Dear Weekend Jolter,
At this rate, we’ll be out of missiles by Saint Patrick’s Day.
As drifting aerial intruders trigger the most mismatched dogfights the skies have ever seen, that wry old curse “may you live in interesting times” seems to haunt our modern age. How interesting is a question the Biden administration hasn’t quite answered with regard to the displays of U.S. air superiority and/or foreign surveillance craftiness and/or alien reconnaissance — or of science projects meeting grisly ends. The first incident two weeks ago, involving the Chinese spy balloon, is still the only one for which we have something approaching an explanation.
President Biden, in providing a called-for public update on Thursday, said “we acted out of an abundance of caution” in shooting down three subsequent unidentified objects, factoring in risks to commercial air traffic and concerns about surveillance. The military is trying to recover the debris while the intelligence community assesses the incidents, he said, but: “We don’t yet know exactly what these three objects were.” At this point, the president said nothing suggests the other three were related to the Chinese spy balloon or other foreign-surveillance programs. Officials’ best guess: They’re tied to private companies, or recreation, or scientific or weather research.
Okay. Michael Brendan Dougherty argued earlier this week that the moment demands clarity from the president. NR’s most recent editorial argues for the same, pointing to the bizarre sequence of events and shifting explanations for why the first object wasn’t shot down for days yet subsequent, potentially “benign” ones were obliterated swiftly:
None of this adds up. The best that can be offered by the administration is that the balloon was flying high above commercial air traffic while the three UFOs were flying at altitudes that could present a theoretical danger to airliners. That does not explain, however, why the administration couldn’t clear the local airspace of commercial travel as it tracked the objects, something well within the purview, capabilities, and procedures of the FAA.
Now that the president has told the public that these objects were likely benign in nature — perhaps tied to commercial or research activities — and that it’s become apparent that there have been many similar unidentified objects over North America in the recent past, the question becomes: Why fire live missiles at these three?
We must conclude that the administration began firing missiles and asking questions later because it was retreating in the face of embarrassment and public pressure.
Suspicions reasonably had centered on China, mother of the don’t-call-it-a-spy-balloon shot down off the South Carolina coast. Jim Geraghty flagged prior reporting on a massive hangar operated by China’s government in Xinjiang, and wondered if there’s a connection. Congressman Mike Gallagher, who chairs the newly formed House China committee, told NR’s Luther Abel he sees the recent incursions as part of the broader campaign of Chinese-government spying, when taken together with CCP police stations on U.S. soil, “PLA-affiliated researchers infiltrating our universities,” and “CCP-affiliated land purchases.”
But administration officials over the last few days moved to tamp down the narrative that last weekend’s intercepted objects posed a security threat or were from China. And, because it had to be said, the White House told Americans not to worry about aliens either (which, as Rich Lowry observes, is exactly how a movie about a hostile alien invasion would begin). Congressman Dan Crenshaw, shedding a bit more light, explained in a post-briefing thread that the other three objects were shot down because they passed near military facilities and posed a danger to commercial aircraft, and that radars previously “were not adjusted for slow-moving objects.” The latter detail is among the most interesting. Jeff Blehar translates it thusly: “America created the world’s most technologically sophisticated geostrategic advance-warning defensive system to guard its airspace and then put it on the wrong setting.”
We’re left with questions still. One from Rich: “If, as NORAD says, it learned about prior intrusions after the fact from the intelligence agencies . . . why weren’t such adjustments made then?” Another from Bing West, concerning the first shoot-down, in light of the Maverick-inspired reaction to the others: “If immediate action is the correct policy, then why wasn’t it applied on January 28?” And back to the central, converse question of why those other objects got the Will Smith treatment, the editorial raises a troubling possibility:
If, in an effort to ameliorate that embarrassment, President Biden is now shooting down the sort of stuff we’ve long known about but never thought was threatening enough to shoot down — at the cost of potentially escalating a geopolitical crisis with a nuclear-armed rival — we are in more trouble than we knew.
We await better answers. Meantime, I’m taking out anything that resembles an Ikea lampshade.
