy to “build a legacy” or win an honorable “place in history.” All one had to do was consult these values and order correctly from a menu of historical roles. With the rise of Salvini, the European Union’s economic commissioner Pierre Moscovici warned of “little Mussolinis” in the continent’s politics, and Luxembourg’s Minister of Foreign Affairs Jean Asselborn accused Salvini of using “fascist methods and tones” — which presumably made Moscovici and Asselborn the Winston Churchill and Franklin Roosevelt of our times.
3. The Obama Administration’s ban on school discipline that shows a “disparate impact” on minorities is being deep-sixed by a Trump Administration commission which concludes, thanks to common sense, that “because teachers, in partnership with principals and other school leaders, know their schools, students, and classrooms best, they should be able to make decisions about school discipline without unnecessary worry about undue federal repercussions.” Heather MacDonald tells the story at City Journal. From her piece:
Beneath those homicide numbers is a larger juvenile crime wave. “The reason so many kids commit murder in Jacksonville is not because they are murderers, but because they are everything else: drug dealers, robbers, thieves, rapists and a bunch of other types of criminals whose crimes of choice has a great likelihood of leading to a murder,” a teen murder convict, Aaron Wright, told the Florida Times-Union. Fifty-nine percent of juvenile murder convicts from Duval County who responded to the paper’s inmate survey reported that they were committing another crime such as robbery or burglary when they or their co-defendant killed their victim. Wright himself was robbing a woman when his fellow robber shot and killed her, making Wright guilty of felony murder.
The same family dysfunction and lack of socialization that create this juvenile crime wave inevitably affects classroom behavior. Duval County Public Schools also have the highest number of violent campus incidents of any Florida school district. Nationwide, schools with the highest minority populations report the highest number of disciplinary infractions. Schools that are 50 percent minority or more experience weekly gang activity at nearly ten times the rate of schools where minorities constituted 5 percent to 20 percent of the population, according to the 2018 “Indicators of School Crime and Safety” report produced by the U.S. Justice and Education Departments. Gang violence in schools with less than 5 percent minority populations was too low to be usable statistically. Widespread weekly disorder in classrooms was reported in schools with at least 50 percent minority populations at more than five times the rate as in schools with 5 percent to 20 percent minorities. More than four times as many high-minority schools reported weekly verbal abuse of teachers compared with schools with a minority student body less than 20 percent. Widespread disorder and teacher abuse at schools with less than 5 percent minority populations was again too low to be statistically reliable.
4. Due process remains in deep trouble on America’s college campuses. The College Fix reports on a new annual survey by The Foundation for Rights in Education which shows that three out of four universities don’t presume innocence for serious misconduct claims, while nine of ten “don’t allow ‘meaningful’ cross-examination in sexual-misconduct cases.” Read the story here.
5. Rod Dreher, at his blog at The American Conservative, tells this most disturbing story of Desmond Napoles, an 11-year-old media-loved autistic drag queen (!) from Brooklyn and a victim of some version of a Munchausen-by-proxying stage-parenting mom. Here’s how Rod’s post begins:
Earlier this week, I wrote about Desmond Napoles, an 11-year-old Brooklyn boy who, as a drag queen, goes by the name “Desmond Is Amazing.” In my blog post, I criticized his parents for allowing him to perform at a gay bar in Brooklyn, at which men threw cash at him, as if he were a stripper. This 11-year-old child has been widely celebrated in the media, including guest spots on Good Morning America and Today. The mainstream media have been entirely complicit in helping this child’s parents exploit him.
Now, I’ve found more. This story is even more disturbing.
Here is video of Desmond performing the same act (imitating Gwen Stefani) he did in Brooklyn at a gay bar in San Francisco this past October. Watch the clip; hooting and cheering men give him money as he prances around the stage.
How many other times has this happened? Does that stage mom, Wendy (sometimes Wendylou) Napoles, take her 11-year-old son to gay bars to perform for men all the time now? Where is Child Protective Services?
