Debt matters, even in a pandemic Debt matters, even in a pandemic Washington Examiner To fight the coronavirus and its economic effects, Congress has already spent nearly $3 trillion, a total to which lawmakers will add to over the summer. Democrats want the number doubled.
It has become conventional wisdom that during a time of national crisis, lawmakers should not worry about blowing up the debt, which is expected to reach unprecedented levels by next year.
There is, indeed, some truth to the argument that decisive action in this crisis should not be hamstrung by worries over deficit spending. Given that the pandemic has led the government to shut down large parts of the economy, significant government spending has been needed to cushion the blow to businesses and to tens of millions of people who have lost their jobs.
But it’s important to remember some context. Before the coronavirus ever appeared, federal finances were already in bad shape. That was during a time when unemployment was at a 50-year low. Now, the Congressional Budget Office says that the debt is going to surpass the record set during World War II by next year. And even that doesn’t anticipate the inevitable additional rounds of coronavirus spending.
Unlike World War II, however, debt will not simply go away once the immediate crisis is over. That’s because the retirement of baby boomers, coupled with rising healthcare costs, is going to keep adding to the debt in coming decades. The coronavirus simply accelerated America's grim fiscal reckoning, bringing it a decade earlier than it otherwise would have been.
While there isn’t a magic amount of debt that triggers a crisis, there is broad agreement among economists that such large and growing debt makes a fiscal crisis more likely. When it arrives, investors will become alarmed about the federal government's ability to service the debt and consequently reluctant to buy more without earning high interest rates. And those push the debt higher faster. Lawmakers will be trapped in a vicious cycle, having to choose among undesirable options such as crushing tax increases and sudden and severe cuts to spending. Either of these could cripple the economy, making it yet more difficult to generate the growth necessary to pay down the debt principal.
In other words, if lawmakers throw caution to the winds in responding to our current crisis, they could set the country up for an even longer period of economic stagnation.
After decades of ignoring rising debt, it would be imprudent to tighten the purse strings suddenly in a time of crisis, when spending is desperately needed. But the danger of reckless spending is that it will lead to a misallocation of resources, and dig a deeper hole for future congresses to deal with.
If lawmakers believe the coronavirus gives them a blank check, they will try to take advantage of the crisis to spend money on wish-list items unrelated to the nation's genuinely pressing concerns. Much less care will be given to how programs meant to respond to the crisis allocate money.
This has already become apparent. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, who spent much of the past year and a half trying to convince everybody she was keeping the radical Left of her caucus at bay, recently shepherded through the House a $3 trillion abomination of a bill that was ostensibly a response to the immediate needs of the pandemic. In reality, it was a wish list that included, among other things, a rescue of perennially mismanaged union pension funds. The bill also would have extended the temporary and excessive $600 weekly supplement to unemployment benefits until the end of January and removed the cap on deducting state and local taxes, to benefit wealthy blue states such as Pelosi’s home.
President Trump, for his part, has talked about spending $2 trillion on a massive infrastructure bill that he’s struggled to get off the ground throughout his time in office.
Meanwhile, the money is flying out the door so fast that there has not been adequate oversight, which resulted, among other things, in large corporations receiving assistance that had been meant for small businesses.
There’s an argument to be made for lots of spending as long as it is accurately targeted and fairly allocated. But when everybody operates as though they have limitless sums of money to play with, excessive spending and a misallocation of the nation's wealth are going to become more prevalent.
That’s why, even though the debt should not handcuff policymakers and prevent them from taking truly necessary actions to pull America out of its present crisis, concerns about debt must be made an important part of the conversation.
On the coronavirus, Gretchen Whitmer has done nothing but make excuses On the coronavirus, Gretchen Whitmer has done nothing but make excuses Washington Examiner Michigan has experienced one of the worst coronavirus outbreaks in the country. And Gov. Gretchen Whitmer would like to convince everyone that her leadership has nothing to do with it at all.
The Democratic governor has faced a good deal of criticism for imposing excessive restrictions and extending her state’s shutdown into mid-June without approval from the state legislature. Whitmer admitted in an interview with Axios on HBO this week that her actions have “not come without a cost” but that they "worked."
Michigan's cases are finally trending downward, and that's good news. But there's no reason to think Whitmer's policies caused the decline, especially given how poorly Michigan has fared compared to neighboring states.
Whitmer’s more extreme restrictions — for example, preventing the sale of paint and gardening equipment and forbidding Michiganders from traveling to their vacation homes in the northern part of the state — have merely annoyed people while yielding little value in the way of public health.
And some of her policies have certainly made things worse, such as her executive order forcing nursing homes to accept contagious COVID-19 patients. At least 25% of Michigan's coronavirus cases have been linked to nursing homes; it’s anyone's guess how many deaths this caused because Whitmer’s administration (big surprise) refuses to make nursing homes report coronavirus deaths publicly.
Whereas other governors have released clear plans for reopening involving goals and phases, Whitmer has no clear plan. Every time Michigan nears the end date of its stay-at-home order, she simply extends it. The resulting uncertainty has increased public frustration and even encouraged defiance.
To add insult to injury, Whitmer’s husband was busted traveling to their vacation home days after the governor commanded Michiganders not to do just that. More recently, he requested to have his boat put on the water for Memorial Day.
Whitmer's extreme lockdown policies haven't stopped Michigan from leading the Midwest in overall and per capita coronavirus deaths. When confronted with this fact, her first instinct has been to deflect blame.
"I'm never going to apologize for the fact that because there was a vacuum of leadership at the federal level, we had to take action to save people here in Michigan," she told Axios on HBO.
It would be easier to pretend that President Trump forced her hand in Michigan if Trump weren't president in every neighboring state as well. Somehow, Ohioans quickly flattened their curve. Their death toll per capita is one-third that of Michigan, and they are already eating out and heading back to work. Both Indiana (40% fewer coronavirus deaths per capita than Michigan) and Illinois (20% fewer) have done significantly better, and Wisconsin (80% fewer) has done better by far.
The other logical problem with blaming Trump is that Michigan has not been neglected by his administration or by the federal bureaucracy. When Whitmer has asked for help, she has received it. Michigan got more than 120,000 N95 masks from the federal government, along with millions in funding through the Federal Emergency Management Agency. Trump is also set to approve Whitmer’s request to extend aid from the National Guard through July 31.
If Whitmer's complaint is that Trump failed to shut down her state for her, it seems misplaced. He has no such power as president. Does she secretly want him to act like a dictator?
Whitmer messed up. She hesitated to shut her state down in the early days of the outbreak. When she did act, she went too far in locking down people at low risk while placing high-risk nursing home patients in a dangerous situation. Now, she's full of excuses and eager to blame everyone but herself for the results.
No one could have rightly expected Whitmer to be perfect or to handle this health crisis flawlessly. Governors are human beings, too. But the good ones, the ones who ought to be leaders, are the ones who know how to admit their mistakes.
Were the lockdowns worth it? Depends how long a vaccine takes Were the lockdowns worth it? Depends how long a vaccine takes Philip Klein For decades to come, public health officials, academics, and the broader population will debate whether the drastic lockdown measures taken in response to the coronavirus were a necessary action to save lives or a colossal mistake. But the answer to this question will depend heavily on how long it takes to develop an effective vaccine.
The argument in favor of lockdowns has been that COVID-19 is a new, sometimes fatal disease that has no available treatments and a relatively high hospitalization rate. Given that it has a long incubation period and that many people with mild or no symptoms could be carriers, it has been able to spread rapidly.
Originally, the argument was that in the absence of testing, it was necessary to order widespread shutdowns of social and economic activity in order to ensure that at its peak, hospitalizations would remain within the capacity of the medical system. Otherwise, there could be a widespread collapse and a significantly higher death toll as a consequence.
Now that no medical system is in danger of collapse and cases have been steadily declining even as testing ramps up to detect them, we seem to have migrated to a situation in which reopening is being tied to some vague notion of safety. And so the lockdowns have become more debatable.
Lockdown opponents have argued that the dramatic consequences of lockdowns have made continuing them not worth it. Tens of millions have lost their jobs, once-thriving businesses have buckled, and schools have remained shut down — with reopening seeming uncertain even in the fall. Meanwhile, depression and missed medical checkups could end up meaning a significant number of deaths tied to the lockdown.
Looked at one way, the fact that the United States passed the milestone of 100,000 deaths with widespread lockdowns for two months shows how dangerous the disease is — and how much worse it could have been had we gone on with life as usual. The fact that the number of new cases began to flatline within a few weeks of the lockdown orders were put in place is evidence in favor of the idea that draconian measures prevented something far worse.
Looked at another way, the lockdowns were useless: After all the devastation they caused, more than 100,000 people died anyway.
There have already been studies providing fodder for both sides of this argument, and in the years to come, there will be significantly more data to analyze. In the long run, research will address questions such as: How did states and countries fare based on the aggressiveness of the lockdowns? Was there really a large spike in suicides relative to normal years? Will we, in coming years, see a spike in deaths in cancer or in other diseases that could have benefited from earlier detection and treatment?
But the biggest unknown is the timing of the vaccine.
Right now, there are dozens of vaccine candidates being tried throughout the world. The process is moving along at unprecedented speed. The hope is that by fall, the first stage of testing will show that at least one vaccine candidate is safe and that it is effective in a small sample of people. That could allow it to be used in a targeted way in some populations or regions as a tool to fight a potential second wave.
The hope is that as soon as early next year, there will be a successful vaccine that has proven to be effective after larger-scale trials and can be produced and administered on a mass scale, allowing life to go back to normal.
If this were to play out, the case for at least the initial lockdown orders will be made much stronger. It would mean that there was a relatively narrow window in which there weren’t any tools available to slow the spread of the coronavirus and that the mass social distancing bought us time and prevented much worse carnage.
If the skeptics are right, however, and it takes years for a vaccine to be developed, if at all, and if the virus proves resistant to other treatments, the lockdowns will be viewed a lot more negatively.
Nobody really views the lockdowns as a sustainable measure for a matter of years. Unless the country is going to enter a period of extended hibernation, at some point, people will be forced to get on with their lives and incur more risk. Given that widespread infections and fatalities would be inevitable under a scenario in which a vaccine takes a long time or never arrives, it will become much harder to defend the economic and social disruption caused by the lockdowns in the meantime.
Bad Boys, bad movie Bad Boys, bad movie Daniel Ross Goodman The Godfather is quite possibly the greatest movie of all time. The Godfather Part II might be even better. The Godfather Part III? We’re better off pretending it never happened. The first Die Hard film might be the greatest action movie of all time. The second Die Hard was pretty good as well. The third? Let’s just say that by 1995, Bruce Willis was no longer exactly in his prime.
Whether it’s The Matrix, The Terminator, Lethal Weapon, or even Shrek, every great movie that’s aspired to become a trilogy (with the possible exceptions of The Lord of the Rings, Star Wars, and Austin Powers) ends up falling off. By the time the filmmakers get to a third movie, they’ve typically exhausted their original inspirations and are forced to rely on formulas and recycled material from their previous productions. If even great films suffer from this law of entropy, what happens when a studio tries to make a trilogy out of a movie that was far from great to begin with? Such is the case with Bad Boys For Life, billed by the film’s PR people as the “highly anticipated” return of Marcus Miles Burnett (Martin Lawrence) and Mike Lowrey (Will Smith). Highly anticipated by whom, exactly?
This third installment of the intermittently entertaining, frequently formulaic Bad Boys franchise brings the fast-talking undercover cops back to Miami for yet another spin down buddy-cop comedy lane before quickly cutting to Mexico City, where a mother, Isabel Aretas (Kate del Castillo) is preparing her son Armando (Jacob Scipio), Manchurian Candidate-style, to take revenge on Lowrey, who put her drug lord husband behind bars. “Todo para ti, papa,” Armando states with robotlike compliance.
This perfunctory introduction sets the film’s mostly predictable plot in motion. Armando makes his way to Miami, determined to assassinate Lowrey and recoup the drug money the Miami PD confiscated from his father. We get quite a jolt when Lowrey is shot during the first 15 minutes of the film by a masked motorcyclist who turns out to be Armando. Lowrey survives, of course, and begs his superior to let him and Burnett track down his would-be assassin. The real plot twist comes when Lowrey has to beg Burnett to come out of retirement to help him with the case, and Burnett says no — at first. “I thought we were bad boys for life?” Lowrey says to Burnett. Burnett pleads that he’s done being a bad boy. “'Good men, good men, whatcha gonna do? Whatcha gonna do when they come for you?' Who the hell wanna sing that song?” Lowrey jokes. “Well, maybe if you sing it like that,” Burnett deadpans. And, just like that, they’re back.
There isn’t much originality here. Lawrence is a bit thicker, and Smith’s famous high top is a bit shorter, but otherwise, not much has changed. We get the same overreliance on shootouts and eye candy, the same gratuitous shots of bikini-clad women, the same strobe-lit scenes of flashy Miami nightlife, the same surfeit of guns, explosions, car chases, and party boats, the same jokes about Burnett’s sexless marriage, the same kinds of lines that would actually be funny if they hadn’t been delivered so earnestly (“That fool put holes in me.” “And you’re filling them with hate”). And, of course, the same Inner Circle “Bad Boys” theme song. The only indications that it’s 2020, not 1995, are that Burnett now has Alexa and a Dwyane Wade Miami Heat jersey instead of an Alonzo Mourning jersey and that the Miami PD has drones. There are a few humorous moments, but Bad Boys For Life mostly lacks the kind of fun, witty banter that lent the first installment of Bad Boys its occasional spark.
We could spend all day picking apart Bad Boys For Life’s absence of imagination — we even get a subplot ripped right out of Return of the Jedi — but even the original Bad Boys wasn’t very original. It was already rather derivative when it debuted in 1995, relying on buddy-cop film conventions that had already been mined nearly to exhaustion by Lethal Weapon and Starsky & Hutch. What made the first Bad Boys occasionally fun was the terrific chemistry between Lawrence, the committed family man, and Smith, the committed bachelor. Lawrence and Smith have always been great together and still are all these years later, but throughout this series they’ve lacked a director and a screenwriter capable of maximizing their talents. Watching Lawrence and Smith play off one another is like watching Michael Jordan and Scottie Pippen before Phil Jackson arrived on the scene to elevate the Chicago Bulls duo to greatness.
Watching Bad Boys for Life, one gets a sense that there is so much more that Lawrence and Smith could have done together if only they hadn’t been saddled with directors such as Michael Bay and screenwriters about whom the accusation of mailing in their scripts would be an insult to anyone who’s actually put in the effort to write out an address and lick an envelope. But then again, if this is what the people want, and it is, judging by the early box-office returns for Bad Boys For Life, then this is what they will keep getting. I’d love to see what a writer-director such as Jordan Peele or Adam McKay would do with Lawrence and Smith. Maybe they’ll give us that treat for Bad Boys IV. One can hope, right?
Daniel Ross Goodman is a writer living in New York, where he is a Ph.D. candidate at the Jewish Theological Seminary of America. He is the author of the forthcoming book Somewhere Over the Rainbow: Wonder and Religion in American Cinema.
Michigan dam failure creates further misery for residents under stay-at-home orders Michigan dam failure creates further misery for residents under stay-at-home orders Jeremy Lott How do you shelter in place when your shelter floods out? That was the dilemma many residents of Midland, Michigan, and the surrounding area of Midland County faced when two dams failed May 18.
The 96-year-old Edenville Dam was breached by rising water from heavy rains, emptying most of the contents of Wixom Lake into the Tittabawassee River and nearby lakes. The Sanford Dam, well downriver, failed as well. Thousands of residents who lived near the river and lakes faced quickly rising waters.
Patricia Benner, a local, estimated that her home was swamped in 9 feet of water that day, 4 feet in the crawl space and 5 feet on the downstairs floor. The kitchen, living room, dining room, a bathroom, and the porch are effectively total write-offs for "at least $50,000 in damages, maybe more," Benner told the Washington Examiner.
Benner and her husband count themselves lucky to live in a multistory house that can be saved with great effort. At least one of her neighbors in a one-story home is "planning a demolition. There's just not enough left to save," she said. The couple found another neighbor, "a young woman who had water to the ceilings in their one-story home, sitting in the corner of her garage having a complete meltdown."
Benner was annoyed that she lost all of her shoes in the flood and "spent three days wearing mud-encrusted, borrowed shoes." The couple are staying in their daughter's small apartment not far away, with the house currently unlivable. "It's, ah, cozy," she said. Other neighbors have had to rent hotel rooms if they can find them, and looting is a problem.
Midland resident Jarrett Skorup's home didn't get flooded. That didn't mean he got to take it easy during the flood — or in the days after.
"My boat got a lot of usage the first day," Skorup told the Washington Examiner. "Mostly taking people in [to their homes] to get valuables and move things to higher floors." In subsequent days, he has helped neighbors pump water out of basements, demolish things that needed to be taken down, and move out "wet items" such as washers, refrigerators, and drywall.
While Skorup was helping with a boat and some heavy lifting, his wife was "watching up to 8 children at a time for other families while they work to restore their homes," he said.
As the waters subside, the blame is rising. Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer, a Democrat, has developed a reputation for heavy-handedness from her handling of the COVID-19 crisis, with a far-reaching stay-at-home order that has been extended until June 12. Her approach to the failures of the Edenville and Sanford dams is similarly combative.
Whitmer considered the question of whether "private companies" ought to "own critical infrastructure" such as dams in her state in a press conference. "I don't think that they should," she admitted.
The governor tasked a state agency, the Michigan Department of Environment, Great Lakes, and Energy, with investigating any wrongdoing by dam owner Boyce Hydro. That same agency is facing a class-action lawsuit by people whose houses were damaged, alleging that the agency contributed to the problem.
Jason Hayes is the director of environmental policy for the Mackinac Center for Public Policy, a conservative think tank located in Midland.
While it is true that heavy rains played a role in the Edenville Dam's failure, Hayes told the Washington Examiner, "it seems increasingly clear that a mix of regulatory compliance and maintenance issues also played a role."
The Federal Energy Regulatory Commission revoked the Edenville Dam's operating license in 2018 because it did not have enough spillway capacity. That much everyone agrees on.
However, after the federal agency revoked the license, EGLE became the regulator of the dam. From 2018 to this year, Hayes said, "the dam's owner, Boyce Hydro, and EGLE had an ongoing conflict over water levels and the potential impacts of water drawdowns on an endangered species of freshwater mussel."
Right now, "EGLE is pointing at Boyce, claiming the failure is solely due to their attempts to save money, which led to poor maintenance," and "Boyce Hydro claims that the dam failed because EGLE forced them to keep water levels too high — effectively prioritizing mussels over human safety."
However, the resolution of that squabbling will be cold comfort for many people in and around Midland whose efforts to clean up and rebuild are hampered by the stay-at-home order. They have to find shelter in any way they can.
Midland County's Office of Emergency Management suggested in a press release that displaced residents might stay at a Midland County Fairgrounds campground, which has "modern bathhouses, electrical hookups, and shared water sources" for only "$20 per night."
"Campers," the Office of Emergency Management advised, "are encouraged to adhere to all social distancing and COVID-19 related recommendations" during their stay at the campgrounds, whose entrance can be found "between Applebee's and the Olive Garden."
Biden goes left on taxes Biden goes left on taxes Fred Barnes Joe Biden and Bernie Sanders have put together six “unity task forces” in hopes of finding common ground on major policy issues. The Sanders gang was leery, fearing it would have to compromise with the less liberal Biden group, but it’s been Biden who has been doing the compromising so far. He’s edged closer to "Medicare for all," Sanders’s top issue, by proposing to reduce the Medicare age from 65 to 60.
Sanders has appointed 18 leftist activists, including Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, for the “unity” effort. She is co-chairwoman of the climate panel. Uniting Biden with AOC won’t be easy, and she’s not the lone panelist who’s outspoken and contentious. The other task forces are focusing on criminal justice reform, the economy, healthcare, immigration, and education.
But a seventh panel is badly needed: taxes. It’s too big an issue to be left to the economy panel. Taxes aren’t a show-stopping issue at the moment. That will change once Biden confronts President Trump. That the former vice president advocates a $4 trillion hike in taxes didn’t outrage his Democratic rivals. But around Trump, the tax issue won’t be safe. It’s too juicy a target. Just four years ago, Hillary Clinton supported a mere $1.5 trillion in higher taxes.
Here’s the story: Taxes loom as one of Biden’s biggest problems. Initially, he must satisfy the two Democratic leaders, Sanders and Massachusetts Sen. Elizabeth Warren, who want to raise tax rates far higher than he does. They see the political moment as ripe for taxing the wealthy, then spending the money on nice things the Left has wanted to for decades.
Democrats see the economy in a unique way. There are two economies: the one where businesses operate and the other, the one they care about, in which the government collects taxes and spends the funds. Each economy wants the same thing: money. And Biden is beginning to see it as the government does. Republicans are old-fashioned. They concentrate on the business.
Sanders, Warren, and lefty Democrats on the task forces don’t want to jeopardize Biden’s ability to defeat Trump. That’s priority No. 1. But the Left, more aggressive than it’s been in years, has the upper hand in the task force negotiations. And it doesn't want to pass up the opportunity to push the country leftward.
Biden has encouraged this thinking with talk of not simply reviving the economy but reforming it. It’s clear he’s moved to the left, and liberals want him to keep on moving. There’s no secret about this. Articles in the leftist American Prospect magazine have headlines such as “Biden’s New Pressure from Progressives” and “The Progressive Pursuit of a Bolder Biden.”
Chances are he’ll continue moving. Pushing him works. Biden cannot afford a split with the Left, Sanders, and Warren. After all, he’s not committed to anything. He has never been accused of being an ideologue. He goes with the flow. Taxing the rich with a vengeance is part of the action.
Biden has had conversations recently with Warren, and it shows. That she’s influenced his position on taxes is inescapable. Like her, Biden seems to have adopted the idea that taxes must be raised no matter the bad effect on the economy.
