One of the last actual journalists at Fox News gives its narrative-hustlers a blistering on-air scolding

 The Five has deteriorated over the years into a sewer of Trumpism affirmation. Two of its regular co-hosts, Gutfeld and Watters, first made names for themselves as funnymen, and before the Right was septically infected by the cult around the Very Stable Genius, they often displayed the capacity for sharp wit borne of actual insight. 

That was a long time ago. They now are nothing but Tucker Carlson/Laura Ingraham/Sean Hannity-level lieutenants of populism-nationalism. And consider that Kennedy started her career in the 1980s as one of MTV's original video jockeys. 

They got a sound smacking last evening from  Jennifer Griffin when they tried to frame US response to Russia breathing down Ukraine's neck as some kind of wag-the-dog ploy:

Fox News National Security Correspondent Jennifer Griffin had some sobering words for hosts of The Five who suggested the Biden administration is overhyping the crisis in eastern Europe for political purposes.

President Joe Biden delivered remarks about the situation on Friday, saying he’s “convinced” that Vladimir Putin has already “made the decision” to invade.

After the president’s speech, Five cohosts Greg Gutfeld and Kennedy suggested the administration is hyping or even faking the threat of war in eastern Europe because of the Durham investigation. In that affair, conservative media has seized upon technical jargon in a motion filed in federal court in order to claim that Hillary Clinton’s 2016 campaign hacked and spied on Donald Trump. That claim is unfounded.

“There’s something else going on here that is–that feels very, very manufactured,” said Gutfeld. “And I don’t know what it is.”

“I know what it is,” Kennedy interjected. “It’s Jake Sullivan,” she said, referring to Biden’s National Security Advisor who also worked on Clinton’s 2016 campaign. Fox News has reported that Sullivan is the unnamed “foreign policy advisor” mentioned in the indictment of Michael Sussmann who was a Clinton campaign attorney. Sussmann is under indictment as part of the Durham probe for making false statements to the FBI.

“Jake Sullivan is the national security adviser,” Kennedy continued. “And he is in deep yogurt in the Durham probe, and he’s been the one saying, ‘We have so much intelligence an invasion is imminent.’ He said that last Friday. It’s the next Friday, here we are. I don’t think Putin is going to invade.”

Kennedy then accused “point person” Vice President Kamala Harris of having a “lack of knowledge on the entire situation.”

Eventually, Griffin joined the show from the Pentagon and proceeded to bury the idea that the situation in eastern Europe is being overplayed by the Biden administration to distract from the Durham investigation.

“First of all, I need to level set with the conversation I’ve just been listening to,” Griffin began. “What we are witnessing right now is not something that’s changed in the last 24 hours. If you go back to notes that I’ve been sending out for the last two weeks, this is something we’ve been watching in terms of you–have commercial satellite imagery, you have the buildup of forces, the type of forces, the numbers of forces, things that we’ve been told in advance to look for in terms of some of the disinformation that is already starting to appear, the false flag operations in the Donbas region. All of that is ticking up.”

Griffin later addressed those who are skeptical of the intelligence assessments being promulgated by the Biden administration.

“I’ve heard comparisons to the Iraq war, and WMD, and how do we know? We’re seeing it with our own eyes,” she said. “If you can’t look at the kind of the Iskandermissile battalions that are now in Belarus [and] 30,000 Russian troops there. Half of [Putin’s] air force has now been deployed toward Ukraine. I am told just moments ago from a senior defense official that 40% of his 190,000 troops who are on the border with Ukraine are now in attack positions. That is something we have been waiting for.”

She went on to explain the potentially devastating and “bloody” consequences of war, and scolded the idea that Biden’s rhetoric about the situation is rooted in domestic political considerations:

“Right now, every American should be watching this and knowing that this is deadly serious,” Griffin said. “This is not some wag-the-dog situation. To even mention the Durham probe in the same sentence as what we know, and what we can see with our own eyes in terms of the military buildup and knowing what Vladimir Putin is capable of–I served in Moscow from 1996 to ’99. I watched as Vladimir Putin rose. I remember the apartment blocks that were blown up by his KGB, his FSB as a pretext to go into Chechnya. Go look at those images of Chechnya and how carpet-bombed Chechnya was when the Russian military moves in. This is not a precision, small pinpointed strike. This will be the full weight of the Russian military going into Ukraine if someone doesn’t stop it in the coming days.”

With that, Griffin’s assessment was complete.

“Jennifer Griffin, thank you so much,” said Jesse Watters. “We appreciate it.”

The cohosts did not address her admonition about the Durham probe.

I'd like  to think that there was some man-did-we-ever-blow-it conversation among the co-hosts after the network went to Special Report,  but this is a crowd with its eyeballs floating in Kool-Aid. 

Still, we have the documentation of an adult setting the record straight. 

 

 

Even San Francisco . . .

 . . . has had it up to here with identity-politics militancy in public education:

San Francisco residents recalled three members of the city’s school board Tuesday for what critics called misplaced priorities and putting progressive politics over the needs of children during the pandemic.

Voters overwhelmingly approved the recall in a special election, according to tallies by the San Francisco Department of Elections.

“The voters of this city have delivered a clear message that the school board must focus on the essentials of delivering a well-run school system above all else,” Mayor London Breed said in a statement. “San Francisco is a city that believes in the value of big ideas, but those ideas must be built on the foundation of a government that does the essentials well.”