NAME. RANK. LINK.
EDITORIALS
Some good news out of South Dakota: A Welcome Victory for South Dakota Conservatives
And then there were two (in the 2024 Republican presidential nomination race): Nikki Haley Enters
The UFO editorial, once more, is here: Biden Owes Americans Better Answers on the UFOs
ARTICLES
Rich Lowry: Why Isn’t Nikki Haley Indian-American Enough?
Stanley Kurtz: The College Board Goes to War with DeSantis
Leon Aron: Putin’s Next War
Charles C. W. Cooke: Apparently ‘Love Your Enemies’ Is Now ‘Fascism’
Kathryn Jean Lopez: Don’t Ignore the Truly ‘Unholy’ Messages to Children
Alexandra DeSanctis: National Republicans Need a Pro-Life Messaging Strategy
Andrew McCarthy: Mike Pence’s Immunity Claim Sure Seems Frivolous
Dan McLaughlin: The 1619 Project Gets Its Facts Wrong Yet Again
Philip Klein: Under Biden, CBO Deficit Projections Have Increased by $6 Trillion
Joel Zinberg: Fauci Changes His Public Tune on Covid Vaccines
John McCormack: Are Biden and Trump Too Old to Be President?
James S. Gilmore III: The Need for American Resolve in the Face of Putin’s Aggression
CAPITAL MATTERS
Douglas Carr has an announcement: Deflation Is Here
Dominic Pino tries to make sense of the Ohio train derailment, and urges a cool-down in the rampant speculation: What’s Going On with the Ohio Train Crash
LIGHTS. CAMERA. REVIEW.
Armond White is sorry to report that the magic is gone: Magic Mike’s Last Dance Is a Stale Striptease
FROM THE NEW, MARCH 6, 2023, ISSUE OF NR
John McCormack: Cheer Up, Pro-lifers
John Hillen: The China Speech a President Should Give
Theodore Kupfer: Vivek Ramaswamy vs. Identity Politics
Luther Ray Abel: A Puff Piece
EXCERPTS, NOW AVAILABLE IN 4K
On the cover of the newest issue of NR, aside from a great image, is a piece by John Hillen on the speech a president should give on China. It would begin like so:
My fellow Americans, tonight I want to talk to you about the great foreign-policy challenge of our time — our strategy to contend with an increasingly ambitious and bellicose China. I speak to you to explain our approach to this challenge in ways that encompass and bring together many different efforts across our government and our country.
Over the past few decades, American strategy toward the People’s Republic of China has been all over the map, both literally and figuratively. On the one hand, in some places our interactions with China are oriented toward confrontation. If you were to look only at our geopolitical and military rivalry with China in East Asia, you might conclude that we are in a cold war with China that could well turn hot — mostly over territorial disputes in the region. On the other hand, our economic dealings with China are generally focused on cooperation and integration, especially in the commercial sphere. China is our third-largest trading partner and by far the largest exporter of goods to the United States. Our countries are economically intertwined in a very comprehensive way.
Some American corporations, sports leagues, and Hollywood studios go further than that and bend over backwards to accommodate the Chinese government’s demands to control speech and economic activity. This is disappointing. Conversely, nongovernmental organizations and the parts of our government that are concerned with human rights and religious freedom rightly condemn China as one of the most oppressive regimes on the planet today. In other areas, ranging from technology to espionage to cyber warfare to asserting global influence, we say that China is a competitor, but we have no comprehensive plan to compete across these and other spheres.
We respond to things — haphazardly at times, as we have done with the Chinese spy balloons over our country — but our responses are piecemeal and not tied in with a unified strategy. These disjointed moves happen when they happen, often coming out in little dribbles of policy: a new military approach here, a new export-control rule there, a regulatory change from one or another government agency, a tariff or investment or trade restriction, a congressional hearing on this or that topic. Many of our actions are not in congruence with each other, so the total effect is limited at best. This incoherence in our approach to the rivalry with China strengthens its position and weakens ours. I want to correct that fundamental flaw in our grand strategy.