On taxes, he’s become something of an echo of Warren. During a CNBC interview with host Joe Kernen last week, Biden was asked if he would raise taxes “right away” if elected. “I would repeal the $2 trillion tax cut for the folks who are making over a million bucks a year,” he said. “Because, as demonstrated, it’s demonstrated very little or no growth.” As for the corporate income rate, “I’d move back to what I had proposed at 285.” It’s currently at 215.
Biden’s tax increases would leave him short of Warren and Sanders. He would nearly double the capital gains tax rate from 23.8% to 43.4%. Warren’s top rate would reach 58.2%, Sanders’s 59.8%. The top rate on individual income, 35% today, would rise to 39.6% under Biden and 52% under Sanders. Warren? She hasn’t said.
This appeared deep in a New York Times story about their conversations: “This would not be the first time Biden considered Warren as a running mate. In 2015, the two had lunch at the Naval Observatory, the vice-presidential residence in Washington, where he suggested he would like her to be his running mate if he entered the presidential race. Associates said that Ms. Warren was excited by the prospect, but Mr. Biden ended up not running.”
Warren’s chances are better this time.
Fred Barnes is a Washington Examiner senior columnist.
Trump will claim coronavirus success but first must define it Trump will claim coronavirus success but first must define it W. James Antle III For President Trump to win a second term in the White House, strategists in both parties agree voters must have the perception he successfully managed the coronavirus outbreak and its economic fallout. But that first means a pitched battle with supporters of presumptive Democratic nominee Joe Biden to define success.
The White House press has more than once asked Trump and his subordinates why he deserves reelection given the COVID-19 death toll. One reporter pointed out that coronavirus deaths had exceeded the 58,000 fatalities the United States suffered during the Vietnam War. Later, as that figure approached 100,000, another asked press secretary Kayleigh McEnany to identify "the number of dead Americans" the electorate should "tolerate" as it heads to the polls in November.
It's a morbid question, and the White House often argues it is also an unfair one. How the Trump administration stacks up against various models and their embedded assumptions, it contends, is different from an apples-to-apples comparison to how other Western democracies, or even Democratic governors who have generally received favorable coverage, have handled the pandemic. But it is one it will have to answer with something other than Trump's early assurances that the virus would somehow just disappear. ("You have to understand, I'm a cheerleader for this country," the president explained.)
The same goes for the economy. Trump isn't going to be able to run for reelection on the 3.5% unemployment rate, which includes record-low rates for black and Hispanic workers, that he'd planned to make central to his pitch for his second term. White House economic adviser Kevin Hassett has publicly acknowledged the administration will be lucky if unemployment is merely in the high single digits by Election Day. Democrats will argue that by any reasonable baseline, the U.S. lost at least 36 million jobs under Trump's watch.
"If he tries to look backward, Biden will credibly be able to say, 'We gave you that. Unemployment was below 5% and tracking downward when you were elected,'" said a Republican strategist. "Or he can say, 'We led one recovery, and I can lead it again.'"
That's why Trump is going to use a different baseline: the low point of the lockdown-induced economic contraction. Compared to that, job creation and economic growth could look impressive by the fall. Some Democrats acknowledge this is a plausible scenario. "We are about to see the best economic data we've seen in the history of this country," Jason Furman, a former leading economic adviser to President Barack Obama, predicted in April, according to Politico.
It's also going to be difficult, Republicans say, for Democrats to run credibly against the coronavirus's economic wreckage if they continue to support extended lockdowns. At the same time, Trump was an early adopter of reopening. Still, the Biden camp is sure to repeat Ronald Reagan's 1980 question asking voters if they are better off than they were four years ago, not four months ago.
The coronavirus questions may be more problematic than the economic ones, since many voters have already concluded that the earliest phase of the federal response was lacking and that the president lost senior citizens on this issue, at least temporarily, by April. Here, Trump will point to his actions, such as curbing travel from China while Biden was warning against xenophobia and his allies' track record in the states. This includes Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida, a 2020 battleground where the death toll has been so much lower than what critics projected that they are left questioning the integrity of the data.
"The governor has done probably about as well as anybody in the country in balancing those two questions," said Florida-based Republican strategist Jamie Miller. "The methodical way in which he went about it, in both closing and reopening. He didn't make knee-jerk decisions. He has not made knee-jerk reactions. He made methodical decisions that have saved a lot of people's lives."
A big question is whether Trump will still be able to tout that kind of progress and claim it as vindication for his own eagerness to reopen shortly after most hospital systems were not overrun or whether the public health situation deteriorates because of a second wave of people getting exposed as stay-at-home orders come to an end across the country.
"Eighty-five percent of the population that comes down with COVID-19 will deal with it with bed rest, liquids, and tender loving care," said former Food and Drug Administration official Peter Pitts. But Trump will be judged heavily on the fate of the other 15%.
Normal People is exceptional television Normal People is exceptional television Graham Hillard For television viewers who have yet to read Sally Rooney’s bestselling 2018 novel Normal People, a hard choice awaits. Plow ahead with Hulu’s masterful new adaptation and one risks occasional confusion. Buy the book first, and the show’s ending will be spoiled. Having stumbled into the first of these options myself, I tentatively recommend it. Yet even audience members who know where the plot is going will find it difficult to look away.
Normal People tells the story of Marianne Sheridan and Connell Waldron, a pair of teenagers on the verge of adulthood in County Sligo, Ireland. Marianne (Daisy Edgar-Jones) is clever but despised, a lonely cynic who dresses down teachers and trades insults with her more popular classmates. Connell (Paul Mescal) is a shy footballer whose unfashionable studiousness is overlooked on account of his rugged charm. When Connell’s mother takes a job cleaning the Sheridans’ mansion, the two young people are thrown together unexpectedly and commence a secret affair. Soon enough, what began as a purely physical liaison blossoms into a connection of striking intimacy and depth.
It is no exaggeration to say that Normal People’s first three episodes, in which Marianne and Connell navigate the contours of their new relationship, are among the most beautiful half-hours of programming ever to appear on U.S. television. Working from scripts co-written by the novelist, director Lenny Abrahamson captures the tenderness and uncertainty of youthful desire with rare and startling precision. Witness, for example, his framing of the moments before the protagonists' first kiss, when Marianne assures Connell that “no one would have to know” if anything were to happen between them. The exchange is presented sparely, with unobtrusive musical accompaniment. (Throughout, the soundtrack and score are excellent.) Crucially, the camera stays on Marianne for a long beat both before and after her act of self-abnegation, a decision that allows Edgar-Jones’s wonderfully expressive face to dramatize Marianne's sadness and longing.
It is exactly this imbalance — Marianne powerful attraction to Connell and his anxiety about being seen with her — that drives the earliest of Normal People’s emotional crises. But it is also here that one of the show’s few flaws is initially evident. Because Edgar-Jones and Mescal are actors of preternatural maturity and share extraordinary chemistry in their many scenes together, it is next to impossible to believe that Connell would hold Marianne at arm’s length for the sake of his high school reputation. (The fact that Marianne is lovely to behold makes the proposition all the more ridiculous.) Rewatching the opening episodes after reading Rooney’s novel, I had a clearer understanding of Connell’s apprehension. On my first go-round, however, I was legitimately puzzled.
If confusion of this sort persists at times as the pair depart for Trinity College, that fact says as much about the difficulty of adapting fiction as it does about the quality of this particular production, which remains outstanding even as the scope widens. Established in bustling Dublin, on their own for the first time, Marianne and Connell make new friends, pursue their studies, and begin the long process of shedding their adolescent identities. Through it all, Edgar-Jones and Mescal inhabit their characters with such naturalistic ease that viewers can’t help but invest in their relationship. In Mescal, Normal People’s creators have found an ideal Connell: a solid slab of a man whose physicality belies an interior frailty. But it is Edgar-Jones who emerges most vividly by the show’s end. Moving effortlessly between Marianne’s brashness and vulnerability, the 21-year-old gives the breakout performance of the year.
So compelling is the series’s acting, in fact, that one is inclined to forgive the two or three instances in which a character’s motivation is less than clear. Take, for example, the issue of Marianne's and Connell’s disparate financial circumstances, which may or may not contribute to a pivotal scene near the show’s midpoint. Forced to give up his room for the summer, Connell knows that he will have to leave Dublin unless he moves in with Marianne. On Rooney’s pages, his hesitance to do so is explicitly economic: To live with Marianne “just felt too much like asking her for money.” Yet because the television program largely omits the book’s ideas about class, the viewer is left with no choice but to shout at the screen that Connell is being ridiculous. If this is a complaint, it is one that could be made about many literary adaptations, especially those that err on the side of subtlety. Indeed, the most remarkable thing about Normal People may be that it works at all despite the absence of the novel’s skillful omniscient narration.
Regardless of their small differences, what the book and show share is an insistence on the redemptive power of love, an idea that feels at once vital and politically courageous given contemporary gender orthodoxies. Adrift in a city that doesn’t know him, Connell needs Marianne to remind him of the man he hopes to be. Long a victim of emotional abuse on the part of her brother, Marianne can be saved only by Connell’s patience, love, and protection. “We have done so much good for one another,” Marianne says in a valedictory scene, and, of course, she’s exactly right. That men and women still can do as much, that normal people have been doing so since time immemorial, is a worthy message for any work of art.
As for Normal People’s sex scenes, much remarked upon in the early response to the series, they are indeed as frank and unblinking as has been reported. Whether or not they are strictly necessary, they are poignant, deeply human, and at one with the show’s unwavering sincerity. Perhaps a better avenue of critical inquiry is whether Normal People’s conclusion is faithful to the traditional values that it spends 12 episodes propagating. My own sense is that Rooney’s otherwise first-rate novel somewhat betrays its ideals, whereas the television program is, to its credit, rather more ambiguous. Yet whatever one decides about the final moments, this is an exceptional story.
Graham Hillard teaches English and creative writing at Trevecca Nazarene University.
The dignity of the buffoon The dignity of the buffoon Washington Examiner Is there a nobler hero in literature than the salmon Curzio Malaparte eulogizes in Kaputt, his semi-fictionalized account of his time as an Italian diplomat during World War II? The last salmon left in the Juutuanjoki, a Finnish river the Nazis have decimated by fishing with grenades, becomes the obsession of Gen. von Heulert, who even sends for “reinforcements” in the form of a Tyrolese “trout specialist.” The general eventually hooks the fish but can’t manage to reel it in; after three hours’ struggle beneath the contemptuous gaze of the Finns, who have pronounced the assault on the salmon a mortal error, he shouts to a foot soldier, “Enough!” and commands him to shoot the creature in the head. The victory is hollow, the Germans are disgraced, and the insolent pointlessness of their war effort is pathetically evident to all.
The story requires two things not common among principled narrators: a coziness with undisputed villains and a liberty with matters of fact. After Benito Mussolini’s arrest and the Allied invasion of Italy in 1943, Malaparte worked frantically, if not effectively, to paint himself a steadfast opponent of fascism. In reality, he’d joined the fascists early and profited handsomely from his association with them. His imprisonment by Mussolini’s regime was a consequence not of his determination to speak his conscience in the press (as he later claimed) but of libels against Italo Balbo, a famed aviator and the governor-general of Libya, whom Malaparte accused in private letters of conducting anti-fascist activities in secret.

A number of qualifications are nevertheless in order. What drew Malaparte to fascism in the 1920s ⁠— corporatism, the promise of national renewal, the need for a counterweight to Bolshevism ⁠— also appealed to many unimpeachable Italians of his day, including the writers Luigi Pirandello and Elio Vittorini. The movement’s racism and cultural dogmatism were alien to Malaparte, who used his position as a writer and editor to bring attention to such taboo subjects as surrealism and Sigmund Freud. It is not that he was brave, though in a certain sense he was, but that he thought so highly of his own cleverness that he felt himself exempted from toeing the party line. How else to explain his double-edged remarks on Mussolini and his outright insults to Adolf Hitler in his 1931 book Coup d’Etat, or his praise of Ethiopia in articles meant to exalt the Italian conquest of it?
Malaparte began Diary of a Foreigner in Paris in September 1947. France was a second homeland for him: He spoke the language fluently, had fought there in World War I, and had many French friends and contacts he hoped would redeem him from the notoriety he had fallen into at home. Months before, he had been absolved of crimes under the fascist regime thanks to his own behind-the-scenes maneuvering, which had cost him allies of all stripes. Clearly meant for publication, Diary shows him reinventing himself as a dissenter, chastising the self-righteousness of resistance figures such as Albert Camus, and struggling to find a place in a country he alternately admires and disdains.
Despite its many evident fictions, Diary has an earnest feel, with introspective passages of a kind rare in Malaparte’s work. The war over, he asks why the sense of victory is so hollow for the French but also for himself. The answer lies in part with that “new race” that is slowly taking shape in Europe, a “European race” destined to bury the histories of people like him. He retains his old and widely attested admiration for workers and the poor but disdains the morality of the “petty bourgeois,” the forerunners of the global technocracy so reviled by today’s far left and far right. He decries as “illegitimate” the power of politicians who, “like all men, don’t believe in anything, but [are] paid to make the people believe that they believe in something.” And yet his attitude is less outraged than stoic: He loves the old Europe not because it was better but because it is the setting for his memories and the longings of his youth.
Malaparte had a genius for anecdotes, and Diary contains several exquisite ones. When hearing of the plight of a widower who wished his wife could help him address the pile of letters he must send out to announce her death, he writes:
This reminds me of a little story about the siege of Paris in 1870. A gentleman had eaten everything — mice, the house cat, the last of the provisions. All that was left was Fido, his dog. He decided to sacrifice Fido. He killed him, put him in a pot, and invited some relatives over for the occasion. During the meal, seeing the bones of the poor dog mounting on the plates, his master exclaimed in tears: “Ah, all these bones ... If only poor Fido were here, how happy he would be!” Elsewhere, he gets a dig in at Count Agustin de Foxa, a Spanish diplomat who took responsibility in a newspaper interview for all the clever sections of Kaputt: “No offense to Foxa, but I tell his stories better than he does.” Having read de Foxa, I am inclined to agree, and the tale that follows, the saga of a Russo-Spanish communist captured in the field, repatriated to Francisco Franco’s Spain in a public relations coup, then discreetly done away with because he can’t stop boasting in public about the superiority of Moscow’s cafes and theaters, is one of Malaparte’s funniest.
Interesting, too, is his engagement with French literature and philosophy. He is withering on existentialism, calling it a fad rather than a system, “a new, artificial bohemianism, which proposes to replace principles with slovenliness, ideas with a sweater.” Andre Malraux, whom he disparages in his correspondence as “a kind of centaur, with nothing human but the head,” seems to exasperate him more than ever, and Malaparte accuses the great humanist of hitting him up once for cab fare without bothering to say thanks. He criticizes French society’s rationalist bent but finds a kindred spirit in Francois-Rene de Chateaubriand, the aristocratic chronicler of the French Revolution, and there is something almost elegiac in his wish to, like the old nobleman, “grasp in this transformation of old Europe into the new that which is eternal in our race, in our civilization.”
I like to imagine Malaparte painted by Francisco Goya, who knew better than any other how to portray that crystalline core of dignity that is an essential characteristic of the buffoon. Few writers have been more calculating than he, more willing to prevaricate and switch sides. But Malaparte was too proud to be a good sellout, too convinced of his own craftiness, and he spent much of his life trying to redress his endless slips of the pen. His one principle was himself, and he stayed true to it to the end. And in his self-love, this incorrigible fabulist, who claimed to have insulted Mussolini’s neckties to his face and to have introduced the sport of water skiing into Italy, offered a haunting snapshot of his era. Now sumptuous, now horrifying, and often both at the same time, Malaparte’s vision showed how deep the rift between sincerity and truth can be.
Adrian Nathan West is a literary translator, critic, and the author of The Aesthetics of Degradation.
Gathering acorns in quarantine Gathering acorns in quarantine Brooke A. Rogers Be the squirrel, girl.
The 2003 bluesy rock song “Little Acorns” by The White Stripes opens with the voice of legendary former Detroit news anchor Mort Crim. Over a simple piano arrangement, Crim describes a woman overwhelmed by tragedy and sadness who finds “the will and courage to continue” when she watches a squirrel collecting acorns for the winter. “One at a time, he would take them to the nest,” the woman relays through our narrator, Crim. “If that squirrel can take care of himself with a harsh winter coming on, so can I.”
When I was a teenager circa 2011, I treated my then-undiagnosed anxiety disorder by playing this song at ear-splitting volume repeatedly until I knew every line of Crim’s intro by heart. Later in the song, Jack White appeals to the listener, in a way that seems both earnest and irreverent, to: “Be like the squirrel, girl.” The message was simple. You can take care of yourself in the face of extreme adversity. Combined with Jack’s inexplicably cathartic guitar jam and Meg’s reliable percussion, it was a soothing reminder that my fate was not entirely out of my own hands.
It's not an exaggeration to say I've listened to "Little Acorns" hundreds of times over the years. I still didn’t expect the theme of storing up food as a tactic for self-preservation to apply to my life quite so literally until early March, when Gov. Andrew Cuomo announced that New York was under a state of emergency due to the coronavirus.
My roommate and I, a bit shocked by how abruptly the outbreak had gone from a real but peripheral concern to the main focus of every moment of our day, began to stock up on the essentials: pasta noodles, canned tomatoes, frozen vegetables, boxed wine, and (the superstar of self-isolation pantries everywhere) beans. Somewhere between making disinfectant out of diluted vodka and making masks out of old T-shirts, my roommate casually raised a question: Should we start pickling stuff?
The idea was comforting: We wouldn’t need to rely on an uncertain supply chain or grocers’ ability to keep products on the shelves, the latter of which was increasingly in question as panicked New Yorkers hoarded goods. As we stood in our Queens kitchen, we pondered the pickle we were in, a quarantine with no certain end, and decided on pickling.
Pickling is simple: Slice up your chosen fruit or vegetable (we went with jalapenos, red onions, garlic, ginger, and lemon rinds), and put them in a jar half-filled with a simple brine. You add whatever herbs suit your fancy and whatever vinegar you have on hand, shake it up, and leave the mixture to soak. The timing varies. Jalapenos and onions are ready overnight. Lemon rinds, mixed with anise for flavor, take a week or so, but then you can slice them up and eat them like candy or use them to garnish margaritas.
Sauerkraut took more patience. We sliced up cabbage and mixed it with salt, working it with our hands until it created its own brine, then left it submerged in the salty water on our kitchen counter for weeks. As time went on, the sauerkraut became a calendar: How long had the kraut been fermenting? A week? Two? Not long enough. Leave it to bubble. In quarantine, marking the passage of time via the fermentation process of cabbage makes just as much sense as crossing off days on a calendar. There's a comforting predictability in it: As inevitably as death and taxes, if you leave cabbage in brine, it will become sauerkraut.
In the first few weeks of quarantine in New York, the sounds you hear coming in from the street are bird songs and sirens. The marriage of the two sounds is eerie — birds are happily indifferent to the upheaval of the city. At first, you hear the sirens every 15 minutes, then 10, then 5, and then there are overlapping sirens coming from different directions, and you stop keeping track. Then one day, you realize that you’ve stopped noticing the sirens altogether, and that inspires a different kind of dread. You’ve gone from detective procedural to David Lynch film.
The act of pickling, fermenting, and bread baking feels odd in a small city apartment. I was born and raised in Wyoming, a state that’s more wilderness than not, more Great Plains than buildings, more empty space than living space. There, it’s easier to imagine growing your own vegetables and saving them in jars. But when society as you knew it is crumbling, the process of preserving food assuages fear, even in a modest kitchen in Astoria. The development of a skill that builds self-reliance is a reassurance when there is no guarantee that you’ll be able to rely on the institutions that have defined your reality.
As the weeks dragged, restaurants and bars remained shuttered, and we remained inside. The number of cases in New York City soared: 20,000, 50,000, 100,000, 200,000. Friends who we lived just miles from but couldn’t see sent care packages and postcards. We craved normalcy, so we tried to replicate pizza from our favorite local spot. We strained tomatoes for the sauce. We used items we had preserved ourselves for the toppings. We made the dough from scratch. Pasta was our next project. We rolled out the pasta dough with empty wine bottles and sliced each noodle by hand. We made the sauces by mixing the pickled lemon rinds with butter and garlic and tomatoes with mushrooms.
We weren't the only ones in New York City and beyond who turned into Oregon-Trail cosplayers as a way to ward off anxiety during the pandemic. A friend who flew to Arizona to wait out the quarantine in the sun altered clothes to pass the time. She cut apart a dress she’d worn in high school and sewed it back together, to keep her hands occupied. When she finished that, she built a camera out of a coffee can. Friends in Harlem began growing tomatoes in the window of their 24th-floor apartment. Anna, a friend in Queens, started making candles in jars and cans she had around the house. Meanwhile, baking became a phenomenon. Social media feeds filled up with city dwellers’ attempts at focaccia, ciabatta, and bagels. It became such a popular pastime that yeast and flour producers couldn’t keep up with the demand.
In my experience, anxiety doesn’t go away; you just learn to corral it into submission. When I was elementary-school-aged, I went through a stage in which I was convinced that something terrible would happen if I didn’t close all of the doors before I left the house. For a few months, I traced the left side of the wall with my fingers when I walked through the hallway to keep some vague, ominous threat at bay. I compulsively went to the basement and checked under the water heater to make sure there was nothing under it that could catch fire.
And I washed my hands until they cracked and bled. The irony that a decade and a half later, I would find myself in a situation in which something terrible was very likely to happen if I didn’t constantly wash my hands wasn’t lost on me. It’s kind of funny, if you think about it: What was 24 years of living with anxiety preparing me for if not a worldwide pandemic? Therapists call the act of playing out every possible bad outcome “catastrophizing,” but it’s easy for people with anxiety to think of it as “preparing for the worst-case scenario.” And now, one of these worst-case scenarios is here. Welcome to the end of the world. The perpetually troubled have been waiting for you. Would you like some focaccia?
The key to keeping anxiety from consuming you is learning coping mechanisms. Mine became invaluable in self-isolation: Finding tasks to keep my mind and hands occupied and building rituals into my daily routine to fake an element of predictability, and taking the pandemic day by day — breaking it into manageable pieces when it feels like a vast and uncertain stretch of time.