Breed will now appoint board replacements who will serve until another election in November.

And what were these school board members focusing on instead?

Racism against Asian Americans has come under a renewed focus since reports of attacks and discrimination escalated with the spread of the coronavirus, which first appeared in late 2019 in Wuhan, China. 

Collins said the tweets were taken out of context and posted before she held her school board position. She refused to take them down or apologize for the wording and ignored calls to resign from parents, Breed and other public officials. 

Collins turned around and sued the district and her colleagues for $87 million, fueling yet another pandemic sideshow. The lawsuit was later dismissed. 

Many Asian parents were already angered by the board’s efforts to end merit-based admissions at the elite Lowell High School, where Asian students are the majority. 

As a result, many Asian American residents were motivated to vote for the first time in a municipal election. The grassroots Chinese/API Voter Outreach Task Force group, which formed in mid-December, said it registered 560 new Asian American voters.

Ann Hsu, a mother of two who helped found the task force, said many Chinese voters saw the effort to change the Lowell admissions system as a direct attack. 

“It is so blatantly discriminatory against Asians,” she said. 

In the city’s Chinese community, Lowell is viewed as a path children can take to success. 

Hey, once you start dividing Americans up by race and ethnicity, some of the races and ethnicities so divided are not going to stand for getting what they perceive as crummy treatment.

San Francisco may have begun to have a bellyful generally speaking. Mayor London Breed has done an abrupt turnaround regarding her position on defunding the police - albeit with a bit of pushing. 

And America generally is undergoing a reassessment of the role school boards play in the life of communities. You see it on the east coast. You see it in the hinterland. 

School boards might want to take heed. Homeschooling is a growing trend and students so educated do better on average than those in public schools. 

The state is losing its access to the insides of citizens' noggins. 

The America-first worldview bumps up against world-stage realities

 It's not necessary to be stupid or to have forgone all attempts at cultivating intellectual rigor to be a Trumpist. Granted, Marjorie Taylor Greene, Matt Gaetz, Paul Gosar are not the sharpest knives in the drawer, but examples of figures with impressive credentials and accomplishments whose eyeballs are afloat in Kool-Aid abound. Alan Dershowitz said of Ted Cruz that he was one of the best students he ever had at Harvard Law School, and Cruz went on to clerk for SCOTUS Chief Justice William Rehnquist. He was Solicitor General for the state of Texas. Outside of the realm of government/politics, one can point to such luminaries as Roger Kimball and Victor Davis Hanson as examples of wrong conclusions tortuously reached.

Consider Josh Hawley, who was likewise praised by professor David Kennedy as "arguably the most gifted student I taught in 50 years" at Yale Law School, edited the Yale Law Journal and clerked for SCOTUS Chief Justice John Roberts. He's another case of someone who seemed to have impeccable conservative bona fides - that is, until the arrival of the Very Stable Genius on the political scene. 

He's since gone full-blow nationalist-populist, supporting Trump's tariffs and ranting in 2019 - at the National Conservatism Conference - against a left-right "consensus that reflects not the interests of the American middle, but of a powerful upper class and their [sic] cosmopolitan priorities."

So it's not in the least surprising that he's penned a letter to Secretary of State Antony Blinken saying that the US taking a leadership role in the defense of Ukraine is contrary to American interests and takes our eye off the ball with regard to China's aims in the Indo-Pacific sphere. He says the U.S. "can no longer bear the heavy burden it once did in other regions of the world - including Europe." He requests written responses to six questions that, in their sum, make clear he's dubious about the idea if Ukraine ever joining NATO. 

He doesn't give any indication that he's given much thought to how Europe and the Indo-Pacific are connected. 

Mark Theissen of the American Enterprise Institute has:

China is watching. If Putin can invade Ukraine, Taiwan may be next. In October, following President Biden’s disastrous August retreat from Afghanistan, China flew a record number of fighters and bombers into Taiwan’s air defense zone — the largest Chinese air force incursion ever against Taiwan. A few weeks ago, as Putin massed forces along Ukraine’s border, China made another major incursion. If the United States fails to deter Russia less than a year after surrendering in Afghanistan, Beijing may calculate that it has a short window of weak US presidential leadership to invade and crush Taiwan’s democracy. The result could be a war in the Pacific.

North Korea and Iran are watching as well. If Putin invades, both countries will have every incentive to accelerate their development of nuclear weapons and the means to deliver them. They both know that after the Soviet Union collapsed, Ukraine inherited an arsenal of nearly 2,000 strategic nuclear weapons. But in December 1994, the United States brokered an agreement called the Budapest Memorandum on Security Assurances in which Ukraine agreed to give up those weapons along with its intercontinental ballistic missiles and strategic bombers. In exchange, Russia pledged to “refrain from the threat or use of force against the territorial integrity or political independence of Ukraine,” while the United States and Britain promised “to provide assistance to Ukraine … if Ukraine should become a victim of an act of aggression.”

In 2014, Russia violated that agreement when it invaded Ukraine and annexed Crimea. Now, Putin is threatening to finish the job. If he is allowed to do so, no nation will ever give up its nuclear weapons in exchange for US security assurances again. To the contrary, the lesson from Pyongyang to Tehran will be that the only path to security is to develop and deploy nuclear weapons and the missiles to deliver them.