6. Gatestone Institute’s Uzay Bulut reports on how Turkey bossman Erdogan has a strategic plan to make his country the main player in a confederacy of Muslim nations governed by sharia law. From his story:
Turkey appears to be accelerating its endeavor to establish an Ottoman-style Islamic government encompassing several Muslim nations. One such effort was apparent in early November at the second “International Islamic Union Congress,” in Istanbul. The conference is sponsored mainly by the Strategic Research Center for Defenders of Justice (ASSAM), headed by Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan’s chief military advisor, Adnan Tanrıverdi, a retired Islamist lieutenant general.
Other organizers of the congress — the next one of which is to be held in December 2019 — include the Association of Justice Defenders (ASDER), Istanbul’s Üsküdar University (ÜÜ), the Union of NGOs of the Islamic World (UNIW), the International Muslim Scholars Association (UMAD) and the International Union of Muslim Scholars (IUMS).
The self-described aim of the congress is “to make determinations on an academic and political ground with regard to current problems in world politics, particularly in Islamic world geography, and to offer solutions to decision-makers.”
BONUS: Lee Edwards was a huge hit on NR’s recent Buckley Legacy cruise. He participated and listened, and, from his experience, shares on The Daily Signal what he believes WFB would have to say to today’s conservatives. From his piece:
Buckley would welcome modern populists into the conservative coalition, knowing that populism and conservatism have a long history starting with the “Draft Goldwater” movement in 1964; continuing with Ronald Reagan, who won a 1980 landslide with the help of the Moral Majority; and extending to the tea party that rocketed into existence in 2009 and provided the winning margin for Trump in 2016.
(Side note: In 1965, Buckley won the votes of working-class Irish Democrats — early-day populists — when he ran for mayor of New York City.)
I stressed that Buckley delineated the critical difference between the conservative movement and the Republican Party, which are two separate institutions. The latter is a political party interested in winning races and gaining power. Conservatism is an intellectual movement dedicated to ideas that often have political application. The fortunes of the conservative moment are not automatically tied to the inevitable ups and downs of the GOP.
I concluded by pointing out that in his leadership of the conservative movement, Buckley sided with T.S. Eliot, who wrote that there are no lost causes because there are no gained causes. Indeed, Buckley welcomed the never-ending struggle to preserve and protect the priceless idea of ordered liberty.
That cause wasn’t lost in Buckley’s day, and it still isn’t lost today.
Lights. Cameras. Pundits.
1. Like Post Sugar Crisp, I can’t get enough of Armond White. As usual, he leaves the varnish at home as he reviews Roma (boo!) and Museo (hooray!). Here’s the kick-off:
Alfonso Cuaron’s Roma — about the downtrodden Mexican maid Cleo (Yalitza Aparicio), who toils in the spacious, two-floor urban residence of a middle-class doctor — has been dubbed the film of the year for the Upper West Side, the Upper East Side, and all the mini-Manhattans across wealthy white America whose denizens prefer dark-skinned help to aid their leisure-class economy. Cuaron’s on record saying the film pays tribute to the nanny of his own bourgeois childhood. I can’t recall another art movie so openly patronizing toward its subject, yet so self-flattering of its maker’s largesse. (The best movie on this topic would be Todd Solondz’s harrowing 2004 Storytelling, in which bourgeois indifference meets hilarious Third World consciousness.)
Cleo (played by Yalitza Aparicio) is the perfect dumb peasant. Short and stubby, she’s naturally childlike and obedient, even with the film’s angry muchacho, the member of a militant martial-arts cult who impregnates, threatens, and abandons her. In a parallel subplot, Cleo’s neurotic mistress warns her, “No matter what they tell you, we women are always alone!” Roma, titled after a district in Mexico City, plays the SJW trifecta: race, class, feminism.
For a cineaste like Cuaron, that impudent title rips off Fellini’s visionary docu-phantasia Fellini Roma (1972). The Mexican auteur uses his routine camera moves and visual ostentation to apotheosize his Millennial’s stunt. Critics ignorant of the enormous humanist intervention made by the Italian neorealist masters Visconti (La Terra Trema), Rossellini (Roma: Citte Aperta), and DeSica (Bicycle Thieves) fool themselves that Cuaron’s contemporary political sentimentality works on the same level — “dreaming of a better yesterday,” as Herman Cain termed it. But Cuaron’s self-serving approach lacks comparable spiritual, political, and artistic complexity.