Meeting your own basic needs, for clothing, light, food, and comfort, and the needs of those around you staves off the fear of problems that are out of your control, which you try not to think about at all: Will the places you loved that made New York home still be there when quarantine is over? Will your friends who fled New York in the early days of the pandemic come back? Will jobs be there for them to come back to? What will this city, which has rebuilt itself over and over again, look like when the curtains of quarantine lift? You don't know, but you know how long it takes cabbage to ferment, so you begin the process again. When you can control nothing else, you can gather your acorns.
Brooke A. Rogers is an editorial page assistant for the New York Post and a frequent commentator on Fox News.
By hook or by crook By hook or by crook Eric Felten Having been under lockdown in the District of Columbia for some two months now, my son and I entertained the notion of sneaking off to do a little fishing at some lonely stream in Virginia, where social distancing is the norm, at least if you don’t want to hook, or be hooked by, your fellow fishermen. But before we could cast a line, there was the question of whether we needed a fishing license. Soon, we were tangled in legalese as frustrating as a reel’s worth of knotted, 8-pound test.
We wouldn’t think of plunking a lure in a lake without observing the permit niceties, and that was before security guards were posted in my neighborhood park to ensure that no one risked exposure to the coronavirus by walking across the empty baseball field. If the Great Hunkering has taught me anything, it is that the authorities — whether president, governor, mayor, or acting deputy assistant school board chairman — have powers over my person I would have never imagined possible. Who am I to say whether the epidemiology they’re enforcing is sound? After all, I’m no virologist. But one thing I do know: When the law is locking up people for cutting hair, it’s a bad idea to go fishing without a license.
Which led me to the Virginia Department of Game and Inland Fisheries website, with its detailed information about who needs a fishing permit, where, when, and of what sort. It was more complicated than I had imagined.
Simple enough was the concept that residents of the state pay less than outsiders. But who counts as a resident? The first definition was straightforward: someone living in the state “for six consecutive months immediately preceding the date of application for license.” The second was rather less clear: “persons who have been domiciliary residents of the state for at least two months upon approval of a completed affidavit to be furnished by the Game Department.”
This affidavit business seems at odds with the next qualification: Legal voters in Virginia count as residents. Which raises the question: How do you prove you’re a legal voter? Thanks to recent legislation in the commonwealth, a photo ID is no longer required to vote in Virginia. So, how can one be required to show proof of being a registered voter to buy a resident fishing permit? Wouldn’t that be angler suppression?
There are a dozen or so exceptions of people who don’t need licenses at all. Among them are members of the military on leave, American Indians who “habitually” reside on a reservation, and “stockholders owning 50 percent or more of the stock of any domestic corporation owning land in Virginia, his or her spouse and children and minor grandchildren, resident or nonresident,” who are free to “fish within the boundaries of lands and inland waters owned by the domestic corporation.”
If you are in Virginia but on National Forest lands, you need not only a Virginia fishing license but a National Forest permit to fish. That rule, however, does not apply if you are on the north or south fork of the Shenandoah, the James River, Skidmore Lake in Rockingham County, North Fork Pound Reservoir, Lake Moomaw, the Jackson River below Gathright Dam, or in Wilson Creek, as long as you are below Douthat Lake and in Alleghany or Bath counties. Those particular exceptions, however, only apply to “residents under 16 and over 65, and nonresidents under 16.”
In other words, someday, when I’m 65 or older, I will be able to fish the Jackson River downstream from Gathright Dam as long as I can prove I’m the majority shareholder in a corporation that owns the stretch of riverbank where I’m standing. Is that right? I don’t know. Perhaps, first, I should consult with an attorney who specializes in the intricacies of Virginia Trout Acquisition Law.
Eric Felten is the James Beard Award-winning author of How's Your Drink?
Blue states afflicted with the most pain from COVID-19 Blue states afflicted with the most pain from COVID-19 Cassidy Morrison The largest shares of coronavirus cases have appeared mostly in blue states and districts, primarily in urban metropolitan areas with large populations of minority groups.
“The places hit hardest by the coronavirus outbreak, which have relatively large shares of ethnic and racial minorities and residents living in densely populated urban and suburban areas, are almost all represented by congressional Democrats,” Bradley Jones of the Pew Research Center wrote Tuesday.
More than half of all reported COVID-19 deaths occurred in Democrat-led congressional districts. Of the 44 districts that have seen the highest fatality rates, 41 are represented by Democrats, according to data collected by the Johns Hopkins University Center for Systems Science and Engineering.
President Trump has attempted to pin this disparity on ineffective blue state politicians. He tweeted in April, “Why should the people and taxpayers of America be bailing out poorly run states (like Illinois, as example) and cities, in all cases Democrat run and managed, when most of the other states are not looking for bailout help?”
The devastation of COVID-19 has also been disproportionately felt in minority groups that live in densely populated cities, such as New York City. Jones reported that districts with higher rates of coronavirus have higher shares of people living in urban areas.
“Nearly half (47%) of the population of districts that have been hardest hit by the coronavirus do not identify as white (while 53% of residents of these districts are white). By comparison, in the 44 districts that have the lowest coronavirus death rate, seven-in-ten residents are white,” Jones said.
Following social distancing protocols is sometimes more difficult in large cities than it is in suburbs. Additionally, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said in its reporting on coronavirus hitting minority groups that racial residential segregation “is linked with a variety of adverse health outcomes and underlying health conditions,” which could exacerbate a person’s risk of contracting the virus.
Still, daily case increases are declining. According to Pew, Democrat-led states are seeing sharper declines in new cases than red states and districts.
The coronavirus has been steadily moving to traditionally red states since the end of April, according to the Brookings Institution. By April 19, counties in Georgia, Louisiana, and Mississippi that primarily went for Trump in 2016 became “high-prevalence” counties in which coronavirus was spreading rapidly.
“For counties that reached high COVID-19 prevalence in the past three weeks, between April 20 and May 10, Trump won over 5 times more of them than [Hillary] Clinton,” said William Frey, a researcher at the Brookings Institution.
Some large cities in red states have been relatively spared, so far, such as Dallas and Houston, contributing to the impression among many Republican voters that the coronavirus is less dangerous than it is made out to be. In fact, Gallup polling found that Republicans are more likely to think that coronavirus mortality is exaggerated.
Polling reported that Republicans are 10 times more likely than Democrats to say the death count is overstated. Fifty percent of Republicans believe the mortality rate is overstated, and 31% believe it is accurately reported. Nearly three-quarters of Democrats, on the other hand, believe that the mortality rate is understated.
The coronavirus has become increasingly politicized, as evidenced by the differences between Democratic and Republican state leaders pushing to reopen their states. Georgia, led by Republican Gov. Brian Kemp, was one of the first states to reopen businesses. So far, states that have advanced most in reopening, mostly those in the South and the Midwest, have not experienced a surge in new cases. All 50 states have begun to reopen, though not all of them have seen a sustained decline in new cases.
Government health experts, such as infectious disease expert Dr. Anthony Fauci and CDC Director Robert Redfield, have warned that a resurgence of cases in the fall is possible and could be more severe. Already, the United States has confirmed that more than 1.7 million people have been infected with the virus, and more than 101,000 people have died.
Businesses seeking COVID-19 liability waivers won’t automatically be immune from lawsuits Businesses seeking COVID-19 liability waivers won’t automatically be immune from lawsuits Jay Heflin Some business owners are seeking protection from coronavirus-related lawsuits by requiring that customers sign liability waivers before entering their establishments. Still, legal experts warn that such measures are not ironclad protections for the proprietors.
"If a company requires a customer to sign a waiver and the customer gets injured and decides to sue, can that customer's lawyer get the waiver thrown out? The answer is, sometimes, yes," said Walter Olsen, a senior fellow at the Cato Institute's Robert A. Levy Center for Constitutional Studies.
State laws vary in terms of the enforceability of liability waivers. In Virginia, liability waivers are generally unenforceable. In contrast, waivers in Florida are enforceable if they meet certain criteria, namely that the waiver's language is clear, unambiguous, unequivocal, and specific.
But even enforceable waivers can be challenged in the courts, said Marc Lamber, head of the personal injury department at Fennemore Craig in Arizona.
"Even if a particular waiver is likely legally enforceable, in some jurisdictions like Arizona, the issue of whether a customer intended to relinquish a legal right will be a question for the jury, not the judge," he told the Washington Examiner via email.
Business owners who take their cases to court can sometimes be surprised that issues beyond the law's scope can decide the case. For example, Walt Disney World Resort, located in Orlando, Florida, requires that patrons assume coronavirus-infection risks when entering the Magic Kingdom. According to Olsen, the jury could view the trail as David versus Goliath and support David if that waiver were to get challenged in court.
"Disney is big, and you're small," he wrote. "So some of these factors that make courts throw [waivers] out, they don't necessarily say [it's in the law] but [the reasons] are hovering in the background so [the courts] will be more considerate to customers."
Liability waivers also don't shield owners who knowingly allow their establishments to become pandemic petri dishes, according to Devin Watkins, an attorney at the libertarian think tank Competitive Enterprise Institute.
"If you know your employee has COVID and you send them to interact with a customer, and they catch COVID, a lot of states say that can't be waived," he told the Washington Examiner.
Recent weeks have seen high-profile instances of potential negligence from owners who failed to keep customers from infecting one another while visiting their establishments.
Holiday revelers ignored social distancing rules and packed into a pool in Missouri's Lake of the Ozarks resort over the Memorial Day weekend.
In Port Washington, Wisconsin, patrons crowded into a bar without objection from the proprietor.
For Watkins, a liability waiver is not an escape hatch for the owners.
"In most states, you can't waive intentional, reckless, or grossly negligent conduct," he said. "It's not like, 'I wasn't aware. I should have been doing things a little better.' … Any kind of waiver that violates public policy, we can't allow you to waive this kind of tort liability."
Olsen stressed that there are two sides to negligent behavior: Customers are equally required to think before heading into a potentially dangerous situation, such as drinking at a packed local bar or crowding into a pool.
"With COVID, there can't be a person left in the country who hasn't heard that COVID-19 is dangerous," he said.
Liability waivers for the coronavirus are incredibly new, but as states reopen, Lamber expects that an increasing number of cases will go to court as customers return to their favorite restaurants or bars, become infected, and sue the owner for exposing them to the disease.
"As a personal injury lawyer already receiving calls about cases related to the transmission of COVID-19, I think we are bound to see a number of lawsuits around the country alleging customers contracted the virus at a business," he said.
Despite customers being able to challenge the validity of a liability waiver, proving that they were infected at a specific business would be hard to prove.
"These cases will be very hard to win because the customer will need to prove not only that the company was negligent but that he or she actually contracted the virus at the business versus all the other sources of exposure," Lamber said.
Saving the recovery from the trial lawyers Saving the recovery from the trial lawyers Washington Examiner Former White House chief of staff and Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel famously quipped, “You never want a serious crisis to go to waste.” He intended it for politicians and activists. But another group is taking it to heart in the COVID-19 pandemic: trial lawyers. The American Association for Justice, the euphemistically named lobbying organization for personal-injury attorneys, has set up a website to help plaintiffs’ lawyers prepare COVID-related lawsuits against businesses. If elected officials do not act to rein the lawsuits in, America’s economic recovery will be substantially impaired.
Battle lines in Washington have been drawn. The Families First Coronavirus Response Act, enacted March 18, protected manufacturers and distributors of medical face masks from lawsuits. The bill was bipartisan; legislators seemed to understand the need to spur production and distribution of personal protective equipment in the face of serious shortages for front-line medical personnel, and that remedying this was inhibited by the threat of lawsuits. But no more: Democratic leaders Chuck Schumer and Nancy Pelosi have signaled an unwillingness to go any further, even as the White House and Republican Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell have argued that any additional COVID relief legislation must offer liability protections for a broader swath of businesses, if they made best efforts to develop safety protocols.
At the center of the impasse is the trial lawyer lobby. Over the years, the plaintiffs’ bar has cultivated its support in Washington and state capitals alike. Unlike ordinary businesses that sell products or services to willing consumers, lawyers generate revenues from unwilling defendants through their unique access to the government’s judicial branch. That doesn’t mean that we don’t need civil lawsuits or that some aren’t necessary. Rather, the point is that lawyers have a vested interest in currying favor with government actors beyond the ordinary regulated industry.
To protect that vested interest, plaintiffs’ lawyers give a lot of cash to key political actors. So far in this political cycle, the political action committee for the aforementioned American Association for Justice is the third-biggest donor to Democrats running for federal office, behind only the PACs for two labor unions. The trial bar’s money is concentrated (97% to Democrats so far this cycle) and consistent (more than $5 million to Democrats’ federal campaigns in each two-year political cycle dating back to 1996).
The trial bar’s political giving through a formal PAC only begins to tell the story. Campaigns require individual donations, legally limited in amount (“hard money”), and plaintiffs’ lawyers have perfected the art of “bundling” such campaign largesse. Four of the top five donors to Sen. Dick Durbin of Illinois are law firms, three focused exclusively on plaintiff-side personal-injury and asbestos litigation. Durbin is the Senate Democrats’ minority whip: the member responsible for rounding up the party’s votes. His House counterpart, Majority Whip James Clyburn of South Carolina, counts the law firm Motley Rice as one of his three largest donors (the second-biggest excluding PACs). The Motley Rice firm was an early leader in asbestos litigation before snagging billions in state lawsuits against tobacco companies and later, other products.
The trial lawyer lobby unsurprisingly argues that it would be irresponsible to foreclose lawsuits. Bruce Stern, the president of the American Association for Justice, even argues that the prospect of lawsuits is necessary to get people back to work: “Workers and consumers will not return to offices, stores and restaurants if companies cannot be held accountable when they fail to prioritize health and safety.” Stern’s professed goals are right: a priority on health and safety, and an economic recovery. But his means are doubtful. Count me skeptical that an unfettered litigation lottery is the best way to promote good safety practices, or that people will rush headlong back to work if they have confidence that their friendly neighborhood plaintiffs’ lawyer will sue on their behalf if they do, in fact, get sick.
Our legal system encourages gamesmanship and empowers shakedowns. Most litigation costs are run up before trial, and our rules make pretrial processes especially costly and prone to abuse. American courts are unusual in giving plaintiff attorneys the power to file “notice” of lawsuits, without evidence, followed by broad rights to “discover” documents and depose witnesses before trial. Suing lawyers have every incentive to make sweeping demands because the costs are borne wholly by the lawsuit’s defendant. That’s true win or lose: Unlike every country in Western Europe, the winner of a lawsuit in America is unable to recoup lawyers’ fees from the losing side. U.S. courts are also unusually permissive in allowing lawyers to group together lots of different cases in “class action” suits, through which lawyers can sue on behalf of a large group of people they’ve never met.
These idiosyncratic American legal rules prove extraordinarily costly. Tort litigation in the United States, as a percentage of the economy, costs about 3 times as much as in the average European country. But that understates the predicament we’re in now. These are no ordinary times. Most businesses, big and small, are hemorrhaging cash. Their reserves are depleted. Few will be able to fight back against lawsuits and stay afloat.
Bankruptcies are an inevitable part of doing business, of course. Many businesses will fail for all sorts of reasons. Yet with unemployment rates higher than at any point since World War II, the economy can ill-afford additional bankruptcies driven by lawsuits.
And the lawsuits are coming. Lawyers are already jostling for position. On media and through the internet, law firms are using client recruitment tactics, well-honed in litigation targeting companies that used asbestos or produced pharmaceuticals. The New York law firm Napoli Shkolnik touts its “national coronavirus lawyers” on its website. But the “best coronavirus lawyers” are actually at the Barnes Firm in California, according to its website, which directs individuals to get tested for the virus SARS-CoV-2 and, if positive, to contact the firm’s attorneys to figure out whom to sue.
As law firms troll for clients, the firms that have them aren’t waiting to file suit. According to a complaint-tracking website set up by the law firm Hunton Andrews Kurth, at least 2,278 COVID-related lawsuits had been filed in the U.S. by May 26. Eight states already have at least 80 COVID lawsuits: California, Florida, Illinois, New Jersey, New York, Ohio, Pennsylvania, and Texas. New York leads the way, with 577 lawsuits already filed. Absent legislation limiting liability, the number of COVID lawsuits can be expected to grow — perhaps exponentially, like the virus itself.
Most of these COVID-related lawsuits, to date, do not allege that an individual was physically injured or killed by the virus. Only 30 pursue a claim that a plaintiff contracted the virus on the job. More than 100, conversely, target educational institutions, typically seeking refunds for not offering in-person instruction. Scores more seek refunds from businesses forced to close by government order. Some of these latter cases might be valid, depending on contractual language, but make no mistake: Businesses have a good chance of being sued if they reopen or if they stay closed. Because behaving well won’t protect businesses from being sued, our litigation system figures to act essentially as a tax on our economic recovery.
Some lawsuits directly or indirectly threaten the public health as well. Among the litigation that does allege worker injury are class-action lawsuits against hospitals, as well as lawsuits against essential producers (Smithfield Foods) and distributors (Wal-Mart) in the food supply chain. Other class-action suits have alleged no actual personal injury at all but compromise the epidemic response. It took the Food and Drug Administration far too long to clear administrative hurdles to increasing manufacturing of alcohol-based hand sanitizers, but when it did, lawyers were quick to pounce and file class-action litigation under state consumer fraud statutes. The alleged fraud? Preexisting product labeling saying that the hand sanitizers kill “99.9% of all germs,” a claim that hasn’t been tested for the novel coronavirus.
Some states have already acted to offer some measure of liability protection. Hard-hit New York and New Jersey, despite their typically trial-bar-friendly orientation, each passed statutes protecting healthcare businesses from lawsuits. A few states have gone further still. North Carolina, for instance, granted lawsuit immunity not only to healthcare providers and volunteers but also to any “essential business,” as defined in the governor’s executive order promulgated in the emergency response, as long as the emergency was declared.
Such a hodgepodge of state rules is generally an asset of federalism, part of the genius of the American constitutional design. Different states face different conditions; New Jersey is not Montana. States have a strong incentive to protect their hospitals and to find the proper balance between local businesses’ viability and the local citizenry’s health and safety. States will make mistakes, and state borders offer little protection against a virus. But decentralized decision-making also avoids the potential for catastrophic error always present in a one-size-fits-all national response.
Still, not all litigation costs are local. Far too often, lawsuits in our modern system target not local, but interstate commerce — and effect a perverse anti-federalism, in which one state’s legal rules make regulatory decisions for the other 49. A meat-packing or pharmaceutical plant in one state typically supplies its product nationally. And plaintiffs’ lawyers are not even bound to sue where the business is; rather, national commerce often empowers plaintiffs’ lawyers to shop their case to the most favorable jurisdiction. Among the initial wave of more than 2,000 product liability lawsuits that led New Jersey-based Johnson & Johnson to announce last week that it was pulling its baby powder from American (but not overseas) shelves, more than two-thirds were filed in state court in St. Louis, Missouri.
In recent decades, Congress has acted on multiple occasions to protect the national interest from ruinous lawsuits. In 1986, the National Childhood Vaccine Injury Act established an alternative-compensation program to handle vaccine injury claims. Following the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, Congress protected airlines from lawsuits and set up a different alternative-compensation scheme for victims and first responders. The Public Readiness and Emergency Preparedness Act, enacted in 2005, applied a broader tort liability shield during terrorist attacks or declared public health emergencies, including epidemics, for manufacturers responding to the crisis. In 1995 and 2005, Congress enacted class-action reforms that made it harder to file certain federal shakedown lawsuits and pulled more large cases with national economic implications into federal court.
These earlier federal liability reforms offer an initial blueprint for the COVID legislative response. The PREP Act is a good starting point for encouraging the research, manufacture, and distribution of lifesaving treatments and vaccines, and Congress should update it for the current pandemic. The 1995 securities litigation reform also serves as a template for limiting lawsuits based on stock-price drops: cases that essentially shift money from one group of shareholders to another, with lawyers pocketing a big percentage in the process. The federal government has overseen national securities markets since the 1930s, and there’s no reason to transfer money from shareholders to lawyers based on market turbulence caused by a public health emergency and government lockdown orders.
For claims based on exposure or medical malpractice, which are typically more localized in scope, and governed by state law, Congress should tread purposefully but carefully. Much as Congress expanded federal jurisdiction for class-action litigation in 2005, it should broaden jurisdictional rules for most COVID-based claims, disallowing the common practice of adding local defendants to keep nationally significant cases out of federal court. Congress could also broaden the federal “offer of judgment” rule to allow defendants in COVID-related lawsuits to collect attorney fees when they win at trial — essentially, in this crisis, adopting the common-sense rule employed by the rest of the world.
Such federal jurisdictional and procedural reforms would ensure rational federal oversight of cases with national economic importance without trampling on states’ interests and ability to adopt alternative regimes to meet differing local needs. Substantive state liability and workers-compensation rules would still generally apply. Congress might, however, consider offering temporary blanket immunity, at least for some industries, followed by a “safe harbor” for businesses that made good-faith efforts to comply with federal guidelines. Some such guidelines have already been developed by the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, and a safe-harbor liability shield would encourage economic recovery while also giving businesses guidance in, and the incentive to adopt, best health and safety practices.
Is such a reform package possible? There’s certainly the temptation to elevate this fight enough to make it a campaign issue but not enough to break the stalemate, in order to spur fundraising and campaign spots for the fall election. Still, I remain convinced that most elected officials, in both parties, truly want to act in the national interest. Doing so will require good-faith efforts on both sides. Democrats will have to resist the trial-bar lobby, which may fight furiously to stymie any threats to its new COVID line of business. Republicans, in turn, must resist the temptation to overreach with legal shields that protect overt misconduct or extend beyond the existing crisis.
As a political matter, Rahm Emanuel may be right: Crises are made to be exploited. But this is no ordinary crisis; the economic and health costs of the current pandemic eclipse anything we’ve seen in the modern era. I am convinced that Congress can act to reform liability rules in a way that promotes both economic recovery and public health. Let’s hope they do, so our viral epidemic doesn’t needlessly foment an epidemic of lawsuits as well.