This could spark a global arms race. Saudi Arabia has pledged to develop its own nuclear arsenal if Iran becomes a nuclear power. Indeed, Amos Yadlin, former head of Israeli military intelligence, has warned that “the Saudis will not wait one month” to go nuclear. Other countries could follow suit. Nuclear nonproliferation as we know it would be dead.

And United States’ credibility would lie in tatters — as would the credibility of NATO. The transatlantic alliance is already reeling from Biden’s debacle in Afghanistan. But the founding purpose of NATO was to deter Russian aggression in Europe. If allies can’t agree to take steps necessary to do that, then it’s fair to ask: Why does NATO still exist?

The consequences of NATO’s failure to deter Russia would resound across every alliance. NATO remains the touchstone of the US commitment to its allies around the world. Every US treaty alliance is measured against NATO. There is a reason 17 nations — including Australia, New Zealand, Japan, South Korea, Jordan and Israel — are designated under US law as “Major Non-NATO Allies.” US law also requires that Taiwan be treated as a Major Non-NATO Ally, without formal designation as such. Those commitments will be rendered meaningless if NATO’s credibility is destroyed. The web of US security alliances that has guaranteed peace and stability internationally would be decimated.

Retired Lt. Col. Alexander Vindman goes so far as to say we've twiddled our thumbs too long as it is, making the situation ever more dire:

Alexander Vindman, who oversaw Ukraine policy in the Trump White House and became a key figure in the 45th president’s first impeachment, has ​criticized the Biden administration for doing “too little, too late” to stop Russia from invading its western neighbor and warned of a conflict that could spread throughout Europe. 

Vindman, a retired Army lieutenant colonel, claimed White House policymakers “didn’t seem to come around to this threat until really quite late.”

“You only start seeing [them] take things seriously in the November and December [2021] time frame​,” Vindman told Yahoo News’ “Skullduggery” podcast on Tuesday. ​

When administration officials did grasp the gravity of the situation in Eastern Europe, Vindman explained, they focused on sanctions and other nonmilitary responses that would have no deterrent effect on Russian President Vladimir Putin. 

“We should have been providing Ukrainians with a lot more advanced military capability,” he said.

The US and its Western allies estimate Putin has massed up to 140,000 troops and heavy military equipment along the Ukrainian border, while White House national security adviser Jake Sullivan has said Russia could launch an attack at “any time.”

Vindman — who blew the whistle on President Donald Trump’s summer 2019 call asking Ukraine President Volodymyr Zelensky to investigate Joe and Hunter Biden as well as natural gas company Burisma — added Tuesday that the effects of a Russian incursion could spill over Ukraine’s borders.

“This could very well not end up being a limited war,” Vindman ​said on the podcast. 

There's no such thing as a set of American interest isolated from world-stage dynamics. 

Consider the joint pronouncement from Xi and Putin emanating from their pre-Olympics summit. They, too, don't want to see NATO expansion:

The leaders of Russia and China pushed back against U.S. pressure on Friday, declaring their opposition to any expansion of NATO and affirming that the island of Taiwan is a part of China, as they met hours before the Winter Olympics kicked off in Beijing.

Russia's Vladimir Putin and China's Xi Jinping issued a joint statement highlighting what it called "interference in the internal affairs" of other states, as both leaders face criticism from Washington over their foreign and domestic policies.

They support elbowing the West out of each other's respective theaters, and were not subtle in saying so.

And Russia is not just eyeing Ukraine as evidenced by the military drills, involving 30,000 troops, it's begun with (and in) Belarus, which borders Poland and the Baltic nations.

This is no time for posturing, Senator Hawley. You're not dumb. Think this through again, in light of the grim developments unfolding every day. 

 

 

 

 

There's no place for principle, character or spine in the 2022 Republican Party

 Last month, at Precipice, I summarized the challenge that I've had as a cultural observer since the insertion of a new force in our nation's politics since 2015:

When I started opining on culture, politics, economics and world affairs online, and in a column I wrote for several years for our local newspaper, the lines of demarcation were more clear-cut. There was right, and there was left. I expended a great many keyboard strokes trying to get people to see that Barack Obama was a lurch leftward beyond any that had come before for the Democrats. Frank Marshall Davis, Rashid Khalidi, the Midwest Academy, Bill Ayers and all that. The task before conservatives (back when that term stood for something recognizable) was straightforward: explain and defend our glorious lineage, from Edmund Burke through Frederic Bastiat, Richard M. Weaver, Russell Kirk, National Review and on up to Reaganite fusionism, and point out the dark nature of the lineage on the other side.

It’s all quite different now, isn’t it? Yes, the Left has grown increasingly grotesque, but an entirely new element has upended everyone’s previous assumptions . . .

That’s why any pundit, let alone fundraiser or political candidate who focuses solely on the very real grotesqueness of the Democrats - “We’ll defeat these leftists and then everything will be alright” - must be viewed with suspicion. Such a figure wants you to ignore the at least equally monstrous malignancy on the Right.

Now, the governor of Florida has illustrated exactly that kind of smokescreening maneuver:

"Liz Cheney is just totally off the rails with her nonsense," DeSantis said during an interview Monday with Fox News Digital. "And I think she's not really a Republican in terms of terms of what she's doing. We want people that are going to fight the left, and that's what we need to do in this country. That's what we're doing in Florida, standing up for people's freedoms. We're opposing wokeness. We're opposing all these things." 