2. Not sure The House that Jack Built will be on my to-view list, but Armond finds that, as civilization crumbles, the film has its merits, and makes a point. From the review:
Jack’s transgressions blatantly summarize pop culture’s immoral shift. His recurring memory-image of farmers threshing a wheat field harvests an infernal legacy: films like Vengeance Is Mine, Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer, The Silence of the Lambs, Pulp Fiction, American Psycho, Hannibal, The Human Centipede, the Saw franchise, the bulk of David Fincher (Seven, Zodiac, Fight Club, Panic Room, Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, Gone Girl) as well as Tarantino’s entire pseudo savvy-sadistic oeuvre. This shows wild, scary impudence. With movies like Dogville, Antichrist, and Melancholia (respectively teasing America, religion, and the apocalypse) already in his quiver, Von Trier’s audacity takes precise aim at Millennial madness.
We view Jack’s debauchery from a 360-degree moral compass that first teases, rationalizes, and then, gradually, judges. In the final sequence, when Jack encounters his hidden conscience (portrayed by German actor Bruno Ganz, of the Internet’s hilarious Hitler-conniption-fit memes), he dons a monk-like hooded robe while venturing into a version of Dante’s Hell. It deliberately evokes Alexander Sokurov’s peculiarly fairy-tale-like envisioning of Goethe’s Faust (2011). Jack’s descent into the underworld, based on self-realization, is entirely personal, an eschatological vision as was Von Trier’s Medea which combined Carl Dreyer’s The Trial of Joan of Arc with Greek myth — it’s a spiritual confrontation with barbarism.
3. Kyle Smith watches the Ruth Bader Ginsburg biopic, On the Basis of Sex, and likes what he sees. From the review:
There is an implicit question of the worth of divisiveness for its own sake. Some feminists, then and now, wanted maximum antagonism and hence (then and now) expended a lot of furious energy on denouncing the patriarchy. An older lawyer who inspired Ginsburg, Dorothy Kenyon (Kathy Bates), is already exhausted by what she sees as failure: “We started asking, ‘Please,’ as though civil rights were sweets to be handed out by judges.” Replies Ginsburg, “Changing the culture means nothing if the law doesn’t change.” Kenyon grumbles that people like Ginsburg just aren’t tough enough: “Ton of knowledge and no smarts.” You will be unsurprised to learn that a movie by Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s nephew argues that Ruth Bader Ginsburg was in the right. But she actually was right. Her strategy is how the feminist war was won.
And yes, that war was won. A peculiar characteristic of the movement is that it gets angrier as the problems become smaller, or even imaginary. Today the feminists denounce “mansplaining” and whip themselves into hysterics fantasizing about how we’re living in The Handmaid’s Tale. Here’s how Ginsburg put it in a recent MSNBC interview:
Our goal in the ’70s was to end the closed-door era. There were so many things that were off limits to women — policing, firefighting, mining, piloting planes. All those barriers are gone. And the stereotypical view of people of a world divided between home and child-caring women and men as breadwinners, men representing the family outside the home, those stereotypes are gone. So we speak of parent rather than mother, and wage-earner rather than male breadwinner.
Far from being Notorious RBG, Ginsburg is a living example of the wisdom of pursuing incremental change. Her life is about the usefulness of diligence over rage, painstaking attention to detail rather than Year One utopianism. She may be a liberal icon, but the means she deployed are conservative ones.
4. As for Vice, the Dick Cheney flick starring Christian Bale, Kyle sees technicolor . . . yawning. From the review:
You’d think a $60 million budget for this one would buy some cinematic sizzle, or at least a few funny jokes, but despite a trailer promising a movie about a badass hip-hop antihero — “Vice, Vice, Baby” — the film is a spastic mess, an angry upchuck, with a script that’s all, “And then I found THIS on Daily Kos!” It fails on all grounds except one: Christian Bale really is something as Dick Cheney. He’s a bit too tall for the role, and he overdid the pie-eating to build himself a Winnie the Pooh tummy, but the way he rounds his shoulders and manages to talk while keeping his teeth pressed together is spot-on. Sam Rockwell, as George W. Bush, and Steve Carell, as Donald Rumsfeld, are major talents, but in this case each of them makes the mistake of doing broad sketch-comedy parody rather than disappearing into the part as Bale does. Then again, Bale has lots of practice playing this role. As I wrote upon the release of The Dark Knight, “Batman is Dick Cheney with hair.”