James R. Copland is a senior fellow with and director of legal policy for the Manhattan Institute for Policy Research. His book, The Unelected: How an Unaccountable Elite Is Governing America, will be published in September by Encounter Books.
GOP files suit, declaring Democratic proxy voting rule unconstitutional GOP files suit, declaring Democratic proxy voting rule unconstitutional Susan Ferrechio For the first time in the 231-year history of the House, absent lawmakers were able to pass legislation by assigning somebody else to cast their votes in the chamber thanks to a rule change passed by the Democratic majority.
Republicans say everything the House passes under the new proxy voting procedure is open to legal challenge. 
A group of House Republican lawmakers and their constituents sued Democrats in U.S. District Court last week, arguing that the Constitution requires that members of the House physically assemble in the chamber and prohibits voting by proxy.
“It is simply impossible to read the Constitution and overlook its repeated and emphatic requirement that Members of Congress actually assemble in their respective chambers when they vote, whether on matters as weighty as declaring war or as ordinary as naming a bridge,” GOP lawmakers contend in the suit.
Lawmakers in both parties are waiting to see whether the court will take on the case or side with Democrats, who argue that the House has the authority to set its own rules without interference from the other branches of government. 
House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, a California Democrat, called the GOP lawsuit “a sad stunt” and said the House instituting proxy voting during the coronavirus pandemic “is fully consistent with the Constitution and is supported by expert legal analyses.”
Pelosi also noted an 1892 Supreme Court case that affirmed the House's authority to determine its own rules. 
The same court ruling also warned that the House “may not by its rules ignore constitutional restraints or violate fundamental rights, and there should be a reasonable relation between the mode or method of proceeding established by the rule and the result which is sought to be attained.”
Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy believes that Democrats overstepped their authority and are violating the Constitution both by allowing proxy voting and permitting the House to establish a quorum with absent members voting by proxy.
“It’s a legitimate question,” McCarthy said. “It’s about the constitutionality of anything they want to move forward.”
The new House rule allows any lawmaker present in the chamber to vote for up to 10 absent members. Last week, more than 70 lawmakers remained home and assigned other lawmakers to vote for them.
House Democrats approved proxy voting after their own rules committee report rejected remote voting. Chairman Jim McGovern calls the proxy voting plan “low-tech remote voting.”
In a report he issued in March, McGovern was wary of changing the rules at all to allow members to vote while absent because the Constitution calls on the House to meet to conduct business in the chamber. 
“Remote voting is also a novel method of voting with no parliamentary history or basis,” McGovern stated in a staff report on remote voting that his panel provided to the Democratic Caucus. “While arguments can be made in favor of its constitutionality, to avoid a court challenge, it is inadvisable to use unprecedented parliamentary procedures on critical legislation. It may be prudent to consider the feasibility of remote voting for certain emergency situations, but that decision should be a multi-committee effort with substantial study.”
Joshua Huder, a senior fellow at Georgetown University’s Government Affairs Institute, told the Washington Examiner that the new proxy voting rule allows lawmakers to relay their votes more accurately. The rule requires that lawmakers specifically instruct their colleagues on how they want their votes cast. The rule forbids a lawmaker from just handing over the authority to another member. Huder also pointed out that the House has changed rules regarding how it operates many times in the past. “This is not the first time that the House has redefined what a quorum is,” Huder said.
The proxy voting rule expires after 45 days unless Pelosi decides to renew it, which she can do without needing another House vote. It could also end if the court intervenes.
The Congressional Research Service wrote in April that federal courts have typically deferred to Congress to set its own rules. 
The GOP’s case may be among the exceptions, Thomas Jipping, a legal scholar at the conservative Heritage Foundation, told the Washington Examiner. 
“Challenges to the conduct of the legislative process are rare, and courts will be cautious about telling another branch how to operate,” Jipping said. “But Democrats' own rules committee staff told them in March that a constitutional challenge was likely, especially if this unprecedented voting system was used for significant legislation.”

We only wish we were decadent We only wish we were decadent Blake Smith The West is decadent, or so we are told. One symptom of our decadence is our masochistic desire to hear, over and over again, how sick we are. Witness the success of Michel Houellebecq's bleak visions of modernity, including his 2019 novel Serotonin. Citing Houellebecq and many others, New York Times columnist Ross Douthat confirms the diagnosis in his recent book The Decadent Society. But what does it mean that we are so eager to hear about our own decadence? What, indeed, does “decadence” mean?
Douthat notes that “decadence” links “the aesthetic and moral and political” into a “comprehensive civilizational indictment.” Yet the concept is not a neutral tool of analysis; it is a weapon. As any consideration of its 19th-century origins reveals, the idea of decadence links aesthetics, morality, and politics in service of a critique of the West that clears the way for a revival of religion — and misrepresents some key features of our era.
Complaints about decline and degeneration are as old as civilization. The word “decadence” is only slightly younger. It derives from the late Latin "decadere," itself a degenerate version of classical Latin words meaning “to fall.” It has been used at least since the 16th and 17th centuries to decry problems as varied as the decline of Spanish power and falling standards of erudition.
Only in the 19th century, however, did decadence come to be seen as something that could be defined and studied. One of the first intellectuals to do so — to transform “decadence” from a vague sense of decline into a clear aesthetic, ethical, and political critique — was the French literary critic Desire Nisard. In his 1834 study the Latin Poets of the Decadence, Nisard combined two topics that had long interested Western thinkers: the fall of the Roman Empire and the supposed decline of Latin literature after the “Golden Age” of Virgil and Cicero. Nisard argued that one could trace Rome's moral and political decline in its writers’ worsening style.
Latin literature began to go awry, Nisard claimed, with 1st-century authors such as the poet Lucan, who experimented with syntax to create jarring, novel effects. These authors “disturbed all the harmonies of language, violated all convention,” Nisard wrote, all “to give themselves the illusion that they were creating something.” For Nisard, great literature is limpid and exact because its authors are concerned with expressing ideas. Writers of the later Roman Empire, however, “no longer had anything important to say.” They had lost contact with the classical Greco-Roman conception of “man,” called to political life and philosophy, but had not yet found a new faith in Christianity. Unable to offer any ideas, they innovated on the level of language, falling into either jargon or vulgarity.
Nisard ended his study by evaluating the French poets of his day to determine France’s level of decadence. They were not quite as bad as the late Romans, in his view, but what he found was nevertheless disconcerting. He would have been horrified to know that, within a few decades, French authors would emulate the style he had critiqued.
In 1868, one year after the death of poet Charles Baudelaire, critic Theophile Gautier wrote a preface to Baudelaire’s Flowers of Evil, celebrating the book as a triumph of decadence. Gautier saw in Baudelaire’s poetry the influence of the Latin authors excoriated by Nisard. He presented Baudelaire as the first to understand that decadence was not something to be warded off with pious injunctions but the inevitable character of a worn-out, exhausted Europe. Seen from the present, late 19th-century Europe might appear a time of great cultural vitality. At the time, however, many observers agreed that, after the French Revolution and Napoleon, Europe had fallen into a slough of bourgeois complacency. Baudelaire, Gautier argued, had discovered in the decadent Romans the literary style fit for the decrepit condition of the West.
For Gautier, however, the recognition that one’s own society is decadent is, at the same time, a recognition that something new is about to be born. Like Nisard, Gautier held that decadent style is a kind of void into which authors descend when they can no longer maintain classical purity. Their literary style becomes self-conscious, tortured, and artificial. But this condition has the virtue of opening them to the possibility of a new revelation. Decadent authors are “already transformed and prepared for spiritual life” in a way that classical writers never could be. Decadent literature was a preparation for conversion to Christianity, which demanded of believers a still more intense dissatisfaction with the flesh.
Decadence could now appear not as a terminal phase of a dying civilization but as the first step toward the cross. By the 1880s, a self-described “decadent” movement had emerged in French literature. Many writers took up Gautier’s suggestion that a study of the decadent Romans was an excellent means of analyzing the modern condition. And many found, at the end of this experiment in literary anachronism, that they had readied themselves for a return to the Church. The most famous of these was Joris-Karl Huysmans, who wrote a series of flamboyantly decadent novels before converting to Catholicism. In his 1884 novel Against the Grain, Huysmans described the library of his protagonist, Jean des Esseintes, who is only interested in Latin literature after Lucan.
In his novels and in his life, Huysmans applied Gautier's theory of decadence. He developed an elaborate style full of rare words in imitation of the decadent Latins. Like them, he described complicated, sensual scenes that provided neither his readers nor his characters with any healthy pleasure. These ornate images and intricate enjoyments seemed to be the last word on what the world could offer and were a kind of training for Catholicism’s combination of aesthetics and asceticism.
Huysmans is a central figure in Houellebecq's 2015 novel Submission, which depicts a near-future scenario in which Islamists take over France. The book’s protagonist is an academic who specializes in Huysmans, and the novel is an attempt to make sense of our era in terms of the late 19th-century notion of decadence. Disgusted with modern life and its dubious, desperate eroticism, Houellebecq’s protagonist flirts with a return to Catholicism but cannot quite summon the faith for a conversion. Failing that, there is always Islam.
Douthat’s diagnosis is much more pessimistic. It breaks with the conception of “decadence” as it has been deployed from Nisard to Houellebecq. Instead of seeing modern decadence as an inventive precursor to some new revival of faith, he finds in it a flat, arid terrain of repetition and imitation. Indeed, the great age of Western literary decadence, in Nisard’s sense, appears to be well behind us. Nineteenth-century decadence gave rise to the explosion of creativity that was modernism. But there do not seem to be contemporary equivalents of James Joyce or Gertrude Stein.
If we take seriously the concept of decadence as it has been developed over the last century and a half, then we are not so fortunate as to be decadent. Being decadent, after all, would mean that we have gone astray in a daring search for the new and that, at that search's end, we will find our way home. The decadents of ancient Rome and 19th-century France frantically sought an escape from their empty and achingly self-conscious cultural condition, which they found in Christianity. Our decline may well be more comfortable, less creative, and incurable.
Blake Smith is a Harper Schmidt fellow at the University of Chicago, where he works on cultural ties between France and India.
Discontent moderator Discontent moderator Stefan Beck Good satire is hard to find. The absurdity of modern life accelerates and mutates so rapidly that satire often tells a joke just as we’ve tired of laughing at it. Then there is the tendency to satirize reality not as one finds it but as one finds it easiest to criticize. Novel trends and dangers are ignored in favor of old bogeymen or else pinned on scapegoats. The latter is nowhere truer than in satire of technological progress.
It is a relief, then, that Mary South’s new collection of short stories, You Will Never Be Forgotten, never flinches from an uncomfortable truth: We often invite and abet the conditions we claim to despise. Her stories unfold in a grotesquely comic projection of our technological society, peopled by online trolls, content moderators, deranged fanboys, clones, and a ghost in a machine (a cellphone, of course). But it’s very much about us and how our motivations create feedback loops with our technologies.

In South’s telling, these feedback loops are mostly negative. “You Will Never Be Forgotten,” the title story, first published to wide acclaim in the New Yorker, is a hunter-becomes-hunted scenario in which an online content moderator — someone whose job it is to remove violent, disturbing material from social platforms and search engines — surveils and stalks her rapist, both online and, thrillingly, in real life. In “Not Setsuko,” a mother who has replaced her murdered daughter with a clone attempts to replicate Version 1.0’s memories by, for instance, running over Version 2.0’s kitten.
“Architecture for Monsters,” which contains surpassingly fine and vivid writing about futuristic built environments, is a profile of an eccentric celebrity architect. The buildings are bodies, in a sense, and vice versa: South uses architecture to explore motherhood, creativity, vulnerability, and impermanence. Along with “Keith Prime,” about a woman who works at a clone farm (for transplant organs, as in Kazuo Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go) but could not afford a “Keith” to save her sick husband, this story is her soberest and most emotionally destabilizing.
In others, South occasionally indulges an impulse to let her sense of the absurd go berserk, and our connection to her characters suffers. She owes a patent debt to George Saunders and Karen Russell, for whom the call of the weird can be more seductive than exploring human personalities. “The Promised Hostel” and “Camp Jabberwocky for Recovering Internet Trolls,” both about highly unusual therapeutic modalities (the former is, among other things, an extended joke about adult men being breastfed), belong to this playbook.
Yet even these arguably shakier stories convey much of modern life’s chaos, the feeling that our solutions, our overreliance on what Jacques Ellul termed “technique," often make things worse. All of South’s stories are about coping with loss, trauma, and grief; whether they succeed or fail for a particular reader depends on how readily the reader can identify real people in her surrealistic, Black Mirror-ish microcosms. But in any case, her settings and conceits always succeed in amplifying what feels unsettling or uncanny about life in 2020.
In “You Will Never Be Forgotten,” the “ninjas” who “kill content without being heard or seen” are a rather sorry bunch, with inane handles such as “BabyJesusUpchuck” (others are unprintable). Our disgust at them yields to an unpleasant recognition of how much control, influence, and moral decision-making is entrusted to unimpressive and untrustworthy figures. The preservation of public morality is reduced to a Sisyphean game of whack-a-mole, not the instructive moral guidance to which we ought to be receptive and by which we ought to grow and flourish.
And thus, the heroine of this story is unmoored, like so many of us: She needs to “figure out her life” without help from a credible authority. She becomes the thing, or at least a thing, that she hates, just as we all permit technology — for we do have lots of choice in the matter — to nudge us toward behaviors that, on paper, we find reprehensible.
South understands that technology has helped us to normalize almost every behavior once collectively regarded as deadly sin. Instagram teaches us that gluttony is curation and that giving scandal to others, by stoking envy, can be disguised as an expression of #gratitude. Dating apps commodify and sometimes imperil us. We call exhibitionism empowerment and rage against trolls not because they are nasty violators of the social compact but because they represent the ineradicable danger of exposing oneself to the world.
“Not Setsuko” challenges us to reject simulacra and embrace reality, even if it means we must endure grief and loss, as we always have. That the simulacrum here is of a person (a temptation that still, one hopes, lies far in the future) does not mean the lesson cannot be applied more broadly. “I speculate,” the narrator writes, “about whether or not dreaming different dreams would be enough to change a child’s personality.” Of course: enough and then some. Simulacra are crude toys, like the worlds contained in video games. Life, humanity, and consciousness, as we used to experience them, are infinitely finer-grained.
This collection has its faults. Its humor sometimes overreaches, delighted by its own inventiveness. “Frequently Asked Questions About Your Craniotomy” has a bit too much in common with the conceit-driven squibs of early McSweeney’s or the New Yorker’s “Daily Shouts.” Not every clever idea can carry gravitas without getting crushed beneath the weight.
All the same, You Will Never Be Forgotten heralds the arrival of a real talent, a writer who uses the armature of science and technology to anatomize human beings and not the other way around. South engages in some superb and imaginative world building, but the world under her gaze is, at her best, recognizably our own. As our shared life gets weirder and woollier, revealing new dangers and confronting us with the old ones that never died, we will need more writers like her — risk-takers and honest judges who help us resist the seductions of novelty and stay human, no matter how painful that may be.
Stefan Beck is a writer living in Hudson, New York.
How China is positioning to neuter America’s military status as top dog How China is positioning to neuter America’s military status as top dog Jamie McIntyre A recently published book begins with the sobering premise that if the United States were to go to war with China today, the biggest, best-trained, best-equipped military force in the history of the world, one fielded by a country that spends more on defense than the next 10 countries combined, would lose.
And most national security experts agree.
The book, which sparked debate inside and outside the Pentagon, is The Kill Chain: Defending America in the Future of High-Tech Warfare, by Christian Brose, a former staff director of the Senate Armed Services Committee and senior policy adviser to the late Sen. John McCain.
In his introductory chapter, Brose lays out how China follows a strategy aimed at denying the U.S. the ability to project power in the way it traditionally has, essentially checkmating America’s greatest strength.
And he describes in chilling detail how the U.S. military as currently configured is uniquely unsuited to go toe-to-toe with China in a conventional force-on-force war.
“Many of the US ships, submarines, fighter jets, bomber aircraft, additional munitions, and other systems that are needed to fight would not be near the war when it started but would be thousands of miles away in the United States. They would come under immediate attack once they began their multiweek mobilization across the planet,” he writes.
“Cyberattacks would grind down the logistical movement of US forces into combat. The defenseless cargo ships and aircraft that would ferry much of that force across the Pacific would be attacked every step of the way. Satellites on which U.S. forces depend for intelligence, communications, and global positioning would be blinded by lasers, shut down by high-energy jammers, or shot out of orbit altogether by antisatellite missiles,” leaving many U.S. forces “deaf, dumb, and blind.”
China’s massive arsenals of advanced precision strike weapons, such as cruise missiles and hypersonic weapons, would hit U.S. planes in the region before they could take off, and U.S. aircraft carriers would have to steam away from China to stay out of range of China’s carrier-killer missiles.
In short, all signs point to an ignominious defeat.
“Over the past decade, in US war games against China, the United States has a nearly perfect record: we have lost almost every single time,” Brose writes. “The American people do not know this. Most members of Congress do not know this — even though they should. But in the Department of Defense, this is a well-known fact.”
When Deputy Defense Secretary Patrick Shanahan was replaced Jim Mattis as acting defense secretary, his first three words to the press were “China, China, China.”
Before he resigned in protest, Mattis crafted the Trump administration’s 2018 National Defense Strategy, which elevated countering China to the top priority.
And current Defense Secretary Mark Esper is leading the charge to jettison so-called legacy systems, which served the U.S. well in past wars, in favor of new technology and new ways of fighting.
“The more capable you are in war, the more likely you are to deter one. ... What we’re trying to do is deter war with China,” Esper said in an interview with Hugh Hewett in May.
“I think we probably need more in terms of submarines. We need to move much more quickly on unmanned or lightly manned ships, and we certainly need new strategic deterrents,” he said. “It’s going to have things like distributed lethality. It has to be survivable against a near-peer power such as China or Russia.”
Precisely right, argues Brose.
“The U.S. military today consists of relatively small numbers of rather large, exquisite, highly expensive, heavily manned, and hard‑to‑replace things,” he writes. (Think aircraft carriers, surface ships, F-35 stealth fighters, and Abrams tanks.)
Brose envisions a future force built around lower-cost systems that are effectively expendable, such as networks of inexpensive drones and missiles. “Lots of missiles.”
“If U.S. systems are cheap to build, operate, and replenish, we would be more willing and able to lose them. … Manned systems will not fare well on future battlefields, which will be extremely violent with heavy losses on all sides.”
That’s the concept of “distributed lethality” — larger numbers of smaller systems spread over a wider area so adversaries can’t concentrate their sensors and weapons on a few big, fat targets.
“I've said for a long time the future strategic triad is about unmanned, cyber, and special forces,” and retired Adm. James Stavridis, a former NATO supreme commander, upon reading Brose’s chapter describing what’s been dubbed “the new American way of war.”
“It’s best in the book, and I agree with it,” Stavridis said.
Brose advocates beating China at its own game and adapting to a world in which the U.S. no longer possesses military dominance over China, what he calls a strategy of defense without dominance.
“If the United States develops a new, defensive way of war that is focused less on projecting military power than on countering the ability of others to do so, we could create the same dilemmas for our competitors that we are facing,” he writes.
“China may be capable of denying dominance to America, but America can do the same to China. And that should be our goal: preventing China from achieving a position of military dominance in Asia.”
Retired Air Force Lt. Gen. Dave Deptula, who was the principal architect of the 1991 Desert Storm air campaign, said that while Brose’s book is highly readable, it only addresses part of what is a very complex problem about what the future U.S. military should look like.
“In my 40-plus years of dealing with defense, one of the things I’ve come away with is that there is no silver bullet solution,” Deptula told the Washington Examiner. “But this whole notion of swarming, of using uninhabited vehicles to be able to confuse and disturb and upset an adversary and make it more difficult to challenge us, certainly needs to be an element of our future force design."
Jamie McIntyre is the Washington Examiner’s senior writer on defense and national security. His morning newsletter, “Jamie McIntyre’s Daily on Defense,” is free and available by email subscription at dailyondefense.com.
Harvard’s war on homeschooling continues Harvard’s war on homeschooling continues Corey DeAngelis Schools have closed for just about every student over the last two months in an attempt to mitigate the spread of COVID-19. In April, Harvard Magazine published an all-out attack on homeschooling — just as everyone was starting to do it. The article highlighted the work of Harvard Law School professor Elizabeth Bartholet by covering the apparent “Risks of Homeschooling” and calling for a “presumptive ban” on the practice.
Bartholet argues a presumptive ban is warranted because homeschooling supposedly “violates children’s right to a ‘meaningful education’ and their right to be protected from potential child abuse.” Bartholet had also organized a now-canceled anti-homeschooling conference to be held at Harvard Law School next month. The official description of the invite-only event said that “the focus will be on problems of educational deprivation and child maltreatment that too often occur under the guise of homeschooling.”
But that was only the beginning. Just last week, a Harvard University employee wrote an anti-homeschooling article, “In Defense of Elizabeth Bartholet,” in the Harvard Crimson. Bartholet also came out swinging. The Harvard Gazette just ran a shocking interview with her titled “A warning on homeschooling.” They should have saved the characters and called it what it really is: a war on homeschooling.
Echoing her previous work, the Harvard Law School professor started her anti-homeschooling interview with anti-conservative and anti-Christian fearmongering. Without evidence, Bartholet claimed that “many homeschooling parents are extreme ideologues, committed to raising their children within their belief systems isolated from any societal influence.” She said homeschoolers might not be taught democratic principles, “such as tolerance of other people’s views and values,” which is ironic, seeing as she doesn’t seem very tolerant of conservatives and Christians. And we already live in a highly polarized society. Does she really think the 3% of children who were homeschooled before the lockdown are the root of our problems?
Bartholet also argued that “there is a strong connection between homeschooling and maltreatment” and that some homeschooled “children are simply not learning basic skills or learning about the most basic democratic values of our society.” She doesn’t have any legitimate evidence for these claims.