A tactic closely akin to the the-Left-is-all-we-have-to-oppose ploy is whataboutism taking the form of "but there was urban violence in 2020." That's how Elise Stefanik, who assumed Liz Cheney's number three position in House Republican leadership, even thou her voting record has been far less consistently conservative that Cheney's, has chosen to obscure the 800-pound gorilla in the room:

“House Democrats did not condemn the violence that happened all of 2020,” she said in reference to riots in some cities following the murder of George Floyd in police custody. “And we believe the January 6 commission is political theater.” 

Sorry, Madame Conference Chair, but that's a non-sequitur. It's not the subject at hand. 

Then there's the dragging-our-brand-across-the-finish-line-is-far-and-away-our-primary-mission approach, as exemplified by Nikki Haley in response to a question from Bret Baier on FNC's Special Report:

“Mike Pence is a good man,” Haley said. “He’s an honest man. I think he did what he thought was right on that day. But I will always say, I’m not a fan of Republicans going against Republicans.”

Donald Trump has, of course, been breaking people who once prided themselves on being animated by principle since he entered the political fray. What a lifetime ago it seems when 

Lindsey Graham characterized the Very Stable Genius thusly:

"If Donald Trump carries the banner of my party," Graham said, "I think it taints conservatism for generations to come. I think his campaign is opportunistic, race-baiting, religious bigotry, xenophobia. Other than that, he’d be a good nominee."

and Rick Perry put it like this:

"Let no one be mistaken Donald Trump’s candidacy is a cancer on conservatism and it must be clearly diagnosed, excised, and discarded," Perry said during a speech in Washington, D.C. "It cannot be pacified or ignored for it will destroy a set of principles that has lifted more people out of poverty than any force in the history of the civilized world and that is the cause of conservatism."

and Ted Cruz, full of righteous indignation, said this:

“This man is a pathological liar. He doesn't know the difference between truth and lies. He lies practically every word that comes out of his mouth,” Cruz told reporters in Evansville, Indiana.

The Hoosier State primary is crucial for Cruz’s goal of preventing Trump from gaining enough delegates to secure the GOP presiential nomination. Most polls show Trump with a lead in the state, and Cruz’s attacks against his rival on Tuesday went into his personal life in a way Trump’s opponents have largely avoided until now.

“Donald Trump is a serial philanderer and he boasts about it,” Cruz said. “This is not a secret, he is proud of being a serial philanderer." 

The only people left in the Republican Party interested in having any personal honor almost certainly have no future in it. They don't even respect each other. They each and all know that they opted to be motivated by fear of a four-year-old in a 76-year-old man's body. 

They claim to be so concerned about the impact of progressive aggression on the foundations of the American way of life, but deep inside they know they've chosen a path that is utterly ineffective in addressing it.

The entire party, save for the handful of outliers with no voice in it, is in the throes of a delusion borne of cowardice. 

 

 

 

 

Sunday roundup

 If it's been a while since you considered the hard life of the man behind Crime and Punishment, The Brothers Karamazov and The Idiot, check out Christopher Sandford's piece entitled "Two Centuries of Dostoevsky" on the website of the American Institute for Economic Research. After having already garnered some literary acclaim for some essays he'd had published, Dostoevsky participated in a protest against czarist policies in the 1840s and got in big trouble for it, including getting 50 lashes for complaining about prison food, an event that left him with a bad case of epilepsy for the rest of his life. Of course, he then went on to write his major works and enjoy some high regard.

Sandford's an interesting cat in his own right. He's kind of specialized in pop-culture history, writing biographies of Paul McCartney, Kurt Cobain and Steve McQueen, among others. 

Associate editor of New York magazine's Daily Intelligencer Eric Levitz ever so cautiously starts to reconsider a public-policy viewpoint he'd wholeheartedly embraced in a piece entitled "Does Pre-K Actually Hurt Kids?" It seems that findings indicating that any ground gained from pre-K is lost by the midway point through elementary school have had an impact on his thinking. Still, he's clearly keen to hold onto the idea that, with some tweaking of how it's implemented, pre-K can be basically beneficial. 

I found some of the comments on the article noteworthy, such as this one:

None of it matters a bit unless the things and habits these children are learning are reinforced in the home. If no one is responding to the kids’ needs appropriately during the times they aren’t in care, if no one is making them healthy meals and reading to them and caring how they do in school, none of it matters a bit. 

But we can’t say that. Which is a shame because it’s the truth. 

Above practically everything else, possibly with the exception of promptly and appropriately responding to a child’s needs, READING is where it all starts. Reading go a child from the time they’re very small helps them learn to pay attention and focus and start to comprehend. It gives them an almost undeniable edge. But so few people do it anymore, and it’s heartbreaking. 

And this:

“Public pre-K programs may not reliably improve enrollees’ long-term academic performance or social behavior. But they do reliably provide parents with a safe, somewhat stimulating place to put their children while they go earn money. And that’s an important service for parents and children alike.”

^ This.   I taught for 5 years, and by the end I realized that we were just free daycare.  