I wrote earlier about how Vice, which informs us that it’s a “true story” at the start and that it’s all about “facts” at the end, has a tenuous grasp on reality. This doesn’t have to be fatal: JFK, while it had little to do with the truth, was an entertaining frolic in the nutty brambles of Oliver Stone’s derangement. Vice, though, is equally lame whether it’s giggling at Cheney or denouncing him. Some bits come from McKay’s SNL brain (the Cheneys, in bed, use Shakespearean dialogue to get each other in a randy mood; the movie fake-ends, even rolling the credits, as we’re told that in the 1990s Cheney retired to private life and never played any part in the nation’s affairs again; there’s a goofy reference to Cheney as “Galactus, destroyer of planets”). Other scenes suggest McKay stays up too late taking the political blogs like heroin. He badgers, nay bludgeons, us with his hysteria about the “unitary executive theory”; this is a standard concept in constitutional law, but he frames it as a Cheney-made license for a president to do anything he wants and the source of the world’s ills. Vice also obsesses over conversations Cheney had with his lawyer and alleged abuses of various executive-branch paperwork requirements (“FACA,” etc.). I won’t bore you with the details, although McKay certainly does. There’s a late montage, as febrile and loony as a Michael Moore segment, blaming Cheney for everything from wildfires to Fox News Channel and (naturally) Donald Trump. When someone compares a dicey political situation to a stack of teacups, McKay cuts to . . . a tottering stack of teacups. Groan.
5. Peter Tonguette reflects on the career and work of Ingmar Bergman (no, not the ventriloquist), the “image magician.” Read it here.
6. Seeing the commercials for the idiot-looking Welcome to Marwen, I was rooting for it to be panned. Armond does not disappoint. From the end of his review:
It is the ultimate liberal delusion to seek remedy through art — which is the essence of propaganda. Welcome to Marwen treats a tragedy in simplistic, “heartwarming” terms that encourage audiences to see human difference only in terms of social good. It is ironic to see a multi-million-dollar Hollywood production argue that therapy is art. Welcome to Marwen turns real hurt into cheap sentiment.
7. Kyle declares Netflix’s Bird Box “fit for holiday viewing.” Here’s a snippet:
Is Bird Box good? Not particularly, but it holds the interest. Sandra Bullock stars as a San Francisco painter and reluctant mother-to-be; after her ultrasound, she gazes longingly at a pamphlet about adoption. Along with her sister (Sarah Paulson), Bullock’s Malorie gets caught up in a viral epidemic of sudden-onset-insanity. (Don’t laugh; I recall such a thing actually happening in the United States as recently as Nov. 9, 2016.) People get a glassy look in their eyes, some unseen force grips them, and they step in front of a speeding truck or dutifully climb into a burning car. This sequence is a bit gory.
Somehow a hardy handful of survivors manage to rush into a house and bolt the door while they figure out what’s happened: Anyone outdoors with eyes open gets transfixed by some force (unseen by us viewers) that compels suicide. Only by using a blindfold while outdoors can one hope to survive. Inside, you’re okay as long as you keep the windows blacked out. And there’s an additional wrinkle involving people who were already lunatics to begin with, who are affected by the visions in a different way.
Follow, follow, follow . . .
Deep in December, it’s nice to remember, and follow. It would be Fantastik if you did. The Twitter suggestions of the day: Madeleine Kearns, Robert VerBruggen, Armond White, Jonathan S. Tobin, Kyle Smith, Roger Scruton, John O’Sullivan, Douglas Murray, Jazzy Jazzy Jeff Nelson, Erika Bachiochi, Andy “Thatsamyboy” Fowler.
A Dios
Like the shepherds, I yearn to be more afraid, but for the right reasons. In the next edition of this epistle, I will tell you just how many lumps of coal Nick left in my hosiery. May you receive three things on Christmas (hey, three gifts were good enough for the Jesus baby!) and on top of that accept my tidings of comfort and joy, which one hopes are not tided in vain.
Merry Christmas to all, and to all a good Weekend,
Jack Falalalala (the seasonal name, which does not kybosh the fact that you can email me your own tidings of comfort, or even umbrage, at jfowler@nationalreview.com.)