But we do have hard evidence of widespread educational failures and abuse in government schools. The Nation’s Report Card just came out last month, and the results aren’t pretty. Only 15% of students were proficient in U.S. history, and 3 out of 4 students were not proficient in civics or geography. The most recent report on the subject from the U.S. Department of Education estimated that 1 in 10 children in government schools will experience educator sexual misconduct by the time they graduate from high school. A 2018 report from the Department of Education also found that 79% of government schools recorded that a violent incident or crime occurred on their campuses and that about 20% of students were bullied in the most recent school year. Based on her own logic, perhaps Bartholet should be calling for a presumptive ban on government schooling.
Indeed, Bartholet accidentally made an argument for homeschooling when she said “the biggest teachers’ unions in the country have found homeschooling deeply problematic.” The teachers union isn’t in the business of helping students; it’s in the business of protecting a monopoly. In fact, the nation’s largest teachers union recently rejected an initiative to “dedicate itself to the pursuit of increased student learning” and not to waver "in its commitment to student learning.” And a 2019 publication in the American Economic Journal found that teacher collective bargaining harms students by reducing their earnings later on in life.
The main logic behind Bartholet’s proposed “presumptive” ban is that “if parents have nothing to hide, they shouldn’t have anything to worry about.” If that logic is justified, shouldn’t we all be forced to send our children to the government before the age of 5 because of the “potential” for abuse? And if we all want children to eat healthy food, shouldn’t we all be forced to pay for government employees to sit at our dinner tables each night because of the “potential” for malnourishment? And why stop at the age of 18? Shouldn’t 100% of adult couples be forced to attend government counseling sessions because of the “potential” for abuse? Of course not. We shouldn’t punish all families for the actions of a few bad actors.
We would also have to get rid of the Fourth Amendment right against unreasonable searches and seizures and our Fifth Amendment right to remain silent, because “if you don’t have anything to hide, you shouldn’t have anything to worry about.” The same logic can be used to justify stop-and-frisk policies, which can come along with all sorts of unintended consequences such as racial discrimination and accidental deaths. A presumptive ban assumes we are all guilty until proven innocent, which cuts against the very core of America’s understanding of justice.
Bartholet argues that “our federal Constitution provides parents with powerful constitutional rights to raise their children.” But the Constitution doesn’t grant us our rights. Instead, it is a check on government abuse of power against our rights. Our rights preexist the government.
The Harvard professor has also said that “effectively, there’s a right to abuse your child and to not educate your child, so long as you homeschool.” This is absurd. Abusing children is illegal — and rightly so. Of course, no serious advocates of homeschooling are arguing that anyone should be able to abuse children.
In her most recent interview, Bartholet says that even for “parents granted permission to homeschool,” she would “still require that their kids participate in at least some school courses and extracurricular activities.” This is a further argument for state-compelled schooling. What Bartholet is describing is a ban on homeschooling altogether, even for the parents she deems worthy of educating their own children at home.
But this is all window dressing for her true goal. In her Arizona Law Review article calling for a ban on homeschooling, Bartholet alludes to a prohibition on private education altogether. She contends that “some private schools pose problems of the same nature as homeschooling” and that “it would be deeply unfair to allow those who can afford private schools to isolate their children from public values in private schools reflecting the parents’ values, while denying this possibility to those unable to afford such schools.”
Both bans are obviously unconstitutional. The U.S. Supreme Court held that parents have the right to “establish a home and bring up children” and “to control the education of their own” in Meyer v. Nebraska in 1923. Two years later, the court held that parents have the right “to direct the upbringing and education of children under their control” and that “the child is not the mere creature of the State” in Pierce v. Society of Sisters.
But authoritarians have long sought the prohibition of private education. The Nazi regime, for instance, outlawed homeschooling with criminal consequences for anyone found practicing in Germany in 1938. The Ku Klux Klan similarly fought to outlaw private education in Oregon in 1922 and succeeded — that is, until the ban was thankfully found unconstitutional by the U.S. Supreme Court in 1925.
Luckily, both sound logic and evidence are on the side of freedom in education. But the Harvard professor’s relentless attacks on homeschooling during a pandemic prove that the fight for liberty never ends. Based on the public backlash to the proposed ban, I am confident that families will continue to fight to prevent the government from taking away their right to educate their own children at home.
In just a few days, more than 1,000 people signed a petition for Harvard Law School to host a debate on homeschooling featuring Bartholet. As an elite academic institution, Harvard should be more than happy to set it up for the sake of civil discourse and ideological diversity. And Elizabeth Bartholet should be more than happy to debate her ideas in public if she is confident in them.
Corey DeAngelis is the director of school choice at the Reason Foundation, the executive director at the Educational Freedom Institute, and an adjunct scholar at the Cato Institute.
How I learned to stop worrying and cheat at crosswords How I learned to stop worrying and cheat at crosswords Rob Long A man of a certain age with a certain level of career success will eventually be expected to pick up a golf club and play.
“You free Wednesday? I usually play in the afternoon,” some plummy friend or business associate will say, mentioning the name of his club with an insider’s shorthand. “I play out at Lynebrook,” he’ll say, or “Piping” or “Havercroft Meadow” or “Blackheart North.” And you’re supposed to nod, impressed, and say something like, “I love that course!” or “I’d love to play there again.” Because that’s the way it is with men who invite you to play golf: They’re competitive. The game starts with the invitation, and if you let them know you’ve never played at their home course, you’ve already lost.
When I was a younger man and less secure in my own physical ineptitude, I used to dread these invitations. I’d invent a cascade of reasons — torn rotator cuffs, arthritic hips, hay fever, one-eye blindness, house arrest — to get out of stepping up to the first tee, in full sight of everyone, and taking that first swing.
Perhaps I should explain what happens when I try to hit a golf ball.
I grip the club with my standard white-knuckle death grip, hunch round-shouldered over the ball, tense up my forearms, lock my wrists, clench my jaw, feel slightly sick to my stomach, and then I swing the golf club.
During the entire second-and-a-half-long action, my mind is racing with thoughts.
Left arm straight, don’t rush, focus on the ball, keep your arms extended, where’s the club head?, don’t pop up, remember to shift your weight, follow through, here comes the release, and where’s the damn club head?
Usually, the ball skitters off to the left (I don’t hit it so much as slap it on the top of its head) and races awkwardly along the ground for a moment until it finally crashes into the bushes. It looks less like a ball than a small animal scampering away in fear.
Over the years, I’ve come to accept that golf, for me, just isn’t going to happen. Now, when the invitations come (and they come less and less often), I just smile and say, “Thanks, but I’m not much of a golfer, I’m afraid,” in a tone of voice that suggests that I’m quite comfortable with my gifts and limitations.
But I’m not. I really do wish I could play golf, especially as I reach the age when a sport that involves lots of little breaks, plus snacks and beer and a cigar, seems awfully appealing. And let’s face it: Golf is not that hard. Unlike other sports, the ball doesn’t move. You don’t have to run. No one is coming at you with a stick or anything. You just swing and hit, and eventually, if you keep doing it, you’ll hit the ball perfectly.
And that’s the key: Eventually, you’ll get it, which means all you need to do is practice. But golf is something you do in front of other people — other judging people. So is practicing golf, which means that if you avoid playing because you don’t want to be mortified in front of strangers, practicing isn’t much better.
Learning new skills is hard but not impossible. Somehow, for instance, I became a person who does crossword puzzles in pen. I ignored them for years until a delayed flight and a lack of Wi-Fi forced me to investigate new ways of keeping myself occupied. I reached for the nearest newspaper with a crossword puzzle and got to work.
The first attempt was a disaster. But then I discovered that there’s an app with almost limitless crossword puzzles and — here’s the important part — the ability to check your answers as you play. I used the app for a few months and then suddenly, without thinking about it, I just picked up the Sunday paper and went at it.
All of which goes to show that the best way to learn to do something hard with confidence is to learn how to do it while cheating. If only there was a way to cheat at golf without being seen.
There was a story, years ago, about a Texas buyout billionaire who was so ashamed of his ridiculous and humiliating golf game that he built his own private golf course — 18 holes on his Texas ranch, a golf course built for one — and practiced daily, for five years, before he would let anyone else, let alone a business competitor, see him step up to the tee.
There should be a more affordable solution.
Rob Long is a television writer and producer and the co-founder of Ricochet.com.
Summer of all fears Summer of all fears Timothy P. Carney Over Memorial Day weekend, some families made their way to America’s beaches and ambled up and down the sand or the boardwalk. In a few parts of the country — famously, in Lake of the Ozarks, Missouri — dozens of young adults gathered for the sort of pool party that traditionally marks the beginning of summer.
The austere giants of American media seemed to think the story was that a few people were having fun in public amid a pandemic. Reporters from the grayest old newspapers, the biggest worldwide wires, and the massive, most lucrative networks scolded and cursed the transgressors for enjoying the outdoors near one another.
Journalism is called the first, rough draft of history. Newspaper and internet reporting, however, are inevitably more myopic. When the history of summer 2020 is told decades down the road, the story of its opening days will not be a story of reckless boardwalk walkers or pool partiers risking the coronavirus. It will be either a summer of liberation from a bizarre and unprecedented lockdown of daily life or, if the lockdowns do not fade away, it will be the summer that never happened.
Those who did go to the beaches and the boardwalks on Memorial Day were venturing out for the first time since March. They found the boardwalk rides and attractions closed. Neighborhood pools in thousands of neighborhoods were still shuttered on their traditional opening weekend, as were country clubs across America.
The history of this spring and summer will be told by the lacunae on plaques outside high school gyms — the year with no title game, no batting champion, no top goal scorer, no wins or losses. This will be the May and June when we didn’t have NBA championships or graduations. The disruption to our daily lives is a once-in-a-generation event today’s schoolchildren will tell years from now to their incredulous children.
Yet griping and typing from their laptops at home, reporters and commentators think the story is that a few folks, after months in obedient isolation, might have broken the rules in so many places. The real story is that for so long, so many followed the draconian rules imposed by so few.
Indeed, it would have been unthinkable a few months back that state and county governments would or could scrunch the lives of 325 million people into the confines of their own homes.
Yet a few hundred people — governors, state health officials, some county executives — suddenly gained control over the lives of millions, down to the microscopic level.
It became a crime for your church to hold a service. Visiting your parents might violate the law. Having a family over for a barbeque became illegal.
Suddenly, the things that were too quotidian even to cherish as “freedoms” were taken away. They were taken away, not by some armed revolution, as when Oliver Cromwell and his Roundheads in Parliament canceled Christmas in 1644, but by the joint decisions of a handful of state-level officials.
The power over everyone's daily lives wielded by so few is probably unprecedented in our nation’s history.
Of course, we are all taught in school about the unity of purpose during World War II. Families grew victory gardens and bought war bonds. Our grandparents or great-grandparents all went along with blackout drills, loved FDR, and tolerated rationing and price controls.
But the experience of the American homefront during the war was certainly more complicated, as is the analogy to the coronavirus pandemic. It’s not a popular idea in our materialistic age, which regards death as the ultimate evil, but it’s at least arguable that stopping the march of two racist, murderous, evil empires was a more noble cause than “flattening the curve.”
Since V-J Day, at least in the minds of nearly every living American, dissent has been patriotic, and civil disobedience has been the stuff of our greatest heroes. The American Revolution, abolition, the civil rights movement, and all the stories we tell of America’s growth as a country highlight people who refused to do as they were told. The American is the cowboy, the maverick, the disobedient citizen.
Once, I visited Germany and met with a government minister who told a very brief history of Europe: The continent was once populated with two kinds of people. Some Europeans followed the rules, stayed out of trouble, and did as they were told, she said; other Europeans were free spirits, rascals, and innovators. One day, the latter kind all got on a boat and moved to America.
To this day in Berlin, you will not see Germans cross against a light, even if no cars are in sight. Americans, in contrast, buck under such a bridle.
Yet that defining trait seemed to evaporate when the pandemic hit.
Around the world, dictators who have gained control over their people’s lives have relied on scapegoating, religious fundamentalism, or sheer terror and force. Today, governors and state and local health officials temporarily put their citizens on near-house arrest, mostly wielding “Science!”
“I operate on the data and on the numbers and on the science,” media darling Andrew Cuomo said around the same time he sent coronavirus patients off to nursing homes, where they triggered mass death. “Follow the data, follow the science, let the professionals tell us when it’s safe to reopen,” the New York governor said. “When it comes to re-opening, SCIENCE — not politics — must be California’s guide,” wrote California Gov. Gavin Newsom.
We know what the governors are doing, and it’s mostly harmless. When politicians pledge fealty to “SCIENCE” again and again, they are playing identity politics. They know that a significant portion of the Democratic base walks around clad in a self-image of science-grounded, reality-based “nerds.” You can tell the signaling worked because of the small rash of liberal commentators declaring their crushes on Cuomo or Newsom for their coronavirus briefings.
But underneath the harmless flexing, the constant invocation of “SCIENCE over politics” ought to be at least a little bit worrying. If science were what politicians pretend it is (ontological certainty yielded by researchers with advanced degrees), it could justify the most onerous intrusions on liberty and disregard for democracy — all for your own good, of course.
“SCIENCE” is the perfect excuse to squash individual choice, because it is a special knowledge possessed by the few and handed, as a saber, to powerful men such as Cuomo and Newsom.
Actual science, as done by scientists, is a realm of uncertainty, best guesses, and constant updating and testing of hypotheses. But combine the politicians’ idea of “SCIENCE” with their hunger for power, and you get what we’ve gotten since March: the Land of the Free placed under stay-at-home orders by a few dozen public servants acting with the power of dictators and the certainty of surgeons but the empirical backing of, well, not much.
Lockdowns were, to borrow the terms of contemporary medicine, an unproven intervention. Nobody had established either the safety or the efficacy of closing schools, closing restaurants, removing basketball hoops, cordoning off playgrounds, banning fishing, banning reading on park benches, banning gatherings of more than 10, forcing millions to work from home, banning elective surgeries, shuttering main street — for three months — and sending 15% of our workforce into unemployment.
The scientists and the bureaucrats at the Food and Drug Administration would never allow doctors to prescribe widely a pharmaceutical so untested. Yet almost in unison in mid-March, after British epidemiologist Neil Ferguson at the Imperial College put out a scary study predicting millions of U.S. deaths and after Tom Hanks was diagnosed with the virus, most governors and state health officials prescribed lockdowns and then kept them in place through May.
There’s some evidence the lockdowns were a bad idea. We know that they caused some harm in addition to alleviating some other harm. But more important is to note how ambitious the lockdowns were, and how sparse the public debate or input was.
In a democracy, putting “SCIENCE over politics” usually means subverting democracy.
Certainly, nobody ran for office on the platform of “I will close your schools and restaurants.” There was no debate in most places. State lawmakers didn’t consider lockdown or quarantine bills in their legislative bodies. There were no floor debates about closing restaurants or amendments about whether to allow outdoor seating. There weren’t recorded votes before these unprecedented government actions to lock down commerce and society.
Governors relied on emergency powers, which itself isn’t unprecedented. But emergency powers are usually limited in duration and location. Amid the manhunt for the Boston Marathon bomber, for instance, local transit was shut down, residents were evacuated or locked in their homes, and businesses were shut down. But that was a local reaction that lasted for a couple of days and had a very discrete aim: catching a killer.
This killer isn’t catchable, unlike the sickness with which it kills. So during the pandemic, governors unilaterally made new crimes, such as leisurely fishing on an empty bank, and closed thousands of businesses and schools, imposing their new rules for months at a time.
Heading into summer 2020, many officials warned that no “all clear” siren was coming. We had to adapt to a "new normal." Presumably, that will include customs and rules targeted at slowing the spread of the virus, such as eschewing handshakes or hugs, shortening church services, or moving more things outdoors. Surely, the “new normal” will also include persistent regulations on building occupancy limits and on sanitation and hygiene.
We need to worry, though, that the new normal will be a handful of government officials making sweeping rules to micromanage our daily lives.
Timothy P. Carney is the senior political columnist at the Washington Examiner and a resident fellow at the American Enterprise Institute. He is the author of Alienated America: Why Some Places Thrive While Others Collapse, The Big Ripoff, and Obamanomics.
Suspending the payroll tax really would stimulate the economy Suspending the payroll tax really would stimulate the economy Stephen Moore The recovery stage for our economy is finally here, and now, the policy priority has to shift to getting people back on the job and businesses up and running. The best incentive to get businesses hiring again and get workers off of unemployment is to suspend the payroll tax for the rest of the year.
So far, Congress's "stimulus" plans have cost more than $2.1 trillion on short-term aid to workers, businesses, and states, but they haven't stimulated much of anything other than government dependence. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi favors another $3 trillion spending bill that would actually encourage states to keep their economies shut down by paying their bills and incentivizing workers to stay unemployed for many more months by extending unemployment benefits that pay more than a job would. It's no surprise that even though we now have 35 million unemployed workers in America, employers are having a hard time luring workers back to jobs. In 31 states today, welfare and unemployment benefits can pay more than work.
More debt-financed government spending will not stimulate the economy. Many congressional Republicans and Democrats want up to $2 trillion more in government spending on infrastructure, aid to states, Medicaid — even windmills. President Barack Obama tried "shovel-ready" projects a little more than a decade ago during the last economic crisis, and it created a limp, L-shaped recovery, rather than the V-shaped recovery we all hoped for and saw under President Ronald Reagan, who used tax rate cuts and deregulation.
Of all the significant proposals in play right now, the only one that would actually create new hiring rather than discourage it would be the payroll tax suspension through Dec. 31, 2020. Currently, the Social Security and Medicare tax takes roughly 7.5% from a worker's paycheck, with another 7.5% paid by employers — up to about $130,000 of income. (The self-employed get socked with a full 15% tax on their income — in addition to income taxes.)
With 1 in 4 people now unemployed, this will help get people back to work and fatten the paychecks of all 150 million U.S. workers. The workers who would benefit the most would be minimum-wage and middle-class workers who pay more payroll than federal income tax. Isn't this what Pelosi wants?
I have heard three spurious complaints about the payroll tax suspension. First, it will hurt the "trust fund" of Social Security and jeopardize benefits paid in the future. No, this plan would provide government bonds to the Social Security Administration, so there would be no adverse effects on benefits paid and promised to seniors. Both the Bush and Obama administrations did this when they temporarily cut the payroll tax.
The second complaint is even dumber. Opponents say this reduction in the worker tax does nothing to help the unemployed. Wrong. It helps the unemployed the best way possible: by creating jobs and higher take-home pay when they do get a job. By reducing the payroll expenses for employers, the cost of hiring more workers falls — which helps get millions of people back to work.
Some also protest that we cannot afford to suspend the payroll tax because this would lower revenues by about $700 billion. But this plan is one-quarter as expensive as the Pelosi plan, which would not create any net new jobs.
Nearly everything Washington has done until now in response to the pandemic has been to reward people for not working. Now, it is time to get back to the idea of making work pay more than staying idle and on the couch. The vast majority of the public wants to earn a paycheck, and they want to get paid an excellent after-tax wage. Polls show that if you ask voters if they'd rather have the next aid package go to mayors, governors, and other politicians to spend or have more money directly in their paychecks, 2 in 3 voters prefer the latter — the payroll tax cut. They have the attitude of Cuba Gooding Jr. in the unforgettable movie Jerry Maguire: "SHOW ME THE MONEY!"
Larry Kramer, 1935-2020 Larry Kramer, 1935-2020 Philip Terzian When Larry Kramer died of pneumonia last week in Manhattan at age 84, the New York Times described him in its headline as a "playwright and outspoken AIDS activist." In its obituary, however, the first post-mortem quotation came from Dr. Anthony Fauci: "Once you got past the rhetoric," Fauci said, "you found that Larry Kramer made a lot of sense and that he had a heart of gold." Which may well be true. Still, if a playwright's death is most prominently noted by the director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases and not a fellow writer or scholar of literature, it's probably closer to the truth to describe him as an outspoken AIDS activist who was also a playwright.
Either way, Kramer’s anger at the emergence of the human immunodeficiency virus, the virus that leads to AIDS and initially devastated the gay community in America, four decades ago was what transformed him from a rising movie production executive (Dr. Strangelove) and Oscar-nominated screenwriter (Women in Love) into the celebrated scourge of the federal government and the scientific establishment during the AIDS pandemic.
In 1981, Kramer founded the Gay Men's Health Crisis, the first service organization in the country designed to assist HIV-positive patients, but was ousted one year later for his aggressive tactics and rhetoric. On the rebound, he swiftly organized the AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power (ACT UP), which married AIDS activism to theatrical flair, and the rest is history. Whereas the Gay Men's Health Crisis emphasized social services and personal assistance, ACT UP was essentially a political organization designed to accelerate the search for drugs and palliative treatments for HIV/AIDS through public pressure.
Kramer's tactics, which became his signature, were neither subtle nor diplomatic: He routinely accused politicians and public health officials of "genocide," invaded clinics and church services and scientific conferences with flash mobs, and delighted in personal abuse, once describing Fauci as a "killer [and] incompetent idiot."
Kramer's rage and passion were understandable: At the time, a diagnosis of HIV was essentially a death sentence, and Kramer was a gay man whose lawyer father bullied him in childhood as a "sissy" and, following in his father's footsteps to Yale, attempted suicide during his freshman year because he felt out of place. It was Kramer's conviction that both the federal government, notably the Food and Drug Administration, and medical researchers were slow to respond to AIDS, or worse, indifferent to its effects and long-term implications because most of its initial victims were homosexual. His best-known work for the stage, The Normal Heart (1985), chronicled the suffering of his circle of friends in New York at the hands of the mysterious killer.
In one sense, Kramer had a point. In the high tide of the HIV/AIDS crisis from the early 1980s to the mid-1990s, the urgent process of researching and developing a medical protocol for the treatment of HIV (for which there remains no vaccine) and saving lives could be frustratingly slow and deliberate. In the words of the New York Times, Fauci "credited Kramer with playing an 'essential' role in the development of elaborate drug regimens ... and in prompting the [FDA] to streamline its assessment and approval of certain new drugs," for which Kramer deserves full credit.