At the John Templeton Foundation website, Joshua Moritz asks, Is There A God-Shaped Hole at the Heart of Mathematics?  He examines the inquiries of Christian mathematicians and philosophers such as John Philoponus, Gottfried Leibniz and Kurt Godel into a rational basis for concluding that God must exist.

If you could use a good dose of encouragement to be content, check out "In Love With The Life You Don't Have" by Greg Morse at Desiring God.

Robert Tracinski, writing at Discourse, has an essay called "In Defense of 'Workism'": 

“Workism” was defined by Derek Thompson a few years ago in The Atlantic as “the belief that work is not only necessary to economic production, but also the centerpiece of one’s identity and life’s purpose, and the belief that any policy to promote human welfare must always encourage more work.”

This last point, pushing back against encouraging work, is where the rubber really meets the road, because it is part of the push to un-reform the welfare reforms of the 1990s, on the grounds that it is cruel and unjust to restrict welfare in a way that requires its recipients to work.

The argument against this emphasis on work is that it is a puritanical moral “obsession” arbitrarily imposed on people, and also that it is all a lie concocted to serve our corporate masters, because the majority will never actually find personal fulfillment in their work. Here is Thompson again:

But our desks were never meant to be our altars. The modern labor force evolved to serve the needs of consumers and capitalists, not to satisfy tens of millions of people seeking transcendence at the office. It’s hard to self-actualize on the job if you’re a cashier—one of the most common occupations in the US—and even the best white-collar roles have long periods of stasis, boredom, or busywork. This mismatch between expectations and reality is a recipe for severe disappointment, if not outright misery.

So you start out thinking you’re going to work to “follow your bliss,” but you just end up working to line the pockets of The Man.

Similarly, Tablet recently carried a broadside against work and career as a source of meaning specifically for women, lamenting that “pop-feminism has continued to lean into the corporate system, devaluing any life choice for women that does not center on economic prosperity.” This is either a radical leftist perspective, with all its railing against “the corporate system,” or a traditionalist-conservative perspective, with its talk about the previous generations of women “who were raised to become mothers and wives.” But who can tell the difference between left and right anymore?

The wider complaint is that we may have greater prosperity and be building and making more things—in other words, we may enjoy material progress—but we face a growing “meaning crisis,” in which we have no clue what gives value and direction to our lives or what can produce a sense of personal fulfillment and happiness. There are various people you can find on YouTube who will tell us how to fill this void with Buddhism, or psychedelics or Stoic philosophy. The fact that none of these solutions is particularly new—the hippies tried two of the three a half century ago—might cast a little doubt on whether this “meaning crisis” is really anything new or whether it is just the human condition.

To state the dilemma: How can we continue to create new wealth, invent new technology and advance human material progress, while also finding something that gives purpose, direction and meaning to our lives?

Put that way, the question kind of answers itself—and “workism” is the answer. Creating new wealth, inventing new technology and advancing human progress is something that gives purpose, direction and meaning to our lives. Or rather, “workism” is a pejorative term—an update of “workaholic”—used to dismiss what is actually a very compelling idea: that solving human problems, building the future and just plain getting things done is, in fact, an important and meaningful activity.

Heather MacDonald of the Manhattan Institute is always good for a chill-your-bones update on how the malignancy of identity politics has further metastasized. In the current issue of City Journal, she looks at the ruination of the Art Institute of Chicago.  Western civilization is likely done for. 

Daren Jonescu is a blogger on whom I frequently check in. I don't always agree with him, and he probably wouldn't have it any other way, given the high priority he sets on the individual rigorously coming to his or her own conclusions about anything. I do find his post entitled "Reasons Not To Drink" worthy of consideration, even though I'm unlikely to cancel cocktail hour, at least presently.  

 

Mike's better-late-than-never "I had no right" declaration

 He delivered it in the context of a speech he gave yesterday to the Federalist Society, and he gave it the appropriate touch of thunderous forthrightness, so that the national media would not fail to see it as the money line of his address. That's one of the signature licks he's been honing since high school, when he made a name for himself on the Rotary Club speech circuit.

The Very Stable Genius has already weighed in, calling Pence weak - no, make that WEAK! I have a feeling the fallout from the entire drool-besotted VSG cult will begin today. 

It will be interesting to see where the fault lines appear as that process gains steam. The money right now would be on it ending his political career, but as they say, a day in that realm is an eternity. Variables abound. 

He's getting applause from folks on the non-Trumpist right, and I suppose I can contribute a clap or two. I'm certainly not going to rise from my seat with any kind of full-throated hurrah, however. If there's one thing I can't stand about politics, it's the way some - and you see this on both the right and the left - are willing to take whatever they can get, to get all excited about an apparent change of course on the part of a political figure without looking into what led to it, and how sincere and permanent it is or isn't. 

Let us not forget that, when the Hollywood Access tape surfaced mere days before the 2016 election, Pence's wife Karen strenuously encouraged him to drop off the ticket, and wouldn't give him a congratulatory kiss on election night. ("Well, Mike, you got what you wanted.") As the new administration got underway, Director of National Security Dan Coats was increasingly uneasy about Trump's behavior and utterances, as was his wife Marilyn. Like Pence, they are Hoosiers and Pence had known them for years. In the book Rage, Bob Woodward recounts a state dinner at which Marilyn Coats and Mike Pence had a brief exchange of a how-can-you-sleep-at-night nature, and then were seated next to each other. She continued the conversation non-verbally, via eye contact, and Pence replied with a your-husband-and-I-must-stay-the-course countenance. 