Tonight I will give you the outlines of a comprehensive new American strategy toward China — not just a list of new policies, but a vision that does not seesaw between confrontation and belligerence, on the one hand, and value-neutral cooperation and accommodation on the other. Rather, the strategy will be integrated, with all the various elements supporting each other, based on a renewal of competitiveness in all manifestations of American power.
NR has run a number of pieces challenging the latest reemergence of the 1619 Project. Most recently, Dan McLaughlin published a characteristically definitive fact-check on the Hulu series:
Once again, Hannah-Jones dedicates crucial space and time to casting the Revolution as depending for its success on people motivated to fight by British threats to slavery, and strongly implies that it would have been better if the British had won the war and the United States had never existed as an independent nation. This is a jarring posture when juxtaposed with her repeated framing of black Americans as the true patriots, such as her American-flag-flying father; it suggests that her radical politics are out of step with the very people her miniseries celebrates.
The original magazine version of the 1619 Project, in the sentence that was since “clarified,” blandly asserted as fact that “one of the primary reasons the colonists decided to declare their independence from Britain was because they wanted to protect the institution of slavery.” At the time, Hannah-Jones did not even bother to cite facts or scholarship to back up her theory, other than asserting generically that “in London, there were growing calls to abolish the slave trade. This would have upended the economy of the colonies, in both the North and the South.” This was false history: As Sean Wilentz of Princeton notes, “the colonists had themselves taken decisive steps to end the Atlantic slave trade from 1769 to 1774. During that time, Maryland, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Connecticut, and Rhode Island either outlawed the trade or imposed prohibitive duties on it. Measures to abolish the trade also won approval in Massachusetts, Delaware, New York, and Virginia, but were denied by royal officials.”
In fact, at the time, there was more opposition in the American colonies to the slave trade than there was in Britain, which did not ban it until 1807 (the same year it was banned by Congress). Hannah-Jones centers her colonial narrative almost entirely on Virginia, but it escapes her notice that Virginia banned the transatlantic slave trade by statute in 1778, in a bill signed and probably authored by Virginia governor Thomas Jefferson (the same man who signed the federal ban in 1807). It makes no sense whatsoever to say that Americans revolted against something the British were not prepared to do, then did it themselves once British opposition had been removed.
More broadly, actual historians of the period are all but unanimous that the anti-slavery movement organized itself and enacted laws earlier in America than in Britain. The world’s first anti-slavery society was organized in Pennsylvania in 1775 at the urging of Quaker abolitionist Anthony Benezet, over a decade before the nascent anti-slavery movement began seriously organizing in Britain in 1786–87. Between 1777 and 1784, slavery was banned in Vermont, Massachusetts, Pennsylvania, New Hampshire, Connecticut, and Rhode Island. It was banned by Congress in the Northwest Territory in 1787, and by statutes passed in New York in 1799 and New Jersey in 1804. Parliament, by contrast, did not ban slavery in the British colonies until 1833, long after most of the American revolutionaries were in their graves. These are historical facts, and Hannah-Jones has never made any effort to address them. Indeed, historian Woody Holton, who features in the miniseries and has been one of the few academics to attempt a factual defense of the 1619 Project’s theories about the Revolution, has observed in his academic work that Hannah-Jones “vastly exaggerates the size and strength of the British abolition movement” at the time of the Revolution.
Leon Aron, from AEI, imagines a terrifying but plausible scenario in which Putin doubles down on the Ukraine war by choosing a fresh target:
Stuck in a war he can neither win nor walk away from, Vladimir Putin is in a bad place. It can only get worse. His options are narrowing quickly: no longer low- and high-risk but between very dangerous and more perilous still. The proverbial desperate times may call for desperate measures. The West should anticipate them, no matter how unlikely or even absurd they may seem. . . .
Since the beginning of his time in office, but especially in his current presidential term, his fourth, Putin has honored the national tradition of choosing shortcuts to solve complicated problems. He ignored risks, doubled down, and raised the stakes in Chechnya in 1999–2009, in Georgia in 2008, in Crimea and Donbass in 2014, and in Syria in 2015. And he won.