At the same time, there are troublesome echoes in the age of COVID-19. What Kramer mistook for deliberate bigotry or incompetence was the gradual realization in the early 1980s of the nature of a host of bewildering symptoms that defied conventional treatment and proved fatal. Then as now, the development of palliative drugs and vaccines is not solely a matter of funding or official mobilization but the careful, deliberate processes of scientific research. Miracles cannot be mandated. Then, too, Kramer's deliberately incendiary language has become habitual in our politics: "I discovered that anger got you further than being nice," he once explained.
Philip Terzian is the author of Architects of Power: Roosevelt, Eisenhower, and the American Century.
Exposing the hoax Exposing the hoax Andrew C. McCarthy No need to build to a crescendo — let’s just say it: The Trump-Russia investigation was a politically driven fraud from beginning to end. It was opened on false pretenses, sustained by investigative abuses, and will undoubtedly end in recriminatory angst, which is what happens when the kind of accountability the victims demand does not, indeed cannot, come to pass.
Worst of all is the damage wrought, though even that isn’t fully understood. Obama administration officials exploited the awesome national security powers that we trust our government to use for counterintelligence operations that safeguard America from jihadists and other foreign hostiles. Because of the abuse, and the growing awareness that few of the abusers will be held to meaningful account, those powers have lost the solid constituency they had maintained in Congress for nearly two decades. Thus, this episode will prove to be a catastrophe for American national security.
Last August, I released Ball of Collusion. As a former longtime federal law enforcement official who is proud of that service, I had come reluctantly to the realization that the Trump-Russia escapade was less an investigation than a political narrative — hence the book’s subtitle, The Plot to Rig an Election and Destroy a Presidency. In fact, it would be more accurate to say I had been dragged to it, kicking and screaming. In the early days, friends of mine, both pro-Trump and Trump-skeptic, asked me if it was possible that the Federal Bureau of Investigation and the Department of Justice had brought an uncorroborated screed of innuendo (under the guise of campaign opposition research) to the secret federal tribunal that issues foreign-intelligence surveillance warrants, in order to monitor the Trump campaign. Confidently, I assured them that that was inconceivable.
Turns out, by trusting that such a thing could never happen, I was the guy wearing the tinfoil hat.
Still, until recently, it was perilous to draw anything but tentative conclusions. There was no doubting that irregularities riddled the Trump-Russia inquiry through the tumultuous months of the 2016 election campaign. Yet, law enforcement and intelligence agencies stonewall because it works. Despite the fact that the executive branch had been under President Trump’s control, at least nominally, since 2017, the Justice Department, the FBI, and the rest of the 17-agency sprawl known as the U.S. “intelligence community” are notoriously adept at closing ranks and closing the information spigot good and tight, but for the occasional, strategic leak. They are hardwired to claim that disclosures of information involving misfeasance and worse would do irreparable harm to national security.
The Trump-Russia inquiry was ingeniously designed. If the president demanded that his subordinates unveil the intelligence files that would reveal the prior administration’s political spying, he stood to be accused of obstructing investigators and seeking to distract the country from his own alleged criminality.
On that score, an underappreciated aspect of the saga is that Trump came to office as a novice. His unhinged Twitter outbursts obscure an abiding uncertainty about the extent of the president’s power to direct the intelligence bureaucracy. A more seasoned Beltway hand would have known what he could safely order reluctant bureaucrats and Obama holdovers to produce for him or disclose to the public. Trump, however, was at sea. That is why it was so vital for his antagonists to sideline Michael Flynn and Jeff Sessions, Trump loyalists with deep experience in intelligence and law enforcement, who could have put a stop to the farce if they’d remained, respectively, national security adviser and attorney general.
Due to the stonewalling, only recently has the paper trail finally begun to catch up to — and, inevitably, verify, and then some — the worst suspicions of “Trump collusion with Russia” naysayers.
We have known for over a year of the special counsel’s finding that there was no evidence of espionage conspiracy, no criminal pact of any kind, between Trump’s campaign and the Kremlin. In fact, long before its final report, the Mueller inquiry’s bottom line was already inescapable from the indictments filed by its team of activist Democratic prosecutors. None of them charged Trump associates with any kind of Russian “collusion” (a weasel word invoked to obfuscate the lack of conspiracy).
Since then, the floodgates have begun to open. Justice Department inspector general reports have illuminated shocking FBI misconduct in submissions to the FISA court. There were serial misrepresentations about the strength of evidence; flat-out lies about the veracity of the seminal informant, former British intelligence officer Christopher Steele; and overarching claims that, consistent with Justice Department policy and FISA court rules, each factual assertion in the four warrant submissions against former Trump campaign adviser Carter Page was “verified,” when, in fact, virtually nothing of consequence had been corroborated.
This inspector general report readily complemented the one completed two years earlier, in connection with the Hillary Clinton emails escapade, which documented rampant anti-Trump bias among key investigators assigned to the Clinton and Trump inquiries — as well as the unusually deep involvement in both cases of the bureau’s highest echelon, then-Director James Comey and then-Deputy Director Andrew McCabe. Also falling into place was another inspector general report, centering on McCabe. He had first orchestrated a leak of investigative information involving a dispute between the FBI and the Obama Justice Department over scrutiny of the Clinton Foundation; then, he made repeated misrepresentations to investigators, including under oath.
Irate, the FISA court forced the Justice Department to conduct a more sweeping internal inquiry. The results have been stunning. While the Trump-Russia investigation stands out for its politicization of surveillance authority, it turns out not to be an outlier in terms of the FBI’s derelictions of investigative duty. In a high percentage of cases, the bureau’s “verified” submissions are never verified, in spite of curative procedures adopted in the 9/11 era, as well as required sign-offs by top FBI and DOJ officials. In short, the FBI and Justice Department have been exploiting the convenience that, contrary to what happens in criminal cases, classified counterintelligence inquiries have no discovery, no defense lawyers, and no one checking the investigators’ work. Rather, there are sloppy representations, made to a judicial monitor that is neither institutionally competent nor practically equipped to investigate the submissions.
Meanwhile, there was the collapse of Robert Mueller’s ill-conceived prosecution of Russian shell companies said to have been instrumental in the “troll-farm” conspiracy. That, we’d been assured, was the social media campaign that, along with hacking, was the one-two punch by which the Putin regime attacked our election.
Mueller’s two Russia indictments, of the troll-farmers and hackers, were always better understood as press releases than criminal prosecutions because everyone knew no Russian would ever be extradited to face the music. But Mueller botched the narrative exercise by charging businesses, evidently not foreseeing that they bore no risks of imprisonment or (as Moscow-based shells) ruinous fines. They retained experienced counsel, who showed up in court, demanded to be given all the discovery, and vowed to take the matter to trial. Ultimately, after first grudgingly conceding that they could not connect the social media ads to the Russian government (though an oligarch said to be close to Vladimir Putin was complicit), prosecutors dismissed the case rather than chance an embarrassing rout at trial. In the run-up, their theory of prosecution was shown to be untenable, and the social media ads themselves were ludicrous — childish, mostly legal under campaign rules, and costing just pennies (the defense claimed the few arguably actionable ones amounted to about $5,000 in expenditures). The suggestion that the troll-farm operation had any effect on the multibillion-dollar ocean of U.S. campaign spending was laughable.
Hacking has taken a hit, too. That is largely because Trump finally dispatched a pit bull to take on the intelligence community. The president eased out acting National Intelligence Director Joseph Maguire, installing in the post Richard Grenell, his hard-charging ambassador to Germany.
Grenell staged a showdown to force Trump nemesis Adam Schiff, the House Intelligence Committee chairman, to disclose hearing testimony from dozens of witnesses that had been kept under wraps for over a year. Among the most startling revelations was the testimony of Shawn Henry, president of CrowdStrike. That is the private cybersecurity firm retained by Democrats to conduct forensic analysis on the party’s servers, whose hacking by Moscow is the collusion narrative’s ne plus ultra. The Obama Justice Department and the FBI could have compelled production of the servers to conduct their own examination. Instead, they delegated to the private firm with deep Democratic ties, notwithstanding the latter’s motive to blame Russia and, derivatively, Trump’s campaign. No wonder Schiff did not want the testimony to see the light of day: Henry admitted — under oath, more than two years ago — that CrowdStrike has no solid evidence that Russian government-directed hackers stole the emails.
More brazen still were the admissions by official after official that they had no proof of any Trump campaign conspiracy with Russia. Publicly, former CIA Director John Brennan intimated that Trump was guilty of treason; former Director of National Intelligence James Clapper suggested he was a Putin asset; McCabe bragged of opening a criminal investigation against the president (for obstruction) after Comey’s firing. But in quiet hearing rooms, under oath, they had nothing. No evidence of conspiracy. The pundits knew that. Schiff and the Democrats who choreographed their testimony knew it. They went on for years, though, encouraging the public and foreign governments to believe the president of the United States could possibly be a Kremlin mole. So did Comey, in bracing public testimony in March 2017, by which time it was already patent that there was no case against Trump and his campaign.
Finally, there is the Flynn prosecution.
Since entering office in 2019, Attorney General William Barr has become increasingly troubled by the Trump-Russia investigation, which he describes, without exaggeration, as “one of the greatest travesties of American history.” Besides assigning Connecticut U.S. Attorney John Durham to conduct what is a criminal investigation of the inquiry, Barr has also taken to assigning other experienced federal prosecutors from outside Washington to examine the resulting prosecutions. Thus was Jeffrey Jensen, the U.S. attorney for St. Louis, given the ticket to scrutinize the Flynn case. His findings, accompanied by the rollout of previously redacted documents, resulted in the DOJ’s decision to dismiss the case, regardless of Flynn’s guilty plea to a false-statements charge (apparently elicited under the threat that Mueller’s team might otherwise indict his son on a dubious charge of failing to register as a foreign agent, due to work Flynn’s private intelligence firm did for Turkey).
In a nutshell, in July 2016, the FBI opened a counterintelligence investigation of Flynn on the baseless theory that he might be a clandestine agent of Russia. Not surprisingly, they were poised to close the case in late December, when Flynn engaged in perfectly appropriate, if ill-fated, communications with Russian Ambassador Sergey Kislyak. Though Flynn had done nothing wrong, the bureau used the contacts as a pretext to continue the investigation.
Though it had a predicate for neither a counterintelligence nor a criminal investigation, the FBI conducted an ambush interview of Flynn at the White House — Comey has bragged about violating protocol, which would have called for approvals from the attorney general and the White House counsel. The session was an obvious perjury trap. In blatant violation of FBI procedures, the bureau edited the interview notes (the “302 report”) for weeks — a complication necessitated by the facts that, while the agents did not believe Flynn had lied to them, the point of the exercise was to lay the groundwork to get him removed as national security adviser. That plan worked when Trump fired Flynn (for allegedly misleading Vice President Mike Pence about whether he had spoken to Kislyak about Obama-imposed sanctions against Russia). The bureau seemed to drop the matter, but it was revived months later by Mueller’s prosecutors, who were obviously hoping to build an obstruction case against Trump, and to squeeze Flynn into cooperating. The newly disclosed documents demonstrate that the prosecutors withheld exculpatory evidence, made misrepresentations to the defense about the genesis of the 302 report, and withheld from the court their agreement not to indict Flynn’s son if he agreed to plead guilty.
Concurrently, Grenell forced the disclosure of documents showing that Flynn’s identity had been “unmasked” an astounding 53 times by 39 different Obama officials in just the few weeks between Trump’s election and his inauguration. (“Unmasking” is the revealing in intelligence reporting of the identities of Americans incidentally intercepted in foreign intelligence monitoring; they are supposed to be concealed, and their revelation facilitates classified leaks.) Ironically, the one time Flynn was not unmasked appears to have been in connection with his Kislyak call in late December. There, the FBI, then consulting directly with the Obama White House, opted not to “mask” him at all, despite FISA procedures calling for doing so. The call was leaked to the Washington Post.
That’s an appropriate note on which to bring us back to the crescendo. Given the brass knuckles Barack Obama’s investigators used on Trump and company, the president’s supporters are unsurprisingly baying for blood. In law enforcement, and especially in foreign counterintelligence, investigative judgments are based on broad discretion, not bright-line rules. It is a far easier thing to spot the abuse of that discretion, especially when all judgments cut in the same politicized direction, than to fit it into an offense of the penal code. Durham is conducting a serious criminal investigation, and we could see some prosecutions, particularly of officials who can be shown to have actionably lied or obstructed justice. But those dreaming of the big indictment of Obama and his top minions will be sorely disappointed.
There are two lessons to be drawn from all this.
First, Barr could not be more right that the malfeasance in our government today is the politicization of law enforcement and intelligence. The only way to fix that is to stop doing it. That cannot be accomplished by bringing what many would see as the most politicized prosecution of all time. The imperative to get the Justice Department and the FBI out of our politics discourages the filing of charges that would be portrayed as banana-republic stuff. Yet, even if Barr succeeds in this noble quest, there is no assurance that a future administration would not turn the clock back.
Second, when wayward officials are not called to account, the powers they have abused become the target of public and congressional ire. The problem is that the powers are essential. Without properly directed foreign counterintelligence, supplemented by legitimate law enforcement, the United States cannot be protected from those who would do her harm.
The Trump-Russia farce has destroyed the bipartisan consensus on counterterrorism, and on the need for aggressive policing against cyberintrusions and other provocations by America’s enemies. There is an implicit understanding: The public endows its national security officials with sweeping secret authorities, and those officials solemnly commit that these authorities will only be used to thwart our enemies, not to spy on Americans or undermine the political process.
That understanding has been fractured. In counterintelligence, government operatives have to be able to look us in the eye and say, “You can trust us.” Americans no longer do. The sentiment is justified. That will not make our consequent vulnerability any less perilous.
Andrew C. McCarthy, a former chief assistant U.S. attorney in New York, is a senior fellow at the National Review Institute, a contributing editor at National Review, and a Fox News contributor.
‘I do’ in the realm of social distancing ‘I do’ in the realm of social distancing Kaylee McGhee White Love is patient. Love is kind. ... It bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things. That includes a virus that makes the traditional wedding illegal.
Over the past few months, thousands of engaged couples have been forced to alter their wedding day plans. Many decided to choose a different date and delay a year. Others decided to elope on their original date and hold a large reception some time in the future. But it’s still too soon to tell when these larger receptions will be able to take place since many states plan on restricting large group gatherings for the foreseeable future.
So, soon-to-be-married couples are adjusting their expectations. Courthouse weddings and elopements are in and large, costly events are out — at least for the time being. The Knot, a popular wedding website, has even created an entire section dedicated to “mini-monies,” or miniature wedding ceremonies, for couples looking for a minimalist event that they can share with close family members and friends. These intimate ceremonies are easier to plan, and they’re better able to adjust alongside the states’ restrictions.
And they might just become the new ideal. Big weddings can be difficult, and they’re not for everyone. But grand and festive events have become the societal norm. Indeed, the average wedding in the United States costs about $33,900, according to the latest Real Weddings study from The Knot. Now, couples that aren’t looking to drop a small fortune on their wedding day have an excuse not to, and family members and friends who might otherwise be disappointed will have no choice but to understand.
Still, the decision to cancel the big day has certainly been a source of frustration and disappointment for the vast majority of couples. But the good news is that it hasn’t stopped people from getting married. Indeed, the Manhattan Marriage Bureau in lower Manhattan said it experienced a mad rush of couples eager to tie the knot before the shutdown began, according to the New York Times.
It seems the threat of a life-changing pandemic can bring both a sense of urgency and clarity.
The last battle The last battle Trent Reedy Back in April, I told you about my friend Nick Jeffries, a former Marine who served through two combat tours in Iraq. The man had the courage to fight our enemies, protect his men, and talk about it afterward.
In 2005, Jeffries was on his second deployment with tough Marines sent into the worst of it. They were well trained and motivated. But every unit in the military has that one problem guy. He’s incompetent, lazy, cowardly, or just weird. For Jeffries’s unit, that guy was Pfc. Smith (his name has been changed out of respect for his privacy).
“He was a turd,” Jeffries said. “You couldn’t give him the reins ‘cause he would just f--k it up.”
For his deficiencies, Smith was relegated to permanent gate duty. He also claimed he suffered from post-traumatic stress disorder. The acronym PTSD is now seared into our cultural lexicon, but, back in 2005, it was greatly misunderstood and dismissed by the men.
According to Jeffries, Marines in his unit routinely cursed Smith. “You’re a b---h! Liar! P---y!” They didn’t believe in PTSD.
Jeffries was often in combat. He watched a Marine get blown up by an IED. “I watched him disappear, and then I picked up his pieces.” He endured tough tours. And yet he experienced no signs of PTSD.
But two weeks after leaving the Marines, he suffered from bone-crushing anxiety. “I didn’t know what it was or why it was happening. I didn’t know what to do.”
Jeffries’s wife Rochelle was pregnant. He needed to care for her, but he could hardly support himself.
Finally, he went to the Veterans Outreach Center in Spokane Valley, Washington. When he first walked in with his service record, a Vietnam War veteran looked over his papers and said, “You’re a war hero. You deserve every bit of help you’re going to get.” It was the beginning of his battle against PTSD.
He received treatment at the center and medication from Veterans Affairs doctors. The trouble was that the medication works a little differently for each person. They must be individualized, which takes time. Jeffries needed help right away. He was anxious and depressed. He thought about killing himself.
“I hear about soldiers or Marines who’ve committed suicide, and it makes me sick,” he told me. “It could have been me.” For the past 12 years, there has never been a point where he hasn’t regularly seen a therapist or a psychologist. For many years, he attended weekly appointments.
The treatments were working. Things were going well enough that Jeffries quit taking his medication. Not long after, he “had a nuclear fallout. I was gonna kill myself, couldn’t go on with my marriage or anything.” He separated from his wife.
In a monthlong in-patient treatment program, he realized the medication was essential. “The problem was bigger than I could handle by myself.” He began to take his treatment seriously again. “I got back into society, back into work.”
One night, only a month before his divorce was finalized, he texted his wife. She texted back. They talked on the phone until dawn and eventually worked it out. “Rochelle is stubborn, can’t be broke,” Jeffries said fondly.
Now, Rochelle is in nursing school, and Jeffries works for the Washington Department of Natural Resources, helping reduce fire risk on private woodlands. Their children are doing great.
Jeffries’s anxiety is at an all-time low, but his struggle with PTSD continues. He takes four different pills every day. Hunting and fishing help. He survived combat, and now he’s surviving combat’s lasting effects. He’s a great American.
This column was tough to write. Jeffries’s experience made me think of the greater challenges I might have faced after my own deployment. It could have been me. I am glad I also sought counseling at the Spokane Veterans Outreach Center. Jeffries shares his story and I write it because we’d like to go back and tell Smith that there’s no disgrace in PTSD. It’s important to us that service members and veterans realize that help is available, and it’s important to seek it out if you need it.
If you or someone you know is struggling with PTSD, I beg you to consider getting help through the Veterans Crisis Line at 800-273-8255 or veteranscrisisline.net. Do it for all us veterans — for the ones we’ve lost, for yourself, and for those who care about you. You are not alone in this last battle.
Trent Reedy served as a combat engineer in the Iowa National Guard from 1999 to 2005, including a tour of duty in Afghanistan.
Our next great crisis Our next great crisis Kaylee McGhee White The coronavirus, doctors are finding, can have lasting symptoms for survivors. So, it turns out, do the lockdowns.
Anxiety, depression, and loneliness are plaguing the public more than ever before as a result of prolonged isolation and a lack of community, and doctors are beginning to worry that a mental health crisis is on the horizon. And with that crisis comes its physical consequences: long-term addiction, drug abuse, alcoholism, and so on.
Mental health experts predicted at the beginning of the shutdown that we’d experience an uptick in despair-related cases. To anyone vaguely familiar with human nature, this comes as no surprise. Man is, after all, a being in motion and a social creature. Take away his community and his work, and he will struggle to find meaning and purpose.
So, how do we begin to repair the damage that’s been done? Well, that depends on whom you ask. Many doctors see cases of anxiety and depression and immediately go the medication route. That seems to be what’s happening right now: Prescriptions for anti-anxiety medications and sleep aids have increased significantly over the past few months, according to data obtained by the Wall Street Journal. Anti-anxiety medications, such as Klonopin and Ativan, rose 34.1% in February and March, and psychiatrists wrote 86% more prescriptions for psychotropic drugs, primarily anti-depressants, such as Prozac and Lexapro.
Prescriptions such as these are attractive because “they work instantly,” according to James Potash, director of psychiatry and behavioral sciences at Johns Hopkins Medicine. But they come with a price tag. Many patients develop a tolerance to short-term treatments, such as Xanax, so they begin to seek higher dosages. And these higher dosages can lead to a sort of addiction since patients who stop taking their medications often experience a surge in anxiety or other drastic physical withdrawal symptoms, such as tremors or, in severe cases, seizures.
“If you have a boatload of Xanax, and you are slightly anxious, and you take one, you feel better. Next time you are anxious, instead of taking care of what is making you anxious, you’re much more likely to reach for the Xanax,” said Beth Salcedo, the former president of the Anxiety and Depression Association of America. “It can very quickly become a habit.”
To prevent this habit from forming, people struggling with anxiety, depression, or loneliness should look to other outlets first, such as exercise and socialization, Salcedo said.
Socializing, however, is a bit hard to do when the government forbids it.
The shutdown was arguably necessary at a certain point to prevent the spread of the coronavirus. But we need to recognize and face its costs, this mental health crisis included. This is not a problem that will simply disappear when the country reopens, though reopening will certainly help.
“If we don’t do something about it now,” said Paul Gionfriddo, president of the advocacy group Mental Health America, “people are going to be suffering from these mental-health impacts for years to come.”
Sunset on the farm Sunset on the farm Timothy P. Carney Americans aren’t eating any less food than before, but fewer than ever are in the business of growing or raising that food.
Family-run farms will soon be a thing of the past, judging by current trends. A nonprofit organization called Food and Water Watch published its study of factory-scale farms, documenting the falling number of family-scale farms.