More recently, when the Pences arrived back home on the afternoon of January 20, 2020, fresh from attending Biden's inauguration, Mike's first words on the Columbus Municipal Airport tarmac were an expression of gratitude toward the Very Stable Genius and Melania for all they'd done for America over the past four years. This, two weeks after the Capitol mob had chanted "Hang Mike Pence!" as they made their way through the building.

And let's note that his gig over the last year has been as a fellow at the Heritage Foundation, which seems to be following the Claremont Institute down the Trumpist rabbit hole. 

So while yesterday's pronouncement was encouraging to a modest degree, I don't think it's time for any welcome-back-Mike gestures. And if he gets eaten alive before he has a chance to gain a foothold in his new landscape, well, that's how karma works, Mr. Vice President. 

NBC's Olympics opening-ceremony coverage was quite the soft-pedal

 Probably the most egregious portion of it came from Savannah Guthrie, in which she characterizes the co-lighting of the Olympic flame by Dinigeer Yilamujiang, a cross-country skier selected from the Uyghur population as "an in-your-face response to those Western nations, including the U.S., who have called this Chinese treatment of that group genocide and diplomatically boycotted those games."

But Andrew Browne's remarks were pretty rancid as well:

An NBC commentator offered what sounded like a defense of the Chinese Communist regime during the Olympics opening ceremony on Friday.

“It’s worth remembering that while Western countries may be boycotting these Olympics over human rights issues, China styles itself as a champion of the developing world, and it has plenty of support in countries from Africa to Latin America where its investments are building up local economies,” said former Wall Street Journal senior correspondent and columnist Andrew Browne, referring to China’s Belt and Road initiative.

Is this just a matter of a giddy response to the pageantry of the moment? Or were they keen to avoid the humiliation of being dragged by Chinese authorities away from giving a report like Dutch journalist Sjoerd den Haas?

In any event, this is the kind of awkwardness that results from participating in a Potemkin village-style dog and pony show by one of the world's cruelest and most ambitiously expansionist regimes on Earth.

 

The outsized influence of woke ideology

 Yes, the troglodytes of Trumpism/neo-Trumpism have had a field day with the fact that Joe Biden must make good on his campaign pledge to nominate a black woman to the Supreme Court, but he now has to act resolute in his determination to follow through, doesn't he? He can talk all he wants to about finding a rigorous Constitutional scholar who is also a black woman, but it sure looks like raw affirmative action to a lot of people.

As in across the board:

. . . just over three-quarters of Americans (76%) want Biden to consider "all possible nominees." Just 23% want him to automatically follow through on his history-making commitment that the White House seems keen on seeing through. At a ceremony honoring the retiring justice, Biden told reporters he is able to honor his promise without compromising on quality.

. . . Although the poll's sample size was not large enough to break out results for Black people, only a little more than 1 in 4 nonwhite Americans (28%) wish for Biden to consider only Black women for the vacancy. Democrats are more supportive of Biden's vow (46%) than Americans as a whole, but still a majority of Democrats (54%) also prefer that Biden consider all possible nominees.

Longtime Democratic apparatchik James Carville cites some statistics that his party would do well to consider:

Carville said in [an interview with Vox] that only 6 percent of adults and about 12 percent of Democrats identify as "progressive."

Why does identity-politics militancy and wokeness in general hold such sway over our culture and public policy, then? N.S. Lyons at The Upheaval explains that it is a matter of twenty factors. I won't excerpt from each one, but some of his discussions thereof merit a look:

2. The void of meaning still hasn’t been filled. I mean, did the gaping hole of meaning in people’s lives created by the uprooting forces of secular liquid modernity get resolved in some alternative way while we weren’t looking? You know, the spiritual void that this creepy chimeric faith-ideology and its romantic political crusades rushed to fill in the first place? Has there been some kind of genuine, organized religious revival? Has decadent nihilism stopped being the defining sentiment of the age? Did the young even become hyper-nationalists or revolutionary Marxist class-warriors instead? Have they found an alternative passionate heroic narrative to act out in some new Davos slide deck? No. And in fact, meanwhile, it also seems that…

3. Social atomization hasn’t reversed. It sure seems like the kind of robust communities, civic associations, and “little platoons” which once served to fortify society against the revolutionary (per Burke) and totalitarian (per Arendt) forces that thrive on atomization haven’t suddenly been rebuilt from the ground up. In fact even the most basic such unit, family formation, appears to be continuing to declineprecipitously. And that may be because…

4. Atomization is probably the inevitable byproduct of liberal modernity. That is: liberalism made the autonomy of the individual its highest good. To maximize individual autonomy, the state therefore found itself obliged (being unable to resist claims that it must enforce an expanding array of rights) to exercise its power to help progressively liberate the individual from all limits and constraints, including from tradition, religion, geography, community, family, and nature itself. (This is certainly deserving of more argument than I have space to recap here; see “Four Big Questions for the Counter-Revolution” for a bit more.) Liberalism has thus acted as a centrifugal force, severing all the centripetal counter-forces that once kept individuals connected to recognizably human communities and launching them outward towards solitary orbits where they can drift cold and alone in their pods.