Has the Ukraine debacle changed Putin, made him more cautious, shrunk the hubris? I doubt it. He is well beyond examining his decisions critically. And there is nobody around him to make him do so. The temptation to do what has worked in the past could prove irresistible.
Like Saddam Hussein, who invaded Kuwait to make up for the eight-year stalemated war with Iran and for the lost lives of an estimated quarter-million Iraqi soldiers, Putin could hope to rekindle the patriotic euphoria that followed Crimea’s “return to the motherland” and to obscure the bloody slog of the Ukraine campaign with a swift military triumph.
Putin would not lack targets among Russia’s neighbors.
He could teach a lesson in deference to Moldova and Georgia, both of which are flirting with the EU. Then there are the Kazakhs, who, Putin averred, never had their own state until the fall of the Soviet Union. He almost certainly had in mind Kazakhstan’s six northern provinces, where most of the country’s 3.5 million ethnic Russians live, when he blamed former Soviet republics for exiting the Soviet Union and “dragging” with them vast areas of historically Russian lands, “presents from the Russian people.”
Yet there is another possible feat, an upping of the ante to win an incomparably larger pot: a lightning and tightly limited assault on a small and ill-protected member country on NATO’s eastern flank, backstopped by the threat of an all-out nuclear war.
Stanley Kurtz has yet another important update on the beef between the College Board and Ron DeSantis, as the former changes tack, dramatically:
Facing a torrent of criticism from customary allies on the left for having caved to Ron DeSantis on the AP African-American Studies (APAAS) curriculum, the College Board issued an attack on Florida’s governor at the unlikely hour of 8 p.m. Saturday night. What can account for so oddly timed a salvo? Friday’s calls from the National Black Justice Coalition, among others, for the resignation of College Board CEO David Coleman may have had something to do with it.
Despite winning a considerable victory on the curriculum front, DeSantis has not yet formally accepted APAAS as a for-credit course in Florida. The governor rightly wants to learn more about the College Board’s newly announced plans to include and highlight critical-race-theory-based readings in APAAS’s “AP Classroom” digital platform.
The College Board appears to have calculated that it has no further political leeway either to reduce the radical readings that will now be made available in its AP Classroom portal, or to balance them with more moderate and conservative voices. Knowing that DeSantis is therefore unlikely to greenlight APAAS, the College Board has gone to war with Florida. Attacking DeSantis is the College Board’s best hope for downsizing the tsunami of outrage threatening to engulf it from the left. Yet the College Board’s attack on Florida’s governor risks driving away the red states, particularly states that have laws barring the promotion of Critical Race Theory (CRT) in K–12.
Against all appearances — and against common sense — the College Board continues to claim that several months’ worth of expressions of concern by Florida about CRT-based content had nothing to do with the radical revisions to APAAS announced on February 1. These denials continue in the face of the timeline released by the Florida Department of Education (FDOE) detailing its contacts with the College Board.
The College Board now claims that those extensive communications with FDOE were merely “transactional.” Supposedly, all the College Board wanted from Florida was a “course code” that would have allowed students to take the pilot APAAS course for credit. Yet by its own account, the College Board understood that Florida was withholding such credit until it was confident that the course did not promote CRT, in violation of Florida law.
Shout-Outs
Lee Smith, at Tablet: Sy Hersh Swings and Misses Big
Gabe Kaminsky, at the Washington Examiner: Microsoft suspends relationship with group blacklisting conservative news
Megan Garber, at the Atlantic: We’re Already Living in the Metaverse
CODA
I’m not a football guy and had no real dog in last weekend’s game other than a personal preference to see the Eagles win, as a stress test for Philadelphia and its lampposts. But the outcome is a reason to surface this heartbreaker of a song, by the New Basement Tapes, a supergroup that got to work turning old Dylan lyrics into music. (Yes, that’s Johnny Depp on guitar.)
Thanks for reading/listening.