Across Michigan, for instance, more than 4,000 families operated small-scale farms back in 1997. That fell to 2,500 family farms in 2007, and below 2,000 in 2017. The numbers are similar across the country: About half of the families farming 20 years ago have sold out to bigger farms.
Food and Water Watch worries about the impacts on the environment, the animals, and the people who eat the produce and the meat. Those impacts are real, but they perhaps pale in comparison to the cultural loss in rural America.
Towns and counties built around farm families are emptying out, and the culture in them is crumbling.
A hundred years ago, most Americans lived in rural communities, according to the Census Bureau. By 1990, the rural population had been halved, to less than 25%. In the last Census (2010), the percentage was less than 20%.
The growth of suburbs and the recent renaissance of U.S. cities are factors in this emptying of rural America. But the disappearance of the local farming economy is at the heart of this. And ruthless modern “efficiency” is at the heart of this.
Farm technology makes farmworkers more productive than in the past. Farm families, like all families, are smaller than in the past. And farm land is more valuable than ever.
“It used to be,” Iowa farmer Jerry McLaughlin told me over a pancake breakfast in the shrinking town of Imogene, “they farmed their ... 300 acres, and they raised 6, 7, 8, 10 kids. Now, on farms 3, 4, 5 times that size, they raise one or two kids.”
So when Farmer Bob passes away, his sons sell the farm and move to the city. This isn't a new story, of course, but as it continues apace, and as corporations swallow more family farms, the story of the family farm may be in its final chapter.
Tough guy Tough guy Kyle Sammin During his first term in Congress, Dan Crenshaw has already become a respected spokesman for conservative ideas. A former Navy SEAL who lost his eye to an improvised explosive device in Afghanistan, he was the surprise winner of the Republican primary against better-known and better-funded opponents in Texas’s 2nd Congressional District in 2018. In the general election, he held the district for Republicans in a Democratic wave year.
Lots of politicians can spout talking points, but Crenshaw is good on his feet, a calm and persuasive rhetorician. In an age of unseriousness in Congress, where members become better-known for social media clapbacks than for thoughtful discussion, the Texas freshman’s voice is welcome.

In his new book, Fortitude: American Resilience in the Era of Outrage, Crenshaw shows exactly why he is a rising star in the Republican firmament. Part war memoir, part treatise, and part self-help book, Fortitude lays out the case against the permanent state of outrage that obsesses many on the Left and the Right. In its place, Crenshaw urges a return to the old-fashioned American values of stoicism, persistence, and perseverance. They are, in his telling, the ideals that made Crenshaw what he is today — and that built the United States.
Crenshaw sees in the rise of outrage culture “the weaponization of emotion, and the elevation of emotion over reason.” The incident that catapulted him to national fame serves as an example. While campaigning for office, Crenshaw’s picture appeared in a segment of Saturday Night Live’s Weekend Update sketch. Comedian Pete Davidson joked about his appearance, specifically his eye patch, saying that Crenshaw looked like “a hit man in a porno.” In an ad-libbed aside, Davidson said, “I’m sorry. I know he lost his eye in a war or whatever.”
Making light of a Navy SEAL’s injuries could have been the perfect grist for the outrage mill. America’s fighting men and women are held in high esteem across nearly all segments of our society, and mocking their sacrifice is one of the few things that can spur even phlegmatic viewers to anger. Few would have blamed Crenshaw for taking offense. Instead, he reacted like a responsible adult. He answered the cheap shot with grace. He appeared on SNL the next week in a segment that poked the same sort of fun at Davidson, who had earlier apologized privately for the jab. After the jokes, Crenshaw delivered a message in support of veterans, turning the negative experience into a positive.
Cancel culture demands inhuman perfection from all of us. It is not enough to be good at what you do: Now, we all must do everything correctly all of the time according to an ever-shifting set of standards. It is a byproduct of the social media world that encourages us to “share” every aspect of our lives in a public therapy session. Living performatively can be a rush when the mob approves, but one misstep, and they are liable to tear you apart. Forgiveness is rarely asked for — and never granted.
A spirit of calmness, a throwback to the ancient philosophy of stoicism, is at the heart of Crenshaw’s book. He cites the work of the stoic most familiar to modern readers, the Roman Emperor Marcus Aurelius, whose Meditations explains the philosophy that served as Aurelius’s touchstone. Meditations remains the best and most popular stoic work today, and for good reason. It teaches one to have a well-ordered mind, which translates, then and now, into a plan for a well-ordered life. The mental aspects of Crenshaw’s SEAL training overlap considerably with Aurelius’s stoicism. That makes sense: Our minds are unchanged from ancient times, even if we live in considerably different environments.
Stoicism is also a fitting philosophy for the modern age, in which individualism often triumphs over virtue. Previous ancient philosophies for virtuous living, such as Aristotelianism, said that correct action was dictated by a person’s role in the community. Stoicism internalized that struggle, encouraging personal reflection about how to live in a community without shared values. That is the experience of many cultural conservatives in the modern West. While an individual search for values is more challenging than adhering to a community standard, it may be the only path left to us. When public virtue fades, stoics preserve it in private.
The West is currently emerging from a long period in which public discourse was dominated by reason. Rationalism is now in retreat, and the voices calling for emotionalism are growing louder. Advocates of the former theory once claimed it was the truth. Now, people speak of “my truth” and the primacy of “lived experience.” People have always been influenced by their feelings, of course, and the dichotomy between reason and emotion is not as stark as the ancients believed. But the new emotionalism would have us ignore reason altogether and return to a primal life in which we are ruled by volatile tempers.
Against this, Crenshaw does not propose a life of pure, unfeeling reason. He says that it is good, at times, to complain, to laugh, to feel. But he also knows what our Founding Fathers knew: We must govern ourselves individually before we can govern ourselves as a nation. A capricious people ruled by emotion cannot handle liberty and will inevitably descend into mere libertinism. Through emotional strength and logical rigor — through fortitude, in short — we can improve ourselves and our society. Crenshaw’s book gives us a fair guide to achieving this, told through the engaging life story of one of conservatism’s rising stars.
Kyle Sammin is a lawyer and writer from Pennsylvania and the co-host of the Conservative Minds podcast. Follow him on Twitter at @KyleSammin.
Rollerblade renaissance Rollerblade renaissance Kaylee McGhee White Like many children growing up in the Midwest, my first bike was a big deal. It was a hot pink vision, its shiny, white wheels ready and able to chase the pavement for hours on end. But I outgrew it pretty quickly, and with it, biking in general.
Joel Johnson, 25, has a similar story. He had not owned a bicycle since he was 15, but the coronavirus pandemic changed that. He bought one right before the shutdown began as a form of transportation — he wanted to avoid San Francisco’s crowded trains and large crowds, and biking to and fro allowed him to do that. But now, it’s become a source of pleasure, he told the Detroit News.
Thousands of other people have similarly rediscovered biking as a means of exercise or simply because they want to leave their homes. And, as a result, bike sales have increased significantly across the country.
“We have a three-day sale once a year literally called ‘the madness sale.’ This just feels like two straight months of madness sales,” said Dale Ollison, a bike mechanic at Hank and Frank Bicycles, which is located in Northern California.
Meanwhile, Generation Z is giving life to yet another childhood trend: rollerblading. Over the past year, Bauer, a skate purveyor owned by Nike, has experienced a 723% increase in customers searching for rollerblades, or in-line skates. This growth seems to be the result of a social media phenomenon: videos featuring teenagers on skates have garnered millions of views on TikTok, which has translated into Google searches and actual sales, according to Buzzfeed News.
But in-line skates are also in demand from professional athletes, particularly hockey players, for whom they were originally invented. Very few NHL players have access to ice rinks, according to ESPN, and rollerblading is the next best alternative. Bauer arranged shipments to more than 100 top NHL athletes toward the beginning of the shutdown, according to Inside Hook, and clips of NHL stars using them to practice stick work have regularly surfaced since then.
For many, both of these activities, biking and rollerblading, represent times past, and the simple pleasures that we used to fill our days with as youngsters.
“Biking was a big joy when we were children and kind of the first freedom we all felt,” said Louie Correa, a Santa Clarita, California, father who has made bike rides with his four children a key part of his family’s daily routine throughout the shutdown. “This whole isolation thing is really starting to spark that back into a lot of folks.”
Word of the Week: ‘Pundit’ Word of the Week: ‘Pundit’ Nicholas Clairmont "Have you ever done one of those word articles you write on the word 'pundit'?” my friend Erin texts. “This may be me being stupid, but as a person who learns almost all definitions from context clues, only today did I find out it’s not a slur.”
There’s a lot to say about this excellent editorial assignment. First, on the limitations of context clues: Please, please never use the phrase “context is everything.” “Con” is Latin for “with,” so context means the side stuff that goes with the main stuff. It, by definition, can’t be everything. Also, just from life experience, people who take the time to assert that context is everything tend to believe other silly things they picked up in some type of grad school.
Second, “pundit” actually has a fascinating history. Erin was shocked to find, per Dictionary.com, that it means “a learned person, expert, or authority; a person who makes comments or judgments, especially in an authoritative manner.” But its history dates to India.
In the massive book Tournament of Shadows: The Great Game and the Race for Empire in Central Asia, authors Karl Meyer and Shareen Blair Brysac write: “The pundit, a title meaning ‘learned Hindu,’ said he had visited Tibet as a youth and knew where to find the precious shawl-wool goat, a creature coveted by the British.”
Later, they explain the peculiarities of this expert class and its position in Himalayan society post-1830: “Over the centuries, Rawats intermarried with neirubors called Bhotias, a Hindu people of Tibetan origin. Though the Bhotian Rawats had Hindu names, they were not deemed orthodox by Hindus in the plains and were able in Tiber to pass readily as Buddhists. It was this clan, so adept at mediating, that provided ‘the pundits’ for the surreptitious British surveys of India’s borderlands through the entire Victorian era.”
The Oxford English Dictionary is much better than Dictionary.com, so its definitions reflect a proper understanding of the word’s origin and development. It has as its first definition “a learned Hindu.” Only in the secondary definition does it mark out the more current usage: “a learned expert or teacher (colloq[ial] and humorous) … hence punditly adv. (nonce-wd), in the manner of a teacher, in a learned way.” The dictionary gives an example of the humorous usage involving pundits who “condescend.”
But at some point, the transfigured modern English version of the pundit-talking-head-newsman as a bit of a joke started needing special emphasis. Stephen Colbert listed “fundit” as one of his titles back on his old show (you know, the good one). Jonah Goldberg on his podcast self-deprecates by stressing he is engaging in “rank punditry.”
So why did Erin, who’s sharp, think “pundit” was a slur from context clues, when pundit literally means a subject matter expert? The same reason people, when polled, report having low trust in the news media. Because the media do a bad job. The context that makes "pundit" a slur is that most of the supposed experts lecturing people on today’s networks and magazines are as condescending as they are ignorant. The pundit caste brought shame on its name.
Tech industry group CEO: ‘Amazon is basically providing for the country at this point’ Tech industry group CEO: ‘Amazon is basically providing for the country at this point’ Nihal Krishan Tech companies have seen increased demand and greater success during the pandemic fallout.
The Washington Examiner interviewed Gary Shapiro, CEO of the Consumer Technology Association and one of the top lobbyists in Washington, to discuss the industry's fortunes. The CTA represents more than 2,200 consumer technology companies. It represents both international behemoths such as Amazon, Google, and Facebook and new startups.
Prior to joining the association in 1982, Shapiro was an associate at the law firm Squire Sanders. He has also worked on Capitol Hill as an assistant to a member of Congress. He received his law degree from Georgetown University Law Center and studied economics and psychology at Binghamton University. Shapiro, 63, is married to Dr. Susan Malinowski, a retina surgeon.
Washington Examiner: Are there any specific challenges that you have for the tech industry, in terms of difficulties or struggles you're facing right now? Any need for assistance or aid, as so many others require?
Shapiro: No, we don't need help. So, we don't ask for aid for the industry. We don't need the additional revenue. The reason being is, for 15 years, we’ve been concerned about the federal debt. And that's a big threat to the health of the U.S. economy. And we're entering a serious situation that keeps getting worse. So, we're not opposing these relief measures that Congress is doing, but we're not asking for anything from our industry.
Washington Examiner: What would you like to see from the federal government, then?
Shapiro: What we are looking for is some predictability and reason, and we’re definitely engaged on the tariff issue. We think that tariffs should be rolled back. We do perceive our challenges with China that have to be addressed or want to talk about them. And we also are looking at regulations, which hurt us. For example, one of the unique asks in the tech industry is some of the competitors to the tech industry we have, like the motion picture industry, and others who push limitations on the internet with Section 230. They want to roll back that provision, which basically protected providers of services from being responsible for user comments, and they want to change that dramatically. So, we are fighting that, and we're fighting a whole bunch of other things that can hurt the tech industry, but we're not out there with our hand out asking for money. I'm even trying to think of one tech organization right now that’s received government aid, and I'm not aware if there is one.
Washington Examiner: The tech industry is in a much stronger position currently than perhaps many others. So, there's not as much of a need to ask for relief, it seems, yes?
Shapiro: The tech industry is providing a lot of solutions now. They're doing so many different things to help. If we had the virus before the tech industry [was] where it is today, let's say 15 years ago, we wouldn't have all this ability to talk into things and get things done virtually. You know, a large percentage of Americans are working from home, and most Americans use a restaurant delivery service. Amazon is basically providing for the country at this point. The tech industry is doing so much to keep the country going. Right now, I think we’ve stepped up and are doing a good job.
The only ask is, I have publicly called for a moratorium on attacking tech companies, trying to break them up, trying to go back on 10 years' worth of acquisitions. We have our own government fighting our global leading companies like Google and Facebook and Microsoft and Qualcomm and Intel and Twitter and Apple. There’s been a history of attacking successful U.S. companies by our own federal government, and it's time for it to stop. Tech is providing the solutions now; they're not causing the problems. Tech is in the helping out business. Increasingly, this happens through drones, self-driving cars, video conferencing, all these services that are out there for free. Artificial intelligence is helping get the vaccines quicker. There's so many different things. So, we're not before Congress asking for a handout. What we're offering is our hand to get people lifted up.
Washington Examiner: On that topic of Congress and mergers, I was curious, your thoughts about Democrats and Republicans are disagreeing right now about merger blockages and specifically corporate mergers. Democrats want to put a stop to all mergers during the coronavirus pandemic, and, of course, Republicans don't think that's appropriate. Where does the industry come down on this issue, and why?
Shapiro: Well, I think the industry is probably unanimous on this one. That is absolute craziness. If you take away the ability of startups to sell themselves, then you dry up investment money. If you dry up investment money, you kill a lot of innovation and entrepreneurship in this country. So, to say the only reason people invest in companies is because they think they're going to get an exit — the only way you can get an exit is if the company goes public, or [if] you’re doing well enough that you’re filling out some dividends and you could sell your interest to another private party or an acquisition. Most of the money for the acquisitions comes from some of the biggest companies and apps that help them get stronger. That helps American companies get strong. I can't think of a worse policy for America than to stop acquisitions because it dries up investors' money, it cooks innovation, and it just cripples American companies compared to the rest of the world. I can’t think of a worse Democratic policy.
Andrew Cuomo’s deadly failures Andrew Cuomo’s deadly failures Karol Markowicz On March 30, as COVID-19 cases and deaths piled up across the Empire State, and the USS Comfort arrived to calm a broken city, Gov. Andrew Cuomo called New York the “canary in the coal mine” of the U.S. coronavirus crisis. “What you see us going through here, you will see happening all across this country.”
Except it didn’t.
Instead, New York racked up massive coronavirus deaths, as the governor’s policies (as well as those of Mayor Bill de Blasio) left New Yorkers exposed. The rest of the country suffered losses, but nowhere near the intensely high number reached by New York.
The story of Cuomo’s role in the pandemic has been massaged by the media. And, indeed, Cuomo’s “just the facts” press conferences were initially soothing at a time of confusion and disarray. His Powerpoint presentations, blessedly boring during a tumultuous time, often began with what day it was, a feature appreciated by people in a seemingly permanent Groundhog Day in their homes. One of the slides invariably included raw numbers of how many had been diagnosed, how many were in the hospital, and how many had died. But as the smoke began to clear, it’s become increasingly obvious that the governor’s bad decisions, petty rivalries, and general incompetence caused much of the destruction in the first place.
The major story of the coronavirus epidemic in New York is how the governor’s policies toward long-term care facilities enabled the virus to run rampant among our most vulnerable population. In late April, it came to light that the previous month, the state ordered long-term care facilities to readmit residents who had been treated for the coronavirus. New residents who were “medically stable” were to be admitted as well. Thus did Cuomo’s New York guarantee that the most vulnerable population would be widely exposed to COVID-19 in environments that enabled its quick and deadly spread.
The official tally has about 20% of New York coronavirus deaths attributed to nursing homes, but we actually can’t be certain of how many people died because of this negligence. If someone from one of these mass-infected nursing homes died in a hospital, it’s not counted as a nursing home death. There’s also evidence that many of those who died at nursing homes weren’t tested for COVID-19, so the official statistic remains a question mark, but it’s almost certainly higher, perhaps much higher, than the state admits.
The count matters because it otherwise obscures the real picture. On May 9, the New York Times reported that nursing home residents and workers accounted for one-third of the nation’s COVID-19 deaths but that only 11% of cases actually occurred inside those facilities. According to a new Associated Press count, at least 4,500 recovering coronavirus patients were sent to New York nursing homes.
Cuomo, for his part, is mostly satisfied with how his government handled events. “We now have a top priority, which we've had since day one — our nursing homes,” he said at a May press conference, in a particularly risible bit of gaslighting. “The one thing we need to be able to say at the end of this is ‘we did everything we could,’” Cuomo added. There is no way he should be able to say that with a straight face.
He also shrugs off blame and argues that “nobody” should be held accountable for the nursing home deaths: “How do we get justice for those families? Who can we prosecute for those deaths? Nobody. Mother Nature, God, where did this virus come from? People are going to die by this virus. That is the truth.”
During Cuomo’s April 23 press conference, the governor was defiant about his mandate, saying: “[The nursing homes] don’t have a right to object. That is the rule and that is the regulation, and they have to comply with that. If they can’t do it, we’ll put them in a facility that can do it.” It was a crass death sentence for countless New Yorkers. The nursing homes, understaffed and with minimal personal protective equipment, didn’t stand a chance. During his May 18 press conference, Cuomo was asked about the elder-care experts’ claims that even before COVID-19, New York state had one of the lowest levels of care in nursing homes and lax health enforcement. Does the state deserve some blame? Cuomo completely dismissed the question.
Then, he tried to shift the blame to President Trump. Cuomo claims that he was just following Centers for Disease Control and Prevention guidance. But not all governors did that. In an interview with National Review, Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida broke down his state’s timeline: “The day that the media had their first big freakout about Florida was March 15, which was, there were people on Clearwater Beach, and it was this big deal. That same day is when we signed the executive order to, one, ban visitation in the nursing homes and, two, ban the reintroduction of a COVID-positive patient back into a nursing home.”
In New York, Cuomo’s mistakes are generally overshadowed by the absurdly terrible performance of de Blasio, but the irony is that the mayor has quietly bested the governor several times over the last few months. Cuomo likes to brag about his coordination with neighboring states but is incapable of coordinating with the mayor of his state’s biggest city, who has left Cuomo blustering emptily on several occasions.
On March 17, de Blasio told New Yorkers to prepare to “shelter in place,” an order to stay home except for essential needs, similar to what had been implemented in northern California. That night, Cuomo smacked that down as impossible before implementing essentially the same guidelines in his PAUSE order three days later.
On April 2, de Blasio announced a new recommendation to wear masks in public. At a press conference the next day, Cuomo questioned the need for them before reversing himself less than two weeks later.
On April 11, the mayor announced that schools would remain closed for the rest of the school year. The governor was quick to jump in and say no decision had been made, arrogantly saying of de Blasio: “He didn’t close them, and he can’t open them.” On May 1, Cuomo was forced to concede the schools are indeed staying closed.
When Cuomo announced New York beaches were allowed to open, de Blasio quickly said New York City’s shores would not. The whole point of this kind of coordination was so no state opens ahead of another one and causes people to travel for goods and services. With New York City beaches not allowing swimming, New Jersey, Long Island, and Connecticut beaches braced for a wave of New Yorkers, with some beaches changing their rules to allow only their own residents onto their beaches.
The rivalry is also obvious in Cuomo’s limited consideration of New York City. On May 7, New York City finally suspended 24-hour subway service to disinfect train cars overnight. The fact that the trains, which fall under the governor’s purview, weren’t already being cleaned and disinfected, months into the pandemic, was shocking. As of May 1, 98 Metropolitan Transportation Authority workers had died from the coronavirus, more than any other state or city agency. A March 6 memo to MTA employees addressed the question of masks, noting, “Masks are not medically necessary as a protection against COVID-I9, and not part of the authorized uniform. They should not be worn by employees during work hours.” An outcry forced the MTA to permit transit employees to wear their own masks a week later. It would be weeks before the MTA would give out masks to its workers. Following in the governor’s footsteps, MTA Chairman Pat Foye blames the CDC and the World Health Organization for their directives saying masks are unnecessary. But there’s a vast gulf between saying that masks aren’t needed and prohibiting employees from wearing them. In Cuomo’s New York, no one takes any blame, and the buck doesn’t stop with the governor.
All of this has gone largely ignored by the media. They need a neat narrative and have widely decided that Cuomo is the hero, while DeSantis is the villain. But by all indications, DeSantis has done a far better job.
In late May, a video of DeSantis went viral. He points out that Florida has a lower death rate than all of its neighbors and all states of a similar size. Washington Post reporter Hamza Shaban rapped DeSantis on Twitter for “bragging” about Florida’s comparably low death rate. Meanwhile, the same day, Cuomo, who presides over a death rate far higher than that of any other state, went on his brother Chris Cuomo’s CNN show, and they proceeded to act out one of their comedy skits, this one about the size of the governor’s nose. Chris Cuomo pulled out a giant prop cotton swab and made fun of his brother. “It’s well known that I have a tiny, button nose. Please stick to the facts on your show, little brother,” the governor responded on Twitter.