From this perspective it is more obvious why the amorphous ideology referred to as “Wokeness” so often seems mixed up and chaotically self-contradictory: it is the confused response to two opposite instincts. On the one hand it is actually a kind of anti-liberal reactionary movement, a blind, emotional scramble to grasp desperately for collectivism in the most basic, tribal sort of community seemingly still available: in identity groups, and in fixed racial identity in particular. But, on the other hand, it simultaneously attempts to continue embracing the boundless autonomy of individual choice as its most sacred principle, celebrating an individual’s right to self-define everything about themselves without limit, up to and including their own concept of material reality. (This cognitive dissonance has never been much more than an ideological speedbump, however – don’t get your hopes up.) And this hyper-individualism has now collided head first with the technological revolution, which increasingly positions itself as offering hope for the boundless potential necessary to escape from any natural limits whatsoever, including by fracturing any solid definition of what we once thought it meant to be human. And, speaking of technology and fracturing, meanwhile…

Most people being on board pales in impact to the fierce determination of an ate-up minority:

8. Majorities don’t matter. Unfortunately for those dreaming of harnessing a majority anti-woke popular will, the truth is that, as statistician and philosopher Nassim Taleb has explained in detail, it’s typically not the majority that sets new societal rules, but the most intolerant minority. If the vast majority generally prefers to eat Food A instead of Food B, but a small minority is absolutely insistent on eating Food B and is willing to start chopping the heads off of anyone who disagrees and serves Food A – and the majority doesn’t care enough to get all bloody dying on this particular culinary hill – all restaurants will soon be serving only Food B, the new national cuisine. This is especially true if the intolerant minority already holds a disproportionate position of influence within the system, given that…

And when that fierce determination lands that minority in positions of societal leadership, the entrenchment is damn hard to reverse:

10. All the institutional high ground is still occupied. Have the top universities already been retaken from the woke, or replaced? (No, one still imaginary university in Austin doesn’t count.) What about the elite finishing schools? The accreditation companies? Most mainstream news media? The social media companies? The publishing houses? Hollywood? The major foundations? The non-profits and the think tanks? The consulting and accounting companies? The investment banks? The NASDAQ? The digital service providers? The HR departments of the Fortune 500, and most of their boards? The law schools? The Bar Association? The permanent federal bureaucratic state? Heck, even Halliburton? No, at such a ludicrous suggestion the Cathedral merely echoes with the mocking laughter of the new woke high clerisy. 

And the generation still getting its worldview formed is warped by being handled with kid gloves:

13. The youth are still coddled and mentally broken. Back in 2015, when most people still thought of what is now referred to as Wokeness only as a bizarre and vaguely amusing phenomenon that was isolated to college campuses, Jonathan Haidt and Greg Lukianoff published an essay titled “The Coddling of the American Mind” in The Atlantic (later to become a book of the same name) as an early hypothesis of what was happening. They advanced an essentially psychological explanation for why so many college students were suddenly acting simultaneously like fragile snowflakes and rabid authoritarians: thanks to the embrace of the “self-esteem” movement and “helicopter-parenting” by their Boomer parents, along with liability risk-aversion by institutions, young people had grown up physically and psychologically “coddled” and therefore emotionally fragile. By this the authors specifically meant that they had adopted a number of beliefs totally inverse to the Stoic-derived principles considered best practice by modern Cognitive Behavioral Therapy. These unhealthy beliefs included: always trusting your feelings, assuming disagreement is always a personal attack, and believing hurtful words lead to real harm, including permanent trauma. Normalization of these beliefs led to a “cult of safety” on campuses, with hyper-attention devoted to the prevention of offense (because it was now actual “violence”). Hence the emergence of such innovations as “microaggressions,” “trigger warnings,” and “safe spaces.”

I must admit that I’ve grown a bit skeptical of this explanation by now. As things have progressed, it’s become increasingly clear to me that these claims to offense are often used as cunningly deliberate weapons against empathetic liberals, and are probably frequently evidence less of psychological fragility than of psychopathy. But, it does seem true that Gen Z sadly does indeed suffer from much higher rates of mental illness than older generations (though the millennials are very close). Even before the pandemic, the rate of anxiety and depression recorded in their age group nearly doubled between 2007 and 2018, as they came of age. The suicide rate rose 57%. From 2009 to 2019, the proportion of high school students reporting persistent feelings of sadness or hopelessness increased by 40%. Only 45% reported their mental health was good overall in 2018. One-third reported having a mental health or substance abuse problem. They are also far and away the loneliest generation. Meanwhile, our whole culture seems to have grown significantly more possessed by emotivism in general, to the point that the decline of rational language and the rise of emotional reasoning can even be tracked quantitatively…

But I digress. If we assume any of this may be causally related to the Revolution, the real question for us here is: has any of this gotten better? Of course not! The pandemic has had a devastating impact on Gen Z’s already fragile mental health. Up to seven in ten now report feeling depressed. Rates of severe depression rose to around 25%. Hospitalization for suicide attempts by girls in particular rose 51% from 2019 to 2021. Meanwhile, far from pulling back at all on the “cult of safety,” colleges have now expanded it to absolutely insane levels. So no, the situation has not improved. And from what we know about how totalitarian cults target and more easily exploit the lonely and vulnerable, we can probably safely assume the Revolutionaries will only have more material to work with moving forward, not less, as college graduates remain fragile and/or “entitled” for the foreseeable future. And speaking of anxious, entitled young people…

But perhaps there will be an insistence among the majority of voters and their Senators on someone who will show she's at least not too badly tainted by that my-experience-as-a-member-of-a-certain-demographic-is-definitely-going-to-influence-my-decisions stuff. And in the meantime, the court as currently comprised is not done with its current term. Also, keep in mind that replacing Breyer doesn't change the balance in terms of how justices are likely to vote on cases. 

 

 

 

 

 

Ascertaining Putin's aims

 The notion that he's bluffing is a soothing balm. It would indeed be comforting to think that some kind of deal can be worked out whereby some kind of language vaguely approximating an assurance that Ukraine wouldn't be joining NATO any time soon would be sufficient for Russia to climb down from the present brink.

That doesn't square with facts on the ground, however:

Russian mechanized forces now rolling into Belarus directly threaten NATO, not just Ukraine. The U.S. and its allies are rightly focused on obvious Russian preparations to invade Ukraine and on trying to deter Moscow. Russian troops moving into positions in southeastern Belarus could be preparing to invade, and the West must respond in that context. But Russian forces are also taking up positions on and near the Polish borderwithin about 100 miles of Warsaw and near the Lithuanian border as well. Deployments to these locations serve little purpose as part of a plan to invade Ukraine. They dramatically increase the Russian threat to Poland, however, and to NATO’s ability to defend its Baltic members even more. The U.S. and its Western European allies must respond to this threat to the alliance — whether or not the Russians attack Ukraine.

Seven to 10 mechanized battalions (equivalent to two-to-three brigades with 4,200-9,000 troops) have travelled from Russia’s Far East to Belarus. Two battalions of advanced Russian S-400 air defense systems as well as 12 Su-35 advanced fighters have also deployed to Belarus. Russia’s Defense Ministry claims these forces will remain in Belarus until mid-February for exercises. The exercises will supposedly occur primarily at training areas near Brest (on the Polish border), Baranovichi (northeast of Brest), Grodno (near the Lithuanian-Polish border), and Minsk. These are not the optimal locations from which to invade Ukraine, although Baranovichi is a good rear base from which Russian forces could stage for an attack. Some Russian troops, however, have already appeared in southeastern Belarus, far from any announced training area, and in one of the ideal locations from which to launch an invasion against Ukraine. The new Russian forces therefore threaten both Ukraine and NATO simultaneously.

The Russian move into Belarus is no spur-of-the-moment or opportunistic action. It is part of a long-term plan Vladimir Putin has been pursuing for years, which is why we have been forecasting it for many months. Putin has expressed his intent to open a military air base in Belarus since at least 2015. Russia has been preparing to project forces into Belarus since at least September 2020 through intensified combined exercises with Belarus. Russian troops have also been rehearsing logistics and command-and-control tasks necessary to deploy Russian forces into Belarus, including supplying fuel, ammunition, and other essentials closer to Belarus.

It sure looks like Poland and the Baltics are in Putin's crosshairs as well as Ukraine. 

And he's shoring up his support from a geographically close neighbor of the United States:

Following recent threats of a potential military deployment to Cuba earlier this month, Russia’s President Vladimir Putin discussed the “strategic partnership” and further coordination of “actions in the international arena” with Cuban leader Miguel Díaz-Canel in a call disclosed Monday by the Kremlin.

In a tweet, Díaz-Canel said the two leaders held a “cordial and fruitful telephone conversation” about “the current international situation” and the development of “future links in different spheres.”

I realize that the US has sent Ukraine lethal munitions lately, and that Ukraine is determined to defend its sovereignty, but is 8,500 US troops being placed on "higher alert" for the time being sufficient US participation in that effort?  

Putin's a pretty astute cat. He saw that Germany was, in many ways, a wobbly member of the Western alliance, what with its rush to hobble its own energy independence and sign up for the Nordstream pipeline. That natural-gas delivery system is serving Putin's designs quite well at present:

An undersea pipeline set to deliver gas from Russia to Germany has become exactly what the two countries have always insisted it would never be: A weapon in a geopolitical crisis.

The United States, United Kingdom, Ukraine and several European Union member states have fiercely opposed the pipeline ever since it was first announced in 2015, warning the project would boost Moscow's influence in Europe.

The 1,200-km (750-mile) pipeline was completed in September and is now awaiting final certification. But even though the pipeline isn't operational yet, it has already acted as a huge wedge between the traditional allies at a time of huge tensions between Russia and the West.

According to experts, that on its own is a win for Russian President Vladimir Putin.

Kristine Berzina, a senior fellow at the German Marshall Fund of the United States, a nonpartisan research center, said Moscow has benefited from the drama around the pipeline. "Everything about the Nord Stream 2 pipeline has been a victory for Russia," she told CNN.

"Given that Russia's aim is to split everybody, if they're seeking to break apart unity in the European Union and in NATO, this pipeline has been a wonderful vessel."

What this adds up to is not a mystery. Putin is not inscrutable. He's perfectly upfront in demonstrating his desire to see the US removed as a military, economic and cultural influence in Europe, and he's willing to risk conflagration on a level not seen since the 1940s to achieve it.