His shtick with his brother, who famously broke quarantine while actually sick with COVID-19, is one of the more noxious examples of the media’s complacency when covering the New York governor. Obviously, the governor’s brother lobs him softballs, if that, but other media outlets don’t do much better.
Cuomo is a gaffe machine, but the press are uninterested. He has blamed the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, “experts,” and others for how hard COVID-19 has hit his state. “Where were all the experts? Where was the New York Times, where was the Wall Street Journal, where was all the bugle blowers who should say, ‘Be careful, there’s a virus in China that may be in the United States?’ That was in November, December.” New York Times Metro Editor Jorge Arangure responded on Twitter: “From Jan. 9 to March 1, the date the NY state government finally took the coronavirus threat seriously, the New York Times had more than 450 stories about the coronavirus.”
Cuomo has also clumsily said that domestic violence, which has spiked during the lockdown, is “bad” but “not death.” Most recently, he’s taken to mentioning, in nearly every one of his press conferences, that the virus arrived to us “from Europe,” as some sort of bit running interference for Beijing’s carelessness and lies in order to further the line that Trump’s placement of blame on China is racist.
Cuomo should hope this kind of misdirection doesn’t catch on. If we’re going on where the virus has been most recently imported from, his mismanagement means that much of the country can refer to it as the New York virus.
Karol Markowicz is a columnist for the New York Post.
The bomb-throwing climate activist taking on Tom Perez and the DNC The bomb-throwing climate activist taking on Tom Perez and the DNC Josh Siegel R.L. Miller, a climate change activist from Southern California who was recently elected to the Democratic National Committee, says her home state's former Gov. Jerry Brown once called her a “political terrorist.”
Upon being elected, Miller promptly told DNC Chairman Tom Perez to “f--- off,” a reflection of her bitterness about the Democratic governing body rejecting her call for there to be a debate focused specifically on climate change during the primary.
Miller, the founder of the liberal mobilization group Climate Hawks Vote, won’t join the DNC until after the 2020 convention.
But her recent electoral success, she said, gives her leverage in her current role on the advisory board to the DNC's climate council, where she will help push the party and its nominee, Joe Biden, to move left on climate change. (Miller voted for Elizabeth Warren.)
Miller, 57, spoke recently with the Washington Examiner about her goals for the DNC and her life in climate activism. Her answers have been condensed for clarity.
Washington Examiner: How did you get involved in climate activism and politics?
Miller: This is very much a second career for me. I was a lawyer and a mom. In the same way a lot of women were galvanized by President Trump to get into politics, my own particular outrage trigger was Sarah Palin.
I had been a hockey mom running bake sales, the mom of a hockey goalie, and here is this woman getting up at the RNC convention telling everyone she was qualified to be vice president because she’s a hockey mom. I was just going, “No way. I am not qualified, and neither are you.”
At the same time, I discovered the liberal blogosphere and began to speak out a little bit locally on climate change.
Then, I began to get really concerned by the number of climate deniers running for Congress.
I started a “climate zombies” project for Daily Kos where I identified every Republican who denied the science of climate change.
Then, we have the Democrats who will say climate is a priority issue but tend to see it as just another issue. Navigating the Democratic coalition is frustrating for climate activists.
Washington Examiner: Why did you decide to run for the DNC?
Miller: I felt generally that California is moving in the right direction, but the national party is moving in a different direction.
I worked on the outside with [DNC member] Christine Pelosi to pass a resolution to get the DNC to stop taking fossil fuel money. We got it done.
Tom Perez reversed course.
Then, the climate debate debacle came along. We did everything you can do to get the Democratic institution to listen to us. We delivered 225,000 signatures to the DNC. I drafted a template resolution asking the DNC members to vote for a climate debate. I felt I did everything right, but still, the vote came down 62% against.
I was so angry by a failure of democracy.
Washington Examiner: What do you want to see change at the DNC? What makes you think you can effect change as one of 447 DNC members?
Miller: We are not going to revisit the climate debate debacle.
What I want to do is make the DNC is more transparent and accessible to ordinary Democrats. There [are a] lot of common or garden-variety Democrats who don't understand what the DNC does.
The other place I hope to make a difference is to change how climate people don't vote. I am passionate about using our political system to solve climate change. We have the technology. We do not have the political will.
The way we fix that is getting those who care about climate change to vote.
Washington Examiner: Do you worry Biden, in his attempt to rally young liberal climate voters, will alienate independents in fossil fuel-producing swing states like Pennsylvania if he moves too far left?
Miller: I don't think we are going to lose independent voters over things like fracking.
Democrats worry too much about the mythical Obama-Trump voters.
That may have been true in 2016, when both Trump and [Hillary] Clinton were widely despised among people not affiliated with either party.
By now, Trump is a known quantity. He has alienated broad swaths of America. He has turned soccer moms into anti-Trump activists.
Biden is going to run as not so well defined despite the fact he has a humongous record. He is running as a warm, fuzzy alternative, like Mr. Rogers with a cardigan sweater, and has a good chance of defeating Trump.
Washington Examiner: Biden already has the most progressive climate policy agenda proposed by a presidential nominee. What more do you think young people want from him?
Miller: I am not a millennial and never quite figured out their attraction to Bernie.
Maybe he needs to simply come across as a little more bold and willing to take risks or a little more willing to acknowledge this is the biggest threat the next generation faces and show some empathy for what they are going through.
Biden needs to do more to appeal to them.
Washington Examiner: What are the odds Biden and the DNC ignore climate change in favor of economic issues, as is typical amid a recession?
Miller: One of the reasons I am a little optimistic this pandemic will not lead to a swing away from environmentalism like in previous recessions is there is more respect for science. People are listening to data. If we don’t respect science, people die.
What the Green New Deal has shown is climate action can be very job friendly if done right.
We want to rebuild better, smarter, and faster.
Washington Examiner: You speak often of your experience surviving the Woolsey Fire that came near your home, one of several wildfires that raged across California in 2018. How will that experience inform how you approach your role with the DNC?
Miller: Climate is not some far-off, abstract issue in the future.
Climate change is scaring the guts out of me every October when the hot winds blow.
As a wildfire survivor, I intend to bring that voice to the DNC. Anyone who tells me other things take precedent, I will say as a matter of experience that this a matter of life and death.
Washington Examiner: You’ve been critical of Tom Perez and other establishment Democrats. How can you be effective on the inside with a bomb-throwing approach?
Miller: I know that I have a complicated relationship with people who think I am not activist enough because I was not a Bernie supporter and these people who think I am far too much of a bomb thrower.
After that quote came out about Tom Perez, people said, “That's a very productive way of starting off.”
I just smiled. Jerry Brown called me a political terrorist. He is gone, and I am still here.
If you respect science and are willing to speak the truth, people are willing to respect that — even if it’s seen as divisive at the time.
Washington Examiner: Your theory of change is based on voting Republicans out of office instead of pursuing bipartisanship. Republicans are starting to pivot on climate change. Why upset that progress?
Miller: I will find allies where I can. I have not been dismissive of the Trillion Trees Initiative [a Republican-led effort to plant trees to absorb carbon]. I know a lot of the Left have been reflexively against it.
One place where people are not divided at all is the need for battery storage. That is a positive place where there is room for bridge-building.
But what is frustrating to me is there is a very clear political divide in the technologies that are embraced, and Republicans seem to really hate solar and wind, and they prefer nuclear. There is a political divide. I don't know how to bridge it.
To try to reduce emissions without reducing fossil fuels, as Republicans propose, is incredibly, breathtakingly naive or wrong.
I see investment in these carbon capture projects [for fossil fuel plants] as very much speculative investments in a pill that will make us thinner when the truth of the matter is we all still need to start dieting now, and it is very much delusional that this carbon capture will solve all of our problems.
The Left wields its Science Club The Left wields its Science Club Hugo Gurdon When Michael Dukakis ran for president in 1988, he presented himself as a technocrat rather than a politician. Good government, he suggested, was about implementing what science and its derivatives, social science and the dismal science of economics, had shown to work. Technocratic solutions founded on science should, he implied, trump less tangible and more emotional phenomena such as optimism, the entrepreneurial spirit, and patriotism.
His was an unappealing and chilly candidacy, and he lost heavily to George H.W. Bush, who, despite not being adept at “the vision thing,” nevertheless rode into the White House on the unspent tide of Reaganism.
But 32 years later, appeals to science are more insistent and much more successful — dangerously so. Legions of politically vociferous people on the Left and in the Democratic Party invoke it as though it rendered any other consideration null and void.
Immediately after the inauguration of President Trump, who had called climate change a hoax in 2012, demonstrators, wearing comically mournful expressions to suggest seriousness of purpose in bad times, traipsed through American cities declaring their allegiance to science.
So, are the Democratic Party and the broader Left really “the party of science”? During the pandemic, they have wielded the claim like a club to bludgeon those who demur at the idea that governments need only defer to epidemiologists and healthcare professionals to get policy right. Counterclaims for economic vitality and the exercise of human nature should not, they imply, weigh heavily on political scales.
Yet, left-wingers’ claims on a wide variety of policies show that they hew to “science” no more than does the Right. On GMO foods and abortion, for example, they dismiss science entirely. Even on climate change, they treat science as a settled matter rather than as a process of constant questioning and verification in which conclusions must change with empirical data.
“Because science …” is an odious and arrogant justification in politics to silence opponents, as Timothy Carney argues. Looking at the extraordinary shutdown of the past three months, he finds that (to adapt Churchillian rhetoric) never in the field of human endeavor have so many people been hobbled so completely by so few.
In this week’s cover story, “Exposing the Hoax,” Andrew McCarthy offers a welcome alternative to coronavirus news by laying out the excellent work done by Attorney General Bill Barr and Ambassador Richard Grenell in unearthing the suspect origins of the Trump-Russia investigation. It’s a breath of fresh air to dip back into pre-pandemic politics, which rumble along even during the shutdown.
James Copland looks at the conflict of interest of Democrats, who monopolize donations from plaintiffs’ lawyers, opposing liability protection for businesses that open to the public and follow the rules. Karol Markowicz excoriates the disaster of Gov. Andrew Cuomo’s pandemic response, Cory DeAngelis similarly blasts the authoritarian elite’s opposition to school choice, and Brooke Rogers shares the secret to keeping anxiety at bay during the pandemic.
Crossword: Transition To Greatness Crossword: Transition To Greatness Brendan Emmett Quigley
American vulnerability and American strength American vulnerability and American strength Hugo Gurdon Early in the COVID-19 pandemic, people predisposed to believe in conspiracies posited the idea that the coronavirus was a Chinese bioweapon manufactured in a Wuhan laboratory. This was always far-fetched. It seemed and still seems far more likely that the virus leaked accidentally from the lab, where safety procedures were known to be sloppy.
But one counterargument made against the weapon theory, that the virus was not lethal enough, always seemed unpersuasive. Surely, a smart bioweapon made by a hostile power wanting to supplant America as world leader would not kill tens or hundreds of millions of people. It would infect and kill only so many as to guarantee panic and shut down and ruin the enemy’s economy while giving the perpetrator plausible deniability.
In this and other respects, the coronavirus would be a missile perfectly aimed to America’s vulnerabilities. We have become a culture obsessed with personal health issues, looking at almost any problem through a therapeutic lens, and prone to excessive alarm. So many problems, even tiny ones, are now described as “scary” that the word is a motif for our times. An economy-destroying overreaction was foreseeable.
America was especially vulnerable to the coronavirus in another respect. It is a “loose” culture disinclined to follow rules and not happy to be told what to do by government. Individual rights and freedom of action are foundational and in the DNA of our people. Accepting severe restrictions, clamping down on personal choices is just not the American way.
Thus, unlike the “tighter” cultures of East Asia, where people are generally rule-followers, not rule-breakers, America was perhaps always more likely to struggle in controlling the pandemic. It’s a place where citizens would naturally rebel against restrictions sooner, and thus is perhaps more prone to second and third waves of infection and repeated massive economic damage.
Michelle Gelfand, a professor of psychology at the University of Maryland, College Park, studies the tightness and looseness of different cultures. She told me America, being a loose culture of rule-breakers, would have “a harder time flattening the curve” of infection than would, say, Singapore, the tightest culture in the world.
There are tight-loose variations within America, but oddly it is the tighter-cultured states most supportive of President Trump, many of them in the South, that are most resistant to restrictions. Gelfand attributes this to citizens of tight cultures “following the leader,” and thus backing Trump’s insistence that the economy open up. Perhaps that is what it is, although the president has contradicted himself on this repeatedly, and I'd posit that people in tight-cultured states are more likely to be sticklers for the oldest rules — constitutionally guaranteed freedoms — and more determined not to give them up.
Either way, however, if America, with its generally loose culture, was always more vulnerable to the pandemic, so its loose culture also seems likely to be its salvation. Loose cultures are inventive and energetic, more likely to find ways to overcome catastrophe by responding fast to the challenges of a new danger.
The pandemic caught America flat-footed, but we’ve been caught flat-footed before, then adapted quickly and won. This country’s nearly miraculous energy, both a cause and product of its loose culture, contributed mightily, for example, to victory at the Battle of Midway only five months after Pearl Harbor, where we had been caught napping.
Now, from an admittedly low base, the economy is bouncing back faster than expected. Overall, it’s expected to shrink by 6%-7% this year, but there were 3 times as many travelers being screened for flights on May 3 than there had been on April 14. Restaurant bookings have shown a similar upturn in states that allow people to go out for a meal.
America’s loose culture nurtures innovation. Two American companies, Moderna, of Massachusetts, and Novavax, of Maryland, among others, are near the front of the global race to develop a COVID-19 vaccine. Both have begun human trials.
Everywhere, America’s can-do spirit is asserting itself, itching to get going or already surging into new territory to find ways to beat the COVID-19 scourge, either by special adaptations that allow near-normal life to resume even if the virus is with us a long while, or else stretching every sinew in an effort to kill it.
America, a rambunctious, rule-averse nation, was probably uniquely vulnerable at the start of the pandemic. But now, it is probably as well placed or better fitted than any other country to recover. The sleeping giant has been rudely disturbed. But it is once again awake.
The 2024 GOP primary is here, and it’s all about China The 2024 GOP primary is here, and it’s all about China Kristen Soltis Anderson Whether President Trump is reelected or defeated in November, the Republican Party will have a presidential primary on its hands come 2024. We don’t yet know if the party will be looking to turn the page from the Trump era or if candidates will be competing over who will most faithfully carry on the Trump legacy. But in a very real sense, the 2024 primary is already underway, and its central issue is already clear: Who has the best plan for dealing with China?
Foreign policy questions often ebb and flow in their importance to the electorate. While healthcare or the economy can remain top of the list for years and years, Iran or Russia or North Korea tend to pop up in headlines without popping to the top of voter priority lists. But China is hardly just a foreign policy issue and is deeply interwoven into all of those issues voters put atop their lists.
Healthcare? The pandemic that is upending our healthcare system originated in China. Economy and jobs? Chinese economic competition has shaped much of our economic landscape for decades. While crises happening elsewhere in the world thankfully do not always have an impact on the day-to-day lives of Americans, China’s actions create significant ripple effects that voters can feel.
There are two key reasons I believe China will remain the dominant issue in the Republican Party for years to come.
First, rising apprehension about China predates both the spread of COVID-19 and the Trump era and is, therefore, less dependent on how either of those questions is resolved.
Despite holding slightly more favorable views toward China during the 2000s, the public shifted to a more unfavorable posture during the 2010s. In the early days of the coronavirus outbreak in the United States, two-thirds of Americans said they viewed China unfavorably, and this was not an issue that had yet been touched by partisanship, with 62% of Democrats and 72% of Republicans, respectively, holding this view.
Of course, in the wake of COVID-19, Republicans are now even more focused on being tough on China. Appearing on Fox Business last week to discuss legislation that would strip many Chinese companies of their ability to be listed on American stock exchanges, Rep. Mike Waltz of Florida said, “I eventually would like to see people walk into a Walmart … seeing made in China and putting the product down.” Meanwhile, House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy recently announced a China task force comprised of a mix of committee leaders and rising stars such as Reps. Elise Stefanik, Adam Kinzinger, and Mike Gallagher.
Whether we have recovered fully as a nation or are still dealing with the aftermath of this crisis three or four years from now, the COVID-19 crisis did not create Republican frustration with China, and this focus will not go away even if the virus hopefully has.
Second, it is also important to note that the push to get tough on China is not confined to any one wing of the Republican Party, and its centrality to the party’s message will not be contingent on whether Trump is or is not reelected. Many Republicans of all stripes, particularly younger Republicans with an eye toward shaping the party’s future, have long focused on China.
Sen. Josh Hawley of Missouri has put forward legislation to remove China’s immunity in order to hold them liable for damages caused by the coronavirus. Gov. Ron DeSantis has threatened to sue China over the virus’s effect on Florida. Sen. Tom Cotton of Arkansas and Rep. Mike Gallagher have partnered on legislation cracking down on Huawei, and Cotton was among the first to criticize China on COVID-19 vocally, raising questions about the virus's origins and battling the media over the issue, culminating in the U.S. intelligence assessment that the virus may have been accidentally released from a lab in Wuhan.
And Sen. Ben Sasse of Nebraska, who has criticized Trump at times, has also long stressed the importance of viewing competition with China as the key strategic challenge of our time, writing over a year ago that “U.S. leaders need to turn the attention of the American people to the coming long-term struggle with China.”
It was less than three months ago that Joe Biden came back to win the South Carolina primary. So yes, three months is an eternity in politics, to say nothing of the three years we have until the next Republican presidential primary debates begin.
But even in a time of incredible uncertainty on so many fronts, it seems crystal clear that no matter how the 2020 election goes, nor how the continuing coronavirus crisis unfolds, that China and dealing with the Chinese Communist Party will be at the heart of the debate over who is best to lead the Republican Party into its post-Trump future.
Jeff Sessions, a wild Senate race, and President Trump’s ‘personal feelings’ Jeff Sessions, a wild Senate race, and President Trump’s ‘personal feelings’ Byron York Jeff Sessions is in a surreal place. He spent 20 years as a senator from Alabama followed by 21 months as U.S. attorney general, and now, he is in a tightly competitive race to win back his old Senate seat. He was the first important national figure in government to endorse candidate Donald Trump back in early 2016. That endorsement was an important boost for Trump, whom some important Republicans dismissed at the time. The newly elected Trump picked Sessions for attorney general.
At the Justice Department, Sessions worked hard to implement the president's agenda on issues such as immigration and crime. But as far as relations with Trump were concerned, it all went to hell in early March 2017, when Sessions, who had been on the job all of 21 days, recused himself from supervising the Trump-Russia investigation.
Driven by Democrats and their allies in the press, the Russia issue picked up steam in Trump's early months as president. But it truly exploded on May 9, 2017, when Trump fired FBI Director James Comey. The resulting firestorm led to the appointment of special counsel Robert Mueller — an appointment made by Sessions's second-in-command, Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein, who was in charge of the Russia matter after Sessions recused himself.
Trump blamed it all, or nearly all, on Sessions, and he never forgave him. Sessions remained in the job until November 2018, but Trump clearly could not stand the man he chose to head the Justice Department.
Fast forward to today. Deep-red Alabama has a Democratic senator, Doug Jones — that's another equally odd story — who is now up for reelection. There was a primary to pick the Republican candidate who will almost certainly defeat Jones in November. Sessions finished a close second to former Auburn University football coach Tommy Tuberville, who won by a little less than 2 percentage points. A runoff is scheduled for July 14.
Trump not only supports Tuberville, but he has been bashing Sessions left and right. First, Trump said Sessions begged him on four separate occasions for the job of attorney general. "I never begged for the job of attorney general, not four times, not one time, not ever," Sessions said.
Sessions also released an "Open Letter to the People of Alabama" in which he explained in detail why he believed then, and believes now, that his recusal was required by law and was the only course he could take.
That didn't assuage Trump one bit. A few days ago, the president tweeted, "3 years ago, after Jeff Sessions recused himself, the Fraudulent Mueller Scam began. Alabama, do not trust Jeff Sessions. He let our country down. That's why I endorsed Coach Tommy Tuberville."
That was finally it for Sessions, who responded with obvious irritation. "Look, I know your anger," he tweeted to the president, "but recusal was required by law. I did my duty & you're damn fortunate I did. It protected the rule of law & resulted in your exoneration. Your personal feelings don't dictate who Alabama picks as their senator, the people of Alabama do."
The political world's collective response was: Whoa! Now, this is getting interesting.
Then, Trump upped the ante again. "Jeff, you had your chance & you blew it," he tweeted. "Recused yourself ON DAY ONE (you never told me of a problem), and ran for the hills. You had no courage, & ruined many lives."
"Mr. President, Alabama can and does trust me, as do conservatives across the country," Sessions responded. "Perhaps you've forgotten."
Who knows where it could go next? On Monday, I asked Sessions if he was surprised by the degree to which Trump seems to hold the entire Russia investigation against him. "Yes, I am surprised about that," he said. "But his frustration is not all unjustified. It's becoming more and more clear that there were problems with this investigation. There may have been political bias. Barr is exactly right that we need to know whether commencing an investigation of a campaign had sufficient predicate."
I mentioned to Sessions that Trump's last interventions in an Alabama Senate race, when he first backed losing Republican primary candidate Luther Strange and then losing Republican general election candidate Roy Moore, resulted in the election of the current Democratic Sen. Doug Jones.
"He did make two recommendations, both of which the voters did not follow," Sessions said. "I would just say that indicates Alabamians do make their own decisions."
"In this instance," he continued, "the president's personal frustrations — he's asking the people of Alabama basically to effectuate his personal feelings about this issue. I'm asking them to send a senator who can best advance Alabama values, Trump values, Sessions values, to make a decision based on what's best for Alabama."
How many times does a top Republican Senate candidate refer to the Republican president's "personal feelings"? Sessions finds himself in an unprecedented situation only partially of his own making. But he is convinced he was correct in recusing himself from the Russia investigation, even if it means losing.
"My conscience is clear," Sessions said. "Doing the right thing is more important to me than even my own political career."